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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11771 ***
+
+OCCASIONAL PAPERS
+
+SELECTED FROM
+THE GUARDIAN, THE TIMES, AND THE SATURDAY REVIEW
+1846-1890
+
+
+By the late
+R.W. CHURCH, M.A., D.C.L.
+Sometime Rector of Whatley, Dean of St. Paul's,
+Honorary Fellow of Oriel College
+
+
+In Two Vols.--VOL. II
+
+
+London
+Macmillan and Co., Limited
+New York: The Macmillan Company
+
+1897
+
+_First Edition February_ 1897
+_Reprinted April_ 1897
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I       MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ROYAL SUPREMACY
+
+II      JOYCE ON COURTS OF SPIRITUAL APPEAL
+
+III     PRIVY COUNCIL JUDGMENTS
+
+IV      SIR JOHN COLERIDGE ON THE PURCHAS CASE
+
+V       MR. GLADSTONE'S LETTER ON THE ENGLISH CHURCH
+
+VI      DISENDOWMENT
+
+VII     THE NEW COURT
+
+VIII    MOZLEY'S BAMPTON LECTURES
+
+IX      ECCE HOMO
+
+X       THE AUTHOR OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ON A NEW REFORMATION
+
+XI      RENAN'S "VIE DE JÉSUS"
+
+XII     RENAN'S "LES APÔTRES"
+
+XIII    RENAN'S HIBBERT LECTURES
+
+XIV     RENAN'S "SOUVENIRS D'ENFANCE"
+
+XV      LIFE OF FREDERICK ROBERTSON
+
+XVI     LIFE OF BARON BUNSEN
+
+XVII    COLERIDGE'S MEMOIR OF KEBLE
+
+XVIII   MAURICE'S THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS
+
+XIX     FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE
+
+XX      SIR RICHARD CHURCH
+
+XXI     DEATH OF BISHOP WILBERFORCE
+
+XXII    RETIREMENT OF THE PROVOST OF ORIEL
+
+XXIII   MARK PATTISON
+
+XXIV    PATTISON'S ESSAYS
+
+XXV     BISHOP FRAZER
+
+XXVI    NEWMAN'S "APOLOGIA"
+
+XXVII   DR. NEWMAN ON THE "EIRENICON"
+
+XXVIII  NEWMAN'S PAROCHIAL SERMONS
+
+XXIX    CARDINAL NEWMAN
+
+XXX     CARDINAL NEWMAN'S COURSE
+
+XXXI    CARDINAL NEWMAN'S NATURALNESS
+
+XXXII   LORD BLACHFORD
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ROYAL SUPREMACY[1]
+
+
+  [1]
+  _Remarks on the Royal Supremacy, as it is Defined by Reason, History,
+  and the Constitution_. A Letter to the Lord Bishop of London, by
+  the Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone, M.P. for the University of Oxford.
+  _Guardian_, 10th July 1850.
+
+Mr. Gladstone has not disappointed the confidence of those who have
+believed of him that when great occasions presented themselves, of
+interest to the Church, he would not be found wanting. A statesman
+has a right to reserve himself and bide his time, and in doubtful
+circumstances may fairly ask us to trust his discretion as to when is
+his time. But there are critical seasons about whose seriousness there
+can be no doubt. One of these is now passing over the English Church.
+And Mr. Gladstone has recognised it, and borne himself in it with a
+manliness, earnestness, and temper which justify those who have never
+despaired of his doing worthy service to the Church, with whose cause
+he so early identified himself.
+
+The pamphlet before us, to which he has put his name, is the most
+important, perhaps, of all that have been elicited by the deep interest
+felt in the matter on which it treats. Besides its importance as the
+expression of the opinion, and, it must be added, the anxieties of a
+leading statesman, it has two intrinsic advantages. It undertakes to
+deal closely and strictly with those facts in the case mainly belonging
+to the period of the Reformation, on which the great stress has been
+laid in the arguments both against our liberty and our very being as a
+Church. And, further, it gives us on these facts, and, in connection
+with them, on the events of the crisis itself, the judgment and the
+anticipations of a mind at once deeply imbued with religious
+philosophy, and also familiar with the consideration of constitutional
+questions, and accustomed to view them in their practical entanglements
+as well as in their abstract and ideal forms. It is, indeed, thus only
+that the magnitude and the true extent of the relations of the present
+contest can be appreciated. The intrinsic greatness, indeed, of
+religious interests cannot receive addition of dignity here. But the
+manner of treating them may. And Mr. Gladstone has done what was both
+due to the question at issue, and in the highest degree important for
+its serious consideration and full elucidation, in raising it from a
+discussion of abstract principles to what it is no less--a real problem
+of English constitutional law.
+
+The following passage will show briefly the ground over which the
+discussion travels:--
+
+    The questions, then, that I seek to examine will be as follow:--
+
+    1. Did the statutes of the Reformation involve the abandonment of
+    the duty of the Church to be the guardian of her faith?
+
+    2. Is the present composition of the appellate tribunal conformable
+    either to reason or to the statutes of the Reformation, and the
+    spirit of the Constitution as expressed in them?
+
+    3. Is the Royal Supremacy, according to the Constitution, any bar
+    to the adjustment of the appellate jurisdiction in such a manner
+    as that it shall convey the sense of the Church in questions of
+    doctrine?
+
+    All these questions I humbly propose to answer in the negative,
+    and so to answer them in conformity with what I understand to be
+    the principles of our history and law. My endeavour will be to
+    show that the powers of the State so determined, in regard to the
+    legislative office of the Church (setting aside for the moment any
+    question as to the right of assent in the laity), are powers of
+    restraint; that the jurisdictions united and annexed to the Crown
+    are corrective jurisdictions; and that their exercise is subject
+    to the general maxim, that the laws ecclesiastical are to be
+    administered by ecclesiastical judges.
+
+Mr. Gladstone first goes into the question--What was done, and what was
+the understanding at the Reformation? All agree that this was a time of
+great changes, and that in the settlement resulting from them the State
+took, and the Church yielded, a great deal. And on the strength of this
+broad general fact, the details of the settlement have been treated
+with an _a priori_ boldness, not deficient often in that kind of
+precision which can be gained by totally putting aside inconvenient
+or perplexing elements, and having both its intellectual and moral
+recommendations to many minds; but highly undesirable where a great
+issue has been raised for the religion of millions, and the political
+constitution of a great nation. Men who are not lawyers seem to have
+thought that, by taking a lawyer's view, or what they considered such,
+of the Reformation Acts, they had disposed of the question for ever. It
+was, indeed, time for a statesman to step in, and protest, if only in
+the name of constitutional and political philosophy, against so narrow
+and unreal an abuse of law-texts--documents of the highest importance
+in right hands, and in their proper place, but capable, as all must
+know, of leading to inconceivable absurdity in speculation, and not
+impossibly fatal confusion in fact.
+
+The bulk of this pamphlet is devoted to the consideration of the language
+and effect, legal and constitutional, of those famous statutes with the
+titles of which recent controversy has made us so familiar. Mr.
+Gladstone makes it clear that it does not at all follow that because the
+Church conceded a great deal, she conceded, or even was expected to
+concede, indefinitely, whatever might be claimed. She conceded, but she
+conceded by compact;--a compact which supposed her power to concede, and
+secured to her untouched whatever was not conceded. And she did not
+concede, nor was asked for, her highest power, her legislative power.
+She did not concede, nor was asked to concede, that any but her own
+ministers--by the avowal of all drawing their spiritual authority from a
+source which nothing human could touch--should declare her doctrine, or
+should be employed in administering her laws. What she did concede was,
+not original powers of direction and guidance, but powers of restraint
+and correction;--under securities greater, both in form and in working,
+than those possessed at the time by any other body in England, for their
+rights and liberties--greater far than might have been expected, when
+the consequences of a long foreign supremacy--not righteously maintained
+and exercised, because at the moment unrighteously thrown off--increased
+the control which the Civil Government always must claim over the
+Church, by the sudden abstraction of a power which, though usurping, was
+spiritual; and presented to the ambition of a despotic King a number of
+unwarrantable prerogatives which the separation from the Pope had left
+without an owner.
+
+On the trite saying, meant at first to represent, roughly and
+invidiously, the effect of the Reformation, and lately urged as
+technically and literally true--"The assertion that in the time of
+Henry VIII. the See of Rome was both 'the source and centre of
+ecclesiastical jurisdiction,' and therefore the supreme judge of
+doctrine; and that this power of the Pope was transferred in its
+entireness to the Crown"--Mr. Gladstone remarks as follows:--
+
+    I will not ask whether the Pope was indeed at that time the
+    supreme judge of doctrine; it is enough for me that not very long
+    before the Council of Constance had solemnly said otherwise, in
+    words which, though they may be forgotten, cannot be annulled....
+
+    That the Pope was the source of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the
+    English Church before the Reformation is an assertion of the
+    gravest import, which ought not to have been thus taken for
+    granted.... The fact really is this:--A modern opinion, which, by
+    force of modern circumstances, has of late gained great favour in
+    the Church of Rome, is here dated back and fastened upon ages to
+    whose fixed principles it was unknown and alien; and the case of
+    the Church of England is truly hard when the Papal authority of
+    the Middle Ages is exaggerated far beyond its real and historical
+    scope, with the effect only of fastening that visionary
+    exaggeration, through the medium of another fictitious notion of
+    wholesale transfer of the Papal privileges to the Crown, upon us,
+    as the true and legal measure of the Royal Supremacy.
+
+    It appears to me that he who alleges in the gross that the Papal
+    prerogatives were carried over to the Crown at the Reformation,
+    greatly belies the laws and the people of that era. Their
+    unvarying doctrine was, that they were restoring the ancient regal
+    jurisdiction, and abolishing one that had been usurped. But there
+    is no evidence to show that these were identical in themselves, or
+    co-extensive in their range. In some respects the Crown obtained
+    at that period more than the Pope had ever had; for I am not aware
+    that the Convocation required his license to deliberate upon
+    canons, or his assent to their promulgation. In other respects the
+    Crown acquired less; for not the Crown, but the Archbishop of
+    Canterbury was appointed to exercise the power of dispensation in
+    things lawful, and to confirm Episcopal elections. Neither the
+    Crown nor the Archbishop succeeded to such Papal prerogatives as
+    were contrary to the law of the land; for neither the 26th of
+    Henry VIII. nor the 2nd of Elizabeth annexed to the Crown all the
+    powers of correction and reformation which had been actually
+    claimed by the Pope, but only such as "hath heretofore been or may
+    lawfully be exercised or used." ... The "ancient jurisdiction,"
+    and not the then recently claimed or exercised powers, was the
+    measure and the substance of what the Crown received from the
+    Legislature; and, with those ancient rights for his rule, no
+    impartial man would say that the Crown was the source of
+    ecclesiastical jurisdiction according to the statutes of the
+    Reformation. But the statutes of the Reformation era relating to
+    jurisdiction, having as statutes the assent of the laity, and
+    accepted by the canons of the clergy, are the standard to which
+    the Church has bound herself as a religious society to conform.
+
+The word "jurisdiction" has played an important part in the recent
+discussions; whether its meaning, with its various involved and
+associated ideas, by no means free from intricacy and confusion, have
+been duly unravelled and made clear, we may be permitted to doubt. A
+distinction of the canonists has been assumed by those who have used
+the word with most precision--_assumed_, though it is by no means a
+simple and indisputable one. Mr. Gladstone draws attention to this,
+when, after noticing that nowhere in the ecclesiastical legislation of
+Elizabeth is the claim made on behalf of the Crown to be the source of
+ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he admits that this _is_ the language of
+the school of English law, and offers an explanation of the fact. That
+which Acts of Parliament do not say, which is negatived in actual
+practice by contradictory and irreconcilable facts, is yet wanted by
+lawyers for the theoretic completeness of their idea and system of law.
+The fact is important as a reminder that what is one real aspect, or,
+perhaps, the most complete and consistent representation of a system
+on paper, may be inadequate and untrue as an exhibition of its real
+working and appearance in the world.
+
+    To sum up the whole, then, I contend that the Crown did not claim
+    by statute, either to be of right, or to become by convention, the
+    _source_ of that kind of action, which was committed by the
+    Saviour to the Apostolic Church, whether for the enactment of
+    laws, or for the administration of its discipline; but the claim
+    was, that all the canons of the Church, and all its judicial
+    proceedings, inasmuch as they were to form parts respectively of
+    the laws and of the legal administration of justice in the
+    kingdom, should run only with the assent and sanction of the
+    Crown. They were to carry with them a double force--a force of
+    coercion, visible and palpable; a force addressed to conscience,
+    neither visible nor palpable, and in its nature only capable of
+    being inwardly appreciated. Was it then unreasonable that they
+    should bear outwardly the tokens of that power to which they were
+    to be indebted for their outward observance, and should work only
+    within by that wholly different influence that governs the kingdom
+    which is not of this world, and flows immediately from its King?
+    ... But while, according to the letter and spirit of the law, such
+    appear to be the limits of the Royal Supremacy in regard to the
+    _legislative_, which is the highest, action of the Church, I do
+    not deny that in other branches it goes farther, and will now
+    assume that the supremacy in all causes, which is at least a claim
+    to control at every point the jurisdiction of the Church, may also
+    be construed to mean as much as that the Crown is the ultimate
+    source of jurisdiction of whatever kind.
+
+    Here, however, I must commence by stating that, as it appears to
+    me, Lord Coke and others attach to the very word jurisdiction a
+    narrower sense than it bears in popular acceptation, or in the
+    works of canonists--a sense which excludes altogether that of the
+    canonists; and also a sense which appears to be the genuine and
+    legitimate sense of the word in its first intention. Now, when we
+    are endeavouring to appreciate the force and scope of the legal
+    doctrine concerning ecclesiastical and spiritual jurisdiction, it
+    is plain that we must take the term employed in the sense of our
+    own law, and not in the different and derivative sense in which it
+    has been used by canonists and theologians. But canonists
+    themselves bear witness to the distinction which I have now
+    pointed out. The one kind is _Jurisdictio coactiva proprie dicta,
+    principibus data_; the other is _Jurisdictio improprie dicta ac
+    mere spiritualis, Ecclesiae ejusque Episcopis a Christo data_....
+
+    Properly speaking, I submit that there is no such thing as
+    jurisdiction in any private association of men, or anywhere else
+    than under the authority of the State. _Jus_ is the scheme of
+    rights subsisting between men in the relations, not of all, but of
+    civil society; and _jurisdicto_ is the authority to determine and
+    enunciate those rights from time to time. Church authority,
+    therefore, so long as it stands alone, is not in strictness of
+    speech, or according to history, jurisdiction, because it is not
+    essentially bound up with civil law.
+
+    But when the State and the Church came to be united, by the
+    conversion of nations, and the submission of the private
+    conscience to Christianity--when the Church placed her power of
+    self-regulation under the guardianship of the State, and the State
+    annexed its own potent sanction to rules, which without it would
+    have been matter of mere private contract, then _jus_ or civil
+    right soon found its way into the Church, and the respective
+    interests and obligations of its various orders, and of the
+    individuals composing them, were regulated by provisions forming
+    part of the law of the land. Matter ecclesiastical or spiritual
+    moulded in the forms of civil law, became the proper subject of
+    ecclesiastical or spiritual jurisdiction, properly so called.
+
+    Now, inasmuch as laws are abstractions until they are put into
+    execution, through the medium of executive and judicial authority,
+    it is evident that the cogency of the reasons for welding
+    together, so to speak, civil and ecclesiastical authority is much
+    more full with regard to these latter branches of power than with
+    regard to legislation. There had been in the Church, from its
+    first existence as a spiritual society, a right to govern, to
+    decide, to adjudge for spiritual purposes; that was a true,
+    self-governing authority; but it was not properly jurisdiction. It
+    naturally came to be included, or rather enfolded, in the term,
+    when for many centuries the secular arm had been in perpetual
+    co-operation with the tribunals of the Church. The thing to be
+    done, and the means by which it was done, were bound together; the
+    authority and the power being always united in fact, were treated
+    as an unity for the purposes of law. As the potentate possessing
+    not the head but the mouth or issue of a river, has the right to
+    determine what shall pass to or from the sea, so the State,
+    standing between an injunction of the Church and its execution,
+    had a right to refer that execution wholly to its own authority.
+
+    There was not contained or implied in such a doctrine any denial
+    of the original and proper authority of the Church for its own
+    self-government, or any assertion that it had passed to and become
+    the property of the Crown. But that authority, though not in its
+    source, yet in its exercise, had immersed itself in the forms of
+    law; had invoked and obtained the aid of certain elements of
+    external power, which belonged exclusively to the State, and for
+    the right and just use of which the State had a separate and
+    independent responsibility, so that it could not, without breach
+    of duty, allow them to be parted from itself. It was, therefore, I
+    submit, an intelligible and, under given circumstances, a
+    warrantable scheme of action, under which the State virtually
+    said: Church decrees, taking the form of law, and obtaining their
+    full and certain effect only in that form, can be executed only as
+    law, and while they are in process of being put into practice can
+    only be regarded as law, and therefore the whole power of their
+    execution, that is to say, all juris diction in matters
+    ecclesiastical and spiritual, must, according to the doctrine of
+    law, proceed from the fountain-head of law, namely, from the
+    Crown. In the last legal resort there can be but one origin for
+    all which is to be done in societies of men by force of legal
+    power; nor, if so, can doubt arise what that origin must be.
+
+    If you allege that the Church has a spiritual authority to
+    regulate doctrines and discipline, still, as you choose to back
+    that authority with the force of temporal law, and as the State is
+    exclusively responsible for the use of that force, you must be
+    content to fold up the authority of the Church in that exterior
+    form through which you desire it to take effect. From whatsoever
+    source it may come originally, it comes to the subject as law; it
+    therefore comes to him from the fountain of law.... The faith of
+    Christendom has been received in England; the discipline of the
+    Christian Church, cast into its local form, modified by statutes
+    of the realm, and by the common law and prerogative, has from time
+    immemorial been received in England; but we can view them only as
+    law, although you may look further back to the divine and
+    spiritual sanction, in virtue of which they acquired that social
+    position, which made it expedient that they should associate with
+    law and should therefore become law.
+
+But as to the doctrine itself, it is most obvious to notice that it is
+not more strange, and not necessarily more literally real, than those
+other legal views of royal prerogative and perfection, which are the
+received theory of all our great jurists--accepted by them for very
+good reasons, but not the less astounding when presented as naked and
+independent truths. It was natural enough that they should claim for
+the Crown the origination of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, considering
+what else they claimed for it. Mr. Allen can present us with a more
+than Chinese idea of royal power, when he draws it only from
+Blackstone:--
+
+    They may have heard [he says, speaking of the "unlearned in the
+    law"] that the law of England is founded in reason and wisdom. The
+    first lesson they are taught will inform them, that the law of
+    England attributes to the King absolute perfection, absolute
+    immortality, and legal ubiquity. They will be told that the King
+    of England is not only incapable of doing wrong, but of thinking
+    wrong. They will be informed that he never dies, that he is
+    invisible as well as immortal, and that in the eye of the law he
+    is present at one and the same instant in every court of justice
+    within his dominions.... They may have been told that the royal
+    prerogative in England is limited; but when they consult the sages
+    of the law, they will be assured that the legal authority of the
+    King of England is absolute and irresistible ... that all are
+    under him, while he is under none but God....
+
+    If they have had the benefit of a liberal education, they have
+    been taught that to obtain security for persons and property was
+    the great end for which men submitted to the restraints of civil
+    government; and they may have heard of the indispensable necessity
+    of an independent magistracy for the due administration of
+    justice; but when they direct their inquiries to the laws and
+    constitution of England, they will find it an established maxim in
+    that country that all jurisdiction emanates from the Crown. They
+    will be told that the King is not ony the chief, but the sole
+    magistrate of the nation; and that all others act by his
+    commission, and in subordination to him.[2]
+
+  [2]
+  _Allen on the Royal Prerogative_, pp. 1-3.
+
+"In the most limited monarchy," as he says truly the "King is
+represented in law books, as in theory an absolute sovereign." "Even
+now," says Mr. Gladstone, "after three centuries of progress toward
+democratic sway, the Crown has prerogatives by acting upon which,
+within their strict and unquestioned bounds, it might at any time throw
+the country into confusion. And so has each House of Parliament." But
+if the absolute supremacy of the Crown _in the legal point of mew
+exactly the same over temporal matters and causes as over spiritual_,
+is taken by no sane man to be a literal fact in temporal matters, it is
+violating the analogy of the Constitution, and dealing with the most
+important subjects in a mere spirit of narrow perverseness, to insist
+that it can have none but a literal meaning in ecclesiastical matters;
+and that the Church _did_ mean, though the State _did not_ to accept a
+despotic prerogative, unbounded by custom, convention, or law, and
+unchecked by acknowledged and active powers in herself. Yet such is the
+assumption, made in bitterness and vexation of spirit by some of those
+who have lately so hastily given up her cause; made with singular
+assurance by others, who, Liberals in all their political doctrines,
+have, for want of better arguments, invoked prerogative against the
+Church.
+
+What the securities and checks were that the Church, not less than the
+nation, contemplated and possessed, are not expressed in the theory
+itself of the royal prerogative; and, as in the ease of the nation, we
+might presume beforehand, that they would be found in practice rather
+than on paper. They were, however, real ones. "With the same theoretical
+laxity and practical security," as in the case of Parliaments and
+temporal judges, "was provision made for the conduct of Church
+affairs." Making allowance for the never absent disturbances arising
+out of political trouble and of personal character, the Church had very
+important means of making her own power felt in the administration of
+her laws, as well as in the making of them.
+
+    The real question, I apprehend, is this:--When the Church assented
+    to those great concessions which were embodied in our permanent
+    law at the Reformation, had she _adequate securities_ that the
+    powers so conveyed would be exercised, upon the whole, with a due
+    regard to the integrity of her faith, and of her office, which was
+    and has ever been a part of that faith? I do not ask whether these
+    securities were all on parchment or not--whether they were written
+    or unwritten--whether they were in statute, or in common law, or
+    in fixed usage, or in the spirit of the Constitution and in the
+    habits of the people--I ask the one vital question, whether,
+    whatever they were in form, they were in substance sufficient?
+
+    _The securities_ which the Church had were these: First, that the
+    assembling of the Convocation was obviously necessary for the
+    purposes of taxation; secondly and mainly, that the very solemn
+    and fundamental laws by which the jurisdiction of the See of Rome
+    was cut off, assigned to the spiritualty of the realm the care of
+    matters spiritual, as distinctly and formally as to the temporalty
+    the care of matters temporal; and that it was an understood
+    principle, and (as long as it continued) a regular usage of the
+    Constitution, that ecclesiastical laws should be administered by
+    ecclesiastical judges. These were the securities on which the
+    Church relied; on, which she had a right to rely; and on which,
+    for a long series of years, her alliance was justified by the
+    results.
+
+And further:--
+
+    The Church had this great and special security on which to rely,
+    that the Sovereigns of this country were, for a century after the
+    Reformation, amongst her best instructed, and even in some
+    instances her most devoted children: that all who made up the
+    governing body (with an insignificant exception) owned personal
+    allegiance to her, and that she might well rest on that personal
+    allegiance as warranting beforehand the expectation, which after
+    experience made good, that the office of the State towards her
+    would be discharged in a friendly and kindly spirit, and that the
+    principles of constitutional law and civil order would not be
+    strained against her, but fairly and fully applied in her behalf.
+
+These securities she now finds herself deprived of. This is the great
+change made in her position--made insensibly, and In a great measure,
+undesignedly--which has altered altogether the understanding on which
+she stood towards the Crown at the Reformation. It now turns out that
+that understanding, though it might have been deemed sufficient for the
+time, was not precise enough; and further, was not sufficiently looked
+after in the times which followed. And on us comes the duty of taking
+care that it be not finally extinguished; thrown off by the despair of
+one side, and assumed by the other as at length abandoned to their
+aggression.
+
+Mr. Gladstone comes to the question with the feelings of a statesman,
+conscious of the greatness and excellence of the State, and anxious
+that the Church should not provoke its jealousy, and in urging her
+claims should "take her stand, as to all matters of substance and
+principle, on the firm ground of history and law." It makes his
+judgment on the present state of things more solemn, and his conviction
+of the necessity of amending it more striking, when they are those of
+one so earnest for conciliation and peace. But on constitutional not
+less than on other grounds, he pronounces the strongest condemnation on
+the present formation of the Court of Appeal, which, working in a way
+which even its framers did not contemplate, has brought so much
+distress into the Church, and which yet, in defiance of principle, of
+consistency, and of the admission of its faultiness, is so recklessly
+maintained. Feeling and stating very strongly the evil sustained by the
+Church, from the suspension of her legislative powers,--"that loss of
+command over her work, and over the heart of the nation, which it has
+brought upon her,"--so strongly indeed that his words, coming from one
+familiar with the chances and hazards of a deliberative assembly, give
+new weight to the argument for the resumption of those powers,--feeling
+all this, he is ready to acquiesce in the measure beyond which the
+Bishops did not feel authorised to go, and which Mr. Gladstone regards
+as "representing the extremest point up to which the love of peace
+might properly carry the concessions of the Church":--
+
+    That which she is entitled in the spirit of the Constitution to
+    demand would be that the Queen's ecclesiastical laws shall be
+    administered by the Queen's ecclesiastical judges, of whom the
+    Bishops are the chief; and this, too, under the checks which the
+    sitting of a body appointed for ecclesiastical legislation would
+    impose.
+
+    But if it is not of vital necessity that a Church Legislature
+    should sit at the present time--if it is not of vital necessity
+    that all causes termed ecclesiastical should be treated under
+    special safeguards--if it is not of vital necessity that the
+    function of judgment should be taken out of the hands of the
+    existing court--let the Church frankly and at once subscribe to
+    every one of these great concessions, and reduce her demands to a
+    _minimum_ at the outset.
+
+    Laws ecclesiastical by ecclesiastical judges, let this be her
+    principle; it plants her on the ground of ancient times, of the
+    Reformation, of our continuous history, of reason and of right.
+    The utmost moderation, in the application of the principle, let
+    this he her temper, and then her case will be strong in the face
+    of God and man, and, come what may, she will conquer.... If, my
+    Lord, it be felt by the rulers of the Church, that a scheme like
+    this will meet sufficiently the necessities of her case, it must
+    be no small additional comfort to them to feel that their demand
+    is every way within the spirit of the Constitution, and short of
+    the terms which the great compact of the Reformation would
+    authorise you to seek. You, and not those who are against you,
+    will take your stand with Coke and Blackstone; you, and not they,
+    will wield the weapons of constitutional principle and law; you,
+    and not they, will be entitled to claim the honour of securing the
+    peace of the State no less than the faith of the Church; you, and
+    not they, will justly point the admonitory finger to those
+    remarkable words of the Institutes:--
+
+    "And certain it is, that this Kingdom hath been best governed, and
+    peace and quiet preserved, when both parties, that is, when the
+    justices of the temporal courts and the ecclesiastical judges have
+    kept themselves within their proper jurisdiction, without
+    encroaching or usurping one upon another; and where such
+    encroachments or usurpations have been made, they have been the
+    seeds of great trouble and inconvenience."
+
+    Because none can resist the principle of your proposal, who admit
+    that the Church has a sphere of proper jurisdiction at all, or any
+    duty beyond that of taking the rule of her doctrine and her
+    practice from the lips of ministers or parliaments. If it shall be
+    deliberately refused to adopt a proposition so moderate, so
+    guarded and restrained in the particular instance, and so
+    sustained by history, by analogy, and by common reason, in the
+    case of the faith of the Church, and if no preferable measure be
+    substituted, it can only be in consequence of a latent intention
+    that the voice of the Civil Power should be henceforward supreme
+    in the determination of Christian doctrine.
+
+We trust that such an assurance, backed as it is by the solemn and
+earnest warnings of one who is not an enthusiast or an agitator, but
+one of the leading men in the Parliament of England, will not be
+without its full weight with those on whom devolves the duty of guiding
+and leading us in this crisis. The Bishops of England have a great
+responsibility on them. Reason, not less than Christian loyalty and
+Christian charity, requires the fairest interpretation of their acts,
+and it may be of their hesitation,--the utmost consideration of their
+difficulties. But reason, not less than Christian loyalty and charity,
+expects that, having accepted the responsibilities of the Episcopate,
+they should not withdraw from them when they arrive; and that there
+should be neither shrinking nor rest nor compromise till the creed and
+the rights of the Church entrusted to their fidelity be placed, as far
+as depends on them, beyond danger.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+JOYCE ON COURTS OF SPIRITUAL APPEAL[3]
+
+
+  [3]
+  _Ecclesia Vindicata; a Treatise on Appeals in Matters Spiritual_.
+  By James Wayland Joyce. _Saturday Review_, 22nd October 1864.
+
+Nothing can be more natural than the extreme dissatisfaction felt by a
+large body of persons in the Church of England at the present Court of
+Final Appeal in matters of doctrine. The grievance, and its effect, may
+have been exaggerated; and the expressions of feeling about it
+certainly have not always been the wisest and most becoming. But as the
+Church of England is acknowledged to hold certain doctrines on matters
+of the highest importance, and, in common with all other religious
+bodies, claims the right of saying what are her own doctrines, it is
+not surprising that an arrangement which seems likely to end in handing
+over to indifferent or unfriendly judges the power of saying what those
+doctrines are, or even whether she has any doctrines at all, should
+create irritation and impatience. There is nothing peculiar to the
+English Church in the assumption, either that outsiders should not
+meddle with and govern what she professes to believe and teach, or
+that the proper and natural persons to deal with theological questions
+are the class set apart to teach and maintain her characteristic
+belief. Whatever may ultimately become of these assumptions, they
+unquestionably represent the ideas which have been derived from the
+earliest and the uniform practice of the Christian Church, and are held
+by most even of the sects which have separated from it. To any one who
+does not look upon the English Church as simply a legally constituted
+department of the State, like the army or navy or the department of
+revenue, and believes it to have a basis and authority of its own,
+antecedent to its rights by statute, there cannot but be a great
+anomaly in an arrangement which, when doctrinal questions are pushed to
+their final issues, seems to deprive her of any voice or control in the
+matters in which she is most interested, and commits them to the
+decision, not merely of a lay, but of a secular and not necessarily
+even Christian court, where the feeling about them is not unlikely to
+be that represented by the story, told by Mr. Joyce, of the eminent
+lawyer who said of some theological debate that he could only decide it
+"by tossing up a coin of the realm." The anomaly of such a court can
+hardly be denied, both as a matter of theory and--supposing it to
+matter at all what Church doctrine really is--as illustrated in some
+late results of its action. It is still more provoking to observe, as
+Mr. Joyce brings out in his historical sketch, that simple carelessness
+and blundering have conspired with the evident tendency of things to
+cripple and narrow the jurisdiction of the Church in what seems to be
+her proper sphere. The ecclesiastical appeals, before the Reformation,
+were to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction alone. They were given to the
+civil power by the Tudor legislation, but to the civil power acting, if
+not by the obligation of law, yet by usage and in fact, through
+ecclesiastical organs and judges. Lastly, by a recent change, of which
+its authors have admitted that they did not contemplate the effect,
+these appeals are now to the civil jurisdiction acting through purely
+civil courts. It is an aggravation of this, when the change which seems
+so formidable has become firmly established, to be told that it was,
+after all, the result of accident and inadvertence, and a "careless use
+of terms in drafting an Act of Parliament"; and that difficult and
+perilous theological questions have come, by "a haphazard chance,"
+before a court which was never meant to decide them. It cannot be
+doubted that those who are most interested in the Church of England
+feel deeply and strongly about keeping up what they believe to be the
+soundness and purity of her professed doctrine; and they think that,
+under fair conditions, they have clear and firm ground for making good
+their position. But it seems by no means unlikely that in the working
+of the Court of Final Appeal there will be found a means of evading the
+substance of questions, and of disposing of very important issues by a
+side wind, to the prejudice of what have hitherto been recognised as
+rightful claims. An arrangement which bears hard upon the Church
+theoretically, as a controversial argument in the hands of Dr. Manning
+or Mr. Binney, and as an additional proof of its Erastian subjection to
+the State, and which also works ill and threatens serious mischief, may
+fairly be regarded by Churchmen with jealousy and dislike, and be
+denounced as injurious to interests for which they have a right to
+claim respect. The complaint that the State is going to force new
+senses on theological terms, or to change by an unavowed process the
+meaning of acknowledged formularies in such a body as the English
+Church, is at least as deserving of attention as the reluctance of
+conscientious Dissenters to pay Church-rates.
+
+Mr. Joyce's book shows comprehensively and succinctly the history of
+the changes which have brought matters to their present point, and the
+look which they wear in the eyes of a zealous Churchman, disturbed both
+by the shock given to his ideas of fitness and consistency, and by the
+prospect of practical evils. It is a clergyman's view of the subject,
+but it is not disposed of by saying that it is a clergyman's view. It
+is incomplete and one-sided, and leaves out considerations of great
+importance which ought to be attended to in forming a judgment on the
+whole question; but it is difficult to say that, regarded simply in
+itself, the claim that the Church should settle her own controversies,
+and that Church doctrine should be judged of in Church courts, is not a
+reasonable one. The truth is that the present arrangement, if we think
+only of its abstract suitableness and its direct and ostensible claims
+to our respect, would need Swift himself to do justice to its exquisite
+unreasonableness. It is absurd to assume, as it is assumed in the whole
+of our ecclesiastical legislation, that the Church is bound to watch
+most jealously over doctrine, and then at the last moment to refuse her
+the natural means of guarding it. It is absurd to assume that the
+"spiritualty" are the only proper persons to teach doctrine, and then
+to act as if they were unfit to judge of doctrine. It is not easy, in
+the abstract, to see why articles which were trusted to clergymen to
+draw up may not be trusted to clergymen to explain, and why what there
+was learning and wisdom enough to do in the violent party times and
+comparative inexperience of the Reformation, cannot be safely left to
+the learning and wisdom of our day for correction or completion. If
+Churchmen and ecclesiastics may care too much for the things about
+which they dispute, it seems undeniable that lawyers who need not even
+be Christians, may care for them too little; and if the Churchmen make
+a mistake in the matter, at least it is their own affair, and they may
+be more fairly made to take the consequences of their own acts than of
+other people's. A strong case, if a strong case were all that was
+wanted, might be made out for a change in the authority which at
+present pronounces in the last resort on Church of England doctrine.
+
+But the difficulty is, not to see that the present state of things,
+which has come about almost by accident, is irregular and
+unsatisfactory, and that in it the civil power has stolen a march on
+the privileges which even Tudors and Hanoverians left to the Church,
+but to suggest what would be more just and more promising. A mixed
+tribunal, composed of laymen and ecclesiastics, would be in effect, as
+Mr. Joyce perceives, simply the present court with a sham colour of
+Church authority added to it; and he describes with candid force the
+confusion which might arise if the lawyers and divines took different
+sides, and how, in the unequal struggle, the latter might "find
+themselves hopelessly prostrate in the stronger grasp of their more
+powerful associates." His own scheme of a theological and
+ecclesiastical committee of reference, to which a purely legal tribunal
+might send down questions of doctrine to be answered, as "experts" or
+juries give answers about matters of science or matters of fact, is
+hardly more hopeful; for even he would not bind the legal court, as of
+course it could not be bound, to accept the doctrine of the
+ecclesiastical committee. He promises, indeed, on the authority of Lord
+Derby, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the lawyers would
+accept the answer of the divines; but whatever the scandal is now, it
+would be far greater if an unorthodox judgment were given in flat
+contradiction to the report of the committee of reference.
+
+As to a purely ecclesiastical Court of Appeal, in the present state of
+the Church both in England and all over the world, it ought to console
+those who must be well aware that here at least it is hardly to be
+looked for, to reflect how such courts act, after all, where they have
+the power to act, and how far things would have gone in a better or
+happier fashion among us if, instead of the Privy Council, there had
+been a tribunal of divines to give final judgment. The history of
+appeals to Rome, from the days of the Jansenists and Fénelon to those
+of Lamennais, may be no doubt satisfactory to those who believe it
+necessary to ascribe to the Pope the highest wisdom and the most
+consummate justice; but to those who venture to notice the real steps
+of the process, and the collateral considerations, political and local,
+which influenced the decision, the review is hardly calculated to make
+those who are debarred from it regret the loss of this unalloyed purity
+of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. And, as regards ourselves, it is true
+that an ecclesiastical tribunal would hardly have been ingenious enough
+to find the means of saying that Messrs. Wilson and Williams had not
+taught in contradiction to the doctrines of the English Church, and
+that they actually, under its present constitution, possessed the
+liberty which, under a different--and, as some people think, a
+better--constitution, they might possess. But it ought also to be borne
+in mind what other judgments ecclesiastical tribunals might have given.
+An ecclesiastical tribunal, unless it had been packed or accidentally
+one-sided, would probably have condemned Mr. Gorham. An ecclesiastical
+tribunal would almost certainly have expelled Archdeacon Denison from
+his preferments. Indeed, the judgment of the Six Doctors on Dr. Pusey,
+arbitrary and unconstitutional as it may be considered, was by no means
+a doubtful foreshadowing of what a verdict upon him would have been
+from any court that we can imagine formed of the high ecclesiastical
+authorities of the time. It undoubtedly seems the most natural thing in
+the world that a great religious body should settle, without hindrance,
+its own doctrines and control its own ministers; but it is also some
+compensation for the perversity with which the course of things has
+interfered with ideal completeness, that our condition, if it had been
+theoretically perfect, would have been perfectly intolerable.
+
+It would be highly unwise in those who direct the counsels of the
+Church of England to accept a practical disadvantage for the gain of a
+greater simplicity and consistency of system. The true moral to be
+deduced from the anomalies of ecclesiastical appeals seems to be, to
+have as little to do with them as possible. The idea of seeking a
+remedy for the perplexities of theology in judicial rulings, and the
+rage for having recourse to law courts, are of recent date in our
+controversies. They were revived among us as one of the results of the
+violent panic caused by the Oxford movement, and of the inconsiderate
+impatience of surprised ignorance which dictated extreme and forcible
+measures; and as this is a kind of game at which, when once started,
+both parties can play, the policy of setting the law in motion to
+silence theological opponents has become a natural and favourite one.
+But it may be some excuse for the legislators who, in 1833, in
+constructing a new Court of Appeal, so completely forgot or underrated
+the functions which it would be called to discharge in the decision of
+momentous doctrinal questions, that at the time no one thought much of
+carrying theological controversies to legal arbitrament. The experiment
+is a natural one to have been made in times of strong and earnest
+religious contention; but, now that it has had its course, it is not
+difficult to see that it was a mistaken one. There seems something
+almost ludicrously incongruous in bringing a theological question into
+the atmosphere and within the technical handling of a law court, and in
+submitting delicate and subtle attempts to grasp the mysteries of the
+unseen and the infinite, of God and the soul, of grace and redemption,
+to the hard logic and intentionally confined and limited view of
+forensic debate. Theological truth, in the view of all who believe in
+it, must always remain independent of a legal decision; and, therefore,
+as regards any real settlement, a theological question must come out of
+a legal sentence in a totally different condition from any others where
+the true and indisputable law of the case is, for the time at least,
+what the supreme tribunal has pronounced it to be. People chafed at not
+getting what they thought the plain broad conclusions from facts and
+documents accepted; they appealed to law from the uncertainty of
+controversy, and found law still more uncertain, and a good deal more
+dangerous. They thought that they were going to condemn crimes and
+expel wrongdoers; they found that these prosecutions inevitably assumed
+the character of the old political trials, which were but an indirect
+and very mischievous form of the struggle between two avowed parties,
+and in which, though the technical question was whether the accused had
+committed the crime, the real one was whether the alleged crime were a
+crime at all. Accordingly, wider considerations than those arising out
+of the strict merits of the case told upon the decision; and the
+negative judgment, and resolute evasion of a condemnation, in each of
+the cases which were of wide and serious importance, were proofs of the
+same tendency in English opinion which has made political trials,
+except in the most extreme cases, almost inconceivable. They mean that
+the questions raised must be fought out and settled in a different and
+more genuine way, and that law feels itself out of place when called to
+interfere in them. As all parties have failed in turning the law into a
+weapon, and yet as all parties have really gained much more than they
+have lost by the odd anomalies of our ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the
+wisest course would seem to be for those who feel the deep importance
+of doctrinal questions to leave the law alone, either as to employing
+it or attempting to change it. Controversy, argument, the display of
+the intrinsic and inherent strength of a great and varied system, are
+what all causes must in the last resort trust to. Lord Westbury will
+have done the Church of England more good than perhaps he thought of
+doing, if his _dicta_ make theologians see that they can be much better
+and more hopefully employed than in trying legal conclusions with
+unorthodox theorisers, or in busying themselves with inventing
+imaginary improvements for a Final Court of Appeal.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+PRIVY COUNCIL JUDGMENTS[4]
+
+
+  [4]
+  _A Collection of the Judgments of the Judicial Committee of the Privy
+  Council in Ecclesiastical Cases relating to Doctrine and Discipline;
+  with a Preface by the Lord Bishop of London, and an Historical
+  Introduction_. Edited by the Hon. G. Brodrick, Barrister-at-Law, and
+  Rev. the Hon. W.H. Fremantle, Chaplain to the Bishop of London.
+  _Guardian_, 15th February 1865.
+
+The Bishop of London has done a useful service in causing the various
+decisions of the present Court of Appeal to be collected into a volume.
+There is such an obvious convenience about the plan that it hardly
+needed the conventional reason given for it, that "the knowledge
+generally possessed on the subject of the Court is vague, and the
+sources from which accurate information can be obtained are little
+understood; and that people who discuss it ought in the first place to
+know what the Court is, and what it does." This is the mere customary
+formula of a preface turned into a rhetorical insinuation which would
+have been better away; most of those who care about the subject, and
+have expressed opinions about it, know pretty well the nature of the
+Court and the result of its working, and whatever variations there may
+be in the judgment passed upon it arise not from any serious
+imperfection of knowledge but from differences of principle. It was
+hardly suitable in a work like this to assume a mystery and obscurity
+about the subject where there is really none, and to claim superior
+exactness and authenticity of information about a matter which in all
+its substantial points is open to all the world. And we could conceive
+the design, well-intentioned as it is, carried out in a way more
+fitting to the gravity of the occasion which has suggested it. The
+Bishop says truly enough that the questions involved in the
+constitution of such a court are some of the most difficult with which
+statesmen have to deal. Therefore it seems to us that a collection of
+the decisions of such a court, put forth for the use of the Church and
+nation under the authority of the Bishop of London, ought to have had
+the dignity and the reserve of a work meant for permanence and for the
+use of men of various opinions, and ought not to have had even the
+semblance, as this book has, of an _ex parte_ pamphlet. The Bishop of
+London is, of course, quite right to let the Church know what he thinks
+about the Court of Final Appeal; and he is perfectly justified in
+recommending us, in forming our opinion, to study carefully the facts
+of the existing state of things; but it seems hardly becoming to make
+the facts a vehicle for indirectly forcing on us, in the shape of
+comments, a very definite and one-sided view of them, which is the very
+subject of vehement contradiction and dispute. It would have been
+better to have committed what was necessary in the way of explanation
+and illustration to some one of greater weight and experience than two
+clever young men of strong bias and manifest indisposition to respect
+or attend to, or even to be patient with, any aspect of the subject but
+their own in this complicated and eventful question, and who, partly
+from overlooking great and material elements in it, and partly from an
+imperfect apprehension of what they had to do, have failed to present
+even the matters of fact with which they deal with the necessary
+exactness and even-handedness. It seems to us that in a work intended
+for the general use of the Church and addressed to men of all opinions,
+they only remember to be thoroughgoing advocates and justifiers of the
+Court which happens to have grown into such important consequence to
+the English Church. The position is a perfectly legitimate one; but we
+think it had better not have been connected with a documentary work
+like the present, set forth by the direction and under the sanction of
+a Bishop of London.
+
+In looking over the cases which have been brought together into a
+connected series, the first point which is suggested by the review is
+the great and important change in the aspect and bearing of doctrinal
+controversies, and in the situation of the Church, as affected by them,
+which the creation and action of this Court have made. From making it
+almost a matter of principle and boast to dispense with any living
+judge of controversies, the Church has passed to having a very
+energetic one. Up to the Gorham judgment, it can hardly be said that
+the ruling of courts of law had had the slightest influence on the
+doctrinal position and character of the Church. Keen and fierce as had
+been the controversies in the Church up to that judgment, how often had
+a legal testing of her standards been seriously sought for or seriously
+appealed to? There had been accusations of heresy, trials,
+condemnations, especially in the times following the Reformation and
+preceding the Civil War; there had been appeals and final judgments
+given in such final courts as existed; but all without making any mark
+on the public mind or the received meaning of doctrines and
+formularies, and without leaving a trace except in law reports. They
+seem to have been forgotten as soon as the particular case was disposed
+of. The limits of supposed orthodox belief revived; but it was not the
+action of judicial decisions which either narrowed or enlarged them.
+Bishop Marsh's Calvinists never thought of having recourse to law. If
+the Church did not do entirely without a Court of Final Appeal, it is
+simply a matter of fact that the same weight and authority were not
+attached to the proceedings of such a court which are attached to them
+now. But since the Gorham case, the work of settling authoritatively,
+if not the meaning of doctrines and of formularies, at any rate the
+methods of interpreting and applying them, has been briskly going on in
+the courts, and a law laid down by judges without appeal has been
+insensibly fastening its hold upon us. The action of the courts is
+extolled as being all in the direction of liberty. Whatever this praise
+may be worth, it is to be observed that it is, after all, a wooden sort
+of liberty, and shuts up quite as much as it opens. It may save, in
+this case or that, individual liberty; but it does so by narrowing
+artificially the natural and common-sense grounds of argument in
+religious controversy, and abridging as much as possible the province
+of theology. Before the Gorham case, the Formularies in general were
+the standard and test, free to both sides, about baptismal
+regeneration. Both parties had the ground open to them, to make what
+they could of them by argument and reason. Discipline was limited by
+the Articles and Formularies, and in part by the authority of great
+divines and by the prevailing opinion of the Church, and by nothing
+else; these were the means which each side had to convince and persuade
+and silence the other, and each side might hope that in the course of
+time its sounder and better supported view might prevail. But now upon
+this state of things comes from without a dry, legal, narrow
+stereotyping, officially and by authority, of the sense to be put upon
+part of the documents in the controversy. You appeal to the
+Prayer-book; your opponent tells you, Oh, the Court of Appeal has ruled
+against you there: and that part of your case is withdrawn from you,
+and he need give himself no trouble to argue the matter with you.
+Against certain theological positions, perhaps of great weight, and
+theological evidence, comes, not only the doctrine of theological
+opponents, but the objection that they are bad law. The interpretation
+which, it may be, we have assumed all our lives, and which we know to
+be that of Fathers and divines, is suddenly pronounced not to be legal.
+The decision does not close the controversy, which goes on as keenly
+and with perhaps a little more exasperation than before; it simply
+stops off, by virtue of a legal construction, a portion of the field of
+argument for one party, which was, perhaps, supposed to have the
+strongest claim to it. The Gorham case bred others; and now, at last,
+after fifteen years, we have got, as may be seen in Messrs. Brodrick
+and Fremantle's book, a body of judicial _dicta_, interpretations,
+rules of exposition, and theological propositions, which have grown up
+in the course of these cases, and which in various ways force a meaning
+and construction on the theological standards and language of the
+Church, which in some instances they were never thought to have, and
+which they certainly never had authoritatively before. Besides her
+Articles and Prayer-hook, speaking the language of divines and open to
+each party to interpret according to the strength and soundness of
+their theological ground, we are getting a supplementary set of legal
+limitations and glosses, claiming to regulate theological argument if
+not teaching, and imposed upon us by the authority not of the Church or
+even of Parliament but of the Judges of the Privy Council. This, it
+strikes us, is a new position of things in the Church, a new
+understanding and a changed set of conditions on which to carry on
+controversies of doctrine; and it seems to us to have a serious
+influence not only on the responsibility of the Church for her own
+doctrine, but on the freedom and genuineness with which questions as to
+that doctrine are discussed. The Court is not to blame for this result;
+to do it justice, it has generally sought to decide as little as it
+could; and the interference of law with the province of pure theology
+is to be rather attributed to that mania for deciding, which of late
+has taken possession pretty equally of all parties. But the
+indisputable result is seen to be, after the experience of fifteen
+years, that law is taking a place in our theological disputes and our
+theological system which is new to it in our theological history; law,
+not laid down prospectively in general provisions, but emerging
+indirectly and incidentally out of constructions and judicial rulings
+on cases of pressing and hazardous exigency; law, applying its
+technical and deliberately narrow processes to questions which of
+course it cannot solve, but can only throw into formal and inadequate,
+if not unreal, terms; and laying down the limits of belief and
+assertion on matters about which hearts burn and souls tremble, by the
+mouth of judges whose consummate calmness and ability is only equalled
+by their profound and avowed want of sympathy for the theology of which
+their position makes them the expounders and final arbiters. A system
+has begun with respect to English Church doctrine, analogous to that by
+which Lord Stowell made the recent law of the sea, or that by which on
+a larger scale the rescripts and decrees of the Popes moulded the great
+system of the canon law.
+
+This is the first thing that strikes us on a comparative survey of this
+set of decisions. The second point is one which at first sight seems
+greatly to diminish the importance of this new condition of things, but
+which on further consideration is seen to have a more serious bearing
+than might have been thought. This is, the odd haphazard way in which
+points have come up for decision; the sort of apparent chance which has
+finally governed the issue of the various contentions; and the
+infinitesimally fine character of the few propositions of doctrine to
+which the Court has given the sanction of its ruling. Knowing what we
+all of us cannot help knowing, and seeing things which lawyers and
+judges are bound not to allow themselves to see or take account of, we
+find it difficult to repress the feeling of amazement, as we travel
+through the volume, to see Mr. Gorham let off, Mr. Heath deprived, then
+Dr. Williams and Mr. Wilson let off, and to notice the delicate
+technical point which brought to nought the laborious and at one time
+hopeful efforts of the worthy persons who tried to turn out Archdeacon
+Denison. And as to the matter of the decisions, though undoubtedly
+_dicta_ of great importance are laid down in the course of them, yet it
+is curious to observe the extremely minute and insignificant statements
+on which in the more important cases judgment is actually pronounced.
+The Gorham case was held to affect the position of a great party; but
+the language and theory actually examined and allowed would hardly, in
+legal strictness, authorise much more than the very peculiar views of
+Mr. Gorham himself. And in the last case, the outside lay world has
+hardly yet done wondering at the consummate feat of legal subtlety by
+which the issue whether the English Church teaches that the Bible is
+inspired was transmuted into the question whether it teaches that every
+single part of every single book is inspired. It might seem that
+rulings, of which the actual product in the way of doctrinal
+propositions was so small, were hardly subjects for any keen interest.
+But it would be shortsighted to regard the matter in this way. In the
+first place, whatever may have happened as yet, it is manifestly a
+serious thing for Church of England doctrine to have been thrown, on a
+scale which is quite new, into the domain of a court of law, to lie at
+the mercy of the confessed chances and uncertainties of legal
+interpretation, with nothing really effective to correct and remedy
+what may possibly be, without any fault in the judges, a fatally
+mischievous construction of the text and letter of her authoritative
+documents. In the next place, no one can fail to see, no one in fact
+affects to deny, that the general result of these recent decisions,
+capricious as their conclusions look at first sight, has been to make
+the Formularies mean much less than they were supposed to mean. The
+tendency of every English court, appealed to not as a court of equity
+but one of criminal jurisdiction, is naturally to be exacting and even
+narrow in the interpretation of language. The general impression left
+by these cases is that the lines of doctrine in the English Church are
+regarded by the judicial mind as very faint, and not much to be
+depended upon; and that these judgments may be the first steps in that
+insensible process by which the unpretending but subtle and powerful
+engine of interpretation has been applied by the courts to give a
+certain turn to law and policy; applied, in this instance, to undermine
+the definiteness and certainty of doctrine, and in the end, the
+understanding itself which has hitherto existed between the Church and
+the State, and has kept alive the idea of her distinct basis,
+functions, and rights.
+
+This is the view of matters which arises from an examination of the
+proceedings contained in this volume. What is the argument urged in the
+Historical Introduction to justify or recommend our acquiescence in it?
+It seems to us to consist mainly in a one-sided and exaggerated
+statement of the Supremacy claimed and brought in by Henry VIII., and
+of the effect in theory and fact which it ought to have on our notion
+of the Church and of Church right. The complaint of the present state
+of things is, that those who may be taken to represent the interests of
+the Church in such a matter as the character of her teaching are
+practically excluded from having any real influence in the decision of
+questions by which the character of that teaching is affected. The
+answer is that she has no right to claim a separate interest in the
+matter, and that the doctrine of the Royal Supremacy was meant to
+extinguish, and has extinguished, any pretence to such a claim. The
+_animus_ which pervades the work, and which is not obscurely disclosed
+in such things as footnotes and abridgments of legal arguments, is thus
+given--more freely, of course, than it would be proper to introduce in
+a book like this--in some remarks of Mr. Brodrick, one of the editors,
+at a recent discussion of the question of Ecclesiastical Appeals in a
+committee of the Social Science Association. He is reported to have
+spoken as follows:--
+
+    The Church of England being established by law, could not be
+    allowed any independence of action; and those who wished for it
+    were like people who wanted to have their cake and eat it. As to
+    the Privy Council, he had never heard its decisions charged with
+    error. What was complained of was that it had declined to take the
+    current opinions of theologians and make them part of the
+    Thirty-nine Articles. There was no need whatever for the Privy
+    Council to possess any special theological knowledge. The only
+    case where that knowledge was necessary was when it was alleged
+    that doctrines had been held in the Church without censure. That
+    was a case in which considerable theological lore was required;
+    but it was within the province of counsel to supply it. Divines
+    had now discovered, what lawyers could have told them long ago,
+    and what he knew some of them had been told--namely, that it would
+    not do to treat the Thirty-nine Articles as penal statutes;
+    because, if that were done, a coach might be easily driven through
+    them. If they had wished to maintain the authority of the
+    Articles, they would have done best to have kept quiet.
+
+The present Court of Appeal is deduced, in the Historical Introduction,
+as a natural and logical consequence, from Henry VIII.'s Supremacy.
+Undoubtedly it is scarcely possible to overstate the all-grasping
+despotism of Henry VIII., and if a precedent for anything reckless of
+all separate rights and independence should be wanted, it would never
+be sought in vain if looked for in the policy and legislation of that
+reign. So far the editors are right; the power over religion claimed by
+Henry VIII. will carry them wherever they want to go; it will give
+them, if they need it, as a still more logical and legitimate
+development of the Supremacy, the Court of High Commission. Only they
+ought to have remembered, as fair historians, that even in the days of
+the Supremacy the distinct nature and business of the Church and of
+Churchmen was never denied. Laymen were given powers over the Church
+and in the Church which were new; but the distinct province of the
+Church, if abridged and put under new control, was not abolished. Side
+by side with the facts showing the Supremacy and its exercise are a set
+of facts, for those who choose to see them, showing that the Church was
+still recognised, even by Henry VIII., as a body which he had not
+created, which he was obliged to take account of, and which filled a
+place utterly different from every other body in the State. Henry VIII.
+played the tyrant with his Churchmen as he did with his Parliament and
+with everybody else; and Churchmen, like everybody else, submitted to
+him. But the "Imperialism" of Henry VIII., though it went beyond even
+the Imperialism of Justinian and Charlemagne in its encroachments on
+the spiritual power, as little denied the fact of that power as they
+did. He recognised the distinct place and claims of the spiritualty;
+and, as we suppose that even the editors of this volume hardly feel
+themselves bound to make out the consistency of Henry, they might have
+spared themselves the weak and not very fair attempt to get rid of the
+force of the remarkable words in which this recognition is recorded in
+the first Statute of Appeals (24 Henry VIII. c. 12). The words would,
+no doubt, be worth but little, were it not that as a matter of fact a
+spiritualty did act and judge and lay down doctrine, and even while
+yielding to unworthy influence did keep up their corporate existence.
+
+But when the ecclesiastical legislation of Henry VIII. is referred to,
+not merely as the historical beginning of a certain state of things
+which has undergone great changes in the course of events, but as
+affording a sort of idea and normal pattern to which our own
+arrangements ought to conform, as supplying us with a theory of Church
+and State which holds good at least against the Church, it seems hard
+that the Church alone should not have the benefit of the entire
+alteration of circumstances since that theory was a reality. Those who
+talk about the Supremacy ought to remember what the Supremacy pretended
+to be. It was over _all_ causes and _all_ persons, civil as well as
+ecclesiastical. It held good certainly in theory, and to a great extent
+in practice, against the temporalty as much as against the spiritualty.
+Why then are we to invoke the Supremacy as then understood, in a
+question about courts of spiritual appeals, and not in questions about
+other courts and other powers in the nation? If the Supremacy, claimed
+and exercised as Henry claimed and exercised it, is good against the
+Church, it is good against many other things besides. If the Church
+inherits bonds and obligations, not merely by virtue of distinct
+statutes, but by the force of a general vague arbitrary theory of royal
+power, why has that power been expelled, or transformed into a mere
+fiction of law, in all other active branches of the national life?
+Unless the Church is simply, what even Henry VIII. did not regard it, a
+creation and delegate of the national power, without any roots and
+constitution of its own, why should the Church be denied the benefit of
+the common sense, and the change in ideas and usage, which have been so
+largely appealed to in civil matters? Why are we condemned to a theory
+which is not only out of date and out of harmony with all the
+traditions and convictions of modern times, hut which was in its own
+time tyrannous, revolutionary, and intolerable? Arguments in favour of
+the present Court, drawn from the reason of the thing, and the
+comparative fitness of the judges for their office, if we do not agree
+with them, at least we can understand. But precedents and arguments
+from the Supremacy of Henry VIII. suggest the question whether those
+who use them are ready to be taken at their word and to have back that
+Supremacy as it was; and whether the examples of policy of that reign
+are seemly to quote as adequate measures of the liberty and rights of
+any set of Englishmen.
+
+The question really calling for solution is--How to reconcile the just
+freedom of individual teachers in the Church with the maintenance of
+the right and duty of the Church to uphold the substantial meaning of
+her body of doctrine? In answering this question we can get no help
+from this volume. It simply argues that the present is practically the
+best of all possible courts; that it is a great improvement, which
+probably it is, on the Courts of Delegates; and that great confidence
+ought to be felt in its decisions. We are further shown how jealously
+and carefully the judges have guarded the right of the individual
+teacher. But it seems to us, according to the views put forward in this
+book, that as the price of all this--of great learning, weight, and
+ability in the judges--of great care taken of liberty--the Church is
+condemned to an interpretation of the Royal Supremacy which floats
+between the old arbitrary view of it and the modern Liberal one, and
+which uses each, as it happens to be most convenient, against the claim
+of the Church to protect her doctrine and exert a real influence on the
+authoritative declaration of it. We all need liberty, and we all ought
+to be ready to give the reasonable liberty which we profess to claim
+for ourselves. But it is a heavy price to pay for it, if the right and
+the power is to be taken out of the hands of the Church to declare what
+is the real meaning of what she supposes herself bound to teach.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SIR JOHN COLERIDGE ON THE PURCHAS CASE[5]
+
+
+  [5]
+  _Remarks on Some Parts of the Report of the Judicial Committee in
+  the Case of "Elphinstone against Purchas."_ A Letter to Canon Liddon,
+  from the Right Hon. Sir J.T. Coleridge. _Guardian_, 5th April 1871.
+
+No one has more right to speak with authority, or more deserves to be
+listened to at a difficult and critical moment for the Church, than Sir
+J.T. Coleridge. An eminent lawyer, and a most earnest and well-informed
+Churchman, he combines in an unusual way claims on the attention of all
+who care for the interests of religion, and for those, too, which are
+so deeply connected with them, the interests of England. The troubles
+created by the recent judgment have induced him to come forward from
+his retirement with words of counsel and warning.
+
+The gist of his Letter may be shortly stated. He is inclined to think
+the decision arrived at by the Judicial Committee a mistaken one. But
+he thinks that it would be a greater and a worse mistake to make this
+decision, wrong as it may be, a reason for looking favourably on
+disestablishment as a remedy for what is complained of. We are glad to
+note the judgment of so fair an observer and so distinguished a lawyer,
+himself a member of the Privy Council, both on the intrinsic
+suitableness and appropriateness of the position[6] which has been
+ruled to be illegal, and on the unsatisfactoriness of the
+interpretation itself, as a matter of judicial reading and
+construction. A great deal has been said, and it is plain that the
+topic is inexhaustible, on the unimportance of a position. We agree
+entirely--on condition that people remember the conditions and
+consequences of their assertion. Every single outward accompaniment of
+worship may, if you carry your assertion to its due level, be said to
+be in itself utterly unimportant; place and time and form and attitude
+are all things not belonging to the essence of the act itself, and are
+indefinitely changeable, as, in fact, the changes in them have been
+countless. Kneeling is not of the essence of prayer, but imagine, first
+prohibiting the posture of kneeling, and then remonstrating with those
+who complained of the prohibition, on the ground of postures being
+unimportant. It is obvious that when you have admitted to the full that
+a position is in itself unimportant, all kinds of reasons may come in
+on the further question whether it is right, fitting, natural. There
+are reasons why the position which has been so largely adopted of late
+is the natural and suitable one. Sir John Coleridge states them
+admirably:--
+
+  [6]
+  The Eastward Position at the celebration of the Holy Communion.
+
+    As to the place of standing at the consecration, my _feeling_ is
+    with them. It seems to me not desirable to make it essential or
+    even important that the people should see the breaking of the
+    bread, or the taking the cup into the hands of the priest, and
+    positively mischievous to encourage them in gazing on him, or
+    watching him with critical eyes while so employed. I much prefer
+    the _spirit of_ the Rubric of 1549--First Book of Edward
+    VI.--which says, "These words before rehearsed are to be said
+    turning still to the Altar, without any elevation, or showing the
+    Sacraments to the people." The use now enforced, I think, tends to
+    deprive the most solemn rite of our religion of one of its most
+    solemn particulars. Surely, whatever school we belong to, and even
+    if we consider the whole rite merely commemorative, it is a very
+    solemn idea to conceive the priest at the head of his flock, and,
+    as it were, a shepherd leading them on in heart and spirit,
+    imploring for them and with them the greatest blessing which man
+    is capable of receiving on earth; he alone uttering the
+    prayer--they meanwhile kneeling all, and in deep silence
+    listening, not gazing, rather with closed eyes--and with their
+    whole undistracted attention, joining in the prayer with one heart
+    and without sound until the united "Amen" breaks from them at the
+    close, and seals their union and assent.
+
+But, of course, comes the further question, whether, an English
+clergyman is authorised to use it. He is not authorised if the Prayer
+Book tells him not to. Of that there is no question. But if the Prayer
+Book not only seems to give him the liberty, but, by the _prima facie_
+look of its words, seems to prescribe it, the harshness of a ruling
+which summarily and under penalties prohibits it is not to be smoothed
+down by saying that the matter is unimportant. Sir John Coleridge's
+view of the two points will be read with interest:--
+
+    You will understand, of course, that I write in respect of the
+    Report recently made by the Judicial Committee in the Purchas
+    case. I am not about to defend it. No one, however, ought to
+    pronounce a condemnation of the solemn judgment of such a tribunal
+    without much consideration; and this remark applies with, special
+    force to myself, well knowing as I do those from whom it
+    proceeded, and having withdrawn from sharing in the labours of the
+    Committee only because age had impaired, with the strength of my
+    body, the faculties also of my mind; and so disabled me from the
+    proper discharge of any judicial duties. With this admission on my
+    part, I yet venture to say that I think Mr. Purchas has not had
+    justice done to him in two main points of the late appeal; I mean
+    the use of the vestments complained of and the side of the
+    communion-table which he faced when consecrating the elements for
+    the Holy Communion. Before I state my reasons, let me premise that
+    I am no Ritualist, in the now conventional use of the term. I do
+    not presume to judge of the motives of those to whom that name is
+    applied. From the information of common but undisputed report as
+    to some of the most conspicuous, I believe them entitled to all
+    praise for their pastoral devotedness and their laborious,
+    self-denying lives; still, I do not shrink from saying that I
+    think them misguided, and the cause of mischief in the Church. So
+    much for my _feeling_ in regard to the vestments. I prefer the
+    surplice at all times and in all ministrations.
+
+    This is _feeling_--and I see no word in the sober language of our
+    rubric which interferes with it--but my _feeling_ is of no
+    importance in the argument, and I mention it only in candour, to
+    show in what spirit I approach the argument.
+
+    Now Mr. Purchas has been tried before the Committee for offences
+    alleged to have been committed against the provisions of the "Act
+    of Uniformity"; of this Act the Common Prayer Book is part and
+    parcel. As to the vestments, his conduct was alleged to be in
+    derogation of the rubric as to the ornaments of the Church and the
+    ministers thereof, which ordains that such shall be retained and
+    be in use as were in the Church of England by the authority of
+    Parliament in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI. The
+    Act of Uniformity is to be construed by the same rules exactly as
+    any Act passed in the last session of Parliament. The clause in
+    question (by which I mean the rubric in question) is perfectly
+    unambiguous in language, free from all difficulty as to
+    construction; it therefore lets in no argument as to intention
+    otrier than that which the words themselves import. There might be
+    a seeming difficulty in _fact_, because it might not be known what
+    vestments were in use by authority of Parliament in the second
+    year of the reign of King Edward VI.; but this difficulty has been
+    removed. It is conceded in the Report that the vestments, the use
+    of which is now condemned, were in use by authority of Parliament
+    in that year. Having that fact, you are bound to construe the
+    rubric as if those vestments were specifically named in it,
+    instead of being only referred to. If an Act should be passed
+    to-morrow that the uniform of the Guards should henceforth be such
+    as was ordered for them by authority and used by them in the 1st
+    George I., you would first ascertain what that uniform was; and,
+    having ascertained it, you would not inquire into the changes
+    which may have been made, many or few, with or without lawful
+    authority, between the 1st George I. and the passing of the new
+    Act. All these, that Act, specifying the earlier date, would have
+    made wholly immaterial. It would have seemed strange, I suppose,
+    if a commanding officer, disobeying the statute, had said in his
+    defence, "There have been many changes since the reign of George
+    I.; and as to 'retaining,' we put a gloss on that, and thought it
+    might mean only retaining to the Queen's use; so we have put the
+    uniforms safely in store." But I think it would have seemed more
+    strange to punish and mulct him severely if he had obeyed the law
+    and put no gloss on plain words.
+
+    This case stands on the same principle. The rubric indeed seems to
+    me to imply with some clearness that in the long interval between
+    Edward VI. and the 14th Charles II. there had been many changes;
+    but it does not stay to specify them, or distinguish between what
+    was mere evasion and what was lawful; it quietly passes them all
+    by, and goes back to the legalised usage of the second year of
+    Edward VI. What had prevailed since, whether by an Archbishop's
+    gloss, by Commissions, or even Statutes, whether, in short, legal
+    or illegal, it makes quite immaterial.
+
+    I forbear to go through the long inquiry which these last words
+    remind one of--not, I am sure, out of any disrespectful feeling to
+    the learned and reverend authors of the Report, but because it
+    seems to me wholly irrelevant to the point for decision. This
+    alone I must add, that even were the inquiry relevant, the
+    authorities on which they rely do not appear to me so clear or
+    cogent, nor the analogies relied on so just, as to warrant the
+    conclusion arrived at. For it should never be forgotten that the
+    defendant in a criminal case, acquitted as to this charge by the
+    learned judge below, was entitled to every presumption in his
+    favour, and could not properly be condemned but by a judgment free
+    from all reasonable doubt. And this remark acquires additional
+    strength because the judgment will be final not only on him but on
+    the whole Church for all time, unless reversed by the Legislature.
+
+On the second point he thus speaks, in terms which for their guarded
+moderation are all the more worth notice:--
+
+    Upon the second point I have less to say, though it is to me much
+    the most important. The Report, I think, cannot be shown
+    conclusively to be wrong here, as it may be on the other; still it
+    does not seem to me to be shown conclusively to be right. You have
+    yourself given no reason in your second letter of the 8th March
+    for doubting at least.
+
+    Let me add that, in my opinion, on such a question as this, where
+    a conclusion is to be arrived at upon the true meaning of Rubrics
+    framed more than two centuries since, and certainly not with a
+    view to any such minute criticism as on these occasions is and
+    must be applied to them, and where the evidence of facts is by no
+    means clear, none probably can be arrived at free from reasonable
+    objection. What is the consequence? It will be asked, Is the
+    question to receive no judicial solution? I am not afraid to
+    answer, Better far that it should receive none than that injustice
+    should be done. The principles of English law furnish the
+    practical solution: dismiss the party charged, unless his
+    conviction can be based on grounds on which reasonable and
+    competent minds can rest satisfied and without scruple. And what
+    mighty mischief will result to countervail the application of this
+    rule of justice? For two centuries our Church has subsisted
+    without an answer to the question which alone gives importance to
+    this inquiry, and surely has not been without God's blessing for
+    that time, in spite of all much more serious shortcomings. Let us
+    remember that Charity, or to use perhaps a better word, Love, is
+    the greatest of all; if that prevail there need be little fear for
+    our Faith or our Hope.
+
+Having said this much, Sir John Coleridge proceeds to the second, and
+indeed the main object of his letter--to remonstrate against
+exaggeration in complaint, both of the particular decision and of the
+Court which gave it:--
+
+    I now return to your letter. You proceed to attempt to show that
+    the words of Keble to yourself, which you cite, are justified by
+    remarks in this Report and some previous judgments of the same
+    tribunal, which appear to you so inconsistent with each other as
+    to make it difficult to believe that the Court was impartial, or
+    "incapable of regarding the documents before it in the light of a
+    plastic material, which might be made to support conclusions held
+    to be advisable at the moment, and on independent grounds." I wish
+    these words had never been written. They will, I fear, be
+    understood as conveying your formed opinions; and coming from you,
+    and addressed to minds already excited and embittered, they will
+    be readily accepted, though they import the heaviest charges
+    against judges--some of them bishops--all of high and hitherto
+    unimpeached character. A very long experience of judicial life
+    makes me know that judges will often provoke and bitterly
+    disappoint both the suitors before them and the public, when
+    discharging their duty honestly and carefully, and a man is
+    scarcely fit for the station unless he can sit tolerably easy
+    under censures which even these may pass upon him. Yet,
+    imputations of partiality or corruption are somewhat hard to bear
+    when they are made by persons of your station and character. When
+    the Judicial Committee sits on appeals from the Spiritual Courts,
+    it _may_ certainly be under God's displeasure, the members _may_
+    be visited with judicial blindness, and deprived of the integrity
+    which in other times and cases they manifest. Against such a
+    supposition there is no direct argument, and I will not enter into
+    such a disputation. I have so much confidence in your generosity
+    and candour, on reflection, as to believe you would not desire I
+    should.
+
+    In the individual case I simply protest against the insinuation. I
+    add a word or two by way of general observation.
+
+    No doubt you have read the judgments in all the cases you allude
+    to carefully; but have you read the pleadings and arguments of the
+    counsel, so as to know accurately the points raised for the
+    consideration of those who were to decide? To know the offence
+    charged and the judgment pronounced may suffice in some cases for
+    an opinion by a competent person, whether the one warranted the
+    other; but more is required to warrant the imputation of
+    inconsistency, partiality, or indirect motives. He who takes this
+    on himself should know further how the pleadings and the arguments
+    presented the case for judgment, and made this or that particular
+    relevant in the discussion. Every one at all familiar with this
+    matter knows that a judgment not uncommonly fails to reflect the
+    private opinion of the judge on the whole of a great point,
+    because the issues of law or fact actually brought before him, and
+    which alone he was bound to decide, did not bring this before him.
+    And this rule, always binding, is, of course, never more so than
+    in regard to a Court of Final Appeal, which should be careful not
+    to conclude more than is regularly before it. Let me add that a
+    just and considerate person will wholly disregard the gossip which
+    flies about in regard to cases exciting much interest; passing
+    words in the course of an argument, forgotten when the judgment
+    comes to be considered, are too often caught up, as having guided
+    the final determination.
+
+Such words are a just rebuke to much of the inconsiderate talk which
+follows on any public act which touches the feelings, perhaps the
+highest and purest feelings of men with deep convictions. Perhaps Mr.
+Liddon's words were unguarded ones. But at the same time it is
+necessary to state without disguise what is the truth in this matter.
+It is necessary for the sake of justice and historical truth. The Court
+of Final Appeal is not like other courts. It is not a pure and simple
+court of law, though it is composed of great lawyers. It is doubtless a
+court where their high training and high professional honour come in,
+as they do elsewhere. But great lawyers are men, partisans and
+politicians, statesmen, if you like; and this is a court where they are
+not precluded, in the same degree as they are in the regular courts by
+the habits and prescriptions of the place, from thinking of what comes
+before them in its relation to public affairs. It is no mere invention
+of disappointed partisans, it is no idle charge of wilful unfairness,
+to say that considerations of high policy come into their
+deliberations; it has been the usual language, ever since the Gorham
+case, of men who cared little for the subject-matter of the questions
+debated; it is the language of those who urge the advantages of the
+Court. "It is a court," as the Bishop of Manchester said the other day,
+speaking in its praise, "composed of men who look at things not merely
+with the eyes of lawyers, but also with the eyes of statesmen."
+Precisely so; and for that reason they must be considered to have the
+responsibilities, not only of lawyers, but of statesmen, and their acts
+are proportionably open to discussion. Sir John Coleridge urges the
+impossibility of any other court; and certainly till we could be
+induced to trust an ecclesiastical court, composed of bishops or
+clergymen, in a higher degree than we could do at present, we see no
+alternative. But to say that a clerical court would be no improvement
+is not to prove that the present court is a satisfactory one. It may be
+difficult under our present circumstances to reform it. But though we
+may have reasons for making the best of it, we may be allowed to say
+that it is a singularly ill-imagined and ill-constructed court, and one
+in which the great features of English law and justice are not so
+conspicuous as they are elsewhere. Suitors do not complain in other
+courts either of the ruling, or sometimes of the language of judges, as
+they complain in this. But when this is made a ground for joining with
+the enemies of all that the English Church holds dear, to bring about a
+great break-up of the existing state of things, we agree with Sir John
+Coleridge in thinking that a great mistake is made; and if care is not
+taken, it may be an irreparable one. He writes:--
+
+    I hasten to my conclusion too long delayed, but a word must still
+    be added on a subject of not less consequence than any I have yet
+    touched on. You say, "Churchmen will to a very great extent indeed
+    find relief from the dilemma in a third course, viz. _co-operation
+    with the political forces_, which, year by year, more and more
+    steadily are working towards disestablishment. This is not a
+    menace; it is the statement of a simple fact." I am bound to
+    believe, and I do believe, you do not intend this as a menace; but
+    such a statement of a future course to depend on a contingency
+    cannot but read very much like one--and against your intention it
+    may well be understood as such. You do not say that _you_ are one
+    who will co-operate with the political party which now seeks to
+    disestablish the Church in accomplishing its purpose, and I do not
+    suppose you ever will. But on behalf, not so much of the clergy as
+    of the laity--on behalf of the worshippers in our churches, of the
+    sick to be visited at home--of the poor in their cottages, of our
+    children in their schools--of our society in general, I entreat
+    those of the clergy who are now feeling the most acutely in this
+    matter, not to suffer their minds to be so absorbed by the present
+    grievance as to take no thought of the evils of disestablishment.
+    I am not foolishly blind to the faults of the clergy--indeed I
+    fear I am sometimes censorious in regard to them--and some of
+    their faults I do think may be referable to Establishment; the
+    possession of house and land, and a sort of independence of their
+    parishioners, in some cases seems to tend to secularity. I regret
+    sometimes their partisanship at elections, their speeches at
+    public dinners. But what good gift of God is not liable to abuse
+    from men? Taken as a whole, we have owed, and we do owe, under
+    Him, to our Established clergy more than we can ever repay, much
+    of it rendered possible by their Establishment. I may refer, and
+    now with special force, to Education--their services in this
+    respect no one denies--and but for Establishment these, I think,
+    could not have been so effectively and systematically rendered. We
+    are now in a great crisis as to this all-important matter.
+    Concurring, as I do heartily, in the praise which has been
+    bestowed on Mr. Forster, and expecting that his great and arduous
+    office will be discharged with perfect impartiality by him, and
+    with a just sense of how much is due to the clergy in this
+    respect, still it cannot be denied that the powers conferred by
+    the Legislature on the holder of it are alarmingly great, even if
+    necessary; and who shall say in what a spirit they may be
+    exercised by his successor? For the general upholding of religious
+    education, in emergencies not improbable, to whom can we look in
+    general so confidently as to the parochial clergy? I speak now
+    specially in regard to parishes such as I am most familiar with,
+    in agricultural districts, small, not largely endowed, sometimes
+    without resident gentry, and with the land occupied by
+    rack-renting farmers, indifferent or hostile to education.
+
+In what Sir John Coleridge urges against the fatal step of welcoming
+disestablishment under an impatient sense of injustice we need not say
+that we concur most earnestly. But it cannot be too seriously
+considered by those who see the mischief of disestablishment, that as
+Sir John Coleridge also says, the English Churrh is, in one sense, a
+divided one; and that to pursue a policy of humiliating and crippling
+one of its great parties must at last bring mischief. The position of
+the High Church party is a remarkable one. It has had more against it
+than its rivals; yet it is probably the strongest of them all. It is
+said, probably with reason, to be the unpopular party. It has been the
+stock object of abuse and sarcasm with a large portion of the press. It
+has been equally obnoxious to Radical small shopkeepers and "true blue"
+farmers and their squires. It has been mobbed in churches and censured
+in Parliament. Things have gone against it, almost uniformly, before
+the tribunals. And unfortunately it cannot be said that it has been
+without its full share of folly and extravagance in some of its
+members. And yet it is the party which has grown; which has drawn some
+of its antagonists to itself, and has reacted on the ideas and habits
+of others; its members have gradually, as a matter of course, risen
+into important post and power. And it is to be noticed that, as a
+party, it has been the most tolerant. All parties are in their nature
+intolerant; none more so, where critical points arise, than Liberal
+ones. But in spite of the Dean of Westminster's surprise at High
+Churchmen claiming to be tolerant, we still think that, in the first
+place, they are really much less inclined to meddle with their
+neighbours than others of equally strong and deep convictions; and
+further, that they have become so more and more; and they have accepted
+the lessons of their experience; they have thrown off, more than any
+strong religious body, the intolerance which was natural to everybody
+once, and have learned, better than they did at one time, to bear with
+what they dislike and condemn. If a party like this comes to feel
+itself dealt with harshly and unfairly, sacrificed to popular clamour
+or the animosity of inveterate and unscrupulous opponents, it is
+certain that we shall be in great danger.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+MR. GLADSTONE'S LETTER ON THE ENGLISH CHURCH[7]
+
+
+  [7]
+  _Guardian_, 29th October 1884.
+
+Mr. Gladstone's Letter, read at the St. Asaph Diocesan Conference, will
+not have surprised those who have borne in mind his deep and
+unintermitted interest in the fortunes and prospects of the Church, and
+his habit of seeking relief from the pressure of one set of thoughts
+and anxieties by giving full play to his mental energies in another
+direction. Its composition and appearance at this moment are quite
+accounted for; it is a contribution to the business of the conference
+of his own diocese, and it was promised long before an autumn session
+on a great question between the two Houses was in view. Still the
+appearance of such a document from a person in Mr. Gladstone's position
+must, of course, invite attention and speculation. He may put aside the
+questions which the word "Disestablishment"--which was in the thesis
+given him to write upon--is likely to provoke--"Will it come? ought it
+to come? must it come? Is it near, or somewhat distant, or indefinitely
+remote?" On these questions he has not a word to say. But, all the
+same, people will naturally try to read between the lines, and to find
+out what was in the writer's thoughts about these questions. We cannot,
+however, see that there is anything to be gathered from the Letter as
+to the political aspect of the matter; he simply confines himself to
+the obvious lesson which passing events sufficiently bring with them,
+that whatever may come it is our business to be prepared.
+
+His anxieties are characteristic. The paper shows, we think, that it
+has not escaped him that disestablishment, however compensated as some
+sanguine people hope, would be a great disaster and ruin. It would be
+the failure and waste to the country of noble and astonishing efforts;
+it would be the break-up and collapse of a great and cheap system, by
+which light and human kindliness and intelligence are carried to vast
+tracts, that without its presence must soon become as stagnant and
+hopeless as many of the rural _communes_ of France; the blow would at
+the moment cripple and disorganise the Church for its work even in the
+towns. But though "happily improbable," it may come; and in such a
+contingency, what occupies Mr. Gladstone's thoughts is, not the
+question whether it would be disastrous, but whether it would be
+disgraceful. That is the point which disturbs and distresses him--the
+possibility that the end of our later Church history, the end of that
+wonderful experiment which has been going on from the sixteenth
+century, with such great vicissitudes, but after every shock with
+increasing improvement and hope, should at last be not only failure,
+but failure with dishonour; and this, he says, could only come in one
+of two ways. It might come from the Church having sunk into sloth and
+death, without faith, without conscience, without love. This, if it
+ever was really to be feared, is not the danger before us now.
+Activity, conviction, energy, self-devotion, these, and not apathetic
+lethargy, mark the temper of our times; and they are as conspicuous in
+the Church as anywhere else. But these qualities, as we have had ample
+experience, may develop into fierce and angry conflicts. It is our
+internal quarrels, Mr. Gladstone thinks, that create the most serious
+risk of disestablishment; and it is only our quarrels, which we have
+not good sense and charity enough to moderate and keep within bounds,
+which would make it "disgraceful."
+
+The main feature of the Letter is the historical retrospect which Mr.
+Gladstone gives of the long history, the long travail of the later
+English Church. Hardly in its first start, under the Tudors, but more
+and more as time went on, it instinctively, as it were, tried the great
+and difficult problem of Christian liberty. The Churches of the
+Continent, Roman and anti-Roman, were simple in their systems; only one
+sharply defined theology, only the disciples and representatives of one
+set of religious tendencies, would they allow to dwell within their
+borders; what was refractory and refused to harmonise was at once cast
+out; and for a certain time they were unvexed with internal
+dissensions. This, both in the case of the Roman, the Lutheran, and the
+Calvinistic Churches of the Continent, requires to be somewhat
+qualified; still, as compared with the rival schools of the English
+Church, Puritan and Anglican, the contrast is a true and a sharp one.
+Mr. Gladstone adopts from a German writer a view which is certainly not
+new to many in England, that "the Reformation, as a religious movement,
+took its shape in England, not in the sixteenth century but in the
+seventeenth." "It seems plain," he says, "that the great bulk of those
+burned under Mary were Puritans"; and he adds, what is not perhaps so
+capable of proof, that "under Elizabeth we have to look, with rare
+exceptions, among the Puritans and Recusants for an active and
+religious life." It was not till the Restoration, it was not till
+Puritanism had shown all its intolerance, all its narrowness, and all
+its helplessness, that the Church was able to settle the real basis and
+the chief lines of its reformed constitution. It is not, as Mr.
