Dr. Hampden was in fact unexceptionably, even rigidly orthodox in his acceptance of Church doctrine and Church creeds. He had published a volume of sermons containing, among other things, an able statement of the Scriptural argument for the doctrine of the Trinity, and an equally able defence of the Athanasian Creed. But he felt that there are formularies which may be only the interpretations of doctrine and inferences from Scripture of a particular time or set of men; and he was desirous of putting into their proper place the authority of such formularies. His object was to put an interval between them and the Scriptures from which they professed to be derived, and to prevent them from claiming the command over faith and conscience which was due only to the authentic evidences of God's revelation. He wished to make room for a deeper sense of the weight of Scripture. He proposed to himself the same thing which was aimed at by the German divines, Arndt, Calixtus, and Spener, when they rose up against the grinding oppression which Lutheran dogmatism had raised on its _Symbolical Books_,[56] and which had come to outdo the worst extravagances of scholasticism. This seems to have been his object--a fair and legitimate one. But in arguing against investing the Thirty-nine Articles with an authority which did not belong to them, he unquestionably, without seeing what he was doing, went much farther--where he never meant to go. In fact, he so stated his argument that he took in with the Thirty-nine Articles every expression of collective belief, every document, however venerable, which the Church had sanctioned from the first. Strangely enough, without observing it, he took in--what he meant to separate by a wide interval from what he called dogma--the doctrine of the infallible authority and sufficiency of Scripture. In denying the worth of the _consensus_ and immemorial judgment of the Church, he cut from under him the claim to that which he accepted as the source and witness of "divine facts." He did not mean to do this, or to do many other things; but from want of clearness of head, he certainly, in these writings which were complained of, did it. He was, in temper and habit, too desirous to be "orthodox," as Whately feared, to accept in its consequences his own theory. The theory which he put forward in his Bampton Lectures, and on which he founded his plan of comprehension in his pamphlet on Dissent, left nothing standing but the authority of the letter of Scripture. All else--right or wrong as it might be--was "speculation," "human inference," "dogma." With perfect consistency, he did not pretend to take even the Creeds out of this category. But the truth was, he did not consciously mean all that he said; and when keener and more powerful and more theological minds pointed out with relentless accuracy what he _had said_ he was profuse and overflowing with explanations, which showed how little he had perceived the drift of his words.