Had he himself seen all that he ought to have been able to see from
his own standpoints? Can any of us do so? The force of early bias
and education, the force of intellectual surroundings, the force of
natural timidity, the force of dulness, were things which he could
appreciate and make allowance for in any other age, and among any
other people than his own; but as belonging to England and the
Nineteenth Century they had no place in his theory of Nature; they
were inconceivable, unnatural, unpardonable, whenever they came into
contact with the subject of Christian evidences. Deplorable, indeed,
they are, but this was just the sort of word to which he could not
confine himself. The criticisms upon the late Dean Alford's notes,
which will be given in the sequel, display this sort of temper; they
are not entirely his own, but he adopted them and endorsed them with
a warmth which we cannot but feel to be unnecessary, not to say more.
Yet I am free to confess that whatever editorial licence I could
venture to take has been taken in the direction of lenity.

On the whole, however, he valued Dean Alford's work very highly,
giving him great praise for the candour with which he not
unfrequently set the harmonists aside. For example, in his notes
upon the discrepancies between St. Luke's and St. Matthew's accounts
of the early life of our Lord, the Dean openly avows that it is quite
beyond his purpose to attempt to reconcile the two. "This part of
the Gospel history," he writes, "is one where the harmonists, by
their arbitrary reconcilement of the two accounts, have given great
advantage to the enemies of the faith. AS THE TWO ACCOUNTS NOW
STAND, it is wholly impossible to suggest any satisfactory method of
UNITING THEM, every one who has attempted it has in some part or
other of his hypothesis violated probability and common sense," but
in spite of this, the Dean had no hesitation in accepting both the