+Gladstone says, "a heroic history"; there is room enough in the
+looseness of some of its arrangements, and the incompleteness of
+others, for diversity of opinion and for polemical criticism. But the
+result, in fact, of this liberty and this incompleteness has been, not
+that the Church has declined lower and lower into indifference and
+negation, but that it has steadily mounted in successive periods to a
+higher level of purpose, to a higher standard of life and thought, of
+faith and work. Account for it as we may, with all drawbacks, with
+great intervals of seeming torpor, with much to be regretted and to be
+ashamed of, that is literally the history of the English Church since
+the Restoration settlement. It is not "heroic," but there are no Church
+annals of the same time more so, and there are none fuller of hope.
+
+But every system has its natural and specific danger, and the specific
+English danger, as it is the condition of vigorous English life, is
+that spirit of liberty which allows and attempts to combine very
+divergent tendencies of opinion. "The Church of England," Mr. Gladstone
+thinks, "has been peculiarly liable, on the one side and on the other,
+both to attack and to defection, and the probable cause is to be found
+in the degree in which, whether for worldly or for religious reasons,
+it was attempted in her case to combine divergent elements within her
+borders." She is still, as he says, "working out her system by
+experience"; and the exclusion of bitterness--even, as he says, of
+"savagery"--from her debates and controversies is hardly yet
+accomplished. There is at present, indeed, a remarkable lull, a "truce
+of God," which, it may be hoped, is of good omen; but we dare not be
+too sure that it is going to be permanent. In the meantime, those who
+tremble lest disestablishment should be the signal of a great break up
+and separation of her different parties cannot do better than meditate
+on Mr. Gladstone's very solemn words:--
+
+    The great maxim, _in omnibus caritas_, which is so necessary to
+    temper all religious controversy, ought to apply with a tenfold
+    force to the conduct of the members of the Church of England. In
+    respect to differences among themselves they ought, of course, in
+    the first place to remember that their right to differ is limited
+    by the laws of the system to which they belong; but within that
+    limit should they not also, each of them, recollect that his
+    antagonist has something to say; that the Reformation and the
+    counter-Reformation tendencies were, in the order of Providence,
+    placed here in a closer juxtaposition than anywhere else in the
+    Christian world; that a course of destiny so peculiar appears to
+    indicate on the part of the Supreme Orderer a peculiar purpose,
+    that not only no religious but no considerate or prudent man
+    should run the risk of interfering with such a purpose; that the
+    great charity which is a bounden duty everywhere in these matters
+    should here be accompanied and upheld by two ever-striving
+    handmaidens, a great Reverence and a great Patience.
+
+This is true, and of deep moment to those who guide and influence
+thought and feeling in the Church. But further, those in whose hands
+the "Supreme Orderer" has placed the springs and the restraints of
+political movement and of change, if they recognise at all this view of
+the English Church, ought to feel one duty paramount in regard to it.
+Never was the Church, they tell us, more active and more hopeful; well
+then, what politicians who care for her have to see to is that she
+shall have _time_ to work out effectually the tendencies which are
+visible in her now more than at any period of her history--that
+combination which Mr. Gladstone wishes for, of the deepest individual
+faith and energy, with forbearance and conciliation and the desire for
+peace. She has a right to claim from English rulers that she should
+have time to let these things work and bear fruit; if she has lost time
+before, she never was so manifestly in earnest in trying to make up for
+it as now. It is not talking, but working together, which brings
+different minds and tempers to understand one another's divergences;
+and it is this disposition to work together which shows itself and is
+growing now. But it needs time. What the Church has a right to ask from
+the arbiters of her temporal and political position in the country, if
+that is ultimately and inevitably to be changed, is that nothing
+precipitate, nothing impatient, should be done; that she should have
+time adequately to develop and fulfil what she now alone among
+Christian communities seems in a position to attempt.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+DISENDOWMENT[8]
+
+
+  [8]
+  _Guardian_, 14th October 1885.
+
+This generation has seen no such momentous change as that which has
+suddenly appeared to be at our very doors, and which people speak of as
+disestablishment. The word was only invented a few years ago, and was
+sneered at as a barbarism, worthy of the unpractical folly which it was
+coined to express. It has been bandied about a good deal lately,
+sometimes _de coeur léger_; and within the last six months it has
+assumed the substance and the weight of a formidable probability. Other
+changes, more or less serious, are awaiting us in the approaching
+future; but they are encompassed with many uncertainties, and all
+forecasts of their working are necessarily very doubtful. About this
+there is an almost brutal clearness and simplicity, as to what it
+means, as to what is intended by those who have pushed it into
+prominence, and as to what will follow from their having their way.
+
+Disestablishment has really come to mean, in the mouth of friends and
+foes, simple disendowment. It is well that the question should be set
+in its true terms, without being confused with vague and less important
+issues. It is not very easy to say what disestablishment by itself
+would involve, except the disappearance of Bishops from the Upper
+House, or the presence of other religious dignitaries, with equal rank
+and rights, alongside of them. Questions of patronage and
+ecclesiastical law might be difficult to settle; but otherwise a
+statute of mere disestablishment, not easy indeed to formulate, would
+leave the Church in the eyes of the country very much what it found it.
+Perhaps "My lord" might be more widely dropped in addressing Bishops;
+but otherwise, the aspect of the Church, its daily work, its
+organisations, would remain the same, and it would depend on the Church
+itself whether the consideration paid to it continues what it has been;
+whether it shall be diminished or increased. The privilege of being
+publicly recognised with special marks of honour by the State has been
+dearly paid for by the claim which the State has always, and sometimes
+unscrupulously, insisted on, of making the true interests of the Church
+subservient to its own passing necessities.
+
+But there is no haziness about the meaning of disendowment. Property is
+a tangible thing, and is subject to the four rules of arithmetic, and
+ultimately to the force of the strong arm. When you talk of
+disendowment, you talk of taking from the Church, not honour or
+privilege or influence, but visible things, to be measured and counted
+and pointed to, which now belong to it and which you want to belong to
+some one else. They belong to individuals because the individuals
+belong to a great body. There are, of course, many people who do not
+believe that such a body exists; or that if it does, it has been called
+into being and exists simply by the act of the State, like the army,
+and, like the army, liable to be disbanded by its master. But that is a
+view resting on a philosophical theory of a purely subjective
+character; it is as little the historical or legal view as it is the
+theological view. We have not yet lost our right in the nineteenth
+century to think of the Church of England as a continuous, historic,
+religious society, bound by ties which, however strained, are still
+unbroken with that vast Christendom from which as a matter of fact it
+sprung, and still, in spite of all differences, external and internal,
+and by force of its traditions and institutions, as truly one body as
+anything can be on earth. To this Church, this body, by right which at
+present is absolutely unquestionable, property belongs; property has
+been given from time immemorial down to yesterday. This property, in
+its bulk, with whatever abatements and allowances, it is intended to
+take from the Church. This is disendowment, and this is what is before
+us.
+
+It is well to realise as well as we can what is inevitably involved in
+this vast and, in modern England, unexampled change, which we are
+sometimes invited to view with philosophic calmness or resignation, as
+the unavoidable drift of the current of modern thought, or still more
+cheerfully to welcome, as the beginning of a new era in the prosperity
+and strength of the Church as a religious institution. We are entreated
+to be of good cheer. The Church will be more free; it will no longer be
+mixed up with sordid money matters and unpopular payments; it will no
+longer have the discredit of State control; the rights of the laity
+will come up and a blow will be struck at clericalism. With all our
+machinery shattered and ruined we shall be thrown more on individual
+energy and spontaneous originality of effort. Our new poverty will spur
+us into zeal. Above all, the Church will be delivered from the
+temptation, incident to wealth, of sticking to abuses for the sake of
+gold; of shrinking from principle and justice and enthusiasm, out of
+fear of worldly loss. It will no longer be a place for drones and
+hirelings. It is very kind of the revolutionists to wish all this good
+to the Church, though if the Church is so bad as to need all these good
+wishes for its improvement, it would be more consistent, and perhaps
+less cynical, to wish it ruined altogether. Yet even if the Church were
+likely to thrive better on no bread, there are reasons of public
+morality why it should not be robbed. But these prophecies and
+forecasts really belong to a sphere far removed from the mental
+activity of those who so easily indulge in them. These excellent
+persons are hardly fitted by habit and feeling to be judges of the
+probable course of Divine Providence, or the development of new
+religious energies and spiritual tendencies in a suddenly impoverished
+body. What they can foresee, and what we can foresee also is, that
+these _tabulae novae_ will be a great blow to the Church. They mean
+that, and that we understand.
+
+It is idle to talk as if it was to be no blow to the Church. The
+confiscation of Wesleyan and Roman Catholic Church property would be a
+real blow to Wesleyan or Roman Catholic interests; and in proportion as
+the body is greater the effects of the blow must be heavier and more
+signal. It is trifling with our patience to pretend to persuade us that
+such a confiscation scheme as is now recommended to the country would
+not throw the whole work of the Church into confusion and disaster, not
+perhaps irreparable, but certainly for the time overwhelming and
+perilous. People speak sometimes as if such a huge transfer of property
+was to be done with the stroke of a pen and the aid of a few office
+clerks; they forget what are the incidents of an institution which has
+lasted in England for more than a thousand years, and whose business
+extends to every aspect and degree of our very complex society from the
+highest to the lowest. Resources may be replaced, but for the time they
+must be crippled. Life may be rearranged for the new circumstances, but
+in the meanwhile all the ordinary assumptions have to be changed, all
+the ordinary channels of activity are stopped up or diverted.
+
+And why should this vast and far-reaching change be made? Is it
+unlawful for the Church to hold property? Other religious organisations
+hold it, and even the Salvation Army knows the importance of funds for
+its work. Is it State property which the State may resume for other
+uses? If anything is certain it is that the State, except in an
+inconsiderable degree, did not endow the Church, but consented in the
+most solemn way to its being endowed by the gifts of private donors, as
+it now consents to the endowment in this way of other religious bodies.
+Does the bigness of the property entitle the State to claim it? This is
+a formidable doctrine for other religious bodies, as they increase in
+influence and numbers. Is it vexatious that the Church should be richer
+and more powerful than the sects? It is not the fault of the Church
+that it is the largest and the most ancient body in England. There is
+but one real and adequate reason: it is the wish to disable and
+paralyse a great religious corporation, the largest and most powerful
+representative of Christianity in our English society, to exhibit it to
+the nation after centuries of existence at length defeated and humbled
+by the new masters' power, to deprive it of the organisation and the
+resources which it is using daily with increasing effect for impressing
+religious truth on the people, for winning their interest, their
+confidence, and their sympathy, for obtaining a hold on the generations
+which are coming. The Liberation Society might go on for years
+repeating their dreary catalogue of grievances and misstatements.
+Doubtless there is much for which they desire to punish the Church;
+doubtless, too, there are men among them who are persuaded that they
+would serve religion by discrediting and impoverishing the Church. But
+they are not the people with whom the Church has to reckon. The
+Liberationists might have long asked in vain for their pet
+"emancipation" scheme. They are stronger men than the Liberationists
+who are going in now for disendowment. They are men--we do them no
+wrong--who sincerely think Christianity mischievous, and who see in the
+power and resources of the Church a bulwark and representative of all
+religion which it is of the first importance to get rid of.
+
+This is the one adequate and consistent reason for the confiscation of
+the property of the Church. There is no other reason that will bear
+discussion to be given for what, without it, is a great moral and
+political wrong. In such a settled society as ours, where men reckon on
+what is their own, such a sweeping and wholesale transfer of property
+cannot be justified, on a mere balance of probable expediency in the
+use of it. Unless it is as a punishment for gross neglect and abuse, as
+was alleged in the partial confiscations of the sixteenth century, or
+unless it is called for as a step to break down what can no longer be
+tolerated, like slavery, there is no other name for it, in the estimate
+of justice, than that of a deep and irreparable wrong. This is
+certainly not the time to punish the Church when it never was more
+improving and more unsparing of sacrifice and effort. But it may be
+full time to stop a career which may render success more difficult for
+schemes ahead, which make no secret of their intention to dispense with
+religion. This, however, is not what most Englishmen wish, whether
+Liberals or Conservatives, or even Nonconformists; and without this end
+there is no more justice in disendowing a great religious corporation
+like the Church, than in disendowing the Duke of Bedford or the Duke of
+Westminster. Of course no one can deny the competence of Parliament to
+do either one or the other; but power does not necessarily carry with
+it justice, and justice means that while there are great and small,
+rich and poor, the State should equally protect all its members and all
+its classes, however different. Revolutions have no law; but a great
+wrong, deliberately inflicted in times of settled order, is more
+mischievous to the nation than even to those who suffer from it.
+History has shown us what follows from such gratuitous and wanton wrong
+in the bitter feeling of defeat and humiliation lasting through
+generations. But worse than this is the effect on the political
+morality of the nation; the corrupting and fatal consciousness of
+having once broken through the restraints of recognised justice, of
+having acquiesced in a tempting but high-handed wrong. The effects of
+disendowment concern England and its morality even more deeply than
+they do the Church.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE NEW COURT[9]
+
+
+  [9]
+  _Guardian_, 15th May 1889.
+
+The claim maintained by the Archbishop in his Judgment, by virtue of
+his metropolitical authority and by that alone, to cite, try, and
+sentence one of his suffragans, is undoubtedly what is called in slang
+language "a large order." Even by those who may have thought it
+inevitable, after the Watson case had been so distinctly accepted by
+the books as a precedent, it is yet felt as a surprise, in the sense in
+which a thing is often a surprise when, after being only talked about
+it becomes a reality. We can imagine some people getting up in the
+morning on last Saturday with one set of feelings, and going to bed
+with another. Bishops, then, who in spite of the alleged anarchy, are
+still looked upon with great reverence, as almost irresponsible in what
+they say and do officially, are, it seems, as much at the mercy of the
+law as the presbyters and deacons whom they have occasionally sent
+before the Courts. They, too, at the will of chance accusers who are
+accountable to no one, are liable to the humiliation, worry, and
+crushing law-bills of an ecclesiastical suit. Whatever may be thought
+of this now, it would have seemed extravagant and incredible to the
+older race of Bishops that their actions should be so called in
+question. They would have thought their dignity gravely assailed, if
+besides having to incur heavy expense in prosecuting offending
+clergymen, they had also to incur it in protecting themselves from the
+charge of being themselves offenders against Church law.
+
+The growth of law is always a mysterious thing; and an outsider and
+layman is disposed to ask where this great jurisdiction sprung up and
+grew into shape and power. In the Archbishop's elaborate and able
+Judgment it is indeed treated as something which had always been; but
+he was more successful in breaking down the force of alleged
+authorities, and inferences from them, on the opposite side, than he
+was in establishing clearly and convincingly his own contention.
+Considering the dignity and importance of the jurisdiction claimed, it
+is curious that so little is heard about it till the beginning of the
+eighteenth century. It is curious that in its two most conspicuous
+instances it should have been called into activity by those not
+naturally friendly to large ecclesiastical claims--by Low Churchmen of
+the Revolution against an offending Jacobite, and by a Puritan
+association against a High Churchman. There is no such clear and strong
+case as Bishop Watson's till we come to Bishop Watson. In his argument
+the Archbishop rested his claim definitely and forcibly on the
+precedent of Bishop Watson's case, and one or two cases which more or
+less followed it. That possibly is sufficient for his purpose; but it
+may still be asked--What did the Watson case itself grow out of? what
+were the precedents--not merely the analogies and supposed legal
+necessities, but the precedents--on which this exercise of
+metropolitical jurisdiction, distinct from the legatine power, rested?
+For it seems as if a formidable prerogative, not much heard of where we
+might expect to hear of it, not used by Cranmer and Laud, though
+approved by Cranmer in the _Reformatio Legum_, had sprung into being
+and energy in the hands of the mild Archbishop Tenison. Watson's case
+may be good law and bind the Archbishop. But it would have been more
+satisfactory if, in reviving a long-disused power, the Archbishop had
+been able to go behind the Watson case, and to show more certainly that
+the jurisdiction which he claimed and proposed to exercise in
+conformity with that case had, like the jurisdiction of other great
+courts of the Church and realm, been clearly and customarily exercised
+long before that case.
+
+The appearance of this great tribunal among us, a distinctly spiritual
+court of the highest dignity, cannot fail to be memorable. It is too
+early to forecast what its results may be. There may be before it an
+active and eventful career, or it may fall back into disuse and
+quiescence. It has jealous and suspicious rivals in the civil courts,
+never well disposed to the claim of ecclesiastical power or purely
+spiritual authority; and though its jurisdiction is not likely to be
+strained at present, it is easy to conceive occasions in the future
+which may provoke the interference of the civil court.
+
+But there is this interest about the present proceedings, that they
+illustrate with curious closeness, amid so much that is different, the
+way in which great spiritual prerogatives grew up in the Church. They
+may have ended disastrously; but at their first beginnings they were
+usually inevitable, innocent, blameless. Time after time the necessity
+arose of some arbiter among those who were themselves arbiters, rulers,
+judges. Time after time this necessity forced those in the first rank
+into this position, as being the only persons who could be allowed to
+take it, and so Archbishops, Metropolitans, Primates appeared, to
+preside at assemblies, to be the mouthpiece of a general sentiment, to
+decide between high authorities, to be the centre of appeals. The
+Papacy itself at its first beginning had no other origin. It interfered
+because it was asked to interfere; it judged because there was no one
+else to judge. And so necessities of a very different kind have forced
+the Archbishop of Canterbury of our day into a position which is new
+and strange to our experience, and which, however constitutional and
+reasonable it may be, must give every one who is at all affected by it
+a good deal to think about.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+MOZLEY'S BAMPTON LECTURES[10]
+
+
+I
+
+  [10]
+  _Eight Lectures on Miracles: the Bampton Lectures for 1865_. By the
+  Rev. J.B. Mozley, B.D. _The Times_, 5th and 6th June 1866.
+
+The way in which the subject of Miracles has been treated, and the
+place which they have had in our discussions, will remain a
+characteristic feature of both the religious and philosophical
+tendencies of thought among us. Miracles, if they are real things, are
+the most awful and august of realities. But, from various causes, one
+of which, perhaps, is the very word itself, and the way in which it
+binds into one vague and technical generality a number of most
+heterogeneous instances, miracles have lost much of their power to
+interest those who have thought most in sympathy with their generation.
+They have been summarily and loosely put aside, sometimes avowedly,
+more often still by implication. Even by those who accepted and
+maintained them, they have often been touched uncertainly and formally,
+as if people thought that they were doing a duty, but would like much
+better to talk about other things which really attracted and filled
+their minds. In the long course of theological war for the last two
+centuries, it is hardly too much to say that miracles, as a subject for
+discussion, have been degraded and worn down from their original
+significance; vulgarised by passing through the handling of not the
+highest order of controversialists, who battered and defaced what they
+bandied about in argument, which was often ingenious and acute, and
+often mere verbal sophistry, but which, in any case, seldom rose to the
+true height of the question. Used either as instruments of proof or as
+fair game for attack, they suffered in the common and popular feeling
+about them. Taken in a lump, and with little realising of all that they
+were and implied, they furnished a cheap and tempting material for
+"short and easy methods" on one side, and on the other side, as it is
+obvious, a mark for just as easy and tempting objections. They became
+trite. People got tired of hearing of them, and shy of urging them, and
+dwelt in preference on other grounds of argument. The more serious
+feeling and the more profound and original thought of the last half
+century no longer seemed to give them the value and importance which
+they had; on both sides a disposition was to be traced to turn aside
+from them. The deeper religion and the deeper and more enterprising
+science of the day combined to lower them from their old evidential
+place. The one threw the moral stress on moral grounds of belief, and
+seemed inclined to undervalue external proofs. The other more and more
+yielded to its repugnance to admit the interruption of natural law, and
+became more and more disinclined even to discuss the supernatural; and,
+curiously enough, along with this there was in one remarkable school of
+religious philosophy an increased readiness to believe in miracles as
+such, without apparently caring much for them as proofs. Of late,
+indeed, things have taken a different turn. The critical importance of
+miracles, after for a time having fallen out of prominence behind other
+questions, has once more made itself felt. Recent controversy has
+forced them again on men's thoughts, and has made us see that, whether
+they are accepted or denied, it is idle to ignore them. They mean too
+much to be evaded. Like all powerful arguments they cut two ways, and
+of all powerful arguments they are the most clearly two-edged. However
+we may limit their range, some will remain which we must face; which,
+according to what is settled about them, either that they are true or
+not true, will entirely change all that we think of religion. Writers
+on all sides have begun to be sensible that a decisive point requires
+their attention, and that its having suffered from an old-fashioned way
+of handling is no reason why it should not on its own merits engage
+afresh the interest of serious men, to whom it is certainly of
+consequence.
+
+The renewed attention of theological writers to the subject of miracles
+as an element of proof has led to some important discussions upon it,
+showing in their treatment of a well-worn inquiry that a change in the
+way of conducting it had become necessary. Of these productions we may
+place Mr. Mozley's _Bampton Lectures_ for last year among the most
+original and powerful. They are an example, and a very fine one, of a
+mode of theological writing which is characteristic of the Church of
+England, and almost peculiar to it. The distinguishing features of it
+are a combination of intense seriousness with a self-restrained, severe
+calmness, and of very vigorous and wide-ranging reasoning on the
+realities of the case with the least amount of care about artificial
+symmetry or scholastic completeness. Admirers of the Roman style call
+it cold, indefinite, wanting in dogmatic coherence, comprehensiveness,
+and grandeur. Admirers of the German style find little to praise in a
+cautious bit-by-bit method, content with the tests which have most
+affinity with common sense, incredulous of exhaustive theories, leaving
+a large margin for the unaccountable or the unexplained. But it has its
+merits, one of them being that, dealing very solidly and very acutely
+with large and real matters of experience, the interest of such
+writings endures as the starting-point and foundation for future work.
+Butler out of England is hardly known, certainly he is not much valued
+either as a divine or a philosopher; but in England, though we
+criticise him freely, it will be a long time before he is out of date.
+Mr. Mozley's book belongs to that class of writings of which Butler may
+be taken as the type. It is strong, genuine argument about difficult
+matters, fairly facing what _is_ difficult, fairly trying to grapple,
+not with what _appears_ the gist and strong point of a question, but
+with what really and at bottom _is_ the knot of it. It is a book the
+reasoning of which may not satisfy every one; but it is a book in which
+there is nothing plausible, nothing put in to escape the trouble of
+thinking out what really comes across the writer's path. This will not
+recommend it to readers who themselves are not fond of trouble; a book
+of hard thinking cannot be a book of easy reading; nor is it a book for
+people to go to who only want available arguments, or to see a question
+apparently settled in a convenient way. But we think it is a book for
+people who wish to see a great subject handled on a scale which befits
+it and with a perception of its real elements. It is a book which will
+have attractions for those who like to see a powerful mind applying
+itself without shrinking or holding back, without trick or reserve or
+show of any kind, as a wrestler closes body to body with his
+antagonist, to the strength of an adverse and powerful argument. A
+stern self-constraint excludes everything exclamatory, all glimpses and
+disclosures of what merely affects the writer, all advantages from an
+appeal, disguised and indirect perhaps, to the opinion of his own side.
+But though the work is not rhetorical, it is not the less eloquent; but
+it is eloquence arising from a keen insight at once into what is real
+and what is great, and from a singular power of luminous, noble, and
+expressive statement. There is no excitement about its close subtle
+trains of reasoning; and there is no affectation,--and therefore no
+affectation of impartiality. The writer has his conclusions, and he
+does not pretend to hold a balance between them and their opposites.
+But in the presence of such a subject he never loses sight of its
+greatness, its difficulty, its eventfulness; and these thoughts make
+him throughout his undertaking circumspect, considerate, and calm.
+
+The point of view from which the subject of miracles is looked at in
+these Lectures is thus stated in the preface. It is plain that two
+great questions arise--first, Are miracles possible? next, If they are,
+can any in fact be proved? These two branches of the inquiry involve
+different classes of considerations. The first is purely philosophical,
+and stops the inquiry at once if it can be settled in the negative. The
+other calls in also the aid of history and criticism. Both questions
+have been followed out of late with great keenness and interest, but it
+is the first which at present assumes an importance which it never had
+before, with its tremendous negative answer, revolutionising not only
+the past, but the whole future of mankind; and it is to the first that
+Mr. Mozley's work is mainly addressed.
+
+    The difficulty which attaches to miracles in the period of thought
+    through which we are now passing is one which is concerned not
+    with their evidence, but with their intrinsic credibility. There
+    has arisen in a certain class of minds an apparent perception of
+    the impossibility of suspensions of physical law. This is one
+    peculiarity of the time; another is a disposition to maintain the
+    disbelief of miracles upon a religious basis, and in a connection
+    with a declared belief in the Christian revelation.
+
+    The following Lectures, therefore, are addressed mainly to the
+    fundamental question of the credibility of Miracles, their use and
+    the evidences of them being only touched on subordinately and
+    collaterally. It was thought that such an aim, though in itself a
+    narrow and confined one, was most adapted to the particular need
+    of the day.
+
+As Mr. Mozley says, various points essential to the whole argument,
+such as testimony, and the criterion between true and false miracles,
+are touched upon; but what is characteristic of the work is the way in
+which it deals with the antecedent objection to the possibility and
+credibility of miracles. It is on this part of the subject that the
+writer strikes out a line for himself, and puts forth his strength. His
+argument may be described generally as a plea for reason against
+imagination and the broad impressions of custom. Experience, such
+experience as we have of the world and human life, has, in all ages,
+been really the mould of human thought, and with large exceptions, the
+main unconscious guide and controller of human belief; and in our own
+times it has been formally and scientifically recognised as such, and
+made the exclusive foundation of all possible philosophy. A philosophy
+of mere experience is not tolerant of miracles; its doctrines exclude
+them; but, what is of even greater force than its doctrines, the subtle
+and penetrating atmosphere of feeling and intellectual habits which
+accompanies it is essentially uncongenial and hostile to them. It is
+against the undue influence of such results of experience--an influence
+openly acting in distinct ideas and arguments, but of which the greater
+portion operates blindly, insensibly, and out of sight--that Mr. Mozley
+makes a stand on behalf of reason, to which it belongs in the last
+resort to judge of the lessons of experience. Reason, as it cannot
+create experience, so it cannot take its place and be its substitute;
+but what reason can do is to say within what limits experience is
+paramount as a teacher; and reason abdicates its functions if it
+declines to do so, for it was given us to work upon and turn to account
+the unmeaning and brute materials which experience gives us in the
+rough. The antecedent objection against miracles is, he says, one of
+experience, but not one of reason. And experience, flowing over its
+boundaries tyrannically and effacing its limits, is as dangerous to
+truth and knowledge as reason once was, when it owned no check in
+nature, and used no test but itself.
+
+Mr. Mozley begins by stating clearly the necessity for coming to a
+decision on the question of miracles. It cannot remain one of the open
+questions, at least of religion. There is, as has been said, a
+disposition to pass by it, and to construct a religion without
+miracles. The thing is conceivable. We can take what are as a matter of
+fact the moral results of Christianity, and of that singular power with
+which it has presided over the improvement of mankind, and alloying and
+qualifying them with other elements, not on the face of the matter its
+products, yet in many cases indirectly connected with its working, form
+something which we may acknowledge as a rule of life, and which may
+satisfy our inextinguishable longings after the unseen and eternal. It
+is true that such a religion presupposes Christianity, to which it owes
+its best and noblest features, and that, as far as we can see, it is
+inconceivable if Christianity had not first been. Still, we may say
+that alchemy preceded chemistry, and was not the more true for being
+the step to what is true. But what we cannot say of such a religion is
+that it takes the place of Christianity, and is such a religion as
+Christianity has been and claims to be. There must ever be all the
+difference in the world between a religion which is or professes to be
+a revelation, and one which cannot be called such. For a revelation is
+a direct work and message of God; but that which is the result of a
+process and progress of rinding out the truth by the experience of
+ages, or of correcting mistakes, laying aside superstitions and
+gradually reducing the gross mass of belief to its essential truth, is
+simply on a level with all other human knowledge, and, as it is about
+the unseen, can never be verified. If there has been no revelation,
+there may be religious hopes and misgivings, religious ideas or dreams,
+religious anticipations and trust; but the truth is, there cannot be a
+religion in the world. Much less can there be any such thing as
+Christianity. It is only when we look at it vaguely in outline, without
+having before our mind what it is in fact and in detail, that we can
+allow ourselves to think so. There is no transmuting its refractory
+elements into something which is not itself; and it is nothing if it is
+not primarily a direct message from God. Limit as we may the manner of
+this communication, still there remains what makes it different from
+all other human possessions of truth, that it was a direct message. And
+that, to whatever extent, involves all that is involved in the idea of
+miracles. It is, as Mr. Mozley says, inconceivable without miracles.
+
+    If, then, a person of evident integrity and loftiness of character
+    rose into notice in a particular country and community eighteen
+    centuries ago, who made these communications about himself--that
+    he had existed before his natural birth, from all eternity, and
+    before the world was, in a state of glory with God; that he was
+    the only-begotten Son of God; that the world itself had been made
+    by him; that he had, however, come down from heaven and assumed
+    the form and nature of man for a particular purpose--viz. to be
+    the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world; that he
+    thus stood in a mysterious and supernatural relation to the whole
+    of mankind; that through him alone mankind had access to God; that
+    he was the head of an invisible kingdom, into which he should
+    gather all the generations of righteous men who had lived in the
+    world; that on his departure from hence he should return to heaven
+    to prepare mansions there for them; and, lastly, that he should
+    descend again at the end of the world to judge the whole human
+    race, on which occasion all that were in their graves should hear
+    his voice and come forth, they that had done good unto the
+    resurrection of life, and they that had done evil unto the
+    resurrection of damnation,--if this person made these assertions
+    about himself, and all that was done was to make the assertions,
+    what would be the inevitable conclusion of sober reason respecting
+    that person? The necessary conclusion of sober reason respecting
+    that person would be that he was disordered in his understanding.
+    What other decision could we come to when a man, looking like one
+    of ourselves, and only exemplifying in his life and circumstances
+    the ordinary course of nature, said this about himself, but that
+    when reason had lost its balance a dream of extraordinary and
+    unearthly grandeur might be the result? By no rational being could
+    a just and benevolent life be accepted as proof of such
+    astonishing announcements. Miracles are the necessary complement
+    then of the truth of such announcements, which without them are
+    purposeless and abortive, the unfinished fragments of a design
+    which is nothing unless it is the whole. They are necessary to the
+    justification of such announcements, which, indeed, unless they
+    are supernatural truths, are the wildest delusions. The matter and
+    its guarantee are the two parts of a revelation, the absence of
+    either of which neutralises and undoes it.
+
+A revelation, in any sense in which it is more than merely a result of
+the natural progress of the human mind and the gradual clearing up of
+mistakes, cannot in the nature of things be without miracles, because
+it is not merely a discovery of ideas and rules of life, but of facts
+undiscoverable without it. It involves _constituent_ miracles, to use
+De Quincey's phrase, as part of its substance, and could not claim a
+bearing without _evidential_ or _polemic_ ones. No other portion or
+form of proof, however it may approve itself to the ideas of particular
+periods or minds, can really make up for this. The alleged sinlessness
+of the Teacher, the internal evidence from adaptation to human nature,
+the historical argument of the development of Christendom, are, as Mr.
+Mozley points out, by themselves inadequate, without that further
+guarantee which is contained in miracles, to prove the Divine origin of
+a religion. The tendency has been of late to fall back on these
+attractive parts of the argument, which admit of such varied handling
+and expression, and come home so naturally to the feelings of an age so
+busy and so keen in pursuing the secrets of human character, and so
+fascinated with its unfolding wonders. But take any of them, the
+argument from results, for instance, perhaps the most powerful of them
+all. "We cannot," as Mr. Mozley says, "rest too much upon it, so long
+as we do not charge it with more of the burden of proof than it is in
+its own nature equal to--viz. the whole. But that it cannot bear." The
+hard, inevitable question remains at the end, for the most attenuated
+belief in Christianity as a religion from God--what is the ultimate
+link which connects it directly with God? The readiness with which we
+throw ourselves on more congenial topics of proof does not show that,
+even to our own minds, these proofs could suffice by themselves,
+miracles being really taken away. The whole power of a complex argument
+and the reasons why it tells do not always appear on its face. It does
+not depend merely on what it states, but also on unexpressed,
+unanalysed, perhaps unrealised grounds, the real force of which would
+at once start forth if they were taken away. We are told of the obscure
+rays of the spectrum, rays which have their proof and their effect,
+only not the same proof and effect as the visible ones which they
+accompany; and the background and latent suppositions of a great
+argument are as essential to it as its more prominent and elaborate
+constructions. And they show their importance sometimes in a remarkable
+and embarrassing way, when, after a long debate, their presence at the
+bottom of everything, unnoticed and perhaps unallowed for, is at length
+disclosed by some obvious and decisive question, which some person had
+been too careless to think of, and another too shy to ask. We may not
+care to obtrude miracles; but take them away, and see what becomes of
+the argument for Christianity.
+
+    It must be remembered that when this part of Christian evidence
+    comes so forcibly home to us, and creates that inward assurance
+    which it does, it does this in connection with the proof of
+    miracles in the background, which though it may not for the time
+    be brought into actual view, is still known to be there, and to be
+    ready for use upon being wanted. The _indirect_ proof from results
+    has the greater force, and carries with it the deeper persuasion,
+    because it is additional and auxiliary to the _direct_ proof
+    behind it, upon which it leans all the time, though we may not
+    distinctly notice and estimate this advantage. Were the evidence
+    of moral result to be taken rigidly alone as the one single
+    guarantee for a Divine revelation, it would then be seen that we
+    had calculated its single strength too highly. If there is a
+    species of evidence which is directly appropriate to the thing
+    believed, we cannot suppose, on the strength of the indirect
+    evidence we possess, that we can do without the direct. But
+    miracles are the direct credentials of a revelation; the visible
+    supernatural is the appropriate witness to the invisible
+    supernatural--that proof which goes straight to the point, and, a
+    token being wanted of a Divine communication, is that token. We
+    cannot, therefore, dispense with this evidence. The position that
+    the revelation proves the miracles, and not the miracles the
+    revelation, admits of a good qualified meaning; but, taken
+    literally, it is a double offence against the rule that things are
+    properly proved by the proper proof of them; for a supernatural
+    fact _is_ the proper proof of a supernatural doctrine, while a
+    supernatural doctrine, on the other hand, is certainly _not_ the
+    proper proof of a supernatural fact.
+
+So that, whatever comes of the inquiry, miracles and revelation must go
+together. There is no separating them. Christianity may claim in them
+the one decisive proof that could be given of its Divine origin and the
+truth of its creed; but, at any rate, it must ever be responsible for
+them.
+
+    But suppose a person to say, and to say with truth, that his own
+    individual faith does not rest upon miracles, is he, therefore,
+    released from the defence of miracles? Is the question of their
+    truth or falsehood an irrelevant one to him? Is his faith secure
+    if they are disproved? By no means; if miracles were, although
+    only at the commencement, necessary to Christianity, and were
+    actually wrought, and therefore form part of the Gospel record and
+    are bound up with the Gospel scheme and doctrines, this part of
+    the structure cannot be abandoned without the sacrifice of the
+    other too. To shake the authority of one-half of this body of
+    statement is to shake the authority of the whole. Whether or not
+    the individual makes _use_ of them for the support of his own
+    faith, the miracles are there; and if they are there they must be
+    there either as true miracles or as false ones. If he does not
+    avail himself of their evidence, his belief is still affected by
+    their refutation. Accepting, as he does, the supernatural truths
+    of Christianity and its miracles upon the same report from the
+    same witnesses, upon the authority of the same documents, he
+    cannot help having at any rate this negative interest in them. For
+    if those witnesses and documents deceive us with regard to the
+    miracles, how can we trust them with regard to the doctrines? If
+    they are wrong upon the evidences of a revelation, how can we
+    depend upon their being right as to the nature of that revelation?
+    If their account of visible facts is to be received with an
+    explanation, is not their account of doctrines liable to a like
+    explanation? Revelation, then, even if it does not need the truth
+    of miracles for the benefit of their proof, still requires it in
+    order not to be crushed under the weight of their falsehood....
+    Thus miracles and the supernatural contents of Christianity must
+    stand or fall together. These two questions--the _nature_ of the
+    revelation, and the _evidence_ of the revelation--cannot be
+    disjoined. Christianity as a dispensation undiscoverable by human
+    reason, and Christianity as a dispensation authenticated by
+    miracles--these two are in necessary combination. If any do not
+    include the supernatural character of Christianity in their
+    definition of it, regarding the former only as one interpretation
+    of it or one particular traditional form of it, which is separable
+    from the essence--for Christianity as thus defined the support of
+    miracles is not wanted, because the moral truths are their own
+    evidence. But Christianity cannot be maintained as a revelation
+    undiscoverable by human reason, a revelation of a supernatural
+    scheme for man's salvation, without the evidence of miracles.
+
+The question of miracles, then, of the supernatural disclosed in the
+world of nature, is the vital point for everything that calls itself
+Christianity. It may be forgotten or disguised; but it is vain to keep
+it back and put it out of sight. It must be answered; and if we settle
+it that miracles are incredible, it is idle to waste our time about
+accommodations with Christianity, or reconstitutions of it. Let us be
+thankful for what it has done for the world; but let us put it away,
+both name and thing. It is an attempt after what is in the nature of
+things impossible to man--a revealed religion, authenticated by God.
+The shape which this negative answer takes is, as Mr. Mozley points
+out, much more definite now than it ever was. Miracles were formerly
+assailed and disbelieved on mixed and often confused grounds; from
+alleged defect of evidence, from their strangeness, or because they
+would be laughed at. Foes and defenders looked at them from the outside
+and in the gross; and perhaps some of those who defended them most
+keenly had a very imperfect sense of what they really were. The
+difficulty of accepting them now arises not mainly from want of
+external evidence, but from having more keenly realised what it is to
+believe a miracle. As Mr. Mozley says--
+
+    How is it that sometimes when the same facts and truths have been
+    before men all their lives, and produced but one impression, a
+    moment comes when they look different from what they did? Some
+    minds may abandon, while others retain, their fundamental position
+    with respect to those facts and truths, but to both they look
+    stranger; they excite a certain surprise which they did not once
+    do. The reasons of this change then it is not always easy for the
+    persons themselves to trace, but of the result they are conscious;
+    and in some this result is a change of belief.
+
+    An inward process of this kind has been going on recently in many
+    minds on the subject of miracles; and in some with the latter
+    result. When it came to the question--which every one must sooner
+    or later put to himself on this subject--Did these things really
+    take place? Are they matters of fact?--they have appeared to
+    themselves to be brought to a standstill, and to be obliged to own
+    an inner refusal of their whole reason to admit them among the
+    actual events of the past. This strong repugnance seemed to be the
+    witness of its own truth, to be accompanied by a clear and vivid
+    light, to be a law to the understanding, and to rule without
+    appeal the question of fact.... But when the reality of the past
+    is once apprehended and embraced, then the miraculous occurrences
+    in it are realised too; being realised they excite surprise, and
+    surprise, when it comes in, takes two directions--it either makes
+    belief more real, or it destroys belief. There is an element of
+    doubt in surprise; for this emotion arises _because_ an event is
+    strange, and an event is strange because it goes counter to and
+    jars with presumption. Shall surprise, then, give life to belief
+    or stimulus to doubt? The road of belief and unbelief in the
+    history of some minds thus partly lies over common ground; the two
+    go part of their journey together; they have a common perception
+    in the insight into the real astonishing nature of the facts with
+    which they deal. The majority of mankind, perhaps, owe their
+    belief rather to the outward influence of custom and education
+    than to any strong principle of faith within; and it is to be
+    feared that many, if they came to perceive how wonderful what they
+    believed was, would not find their belief so easy and so
+    matter-of-course a thing as they appear to find it. Custom throws
+    a film over the great facts of religion, and interposes a veil
+    between the mind and truth, which, by preventing wonder,
+    intercepts doubt too, and at the same time excludes from deep
+    belief and protects from disbelief. But deeper faith and disbelief
+    throw off in common the dependence on mere custom, draw aside the
+    interposing veil, place themselves face to face with the contents
+    of the past, and expose themselves alike to the ordeal of wonder.
+
+    It is evident that the effect which the visible order of nature
+    has upon some minds is, that as soon as they realise what a
+    miracle is, they are stopped by what appears to them a simple
+    sense of its impossibility. So long as they only believe by habit
+    and education, they accept a miracle without difficulty, because
+    they do not realise it as an event which actually took place in
+    the world; the alteration of the face of the world, and the whole
+    growth of intervening history, throw the miracles of the Gospel
+    into a remote perspective in which they are rather seen as a
+    picture than real occurrences. But as soon as they see that, if
+    these miracles are true, they once really happened, what they feel
+    then is the apparent sense of their impossibility. It is not a
+    question of evidence with them: when they realise, e.g., that
+    our Lord's resurrection, if true, was a visible fact or
+    occurrence, they have the seeming certain perception that it is an
+    impossible occurrence. "I cannot," a person says to himself in
+    effect, "tear myself from the type of experience and join myself
+    to another. I cannot quit order and law for what is eccentric.
+    There is a repulsion between such facts and my belief as strong as
+    that between physical substances. In the mere effort to conceive
+    these amazing scenes as real ones, I fall back upon myself and
+    upon that type of reality which the order of nature has impressed
+    upon me."
+
+The antagonism to the idea of miracles has grown stronger and more
+definite with the enlarged and more widely-spread conception of
+invariable natural law, and also, as Mr. Mozley points out, with that
+increased power in our time of realising the past, which is not the
+peculiarity of individual writers, but is "part of the thought of the
+time." But though it has been quickened and sharpened by these
+influences, it rests ultimately on that sense which all men have in
+common of the customary and regular in their experience of the world.
+The world, which we all know, stands alone, cut off from any other; and
+a miracle is an intrusion, "an interpolation of one order of things
+into another, confounding two systems which are perfectly distinct."
+The broad, deep resistance to it which is awakened in the mind when we
+look abroad on the face of nature is expressed in Emerson's phrase--"A
+miracle is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clouds or the
+falling rain." Who can dispute it? Yet the rejoinder is obvious, and
+has often been given--that neither is man. Man, who looks at nature and
+thinks and feels about its unconscious unfeeling order; man, with his
+temptations, his glory, and his shame, his heights of goodness, and
+depths of infamy, is not one with those innocent and soulless forces so
+sternly immutable--"the blowing clouds and falling rain." The two awful
+phenomena which Kant said struck him dumb--the starry heavens, and
+right and wrong--are vainly to be reduced to the same order of things.
+Nothing can be stranger than the contrast between the rigid, inevitable
+sequences of nature, apparently so elastic only because not yet
+perfectly comprehended, and the consciousness of man in the midst of
+it. Nothing can be stranger than the juxtaposition of physical law and
+man's sense of responsibility and choice. Man is an "insertion," an
+"interpolation in the physical system"; he is "insulated as an anomaly
+in the midst of matter and material law." Mr. Mozley's words are
+striking:--
+
+    The first appearance, then, of man in nature was the appearance of
+    a new being in nature; and this fact was relatively to the then
+    order of things miraculous; no more physical account can be given
+    of it than could be given of a resurrection to life now. What more
+    entirely new and eccentric fact, indeed, can be imagined than a
+    human soul first rising up amidst an animal and vegetable world?
+    Mere consciousness--was not that of itself a new world within the
+    old one? Mere knowledge--that nature herself became known to a
+    being within herself, was not that the same? Certainly man was not
+    all at once the skilled interpreter of nature, and yet there is
+    some interpretation of nature to which man as such is equal in
+    some degree. He derives an impression from the sight of nature
+    which an animal does not derive; for though the material spectacle
+    is imprinted on its retina, as it is on man's, it does not see
+    what man sees. The sun rose, then, and the sun descended, the
+    stars looked down upon the earth, the mountains climbed to heaven,
+    the cliffs stood upon the shore, the same as now, countless ages
+    before a single being existed who _saw_ it. The counterpart of
+    this whole scene was wanting--the understanding mind; that mirror
+    in which the whole was to be reflected; and when this arose it was
+    a new birth for creation itself, that it became _known_,--an image
+    in the mind of a conscious being. But even consciousness and
+    knowledge were a less strange and miraculous introduction into the
+    world than conscience.
+
+    Thus wholly mysterious in his entrance into this scene, man is
+    _now_ an insulation in it; he came in by no physical law, and his
+    freewill is in utter contrast to that law. What can be more
+    incomprehensible, more heterogeneous, a more ghostly resident in
+    nature, than the sense of right and wrong? What is it? Whence is
+    it? The obligation of man to sacrifice himself for right is a
+    truth which springs out of an abyss, the mere attempt to look down
+    into which confuses the reason. Such is the juxtaposition of
+    mysterious and physical contents in the same system. Man is alone,
+    then, in nature: he alone of all the creatures communes with a
+    Being out of nature; and he divides himself from all other
+    physical life by prophesying, in the face of universal visible
+    decay, his own immortality.
+
+And till this anomaly has been removed--that is, till the last trace of
+what is moral in man has disappeared under the analysis of science, and
+what ought to be is resolved into a mere aspect of what is, this deep
+exception to the dominion of physical law remains as prominent and
+undeniable as physical law itself.
+
+    It is, indeed, avowed by those who reduce man in nature, that upon
+    the admission of free-will, the objection to the miraculous is over,
+    and that it is absurd to allow exception to law in man, and reject
+    it in nature.
+
+But the broad, popular sense of natural order, and the instinctive and
+common repugnance to a palpable violation of it, have been forged and
+refined into the philosophical objection to miracles. Two great
+thinkers of past generations, two of the keenest and clearest
+intellects which have appeared since the Reformation, laid the
+foundations of it long ago. Spinoza urged the uselessness of miracles,
+and Hume their incredibility, with a guarded subtlety and longsighted
+refinement of statement which made them in advance of their age except
+with a few. But their reflections have fallen in with a more advanced
+stage of thought and a taste for increased precision and exactness, and
+they are beginning to bear their fruit. The great and telling objection
+to miracles is getting to be, not their want of evidence, but, prior to
+all question of evidence, the supposed impossibility of fitting them in
+with a scientific view of nature. Reason, looking at nature and
+experience, is said to raise an antecedent obstacle to them which no
+alleged proof of fact can get over. They cannot be, because they are so
+unlike to everything else in the world, even of the strangest kind, in
+this point--in avowedly breaking the order of nature. And reason cannot
+be admitted to take cognizance of their claims and to consider their
+character, their purpose, their results, their credentials, because the
+mere supposition of them violates the fundamental conception and
+condition of science, absolute and invariable law, as well as that
+common-sense persuasion which everybody has, whether philosopher or
+not, of the uniformity of the order of the world.
+
+
+II
+
+To make room for reason to come in and pronounce upon miracles on their
+own merits--to clear the ground for the consideration of their actual
+claims by disposing of the antecedent objection of impossibility, is
+Mr. Mozley's main object.
+
+    Whatever difficulty there is in believing in miracles in general
+    arises from the circumstance that they are in contradiction to or
+    unlike the order of nature. To estimate the force of this
+    difficulty, then, we must first understand what kind of belief it
+    is which we have in the order of nature; for the weight of the
+    objection to the miraculous must depend on the nature of the
+    belief to which the miraculous is opposed.
+
+His examination of the alleged impossibility of miracles may be
+described as a very subtle turning the tables on Hume and the empirical
+philosophy. For when it is said that it is contrary to reason to
+believe in a suspension of the order of nature, he asks on what ground
+do we believe in the order of nature; and Hume himself supplies the
+answer. There is nothing of which we have a firmer persuasion. It is
+the basis of human life and knowledge. We assume at each step, without
+a doubt, that the future will be like the past. But why? Hume has
+carefully examined the question, and can find no answer, except the
+fact that we do assume it. "I apprehend," says Mr. Mozley, accepting
+Hume's view of the nature of probability, "that when we examine the
+different reasons which may be assigned for this connection, i.e. for
+the belief that the future will be like the past, they all come at last
+to be mere statements of the belief itself, and not reasons to account
+for it."
+
+    Let us imagine the occurrence of a particular physical phenomenon
+    for the first time. Upon that single occurrence we should have but
+    the very faintest expectation of another. If it did occur again
+    once or twice, so far from counting on another recurrence, a
+    cessation would come as the more natural event to us. But let it
+    occur a hundred times, and we should feel no hesitation in
+    inviting persons from a distance to see it; and if it occurred
+    every day for years, its recurrence would then be a certainty to
+    us, its cessation a marvel. But what has taken place in the
+    interim to produce this total change in our belief? From the mere
+    repetition do we know anything more about its cause? No. Then what
+    have we got besides the past repetition itself? Nothing. Why,
+    then, are we so certain of its _future_ repetition? All we can say
+    is that the known casts its shadow before; we project into unborn
+    time the existing types, and the secret skill of nature intercepts
+    the darkness of the future by ever suspending before our eyes, as
+    it were in a mirror, a reflection of the past. We really look at a
+    blank before us, but the mind, full of the scene behind, sees it
+    again in front....
+
+    What ground of reason, then, can we assign for our expectation
+    that any part of the course of nature will the _next_ moment be
+    like what it has been up to _this_ moment, i.e. for our belief
+    in the uniformity of nature? None. No demonstrative reason can be
+    given, for the contrary to the recurrence of a fact of nature is
+    no contradiction. No probable reason can be given, for all
+    probable reasoning respecting the course of nature is founded
+    _upon_ this presumption of likeness, and therefore cannot be the
+    foundation of it. No reason can be given for this belief. It is
+    without a reason. It rests upon no rational ground and can be
+    traced to no rational principle. Everything connected with human
+    life depends upon this belief, every practical plan or purpose
+    that we form implies it, every provision we make for the future,
+    every safeguard and caution we employ against it, all calculation,
+    all adjustment of means to ends, supposes this belief; it is this
+    principle alone which renders our experience of the slightest use
+    to us, and without it there would be, so far as we are concerned,
+    no order of nature and no laws of nature; and yet this belief has
+    no more producible reason for it than a speculation of fancy. A
+    natural fact has been repeated; it will be repeated:--I am
+    conscious of utter darkness when I try to see why one of these
+    follows from the other: I not only see no reason, but I perceive
+    that I see none, though I can no more help the expectation than I
+    can stop the circulation of my blood. There is a premiss, and
+    there is a conclusion, but there is a total want of connection
+    between the two. The inference, then, from the one of these to the
+    other rests upon no ground of the understanding; by no search or
+    analysis, however subtle or minute, can we extract from any corner
+    of the human mind and intelligence, however remote, the very
+    faintest reason for it.
+
+Hume, who had urged with great force that miracles were contrary to
+that probability which is created by experience, had also said that
+this probability had no producible ground in reason; that, universal,
+unfailing, indispensable as it was to the course of human life, it was
+but an instinct which defied analysis, a process of thought and
+inference for which he vainly sought the rational steps. There is no
+absurdity, though the greatest impossibility, in supposing this order
+to stop to-morrow; and, if the world ends at all, its end will be in an
+increasing degree improbable up to the very last moment. But, if this
+whole ground of belief is in its own nature avowedly instinctive and
+independent of reason, what right has it to raise up a bar of
+intellectual necessity, and to shut out reason from entertaining the
+question of miracles? They may have grounds which appeal to reason; and
+an unintelligent instinct forbids reason from fairly considering what
+they are. Reason cannot get beyond the actual fact of the present state
+of things for believing in the order of nature; it professes to find no
+necessity for it; the interruption of that order, therefore, whether
+probable or not, is not against reason. Philosophy itself, says Mr.
+Mozley, cuts away the ground on which it had raised its preliminary
+objection to miracles.
+
+    And now the belief in the order of nature being thus, however
+    powerful and useful, an unintelligent impulse of which we can give
+    no rational account, in what way does this discovery affect the
+    question of miracles? In this way, that this belief not having
+    itself its foundation in reason, the ground is gone upon which it
+    could be maintained that miracles as opposed to the order of
+    nature were opposed to reason. There being no producible reason
+    why a new event should be like the hitherto course of nature, no
+    decision of reason is contradicted by its unlikeness. A miracle,
+    in being opposed to our experience, is not only not opposed to
+    necessary reasoning, but to any reasoning. Do I see by a certain
+    perception the connection between these two--It _has_ happened so,
+    it _will_ happen so; then may I reject a new reported fact which
+    has _not_ happened so as an impossibility. But if I do not see the
+    connection between these two by a certain perception, or by any
+    perception, I cannot. For a miracle to be rejected as such, there
+    must, at any rate, be some proposition in the mind of man which is
+    opposed to it; and that proposition can only spring from the
+    quarter to which we have been referring--that of elementary
+    experimental reasoning. But if this experimental reasoning is of
+    that nature which philosophy describes it as being of, i.e. if
+    it is not itself a process of reason, how can there from an
+    irrational process of the mind arise a proposition at all,--to
+    make which is the function of the rational faculty alone? There
+    cannot; and it is evident that the miraculous does not stand in
+    any opposition whatever to reason....
+
+    Thus step by step has philosophy loosened the connection of the
+    order of nature with the ground of reason, befriending, in exact
+    proportion as it has done this, the principle of miracles. In the
+    argument against miracles the first objection is that they are
+    against _law_; and this is answered by saying that we know nothing
+    in nature of law in the sense in which it prevents miracles. Law
+    can only prevent miracles by _compelling_ and making necessary the
+    succession of nature, i.e. in the sense of causation; but
+    science has itself proclaimed the truth that we see no causes in
+    nature, that the whole chain of physical succession is to the eye
+    of reason a rope of sand, consisting of antecedents and
+    consequents, but without a rational link or trace of necessary
+    connection between them. We only know of law in nature in the
+    sense of recurrences in nature, classes of facts, _like_ facts in
+    nature--a chain of which, the junction not being reducible to
+    reason, the interruption is not against reason. The claim of law
+    settled, the next objection in the argument against miracles is
+    that they are against _experience_; because we expect facts _like_
+    to those of our experience, and miracles are _unlike_ ones. The
+    weight, then, of the objection of unlikeness to experience depends
+    on the reason which can be produced for the expectation of
+    likeness; and to this call philosophy has replied by the summary
+    confession that we have _no_ reason. Philosophy, then, could not
+    have overthrown more thoroughly than it has done the order of
+    nature as a necessary course of things, or cleared the ground more
+    effectually for the principle of miracles.
+
+Nor, he argues, does this instinct change its nature, or become a
+necessary law of reason, when it takes the form of an inference from
+induction. For the last step of the inductive process, the creation of
+its supposed universal, is, when compared with the real standard of
+universality acknowledged by reason, an incomplete and more or less
+precarious process; "it gets out of facts something more than what they
+actually contain"; and it can give no reason for itself but what the
+common faith derived from experience can give, the anticipation of
+uniform recurrence. "The inductive principle," he says, "is only the
+unreasoning impulse applied to a scientifically ascertained fact,
+instead of to a vulgarly ascertained fact.... Science has led up to the
+fact, but there it stops, and for converting the fact into a law a
+totally unscientific principle comes in, the same as that which
+generalises the commonest observations in nature."
+
+    The scientific part of induction being only the pursuit of a
+    particular fact, miracles cannot in the nature of the case receive
+    any blow from the scientific part of induction; because the
+    existence of one fact does not interfere with the existence of
+    another dissimilar fact. That which _does_ resist the miraculous
+    is the _un_scientific part of induction, or the instinctive
+    generalisation upon this fact.... It does not belong to this
+    principle to lay down speculative positions, and to say what can
+    or cannot take place in the world. It does not belong to it to
+    control religious belief, or to determine that certain acts of God
+    for the revelation of His will to man, reported to have taken
+    place, have not taken place. Such decisions are totally out of its
+    sphere; it can assert the universal as a _law_, but the universal
+    as a law and the universal as a proposition are wholly distinct.
+    The one asserts the universal as a fact, the other as a
+    presumption; the one as an absolute certainty, the other as a
+    practical certainty, when there is no reason to expect the
+    contrary. The one contains and includes the particular, the other
+    does not; from the one we argue mathematically to the falsehood of
+    any opposite particular; from the other we do not.... For example,
+    one signal miracle, pre-eminent for its grandeur, crowned the
+    evidence of the supernatural character and office of our Lord--our
+    Lord's ascension--His going up with His body of flesh and bones
+    into the sky in the presence of His disciples. "He lifted up His
+    hands, and blessed them. And while He blessed them, He was parted
+    from them, and carried up into heaven. And they looked stedfastly
+    toward heaven as He went up, and a cloud received Him out of their
+    sight."
+
+    Here is an amazing scene, which strikes even the devout believer,
+    coming across it in the sacred page suddenly or by chance, amid
+    the routine of life, with a fresh surprise. Did, then, this event
+    really take place? Or is the evidence of it forestalled by the
+    inductive principle compelling us to remove the scene _as such_
+    out of the category of matters of fact? The answer is, that the
+    inductive principle is in its own nature only an _expectation_;
+    and that the expectation, that what is unlike our experience will
+    not happen, is quite consistent with its occurrence in fact. This
+    principle does not pretend to decide the question of fact, which
+    is wholly out of its province and beyond its function. It can only
+    decide the fact by the medium of a universal; the universal
+    proposition that no man has ascended to heaven. But this is a
+    statement which exceeds its power; it is as radically incompetent
+    to pronounce it as the taste or smell is to decide on matters of
+    sight; its function is practical, not logical. No antecedent
+    statement, then, which touches my belief in this scene, is allowed
+    by the laws of thought. Converted indeed into a universal
+    proposition, the inductive principle is omnipotent, and totally
+    annihilates every particular which does not come within its range.
+    The universal statement that no man has ascended into heaven
+    absolutely falsifies the fact that One Man has. But, thus
+    transmuted, the inductive principle issues out of this
+    metamorphose, a fiction not a truth; a weapon of air, which even
+    in the hands of a giant can inflict no blow because it is itself a
+    shadow. The object of assault receives the unsubstantial thrust
+    without a shock, only exposing the want of solidity in the
+    implement of war. The battle against the supernatural has been
+    going on long, and strong men have conducted it, and are
+    conducting it--but what they want is a weapon. The logic of
+    unbelief wants a universal. But no real universal is forthcoming,
+    and it only wastes its strength in wielding a fictitious one.
+
+It is not in reason, which refuses to pronounce upon the possible
+merely from experience of the actual, that the antecedent objection to
+miracles is rooted. Yet that the objection is a powerful one the
+consciousness of every reflecting mind testifies. What, then, is the
+secret of its force? In a lecture of singular power Mr. Mozley gives
+his answer. What tells beforehand against miracles is not reason, but
+imagination. Imagination is often thought to favour especially the
+supernatural and miraculous. It does do so, no doubt. But the truth is,
+that imagination tells both ways--as much against the miraculous as for
+it. The imagination, that faculty by which we give life and body and
+reality to our intellectual conceptions, takes its character from the
+intellectual conceptions with which it is habitually associated. It
+accepts the miraculous or shrinks from it and throws it off, according
+to the leaning of the mind of which it is the more vivid and, so to
+speak, passionate expression. And as it may easily exaggerate on one
+side, so it may just as easily do the same on the other. Every one is
+familiar with that imaginative exaggeration which fills the world with
+miracles. But there is another form of imagination, not so distinctly
+recognised, which is oppressed by the presence of unchanging succession
+and visible uniformity, which cannot shake off the yoke of custom or
+allow anything different to seem to it real. The sensitiveness and
+impressibility of the imagination are affected, and unhealthily
+affected, not merely by strangeness, but by sameness; to one as to the
+other it may "passively submit and surrender itself, give way to the
+mere form of attraction, and, instead of grasping something else, be
+itself grasped and mastered by some dominant idea." And it is then, in
+one case as much as in the other, "not a power, but a failing and
+weakness of nature."
+
+    The passive imagination, then, in the present case exaggerates a
+    practical expectation of the uniformity of nature, implanted in us
+    for practical ends, into a scientific or universal proposition;
+    and it does this by surrendering itself to the impression produced
+    by the constant spectacle of the regularity of visible nature. By
+    such a course a person allows the weight and pressure of this idea
+    to grow upon him till it reaches the point of actually restricting
+    his sense of possibility to the mould of physical order.... The
+    order of nature thus stamps upon some minds the idea of its
+    immutability simply by its repetition. The imagination we usually
+    indeed associate with the acceptance of the supernatural rather
+    than with the denial of it; but the passive imagination is in
+    truth neutral; it only increases the force and tightens the hold
+    of any impression upon us, to whatever class the impression may
+    belong, and surrenders itself to a superstitious or a physical
+    idea, as it may be. Materialism itself is the result of
+    imagination, which is so impressed by matter that it cannot
+    realise the existence of spirit.
+
+The great opponent, then, of miracles, considered as possible
+occurrences, is not reason, but something which on other great subjects
+is continually found on the opposite side to reason, resisting and
+counteracting it; that powerful overbearing sense of the actual and the
+real, which when it is opposed by reason is apt to make reason seem
+like the creator of mere ideal theories; which gives to arguments
+implying a different condition of things from one which is familiar to
+present experience the disadvantage of appearing like artificial and
+unsubstantial refinements of thought, such as, to the uncultivated
+mind, appear not merely metaphysical discussions, but what are known to
+be the most certain reasonings of physical and mathematical science. It
+is that measure of the probable, impressed upon us by the spectacle; to
+which we are accustomed all our lives long, of things as we find them,
+and which repels the possibility of a break or variation; that sense of
+probability which the keenest of philosophers declares to be incapable
+of rational analysis, and pronounces allied to irrational portions of
+our constitution, like custom, and the effect of time, and which is
+just as much an enemy to invention, to improvement, to a different
+state of things in the future, as it is to the belief and realising of
+a different state of things in the past. The antecedent objection to
+the miraculous is not reason, but an argument which limits and narrows
+the domain of reason; which excludes dry, abstract, passionless
+reason--with its appeals to considerations remote from common
+experience, its demands for severe reflection, its balancing and long
+chains of thought--from pronouncing on what seems to belong to the
+flesh and blood realities of life as we know it. Against this
+tyrannical influence, which may be in a vulgar and popular as in a
+scientific form, which may be the dull result of habit or the more
+specious effect of a sensitive and receptive imagination, but which in
+all cases is at bottom the same, Mr. Mozley claims to appeal to
+reason:--
+
+    To conclude, then, let us suppose an intelligent Christian of the
+    present day asked, not what evidence he has of miracles, but how
+    he can antecedently to all evidence think such amazing occurrences
+    _possible_, he would reply, "You refer me to a certain sense of
+    impossibility which you suppose me to possess, applying not to
+    mathematics but to facts. Now, on this head, I am conscious of a
+    certain natural resistance in my mind to events unlike the order
+    of nature. But I resist many things which I know to be certain:
+    infinity of space, infinity of time, eternity past, eternity
+    future, the very idea of a God and another world. If I take mere
+    resistance, therefore, for denial, I am confined in every quarter
+    of my mind; I cannot carry out the very laws of reason, I am
+    placed under conditions which are obviously false. I conclude,
+    therefore, that I may resist and believe at the same time. If
+    Providence has implanted in me a certain expectation of uniformity
+    or likeness in nature, there is implied in that very expectations
+    resistance to an _un_like event, which resistance does not cease
+    even when upon evidence I _believe_ the event, but goes on as a
+    mechanical impression, though the reason counterbalances it.
+    Resistance, therefore, is not disbelief, unless by an act of my
+    own reason I _give_ it an absolute veto, which I do _not_ do. My
+    reason is clear upon the point, that there is no disagreement
+    between itself and a miracle as such." ... Nor is it dealing
+    artificially with ourselves to exert a force upon our minds
+    against the false certainty of the resisting imagination--such a
+    force as is necessary to enable reason to stand its ground, and
+    bend back again that spring of impression against the miraculous
+    which has illegally tightened itself into a law to the
+    understanding. Reason does not always prevail spontaneously and
+    without effort even in questions of belief; so far from it, that
+    the question of faith against reason may often be more properly
+    termed the question of reason against imagination. It does not
+    seldom require faith to believe reason, isolated as she may be
+    amid vast irrational influences, the weight of custom, the power
+    of association, the strength of passion, the _vis inertiae_ of
+    sense, the mere force of the uniformity of nature as a
+    spectacle--those influences which make up that power of the world
+    which Scripture always speaks of as the antagonist of faith.
+
+The antecedent questions about miracles, before coming to the question
+of the actual evidence of any, are questions about which reason--reason
+disengaged and disembarrassed from the arbitrary veto of
+experience--has a right to give its verdict. Miracles presuppose the
+existence of God, and it is from reason alone that we get the idea of
+God; and the antecedent question then is, whether they are really
+compatible with the idea of God which reason gives us. Mr. Mozley
+remarks that the question of miracles is really "shut up in the
+enclosure of one assumption, that of the existence of God"; and that if
+we believe in a personal Deity with all power over nature, that belief
+brings along with it the possibility of His interrupting natural order
+for His own purposes. He also bids us observe that the idea of God
+which reason gives us is exposed to resistance of the same kind, and
+from precisely the same forces, in our mental constitution, as the idea
+of miracles. When reason has finished its overwhelming proof, still
+there is a step to be taken before the mind embraces the equally
+overwhelming conclusion--a step which calls for a distinct effort,
+which obliges the mind, satisfied as it may be, to beat back the
+counteracting pressure of what is visible and customary. After
+reason--not opposed to it or independent of it, but growing out of it,
+yet a distinct and further movement--comes faith. This is the case, not
+specially in religion, but in all subjects, where the conclusions of
+reason cannot be subjected to immediate verification. How often, as he
+observes, do we see persons "who, when they are in possession of the
+best arguments, and what is more, understand those arguments, are still
+shaken by almost any opposition, because they want the faculty to
+_trust_ an argument when they have got one."
+
+    Not, however, that the existence of a God is so clearly seen by
+    reason as to dispense with faith; not from any want of cogency in
+    the reasons, but from the amazing nature of the conclusion--that
+    it is so unparalleled, transcendent, and inconceivable a truth to
+    believe. It requires trust to commit oneself to the conclusion of
+    any reasoning, however strong, when such as this is the
+    conclusion: to put enough dependence and reliance upon any
+    premisses, to accept upon the strength of them so immense a
+    result. The issue of the argument is so astonishing that if we do
+    not tremble for its safety, it must be on account of a practical
+    principle in our minds which enables us to _confide_ and trust in
+    reasons, when they are really strong and good ones.... Faith, when
+    for convenience' sake we do distinguish it from reason, is not
+    distinguished from reason by the want of premisses, but by the
+    nature of the conclusions. Are our conclusions of the customary
+    type? Then custom imparts the full sense of security. Are they not
+    of the customary, but of a strange and unknown type? Then the
+    mechanical sense of security is wanting, and a certain trust is
+    required for reposing in them, which we call faith. But that which
+    draws these conclusions is in either case reason. We infer, we go
+    upon reasons, we use premisses in either case. The premisses of
+    faith are not so palpable as those of ordinary reason, but they
+    are as real and solid premisses all the same. Our faith in the
+    existence of a God and a future state is founded upon reasons as
+    much so as the belief in the commonest kind of facts. The reasons
+    are in themselves as strong, but, because the conclusions are
+    marvellous and are not seconded and backed by known parallels or
+    by experience, we do not so passively acquiesce in them; there is
+    an exertion of confidence in depending upon them and assuring
+    ourselves of their force. The inward energy of the reason has to
+    be evoked, when she can no longer lean upon the outward prop of
+    custom, but is thrown back upon herself and the intrinsic force of
+    her premisses. Which reason, not leaning upon custom, is faith;
+    she obtains the latter name when she depends entirely upon her own
+    insight into certain grounds, premisses, and evidences, and
+    follows it though it leads to transcendent, unparalleled, and
+    supernatural conclusions....
+
+    Indeed, does not our heart bear witness to the fact that to
+    believe in a God is an exercise of faith? That the universe was
+    produced by the will of a personal Being, that its infinite forces
+    are all the power of that one Being, its infinite relations the
+    perceptions of one Mind--would not this, if any truth could,
+    demand the application of the maxim, _Credo quia impossibile_?
+    Look at it only as a conception, and does the wildest fiction of
+    the imagination equal it? No premisses, no arguments therefore,
+    can so accommodate this truth to us as not to leave the belief in
+    it an act of mental ascent and trust, of faith as distinguished
+    from sight. _Divest_ reason of its trust, and the universe stops
+    at the impersonal stage--there is no God; and yet, if the first
+    step in religion is the greatest, how is it that the freest and
+    boldest speculator rarely declines it? How is it that the most
+    mysterious of all truths is a universally accepted one? What is it
+    which guards this truth? What is it which makes men shrink from
+    denying it? Why is atheism a crime? Is it that authority still
+    reigns upon one question, and that the voice of all ages is too
+    potent to be withstood?
+
+But the progress of civilisation and thought has impressed this amazing
+idea on the general mind. It is no matter-of-course conception. The
+difficulties attending it were long insuperable to the deepest thought
+as well as to popular belief; and the triumph of the modern and
+Christian idea of God is the result not merely of the eager forwardness
+of faith, but of the patient and inquiring waiting of reason. And the
+question, whether we shall pronounce the miraculous to be impossible as
+such, is really the question whether we shall once more let this belief
+go.
+
+    The conception of a limited Deity then, i.e. a Being really
+    circumscribed in power, and not verbally only by a confinement to
+    necessary truth, is at variance with our fundamental idea of a
+    God; to depart from which is to retrograde from modern thought to
+    ancient, and to go from Christianity back again to Paganism. The
+    God of ancient religion was either not a personal Being or not an
+    omnipotent Being; the God of modern religion is both. For, indeed,
+    civilisation is not opposed to faith. The idea of the Supreme
+    Being in the mind of European society now is more primitive, more
+    childlike, more imaginative than the idea of the ancient Brahman
+    or Alexandrian philosopher; it is an idea which both of these
+    would have derided as the notion of a child--a _negotiosus Deus_,
+    who interposes in human affairs and answers prayers. So far from
+    the philosophical conception of the Deity having advanced with
+    civilisation, and the poetical receded, the philosophical has
+    receded and the poetical advanced. The God of whom it is said,
+    "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them
+    is forgotten before God; but even the very hairs of your head are
+    numbered," is the object of modern worship. Nor, again, has
+    civilisation shown any signs of rejecting doctrine. Certain ages
+    are, indeed, called the ages of faith; but the bulk of society in
+    _this_ age believes that it lives under a supernatural
+    dispensation, and accepts truths which are not less supernatural,
+    though they have more proof, than some doctrines of the Middle
+    Ages; and, if so, _this_ is an age of faith. It is true that most
+    people do not live up to their faith now; neither did they in the
+    Middle Ages.
+
+    Has not modern philosophy, again, shown both more strength and
+    acuteness, and also more faith, than the ancient? I speak of the
+    main current. Those ancient thinkers who reduced the Supreme Being
+    to a negation, with all their subtlety, wanted strength, and
+    settled questions by an easier test than that of modern
+    philosophy. The merit of a modern metaphysician is, like that of a
+    good chemist or naturalist, accurate observation in noting the
+    facts of mind. Is there a contradiction in the idea of creation?
+    Is there a contradiction in the idea of a personal Infinite Being?
+    He examines his own mind, and if he does not see one, he passes
+    the idea. But the ancient speculators decided, without examination
+    of the true facts of mind, by a kind of philosophical fancy; and,
+    according to this loose criterion, the creation of matter and a
+    personal Infinite Being were impossibilities, for they mistook the
+    inconceivable for the impossible. And thus a stringent test has
+    admitted what a loose but capricious test discarded, and the true
+    notion of God has issued safe out of the crucible of modern
+    metaphysics. Reason has shown its strength, but then it has turned
+    that strength back upon itself; it has become its own critic; and
+    in becoming its own critic it has become its own check.
+
+    If the belief, then, in a personal Deity lies at the bottom of all
+    religious and virtuous practice, and if the removal of it would be
+    a descent for human nature, the withdrawal of its inspiration and
+    support, and a fall in its whole standard; the failure of the very
+    breath of moral life in the individual and in society; the decay
+    and degeneration of the very stock of mankind;--does a theory
+    which would withdraw miraculous action from the Deity interfere
+    with that belief? If it would, it is but prudent to count the cost
+    of that interference. Would a Deity deprived of miraculous action
+    possess action at all? And would a God who cannot act be a God? If
+    this would be the issue, such an issue is the very last which
+    religious men can desire. The question here has been all
+    throughout, not whether upon any ground, but whether upon a
+    religious ground and by religious believers, the miraculous as
+    such could be rejected. But to that there is but one answer--that
+    it is impossible in reason to separate religion from the
+    supernatural, and upon a religious basis to overthrow miracles....
+
+    And so we arrive again by another route at the old turning
+    question; for the question whether man is or is not the _vertex_
+    of nature, is the question whether there is or is not a God. Does
+    free agency stop at the human stage, or is there a sphere of
+    free-will above the human, in which, as in the human, not physical
+    law but spirit moves matter? And does that free-will penetrate the
+    universal frame invisibly to us, an omnipresent agent? If so,
+    every miracle in Scripture is as natural an event in the universe
+    as any chemical experiment in the physical world; if not, the seat
+    of the great Presiding Will is empty, and nature has no Personal
+    Head; man is her highest point; he finishes her ascent; though by
+    this very supremacy he falls, for under fate he is not free
+    himself; all nature either ascends to God, or descends to law. Is
+    there above the level of material causes a region of Providence?
+    If there is, nature there is moved by the Supreme Free Agent; and
+    of such a realm a miracle is the natural production.
+
+    Two rationales of miracles thus present themselves to our choice;
+    one more accommodating to the physical imagination and easy to
+    fall in with, on a level with custom, common conceptions, and
+    ordinary history, and requiring no ascent of the mind to embrace,
+    viz. the solution of miracles as the growth of fancy and legend;
+    the other requiring an ascent of the reason to embrace it, viz.
+    the rationale of the supremacy of a Personal Will in nature. The
+    one is the explanation to which we fall when we dare not trust our
+    reason, but mistake its inconceivable truths for sublime but
+    unsubstantial visions; the other is that to which we rise when we
+    dare trust our reason, and the evidences which it lays before us
+    of the existence of a Personal Supreme Being.
+
+The belief in a personal God thus bringing with it the possibility of
+miracles, what reason then has to judge is whether it can accept
+miracles as such, or any set of miracles, as worthy of a reasonable
+conception of the Divine Nature, and whether it can be fairly said that
+such miracles have answered a purpose which approves itself to our
+reason. Testimony will always speak at a disadvantage till we are
+assured on these points. Into the subject of testimony Mr. Mozley
+enters only in a general way, though his remarks on the relation of
+testimony to facts of so exceptional a nature as miracles, and also on
+the distinct peculiarities of Christian evidence as contrasted with the
+evidence of all other classes of alleged miracles, are marked by a
+characteristic combination of acuteness, precision, and broad practical
+sobriety and moderation. He rebukes with quiet and temperate and yet
+resolute plainness of statement the misplaced ingenuity which, on
+different sides, to serve very different causes, has tried to confuse
+and perplex the claims of the great Christian miracles by comparisons
+which it is really mere wantonness to make with later ones; for, be
+they what they may, it is certain that the Gospel miracles, in nature,
+in evidence, and in purpose and result, are absolutely unique in the
+world, and have nothing like them. And though the book mainly confines
+itself to its proper subject, the antecedent question of credibility,
+some of the most striking remarks in it relate to the way in which the
+purpose of miracles is visible in those of Christianity, and has been
+served by them. A miracle is an instrument--an instrument without which
+revelation is impossible; and Mr. Mozley meets Spinoza's objection to
+the unmeaning isolation of a miracle by insisting on the distinction,
+which Spinoza failed to see, between a miracle simply as a wonder for
+its own sake, and as a means, deriving its use and its value simply
+from the end which it was to serve. He observes that all the stupendous
+"marvels of nature do not speak to us in that way in which one miracle
+does, because they do not tell us that we are not like themselves"; and
+he remarks on the "perverse determination of Spinoza to look at
+miracles in that aspect which does not belong to them, and not to look
+at them in that aspect which does."
+
+    He compares miracles with nature, and then says how wise is the
+    order of nature, how meaningless the violation of it; how
+    expressive of the Almighty Mind the one, what a concealment of it
+    the other! But no one pretends to say that a miracle competes with
+    nature, in physical purpose and effectiveness. That is not its
+    object. But a miracle, though it does not profess to compete with
+    nature upon its rival's own ground, has a ghostly force and import
+    which nature has not. If real, it is a token, more pointed and
+    direct than physical order can be, of another world, and of Moral
+    Being and Will in that world.
+
+Thus, regarding miracles as means to fulfil a purpose, Mr. Mozley shows
+what has come of them. His lecture on "Miracles regarded in their
+Practical Result" is excelled by some of the others as examples of
+subtle and searching thought and well-balanced and compact argument;
+but it is a fine example of the way in which a familiar view can have
+fresh colour and force thrown into it by the way in which it is
+treated. He shows that it is impossible in fact to separate from the
+miracles in which it professed to begin, the greatest and deepest moral
+change which the world has ever known. This change was made not by
+miracles but by certain doctrines. The Epistle to the Romans surveyed
+the moral failure of the world; St. Paul looked on the chasm between
+knowledge and action, the "unbridged gulf, this incredible inability of
+man to do what was right, with profound wonder"; but in the face of
+this hopeless spectacle he dared to prophesy the moral elevation which
+we have witnessed, and the power to which he looked to bring it about
+was the Christian doctrines. St. Paul "takes what may be called the
+high view of human nature--i.e. what human nature is capable of when
+the proper motive and impulse is applied to it." He sees in Christian
+doctrine that strong force which is to break down "the _vis inertiae_
+of man, to set human nature going, to touch the spring of man's heart";
+and he compares with St. Paul's doctrines and hopefulness the doctrinal
+barrenness, the despair of Mohammedanism:--
+
+    If one had to express in a short compass the character of its
+    remarkable founder as a teacher, it would be that that great man
+    had no faith in human nature. There were two things which he
+    thought man could do and would do for the glory of God--transact
+    religious forms, and fight; and upon those two points he was
+    severe; but within the sphere of common practical life, where
+    man's great trial lies, his code exhibits the disdainful laxity of
+    a legislator who accommodates his rule to the recipient, and shows
+    his estimate of the recipient by the accommodation which he
+    adopts. Did we search history for a contrast, we could hardly
+    discover a deeper one than that between St. Paul's overflowing
+    standard of the capabilities of human nature and the oracular
+    cynicism of the great false Prophet. The writer of the Koran does,
+    indeed, if any discerner of hearts ever did, take the measure of
+    mankind; and his measure is the same that Satire has taken, only
+    expressed with the majestic brevity of one who had once lived in
+    the realm of Silence. "Man is weak," says Mahomet. And upon that
+    maxim he legislates.... The keenness of Mahomet's insight into
+    human nature, a wide knowledge of its temptations, persuasives,
+    influences under which it acts, a vast immense capacity of
+    forbearance for it, half grave half genial, half sympathy half
+    scorn, issue in a somewhat Horatian model, the character of the
+    man of experience who despairs of any change in man, and lays down
+    the maxim that we must take him as we find him. It was indeed his
+    supremacy in both faculties, the largeness of the passive nature
+    and the splendour of action, that constituted the secret of his
+    success. The breadth and flexibility of mind that could negotiate
+    with every motive of interest, passion, and pride in man is
+    surprising; there is boundless sagacity; what is wanting is hope,
+    a belief in the capabilities of human nature. There is no upward
+    flight in the teacher's idea of man. Instead of which, the notion
+    of the power of earth, and the impossibility of resisting it,
+    depresses his whole aim, and the shadow of the tomb falls upon the
+    work of the great false Prophet.
+
+    The idea of God is akin to the idea of man. "He knows us," says
+    Mahomet. God's _knowledge_, the vast _experience_, so to speak, of
+    the Divine Being, His infinite acquaintance with man's frailties
+    and temptations, is appealed to as the ground of confidence. "He
+    is the Wise, the Knowing One," "He is the Knowing, the Wise," "He
+    is easy to be reconciled." Thus is raised a notion of the Supreme
+    Being, which is rather an extension of the character of the
+    large-minded and sagacious man of the world than an extension of
+    man's virtue and holiness. He forgives because He knows too much
+    to be rigid, because sin universal ceases to be sin, and must be
+    given way to. Take a man who has had large opportunity of studying
+    mankind, and has come into contact with every form of human
+    weakness and corruption; such a man is indulgent as a simple
+    consequence of his knowledge, because nothing surprises him. So
+    the God of Mahomet forgives by reason of His vast knowledge.
+
+In contrast with the fruit of this he observes that "the prophecy in
+the Epistle to the Romans has been fulfilled, and that doctrine has
+been historically at the bottom of a great change of moral practice in
+mankind." The key has been found to set man's moral nature in action,
+to check and reverse that course of universal failure manifest before;
+and this key is Christian doctrine. "A stimulus has been given to human
+nature which has extracted an amount of action from it which no Greek
+or Roman could have believed possible." It is inconceivable that but
+for such doctrine such results as have been seen in Christendon would
+have followed; and were it now taken away we cannot see anything else
+that would have the faintest expectation of taking its place. "Could we
+commit mankind to a moral Deism without trembling for the result?" Can
+the enthusiasm for the divinity of human nature stand the test of
+clear, unsparing observation? Would it not issue in such an estimate of
+human nature as Mahomet took? "A deification of humanity upon its own
+grounds, an exaltation which is all height and no depth, wants power
+because it wants truth. It is not founded upon the facts of human
+nature, and therefore issues in vain and vapid aspiration, and injures
+the solidity of man's character." As he says, "The Gospel doctrine of
+the Incarnation and its effects alone unites the sagacious view of
+human nature with the enthusiastic." And now what is the historical
+root and basis from which this one great moral revolution in the
+world's history, so successful, so fruitful, so inexhaustible, has
+started?
+
+    But if, as the source and inspiration of practice, doctrine has
+    been the foundation of a new state of the world, and of that
+    change which distinguishes the world under Christianity from the
+    world before it, miracles, as the proof of that doctrine, stand
+    before us in a very remarkable and peculiar light. Far from being
+    mere idle feats of power to gratify the love of the marvellous;
+    far even from being mere particular and occasional rescues from
+    the operation of general laws,--they come before us as means for
+    accomplishing the largest and most important practical object that
+    has ever been accomplished in the history of mankind. They lie at
+    the bottom of the difference of the modern from the ancient world;
+    so far, i.e., as that difference is moral. We see as a fact a
+    change in the moral condition of mankind, which marks ancient and
+    modern society as two different states of mankind. What has
+    produced this change, and elicited this new power of action?
+    Doctrine. And what was the proof of that doctrine, or essential to
+    the proof of it? Miracles. The greatness of the result thus throws
+    light upon the propriety of the means, and shows the fitting
+    object which was presented for the introduction of such means--the
+    fitting occasion which had arisen for the use of them; for,
+    indeed, no more weighty, grand, or solemn occasion can be
+    conceived than the foundation of such a new order of things in the
+    world. Extraordinary action of Divine power for such an end has
+    the benefit of a justifying object of incalculable weight; which
+    though not of itself, indeed, proof of the fact, comes with
+    striking force upon the mind in connection with the proper proof.
+    It is reasonable, it is inevitable, that we should be impressed by
+    such a result; for it shows that the miraculous system has been a
+    practical one; that it has been a step in the ladder of man's
+    ascent, the means of introducing those powerful truths which have
+    set his moral nature in action.
