The life and letters of Benjamin Jowett, M. A., master of Balliol college, Oxford.

II8

Life of Benjamin Jowell

[CHAP. IV

I quite agree in what you say about Pimlico churches and
modern Luthers. I wonder people do not feel the curse of
having no old to entwine with the new. The said Pimlico
structures very soon become cracked and show the stuff they
are made of. For my own part I get rather to hate logic,
certainly when applied as it usually is to these subjects, and
hope there is a point of view in which you may place yourself
above it without being a fool or a madman. I think it is one
of the chief charges against the Church of Rome, that it has
defined, and subdefined, and deduced, and subdeduced until
religion has come to be something absolutely different from
the religion of the Bible, not merely as to the things believed,
but as to the mode of believing. Systematized theology they
put in the place of the philosophy of religion.
You see I am obliged to have recourse to a kind of shady
dissertation to fill up my letter. Old Ward's marriage you
will have seen by the papers is known to all the worldsonnets are addressed to him, the country newspapers have
impromnptus on the subject, the matter has ended in a universal
roar of laughter. I am afraid it is a bad thing for him, which
it would not be on your view, if he would resign himself
to his better nature and become a domesticated animal. This,
however, he is not disposed to do. I fear he will go on
despised by all the world-'Hildebrand the married man'with the worst effect on himself if not upon others.
To A. P. STANLEY.
September, I845.
I have read part of Ewald and part of Bunsen'sl work.
'Give me a bit of paper and a pencil, and I'll sketch you a plan
of a church. It won't take five minutes, I assure you.' It
seems to show a great ignorance of the truth, 'Ecclesia
nascitur, non fit.' Surely it must be an idle attempt to construct any outward form of a church which is not simply
an expression of religious tendencies in the people...... Ewald I like much better than I did at first. About

1 Die Verfassung der Kirche der Zukunft, published in I845.