Doubtless so much knowledge, so much honest and unsparing toil, such freshness and quickness of thought, have not been wasted; there will always be much to learn from Bunsen's writings. But his main service has been the moral one of his example; of his ardent and high-souled industry, of his fearlessness in accepting the conclusions of his inquiries, of his untiring faith through many changes and some disappointments that there is a way to reconcile all the truths that interest men--those of religion, and those of nature and history. The sincerity and earnestness with which he attempted this are a lesson to everybody; his success is more difficult to recognise, and it may perhaps be allowable to wish that he had taken more exactly the measure of the great task which he set to himself. His ambition was a high one. He aspired to be the Luther of the new 1517 which he so often dwelt upon, and to construct a theology which, without breaking with the past, should show what Christianity really is, and command the faith and fill the opening thought of the present. It can hardly be said that he succeeded. The Church of the Future still waits its interpreter, to make good its pretensions to throw the ignorant and mistaken Church of the Past into the shade. XVII COLERIDGE'S MEMOIR OF KEBLE[20] [20] _A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble_. By the Right Hon. Sir J.T. Coleridge. _Saturday Review_, 20th March 1860. Mr. Keble has been fortunate in his biographer. There have been since his death various attempts to appreciate a character manifestly of such depth and interest, yet about which outsiders could find so little to say. Professor Shairp, of St. Andrews, two or three years ago gave a charming little sketch, full of heart and insight, and full too of noble modesty and reverence, which deserves to be rescued from the danger of being forgotten into which sketches are apt to fall, both on account of its direct subject, and also for the contemporary evidence which it contains of the impressions made on a perfectly impartial and intelligent observer by the early events of the Oxford movement. The brilliant Dean of Westminster, in _Macmillan's Magazine_, has attempted, with his usual grace and kindliness, to do justice to Keble's character, and has shown how hard he found the task. The paper on Keble forms a pendant to a recent paper on Dean Milman. The two papers show conspicuously the measure and range of Dr. Stanley's power; what he can comprehend and appreciate in religious earnestness and height, and what he cannot; in what shapes, as in Dean Milman, he can thoroughly sympathise with it and grasp it, and where its phenomena, as in Mr. Keble, simply perplex and baffle him, and carry him out of his depth.