+
+Of this work, remarkable in so many ways, we will add but one thing
+more. It is marked throughout with the most serious and earnest
+conviction, but it is without a single word, from first to last, of
+asperity or insinuation against opponents; and this, not from any
+deficiency of feeling as to the importance of the issue, but from a
+deliberate and resolutely maintained self-control, and from an
+overruling ever-present sense of the duty, on themes like these, of a
+more than judicial calmness.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+ECCE HOMO[11]
+
+
+  [11]
+  _Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. Guardian_,
+  7th February 1866.
+
+This is a dangerous book to review. The critic of it, if he is prudent,
+will feel that it is more than most books a touchstone of his own
+capacity, and that in giving his judgment upon it he cannot help giving
+his own measure and betraying what he is himself worth. All the
+unconscious guiding which a name, even if hitherto unknown, gives to
+opinion is wanting. The first aspect of the book is perplexing; closer
+examination does not clear up all the questions which present
+themselves; and many people, after they have read it through, will not
+feel quite certain what it means. Much of what is on the surface and
+much of what is inherent in the nature of the work will jar painfully
+on many minds; while others who begin to read it under one set of
+impressions may by the time they have got to the end complain of having
+been taken in. There can be no doubt on which side the book is; but it
+may be open to debate from which side it has come. The unknown champion
+who comes into the lists with barred vizor and no cognisance on his
+shield leaves it not long uncertain for which of the contending parties
+he appears; but his weapons and his manner of fighting are not the
+ordinary ones of the side which he takes; and there is a force in his
+arm, and a sweep in his stroke, which is not that of common men. The
+book is one which it is easy to take exception to, and perhaps still
+easier to praise at random; but the subject is put before us in so
+unusual a way, and one so removed from the ordinary grooves of thought,
+that in trying to form an adequate estimate of the work as a whole, a
+man feels as he does when he is in the presence of something utterly
+unfamiliar and unique, when common rules and inferences fail him, and
+in pronouncing upon which he must make something of a venture.
+
+In making our own venture we will begin with what seems to us
+incontestable. In the first place, but that it has been questioned, we
+should say that there could be no question of the surpassing ability
+which the book displays. It is far beyond the power of the average
+clever and practised writer of our days. It is the work of a man in
+whom thought, sympathy, and imagination are equally powerful and
+wealthy, and who exercises a perfect and easy command over his own
+conceptions, and over the apt and vivid language which is their
+expression. Few men have entered so deeply into the ideas and feelings
+of the time, or have looked at the world, its history and its
+conditions, with so large and piercing an insight. But it is idle to
+dwell on what must strike, at first sight, any one who but opens the
+book. We go on to observe, what is equally beyond dispute, the deep
+tone of religious seriousness which pervades the work. The writer's way
+of speaking is very different from that of the ascetic or the devotee;
+but no ascetic or devotee could be more profoundly penetrated with the
+great contrast between holiness and evil, and show more clearly in his
+whole manner of thinking the ineffaceable impression of the powers of
+the world to come. Whatever else the book may be, this much is plain on
+the face of it--it is the work of a mind of extreme originality, depth,
+refinement, and power; and it is also the work of a very religious man:
+Thomas à Kempis had not a more solemn sense of things unseen and of
+what is meant by the Imitation of Christ.
+
+What the writer wishes his book to be understood to be we must gather
+from his Preface:--
+
+    Those who feel dissatisfied with the current conceptions of
+    Christ, if they cannot rest content without a definite opinion,
+    may find it necessary to do what to persons not so dissatisfied it
+    seems audacious and perilous to do. They may be obliged to
+    reconsider the whole subject from the beginning, and placing
+    themselves in imagination at the time when he whom we call Christ
+    bore no such name, but was simply, as St. Luke describes him, a
+    young man of promise, popular with those who knew him, and
+    appearing to enjoy the Divine favour, to trace his biography from
+    point to point, and accept those conclusions about him, not which
+    church doctors or even apostles have sealed with their authority,
+    but which the facts themselves, critically weighed, appear to
+    warrant.
+
+    This is what the present writer undertook to do for the
+    satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good
+    many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that
+    there was no historical character whose motives, objects, and
+    feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which
+    proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others.
+
+    What is now published is a fragment. No theological questions
+    whatever are here discussed. Christ, as the creator of modern
+    theology and religion, will make the subject of another volume,
+    which, however, the author does not hope to publish for some time
+    to come. In the meanwhile he has endeavoured to furnish an answer
+    to the question, What was Christ's object in founding the Society
+    which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to attain that
+    object?
+
+Thus the book comes before us as a serious facing of difficulties. And
+that the writer lays stress on its being so viewed appears further from
+a letter which he wrote to the _Spectator_, repeating emphatically that
+the book is not one "written after the investigation was completed, but
+the _investigation_ itself." The letter may be taken to complete the
+statement of the Preface:--
+
+    I endeavoured in my Preface to describe the state of mind in which
+    I undertook my book. I said that the character and objects of
+    Christ were at that time altogether incomprehensible to me, and
+    that I wished to try whether an independent investigation would
+    relieve my perplexity. Perhaps I did not distinctly enough state
+    that _Ecce Homo_ is not a book written after the investigation was
+    completed, but the _investigation_ itself.
+
+    The Life of Christ is partly easy to understand and partly
+    difficult. This being so, what would a man do who wished to study
+    it methodically? Naturally he would take the easy part first. He
+    would collect, arrange, and carefully consider all the facts which
+    are simple, and until he has done this, he would carefully avoid
+    all those parts of his subject which are obscure, and which cannot
+    be explained without making bold hypotheses. By this course he
+    would limit the problem, and in the meanwhile arrive at a probable
+    opinion concerning the veracity of the documents, and concerning
+    the characteristics, both intellectual and moral, of the person
+    whose high pretensions he wished to investigate.
+
+    This is what I have done. I have postponed altogether the hardest
+    questions connected with Christ, as questions which cannot
+    properly be discussed until a considerable quantity of evidence
+    has been gathered about his character and views. If this evidence,
+    when collected, had appeared to be altogether conflicting and
+    inconsistent, I should have been saved the trouble of proceeding
+    any further; I should have said that Christ is a myth. If it had
+    been consistent, and had disclosed to me a person of mean and
+    ambitious aims, I should have said, Christ is a deceiver. Again,
+    if it had exhibited a person of weak understanding and strong
+    impulsive sensibility, I should have said Christ is a bewildered
+    enthusiast.
+
+    In all these cases you perceive my method would have saved me a
+    good deal of trouble. As it is, I certainly feel bound to go on,
+    though, as I say in my Preface, my progress will necessarily be
+    slow. But I am much engaged and have little time for theological
+    study. But pray do not suppose that postponing questions is only
+    another name for evading them. I think I have gained much by this
+    postponement. I have now a very definite notion of Christ's
+    character and that of his followers. I shall be able to judge how
+    far he was likely to deceive himself or them. It is possible I may
+    have put others, who can command more time than I, in a condition
+    to take up the subject where for the present I leave it.
+
+    You say my picture suffers by my method. But _Ecce Homo_ is not a
+    picture: it is the very opposite of a picture; it is an analysis.
+    It may be, you will answer, that the title suggests a picture.
+    This may perhaps be true, and if so, it is no doubt a fault, but a
+    fault in the title, not in the book. For titles are put to books,
+    not books to titles.
+
+Thus it appears that the writer found it his duty to investigate those
+awful questions which every thinking man feels to be full of the
+"incomprehensible" and unfathomable, but which many thinking men, for
+various reasons both good and bad, shrink from attempting to
+investigate, accepting on practical and very sufficient grounds the
+religious conclusions which are recommended and sanctioned by the
+agreement of Christendom. And finding it his duty to investigate them
+at all, he saw that he was bound to investigate in earnest. But under
+what circumstances this happened, from what particular pressure of
+need, and after what previous belief or state of opinion, we are not
+told. Whether from being originally on the doubting side--on the
+irreligious side we cannot suppose he ever could have been--he has
+risen through his investigation into belief; or whether, originally on
+the believing side, he found the aspect so formidable, to himself or to
+the world, of the difficulties and perplexities which beset belief,
+that he turned to bay upon the foes that dogged him--must be left to
+conjecture. It is impossible to question that he has been deeply
+impressed with the difficulties of believing; it is impossible to
+question that doubt has been overborne and trampled under foot. But
+here we have the record, it would not be accurate to say of the
+struggle, but of that resolute and unflinching contemplation of the
+realities of the case which decided it. Such plunging into such a
+question must seem, as he says, to those who do not need it, "audacious
+and perilous"; for if you plunge into a question in earnest, and do not
+under a thin disguise take a side, you must, whatever your bias and
+expectation, take your chance of the alternative answers which may come
+out. It is a simple fact that there are many people who feel
+"dissatisfied with the current conceptions" of our Lord--whether
+reasonably and justly dissatisfied is another question; but whatever we
+think of it they remain dissatisfied. In such emergencies it is
+conceivable that a man who believes, yet keenly realises and feels what
+disturbs or destroys the belief of others, should dare to put himself
+in their place; should enter the hospital and suffer the disease which
+makes such ravages; should descend into the shades and face the
+spectres. No one can deny the risk of dwelling on such thoughts as he
+must dwell on; but if he feels warmly with his kind, he may think it
+even a duty to face the risk. To any one accustomed to live on his
+belief it cannot but be a hard necessity, full of pain and difficulty,
+first to think and then to speak of what he believes, as if it _might
+not_ be, or _could be_ otherwise; but the changes of time bring up ever
+new hard necessities; and one thing is plain, that if ever such an
+investigation is undertaken, it ought to be a real one, in good earnest
+and not in play. If a man investigates at all, both for his own sake
+and for the sake of the effect of his investigation on others, he must
+accept the fair conditions of investigation. We may not ourselves be
+able to conceive the possibility of taking, even provisionally, a
+neutral position; but looking at what is going on all round us, we
+ought to be able to enlarge our thoughts sufficiently to take in the
+idea that a believing mind may feel it a duty to surrender itself
+boldly to the intellectual chances and issues of the inquiry, and to
+"let its thoughts take their course in the confidence that they will
+come home at last." It may be we ourselves who "have not faith enough
+to be patient of doubt"; there may be others who feel that if what they
+believe is real, they need not be afraid of the severest revisal and
+testing of the convictions on which they rest; who feel that, in the
+circumstances of the time, it is not left to their choice whether these
+convictions shall be sifted unsparingly and to the uttermost; and who
+think it a venture not unworthy of a Christian, to descend even to the
+depths to go through the thoughts of doubters, if so be that he may
+find the spell that shall calm them. We do not say that this book is
+the production of such a state of mind; we only think that it may be.
+One thing is clear, wherever the writer's present lot is cast, he has
+that in him which not only enables him, but forces him, to sympathise
+with what he sees in the opposite camp. If he is what is called a
+Liberal, his whole heart is yet pouring itself forth towards the great
+truths of Christianity. If he is what is called orthodox, his whole
+intellect is alive to the right and duty of freedom of thought. He will
+therefore attract and repel on both sides. And he appears to feel that
+the position of double sympathy gives him a special advantage, to
+attract to each side what is true in its opposite, and to correct in
+each what is false or inadequate.
+
+What, then, is this investigation, and what course does it follow? At
+the first aspect, we might take it for one of those numerous attempts
+on the Liberal side, partly impatient, partly careless of Christianity,
+to put a fresh look on the Christian history, and to see it with new
+eyes. The writer's language is at starting neutral; he speaks of our
+Lord in the language indeed of the New Testament, but not in the usual
+language of later Christian writers. All through, the colour and tone
+is absolutely modern; and what would naturally be expressed in familiar
+theological terms is for the most part studiously put in other words.
+Persons acquainted with the writings of the late Mr. Robertson might be
+often reminded of his favourite modes of teaching; of his maxim that
+truth is made up of two opposites which seem contradictories; of the
+distinction which he was so fond of insisting upon between principles
+and rules; above all, of his doctrine that the true way to rise to the
+faith in our Lord's Divine Nature was by first realising His Human
+Life. But the resemblance is partial, if not superficial, and gives way
+on closer examination before broad and characteristic features of an
+entirely different significance. That one which at first arrests
+attention, and distinguishes this writer's line of thought from the
+common Liberal way of dealing with the subject, is that from the first
+page of the book to its last line the work of Christ is viewed, not
+simply as the foundation of a religious system, the introduction of
+certain great principles, the elevation of religious ideas, the
+delivery of Divine truths, the exhibition of a life and example, but as
+the call and creation of a definite, concrete, organised society of
+men. The subject, of investigation is not merely the character and
+history of the Person, but the Person as connected with His work.
+Christ is regarded not simply in Himself or in His teaching, as the
+Founder of a philosophy, a morality, a theology in the abstract, but as
+the Author of a Divine Society, the Body which is called by His Name,
+the Christian Church Universal, a real and visible company of men,
+which, however we may understand it, exists at this moment as it has
+existed since His time, marked by His badges, governed by His laws, and
+working out His purpose. The writer finds the two joined in fact, and
+he finds them also joined in the recorded history of Christ's plan. The
+book might almost be described as the beginning of a new _De Civitate
+Dei_, written with the further experience of fourteen centuries and
+from the point of view of our own generation. This is one remarkable
+peculiarity of this investigation; another is the prominence given to
+the severe side of the Person and character of whom he writes, and what
+is even more observable, the way in which both the severity and the
+gentleness are apprehended and harmonised.
+
+We are familiar with the attempts to resolve the Christianity of the
+New Testament into philanthropy; and, on the other hand, writers like
+Mr. Carlyle will not let us forget that the world is as dark and evil
+as the Bible draws it. This writer feels both in one. No one can show
+more sympathy with enlarged and varied ideas of human happiness, no one
+has connected them more fearlessly with Christian principles, or
+claimed from those principles more unlimited developments, even for the
+physical well-being of men. No one has extended wider the limits of
+Christian generosity, forbearance, and tolerance. But, on the other
+hand, what is striking is, that all this is compatible, and is made to
+appear so, with the most profound and terrible sense of evil, with
+indignation and scorn which is scathing where it kindles and strikes,
+with a capacity and energy of deliberate religious hatred against what
+is impure and false and ungodly, which mark one who has dared to
+realise and to sympathise with the wrath of Jesus Christ.
+
+The world has been called in these later days, and from opposite
+directions, to revise its judgments about Jesus Christ. Christians, on
+the one hand, have been called to do it by writers of whom M. Ernest
+Renan is the most remarkable and the most unflinching. But the
+sceptical and the unbelieving have likewise been obliged to change
+their ground and their tone, and no one with any self-respect or care
+for his credit even as a thinker and a man would like to repeat the
+superficial and shallow flippancy and irreligion of the last century.
+Two things have been specially insisted on. We have been told that if
+we are to see the truth of things as it is, we must disengage our minds
+from the deeply rooted associations and conceptions of a later
+theology, and try to form our impressions first-hand and unprompted
+from the earliest documents which we can reach. It has been further
+urged on us, in a more believing spirit, that we should follow the
+order by which in fact truth was unfolded, and rise from the full
+appreciation of our Lord's human nature to the acknowledgment of His
+Divine nature. It seems to us that the writer of this book has felt the
+force of both these appeals, and that his book is his answer to them.
+Here is the way in which he responds to both--to the latter indirectly,
+but with a significance which no one can mistake; to the former
+directly and avowedly. He undertakes, isolating himself from current
+beliefs, and restricting himself to the documents from which, if from
+any source at all, the original facts about Christ are to be learned,
+to examine what the genuine impression is which an attempt to realise
+the statements about him leaves on the mind. This has been done by
+others, with results supposed to be unfavourable to Christianity. He
+has been plainly moved by these results, though not a hint is given of
+the existence of Renan or Strauss. But the effect on his own mind has
+been to drive him back on a closer survey of the history in its first
+fountains, and to bring him from it filled more than ever with wonder
+at its astonishing phenomena, to protest against the poverty and
+shallowness of the most ambitious and confident of these attempts. They
+leave the historical Character which they pourtray still unsounded, its
+motives, objects, and feelings absolutely incomprehensible. He accepts
+the method to reverse the product. "Look at Christ historically,"
+people say; "see Him as He really was." The answer here is, "Well, I
+will look at Him with whatever aid a trained historical imagination can
+look at Him. I accept your challenge; I admit your difficulties. I will
+dare to do what you do. I will try and look at the very facts
+themselves, with singleness and 'innocence of the eye,' trying to see
+nothing more than I really see, and trying to see all that my eye falls
+on. I will try to realise indeed what is recorded of Him. And _this_ is
+what I see. This is the irresistible impression from the plainest and
+most elementary part of the history, if we are to accept any history at
+all. A miracle could not be more unlike the order of our experience
+than the Character set before us is unique and unapproachable in all
+known history. Further, all that makes the superiority of the modern
+world to the ancient, and is most permanent and pregnant with
+improvement in it, may be traced to the appearance of that Character,
+and to the work which He planned and did. You ask for a true picture of
+Him, drawn with freedom, drawn with courage; here, if you dare look at
+it, is what those who wrote of Him showed Him to be. Renan has tried to
+draw this picture. Take the Gospels as they stand; treat them simply as
+biographies; look, and see, and think of what they tell, and then ask
+yourself about Renan's picture, and what it looks like when placed side
+by side with the truth."
+
+This, as we have ventured to express it in our own words, seems to be
+the writer's position. It is at any rate the effect of his book, to our
+minds. The inquiry, it must always be remembered, is a preliminary one,
+dealing, as he says, with the easiest and obvious elements of the
+problem; and much that seems inadequate and unsatisfactory may be
+developed hereafter. He starts from what, to those who already have the
+full belief, must appear a low level. He takes, as it will be seen, the
+documents as they stand. He takes little more than the first three
+Gospels, and these as a whole, without asking minute questions about
+them. The mythical theory he dismisses as false to nature, in dealing
+with such a Character and such results. He talks in his preface of
+"critically weighing" the facts; but the expression is misleading. It
+is true that we may talk of criticism of character; but the words
+naturally suggest that close cross-questioning of documents and details
+which has produced such remarkable results in modern investigations;
+and of this there is none. It is a work in no sense of criticism; it is
+a work of what he calls the "trained historical imagination"; a work of
+broad and deep knowledge of human nature and the world it works in and
+creates about it; a work of steady and large insight into character,
+and practical judgment on moral likelihoods. He answers Strauss as he
+answers Renan, by producing the interpretation of a character, so
+living, so in accordance with all before and after, that it overpowers
+and sweeps away objections; a picture, an analysis or outline, if he
+pleases, which justifies itself and is its own evidence, by its
+originality and internal consistency. Criticism in detail does not
+affect him. He assumes nothing of the Gospels, except that they are
+records; neither their inspiration in any theological sense, nor their
+authorship, nor their immunity from mistake, nor the absolute purity of
+their texts. But taking them as a whole he discerns in them a Character
+which, if you accept them at all and on any terms, you cannot mistake.
+Even if the copy is ever so imperfect, ever so unskilful, ever so
+blurred and defaced, there is no missing the features any more than a
+man need miss the principle of a pattern because it is rudely or
+confusedly traced. He looks at these "biographies" as a geologist might
+do at a disturbed series of strata; and he feeds his eye upon them till
+he gets such a view of the coherent whole as will stand independent of
+the right or wrong disposition of the particular fragments. To the mind
+which discerns the whole, the regulating principle, the general curves
+and proportions of the strata may be just as visible after the
+disturbance as before it. The Gospels bring before us the visible and
+distinct outlines of a life which, after all efforts to alter the idea
+of it, remains still the same; they present certain clusters of leading
+ideas and facts so embedded in their substance that no criticism of
+detail can possibly get rid of them, without absolutely obliterating
+the whole record. It is this leading idea, or cluster of ideas, to be
+gained by intent gazing, which the writer disengages from all questions
+of criticism in the narrow sense of the word, and sets before us as
+explaining the history of Christianity, and as proving themselves by
+that explanation. That the world has been moved we know. "Give me," he
+seems to say, "the Character which is set forth in the Gospels, and I
+can show how He moved it":--
+
+    It is in the object of the present treatise to exhibit Christ's
+    career in outline. No other career ever had so much unity; no
+    other biography is so simple or can so well afford to dispense
+    with details. Men in general take up scheme after scheme, as
+    circumstances suggest one or another, and therefore most
+    biographies are compelled to pass from one subject to another, and
+    to enter into a multitude of minute questions, to divide the life
+    carefully into periods by chronological landmarks accurately
+    determined, to trace the gradual development of character and
+    ripening or change of opinions. But Christ formed one plan and
+    executed it; no important change took place in his mode of
+    thinking, speaking, or acting; at least the evidence before us
+    does not enable us to trace any such change. It is possible,
+    indeed, for students of his life to find details which they may
+    occupy themselves with discussing; they may map out the chronology
+    of it, and devise methods of harmonising the different accounts;
+    but such details are of little importance compared with the one
+    grand question, what was Christ's plan, and throw scarcely any
+    light upon that question. What was Christ's plan is the main
+    question which will be investigated in the present treatise, and
+    that vision of universal monarchy which we have just been
+    considering affords an appropriate introduction to it....
+
+    We conclude then, that Christ in describing himself as a king, and
+    at the same time as king of the Kingdom of God--in other words as
+    a king representing the Majesty of the Invisible King of a
+    theocracy--claimed the character first of Founder, next of
+    Legislator; thirdly, in a certain high and peculiar sense, of
+    Judge, of a new divine society.
+
+    In defining as above the position which Christ assumed, we have
+    not entered into controvertible matter. We have not rested upon
+    single passages, nor drawn upon the fourth Gospel. To deny that
+    Christ did undertake to found and to legislate for a new
+    theocratic society, and that he did claim the office of Judge of
+    mankind, is indeed possible, but only to those who altogether deny
+    the credibility of the extant biographies of Christ. If those
+    biographies be admitted to be generally trustworthy, then Christ
+    undertook to be what we have described; if not, then of course
+    this, but also every other account of him falls to the ground.
+
+We have said that he starts from a low level; and he restricts himself
+so entirely at the opening to facts which do not involve dispute, that
+his views of them are necessarily incomplete, and, so to say,
+provisional and deliberate understatements. He begins no higher than
+the beginning of the public ministry, the Baptism, and the Temptation;
+and his account of these leaves much to say, though it suggests much of
+what is left unsaid. But he soon gets to the proper subject of his
+book--the absolute uniqueness of Him whose equally unique work has been
+the Christian Church. And this uniqueness he finds in the combination
+of "unbounded personal pretensions," and the possession, claimed and
+believed, of boundless power, with an absolutely unearthly use of His
+pretensions and His power, and with a goodness which has proved to be,
+and still is, the permanent and ever-flowing source of moral elevation
+and improvement in the world. He early comes across the question of
+miracles, and, as he says, it is impossible to separate the claim to
+them and the belief in them from the story. We find Christ, he says,
+"describing himself as a king, and at the same time as king of the
+Kingdom of God"; calling forth and founding a new and divine society,
+and claiming to be, both now and hereafter, the Judge without appeal of
+all mankind; "he considered, in short, heaven and hell to be in his
+hands." And we find, on the other hand, that as such He has been
+received. To such an astonishing chain of phenomena miracles naturally
+belong:--
+
+    When we contemplate this scheme as a whole, and glance at the
+    execution and results of it, three things strike us with
+    astonishment. First, its prodigious originality, if the expression
+    may be used. What other man has had the courage or elevation of
+    mind to say, "I will build up a state by the mere force of my
+    will, without help from the kings of the world, without taking
+    advantage of any of the secondary causes which unite men
+    together--unity of interest or speech, or blood-relationship. I
+    will make laws for my state which shall never be repealed, and I
+    will defy all the powers of destruction that are at work in the
+    world to destroy what I build"?
+
+    Secondly, we are astonished at the calm confidence with which the
+    scheme was carried out. The reason why statesmen can seldom work
+    on this vast scale is that it commonly requires a whole lifetime
+    to gain that ascendency over their fellow-men which such schemes
+    presuppose. Some of the leading organisers of the world have said,
+    "I will work my way to supreme power, and then I will execute
+    great plans." But Christ overleaped the first stage altogether. He
+    did not work his way to royalty, but simply said to all men, "I am
+    your king." He did not struggle forward to a position in which he
+    could found a new state, but simply founded it.
+
+    Thirdly, we are astonished at the prodigious success of the
+    scheme. It is not more certain that Christ presented himself to
+    men as the founder, legislator, and judge of a divine society than
+    it is certain that men have accepted him in these characters, that
+    the divine society has been founded, that it has lasted nearly two
+    thousand years, that it has extended over a large and the most
+    highly-civilised portion of the earth's surface, and that it
+    continues full of vigour at the present day.
+
+    Between the astonishing design and its astonishing success there
+    intervenes an astonishing instrumentality--that of miracles. It
+    will be thought by some that in asserting miracles to have been
+    actually wrought by Christ we go beyond what the evidence, perhaps
+    beyond what any possible evidence, is able to sustain. Waiving,
+    then, for the present, the question whether miracles were actually
+    wrought, we may state a fact which is fully capable of being
+    established by ordinary evidence, and which is actually
+    established by evidence as ample as any historical fact
+    whatever--the fact, namely, that Christ _professed_ to work
+    miracles. We may go further, and assert with confidence that
+    Christ was believed by his followers really to work miracles, and
+    that it was mainly on this account that they conceded to Him the
+    pre-eminent dignity and authority which he claimed. The accounts
+    which we have of these miracles may be exaggerated; it is possible
+    that in some special cases stories have been related which have no
+    foundation whatever; but on the whole, miracles play so important
+    a part in Christ's scheme, that any theory which would represent
+    them as due entirely to the imagination of his followers or of a
+    later age destroys the credibility of the documents not partially
+    but wholly, and leaves Christ a personage as mythical as Hercules.
+    Now, the present treatise aims to show that the Christ of the
+    Gospels is not mythical, by showing that the character those
+    biographies portray is in all its large features strikingly
+    consistent, and at the same time so peculiar as to be altogether
+    beyond the reach of invention both by individual genius and still
+    more by what is called the "consciousness of an age." Now, if the
+    character depicted in the Gospels is in the main real and
+    historical, they must be generally trustworthy, and if so, the
+    responsibility of miracles is fixed on Christ. In this case the
+    reality of the miracles themselves depends in a great degree on
+    the opinion we form of Christ's veracity, and this opinion must
+    arise gradually from the careful examination of his whole life.
+    For our present purpose, which is to investigate the plan which
+    Christ formed and the way in which he executed it, it matters
+    nothing whether the miracles were real or imaginary; in either
+    case, being believed to be real, they had the same effect.
+    Provisionally, therefore, we may speak of them as real.
+
+Without the belief in miracles, as he says, it is impossible to
+conceive the history of the Church:--
+
+    If we suppose that Christ really performed no miracles, and that
+    those which are attributed to him were the product of
+    self-deception mixed in some proportion or other with imposture,
+    then no doubt the faith of St. Paul and St. John was an empty
+    chimera, a mere misconception; but it is none the less true that
+    those apparent miracles were essential to Christ's success, and
+    that had he not pretended to perform them the Christian Church
+    would never have been founded, and the name of Jesus of Nazareth
+    would be known at this day only to the curious in Jewish
+    antiquities.
+
+But he goes on to point out what was the use which Christ made of
+miracles, and how it was that they did not, as they might have done,
+even impede His purpose of founding His kingdom on men's consciences
+and not on their terrors. In one of the most remarkable passages
+perhaps ever written on the Gospel miracles as they are seen when
+simply looked at as they are described, the writer says:--
+
+    He imposed upon himself a strict restraint in the dse of his
+    supernatural powers. He adopted the principle that he was not sent
+    to destroy men's lives but to save them, and rigidly abstained in
+    practice from inflicting any kind of damage or harm. In this course
+    he persevered so steadily that it became generally understood.
+    Every one knew that this _king_, whose royal pretensions were so
+    prominent, had an absolutely unlimited patience, and that he would
+    endure the keenest criticism, the bitterest and most malignant
+    personal attacks. Men's mouths were open to discuss his claims and
+    character with perfect freedom; so far from regarding him with that
+    excessive fear which might have prevented them from receiving his
+    doctrine intelligently, they learnt gradually to treat him, even
+    while they acknowledged his extraordinary power, with a reckless
+    animosity which they would have been afraid to show towards an
+    ordinary enemy. With curious inconsistency they openly charged him
+    with being leagued with the devil; in other words, they acknowledged
+    that he was capable of boundless mischief, and yet they were so
+    little afraid of him that they were ready to provoke him to use his
+    whole power against themselves. The truth was that they believed
+    him to be disarmed by his own deliberate resolution, and they
+    judged rightly. He punished their malice only by verbal reproofs,
+    and they gradually gathered courage to attack the life of one whose
+    miraculous powers they did not question.
+
+    Meantime, while this magnanimous self-restraint saved him from
+    false friends and mercenary or servile flatterers, and saved the
+    kingdom which he founded from the corruption of self-interest and
+    worldliness, it gave him a power over the good such as nothing
+    else could have given. For the noblest and most amiable thing that
+    can be seen is power mixed with gentleness, the reposing,
+    self-restraining attitude of strength. These are the "fine strains
+    of honour," these are "the graces of the gods"--
+
+        To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air.
+        And yet to charge the sulphur with a bolt
+        That shall but rive an oak.
+
+    And while he did no mischief under any provocation, his power
+    flowed in acts of beneficence on every side. Men could approach
+    near to him, could eat and drink with him, could listen to his
+    talk and ask him questions, and they found him not accessible
+    only, but warmhearted, and not occupied so much with his own plans
+    that he could not attend to a case of distress or mental
+    perplexity. They found him full of sympathy and appreciation,
+    dropping words of praise, ejaculations of admiration, tears. He
+    surrounded himself with those who had tasted of his bounty, sick
+    people whom he had cured, lepers whose death-in-life, demoniacs
+    whose hell-in-life, he had terminated with a single powerful word.
+    Among these came loving hearts who thanked him for friends and
+    relatives rescued for them out of the jaws of premature death, and
+    others whom he had saved, by a power which did not seem different,
+    from vice and degradation.
+
+    This temperance in the use of supernatural power is the
+    masterpiece of Christ. It is a moral miracle superinduced upon a
+    physical one. This repose in greatness makes him surely the most
+    sublime image ever offered to the human imagination. And it is
+    precisely this trait which gave him his immense and immediate
+    ascendency over men. If the question be put--Why was Christ so
+    successful?--Why did men gather round him at his call, form
+    themselves into a new society according to his wish, and accept
+    him with unbounded devotion as their legislator and judge? some
+    will answer, Because of the miracles which attested his divine
+    character; others, Because of the intrinsic beauty and divinity of
+    the great law of love which he propounded. But miracles, as we
+    have seen, have not by themselves this persuasive power. That a
+    man possesses a strange power which I cannot understand is no
+    reason why I should receive his words as divine oracles of truth.
+    The powerful man is not of necessity also wise; his power may
+    terrify and yet not convince. On the other hand, the law of love,
+    however divine, was but a precept. Undoubtedly it deserved that
+    men should accept it for its intrinsic worth, but men are not
+    commonly so eager to receive the words of wise men nor so
+    unbounded in their gratitude to them. It was neither for his
+    miracles nor for the beauty of his doctrine that Christ was
+    worshipped. Nor was it for his winning personal character, nor for
+    the persecutions he endured, nor for his martyrdom. It was for the
+    inimitable unity which all these things made when taken together.
+    In other words, it was for this that he whose power and greatness
+    as shown in his miracles were overwhelming denied himself the use
+    of his power, treated it as a slight thing, walked among men as
+    though he were one of them, relieved them in distress, taught them
+    to love each other, bore with undisturbed patience a perpetual
+    hailstorm of calumny; and when his enemies grew fiercer, continued
+    still to endure their attacks in silence, until, petrified and
+    bewildered with astonishment, men saw him arrested and put to
+    death with torture, refusing steadfastly to use in his own behalf
+    the power he conceived he held for the benefit of others. It was
+    the combination of greatness and self-sacrifice which won their
+    hearts, the mighty powers held under a mighty control, the
+    unspeakable condescension, the _Cross_ of _Christ_.
+
+And he goes on to describe the effect upon the world; and what it was
+that "drew all men unto Him":--
+
+    To sum up the results of this chapter. We began by remarking that
+    an astonishing plan met with an astonishing success, and we raised
+    the question to what instrumentality that success was due. Christ
+    announced himself as the Founder and Legislator of a new Society,
+    and as the Supreme Judge of men. Now by what means did he procure
+    that these immense pretensions should be allowed? He might have
+    done it by sheer power, he might have adopted persuasion, and
+    pointed out the merits of the scheme and of the legislation he
+    proposed to introduce. But he adopted a third plan, which had the
+    effect not merely of securing obedience, but of exciting
+    enthusiasm and devotion. He laid men under an immense
+    _obligation_. He convinced them that he was a person of altogether
+    transcendent greatness, one who needed nothing at their hands, one
+    whom it was impossible to benefit by conferring riches, or fame,
+    or dominion upon him, and that, being so great, he had devoted
+    himself of mere benevolence to their good. He showed them that for
+    their sakes he lived a hard and laborious life, and exposed
+    himself to the utmost malice of powerful men. They saw him hungry,
+    though they believed him able to turn the stones into bread; they
+    saw his royal pretensions spurned, though they believed that he
+    could in a moment take into his hand all the kingdoms of the world
+    and the glory of them; they saw his life in danger; they saw him
+    at last expire in agonies, though they believed that, had he so
+    willed it, no danger could harm him, and that had he thrown
+    himself from the topmost pinnacle of the temple he would have been
+    softly received in the arms of ministering angels. Witnessing his
+    sufferings, and convinced by the miracles they saw him work that
+    they were voluntarily endured, men's hearts were touched, and pity
+    for weakness blending strangely with wondering admiration of
+    unlimited power, an agitation of gratitude, sympathy, and
+    astonishment, such as nothing else could ever excite, sprang up in
+    them; and when, turning from his deeds to his words, they found
+    this very self-denial which had guided his own life prescribed as
+    the principle which should guide theirs, gratitude broke forth in
+    joyful obedience, self-denial produced self-denial, and the Law
+    and Lawgiver together were enshrined in their inmost hearts for
+    inseparable veneration.
+
+It is plain that whatever there is novel in such a line of argument
+must depend upon the way in which it is handled; and it is the
+extraordinary and sustained power with which this is done which gives
+its character to the book. The writer's method consists in realising
+with a depth of feeling and thought which it would not be easy to
+match, what our Lord was in His human ministry, as that ministry is set
+before us by those who witnessed it; and next, in showing in detail the
+connection of that ministry, which wrought so much by teaching, but
+still more by the Divine example, "not sparing words but resting most
+on deeds," with all that is highest, purest, and best in the morality
+of Christendom, and with what is most fruitful and most hopeful in the
+differences between the old world and our own. We cannot think we are
+wrong when we say that no one could speak of our Lord as this writer
+speaks, with the enthusiasm, the overwhelming sense of His
+inexpressible authority, of His unapproachable perfection, with the
+profound faith which lays everything at His feet, and not also believe
+all that the Divine Society which Christ founded has believed about
+Him. And though for the present his subject is history, and human
+morality as it appears to have been revolutionised and finally fixed by
+that history, and not the theology which subsequent in date is yet the
+foundation of both, it is difficult to imagine any reader going along
+with him and not breaking out at length into the burst, "My Lord and my
+God." If it is not so, then the phenomenon is strange indeed; for a
+belief below the highest and truest has produced an appreciation, a
+reverence, an adoration which the highest belief has only produced in
+the choicest examples of those who have had it, and by the side of
+which the ordinary exhibitions of the divine history are pale and
+feeble. To few, indeed, as it seems to us, has it been given to feel,
+and to make others feel, what in all the marvellous complexity of high
+and low, and in all the Divine singleness of His goodness and power,
+the Son of Man appeared in the days of His flesh. It is not more vivid
+or more wonderful than what the Gospels with so much detail tell us of
+that awful ministry in real flesh and blood, with a human soul and with
+all the reality of man's nature; but most of us, after all, read the
+Gospels with sealed and unwondering eyes. But, dwelling on the Manhood,
+so as almost to overpower us with the contrast between the distinct and
+living truth and the dead and dull familiarity of our thoughts of
+routine and custom, he does so in such a way that it is impossible to
+doubt, though the word Incarnation never occurs in the volume, that all
+the while he has before his thoughts the "taking of the manhood into
+God." What is the Gospel picture?
+
+    And let us pause once more to consider that which remains
+    throughout a subject of ever-recurring astonishment, the unbounded
+    personal pretensions which Christ advances. It is common in human
+    history to meet with those who claim some superiority over their
+    fellows. Men assert a pre-eminence over their fellow-citizens or
+    fellow-countrymen and become rulers of those who at first were
+    their equals, but they dream of nothing greater than some partial
+    control over the actions of others for the short space of a
+    lifetime. Few indeed are those to whom it is given to influence
+    future ages. Yet some men have appeared who have been "as levers
+    to uplift the earth and roll it in another course." Homer by
+    creating literature, Socrates by creating science, Caesar by
+    carrying civilisation inland from the shores of the Mediterranean,
+    Newton by starting science upon a career of steady progress, may
+    be said to have attained this eminence. But these men gave a
+    single impact like that which is conceived to have first set the
+    planets in motion; Christ claims to be a perpetual attractive
+    power like the sun which determines their orbit. They contributed
+    to men some discovery and passed away; Christ's discovery is
+    himself. To humanity struggling with its passions and its destiny
+    he says, Cling to me, cling ever closer to me. If we believe St.
+    John, he represented himself as the Light of the world, as the
+    Shepherd of the souls of men, as the Way to immortality, as the
+    Vine or Life-tree of humanity. And if we refuse to believe that he
+    used those words, we cannot deny, without rejecting all the
+    evidence before us, that he used words which have substantially
+    the same meaning. We cannot deny that he commanded men to leave
+    everything and attach themselves to him; that he declared himself
+    king, master, and judge of men; that he promised to give rest to
+    all the weary and heavy-laden; that he instructed his followers to
+    hope for life from feeding on his body and blood.
+
+    But it is doubly surprising to observe that these enormous
+    pretensions were advanced by one whose special peculiarity, not
+    only among his contemporaries but among the remarkable men that
+    have appeared before and since, was an almost feminine tenderness
+    and humility. This characteristic was remarked, as we have seen,
+    by the Baptist, and Christ himself was fully conscious of it. Yet
+    so clear to him was his own dignity and infinite importance to the
+    human race as an objective fact with which his own opinion of
+    himself had nothing to do, that in the same breath in which he
+    asserts it in the most unmeasured language, he alludes, apparently
+    with entire unconsciousness, to his _humility_. "Take my yoke upon
+    you, and learn of me; _for I am meek and lowly of heart_." And
+    again, when speaking to his followers of the arrogance of the
+    Pharisees, he says, "They love to be called Rabbi; but be not you
+    called Rabbi: _for one is your master, even Christ_."
+
+    Who is the humble man? It is he who resists with special
+    watchfulness and success the temptations which the conditions of
+    his life may offer to exaggerate his own importance.... If he
+    judged himself correctly, and if the Baptist described him well
+    when he compared him to a lamb, and, we may add, if his
+    biographers have delineated his character faithfully, Christ was
+    one naturally contented with obscurity, wanting the restless
+    desire for distinction and eminence which is common in great men,
+    hating to put forward personal claims, disliking competition and
+    "disputes who should be greatest," finding something bombastic in
+    the titles of royalty, fond of what is simple and homely, of
+    children, of poor people, occupying himself so much with the
+    concerns of others, with the relief of sickness and want, that the
+    temptation to exaggerate the importance of his own thoughts and
+    plans was not likely to master him; lastly, entertaining for the
+    human race a feeling so singularly fraternal that he was likely to
+    reject as a sort of treason the impulse to set himself in any
+    manner above them. Christ, it appears, was this humble man. When
+    we have fully pondered the fact we may be in a condition to
+    estimate the force of the evidence which, submitted to his mind,
+    could induce him, in direct opposition to all his tastes and
+    instincts, to lay claim, persistently, with the calmness of entire
+    conviction, in opposition to the whole religious world, in spite
+    of the offence which his own followers conceived, to a dominion
+    more transcendent, more universal, more complete, than the most
+    delirious votary of glory ever aspired to in his dreams.
+
+And what is it that our Lord has done for man by being so truly man?
+
+    This then it is which is wanted to raise the feeling of humanity
+    into an enthusiasm; when the precept of love has been given, an
+    image must be set before the eyes of those who are called upon to
+    obey it, an ideal or type of man which may be noble and amiable
+    enough to raise the whole race and make the meanest member of it
+    sacred with reflected glory.
+
+    Did not Christ do this? Did the command to love go forth to those
+    who had never seen a human being they could revere? Could his
+    followers turn upon him and say, How can we love a creature so
+    degraded, full of vile wants and contemptible passions, whose
+    little life is most harmlessly spent when it is an empty round of
+    eating and sleeping; a creature destined for the grave and for
+    oblivion when his allotted term of fretfulness and folly has
+    expired? Of this race Christ himself was a member, and to this day
+    is it not the best answer to all blasphemers of the species, the
+    best consolation when our sense of its degradation is keenest,
+    that a human brain was behind his forehead, and a human heart
+    beating in his breast, and that within the whole creation of God
+    nothing more elevated or more attractive has yet been found than
+    he? And if it be answered that there was in his nature something
+    exceptional and peculiar, that humanity must not be measured by
+    the stature of Christ, let us remember that it was precisely thus
+    that he wished it to be measured, delighting to call himself the
+    Son of Man, delighting to call the meanest of mankind his
+    brothers. If some human beings are abject and contemptible, if it
+    be incredible to us that they can have any high dignity or
+    destiny, do we regard them from so great a height as Christ? Are
+    we likely to be more pained by their faults and deficiencies than
+    he was? Is our standard higher than his? And yet he associated by
+    preference with the meanest of the race; no contempt for them did
+    he ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear than
+    the best and wisest to the common Father, no doubt that they were
+    naturally capable of rising to a moral elevation like his own.
+    There is nothing of which a man may be prouder than of this; it is
+    the most hopeful and redeeming fact in history; it is precisely
+    what was wanting to raise the love of man as man to enthusiasm. An
+    eternal glory has been shed upon the human race by the love Christ
+    bore to it And it was because the Edict of Universal Love went
+    forth to men whose hearts were in no cynical mood, but possessed
+    with a spirit of devotion to a man, that words which at any other
+    time, however grandly they might sound, would have been but words,
+    penetrated so deeply, and along with the law of love the power of
+    love was given. Therefore also the first Christians were enabled
+    to dispense with philosophical phrases, and instead of saying that
+    they loved the ideal of man in man, could simply say and feel that
+    they loved Christ in every man.
+
+    We have here the very kernel of the Christian moral scheme. We
+    have distinctly before us the end Christ proposed to himself, and
+    the means he considered adequate to the attainment of it....
+
+    But how to give to the meagre and narrow hearts of men such
+    enlargement? How to make them capable of a universal sympathy?
+    Christ believed it possible to bind men to their kind, but on one
+    condition--that they were first bound fast to himself. He stood
+    forth as the representative of men, he identified himself with the
+    cause and with the interests of all human beings; he was destined,
+    as he began before long obscurely to intimate, to lay down his
+    life for them. Few of us sympathise originally and directly with
+    this devotion; few of us can perceive in human nature itself any
+    merit sufficient to evoke it. But it is not so hard to love and
+    venerate him who felt it. So vast a passion of love, a devotion so
+    comprehensive, elevated, deliberate, and profound, has not
+    elsewhere been in any degree approached save by some of his
+    imitators. And as love provokes love, many have found it possible
+    to conceive for Christ an attachment the closeness of which no
+    words can describe, a veneration so possessing and absorbing the
+    man within them, that they have said, "I live no more, but Christ
+    lives in me."
+
+And what, in fact, has been the result, after the utmost and freest
+abatement for the objections of those who criticise the philosophical
+theories or the practical effects of Christianity?
+
+    But that Christ's method, when rightly applied, is really of
+    mighty force may be shown by an argument which the severest censor
+    of Christians will hardly refuse to admit. Compare the ancient
+    with the modern world: "Look on this picture and on that." The
+    broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into
+    prominence. Among all the men of the ancient heathen world there
+    were scarcely one or two to whom we might venture to apply the
+    epithet "holy." In other words, there were not more than one or
+    two, if any, who, besides being virtuous in their actions, were
+    possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides
+    abstaining from vice, regarded even a vicious thought with horror.
+    Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this
+    higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few
+    will maintain that it has been exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth
+    is that there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country
+    since the time of Christ, where a century has passed without
+    exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence
+    has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at
+    times like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has
+    Christ failed? or can Christianity die?
+
+The principle of feeling and action which Christ implanted in that
+Divine Society which He founded, or in other words, His morality, had
+two peculiarities; it sprang, and it must spring still, from what this
+writer calls all through an "enthusiasm"; and this enthusiasm was
+kindled and maintained by the influence of a Person. There can be no
+goodness without impulses to goodness, any more than these impulses are
+enough without being directed by truth and reason; but the impulses
+must come before the guidance, and "Christ's Theocracy" is described
+"as a great attempt to set all the virtues of the world on this basis,
+and to give it a visible centre and fountain." He thus describes how
+personal influence is the great instrument of moral quickening and
+elevation:--
+
+    How do men become for the most part "pure, generous, and humane"?
+    By personal, not by logical influences. They have been reared by
+    parents who had these qualities, they have lived in a society
+    which had a high tone, they have been accustomed to see just acts
+    done, to hear gentle words spoken, and the justness and the
+    gentleness have passed into their hearts, and slowly moulded their
+    habits and made their moral discernment clear; they remember
+    commands and prohibitions which it is a pleasure to obey for the
+    sake of those who gave them; often they think of those who may be
+    dead and say, "How would this action appear to him? Would he
+    approve that word or disapprove it?" To such no baseness appears a
+    small baseness because its consequences may be small, nor does the
+    yoke of law seem burdensome although it is ever on their necks,
+    nor do they dream of covering a sin by an atoning act of virtue.
+    Often in solitude they blush when some impure fancy sails across
+    the clear heaven of their minds, because they are never alone,
+    because the absent Examples, the Authorities they still revere,
+    rule not their actions only but their inmost hearts; because their
+    conscience is indeed awake and alive, representing all the
+    nobleness with which they stand in sympathy, and reporting their
+    most hidden indecorum before a public opinion of the absent and
+    the dead.
+
+    Of these two influences--that of Reason and that of Living
+    Example--which would a wise reformer reinforce? Christ chose the
+    last He gathered all men into a common relation to himself, and
+    demanded that each should set him on the pedestal of his heart,
+    giving a lower place to all other objects of worship, to father
+    and mother, to husband or wife. In him should the loyalty of all
+    hearts centre; he should be their pattern, their Authority and
+    Judge. Of him and his service should no man be ashamed, but to
+    those who acknowledged it morality should be an easy yoke, and the
+    law of right as spontaneous as the law of life; sufferings should
+    be easy to bear, and the loss of worldly friends repaired by a new
+    home in the bosom of the Christian kingdom; finally, in death
+    itself their sleep should be sweet upon whose tombstone it could
+    be written "Obdormivit in Christo."
+
+In his treatment of this part of the subject, the work of Christ as the
+true Creator, through the Christian Church, of living morality, what is
+peculiar and impressive is the way in which sympathy with Christianity
+in its antique and original form, in its most austere, unearthly,
+exacting aspects, is combined with sympathy with the practical
+realities of modern life, with its boldness, its freedom, its love of
+improvement, its love of truth. It is no common grasp which can embrace
+both so easily and so firmly. He is one of those writers whose strong
+hold on their ideas is shown by the facility with which they can afford
+to make large admissions, which are at first sight startling. Nowhere
+are more tremendous passages written than in this book about the
+corruptions of that Christianity which yet the writer holds to be the
+one hope and safeguard of mankind. He is not afraid to pursue his
+investigation independently of any inquiry into the peculiar claims to
+authority of the documents on which it rests. He at once goes to their
+substance and their facts, and the Person and Life and Character which
+they witness to. He is not afraid to put Faith on exactly the same
+footing as Life, neither higher nor lower, as the title to membership
+in the Church; a doctrine which, if it makes imperfect and rudimentary
+faith as little a disqualification as imperfect and inconsistent life,
+obviously does not exclude the further belief that deliberate heresy is
+on the same level with deliberate profligacy. But the clear sense of
+what is substantial, the power of piercing through accidents and
+conditions to the real kernel of the matter, the scornful disregard of
+all entanglement of apparent contradictions and inconsistencies, enable
+him to bring out the lesson which he finds before him with overpowering
+force. He sees before him immense mercy, immense condescension, immense
+indulgence; but there are also immense requirements--requirements not
+to be fulfilled by rule or exhausted by the lapse of time, and which
+the higher they raise men the more they exact--an immense seriousness
+and strictness, an immense care for substance and truth, to the
+disregard, if necessary, of the letter and the form. The "Dispensation
+of the Spirit" has seldom had an interpreter more in earnest and more
+determined to see meaning in his words. We have room but for two
+illustrations. He is combating the notion that the work of Christianity
+and the Church nowadays is with the good, and that it is waste of hope
+and strength to try to reclaim the bad and the lost:--
+
+    Once more, however, the world may answer, Christ may be consistent
+    in this, but is he wise? It may be true that he does demand an
+    enthusiasm, and that such an enthusiasm may be capable of
+    awakening the moral sense in hearts in which it seemed dead. But
+    if, notwithstanding this demand, only a very few members of the
+    Christian Church are capable of the enthusiasm, what use in
+    imposing on the whole body a task which the vast majority are not
+    qualified to perform? Would it not be well to recognise the fact
+    which we cannot alter, and to abstain from demanding from frail
+    human nature what human nature cannot render? Would it not be well
+    for the Church to impose upon its ordinary members only ordinary
+    duties? When the Bernard or the Whitefield appears let her by all
+    means find occupation for him. Let her in such cases boldly invade
+    the enemy's country. But in ordinary times would it not be well
+    for her to confine herself to more modest and practicable
+    undertakings? There is much for her to do even though she should
+    honestly confess herself unable to reclaim the lost. She may
+    reclaim the young, administer reproof to slight lapses, maintain a
+    high standard of virtue, soften manners, diffuse enlightenment.
+    Would it not be well for her to adapt her ends to her means?
+
+    No, it would not be well; it would be fatal to do so; and Christ
+    meant what he said, and said what was true, when he pronounced the
+    Enthusiasm of Humanity to be everything, and the absence of it to
+    be the absence of everything. The world understands its own
+    routine well enough; what it does not understand is the mode of
+    changing that routine. It has no appreciation of the nature or
+    measure of the power of enthusiasm, and on this matter it learns
+    nothing from experience, but after every fresh proof of that
+    power, relapses from its brief astonishment into its old
+    ignorance, and commits precisely the same miscalculation on the
+    next occasion. The power of enthusiasm is, indeed, far from being
+    unlimited; in some cases it is very small....
+
+    But one power enthusiasm has almost without limit--the power of
+    propagating itself; and it was for this that Christ depended on
+    it. He contemplated a Church in which the Enthusiasm of Humanity
+    should not be felt by two or three only, but widely. In whatever
+    heart it might be kindled, he calculated that it would pass
+    rapidly into other hearts, and that as it can make its heat felt
+    outside the Church, so it would preserve the Church itself from
+    lukewarmncss. For a lukewarm Church he would not condescend to
+    legislate, nor did he regard it as at all inevitable that the
+    Church should become lukewarm. He laid it as a duty upon the
+    Church to reclaim the lost, because he did not think it utopian to
+    suppose that the Church might be not in its best members only, but
+    through its whole body, inspired by that ardour of humanity that
+    can charm away the bad passions of the wildest heart, and open to
+    the savage and the outlaw lurking in moral wildernesses an
+    entrancing view of the holy and tranquil order that broods over
+    the streets and palaces of the city of God....
+
+    Christianity is an enthusiasm or it is nothing; and if there
+    sometimes appear in the history of the Church instances of a tone
+    which is pure and high without being enthusiastic, of a mood of
+    Christian feeling which is calmly favourable to virtue without
+    being victorious against vice, it will probably be found that all
+    that is respectable in such a mood is but the slowly-subsiding
+    movement of an earlier enthusiasm, and all that is produced by the
+    lukewarmness of the time itself is hypocrisy and corrupt
+    conventionalism.
+
+    Christianity, then, would sacrifice its divinity if it abandoned
+    its missionary character and became a mere educational
+    institution. Surely this Article of Conversion is the true
+    _articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae_. When the power of
+    reclaiming the lost dies out of the Church, it ceases to be the
+    Church. It may remain a useful institution, though it is most
+    likely to become an immoral and mischievous one. Where the power
+    remains, there, whatever is wanting, it may still be said that
+    "the tabernacle of God is with men."
+
+One more passage about those who in all Churches and sects think that
+all that Christ meant by His call was to give them a means to do what
+the French call _faire son salut_:--
+
+    It appears throughout the Sermon on the Mount that there was a
+    class of persons whom Christ regarded with peculiar aversion--the
+    persons who call themselves one thing and are another. He
+    describes them by a word which originally meant an "actor."
+    Probably it may in Christ's time have already become current in
+    the sense which we give to the word "hypocrite." But no doubt
+    whenever it was used the original sense of the word was distinctly
+    remembered. And in this Sermon, whenever Christ denounces any
+    vice, it is with the words "Be not you like the actors." In common
+    with all great reformers, Christ felt that honesty in word and
+    deed was the fundamental virtue; dishonesty, including
+    affectation, self-consciousness, love of stage effect, the one
+    incurable vice. Our thoughts, words, and deeds are to be of a
+    piece. For example, if we would pray to God, let us go into some
+    inner room where none but God shall see us; to pray at the corner
+    of the streets, where the passing crowd may admire our devotion,
+    is to _act_ a prayer. If we would keep down the rebellious flesh
+    by fasting, this concerns ourselves only; it is acting to parade
+    before the world our self-mortification. And if we would put down
+    sin let us put it down in ourselves first; it is only the actor
+    who begins by frowning at it in others. But there are subtler
+    forms of hypocrisy, which Christ does not denounce, probably
+    because they have sprung since out of the corruption of a subtler
+    creed. The hypocrite of that age wanted simply money or credit
+    with the people. His ends were those of the vulgar, though his
+    means were different Christ endeavoured to cure both alike of
+    their vulgarity by telling them of other riches and another
+    happiness laid up in heaven. Some, of course, would neither
+    understand nor regard his words, others would understand and
+    receive them. But a third class would receive them without
+    understanding them, and instead of being cured of their avarice
+    and sensuality, would simply transfer them to new objects of
+    desire. Shrewd enough to discern Christ's greatness, instinctively
+    believing what he said to be true, they would set out with a
+    triumphant eagerness in pursuit of the heavenly riches, and laugh
+    at the short-sighted and weak-minded speculator who contented
+    himself with the easy but insignificant profits of a worldly life.
+    They would practise assiduously the rules by which Christ said
+    heaven was to be won. They would patiently turn the left cheek,
+    indefatigibly walk the two miles, they would bless with effusion
+    those who cursed them, and pray fluently for those who used them
+    spitefully. To love their enemies, to love any one, they would
+    certainly find impossible, but the outward signs of love might
+    easily be learnt. And thus there would arise a new class of
+    actors, not like those whom Christ denounced, exhibiting before an
+    earthly audience and receiving their pay from human managers, but
+    hoping to be paid for their performance out of the incorruptible
+    treasures, and to impose by their dramatic talent upon their
+    Father in heaven.
+
+We have said that one peculiarity of this work is the connection which
+is kept in view from the first between the Founder and His work;
+between Christ and the Christian Church. He finds it impossible to
+speak of Him without that still existing witness of His having come,
+which is only less wonderful and unique than Himself. This is where,
+for the present, he leaves the subject:--
+
+    For the New Jerusalem, as we witness it, is no more exempt from
+    corruption than was the Old.... First the rottenness of dying
+    superstitions, their barbaric manners, their intellectualism
+    preferring system and debate to brotherhood, strangling
+    Christianity with theories and framing out of it a charlatan's
+    philosophy which madly tries to stop the progress of science--all
+    these corruptions have in the successive ages of its long life
+    infected the Church, and many new and monstrous perversions of
+    individual character have disgraced it. The creed which makes
+    human nature richer and larger makes men at the same time capable
+    of profounder sins; admitted into a holier sanctuary, they are
+    exposed to the temptation of a greater sacrilege; awakened to the
+    sense of new obligations, they sometimes lose their simple respect
+    for the old ones; saints that have resisted the subtlest
+    temptations sometimes begin again, as it were, by yielding without
+    a struggle to the coarsest; hypocrisy has become tenfold more
+    ingenious and better supplied with disguises; in short, human
+    nature has inevitably developed downwards as well as upwards, and
+    if the Christian ages be compared with those of heathenism, they
+    are found worse as well as better, and it is possible to make it a
+    question whether mankind has gained on the whole....
+
+    But the triumph of the Christian Church is that it is
+    _there_--that the most daring of all speculative dreams, instead
+    of being found impracticable, has been carried into effect, and
+    when carried into effect, instead of being confined to a few
+    select spirits, has spread itself over a vast space of the earth's
+    surface, and when thus diffused, instead of giving place after an
+    age or two to something more adapted to a later time, has endured
+    for two thousand years, and at the end of two thousand years,
+    instead of lingering as a mere wreck spared by the tolerance of
+    the lovers of the past, still displays vigour and a capacity of
+    adjusting itself to new conditions, and lastly, in all the
+    transformations it undergoes, remains visibly the same thing and
+    inspired by its Founder's universal and unquenchable spirit.
+
+    It is in this and not in any freedom from abuses that the divine
+    power of Christianity appears. Again, it is in this, and not in
+    any completeness or all-sufficiency....
+
+    But the achievement of Christ in founding by his single will and
+    power a structure so durable and so universal, is like no other
+    achievement which history records. The masterpieces of the men of
+    action are coarse and common in comparison with it, and the
+    masterpieces of speculation flimsy and insubstantial. When we
+    speak of it the commonplaces of admiration fail us altogether.
+    Shall we speak of the originality of the design, of the skill
+    displayed in the execution? All such terms are inadequate.
+    Originality and contriving skill operated indeed, but, as it were,
+    implicitly. The creative effort which produced that against which,
+    it is said, the gates of hell shall not prevail, cannot be
+    analysed. No architects' designs were furnished for the New
+    Jerusalem, no committee drew up rules for the Universal
+    Commonwealth. If in the works of Nature we can trace the
+    indications of calculation, of a struggle with difficulties, of
+    precaution, of ingenuity, then in Christ's work it may be that the
+    same indications occur. But these inferior and secondary powers
+    were not consciously exercised; they were implicitly present in
+    the manifold yet single creative act. The inconceivable work was
+    done in calmness; before the eyes of men it was noiselessly
+    accomplished, attracting little attention. Who can describe that
+    which unites men? Who has entered into the formation of speech
+    which is the symbol of their union? Who can describe exhaustively
+    the origin of civil society? He who can do these things can
+    explain the origin of the Christian Church. For others it must be
+    enough to say, "the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed." No
+    man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded
+    together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard
+    the chink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended _out of heaven from
+    God_.
+
+And here we leave this remarkable book. It seems to us one of those
+which permanently influence opinion, not so much by argument as such,
+as by opening larger views of the familiar and the long-debated, by
+deepening the ordinary channels of feeling, and by bringing men back to
+seriousness and rekindling their admiration, their awe, their love,
+about what they know best. We have not dwelt on minute criticisms about
+points to which exception might be taken. We have not noticed even
+positions on which, without further explanation, we should more or less
+widely disagree. The general scope of it, and the seriousness as well
+as the grandeur and power with which the main idea is worked out, seem
+to make mere secondary objections intolerable. It is a fragment, with
+the disadvantages of a fragment. What is put before us is far from
+complete, and it needs to be completed. In part at least an answer has
+been given to the question _what_ Christ was; but the question remains,
+not less important, and of which the answer is only here foreshadowed,
+_who_ He was. But so far as it goes, what it does is this: in the face
+of all attempts to turn Christianity into a sentiment or a philosophy,
+it asserts, in a most remarkable manner, a historical religion and a
+historical Church; but it also seeks, in a manner equally remarkable,
+to raise and elevate the thoughts of all, on all sides, about Christ,
+as He showed Himself in the world, and about what Christianity was
+meant to be; to touch new springs of feeling; to carry back the Church
+to its "hidden fountains," and pierce through the veils which hide from
+us the reality of the wonders in which it began.
+
+The book is indeed a protest against the stiffness of all cast-iron
+systems, and a warning against trusting in what is worn out. But it
+shows how the modern world, so complex, so refined, so wonderful, is,
+in all that it accounts good, but a reflection of what is described in
+the Gospels, and its civilisation, but an application of the laws of
+Christ, changing, it may be, indefinitely in outward form, but
+depending on their spirit as its ever-living spring. If we have
+misunderstood this book, and its cautious understatements are not
+understatements at all, but represent the limits beyond which the
+writer does not go, we can only say again it is one-of the strangest
+among books. If we have not misunderstood him, we have before us a
+writer who has a right to claim deference from those who think deepest
+and know most, when he pleads before them that not Philosophy can save
+and reclaim the world, but Faith in a Divine Person who is worthy of
+it, allegiance to a Divine Society which He founded, and union of
+hearts in the object for which He created it.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE AUTHOR OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ON A NEW REFORMATION[12]
+
+
+  [12]
+  _Guardian_, 6th March 1889.
+
+Mrs. Ward, in the _Nineteenth Century_, develops with warmth and force
+the theme and serious purpose of _Robert Elsmere_; and she does so,
+using the same literary method which she used, certainly with effect,
+in the story itself. Every age has its congenial fashion of discussing
+the great questions which affect, or seem to affect, the fate of
+mankind. According to the time and its circumstances, it is a _Summa
+Theologiae_, or a _Divina Commedia_, or a _Novum Organum_, or a
+Calvin's _Institutes_, or a Locke _On the Understanding_, or an
+_Encyclopedia_, or a _Candide_, which sets people thinking more than
+usual and comparing their thoughts. Long ago in the history of human
+questioning, Plato and Cicero discovered the advantages over dry
+argument of character and easy debate, and so much of story as clothed
+abstractions and hard notions with human life and affections. It is a
+weighty precedent. And as the prophetess of a "New Reformation" Mrs.
+Ward has reverted to what is substantially the same method. She is
+within her right. We do not blame her for putting her argument into the
+shape of a novel, and bringing out the points of her case in the trials
+and passionate utterances of imaginary persons, or in a conversation
+about their mental history. But she must take the good with the bad.
+Such a method has its obvious advantages, in freedom, and convenience,
+and range of illustration. It has its disadvantages. The dealer in
+imagination may easily become the unconscious slave of imagination;
+and, living in a self-constructed world, may come to forget that there
+is any other; and the temptation to unfairness becomes enormous when
+all who speak, on one side or the other, only speak as you make or let
+them speak.
+
+It is to imagination that _Robert Elsmere_ makes its main appeal,
+undoubtedly a powerful and pathetic one. It bids us ask ourselves what,
+with the phenomena before us, we can conceive possible and real. It
+implies, of course, much learning, with claims of victory in the
+spheres of history and science, with names great in criticism, of whom
+few readers probably can estimate the value, though all may be affected
+by the formidable array. But it is not in these things, as with a book
+like _Supernatural Religion_, that the gist of the argument lies. The
+alleged results of criticism are taken for granted; whether rightly or
+wrongly the great majority of readers certainly cannot tell. But then
+the effect of the book, or the view which it represents, begins.
+Imagine a man, pure-minded, earnest, sensitive, self-devoted, plunged
+into the tremendous questions of our time. Bit by bit he finds what he
+thought to be the truth of truths breaking away. In the darkness and
+silence with which nature covers all beyond the world of experience he
+thought he had found light and certainty from on high. He thought that
+he had assurances and pledges which could not fail him, that God was in
+the world, governed it, loved it, showed Himself in it He thought he
+had a great and authentic story to fall back upon, and a Sacred Book,
+which was its guaranteed witness, and by which God still spoke to his
+soul. He thought that, whatever he did not know, he knew this, and this
+was a hope to live and die in; with all that he saw round him, of pain
+and sin and misery, here was truth on which he could rest secure, in
+his fight with evil. Like the rest of us, he knew that terrible,
+far-reaching, heart-searching questions were abroad; that all that to
+him was sacred and unapproachable in its sanctity was not so to
+all--was not so, perhaps, to men whom he felt to be stronger and more
+knowing than himself--was not so, perhaps, to some who seemed to him to
+stand, in character and purpose, at a moral height above him. Still he
+thought himself in full possession of the truth which God had given
+him, till at length, in one way or another, the tide of questioning
+reached him. Then begins the long agony. He hears that what he never
+doubted is said to be incredible, and is absolutely given up. He finds
+himself bin-rounded by hostile powers of thought, by an atmosphere
+which insensibly but irresistibly governs opinion, by doubt and denial
+in the air, by keen and relentless intellect, before which he can only
+he silent; he sees and hears all round the disintegrating process going
+on in the creeds and institutions and intellectual statements of
+Christianity. He is assured, and sees some reason to believe it, that
+the intellect of the day is against him and his faith; and further,
+that unreality taints everything, belief and reasoning, and profession
+and conduct Step by step he is forced from one position and another;
+the process was a similar and a familiar one when the great Roman
+secession was going on fifty years ago. But now, in Robert Elsmere,
+comes the upshot. He is not landed, as some logical minds have been,
+which have gone through the same process, in mere unbelief or
+indifference. He is too good for that. Something of his old
+Christianity is too deeply engrained in him. He cannot go back from the
+moral standard to which it accustomed him. He will serve God in a
+Christian spirit and after the example of Christ, though not in what
+can claim to be called a Christian way. He is the beginner of one more
+of the numberless attempts to find a new mode of religion, purer than
+any of the old ones could be--of what Mrs. Ward calls in her new paper
+"A New Reformation."
+
+In this paper, which is more distinctly a dialogue on the Platonic
+model, she isolates the main argument on which the story was based, but
+without any distinct reference to any of the criticisms on her book.
+_Robert Elsmere_ rests on the achievements of historic criticism,
+chiefly German criticism. From the traditional, old-fashioned Christian
+way of regarding and using the old records which we call the Bible, the
+ground, we are told, is hopelessly and for ever cut away by German
+historical criticism. And the difference between the old and the modern
+way of regarding and using them is expressed by the difference between
+_bad translation_ and _good_; the old way of reading, quoting, and
+estimating ancient documents of all kinds was purblind, lifeless,
+narrow, mechanical, whereas the modern comparative and critical method
+not only is more sure in important questions of authenticity, but puts
+true life and character and human feeling and motives into the
+personages who wrote these documents, and of whom they speak. These
+books were entirely misunderstood, even if people knew the meaning of
+their words; now, at last, we can enter into their real spirit and
+meaning. And where such a change of method and point of view, as
+regards these documents, is wholesale and sweeping, it involves a
+wholesale and sweeping change in all that is founded on them. Revised
+ideas about the Bible mean a revised and reconstructed Christianity--"A
+New Reformation."
+
+Mrs. Ward lays more stress than everybody will agree to on what she
+likens to the difference between _good translation_ and _bad_, in
+dealing with the materials of history. Doubtless, in our time, the
+historical imagination, like the historical conscience, has been
+awakened. In history, as in other things, the effort after the real and
+the living has been very marked; it has sometimes resulted, as we know,
+in that parading of the real which we call the realistic. The mode of
+telling a story or stating a case varies, even characteristically, from
+age to age, from Macaulay to Hume, from Hume to Rapin, from Rapin to
+Holinshed or Hall; but after all, the story in its main features
+remains, after allowing for the differences in the mode of presenting
+it. German criticism, to which we are expected to defer, has its mode.
+It combines two elements--a diligent, searching, lawyer-like habit of
+cross-examination, laborious, complete and generally honest, which,
+when it is not spiteful or insolent, deserves all the praise it
+receives; but with it a sense of the probable, in dealing with the
+materials collected, and a straining after attempts to construct
+theories and to give a vivid reality to facts and relations, which are
+not always so admirable; which lead, in fact, sometimes to the height
+of paradox, or show mere incapacity to deal with the truth and depth of
+life, or make use of a poor and mean standard--_mesquin_ would be the
+French word--in the interpretation of actions and aims. It has
+impressed on us the lesson--not to be forgotten when we read Mrs.
+Ward's lists of learned names--that weight and not number is the test
+of good evidence. German learning is decidedly imposing. But after all
+there are Germans and Germans; and with all that there has been of
+great in German work there has been also a large proportion of what is
+bad--conceited, arrogant, shallow, childish. German criticism has been
+the hunting-ground of an insatiable love of sport--may we not say,
+without irreverence, the scene of the discovery of a good many mares'
+nests? When the question is asked, why all this mass of criticism has
+made so little impression on English thought, the answer is, because of
+its extravagant love of theorising, because of its divergences and
+variations, because of its negative results. Those who have been so
+eager to destroy have not been so successful in construction. Clever
+theories come to nothing; streams which began with much noise at last
+lose themselves in the sand. Undoubtedly, it presents a very important,
+and, in many ways, interesting class of intellectual phenomena, among
+the many groups of such inquiries, moral, philosophical, scientific,
+political, social, of which the world is full, and of which no sober
+thinker expects to see the end. If this vaunted criticism is still left
+to scholars, it is because it is still in the stage in which only
+scholars are competent to examine and judge it; it is not fit to be a
+factor in the practical thought and life of the mass of mankind.
+Answers, and not merely questions, are what we want, who have to live,
+and work, and die. Criticism has pulled about the Bible without
+restraint or scruple. We are all of us steeped in its daring
+assumptions and shrewd objections. Have its leaders yet given us an
+account which it is reasonable to receive, clear, intelligible,
+self-consistent and consistent with all the facts, of what this
+mysterious book is?
+
+Meanwhile, in the face of theories and conjectures and negative
+arguments, there is something in the world which is fact, and hard
+fact. The Christian Church is the most potent fact in the most
+important ages of the world's progress. It is an institution like the
+world itself, which has grown up by its own strength and according to
+its own principle of life, full of good and evil, having as the law of
+its fate to be knocked about in the stern development of events,
+exposed, like human society, to all kinds of vicissitudes and
+alternations, giving occasion to many a scandal, and shaking the faith
+and loyalty of many a son, showing in ample measure the wear and tear
+of its existence, battered, injured, sometimes degenerate, sometimes
+improved, in one way or another, since those dim and long distant days
+when its course began; but showing in all these ways what a real thing
+it is, never in the extremity of storms and ruin, never in the deepest
+degradation of its unfaithfulness, losing hold of its own central
+unchanging faith, and never in its worst days of decay and corruption
+losing hold of the power of self-correction and hope of recovery.
+_Solvitur ambulando_ is an argument to which Mrs. Ward appeals, in
+reply to doubts about the solidity of the "New Reformation." It could
+be urged more modestly if the march of the "New Reformation" had lasted
+for even half of one of the Christian centuries. The Church is in the
+world, as the family is in the world, as the State is in the world, as
+morality is in the world, a fact of the same order and greatness. Like
+these it has to make its account with the "all-dissolving" assaults of
+human thought. Like these it has to prove itself by living, and it does
+do so. In all its infinite influences and ministries, in infinite
+degrees and variations, it is the public source of light and good and
+hope. If there are select and aristocratic souls who can do without it,
+or owe it nothing, the multitude of us cannot. And the Christian Church
+is founded on a definite historic fact, that Jesus Christ who was
+crucified rose from the dead; and, coming from such an author, it comes
+to us, bringing with it the Bible. The fault of a book like _Robert
+Elsmere_ is that it is written with a deliberate ignoring that these
+two points are not merely important, but absolutely fundamental, in the
+problems with which it deals. With these not faced and settled it is
+like looking out at a prospect through a window of which all the glass
+is ribbed and twisted, distorting everything. It may be that even yet
+we imperfectly understand our wondrous Bible. It may be that we have
+yet much to learn about it. It may be that there is much that is very
+difficult about it. Let us reverently and fearlessly learn all we can
+about it. Let us take care not to misuse it, as it has been terribly
+misused. But coming to us from the company and with the sanction of
+Christ risen, it never can be merely like other books. A so-called
+Christianity, ignoring or playing with Christ's resurrection, and using
+the Bible as a sort of Homer, may satisfy a class of clever and
+cultivated persons. It may be to them the parent of high and noble
+thoughts, and readily lend itself to the service of mankind. But it is
+well in so serious a matter not to confuse things. This new religion
+may borrow from Christianity as it may borrow from Plato, or from
+Buddhism, or Confucianism, or even Islam. But it is not Christianity.
+_Robert Elsmere_ may be true to life, as representing one of those
+tragedies which happen in critical moments of history. But a
+Christianity which tells us to think of Christ doing good, but to
+forget and put out of sight Christ risen from the dead, is not true to
+life. It is as delusive to the conscience and the soul as it is
+illogical to reason.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+RENAN'S "VIE DE JÉSUS"[13]
+
+
+  [13]
+  _Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre I.--_Vie de Jésus_.
+  Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_, 9th September 1863.
+
+Unbelief is called upon nowadays, as well as belief, to give its
+account of the origin of that undeniable and most important fact which
+we call the Christian religion. And if it is true that in some respects
+the circumstances under which the controversy is carried on are, as it
+has been alleged, more than heretofore favourable to unbelief, it is
+also true that in some other respects the case of unbelief has
+difficulties which it had not once. It has to accept and admit, if it
+wishes to gain a favourable hearing from the present generation, the
+unique and surpassing moral grandeur, depth, and attractiveness of
+Christianity. The polemic method which set Christianity in broad
+contrast with what was supposed to be best and highest in human nature,
+and therefore found no difficulty in tracing to a bad source what was
+itself represented to be bad, is not a method suited to the ideas and
+feelings of our time; and the sneers and sarcasms of the last century,
+provoked by abuses and inconsistencies which have since received their
+ample and memorable punishment, cease to produce any effect on readers
+of the present day, except to call forth a passing feeling of
+repugnance at what is shallow and profane, mixed, it may be, sometimes,
+with an equally passing admiration for what is witty and brilliant.
+Even in M. Renan's view, Voltaire has done his work, and is out of
+date. Those who now attack Christianity have to attack it under the
+disadvantage of the preliminary admission that its essential and
+distinguishing elements are, on the whole, in harmony and not in
+discordance with the best conceptions of human duty and life, and that
+its course and progress have been, at any rate, concurrent with all
+that is best and most hopeful in human history. First allowing that as
+a fact it contains in it things than which we cannot imagine anything
+better, and without which we should never have reached to where we are,
+they then have to dispute its divine claims. No man could write
+persuasively on religion now, _against_ it any more than _for_ it, who
+did not show that he was fully penetrated not only with its august and
+beneficent aspect, but with the essential and everlasting truths which,
+in however imperfect shapes, or whencesoever derived, are embodied in
+it and are ministered by it to society.
+
+That Christianity is, as a matter of fact, a successful and a living
+religion, in a degree absolutely without parallel in any other
+religion, is the point from which its assailants have now to start.
+They have also to take account of the circumstance, to the recognition
+of which the whole course of modern thought and inquiry has brought us,
+that it has been successful, not by virtue merely of any outward and
+accidental favouring circumstances, but of its intrinsic power and of
+principles which are inseparable from its substance. This being the
+condition of the question, those who deny its claim to a direct Divine
+origin have to frame their theory of it so as to account, on principles
+supposed to be common to it and other religions, not merely for its
+rise and its conquests, but for those broad and startling differences
+which separate it, in character and in effects, from all other known
+religions. They have to show how that which is instinct with
+never-dying truth sprang out of what was false and mistaken, if not
+corrupt; how that which alone has revealed God to man's conscience had
+no other origin than what in other instances has led men through
+enthusiasm and imposture to a barren or a mischievous superstition.
+
+Such an attempt is the work before us--a work destined, probably, both
+from its ability and power and from its faults, to be for modern France
+what the work of Strauss was for Germany, the standard expression of an
+unbelief which shrinks with genuine distaste from the coarse and
+negative irreligion of older infidelity, and which is too refined, too
+profound and sympathetic in its views of human nature, to be insensible
+to those numberless points in which as a fact Christianity has given
+expression to the best and highest thoughts that man can have. Strauss,
+to account for what we see, imagined an idea, or a set of ideas,
+gradually worked out into the shape of a history, of which scarcely
+anything can be taken as real matter of fact, except the bare existence
+of the person who was clothed in the process of time with the
+attributes created by the idealising legend. Such a view is too vague
+and indistinct to satisfy French minds. A theory of this sort, to find
+general acceptance in France, must start with concrete history, and not
+be history held in solution in the cloudy shapes of myths which vanish
+as soon as touched. M. Renan's process is in the main the reverse of
+Strauss's. He undertakes to extract the real history recorded in the
+Gospels; and not only so, but to make it even more palpable and
+interesting, if not more wonderful, than it seems at first sight in the
+original records, by removing the crust of mistake and exaggeration
+which has concealed the true character of what the narrative records;
+by rewriting it according to those canons of what is probable and
+intelligible in human life and capacity which are recognised in the
+public whom he addresses.
+
+Two of these canons govern the construction of the book. One of them is
+the assumption that in no part of the history of man is the
+supernatural to be admitted. This, of course, is not peculiar to M.
+Renan, though he lays it down with such emphasis in all his works, and
+is so anxious to bring it into distinct notice on every occasion, that
+it is manifestly one which he is desirous to impress on all who read
+him, as one of the ultimate and unquestionable foundations of all
+historical inquiry. The other canon is one of moral likelihood, and it
+is, that it is credible and agreeable to what we gather from
+experience, that the highest moral elevation ever attained by man
+should have admitted along with it, and for its ends, conscious
+imposture. On the first of these assumptions, all that is miraculous in
+the Gospel narratives is, not argued about, or, except perhaps in one
+instance--the raising of Lazarus--attempted to be accounted for or
+explained, but simply left out and ignored. On the second, the fact
+from which there is no escape--that He whom M. Renan venerates with a
+sincerity which no one can doubt as the purest and greatest of moral
+reformers, did claim power from God to work miracles--is harmonised
+with the assumption that the claim could not possibly have been a true
+one.
+
+M. Renan professes to give an historical account of the way in which
+the deepest, purest, most enduring religious principles known among men
+were, not merely found out and announced, but propagated and impressed
+upon the foremost and most improved portions of mankind, by the power
+of a single character. It is impossible, without speaking of Jesus of
+Nazareth as Christians are used to do, to speak of His character and of
+the results of His appearance in loftier terms than this professed
+unbeliever in His Divine claims. But when the account is drawn out in
+detail, of a cause alleged to be sufficient to produce such effects,
+the apparent inadequacy of it is most startling. When we think of what
+Christianity is and has done, and that, in M. Renan's view, Christ, the
+Christ whom he imagines and describes, is all in all to Christianity,
+and then look to what he conceives to have been the original spring and
+creative impulse of its achievements, the first feeling is that no
+shifts that belief has sometimes been driven to, to keep within the
+range of the probable, are greater than those accepted by unbelief, in
+its most enlightened and reflecting representations. To suppose such an
+one as M. Renan paints, changing the whole course of history,
+overturning and converting the world, and founding the religion which
+M. Renan thinks the lasting religion of mankind, involves a force upon
+our imagination and reason to which it is not easy to find a parallel.
+
+His view is that a Galilean peasant, in advance of his neighbours and
+countrymen only in the purity, force, and singleness of purpose with
+which he realised the highest moral truths of Jewish religious wisdom,
+first charming a few simple provincials by the freshness and native
+beauty of his lessons, was then led on, partly by holy zeal against
+falsehood and wickedness, partly by enthusiastic delusions as to his
+own mission and office, to attack the institutions of Judaism, and
+perished in the conflict--and that this was the cause why Christianity
+and Christendom came to be and exist. This is the explanation which a
+great critical historian, fully acquainted with the history of other
+religions, presents, as a satisfactory one, of a phenomenon so
+astonishing and unique as that of a religion which has suited itself
+with undiminished vitality to the changes, moral, social, and
+political, which have marked the eighteen centuries of European
+history. There have been other enthusiasts for goodness and truth, more
+or less like the character which M. Renan draws in his book, but they
+have never yet founded a universal religion, or one which had the
+privilege of perpetual youth and unceasing self-renovation. There have
+been other great and imposing religions, commanding the allegiance for
+century after century of millions of men; but who will dare assert that
+any of these religions, that of Sakya-Mouni, of Mahomet, or that of the
+Vedas, could possibly be the religion, or satisfy the religious ideas
+and needs, of the civilised West?
+
+When M. Renan comes to detail he is as strangely insensible to what seem
+at first sight the simplest demands of probability. As it were by a sort
+of reaction to the minute realising of particulars which has been in
+vogue among some Roman Catholic writers, M. Renan realises too--realises
+with no less force and vividness, and, according to his point of view,
+with no less affectionate and tender interest. He popularises the
+Gospels; but not for a religious set of readers--nor, we must add, for
+readers of thought and sense, whether interested for or against
+Christianity, but for a public who study life in the subtle and highly
+wrought novels of modern times. He appeals from what is probable to
+those representations of human nature which aspire to pass beyond the
+conventional and commonplace, and especially he dwells on neglected and
+unnoticed examples of what is sweet and soft and winning. But it is hard
+to recognise the picture he has drawn in the materials out of which he
+has composed it. The world is tolerably familiar with them. If there is
+a characteristic, consciously or unconsciously acknowledged in the
+Gospel records, it is that of the gravity, the plain downright
+seriousness, the laborious earnestness, impressed from first to last on
+the story. When we turn from these to his pages it is difficult to
+exaggerate the astounding impression which his epithets and descriptions
+have on the mind. We are told that there is a broad distinction between
+the early Galilean days of hope in our Lord's ministry, and the later
+days of disappointment and conflict; and that if we look, we shall find
+in Galilee the "_fin et joyeux moraliste_," full of a "_conversation
+pleine de gaieté et de charme_," of "_douce gaieté et aimables
+plaisanteries_," with a "_prédication suave et douce, toute pleine de la
+nature et du parfum des champs_," creating out of his originality of
+mind his "_innocents aphorismes_," and the "_genre d'élicieux_" of
+parabolic teaching; "_le charmant docteur qui pardonnait à tous pourvu
+qu'on l'aimât_." He lived in what was then an earthly paradise, in "_la
+joyeuse Galilée_" in the midst of the "_nature ravissante_" which gave
+to everything about the Sea of Galilee "_un tour idyllique et
+charmant_." So the history of Christianity at its birth is a
+"_délicieuse pastorale_" an "_idylle_," a "_milieu enivrant_" of joy and
+hope. The master was surrounded by a "_bande de joyeux enfants_," a
+"_troupe gaie et vagabonde_," whose existence in the open air was a
+"perpetual enchantment." The disciples were "_ces petits comités de
+bonnes gens_," very simple, very credulous, and like their country full
+of a "_sentiment gai et tendre de la vie_," and of an "_imagination
+riante_." Everything is spoken of as "delicious"--"_délicieuse
+pastorale," "délicieuse beauté," "délicieuses sentences," "délicieuse
+théologie d'amour_." Among the "tender and delicate souls of the
+North"--it is not quite thus that Josephus describes the Galileans--was
+set up an "_aimable communisme_." Is it possible to imagine a more
+extravagant distortion than the following, both in its general effect
+and in the audacious generalisation of a very special incident, itself
+inaccurately conceived of?--
+
+    Il parcourait ainsi la Galilée au milieu _d'une fête perpétuelle_.
