Etext preparer's note: This text was first published anonymously in 1886.
When you were kind enough to allow me to dedicate this book toyou—you, to whose frank discussion of sacred things and kindlyindifference to exaggerations of expression I owe so much—I feltyou were only adding another to the long list of delicate benefitsfor which a friend can not be directly repaid.
My object has throughout been this: I have seen so much of whatmay be called the dissidence of religious thought and religiousorganization among those of my own generation at the Universities,and the unhappy results of such a separation, that I felt bound tocontribute what I could to a settlement of this division, existingso much more in word than in fact—a point which you helped me verygreatly to grasp.
I have been fortunate enough to have seen and known both sides of thebattle. I have seen men in the position of teachers, both anxious andcompetent to position of teachers, both anxious and competent tosettle differences, when brought into contact with men of seriousGod-seeking souls, with the nominal intention of dropping thebandying of words and cries and of attacking principles, meet andargue and part, almost unconscious that they have never touched theroot of the matter at all, yet dissatisfied with the efforts whichonly seem to widen the breach they are intended to fill.
And why? Both sides are to blame, no doubt: the teachers, for beingmore anxious to expound systems than to listen to difficulties, tomake their theories plain than to analyse the theories of their—Iwill not say adversaries—but opponents; the would-be learners,for hasty generalization; for bringing to the conflict a deliberateprejudice against all traditional authority, a want of patience intranslating dogmas into life, a tendency to flatly deny that such atransmutation is possible.
Fortunately, the constructive side is in no want of an exponent;but I have tried to give a true portrait in this arrangement, orrather selection, of realities, of what a serious and thoughtfulsoul-history may in these days be: to depict the career of acharacter for which no one can fail to have the profoundest sympathy,being as it is, by the nature of its case, condemned to a saddersterner view of life than its uprightness justifies, and deprived ofthe helpful encouragement of so many sweet natures, whose single aimin life is to help other souls, if they only knew how.
And so, as I said before, it is with a most grateful remembrance ofcertain gracious words of yours, let fall in the stately house of Godwhere we have worshipped together, in lecture-rooms where I have satto hear you, and in conversations held in quiet college rooms orstudious gardens, that I place your name at the head of these pages,the first I have sent out to shift for themselves, or rather to passwhither the Inspirer of all earnest endeavour may appoint.
There are several forms of temperament. The kind that mostlyissues in biography is the practical temperament. P