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He was as much an Englishman as he was a gentleman, and he had the very grave weaknesses of both characters. The chief English fault, especially in the nineteenth century, has been lack of decision, not only lack of decision in action, but lack of the equally essential decision in thought which some call dogma.

To present these difficulties in brief, it must be observed that freedom is opposed, to all appearance, by determination or certainty of any kind whatever; and nevertheless the common dogma of our philosophers states that the truth of contingent futurities is determined.

For we must never forget that accurate representation of what the grocer thinks he sees was the central dogma of Victorian art. It is the general acceptance of this view that the accurate imitation of objects is an essential quality in a work of art and the general inability to create, or even to recognise, aesthetic qualities, that mark the nineteenth century as the end of a slope.

Since the Spirit who is given is life, the result of the gift of that Spirit is a new life, and we all know what disastrous and debasing consequences have followed from that dogma of regeneration by baptism.

Lamenting over the sentimentalism of modern religion, and the distance it had travelled from its old models, he says: "Instead of the Vírgen being held up to admiration as the Mother of Our Lord, and as an example of all feminine perfection, the ideal woman and mother, the people are called on to worship the idea of the Immaculate Conception, an abstract dogma of recent invention, and in place of showing us the perfect man in the Son of God, they are asked to worship a 'bleeding heart, abstracted from the body, and held up as an object of reverence, apart from the living body of Jesus Christ."

But, though clergymen are thus put quietly out of court, a layman may still be heard; and one could almost wish that he had lived to handle, in some fresh preface to Literature and Dogma, such a confession of faith as that which Lord Salisbury gave in 1894 "To me, the central point is the Resurrection of Christ, which I believe.

I know no country where men enjoy so great freedom as in England. But it is a dogma of democracy that the people itself must determine in what manner it will be governed, and I therefore repeat that the final word can only be spoken by the constitutional representative body. I believe that I am here entirely at one with the present Government.

Only for fools or the weak does materialism become a debasing dogma; assuredly, in its code there are none of those precepts of ordinary morals which our fathers entitled virtue; but I do find there a grand word which may well counterbalance many others, that is to say, Honor, self-esteem! Unquestionably a materialist may not be a saint; but he can be a gentleman, which is something.

It would be difficult to cite a clearer renouncement of the outworn "van to van," ship to ship, dogma; but Rodney is said to have expressed himself in more emphatic terms subsequently, as follows: "During all the commands Lord Rodney has been entrusted with, he made it a rule to bring his whole force against a part of the enemy's, and never was so absurd as to bring ship against ship, when the enemy gave him an opportunity of acting otherwise."

The parson here entered into a very unintelligible explanation of a subject which constitutes, in defiance of common sense and of the plainest teaching of the gospel, the leading dogma of Presbyterianism; namely, foreordination, or the eternal decree of every man's election or reprobation, irrespective of free will, good works, or even the all-saving merits of our Lord Jesus Christ.