+    Il se servait d'une mule, monture en Orient si bonne et si sûre,
+    et dont le grand oeil noir, ombragé de longs cils, a beaucoup de
+    douceur. Ses disciples déployarent quelquefois autour de lui une
+    pompe rustique, dont leurs vêtements, tenant lieu de tapis,
+    faisaient les frais. Ils les mettaient sur la mule qui le portait,
+    ou les étendaient à terre sur son passage.
+
+History has seen strange hypotheses; but of all extravagant notions,
+that one that the world has been conquered by what was originally an
+idyllic gipsying party is the most grotesque. That these "_petits
+comités de bonnes gens_" though influenced by a great example and
+wakened out of their "delicious pastoral" by a heroic death, should
+have been able to make an impression on Judaean faith, Greek intellect,
+and Roman civilisation, and to give an impulse to mankind which has
+lasted to this day, is surely one of the most incredible hypotheses
+ever accepted, under the desperate necessity of avoiding an unwelcome
+alternative.
+
+M. Renan is willing to adopt everything in the Gospel history except
+what is miraculous. If he is difficult to satisfy as to the physical
+possibility or the proof of miracles, at least he is not hard to
+satisfy on points of moral likelihood; and he draws on his ample power
+of supposing the combination of moral opposites in order to get rid of
+the obstinate and refractory supernatural miracle. To some extent,
+indeed, he avails himself of that inexhaustible resource of unlimited
+guessing, by means of which he reverses the whole history, and makes it
+take a shape which it is hard to recognise in its original records. The
+feeding of the five thousand, the miracle described by all the four
+Evangelists, is thus curtly disposed of:--"Il se retira au désert.
+Beaucoup de monde l'y suivit. _Grâce à une extrème frugalité_ la troupe
+sainte y vécut; _on crut naturellement_ voir en cela un miracle." This
+is all he has to say. But miracles are too closely interwoven with the
+whole texture of the Gospel history to be, as a whole, thus disposed
+of. He has, of course, to admit that miracles are so mixed up with it
+that mere exaggeration is not a sufficient account of them. But be bids
+us remember that the time was one of great credulity, of slackness and
+incapacity in dealing with matters of evidence, a time when it might be
+said that there was an innocent disregard of exact and literal truth
+where men's souls and affections were deeply interested. But, even
+supposing that this accounted for a belief in certain miracles growing
+up--which it does not, for the time was not one of mere childlike and
+uninquiring belief, but was as perfectly familiar as we are with the
+notion of false claims to miraculous power which could not stand
+examination--still this does not meet the great difficulty of all, to
+which he is at last brought. It is undeniable that our Lord professed
+to work miracles. They were not merely attributed to Him by those who
+came after Him. If we accept in any degree the Gospel account, He not
+only wrought miracles, but claimed to do so; and M. Renan admits
+it--that is, he admits that the highest, purest, most Divine person
+ever seen on earth (for all this he declares in the most unqualified
+terms) stooped to the arts of Simon Magus or Apollonius of Tyana. He
+was a "thaumaturge"--"tard et à contre-coeur"--"avec une sorte de
+mauvaise humeur"--"en cachette"--"malgré lui"--"sentant le vanité de
+l'opinion"; but still a "thaumaturge." Moreover, He was so almost of
+necessity; for M. Renan holds that without the support of an alleged
+supernatural character and power, His work must have perished.
+Everything, to succeed and be realised, must, we are told, be fortified
+with something of alloy. We are reminded of the "loi fatale qui
+condamne l'idée à déchoir dès qu'elle cherche à convertir les hommes."
+"Concevoir de bien, en efifet, ne suffit pas; il faut le faire réussir
+parmi les hommes. Pour cela, des voies moins pures sont nécessaires."
+If the Great Teacher had kept to the simplicity of His early lessons,
+He would have been greater, but "the truth would not have been
+promulgated." "He had to choose between these two alternatives, either
+renouncing his mission or becoming a 'thaumaturge.'" The miracles
+"were a violence done to him by his age, a concession which was wrung
+from him by a passing necessity." And if we feel startled at such a
+view, we are reminded that we must not measure the sincerity of
+Orientals by our own rigid and critical idea of veracity; and that
+"such is the weakness of the human mind, that the best causes are not
+usually won but by bad reasons," and that the greatest of discoverers
+and founders have only triumphed over their difficulties "by daily
+taking account of men's weakness and by not always giving the true
+reasons of the truth."
+
+    L'histoire est impossible si l'on n'admet hautement qu'il y a pour
+    la sincerite plusieurs mesures. Toutes les grandes choses se font
+    par le peuple, or on ne conduit pas le peuple qu'en se prétant à
+    ses idées. Le philosophe, qui sachant cela, s'isole et se
+    retranche dans sa noblesse, est hautement louable. Mais celui qui
+    prend l'humanité avec ses illusions et cherche à agir sur elle et
+    avec elle, ne saurait être blamé. César savait fort bien qu'il
+    n'était pas fils de Vénus; la France ne serait pas ce qu'elle est
+    si l'on n'avait cru mille ans à la sainte ampoule de Reims. Il
+    nous est facile à nous autres, impuissants que nous sommes,
+    d'appeler cela mensonge, et fiers de notre timide honnêteté, de
+    traiter avec dédain les héros qui out accepté dans d'autres
+    conditions la lutte de la vie. Quand nous aurons fait avec nos
+    scrupules ce qu'ils firent avec leurs mensonges, nous aurons le
+    droit d'être pour eux sévères.
+
+Now let M. Renan or any one else realise what is involved, on his
+supposition, not merely, as he says, of "illusion or madness," but of
+wilful deceit and falsehood, in the history of Lazarus, even according
+to his lame and hesitating attempt to soften it down and extenuate it;
+and then put side by side with it the terms in which M. Renan has
+summed up the moral greatness of Him of whom he writes:--
+
+    La foi, l'enthousiasme, la constance de la première génération
+    chrétienne ne s'expliquent qu'en supposant à l'origine de tout le
+    mouvement un homme de proportions colossales.... Cette sublime
+    personne, qui chaque jour préside encore au destin du monde, il
+    est permis de l'appeler divine, non en ce sens que Jésus ait
+    absorbé tout le divin, mais en ce sens que Jésus est l'individu
+    qui a fait faire à son espèce le plus grand pas vers le divin....
+    Au milieu de cette uniforme vulgarité, des colonnes s'élèvent vers
+    le ciel et attestent une plus noble destinée. Jésus est la plus
+    haute de ces colonnes qui montrent à l'homme d'où il vient et où
+    il doit tendre. En lui s'est condensé tout ce qu'il y a de bon et
+    d'élevé dans notre nature.... Quels que puissent être les
+    phénomènes inattendus de l'avenir, Jésus ne sera pas surpassé....
+    Tous les siècles proclameront qu'entre les fils des hommes il n'en
+    est pas né de plus grand que Jésus.
+
+And of such an one we are told that it is a natural and reasonable view
+to take, not merely that He claimed a direct communication with God,
+which disordered reason could alone excuse Him for claiming, but that
+He based His whole mission on a pretension to such supernatural powers
+as a man could not pretend to without being conscious that they were
+delusions. The conscience of that age as to veracity or imposture was
+quite clear on such a point. Jew and Greek and Roman would have
+condemned as a deceiver one who, not having the power, took on him to
+say that by the finger of God he could raise the dead. And yet to a
+conscience immeasurably above his age, it seems, according to M. Renan,
+that this might be done. It is absurd to say that we must not judge
+such a proceeding by the ideas of our more exact and truth-loving age,
+when it would have been abundantly condemned by the ideas recognised in
+the religion and civilisation of the first century.
+
+M. Renan repeatedly declares that his great aim is to save religion by
+relieving it of the supernatural. He does not argue; but instead of the
+old familiar view of the Great History, he presents an opposite theory
+of his own, framed to suit that combination of the revolutionary and
+the sentimental which just now happens to be in favour in the unbelieving
+schools. And this is the result: a representation which boldly invests
+its ideal with the highest perfections of moral goodness, strength, and
+beauty, and yet does not shrink from associating with it also--and
+that, too, as the necessary and inevitable condition of success--a
+deliberate and systematic willingness to delude and insensibility to
+untruth. This is the religion and this is the reason which appeals to
+Christ in order to condemn Christianity.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+RENAN'S "LES APÔTRES"[14]
+
+
+  [14]
+  _Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre II.--_Les Apôtres_.
+  Par Ernest Renan. _Saturday Review_, 14th July 1866.
+
+In his recent volume, _Les Apôtres_, M. Renan has undertaken two tasks
+of very unequal difficulty. He accounts for the origin of the Christian
+belief and religion, and he writes the history of its first
+propagation. These are very different things, and to do one of them is
+by no means to do the other. M. Renan's historical sketch of the first
+steps of the Christian movement is, whatever we may think of its
+completeness and soundness, a survey of characters and facts, based on
+our ordinary experience of the ways in which men act and are
+influenced. Of course it opens questions and provokes dissent at every
+turn; but, after all, the history of a religion once introduced into
+the world is the history of the men who give it shape and preach it,
+who accept or oppose it. The spread and development of all religions
+have certain broad features in common, which admit of philosophical
+treatment simply as phenomena, and receive light from being compared
+with parallel examples of the same kind; and whether a man's historical
+estimate is right, and his picture accurate and true, depends on his
+knowledge of the facts, and his power to understand them and to make
+them understood. No one can dispute M. Renan's qualifications for being
+the historian of a religious movement. The study of religion as a
+phenomenon of human nature and activity has paramount attractions for
+him. His interest in it has furnished him with ample and varied
+materials for comparison and generalisation. He is a scholar and a man
+of learning, quick and wide in his sympathies, and he commands
+attention by the singular charm of his graceful and lucid style. When,
+therefore, he undertakes to relate how, as a matter of fact, the
+Christian Church grew up amid the circumstances of its first
+appearance, he has simply to tell the story of the progress of a
+religious cause; and this is a comparatively light task for him. But he
+also lays before us what he appears to consider an adequate account of
+the origin of the Christian belief. The Christian belief, it must be
+remembered, means, not merely the belief that there was such a person
+as he has described in his former, volume, but the belief that one who
+was crucified rose again from the dead, and lives for evermore above.
+It is in this belief that the Christian religion had its beginning;
+there is no connecting Christ and Christianity, except through the
+Resurrection. The origin, therefore, of the belief in the Resurrection,
+in the shape in which we have it, lies across M. Renan's path to
+account for; and neither the picture which he has drawn in his former
+volume, nor the history which he follows out in this, dispense him from
+the necessity of facing this essential and paramount element in the
+problem which he has to solve. He attempts to deal with this, the knot
+of the great question. But his attempt seems to us to disclose a more
+extraordinary insensibility to the real demands of the case, and to
+what we cannot help calling the pitiable inadequacy of his own
+explanation, than we could have conceived possible in so keen and
+practised a mind.
+
+The Resurrection, we repeat, bars the way in M. Renan's scheme for
+making an intelligible transition, from the life and character which he
+has sought to reproduce from the Gospels, to the first beginnings and
+preaching of Christianity. The Teacher, he says, is unique in wisdom,
+in goodness, in the height of his own moral stature and the Divine
+elevation of his aims. The religion is, with all abatements and
+imperfections, the only one known which could be the religion of
+humanity. After his portraiture of the Teacher, follows, naturally
+enough, as the result of that Teacher's influence and life, a religion
+of corresponding elevation and promise. The passage from a teaching
+such as M. Renan supposes to a religion such as he allows Christianity
+to be may be reasonably understood as a natural consequence of
+well-known causes, but for one thing--the interposition between the two
+of an alleged event which simply throws out all reasonings drawn from
+ordinary human experience. From the teaching and life of Socrates
+follow, naturally enough, schools of philosophy, and an impulse which
+has affected scientific thought ever since. From the preaching and life
+of Mahomet follows, equally naturally, the religion of Islam. In each
+case the result is seen to be directly and distinctly linked on to the
+influences which gave it birth, and nothing more than these influences
+is wanted, or makes any claim, to account for it. So M. Renan holds
+that all that is needed to account for Christianity is such a
+personality and such a career as he has described in his last volume.
+But the facts will not bend to this. Christianity hangs on to Christ
+not merely as to a Person who lived and taught and died, but as to a
+Person who rose again from death. That is of the very essence of its
+alleged derivation from Christ. It knows Christ only as Christ risen;
+the only reason of its own existence that it recognises is the
+Resurrection. The only claim the Apostles set forth for preaching to
+the world is that their Master who was crucified was alive once more.
+Every one knows that this was the burden of all their words, the
+corner-stone of all their work. We may believe them or not. We may take
+Christianity or leave it. But we cannot derive Christianity from
+Christ, without meeting, as the bond which connects the two, the
+Resurrection. But for the Resurrection, M. Renan's scheme might be
+intelligible. A Teacher unequalled for singleness of aim and nobleness
+of purpose lives and dies, and leaves the memory and the leaven of His
+teaching to disciples, who by them, even though in an ill-understood
+shape, and with incomparably inferior qualities themselves, purify and
+elevate the religious ideas and feelings of mankind. If that were all,
+if there were nothing but the common halo of the miraculous which is
+apt to gather about great names, the interpretation might be said to be
+coherent. But a theory of Christianity cannot neglect the most
+prominent fact connected with its beginning. It is impossible to leave
+it out of the account, in judging both of the Founder and of those whom
+his influence moulded and inspired.
+
+M. Renan has to account for the prominence given to the Resurrection in
+the earliest Christian teaching, without having recourse to the
+supposition of conscious imposture and a deliberate conspiracy to
+deceive; for such a supposition would not harmonise either with the
+portrait he has drawn of the Master, or with his judgment of the
+seriousness and moral elevation of the men who, immeasurably inferior
+as they were to Him, imbibed His spirit, and represented and
+transmitted to us His principles. And this is something much more than
+can be accounted for by the general disposition of the age to assume
+the supernatural and the miraculous. The way in which the Resurrection
+is circumstantially and unceasingly asserted, and made on every
+occasion and from the first the foundation of everything, is something
+very different from the vague legends which float about of kings or
+saints whom death has spared, or from a readiness to see the direct
+agency of heaven in health or disease. It is too precise, too
+matter-of-fact, too prosaic in the way in which it is told, to be
+resolved into ill-understood dreams and imaginations. The various
+recitals show little care to satisfy our curiosity, or to avoid the
+appearance of inconsistency in detail; but nothing can be more removed
+from vagueness and hesitation than their definite positive statements.
+It is with them that the writer on Christianity has to deal.
+
+M. Renan's method is--whilst of course not believing them, yet not
+supposing conscious fraud--to treat these records as the description of
+natural, unsought visions on the part of people who meant no harm, but
+who believed what they wished to believe. They are the story of a great
+mistake, but a mistake proceeding simply, in the most natural way in
+the world, from excess of "idealism" and attachment. Unaffected by the
+circumstance that there never were narratives less ideal, and more
+straightforwardly real--that they seem purposely framed to be a
+contrast to professed accounts of visions, and to exclude the
+possibility of their being confounded with such accounts; and that the
+alleged numbers who saw, the alleged frequency and repetition and
+variation of the instances, and the alleged time over which the
+appearances extended, and after which they absolutely ceased, make the
+hypothesis of involuntary and undesigned allusions of regret and
+passion infinitely different from what it might be in the case of one
+or two persons, or for a transitory period of excitement and
+crisis--unaffected by such considerations, M. Renan proceeds to tell,
+in his own way, the story of what he supposes to have occurred,
+without, of course, admitting the smallest real foundation for what was
+so positively asserted, but with very little reproach or discredit to
+the ardent and undoubting assertors. He begins with a statement which
+is meant to save the character of the Teacher. "Jesus, though he spoke
+unceasingly of resurrection, of new life, had never said quite clearly
+that he should rise again in the flesh." He says this with the texts
+before him, for he quotes them and classifies them in a note. But this
+is his point of departure, laid down without qualification. Yet if
+there is anything which the existing records do say distinctly, it is
+that Jesus Christ said over and over again that He should rise again,
+and that He fixed the time within which He should rise. M. Renan is not
+bound to believe them. But he must take them as he finds them; and on
+this capital point either we know nothing at all, and have no evidence
+to go upon, or the evidence is simply inverted by M. Renan's assertion.
+There may, of course, be reasons for believing one part of a man's
+evidence and disbelieving another; but there is nothing in this case
+but incompatibility with a theory to make this part of the evidence
+either more or less worthy of credit than any other part. What is
+certain is that it is in the last degree weak and uncritical to lay
+down, as the foundation and first pre-requisite of an historical view,
+a position which the records on which the view professes to be based
+emphatically and unambiguously contradict. Whatever we may think of it,
+the evidence undoubtedly is, if evidence there is at all, that Jesus
+Christ did say, though He could not get His disciples at the time to
+understand and believe Him, that He should rise again on the third day.
+What M. Renan had to do, if he thought the contrary, was not to assume,
+but to prove, that in these repeated instances in which they report His
+announcements, the Evangelists mistook or misquoted the words of their
+Master.
+
+He accepts, however, their statement that no one at first hoped that
+the words would be made good; and he proceeds to account for the
+extraordinary belief which, in spite of this original incredulity, grew
+up, and changed the course of things and the face of the world. We
+admire and respect many things in M. Renan; but it seems to us that his
+treatment of this matter is simply the _ne plus ultra_ of the
+degradation of the greatest of issues by the application to it of
+sentiment unworthy of a silly novel. In the first place, he lays down
+on general grounds that, though the disciples had confessedly given up
+all hope, it yet _was natural_ that they should expect to see their
+master alive again. "Mais I'enthousiasme et l'amour ne connaissent pas
+les situations sans issue." Do they not? Are death and separation such
+light things to triumph over that imagination finds it easy to cheat
+them? "Ils se jouent de l'impossible et, plutôt que d'abdiquer
+l'espérance, ils font violence à toute réalité." Is this an account of
+the world of fact or the world of romance? The disciples did not hope;
+but, says M. Renan, vague words about the future had dropped from their
+master, and these were enough to build upon, and to suggest that they
+would soon see him back. In vain it is said that in fact they did not
+expect it. "Une telle croyance était d'ailleurs si naturelle, que la
+foi des disciples aurait suffi pour la créer de toutes pièces." Was it
+indeed--in spite of Enoch and Elias, cases of an entirely different
+kind--so natural to think that the ruined leader of a crushed cause,
+whose hopeless followers had seen the last of him amid the lowest
+miseries of torment and scorn, should burst the grave?
+
+    Il devait arriver [he proceeds] pour Jésus ce qui arrive pour tous
+    les hommes qui ont captivé l'attention de leurs semblables. Le
+    monde, habitué a leur attribuer des vertus surhumaines, ne peut
+    admettre qu'ils aient subi la loi injuste, révoltante, inique, du
+    trépas commun.... La mort est chose si absurde quand elle frappe
+    l'homme de génie ou l'homme d'un grand coeur, que le peuple ne
+    croit pas à la possibilité d'une telle erreur de la nature. Les
+    héros ne meurent pas.
+
+The history of the world presents a large range of instances to test
+the singular assertion that death is so "absurd" that "the people"
+cannot believe that great and good men literally die. But would it be
+easy to match the strangeness of a philosopher and a man of genius
+gravely writing this down as a reason--not why, at the interval of
+centuries, a delusion should grow up--but why, on the very morrow of a
+crucifixion and burial, the disciples should have believed that all the
+dreadful work they had seen a day or two before was in very fact and
+reality reversed? We confess we do not know what human experience is if
+it countenances such a supposition as this.
+
+From this antecedent probability he proceeds to the facts. "The Sabbath
+day which followed the burial was occupied with these thoughts....
+Never was the rest of the Sabbath so fruitful." They all, the women
+especially, thought of him all day long in his bed of spices, watched
+over by angels; and the assurance grew that the wicked men who had
+killed him would not have their triumph, that he would not be left to
+decay, that he would be wafted on high to that Kingdom of the Father of
+which he had spoken. "Nous le verrons encore; nous entendrons sa voix
+charmante; c'est en vain qu'ils l'auront tué." And as, with the Jews, a
+future life implied a resurrection of the body, the shape which their
+hope took was settled. "Reconnaître que la mort pouvait être
+victorieuse de Jésus, de celui qui venait de supprimer son empire,
+c'était le comble de l'absurdité." It is, we suppose, irrelevant to
+remark that we find not the faintest trace of this sense of absurdity.
+The disciples, he says, had no choice between hopelessness and "an
+heroic affirmation"; and he makes the bold surmise that "un homme
+pénétrant aurait pu annoncer _dès le samedi_ que Jésus revivrait." This
+may be history, or philosophy, or criticism; what it is _not_ is the
+inference naturally arising from the only records we have of the time
+spoken of. But the force of historical imagination dispenses with the
+necessity of extrinsic support. "La petite société chrétienne, ce
+jour-là, opéra le véritable miracle: elle ressuscita Jésus en son coeur
+par l'amour intense qu'elle lui porta. Elle décida que Jésus ne
+mourrait pas." The Christian Church has done many remarkable things;
+but it never did anything so strange, or which so showed its power, as
+when it took that resolution.
+
+How was the decision, involuntary and unconscious, and guiltless of
+intentional deception, if we can conceive of such an attitude of mind,
+carried out? M. Renan might leave the matter in obscurity. But he sees
+his way, in spite of incoherent traditions and the contradictions which
+they present, to a "sufficient degree of probability." The belief in
+the Resurrection originated in an hallucination of the disordered fancy
+of Mary Magdalen, whose mind was thrown off its balance by her
+affection and sorrow; and, once suggested, the idea rapidly spread, and
+produced, through the Christian society, a series of corresponding
+visions, firmly believed to be real. But Mary Magdalen was the founder
+of it all:--
+
+    Elle eut, en ce moment solennel, une part d'action tout à fait
+    hors ligne. C'est elle qu'il faut suivre pas à pas; car elle
+    porta, ce jour-là, pendant une heure, tout le travail de la
+    conscience chrétienne; son témoignage décida la foi de
+    l'avenir.... La vision légère s'écarte et lui dit: "Ne me touche
+    pas!" Peu a peu l'ombre disparait. Mais le miracle de l'amour est
+    accompli. Ce que Céphas n'a pu faire, Marie l'a faite; elle a su
+    tirer la vie, la parole douce et pénétrante, du tombeau vide. Il
+    ne s'agit plus de conséquences à déduire ni de conjectures à
+    former. Marie a vu et entendu. La résurrection a son premier
+    témoin immédiat.
+
+He proceeds to criticise the accounts which ascribe the first vision to
+others; but in reality Mary Magdalen, he says, has done most, after the
+great Teacher, for the foundation of Christianity. "Queen and patroness
+of idealists," she was able to "impose upon all the sacred vision of
+her impassioned soul." All rests upon her first burst of entbusiasm,
+which gave the signal and kindled the faith of others. "Sa grande
+affirmation de femme, 'il est ressuscité,' a été la base de la foi de
+l'humanité":--
+
+    Paul ne parle pas de la vision de Marie et reporte tout l'honneur
+    de la première apparition sur Pierre. Mais cette expression est
+    très~inexacte. Pierre ne vit que le caveau vide, le suaire et le
+    linceul. Marie seule aima assez pour dépasser la nature et faire
+    revivre le fantome du maitre exquis. Dans ces sortes de crises
+    merveilleuses, voir après les autres n'est rien; tout le mérite
+    est de voir pour la première fois; car les autres modèlent ensuite
+    leur vision sur le type reçu. C'est le propre des belles
+    organisations de concevoir l'image promptement, avec justesse et
+    par une sorte de sens intime du dessin. La gloire de la
+    résurrection appartient donc à Marie de Magdala. Après Jésus,
+    c'est Marie qui a le plus fait pour la fondation du Christianisme.
+    L'ombre créée par les sens délicats de Madeleine plane encore sur
+    le monde.... Loin d'ici, raison impuissante! Ne va pas appliquer
+    une froide analyse à ce chef-d'oeuvre de l'idéalisme et de
+    l'amour. Si la sagesse renonce à consoler cette pauvre race
+    humaine, trahie par le sort, laisse la folie tenter l'aventure. Où
+    est le sage qui a donné au monde autant de joie, que la possédée
+    Marie de Magdala?
+
+He proceeds to describe, on the same supposition, the other events of
+the day, which he accepts as having in a certain very important sense
+happened, though, of course, only in the sense which excludes their
+reality. No doubt, for a series of hallucinations, anything will do in
+the way of explanation. The scene of the evening was really believed to
+have taken place as described, though it was the mere product of chance
+noises and breaths of air on minds intently expectant; and we are
+bidden to remember "that in these decisive hours a current of wind, a
+creaking window, an accidental rustle, settle the belief of nations for
+centuries." But at any rate it was a decisive hour:--
+
+    Tels furent les incidents de ce jour qui a fixé le sort de
+    l'humanité. L'opinion que Jésus était ressuscité s'y fonda d'une
+    manière irrévocable. La secte, qu'on avait cru éteindre en tuant
+    le maître, fut dès lors assurée d'un immense avenir.
+
+We are willing to admit that Christian writers have often spoken
+unreally and unsatisfactorily enough in their comments on this subject.
+But what Christian comment, hard, rigid, and narrow in its view of
+possibilities, ever equalled this in its baselessness and supreme
+absence of all that makes a view look like the truth? It puts the most
+extravagant strain on documents which, truly or falsely, but at any
+rate in the most consistent and uniform manner, assert something
+different. What they assert in every conceivable form, and with
+distinct detail, are facts; it is not criticism, but mere arbitrary
+license, to say that all these stand for visions. The issue of truth or
+falsehood is intelligible; the middle supposition of confusion and
+mistake in that which is the basis of everything, and is definitely and
+in such varied ways repeated, is trifling and incredible. We may
+disbelieve, if we please, St. Paul's enumeration of the appearances
+after the Resurrection; but to resolve it into a series of visions is
+to take refuge in the most unlikely of guesses. And, when we take into
+view the whole of the case--not merely the life and teaching out of
+which everything grew, but the aim and character of the movement which
+ensued, and the consequences of it, long tested and still continuing,
+to the history and development of mankind--we find it hard to measure
+the estimate of probability which is satisfied with the supposition
+that the incidents of one day of folly and delusion irrevocably decided
+the belief of ages, and the life and destiny of millions. Without the
+belief in the Resurrection there would have been no Christianity; if
+anything may be laid down as certain, this may. We should probably
+never have even heard of the great Teacher; He would not have been
+believed in, He would not have been preached to the world; the impulse
+to conversion would have been wanting; and all that was without
+parallel good and true and fruitful in His life would have perished,
+and have been lost in Judaea. And the belief in the Resurrection M.
+Renan thinks due to an hour of over-excited fancy in a woman agonized
+by sorrow and affection. When we are presented with an hypothesis on
+the basis of intrinsic probability, we cannot but remember that the
+power of delusion and self-deception, though undoubtedly shown in very
+remarkable instances, must yet be in a certain proportion to what it
+originates and produces, and that it is controlled by the numerous
+antagonistic influences of the world. Crazy women have founded
+superstitions; but we cannot help thinking that it would be more
+difficult than M. Renan supposes for crazy women to found a world-wide
+religion for ages, branching forth into infinite forms, and tested by
+its application to all varieties of civilisation, and to national and
+personal character. M. Renan points to La Salette. But the assumption
+would be a bold one that the La Salette people could have invented a
+religion for Christendom which would stand the wear of eighteen
+centuries, and satisfy such different minds. Pious frauds, as he says,
+may have built cathedrals. But you must take Christianity for what it
+has proved itself to be in its hard and unexampled trial. To start an
+order, a sect, an institution, even a local tradition or local set of
+miracles, on foundations already laid, is one thing; it is not the same
+to be the spring of the most serious and the deepest of moral movements
+for the improvement of the world, the most unpretending and the most
+careless of all outward form and show, the most severely searching and
+universal and lasting in its effects on mankind. To trace that back to
+the Teacher without the intervention of the belief in the Resurrection
+is manifestly impossible. We know what He is said to have taught; we
+know what has come of that teaching in the world at large; but if the
+link which connects the two be not a real one, it is vain to explain it
+by the dreams of affection. It was not a matter of a moment or an hour,
+but of days and weeks continually; not the assertion of one imaginative
+mourner or two, but of a numerous and variously constituted body of
+people. The story, if it was not true, was not delusion, but imposture.
+We certainly cannot be said to know much of what happens in the genesis
+of religions. But that between such a teacher and such teaching there
+should intervene such a gigantic falsehood, whether imposture or
+delusion, is unquestionably one of the hardest violations of
+probability conceivable, as well as one of the most desperate
+conclusions as regards the capacity of mankind for truth. Few thoughts
+can be less endurable than that the wisest and best of our race, men of
+the soberest and most serious tempers, and most candid and judicial
+minds, should have been the victims and dupes of the mad affection of a
+crazy Magdalen, of "ces touchantes démoniaques, ces pécheresses
+converties, ces vraies fondatrices du Christianisme." M. Renan shrinks
+from solving such a question by the hypothesis of conscious fraud. To
+solve it by sentiment is hardly more respectful either to the world or
+to truth.
+
+We have left ourselves no room to speak of the best part of M. Renan's
+new volume, his historical comment on the first period of Christianity.
+We do not pretend to go along with him in his general principles of
+judgment, or in many of his most important historical conclusions. But
+here he is, what he is not in the early chapters, on ground where his
+critical faculty comes fairly into play. He is, we think, continually
+paradoxical and reckless in his statements; and his book is more
+thickly strewn than almost any we know with half-truths, broad axioms
+which require much paring down to be of any use, but which are made by
+him to do duty for want of something stronger. But, from so keen and so
+deeply interested a writer, it is our own fault if we do not learn a
+good deal. And we may study in its full development that curious
+combination, of which M. Renan is the most conspicuous example, of
+profound veneration for Christianity and sympathy with its most
+characteristic aspects, with the scientific impulse to destroy in the
+public mind the belief in its truth.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+M. RENAN'S HIBBERT LECTURES[15]
+
+
+  [15]
+  _Guardian_, 14th April 1880.
+
+I
+
+The object of M. Renan's lectures at St. George's Hall is, as we
+understand him, not merely to present a historical sketch of the
+influence of Rome on the early Church, but to reconcile the historical
+imagination with the results of his own and kindred speculations on the
+origin of Christianity. He has, with a good faith which we do not
+question, investigated the subject and formed his conclusions upon it.
+He on the present occasion assumes these investigations, and that he,
+at any rate, is satisfied with their result. He hardly pretends to
+carry the mixed popular audience whom he addresses into any real
+inquiry into the grounds on which he has satisfied himself that the
+received account of Christianity is not the true one. But he is aware
+that all minds are more or less consciously impressed with the broad
+difficulty that, after all attempts to trace the origin of Christianity
+to agencies and influences of well-understood human character, the
+disproportion between causes and effects still continues to appear
+excessive. The great Christian tradition with its definite beliefs
+about the conditions of man's existence, which has shaped the fortunes
+and determined the future of mankind on earth, is in possession of the
+world as much as the great tradition of right and wrong, or of the
+family, or of the State. How did it get there? It is most astonishing
+that it should have done so, what is the account of it? Of course
+people may inquire into this question as they may inquire into the
+basis of morality, or the origin of the family or the State. But here,
+as on those subjects, reason, and that imagination which is one of the
+forces of reason, by making the mind duly sensible of the magnitude of
+ideas and alternatives, are exacting. M. Renan's task is to make the
+purely human origin of Christianity, its origin in the circumstances,
+the beliefs, the ideas, and the moral and political conditions of the
+first centuries, seem to us _natural_--as natural in the history of the
+world as other great and surprising events and changes--as natural as
+the growth and the fall of the Roman Empire, or as the Reformation, or
+the French Revolution. He is well qualified to sound the depths of his
+undertaking and to meet its heavy exigencies. With a fuller knowledge
+of books, and a closer familiarity than most men with the thoughts and
+the events of the early ages, with a serious value for the idea of
+religion as such, and certainly with no feeble powers of recalling the
+past and investing it with colour and life, he has to show how these
+things can be--how a religion with such attributes as he freely
+ascribes to the Gospel, so grand, so pure, so lasting, can have sprung
+up not merely _in_ but _from_ a most corrupt and immoral time, and can
+have its root in the most portentous and impossible of falsehoods. It
+must be said to be a bold undertaking.
+
+M. Renan has always aimed at doing justice to what he assailed;
+Christians, who realise what they believe, will say that he patronises
+their religion, and naturally they resent such patronage. Such candour
+adds doubtless to the literary effect of his method; but it is only due
+to him to acknowledge the fairness of his admissions. He starts with
+the declaration that there never was a nobler moment in human history
+than the beginnings of the Christian Church. It was the "most heroic
+episode in the annals of mankind." "Never did man draw forth from his
+bosom more devotion, more love of the ideal, than in the 150 years
+which elapsed between the sweet Galilean vision and the death of Marcus
+Aurelius." It was not only that the saints were admirable and beautiful
+in their lives; they had the secret of the future, and laid down the
+lines on which the goodness and hope of the coming world were to move."
+Never was the religious conscience more eminently creative, never did
+it lay down with more authority the law of future ages."
+
+Now, if this is not mere rhetoric, what does it come to? It means not
+merely that there was here a phenomenon, not only extraordinary but
+unique, in the development of human character, but that here was
+created or evolved what was to guide and form the religious ideas of
+mankind; here were the springs of what has reached through all the ages
+of expanding humanity to our own days, of what is best and truest and
+deepest and holiest. M. Renan, at any rate, does not think this an
+illusion of Christian prepossessions, a fancy picture of a mythic age
+of gold, of an unhistorical period of pure and primitive antiquity. Put
+this view of things by the side of any of the records or the literature
+of the time remaining to us; if not St. Paul's Epistles nor Tacitus nor
+Lucian, then Virgil and Horace and Cicero, or Seneca or Epictetus or
+Marcus Aurelius. Is it possible by any effort of imagination to body
+forth the links which can solidly connect the ideas which live and work
+and grow on one side, with the ideas which are represented by the facts
+and principles of the other side? Or is it any more possible to connect
+what we know of Christian ideas and convictions by a bond of natural
+and intelligible, if not necessary derivation, with what we know of
+Jewish ideas and Jewish habits of thought at the time in question? Yet
+that is the thing to be done, to be done rigorously, to be done clearly
+and distinctly, by those who are satisfied to find the impulses and
+faith which gave birth to Christianity amid the seething confusions of
+the time which saw its beginning; absolutely identical with those wild
+movements in origin and nature, and only by a strange, fortunate
+accident immeasurably superior to them.
+
+This question M. Renan has not answered; as far as we can see he has
+not perceived that it is the first question for him to answer, in
+giving a philosophical account of the history of Christianity. Instead,
+he tells us, and he is going still further to tell us, how Rome and its
+wonderful influences acted on Christianity, and helped to assure its
+victories. But, first of all, what is that Christianity, and whence did
+it come, which Rome so helped? It came, he says, from Judaism; "it was
+Judaism under its Christian form which Rome propagated without wishing
+it, yet with such mighty energy that from a certain epoch Romanism and
+Christianity became synonymous words"; it was Jewish monotheism, the
+religion the Roman hated and despised, swallowing up by its contrast
+all that was local, legendary, and past belief, and presenting one
+religious law to the countless nationalities of the Empire, which like
+itself was one, and like itself above all nationalities.
+
+This may all be true, and is partially true; but how did that hated and
+partial Judaism break through its trammels, and become a religion for
+all men, and a religion to which all men gathered? The Roman
+organisation was an admirable vehicle for Christianity; but the vehicle
+does not make that which it carries, or account for it. M. Renan's
+picture of the Empire abounds with all those picturesque details which
+he knows so well where to find, and knows so well, too, how to place in
+an interesting light. There were then, of course, conditions of the
+time more favourable to the Christian Church than would have been the
+conditions of other times. There was a certain increased liberty of
+thought, though there were also some pretty strong obstacles to it. M.
+Renan has Imperial proclivities, and reminds us truly enough that
+despotisms are sometimes more tolerant than democracies, and that
+political liberty is not the same as spiritual and mental freedom, and
+does not always favour it. It may be partially true, as he says, that
+"Virgil and Tibullus show that Roman harshness and cruelty were
+softening down"; that "equality and the rights of men were preached by
+the Stoics"; that "woman was more her own mistress, and slaves were
+better treated than in the days of Cato"; that "very humane and just
+laws were enacted under the very worst emperors; that Tiberius and Nero
+were able financiers"; that "after the terrible butcheries of the old
+centuries, mankind was crying with the voice of Virgil for peace and
+pity." A good many qualifications and abatements start up in our minds
+on reading these statements, and a good many formidable doubts suggest
+themselves, if we can at all believe what has come down to us of the
+history of these times. It is hard to accept quite literally the bold
+assertion that "love for the poor, sympathy with all men, almsgiving,
+were becoming virtues." But allow this as the fair and hopeful side of
+the Empire. Yet all this is a long way from accounting for the effects
+on the world of Christianity, even in the dim, vaporous form in which
+M. Renan imagines it, much more in the actual concrete reality in
+which, if we know anything, it appeared. "Christianity," he says,
+"responded to the cry for peace and pity of all weary and tender
+souls." No doubt it did; but what was it that responded, and what was
+its consolation, and whence was its power drawn? What was there in the
+known thoughts or hopes or motives of men at the time to furnish such a
+response? "Christianity," he says, "could only have been born and
+spread at a time when men had no longer a country"; "it was that
+explosion of social and religious ideas which became inevitable after
+Augustus had put an end to political struggles," after his policy had
+killed "patriotism." It is true enough that the first Christians,
+believing themselves subjects of an Eternal King and in view of an
+eternal world, felt themselves strangers and pilgrims in this; yet did
+the rest of the Roman world under the Caesars feel that they had no
+country, and was the idea of patriotism extinct in the age of Agricola?
+But surely the real question worth asking is, What was it amid the
+increasing civilisation and prosperous peace of Rome under the first
+Emperors which made these Christians relinquish the idea of a country?
+From whence did Christianity draw its power to set its followers in
+inflexible opposition to the intensest worship of the State that the
+world has ever known?
+
+To tell us the conditions under which all this occurred is not to tell
+us the cause of it. We follow with interest the sketches which M. Renan
+gives of these conditions, though it must be said that his
+generalisations are often extravagantly loose and misleading. We do
+indeed want to know more of those wonderful but hidden days which
+intervene between the great Advent, with its subsequent Apostolic age,
+and the days when the Church appears fully constituted and recognised.
+German research and French intelligence and constructiveness have done
+something to help us, but not much. But at the end of all such
+inquiries appears the question of questions, What was the beginning and
+root of it all? Christians have a reasonable answer to the question.
+There is none, there is not really the suggestion of one, in M. Renan's
+account of the connection of Christianity with the Roman world.
+
+
+II[16]
+
+  [16]
+  _Guardian_, 21st April 1880.
+
+M. Renan has pursued the line of thought indicated in his first
+lecture, and in his succeeding lectures has developed the idea that
+Christianity, as we know it, was born in Imperial Rome, and that in its
+visible form and active influence on the world it was the manifest
+product of Roman instincts and habits; it was the spirit of the Empire
+passing into a new body and accepting in exchange for political power,
+as it slowly decayed and vanished, a spiritual supremacy as unrivalled
+and as astonishing. The "Legend of the Roman Church--Peter and Paul,"
+"Rome the Centre in which Church Authority grew up," and "Rome the
+Capital of Catholicism," are the titles of the three lectures in which
+this thesis is explained and illustrated. A lecture on Marcus Aurelius,
+at the Royal Institution, though not one of the series, is obviously
+connected with it, and concludes M. Renan's work in England.
+
+Except the brilliant bits of writing which, judging from the full
+abstracts given in translation in the _Times_, appear to have been
+interspersed, and except the undoubting self-confidence and _aplomb_
+with which a historical survey, reversing the common ideas of mankind,
+was delivered, there was little new to be learned from M. Renan's
+treatment of his subject. Perhaps it may be described as the Roman
+Catholic theory of the rise of the Church, put in an infidel point of
+view. It is Roman Catholic in concentrating all interest, all the
+sources of influence and power in the Christian religion and Christian
+Church, from the first moment at Rome. But for Rome the Christian
+Church would not have existed. The Church is inconceivable without
+Rome, and Rome as the seat and centre of its spiritual activity.
+Everything else is forgotten. There were Christian Churches all over
+the Empire, in Syria, in Egypt, in Africa, in Asia Minor, in Gaul, in
+Greece. A great body of Christian literature, embodying the ideas and
+character of Christians all over the Empire, was growing up, and this
+was not Roman and had nothing to do with Rome; it was Greek as much as
+Latin, and local, not metropolitan, in its characteristics.
+Christianity was spreading here, there, and everywhere, slowly and
+imperceptibly as the tide comes in, or as cells multiply in the growing
+tissues of organised matter; it was spreading under its many distinct
+guides and teachers, and taking possession of the cities and provinces
+of the Empire. All this great movement, the real foundation of all that
+was to be, is overlooked and forgotten in the attention which is fixed
+on Rome and confined to it. As in the Roman Catholic view, M. Renan
+brings St. Paul and St. Peter together to Rome, to found that great
+Imperial Church in which the manifold and varied history of Christendom
+is merged and swallowed up. Only, of course, M. Renan brings them there
+as "fanatics" instead of Apostles and martyrs. We know something about
+St. Peter and St. Paul. We know them at any rate from their writings.
+In M. Renan's representation they stand opposed to one another as
+leaders of factions, to whose fierce hatreds and jealousies there is
+nothing comparable. "All the differences," he is reported to say,
+"which divide orthodox folks, heretics, schismatics, in our own day,
+are as nothing compared with the dissension between Peter and Paul." It
+is, as every one knows, no new story; but there it is in M. Renan in
+all its crudity, as if it were the most manifest and accredited of
+truths. M. Renan first brings St. Paul to Rome. "It was," he says, "a
+great event in the world's history, almost as pregnant with
+consequences as his conversion." How it was so M. Renan does not
+explain; but he brings St. Peter to Rome also, "following at the heels
+of St. Paul," to counteract and neutralise his influence. And who is
+this St. Peter? He represents the Jewish element; and what that element
+was at Rome M. Renan takes great pains to put before us. He draws an
+elaborate picture of the Jews and Jewish quarter of Rome--a "longshore
+population" of beggars and pedlars, with a Ghetto resembling the
+Alsatia of _The Fortunes of Nigel_, seething with dirt and fanaticism.
+These were St. Peter's congeners at Rome, whose ideas and claims,
+"timid trimmer" though he was, he came to Rome to support against the
+Hellenism and Protestantism of St. Paul. And at Rome they, both of
+them, probably, perished in Nero's persecution, and that is the history
+of the success of Christianity. "Only fanatics can found anything.
+Judaism lives on because of the intense frenzy of its prophets and
+annalists, Christianity by means of its martyrs."
+
+But a certain Clement arose after their deaths, to arrange a
+reconciliation between the fiercely antagonistic factions of St. Peter
+and St. Paul. How he harmonised them M. Renan leaves us to imagine; but
+he did reconcile them; he gathered in his own person the authority of
+the Roman Church; he lectured the Corinthian Church on its turbulence
+and insubordination; he anticipated, M. Renan remarked, almost in
+words, the famous saying of the French Archbishop of Rouen, "My clergy
+are my regiment, and they are drilled to obey like a regiment." On this
+showing, Clement might almost be described as the real founder of
+Christianity, of which neither St. Peter nor St. Paul, with their
+violent oppositions, can claim to be the complete representative; at
+any rate he was the first Pope, complete in all his attributes. And in
+accordance with this beginning M. Renan sees in the Roman Church,
+first, the centre in which Church authority grew up, and next, the
+capital of Catholicism. In Rome the congregation gave up its rights to
+its elders, and these rights the elders surrendered to the single ruler
+or Bishop. The creation of the Episcopate was eminently the work of
+Rome; and this Bishop of Rome caught the full spirit of the Caesar, on
+whose decay he became great; and troubling himself little about the
+deep questions which exercised the minds and wrung the hearts of
+thinkers and mystics, he made himself the foundation of order,
+authority, and subordination to all parts of the Imperial world.
+
+Such is M. Renan's explanation of the great march and triumph of the
+Christian Church. The Roman Empire, which we had supposed was the
+natural enemy of the Church, was really the founder of all that made
+the Church strong, and bequeathed to the Church its prerogatives and
+its spirit, and partly its machinery. We should hardly gather from this
+picture that there was, besides, a widespread Catholic Church, with its
+numerous centres of life and thought and teaching, and with very slight
+connection, in the early times, with the Church of the capital. And, in
+the next place, we should gather from it that there was little more in
+the Church than a powerful and strongly built system of centralised
+organisation and control; we should hardly suspect the existence of the
+real questions which interested or disturbed it; we should hardly
+suspect the existence of a living and all-engrossing theology, or the
+growth and energy in it of moral forces, or that the minds of
+Christians about the world were much more busy with the discipline of
+life, the teaching and meaning of the inspired words of Scripture, and
+the ever-recurring conflict with perverseness and error, than with
+their dependent connection on the Imperial Primacy of Rome, and the
+lessons they were to learn from it.
+
+Disguised as it may be, M. Renan's lectures represent not history, but
+scepticism as to all possibility of history. Pictures of a Jewish
+Ghetto, with its ragged mendicants smelling of garlic, in places where
+Christians have been wont to think of the Saints; ingenious
+explanations as to the way in which the "club" of the Christian Church
+surrendered its rights to a _bureau_ of its officers; exhortations to
+liberty and tolerance; side-glances at the contrasts of national gifts
+and destinies and futures in the first century and in the nineteenth;
+felicitous parallels and cunning epigrams, subtle combinations of the
+pathetic, the egotistical, and the cynical, all presented with calm
+self-reliance and in the most finished and distinguished of styles, may
+veil for the moment from the audience which such things amuse, and even
+interest, the hollowness which lies beneath. But the only meaning of
+the lectures is to point out more forcibly than ever that besides the
+obvious riddles of man's life there is one stranger and more appalling
+still--that a religion which M. Renan can never speak of without
+admiration and enthusiasm is based on a self-contradiction and deluding
+falsehood, more dreadful in its moral inconsistencies than the grave.
+
+We cannot help feeling that M. Renan himself is a true representative
+of that highly cultivated society of the Empire which would have
+crushed Christianity, and which Christianity, vanquished. He still owes
+something, and owns it, to what he has abandoned--"I am often tempted
+to say, as Job said, in our Latin version, _Etiam si occident me, in
+ipso sperabo_. But the next moment all is gone--all is but a symbol and
+a dream." There is no possibility of solving the religious problem. He
+relapses into profound disbelief of the worth and success of moral
+efforts after truth. His last word is an exhortation to tolerance for
+"fanatics," as the best mode of extinguishing them. "If, instead of
+leading _Polyeucte_ to punishment, the magistrate, with a smile and
+shake of the hand, had sent him home again, _Polyeucte_ would not have
+been caught offending again; perhaps, in his old age, he would even
+have laughed at his escapade, and would have become a sensible man." It
+is as obvious and natural in our days to dispose of such difficulties
+in this way with a smile and a sneer as it was in the first century
+with a shout--_"Christiani ad leones."_ But Corneille was as good a
+judge of the human heart as M. Renan. He had gauged the powers of faith
+and conviction; he certainly would have expected to find his
+_Polyeucte_ more obstinate.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+RENAN'S "SOUVENIRS D'ENFANCE"[17]
+
+
+  [17]
+  _Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse_. Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_,
+  18th July 1883.
+
+The sketches which M. Renan gives us of his early life are what we
+should have looked for from the writer of the _Vie de Jésus_. The story
+of the disintegration of a faith is supposed commonly to have something
+tragic about it. We expect it to be a story of heart-breaking
+disenchantments, of painful struggles, of fierce recoils against
+ancient beliefs and the teachers who bolstered them up; of indignation
+at having been so long deceived; of lamentation over years wasted in
+the service of falsehood. The confessions of St. Augustine, the
+biography of Blanco White, the letters of Lamennais, at least agree in
+the witness which they bear to the bitter pangs and anxieties amid
+which, in their case, the eventful change came about. Even Cardinal
+Newman's _Apologia_, self-restrained and severely controlled as it is,
+shows no doubtful traces of the conflicts and sorrows out of which he
+believed himself to have emerged to a calmer and surer light. But M.
+Renan's story is an idyl, not a tragedy. It is sunny, placid,
+contented. He calls his life the "_charmante promenade_" which the
+"cause of all good," whatever that may be, has granted him through the
+realities of existence. There are in it no storms of passion, no
+cruelties of circumstances, no deplorable mistakes, no complaints, no
+recriminations. His life flows on smoothly, peacefully, happily, with
+little of rapids and broken waters, gradually and in the most natural
+and inevitable way enlarging itself, moving in new and wider channels
+and with increased volume and force, but never detaching itself and
+breaking off from its beginnings. It is a spectacle which M. Renan, who
+has lived this life, takes a gentle pleasure in contemplating. He looks
+back on it with thankfulness, and also with amusement It makes a
+charming and complete picture. No part could be wanting without
+injuring the effect of the whole. It is the very ideal of the education
+of the Rousseau school--a child of nature, developing, amid the
+simplest and humblest circumstances of life, the finest gifts and most
+delicate graces of faith and reverence and purity--brought up by sages
+whose wisdom he could not in time help outrunning, but whose piety,
+sweetness, disinterestedness, and devoted labour left on his mind
+impressions which nothing could wear out; and at length, when the time
+came, passing naturally, and without passion or bitterness, from out of
+their faithful but too narrow discipline into a wider and ampler air,
+and becoming, as was fit, master and guide to himself, with light which
+they could not bear, and views of truth greater and deeper than they
+could conceive. But every stage of the progress, through the virtues of
+the teachers, and the felicitous disposition of the pupil, exhibits
+both in exactly the due relations in which each ought to be with the
+other, with none of the friction of rebellious and refractory temper on
+one side, or of unintelligent harshness on the other. He has nothing to
+regret in the schools through which he passed, in the preparations
+which he made there for the future, in the way in which they shaped his
+life. He lays down the maxim, "On ne doit jamais écrire que de ce qu'on
+aime." There is a serene satisfaction diffused through the book, which
+scarcely anything intervenes to break or disturb; he sees so much
+poetry in his life, so much content, so much signal and unlooked-for
+success, that he has little to tell except what is delightful and
+admirable. And then he is so certain that he is right: he can look down
+with so much good-humoured superiority on past and present, alike on
+what he calls "l'effroyable aventure du moyen âge," and on the march of
+modern society to the dead level of "Americanism." It need not be said
+that the story is told with all M. Renan's consummate charm of
+storytelling. All that it wants is depth of real feeling and
+seriousness--some sense of the greatness of what he has had to give up,
+not merely of its poetic beauty and tender associations. It hardly
+seems to occur to him that something more than his easy cheerfulness
+and his vivid historical imagination is wanted to solve for him the
+problems of the world, and that his gradual transition from the
+Catholicism of the seminary to the absolute rejection of the
+supernatural in religion does not, as he describes it, throw much light
+on the question of the hopes and destiny of mankind.
+
+The outline of his story is soon told. It is in general like that of
+many more who in France have broken away from religion. A clever
+studious boy, a true son of old Brittany--the most melancholy, the most
+tender, the most ardent, the most devout, not only of all French
+provinces, but of all regions in Europe--is passed on from the teaching
+of good, simple, hard-working country priests to the central
+seminaries, where the leaders of the French clergy are educated. He
+comes up a raw, eager, ignorant provincial, full of zeal for knowledge,
+full of reverence and faith, and first goes through the distinguished
+literary school of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, of which Dupanloup was
+the founder and the inspiring soul. Thence he passed under the more
+strictly professional discipline of St. Sulpice: first at the
+preparatory philosophical school at Issy, then to study scientific
+theology in the house of St. Sulpice itself at Paris. At St. Sulpice he
+showed special aptitudes for the study of Hebrew, in which he was
+assisted and encouraged by M. le Hir, "the most remarkable person," in
+his opinion, "whom the French clergy has produced in our days," a
+"savant and a saint," who had mastered the results of German criticism
+as they were found in the works of Gesenius and Ewald. On his faith all
+this knowledge had not made the faintest impression; but it was this
+knowledge which broke down M. Renan's, and finally led to his retiring
+from St. Sulpice. On the one side was the Bible and Catholic theology,
+carefully, scientifically, and consistently taught at St. Sulpice; on
+the other were the exegesis and the historical criticism of the German
+school. He came at length to the conclusion that the two are
+incompatible; that there was but a choice of alternatives; and purely
+on the ground of historical criticism, he says, not on any abstract
+objections to the supernatural, or to miracles, or to Catholic dogma,
+he gave up revealed religion. He gave it up not without regrets at the
+distress caused to friends, and at parting with much that was endeared
+to him by old associations, and by intrinsic beauty and value; but, as
+far as can be judged, without any serious sense of loss. He spent some
+time in obscurity, teaching, and studying laboriously, and at length
+beginning to write. Michel Lévy, the publisher, found him out, and
+opened to him a literary career, and in due time he became famous. He
+has had the ambiguous honour of making the Bible an object of such
+interest to French readers as it never was before, at the cost of
+teaching them to find in it a reflection of their own characteristic
+ways of looking at life and the world. It is not an easy thing to do
+with such a book as the Bible; but he has done it.
+
+As a mere history of a change of convictions, the _Souvenirs_ are
+interesting, but hardly of much importance. They are written with a
+kind of Epicurean serenity and dignity, avoiding all exaggeration and
+violence, profuse in every page in the delicacies and also in the
+reticences of respect, not too serious to exclude the perpetual
+suggestion of a well-behaved amused irony, not too much alive to the
+ridiculous and the self-contradictory to forget the attitude of
+composure due to the theme of the book. He warns his readers at the
+outset that they must not look for a stupid literalness in his account.
+"Ce qu'on dit de soi est toujours poésie"--the reflection of states of
+mind and varying humours, not the exact details of fact. "Tout est vrai
+dans ce petit volume, mais non de ce genre de verité qui est requis
+pour une _Biographie universelle_. Bien des choses ont été mises, afin
+qu'on sourie; si l'usage l'eût permis, j'aurais dû écrire plus d'une
+fois à la marge--_cum grano salis_". It is candid to warn us thus to
+read a little between the lines; but it is a curious and unconscious
+disclosure of his characteristic love of a mixture of the misty and the
+clear. The really pleasant part of it is his account, which takes up
+half the volume, of Breton ways and feelings half a century ago, an
+account which exactly tallies with the pictures of them in Souvestre's
+writings; and the kindliness and justice with which he speaks of his
+old Catholic and priestly teachers, not only in his boyish days at
+Tréguier, but in his seminary life in Paris. His account of this
+seminary life is unique in its picturesque vividness. He describes how,
+at St. Nicolas, under the fiery and irresistible Dupanloup, whom he
+speaks of with the reserved courtesy due to a distinguished person whom
+he much dislikes, his eager eyes were opened to the realities of
+literature, and to the subtle powers of form and style in writing,
+which have stood him in such stead, and have been the real secret of
+his own success.
+
+    Le monde s'ouvrit pour moi. Malgré sa prétention d'être un asile
+    fermé aux bruits du dehors, Saint-Nicolas était a cette époque la
+    maison la plus brillante et la plus mondaine. Paris y entrait à
+    pleins bords par les portes et les fenêtres, Paris tout entier,
+    moins la corruption, je me hâte de le dire, Paris avec ses
+    petitesses et ses grandeurs, ses hardiesses et ses chiffons, sa
+    force révolutionnaire et ses mollesses flasques. Mes vieux prêtres
+    de Bretagne savaient bien mieux les mathématiques et le latin que
+    mes nouveaux maîtres; mais ils vivaient dans des catacombes sans
+    lumière et sans air. Ici, l'atmosphère du siècle circulait
+    librement.... Au bout de quelque temps une chose tout à fait
+    inconnue m'etait révélée. Les mots, talent, éclat, réputation
+    eurent un sens pour moi. J'étais perdu pour l'idéal modeste que
+    mes anciens maîtres m'avaient inculqué.
+
+And he describes how Dupanloup brought his pupils perpetually into
+direct relations with himself and communicated to them something of his
+own enthusiasm. He gained the power over their hearts which a great
+general gains over his soldiers. His approval, his interest in a man,
+were the all-absorbing object, the all-sufficient reward; the one
+punishment feared was dismissal, always inflicted with courtesy and
+tact, from the honour and the joy of serving under him:--
+
+    Adoré de ses élèves, M. Dupanloup n'était pas toujours agréable à
+    ces collaborateurs. On m'a dit que, plus tard, dans son diocèse,
+    les choses se passèrent de la même manière, qu'il fut toujours
+    plus aimé de ses laïques que de ses prêtres. Il est certain qu'il
+    écrasait tout autour de lui. Mais sa violence même nous attachait;
+    car nous sentions que nous étions son but unique. Ce qu'il était,
+    c'était un éveilleur incomparable; pour tirer de chacun de ses
+    élèves la somme de ce qu'il pouvait donner, personne ne l'égalait.
+    Chacun de ses deux cents élèves existait distinct dans sa pensée;
+    il était pour chacun d'eux l'excitateur toujours présent, le motif
+    de vivre et de travailler. Il croyait au talent et en faisait la
+    base de la foi. Il répétait souvent que l'homme vaut en proportion
+    de sa faculté d'admirer. Son admiration n'était pas toujours assez
+    éclairée par la science; mais elle venait d'une grande chaleur
+    d'âme et d'un coeur vraiment possédé de l'amour du beau.... Les
+    défauts de l'éducation qu'il donnait étaient les défauts même de
+    son esprit. Il était trop peu rationnel, trop peu scientifique. On
+    eût dit que ses deux cents élèves étaient destinés à être tous
+    poètes, écrivains, orateurs.
+
+St. Nicolas was literary. Issy and St. Sulpice were severely
+philosophic and scientific, places of "_fortes études_"; and the writer
+thinks that they were more to his own taste than the more brilliant
+literary education given under Dupanloup. In one sense it may be so.
+They introduced him to exactness of thought and precision of
+expression, and they widened his horizon of possible and attainable
+knowledge. He passed, he says, from words to things. But he is a writer
+who owes so much to the form into which he throws his thoughts, to the
+grace and brightness and richness of his style, that he probably is a
+greater debtor to the master whom he admires and dislikes, Dupanloup,
+than to the modest, reserved, and rather dull Sulpician teachers, whom
+he loves and reveres and smiles at, whose knowledge of theology was
+serious, profound, and accurate, and whose characteristic temper was
+one of moderation and temperate reason, joined to a hatred of display,
+and a suspicion of all that seemed too clever and too brilliant. But
+his witness to their excellence, to their absolute self-devotion to
+their work, to their dislike of extravagance and exaggeration, to their
+good sense and cultivation, is ungrudging and warm. Of course he thinks
+them utterly out of date; but on their own ground he recognises that
+they were men of strength and solidity, the best and most thorough of
+teachers; the most sincere, the most humble, the most self-forgetting
+of priests:--
+
+    Beaucoup de mes jugements étonnent les gens du monde parcequ'ils
+    n'out pas vu ce que j'ai vu. J'ai vu à Saint-Sulpice, associés à
+    des idées étroites, je l'avoue, les miracles que nos races peuvent
+    produire en fait de bonté, de modestie, d'abnégation personelle.
+    Ce qu'il y a de vertu à Saint-Sulpice suffirait pour gouverner un
+    monde, et cela m'a rendu difficile pour ce que j'ai trouvé
+    ailleurs.
+
+M. Renan, as we have said, is very just to his education, and to the
+men who gave it. He never speaks of them except with respect and
+gratitude. It is seldom, indeed, that he permits himself anything like
+open disparagement of the men and the cause which he forsook. The
+shafts of his irony are reserved for men on his own side, for the
+radical violences of M. Clémenceau, and for the exaggerated reputation
+of Auguste Comte, "who has been set up as a man of the highest order of
+genius, for having said, in bad French, what all scientific thinkers
+for two hundred years have seen as clearly as himself." He attributes
+to his ecclesiastical training those excellences in his own temper and
+principles on which he dwells with much satisfaction and thankfulness.
+They are, he considers, the result of his Christian and "Sulpician"
+education, though the root on which they grew is for ever withered and
+dead. "La foi disparue, la morale reste.... C'est par le caractère que
+je suis resté essentiellement l'élève de mes anciens maîtres." He is
+proud of these virtues, and at the same time amused at the odd
+contradictions in which they have sometimes involved him:--
+
+    Il me plairait d'expliquer par le détail et de montrer comment la
+    gageure paradoxale de garder les vertus cléricales, sans la foi
+    qui leur sert de base et dans un monde pour lequel elles ne sont
+    pas faites, produisit, en ce que me concerne, les rencontres les
+    plus divertissantes. J'aimerais à raconter toutes les aventures
+    que mes vertus sulpiciennes m'amenèrent, et les tours singuliers
+    qu'elles m'ont joués. Après soixante ans de vie sérieuse on a le
+    droit de sourire; et où trouver une source de rire plus abondante,
+    plus à portée, plus inoffensive qu'en soimême? Si jamais un auteur
+    comique voulait amuser le public de mes ridicules, je ne lui
+    demanderais qu'une chose; c'est de me prendre pour collaborateur;
+    je lui conterais des choses vingt fois plus amusantes que celles
+    qu'il pourrait inventer.
+
+He dwells especially on four of these virtues which were, he thinks,
+graven ineffaceably on his nature at St. Sulpice. They taught him there
+not to care for money or success. They taught him the old-fashioned
+French politeness--that beautiful instinct of giving place to others,
+which is perishing in the democratic scramble for the best places, in
+the omnibus and the railway as in business and society. It is more
+curious to find that he thinks that they taught him to be modest.
+Except on the faith of his assertions, the readers of his book would
+not naturally have supposed that he believed himself specially endowed
+with this quality; it is at any rate the modesty which, if it shrinks
+into retirement from the pretensions of the crowd, goes along with a
+high and pitying sense of superiority, and a self-complacency of which
+the good humour never fails. His masters also taught him to value
+purity. For this he almost makes a sort of deprecating apology. He saw,
+indeed, "the vanity of this virtue as of all the others"; he admits
+that it is an unnatural virtue. But he says, "L'homme ne doit jamais se
+permettre deux hardiesses à la fois. Le libre penseur doit être réglé
+en ses moeurs." In this doctrine it may be doubted whether he will find
+many followers. An unnatural virtue, where nature only is recognised as
+a guide, is more likely to be discredited by his theory than
+recommended by his example, particularly if the state of opinion in
+France is such as is described in the following passage--a passage
+which in England few men, whatever they might think, would have the
+boldness to state as an acknowledged social phenomenon:--
+
+    Le monde, dont les jugements sont rarement tout à fait faux, voit
+    une sorte de ridicule à être vertueux quand on n'y est pas obligé
+    par un devoir professionnel. Le prêtre, ayant pour état d'être
+    chaste, comme le soldat d'être brave, est, d'après ces idées,
+    presque le seul qui puisse sans ridicule tenir à des principes sur
+    lesquels la morale et la mode se livrent les plus étranges
+    combats. Il est hors de doute qu'en ce point, comme en beaucoup
+    d'autres, mes principes clericaux, conservés dans le siècle, m'ont
+    nui aux yeux du monde.
+
+We have one concluding observation to make. This is a book of which the
+main interest, after all, depends on the way in which it touches on the
+question of questions, the truth and reality of the Christian religion.
+But from first to last it docs not show the faintest evidence that the
+writer ever really knew, or even cared, what religion is. Religion is
+not only a matter of texts, of scientific criticisms, of historical
+investigations, of a consistent theology. It is not merely a procession
+of external facts and events, a spectacle to be looked at from the
+outside. It is, if it is anything, the most considerable and most
+universal interest in the complex aggregate of human interests. It
+grows out of the deepest moral roots, out of the most characteristic
+and most indestructible spiritual elements, out of wants and needs and
+aspirations and hopes, without which man, as we know him, would not be
+man. When a man, in asking whether Christianity is true, leaves out all
+this side of the matter, when he shows that it has not come before him
+as a serious and importunate reality, when he shows that he is
+unaffected by those deep movements and misgivings and anxieties of the
+soul to which religion corresponds, and treats the whole matter as a
+question only of erudition and criticism, we may acknowledge him to be
+an original and acute critic, a brilliant master of historical
+representation; but he has never yet come face to face with the
+problems of religion. His love of truth may be unimpeachable, but he
+docs not know what he is talking about. M. Renan speaks of giving up
+his religion as a man might speak of accepting a new and unpopular
+physical hypothesis like evolution, or of making up his mind to give up
+the personality of Homer or the early history of Rome. Such an interior
+attitude of mind towards religion as is implied, for instance, in
+Bishop Butler's _Sermons on the Love of God_, or the _De Imitatione_ or
+Newman's _Parochial Sermons_ seems to him, as far as we can judge, an
+unknown and unattempted experience. It is easy to deal with a question
+if you leave out half the factors of it, and those the most difficult
+and the most serious. It is easy to be clear if you do not choose to
+take notice of the mysterious, and if you exclude from your
+consideration as vague and confused all that vast department of human
+concerns where we at best can only "see through a glass darkly." It is
+easy to find the world a pleasant and comfortable and not at all
+perplexing place, if your life has been, as M. Renan describes his own,
+a "charming promenade" through it; if, as he says, you are blessed with
+"a good humour not easily disturbed "; and you "have not suffered
+much"; and "nature has prepared cushions to soften shocks"; and you
+have "had so much enjoyment in this life that you really have no right
+to claim any compensation beyond it." That is M. Renan's experience of
+life--a life of which he looks forward to the perfection in the
+clearness and security of its possible denials of ancient beliefs, and
+in the immense development of its positive and experimental knowledge.
+How would Descartes have rejoiced, he says, if he could have seen some
+poor treatise on physics or cosmography of our day, and what would we
+not give to catch a glimpse of such an elementary schoolbook of a
+hundred years hence.
+
+But that is not at any rate the experience of all the world, nor does
+it appear likely ever to be within the reach of all the world. There is
+another aspect of life more familiar than this, an aspect which has
+presented itself to the vast majority of mankind, the awful view of it
+which is made tragic by pain and sorrow and moral evil; which, in the
+way in which religion looks at it, if it is sterner, is also higher and
+nobler, and is brightened by hope and purposes of love; a view which
+puts more upon men and requires more from them, but holds before them a
+destiny better than the perfection here of physical science. To minds
+which realise all this, it is more inconceivable than any amount of
+miracle that such a religion as Christianity should have emerged
+naturally out of the conditions of the first century. They refuse to
+settle such a question by the short and easy method on which M. Renan
+relies; they will not consent to put it on questions about the two
+Isaiahs, or about alleged discrepancies between the Evangelists; they
+will not think the claims of religion disposed of by M. Renan's canon,
+over and over again contradicted, that whether there can be or not,
+there _is_ no evidence of the supernatural in the world. To those who
+measure and feel the true gravity of the issues, it is almost
+unintelligible to find a man who has been face to face with
+Christianity all his life treating the deliberate condemnation of it
+almost gaily and with a light heart, and showing no regrets in having
+to give it up as a delusion and a dream. It is a poor and meagre end of
+a life of thought and study to come to the conclusion that the age in
+which he has lived is, if not one of the greatest, at least "the most
+amusing of all ages."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+LIFE OF FREDERICK ROBERTSON[18]
+
+
+  [18]
+  _Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson_. Edited by Stopford A.
+  Brooke. _Guardian_, 15th November 1865.
+
+If the proof of a successful exhibition of a strongly marked and
+original character be that it excites and sustains interest throughout,
+that our tastes are appealed to and our judgments called forth with
+great strength, that we pass continuously and rapidly, as we read, from
+deep and genuine admiration to equally deep and genuine dissent and
+disapprobation, that it allows us to combine a general but irresistible
+sense of excellence growing upon us through the book with an
+under-current of real and honest dislike and blame, then this book in a
+great measure satisfies the condition of success. It is undeniable that
+in what it shows us of Mr. Robertson there is much to admire, much to
+sympathise with, much to touch us, a good deal to instruct us. He is
+set before us, indeed, by the editor, as the ideal of all that a great
+Christian teacher and spiritual guide, all that a brave and wise and
+high-souled man, may be conceived to be. We cannot quite accept him as
+an example of such rare and signal achievement; and the fault of the
+book is the common one of warm-hearted biographers to wind their own
+feelings and those of their readers too high about their subject; to
+talk as if their hero's excellences were unknown till he appeared to
+display them, and to make up for the imperfect impression resulting
+from actual facts and qualities by insisting with overstrained emphasis
+on a particular interpretation of them. The book would be more truthful
+and more pleasing if the editor's connecting comments were more simply
+written, and made less pretension to intensity and energy of language.
+Yet with all drawbacks of what seem to us imperfect taste, an imperfect
+standard of character, and an imperfect appreciation of what there is
+in the world beyond a given circle of interests, the book does what a
+biography ought to do--it shows us a remarkable man, and it gives us
+the means of forming our own judgment about him. It is not a tame
+panegyric or a fancy picture.
+
+The main portion of the book consists of Mr. Robertson's own letters,
+and his own accounts of himself; and we are allowed to see him, in a
+great degree at least, as he really was. The editor draws a moral,
+indeed, and tells us what we ought to think about what we see; but we
+can use our own judgment about that. And, as so often happens in real
+life, what we see both attracts and repels; it calls forth,
+successively and in almost equal measure, warm sympathy and admiration,
+and distinct and hearty disagreement. At least there is nothing of
+commonplace--of what is commonplace yet in our generation; though there
+is a good deal that bids fair to become commonplace in the next. It is
+the record of a genuine spontaneous character, seeking its way, its
+duty, its perfection, with much sincerity and elevation of purpose, and
+many anxieties and sorrows, and not, we doubt not, without much of the
+fruits that come with real self-devotion; a record disclosing a man
+with great faults and conspicuous blanks in his nature, one with whose
+principles, taste, or judgment we constantly find ourselves having a
+vehement quarrel, just after having been charmed and conciliated by
+some unexpectedly powerful or refined statement of an important truth.
+We cannot think, and few besides his own friends will think, that he
+had laid his hand with so sure an accuracy and with so much promise
+upon the clue which others had lost or bungled over. But there is much
+to learn in his thoughts and words, and there is not less to learn from
+his life. It is the life of a man who did not spare himself in
+fulfilling what he received as his task, who sacrificed much in order
+to speak his message, as he thought, more worthily and to do his office
+more effectually, and whose career touches us the more from the shadow
+of suffering and early death that hangs over its aspirations and
+activity. A book which fairly shows us such a life is not of less value
+because it also shows us much that we regret and condemn.
+
+Mr. Robertson was brought up not only in the straitest traditions of
+the Evangelical school, but in the heat of its controversial warfare.
+His heart, when he was a boy, was set on entering the army; and one of
+his most characteristic points through life, shown in many very
+different forms, was his pugnacity, his keen perception of the
+"_certaminis gaudia_":--
+
+    "There is something of combativeness in me," he writes, "which
+    prevents the whole vigour being drawn out, except when I have an
+    antagonist to deal with, a falsehood to quell, or a wrong to
+    avenge. Never till then does my mind feel quite alive. Could I
+    have chosen my own period of the world to have lived in, and my
+    own type of life, it should be the feudal ages, and the life of a
+    Cid, the redresser of wrongs."
+
+    "On the other hand," writes his biographer, "when he met men who
+    despised Christianity, or who, like the Roman Catholics, held to
+    doctrines which he believed untrue, this very enthusiasm and
+    unconscious excitement swept him sometimes beyond himself. He
+    could not moderate his indignation down to the cool level of
+    ordinary life. Hence he was wanting at this time in the wise
+    tolerance which formed so conspicuous a feature of his maturer
+    manhood. He held to his own views with pertinacity. He believed
+    them to be true; and he almost refused to allow the possibility of
+    the views of others having truth in them also. He was more or less
+    one-sided at this period. With the Roman Catholic religion it was
+    war to the death, not in his later mode of warfare, by showing the
+    truth which lay beneath the error, but by denouncing the error. He
+    seems invariably, with the pugnacity of a young man, to have
+    attacked their faith; and the mode in which this was done was
+    startlingly different from that which afterwards he adopted."
+
+He yielded, after considerable resistance, to the wishes and advice of
+his friends, that he should prepare for orders. "With a romantic
+instinct of self-sacrifice," says his biographer, "he resolved to give
+up the idea of his whole life." This we can quite understand; but with
+that propensity of biographers to credit their subject with the
+desirable qualities which it may be supposed that they ought to have,
+besides those which they really have, the editor proceeds to observe
+that this would scarcely have happened had not Mr. Robertson's
+"_characteristic self-distrust_ disposed him to believe that he was
+himself the worst judge of his future profession." This is the way in
+which the true outline of a character is blurred and confused, in order
+to say something proper and becoming. Self-distrust was not among the
+graces or weaknesses of Mr. Robertson's nature, unless indeed we
+mistake for it the anxiety which even the stoutest heart may feel at a
+crisis, or the dissatisfaction which the proudest may feel at the
+interval between attempt and achievement.
+
+He was an undergraduate at Brasenose at the height of the Oxford
+movement. He was known there, so far as he was known at all, as a keen
+partisan of the Evangelical school; and though no one then suspected
+the power which was really in him, his party, not rich in men of
+strength or promise, made the most of a recruit who showed ability and
+entered heartily into their watchwords, and, it must be said, their
+rancour. He was conspicuous among the young men of his standing for the
+forwardness with which he took his side against "Tractarianism," and
+the vehemence of his dislike of it, and for the almost ostentatious and
+defiant prominence which he gave to the convictions and social habits
+of his school He expressed his scorn and disgust at the "donnishness,"
+the coldness, the routine, the want of heart, which was all that he
+could see at Oxford out of the one small circle of his friends. He
+despised the Oxford course of work, and would have nothing more to do
+with it than he could help--as he lived to regret afterwards. Yet even
+then he was in his tastes and the instinctive tendencies of his mind
+above his party. He was an admiring reader of Wordsworth and Shelley;
+he felt the strength of Aristotle and Plato; he is said to have
+appreciated Mr. Newman's preaching, and to have gallantly defended what
+he admired in him and his friends. His editor, indeed, Mr. Brooke,
+appears to be a little divided and embarrassed, between his wish to
+enforce Mr. Robertson's largeness of mind and heart, and his fear of
+giving countenance to suspicions that he was ever so little inclined to
+"High Churchism"; between his desire to show that Mr. Robertson
+estimated the High Church leaders as much as an intelligent man ought,
+and disliked their system as much as a sound-thinking Christian ought.
+We should have thought that he need not be so solicitous to "set at
+rest the question about Mr. Robertson's High Church tendencies." "I
+hate High Churchism," was one of his latest declarations, when
+professing his sympathy with individual High Churchmen. One thing,
+however, is quite clear--that in his early life his partisanship was
+thoroughgoing and unflinching enough to satisfy the fiercest and most
+fanatical of their opponents. Such a representation as this is simply
+misleading:--
+
+    The almost fierceness with which he speaks against the Tract
+    school is proof in him of the strength of the attraction it
+    possessed for him, just as afterwards at Brighton his attacks on
+    Evangelicalism are proof of the strength with which he once held
+    to that form of Christianity, and the force of the reaction with
+    which he abandoned it for ever. Out of these two reactions--when
+    their necessary ultra tendencies had been mellowed down by
+    time--emerged at last the clearness and the just balance of
+    principles with which he taught during 1848 and the following
+    years, at Brighton. He had probed both schools of theological
+    thought to their recesses, and had found them wanting. He spoke of
+    what he knew when he protested against both. He spoke also of what
+    he knew when he publicly recognised the Spirit of all good moving
+    in the lives of those whose opinions he believed to be erroneous.
+
+It is absurd to say, because he sometimes spoke of the "danger" he had
+been in from "Tractarianism," that he had felt in equal degree the
+"strength of attraction" towards the one school and towards the other,
+and it is equally absurd to talk of his "having probed both to their
+recesses." He read, and argued, and discussed the pamphlets of the
+controversy--the "replies," Mr. Brooke says, with more truth probably
+than he thought of in using the word--like other undergraduates who
+took interest in what was going on, and thought themselves fit to
+choose their side. With his tutor and friend, Mr. Churton, he read
+Taylor's _Ancient Christianity_, carefully looking out the passages
+from the Fathers. "I am reading the early Church history with
+Golightly," he says, "which is a very great advantage, as he has a fund
+of general information and is a close reader." But we must doubt
+whether this involved "probing to the recesses" the "Tractarian" side
+of the question. And we distrust the depth and the judgment, and the
+impartiality also of a man who is said to have read Newman's sermons
+continually with delight to the day of his death, and by whom no book
+was more carefully studied and more highly honoured than _The Christian
+Year_, and who yet to the last could see nothing better in the Church
+movement as a whole than, according to the vulgar view of it, a revival
+of forms partly useful, partly hurtful It seems to us the great
+misfortune of his life, and one which exercised its evil influence on
+him to the end, that, thrown young into the narrowest and weakest of
+religious schools, he found it at first so congenial to his vehement
+temperament, that he took so kindly to certain of its more unnatural
+and ungenerous ways, and thus was cut off from the larger and healthier
+influences of the society round him. Those were days when older men
+than he took their side too precipitately; but he found himself
+encouraged, even as an undergraduate, to dogmatise, to be positive, to
+hate, to speak evil. He learnt the lesson too well. This is the
+language of an undergraduate at the end of his university course;--
+
+    But I seem this term to have in a measure waked out of a long
+    trance, partly caused by my own gross inconsistencies, and partly
+    by the paralysing effects of this Oxford-delusion heresy, for such
+    it is I feel persuaded. And to know it a man must live here, and
+    he will see the promising and ardent men sinking one after another
+    in a deadly torpor, wrapped up in self-contemplation, dead to
+    their Redeemer, and useless to His Church, under the baneful
+    breath of this accursed upas tree. I say accursed, because I
+    believe that St. Paul would use the same language to Oxford as he
+    did to the Galatian Church, "I would they were even cut off which
+    trouble you"; accursed, because I believe that the curse of God
+    will fall on it He has denounced it on the Papal hereby, and he is
+    no respecter of persons, to punish the name and not the reality.
+    May He forgive me if I err, and lead me into all truth. But I do
+    not speak as one who has been in no clanger, and therefore cannot
+    speak very quietly. It is strange into what ramifications the
+    disbelief of external justification will extend; _we will_ make it
+    internal, whether it be by self-mortification, by works of
+    evangelical obedience, or by the sacraments, and that just at the
+    time when we suppose most that we are magnifying the work of the
+    Lord.
+
+Mr. Brooke rather likes to dwell, as it seems to us, in an unreal and
+disproportionate way, on Mr. Robertson's sufferings, in the latter part
+of his life, from the bitter and ungenerous attacks of which he was the
+object. "This is the man," he says in one place, "who was afterwards at
+Brighton driven into the deepest solitariness of heart, whom God
+thought fit to surround with slander and misunderstanding." He was, we
+doubt not, fiercely assailed by the Evangelical party, which he had
+left, and which he denounced in no gentle language; he was, as we can
+well believe, "constantly attacked, by some manfully, by others in an
+underhand manner, and was the victim of innuendoes and slander." We
+cannot, however, help thinking that Mr. Brooke unconsciously
+exaggerates the solitariness and want of sympathy which went with all
+this. Mr. Robertson had, and knew that he had, his ardent and
+enthusiastic admirers as well as his worrying and untiring opponents.
+But what we remark is this. It was the measure which he had meted out
+to others, in the fierceness of his zeal for Evangelicalism, which the
+Evangelicals afterwards meted out to him. They did not more talk evil
+of what they knew not and had taken no real pains to understand, than
+he had done of a body of men as able, as well-instructed, as
+deep-thinking, as brave, as earnest as himself in their war against sin
+and worldliness. The stupidity, the perverse ill-nature, the resolute
+ignorance, the audacious and fanatical application of Scripture
+condemnations, the reckless judging without a desire to do justice,
+which he felt and complained of so bitterly when turned against
+himself, he had sanctioned and largely shared in when the same party
+which attacked him in the end attacked the earlier revivers of
+thoughtful and earnest religion. Nor do we find that he ever expressed
+regret for a vehemence of condemnation which his after-knowledge must
+have shown him that he had no business to pass, because, even if he
+afterwards adhered to it, he had originally passed it on utterly false
+and inadequate grounds. He only became as fierce against the
+Evangelicals as he had been against the followers of Mr. Newman. He
+never unlearnt the habit of harsh reprobation which his Evangelical
+friends had encouraged. He only transferred its full force against
+themselves.
+
+He left Oxford and began his ministry, first at Winchester, and then at
+Cheltenham, full of Evangelical _formulae_ and Evangelical narrow zeal.
+It does not appear that, except as an earnest hard-working clergyman,
+he was in any way distinguished from numbers of the same class, though
+we are quite willing to believe that even then his preaching, in warmth
+and vigour, was above the average. But as he, or his biographer, says,
+he had not yet really begun to think. When he began to think, he did so
+with the rapidity, the intensity, the impatient fervid vehemence which
+lay all along at the bottom of his character. His Evangelical views
+appear to have snapped to pieces and dissolved with a violence and
+sudden abruptness entirely unaccounted for by anything which these
+volumes show us. He read Carlyle; but so did many other people. He
+found the religious world at Cheltenham not so pure as he had imagined
+it; but this is what must have happened anywhere, and is not enough to
+account for such a complete revolution of belief. He had a friend
+deeply read in German philosophy and criticism who is said to have
+exercised influence on him. Still, we repeat, the steps and processes
+of the change from the Evangelicalism of Cheltenham to a condition, at
+first, of almost absolute doubt, are very imperfectly explained:--
+
+    These letters were written in 1843. In the following year doubts
+    and questionings began to stir in his mind. He could not get rid
+    of them. They were forced upon him by his reading and his
+    intercourse with men. They grew and tortured him. His teaching in
+    the pulpit altered, and it became painful to him to preach. He was
+    reckoned of the Evangelical school, and he began to feel that his
+    position was becoming a false one. He felt the excellence and
+    earnestness, and gladly recognised the work of the nobler portion
+    of that party, but he felt also that he must separate from it. In
+    his strong reaction from its extreme tendencies, he understood
+    with a shock which upturned his whole inward life for a time, that
+    the system on which he had founded his whole faith and work could
+    never be received by him again. Within its pale, for him, there
+    was henceforward neither life, peace, nor reality. It was not,
+    however, till almost the end of his ministry at Cheltenham that
+    this became clearly manifest to him. It had been growing slowly
+    into a conviction. An outward blow--the sudden ruin of a
+    friendship which he had wrought, as he imagined, for ever into his
+    being--a blow from which he never afterwards wholly
+    recovered--accelerated the inward crisis, and the result was a
+    period of spiritual agony so awful that it not only shook his
+    health to its centre, but smote his spirit down into so profound a
+    darkness that of all his early faiths but one remained, "It must
+    be right to do right."
