side of Christianity, and who much enlarge on the preeminence of this, to put themselves right, as it were, with dogmatic theology, by a passing sentence expressing profound belief in its dogmas, though in discussing them, it is implied, there is little profit. So Mr. Erskine of Linlathen, that unwearying and much-revered exponent of the moral side of the Bible: 'It seems difficult,' he says, 'to conceive that any man should read through the New Testament candidly and attentively, without being convinced that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to and implied in every part of the system.' Even already many readers of Mr. Erskine feel, when they come across such a sentence as that, as if they had suddenly taken gravel or sand into their mouth. Twenty years hence this feeling will be far stronger; the reader will drop the book, saying that certainly it can avail him nothing. So, also, Bunsen was fond of maintaining, putting some peculiar meaning of his own into the words, that the whole of Christianity was in the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith. Thus, too, the Bishop of Exeter chooses to say that his main objection to keeping the Athanasian Creed is, that it endangers the doctrine of the Trinity, which is so important. Mr. Maurice, again, that pure and devout spirit,—of whom, however, the truth must at last be told, that in theology he passed his life beating the bush with deep emotion and never starting the hare,—Mr. Maurice declared that by reading between the lines he saw in the Thirty-nine Articles and the Athanasian Creed the altogether perfect expression of the Christian faith.
But all this is mischievous as well as vain. It is vain, because it is meant to conciliate the so-called orthodox, and it does not conciliate them. Of his attachment to the doctrine of the Trinity the Bishop of Exeter may make what protestations he will, Archdeacon Denison will
