CHAPTER VII.
CANON E.W.

BARNES _True religion takes up that place in the mind which superstition would usurp, and so leaves little room for it; and likewise lays us under the strongest obligations to oppose it .-- BISHOP BUTLER.
Socrates looked up at him, and replied, Farewell: I will do as you say.

Then he turned to us and said, How courteous the man is!--PLATO._ In this able and courageous Doctor of Science, who came to theology from mathematics, a great virtue and a small fault combine to check his intellectual usefulness.

His heart is as full of modesty as his mind of tentatives.
He is possessed by a gracious nature, and could no more think of raising his voice to shout down a Boanerges than he could dream of lifting an elbow to push his way through a press of people bound for the limelight.
It is only a deep moral earnestness which brings him into public life at all, and he endeavours to treat that public life not as it is but as it ought to be.
In "the calmness and moderation of his sentiments," in his dislike of everything that is sensational, and of all "undue emphasis," he resembles Joubert, who wanted "to infuse exquisite sense into common sense, or to render exquisite sense common." Modesty might not so hamper the usefulness of Canon Barnes if he knew a little less than he does know, and was also conveniently blind to the vastness of scientific territory.

But he knows much; much too much for vociferation; and his eyes are so wide open to the enormous sweep of scientific inquiry that he can nowhere discern at present the ground for a single thesis which effectually accounts for everything--a great lack in a popular preacher.
I am disposed to deplore the degree both of his modesty and his scholarship, for he possesses one of the rarest and most precious of gifts in a very learned man, particularly a mathematician and a theologian, namely, the gift of lucid exposition.