+
+This seems to have been in 1846, and in the beginning of the next year
+he had already taken his new line. The explanation does not explain
+much. We have no right to ask for more than his friends think fit to
+tell us of this turning-point of his life. But we observe that this
+deeply important passage is left with but little light and much
+manifest reticence. That the crisis took place we have his own touching
+and eloquent words to assure us. It left him also as firm in his
+altered convictions as he had been in his old ones. What caused it,
+what were its circumstances and characteristics, and what affected its
+course and results, we can only guess. But it was decisive and it was
+speedy. He spent a few months in Germany in the end of 1846, and in the
+beginning of 1847 the Bishop of Oxford was willing to appoint him to
+St. Ebbe's. But his stay there was short. Three months afterwards he
+accepted the chapel at Brighton which he held till his death in August
+1853.
+
+He was now the Robertson whom all the world knows, and the change was a
+most remarkable one. It seems strictly accurate to say that he started
+at once into a new man--new in all his views and tastes; new in the
+singular burst of power which at once shows itself in the keen, free,
+natural language of his letters and his other writings; new in the deep
+concentrated earnestness of character with which he seemed to grasp his
+peculiar calling and function. All the conventionalities of his old
+school, which hung very thick about him even to the end of his
+Cheltenham life, seem suddenly to drop off, and leave him, without a
+trace remaining on his mind, in the full use and delight of his new
+liberty. We cannot say that we are more inclined to agree with him in
+his later stage than in his earlier. And the rapid transformation of a
+most dogmatic and zealous Evangelical into an equally positive and
+enthusiastic "Broad Churchman" does not seem a natural or healthy
+process, and suggests impatience and self-confidence more than
+self-command and depth. But we get, without doubt, to a real man--a man
+whose words have a meaning, and stand for real things; whose language
+no longer echoes the pale dreary commonplaces of a school, but reveals
+thoughts which he has thought for himself, and the power of being able
+"to speak as he will." His mind seems to expand, almost at a bound, to
+all the manifold variety of interests of which the world is full. His
+letters on his own doings, on the books and subjects of the day, on the
+remarks or the circumstances of his friends, his criticism, his satire,
+his controversial or friendly discussions, are full of energy,
+versatility, refinement, boldness, and strength; and his remarkable
+power of clear, picturesque, expressive diction, not unworthy of our
+foremost masters of English, appears all at once, as it were, full
+grown. It is difficult to believe, as we read the later portions of his
+life, that we are reading about the same man who appeared, so short a
+time before, at the beginning, to promise at best to turn into a
+popular Evangelical preacher, above the average, perhaps, in taste and
+power, but not above the average in freedom from cramping and sour
+prejudices.
+
+Mr. Robertson had hold of some great truths, and he applied them, both
+in his own thoughts and self-development and in his popular teaching,
+with great force. He realised two things with a depth and intensity
+which give an awful life and power to all he said about religion. He
+realised with singular and pervading keenness that which a greater man
+than he speaks of as the first and the great discovery of the awakened
+soul--" the thought of two, and two only, supreme and luminously
+self-evident beings, himself and the Creator." "Alone with God,"
+expresses the feeling which calmed his own anxieties and animated his
+religious appeals to others. And he realised with equal earnestness the
+great truth which is spoken of by Mr. Brooke, though in language which
+to us has an unpleasant sound, in the following extract:
+
+    Yet, notwithstanding all this--which men called while he lived,
+    and now when he is dead will call, want of a clear and
+    well-defined system of theology--he had a fixed basis for his
+    teaching. It was the Divine-human Life of Christ. It is the fourth
+    principle mentioned in his letter, "that belief in the human
+    character of Christ must be antecedent to belief in His divine
+    origin." He felt that an historical Christianity was absolutely
+    essential; that only through a visible life of the Divines in the
+    flesh could God become intelligible to men; that Christ was God's
+    idea of our nature realised; that only when we fall back on the
+    glorious portrait of what has been, ran we be delivered from
+    despair of Humanity; that in Christ "all the blood of all the
+    nations ran," and all the powers of man were redeemed. Therefore
+    he grasped as the highest truth, on which to rest life and
+    thought, the reality expressed in the words, "the Word was made
+    Flesh." The Incarnation was to him the centre of all history, the
+    blossoming of Humanity. The Life which followed the Incarnation
+    was the explanation of the Life of God, and the only solution of
+    the problem of the Life of man. He did not speak much of loving
+    Christ; his love was fitly mingled with that veneration which
+    makes love perfect; his voice was solemn, and he paused before he
+    spoke His name in common talk; for what that name meant had become
+    the central thought of his intellect and the deepest realisation
+    of his spirit. He had spent a world of study, of reverent
+    meditation, of adoring contemplation, on the Gospel history.
+    Nothing comes forward more frequently in his letters than the way
+    in which he had entered into the human life of Christ. To that
+    everything is referred--by that everything is explained.
+
+In bringing home these great truths to the feelings of those who had
+lived insensible to them lay the chief value of his preaching. He
+awakened men to believe that there was freshness and reality in things
+which they had by use become dulled to. There are no doubt minds which
+rise to the truth most naturally and freely without the intervention of
+dogmatic expressions, and to these such expressions, as they are a
+limit and a warning, are also felt as a clog. Mr. Robertson's early
+experience had made him suspicious and irritable about dogma as such;
+and he prided himself on being able to dispense with it, while at the
+same time preserving the principle and inner truth which it was
+intended to convey. But in his ostentatious contempt of dogmatic
+precision and exactness, none but those who have not thought about the
+matter will see any proof of his strength or wisdom. Dogma, accurate,
+subtle, scientific, does not prevent a mind of the first order from
+breathing freshness of feeling, grandeur, originality, and the sense of
+reality, into the exposition of the truth which it represents. It is no
+fetter except to those minds which in their impulsiveness, their
+self-confidence, and their want of adequate grasp and sustained force,
+most need its salutary restraint. And no man has a right, however
+eloquent and impressive his speech may be, to talk against dogma till
+he shows that he does not confound accuracy of statement with
+conventional formalism. Mr. Robertson lays down the law pretty
+confidently about the blunders of everybody about him--Tractarian,
+Evangelical, Dissenter, Romanist, and Rationalist. We must say that the
+impression of every page of his letters is, that clear and "intuitive"
+as he was, he had not always understood what he condemned. He was
+especially satisfied with a view of Baptism which he thought rose above
+both extremes and took in the truth of both while it avoided their
+errors. But is it too much to say that a man who, not in the heat of
+rhetoric, but when preparing candidates for Confirmation, and piquing
+himself on his freedom from all prejudice, deliberately describes the
+common Church view of Baptism as implying a "magical" change, and
+actually illustrates what he means by the stories of magical changes in
+the _Arabian Nights_--who knowing, or able to read, all that has been
+said by divines on the subject from the days of Augustine, yet commits
+himself to the assertion that this is in fact what they hold and
+teach--is it too much to say that such a man, whatever may be his other
+gifts, has forfeited all claim to be considered capable of writing and
+expressing himself with accuracy, truth, and distinctness on
+theological questions? And if theological questions are to be dealt
+with, ought they not to be dealt with accurately, and not loosely?
+
+But we have lingered too long over these volumes. They are very
+instructive, sometimes very elevating, almost always very touching. The
+life which they describe greatly wanted discipline, self-restraint, and
+the wise and manly fear of overrating one's own novelties. But we see
+in it a life consecrated to duty, fulfilled with much pain and
+self-sacrifice, and adorned by warm and deep affections, by vigour and
+refinement of thought, and earnest love for truth and purity. No one
+can help feeling his profound and awful sense of things unseen, though
+in the philosophy by which he sought to connect things seen and things
+unseen, we cannot say that we can have much confidence. We have only
+one concluding remark to make, and that is not on him but on his
+biographer. An exaggerated tone, as we have said, seems to us to
+pervade the book. There is what seems to us an unhealthy attempt to
+create in the reader an impression of the exceptional severity of the
+sufferings of Mr. Robertson's life, of his loneliness, of his
+persecutions. But in this point much may fairly be pardoned to the
+affection of a friend. What, however, we can less excuse is the want of
+good feeling with which Mr. Brooke, in his account of Mr. Robertson's
+last days, allows himself to give an _ex parte_, account of a dispute
+between Mr. Robertson and the Vicar of Brighton, about the appointment
+of a curate, and not simply to insinuate, but distinctly declare that
+this dispute with its result was the fatal stroke which, in his state
+of ill-health, hastened his death. We say nothing about the rights of
+the story, for we never heard anything of them but what Mr. Brooke
+tells us. But there is an appearance of vindictiveness in putting it on
+record with this particular aspect which nothing in the story itself
+seems to us to justify. In describing Mr. Robertson's departure from
+Cheltenham, Mr. Brooke has plainly thought right to use much reticence.
+He would have done well to have used the same reticence about these
+quarrels at Brighton.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+LIFE OF BARON BUNSEN[19]
+
+
+  [19]
+  _A Memoir of Baron Bunsen_. By his Widow, Baroness Bunsen. _Saturday
+  Review_, 2nd May 1868.
+
+Bunsen was really one of those persons, more common two centuries ago
+than now, who could belong as much to an adopted country as to that in
+which they were born and educated. A German of the Germans, he yet
+succeeded in also making himself at home in England, in appreciating
+English interests, in assimilating English thought and traditions, and
+exercising an important influence at a critical time on one extremely
+important side of English life and opinion. He was less felicitous in
+allying the German with the Englishman, perhaps from personal
+peculiarities of impatience, self-assertion, and haste, than one who
+has since trodden in his steps and realised more completely and more
+splendidly some of the great designs which floated before his mind. But
+few foreigners have gained more fairly, by work and by sympathy, the
+_droit de cité_ in England than Bunsen.
+
+It is a great pity that books must be so long and so bulky, and though
+Bunsen's life was a very full and active one in all matters of
+intellectual interest, and in some of practical interest also, we
+cannot help thinking that his biography would have gained by greater
+exercise of self-denial on the part of his biographer. It is altogether
+too prolix, and the distinction is not sufficiently observed between
+what is interesting simply to the Bunsen family and their friends, and
+what is interesting to the public. One of the points in which
+biographers, and the present author among the number, make mistakes, is
+in their use of letters. They never know when to stop in giving
+correspondence. If we had only one or two letters of a remarkable map,
+they would be worth printing, even if they were very much like other
+people's letters. But when we have bundles and letter-books without end
+to select from, selection, in a work professedly biographical, becomes
+advisable. We want types and specimens of a man's letters; and when the
+specimen has been given, we want no more, unless what is given is for
+its own sake remarkable. A great number of Bunsen's early letters are
+printed. Some of them are of much interest, showing how early the germs
+were formed of ideas and plans which occupied his life, and what were
+the influences by which he was surrounded, and how he comported himself
+in regard to them. But many more of these letters are what any young
+man of thought and of an affectionate nature might have written; and we
+do not want to have it shown us, over and over again, merely that
+Bunsen was thoughtful and affectionate. A wise and severe economy in
+this matter would have produced at least the same effect, at much less
+cost to the reader.
+
+Bunsen was born in 1791, at Corbach, in the little principality of
+Waldeck, and grew up under the severe and simple training of a frugal
+German household, and with a solid and vigorous German education. He
+became in time Heyne's pupil at Göttingen, and very early showed the
+qualities which distinguished him in his after life--restless eagerness
+after knowledge and vast powers of labour, combined with large and
+ambitious, and sometimes vague, ideas, and with depth and fervour of
+religious sentiment. He entered on life when the reaction against the
+cold rationalistic theories of the age before him was stimulated by the
+excitement of the war of liberation; and in his deep and supreme
+interest in the Bible he kept to the last the stamp which he then
+received. More interesting than the recollections of a distinguished
+man's youth by his friends after he has become distinguished--which are
+seldom quite natural and not always trustworthy--are the contemporary
+records of the impressions made on _him_ in his youth by those who were
+distinguished men when he was young. In some of Bunsen's letters we
+have such impressions. Thus he writes of Heyne in 1813:--
+
+    Poor and lonely did I arrive in this place [Göttingen]. Heyne
+    received me, guided me, bore with me, encouraged me, showed me in
+    himself the example of a high and noble energy, and indefatigable
+    activity in a calling which was not that to which his merit
+    entitled him. He might have superintended and administered and
+    maintained an entire kingdom without more effort and with yet
+    greater efficiency than the University for which he lived; he was
+    too great for a mere philologer, and in general for a professor of
+    mere learning in the age into which he was cast, and he was more
+    distinguished in every other way than in this.... And what has he
+    established or founded at the cost of this exertion of faculties?
+    Learning annihilates itself, and the most perfect is the first
+    submerged; for the next age scales with ease the height which cost
+    the preceding the full vigour of life. Yet two things remain of
+    him and will not perish--the one, the tribute left by his free
+    spirit to the finest productions of the human mind; and what he
+    felt, thought, and has immortalised in many men of excellence gone
+    before. Read his explanations of Tischbein's engravings from
+    Homer, his last preface to Virgil, and especially his oration on
+    the death of Müller, and you will understand what I mean. I speak
+    not of his political instinct, made evident in his survey of the
+    public and private life of the ancients. The other memorial which
+    will subsist of him, more warm in life than the first, is the
+    remembrance of his generosity, to which numbers owe a deep
+    obligation.
+
+And of Schelling, about the same time, whom he had just seen in Munich:--
+
+    Schelling before all must be mentioned as having received me well,
+    after his fashion, giving me frequent occasions of becoming
+    acquainted with his philosophical views and judgments, in his own
+    original and peculiar manner. His mode of disputation is rough and
+    angular; his peremptoriness and his paradoxes terrible. Once he
+    undertook to explain animal magnetism, and for this purpose to
+    give an idea of Time, from which resulted that all is present and
+    in existence--the Present as existing in the actual moment; the
+    Future, as existing in a future moment. When I demanded the proof,
+    he referred me to the word _is_, which applies to existence, in
+    the sentence that "this _is_ future." Seckendorf, who was present
+    (with him I have become closely acquainted, to my great
+    satisfaction), attempted to draw attention to the confounding the
+    subjective (i.e. him who pronounces that sentence) with the
+    objective; or, rather, to point out a simple grammatical
+    misunderstanding--in short, declared the position impossible.
+    "Well," replied Schelling drily, "you have not understood me." Two
+    Professors (his worshippers), who were present, had meanwhile
+    endeavoured by their exclamations, "Only observe, all _is_, all
+    _exists_" (to which the wife of Schelling, a clever woman,
+    assented), to help me into conviction; and a vehement beating the
+    air--for arguing and holding fast by any firm point were out of
+    the question--would have arisen, if I had not contrived to escape
+    by giving a playful turn to the conversation. I am perfectly aware
+    that Schelling _could_ have expressed and carried through his real
+    opinion far better--i.e. rationally. I tell the anecdote merely
+    to give an idea of his manner in conversation.
+
+At Göttingen he was one of a remarkable set, comprising Lachmann,
+Lücke, Brandis, and some others, thought as much of at the time as
+their friends, but who failed to make their way to the front ranks of
+the world. Like others of his countrymen, Bunsen began to find "that
+the world's destinies were not without their effect on him," and to
+feel dissatisfied with the comparatively narrow sphere of even German
+learning. The thought grew, and took possession of him, of "bringing
+over, into his knowledge and into his fatherland, the solemn and
+distant East," and to "draw the East into the study of the entire
+course of humanity (particularly of European, and more especially of
+Teutonic humanity)," making Germany the "central point of this study."
+Vast plans of philological and historical study, involving, as the only
+means then possible of carrying them out, schemes of wide travel and
+long sojourn in the East, opened on him. Indian and Persian literature,
+the instinctive certainty of its connection with the languages and
+thought of the West, and the imperfection of means of study in Europe,
+drew him, as many more were drawn at the time, to seek the knowledge
+which they wanted in foreign and distant lands. With Bunsen, this wide
+and combined study of philology, history, and philosophy, which has
+formed one of the characteristic pursuits of our time, was from the
+first connected with the study of the Bible as its central point. In
+1815 came a decisive turning-point in his life--his acquaintance, and
+the beginning of his close connection, with Niebuhr, at Berlin; and
+from this time he felt himself a Prussian. "That State in Northern
+Germany," he writes to Brandis in 1815, "which gladly receives every
+German, from wheresoever he may come, and considers every one thus
+entering as a citizen born, is _the true Germany_":--
+
+    That such a State [he proceeds, in the true Bismarckian spirit]
+    should prove inconvenient to others of inferior importance, which
+    persist in continuing their isolated existence, regardless of the
+    will of Providence and of the general good, is of no consequence
+    whatever; nor even does it matter that, in its present management,
+    there are defects and imperfections.... We intend to be in Berlin
+    in three weeks; and there (in Prussia) am I resolved to fix my
+    destinies.
+
+After reading Persian for a short time in Paris with De Sacy, and after
+the failure of a plan of travel with Mr. Astor of New York, Bunsen
+joined Niebuhr at Florence in the end of 1816, and went on with him to
+Rome, where Niebuhr was Prussian envoy. There, enjoying Niebuhr's
+society, "equally sole in his kind with Rome," he took up his abode,
+and plunged into study. He gave up his plans of Oriental travel,
+finding he could do all that he wanted without them. Too much a
+student, as he writes to a friend, to think of marrying, which he could
+not do "without impairing his whole scheme of mental development," he
+nevertheless found his fate in an English lady, Miss Waddington, who
+became his wife. And, finally, when the health of his friend Brandis,
+Niebuhr's secretary in the Prussian Legation, broke down, Bunsen took
+his place, and entered on that combined path of study and diplomacy in
+which he continued for the greater part of his life.
+
+It may be questioned whether Bunsen's career answered altogether
+successfully to what he proposed to himself, or was in fact all that
+his friends and he himself thought it; but it was eminently one in
+which from the first he had laid down for himself a plan of life which
+he tenaciously followed through many changes and varieties of work,
+without ever losing sight of the purpose with which he began. He piqued
+himself on having early seen that a man ought to have an object to
+which to devote his whole life--"be it a dictionary like Johnson's or a
+history like Gibbon's"--and on having discerned and chosen his own
+object. And at an early time of his life in Rome he draws an outline of
+thought and inquiry, destined to break off into many different labours,
+in very much the same language in which he might have described it in
+the last year of his life:--
+
+    _The consciousness of God in the mind of man, and that which in
+    and through that consciousness He has accomplished, especially in
+    language and religion_, this was from the earliest time before my
+    mind. After having awhile fancied to attain my point, sometimes
+    here, sometimes there, at length (it was in the Christmas holidays
+    of 1812, after having gained the prize in November) I made a
+    general and comprehensive plan. I wished to go through and
+    represent heathen antiquity, in its principal phases, in three
+    great periods of the world's history, according to its languages,
+    its religious conceptions, and its political institutions; first
+    of all in the East, where the earliest expressions in each are
+    highly remarkable, although little known; then in the second great
+    epoch, among the Greeks and Romans; thirdly, among the Teutonic
+    nations, who put an end to the Roman Empire.
+
+    At first I thought of Christianity only as something which every
+    one, like the mother tongue, knows intuitively, and therefore not
+    as the object of a peculiar study. But in January 1816, when I for
+    the last time took into consideration all that belonged to my
+    plan, and wrote it down, I arrived at this conclusion, that as God
+    had caused the conception of Himself to be developed in the mind
+    of man in a twofold manner, the one through revelation to the
+    Jewish people through their patriarchs, the other through reason
+    in the heathen; so also must the inquiry and representation of
+    this development be twofold; and as God had kept these two ways
+    for a length of time independent and separate, so should we, in
+    the course of the examination, separate knowledge from man, and
+    his development from the doctrine of revelation and faith, firmly
+    trusting that God in the end would bring about the union of both.
+    This is now also my firm conviction, that we must not mix them or
+    bring them together forcibly, as many have done with well-meaning
+    zeal but unclear views, and as many in Germany with impure designs
+    are still doing.
+
+The design had its interruptions, both intellectual and practical. The
+plan was an ambitious one, too ambitious for Bunsen's time and powers,
+or even probably for our own more advanced stage of knowledge; and
+Bunsen ever found it hard to resist the attractions of a new object of
+interest, and did not always exhaust it, though he seldom touched
+anything without throwing light on it. Thus he was drawn by
+circumstances to devote a good deal of time, more than he intended, to
+the mere antiquarianism of Rome. By and by he found himself succeeding
+Niebuhr as the diplomatic representative of Prussia at Rome. And his
+attempt to meet the needs of his own strong devotional feelings by
+giving more warmth and interest to the German services at the embassy,
+"the congregation on the Capitoline Hill," led him, step by step, to
+those wider schemes for liturgical reform which influenced so
+importantly the course of his fortunes. They brought him, a young and
+unknown man, with little more than Niebuhr's good word, into direct and
+confidential communication with the King of Prussia, who was then
+intent on plans of the same kind, and who recognised in Bunsen, after
+some preliminary jealousy and misgivings, the man most fitted to assist
+in carrying them out. But though Bunsen, who started with the resolve
+of being both a student and a scholar, was driven, as he thought
+against his will, into paths which led him deeper and deeper into
+public life and diplomacy, his early plans were never laid aside even
+under the stress of official employment. Perhaps it may be difficult to
+strike the balance of what they lost or gained by it.
+
+The account of his life at Rome contains much that is interesting.
+There is the curious mixture of sympathy and antipathy in Bunsen's mind
+for the place itself; the antipathy of a German, a Protestant, and a
+free inquirer, for the Roman, the old Catholic, the narrow, timid,
+traditional spirit which pervaded everything in the great seat of
+clerical and Papal government; and the sympathy, scarcely less intense,
+not merely, or in the first place, for the classical aspects of Rome,
+but for its religious character, as still the central point of
+Christendom, full of the memorials and the savour of the early days of
+Christianity, mingling with what its many centuries of history have
+added to them; and for all that aroused the interest and touched the
+mind of one deeply busy with two great religious problems--the best
+forms for Christian worship, and the restoration, if possible, of some
+organisation and authority in Protestant Germany. For a long time
+Bunsen, like his master Niebuhr, was on the best terms with Cardinals,
+Monsignori, and Popes. The Roman services were no objects to him of
+abhorrence or indifference. He saw, in the midst of accretions, the
+remains of the more primitive devotion; and the architecture, the art,
+and the music, to be found only in Rome, were to him inexhaustible
+sources of delight. As may be supposed, letters like Bunsen's, and the
+recollections of his biographer, are full of interesting gossip;
+notices of famous people, and of things that happened in Rome in the
+days of the Emancipation and Reform Bills, Revolutions of Naples in
+'20 and France in '30, during the twenty years, from 1818 to 1838, in
+which the men of the great war and the restorations were going off the
+scene, and the men of the modern days--Liberals, High Churchmen,
+Ultra-montanes--were coming on. Those twenty years, of course, were not
+without their changes in Bunsen's own views. The man who had come to
+Rome, in position a poor and obscure student, had grown into the oracle
+of a highly cultivated society, whose acquaintance was eagerly sought
+by every one of importance who lived at Rome or visited it, and into
+the diplomatic representative of one of the great Powers. The scholar
+had come to have, not merely theories, but political and ecclesiastical
+aims. The disciple of Niebuhr, who at one time had seen all things very
+much as Niebuhr saw them in his sad later days of disgust at revolution
+and cynical despair of liberty, had come since under the influence of
+Arnold, and, as his letters to Arnold show, had taken into his own mind
+much of the more generous and hopeful, though vague, teaching of that
+equally fervid teacher of liberalism and of religion. These letters are
+of much interest. They show the dreams and the fears and antipathies of
+the time; they contain some remarkable anticipations, some equally
+remarkable miscalculations, and some ideas and proposals which, with
+our experience, excite our wonder that any one could have imagined them
+practicable. Every one knows that Bunsen's diplomatic career at Rome
+ended unfortunately. He was mixed up with the violent proceedings of
+the Prussian Government in the dispute with the Archbishop of Cologne
+about marriages between Protestants and Catholics, and he had the
+misfortune to offend equally both his own Court and that of Rome. It is
+possible that, as is urged in the biography before us, he was
+sacrificed to the blunders and the enmities of powers above him. But,
+for whatever reason, no clear account is given of the matter by his
+biographer, though a good deal is suggested; and in the absence of
+intelligible explanations the conclusion is natural that, though he may
+have been ill-used, he may also have been unequal to his position.
+
+But his ill-success or his ill-usage at Rome was more than compensated
+by the results to which it may be said to have led. Out of it
+ultimately came that which gave the decisive character to Bunsen's
+life--his settlement in London as Prussian Minister. On leaving Rome he
+came straight to England He came full of admiration and enthusiasm to
+"his Ithaca, his island fatherland," and he was flattered and delighted
+by the welcome he received, and by the power which he perceived in
+himself, beyond that of most foreigners, to appreciate and enjoy
+everything English. He liked everything--people, country, and
+institutions; even, as his biographer writes, our rooks. The zest of
+his enjoyment was not diminished by his keen sense of what appear to
+foreigners our characteristic defects--the want of breadth of interest
+and boldness of speculative thought which accompanies so much energy in
+public life and so much practical success; and he seems to have felt in
+himself a more than ordinary fitness to be a connecting link between
+the two nations--that he had much to teach Englishmen, and that they
+were worth teaching. He thoroughly sympathised with the earnestness and
+strong convictions of English religion; but he thought it lamentably
+destitute of rational grounds, of largeness of idea and of critical
+insight, enslaved to the letter, and afraid of inquiry. But, with all
+drawbacks, his visit to England made it a very attractive place to him;
+and when he was appointed by his Government Envoy to the Swiss
+Confederation, with strict injunctions "to do nothing," his eyes were
+oft on turned towards England. In 1840 the King of Prussia died, and
+Bunsen's friend and patron, the Crown Prince, became Frederic William
+IV. He resembled Bunsen in more ways than one; in his ardent religious
+sentiment, in his eagerness, in his undoubting and not always
+far-sighted self-confidence and self-assertion, and in a combination of
+practical vagueness of view and a want of understanding men, with a
+feverish imperiousness in carrying out a favourite plan. In 1841 he
+sent Bunsen to England to negotiate the ill-considered and precipitate
+arrangement for the Jerusalem bishopric; and on the successful
+conclusion of the negotiation, Bunsen was appointed permanently to be
+Prussian Minister in London. The manner of appointment was remarkable.
+The King sent three names to Lord Aberdeen and the English Court, and
+they selected Bunsen's.
+
+Thus Bunsen, who twenty-five years before had sat down a penniless
+student, almost in despair at the failure of his hopes as a travelling
+tutor, in Orgagna's _loggia_ at Florence, had risen, in spite of real
+difficulties and opposition, to a brilliant position in active
+political life; and the remarkable point is that, whether he was
+ambitious or not of this kind of advancement--and it would perhaps
+have been as well on his part to have implied less frequently that he
+was not--he was all along, above everything, the student and the
+theologian. What is even more remarkable is that, plunged into the
+whirl of London public life and society, he continued still to be, more
+even than the diplomatist, the student and theologian. The Prussian
+Embassy during the years that he occupied it, from 1841 to 1854, was
+not an idle place, and Bunsen was not a man to leave important State
+business to other hands. The French Revolution, the German Revolution,
+the Frankfort Assembly, the question of the revival of the Empire, the
+beginnings of the Danish quarrel and of the Crimean war, all fell
+within that time, and gave the Prussian Minister in such a centre as
+London plenty to think of, to do, and to write about. Yet all this time
+was a time of intense and unceasing activity in that field of
+theological controversy in which Bunsen took such delight. The
+diplomatist entrusted with the gravest affairs of a great Power in the
+most critical and difficult times, and fully alive to the interest and
+responsibility of his charge, also worked harder than most Professors,
+and was as positive and fiery in his religious theories and antipathies
+as the keenest and most dogmatic of scholastic disputants, he was busy
+about Egyptian chronology, about cuneiform writing, about comparative
+philology; he plunged with characteristic eagerness into English
+theological war; and such books as his _Church of the Future_, and his
+writings on Ignatius and Hippolytus, were not the least important of
+the works which marked the progress of the struggle of opinions here.
+But they represented only a very small part of the unceasing labour
+that was going on in the early morning hours in Carlton House Terrace.
+All this time the foundations were being laid and the materials
+gathered for books of wider scope and more permanent aim, too vast for
+him to accomplish even in his later years of leisure. It is an original
+and instructive picture; for though we boast statesmen who still carry
+on the great traditions of scholarship, and give room in their minds
+for the deeper and more solemn problems of religion and philosophy,
+they are not supposed to be able to carry on simultaneously their
+public business and their classical or scientific studies, and at any
+rate they do not attack the latter with the devouring zeal with which
+Bunsen taxed the efforts of hard-driven secretaries and readers to keep
+pace with his inexhaustible demands for more and more of the most
+abstruse materials of knowledge.
+
+The end of his London diplomatic career was, like the end of his Roman
+one, clouded with something like disgrace; and, like the Roman one, is
+left here unexplained. But it was for his happiness, probably, that his
+residence in England came to a close. He had found the poetry of his
+early notions about England, political and theological at least,
+gradually changing into prose. He found less and less to like, in what
+at first most attracted him, in the English Church; he and it, besides
+knowing one another better, were also changing. He probably increased
+his sympathies for England, and returned in a measure to his old
+kindness for it, by looking at it only from a distance. The labour of
+his later days, as vast and indefatigable as that of his earlier days,
+was devoted to his great work, which was, as it were, to popularise the
+Bible and revive interest in it by a change in the method of presenting
+it and commenting on it. To the last the Bible was the central point of
+his philosophical as well as his religious thoughts, as it had been in
+his first beginnings as a student at Gottingen and Rome. After a life
+of many trials, but of unusual prosperity and enjoyment, he died in the
+end of 1860. The account of his last days is a very touching one.
+
+We do not pretend to think Bunsen the great and consummate man that,
+naturally enough, he appears to his friends. We doubt whether he can be
+classed as a man in the first rank at all. We doubt whether he fully
+understood his age, and yet it is certain that he was confident and
+positive that he did understand it better than most men; and an undue
+confidence of this kind implies considerable defects both of intellect
+and character. He wanted the patient, cautious, judicial self-distrust
+which his studies eminently demanded, and of which he might have seen
+some examples in England. No one can read these volumes without seeing
+the disproportionate power which first impressions had with him; he was
+always ready to say that something, which had just happened or come
+before him, was the greatest or the most complete thing of its kind.
+Wonderfully active, wonderfully quick and receptive, full of
+imagination and of the power of combining and constructing, and never
+wearied out or dispirited, his mind took in large and grand ideas, and
+developed them with enthusiasm and success, and with all the resources
+of wide and varied knowledge; but the affluence and ingenuity of his
+thoughts indisposed him, as it indisposes many other able men, to the
+prosaic and uninteresting work of calling these thoughts into question,
+and cross-examining himself upon their grounds and tenableness. He
+tried too much; the multiplicity of his intellectual interests was too
+much for him, and he often thought that he was explaining when he was
+but weaving a wordy tissue, and "darkening counsel" as much as any of
+the theological sciolists whom he denounced. People, for instance,
+must, it seems to us, be very easily satisfied who find any fresh light
+in the attempt, not unfrequent in his letters, to adapt the Lutheran
+watchword of Justification by faith to modern ideas. He was very rapid,
+and this rapidity made him hasty and precipitate; it also made him apt
+to despise other men, and, what was of more consequence, the
+difficulties of the subject likewise. Others did not always find it
+easy to understand him; and it may fairly be questioned if he always
+sufficiently asked whether he understood himself. He was generous and
+large-spirited in intention, though not always so in fact.
+
+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.
+
+Sir John Coleridge knew Keble probably as long and as intimately as any
+one; and on the whole, he had the most entire sympathy with his
+friend's spirit, even where he disagreed with his opinions. He
+thoroughly understood and valued the real and living unity of a
+character which mostly revealed itself to the outer world by what
+seemed jerks and discordant traits. From early youth, through manhood
+to old age, he had watched and tested and loved that varied play and
+harmony of soul and mind, which was sometimes tender, sometimes stern,
+sometimes playful, sometimes eager; abounding with flashes of real
+genius, and yet always inclining by instinctive preference to things
+homely and humble; but which was always sound and unselfish and
+thorough, endeavouring to subject itself to the truth and will of God.
+To Sir John Coleridge all this was before him habitually as a whole; he
+could take it in, not by putting piece by piece together, but because
+he saw it. And besides being an old and affectionate and intelligent
+friend, he was also a discriminating one. In his circumstances he was
+as opposite to Keble as any one could be; he was a lawyer and man of
+the world, whose busy life at Westminster had little in common with the
+studies or pursuits of the divine and the country parson.
+
+Such an informant presents a picture entirely different in kind from
+the comments and criticisms of those who can judge only from Mr.
+Keble's writings and religious line, or from the rare occasions in
+which he took a public part. These appearances, to many who willingly
+acknowledge the charm which has drawn to him the admiration and
+affection of numbers externally most widely at variance with him, do
+not always agree together. People delight in his poetry who hate his
+theology. They cannot say too much of the tenderness, the depth, the
+truth, the quick and delicate spirit of love and purity, which have
+made his verses the best interpreters and soothers of modern religious
+feeling; yet, in the religious system from which his poetry springs,
+they find nothing but what seems to them dry, harsh, narrow, and
+antiquated. He attracts and he repels; and the attraction and repulsion
+are equally strong. They see one side, and he is irresistible in his
+simplicity, humbleness, unworldliness, and ever considerate charity,
+combined with so much keenness and freshness of thought, and such sure
+and unfailing truth of feeling. They see another, and he seems to them
+full of strange unreality, strained, exaggerated, morbid, bristling
+with a forced yet inflexible intolerance. At one moment he seems the
+very ideal of a Christian teacher, made to win the sympathy of all
+hearts; the next moment a barrier rises in the shape of some unpopular
+doctrine or some display of zealous severity, seeming to be a strange
+contrast to all that was before, which utterly astonishes and
+disappoints. Mr. Keble was very little known to the public in general,
+less so even than others whose names are associated with his; and it is
+evident that to the public in general he presented a strange assemblage
+of incoherent and seemingly irreconcilable qualities. His mind seemed
+to work and act in different directions; and the results at the end
+seemed to be with wide breaks and interruptions between them. But a
+book like this enables us to trace back these diverging lines to the
+centre from which they spring. What seemed to be in such sharp
+contradiction at the outside is seen to flow naturally from the
+perfectly homogeneous and consistent character within. Many people will
+of course except to the character. It is not the type likely to find
+favour in an age of activity, doubt, and change. But, as it was
+realised in Mr. Keble, there it is in Sir John Coleridge's pages,
+perfectly real, perfectly natural, perfectly whole and uniform, with
+nothing double or incongruous in it, though it unfolded itself in
+various and opposite ways. And its ideal was simply that which has been
+consecrated as the saintly character in the Christian Church since the
+days of St. John--the deepest and most genuine love of all that was
+good; the deepest and most genuine hatred of all that was believed to
+be evil.
+
+The picture which Sir John Coleridge puts before us, though deficient
+in what is striking and brilliant, is a sufficiently remarkable and
+uncommon one. It is the picture of a man of high cultivation and
+intellect, in whom religion was not merely something flavouring and
+elevating life, not merely a great element and object of spiritual
+activity, but really and unaffectedly the one absorbing interest, and
+the spring of every thought and purpose. Whether people like such a
+character or not, and whether or not they may think the religion wrong,
+or distorted and imperfect, if they would fairly understand the writer
+of the _Christian Year_ they must start from this point. He was a man
+who, without a particle of the religious cant of any school, without
+any self-consciousness or pretension or unnatural strain, literally
+passed his clays under the quick and pervading influence, for restraint
+and for stimulus, of the will and presence of God. With this his whole
+soul was possessed; its power over him had not to be invoked and
+stirred up; it acted spontaneously and unnoticed in him; it was
+dominant in all his activity; it quenched in him aims, and even, it may
+be, faculties; it continually hampered the free play of his powers and
+gifts, and made him often seem, to those who had not the key, awkward,
+unequal, and unintelligible. But for this awful sense of truth and
+reality unseen, which dwarfed to him all personal thoughts and all
+present things, he might have been a more finished writer, a more
+attractive preacher, a less indifferent foster-father to his own works.
+But it seemed to him a shame, in the presence of all that his thoughts
+habitually dwelt with, to think of the ordinary objects of authorship,
+of studying anything of this world for its own sake, of perfecting
+works of art, of cultivating the subtle forces and spells of language
+to give attractiveness to his writings. Abruptness, inadequacy, and
+obscurity of expression were light matters, and gave him little
+concern, compared with the haunting fear of unreal words. This "seeking
+first the kingdom of God and His righteousness," as he understood it,
+was the basis of all that he was; it was really and unaffectedly his
+governing principle, the root of his affections and his antipathies,
+just as to other men is the passion for scientific discovery or
+political life.
+
+But within these limits, and jealously restrained by these conditions,
+a strongly marked character, exuberant with power and life, and the
+play of individual qualities, displayed itself. There were two
+intellectual sides to his mind--one which made him a poet, quickness
+and delicacy of observation and sympathetic interpretation, the
+realising and anticipating power of deep feeling and penetrative
+imagination; the other, at first sight, little related to poetry, a
+hard-headed, ingenious, prosaic shrewdness and directness of common
+sense, dealing practically with things as they are and on the whole,
+very little curious about scientific questions and precision,
+argumentative in a fashion modelled on Bishop Butler, and full of
+logical resource, good and, often it must be owned, bad. It was a mind
+which unfolded first under the plain, manly discipline of an
+old-fashioned English country parsonage, where the unshowy piety and
+strong morality and modest theology of the middle age of Anglicanism,
+the school of Pearson, Bull, and Wilson, were supreme. And from this it
+came under the new influences of bold and independent thought which
+were beginning to stir at Oxford; influences which were at first
+represented by such men as Davison, Copleston, and, above all, Whately;
+influences which repelled Keble by what he saw of hardness,
+shallowness, and arrogance, and still more of self-sufficiency and
+intellectual display and conceit in the prevailing tone of speculation,
+but which nevertheless powerfully affected him, and of which he showed
+the traces to the last Sir John Coleridge is disappointing as to the
+amount of light which he throws on the process which was going on in
+Keble's mind during the fifteen years or so between his degree and the
+_Christian Year_; but there is one touch which refers to this period.
+Speaking in 1838 of Alexander Knox, and expressing dislike of his
+position, "as on the top of a high hill, seeing which way different
+schools tend," and "exercising a royal right of eclecticism over all,"
+he adds:--
+
+    I speak the more feelingly because I know I was myself inclined to
+    eclecticism at one time; and if it had not been for my father and
+    my brother, where I should have been now, who can say?
+
+But he was a man who, with a very vigorous and keen intellect, capable
+of making him a formidable disputant if he had been so minded, may be
+said not to have cared for his intellect. He used it at need, but he
+distrusted and undervalued it as an instrument and help. Goodness was
+to him the one object of desire and reverence; it was really his own
+measure of what he respected and valued; and where he recognised it,
+and in whatever shape, grave or gay, he cared not about seeming
+consistent in somehow or other paying it homage. People who knew him
+remember how, in this austere judge of heresy, burdened by the
+ever-pressing conviction of the "decay" of the Church and the distress
+of a time of change, tenderness, playfulness, considerateness, the
+restraint of a modesty which could not but judge, yet mistrusted its
+fitness, marked his ordinary intercourse. Overflowing with affection to
+his friends, and showing it in all kinds of unconventional and
+unexpected instances, keeping to the last a kind of youthful freshness
+as if he had never yet realised that he was not a boy, and shrunk from
+the formality and donnishness of grown-up life, he was the most refined
+and thoughtful of gentlemen, and in the midst of the fierce party
+battles of his day, with all his strong feeling of the tremendous
+significance of the strife, always a courteous and considerate
+opponent. Strong words he used, and used deliberately. But those were
+the days when the weapons of sarcasm and personal attack were freely
+handled. The leaders of the High Church movement were held up to
+detestation as the Oxford Malignants, and they certainly showed
+themselves fully able to give their assailants as good as they brought;
+yet Mr. Keble, involved in more than one trying personal controversy,
+feeling as sternly and keenly as any one about public questions, and
+tried by disappointment and the break up of the strongest ties, never
+lost his evenness of temper, never appeared in the arena of personal
+recrimination. In all the prominent part which he took, and in the
+resolute and sometimes wrathful tone in which he defended what seemed
+harsh measures, he may have dropped words which to opponents seemed
+severe ones, but never any which even they could call a scornful one or
+a sneer.
+
+It was in keeping with all that he was--a mark of imperfection it may
+be, yet part of the nobleness and love of reality in a man who felt so
+deeply the weakness and ignorance of man--that he cared so little about
+the appearances of consistency. Thus, bound as he was by principle to
+show condemnation when he thought that a sacred cause was invaded, he
+was always inclining to conciliate his wrath with his affectionateness,
+and his severity with his consideration of circumstances and his own
+mistrust of himself. He was, of all men holding strong opinions, one of
+the most curiously and unexpectedly tolerant, wherever he could
+contrive to invent an excuse for tolerance, or where long habitual
+confidence was weighed against disturbing appearances. Sir John
+Coleridge touches this in the following extract, which is
+characteristic:--
+
+    On questions of this kind especially [University Reform], his
+    principles were uncompromising; if a measure offended against what
+    he thought honest, or violated what he thought sacred, good motives
+    in the framers he would not admit as palliation, nor would he
+    be comforted by an opinion of mine that measures mischievous
+    in their logical consequences were never in the result so
+    mischievous, or beneficial measures so beneficial, as had been
+    foretold. So he writes playfully to me at an earlier time:--
+
+        "Hurrell Froude and I took into consideration your opinion
+        that 'there are good men of all parties,' and agreed that it
+        is a bad doctrine for these days; the time being come in
+        which, according to John Miller, 'scoundrels must be called
+        scoundrels'; and, moreover, we have stigmatised the said
+        opinion by the name of the Coleridge Heresy. So hold it any
+        longer at your peril."
+
+    I think it fair to set down these which were, in truth, formed
+    opinions, and not random sayings; but it would be most unfair if
+    one concluded from them, written and spoken in the freedom of
+    friendly intercourse, that there was anything sour in his spirit,
+    or harsh and narrow in his practice; when you discussed any of
+    these things with him, the discussion was pretty sure to end, not
+    indeed with any insincere concession of what he thought right and
+    true, but in consideration for individuals and depreciation of
+    himself.
+
+And the same thing comes out in the interesting letter in which the
+Solicitor-General describes his last recollections of Keble:--
+
+    There was, I am sure, no trace of failing then to be discerned in
+    his apprehension, or judgment, or discourse. He was an old man who
+    had been very ill, who was still physically weak, and who needed
+    care; but he was the same Mr. Keble I had always known, and whom,
+    for aught that appeared, I might hope still to know for many years
+    to come. Little bits of his tenderness, flashes of his fun,
+    glimpses of his austerer side, I seem to recall, but I cannot put
+    them upon paper.... Once I remember walking with him just the same
+    short walk, from his house to Sir William's, and our conversation
+    fell upon Charles I., with regard to whose truth and honour I had
+    used some expressions in a review, which had, as I heard,
+    displeased him. I referred to this, and he said it was true. I
+    replied that I was very sorry to displease him by anything I said
+    or thought; but that if the Naseby letters were genuine, I could
+    not think that what I said was at all too strong, and that a man
+    could but do his best to form an honest opinion upon historical
+    evidence, and, if he had to speak, to express that opinion. On
+    this he said, with a tenderness and humility not only most
+    touching, but to me most embarrassing, that "It might be so; what
+    was he to judge of other men; he was old, and things were now
+    looked at very differently; that he knew he had many things to
+    unlearn and learn afresh; and that I must not mind what he had
+    said, for that in truth belief in the heroes of his youth had
+    become part of him." I am afraid these are my words, and not his;
+    and I cannot give his way of speaking, which to any one with a
+    heart, I think, would have been as overcoming as it was to me.
+
+This same carelessness about appearances seems to us to be shown in
+Keble's theological position in his later years. A more logical, or a
+more plausible, but a less thoroughly real man might easily have
+drifted into Romanism. There was much in the circumstances round him,
+in the admissions which he had made, to lead that way; and his
+chivalrous readiness to take the beaten or unpopular side would help
+the tendency. But he was a man who gave great weight to his instinctive
+perception of what was right and wrong; and he was also a man who, when
+he felt sure of his duty, did not care a straw about what the world
+thought of appearances, or required as a satisfaction of seeming
+consistency. In him was eminently illustrated the characteristic
+strength and weakness of English religion, which naturally comes out in
+that form of it which is called Anglicanism; that poor Anglicanism, the
+butt and laughing-stock of all the clever and high-flying converts to
+Rome, of all the clever and high-flying Liberals, and of all those poor
+copyists of the first, far from clever, though very high-flying, who
+now give themselves out as exclusive heirs of the great name of
+Catholic; sneered at on all sides as narrow, meagre, shattered, barren;
+which certainly does not always go to the bottom of questions, and is
+too much given to "hunting-up" passages for _catenas_ of precedents and
+authorities; but which yet has a strange, obstinate, tenacious moral
+force in it; which, without being successful in formulating theories or
+in solving fallacies, can pierce through pretences and shams; and which
+in England seems the only shape in which intense religious faith can
+unfold itself and connect itself with morality and duty, without
+seeming to wear a peculiar dress of its own, and putting a barrier of
+self-chosen watchwords and singularities between itself and the rest of
+the nation.
+
+It seems to us a great advantage to truth to have a character thus
+exhibited in its unstudied and living completeness, and exhibited
+directly, as the impression from life was produced on those before
+whose eyes it drew itself out day by day in word and act, as the
+occasion presented itself. There is, no doubt, a more vivid and
+effective way; one in which the Dean of Westminster is a great master,
+though it is not the method which he followed in what is probably his
+most perfect work, the _Life of Dr. Arnold_--the method of singling out
+points, and placing them, if possible, under a concentrated light, and
+in strong contrast and relief. Thus in Keble's case it is easy, and
+doubtless to many observers natural and tempting, to put side by side,
+with a strange mixture of perplexity and repulsion, _The Christian
+Year_, and the treatise _On Eucharistical Adoration_; to compare even
+in Keble's poetry, his tone on nature and human life, on the ways of
+children and the thoughts of death, with that on religious error and
+ecclesiastical divergences from the Anglican type; and to dwell on the
+contrast between Keble bearing his great gifts with such sweetness and
+modesty, and touching with such tenderness and depth the most delicate
+and the purest of human feelings, and Keble as the editor of Fronde's
+_Remains_, forward against Dr. Hampden, breaking off a friendship of
+years with Dr. Arnold, stiff against Liberal change and indulgent to
+ancient folly and error, the eulogist of patristic mysticism and Bishop
+Wilson's "discipline," and busy in the ecclesiastical agitations and
+legal wranglings of our later days, about Jerusalem Bishoprics and
+Courts of Final Appeal and ritual details, about Gorham judgments,
+_Essays and Reviews_ prosecutions, and Colenso scandals. The objection
+to this method of contrast is that it does not give the whole truth. It
+does not take notice that, in appreciating a man like Keble, the thing
+to start from is that his ideal and model and rule of character was
+neither more nor less than the old Christian one. It was simply what
+was accepted as right and obvious and indisputable, not by Churchmen
+only, but by all earnest believers up to our own days. Given certain
+conditions of Christian faith and duty which he took for granted as
+much as the ordinary laws of morality, then the man's own individual
+gifts or temper or leanings displayed themselves. But when people talk
+of Keble being narrow and rigid and harsh and intolerant, they ought
+first to recollect that he had been brought up with the ideas common to
+all whom he ever heard of or knew as religious people. All earnest
+religious conviction must seem narrow to those who do not share it. It
+was nothing individual or peculiar, either to him or his friends, to
+have strong notions about defending what they believed that they had
+received as the truth; and they were people who knew what they were
+about, too, and did not take things up at random. In this he was not
+different from Hooker, or Jeremy Taylor, or Bishop Butler, or Baxter,
+or Wesley, or Dr. Chalmers; it may be added, that he was not different
+from Dr. Arnold or Archbishop Whately. It must not be forgotten that
+till of late years there was always supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be
+such a thing as false doctrine, and that intolerance of it, within the
+limits of common justice, was always held as much part of the Christian
+character as devotion and charity. Men differed widely as to what was
+false doctrine, but they did not differ much as to there being such a
+thing, and as to what was to be thought of it. Keble, like other people
+of his time, took up his system, and really, considering that the ideal
+which he honestly and earnestly aimed at was the complete system of the
+Catholic Church, it is an abuse of words to call it, whatever else it
+may be called, a narrow system. There may be a wider system still, in
+the future; but it is at least premature to say that a man is narrow
+because he accepts in good faith the great traditional ideas and
+doctrines of the Christian Church; for of everything that can yet be
+called a religious system, in the sense commonly understood, as an
+embodiment of definite historical revelation, it is not easy to
+conceive a less narrow one. And, accepting it as the truth, it was
+dearer to him than life. That he was sensitively alive to whatever
+threatened or opposed it, and was ready to start up like a soldier,
+ready to do battle against any odds and to risk any unpopularity or
+misconstruction, was only the sure and natural result of that deep love
+and loyalty and thorough soundness of heart with which he loved his
+friends, but what he believed to be truth and God's will better than
+his friends. But it is idle and shallow to confuse the real narrowness
+which springs from a harsh temper or a cramped and self-sufficient
+intellect, and which is quite compatible with the widest theoretical
+latitude, and the inevitable appearance of narrowness and severity
+which must always be one side which a man of strong convictions and
+earnest purpose turns to those whose strong convictions and earnest
+purpose are opposite to his.
+
+Mr. Keble, saintly as was his character, if ever there was such a
+character, belonged, as we all do, to his day and generation. The
+aspect of things and the thoughts of men change; enlarging, we are
+always apt to think, but perhaps really also contracting in some
+directions where they once were larger. In Mr. Keble, the service which
+he rendered to his time consisted, not merely, as it is sometimes
+thought, in soothing and refining it, but in bracing it. He was the
+preacher and example of manly hardness, simplicity, purpose in the
+religious character. It may be that his hatred of evil--of hollowness,
+impurity, self-will, conceit, ostentation--was greater than was always
+his perception of various and mingled good, or his comprehension of
+those middle things and states which are so much before us now. But the
+service cannot be overrated, to all parties, of the protest which his
+life and all his words were against dangers which were threatening all
+parties, and not least the Liberal party--the danger of shallowness and
+superficial flippancy; the danger of showy sentiment and insincerity,
+of worldly indifference to high duties and calls. With the one great
+exception of Arnold--Keble's once sympathetic friend, though afterwards
+parted from him--the religious Liberals of our time have little reason
+to look back with satisfaction to the leaders, able and vigorous as
+some of them were, who represented their cause then. They owe to Keble,
+as much as do those who are more identified with his theology, the
+inestimable service of having interpreted religion by a genuine life,
+corresponding in its thoroughness and unsparing, unpretending
+devotedness, as well as in its subtle vividness of feeling, to the
+great object which religion professes to contemplate.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+MAURICE'S THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS[21]
+
+
+  [21]
+  _Theological Essays_. By F.D. Maurice. _Guardian_, 7th September 1853.
+
+The purpose of this volume of essays is to consider the views
+entertained by Unitarians of what are looked upon by Christians
+generally as fundamental truths; to examine what force there is in
+Unitarian objections, and what mistakes are involved in the popular
+notions and representations of those fundamental truths; and so,
+without entering into controversy, for which Mr. Maurice declares
+himself entirely indisposed, and in the utility of which he entirely
+disbelieves, to open the way for a deeper and truer, and more serious
+review, by all parties, of either the differences or the misunderstandings
+which keep them asunder. It is a work, the writer considers, as
+important as any which he has undertaken: "No labour I have been
+engaged in has occupied me so much, or interested me more deeply;"
+and with his estimate of his subject we are not disposed to disagree.
+
+We always rise from the perusal of one of Mr. Maurice's books with the
+feeling that he has shown us one great excellence, and taught us one
+great lesson. He has shown us an example of serious love of truth, and
+an earnest sense of its importance, and of his own responsibility in
+speaking of it. Most readers, whatever else they may think, must have
+their feeling of the wide and living interest of a theological or moral
+subject quickened by Mr. Maurice's thoughts on it. This is the
+excellence. The lesson is this--to look into the meaning of our
+familiar words, and to try to use them with a real meaning. Not that
+Mr. Maurice always shows us how; but it is difficult for conscience to
+escape being continually reminded of the duty. And it is in these two
+things that the value of Mr. Maurice's writings mainly consists. The
+enforcing of them has been, to our mind, his chief "mission," and his
+most valuable contribution to the needs of his generation.
+
+In this volume they are exhibited, as in his former ones; and in this
+he shows also, as he has shown before, his earnest desire to find a way
+whereby, without compromising truth or surrendering sacred convictions
+of the heart, serious men of very different sides might be glad to find
+themselves in some points mistaken, in order that they might find
+themselves at one. This philosophy, not of comprehension but of
+conciliation, the craving after which has awakened in the Church,
+whenever mental energy has been quickened, the philosophy in which
+Clement of Alexandria and Origin, and, we may add, St. Augustine, made
+many earnest essays, is certainly no unworthy aim for the theologian of
+our days. He would, indeed, deserve largely of the Church who should
+show us a solid and safe way to it.
+
+But while we are far from denouncing or suspecting the wish or the
+design, we are bound to watch jealously and criticise narrowly the
+execution. For we all know what such plans have come to before now. And
+it is for the interest of all serious and earnest people on all sides,
+that there should be no needless and additional confusion introduced
+into theology--such confusion as is but too likely to follow, when a
+design of conciliation, with the aim of which so many, for good reasons
+or bad ones, are sure to sympathise, is carried out by hands that are
+not equal to it. With the fullest sense of the serious truthfulness of
+those who differ from us, of the real force of many of their objections
+and criticisms on our proceedings, our friends, and our ideas, it is
+far better to hold our peace, than from impatience at what we feel to
+be the vulnerable point of our own side, to rush into explanations
+before we are sure of our power adequately to explain.
+
+And to this charge it seems to us that Mr. Maurice is open. There is
+sense and manliness in his disclaimer of proselytism; and there is a
+meaning in which we can agree with his account of truth. "If I could
+persuade all Dissenters," he says, "to become members of my Church
+to-morrow, I should be very sorry to do it. I believe the chances are
+they might leave it the next day. I do not wish to make them think as I
+think. But I want that they and I should be what we pretend to be, and
+then I doubt not we should find that there is a common ground for us
+all far beneath our thinkings. For truth I hold not to be that which
+every man troweth, but to be that which lies at the bottom of all men's
+trowings, that in which those trowings have their only meeting-point."
+He would make as clear as can be that deep substructure, and leave the
+sight of it to work its natural effect on the honest heart. A noble
+aim; but surely requiring, if anything can, the clear eye, the steady
+hand, the heart as calm as earnest. Surely a work in which the greatest
+exactness and precision, as well as largeness of thought, would not be
+too much. For if we but take away the "trowings" without coming down to
+the central foundation, or lose ourselves, and mistake a new "trowing"
+of our own for it, it is hardly a sufficient degree of blame to say
+that we have done no good.
+
+And in these qualities of exactness and precision it does seem to us
+that Mr. Maurice is, for his purpose, fatally deficient. His criticisms
+are often acute, his thrusts on each side often very home ones, and
+but too full of truth; his suggestions often full of thought and
+instruction; his balancings and contrasts of errors and truths, if
+sometimes too artificial, yet generally striking. But when we come to
+seek for the reconciling truth, which one side has overlaid and
+distorted, and the other ignorantly shrunk back from, but which, when
+placed in its real light and fairly seen, is to attract the love and
+homage of both, we seem--not to grasp a shadow--Mr. Maurice is too
+earnest and real a believer for that--but to be very much where we
+were, except that a cloud of words surrounds us. His positive
+statements seem like a running protest against being obliged to commit
+himself and come to the point; like a continual assertion of the
+hopelessness and uselessness of a definite form of speaking about the
+matter in hand. Take, for instance, the following short statement:--
+
+    "My object," he says, speaking of the words which he has taken as
+    the subject of his essays, "has been to examine the language with
+    which we are most familiar, and which has been open to most
+    objections, especially from Unitarians. Respecting the Conception
+    I have been purposely silent; not because I have any doubt about
+    that article, or am indifferent to it, but because I believe the
+    word '_miraculous_,' which we _ordinarily connect with it, suggests
+    an untrue meaning; because I think the truth is conveyed to us
+    most safely in the simple language of the Evangelists_; and because
+    that language taken in connection with the rest of their story,
+    offers itself, I suspect, to a majority of those who have taken
+    in the idea of an Incarnation, as the _only natural and rational_
+    account of the method by which the eternal Son of God could have
+    taken human flesh."
+
+Now, would not Mr. Maurice have done better if he had enounced the
+definite meaning, or shade of meaning, which he considers short of, or
+different from, our _ordinary_ meaning of _miraculous_, as applied to
+this subject, and yet the same as that suggested by the Gospel account?
+We have no doubt what Mr. Maurice does believe on this sacred subject.
+But we are puzzled by what he means to disavow, as an "_untrue
+meaning_" of the word _miraculous_, as applied to what he believes.
+And  the Unitarians whom he addresses must, we think, be puzzled too.
+
+We have quoted this passage because it is a short one, and therefore a
+convenient one for a short notice like this. But the same tormenting
+indistinctness pervades the attempts generally to get a meaning or a
+position, which shall be substantially and in its living force the same
+as the popular and orthodox article, yet convict it of confusion or
+formalism; and which shall give to the Unitarian what he aims at by his
+negation of the popular article, without leaving him any longer a
+reason for denying it. The essay on Inspiration is an instance of this.
+Mr. Maurice says very truly, that it is necessary to face the fact that
+important questions are asked on the subject, very widely, and by
+serious people; that popular notions are loose and vague about it; that
+it is a dangerous thing to take refuge in a hard theory, if it is an
+inconsistent and inadequate one; that if doubts do grow up, they are
+hardly to be driven away by assertions. He accepts the challenge to
+state his own view of Inspiration, and devotes many pages to doing so.
+In these page's are many true and striking things. So far as we
+understand, there is not a statement that we should contradict. But we
+have searched in vain for a passage which might give, in Mr. Maurice's
+words, a distinct answer to the question of friend or opponent, What do
+you mean by the "Inspiration of the Bible?" Mr. Maurice tells us a most
+important truth--that that same Great Person by whose "holy
+inspiration" all true Christians still hope to be taught, inspired the
+prophets. He protests against making it necessary to say that there is
+a _generic_ difference between one kind of Inspiration and the other,
+or "setting up the Bible as a book which encloses all that may be
+lawfully called Inspiration." He looks on the Bible as a link--a great
+one, yet a link, joining on to what is before and what comes after--in
+God's method of teaching man His truth. He cares little about phrases
+like "verbal inspiration" and "plenary inspiration"--"forms of speech
+which are pretty toys for those that have leisure to play with them;
+and if they are not made so hard as to do mischief, the use of them
+should not be checked. But they do not belong to business." He bids us,
+instead, give men "the Book of Life," and "have courage to tell them
+that there is a Spirit with them who will guide them into all truth."
+Great and salutary lessons. But we must say that they have been long in
+the world, and, it must be said, are as liable to be misunderstood as
+any other "popular" notions on the subject. If there is nothing more to
+say on the subject--if it is one where, though we see and are sure of a
+truth, yet we must confess it to be behind a veil, as yet indistinct
+and not to be grasped, let us manfully say so, and wait till God reveal
+even this unto us. But it is not a wise or a right course to raise
+expectations of being able to say something, not perhaps new, but
+satisfactory, when the questions which are really being asked, which
+are the professed occasion of the answer, remain, in their Intellectual
+difficulty, entirely unresolved. Mr. Maurice is no trifler; when he
+throws hard words about,--when at the close of this essay he paints to
+himself the disappointment of some "Unitarian listener, who had hoped
+that Mr. Maurice was going to join him in cursing his enemies, and
+found that he had blessed them these three times,"--he ought to
+consider whether the result has not been, and very naturally, to leave
+both parties more convinced than before of the hollowness of all
+professions to enter into, and give weight to, the difficulties and the
+claims of opposite sides.
+
+Mr. Maurice has not done justice, as it seems to us, in this case, to
+the difficulty of the Unitarian. In other cases he makes free with the
+common belief of Christendom, and claims sacrifices which are as
+needless as they are unwarrantable. If there is a belief rooted in the
+minds of Christians, it is that of a future judgment. If there is an
+expectation which Scripture and the Creed sanction in the plainest
+words, it is that this present world is to have an end, and that then,
+a time now future, Christ will judge quick and dead. Say as much as can
+be said of the difficulty of conceiving such a thing, it really amounts
+to no more than the difficulty of conceiving what will happen, and how
+we shall be dealt with, when this familiar world passes away. And this
+belief in a "_final_ judgment, _unlike any other that has ever been in
+the world_," Mr. Maurice would have us regard as a misinterpretation of
+Bible and Creed--a "dream" which St. Paul would never "allow us" to
+entertain, but would "compel" us instead "to look upon everyone of what
+we rightly call 'God's judgments' as _essentially resembling it in kind
+and principle_." "Our eagerness to deny this," he continues, "to make
+out an altogether peculiar and unprecedented judgment at the end of the
+world, has obliged us first _to practise the most violent outrages upon
+the language of Scripture_, insisting that words cannot really mean
+what, according to all ordinary rules of construction, they must mean."
+It really must be said that the "outrage," if so it is to be called, is
+not on the side of the popular belief. And why does this belief seem
+untenable to Mr. Maurice? Because it seems inconsistent to him with a
+truth which he states and enforces with no less earnestness than
+reason, that Christ is every moment judging us--that His tribunal is
+one before which we in our inmost "being are standing now--and that the
+time will come when we shall know that it is so, and when all that has
+concealed the Judge from us shall be taken away." Doubtless Christ is
+always with us--always seeing us--always judging us. Doubtless
+"everywhere" in Scripture the idea is kept before us of judgment in its
+fullest, largest, most natural sense, as "importing" not merely passing
+sentence, and awarding reward or penalty, but "discrimination and
+discovery. Everywhere that discrimination or discovery is supposed to
+be exercised over the man himself, over his internal character, over
+his meaning and will." Granted, also, that men have, in their attempts
+to figure to themselves the "great assize," sometimes made strange
+work, and shown how carnal their thoughts are, both in what they
+expected, and in the influence they allowed it to have over them. But
+what of all this? Correct these gross ideas, but leave the words of
+Scripture in their literal meaning, and do not say that all those who
+receive them as the announcement of what is to be, under conditions now
+inconceivable to man, _must_ understand "the substitution of a mere
+external trial or examination" for the inward and daily trial of our
+hearts, as a mere display of "earthly pomp and ceremonial"--a
+resumption by Christ "of earthly conditions"; or that, because they
+believe that at "some distant unknown period they shall be brought into
+the presence of One who is now" not "far from them," but out of
+sight--how, or in what manner they know not--therefore they _must_
+suppose that He "is not now fulfilling the office of a Judge, whatever
+else may be committed to Him."
+
+Mr. Maurice is aiming at a high object. He would reconcile the old and
+the new. He would disencumber what is popular of what is vulgar,
+confused, sectarian, and preserve and illustrate it by disencumbering
+it. He calls on us not to be afraid of the depths and heights, the
+freedom and largeness, the "spirit and the truth," of our own theology.
+It is a warning and a call which every age wants. We sympathise with
+his aim, with much of his positive teaching, with some of his aversions
+and some of his fears. We do not respect him the less for not being
+afraid of being called hard names. But certainly such a writer has
+need, in no common degree, of conforming himself to that wise maxim,
+which holds in writing as well as in art--"Know what you want to do,
+then do it."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE[22]
+
+
+  [22]
+  _Saturday Review_, 6th April 1872.
+
+This Easter week we have lost a man about whom opinions and feelings
+were much divided, who was by many of the best and most thoughtful
+among us looked on as the noblest and greatest of recent English
+teachers, and who certainly had that rare gift of inspiring enthusiasm
+and trust among honest and powerful minds in search of guidance, which
+belongs to none but to men of a very high order. Professor Maurice has
+ended a life of the severest and most unceasing toil, still working to
+the utmost that failing bodily strength allowed--still to the last in
+harness. The general public, though his name is familiar to them,
+probably little measure the deep and passionate affection with which he
+was regarded by the circle of his friends and by those whose thoughts
+and purposes he had moulded; or the feeling which his loss causes in
+them of a blank, great and not to be filled up, not only personally for
+themselves, but in the agencies which are working most hopefully in
+English society. But even those who knew him least, and only from the
+outside, and whose points of view least coincided with his, must feel
+that there has been, now that we look back on his course, something
+singularly touching and even pathetic in the combination shown in all
+that he did, of high courage and spirit, and of unwearied faith and
+vigour, with the deepest humility and with the sincerest
+disinterestedness and abnegation, which never allowed him to seek
+anything great for himself, and, in fact, distinguished and honoured as
+he was, never found it. For the sake of his generation we may regret
+that he did not receive the public recognition and honour which were
+assuredly his due; but in truth his was one of those careers which, for
+their own completeness and consistency, gain rather than lose by
+escaping the distractions and false lights of what is called
+preferment.
+
+The two features which strike us at the moment as characteristic of Mr.
+Maurice as a writer and teacher, besides the vast range both of his
+reading and thought, and the singularly personal tone and language of
+all that he wrote, are, first, the combination in him of the most
+profound and intense religiousness with the most boundless claim and
+exercise of intellectual liberty; and next, the value which he set,
+exemplifying his estimate in his own long and laborious course, on
+processes and efforts, as compared with conclusions and definite
+results, in that pursuit of truth which was to him the most sacred of
+duties. There is no want of earnest and fervent religion among us,
+intelligent, well-informed, deliberate, as well as of religion, to
+which these terms can hardly be applied. And there is also no want of
+the boldest and most daring freedom of investigation and judgment. But
+what Mr. Maurice seemed to see himself, and what he endeavoured to
+impress on others, was that religion and liberty are no natural
+enemies, but that the deepest and most absorbing forms of historical
+and traditional religion draw strength and seriousness of meaning, and
+binding obligation, from an alliance, frank and unconditional, with
+what seem to many the risks, the perilous risks and chances, of
+freedom.
+
+It was a position open to obvious and formidable criticism; but against
+this criticism is to be set the fact, that in a long and energetic
+life, in which amidst great trials and changes there was a singular
+uniformity and consistency of character maintained, he did unite the
+two--the most devout Christianity with the most fearless and
+unshrinking boldness in facing the latest announcements and
+possibilities of modern thought. That he always satisfactorily
+explained his point of view to others is more than can be said; but he
+certainly satisfied numbers of keen and anxious thinkers, who were
+discontented and disheartened both by religion as it is presented by
+our great schools and parties, and by science as its principles and
+consequences are expounded by the leading philosophical authorities of
+the day. The other point to which we have adverted partly explains the
+influence which he had with such minds. He had no system to formulate
+or to teach. He was singularly ready to accept, as adequate expressions
+of those truths in whose existence he so persistently believed, the old
+consecrated forms in which simpler times had attempted to express them.
+He believed that these truths are wider and vaster than the human mind
+which is to be made wiser and better by them. And his aim was to reach
+up to an ever more exact, and real, and harmonious hold of these
+truths, which in their essential greatness he felt to be above him; to
+reach to it in life as much as in thought. And so to the end he was
+ever striving, not so much to find new truths as to find the heart and
+core of old ones, the truth of the truth, the inner life and
+significance of the letter, of which he was always loth to refuse the
+traditional form. In these efforts at unfolding and harmonising there
+was considerable uniformity; no one could mistake Mr. Maurice's manner
+of presenting the meaning and bearing of an article of the Creed for
+the manner of any one else; but the result of this way of working, in
+the effect of the things which he said, and in his relations to
+different bodies of opinion and thought both in the Church and in
+society, was to give the appearance of great and important changes in
+his teaching and his general point of view, as life went on. This
+governing thought of his, of the immeasurably transcendent compass and
+height of all truths compared with the human mind and spirit which was
+to bow to them and to gain life and elevation by accepting them,
+explains the curious and at present almost unique combination in him,
+of deep reverence for the old language of dogmatic theology, and an
+energetic maintenance of its fitness and value, with dissatisfaction,
+equally deep and impartially universal, at the interpretations put on
+this dogmatic language by modern theological schools, and at the modes
+in which its meaning is applied by them both in directing thought and
+influencing practice. This habit of distinguishing sharply and
+peremptorily between dogmatic language and the popular reading of it at
+any given time is conspicuous in his earliest as in his latest handling
+of these subjects; in the pamphlet of 1835, _Subscription no Bondage_,
+explaining and defending the old practice at Oxford; and in the papers
+and letters, which have appeared from him in periodicals, on the
+Athanasian Creed, and which are, we suppose, almost his last writings.
+
+The world at large thought Mr. Maurice obscure and misty, and was, as
+was natural, impatient of such faults. The charge was, no doubt, more
+than partially true; and nothing but such genuine strength and
+comprehensive power as his could have prevented it from being a fatal
+one to his weight and authority. But it is not uninstructive to
+remember what was very much at the root of it. It had its origin, not
+altogether, but certainly in a great degree, in two of his moral
+characteristics. One was his stubborn, conscientious determination, at
+any cost of awkwardness, or apparent inconsistency, or imperfection of
+statement, to say out what he had to say, neither more nor less, just
+as he thought it, and just as he felt it, with the most fastidious care
+for truthful accuracy of meaning. He never would suffer what he
+considered either the connection or the balance and adjustment of
+varied and complementary truths to be sacrificed to force or point of
+expression; and he had to choose sometimes, as all people have, between
+a blurred, clumsy, and ineffective picture and a consciously incomplete
+and untrue one. His choice never wavered; and as the artist's aim was
+high, and his skill not always equally at his command, he preferred the
+imperfection which left him the consciousness of honesty. The other
+cause which threw a degree of haze round his writings was the personal
+shape into which he was so fond of throwing his views. He shrunk from
+their enunciation as arguments and conclusions which claimed on their
+own account and by their own title the deference of all who read them;
+and he submitted them as what he himself had found and had been granted
+to see--the lessons and convictions of his own experience. Sympathy is,
+no doubt, a great bond among all men; but, after all, men's experience
+and their points of view are not all alike, and when we are asked to
+see with another's eyes, it is not always easy. Mr. Maurice's desire to
+give the simplest and most real form to his thoughts as they arose in
+his own mind contributed more often than he supposed to prevent others
+from entering into his meaning. He asked them to put themselves in his
+place. He did not sufficiently put himself in theirs.
+
+But he has taught us great lessons, of the sacredness, the largeness,
+and, it may be added, the difficulty of truth; lessons of sympathy with
+one another, of true humility and self-conquest in the busy and
+unceasing activity of the intellectual faculties. He has left no school
+and no system, but he has left a spirit and an example. We speak of him
+here only as those who knew him as all the world knew him; but those
+who were his friends are never tired of speaking of his grand
+simplicity of character, of his tenderness and delicacy, of the
+irresistible spell of lovableness which won all within its reach. They
+remember how he spoke, and how he read; the tones of a voice of
+singularly piercing clearness, which was itself a power of
+interpretation, which revealed his own soul and went straight to the
+hearts of hearers. He has taken his full share in the controversies of
+our days, and there must be many opinions both about the line which he
+took, and even sometimes about the temper in which he carried on
+debate. But it is nothing but the plainest justice to say that he was a
+philosopher, a theologian, and, we may add, a prophet, of whom, for his
+great gifts, and, still more, for his noble and pure use of them, the
+modern English Church may well be proud.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+SIR RICHARD CHURCH[23]
+
+
+  [23]
+  _Guardian_, 26th March 1873.
+
+General Sir Richard Church died last week at Athens. Many English
+travellers in the East find their way to Athens; most of them must have
+heard his name repeated there as the name of one closely associated
+with the later fortunes of the Greek nation, and linking the present
+with times now distant; some of them may have seen him, and may
+remember the slight wiry form which seemed to bear years so lightly,
+the keen eye and grisled moustache and soldierly bearing, and perhaps
+the antique and ceremonious courtesy, stately yet cordial, recalling a
+type of manners long past, with which he welcomed those who had a claim
+on his attentions or friendly offices. Five and forty years ago his
+name was much in men's mouths. He was prominent in a band of
+distinguished men, who represented a new enthusiasm in Europe. Less by
+what they were able to do than by their character and their unreserved
+self-devotion and sacrifice, they profoundly affected public opinion,
+and disarmed the jealousy of absolutist courts and governments in
+favour of a national movement, which, whether disappointment may have
+followed its success, was one of the most just and salutary of
+revolutions--the deliverance of a Christian nation from the hopeless
+tyranny of the Turks.
+
+He was one of the few remaining survivors of the generation which had
+taken part in the great French war and in the great changes resulting
+from it--changes which have in time given way to vaster alterations,
+and been eclipsed by them. He began his military life as a boy-ensign
+in one of the regiments forming part of the expedition which, under Sir
+Ralph Abercromby, drove the French out of Egypt in 1801; and on the
+shores of the Mediterranean, where his career began, it was for the
+most part continued and finished. His genius led him to the more
+irregular and romantic forms of military service; he had the gift of
+personal influence, and the power of fascinating and attaching to
+himself, with extraordinary loyalty, the people of the South. His
+adventurous temper, his sympathetic nature, his chivalrous courtesy,
+his thorough trustworthiness and sincerity, his generosity, his high
+spirit of nobleness and honour, won for him, from Italians and Greeks,
+not only that deep respect which was no unusual tribute from them to
+English honesty and strength and power of command, but that love, and
+that affectionate and almost tender veneration, for which strong and
+resolute Englishmen have not always cared from races of whose
+characteristic faults they were impatient.
+
+His early promise in the regular service was brilliant; as a young
+staff-officer, and by a staff-officer's qualities of sagacity,
+activity, and decision, he did distinguished service at Maida; and had
+he followed the movement which made Spain the great battle-ground for
+English soldiers, he had every prospect of earning a high place among
+those who fought under Wellington. But he clung to the Mediterranean.
+He was employed in raising and organising those foreign auxiliary corps
+which it was thought were necessary to eke out the comparatively scanty
+numbers of the English armies, and to keep up threatening
+demonstrations on the outskirts of the French Empire. It was in this
+service that his connection with the Greek people was first formed, and
+his deep and increasing interest in its welfare created. He was
+commissioned to form first one, and then a second, regiment of Greek
+irregulars; and from the Ionian Islands, from the mainland of Albania,
+from the Morea, chiefs and bands, accustomed to the mountain warfare,
+half patriotic, half predatory, carried on by the more energetic Greek
+highlanders against the Turks, flocked to the English standards. The
+operations in which they were engaged were desultory, and of no great
+account in the general result of the gigantic contest; but they made
+Colonel Church's name familiar to the Greek population, who were
+hoping, amid the general confusion, for an escape from the tyranny of
+the Turks. But his connection with Greece was for some time delayed.
+His peculiar qualifications pointed him out as a fit man to be a medium
+of communication between the English Government and the foreign armies
+which were operating on the outside of the circle within which the
+decisive struggle was carried on against Napoleon; and he was the
+English Military Commissioner attached to the Austrian armies in Italy
+in 1814 and 1815.
+
+At the Peace, his eagerness for daring and adventurous enterprise was
+tempted by great offers from the Neapolitan Government. The war had
+left brigandage, allied to a fierce spirit of revolutionary
+freemasonry, all-powerful in the south of Italy; and a stern and
+resolute, yet perfectly honest and just hand, was needed to put it
+down. He accepted the commission; he was reckless of conspiracy and
+threats of assassination; he was known to be no sanguinary and
+merciless lover of severity, but he was known also to be fearless and
+inexorable against crime; and, not without some terrible examples, yet
+with complete success, he delivered the south of Italy from the
+scourge. But his thoughts had always been turned towards Greece; at
+last the call came, and he threw himself with all his hopes and all his
+fortunes into a struggle which more than any other that history can
+show engaged at the time the interest of Europe. His first efforts
+resulted in a disastrous defeat against overwhelming odds, for which,
+as is natural, he has been severely criticised; his critics have shown
+less quickness in perceiving the qualities which he displayed after
+it--his unshaken, silent fortitude, the power with which he kept
+together and saved the wrecks of his shattered and disheartened
+volunteer army, the confidence in himself with which he inspired them,
+the skill with which he extricated them from their dangers in the face
+of a strong and formidable enemy, the humanity which he strove so
+earnestly by word and example to infuse into the barbarous warfare
+customary between Greeks and Turks, the tenacity with which he clung to
+the fastnesses of Western Greece, obtaining by his perseverance from
+the diplomacy of Europe a more favourable line of boundary for the new
+nation which it at length recognised. To this cause he gave up
+everything; personal risks cannot be counted; but he threw away all
+prospects in England; he made no bargains; he sacrificed freely to the
+necessities of the struggle any pecuniary resource that he could
+command, neither requiring nor receiving any repayment. He threw in his
+lot with the people for whom he had surrendered everything, in order to
+take part in their deliverance. Since his arrival in Greece in 1827 he
+has never turned his face westwards. He took the part which is perhaps
+the only becoming and justifiable one for the citizen of one State who
+permits himself to take arms, even in the cause of independence, for
+another; having fought for the Greeks, he lived with them, and shared,
+for good and for evil, their fortunes.
+
+For more than forty years he has resided at Athens under the shadow of
+the great rock of the Acropolis. Distinguished by all the honours the
+Greek nation could bestow, military or political, he has lived in
+modest retirement, only on great emergencies taking any prominent part
+in the political questions of Greece, but always throwing his influence
+on the side of right and honesty. The course of things in Greece was
+not always what an educated Englishman could wish it to be. But
+whatever his judgment, or, on occasion, his action might be, there
+never could be a question, with his friends any more than with his
+opponents--enemies he could scarcely be said to have--as to the
+straightforwardness, the pure motives, the unsullied honour of anything
+that he did or anything that he advised. The Greeks saw among them one
+deeply sympathising with all that they cared for, commanding, if he had
+pleased to work for it, considerable influence out of Greece, the
+intimate friend of a Minister like Sir Edmund Lyons, yet keeping free
+from the temptation to make that use of influence which seems so
+natural to politicians in a place like Athens; thinking much of Greece
+and of the interests of his friends there, but thinking as much of
+truth and justice and conscience; hating intrigue and trick, and
+shaming by his indignant rebuke any proposal of underhand courses that
+might be risked in his presence.
+
+The course of things, the change of ideas and of men, threw him more
+and more out of any forward and prominent place in the affairs of
+Greece. But his presence in Athens was felt everywhere. There was a man
+who had given up everything for Greece and sought nothing in return.
+His blameless unselfishness, his noble elevation of character, were a
+warning and a rebuke to the faults which have done so much mischief to
+the progress of the nation; and yet every Greek in Athens knew that no
+one among them was more jealous of the honour of the nation or more
+anxious for its good. To a new political society, freshly exposed to
+the temptations of party struggles for power, no greater service can be
+rendered than a public life absolutely clear from any suspicion of
+self-seeking, governed uninterruptedly and long by public spirit,
+public ends, and a strong sense of duty. Such a service General Church
+has rendered to his adopted country. During his residence among them
+for nearly half a century they have become familiar, not in word, but
+in living reality, with some of the best things which the West has to
+impart to the East. They have had among them an example of English
+principle, English truth, English high-souled disinterestedness, and
+that noble English faith which, in a great cause, would rather hope in
+vain than not hope at all. They have learned to venerate all this, and,
+some of them, to love it.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+DEATH OF BISHOP WILBERFORCE[24]
+
+
+  [24]
+  _Guardian_, 23rd July 1873.
+
+The beautiful summer weather which came on us at the beginning of this
+week gives by contrast a strange and terrible point to the calamity,
+the announcement of which sent such a shock through the whole country
+on Monday last. Summer days in all their brilliance seemed come at
+last, after a long waiting which made them the more delightful. But as
+people came down to breakfast on that morning, or as they gathered at
+railway stations on their way to business, the almost incredible
+tidings met them that the Bishop of Winchester was dead; that he had
+been killed by a fall from his horse. In a moment, by the most trivial
+of accidents, one of the foremost and most stirring men of our
+generation had passed away from the scene in which his part was so
+large a one. With everything calm and peaceful round him, in the midst
+of the keen but tranquil enjoyment of a summer evening ride with a
+friend through some of the most charming scenery in England, looking
+forward to meeting another friend, and to the pleasure which a quiet
+Sunday brings to hard-worked men in fine weather, and a pleasant
+country house, the blow fell. The moment before, as Lord Granville
+remarks, he had given expression to the fulness of his enjoyment. He
+was rejoicing in the fine weather, he was keenly noticing the beauty of
+the scenery at every point of the way; with his characteristic love of
+trees he was noticing the different kinds and the soils which suited
+them; especially he was greatly pleased with his horse. There comes a
+slight dip in the smooth turf; the horse stumbles and recovers himself
+unhurt; but in that short interval of time all has vanished, all things
+earthly, from that quick eye and that sensitive and sympathetic mind.
+It is indeed tragic. He is said to have thought with distress of a
+lingering end. He was spared it. He died as a soldier dies.
+
+A shock like this brings with it also a shock of new knowledge and
+appreciation of things. We are made to feel with a new force what it is
+that we have lost, and to understand more exactly what is the
+proportion of what we have lost to what we still retain. To friends and
+opponents the Bishop of Winchester could not but be, under any
+circumstances, a person of the greatest importance. But few of us,
+probably, measured fully and accurately the place which he filled among
+us. We are better aware of it now when he has been taken away from us.
+Living among us, and acting before us from day to day, the object of
+each day's observation and criticism, under each day's varying
+circumstances and feelings, within our reach always if we wanted to see
+him or to hear him, he was presented to our thoughts in that partial
+disclosure, and that everyday homeliness, which as often disguise the
+true and complete significance of a character, as they give substance
+and reality to our conceptions of it. As the man's course moves on, we
+are apt to lose in our successive judgments of the separate steps of
+it--it may be stops of great immediate interest--our sense of its
+connection and tendency, of the true measure of it as a whole, of the
+degree in which character is growing and rising, or, on the other hand,
+falling or standing still. The Bishop of Winchester had many
+admirers--many who deeply loved and trusted him--many who, in the face
+of a good deal of suspicion and hostile comment, stoutly insisted on
+the high estimate which they had formed of him. But even among them,
+and certainly in the more indifferent public, there were few who had
+rightly made it clear to their own minds what he had really grown to be
+both in the Church and the country.
+
+For it is obvious, at the first glance now that he is gone, that there
+is no one who can fill the place which he filled. It seems to us beyond
+dispute that he has been the greatest Bishop the English Church has
+seen for a century and a half. We do not say the greatest man, but the
+greatest Bishop; the one among the leaders of the English Church who
+most adequately understood the relations of his office, not only to the
+Church, but to his times and his country, and who most adequately
+fulfilled his own conception of them. We are very far from saying this
+because of his exuberant outfit of powers and gifts; because of his
+versatility, his sympathetic nature, his eager interest in all that
+interested his fellows, his inexhaustible and ready resources of
+thought and speech, of strong and practical good sense, of brilliant or
+persuasive or pathetic eloquence. In all this he had equals and rivals,
+though perhaps he had not many in the completeness and balance of his
+powers. Nor do we say anything of those gifts, partly of the intellect,
+but also of the soul and temper and character, by which he was able at
+once to charm without tiring the most refined and fastidious society,
+to draw to him the hearts of hard-working and anxious clergymen, and to
+enchain the attention of the dullest and most ignorant of rustic
+congregations. All these are, as it seems to us, the subordinate, and
+not the most interesting, parts of what he was; they were on the
+surface and attracted notice, and the parts were often mistaken for the
+whole. Nor do we forget what often offended even equitable judges,
+disliking all appearance of management and mere adroitness--or what was
+often objected against his proceedings by opponents at least as
+unscrupulous as they wished him to be thought. We are far from thinking
+that his long career was free from either mistakes or faults; it is not
+likely that a course steered amid such formidable and perplexing
+difficulties, and steered with such boldness and such little attempt to
+evade them, should not offer repeated occasions not only for
+ill-natured, but for grave and serious objections.
