This may be true; but in my brother's case
there was something even more unpromising than this; there was a
commonness, so to speak, of mental execution, from which no one could
have foreseen his after-emancipation. Yet in the course of time he was
indeed emancipated to the very uttermost, while his bonds will, I firmly
trust, be found to have been of inestimable service to the whole human
race.
For although it was so many years before he was enabled to see the
Christian scheme _as a whole_, or even to conceive the idea that there
was any whole at all, other than each one of the stages of opinion
through which he was at the time passing; yet when the idea was at length
presented to him by one whom I must not name, the discarded fragments of
his faith assumed shape, and formed themselves into a consistently
organised scheme. Then became apparent the value of his knowledge of the
details of so many different sides of Christian verity. Buried in the
details, he had hitherto ignored the fact that they were only the
unessential developments of certain component parts. Awakening to the
perception of the whole after an intimate acquaintance with the details,
he was able to realise the position and meaning of all that he had
hitherto experienced in a way which has been vouchsafed to few, if any
others. Thus he became truly a broad Churchman.
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