has honoured me by the dedication of his recently published lectures
on 'Older England;' and whose eager enthusiasm and far collected
learning have enabled me for the first time to assign their just
meaning and value to the ritual and imagery of Saxon devotion. But
while every page of Mr. Hodgett's book, and, I may gratefully say
also, every sentence of his teaching, has increased and justified the
respect in which I have always been by my own feeling disposed to
hold the mythologies founded on the love and knowledge of the natural
world, I have also been led by them to conceive, far more forcibly
than hitherto, the power which the story of Christianity possessed,
first heard through the wreaths of that cloudy superstition, in the
substitution, for its vaporescent allegory, of a positive and literal
account of a real Creation, and an instantly present, omnipresent, and
compassionate God.

Observe, there is no question whatever in examining this influence,
how far Christianity itself is true, or the transcendental doctrines
of it intelligible. Those who brought you the story of it believed it
with all their souls to be true,--and the effect of it on the hearts
of your ancestors was that of an unquestionable, infinitely lucid
message straight from God, doing away with all difficulties, grief,
and fears for those who willingly received it, nor by any, except
wilfully and obstinately vile persons, to be, by any possibility,
denied or refused.

And it was precisely, observe, the vivacity and joy with which the
main fact of Christ's life was accepted which gave the force and wrath
to the controversies instantly arising about its nature.

Those controversies vexed and shook, but never undermined, the faith