But the difficulty of describing and judging him goes deeper. His was a singularly complex nature, whose threads it was hard to unravel. His individuality was extremely strong. All that he said or did bore its impress. Yet it was an individuality so far from being self-consistent as sometimes to seem a bundle of opposite qualities capriciously united in a single person. He might with equal truth have been called, and he was in fact called, a conservative and a revolutionary. He was dangerously impulsive, and had frequently to suffer for his impulsiveness; yet he was also not merely prudent and cautious, but so astute as to have been accused of craft and dissimulation. So great was his respect for tradition that he clung to views regarding the authorship of the Homeric poems and the date of the books of the Old Testament which nearly all competent specialists have now rejected. So bold was he in practical matters that he carried through sweeping changes in the British constitution, changed the course of English policy in the nearer East, overthrew an established church in one part of the United Kingdom, and committed himself in principle to the overthrow of two other established churches in other parts. He came near to being a Roman Catholic in his religious opinions, yet was for the last twenty years of his life the trusted leader of the English Protestant Nonconformists and the Scottish Presbyterians. No one who knew him intimately doubted his conscientious sincerity and earnestness, yet four-fifths of the English upper classes were in his later years wont to regard him as a self-interested schemer who would sacrifice his country to his ambition. Though he loved general principles, and often soared out of the sight of his audience when discussing them, he generally ended by deciding upon points of detail the question at issue. He was at different times of his life the defender and the assailant of the same institutions, yet scarcely seemed inconsistent in doing opposite things, because his methods and his arguments preserved the same type and colour throughout. Those who had at the beginning of his career discerned in him the capacity for such diversities and contradictions would probably have predicted that they must wreck it by making his purposes fluctuating and his course erratic. Such a prediction might have proved true of any one with less firmness of will and less intensity of temper. It was the persistent heat and vehemence of his character, the sustained passion which he threw into the pursuit of the object on which he was for the moment bent, that fused these dissimilar qualities and made them appear to contribute to and increase the total force which he exerted.