fear of differences of opinion where the heart was set on truth.
"Remember," she told me he said to her--"remember that our God is the
God of truth, and that therefore the honest search for truth can never
be displeasing in His eyes." Once again after that he came, and after
his visit to my mother we had another long talk. I ventured to ask
him, the conversation having turned that way, how, with views so broad
as his, he found it possible to remain in communion with the Church of
England. "I think," he answered, gently, "that I am of more service to
true religion by remaining in the Church and striving to widen its
boundaries from within, than if I left it and worked from without."
And he went on to explain how, as Dean of Westminster, he was in a
rarely independent position, and could make the Abbey of a wider
national service than would otherwise be possible. In all he said on
this his love for and his pride in the glorious Abbey were manifest,
and it was easy to see that old historical associations, love of
music, of painting, of stately architecture, were the bonds that held
him bound to the "old historic Church of England." His emotions, not
his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrank, with the
over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar, from the idea of allowing
the old traditions to be handled roughly by inartistic hands.
Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet
more exquisitely sensitive by the training of the college and the
court; the polished courtesy of his manners was but the natural
expression of a noble and lofty mind--a mind whose very gentleness
sometimes veiled its strength. I have often heard Dean Stanley harshly
spoken of, I have heard his honesty roughly challenged; but never has
he been attacked in my presence that I have not uttered my protest
against the injustice done him, and thus striven to repay some small
fraction of that great debt of gratitude which I shall ever owe his
memory.