Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill STANLEY ON THE STUDY OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY1 In these introductory lectures Mr. Stanley gives us the keynote of what he means to be his professorial teaching. It will be, if we are to judge from them, comprehensive, wide in its range and in its sympathies, noble and generous in its spirit, full, rich, varied, attractive,—attractive from its abundance of materials and information, from the hearty earnestness and warmth of the teacher, and from the finished elegance of his manner. On the other hand, this teaching does not promise to be distinguished by deep and searching views; it seems not unlikely to be tempted to linger on the surface by a love of the picturesque and dramatic, and by an instinctive shrinking from the thorns and pitfalls of theological controversy, and the doubts and contradictions of inward experiences; it will show, besides candour, temper, and elevation, anuneasy hesitation, an impulse to go to the edge checked by an unconquerable drawing back, in those inevitable questions where men have hitherto found it necessary to make up their minds; and though far from forgetting the divine and unearthly aspects of Church history, it will put out its strength and lay the stress of its results on the purely human side of that history. Mr. Stanley would be as far as possible from intending to divorce the earthly from the heavenly, the human agents from the more than human significance and importance of the actions in which they had their part. But we may expect, probably, that sometimes wisely, sometimes questionably, he will present that purely human side and significance of ecclesiastical history with a strength and exclusiveness which will be new in one of its English University chairs. 1 Three Introductory Lectures on the Study of Ecclesiastical His- to...