+
+But looking over that long course of his Episcopate, from 1845 to the
+present year, we see in him, in an eminent and unique degree, two
+things. He had a distinct and statesmanlike idea of Church policy; and
+he had a new idea of the functions of a Bishop, and of what a Bishop
+might do and ought to do. And these two ideas he steadily kept in view
+and acted upon with increasing clearness in his purpose and unflagging
+energy in action. He grasped in all its nobleness and fulness and
+height the conception of the Church as a great religious society of
+Divine origin, with many sides and functions, with diversified gifts
+and ever new relations to altering times, but essentially, and above
+all things, a religious society. To serve that society, to call forth
+in it the consciousness of its calling and its responsibilities, to
+strengthen and put new life into its organisation, to infuse ardour and
+enthusiasm and unity into its efforts, to encourage and foster
+everything that harmonised with its principle and purpose, to watch
+against the counteracting influences of self-willed or ignorant
+narrowness, to adjust its substantial rights and its increasing
+activity to the new exigencies of political changes, to elicit from the
+Church all that could command the respect and win the sympathy and
+confidence of Englishmen, and make its presence recognised as a supreme
+blessing by those whom nothing but what was great and real in its
+benefits would satisfy--this was the aim from which, however perplexed
+or wavering or inconsistent he may have been at times, he never really
+swerved. In the breadth and largeness of his principle, in the freedom
+and variety of its practical applications, in the distinctness of his
+purposes and the intensity of his convictions, he was an example of
+high statesmanship common in no age of the Church, and in no branch of
+it. And all this rested on the most profound personal religion as its
+foundation, a religion which became in time one of very definite
+doctrinal preferences, but of wide sympathies, and which was always of
+very exacting claims for the undivided work and efforts of a lifetime.
+
+When he became Bishop he very soon revolutionised the old notion of a
+Bishop's duties. He threw himself without any regard to increasing
+trouble and labour on the great power of personal influence. In every
+corner of his diocese he made himself known and felt; in all that
+interested its clergy or its people he took his part more and more. He
+went forth to meet men; he made himself their guest and companion as
+well as their guide and chief; he was more often to be found moving
+about his diocese than he was to be found at his own home at Cuddesdon.
+The whole tone of communication between Bishop and people rose at once
+in freedom and in spiritual elevation and earnestness; it was at once
+less formal and more solemnly practical. He never spared his personal
+presence; always ready to show himself, always ready to bring the rarer
+and more impressive rites of the Church, such as Ordination, within the
+view of people at a distance from his Palace or Cathedral, he was never
+more at his ease than in a crowd of new faces, and never exhausted and
+worn out in what he had to say to fresh listeners. Gathering men about
+him at one time; turning them to account, assigning them tasks,
+pressing the willing, shaming the indolent or the reluctant, at
+another; travelling about with the rapidity and system of an officer
+inspecting his positions, he infused into the diocese a spirit and zeal
+which nothing but such labour and sympathy could give, and bound it
+together by the bands of a strong and wise organisation.
+
+What he did was but a very obvious carrying out of the idea of the
+Episcopal office; but it had not seemed necessary once, and his merit
+was that he saw both that it was necessary and practicable. It is he
+who set the standard of what is now expected, and is more or less
+familiar, in all Bishops. And as he began so he went on to the last. He
+never flagged, he never grew tired of the continual and varied
+intercourse which he kept up with his clergy and people. To the last he
+worked his diocese as much as possible not from a distance, but from
+local points which brought him into closer communication with his
+flock. London, with its great interests and its great attractions,
+social and political, never kept away one who was so keenly alive to
+them, and so prominent in all that was eventful in his time, from
+attending to the necessities and claims of his rural parishes. What his
+work was to the very last, how much there was in him of unabated force,
+of far-seeing judgment, of noble boldness and earnestness, of power
+over the souls and minds of men in many ways divided, a letter from Dr.
+Monsell[25] in our columns shows.
+
+He had a great and all-important place in a very critical moment, to
+which he brought a seriousness of purpose, a power and ripeness of
+counsel, and a fearlessness distinctly growing up to the last. It is
+difficult to see who will bend the bow which he has dropped.
+
+  [25]
+  ... The shock that the sudden announcement of an event so
+  solemn must ever give, was tenfold great to one who, like myself,
+  had been, during the past week, closely associated with him in
+  anxious deliberations as to the best means of meeting the various
+  difficulties and dangers with which the Church is at present
+  surrounded.
+
+  He had gathered round him, as was his annual wont, his Archdeacons
+  and Rural Deans, to deliberate for the Church's interests; and in
+  his opening address, and conduct of a most important meeting, never
+  had he shone out more clearly in intellectual vigour, in theological
+  soundness, in moral boldness, in Christian gentleness and love.
+
+  ... He spoke upon the gravest questions of the day--questions which
+  require more than they generally receive, delicate handling. He
+  divided from the evil of things, which some in the spirit of party
+  condemn wholesale, the hidden good which lies wrapt up in them, and
+  which it would be sin as well as folly to sweep away. He made every
+  man who heard him feel the blessing of having in the Church such a
+  veteran leader, and drew forth from more than one there the openly
+  expressed hope that as he had in bygone days been the bold and
+  cautious controller of an earlier movement in the right direction,
+  so now he would save to the Church some of her precious things which
+  rude men would sweep away, and help her to regain what is essential
+  to her spiritual existence without risking the sacredness of private
+  life, the purity of private thoughts, the sense of direct
+  responsibility between God and the soul, which are some of the most
+  distinctive characteristics of our dear Church of England.
+
+  From his council chamber in Winchester House I went direct with him
+  to the greater council chamber of St. Stephen's to hear him there
+  vindicate the rights and privileges of his order, and beat back the
+  assaults of those who, in high places, think that by a speech in, or
+  a vote of, either house they can fashion the Church as they please.
+  Never did he speak with more point and power; and never did he seem
+  to have won more surely the entire sympathy of the house.
+
+  To gather in overwhelming numbers round him in the evening his
+  London clergy and their families, to meet them all with the kind
+  cordiality of a real father and friend, to run on far into the
+  middle of the night in this laborious endeavour to please--was "the
+  last effort of his toilsome day."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+RETIREMENT OF THE PROVOST OF ORIEL[26]
+
+
+  [26]
+  _Guardian_, 4th November 1874.
+
+Dr. Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, has resigned the Provostship. He has
+held it from 1828, within four years of half a century. The time during
+which he has presided over his college has been one of the most
+eventful periods in the history of the University; it has been a time
+of revolt against custom, of reform, of keen conflict, of deep changes;
+and in all connected with these he has borne a part, second to none in
+prominence, in importance, and we must add, in dignity. No name of
+equal distinction has disappeared from the list of Heads of Houses
+since the venerable President of Magdalen passed away. But Dr. Routh,
+though he watched with the keenest intelligence, and not without
+sympathy, all that went on in the days into which his life had been
+prolonged, watched it with the habits and thoughts of days long
+departed; he had survived from the days of Bishop Horne and Dr. Parr
+far into our new and strange century, to which he did not belong, and
+he excited its interest as a still living example of what men were
+before the French Revolution. The eminence of the Provost of Oriel is
+of another kind. He calls forth interest because among all recent
+generations of Oxford men, and in all their restless and exciting
+movements, he has been a foremost figure. He belongs to modern Oxford,
+its daring attempts, its fierce struggles, its successes, and its
+failures. He was a man of whom not only every one heard, but whom every
+one saw; for he was much in public, and his unsparing sense of public
+duty made him regularly present in his place at Council, at
+Convocation, at the University Church, at College chapel. The outward
+look of Oxford will be altered by the disappearance in its ceremonies
+and gatherings of his familiar form and countenance.
+
+He would anywhere have been a remarkable man. His active and
+independent mind, with its keen, discriminating, practical
+intelligence, was formed and disciplined amid that company of
+distinguished scholars and writers who, at Oxford, in the second decade
+of the century were revolted by the scandalous inertness and
+self-indulgence of the place, with its magnificent resources squandered
+and wasted, its stupid orthodoxy of routine, its insensibility to the
+questions and the dangers rising all round; men such as Keble, Arnold,
+Davison, Copleston, Whately. These men, different as they were from one
+another, all represented the awakening but still imperfect
+consciousness that a University life ought to be something higher than
+one of literary idleness, given up to the frivolities of mere elegant
+scholarship, and to be crowned at last by comfortable preferment; that
+there was much difficult work to be seriously thought about and done,
+and that men were placed at Oxford under heavy responsibilities to use
+their thoughts and their leisure for the direct service of their
+generation. Clever fops and dull pedants joined in sneering at this new
+activity and inquisitiveness of mind, and this grave interest and
+employment of intellect on questions and in methods outside the
+customary line of University studies and prejudices; but the men were
+too powerful, and their work too genuine and effective, and too much in
+harmony with the temper and tendencies of the time, to be stopped by
+impertinence and obstructiveness. Dr. Hawkins was one of those who made
+the Oriel Common-room a place of keen discussion and brilliant
+conversation, and, for those days, of bold speculation; while the
+College itself reflected something of the vigour and accomplishments of
+the Common-room. Dr. Newman, in the _Apologia_, has told us, in
+touching terms of acknowledgment, what Dr. Hawkins was when, fifty
+years ago, the two minds first came into close contact, and what
+intellectual services he believed Dr. Hawkins had rendered him. He
+tells us, too, how Dr. Hawkins had profoundly impressed him by a work
+in which, with characteristic independence and guarded caution equally
+characteristic, he cuts across popular prejudices and confusions of
+thought, and shows himself original in discerning and stating an
+obvious truth which had escaped other people--his work on
+_Unauthoritative Tradition_. His logical acuteness, his habits of
+disciplined accuracy, abhorrent and impatient of all looseness of
+thinking and expression, his conscientious efforts after substantial
+reality in his sharpest distinctions, his capacity for taking trouble,
+his serious and strong sense of the debt involved in the possession of
+intellectual power--all this would have made him eminent, whatever the
+times in which he lived.
+
+But the times in which we live and what they bring with them mould most
+of us; and the times shaped the course of the Provost of Oriel, and
+turned his activity into a channel of obstinate and prolonged
+antagonism, of resistance and protest, most conscientious but most
+uncompromising, against two great successive movements, both of which
+he condemned as unbalanced and recoiled from as revolutionary--the
+Tractarian first, and then the Liberal movement in Oxford. Of the
+former, it is not perhaps too much to say that he was in Oxford, at
+least, the ablest and most hurtful opponent. From his counsels, from
+his guarded and measured attacks, from the power given him by a partial
+agreement against popular fallacies with parts of its views, from his
+severe and unflinching determination, it received its heaviest blows
+and suffered its greatest losses. He detested what he held to be its
+anti-Liberal temper, and its dogmatic assertions; he resented its
+taking out of his hands a province of theology which he and Whately had
+made their own, that relating to the Church; he thought its tone of
+feeling and its imaginative and poetical side exaggerated or childish;
+and he could not conceive of its position except as involving palpable
+dishonesty. No one probably guided with such clear and self-possessed
+purpose that policy of extreme measures, which contributed to bring
+about, if it did not itself cause, the break-up of 1845. Then succeeded
+the great Liberal tide with its demands for extensive and immediate
+change, its anti-ecclesiastical spirit, its scarcely disguised
+scepticism, its daring philosophical and critical enterprises. By
+degrees it became clear that the impatience and intolerance which had
+purged the University of so many Churchmen had, after all, left the
+Church movement itself untouched, to assume by degrees proportions
+scarcely dreamed of when it began; but that what the defeat of the
+Tractarians really had done was, to leave the University at the mercy
+of Liberals to whom what had been called Liberalism in the days of
+Whately was mere blind and stagnant Conservatism.
+
+One war was no sooner over than the Provost of Oriel found another even
+more formidable on his hands. The most dauntless and most unshaken of
+combatants, he faced his new antagonists with the same determination,
+the same unshrinking sense of duty with which he had fought his old
+ones. He used the high authority and influence which his position and
+his character justly gave him, to resist or to control, as far as he
+could, the sweeping changes which, while bringing new life into Oxford,
+have done so much to break up her connection of centuries with the
+Church. He boldly confronted the new spirit of denial and unbelief. He
+wrote, he preached, he published, as he had done against other
+adversaries, always with measured and dignified argument, but not
+shrinking from plain-spoken severity of condemnation. Never sparing
+himself labour when he thought duty called, he did not avail himself of
+the privilege of advancing years to leave the war to be carried on by
+younger champions.
+
+It is impossible for those who may at times have found themselves most
+strongly, and perhaps most painfully, opposed to him, not to admire and
+revere one who, through so long a career has, in what he held to be his
+duty to the Church and to religion, fought so hard, encountered such
+troubles, given up so many friendships and so much ease, and who, while
+a combatant to the last, undiscouraged by odds and sometimes by
+ill-success, has brought to the weariness and disappointment of old age
+an increasing gentleness and kindliness of spirit, which is one of the
+rarest tokens and rewards of patient and genuine self-discipline. A man
+who has set himself steadily and undismayed to stem and bring to reason
+the two most powerful currents of conviction and feeling which have
+agitated his times, leaves an impressive example of zeal and
+fearlessness, even to those against whom he has contended. What is the
+upshot which has come of these efforts, and whether the controversies
+of the moment have not in his case, as in others, diverted and absorbed
+faculties which might have been turned to calmer and more permanent
+tasks, we do not inquire.
+
+Perhaps a life of combat never does all that the combatant thinks it
+ought to accomplish, or compensates for the sacrifices it entails. In
+the case of the Provost of Oriel, he had, with all his great and noble
+qualities, one remarkable want, which visibly impaired his influence
+and his persuasiveness. He was out of sympathy with the rising
+aspirations and tendencies of the time on the two opposite sides; he
+was suspicious and impatient of them. He was so sensible of their weak
+points, the logical difficulties which they brought with them, their
+precipitate and untested assumptions, the extravagance and unsoundness
+of character which often seemed inseparable from them, that he seldom
+did justice to them viewed in their complete aspect, or was even alive
+to what was powerful and formidable in the depth, the complexity, and
+the seriousness of the convictions and enthusiasm which carried them
+onwards. In truth, for a man of his singular activity and reach of
+mind, he was curiously indifferent to much that most interested his
+contemporaries in thought and literature; he did not understand it, and
+he undervalued it as if it belonged merely to the passing fashions of
+the hour.
+
+This long career is now over. Warfare is always a rude trade, and men
+on all sides who have had to engage in it must feel at the end how much
+there is to be forgiven and needing forgiveness; how much now appears
+harsh, unfair, violent, which once appeared only necessary and just. A
+hard hitter like the Provost of Oriel must often have left behind the
+remembrance of his blows. But we venture to say that, even in those who
+suffered from them, he has left remembrances of another and better
+sort. He has left the recollection of a pure, consistent, laborious
+life, elevated in its aim and standard, and marked by high public
+spirit and a rigid and exacting sense of duty. In times when it was
+wanted, he set in his position in the University an example of modest
+and sober simplicity of living; and no one who ever knew him can doubt
+the constant presence, in all his thoughts, of the greatness of things
+unseen, or his equally constant reference of all that he did to the
+account which he was one day to give at his Lord's judgment-seat. We
+trust that he may be spared to enjoy the rest which a weaker or less
+conscientious man would have claimed long ago.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+MARK PATTISON[27]
+
+
+  [27]
+  _Guardian_, 6th August 1884.
+
+The Rector of Lincoln, who died at Harrogate this day week, was a man
+about whom judgments are more than usually likely to be biassed by
+prepossessions more or less unconscious, and only intelligible to the
+mind of the judge. There are those who are in danger of dealing with
+him too severely. There are also those whose temptation will be to
+magnify and possibly exaggerate his gifts and acquirements--great as
+they undoubtedly were,--the use that he made of them, and the place
+which he filled among his contemporaries. One set of people finds it
+not easy to forget that he had been at one time closer than most young
+men of his generation to the great religious leaders whom they are
+accustomed to revere; that he was of a nature fully to understand and
+appreciate both their intellectual greatness and their moral and
+spiritual height; that he had shared to the full their ideas and hopes;
+that they, too, had measured his depth of character, and grasp, and
+breadth, and subtlety of mind; and that the keenest judge among them of
+men and of intellect had pirlud him out as one of the most original and
+powerful of a number of very able contemporaries. Those who remember
+this cannot easily pardon the lengths of dislike and hitterness to
+which in after life Pattison allowed himself to be carried against the
+cause which once had his hearty allegiance, and in which, if he had
+discovered, as he thought, its mistakes and its weakness, he had once
+recognised with all his soul the nobler side. And on the other hand,
+the partisans of the opposite movement, into whose interests he so
+disastrously, as it seems to us, and so unreservedly threw himself,
+naturally welcomed and made the most of such an accession to their
+strength, and such an unquestionable addition to their literary fame.
+To have detached such a man from the convictions which he had so
+professedly and so earnestly embraced, and to have enlisted him as
+their determined and implacable antagonist--to be able to point to him
+in him maturity and strength of his powers as one who, having known its
+best aspects, had deliberately despaired of religion, and had turned
+against its representatives the scorn and hatred of a passionate
+nature, whose fires burned all the more fiercely under its cold crust
+of reserve and sarcasm--this was a triumph of no common order; and it
+might conceivably blind those who could rejoice in it to the
+comparative value of qualities which, at any rate, were very rare and
+remarkable ones.
+
+Pattison was a man who, in many ways, did not do himself justice. As a
+young man, his was a severe and unhopeful mind, and the tendency to
+despond was increased by circumstances. There was something in the
+quality of his unquestionable ability which kept him for long out of
+the ordinary prizes of an Oxford career; in the class list, in the
+higher competition for Fellowships, he was not successful. There are
+those who long remembered the earnest pleading of the Latin letters
+which it was the custom to send in when a man stood for a Fellowship,
+and in which Pattison set forth his ardent longing for knowledge, and
+his narrow and unprosperous condition as a poor student. He always came
+very near; indeed, he more than once won the vote of the best judges;
+but he just missed the prize. To the bitter public disappointments of
+1845 were added the vexations caused by private injustice and
+ill-treatment. He turned fiercely on those who, as he thought, had
+wronged him, and he began to distrust men, and to be on the watch for
+proofs of hollowness and selfishness in the world and in the Church.
+Yet at this time, when people were hearing of his bitter and unsparing
+sayings in Oxford, he was from time to time preaching in village
+churches, and preaching sermons which both his educated and his simple
+hearers thought unlike those of ordinary men in their force, reality,
+and earnestness. But with age and conflict the disposition to harsh and
+merciless judgments strengthened and became characteristic. This,
+however, should be remembered: where he revered ho revered with genuine
+and unstinted reverence; where he saw goodness in which he believed he
+gave it ungrudging honour. He had real pleasure in recognising height
+and purity of character, and true intellectual force, and he maintained
+his admiration when the course of things had placed wide intervals
+between him and those to whom it had been given. His early friendships,
+where they could be retained, he did retain warmly and generously even
+to the last; he seemed almost to draw a line between them and other
+things in the world. The truth, indeed, was that beneath that icy and
+often cruel irony there was at bottom a most warm and affectionate
+nature, yearning for sympathy, longing for high and worthy objects,
+which, from the misfortunes especially of his early days, never found
+room to expand and unfold itself. Let him see and feel that anything
+was real--character, purpose, cause--and at any rate it was sure of his
+respect, probably of his interest. But the doubt whether it was real
+was always ready to present itself to his critical and suspicious mind;
+and these doubts grew with his years.
+
+People have often not given Pattison credit for the love that was in
+him for what was good and true; it is not to be wondered at, but the
+observation has to be made. On the other hand, a panegyrie, like that
+which we reprint from the _Times_, sets too high an estimate on his
+intellectual qualities, and on the position which they gave him. He was
+full of the passion for knowledge; he was very learned, very acute in
+his judgment on what his learning brought before him, very versatile,
+very shrewd, very subtle; too full of the truth of his subject to care
+about seeming to be original; but, especially in his poetical
+criticisms, often full of that best kind of originality which consists
+in seeing and pointing out novelty in what is most familiar and trite.
+But, not merely as a practical but as a speculative writer, he was apt
+to be too much under the empire and pressure of the one idea which at
+the moment occupied and interested his mind. He could not resist it; it
+came to him with exclusive and overmastering force; he did not care to
+attend to what limited it or conflicted with it. And thus, with all the
+force and sagacity of his University theories, they were not always
+self-consistent, and they were often one-sided and exaggerated. He was
+not a leader whom men could follow, however much they might rejoice at
+the blows which he might happen to deal, sometimes unexpectedly, at
+things which they disliked. And this holds of more serious things than
+even University reform and reconstruction.
+
+And next, though every competent reader must do justice to Pattison's
+distinction as a man of letters, as a writer of English prose, and as a
+critic of what is noble and excellent and what is base and poor in
+literature, there is a curious want of completeness, a frequent crudity
+and hardness, a want, which is sometimes a surprising want, of good
+sense and good taste, which form unwelcome blemishes in his work, and
+just put it down below the line of first-rate excellence which it ought
+to occupy. Morally, in that love of reality, and of all that is high
+and noble in character, which certainly marked him, he was much better
+than many suppose, who know only the strength of his animosities and
+the bitterness of his sarcasm. Intellectually, in reach, and fulness,
+and solidity of mental power, it may be doubted whether he was so great
+as it has recently been the fashion to rate him.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+PATTISON'S ESSAYS[28]
+
+
+  [28]
+  _Essays by the late Mark Pattison, sometime Rector of Lincoln
+  College_. Collected and arranged by Henry Nettleship, M.A., Corpus
+  Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. _Guardian_, 1st May
+  1889.
+
+This is a very interesting but a very melancholy collection of papers.
+They are the remains of the work of a man of first-rate intellect,
+whose powers, naturally of a high order, had been diligently and wisely
+cultivated, whose mind was furnished in a very rare degree with all
+that reading, wide and critical, could give, and which embraced in the
+circle of its interest all that is important to human life and society.
+Mr. Pattison had no vulgar standard of what knowledge is, and what
+goodness is. He was high, sincere, exacting, even austere, in his
+estimates of either; and when he was satisfied he paid honour with
+sometimes unexpected frankness and warmth. But from some unfortunate
+element in his temperament, or from the effect upon it of untoward and
+unkindly circumstances at those critical epochs of mental life, when
+character is taking its bent for good and all, he was a man in whose
+judgment severity--and severity expressing itself in angry scorn--was
+very apt to outrun justice. Longing for sympathy and not ill-fitted for
+it, capable of rare exertions in helping those whom he could help, he
+passed through life with a reputation for cynicism which, while he
+certainly exhibited it, he no less certainly would, if he had known
+how, have escaped from. People could easily tell what would incur his
+dislike and opposition, what would provoke his slow, bitter, merciless
+sarcasm; it was never easy to tell what would satisfy him, what would
+attract his approval, when he could be tempted to see the good side of
+a thing. It must not be forgotten that he had gone through a trial to
+which few men are equal. He had passed from the extreme ranks and the
+strong convictions of the Oxford movement--convictions of which the
+translation of Aquinas's _Catena Aurea_, still printed in the list of
+his works, is a memorial--to the frankest form of Liberal thought. As
+he himself writes, we cannot give up early beliefs, much less the deep
+and deliberate convictions of manhood, without some shock to the
+character. In his case the change certainly worked. It made him hate
+what he had left, and all that was like it, with the bitterness of one
+who has been imposed upon, and has been led to commit himself to what
+he now feels to be absurd and contemptible, and the bitterness of this
+disappointment gave an edge to all his work. There seems through all
+his criticism, powerful as it is, a tone of harshness, a readiness to
+take the worst construction, a sad consciousness of distrust and
+suspicion of all things round him, which greatly weakens the effect of
+his judgment. If a man will only look for the worst side, he will only
+find the worst side; but we feel that we act reasonably by not
+accepting such a teacher as our guide, however ably he may state his
+case. There is a want of equitableness and fairness in his stern and
+sometimes cruel condemnations; and yet not religion only, but the
+wisest wisdom of the world tells of the indispensable value of this
+equitableness, this old Greek virtue of [Greek: epieikeia], in our
+views of men and things. It is not religion only, but common sense
+which says that "sweetness and light," kindliness, indulgence,
+sympathy, are necessary for moral and spiritual health. Scorn,
+indignation, keenly stinging sarcasm, doubtless have their place in a
+world in which untruth and baseness abound and flourish; but to live on
+these is poison, at least to oneself.
+
+These fierce antipathies warped his judgment in strange and unexpected
+ways. Among these papers is a striking one on Calvin. If any character
+in history might be expected to have little attraction for him it is
+Calvin. Dogmatist, persecutor, tyrant, the proud and relentless
+fanatic, who more than any one consecrated harsh narrowness in religion
+by cruel theories about God, what was there to recommend him to a lover
+of liberty who had no patience for ecclesiastical pretensions of any
+kind, and who tells us that Calvin's "sins against human liberty are of
+the deepest dye"? For if Laud chastised his adversaries with whips,
+Calvin chastised his with scorpions. Perhaps it is unreasonable to be
+suprised, yet we are taken by surprise, when we find a thinker like Mr.
+Pattison drawn by strong sympathy to Calvin and setting him up among
+the heroes and liberators of humanity. Mr. Pattison is usually fair in
+details, that is, he does not suppress bad deeds or qualities in those
+whom he approves, or good deeds or qualities in those whom he hates: it
+is in his general judgments that his failing comes out. He makes no
+attempt to excuse the notorious features of Calvin's rule at Geneva;
+but Mr. Pattison reads into his character a purpose and a grandeur
+which place him far above any other man of his day. To recommend him to
+our very different ways of thinking, Mr. Pattison has the courage to
+allege that his interest in dogmatic theology was a subordinate matter,
+and that the "renovation of character," the "moral purification of
+humanity," was the great guiding idea of him who taught that out of the
+mass of human kind only a predestined remnant could possibly be saved.
+It is a singular interpretation of the mind of the author of the
+_Institutes_:--
+
+    The distinction of Calvin as a Reformer is not to be sought in the
+    doctrine which now bears his name, or in any doctrinal peculiarity.
+    His great merit lies _in his comparative neglect of dogma. He
+    seized the idea of reformation as a real renovation of human
+    character_. The moral purification of humanity as the original
+    idea of Christianity is the guiding idea of his system.... He
+    swept away at once the sacramental machinery of material media of
+    salvation which the middle-age Church had provided in such
+    abundance, and which Luther frowned upon, but did not reject. He
+    was not satisfied to go back only to the historical origin of
+    Christianity, but would found human virtue on the eternal
+    antemundane will of God.
+
+Again:--
+
+    Calvin thought neither of fame or fortune. The narrowness of his
+    views and the disinterestedness of his soul alike precluded him
+    from regarding Geneva as a stage for the gratification of personal
+    ambition. This abegnation of self was one great part of his
+    success.
+
+And then Mr. Pattison goes on to describe in detail how, governed and
+possessed by one idea, and by a theory, to oppose which was "moral
+depravity," he proceeded to establish his intolerable system of
+discipline, based on dogmatic grounds--meddlesome, inquisitorial,
+petty, cruel--over the interior of every household in Geneva. What is
+there fascinating, or even imposing, in such a character? It is the
+common case of political and religious bigots, whether Jacobin, or
+Puritan, or Jesuit, poor in thought and sympathy and strong in will,
+fixing their yoke on a society, till the plague becomes unbearable. He
+seeks nothing for himself and, forsooth, he makes sacrifices. But he
+gets what he wants, his idea carried out; and self-sacrifice is of what
+we care for, and not of what we do not care for. And to keep up this
+supposed character of high moral purpose, we are told of Calvin's
+"comparative neglect of dogma," of his seizing the idea of a "real
+reformation of human character," a "moral purification of humanity," as
+the guiding idea of his system. Can anything be more unhistorical than
+to suggest that the father and source of all Western Puritan theology
+"neglected dogma," and was more of a moralist than a divine? It is not
+even true that he "swept away at once the sacramental machinery" of
+mediaeval and Lutheran teaching; Calvin writes of the Eucharist in
+terms which would astonish some of his later followers. But what is the
+reason why Mr. Pattison attributes to the historical Calvin so much
+that does not belong to him, and, in spite of so much that repels, is
+yet induced to credit him with such great qualities? The reason is to
+be found in the intense antipathy with which Mr. Pattison regarded what
+he calls "the Catholic reaction" over Europe, and in the fact that
+undoubtedly Calvin's system and influence was the great force which
+resisted both what was bad and false in it, and also what was good,
+true, generous, humane. Calvinism opposed the "Catholic reaction"
+point-blank, and that was enough to win sympathy for it, even from Mr.
+Pattison.
+
+The truth is that what Popery is to the average Protestant, and what
+Protestant heresy is to the average Roman Catholic, the "Catholic
+reaction," the "Catholic revival" in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries and in our own, is to Mr. Pattison's final judgment. It was
+not only a conspiracy against human liberty, but it brought with it the
+degradation and ruin of genuine learning. It is the all-sufficing cause
+and explanation of the mischief and evil doings which he has to set
+before us. Yet after the violence, the ignorance, the injustice, the
+inconsistencies of that great ecclesiastical revolution which we call
+by the vague name of Reformation, a "Catholic reaction" was inevitable.
+It was not conceivable that common sense and certain knowledge would
+submit for ever to be overcrowed by the dogmas and assertions of the
+new teachers. Like other powerful and wide and strongly marked
+movements, like the Reformation which it combated, it was a very mixed
+thing. It produced some great evils and led to some great crimes. It
+started that fatal religious militia, the Jesuit order, which,
+notwithstanding much heroic self-sacrifice, has formed a permanent bar
+to all possible reunion of Christendom, has fastened its yoke on the
+Papacy itself, and has taught the Church, as a systematic doctrine, to
+put its trust in the worst expedients of human policy. The religious
+wars in France and Germany, the relentless massacres of the Low
+Countries and the St. Bartholomew, the consecration of treason and
+conspiracy, were, without doubt, closely connected with the "Catholic
+reaction." But if this great awakening and stimulating influence raised
+new temptations to human passion and wickedness, it was not only in the
+service of evil that this new zeal was displayed. The Council of Trent,
+whatever its faults, and it had many, was itself a real reformation.
+The "Catholic revival" meant the rekindling of earnest religion and
+care for a good life in thousands of souls. If it produced the Jesuits,
+it as truly produced Port Royal and the Benedictines. Europe would be
+indeed greatly the poorer if it wanted some of the most conspicuous
+products of the Catholic revival.
+
+It is Mr. Pattison's great misfortune that through obvious faults of
+temper he has missed the success which naturally might have seemed
+assured to him, of dealing with these subjects in a large and
+dispassionate way. Scholar, thinker, student as he is, conversant with
+all literature, familiar with books and names which many well-read
+persons have never heard of, he has his bitter prejudices, like the
+rest of us, Protestants or Catholics; and what he hates is continually
+forcing itself into his mind. He tells, with great and pathetic force,
+the terrible story of the judicial murder of Calas at Toulouse, and of
+Voltaire's noble and successful efforts to bring the truth to light,
+and to repair, as far as could be repaired, its infamous injustice. It
+is a story which shows to what frightful lengths fanaticism may go in
+leading astray even the tribunals of justice. But unhappily the story
+can be paralleled in all times of the world's history; and though the
+Toulouse mob and Judges were Catholics, their wickedness is no more a
+proof against the Catholic revival than Titus Oates and the George
+Gordon riots are against Protestantism, or the Jacobin tribunals
+against Republican justice. But Mr. Pattison cannot conclude his
+account without an application. Here you have an example of what the
+Catholic revival does. It first breaks Calas on the wheel; and then,
+because Voltaire took up his cause, it makes modern Frenchmen, if they
+are Catholics, believe that Calas deserved it:--
+
+    It is part of that general Catholic revival which has been working
+    for some years, and which like a fog is spreading over the face of
+    opinion.... The memory of Calas had been vindicated by Voltaire and
+    the Encyclopedists. That was quite enough for the Catholics....
+    It is the characteristic of Catholicism that it supersedes reason,
+    and prejudges all matters by the application of fixed principles.
+
+    It is no use that M. Coquerel flatters himself that he has set the
+    matter at rest. He flatters himself in vain; he ought to know his
+    Catholic countrymen better:--
+
+    We have little doubt that as long as the Catholic religion shall
+    last their little manuals of falsified history will continue to
+    repeat that Jean Calas murdered his son because he had become a
+    convert to the Catholic faith.
+
+    Are little manuals of falsified history confined only to one set
+    of people? Is not John Foxe still proof against the assaults of
+    Dr. Maitland? The habit of _à priori_ judgments as to historical
+    facts is, as Mr. Pattison truly says, "fatal to truth and
+    integrity." It is most mischievous when it assumes a philosophic
+    gravity and warps the criticism of a distinguished scholar.
+
+This fixed habit of mind is the more provoking because, putting aside
+the obtrusive and impertinent injustice to which it leads, Mr.
+Pattison's critical work is of so high a character. His extensive and
+accurate reading, the sound common sense with which he uses his
+reading, and the modesty and absence of affectation and display which
+seem to be a law of his writing, place him very high. Perhaps he
+believes too much in books and learning, in the power which they exert,
+and what they can do to enable men to reach the higher conquests of
+moral and religious truth--perhaps he forgets, in the amplitude of his
+literary resources, that behind the records of thought and feeling
+there are the living mind and thought themselves, still clothed with
+their own proper force and energy, and working in defiance of our
+attempts to classify, to judge, or to explain: that there are the real
+needs, the real destinies of mankind, and the questions on which they
+depend--of which books are a measure indeed, but an imperfect one. As
+an instance, we might cite his "Essay on the Theology of
+Germany"--elaborate, learned, extravagant in its praise and in its
+scorn, full of the satisfaction of a man in possession of a startling
+and little known subject, but with the contradictions of a man who in
+spite of his theories believes more than his theories. But, as a
+student who deals with books and what books can teach, it is a pleasure
+to follow him; his work is never slovenly or superficial; the reader
+feels that he is in the hands of a man who thoroughly knows what he is
+talking about, and both from conscience and from disposition is anxious
+above all to be accurate and discriminative. If he fails, as he often
+seems to us to do, in the justice and balance of his appreciation of
+the phenomena before him, if his statements and generalisations are
+crude and extravagant, it is that passion and deep aversions have
+overpowered the natural accuracy of his faculty of judgment.
+
+The feature which is characteristic in all his work is his profound
+value for learning, the learning of books, of documents, of all
+literature. He is a thinker, a clear and powerful one; he is a
+philosopher, who has explored the problems of abstract science with
+intelligence and interest, and fully recognises their importance; he
+has taken the measure of the political and social questions which the
+progress of civilisation has done so little to solve; he is at home
+with the whole range of literature, keen and true in observation and
+criticism; he has strongly marked views about education, and he took a
+leading part in the great changes which have revolutionised Oxford. He
+is all this; but beyond and more than all this he is a devotee of
+learning, as other men are of science or politics, deeply penetrated
+with its importance, keenly alive to the neglect of it, full of faith
+in the services which it can render to mankind, fiercely indignant at
+what degrades, or supplants, or enfeebles it. Learning, with the severe
+and bracing discipline without which it is impossible, learning
+embracing all efforts of human intellect--those which are warning
+beacons as well those which have elevated and enlightened the human
+mind--is the thing which attracts and satisfies him as nothing else
+does; not mere soulless erudition, but a great supply and command of
+varied facts, marshalled and turned to account by an intelligence which
+knows their use. The absence of learning, or the danger to learning, is
+the keynote of a powerful but acrid survey of the history and prospects
+of the Anglican Church, for which, in spite of its one-sidedness and
+unfairness, Churchmen may find not a little which it will be useful to
+lay to heart. Dissatisfaction with the University system, in its
+provision for the encouragement of learning and for strengthening and
+protecting its higher interests, is the stimulus to his essay on Oxford
+studies, which is animated with the idea of the University as a true
+home of real learning, and is full of the hopes, the animosities, and,
+it may be added, the disappointments of a revolutionary time. He exults
+over the destruction of the old order; but his ideal is too high, he is
+too shrewd an observer, too thorough and well-trained a judge of what
+learning really means, to be quite satisfied with the new.
+
+The same devotion to learning shows itself in a feature of his literary
+work, which is almost characteristic--the delight which he takes in
+telling the detailed story of the life of some of the famous working
+scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These men, whose
+names are known to the modern world chiefly in notes to classical
+authors, or occasionally in some impertinent sneer, he likes to
+contemplate as if they were alive. To him they are men with individual
+differences, each with a character and fortunes of his own, sharers to
+the full in the struggles and vicissitudes of life. He can appreciate
+their enormous learning, their unwearied labour, their sense of honour
+in their profession; and the editor of texts, the collator of various
+readings and emendations, the annotator who to us perhaps seems but a
+learned pedant appears to him as a man of sound and philosophic
+thought, of enthusiasm for truth and light--perhaps of genius--a man,
+too, with human affections and interests, with a history not devoid of
+romance. There is something touching in Mr. Pattison's affection for
+those old scholars, to whom the world has done scant justice. His own
+chief literary venture was the life of one of the greatest of them,
+Isaac Casaubon. We have in these volumes sketches, not so elaborate, of
+several others, the younger Scaliger, Muretus, Huet, and the great
+French printers, the Stephenses; and in these sketches we are also
+introduced to a number of their contemporaries, with characteristic
+observations on them, implying an extensive and first-hand knowledge of
+what they were, and an acquaintance with what was going on in the
+scholar world of the day. The most important of these sketches is the
+account of Justus Scaliger. There is first a review article, very
+vigorous and animated. But Mr. Pattison had intended a companion volume
+to his Casaubon; and of this, which was never completed, we have some
+fragments, not equal in force and compactness to the original sketch.
+But sketch and fragments together present a very vivid picture of this
+remarkable person, whose temper and extravagant vanity his biographer
+admits, but who was undoubtedly a marvel both of knowledge and of the
+power to use it, and to whom we owe the beginning of order and system
+in chronology. Scaliger was to Mr. Pattison the type of the real
+greatness of the scholar, a greatness not the less real that the world
+could hardly understand it. He certainly leaves Scaliger before us,
+with his strange ways of working, his hold of the ancient languages as
+if they were mother tongues, his pride and slashing sarcasm, and his
+absurd claim of princely descent, with lineaments not soon forgotten;
+but it is amusing to meet once more, in all seriousness, Mr. Pattison's
+_bête noire_ of the Catholic reaction, in the quarrels between Scaliger
+and some shallow but clever and scurrilous Jesuits, whom he had
+provoked by exposing the False Decretals and the False Dionysius, and
+who revenged themselves by wounding him in his most sensitive part, his
+claim to descent from the Princes of Verona. Doubtless the religious
+difference envenomed the dispute, but it did not need the "Catholic
+reaction" to account for such ignoble wrangles in those days.
+
+These remains show what a historian of literature we have lost in Mr.
+Pattison. He was certainly capable of doing much more than the
+specimens of work which he has left behind; but what he has left is of
+high value. Wherever the disturbing and embittering elements are away,
+it is hard to say which is the more admirable, the patient and
+sagacious way in which he has collected and mastered his facts, or the
+wise and careful judgment which he passes on them. We hear of people
+being spoilt by their prepossessions, their party, their prejudices,
+the necessities of their political and ecclesiastical position; Mr.
+Pattison is a warning that a man may claim the utmost independence, and
+yet be maimed in his power of being just and reasonable by other things
+than party. As it is, he has left us a collection of interesting and
+valuable studies, disastrously and indelibly disfigured by an
+implacable bitterness, in which he but too plainly found the greatest
+satisfaction.
+
+Mr. Pattison used in his later years to give an occasional lecture to a
+London audience. One of the latest was one addressed, we believe, to a
+class of working people on poetry, in which he dwelt on its healing and
+consoling power. It was full of Mr. Pattison's clearness and directness
+of thought, and made a considerable impression on some who only knew it
+from an abstract in the newspapers; and it was challenged by a
+working-man in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, who urged against it with some
+power the argument of despair. Perhaps the lecture was not written; but
+if it was, and our recollection of it is at all accurate, it was not
+unworthy of a place in this collection.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+BISHOP FRAZER[29]
+
+
+  [29]
+  _Guardian_, 28th October 1885.
+
+Every one must be deeply touched by the Bishop of Manchester's sudden,
+and, to most of us, unexpected death; those not the least who,
+unhappily, found themselves in opposition to him in many important
+matters. For, in spite of much that many people must wish otherwise in
+his career as Bishop, it was really a very remarkable one. Its leading
+motive was high and genuine public spirit, and a generous wish to be in
+full and frank sympathy with all the vast masses of his diocese; to put
+himself on a level with them, as man with man, in all their interests,
+to meet them fearlessly and heartily, to raise their standard of
+justice and large-heartedness by showing them that in their life of
+toil he shared the obligation and the burden of labour, and felt bound
+by his place to be as unsparing and unselfish a worker as any of his
+flock. Indeed, he was as original as Bishop Wilberforce, though in a
+different direction, in introducing a new type and ideal of Episcopal
+work, and a great deal of his ideal he realised. It is characteristic
+of him that one of his first acts was to remove the Episcopal residence
+from a mansion and park in the country to a house in Manchester. There
+can be no doubt that he was thoroughly in touch with the working
+classes in Lancashire, in a degree to which no other Bishop, not even
+Bishop Wilberforce, had reached. There was that in the frankness and
+boldness of his address which disarmed their keen suspicion of a
+Bishop's inevitable assumption of superiority, and put them at their
+ease with him. He was always ready to meet them, and to speak off-hand
+and unconventionally, and as they speak, not always with a due
+foresight of consequences or qualifications. If he did sometimes in
+this way get into a scrape, he did not much mind it, and they liked him
+the better for it. He was perfectly fearless in his dealings with them;
+in their disputes, in which he often was invited to take a part, he
+took the part which seemed to him the right one, whether or not it
+might be the unpopular one. Very decided, very confident in his
+opinions and the expression of them, there yet was apparent a curious
+and almost touching consciousness of a deficiency in some of the
+qualities--knowledge, leisure, capacity for the deeper and subtler
+tasks of thought--necessary to give a strong speaker the sense of being
+on sure ground. But he trusted to his manly common sense; and this,
+with the populations with which he had to deal, served him well, at
+least in the main and most characteristic part of his work.
+
+And for his success in this part of his work--in making the crowds in
+Manchester feel that their Bishop was a man like themselves, quite
+alive to their wants and claims and feelings, and not so unlike them in
+his broad and strong utterances--his Episcopate deserves full
+recognition and honour. He set an example which we may hope to see
+followed and improved upon. But unfortunately there was also a less
+successful side. He was a Bishop, an overseer of a flock of many ways
+of life and thought, a fellow-worker with them, sympathetic, laborious,
+warm-hearted. But he was also a Bishop of the Church of Christ, an
+institution with its own history, its great truths to keep and deliver,
+its characteristic differences from the world which it is sent to
+correct and to raise to higher levels than those of time and nature.
+There is no reason why this side of the Episcopal office should not be
+joined to that in which Bishop Frazer so signally excelled. But for
+this part of it he was not well qualified, and much in his performance
+of it must be thought of with regret. The great features of Christian
+truth had deeply impressed him; and to its lofty moral call he
+responded with conviction and earnestness. But an acquaintance with
+what he has to interpret and guard which may suffice for a layman is
+not enough for a Bishop; and knowledge, the knowledge belonging to his
+profession, the deeper and more varied knowledge which makes a man
+competent to speak as a theologian, Bishop Frazer did not possess. He
+rather disbelieved in it, and thought it useless, or, it might be,
+mischievous. He resented its intrusion into spheres where he could only
+see the need of the simplest and least abstruse language. But facts are
+not what we may wish them, but what they are; and questions, if they
+are asked, may have to be answered, with toil, it may be, and
+difficulty, like the questions, assuredly not always capable of easy
+and transparent statement, of mathematical or physical science; and
+unless Christianity is a dream and its history one vast delusion, such
+facts and such questions have made what we call theology. But to the
+Bishop's practical mind they were without interest, and he could not
+see how they could touch and influence living religion. And did not
+care to know about them; he was impatient, and even scornful, when
+stress was laid on them; he was intolerant when he thought they
+competed with the immediate realities of religion. And this want of
+knowledge and of respect for knowledge was a serious deficiency. It
+gave sometimes a tone of thoughtless flippancy to his otherwise earnest
+language. And as he was not averse to controversy, or, at any rate,
+found himself often involved in it, he was betrayed sometimes into
+assertions and contradictions of the most astounding inaccuracy, which
+seriously weakened his authority when he was called upon to accept the
+responsibility of exerting it.
+
+Partly for this reason, partly from a certain vivacity of temper, he
+certainly showed himself, in spite of his popular qualities, less equal
+than many others of his brethren to the task of appeasing and assuaging
+religious strife. The difficulties in Manchester were not greater than
+in other dioceses; there was not anything peculiar in them; there was
+nothing but what a patient and generous arbiter, with due knowledge of
+the subject, might have kept from breaking out into perilous scandals.
+Unhappily he failed; and though he believed that he had only done his
+duty, his failure was a source of deep distress to himself and to
+others. But now that he has passed away, it is but bare justice to say
+that no one worked up more conscientiously to his own standard. He gave
+himself, when he was consecrated, ten or twelve years of work, and then
+he hoped for retirement. He has had fifteen, and has fallen at his
+post. And to the last, the qualities which gave his character such a
+charm in his earlier time had not disappeared. There seemed to be
+always something of the boy about him, in his simplicity, his confiding
+candour and frankness with his friends, his warm-hearted and kindly
+welcome, his mixture of humility with a sense of power. Those who can
+remember him in his younger days still see, in spite of all the storms
+and troubles of his later ones, the image of the undergraduate and the
+young bachelor, who years ago made a start of such brilliant promise,
+and who has fulfilled so much of it, if not all. These things at any
+rate lasted to the end--his high and exacting sense of public duty, and
+his unchanging affection for his old friends.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+NEWMAN'S "APOLOGIA"[30]
+
+
+  [30]
+  _Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ_. By John Henry Newman, D.D. _Guardian_, 22nd
+  June 1864.
+
+We have not noticed before Dr. Newman's _Apologia_, which has been
+coming out lately in weekly numbers, because we wished, when we spoke
+of it, to speak of it as a whole. The special circumstances out of
+which it arose may have prescribed the mode of publication. It may have
+been thought more suitable, in point of form, to answer a pamphlet by a
+series of pamphlets rather than at once by a set octavo of several
+hundred pages. But the real subject which Dr. Newman has been led to
+handle is one which will continue to be of the deepest interest long
+after the controversy which suggested it is forgotten. The real subject
+is the part played in the great Church movement by him who was the
+leading mind in it; and it was unsatisfactory to speak of this till all
+was said, and we could look on the whole course described. Such a
+subject might have well excused a deliberate and leisurely volume to
+itself; perhaps in this way we should have gained, in the laying out
+and concentration of the narrative, and in what helps to bring it as a
+whole before our thoughts. But a man's account of himself is never so
+fresh and natural as when it is called out by the spur and pressure of
+an accidental and instant necessity, and is directed to a purpose and
+quickened by feelings which belong to immediate and passing
+circumstances. The traces of hurried work are of light account when
+they are the guarantees that a man is not sitting down to draw a
+picture of himself, but stating his case in sad and deep earnest out of
+the very fulness of his heart.
+
+The aim of the book is to give a minute and open account of the steps
+and changes by which Dr. Newman passed from the English Church to the
+Roman. The history of a change of opinion has often been written from
+the most opposite points of view; but in one respect this book seems to
+stand alone. Let it be remembered what it is, the narrative and the
+justification of a great conversion; of a change involving an entire
+reversal of views, judgments, approvals, and condemnations; a change
+which, with all ordinary men, involves a reversal, at least as great,
+of their sympathies and aversions, of what they tolerate and speak
+kindly of. Let it be considered what changes of feeling most changes of
+religion compel and consecrate; how men, commonly and very naturally,
+look back on what they have left and think they have escaped from, with
+the aversion of a captive to his prison; how they usually exaggerate
+and make absolute their divergence from what they think has betrayed,
+fooled, and degraded them; how easily they are tempted to visit on it
+and on those who still cling to it their own mistakes and faults. Let
+it be remembered that there was here to be told not only the history of
+a change, but the history of a deep disappointment, of the failure of a
+great design, of the breakdown of hopes the most promising and the most
+absorbing; and this, not in the silence of a man's study, but in the
+fever and contention of a great struggle wrought up to the highest
+pitch of passion and fierceness, bringing with it on all sides and
+leaving behind it, when over, the deep sense of wrong. It is no history
+of a mere intellectual movement, or of a passage from strong belief to
+a weakened and impaired one, to uncertainty, or vagueness, or
+indifference; it is not the account of a change by a man who is half
+sorry for his change, and speaks less hostilely of what he has left
+because he feels less friendly towards what he has joined. There is no
+reserved thought to be discerned in the background of disappointment or
+a wish to go back again to where he once was. It is a book which
+describes how a man, zealous and impatient for truth, thought he had
+found it in one Church, then thought that his finding was a delusion,
+and sought for it and believed he had gained it in another. What it
+shows us is no serene readjustment of abstract doctrines, but the wreck
+and overturning of trust and conviction and the practical grounds of
+life, accompanied with everything to provoke, embitter, and exasperate.
+It need not be said that what Dr. Newman holds he is ready to carry out
+to the end, or that he can speak severely of men and systems.
+
+Let all this be remembered, and also that there is an opposition
+between what he was and what he is, which is usually viewed as
+irreconcilable, and which, on the ordinary assumptions about it, is so;
+and we venture to say that there is not another instance to be quoted,
+of the history of a conversion, in which he who tells his conversion
+has so retained his self-possession, his temper, his mastery over his
+own real judgment and thoughts, his ancient and legitimate sympathies,
+his superiority to the natural and inevitable temptations of so altered
+a position; which is so generous to what he feels to be strong and good
+in what he has nevertheless abandoned, so fearless about letting his
+whole case come out, so careless about putting himself in the right in
+detail; which is so calm, and kindly, and measured, with such a quiet
+effortless freedom from the stings of old conflicts, which bears so few
+traces of that bitterness and antipathy which generally--and we need
+hardly wonder at it--follows the decisive breaking with that on which a
+man's heart was stayed, and for which he would once have died.
+
+There is another thing to be said, and we venture to say it out
+plainly, because Dr. Newman himself has shown that he knows quite well
+what he has been doing. While he has written what will command the
+sympathy and the reverence of every one, however irreconcilably opposed
+to him, to whom a great and noble aim and the trials of a desperate and
+self-sacrificing struggle to compass it are objects of admiration and
+honour, it is undeniable that ill-nature or vindictiveness or stupidity
+will find ample materials of his own providing to turn against him.
+Those who know Dr. Newman's powers and are acquainted with his career,
+and know to what it led him, and yet persist in the charge of
+insincerity and dishonesty against one who probably has made the
+greatest sacrifice of our generation to his convictions of truth, will
+be able to pick up from his own narrative much that they would not
+otherwise have known, to confirm and point the old familiar views
+cherished by dislike or narrowness. This is inevitable when a man takes
+the resolution of laying himself open so unreservedly, and with so
+little care as to what his readers think of what he tells them, so that
+they will be persuaded that he was ever, even from his boyhood, deeply
+conscious of the part which he was performing in the sight of his
+Maker. Those who smile at the belief of a deep and religious mind in
+the mysterious interventions and indications of Providence in the
+guidance of human life, will open their eyes at the feeling which leads
+him to tell the story of his earliest recollections of Roman Catholic
+peculiarities, and of the cross imprinted on his exercise-book. Those
+who think that everything about religion and their own view of religion
+is such plain sailing, so palpable and manifest, that all who are not
+fools or knaves must be of their own opinion, will find plenty to
+wonder at in the confessions of awful perplexity which equally before
+and after his change Dr. Newman makes. Those who have never doubted,
+who can no more imagine the practical difficulties accompanying a great
+change of belief than they can imagine a change of belief itself, will
+meet with much that to them will seem beyond pardon, in the actual
+events of a change, involving such issues and such interests, made so
+deliberately and cautiously, with such hesitation and reluctance, and
+in so long a time; they will be able to point to many moments in it
+when it will be easy to say that more or less ought to have been said,
+more or less ought to have been done. Much more will those who are on
+the side of doubt, who acquiesce in, or who desire the overthrow of
+existing hopes and beliefs, rejoice in such a frank avowal of the
+difficulties of religion and the perplexities of so earnest a believer,
+and make much of their having driven such a man to an alternative so
+obnoxious and so monstrous to most Englishmen. It is a book full of
+minor premisses, to which many opposite majors will be fitted. But
+whatever may be thought of many details, the effect and lesson of the
+whole will not be lost on minds of any generosity, on whatever side
+they may be; they will be touched with the confiding nobleness which
+has kept back nothing, which has stated its case with its weak points
+and its strong, and with full consciousness of what was weak as well as
+of what was strong, which has surrendered its whole course of conduct,
+just as it has been, to be scrutinised, canvassed, and judged. What we
+carry away from following such a history is something far higher and
+more solemn than any controversial inferences; and it seems almost like
+a desecration to make, as we say, capital out of it, to strengthen mere
+argument, to confirm a theory, or to damage an opponent.
+
+The truth, in fact, is, that the interest is personal much more than
+controversial. Those who read it as a whole, and try to grasp the
+effect of all its portions compared together and gathered into one,
+will, it seems to us, find it hard to bend into a decisive triumph for
+any of the great antagonist systems which appear in collision. There
+can be no doubt of the perfect conviction with which Dr. Newman has
+taken his side for good. But while he states the effect of arguments on
+his own mind, he leaves the arguments in themselves as they were, and
+touches on them, not for the sake of what they are worth, but to
+explain the movements and events of his own course. Not from any
+studied impartiality, which is foreign to his character, but from his
+strong and keen sense of what is real and his determined efforts to
+bring it out, he avoids the temptation--as it seems to us, who still
+believe that he was more right once than he is now--to do injustice to
+his former self and his former position. At any rate, the arguments to
+be drawn from this narrative, for or against England, or for or against
+Rome, seem to us very evenly balanced. Of course, such a history has
+its moral. But the moral is not the ordinary vulgar one of the history
+of a religious change. It is not the supplement or disguise of a
+polemical argument. It is the deep want and necessity in our age of the
+Church, even to the most intensely religious and devoted minds, of a
+sound and secure intellectual basis for the faith which they value more
+than life and all things. We hope that we are strong enough to afford
+to judge fairly of such a spectacle, and to lay to heart its warnings,
+even though the particular results seem to go against what we think
+most right. It is a mortification and a trial to the English Church to
+have seen her finest mind carried away and lost to her, but it is a
+mortification which more confident and peremptory systems than hers
+have had to undergo; the parting was not without its compensations if
+only that it brought home so keenly to many the awfulness and the
+seriousness of truth; and surely never did any man break so utterly
+with a Church, who left so many sympathies behind him and took so many
+with him, who continued to feel so kindly and with such large-hearted
+justice to those from whom his changed position separated him in this
+world for ever.
+
+The _Apologia_ is the history of a great battle against Liberalism,
+understanding by Liberalism the tendencies of modern thought to destroy
+the basis of revealed religion, and ultimately of all that can be
+called religion at all. The question which he professedly addresses
+himself to set at rest, that of his honesty, is comparatively of slight
+concern to those who knew him, except so far that they must be
+interested that others, who did not know him, should not be led to do a
+revolting injustice. The real interest is to see how one who felt so
+keenly the claims both of what is new and what is old, who, with such
+deep and unusual love and trust for antiquity, took in with quick
+sympathy, and in its most subtle and most redoubtable shapes, the
+intellectual movement of modern times, could continue to feel the force
+of both, and how he would attempt to harmonise them. Two things are
+prominent in the whole history. One is the fact of religion, early and
+deeply implanted in the writer's mind, absorbing and governing it
+without rival throughout. He speaks of an "inward conversion" at the
+age of fifteen, "of which I was conscious, and of which I am still more
+certain than that I have hands and feet." It was the religion of dogma
+and of a definite creed which made him "rest in the thought of two, and
+two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my
+Creator"--which completed itself with the idea of a visible Church and
+its sacramental system. Religion, in this aspect of it, runs unchanged
+from end to end of the scene of change:--
+
+    I have changed in many things; in this I have not. From the age of
+    fifteen dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I
+    know no other religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other
+    sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream
+    and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without the fact
+    of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being. What
+    I held in 1816 I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. Please God I
+    shall hold it to the end. Even when I was under Dr. Whately's
+    influence I had no temptation to be less zealous for the dogmas of
+    the faith.
+
+The other thing is the haunting necessity, in an age of thought and
+innovation, of a philosophy of religion, equally deep, equally
+comprehensive and thorough, with the invading powers which it was
+wanted to counteract; a philosophy, not on paper or in theory, but
+answering to and vouched for by the facts of real life. In the English
+Church he found, we think that we may venture to say, the religion
+which to him was life, but not the philosophy which he wanted. The
+_Apologia_ is the narrative of his search for it. Two strongly marked
+lines of thought are traceable all through, one modern in its scope and
+sphere, the other ancient. The leading subject of his modern thought is
+the contest with liberal unbelief; contrasted with this was his strong
+interest in Christian antiquity, his deep attachment to the creed, the
+history, and the moral temper of the early Church. The one line of
+thought made him, and even now makes him, sympathise with Anglicanism,
+which is in the same boat with him, holds the same principle of the
+unity and continuity of revealed truth, and is doing the same work,
+though, as he came to think in the end, feebly and hopelessly. The
+other, more and more, carried him away from Anglicanism; and the
+contrast and opposition between it and the ancient Church, in
+organisation, in usage, and in that general tone of feeling which
+quickens and gives significance and expression to forms, overpowered
+more and more the sense of affinity, derived from the identity of
+creeds and sacraments and leading points of Church polity, and from the
+success with which the best and greatest Anglican writers had
+appropriated and assimilated the theology of the Fathers. But though he
+urges the force of ecclesiastical precedents in a startling way, as in
+the account which he gives of the effect of the history of the
+Monophysites on his view of the tenableness of the Anglican theory,
+absolutely putting out of consideration the enormous difference of
+circumstances between the cases which are compared, and giving the
+instance in question a force and importance which seem to be in
+singular contrast with the general breadth and largeness of his
+reasoning, it was not the halting of an ecclesiastical theory which
+dissatisfied him with the English Church.
+
+Anglicanism was not daring enough for him. With his ideas of the coming
+dangers and conflicts, he wanted something bold and thoroughgoing,
+wide-reaching in its aims, resolute in its language, claiming and
+venturing much. Anglicanism was not that. It had given up as
+impracticable much that the Church had once attempted. It did not
+pretend to rise so high, to answer such great questions, to lay down
+such precise definitions. Wisely modest, or timidly uncertain--mindful
+of the unalterable limits of our human condition, _we_ say; forgetful,
+_he_ thought, or doubting, or distrustful, of the gifts and promises of
+a supernatural dispensation--it certainly gave no such complete and
+decisive account of the condition and difficulties of religion and the
+world, as had been done once, and as there were some who did still.
+There were problems which it did not profess to solve; there were
+assertions which others boldly risked, and which it shrunk from making;
+there were demands which it ventured not to put forward. Again, it was
+not refined enough for him; it had little taste for the higher forms of
+the saintly ideal; it wanted the austere and high-strung-virtues; it
+was contented, for the most part, with the domestic type of excellence,
+in which goodness merged itself in the interests and business of the
+common world, and, working in them, took no care to disengage itself or
+mark itself off, as something distinct from them and above them. Above
+all, Anglicanism was too limited; it was local, insular, national; its
+theory was made for its special circumstances; and he describes in a
+remarkable passage how, in contrast with this, there rung in his ears
+continually the proud self-assertion of the other side, _Securus
+judicat orbis terrarum_. What he wanted, what it was the aim of his
+life to find, was a great and effective engine against Liberalism; for
+years he tried, with eager but failing hope, to find it in the theology
+and working of the English Church; when he made up his mind that
+Anglicanism was not strong enough for the task, he left it for a system
+which had one strong power; which claimed to be able to shut up
+dangerous thought.
+
+Very sorrowful, indeed, is the history, told so openly, so simply, so
+touchingly, of the once promising advance, of the great breakdown. And
+yet, to those who still cling to what he left, regret is not the only
+feeling. For he has the nobleness and the generosity to say what he
+_did_ find in the English Church, as well as what he did not find. He
+has given her up for good, but he tells and he shows, with no grudging
+frankness, what are the fruits of her discipline. "So I went on for
+years, up to 1841. It was, in a human point of view, the happiest time
+of my life.... I did not suppose that such sunshine would last, though I
+knew not what would be its termination. It was the time of plenty, and
+during its seven years I tried to lay up as much as I could for the
+dearth which was to follow it." He explains and defends what to us seem
+the fatal marks against Rome; but he lets us see with what force, and
+for how long, they kept alive his own resistance to an attraction which
+to him was so overwhelming. And he is at no pains to conceal--it seems
+even to console him to show--what a pang and wrench it cost him to
+break from that home under whose shadow his spiritual growth had
+increased. He has condemned us unreservedly; but there must, at any
+rate, be some wonderful power and charm about that which he loved with
+a love which is not yet extinguished; else how could he write of the
+past as he does? He has shown that he can understand, though he is
+unable to approve, that others should feel that power still.
+
+Dr. Newman has stated, with his accustomed force and philosophical
+refinement, what he considers the true idea of that infallibility,
+which he looks upon as the only power in the world which can make head
+against and balance Liberalism--which "can withstand and baffle the
+fierce energy of passion, and the all-corroding, all-dissolving
+scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries;" which he considers
+"as a provision, adapted by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve
+religion in the world, and to restrain that freedom of thought which is
+one of the greatest of our natural gifts, from its own suicidal
+excesses." He says, as indeed is true, that it is "a tremendous power,"
+though he argues that, in fact, its use is most wisely and beneficially
+limited. And doubtless, whatever the difficulty of its proof may be,
+and to us this proof seems simply beyond possibility, it is no mere
+power upon paper. It acts and leaves its mark; it binds fast and
+overthrows for good. But when, put at its highest, it is confronted
+with the "giant evil" which it is supposed to be sent into the world to
+repel, we can only say that, to a looker-on, its failure seems as
+manifest as the existence of the claim to use it. It no more does its
+work, in the sense of _succeeding_ and triumphing, than the less
+magnificent "Establishments" do. It keeps _some_ check--it fails on a
+large scale and against the real strain and pinch of the mischief; and
+they, too, keep _some_ check, and are not more fairly beaten than it
+is, in "making a stand against the wild living intellect of man."
+
+Without infallibility, it is said, men will turn freethinkers and
+heretics; but don't they, _with_ it? and what is the good of the engine
+if it will not do its work? And if it is said that this is the fault of
+human nature, which resists what provokes and checks it, still that
+very thing, which infallibility was intended to counteract, goes on
+equally, whether it comes into play or not. Meanwhile, truth does stay
+in the world, the truth that there has been among us a Divine Person,
+of whom the Church throughout Christendom is the representative,
+memorial, and the repeater of His message; doubtless, the means of
+knowledge are really guarded; yet we seem to receive that message as we
+receive the witness of moral truth; and it would not be contrary to the
+analogy of things here if we had often got to it at last through
+mistakes. But when it is reached, there it is, strong in its own power;
+and it is difficult to think that if it is not strong enough in itself
+to stand, it can be protected by a claim of infallibility. A future, of
+which infallibility is the only hope and safeguard, seems to us indeed
+a prospect of the deepest gloom.
+
+Dr. Newman, in a very remarkable passage, describes the look and
+attitude of invading Liberalism, and tells us why he is not forward in
+the conflict. "It seemed to be a time of all others in which Christians
+had a call to be patient, in which they had no other way of helping
+those who were alarmed than that of exhorting them to have a little
+faith and fortitude, and 'to beware,' as the poet says, 'of dangerous
+steps.'" And he interprets "recent acts of the highest Catholic
+authority" as meaning that there is nothing to do just now but to sit
+still and trust. Well; but the _Christian Year_ will do that much for
+us, just as well.
+
+People who talk glibly of the fearless pursuit of truth may here see a
+real example of a life given to it--an example all the more solemn and
+impressive if they think that the pursuit was in vain. It is easy to
+declaim about it, and to be eloquent about lies and sophistries; but it
+is shallow to forget that truth has its difficulties. To hear some
+people talk, it might be thought that truth was a thing to be made out
+and expressed at will, under any circumstances, at any time, amid any
+complexities of facts or principles, by half an hour's choosing to be
+attentive, candid, logical, and resolute; as if there was not a chance
+of losing what perhaps you have, as well as of gaining what you think
+you need. If they would look about them, if they would look into
+themselves, they would recognise that Truth is an awful and formidable
+goddess to all men and to all systems; that all have their weak points
+where virtually, more or less consciously, more or less dexterously,
+they shrink from meeting her eye; that even when we make sacrifice of
+everything for her sake, we find that she still encounters us with
+claims, seemingly inconsistent with all that she has forced us to
+embrace--with appearances which not only convict us of mistake, but
+seem to oblige us to be tolerant of what we cannot really assent to.
+
+She gives herself freely to the earnest and true-hearted inquirer; but
+to those who presume on the easiness of her service, she has a side of
+strong irony. You common-sense men, she seems to say, who see no
+difficulties in the world, you little know on what shaky ground you
+stand, and how easily you might be reduced to absurdity. You critical
+and logical intellects, who silence all comers and cannot be answered,
+and can show everybody to be in the wrong--into what monstrous and
+manifest paradoxes are you not betrayed, blind to the humble facts
+which upset your generalisations, not even seeing that dulness itself
+can pronounce you mistaken!
+
+In the presence of such a narrative as this, sober men will think more
+seriously than ever about charging their most extreme opponents with
+dishonesty and disregard to truth.
+
+As we said before, this history seems to us to leave the theological
+question just where it was. The objections to Rome, which Dr. Newman
+felt so strongly once, but which yielded to other considerations, we
+feel as strongly still. The substantial points of the English theory,
+which broke down to his mind, seem to us as substantial and trustworthy
+as before. He failed, but we believe that, in spite of everything,
+England is the better for his having made his trial. Even Liberalism
+owes to the movement of which he was the soul much of what makes it now
+such a contrast, in largeness of mind and warmth, to the dry,
+repulsive, narrow, material Liberalism of the Reform era. He, and he
+mainly, has been the source, often unrecognised and unsuspected, of
+depth and richness and beauty, and the strong passion for what is
+genuine and real, in our religious teaching. Other men, other
+preachers, have taken up his thoughts and decked them out, and had the
+credit of being greater than their master.
+
+In looking back on the various turns and vicissitudes of his English
+course, we, who inherit the fruits of that glorious failure, should
+speak respectfully and considerately where we do not agree with him,
+and with deep gratitude--all the more that now so much lies between
+us--where we do. But the review makes us feel more than ever that the
+English Church, whose sturdy strength he underrated, and whose
+irregular theories provoked him, was fully worthy of the interest and
+the labours of the leader who despaired of her. Anglicanism has so far
+outlived its revolutions, early and late ones, has marched on in a
+distinct path, has developed a theology, has consolidated an
+organisation, has formed a character and tone, has been the organ of a
+living spirit. The "magnetic storms" of thought which sweep over the
+world may be destructive and dangerous to it, as much as, but not more
+than, to other bodies which claim to be Churches and to represent the
+message of God. But there is nothing to make us think that, in the
+trials which may be in store, the English Church will fail while others
+hold their own.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+DR. NEWMAN ON THE "EIRENICON"[31]
+
+
+  [31]
+  _The Times_, 31st March 1866.
+
+Dr. Pusey's Appeal has received more than one answer. These answers,
+from the Roman Catholic side, are--what it was plain that they would
+be--assurances to him that he looks at the question from an entirely
+mistaken point of view; that it is, of course, very right and good of
+him to wish for peace and union, but that there is only one way of
+peace and union--unconditional submission. He may have peace and union
+for himself at any moment, if he will; so may the English Church, or
+the Greek Church, or any other religious body, organised or
+unorganised.
+
+The way is always open; there is no need to write long books or make
+elaborate proposals about union. Union means becoming Catholic;
+becoming Catholic means acknowledging the exclusive claims of the Pope
+or the Roman Church. In the long controversy one party has never for an
+instant wavered in the assertion that it could not, and never would, be
+in the wrong. The way to close the controversy, and the only one, is to
+admit that Dr. Pusey shall have any amount of assurance and proof that
+the Roman position and Roman doctrine and practice are the right ones.
+
+His misapprehensions shall be corrected; his ignorance of what is Roman
+theology fully, and at any length, enlightened. There is no desire to
+shrink from the fullest and most patient argument in its favour, and he
+may call it, if he likes, explanation. But there is only one practical
+issue to what he has proposed--not to stand bargaining for impossible
+conditions, but thankfully and humbly to join himself to the true
+Church while he may. It is only the way in which the answer is given
+that varies. Here characteristic differences appear. The authorities of
+the Roman Catholic Church swell out to increased magnificence, and
+nothing can exceed the suavity and the compassionate scorn with which
+they point out the transparent absurdity and the audacity of such
+proposals. The Holy Office at Rome has not, it may be, yet heard of Dr.
+Pusey; it may regret, perhaps, that it did not wait for so
+distinguished a mark for its censure; but its attention has been drawn
+to some smaller offenders of the same way of thinking, and it has been
+induced to open all the floodgates of its sonorous and antiquated
+verbiage to sweep away and annihilate a poor little London
+periodical--"_ephemeridem cui titulus, 'The Union Review_.'" The
+Archbishop of Westminster, not deigning to name Dr. Pusey, has seized
+the opportunity to reiterate emphatically, in stately periods and with
+a polished sarcasm, his boundless contempt for the foolish people who
+dare to come "with swords wreathed in myrtle" between the Catholic
+Church and "her mission to the great people of England." On the other
+hand, there have been not a few Roman Catholics who have listened with
+interest and sympathy to what Dr. Pusey had to say, and, though
+obviously they had but one answer to give, have given it with a sense
+of the real condition and history of the Christian world, and with the
+respect due to a serious attempt to look evils in the face. But there
+is only one person on the Roman Catholic side whose reflections on the
+subject English readers in general would much care to know. Anybody
+could tell beforehand what Archbishop Manning would say; but people
+could not feel so certain what Dr. Newman might say.
+
+Dr. Newman has given his answer; and his answer is, of course, in
+effect the same as that of the rest of his co-religionists. He offers
+not the faintest encouragement to Dr. Pusey's sanguine hopes. If it is
+possible to conceive that one side could move in the matter, it is
+absolutely certain that the other would be inflexible. Any such dealing
+on equal terms with the heresy and schism of centuries is not to be
+thought of; no one need affect surprise at the refusal. What Dr. Pusey
+asks is, in fact, to pull the foundation out from under the whole
+structure of Roman Catholic pretensions. Dr. Newman does not waste
+words to show that the plan of the _Eirenicon_ is impossible. He
+evidently assumes that it is so, and we agree with him. But there are
+different ways of dispelling a generous dream, and telling a serious
+man who is in earnest that he is mistaken. Dr. Newman does justice, as
+he ought to do, to feelings and views which none can enter into better
+than he, whatever he may think of them now. He does justice to the
+understanding and honesty, as well as the high aims, of an old friend,
+once his comrade in difficult and trying times, though now long parted
+from him by profound differences, and to the motives which prompted so
+venturous an attempt as the _Eirenicon_ to provoke public discussion on
+the reunion of Christendom. He is capable of measuring the real state
+of the facts, and the mischiefs and evils for which a remedy is wanted,
+by a more living rule than the suppositions and consequences of a
+cut-and-dried theory. Rightly or wrongly he argues--at least, he gives
+us something to think of. Perhaps not the least of his merit is that he
+writes simply and easily in choice and varied English, instead of
+pompously ringing the changes on a set of _formulae_ which beg the
+question, and dinning into our ears the most extravagant assertions of
+foreign ecclesiastical arrogance. We may not always think him fair, or
+a sound reasoner, but he is conciliatory, temperate, and often
+fearlessly candid. He addresses readers who will challenge and examine
+what he says, not those whose minds are cowed and beaten down before
+audacity in proportion to its coolness, and whom paradox, the more
+extreme the better, fascinates and drags captive. To his old friend he
+is courteous, respectful, sympathetic; where the occasion makes it
+fitting, affectionate, even playful, as men are who can afford to let
+their real feelings come out, and have not to keep up appearances.
+Unflinching he is in maintaining his present position as the upholder
+of the exclusive claims of the Roman Church to represent the Catholic
+Church of the Creeds; but he has the good sense and good feeling to
+remember that he once shared the views of those whom he now
+controverts, and that their present feelings about the divisions of
+Christendom were once his own. Such language as the following is plain,
+intelligible, and manly. Of course, he has his own position, and must
+see things according to it. But he recognises the right of conscience
+in those who, having gone a long way with him, find that they can go no
+further, and he pays a compliment, becoming as from himself, and not
+without foundation in fact, to the singular influence which, from
+whatever cause, Dr. Pusey's position gives him, and which, we may add,
+imposes on him, in more ways than one, very grave responsibilities:--
+
+    You, more than any one else alive, have been the present and
+    untiring agent by whom a great work has been effected in it; and,
+    far more than is usual, you have received in your lifetime, as
+    well as merited, the confidence of your brethren. You cannot speak
+    merely for yourself; your antecedents, your existing influence,
+    are a pledge to us that what you may determine will be the
+    determination of a multitude. Numbers, too, for whom you cannot
+    properly be said to speak, will be moved by your authority or your
+    arguments; and numbers, again, who are of a school more recent
+    than your own, and who are only not your followers because they
+    have outstripped you in their free speeches and demonstrative acts
+    in our behalf, will, for the occasion, accept you as their
+    spokesman. There is no one anywhere--among ourselves, in your own
+    body, or, I suppose, in the Greek Church--who can affect so vast a
+    circle of men, so virtuous, so able, so learned, so zealous, as
+    come, more or less, under your influence; and I cannot pay them
+    all a greater compliment than to tell them they ought all to be
+    Catholics, nor do them a more affectionate service than to pray
+    that they may one day become such....
+
+    I recollect well what an outcast I seemed to myself when I took
+    down from the shelves of my library the volumes of St. Athanasius
+    or St. Basil, and set myself to study them; and how, on the
+    contrary, when at length I was brought into Catholicism, I kissed
+    them with delight, with a feeling that in them I had more than all
+    that I had lost, and, as though I were directly addressing the
+    glorious saints who bequeathed them to the Church, I said to the
+    inanimate pages, "You are now mine, and I am now yours, beyond any
+    mistake." Such, I conceive, would be the joy of the persons I
+    speak of if they could wake up one morning and find themselves
+    possessed by right of Catholic traditions and hopes, without
+    violence to their own sense of duty; and certainly I am the last
+    man to say that such violence is in any case lawful, that the
+    claims of conscience are not paramount, or that any one may
+    overleap what he deliberately holds to be God's command, in order
+    to make his path easier for him or his heart lighter.
+
+    I am the last man to quarrel with this jealous deference to the
+    voice of our conscience, whatever judgment others may form of us
+    in consequence, for this reason, because their case, as it at
+    present stands, has as you know been my own. You recollect well
+    what hard things were said against us twenty-five years ago which
+    we knew in our hearts we did not deserve. Hence, I am now in the
+    position of the fugitive Queen in the well-known passage, who,
+    "_haud ignara mali_" herself, had learned to sympathise with those
+    who were inheritors of her past wanderings.
+
+Dr. Newman's hopes, and what most of his countrymen consider the hopes
+of truth and religion, are not the same. His wish is, of course, that
+his friend should follow him; a wish in which there is not the
+slightest reason to think that he will be gratified. But differently as
+we must feel as to the result, we cannot help sharing the evident
+amusement with which Dr. Newman recalls a few of the compliments which
+were lavished on him by some of his present co-religionists when he was
+trying to do them justice, and was even on the way to join them. He
+reprints with sly and mischievous exactness a string of those glib
+phrases of controversial dislike and suspicion which are common to all
+parties, and which were applied to him by "priests, good men, whose
+zeal outstripped their knowledge, and who in consequence spoke
+confidently, when they would have been wiser had they suspended their
+adverse judgment of those whom they were soon to welcome as brothers in
+communion." It is a trifle, but it strikes us as characteristic. Dr.
+Newman is one of the very few who have carried into his present
+communion, to a certain degree at least, an English habit of not
+letting off the blunders and follies of his own side, and of daring to
+think that a cause is better served by outspoken independence of
+judgment than by fulsome, unmitigated puffing. It might be well if even
+in him there were a little more of this habit. But, so far as it goes,
+it is the difference between him and most of those who are leaders on
+his side. Indirectly he warns eager controversialists that they are not
+always the wisest and the most judicious and far-seeing of men; and we
+cannot quarrel with him, however little we may like the occasion, for
+the entertainment which he feels in inflicting on his present brethren
+what they once judged and said of him, and in reminding them that their
+proficiency in polemical rhetoric did not save them from betraying the
+shallowness of their estimate and the shortness of their foresight.
+
+When he comes to discuss the _Eirenicon_, Dr. Newman begins with a
+complaint which seems to us altogether unreasonable. He seems to think
+it hard that Dr. Pusey should talk of peace and reunion, and yet speak
+so strongly of what he considers the great corruptions of the Roman
+Church. In ordinary controversy, says Dr. Newman, we know what we are
+about and what to expect; "'_Caedimur, et totidem plagis consumimus
+hostem_.' We give you a sharp cut and you return it.... But we at least
+have not professed to be composing an _Eirenicon_, when we treated you
+as foes." Like Archbishop Manning, Dr. Newman is reminded "of the sword
+wreathed in myrtle;" but Dr. Pusey, he says, has improved on the
+ancient device,--"Excuse me, you discharge your olive-branch as if from
+a catapult."
+
+This is, no doubt, exactly what Dr. Pusey has done. Going much further
+than the great majority of his countrymen will go with him in
+admissions in favour of the Roman Catholic Church, he has pointed out
+with a distinctness and force, never, perhaps, exceeded, what is the
+impassable barrier which, as long as it lasts, makes every hope of
+union idle. The practical argument against Rome is stated by him in a
+shape which comes home to the consciences of all, whatever their
+theological training and leanings, who have been brought up in English
+ways and ideas of religion. But why should he not? He is desirous of
+union--the reunion of the whole of Christendom. He gives full credit to
+the Roman communion--much more credit than most of his brethren think
+him justified in giving--for what is either defensible or excellent in
+it. Dr. Newman must be perfectly aware that Dr. Pusey has gone to the
+very outside of what our public feeling in England will bear in favour
+of efforts for reconciliation, and he nowhere shows any sign that he is
+thinking of unconditional submission. How, then, can he be expected to
+mince matters and speak smoothly when he comes to what he regards as
+the real knot of the difficulty, the real and fatal bar to all
+possibility of a mutual understanding? If his charges are untrue or
+exaggerated in detail or colouring, that is another matter; but the
+whole of his pleading for peace presupposes that there are great and
+serious obstacles to it in what is practically taught and authorised in
+the Roman Church; and it is rather hard to blame him for "not making
+the best of things," and raising difficulties in the way of the very
+object which he seeks, because he states the truth about these
+obstacles. We are afraid that we must be of Dr. Newman's opinion that
+the _Eirenicon_ is not calculated to lead, in our time at least, to
+what it aims at--the reunion of Christendom; but this arises from the
+real obstacles themselves, not from Dr. Pusey's way of stating them.
+There may be no way to peace, but surely if there is, though it implies
+giving full weight to your sympathies, and to the points on which you
+may give way, it also involves the possibility of speaking out plainly,
+and also of being listened to, on the points on which you really
+disagree. Does Dr. Newman think that all Dr. Pusey felt he had to do
+was to conciliate Roman Catholics? Does it follow, because objections
+are intemperately and unfairly urged on the Protestant side, that
+therefore they are not felt quite as much in earnest by sober and
+tolerant people, and that they may not be stated in their real force
+without giving occasion for the remark that this is reviving the old
+cruel war against Rome, and rekindling a fierce style of polemics which
+is now out of date? And how is Dr. Pusey to state these objections if,
+when he goes into them, not in a vague declamatory way, but showing his
+respect and seriousness by his guarded and full and definite manner of
+proof, he is to be met by the charge that he does not show sufficient
+consideration? All this may be a reason for thinking it vain to write
+an Eirenicon at all. But if one is to be attempted, it certainly will
+not do to make it a book of compliments. Its first condition is that if
+it makes light of lesser difficulties it should speak plainly about
+greater ones.
+
+But this is, after all, a matter of feeling. No doubt, as Dr. Newman
+says, people are not pleased or conciliated by elaborate proofs that
+they are guilty of something very wrong or foolish. What is of more
+interest is to know the effect on a man like Dr. Newman of such a
+display of the prevailing tendency of religious thought and devotion in
+his communion as Dr. Pusey has given from Roman Catholic writers. And
+it is plain that, whoever else is satisfied with them, these tendencies
+are not entirely satisfactory to Dr. Newman. That rage for foreign
+ideas and foreign usages which has come over a section of his friends,
+the loudest and perhaps the ablest section of them, has no charms for
+him. He asserts resolutely and rather sternly his right to have an
+opinion of his own, and declines to commit himself, or to allow that
+his cause is committed, to a school of teaching which happens for the
+moment to have the talk to itself; and he endeavours at great length to
+present a view of the teaching of his Church which shall be free, if
+not from all Dr. Pusey's objections, yet from a certain number of them,
+which to Dr. Newman himself appear grave. After disclaiming or
+correcting certain alleged admissions of his own, on which Dr. Pusey
+had placed a construction too favourable to the Anglican Church, Dr.
+Newman comes to a passage which seems to rouse him. A convert, says Dr.
+Pusey, must take things as he finds them in his new communion, and it
+would be unbecoming in him to criticise. This statement gives Dr.
+Newman the opportunity of saying that, except with large qualifications,
+he does not accept it for himself. Of course, he says, there are
+considerations of modesty, of becomingness, of regard to the feelings
+of others with equal or greater claims than himself, which bind a
+convert as they bind any one who has just gained admission into a
+society of his fellow men. He has no business "to pick and choose," and
+to set himself up as a judge of everything in his new position. But
+though every man of sense who thought he had reason for so great a
+change would be generous and loyal in accepting his new religion as a
+whole, in time he comes "to have a right to speak as well as to hear;"
+and for this right, both generally and in his own case, he stands up
+very resolutely:--
+
+    Also, in course of time a new generation rises round him, and
+    there is no reason why he should not know as much, and decide
+    questions with as true an instinct, as those who perhaps number
+    fewer years than he does Easter communions. He has mastered the
+    fact and the nature of the differences of theologian from
+    theologian, school from school, nation from nation, era from era.
