But it does not follow, because he had not asked all the questions that others have asked, that he had not thought out his reasonable faith.

His religion was not one of mere vague sentiment: it was the result of reflection and deliberate judgment.

It was the discriminating and intelligent Church of England religion of Hooker and Andrewes, which had gone back to something deeper and nobler in Christianity than the popular Calvinism of the earlier Reformation; and though sternly hostile to the system of the Papacy, both on religious and political grounds, attempted to judge it with knowledge and justice.

This deliberate character of his belief is shown in the remarkable Confession of Faith which he left behind him: a closely-reasoned and nobly-expressed survey of Christian theology--"a _summa theologiae_, digested into seven pages of the finest English of the days when its tones were finest." "The entire scheme of Christian theology," as Mr.Spedding says, "is constantly in his thoughts; underlies everything; defines for him the limits of human speculation; and, as often as the course of inquiry touches at any point the boundary line, never fails to present itself.

There is hardly any occasion or any kind of argument into which it does not at one time or another incidentally introduce itself." Doubtless it was a religion which in him was compatible, as it has been in others, with grave faults of temperament and character.