196 MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN 



Religion His piety was, indeed, a thing of chief importance. 



morality. His views (as they are called) upon religious matters 

 varied much ; and he could never be induced to 

 think them more or less than views. ' All dogma 

 is to me mere form,' he wrote ; ' dogmas are 

 mere blind struggles to express the inexpressible. 

 I cannot conceive that any single proposition 

 whatever in religion is true in the scientific sense ; 

 and yet all the while I think the religious view 

 of the world is the most true view. Try to separate 

 from the mass of their statements that which is 

 common to Socrates, Isaiah, David, St. Bernard, 

 the Jansenists, Luther, Mahomet, Bunyan yes, 

 and George Eliot : of course you do not believe 

 that this something could be written down in a 

 set of propositions like Euclid, neither will you 

 deny that there is something common and this 

 something very valuable. ... I shall be sorry 

 if the boys ever give a moment's thought to the 

 question of what community they belong to 

 I hope they will belong to the great community.' 

 I should observe that as time went on his con- 

 formity to the church in which he was born grew 

 more complete, and his views drew nearer the 

 conventional. ' The longer I live, my dear Louis,' 

 he wrote but a few months before his death, ' the 

 more convinced I become of a direct care by God 

 which is reasonably impossible but there it 

 is.' And in his last year he took the communion. 