+    He knows that there is much of what may be called fashion in
+    opinions and practices, according to the circumstances of time and
+    place, according to current politics, the character of the Pope of
+    the day, or the chief Prelates of a particular country; and that
+    fashions change. His experience tells him that sometimes what is
+    denounced in one place as a great offence, or preached up as a
+    first principle, has in another nation been immemorially regarded
+    in just a contrary sense, or has made no sensation at all, one way
+    or the other, when brought before public opinion; and that loud
+    talkers, in the Church as elsewhere, are apt to carry all before
+    them, while quiet and conscientious persons commonly have to give
+    way. He perceives that, in matters which happen to be in debate,
+    ecclesiastical authority watches the state of opinion and the
+    direction and course of controversy, and decides accordingly; so
+    that in certain cases to keep back his own judgment on a point is
+    to be disloyal to his superiors.
+
+    So far generally; now in particular as to myself. After twenty
+    years of Catholic life, I feel no delicacy in giving my opinion on
+    any point when there is a call for me,--and the only reason why I
+    have not done so sooner or more often than I have, is that there
+    has been no call. I have now reluctantly come to the conclusion
+    that your Volume _is_ a call. Certainly, in many instances in
+    which theologian differs from theologian, and country from
+    country, I have a definite judgment of my own; I can say so
+    without offence to any one, for the very reason that from the
+    nature of the case it is impossible to agree with all of them. I
+    prefer English habits of belief and devotion to foreign, from the
+    same causes, and by the same right, which justifies foreigners in
+    preferring their own. In following those of my people, I show less
+    singularity, and create less disturbance than if I made a flourish
+    with what is novel and exotic. And in this line of conduct I am
+    but availing myself of the teaching which I fell in with on
+    becoming a Catholic; and it is a pleasure to me to think that what
+    I hold now, and would transmit after me if I could, is only what I
+    received then.
+
+He observes that when he first joined the Roman Catholic Church the
+utmost delicacy was observed in giving him advice; and the only warning
+which he can recollect was from the Vicar-General of the London
+district, who cautioned him against books of devotion of the Italian
+school, which were then just coming into England, and recommended him
+to get, as safe guides, the works of Bishop Hay. Bishop Hay's name is
+thus, probably for the first time, introduced to the general English
+public. It is difficult to forbear a smile at the great Oxford teacher,
+the master of religious thought and feeling to thousands, being gravely
+set to learn his lesson of a more perfect devotion, how to meditate and
+how to pray, from "the works of Bishop Hay"; it is hardly more easy to
+forbear a smile at his recording it. But Bishop Hay was a sort of
+symbol, and represents, he says, English as opposed to foreign habits
+of thought; and to these English habits he not only gives his
+preference, but he maintains that they are more truly those of the
+whole Roman Catholic body in England than the more showy and extreme
+doctrines of a newer school. Dr. Pusey does wrong, he says, in taking
+this new school as the true exponent of Roman Catholic ideas. That it
+is popular he admits, but its popularity is to be accounted for by
+personal qualifications in its leaders for gaining the ear of the
+world, without supposing that they speak for their body.
+
+    Though I am a convert, then, I think I have a right to speak out;
+    and that the more because other converts have spoken for a long
+    time, while I have not spoken; and with still more reason may I
+    speak without offence in the case of your present criticisms of
+    us, considering that in the charges you bring the only two English
+    writers you quote in evidence are both of them converts, younger
+    in age than myself. I put aside the Archbishop of course, because
+    of his office. These two authors are worthy of all consideration,
+    at once from their character and from their ability. In their
+    respective lines they are perhaps without equals at this
+    particular time; and they deserve the influence they possess. One
+    is still in the vigour of his powers; the other has departed amid
+    the tears of hundreds. It is pleasant to praise them for their
+    real qualifications; but why do you rest on them as authorities?
+    Because the one was "a popular writer"; but is there not
+    sufficient reason for this in the fact of his remarkable gifts, of
+    his poetical fancy, his engaging frankness, his playful wit, his
+    affectionateness, his sensitive piety, without supposing that the
+    wide diffusion of his works arises out of his particular
+    sentiments about the Blessed Virgin? And as to our other friend,
+    do not his energy, acuteness, and theological reading, displayed
+    on the vantage ground of the historic _Dublin Review_, fully
+    account for the sensation he has produced, without supposing that
+    any great number of our body go his lengths in their view of the
+    Pope's infallibility? Our silence as regards their writings is
+    very intelligible; it is not agreeable to protest, in the sight of
+    the world, against the writings of men in our own communion whom
+    we love and respect. But the plain fact is this--they came to the
+    Church, and have thereby saved their souls; but they are in no
+    sense spokesmen for English Catholics, and they must not stand in
+    the place of those who have a real title to such an office.
+
+And he appeals from them, as authorities, to a list of much more sober
+and modest writers, though, it may be, the names of all of them are not
+familiar to the public. He enumerates as the "chief authors of the
+passing generation," "Cardinal Wiseman, Dr. Ullathorne, Dr. Lingard,
+Mr. Tierney, Dr. Oliver, Dr. Rock, Dr. Waterworth, Dr. Husenbeth, Mr.
+Flanagan." If these well-practised and circumspect veterans in the
+ancient controversy are not original and brilliant, at least they are
+safe; and Dr. Newman will not allow the flighty intellectualism which
+takes more hold of modern readers to usurp their place, and for himself
+he sturdily and bluffly declines to give up his old standing-ground for
+any one:--
+
+    I cannot, then, without remonstrance, allow you to identify the
+    doctrine of our Oxford friends in question, on the two subjects I
+    have mentioned, with the present spirit or the prospective creed
+    of Catholics; or to assume, as you do, that because they are
+    thoroughgoing and relentless in their statements, therefore they
+    are the harbingers of a new age, when to show a deference for
+    Antiquity will be thought little else than a mistake. For myself,
+    hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my
+    stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of
+    their time is not yet an old almanac to me. Of course I maintain
+    the value and authority of the "Schola," as one of the _loci
+    theologici_; still I sympathise with Petavius in preferring to its
+    "contentious and subtle theology" that "more elegant and fruitful
+    teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite antiquity."
+    The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down
+    the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder
+    quite as serviceable for that purpose now as it was twenty years
+    ago. Though I hold, as you remark, a process of development in
+    Apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not
+    supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them.
+
+Is he right in saying that he is not responsible as a Roman Catholic
+for the extravagances that Dr. Pusey dwells upon? He is, it seems to
+us, and he is not. No doubt the Roman Catholic system is in practice a
+wide one, and he has a right, which we are glad to see that he is
+disposed to exercise, to maintain the claims of moderation and
+soberness, and to decline to submit his judgment to the fashionable
+theories of the hour. A stand made for independence and good sense
+against the pressure of an exacting and overbearing dogmatism is a good
+thing for everybody, though made in a camp with which we have nothing
+to do. He goes far enough, indeed, as it is. Still, it is something
+that a great writer, of whose genius and religious feeling Englishmen
+will one day be even prouder than they are now, should disconnect
+himself from the extreme follies of his party, and attempt to represent
+what is the nobler and more elevated side of the system to which he has
+attached himself. But it seems to us much more difficult for him to
+release his cause from complicity with the doctrines which he dislikes
+and fears. We have no doubt that he is not alone, and that there are
+numbers of his English brethren who are provoked and ashamed at the
+self-complacent arrogance and childish folly shown in exaggerating and
+caricaturing doctrines which are, in the eyes of most Englishmen,
+extravagant enough in themselves. But the question is whether he or the
+innovators represent the true character and tendencies of their
+religious system. It must be remembered that with a jealous and touchy
+Government, like that of the Roman Church, which professes the duty and
+boasts of the power to put down all dangerous ideas and language, mere
+tolerance means much. Dr. Newman speaks as an Englishman when he writes
+thus:--
+
+    This is specially the case with great ideas. You may stifle them;
+    or you may refuse them elbow-room; or you may torment them with
+    your continual meddling; or you may let them have free course and
+    range, and be content, instead of anticipating their excesses, to
+    expose and restrain those excesses after they have occurred. But
+    you have only this alternative; and for myself, I prefer much,
+    wherever it is possible, to be first generous and then just; to
+    grant full liberty of thought, and to call it to account when
+    abused.
+
+But that has never been the principle of his Church. At least, the
+liberty which it has allowed has been a most one-sided liberty. It has
+been the liberty to go any length in developing the favourite opinions
+about the power of the Pope, or some popular form of devotion; but as
+to other ideas, not so congenial, "great" ones and little ones too, the
+lists of the Roman Index bear witness to the sensitive vigilance which
+took alarm even at remote danger. And those whose pride it is that they
+are ever ready and able to stop all going astray must be held
+responsible for the going astray which they do not stop, especially
+when it coincides with what they wish and like.
+
+But these extreme writers do not dream of tolerance. They stoutly and
+boldly maintain that they but interpret in the only natural and
+consistent manner the mind of their Church; and no public or official
+contradiction meets them. There may be a disapproving opinion in their
+own body, but it does not show itself. The disclaimer of even such a
+man as Dr. Newman is in the highest degree guarded and qualified. They
+are the people who can excite attention and gain a hearing, though it
+be an adverse one. They have the power to make themselves the most
+prominent and accredited representatives of their creed, and, if
+thoroughgoing boldness and ability are apt to attract the growth of
+thought and conviction, they are those who are likely to mould its
+future form. Sober prudent people may prefer the caution of Dr.
+Newman's "chief authors," but to the world outside most of these will
+be little more than names, and the advanced party, which talks most
+strongly about the Pope's infallibility and devotion to St. Mary, has
+this to say for itself. Popular feeling everywhere in the Roman
+communion appears to go with it, and authority both in Rome and in
+England shelters and sanctions it. Nothing can be more clearly and
+forcibly stated than the following assertions of the unimpeachable
+claim of "dominant opinions" in the Roman Catholic system by the
+highest Roman Catholic authority in England. "It is an ill-advised
+overture of peace," writes Archbishop Manning,
+
+    to assail the popular, prevalent, and dominant opinions,
+    devotions, and doctrines of the Catholic Church with hostile
+    criticism.... The presence and assistance of the Holy Ghost, which
+    secures the Church within the sphere of faith and morals, invests
+    it also with instincts and a discernment which preside over its
+    worship and doctrines, its practices and customs. We may be sure
+    that whatever is prevalent in the Church, under the eye of its
+    public authority, practised by the people, and not censured by its
+    pastors, is at least conformable to faith and innocent as to
+    morals. Whosoever rises up to condemn such practices and opinions
+    thereby convicts himself of the private spirit which is the root
+    of heresy. But if it be ill-advised to assail the mind of the
+    Church, it is still more so to oppose its visible Head. There can
+    be no doubt that the Sovereign Pontiff has declared the same
+    opinion as to the temporal power as that which is censured in
+    others, and that he defined the Immaculate Conception, and that he
+    believes in his own infallibility. If these things be our
+    reproach, we share it with the Vicar of Jesus Christ. They are not
+    our private opinions, nor the tenets of a school, but the mind of
+    the Pontiff, as they were of his predecessors, as they will be of
+    those who come after him.--Archbishop Manning's _Pastoral_, pp.
+    64-66, 1866.
+
+To maintain his liberty against extreme opinions generally is one of
+Dr. Newman's objects in writing his letter; the other is to state
+distinctly what he holds and what he does not hold, as regards the
+subject on which Dr. Pusey's appeal has naturally made so deep an
+impression:--
+
+    I do so, because you say, as I myself have said in former years,
+    that "That vast system as to the Blessed Virgin ... to all of us
+    has been the special _crux_ of the Roman system" (p. 101). Here, I
+    say, as on other points, the Fathers are enough for me. I do not
+    wish to say more than they, and will not say less. You, I know,
+    will profess the same; and thus we can join issue on a clear and
+    broad principle, and may hope to come to some intelligible result.
+    We are to have a treatise on the subject of Our Lady soon from the
+    pen of the Most Rev. Prelate; but that cannot interfere with such
+    a mere argument from the Fathers as that to which I shall confine
+    myself here. Nor, indeed, as regards that argument itself, do I
+    profess to be offering you any new matter, any facts which have
+    not been used by others,--by great divines, as Petavius, by living
+    writers, nay, by myself on other occasions. I write afresh,
+    nevertheless, and that for three reasons--first, because I wish to
+    contribute to the accurate statement and the full exposition of
+    the argument in question; next, because I may gain a more patient
+    hearing than has sometimes been granted to better men than myself;
+    lastly, because there just now seems a call on me, under my
+    circumstances, to avow plainly what I do and what I do not hold
+    about the Blessed Virgin, that others may know, did they come to
+    stand where I stand, what they would and what they would not be
+    bound to hold concerning her.
+
+If this "vast system" is a _crux_ to any one, we cannot think that even
+Dr. Newman's explanation will make it easier. He himself recoils, as
+any Englishman of sense and common feeling must, at the wild
+extravagances into which this devotion has run. But he accepts and
+defends, on the most precarious grounds, the whole system of thought
+out of which they have sprung by no very violent process of growth. He
+cannot, of course, stop short of accepting the definition of the
+Immaculate Conception as an article of faith, and, though he
+emphatically condemns, with a warmth and energy of which no one can
+doubt the sincerity, a number of revolting consequences drawn from the
+theology of which that dogma is the expression, he is obliged to defend
+everything up to that. For a professed disciple of the Fathers this is
+not easy. If anything is certain, it is that the place which the
+Blessed Virgin occupies in the Roman Catholic system--popular or
+authoritative, if it is possible fairly to urge such a distinction in a
+system which boasts of all-embracing authority--is something perfectly
+different from anything known in the first four centuries. In all the
+voluminous writings on theology which remain from them we may look in
+vain for any traces of that feeling which finds words in the common
+hymn, "_Ave, marls Stella_" and which makes her fill so large a space
+in the teaching and devotion of the Roman Church. Dr. Newman attempts
+to meet this difficulty by a distinction. The doctrine, he says, was
+there, the same then as now; it is only the feelings, behaviour, and
+usages, the practical consequences naturally springing from the
+doctrine, which have varied or grown:--
+
+    I fully grant that the _devotion_ towards the Blessed Virgin has
+    increased among Catholics with the progress of centuries. I do not
+    allow that the _doctrine_ concerning her has undergone a growth,
+    for I believe it has been in substance one and the same from the
+    beginning.
+
+There is, doubtless, such a distinction, though whether available for
+Dr. Newman's purpose is another matter. But when we recollect that
+modern "doctrine," besides defining the Immaculate Conception, places
+her next in glory to the Throne of God, and makes her the Queen of
+Heaven, and the all-prevailing intercessor with her Son, the assertion
+as to "doctrine" is a bold one. It rests, as it seems to us, simply on
+Dr. Newman identifying his own inferences from the language of the
+ancient writers whom he quotes with the language itself. They say a
+certain thing--that Mary is the "second Eve." Dr. Newman, with all the
+theology and all the controversies of eighteen centuries in his mind,
+deduces from this statement a number of refined consequences as to her
+sinlessness, and greatness, and reward, which seem to him to flow from
+it, and says that it means all these consequences. Mr. Ruskin somewhere
+quotes the language of an "eminent Academician," who remarks, in answer
+to some criticism on a picture, "that if you look for curves, you will
+see curves; and if you look for angles, you will see angles." So it is
+here. The very dogma of the Immaculate Conception itself Dr. Newman
+sees indissolubly involved in the "rudimentary teaching" which insists
+on the parallelism between Eve and Mary:--
+
+    Was not Mary as fully endowed as Eve?... If Eve was (as Bishop
+    Bull and others maintain) raised above human nature by that
+    indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that
+    Mary had a greater grace?... And if Eve had this supernatural
+    inward gift given her from the moment of her personal existence,
+    is it possible to deny that Mary, too, had this gift from the very
+    first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to
+    resist this inference:--well, this is simply and literally the
+    doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I say the doctrine of the
+    Immaculate Conception is in its substance this, and nothing more
+    or less than this (putting aside the question of degrees of
+    grace), and it really does seem to me bound up in that doctrine of
+    the Fathers, that Mary is the second Eve.
+
+It seems obvious to remark that the Fathers are not even alleged to
+have themselves drawn this irresistible inference; and next, that even
+if it be drawn, there is a long interval between it and the elevation
+of the Mother of Jesus Christ to the place to which modern Roman
+doctrine raises her. Possibly, the Fathers might have said, as many
+people will say now, that, in a matter of this kind, it is idle to draw
+inferences when we are, in reality, utterly without the knowledge to
+make them worth anything. At any rate, if they had drawn them, we
+should have found some traces of it in their writings, and we find
+none. We find abundance of poetical addresses and rhetorical
+amplification, which makes it all the more remarkable that the plain
+dogmatic view of her position, which is accepted by the Roman Church,
+does not appear in them. We only find a "rudimentary doctrine," which,
+naturally enough, gives the Blessed Virgin a very high and sacred place
+in the economy of the Incarnation. But how does the doctrine, as it is
+found in even their rhetorical passages, go a step beyond what would be
+accepted by any sober reader of the New Testament? They speak of what
+she was; they do not presume to say what she is. What Protestant could
+have the slightest difficulty in saying not only what Justin says, and
+Tertullian copies from him, and Irenaeus enlarges upon, but what Dr.
+Newman himself says of her awful and solitary dignity, always excepting
+the groundless assumption which, from her office in this world takes
+for granted, first her sinlessness, and then a still higher office in
+the next? We do not think that, as a matter of literary criticism, Dr.
+Newman is fair in his argument from the Fathers. He lays great stress
+on Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Irenaeus, as three independent
+witnesses from different parts of the world; whereas it is obvious that
+Tertullian at any rate copies almost literally from Justin Martyr, and
+it is impossible to compare a mere incidental point of rhetorical, or,
+if it be so, argumentative illustration, occurring once or twice in a
+long treatise, with a doctrine, such as that of the Incarnation itself,
+on which the whole treatise is built, and of which it is full. The
+wonder is, indeed, that the Fathers, considering how much they wrote,
+said so little of her; scarcely less is it a wonder, then, that the New
+Testament says so little, but from this little the only reason which
+would prevent a Protestant reader of the New Testament from accepting
+the highest statement of her historical dignity is the reaction from
+the development of them into the consequences which have been notorious
+for centuries in the unreformed Churches. Protestants, left to
+themselves, are certainly not prone to undervalue the saints of
+Scripture; it has been the presence of the great system of popular
+worship confronting them which has tied their tongues in this matter.
+Yet Anglican theologians like Mr. Keble, popular poets like Wordsworth,
+broad Churchmen like Mr. Robertson, have said things which even Roman
+Catholics might quote as expressions of their feeling. But Dr. Newman
+must know that many things may be put, and put most truly, into the
+form of poetical expression which will not bear hardening into a dogma.
+A Protestant may accept and even amplify the ideas suggested by
+Scripture about the Blessed Virgin; but he may feel that he cannot tell
+how the Redeemer was preserved from sinful taint; what was the grace
+bestowed on His mother; or what was the reward and prerogative which
+ensued to her. But it is just these questions which the Roman doctrine
+undertakes to answer without a shadow of doubt, and which Dr. Newman
+implies that the theology of the Fathers answered as unambiguously.
+
+But from what has happened in the history of religion, we do not think
+that Protestants in general who do not shrink from high language about
+Abraham, Moses, or David, would find anything unnatural or
+objectionable in the language of the early Christian writers about the
+Mother of our Lord, though possibly it might not be their own; but the
+interval from this language to that certain knowledge of her present
+office in the economy of grace which is implied in what Dr. Newman
+considers the "doctrine" about her is a very long one. The step to the
+modern "devotion" in its most chastened form is longer still. We cannot
+follow the subtle train of argument which says that because the
+"doctrine" of the second century called her the "second Eve," therefore
+the devotion which sets her upon the altars of Christendom in the
+nineteenth is a right development of the doctrine. What is wanted is
+not the internal thread of the process, but the proof and confirmation
+from without that it was the right process; and this link is just what
+is wanting, except on a supposition which begs the question. It is
+conceivable that this step from "doctrine" to "devotion" may have been
+a mistake. It is conceivable that the "doctrine" may have been held in
+the highest form without leading to the devotion; for Dr. Newman, of
+course, thinks that Athanasius and Augustine held "the doctrine," yet,
+as he says, "we have no proof that Athanasius himself had any special
+devotion to the Blessed Virgin," and in another place he repeats his
+doubts whether St. Chrysostom or St. Athanasius invoked her; "nay," he
+adds, "I should like to know whether St. Augustine, in all his
+voluminous writings, invokes her once." What has to be shown is, that
+this step was not a mistake; that it was inevitable and legitimate.
+
+"This being the faith of the Fathers about the Blessed Virgin," says
+Dr. Newman, "we need not wonder that it should in no long time be
+transmuted into devotion." The Fathers expressed a historical fact
+about her in the term [Greek: Theotokos]; therefore, argues the later
+view, she is the source of our present grace now. It is the _rationale_
+of this inference, which is not an immediate or obvious one, which is
+wanted. And Dr. Newman gives it us in the words of Bishop Butler:--
+
+    Christianity is eminently an objective religion. For the most part
+    it tells us of persons and facts in simple words, and leaves the
+    announcement to produce its effect on such hearts as are prepared
+    to receive it. This, at least, is its general character; and
+    Butler recognises it as such in his _Analogy_, when speaking of
+    the Second and Third Persons of the Holy Trinity:--"The internal
+    worship," he says, "to the Son and Holy Ghost is no farther matter
+    of pure revealed command than as the relations they stand in to us
+    are matters of pure revelation; but the relations being known, the
+    obligations to such internal worship are _obligations of reason
+    arising out of those relations themselves_."
+
+We acknowledge the pertinency of the quotation. So true is it that "the
+relations being known," the obligations of worship arise of themselves
+from these relations, that if the present relation of the Blessed
+Virgin to mankind has always been considered to be what modern Roman
+theology considers it, it is simply inconceivable that devotion to her
+should not have been universal long before St. Athanasius and St.
+Augustine; and equally inconceivable, to take Dr. Newman's remarkable
+illustration, that if the real position of St. Joseph is next to her,
+it should have been reserved for the nineteenth century, if not,
+indeed, to find it out, at least to acknowledge it; but the whole
+question is about the fact of the "relations" themselves. If we believe
+that the Second and Third Persons are God, we do not want to be told to
+worship them. But such a relation as Dr. Newman supposes in the case of
+the Blessed Virgin does not flow of itself from the idea contained, for
+instance, in the word [Greek: Theotokos], and even if it did, we should
+still want to be told, in the case of a creature, and remembering the
+known jealousy of religion of even the semblance of creature worship,
+what _are_ the "religious regards," which, not flowing from the nature
+of the case, but needing to be distinctly authorised, are right and
+binding.
+
+The question is of a dogmatic and a popular system. We most fully admit
+that, with Dr. Newman or any other of the numberless well-trained and
+excellent men in the Roman Church, the homage to the Mother does not
+interfere with the absolutely different honour rendered to the Son. We
+readily acknowledge the elevating and refining beauty of that
+character, of which the Virgin Mother is the type, and the services
+which that ideal has rendered to mankind, though we must emphatically
+say that a man need not be a Roman Catholic to feel and to express the
+charm of that moral beauty. But here we have a doctrine as definite and
+precise as any doctrine can be, and a great system of popular devotion,
+giving a character to a great religious communion. Dr. Newman is not
+merely developing and illustrating an idea: he is asserting a definite
+revealed fact about the unseen world, and defending its consequences in
+a very concrete and practical shape. And the real point is what proof
+has he given us that this is a revealed fact; that it is so, and that
+we have the means of knowing it? He has given us certain language of
+the early writers, which he says is a tradition, though it is only what
+any Protestant might have been led to by reading his Bible. But between
+that language, taken at its highest, and the belief and practice which
+his Church maintains, there is a great gap. The "Second Eve," the
+[Greek: Theotokos], are names of high dignity; but enlarge upon them as
+we may, there is between them and the modern "Regina Coeli" an interval
+which nothing but direct divine revelation can possibly fill; and of
+this divine revelation the only evidence is the fact that there is the
+doctrine. So awful and central an article of belief needs corresponding
+proof. In Dr. Newman's eloquent pages we have much collateral thought
+on the subject--sometimes instinct with his delicacy of perception and
+depth of feeling, sometimes strangely over-refined and irrelevant, but
+always fresh and instructive, whether to teach or to warn. The one
+thing which is missing in them is direct proof.
+
+He does not satisfy us, but he does greatly interest us in his way of
+dealing with the practical consequences of his doctrine, in the
+manifold development of devotion in his communion. What he tells us
+reveals two things. By this devotion he is at once greatly attracted,
+and he is deeply shocked. No one can doubt the enthusiasm with which he
+has thrown himself into that devotion, an enthusiasm which, if it was
+at one time more vehement and defiant than it is now, is still a most
+intense element in his religious convictions. Nor do we feel entitled
+to say that in him it interferes with religious ideas and feelings of a
+higher order, which we are accustomed to suppose imperilled by it. It
+leads him, indeed, to say things which astonish us, not so much by
+their extreme language as by the absence, as it seems to us, of any
+ground to say them at all. It forces him into a championship for
+statements, in defending which the utmost that can be done is to frame
+ingenious pleas, or to send back a vigorous retort. It tempts him at
+times to depart from his generally broad and fair way of viewing
+things, as when he meets the charge that the Son is forgotten for the
+Mother, not merely by a denial, but by the rejoinder that when the
+Mother is not honoured as the Roman Church honours her the honour of
+the Son fails. It would have been better not to have reprinted the
+following extract from a former work, even though it were singled out
+for approval by the late Cardinal. The italics are his own:--
+
+    I have spoken more on this subject in my _Essay on Development_,
+    p. 438, "Nor does it avail to object that, in this contrast of
+    devotional exercises, the human is sure to supplant the Divine,
+    from the infirmity of our nature; for, I repeat, the question is
+    one of fact, whether it has done so. And next, it must be asked,
+    _whether the character of Protestant devotion towards Our Lord has
+    been that of worship at all_; and not rather such as we pay to an
+    excellent human being.... Carnal minds will ever create a carnal
+    worship for themselves, and to forbid them the service of the
+    saints will have no tendency to teach them the worship of God.
+    Moreover, ... great and constant as is the devotion which the
+    Catholic pays to St. Mary, it has a special province, and _has far
+    more connection with the public services and the festive aspect of
+    Christianity_, and with certain extraordinary offices which she
+    holds, _than with what is strictly personal and primary in religion_".
+    Our late Cardinal, on my reception, singled out to me this last
+    sentence, for the expression of his especial approbation.
+
+Can Dr. Newman defend the first of these two assertions, when he
+remembers such books of popular Protestant devotion as Wesley's Hymns,
+or the German hymn-books of which we have examples in the well-known
+_Lyra Germanica_? Can he deny the second when he remembers the
+exercises of the "Mois de Marie" in French churches, or if he has heard
+a fervid and earnest preacher at the end of them urge on a church full
+of young people, fresh from Confirmation and first Communion, a special
+and personal self-dedication to the great patroness for protection amid
+the daily trials of life, in much the same terms as in an English
+Church they might be exhorted to commit themselves to the Redeemer of
+mankind? Right or wrong, such devotion is not a matter of the "festive
+aspect" of religion, but most eminently of what is "personal and
+primary" in it; and surely of such a character is a vast proportion of
+the popular devotion here spoken of.
+
+But for himself, no doubt, he has accepted this _cultus_ on its most
+elevated and refined side. He himself makes the distinction, and says
+that there is "a healthy" and an "artificial" form of it; a devotion
+which does not shock "solid piety and Christian good sense; I cannot
+help calling this the English style." And when other sides are
+presented to him, he feels what any educated Englishman who allows his
+English feelings play is apt to feel about them. What is more, he has
+the boldness to say so. He makes all kinds of reserves to save the
+credit of those with whom he cannot sympathise. He speaks of the
+privileges of Saints; the peculiarities of national temperament; the
+distinctions between popular language and that used by scholastic
+writers, or otherwise marked by circumstances; the special characters
+of some of the writers quoted, their "ruthless logic," or their
+obscurity; the inculpated passages are but few and scattered in
+proportion to their context; they are harsh, but sound worse than they
+mean; they are hardly interpreted and pressed. He reminds Dr. Pusey
+that there is not much to choose between the Oriental Churches and Rome
+on this point, and that of the two the language of the Eastern is the
+most florid; luxuriant, and unguarded. But, after all, the true feeling
+comes out at last, "And now, at length," he says, "coming to the
+statements, not English, but foreign, which offend you, I will frankly
+say that I read some of those which you quote with grief and almost
+anger." They are "perverse sayings," which he hates. He fills a page
+and a half with a number of them, and then deliberately pronounces his
+rejection of them.
+
+    After such explanations, and with such authorities to clear my
+    path, I put away from me as you would wish, without any
+    hesitation, as matters in which my heart and reason have no part
+    (when taken in their literal and absolute sense, as any Protestant
+    would naturally take them, and as the writers doubtless did not
+    use them), such sentences and phrases as these:--that the mercy of
+    Mary is infinite, that God has resigned into her hands His
+    omnipotence, that (unconditionally) it is safer to seek her than
+    her Son, that the Blessed Virgin is superior to God, that He is
+    (simply) subject to her command, that our Lord is now of the same
+    disposition as His Father towards sinners--viz. a disposition to
+    reject them, while Mary takes His place as an Advocate with the
+    Father and Son; that the Saints are more ready to intercede with
+    Jesus than Jesus with the Father, that Mary is the only refuge of
+    those with whom God is angry; that Mary alone can obtain a
+    Protestant's conversion; that it would have sufficed for the
+    salvation of men if our Lord had died, not to obey His Father, but
+    to defer to the decree of His Mother, that she rivals our Lord in
+    being God's daughter, not by adoption, but by a kind of nature;
+    that Christ fulfilled the office of Saviour by imitating her
+    virtues; that, as the Incarnate God bore the image of His Father,
+    so He bore the image of His Mother; that redemption derived from
+    Christ indeed its sufficiency, but from Mary its beauty and
+    loveliness; that as we are clothed with the merits of Christ so we
+    are clothed with the merits of Mary; that, as He is Priest, in
+    like manner is she Priestess; that His body and blood in the
+    Eucharist are truly hers, and appertain to her; that as He is
+    present and received therein, so is she present and received
+    therein; that Priests are ministers as of Christ, so of Mary; that
+    elect souls are, born of God and Mary; that the Holy Ghost brings
+    into fruitfulness His action by her, producing in her and by her
+    Jesus Christ in His members; that the kingdom of God in our souls,
+    as our Lord speaks, is really the kingdom of Mary in the soul--and
+    she and the Holy Ghost produce in the soul extraordinary
+    things--and when the Holy Ghost finds Mary in a soul He flies
+    there.
+
+    Sentiments such as these I never knew of till I read your book,
+    nor, as I think, do the vast majority of English Catholics know
+    them. They seem to me like a bad dream. I could not have conceived
+    them to be said. I know not to what authority to go for them, to
+    Scripture, or to the Fathers, or to the decrees of Councils, or to
+    the consent of schools, or to the tradition of the faithful, or to
+    the Holy See, or to Reason. They defy all the _loci theologici_.
+    There is nothing of them in the Missal, in the Roman Catechism, in
+    the Roman _Raccolta_, in the Imitation of Christ, in Gother,
+    Challoner, Milner, or Wiseman, so far as I am aware. They do but
+    scare and confuse me. I should not be holier, more spiritual, more
+    sure of perseverance, if I twisted my moral being into the
+    reception of them; I should but be guilty of fulsome frigid
+    flattery towards the most upright and noble of God's creatures if
+    I professed them--and of stupid flattery too; for it would be like
+    the compliment of painting up a young and beautiful princess with
+    the brow of a Plato and the muscle of an Achilles. And I should
+    expect her to tell one of her people in waiting to turn me off her
+    service without warning. Whether thus to feel be the _scandalum
+    parvulorum_ in my case, or the _scandalum Pharisaeorum_, I leave
+    others to decide; but I will say plainly that I had rather believe
+    (which is impossible) that there is no God at all, than that Mary
+    is greater than God. I will have nothing to do with statements,
+    which can only be explained by being explained away. I do not,
+    however, speak of these statements, as they are found in their
+    authors, for I know nothing of the originals, and cannot believe
+    that they have meant what you say; but I take them as they lie in
+    your pages. Were any of them, the sayings of Saints in ecstasy, I
+    should know they had a good meaning; still I should not repeat
+    them myself; but I am looking at them, not as spoken by the
+    tongues of Angels, but according to that literal sense which they
+    bear in the mouths of English men and English women. And, as
+    spoken by man to man in England in the nineteenth century, I
+    consider them calculated to prejudice inquirers, to frighten the
+    unlearned, to unsettle consciences, to provoke blasphemy, and to
+    work the loss of souls.
+
+Of course; it is what might be expected of him. But Dr. Newman has
+often told us that we must take the consequences of our principles and
+theories, and here are some of the consequences which meet him; and, as
+he says, they "scare and confuse him." He boldly disavows them with no
+doubtful indignation. But what other voice but his, of equal authority
+and weight, has been lifted up to speak the plain truth about them?
+Why, if they are wrong, extravagant, dangerous, is his protest
+solitary? His communion has never been wanting in jealousy of dangerous
+doctrines, and it is vain to urge that these things and things like
+them have been said in a corner. The Holy Office is apt to detect
+mischief in small writers as well as great, even if these teachers were
+as insignificant as Dr. Newman would gladly make them. Taken as a
+whole, and in connection with notorious facts, these statements are
+fair examples of manifest tendencies, which certainly are not on the
+decline. And if a great and spreading popular _cultus_, encouraged and
+urged on beyond all former precedent, is in danger of being developed
+by its warmest and most confident advocates into something of which
+unreason is the lightest fault, is there not ground for interfering?
+Doubtless Roman writers maybe quoted by Dr. Newman, who felt that there
+was a danger, and we are vaguely told about some checks given to one or
+two isolated extravagances, which, however, in spite of the checks, do
+not seem to be yet extinct. But Allocutions and Encyclicals are not for
+errors of this kind. Dr. Newman says that "it is wiser for the most
+part to leave these excesses to the gradual operation of public
+opinion,--that is, to the opinion of educated and sober Catholics; and
+this seems to me the healthiest way of putting them down." We quite
+agree with him; but his own Church does not think so; and we want to
+see some evidence of a public opinion in it capable of putting them
+down. As it is, he is reduced to say that "the line cannot be logically
+drawn between the teaching of the Fathers on the subject and our own;"
+an assertion which, if it were true, would be more likely to drag down
+one teaching than to prop up the other; he has to find reasons, and
+doubtless they are to be found thick as blackberries, for accounting
+for one extravagance, softening down another, declining to judge a
+third. But in the meantime the "devotion" in its extreme form, far
+beyond what he would call the teaching of his Church, has its way; it
+maintains its ground; it becomes the mark of the bold, the advanced,
+the refined, as well as of the submissive and the crowd; it roots
+itself under the shelter of an authority which would stop it if it was
+wrong; it becomes "dominant"; it becomes at length part of that "mind
+of the living Church" which, we are told, it is heresy to impugn,
+treason to appeal from, and the extravagance of impertinent folly to
+talk of reforming.
+
+It is very little use, then, for Dr. Newman to tell Dr. Pusey or any
+one else, "You may safely trust us English Catholics as to this
+devotion." "English Catholics," as such,--it is the strength and the
+weakness of their system,--have really the least to say in the matter.
+The question is not about trusting "us English Catholics," but the
+Pope, and the Roman Congregation, and those to whom the Roman
+authorities delegate their sanction and give their countenance. If Dr.
+Newman is able, as we doubt not he is desirous, to elevate the tone of
+his own communion and put to shame some of its fashionable excesses, he
+will do a great work, in which we wish him every success, though the
+result of it might not really be to bring the body of his countrymen
+nearer to it. But the substance of Dr. Pusey's charges remain after all
+unanswered, and there is no getting over them while they remain. They
+are of that broad, palpable kind against which the refinements of
+argumentative apology play in vain. They can only be met by those who
+feel their force, on some principle equally broad. Dr. Newman suggests
+such a ground in the following remarks, which, much as they want
+qualification and precision, have a basis of reality in them:--
+
+    It is impossible, I say, in a doctrine like this, to draw the line
+    cleanly between truth and error, right and wrong. This is ever the
+    case in concrete matters which have life. Life in this world is
+    motion, and involves a continual process of change. Living things
+    grow into their perfection, into their decline, into their death.
+    No rule of art will suffice to stop the operation of this natural
+    law, whether in the material world or in the human mind.... What
+    has power to stir holy and refined souls is potent also with the
+    multitude, and the religion of the multitude is ever vulgar and
+    abnormal; it ever will be tinctured with fanaticism and
+    superstition while men are what they are. A people's religion is
+    ever a corrupt religion. If you are to have a Catholic Church you
+    must put up with fish of every kind, guests good and bad, vessels
+    of gold, vessels of earth. You may beat religion out of men, if you
+    will, and then their excesses will take a different direction; but
+    if you make use of religion to improve them, they will make use of
+    religion to corrupt it. And then you will have effected that
+    compromise of which our countrymen report so unfavourably from
+    abroad,--a high grand faith and worship which compels their
+    admiration, and puerile absurdities among the people which excite
+    their contempt.
+
+It is like Dr. Newman to put his case in this broad way, making large
+admissions, allowing for much inevitable failure. That is, he defends
+his Church as he would defend Christianity generally, taking it as a
+great practical system must be in this world, working with human nature
+as it is. His reflection is, no doubt, one suggested by a survey of the
+cause of all religion. The coming short of the greatest promisee, the
+debasement of the noblest ideals, are among the commonplaces of
+history. Christianity cannot be maintained without ample admissions of
+failure and perversion. But it is one thing to make this admission for
+Christianity generally, an admission which the New Testament in
+foretelling its fortunes gives us abundant ground for making; and quite
+another for those who maintain the superiority of one form of
+Christianity above all others, to claim that they may leave out of the
+account its characteristic faults. It is quite true that all sides
+abundantly need to appeal for considerate judgment to the known
+infirmity of human nature; but amid the conflicting pretensions which
+divide Christendom no one side can ask to have for itself the exclusive
+advantage of this plea. All may claim the benefit of it, but if it is
+denied to any it must be denied to all. In this confused and imperfect
+world other great popular systems of religion besides the Roman may use
+it in behalf of shortcomings, which, though perhaps very different, are
+yet not worse. It is obvious that the theory of great and living ideas,
+working with a double edge, and working for mischief at last, holds
+good for other things besides the special instance on which Dr. Newman
+comments. It is to be further observed that to claim the benefit of
+this plea is to make the admission that you come under the common law
+of human nature as to mistake, perversion, and miscarriage, and this in
+the matter of religious guidance the Roman theory refuses to do. It
+claims for its communion as its special privilege an exemption from
+those causes of corruption of which history is the inexorable witness,
+and to which others admit themselves to be liable; an immunity from
+going wrong, a supernatural exception from the common tendency of
+mankind to be led astray, from the common necessity to correct and
+reform themselves when they are proved wrong. How far this is realised,
+not on paper and in argument, but in fact, is indeed one of the most
+important questions for the world, and it is one to which the world
+will pay more heed than to the best writing about it There are not
+wanting signs, among others of a very different character, of an honest
+and philosophical recognition of this by some of the ablest writers of
+the Roman communion. The day on which the Roman Church ceases to
+maintain that what it holds must be truth because it holds it, and
+admits itself subject to the common condition by which God has given
+truth to men, will be the first hopeful day for the reunion of
+Christendom.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+NEWMAN'S PAROCHIAL SERMONS[32]
+
+
+  [32]
+  _Parochial and Plain Sermons_. By John Henry Newman, B.D., formerly
+  Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford. Edited by W.J. Copeland, B.D. _Saturday
+  Review_, 5th June 1869.
+
+Dr. Newman's Sermons stand by themselves in modern English literature;
+it might be said, in English literature generally. There have been
+equally great masterpieces of English writing in this form of
+composition, and there have been preachers whose theological depth,
+acquaintance with the heart, earnestness, tenderness, and power have
+not been inferior to his. But the great writers do not touch, pierce,
+and get hold of minds as he does, and those who are famous for the
+power and results of their preaching do not write as he does. His
+sermons have done more perhaps than any one thing to mould and quicken
+and brace the religious temper of our time; they have acted with equal
+force on those who were nearest and on those who were farthest from him
+in theological opinion. They have altered the whole manner of feeling
+towards religious subjects. We know now that they were the beginning,
+the signal and first heave, of a vast change that was to come over the
+subject; of a demand from religion of a thoroughgoing reality of
+meaning and fulfilment, which is familiar to us, but was new when it
+was first made. And, being this, these sermons are also among the very
+finest examples of what the English language of our day has done in the
+hands of a master. Sermons of such intense conviction and directness of
+purpose, combined with such originality and perfection on their purely
+literary side, are rare everywhere. Remarkable instances, of course,
+will occur to every one of the occasional exhibition of this
+combination, but not in so sustained and varied and unfailing a way.
+Between Dr. Newman and the great French school there is this
+difference--that they are orators, and he is as far as anything can be
+in a great preacher from an orator. Those who remember the tones and
+the voice in which the sermons were heard at St. Mary's--we may refer
+to Professor Shairp's striking account in his volume on Keble, and to a
+recent article in the _Dublin Review_--can remember how utterly unlike
+an orator in all outward ways was the speaker who so strangely moved
+them. The notion of judging of Dr. Newman as an orator never crossed
+their minds. And this puts a difference between him and a remarkable
+person whose name has sometimes been joined with his--Mr. F. Robertson.
+Mr. Robertson was a great preacher, but he was not a writer.
+
+It is difficult to realise at present the effect produced originally by
+these sermons. The first feeling was that of their difference in manner
+from the customary sermon. People knew what an eloquent sermon was, or
+a learned sermon, or a philosophical sermon, or a sermon full of
+doctrine or pious unction. Chalmers and Edward Irving and Robert Hall
+were familiar names; the University pulpit and some of the London
+churches had produced examples of forcible argument and severe and
+finished composition; and of course instances were abundant everywhere
+of the good, sensible, commonplace discourse; of all that was heavy,
+dull, and dry, and of all that was ignorant, wild, fanatical, and
+irrational. But no one seemed to be able, or to be expected, unless he
+avowedly took the buffoonery line which some of the Evangelical
+preachers affected, to speak in the pulpit with the directness and
+straightforward unconventionality with which men speak on the practical
+business of life. With all the thought and vigour and many beauties
+which were in the best sermons, there was always something forced,
+formal, artificial about them; something akin to that mild pomp which
+usually attended their delivery, with beadles in gowns ushering the
+preacher to the carpeted pulpit steps, with velvet cushions, and with
+the rustle and fulness of his robes. No one seemed to think of writing
+a sermon as he would write an earnest letter. A preacher must approach
+his subject in a kind of roundabout make-believe of preliminary and
+preparatory steps, as if he was introducing his hearers to what they
+had never heard of; make-believe difficulties and objections were
+overthrown by make-believe answers; an unnatural position both in
+speaker and hearers, an unreal state of feeling and view of facts, a
+systematic conventional exaggeration, seemed almost impossible to be
+avoided; and those who tried to escape being laboured and grandiloquent
+only escaped it, for the most part, by being vulgar or slovenly. The
+strong severe thinkers, jealous for accuracy, and loathing clap-trap as
+they loathed loose argument, addressed and influenced intelligence; but
+sermons are meant for heart and souls as well as minds, and to the
+heart, with its trials and its burdens, men like Whately never found
+their way. Those who remember the preaching of those days, before it
+began to be influenced by the sermons at St. Mary's, will call to mind
+much that was interesting, much that was ingenious, much correction of
+inaccurate and confused views, much manly encouragement to high
+principle and duty, much of refined and scholarlike writing. But for
+soul and warmth, and the imaginative and poetical side of the religious
+life, you had to go where thought and good sense were not likely to be
+satisfied.
+
+The contrast of Mr. Newman's preaching was not obvious at first. The
+outside form and look was very much that of the regular best Oxford
+type--calm, clear, and lucid in expression, strong in its grasp,
+measured in statement, and far too serious to think of rhetorical
+ornament. But by degrees much more opened. The range of experience from
+which the preacher drew his materials, and to which he appealed, was
+something wider, subtler, and more delicate than had been commonly
+dealt with in sermons. With his strong, easy, exact, elastic language,
+the instrument of a powerful and argumentative mind, he plunged into
+the deep realities of the inmost spiritual life, of which cultivated
+preachers had been shy. He preached so that he made you feel without
+doubt that it was the most real of worlds to him; he made you feel in
+time, in spite of yourself, that it was a real world with which you too
+had concern. He made you feel that he knew what he was speaking about;
+that his reasonings and appeals, whether you agreed with them or not,
+were not the language of that heated enthusiasm with which the world is
+so familiar; that he was speaking words which were the result of
+intellectual scrutiny, balancings, and decisions, as well as of moral
+trials, of conflicts and suffering within; words of the utmost
+soberness belonging to deeply gauged and earnestly formed purposes. The
+effect of his sermons, as compared with the common run at the time, was
+something like what happens when in a company you have a number of
+people giving their views and answers about some question before them.
+You have opinions given of various worth and expressed with varying
+power, precision, and distinctness, some clever enough, some clumsy
+enough, but all more or less imperfect and unattractive in tone, and
+more or less falling short of their aim; and then, after it all, comes
+a voice, very grave, very sweet, very sure and clear, under whose words
+the discussion springs up at once to a higher level, and in which we
+recognise at once a mind, face to face with realities, and able to
+seize them and hold them fast.
+
+The first notable feature in the external form of this preaching was
+its terse unceremonious directness. Putting aside the verbiage and
+dulled circumlocution and stiff hazy phraseology of pulpit etiquette
+and dignity, it went straight to its point. There was no waste of time
+about customary formalities. The preacher had something to say, and
+with a kind of austere severity he proceeded to say it. This, for
+instance, is the sort of way in which a sermon would begin:--
+
+    Hypocrisy is a serious word. We are accustomed to consider the
+    hypocrite as a hateful, despicable character, and an uncommon one.
+    How is it, then, that our Blessed Lord, when surrounded by an
+    innumerable multitude, began, _first of all_, to warn His disciples
+    against hypocrisy, as though they were in especial danger of
+    becoming like those base deceivers the Pharisees? Thus an
+    instructive subject is opened to our consideration, which I will
+    now pursue.--Vol. I. Serm. X.
+
+The next thing was that, instead of rambling and straggling over a
+large subject, each sermon seized a single thought, or definite view,
+or real difficulty or objection, and kept closely and distinctly to it;
+and at the same time treated it with a largeness and grasp and ease
+which only a full command over much beyond it could give. Every sermon
+had a purpose and an end which no one could misunderstand. Singularly
+devoid of anything like excitement--calm, even, self-controlled--there
+was something in the preacher's resolute concentrated way of getting
+hold of a single defined object which reminded you of the rapid spring
+or unerring swoop of some strong-limbed or swift-winged creature on its
+quarry. Whatever you might think that he did with it, or even if it
+seemed to escape from him, you could have no doubt what he sought to
+do; there was no wavering, confused, uncertain bungling in that
+powerful and steady hand. Another feature was the character of the
+writer's English. We have learned to look upon Dr. Newman as one of the
+half-dozen or so of the innumerable good writers of the time who have
+fairly left their mark as masters on the language. Little, assuredly,
+as the writer originally thought of such a result, the sermons have
+proved a permanent gift to our literature, of the purest English, full
+of spring, clearness, and force. A hasty reader would perhaps at first
+only notice a very light, strong, easy touch, and might think, too,
+that it was a negligent one. But it was not negligence; real negligence
+means at bottom bad work, and bad work will not stand the trial of
+time. There are two great styles--the self-conscious, like that of
+Gibbon or Macaulay, where great success in expression is accompanied by
+an unceasing and manifest vigilance that expression shall succeed, and
+where you see at each step that there is or has been much care and work
+in the mind, if not on the paper; and the unconscious, like that of
+Pascal or Swift or Hume, where nothing suggests at the moment that the
+writer is thinking of anything but his subject, and where the power of
+being able to say just what he wants to say seems to come at the
+writer's command, without effort, and without his troubling himself
+more about it than about the way in which he holds his pen. But both
+are equally the fruit of hard labour and honest persevering
+self-correction; and it is soon found out whether the apparent
+negligence comes of loose and slovenly habits of mind, or whether it
+marks the confidence of one who has mastered his instrument, and can
+forget himself and let himself go in using it. The free unconstrained
+movement of Dr. Newman's style tells any one who knows what writing is
+of a very keen and exact knowledge of the subtle and refined secrets of
+language. With all that uncared-for play and simplicity, there was a
+fulness, a richness, a curious delicate music, quite instinctive and
+unsought for; above all, a precision and sureness of expression which
+people soon began to find were not within the power of most of those
+who tried to use language. Such English, graceful with the grace of
+nerve, flexibility, and power, must always have attracted attention;
+but it had also an ethical element which was almost inseparable from
+its literary characteristics. Two things powerfully determined the
+style of these sermons. One was the intense hold which the vast
+realities of religion had gained on the writer's mind, and the perfect
+truth with which his personality sank and faded away before their
+overwhelming presence; the other was the strong instinctive shrinking,
+which was one of the most remarkable and certain marks of the beginners
+of the Oxford movement, from anything like personal display, any
+conscious aiming at the ornamental and brilliant, any show of gifts or
+courting of popular applause. Morbid and excessive or not, there can be
+no doubt of the stern self-containing severity which made them turn
+away, not only with fear, but with distaste and repugnance, from all
+that implied distinction or seemed to lead to honour; and the control
+of this austere spirit is visible, in language as well as matter, in
+every page of Dr. Newman's sermons.
+
+Indeed, form and matter are closely connected in the sermons, and
+depend one on another, as they probably do in all work of a high order.
+The matter makes and shapes the form with which it clothes itself. The
+obvious thing which presents itself in reading them is that, from first
+to last, they are a great systematic attempt to raise the whole level
+of religious thought and religious life. They carry in them the
+evidence of a great reaction and a scornful indignant rising up against
+what were going about and were currently received as adequate ideas of
+religion. The dryness and primness and meagreness of the common Church
+preaching, correct as it was in its outlines of doctrine, and sober and
+temperate in tone, struck cold on a mind which had caught sight, in the
+New Testament, of the spirit and life of its words. The recoil was even
+stronger from the shallowness and pretentiousness and self-display of
+what was popularly accepted as earnest religion; morally the preacher
+was revolted at its unctuous boasts and pitiful performance, and
+intellectually by its narrowness and meanness of thought and its
+thinness of colour in all its pictures of the spiritual life. From
+first to last, in all manner of ways, the sermons are a protest, first
+against coldness, but even still more against meanness, in religion.
+With coldness they have no sympathy, yet coldness may be broad and
+large and lofty in its aspects; but they have no tolerance for what
+makes religion little and poor and superficial, for what contracts its
+horizon and dwarfs its infinite greatness and vulgarises its mystery.
+Open the sermons where we will, different readers will rise from them
+with very different results; there will be among many the strongest and
+most decisive disagreement; there may be impatience at dogmatic
+harshness, indignation at what seems overstatement and injustice,
+rejection of arguments and conclusions; but there will always be the
+sense of an unfailing nobleness in the way in which the writer thinks
+and speaks. It is not only that he is in earnest; it is that he has
+something which really is worth being in earnest for. He placed the
+heights of religion very high. If you have a religion like
+Christianity--this is the pervading note--think of it, and have it,
+worthily. People will differ from the preacher endlessly as to how this
+is to be secured. But that they will learn this lesson from the
+sermons, with a force with which few other writers have taught it, and
+that this lesson has produced its effect in our time, there can be no
+doubt. The only reason why it may not perhaps seem so striking to
+readers of this day is that the sermons have done their work, and we do
+not feel what they had to counteract, because they have succeeded in
+great measure in counteracting it. It is not too much to say that they
+have done more than anything else to revolutionise the whole idea of
+preaching in the English Church. Mr. Robertson, in spite of himself,
+was as much the pupil of their school as Mr. Liddon, though both are so
+widely different from their master.
+
+The theology of these sermons is a remarkable feature about them. It is
+remarkable in this way, that, coming from a teacher like Dr. Newman, it
+is nevertheless a theology which most religious readers, except the
+Evangelicals and some of the more extreme Liberal thinkers, can either
+accept heartily or be content with, as they would be content with St.
+Augustine or Thomas à Kempis--content, not because they go along with
+it always, but because it is large and untechnical, just and
+well-measured in the proportions and relative importance of its parts.
+People of very different opinions turn to them, as being on the whole
+the fullest, deepest, most comprehensive approximation they can find to
+representing Christianity in a practical form. Their theology is
+nothing new; nor does it essentially change, though one may observe
+differences, and some important ones, in the course of the volumes,
+which embrace a period from 1825 to 1842. It is curious, indeed, to
+observe how early the general character of the sermons was determined,
+and how in the main it continues the same. Some of the first in point
+of date are among the "Plain Sermons"; and though they may have been
+subsequently retouched, yet there the keynote is plainly struck of that
+severe and solemn minor which reigns throughout. Their theology is
+throughout the accepted English theology of the Prayer-book and the
+great Church divines--a theology fundamentally dogmatic and
+sacramental, but jealously keeping the balance between obedience and
+faith; learned, exact, and measured, but definite and decided. The
+novelty was in the application of it, in the new life breathed into it,
+in the profound and intense feelings called forth by its ideas and
+objects, in the air of vastness and awe thrown about it, in the
+unexpected connection of its creeds and mysteries with practical life,
+in the new meaning given to the old and familiar, in the acceptance in
+thorough earnest, and with keen purpose to call it into action, of what
+had been guarded and laid by with dull reverence. Dr. Newman can hardly
+be called in these sermons an innovator on the understood and
+recognised standard of Anglican doctrine; he accepted its outlines as
+Bishop Wilson, for instance, might have traced them. What he did was
+first to call forth from it what it really meant, the awful heights and
+depths of its current words and forms; and next, to put beside them
+human character and its trials, not as they were conventionally
+represented and written about, but as a piercing eye and sympathising
+spirit saw them in the light of our nineteenth century, and in the
+contradictory and complicated movements, the efforts and failures, of
+real life. He took theology for granted, as a Christian preacher has a
+right to do; he does not prove it, and only occasionally meets
+difficulties, or explains; but, taking it for granted, he took it at
+its word, in its relation to the world of actual experience.
+
+Utterly dissatisfied with what he found current as religion, Dr. Newman
+sought, without leaving the old paths, to put before people a strong
+and energetic religion based, not on feeling or custom, but on reason
+and conscience, and answering, in the vastness of its range, to the
+mysteries of human nature, and in its power to man's capacities and
+aims. The Liberal religion of that day, with its ideas of natural
+theology or of a cold critical Unitarianism, was a very shallow one;
+the Evangelical, trusting to excitement, had worn out its excitement
+and had reached the stage when its formulas, poor ones at the best, had
+become words without meaning. Such views might do in quiet, easy-going
+times, if religion were an exercise at will of imagination or thought,
+an indulgence, an ornament, an understanding, a fashion; not if it
+corresponded to such a state of things as is implied in the Bible, or
+to man's many-sided nature as it is shown in Shakspeare. The sermons
+reflect with merciless force the popular, superficial, comfortable
+thing called religion which the writer saw before him wherever he
+looked, and from which his mind recoiled. Such sermons as those on the
+"Self-wise Enquirer" and the "Religion of the Day," with its famous
+passage about the age not being sufficiently "gloomy and fierce in its
+religion," have the one-sided and unmeasured exaggeration which seems
+inseparable from all strong expressions of conviction, and from all
+deep and vehement protests against general faults; but, qualify and
+limit them as we may, their pictures were not imaginary ones, and there
+was, and is, but too much to justify them. From all this trifling with
+religion the sermons called on men to look into themselves. They
+appealed to conscience; and they appealed equally to reason and
+thought, to recognise what conscience is, and to deal honestly with it.
+They viewed religion as if projected on a background of natural and
+moral mystery, and surrounded by it--an infinite scene, in which our
+knowledge is like the Andes and Himalayas in comparison with the mass
+of the earth, and in which conscience is our final guide and arbiter.
+No one ever brought out so impressively the sense of the impenetrable
+and tremendous vastness of that amid which man plays his part. In such
+sermons as those on the "Intermediate State," the "Invisible World,"
+the "Greatness and Littleness of Human Life," the "Individuality of the
+Soul," the "Mysteriousness of our Present Being," we may see
+exemplified the enormous irruption into the world of modern thought of
+the unknown and the unknowable, as much as in the writers who, with far
+different objects, set against it the clearness and certainty of what
+we do know. But, beyond all, the sermons appealed to men to go back
+into their own thoughts and feelings, and there challenged them; were
+not the preacher's words the echoes and interpreting images of their
+own deepest, possibly most perplexing and baffling, experience? From
+first to last this was his great engine and power; from first to last
+he boldly used it. He claimed to read their hearts; and people felt
+that he did read them, their follies and their aspirations, the blended
+and tangled web of earnestness and dishonesty, of wishes for the best
+and truest, and acquiescence in makeshifts; understating what ordinary
+preachers make much of, bringing into prominence what they pass by
+without being able to see or to speak of it; keeping before his hearers
+the risk of mismanaging their hearts, of "all kinds of unlawful
+treatment of the soul." What a contrast to ordinary ways of speaking on
+a familiar theological doctrine is this way of bringing it into
+immediate relation to real feeling:--
+
+    It is easy to speak of human nature as corrupt in the general, to
+    admit it in the general, and then get quit of the subject; as if,
+    the doctrine being once admitted, there was nothing more to be done
+    with it. But, in truth, we can have no real apprehension of the
+    doctrine of our corruption till we view the structure of our minds,
+    part by part; and dwell upon and draw out the signs of our
+    weakness, inconsistency, and ungodliness, which are such as can
+    arise from nothing but some strange original defect in our original
+    nature.... We are in the dark about ourselves. When we act, we are
+    groping in the dark, and may meet with a fall any moment. Here and
+    there, perhaps, we see a little; or in our attempts to influence
+    and move our minds, we are making experiments (as it were) with
+    some delicate and dangerous instrument, which works we do not know
+    how, and may produce unexpected and disastrous effects. The
+    management of our hearts is quite above us. Under these
+    circumstances it becomes our comfort to look up to God. "Thou, God,
+    seest me." Such was the consolation of the forlorn Hagar in the
+    wilderness. He knoweth whereof we are made, and He alone can uphold
+    us. He sees with most appalling distinctness all our sins, all the
+    windings and recesses of evil within us; yet it is our only comfort
+    to know this, and to trust Him for help against ourselves.--Vol. I.
+    Serm. XIII.
+
+The preacher contemplates human nature, not in the stiff formal
+language in which it had become conventional with divines to set out
+its shortcomings and dangers, but as a great novelist contemplates and
+tries to describe it; taking in all its real contradictions and
+anomalies, its subtle and delicate shades; fixing upon the things which
+strike us in ourselves or our neighbours as ways of acting and marks of
+character; following it through its wide and varying range, its
+diversified and hidden folds and subtle self-involving realities of
+feeling and shiftiness; touching it in all its complex sensibilities,
+anticipating its dim consciousnesses, half-raising veils which hide
+what it instinctively shrinks from, sending through it unexpected
+thrills and shocks; large-hearted in indulgence, yet exacting; most
+tender, yet most severe. And against all this real play of nature he
+sets in their full force and depth the great ideas of God, of sin, and
+of the Cross; and, appealing not to the intelligence of an aristocracy
+of choice natures, but to the needs and troubles and longings which
+make all men one, he claimed men's common sympathy for the heroic in
+purpose and standard. He warned them against being fastidious, where
+they should be hardy. He spoke in a way that all could understand of
+brave ventures, of resolutely committing themselves to truth and duty.
+
+The most practical of sermons, the most real and natural in their way
+of dealing with life and conduct, they are also intensely dogmatic. The
+writer's whole teaching presupposes, as we all know, a dogmatic
+religion; and these sermons are perhaps the best vindication of it
+which our time, disposed to think of dogmas with suspicion, has seen.
+For they show, on a large scale and in actual working instances, how
+what is noblest, most elevated, most poetical, most free and searching
+in a thinker's way of regarding the wonderful scene of life, falls in
+naturally, and without strain, with a great dogmatic system like that
+of the Church. Such an example does not prove that system to be true,
+but it proves that a dogmatic system, as such, is not the cast-iron,
+arbitrary, artificial thing which it is often assumed to be. It is,
+indeed, the most shallow of all commonplaces, intelligible in ordinary
+minds, but unaccountable in those of high power and range, whether they
+believe or not, that a dogmatic religion is of course a hard, dry,
+narrow, unreal religion, without any affinities to poetry or the truth
+of things, or to the deeper and more sacred and powerful of human
+thoughts. If dogmas are not true, that is another matter; but it is the
+fashion to imply that dogmas are worthless, mere things of the past,
+without sense or substance or interest, because they are dogmas. As if
+Dante was not dogmatic in form and essence; as if the grandest and
+worthiest religious prose in the English language was not that of
+Hooker, nourished up amid the subtleties, but also amid the vast
+horizons and solemn heights, of scholastic divinity. A dogmatic system
+is hard in hard hands, and shallow in shallow minds, and barren in dull
+ones, and unreal and empty to preoccupied and unsympathising ones; we
+dwarf and distort ideas that we do not like, and when we have put them
+in our own shapes and in our own connection, we call them unmeaning or
+impossible. Dogmas are but expedients, common to all great departments
+of human thought, and felt in all to be necessary, for representing
+what are believed as truths, for exhibiting their order and
+consequences, for expressing the meaning of terms, and the relations of
+thought. If they are wrong, they are, like everything else in the
+world, open to be proved wrong; if they are inadequate, they are open
+to correction; but it is idle to sneer at them for being what they must
+be, if religious facts and truths are to be followed out by the
+thoughts and expressed by the language of man. And what dogmas are in
+unfriendly and incapable hands is no proof of what they may be when
+they are approached as things instinct with truth and life; it is no
+measure of the way in which they may be inextricably interwoven with
+the most unquestionably living thought and feeling, as in these
+sermons. Jealous, too, as the preacher is for Church doctrines as the
+springs of Christian life, no writer of our time perhaps has so
+emphatically and impressively recalled the narrow limits within which
+human language can represent Divine realities. No one that we know of
+shows that he has before his mind with such intense force and
+distinctness the idea of God; and in proportion as a mind takes in and
+submits itself to the impression of that awful vision, the gulf widens
+between all possible human words and that which they attempt to
+express:--
+
+    When we have deduced what we deduce by our reason from the study of
+    visible nature, and then read what we read in His inspired word,
+    and find the two apparently discordant, _this_ is the feeling I
+    think we ought to have on our minds;--not an impatience to do what
+    is beyond our powers, to weigh evidence, sum up, balance, decide,
+    reconcile, to arbitrate between the two voices of God,--but a sense
+    of the utter nothingness of worms such as we are; of our plain and
+    absolute incapacity to contemplate things _as they really are_; a
+    perception of our emptiness before the great Vision of God; of our
+    "comeliness being turned into corruption, and our retaining no
+    strength"; a conviction that what is put before us, whether in
+    nature or in grace, is but an intimation, useful for particular
+    purposes, useful for practice, useful in its department, "until the
+    day break and the shadows flee away"; useful in such a way that
+    both the one and the other representation may at once be used, as
+    two languages, as two separate approximations towards the Awful
+    Unknown Truth, such as will not mislead us in their respective
+    provinces.--Vol. II. Serm. XVIII.
+
+    "I cannot persuade myself," he says, commenting on a mysterious
+    text of Scripture, "thus to dismiss so solemn a passage" (i.e. by
+    saying that it is "all figurative"). "It seems a presumption to say
+    of dim notices about the unseen world, 'they only mean this or
+    that,' as if one had ascended into the third heaven, or had stood
+    before the throne of God. No; I see herein a deep mystery, a hidden
+    truth, which I cannot handle or define, shining 'as jewels at the
+    bottom of the great deep,' darkly and tremulously, yet really
+    there. And for this very reason, while it is neither pious nor
+    thankful to explain away the words which convey it, while it is a
+    duty to use them, not less a duty is it to use them humbly,
+    diffidently, and teachably, with the thought of God before us, and
+    of our own nothingness."--Vol. III. Serm. XXV.
+
+There are two great requisites for treating properly the momentous
+questions and issues which have been brought before our generation. The
+first is accuracy--accuracy of facts, of terms, of reasoning; plain
+close dealing with questions in their real and actual conditions;
+clear, simple, honest, measured statements about things as we find
+them. The other is elevation, breadth, range of thought; a due sense of
+what these questions mean and involve; a power of looking at things
+from a height; a sufficient taking into account of possibilities, of
+our ignorance, of the real proportions of things. We have plenty of the
+first; we are for the most part lamentably deficient in the second. And
+of this, these sermons are, to those who have studied them, almost
+unequalled examples. Many people, no doubt, would rise from their
+perusal profoundly disagreeing with their teaching; but no one, it
+seems to us, could rise from them--with their strong effortless
+freedom, their lofty purpose, their generous standard, their deep and
+governing appreciation of divine things, their thoroughness, their
+unselfishness, their purity, their austere yet piercing sympathy--and
+not feel his whole ways of thinking about religion permanently enlarged
+and raised. He will feel that he has been with one who "told him what
+he knew about himself and what he did not know; has read to him his
+wants or feelings, and comforted him by the very reading; has made him
+feel that there was a higher life than this life, and a brighter world
+than we can see; has encouraged him, or sobered him, or opened a way to
+the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed." They show a man who saw very
+deeply into the thought of his time, and who, if he partly recoiled
+from it and put it back, at least equally shared it. Dr. Newman has
+been accused of being out of sympathy with his age, and of disparaging
+it. In reality, no one has proved himself more keenly sensitive to its
+greatness and its wonders; only he believed that he saw something
+greater still. We are not of those who can accept the solution which he
+has accepted of the great problems which haunt our society; but he saw
+better than most men what those problems demand, and the variety of
+their often conflicting conditions. Other men, perhaps, have succeeded
+better in what they aimed at; but no one has attempted more, with
+powers and disinterestedness which justified him in attempting it. The
+movement which he led, and of which these sermons are the
+characteristic monument, is said to be a failure; but there are
+failures, and even mistakes, which are worth many successes of other
+sorts, and which are more fruitful and permanent in their effects.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+CARDINAL NEWMAN[33]
+
+
+  [33]
+  _Guardian_, 21st May 1879.
+
+It is not wonderful that people should be impressed by the vicissitudes
+and surprises and dramatic completeness of Cardinal Newman's career.
+It is not wonderful that he should be impressed by this himself. That
+he who left us in despair and indignation in 1845 should have passed
+through a course of things which has made him, Roman Catholic as he
+is, a man of whom Englishmen are so proud in 1879, is even more
+extraordinary than that the former Fellow of Oriel should now be
+surrounded with the pomp and state of a Cardinal. There is only one
+other career in our time which, with the greatest possible contrasts in
+other points, suggests in its strangeness and antecedent improbabilities
+something of a parallel. It is the train of events which has made
+"Disraeli the Younger" the most powerful Minister whom England has seen
+in recent years. But Lord Beaconsfield has aimed at what he has
+attained to, and has fought his way to it through the chances and
+struggles of a stirring public life. Cardinal Newman's life has been
+from first to last the life of the student and recluse. He has lived in
+the shade. He has sought nothing for himself. He has shrunk from the
+thought of advancement. The steps to the high places of the world have
+not offered themselves to him, and he has been content to be let alone.
+Early in his course his rare gifts of mind, his force of character, his
+power over hearts and sympathies, made him for a while a prominent
+person. Then came a series of events which seemed to throw him out of
+harmony with the great mass of his countrymen. He appeared to be, if not
+forgotten, yet not thought of, except by a small number of friends--old
+friends who had known him too well and too closely ever to forget, and
+new friends gathered round him by the later circumstances of his life
+and work. People spoke of him as a man who had made a great mistake and
+failed; who had thrown up influence and usefulness here, and had not
+found it there; too subtle, too imaginative for England, too
+independent for Rome. He seemed to have so sunk out of interest and
+account that off-hand critics, in the easy gaiety of their heart, might
+take liberties with his name.
+
+Then came the first surprise. The _Apologia_ was read with the keenest
+interest by those who most differed from the writer's practical
+conclusions; twenty years had elapsed since he had taken the unpopular
+step which seemed to condemn him to obscurity; and now he emerged from
+it, challenging not in vain the sympathy of his countrymen. They
+awoke, it may be said--at least the younger generation of them--to
+what he really was; the old jars and bitternesses had passed out of
+remembrance; they only felt that they had one among them who could
+write--for few of them ever heard his wonderful voice--in a way which
+made English hearts respond quickly and warmly. And the strange thing
+was that the professed, the persistent denouncer of Liberalism, was
+welcomed back to his rightful place among Englishmen by none more
+warmly than by many Liberals. Still, though his name was growing more
+familiar year by year, the world did not see much more of him. The
+head of a religious company, of an educational institution at
+Birmingham, he lived in unpretending and quiet simplicity, occupied
+with the daily business of his house, with his books, with his
+correspondence, with finishing off his many literary and theological
+undertakings. Except in some chance reference in a book or newspaper
+which implied how considerable a person the world thought him, he was
+not heard of. People asked about him, but there was nothing to tell.
+Then at last, neglected by Pius IX., he was remembered by Leo XIII.
+The Pope offered him the Cardinalship, he said, because he thought it
+would be "grateful to the Catholics of England, and to England
+itself." And he was not mistaken. Probably there is not a single thing
+that the Pope could do which would be so heartily welcomed.
+
+After breaking with England and all things English in wrath and sorrow,
+nearly thirty-five years ago, after a long life of modest retirement,
+unmarked by any public honours, at length before he dies Dr. Newman is
+recognised by Protestant England as one of its greatest men. It watches
+with interest his journey to Rome, his proceedings at Rome. In a crowd
+of new Cardinals--men of eminence in their own communion--he is the
+only one about whom Englishmen know or care anything. His words, when
+he speaks, pass _verbatim_ along the telegraph wires, like the words of
+the men who sway the world. We read of the quiet Oxford scholar's arms
+emblazoned on vestment and furniture as those of a Prince of the
+Church, and of his motto--_Cor ad cor loquitur_. In that motto is the
+secret of all that he is to his countrymen. For that skill of which he
+is such a master, in the use of his and their "sweet mother tongue," is
+something much more than literary accomplishment and power. It means
+that he has the key to what is deepest in their nature and most
+characteristic in them of feeling and conviction--to what is deeper
+than opinions and theories and party divisions; to what in their most
+solemn moments they most value and most believe in.
+
+His profound sympathy with the religiousness which still, with all the
+variations and all the immense shortcomings of English religion, marks
+England above all cultivated Christian nations, is really the bond
+between him and his countrymen, who yet for the most part think so
+differently from him, both about the speculative grounds and many of
+the practical details of religion. But it was natural for him, on an
+occasion like this, reviewing the past and connecting it with the
+present, to dwell on these differences. He repeated once more, and
+made it the keynote of his address, his old protest against
+"Liberalism in religion," the "doctrine that there is no positive
+truth in religion, but one creed is as good as another." He lamented
+the decay of the power of authority, the disappearance of religion
+from the sphere of political influence, from education, from
+legislation. He deplored the increasing impossibility of getting men
+to work together on a common religious basis. He pointed out the
+increasing seriousness and earnestness of the attempts to "supersede,
+to block out religion," by an imposing and high morality, claiming to
+dispense with it.
+
+He dwelt on the mischief and dangers; he expressed, as any Christian
+would, his fearlessness and faith in spite of them; but do we gather,
+even from such a speaker, and on such an occasion, anything of the
+remedy? The principle of authority is shaken, he tells us; what can he
+suggest to restore it? He under-estimates, probably, the part which
+authority plays, implicitly yet very really, in English popular
+religion, much more in English Church religion; and authority, even in
+Rome, is not everything, and does not reach to every subject. But
+authority in our days can be nothing without real confidence in it;
+and where confidence in authority has been lost, it is idle to attempt
+to restore it by telling men that authority is a good and necessary
+thing. It must be won back, not simply claimed. It must be regained,
+when forfeited, by the means by which it was originally gained. And
+the strange phenomenon was obviously present to his clear and candid
+mind, though he treated it as one which is disappearing, and must at
+length pass away, that precisely here in England, where the only
+religious authority he recognises has been thrown off, the hold of
+religion on public interest is most effective and most obstinately
+tenacious.
+
+What is the history of this? What is the explanation of it? Why is it
+that where "authority," as he understands it, has been longest
+paramount and undisputed, the public place and public force of
+religion have most disappeared; and that a "dozen men taken at random
+in the streets" of London find it easier, with all their various
+sects, to work together on a religious basis than a dozen men taken at
+random from the streets of Catholic Paris or Rome? Indeed, the public
+feeling towards himself, expressed in so many ways in the last few
+weeks, might suggest a question not undeserving of his thoughts. The
+mass of Englishmen are notoriously anti-Popish and anti-Roman. Their
+antipathies on this subject are profound, and not always reasonable.
+They certainly do not here halt between two opinions, or think that
+one creed is as good as another. What is it which has made so many of
+them, still retaining all their intense dislike to the system which
+Cardinal Newman has accepted, yet welcome so heartily his honours in
+it, notwithstanding that he has passed from England to Rome, and that
+he owes so much of what he is to England? Is it that they think it
+does not matter what a man believes, and whether a man turns Papist?
+Or is it not that, in spite of all that would repel and estrange, in
+spite of the oppositions of argument and the inconsistencies of
+speculation, they can afford to recognise in him, as in a high
+example, what they most sincerely believe in and most deeply prize,
+and can pay him the tribute of their gratitude and honour, even when
+unconvinced by his controversial reasonings, and unsatisfied by the
+theories which he has proposed to explain the perplexing and
+refractory anomalies of Church history? Is it not that with history,
+inexorable and unalterable behind them, condemning and justifying,
+supporting and warning all sides in turn, thoughtful men feel how much
+easier it is to point out and deplore our disasters than to see a way
+now to set them right? Is it not also that there are in the Christian
+Church bonds of affinity, subtler, more real and more prevailing than
+even the fatal legacies of the great schisms? Is it not that the
+sympathies which unite the author of the _Parochial Sermons_ and the
+interpreter of St. Athanasius with the disciples of Andrewes, and Ken,
+and Bull, of Butler and Wilson, are as strong and natural as the
+barriers which outwardly keep them asunder are to human eyes
+hopelessly insurmountable?
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+CARDINAL NEWMAN'S COURSE[34]
+
+
+  [34]
+  _Guardian_, 13th August 1890.
+
+The long life is closed. And men, according to their knowledge and
+intelligence, turn to seek for some governing idea or aspect of things,
+by which to interpret the movements and changes of a course which, in
+spite of its great changes, is felt at bottom to have been a uniform
+and consistent one. For it seems that, at starting, he is at once
+intolerant, even to harshness, to the Roman Church, and tolerant,
+though not sympathetic, to the English; then the parts are reversed,
+and he is intolerant to the English and tolerant to the Roman; and then
+at last, when he finally anchored in the Roman Church, he is seen
+as--not tolerant, for that would involve dogmatic points on which he
+was most jealous, but--sympathetic in all that was of interest to
+England, and ready to recognise what was good and high in the English
+Church.
+
+Is not the ultimate key to Newman's history his keen and profound sense
+of the life, society, and principles of action presented in the New
+Testament? To this New Testament life he saw, opposed and in contrast,
+the ways and assumptions of English life, religious as well as secular.
+He saw that the organisation of society had been carried, and was still
+being carried, to great and wonderful perfection; only it was the
+perfection of a society and way of life adapted to the present world,
+and having its ends here; only it was as different as anything can be
+from the picture which the writers of the New Testament, consciously
+and unconsciously, give of themselves and their friends. Here was a
+Church, a religion, a "Christian nation," professing to be identical in
+spirit and rules of faith and conduct with the Church and religion of
+the Gospels and Epistles; and what was the identity, beyond certain
+phrases and conventional suppositions? He could not see a trace in
+English society of that simple and severe hold of the unseen and the
+future which is the colour and breath, as well as the outward form, of
+the New Testament life. Nothing could be more perfect, nothing grander
+and nobler, than all the current arrangements for this life; its
+justice and order and increasing gentleness, its widening sympathies
+between men; but it was all for the perfection and improvement of this
+life; it would all go on, if what we experience now was our only scene
+and destiny. This perpetual antithesis haunted him, when he knew it, or
+when he did not. Against it the Church ought to be the perpetual
+protest, and the fearless challenge, as it was in the days of the New
+Testament. But the English Church had drunk in, he held, too deeply the
+temper, ideas, and laws of an ambitious and advancing civilisation; so
+much so as to be unfaithful to its special charge and mission. The
+prophet had ceased to rebuke, warn, and suffer; he had thrown in his
+lot with those who had ceased to be cruel and inhuman, but who thought
+only of making their dwelling-place as secure and happy as they could.
+The Church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate,
+liberal; jealous about the forms of its creeds, equally jealous of its
+secular rights, interested in the discussion of subordinate questions,
+and becoming more and more tolerant of differences; ready for works of
+benevolence and large charity, in sympathy with the agricultural poor,
+open-handed in its gifts; a willing fellow-worker with society in
+kindly deeds, and its accomplice in secularity. All this was admirable,
+but it was not the life of the New Testament, and it was _that_ which
+filled his thoughts. The English Church had exchanged religion for
+civilisation, the first century for the nineteenth, the New Testament
+as it is written, for a counterfeit of it interpreted by Paley or Mr.
+Simeon; and it seemed to have betrayed its trust.
+
+Form after form was tried by him, the Christianity of Evangelicalism,
+the Christianity of Whately, the Christianity of Hawkins, the
+Christianity of Keble and Pusey; it was all very well, but it was not
+the Christianity of the New Testament and of the first ages. He wrote
+the _Church of the Fathers_ to show they were not merely evidences of
+religion, but really living men; that they could and did live as they
+taught, and what was there like the New Testament or even the first
+ages now? Alas! there was nothing completely like them; but of all
+unlike things, the Church of England with its "smug parsons," and
+pony-carriages for their wives and daughters, seemed to him the most
+unlike: more unlike than the great unreformed Roman Church, with its
+strange, unscriptural doctrines and its undeniable crimes, and its
+alliance, wherever it could, with the world. But at least the Roman
+Church had not only preserved, but maintained at full strength through
+the centuries to our day two things of which the New Testament was
+full, and which are characteristic of it--devotion and self-sacrifice.
+The crowds at a pilgrimage, a shrine, or a "pardon" were much more like
+the multitudes who followed our Lord about the hills of Galilee--like
+them probably in that imperfect faith which we call superstition--than
+anything that could be seen in the English Church, even if the
+Salvation Army were one of its instruments. And the spirit which
+governed the Roman Church had prevailed on men to make the sacrifice of
+celibacy a matter of course, as a condition of ministering in a regular
+and systematic way not only to the souls, but to the bodies of men, not
+only for the Priesthood, but for educational Brotherhoods, and Sisters
+of the poor and of hospitals. Devotion and sacrifice, prayer and
+self-denying charity, in one word sanctity, are at once on the surface
+of the New Testament and interwoven with all its substance. He recoiled
+from a representation of the religion of the New Testament which to his
+eye was without them. He turned to where, in spite of every other
+disadvantage, he thought he found them. In S. Filippo Neri he could
+find a link between the New Testament and progressive civilisation. He
+could find no S. Filippo--so modern and yet so Scriptural--when he
+sought at home.
+
+His mind, naturally alive to all greatness, had early been impressed
+with the greatness of the Church of Rome. But in his early days it was
+the greatness of Anti-Christ. Then came the change, and his sense of
+greatness was satisfied by the commanding and undoubting attitude of
+the Roman system, by the completeness of its theory, by the sweep of
+its claims and its rule, by the even march of its vast administration.
+It could not and it did not escape him, that the Roman Church, with all
+the good things which it had, was, as a whole, as unlike the Church of
+the New Testament and of the first ages as the English. He recognised
+it frankly, and built up a great theory to account for the fact,
+incorporating and modernising great portions of the received Roman
+explanations of the fact. But what won his heart and his enthusiasm was
+one thing; what justified itself to his intellect was another. And it
+was the reproduction, partial, as it might be, yet real and
+characteristic, in the Roman Church of the life and ways of the New
+Testament, which was the irresistible attraction that tore him from the
+associations and the affections of half a lifetime.
+
+The final break with the English Church was with much heat and
+bitterness; and both sides knew too much each of the other to warrant
+the language used on each side. The English Church had received too
+much loyal and invaluable service from him in teaching and example to
+have insulted him, as many of its chief authorities did, with the
+charges of dishonesty and bad faith; his persecutors forgot that a
+little effort on his part might, if he had been what they called him,
+and had really been a traitor, have formed a large and compact party,
+whose secession might have caused fatal damage. And he, too, knew too
+much of the better side of English religious life to justify the fierce
+invective and sarcasm with which he assailed for a time the English
+Church as a mere system of comfortable and self-deceiving worldliness.
+
+But as time went over him in his new position two things made
+themselves felt. One was, that though there was a New Testament life,
+lived in the Roman Church with conspicuous truth and reality, yet the
+Roman Church, like the English, was administered and governed by
+men--men with passions and faults, men of mixed characters--who had,
+like their English contemporaries and rivals, ends and rules of action
+not exactly like those of the New Testament. The Roman Church had to
+accept, as much as the English, the modern conditions of social and
+political life, however different in outward look from those of the
+Sermon on the Mount. The other was the increasing sense that the
+civilisation of the West was as a whole, and notwithstanding grievous
+drawbacks, part of God's providential government, a noble and
+beneficent thing, ministering graciously to man's peace and order,
+which Christians ought to recognise as a blessing of their times such
+as their fathers had not, for which they ought to be thankful, and
+which, if they were wise, they would put to what, in his phrase, was an
+"Apostolical" use. In one of the angelical hymns in the _Dream of
+Gerontius_, he dwells on the Divine goodness which led men to found "a
+household and a fatherland, a city and a state" with an earnestness of
+sympathy, recalling the enumeration of the achievements of human
+thought and hand, and the arts of civil and social life--[Greek: kai
+phthegma kai aenemoen phronaema kai astynomous orgas]--dwelt on so
+fondly by Aeschylus and Sophocles.
+
+The force with which these two things made themselves felt as age came
+on--the disappointments attending his service to the Church, and the
+grandeur of the physical and social order of the world and its Divine
+sanction in spite of all that is evil and all that is so shortlived in
+it--produced a softening in his ways of thought and speech. Never for a
+moment did his loyalty and obedience to his Church, even when most
+tried, waver and falter. The thing is inconceivable to any one who ever
+knew him, and the mere suggestion would be enough to make him blaze
+forth in all his old fierceness and power. But perfectly satisfied of
+his position, and with his duties clearly defined, he could allow large
+and increasing play, in the leisure of advancing age, to his natural
+sympathies, and to the effect of the wonderful spectacle of the world
+around him. He was, after all, an Englishman; and with all his
+quickness to detect and denounce what was selfish and poor in English
+ideas and action, and with all the strength of his deep antipathies,
+his chief interests were for things English--English literature,
+English social life, English politics, English religion. He liked to
+identify himself, as far as it was possible, with things English, even
+with things that belonged to his own first days. He republished his
+Oxford sermons and treatises. He prized his honorary fellowship at
+Trinity; he enjoyed his visit to Oxford, and the welcome which he met
+there. He discerned how much the English Church counted for in the
+fight going on in England for the faith in Christ. There was in all
+that he said and did a gentleness, a forbearance, a kindly
+friendliness, a warm recognition of the honour paid him by his
+countrymen, ever since the _Apologia_ had broken down the prejudices
+which had prevented Englishmen from doing him justice. As with his
+chief antagonist at Oxford, Dr. Hawkins, advancing years brought with
+them increasing gentleness, and generosity, and courtesy. But through
+all this there was perceptible to those who watched a pathetic yearning
+for something which was not to be had: a sense, resigned--for so it was
+ordered--but deep and piercing, how far, not some of us, but all of us,
+are from the life of the New Testament: how much there is for religion
+to do, and how little there seems to be to do it.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+CARDINAL NEWMAN'S NATURALNESS[35]
+
+
+  [35]
+  _Guardian_, 20th August 1890.
