Sublime

The chief English fault, especially in the nineteenth century, has been lack of decision, not only lack of decision in action, but lack of the equally essential decision in thought–which some call dogma.

mysticism was with him, as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of common sense.

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

He was even in many ways very modern, which some rather erroneously suppose to be the same as being human;

But the truth is that the ordinary honest man, whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings, was not either disgusted or even annoyed at the candour of the moderns. What disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence of a clear realism, but the absence of a clear idealism.

They were so full of the romance that anybody could be Lord Mayor, that they seemed to have slipped into thinking that everybody could.

but we do not know why

First, a man reading the Gospel sayings would not find platitudes.

But whether he is allowed to fade into a truism or preserved as a sensation by being preserved as a secret, it is clear that he is always either an old truism or an old tradition. There is nothing to show that he is an improved product of the mere mythology and everything to show that he preceded it.