Several correspondents express annoyance, or rather pain, that we should
have called Lord Shaftesbury's faith a narrow one. They say his opinions on cremation—which, oddly enough, he favoured—on vivisection, on missionary enterprise, on many most varied kinds of philanthropic effort, show that the word " narrowness " ill-describes his mental attitude. We are afraid that we must retain it, though we are aware that Lord Shaftes- bury helped to promote Dean Stanley, and that on one or two points he showed a Catholicity due perhaps as much to his wide acquaintance with men and manners as to any openness of opinion. We never affirmed or thought that his sympathies were narrow ; but to say that his creed was not, is to misuse words. He never got rid of the feeling that there was a certain wickedness in doubting, and that doubt meafit the non- acceptance of the old " Evangelical " formula. We never, how- ever, attributed narrowness to him in a morally depreciatory way, and thought we had made this clear. It was part of the constitution of his mind to regard a creed as he would regard a system of arithmetic, and to grow impatient of even the slightest deviation. There are many such minds among the noblest Christians, both Catholic and Protestant ; and their owners are often among the most efficient, as they are always among the happiest, of mankind. It is only a few with whom the drawback to breadth is not want of intensity, and those few will generally be found to hold certain dogmas, moral or intel- lectual, with great rigidity. The special fineness of Lord Shaftesbury's character was that, holding the views he did, he could, not only
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