Such a book
is not only an honor to the men engaged in its production, but of happy
augury for the future progress of truth.
The topics which these Essays discuss are of as much interest in America
as in England, to those outside the English Church as to those within
it. But, at the same time, most of the Essays (and this consideration
is not a satisfactory one) are of a kind which it would seem could have
been produced only in England, and there only within the limits of the
Church. In America we have no body of men capable of work so different
in its parts, and, at the same time, exhibiting such soundness and
extent of scholarship, such liberality of opinion, such disciplined
habits of thought. Any single Essay in the volume might, perhaps,
without any extravagance of supposition, have been the work of some
American scholar; but the difficulty would be to find here seven writers
each capable of producing one of the Essays. The intellectual discipline
of English methods of study and of English institutions still produces
a greater number of men capable of the highest sort of work, than the
methods in vogue and the institutions established here. We have thinkers
who venture as pioneers into the uncleared wilderness. Their vigorous
blows bring down many an old tree moss-grown with errors, and their
ploughs for the first time turn the soil covered with the fallen leaves
of decayed beliefs; but we fail in our supply of those men who are to
follow the pioneers and do the higher and more lasting constructive work
of civilization.
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