GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 329 



on that of scholastic or accepted interpretation, which he 

 never preferred to his own where the two differed, that his 

 memory could promptly supply him with an appropriate 

 text at every turn of the argument, and that he never 

 accepted the most alluring temptation to fight on theoretic 

 ground outside the protecting shadow of the ipsissima 

 verba of the Bible, it will perhaps be understood that he 

 was an antagonist whom it was easy to disagree with, but 

 uncommonly difficult to defeat. 



This being the foundation upon which Philip Gosse's 

 religious edifice was based, it is not difficult to perceive 

 how certain radical peculiarities of his character, to which 

 the reader's attention has already been drawn, flourished 

 under its shelter. His temper was unbending, and yet 

 singularly wanting in initiative, and this was a system 

 which provided his mind with the fully developed osseous 

 skeleton it demanded. Revelation had to be accepted as a 

 whole, and so as to leave no margin for scepticism. At the 

 same time, the detail of Biblical interpretation opened up a 

 field of minute investigation which w^as absolutely boundless, 

 and which my father's near-sighted intellect, so helpless in 

 sweeping a large philosophical horizon, so amazingly alert 

 and vigorous in analyzing a minute area, could explore, 

 without exhaustion, to an infinite degree. Hence what 

 fascinated him more than any other mental exercise, 

 especially of late years, was to take a passage of Scripture 

 (in the Greek, for he never mastered Hebrew), and to 

 dissect it, as if under the microscope, word by word, 

 particle by particle, passing at length into subtleties where, 

 undoubtedly, few could follow him. 



Protected by his ample shield, the text of Scripture, he 

 was quite calm under the charge of heterodoxy which 

 sometimes reached him in his retreat. It is not a matter for 

 surprise that with his remarkable temperament, his isolated 



