in a hundred ways and from all possible points of view; and it is not
till the company breaks up and the lights are blown out, and you are
left alone with silence, that the doubt occurs to you, What is the
good of it all?

Where is the actuary who can appraise the value of a man's opinions?
'When we speak of a man's opinions,' says Dr. Newman, 'what do we mean
but the collection of notions he happens to have?' Happens to have!
How did he come by them? It is the knowledge we all possess of the
sorts of ways in which men get their opinions that makes us so little
affected in our own minds by those of men for whose characters and
intellects we may have great admiration. A sturdy Nonconformist
minister, who thinks Mr. Gladstone the ablest and most honest man, as
well as the ripest scholar within the three kingdoms, is no whit
shaken in his Nonconformity by knowing that his idol has written in
defence of the Apostolical Succession, and believes in special
sacramental graces. Mr. Gladstone may have been a great student of
Church history, whilst Nonconformist reading under that head usually
begins with Luther's Theses--but what of that? Is it not all explained
by the fact that Mr. Gladstone was at Oxford in 1831? So at least the
Nonconformist minister will think.

The admission frankly made, that these remarks are confined to the
realms of opinion, prevents me from urging on everyone my
prescription, but, with the two exceptions to be immediately named, I
believe it would be found generally useful. It may be made up thus:
'As much reticence as is consistent with good-breeding upon, and a
wisely tempered indifference to, the various speculative questions now
agitated in our midst.'