+
+Every one feels what is meant when we speak of a person's ways being
+"natural," in contrast to being artificial, or overstrained, or
+studied, or affected. But it is easier to feel what is meant than to
+explain and define it. We sometimes speak as if it were a mere quality
+of manner; as if it belonged to the outside show of things, and denoted
+the atmosphere, clear and transparent, through which they are viewed.
+It corresponds to what is lucid in talk and style, and what ethically
+is straightforward and unpretentious. But it is something much more
+than a mere surface quality. When it is real and part of the whole
+character, and not put on from time to time for effect, it reaches a
+long way down to what is deepest and most significant in a man's moral
+nature. It is connected with the sense of truth, with honest
+self-judgment, with habits of self-discipline, with the repression of
+vanity, pride, egotism. It has no doubt to do with good taste and good
+manners, but it has as much to do with good morals--with the resolute
+habit of veracity with oneself--with the obstinate preference for
+reality over show, however tempting--with the wholesome power of being
+able to think little about oneself.
+
+It is common to speak of the naturalness and ease of Cardinal Newman's
+style in writing. It is, of course, the first thing that attracts
+notice when we open one of his books; and there are people who think it
+bald and thin and dry. They look out for longer words, and grander
+phrases, and more involved constructions, and neater epigrams. They
+expect a great theme to be treated with more pomp and majesty, and they
+are disappointed. But the majority of English readers seem to be agreed
+in recognising the beauty and transparent flow of his language, which
+matches the best French writing in rendering with sureness and without
+effort the thought of the writer. But what is more interesting than
+even the formation of such a style--a work, we may be sure, not
+accomplished without much labour--is the man behind the style. For the
+man and the style are one in this perfect naturalness and ease. Any one
+who has watched at all carefully the Cardinal's career, whether in old
+days or later, must have been struck with this feature of his
+character, his naturalness, the freshness and freedom with which he
+addressed a friend or expressed an opinion, the absence of all
+mannerism and formality; and, where he had to keep his dignity, both
+his loyal obedience to the authority which enjoined it and the
+half-amused, half-bored impatience that he should be the person round
+whom all these grand doings centred. It made the greatest difference in
+his friendships whether his friends met him on equal terms, or whether
+they brought with them too great conventional deference or solemnity of
+manner. "So and so is a very good fellow, but he is not a man to talk
+to in your shirt sleeves," was his phrase about an over-logical and
+over-literal friend. Quite aware of what he was to his friends and to
+the things with which he was connected, and ready with a certain
+quickness of temper which marked him in old days to resent anything
+unbecoming done to his cause or those connected with it, he would not
+allow any homage to be paid to himself. He was by no means disposed to
+allow liberties to be taken or to put up with impertinence; for all
+that bordered on the unreal, for all that was pompous, conceited,
+affected, he had little patience; but almost beyond all these was his
+disgust at being made the object of foolish admiration. He protested
+with whimsical fierceness against being made a hero or a sage; he was
+what he was, he said, and nothing more; and he was inclined to be rude
+when people tried to force him into an eminence which he refused. With
+his profound sense of the incomplete and the ridiculous in this world,
+and with a humour in which the grotesque and the pathetic sides of life
+were together recognised at every moment, he never hesitated to admit
+his own mistakes--his "floors" as he called them. All this ease and
+frankness with those whom he trusted, which was one of the lessons
+which he learnt from Hurrell Froude, an intercourse which implied a
+good deal of give and take--all this satisfied his love of freedom, his
+sense of the real. It was his delight to give himself free play with
+those whom he could trust; to feel that he could talk with "open
+heart," understood without explaining, appealing for a response which
+would not fail, though it was not heard. He could be stiff enough with
+those who he thought were acting a part, or pretending to more than
+they could perform. But he believed--what was not very easy to believe
+beforehand--that he could win the sympathy of his countrymen, though
+not their agreement with him; and so, with characteristic naturalness
+and freshness, he wrote the _Apologia_.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+LORD BLACHFORD[36]
+
+
+  [36]
+  _Guardian_, 27th Nov. 1889.
+
+Lord Blachford, whose death was announced last week, belonged to a
+generation of Oxford men of whom few now survive, and who, of very
+different characters and with very different careers and histories, had
+more in common than any set of contemporaries at Oxford since their
+time. Speaking roughly, they were almost the last product of the old
+training at public school and at college, before the new reforms set
+in; of a training confessedly imperfect and in some ways deplorably
+defective, but with considerable elements in it of strength and
+manliness, with keen instincts of contempt for all that savoured of
+affectation and hollowness, and with a sort of largeness and freedom
+about it, both in its outlook and its discipline, which suited vigorous
+and self-reliant natures in an exciting time, when debate ran high and
+the gravest issues seemed to be presenting themselves to English
+society. The reformed system which has taken its place at Oxford
+criticises, not without some justice, the limitations of the older one;
+the narrow range of its interests, the few books which men read, and
+the minuteness with which they were "got up." But if these men did not
+learn all that a University ought to teach its students, they at least
+learned two things. They learned to work hard, and they learned to make
+full use of what they knew. They framed an ideal of practical life,
+which was very variously acted upon, but which at any rate aimed at
+breadth of grasp and generosity of purpose, and at being thorough. This
+knot of men, who lived a good deal together, were recognised at the
+time as young men of much promise, and they looked forward to life with
+eagerness and high aspiration. They have fulfilled their promise; their
+names are mixed up with all the recent history of England; they have
+filled its great places and governed its policy during a large part of
+the Queen's long reign. Their names are now for the most part things of
+the past--Sidney Herbert, Lord Canning, Lord Dalhousie, Lord Elgin,
+Lord Cardwell, the Wilberforces, Mr. Hope Scott, Archbishop Tait. But
+they still have their representatives among us--Mr. Gladstone, Lord
+Selborne, Lord Sherbrooke, Sir Thomas Acland, Cardinal Manning. It is
+not often that a University generation or two can produce such a list
+of names of statesmen and rulers; and the list might easily be
+enlarged.
+
+To this generation Frederic Rogers belonged, not the least
+distinguished among his contemporaries; and he was early brought under
+an influence likely to stimulate in a high degree whatever powers a man
+possessed, and to impress a strong character with elevated and enduring
+ideas of life and duty. Mr. Newman, with Mr. Hurrell Froude and Mr.
+Robert Wilberforce, had recently been appointed tutors of their college
+by Dr. Copleston. They were in the first eagerness of their enthusiasm
+to do great things with the college, and the story goes that Mr.
+Newman, on the look-out for promising pupils, wrote to an Eton friend,
+asking him to recommend some good Eton men for admission at Oriel.
+Frederic Rogers, so the story goes, was one of those mentioned; at any
+rate, he entered at Oriel, and became acquainted with Mr. Newman as a
+tutor, and the admiration and attachment of the undergraduate ripened
+into the most unreserved and affectionate friendship of the grown
+man--a friendship which has lasted through all storms and difficulties,
+and through strong differences of opinion, till death only has ended
+it. From Mr. Newman his pupil caught that earnest devotion to the cause
+of the Church which was supreme with him through life. He entered
+heartily into Mr. Newman's purpose to lift the level of the English
+Church and its clergy. While Mr. Newman at Oxford was fighting the
+battle of the English Church, there was no one who was a closer friend
+than Rogers, no one in whom Mr. Newman had such trust, none whose
+judgment he so valued, no one in whose companionship he so delighted;
+and the master's friendship was returned by the disciple with a noble
+and tender, and yet manly honesty. There came, as we know, times which
+strained even that friendship; when the disciple, just at the moment
+when the master most needed and longed for sympathy and counsel, had to
+choose between his duty to his Church and the claims and ties of
+friendship. He could not follow in the course which his master and
+friend had found inevitable; and that deepest and most delightful
+friendship had to be given up. But it was given up, not indeed without
+great suffering on both sides, but without bitterness or unworthy
+thoughts. The friend had seen too closely the greatness and purity of
+his master's character to fail in tenderness and loyalty, even when he
+thought his master going most wrong. He recognised that the error,
+deplorable as he thought it, was the mistake of a lofty and unselfish
+soul; and in the height of the popular outcry against him he came
+forward, with a distant and touching reverence, to take his old
+friend's part and rebuke the clamour. And at length the time came when
+disagreements were left long behind and each person had finally taken
+his recognised place; and then the old ties were knit up again. It
+could not be the former friendship of every day and of absolute and
+unreserved confidence. But it was the old friendship of affection and
+respect renewed, and pleasure in the interchange of thoughts. It was a
+friendship of the antique type, more common, perhaps, even in the last
+century than with us, but enriched with Christian hopes and Christian
+convictions.
+
+Lord Blachford, in spite of his brilliant Oxford reputation, and though
+he was a singularly vigorous writer, with wide interests and very
+independent thought, has left nothing behind him in the way of
+literature. This was partly because he very early became a man of
+affairs; partly that his health interfered with habits of study. It
+used to be told at Oxford that when he was working for his Double First
+he could scarcely use his eyes, and had to learn much of his work by
+being read to. The result was that he was not a great reader; and a man
+ought to be a reader who is to be a writer. But, besides this, there
+was a strongly marked feature in his character which told in the same
+direction. There was a curious modesty about him which formed a
+contrast with other points; with a readiness and even eagerness to put
+forth and develop his thoughts on matters that interested him, with a
+perfect consciousness of his remarkable powers of statement and
+argument, with a constitutional impetuosity blended with caution which
+showed itself when anything appealed to his deeper feelings or called
+for his help; yet with all these impelling elements, his instinct was
+always to shrink from putting himself forward, except when it was a
+matter of duty. He accepted recognition when it came, but he never
+claimed it. And this reserve, which marked his social life, kept him
+back from saying in a permanent form much that he had to say, and that
+was really worth saying. Like many of the distinguished men of his day,
+he was occasionally a journalist. We have been reminded by the _Times_
+that he at one time wrote for that paper. And he was one of the men to
+whose confidence and hope in the English Church the _Guardian_ owes its
+existence.
+
+His life was the uneventful one of a diligent and laborious public
+servant, and then of a landlord keenly alive to the responsibilities of
+his position. He passed through various subordinate public employments,
+and finally succeeded Mr. Herman Merivale as permanent Under-Secretary
+for the Colonies. It is a great post, but one of which the work is done
+for the most part out of sight. Colonial Secretaries in Parliament come
+and go, and have the credit, often quite justly, of this or that
+policy. But the public know little of the permanent official who keeps
+the traditions and experience of the department, whose judgment is
+always an element, often a preponderating element, in eventful
+decisions, and whose pen drafts the despatches which go forth in the
+name of the Government. Sir Frederic Rogers, as he became in time, had
+to deal with some of the most serious colonial questions which arose
+and were settled while he was at the Colonial Office. He took great
+pains, among other things, to remove, or at least diminish, the
+difficulties which beset the _status_ of the Colonial Church and
+clergy, and to put its relations to the Church at home on a just and
+reasonable footing. There is a general agreement as to the industry and
+conspicuous ability with which his part of the work was done. Mr.
+Gladstone set an admirable example in recognising in an unexpected way
+faithful but unnoticed services, and at the same time paid a merited
+honour to the permanent staff of the public offices, when he named Sir
+Frederic Rogers for a peerage.
+
+Lord Blachford, for so he became on his retirement from the Colonial
+Office, cannot be said to have quitted entirely public life, as he
+always, while his strength lasted, acknowledged public claims on his
+time and industry. He took his part in two or three laborious
+Commissions, doing the same kind of valuable yet unseen work which he
+had done in office, guarding against blunders, or retrieving them,
+giving direction and purpose to inquiries, suggesting expedients. But
+his main employment was now at his own home. He came late in life to
+the position of a landed proprietor, and he at once set before himself
+as his object the endeavour to make his estate as perfect as it could
+be made--perfect in the way in which a naturally beautiful country and
+his own good taste invited him to make it, but beyond all, as perfect
+as might be, viewed as the dwelling-place of his tenants and the
+labouring poor. A keen and admiring student of political economy, his
+sympathies were always with the poor. He was always ready to challenge
+assumptions, such as are often loosely made for the convenience of the
+well-to-do. The solicitude which always pursued him was the thought of
+his cottages, and it was not satisfied till the last had been put in
+good order. The same spirit prompted him to allow labourers who could
+manage the undertaking to rent pasture for a few cows; and the
+experiment, he thought, had succeeded. The idea of justice and the
+general welfare had too strong a hold on his mind to allow him to be
+sentimental in dealing with the difficult questions connected with
+land. But if his labourers found him thoughtful of their comfort his
+farmers found him a good landlord--strict where he met with dishonesty
+and carelessness, but open-minded and reasonable in understanding their
+points of view, and frank, equitable, and liberal in meeting their
+wishes. Disclaiming all experience of country matters, and not minding
+if he fell into some mistakes, he made his care of his estate a model
+of the way in which a good man should discharge his duties to the land.
+
+His was one of those natures which have the gift of inspiring
+confidence in all who come near him; all who had to do with him felt
+that they could absolutely trust him. The quality which was at the
+bottom of his character as a man was his unswerving truthfulness; but
+upon this was built up a singularly varied combination of elements not
+often brought together, and seldom in such vigour and activity. Keen,
+rapid, penetrating, he was quick in detecting anything that rung hollow
+in language or feeling; and he did not care to conceal his dislike and
+contempt. But no one threw himself with more genuine sympathy into the
+real interests of other people. No matter what it was, ethical or
+political theory, the course of a controversy, the arrangement of a
+trust-deed, the oddities of a character, the marvels of natural
+science, he was always ready to go with his companion as far as he
+chose to go, and to take as much trouble as if the question started had
+been his own. Where his sense of truth was not wounded he was most
+considerate and indulgent; he seemed to keep through life his
+schoolboy's amused tolerance for mischief that was not vicious. No one
+entered more heartily into the absurdities of a grotesque situation; of
+no one could his friends be so sure that he would miss no point of a
+good story; and no one took in at once more completely or with deeper
+feeling the full significance of some dangerous incident in public
+affairs, or discerned more clearly the real drift of confused and
+ambiguous tendencies. He was conscious of the power of his intellect,
+and he liked to bring it to bear on what was before him; he liked to
+probe things to the bottom, and see how far his companion in
+conversation was able to go; but ready as he was with either argument
+or banter he never, unless provoked, forced the proof of his power on
+others. For others, indeed, of all classes and characters, so that they
+were true, he had nothing but kindness, geniality, forbearance, the
+ready willingness to meet them on equal terms. Those who had the
+privilege of his friendship remember how they were kept up in their
+standard and measure of duty by the consciousness of his opinion, his
+judgment, his eagerness to feel with them, his fearless, though it
+might be reluctant, expression of disagreement It was, indeed, that
+very marked yet most harmonious combination of severity and tenderness
+which gave such interest to his character. A strong love of justice, a
+deep and unselfish and affectionate gentleness and patience, are
+happily qualities not too rare. But to have known one at once so
+severely just and so indulgently tender and affectionate makes a mark
+in a man's life which he forgets at his peril.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited, _Edinburgh_.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Occasional Papers, by R.W. Church
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11771 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Occasional Papers, by R.W. Church
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Occasional Papers
+       Selected from The Guardian,  The Times, and The Saturday Review,
+       1846-1890
+       
+
+Author: R.W. Church
+
+Release Date: April 3, 2004 [EBook #11771]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OCCASIONAL PAPERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by MBP, papeters, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+OCCASIONAL PAPERS
+
+SELECTED FROM
+THE GUARDIAN, THE TIMES, AND THE SATURDAY REVIEW
+1846-1890
+
+
+By the late
+R.W. CHURCH, M.A., D.C.L.
+Sometime Rector of Whatley, Dean of St. Paul's,
+Honorary Fellow of Oriel College
+
+
+In Two Vols.--VOL. II
+
+
+London
+Macmillan and Co., Limited
+New York: The Macmillan Company
+
+1897
+
+_First Edition February_ 1897
+_Reprinted April_ 1897
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I       MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ROYAL SUPREMACY
+
+II      JOYCE ON COURTS OF SPIRITUAL APPEAL
+
+III     PRIVY COUNCIL JUDGMENTS
+
+IV      SIR JOHN COLERIDGE ON THE PURCHAS CASE
+
+V       MR. GLADSTONE'S LETTER ON THE ENGLISH CHURCH
+
+VI      DISENDOWMENT
+
+VII     THE NEW COURT
+
+VIII    MOZLEY'S BAMPTON LECTURES
+
+IX      ECCE HOMO
+
+X       THE AUTHOR OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ON A NEW REFORMATION
+
+XI      RENAN'S "VIE DE JÉSUS"
+
+XII     RENAN'S "LES APÔTRES"
+
+XIII    RENAN'S HIBBERT LECTURES
+
+XIV     RENAN'S "SOUVENIRS D'ENFANCE"
+
+XV      LIFE OF FREDERICK ROBERTSON
+
+XVI     LIFE OF BARON BUNSEN
+
+XVII    COLERIDGE'S MEMOIR OF KEBLE
+
+XVIII   MAURICE'S THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS
+
+XIX     FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE
+
+XX      SIR RICHARD CHURCH
+
+XXI     DEATH OF BISHOP WILBERFORCE
+
+XXII    RETIREMENT OF THE PROVOST OF ORIEL
+
+XXIII   MARK PATTISON
+
+XXIV    PATTISON'S ESSAYS
+
+XXV     BISHOP FRAZER
+
+XXVI    NEWMAN'S "APOLOGIA"
+
+XXVII   DR. NEWMAN ON THE "EIRENICON"
+
+XXVIII  NEWMAN'S PAROCHIAL SERMONS
+
+XXIX    CARDINAL NEWMAN
+
+XXX     CARDINAL NEWMAN'S COURSE
+
+XXXI    CARDINAL NEWMAN'S NATURALNESS
+
+XXXII   LORD BLACHFORD
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ROYAL SUPREMACY[1]
+
+
+  [1]
+  _Remarks on the Royal Supremacy, as it is Defined by Reason, History,
+  and the Constitution_. A Letter to the Lord Bishop of London, by
+  the Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone, M.P. for the University of Oxford.
+  _Guardian_, 10th July 1850.
+
+Mr. Gladstone has not disappointed the confidence of those who have
+believed of him that when great occasions presented themselves, of
+interest to the Church, he would not be found wanting. A statesman
+has a right to reserve himself and bide his time, and in doubtful
+circumstances may fairly ask us to trust his discretion as to when is
+his time. But there are critical seasons about whose seriousness there
+can be no doubt. One of these is now passing over the English Church.
+And Mr. Gladstone has recognised it, and borne himself in it with a
+manliness, earnestness, and temper which justify those who have never
+despaired of his doing worthy service to the Church, with whose cause
+he so early identified himself.
+
+The pamphlet before us, to which he has put his name, is the most
+important, perhaps, of all that have been elicited by the deep interest
+felt in the matter on which it treats. Besides its importance as the
+expression of the opinion, and, it must be added, the anxieties of a
+leading statesman, it has two intrinsic advantages. It undertakes to
+deal closely and strictly with those facts in the case mainly belonging
+to the period of the Reformation, on which the great stress has been
+laid in the arguments both against our liberty and our very being as a
+Church. And, further, it gives us on these facts, and, in connection
+with them, on the events of the crisis itself, the judgment and the
+anticipations of a mind at once deeply imbued with religious
+philosophy, and also familiar with the consideration of constitutional
+questions, and accustomed to view them in their practical entanglements
+as well as in their abstract and ideal forms. It is, indeed, thus only
+that the magnitude and the true extent of the relations of the present
+contest can be appreciated. The intrinsic greatness, indeed, of
+religious interests cannot receive addition of dignity here. But the
+manner of treating them may. And Mr. Gladstone has done what was both
+due to the question at issue, and in the highest degree important for
+its serious consideration and full elucidation, in raising it from a
+discussion of abstract principles to what it is no less--a real problem
+of English constitutional law.
+
+The following passage will show briefly the ground over which the
+discussion travels:--
+
+    The questions, then, that I seek to examine will be as follow:--
+
+    1. Did the statutes of the Reformation involve the abandonment of
+    the duty of the Church to be the guardian of her faith?
+
+    2. Is the present composition of the appellate tribunal conformable
+    either to reason or to the statutes of the Reformation, and the
+    spirit of the Constitution as expressed in them?
+
+    3. Is the Royal Supremacy, according to the Constitution, any bar
+    to the adjustment of the appellate jurisdiction in such a manner
+    as that it shall convey the sense of the Church in questions of
+    doctrine?
+
+    All these questions I humbly propose to answer in the negative,
+    and so to answer them in conformity with what I understand to be
+    the principles of our history and law. My endeavour will be to
+    show that the powers of the State so determined, in regard to the
+    legislative office of the Church (setting aside for the moment any
+    question as to the right of assent in the laity), are powers of
+    restraint; that the jurisdictions united and annexed to the Crown
+    are corrective jurisdictions; and that their exercise is subject
+    to the general maxim, that the laws ecclesiastical are to be
+    administered by ecclesiastical judges.
+
+Mr. Gladstone first goes into the question--What was done, and what was
+the understanding at the Reformation? All agree that this was a time of
+great changes, and that in the settlement resulting from them the State
+took, and the Church yielded, a great deal. And on the strength of this
+broad general fact, the details of the settlement have been treated
+with an _a priori_ boldness, not deficient often in that kind of
+precision which can be gained by totally putting aside inconvenient
+or perplexing elements, and having both its intellectual and moral
+recommendations to many minds; but highly undesirable where a great
+issue has been raised for the religion of millions, and the political
+constitution of a great nation. Men who are not lawyers seem to have
+thought that, by taking a lawyer's view, or what they considered such,
+of the Reformation Acts, they had disposed of the question for ever. It
+was, indeed, time for a statesman to step in, and protest, if only in
+the name of constitutional and political philosophy, against so narrow
+and unreal an abuse of law-texts--documents of the highest importance
+in right hands, and in their proper place, but capable, as all must
+know, of leading to inconceivable absurdity in speculation, and not
+impossibly fatal confusion in fact.
+
+The bulk of this pamphlet is devoted to the consideration of the language
+and effect, legal and constitutional, of those famous statutes with the
+titles of which recent controversy has made us so familiar. Mr.
+Gladstone makes it clear that it does not at all follow that because the
+Church conceded a great deal, she conceded, or even was expected to
+concede, indefinitely, whatever might be claimed. She conceded, but she
+conceded by compact;--a compact which supposed her power to concede, and
+secured to her untouched whatever was not conceded. And she did not
+concede, nor was asked for, her highest power, her legislative power.
+She did not concede, nor was asked to concede, that any but her own
+ministers--by the avowal of all drawing their spiritual authority from a
+source which nothing human could touch--should declare her doctrine, or
+should be employed in administering her laws. What she did concede was,
+not original powers of direction and guidance, but powers of restraint
+and correction;--under securities greater, both in form and in working,
+than those possessed at the time by any other body in England, for their
+rights and liberties--greater far than might have been expected, when
+the consequences of a long foreign supremacy--not righteously maintained
+and exercised, because at the moment unrighteously thrown off--increased
+the control which the Civil Government always must claim over the
+Church, by the sudden abstraction of a power which, though usurping, was
+spiritual; and presented to the ambition of a despotic King a number of
+unwarrantable prerogatives which the separation from the Pope had left
+without an owner.
+
+On the trite saying, meant at first to represent, roughly and
+invidiously, the effect of the Reformation, and lately urged as
+technically and literally true--"The assertion that in the time of
+Henry VIII. the See of Rome was both 'the source and centre of
+ecclesiastical jurisdiction,' and therefore the supreme judge of
+doctrine; and that this power of the Pope was transferred in its
+entireness to the Crown"--Mr. Gladstone remarks as follows:--
+
+    I will not ask whether the Pope was indeed at that time the
+    supreme judge of doctrine; it is enough for me that not very long
+    before the Council of Constance had solemnly said otherwise, in
+    words which, though they may be forgotten, cannot be annulled....
+
+    That the Pope was the source of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the
+    English Church before the Reformation is an assertion of the
+    gravest import, which ought not to have been thus taken for
+    granted.... The fact really is this:--A modern opinion, which, by
+    force of modern circumstances, has of late gained great favour in
+    the Church of Rome, is here dated back and fastened upon ages to
+    whose fixed principles it was unknown and alien; and the case of
+    the Church of England is truly hard when the Papal authority of
+    the Middle Ages is exaggerated far beyond its real and historical
+    scope, with the effect only of fastening that visionary
+    exaggeration, through the medium of another fictitious notion of
+    wholesale transfer of the Papal privileges to the Crown, upon us,
+    as the true and legal measure of the Royal Supremacy.
+
+    It appears to me that he who alleges in the gross that the Papal
+    prerogatives were carried over to the Crown at the Reformation,
+    greatly belies the laws and the people of that era. Their
+    unvarying doctrine was, that they were restoring the ancient regal
+    jurisdiction, and abolishing one that had been usurped. But there
+    is no evidence to show that these were identical in themselves, or
+    co-extensive in their range. In some respects the Crown obtained
+    at that period more than the Pope had ever had; for I am not aware
+    that the Convocation required his license to deliberate upon
+    canons, or his assent to their promulgation. In other respects the
+    Crown acquired less; for not the Crown, but the Archbishop of
+    Canterbury was appointed to exercise the power of dispensation in
+    things lawful, and to confirm Episcopal elections. Neither the
+    Crown nor the Archbishop succeeded to such Papal prerogatives as
+    were contrary to the law of the land; for neither the 26th of
+    Henry VIII. nor the 2nd of Elizabeth annexed to the Crown all the
+    powers of correction and reformation which had been actually
+    claimed by the Pope, but only such as "hath heretofore been or may
+    lawfully be exercised or used." ... The "ancient jurisdiction,"
+    and not the then recently claimed or exercised powers, was the
+    measure and the substance of what the Crown received from the
+    Legislature; and, with those ancient rights for his rule, no
+    impartial man would say that the Crown was the source of
+    ecclesiastical jurisdiction according to the statutes of the
+    Reformation. But the statutes of the Reformation era relating to
+    jurisdiction, having as statutes the assent of the laity, and
+    accepted by the canons of the clergy, are the standard to which
+    the Church has bound herself as a religious society to conform.
+
+The word "jurisdiction" has played an important part in the recent
+discussions; whether its meaning, with its various involved and
+associated ideas, by no means free from intricacy and confusion, have
+been duly unravelled and made clear, we may be permitted to doubt. A
+distinction of the canonists has been assumed by those who have used
+the word with most precision--_assumed_, though it is by no means a
+simple and indisputable one. Mr. Gladstone draws attention to this,
+when, after noticing that nowhere in the ecclesiastical legislation of
+Elizabeth is the claim made on behalf of the Crown to be the source of
+ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he admits that this _is_ the language of
+the school of English law, and offers an explanation of the fact. That
+which Acts of Parliament do not say, which is negatived in actual
+practice by contradictory and irreconcilable facts, is yet wanted by
+lawyers for the theoretic completeness of their idea and system of law.
+The fact is important as a reminder that what is one real aspect, or,
+perhaps, the most complete and consistent representation of a system
+on paper, may be inadequate and untrue as an exhibition of its real
+working and appearance in the world.
+
+    To sum up the whole, then, I contend that the Crown did not claim
+    by statute, either to be of right, or to become by convention, the
+    _source_ of that kind of action, which was committed by the
+    Saviour to the Apostolic Church, whether for the enactment of
+    laws, or for the administration of its discipline; but the claim
+    was, that all the canons of the Church, and all its judicial
+    proceedings, inasmuch as they were to form parts respectively of
+    the laws and of the legal administration of justice in the
+    kingdom, should run only with the assent and sanction of the
+    Crown. They were to carry with them a double force--a force of
+    coercion, visible and palpable; a force addressed to conscience,
+    neither visible nor palpable, and in its nature only capable of
+    being inwardly appreciated. Was it then unreasonable that they
+    should bear outwardly the tokens of that power to which they were
+    to be indebted for their outward observance, and should work only
+    within by that wholly different influence that governs the kingdom
+    which is not of this world, and flows immediately from its King?
+    ... But while, according to the letter and spirit of the law, such
+    appear to be the limits of the Royal Supremacy in regard to the
+    _legislative_, which is the highest, action of the Church, I do
+    not deny that in other branches it goes farther, and will now
+    assume that the supremacy in all causes, which is at least a claim
+    to control at every point the jurisdiction of the Church, may also
+    be construed to mean as much as that the Crown is the ultimate
+    source of jurisdiction of whatever kind.
+
+    Here, however, I must commence by stating that, as it appears to
+    me, Lord Coke and others attach to the very word jurisdiction a
+    narrower sense than it bears in popular acceptation, or in the
+    works of canonists--a sense which excludes altogether that of the
+    canonists; and also a sense which appears to be the genuine and
+    legitimate sense of the word in its first intention. Now, when we
+    are endeavouring to appreciate the force and scope of the legal
+    doctrine concerning ecclesiastical and spiritual jurisdiction, it
+    is plain that we must take the term employed in the sense of our
+    own law, and not in the different and derivative sense in which it
+    has been used by canonists and theologians. But canonists
+    themselves bear witness to the distinction which I have now
+    pointed out. The one kind is _Jurisdictio coactiva proprie dicta,
+    principibus data_; the other is _Jurisdictio improprie dicta ac
+    mere spiritualis, Ecclesiae ejusque Episcopis a Christo data_....
+
+    Properly speaking, I submit that there is no such thing as
+    jurisdiction in any private association of men, or anywhere else
+    than under the authority of the State. _Jus_ is the scheme of
+    rights subsisting between men in the relations, not of all, but of
+    civil society; and _jurisdicto_ is the authority to determine and
+    enunciate those rights from time to time. Church authority,
+    therefore, so long as it stands alone, is not in strictness of
+    speech, or according to history, jurisdiction, because it is not
+    essentially bound up with civil law.
+
+    But when the State and the Church came to be united, by the
+    conversion of nations, and the submission of the private
+    conscience to Christianity--when the Church placed her power of
+    self-regulation under the guardianship of the State, and the State
+    annexed its own potent sanction to rules, which without it would
+    have been matter of mere private contract, then _jus_ or civil
+    right soon found its way into the Church, and the respective
+    interests and obligations of its various orders, and of the
+    individuals composing them, were regulated by provisions forming
+    part of the law of the land. Matter ecclesiastical or spiritual
+    moulded in the forms of civil law, became the proper subject of
+    ecclesiastical or spiritual jurisdiction, properly so called.
+
+    Now, inasmuch as laws are abstractions until they are put into
+    execution, through the medium of executive and judicial authority,
+    it is evident that the cogency of the reasons for welding
+    together, so to speak, civil and ecclesiastical authority is much
+    more full with regard to these latter branches of power than with
+    regard to legislation. There had been in the Church, from its
+    first existence as a spiritual society, a right to govern, to
+    decide, to adjudge for spiritual purposes; that was a true,
+    self-governing authority; but it was not properly jurisdiction. It
+    naturally came to be included, or rather enfolded, in the term,
+    when for many centuries the secular arm had been in perpetual
+    co-operation with the tribunals of the Church. The thing to be
+    done, and the means by which it was done, were bound together; the
+    authority and the power being always united in fact, were treated
+    as an unity for the purposes of law. As the potentate possessing
+    not the head but the mouth or issue of a river, has the right to
+    determine what shall pass to or from the sea, so the State,
+    standing between an injunction of the Church and its execution,
+    had a right to refer that execution wholly to its own authority.
+
+    There was not contained or implied in such a doctrine any denial
+    of the original and proper authority of the Church for its own
+    self-government, or any assertion that it had passed to and become
+    the property of the Crown. But that authority, though not in its
+    source, yet in its exercise, had immersed itself in the forms of
+    law; had invoked and obtained the aid of certain elements of
+    external power, which belonged exclusively to the State, and for
+    the right and just use of which the State had a separate and
+    independent responsibility, so that it could not, without breach
+    of duty, allow them to be parted from itself. It was, therefore, I
+    submit, an intelligible and, under given circumstances, a
+    warrantable scheme of action, under which the State virtually
+    said: Church decrees, taking the form of law, and obtaining their
+    full and certain effect only in that form, can be executed only as
+    law, and while they are in process of being put into practice can
+    only be regarded as law, and therefore the whole power of their
+    execution, that is to say, all juris diction in matters
+    ecclesiastical and spiritual, must, according to the doctrine of
+    law, proceed from the fountain-head of law, namely, from the
+    Crown. In the last legal resort there can be but one origin for
+    all which is to be done in societies of men by force of legal
+    power; nor, if so, can doubt arise what that origin must be.
+
+    If you allege that the Church has a spiritual authority to
+    regulate doctrines and discipline, still, as you choose to back
+    that authority with the force of temporal law, and as the State is
+    exclusively responsible for the use of that force, you must be
+    content to fold up the authority of the Church in that exterior
+    form through which you desire it to take effect. From whatsoever
+    source it may come originally, it comes to the subject as law; it
+    therefore comes to him from the fountain of law.... The faith of
+    Christendom has been received in England; the discipline of the
+    Christian Church, cast into its local form, modified by statutes
+    of the realm, and by the common law and prerogative, has from time
+    immemorial been received in England; but we can view them only as
+    law, although you may look further back to the divine and
+    spiritual sanction, in virtue of which they acquired that social
+    position, which made it expedient that they should associate with
+    law and should therefore become law.
+
+But as to the doctrine itself, it is most obvious to notice that it is
+not more strange, and not necessarily more literally real, than those
+other legal views of royal prerogative and perfection, which are the
+received theory of all our great jurists--accepted by them for very
+good reasons, but not the less astounding when presented as naked and
+independent truths. It was natural enough that they should claim for
+the Crown the origination of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, considering
+what else they claimed for it. Mr. Allen can present us with a more
+than Chinese idea of royal power, when he draws it only from
+Blackstone:--
+
+    They may have heard [he says, speaking of the "unlearned in the
+    law"] that the law of England is founded in reason and wisdom. The
+    first lesson they are taught will inform them, that the law of
+    England attributes to the King absolute perfection, absolute
+    immortality, and legal ubiquity. They will be told that the King
+    of England is not only incapable of doing wrong, but of thinking
+    wrong. They will be informed that he never dies, that he is
+    invisible as well as immortal, and that in the eye of the law he
+    is present at one and the same instant in every court of justice
+    within his dominions.... They may have been told that the royal
+    prerogative in England is limited; but when they consult the sages
+    of the law, they will be assured that the legal authority of the
+    King of England is absolute and irresistible ... that all are
+    under him, while he is under none but God....
+
+    If they have had the benefit of a liberal education, they have
+    been taught that to obtain security for persons and property was
+    the great end for which men submitted to the restraints of civil
+    government; and they may have heard of the indispensable necessity
+    of an independent magistracy for the due administration of
+    justice; but when they direct their inquiries to the laws and
+    constitution of England, they will find it an established maxim in
+    that country that all jurisdiction emanates from the Crown. They
+    will be told that the King is not ony the chief, but the sole
+    magistrate of the nation; and that all others act by his
+    commission, and in subordination to him.[2]
+
+  [2]
+  _Allen on the Royal Prerogative_, pp. 1-3.
+
+"In the most limited monarchy," as he says truly the "King is
+represented in law books, as in theory an absolute sovereign." "Even
+now," says Mr. Gladstone, "after three centuries of progress toward
+democratic sway, the Crown has prerogatives by acting upon which,
+within their strict and unquestioned bounds, it might at any time throw
+the country into confusion. And so has each House of Parliament." But
+if the absolute supremacy of the Crown _in the legal point of mew
+exactly the same over temporal matters and causes as over spiritual_,
+is taken by no sane man to be a literal fact in temporal matters, it is
+violating the analogy of the Constitution, and dealing with the most
+important subjects in a mere spirit of narrow perverseness, to insist
+that it can have none but a literal meaning in ecclesiastical matters;
+and that the Church _did_ mean, though the State _did not_ to accept a
+despotic prerogative, unbounded by custom, convention, or law, and
+unchecked by acknowledged and active powers in herself. Yet such is the
+assumption, made in bitterness and vexation of spirit by some of those
+who have lately so hastily given up her cause; made with singular
+assurance by others, who, Liberals in all their political doctrines,
+have, for want of better arguments, invoked prerogative against the
+Church.
+
+What the securities and checks were that the Church, not less than the
+nation, contemplated and possessed, are not expressed in the theory
+itself of the royal prerogative; and, as in the ease of the nation, we
+might presume beforehand, that they would be found in practice rather
+than on paper. They were, however, real ones. "With the same theoretical
+laxity and practical security," as in the case of Parliaments and
+temporal judges, "was provision made for the conduct of Church
+affairs." Making allowance for the never absent disturbances arising
+out of political trouble and of personal character, the Church had very
+important means of making her own power felt in the administration of
+her laws, as well as in the making of them.
+
+    The real question, I apprehend, is this:--When the Church assented
+    to those great concessions which were embodied in our permanent
+    law at the Reformation, had she _adequate securities_ that the
+    powers so conveyed would be exercised, upon the whole, with a due
+    regard to the integrity of her faith, and of her office, which was
+    and has ever been a part of that faith? I do not ask whether these
+    securities were all on parchment or not--whether they were written
+    or unwritten--whether they were in statute, or in common law, or
+    in fixed usage, or in the spirit of the Constitution and in the
+    habits of the people--I ask the one vital question, whether,
+    whatever they were in form, they were in substance sufficient?
+
+    _The securities_ which the Church had were these: First, that the
+    assembling of the Convocation was obviously necessary for the
+    purposes of taxation; secondly and mainly, that the very solemn
+    and fundamental laws by which the jurisdiction of the See of Rome
+    was cut off, assigned to the spiritualty of the realm the care of
+    matters spiritual, as distinctly and formally as to the temporalty
+    the care of matters temporal; and that it was an understood
+    principle, and (as long as it continued) a regular usage of the
+    Constitution, that ecclesiastical laws should be administered by
+    ecclesiastical judges. These were the securities on which the
+    Church relied; on, which she had a right to rely; and on which,
+    for a long series of years, her alliance was justified by the
+    results.
+
+And further:--
+
+    The Church had this great and special security on which to rely,
+    that the Sovereigns of this country were, for a century after the
+    Reformation, amongst her best instructed, and even in some
+    instances her most devoted children: that all who made up the
+    governing body (with an insignificant exception) owned personal
+    allegiance to her, and that she might well rest on that personal
+    allegiance as warranting beforehand the expectation, which after
+    experience made good, that the office of the State towards her
+    would be discharged in a friendly and kindly spirit, and that the
+    principles of constitutional law and civil order would not be
+    strained against her, but fairly and fully applied in her behalf.
+
+These securities she now finds herself deprived of. This is the great
+change made in her position--made insensibly, and In a great measure,
+undesignedly--which has altered altogether the understanding on which
+she stood towards the Crown at the Reformation. It now turns out that
+that understanding, though it might have been deemed sufficient for the
+time, was not precise enough; and further, was not sufficiently looked
+after in the times which followed. And on us comes the duty of taking
+care that it be not finally extinguished; thrown off by the despair of
+one side, and assumed by the other as at length abandoned to their
+aggression.
+
+Mr. Gladstone comes to the question with the feelings of a statesman,
+conscious of the greatness and excellence of the State, and anxious
+that the Church should not provoke its jealousy, and in urging her
+claims should "take her stand, as to all matters of substance and
+principle, on the firm ground of history and law." It makes his
+judgment on the present state of things more solemn, and his conviction
+of the necessity of amending it more striking, when they are those of
+one so earnest for conciliation and peace. But on constitutional not
+less than on other grounds, he pronounces the strongest condemnation on
+the present formation of the Court of Appeal, which, working in a way
+which even its framers did not contemplate, has brought so much
+distress into the Church, and which yet, in defiance of principle, of
+consistency, and of the admission of its faultiness, is so recklessly
+maintained. Feeling and stating very strongly the evil sustained by the
+Church, from the suspension of her legislative powers,--"that loss of
+command over her work, and over the heart of the nation, which it has
+brought upon her,"--so strongly indeed that his words, coming from one
+familiar with the chances and hazards of a deliberative assembly, give
+new weight to the argument for the resumption of those powers,--feeling
+all this, he is ready to acquiesce in the measure beyond which the
+Bishops did not feel authorised to go, and which Mr. Gladstone regards
+as "representing the extremest point up to which the love of peace
+might properly carry the concessions of the Church":--
+
+    That which she is entitled in the spirit of the Constitution to
+    demand would be that the Queen's ecclesiastical laws shall be
+    administered by the Queen's ecclesiastical judges, of whom the
+    Bishops are the chief; and this, too, under the checks which the
+    sitting of a body appointed for ecclesiastical legislation would
+    impose.
+
+    But if it is not of vital necessity that a Church Legislature
+    should sit at the present time--if it is not of vital necessity
+    that all causes termed ecclesiastical should be treated under
+    special safeguards--if it is not of vital necessity that the
+    function of judgment should be taken out of the hands of the
+    existing court--let the Church frankly and at once subscribe to
+    every one of these great concessions, and reduce her demands to a
+    _minimum_ at the outset.
+
+    Laws ecclesiastical by ecclesiastical judges, let this be her
+    principle; it plants her on the ground of ancient times, of the
+    Reformation, of our continuous history, of reason and of right.
+    The utmost moderation, in the application of the principle, let
+    this he her temper, and then her case will be strong in the face
+    of God and man, and, come what may, she will conquer.... If, my
+    Lord, it be felt by the rulers of the Church, that a scheme like
+    this will meet sufficiently the necessities of her case, it must
+    be no small additional comfort to them to feel that their demand
+    is every way within the spirit of the Constitution, and short of
+    the terms which the great compact of the Reformation would
+    authorise you to seek. You, and not those who are against you,
+    will take your stand with Coke and Blackstone; you, and not they,
+    will wield the weapons of constitutional principle and law; you,
+    and not they, will be entitled to claim the honour of securing the
+    peace of the State no less than the faith of the Church; you, and
+    not they, will justly point the admonitory finger to those
+    remarkable words of the Institutes:--
+
+    "And certain it is, that this Kingdom hath been best governed, and
+    peace and quiet preserved, when both parties, that is, when the
+    justices of the temporal courts and the ecclesiastical judges have
+    kept themselves within their proper jurisdiction, without
+    encroaching or usurping one upon another; and where such
+    encroachments or usurpations have been made, they have been the
+    seeds of great trouble and inconvenience."
+
+    Because none can resist the principle of your proposal, who admit
+    that the Church has a sphere of proper jurisdiction at all, or any
+    duty beyond that of taking the rule of her doctrine and her
+    practice from the lips of ministers or parliaments. If it shall be
+    deliberately refused to adopt a proposition so moderate, so
+    guarded and restrained in the particular instance, and so
+    sustained by history, by analogy, and by common reason, in the
+    case of the faith of the Church, and if no preferable measure be
+    substituted, it can only be in consequence of a latent intention
+    that the voice of the Civil Power should be henceforward supreme
+    in the determination of Christian doctrine.
+
+We trust that such an assurance, backed as it is by the solemn and
+earnest warnings of one who is not an enthusiast or an agitator, but
+one of the leading men in the Parliament of England, will not be
+without its full weight with those on whom devolves the duty of guiding
+and leading us in this crisis. The Bishops of England have a great
+responsibility on them. Reason, not less than Christian loyalty and
+Christian charity, requires the fairest interpretation of their acts,
+and it may be of their hesitation,--the utmost consideration of their
+difficulties. But reason, not less than Christian loyalty and charity,
+expects that, having accepted the responsibilities of the Episcopate,
+they should not withdraw from them when they arrive; and that there
+should be neither shrinking nor rest nor compromise till the creed and
+the rights of the Church entrusted to their fidelity be placed, as far
+as depends on them, beyond danger.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+JOYCE ON COURTS OF SPIRITUAL APPEAL[3]
+
+
+  [3]
+  _Ecclesia Vindicata; a Treatise on Appeals in Matters Spiritual_.
+  By James Wayland Joyce. _Saturday Review_, 22nd October 1864.
+
+Nothing can be more natural than the extreme dissatisfaction felt by a
+large body of persons in the Church of England at the present Court of
+Final Appeal in matters of doctrine. The grievance, and its effect, may
+have been exaggerated; and the expressions of feeling about it
+certainly have not always been the wisest and most becoming. But as the
+Church of England is acknowledged to hold certain doctrines on matters
+of the highest importance, and, in common with all other religious
+bodies, claims the right of saying what are her own doctrines, it is
+not surprising that an arrangement which seems likely to end in handing
+over to indifferent or unfriendly judges the power of saying what those
+doctrines are, or even whether she has any doctrines at all, should
+create irritation and impatience. There is nothing peculiar to the
+English Church in the assumption, either that outsiders should not
+meddle with and govern what she professes to believe and teach, or
+that the proper and natural persons to deal with theological questions
+are the class set apart to teach and maintain her characteristic
+belief. Whatever may ultimately become of these assumptions, they
+unquestionably represent the ideas which have been derived from the
+earliest and the uniform practice of the Christian Church, and are held
+by most even of the sects which have separated from it. To any one who
+does not look upon the English Church as simply a legally constituted
+department of the State, like the army or navy or the department of
+revenue, and believes it to have a basis and authority of its own,
+antecedent to its rights by statute, there cannot but be a great
+anomaly in an arrangement which, when doctrinal questions are pushed to
+their final issues, seems to deprive her of any voice or control in the
+matters in which she is most interested, and commits them to the
+decision, not merely of a lay, but of a secular and not necessarily
+even Christian court, where the feeling about them is not unlikely to
+be that represented by the story, told by Mr. Joyce, of the eminent
+lawyer who said of some theological debate that he could only decide it
+"by tossing up a coin of the realm." The anomaly of such a court can
+hardly be denied, both as a matter of theory and--supposing it to
+matter at all what Church doctrine really is--as illustrated in some
+late results of its action. It is still more provoking to observe, as
+Mr. Joyce brings out in his historical sketch, that simple carelessness
+and blundering have conspired with the evident tendency of things to
+cripple and narrow the jurisdiction of the Church in what seems to be
+her proper sphere. The ecclesiastical appeals, before the Reformation,
+were to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction alone. They were given to the
+civil power by the Tudor legislation, but to the civil power acting, if
+not by the obligation of law, yet by usage and in fact, through
+ecclesiastical organs and judges. Lastly, by a recent change, of which
+its authors have admitted that they did not contemplate the effect,
+these appeals are now to the civil jurisdiction acting through purely
+civil courts. It is an aggravation of this, when the change which seems
+so formidable has become firmly established, to be told that it was,
+after all, the result of accident and inadvertence, and a "careless use
+of terms in drafting an Act of Parliament"; and that difficult and
+perilous theological questions have come, by "a haphazard chance,"
+before a court which was never meant to decide them. It cannot be
+doubted that those who are most interested in the Church of England
+feel deeply and strongly about keeping up what they believe to be the
+soundness and purity of her professed doctrine; and they think that,
+under fair conditions, they have clear and firm ground for making good
+their position. But it seems by no means unlikely that in the working
+of the Court of Final Appeal there will be found a means of evading the
+substance of questions, and of disposing of very important issues by a
+side wind, to the prejudice of what have hitherto been recognised as
+rightful claims. An arrangement which bears hard upon the Church
+theoretically, as a controversial argument in the hands of Dr. Manning
+or Mr. Binney, and as an additional proof of its Erastian subjection to
+the State, and which also works ill and threatens serious mischief, may
+fairly be regarded by Churchmen with jealousy and dislike, and be
+denounced as injurious to interests for which they have a right to
+claim respect. The complaint that the State is going to force new
+senses on theological terms, or to change by an unavowed process the
+meaning of acknowledged formularies in such a body as the English
+Church, is at least as deserving of attention as the reluctance of
+conscientious Dissenters to pay Church-rates.
+
+Mr. Joyce's book shows comprehensively and succinctly the history of
+the changes which have brought matters to their present point, and the
+look which they wear in the eyes of a zealous Churchman, disturbed both
+by the shock given to his ideas of fitness and consistency, and by the
+prospect of practical evils. It is a clergyman's view of the subject,
+but it is not disposed of by saying that it is a clergyman's view. It
+is incomplete and one-sided, and leaves out considerations of great
+importance which ought to be attended to in forming a judgment on the
+whole question; but it is difficult to say that, regarded simply in
+itself, the claim that the Church should settle her own controversies,
+and that Church doctrine should be judged of in Church courts, is not a
+reasonable one. The truth is that the present arrangement, if we think
+only of its abstract suitableness and its direct and ostensible claims
+to our respect, would need Swift himself to do justice to its exquisite
+unreasonableness. It is absurd to assume, as it is assumed in the whole
+of our ecclesiastical legislation, that the Church is bound to watch
+most jealously over doctrine, and then at the last moment to refuse her
+the natural means of guarding it. It is absurd to assume that the
+"spiritualty" are the only proper persons to teach doctrine, and then
+to act as if they were unfit to judge of doctrine. It is not easy, in
+the abstract, to see why articles which were trusted to clergymen to
+draw up may not be trusted to clergymen to explain, and why what there
+was learning and wisdom enough to do in the violent party times and
+comparative inexperience of the Reformation, cannot be safely left to
+the learning and wisdom of our day for correction or completion. If
+Churchmen and ecclesiastics may care too much for the things about
+which they dispute, it seems undeniable that lawyers who need not even
+be Christians, may care for them too little; and if the Churchmen make
+a mistake in the matter, at least it is their own affair, and they may
+be more fairly made to take the consequences of their own acts than of
+other people's. A strong case, if a strong case were all that was
+wanted, might be made out for a change in the authority which at
+present pronounces in the last resort on Church of England doctrine.
+
+But the difficulty is, not to see that the present state of things,
+which has come about almost by accident, is irregular and
+unsatisfactory, and that in it the civil power has stolen a march on
+the privileges which even Tudors and Hanoverians left to the Church,
+but to suggest what would be more just and more promising. A mixed
+tribunal, composed of laymen and ecclesiastics, would be in effect, as
+Mr. Joyce perceives, simply the present court with a sham colour of
+Church authority added to it; and he describes with candid force the
+confusion which might arise if the lawyers and divines took different
+sides, and how, in the unequal struggle, the latter might "find
+themselves hopelessly prostrate in the stronger grasp of their more
+powerful associates." His own scheme of a theological and
+ecclesiastical committee of reference, to which a purely legal tribunal
+might send down questions of doctrine to be answered, as "experts" or
+juries give answers about matters of science or matters of fact, is
+hardly more hopeful; for even he would not bind the legal court, as of
+course it could not be bound, to accept the doctrine of the
+ecclesiastical committee. He promises, indeed, on the authority of Lord
+Derby, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the lawyers would
+accept the answer of the divines; but whatever the scandal is now, it
+would be far greater if an unorthodox judgment were given in flat
+contradiction to the report of the committee of reference.
+
+As to a purely ecclesiastical Court of Appeal, in the present state of
+the Church both in England and all over the world, it ought to console
+those who must be well aware that here at least it is hardly to be
+looked for, to reflect how such courts act, after all, where they have
+the power to act, and how far things would have gone in a better or
+happier fashion among us if, instead of the Privy Council, there had
+been a tribunal of divines to give final judgment. The history of
+appeals to Rome, from the days of the Jansenists and Fénelon to those
+of Lamennais, may be no doubt satisfactory to those who believe it
+necessary to ascribe to the Pope the highest wisdom and the most
+consummate justice; but to those who venture to notice the real steps
+of the process, and the collateral considerations, political and local,
+which influenced the decision, the review is hardly calculated to make
+those who are debarred from it regret the loss of this unalloyed purity
+of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. And, as regards ourselves, it is true
+that an ecclesiastical tribunal would hardly have been ingenious enough
+to find the means of saying that Messrs. Wilson and Williams had not
+taught in contradiction to the doctrines of the English Church, and
+that they actually, under its present constitution, possessed the
+liberty which, under a different--and, as some people think, a
+better--constitution, they might possess. But it ought also to be borne
+in mind what other judgments ecclesiastical tribunals might have given.
+An ecclesiastical tribunal, unless it had been packed or accidentally
+one-sided, would probably have condemned Mr. Gorham. An ecclesiastical
+tribunal would almost certainly have expelled Archdeacon Denison from
+his preferments. Indeed, the judgment of the Six Doctors on Dr. Pusey,
+arbitrary and unconstitutional as it may be considered, was by no means
+a doubtful foreshadowing of what a verdict upon him would have been
+from any court that we can imagine formed of the high ecclesiastical
+authorities of the time. It undoubtedly seems the most natural thing in
+the world that a great religious body should settle, without hindrance,
+its own doctrines and control its own ministers; but it is also some
+compensation for the perversity with which the course of things has
+interfered with ideal completeness, that our condition, if it had been
+theoretically perfect, would have been perfectly intolerable.
+
+It would be highly unwise in those who direct the counsels of the
+Church of England to accept a practical disadvantage for the gain of a
+greater simplicity and consistency of system. The true moral to be
+deduced from the anomalies of ecclesiastical appeals seems to be, to
+have as little to do with them as possible. The idea of seeking a
+remedy for the perplexities of theology in judicial rulings, and the
+rage for having recourse to law courts, are of recent date in our
+controversies. They were revived among us as one of the results of the
+violent panic caused by the Oxford movement, and of the inconsiderate
+impatience of surprised ignorance which dictated extreme and forcible
+measures; and as this is a kind of game at which, when once started,
+both parties can play, the policy of setting the law in motion to
+silence theological opponents has become a natural and favourite one.
+But it may be some excuse for the legislators who, in 1833, in
+constructing a new Court of Appeal, so completely forgot or underrated
+the functions which it would be called to discharge in the decision of
+momentous doctrinal questions, that at the time no one thought much of
+carrying theological controversies to legal arbitrament. The experiment
+is a natural one to have been made in times of strong and earnest
+religious contention; but, now that it has had its course, it is not
+difficult to see that it was a mistaken one. There seems something
+almost ludicrously incongruous in bringing a theological question into
+the atmosphere and within the technical handling of a law court, and in
+submitting delicate and subtle attempts to grasp the mysteries of the
+unseen and the infinite, of God and the soul, of grace and redemption,
+to the hard logic and intentionally confined and limited view of
+forensic debate. Theological truth, in the view of all who believe in
+it, must always remain independent of a legal decision; and, therefore,
+as regards any real settlement, a theological question must come out of
+a legal sentence in a totally different condition from any others where
+the true and indisputable law of the case is, for the time at least,
+what the supreme tribunal has pronounced it to be. People chafed at not
+getting what they thought the plain broad conclusions from facts and
+documents accepted; they appealed to law from the uncertainty of
+controversy, and found law still more uncertain, and a good deal more
+dangerous. They thought that they were going to condemn crimes and
+expel wrongdoers; they found that these prosecutions inevitably assumed
+the character of the old political trials, which were but an indirect
+and very mischievous form of the struggle between two avowed parties,
+and in which, though the technical question was whether the accused had
+committed the crime, the real one was whether the alleged crime were a
+crime at all. Accordingly, wider considerations than those arising out
+of the strict merits of the case told upon the decision; and the
+negative judgment, and resolute evasion of a condemnation, in each of
+the cases which were of wide and serious importance, were proofs of the
+same tendency in English opinion which has made political trials,
+except in the most extreme cases, almost inconceivable. They mean that
+the questions raised must be fought out and settled in a different and
+more genuine way, and that law feels itself out of place when called to
+interfere in them. As all parties have failed in turning the law into a
+weapon, and yet as all parties have really gained much more than they
+have lost by the odd anomalies of our ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the
+wisest course would seem to be for those who feel the deep importance
+of doctrinal questions to leave the law alone, either as to employing
+it or attempting to change it. Controversy, argument, the display of
+the intrinsic and inherent strength of a great and varied system, are
+what all causes must in the last resort trust to. Lord Westbury will
+have done the Church of England more good than perhaps he thought of
+doing, if his _dicta_ make theologians see that they can be much better
+and more hopefully employed than in trying legal conclusions with
+unorthodox theorisers, or in busying themselves with inventing
+imaginary improvements for a Final Court of Appeal.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+PRIVY COUNCIL JUDGMENTS[4]
+
+
+  [4]
+  _A Collection of the Judgments of the Judicial Committee of the Privy
+  Council in Ecclesiastical Cases relating to Doctrine and Discipline;
+  with a Preface by the Lord Bishop of London, and an Historical
+  Introduction_. Edited by the Hon. G. Brodrick, Barrister-at-Law, and
+  Rev. the Hon. W.H. Fremantle, Chaplain to the Bishop of London.
+  _Guardian_, 15th February 1865.
+
+The Bishop of London has done a useful service in causing the various
+decisions of the present Court of Appeal to be collected into a volume.
+There is such an obvious convenience about the plan that it hardly
+needed the conventional reason given for it, that "the knowledge
+generally possessed on the subject of the Court is vague, and the
+sources from which accurate information can be obtained are little
+understood; and that people who discuss it ought in the first place to
+know what the Court is, and what it does." This is the mere customary
+formula of a preface turned into a rhetorical insinuation which would
+have been better away; most of those who care about the subject, and
+have expressed opinions about it, know pretty well the nature of the
+Court and the result of its working, and whatever variations there may
+be in the judgment passed upon it arise not from any serious
+imperfection of knowledge but from differences of principle. It was
+hardly suitable in a work like this to assume a mystery and obscurity
+about the subject where there is really none, and to claim superior
+exactness and authenticity of information about a matter which in all
+its substantial points is open to all the world. And we could conceive
+the design, well-intentioned as it is, carried out in a way more
+fitting to the gravity of the occasion which has suggested it. The
+Bishop says truly enough that the questions involved in the
+constitution of such a court are some of the most difficult with which
+statesmen have to deal. Therefore it seems to us that a collection of
+the decisions of such a court, put forth for the use of the Church and
+nation under the authority of the Bishop of London, ought to have had
+the dignity and the reserve of a work meant for permanence and for the
+use of men of various opinions, and ought not to have had even the
+semblance, as this book has, of an _ex parte_ pamphlet. The Bishop of
+London is, of course, quite right to let the Church know what he thinks
+about the Court of Final Appeal; and he is perfectly justified in
+recommending us, in forming our opinion, to study carefully the facts
+of the existing state of things; but it seems hardly becoming to make
+the facts a vehicle for indirectly forcing on us, in the shape of
+comments, a very definite and one-sided view of them, which is the very
+subject of vehement contradiction and dispute. It would have been
+better to have committed what was necessary in the way of explanation
+and illustration to some one of greater weight and experience than two
+clever young men of strong bias and manifest indisposition to respect
+or attend to, or even to be patient with, any aspect of the subject but
+their own in this complicated and eventful question, and who, partly
+from overlooking great and material elements in it, and partly from an
+imperfect apprehension of what they had to do, have failed to present
+even the matters of fact with which they deal with the necessary
+exactness and even-handedness. It seems to us that in a work intended
+for the general use of the Church and addressed to men of all opinions,
+they only remember to be thoroughgoing advocates and justifiers of the
+Court which happens to have grown into such important consequence to
+the English Church. The position is a perfectly legitimate one; but we
+think it had better not have been connected with a documentary work
+like the present, set forth by the direction and under the sanction of
+a Bishop of London.
+
+In looking over the cases which have been brought together into a
+connected series, the first point which is suggested by the review is
+the great and important change in the aspect and bearing of doctrinal
+controversies, and in the situation of the Church, as affected by them,
+which the creation and action of this Court have made. From making it
+almost a matter of principle and boast to dispense with any living
+judge of controversies, the Church has passed to having a very
+energetic one. Up to the Gorham judgment, it can hardly be said that
+the ruling of courts of law had had the slightest influence on the
+doctrinal position and character of the Church. Keen and fierce as had
+been the controversies in the Church up to that judgment, how often had
+a legal testing of her standards been seriously sought for or seriously
+appealed to? There had been accusations of heresy, trials,
+condemnations, especially in the times following the Reformation and
+preceding the Civil War; there had been appeals and final judgments
+given in such final courts as existed; but all without making any mark
+on the public mind or the received meaning of doctrines and
+formularies, and without leaving a trace except in law reports. They
+seem to have been forgotten as soon as the particular case was disposed
+of. The limits of supposed orthodox belief revived; but it was not the
+action of judicial decisions which either narrowed or enlarged them.
+Bishop Marsh's Calvinists never thought of having recourse to law. If
+the Church did not do entirely without a Court of Final Appeal, it is
+simply a matter of fact that the same weight and authority were not
+attached to the proceedings of such a court which are attached to them
+now. But since the Gorham case, the work of settling authoritatively,
+if not the meaning of doctrines and of formularies, at any rate the
+methods of interpreting and applying them, has been briskly going on in
+the courts, and a law laid down by judges without appeal has been
+insensibly fastening its hold upon us. The action of the courts is
+extolled as being all in the direction of liberty. Whatever this praise
+may be worth, it is to be observed that it is, after all, a wooden sort
+of liberty, and shuts up quite as much as it opens. It may save, in
+this case or that, individual liberty; but it does so by narrowing
+artificially the natural and common-sense grounds of argument in
+religious controversy, and abridging as much as possible the province
+of theology. Before the Gorham case, the Formularies in general were
+the standard and test, free to both sides, about baptismal
+regeneration. Both parties had the ground open to them, to make what
+they could of them by argument and reason. Discipline was limited by
+the Articles and Formularies, and in part by the authority of great
+divines and by the prevailing opinion of the Church, and by nothing
+else; these were the means which each side had to convince and persuade
+and silence the other, and each side might hope that in the course of
+time its sounder and better supported view might prevail. But now upon
+this state of things comes from without a dry, legal, narrow
+stereotyping, officially and by authority, of the sense to be put upon
+part of the documents in the controversy. You appeal to the
+Prayer-book; your opponent tells you, Oh, the Court of Appeal has ruled
+against you there: and that part of your case is withdrawn from you,
+and he need give himself no trouble to argue the matter with you.
+Against certain theological positions, perhaps of great weight, and
+theological evidence, comes, not only the doctrine of theological
+opponents, but the objection that they are bad law. The interpretation
+which, it may be, we have assumed all our lives, and which we know to
+be that of Fathers and divines, is suddenly pronounced not to be legal.
+The decision does not close the controversy, which goes on as keenly
+and with perhaps a little more exasperation than before; it simply
+stops off, by virtue of a legal construction, a portion of the field of
+argument for one party, which was, perhaps, supposed to have the
+strongest claim to it. The Gorham case bred others; and now, at last,
+after fifteen years, we have got, as may be seen in Messrs. Brodrick
+and Fremantle's book, a body of judicial _dicta_, interpretations,
+rules of exposition, and theological propositions, which have grown up
+in the course of these cases, and which in various ways force a meaning
+and construction on the theological standards and language of the
+Church, which in some instances they were never thought to have, and
+which they certainly never had authoritatively before. Besides her
+Articles and Prayer-hook, speaking the language of divines and open to
+each party to interpret according to the strength and soundness of
+their theological ground, we are getting a supplementary set of legal
+limitations and glosses, claiming to regulate theological argument if
+not teaching, and imposed upon us by the authority not of the Church or
+even of Parliament but of the Judges of the Privy Council. This, it
+strikes us, is a new position of things in the Church, a new
+understanding and a changed set of conditions on which to carry on
+controversies of doctrine; and it seems to us to have a serious
+influence not only on the responsibility of the Church for her own
+doctrine, but on the freedom and genuineness with which questions as to
+that doctrine are discussed. The Court is not to blame for this result;
+to do it justice, it has generally sought to decide as little as it
+could; and the interference of law with the province of pure theology
+is to be rather attributed to that mania for deciding, which of late
+has taken possession pretty equally of all parties. But the
+indisputable result is seen to be, after the experience of fifteen
+years, that law is taking a place in our theological disputes and our
+theological system which is new to it in our theological history; law,
+not laid down prospectively in general provisions, but emerging
+indirectly and incidentally out of constructions and judicial rulings
+on cases of pressing and hazardous exigency; law, applying its
+technical and deliberately narrow processes to questions which of
+course it cannot solve, but can only throw into formal and inadequate,
+if not unreal, terms; and laying down the limits of belief and
+assertion on matters about which hearts burn and souls tremble, by the
+mouth of judges whose consummate calmness and ability is only equalled
+by their profound and avowed want of sympathy for the theology of which
+their position makes them the expounders and final arbiters. A system
+has begun with respect to English Church doctrine, analogous to that by
+which Lord Stowell made the recent law of the sea, or that by which on
+a larger scale the rescripts and decrees of the Popes moulded the great
+system of the canon law.
+
+This is the first thing that strikes us on a comparative survey of this
+set of decisions. The second point is one which at first sight seems
+greatly to diminish the importance of this new condition of things, but
+which on further consideration is seen to have a more serious bearing
+than might have been thought. This is, the odd haphazard way in which
+points have come up for decision; the sort of apparent chance which has
+finally governed the issue of the various contentions; and the
+infinitesimally fine character of the few propositions of doctrine to
+which the Court has given the sanction of its ruling. Knowing what we
+all of us cannot help knowing, and seeing things which lawyers and
+judges are bound not to allow themselves to see or take account of, we
+find it difficult to repress the feeling of amazement, as we travel
+through the volume, to see Mr. Gorham let off, Mr. Heath deprived, then
+Dr. Williams and Mr. Wilson let off, and to notice the delicate
+technical point which brought to nought the laborious and at one time
+hopeful efforts of the worthy persons who tried to turn out Archdeacon
+Denison. And as to the matter of the decisions, though undoubtedly
+_dicta_ of great importance are laid down in the course of them, yet it
+is curious to observe the extremely minute and insignificant statements
+on which in the more important cases judgment is actually pronounced.
+The Gorham case was held to affect the position of a great party; but
+the language and theory actually examined and allowed would hardly, in
+legal strictness, authorise much more than the very peculiar views of
+Mr. Gorham himself. And in the last case, the outside lay world has
+hardly yet done wondering at the consummate feat of legal subtlety by
+which the issue whether the English Church teaches that the Bible is
+inspired was transmuted into the question whether it teaches that every
+single part of every single book is inspired. It might seem that
+rulings, of which the actual product in the way of doctrinal
+propositions was so small, were hardly subjects for any keen interest.
+But it would be shortsighted to regard the matter in this way. In the
+first place, whatever may have happened as yet, it is manifestly a
+serious thing for Church of England doctrine to have been thrown, on a
+scale which is quite new, into the domain of a court of law, to lie at
+the mercy of the confessed chances and uncertainties of legal
+interpretation, with nothing really effective to correct and remedy
+what may possibly be, without any fault in the judges, a fatally
+mischievous construction of the text and letter of her authoritative
+documents. In the next place, no one can fail to see, no one in fact
+affects to deny, that the general result of these recent decisions,
+capricious as their conclusions look at first sight, has been to make
+the Formularies mean much less than they were supposed to mean. The
+tendency of every English court, appealed to not as a court of equity
+but one of criminal jurisdiction, is naturally to be exacting and even
+narrow in the interpretation of language. The general impression left
+by these cases is that the lines of doctrine in the English Church are
+regarded by the judicial mind as very faint, and not much to be
+depended upon; and that these judgments may be the first steps in that
+insensible process by which the unpretending but subtle and powerful
+engine of interpretation has been applied by the courts to give a
+certain turn to law and policy; applied, in this instance, to undermine
+the definiteness and certainty of doctrine, and in the end, the
+understanding itself which has hitherto existed between the Church and
+the State, and has kept alive the idea of her distinct basis,
+functions, and rights.
+
+This is the view of matters which arises from an examination of the
+proceedings contained in this volume. What is the argument urged in the
+Historical Introduction to justify or recommend our acquiescence in it?
+It seems to us to consist mainly in a one-sided and exaggerated
+statement of the Supremacy claimed and brought in by Henry VIII., and
+of the effect in theory and fact which it ought to have on our notion
+of the Church and of Church right. The complaint of the present state
+of things is, that those who may be taken to represent the interests of
+the Church in such a matter as the character of her teaching are
+practically excluded from having any real influence in the decision of
+questions by which the character of that teaching is affected. The
+answer is that she has no right to claim a separate interest in the
+matter, and that the doctrine of the Royal Supremacy was meant to
+extinguish, and has extinguished, any pretence to such a claim. The
+_animus_ which pervades the work, and which is not obscurely disclosed
+in such things as footnotes and abridgments of legal arguments, is thus
+given--more freely, of course, than it would be proper to introduce in
+a book like this--in some remarks of Mr. Brodrick, one of the editors,
+at a recent discussion of the question of Ecclesiastical Appeals in a
+committee of the Social Science Association. He is reported to have
+spoken as follows:--
+
+    The Church of England being established by law, could not be
+    allowed any independence of action; and those who wished for it
+    were like people who wanted to have their cake and eat it. As to
+    the Privy Council, he had never heard its decisions charged with
+    error. What was complained of was that it had declined to take the
+    current opinions of theologians and make them part of the
+    Thirty-nine Articles. There was no need whatever for the Privy
+    Council to possess any special theological knowledge. The only
+    case where that knowledge was necessary was when it was alleged
+    that doctrines had been held in the Church without censure. That
+    was a case in which considerable theological lore was required;
+    but it was within the province of counsel to supply it. Divines
+    had now discovered, what lawyers could have told them long ago,
+    and what he knew some of them had been told--namely, that it would
+    not do to treat the Thirty-nine Articles as penal statutes;
+    because, if that were done, a coach might be easily driven through
+    them. If they had wished to maintain the authority of the
+    Articles, they would have done best to have kept quiet.
+
+The present Court of Appeal is deduced, in the Historical Introduction,
+as a natural and logical consequence, from Henry VIII.'s Supremacy.
+Undoubtedly it is scarcely possible to overstate the all-grasping
+despotism of Henry VIII., and if a precedent for anything reckless of
+all separate rights and independence should be wanted, it would never
+be sought in vain if looked for in the policy and legislation of that
+reign. So far the editors are right; the power over religion claimed by
+Henry VIII. will carry them wherever they want to go; it will give
+them, if they need it, as a still more logical and legitimate
+development of the Supremacy, the Court of High Commission. Only they
+ought to have remembered, as fair historians, that even in the days of
+the Supremacy the distinct nature and business of the Church and of
+Churchmen was never denied. Laymen were given powers over the Church
+and in the Church which were new; but the distinct province of the
+Church, if abridged and put under new control, was not abolished. Side
+by side with the facts showing the Supremacy and its exercise are a set
+of facts, for those who choose to see them, showing that the Church was
+still recognised, even by Henry VIII., as a body which he had not
+created, which he was obliged to take account of, and which filled a
+place utterly different from every other body in the State. Henry VIII.
+played the tyrant with his Churchmen as he did with his Parliament and
+with everybody else; and Churchmen, like everybody else, submitted to
+him. But the "Imperialism" of Henry VIII., though it went beyond even
+the Imperialism of Justinian and Charlemagne in its encroachments on
+the spiritual power, as little denied the fact of that power as they
+did. He recognised the distinct place and claims of the spiritualty;
+and, as we suppose that even the editors of this volume hardly feel
+themselves bound to make out the consistency of Henry, they might have
+spared themselves the weak and not very fair attempt to get rid of the
+force of the remarkable words in which this recognition is recorded in
+the first Statute of Appeals (24 Henry VIII. c. 12). The words would,
+no doubt, be worth but little, were it not that as a matter of fact a
+spiritualty did act and judge and lay down doctrine, and even while
+yielding to unworthy influence did keep up their corporate existence.
+
+But when the ecclesiastical legislation of Henry VIII. is referred to,
+not merely as the historical beginning of a certain state of things
+which has undergone great changes in the course of events, but as
+affording a sort of idea and normal pattern to which our own
+arrangements ought to conform, as supplying us with a theory of Church
+and State which holds good at least against the Church, it seems hard
+that the Church alone should not have the benefit of the entire
+alteration of circumstances since that theory was a reality. Those who
+talk about the Supremacy ought to remember what the Supremacy pretended
+to be. It was over _all_ causes and _all_ persons, civil as well as
+ecclesiastical. It held good certainly in theory, and to a great extent
+in practice, against the temporalty as much as against the spiritualty.
+Why then are we to invoke the Supremacy as then understood, in a
+question about courts of spiritual appeals, and not in questions about
+other courts and other powers in the nation? If the Supremacy, claimed
+and exercised as Henry claimed and exercised it, is good against the
+Church, it is good against many other things besides. If the Church
+inherits bonds and obligations, not merely by virtue of distinct
+statutes, but by the force of a general vague arbitrary theory of royal
+power, why has that power been expelled, or transformed into a mere
+fiction of law, in all other active branches of the national life?
+Unless the Church is simply, what even Henry VIII. did not regard it, a
+creation and delegate of the national power, without any roots and
+constitution of its own, why should the Church be denied the benefit of
+the common sense, and the change in ideas and usage, which have been so
+largely appealed to in civil matters? Why are we condemned to a theory
+which is not only out of date and out of harmony with all the
+traditions and convictions of modern times, hut which was in its own
+time tyrannous, revolutionary, and intolerable? Arguments in favour of
+the present Court, drawn from the reason of the thing, and the
+comparative fitness of the judges for their office, if we do not agree
+with them, at least we can understand. But precedents and arguments
+from the Supremacy of Henry VIII. suggest the question whether those
+who use them are ready to be taken at their word and to have back that
+Supremacy as it was; and whether the examples of policy of that reign
+are seemly to quote as adequate measures of the liberty and rights of
+any set of Englishmen.
+
+The question really calling for solution is--How to reconcile the just
+freedom of individual teachers in the Church with the maintenance of
+the right and duty of the Church to uphold the substantial meaning of
+her body of doctrine? In answering this question we can get no help
+from this volume. It simply argues that the present is practically the
+best of all possible courts; that it is a great improvement, which
+probably it is, on the Courts of Delegates; and that great confidence
+ought to be felt in its decisions. We are further shown how jealously
+and carefully the judges have guarded the right of the individual
+teacher. But it seems to us, according to the views put forward in this
+book, that as the price of all this--of great learning, weight, and
+ability in the judges--of great care taken of liberty--the Church is
+condemned to an interpretation of the Royal Supremacy which floats
+between the old arbitrary view of it and the modern Liberal one, and
+which uses each, as it happens to be most convenient, against the claim
+of the Church to protect her doctrine and exert a real influence on the
+authoritative declaration of it. We all need liberty, and we all ought
+to be ready to give the reasonable liberty which we profess to claim
+for ourselves. But it is a heavy price to pay for it, if the right and
+the power is to be taken out of the hands of the Church to declare what
+is the real meaning of what she supposes herself bound to teach.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SIR JOHN COLERIDGE ON THE PURCHAS CASE[5]
+
+
+  [5]
+  _Remarks on Some Parts of the Report of the Judicial Committee in
+  the Case of "Elphinstone against Purchas."_ A Letter to Canon Liddon,
+  from the Right Hon. Sir J.T. Coleridge. _Guardian_, 5th April 1871.
+
+No one has more right to speak with authority, or more deserves to be
+listened to at a difficult and critical moment for the Church, than Sir
+J.T. Coleridge. An eminent lawyer, and a most earnest and well-informed
+Churchman, he combines in an unusual way claims on the attention of all
+who care for the interests of religion, and for those, too, which are
+so deeply connected with them, the interests of England. The troubles
+created by the recent judgment have induced him to come forward from
+his retirement with words of counsel and warning.
+
+The gist of his Letter may be shortly stated. He is inclined to think
+the decision arrived at by the Judicial Committee a mistaken one. But
+he thinks that it would be a greater and a worse mistake to make this
+decision, wrong as it may be, a reason for looking favourably on
+disestablishment as a remedy for what is complained of. We are glad to
+note the judgment of so fair an observer and so distinguished a lawyer,
+himself a member of the Privy Council, both on the intrinsic
+suitableness and appropriateness of the position[6] which has been
+ruled to be illegal, and on the unsatisfactoriness of the
+interpretation itself, as a matter of judicial reading and
+construction. A great deal has been said, and it is plain that the
+topic is inexhaustible, on the unimportance of a position. We agree
+entirely--on condition that people remember the conditions and
+consequences of their assertion. Every single outward accompaniment of
+worship may, if you carry your assertion to its due level, be said to
+be in itself utterly unimportant; place and time and form and attitude
+are all things not belonging to the essence of the act itself, and are
+indefinitely changeable, as, in fact, the changes in them have been
+countless. Kneeling is not of the essence of prayer, but imagine, first
+prohibiting the posture of kneeling, and then remonstrating with those
+who complained of the prohibition, on the ground of postures being
+unimportant. It is obvious that when you have admitted to the full that
+a position is in itself unimportant, all kinds of reasons may come in
+on the further question whether it is right, fitting, natural. There
+are reasons why the position which has been so largely adopted of late
+is the natural and suitable one. Sir John Coleridge states them
+admirably:--
+
+  [6]
+  The Eastward Position at the celebration of the Holy Communion.
+
+    As to the place of standing at the consecration, my _feeling_ is
+    with them. It seems to me not desirable to make it essential or
+    even important that the people should see the breaking of the
+    bread, or the taking the cup into the hands of the priest, and
+    positively mischievous to encourage them in gazing on him, or
+    watching him with critical eyes while so employed. I much prefer
+    the _spirit of_ the Rubric of 1549--First Book of Edward
+    VI.--which says, "These words before rehearsed are to be said
+    turning still to the Altar, without any elevation, or showing the
+    Sacraments to the people." The use now enforced, I think, tends to
+    deprive the most solemn rite of our religion of one of its most
+    solemn particulars. Surely, whatever school we belong to, and even
+    if we consider the whole rite merely commemorative, it is a very
+    solemn idea to conceive the priest at the head of his flock, and,
+    as it were, a shepherd leading them on in heart and spirit,
+    imploring for them and with them the greatest blessing which man
+    is capable of receiving on earth; he alone uttering the
+    prayer--they meanwhile kneeling all, and in deep silence
+    listening, not gazing, rather with closed eyes--and with their
+    whole undistracted attention, joining in the prayer with one heart
+    and without sound until the united "Amen" breaks from them at the
+    close, and seals their union and assent.
+
+But, of course, comes the further question, whether, an English
+clergyman is authorised to use it. He is not authorised if the Prayer
+Book tells him not to. Of that there is no question. But if the Prayer
+Book not only seems to give him the liberty, but, by the _prima facie_
+look of its words, seems to prescribe it, the harshness of a ruling
+which summarily and under penalties prohibits it is not to be smoothed
+down by saying that the matter is unimportant. Sir John Coleridge's
+view of the two points will be read with interest:--
+
+    You will understand, of course, that I write in respect of the
+    Report recently made by the Judicial Committee in the Purchas
+    case. I am not about to defend it. No one, however, ought to
+    pronounce a condemnation of the solemn judgment of such a tribunal
+    without much consideration; and this remark applies with, special
+    force to myself, well knowing as I do those from whom it
+    proceeded, and having withdrawn from sharing in the labours of the
+    Committee only because age had impaired, with the strength of my
+    body, the faculties also of my mind; and so disabled me from the
+    proper discharge of any judicial duties. With this admission on my
+    part, I yet venture to say that I think Mr. Purchas has not had
+    justice done to him in two main points of the late appeal; I mean
+    the use of the vestments complained of and the side of the
+    communion-table which he faced when consecrating the elements for
+    the Holy Communion. Before I state my reasons, let me premise that
+    I am no Ritualist, in the now conventional use of the term. I do
+    not presume to judge of the motives of those to whom that name is
+    applied. From the information of common but undisputed report as
+    to some of the most conspicuous, I believe them entitled to all
+    praise for their pastoral devotedness and their laborious,
+    self-denying lives; still, I do not shrink from saying that I
+    think them misguided, and the cause of mischief in the Church. So
+    much for my _feeling_ in regard to the vestments. I prefer the
+    surplice at all times and in all ministrations.
+
+    This is _feeling_--and I see no word in the sober language of our
+    rubric which interferes with it--but my _feeling_ is of no
+    importance in the argument, and I mention it only in candour, to
+    show in what spirit I approach the argument.
+
+    Now Mr. Purchas has been tried before the Committee for offences
+    alleged to have been committed against the provisions of the "Act
+    of Uniformity"; of this Act the Common Prayer Book is part and
+    parcel. As to the vestments, his conduct was alleged to be in
+    derogation of the rubric as to the ornaments of the Church and the
+    ministers thereof, which ordains that such shall be retained and
+    be in use as were in the Church of England by the authority of
+    Parliament in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI. The
+    Act of Uniformity is to be construed by the same rules exactly as
+    any Act passed in the last session of Parliament. The clause in
+    question (by which I mean the rubric in question) is perfectly
+    unambiguous in language, free from all difficulty as to
+    construction; it therefore lets in no argument as to intention
+    otrier than that which the words themselves import. There might be
+    a seeming difficulty in _fact_, because it might not be known what
+    vestments were in use by authority of Parliament in the second
+    year of the reign of King Edward VI.; but this difficulty has been
+    removed. It is conceded in the Report that the vestments, the use
+    of which is now condemned, were in use by authority of Parliament
+    in that year. Having that fact, you are bound to construe the
+    rubric as if those vestments were specifically named in it,
+    instead of being only referred to. If an Act should be passed
+    to-morrow that the uniform of the Guards should henceforth be such
+    as was ordered for them by authority and used by them in the 1st
+    George I., you would first ascertain what that uniform was; and,
+    having ascertained it, you would not inquire into the changes
+    which may have been made, many or few, with or without lawful
+    authority, between the 1st George I. and the passing of the new
+    Act. All these, that Act, specifying the earlier date, would have
+    made wholly immaterial. It would have seemed strange, I suppose,
+    if a commanding officer, disobeying the statute, had said in his
+    defence, "There have been many changes since the reign of George
+    I.; and as to 'retaining,' we put a gloss on that, and thought it
+    might mean only retaining to the Queen's use; so we have put the
+    uniforms safely in store." But I think it would have seemed more
+    strange to punish and mulct him severely if he had obeyed the law
+    and put no gloss on plain words.
+
+    This case stands on the same principle. The rubric indeed seems to
+    me to imply with some clearness that in the long interval between
+    Edward VI. and the 14th Charles II. there had been many changes;
+    but it does not stay to specify them, or distinguish between what
+    was mere evasion and what was lawful; it quietly passes them all
+    by, and goes back to the legalised usage of the second year of
+    Edward VI. What had prevailed since, whether by an Archbishop's
+    gloss, by Commissions, or even Statutes, whether, in short, legal
+    or illegal, it makes quite immaterial.
+
+    I forbear to go through the long inquiry which these last words
+    remind one of--not, I am sure, out of any disrespectful feeling to
+    the learned and reverend authors of the Report, but because it
+    seems to me wholly irrelevant to the point for decision. This
+    alone I must add, that even were the inquiry relevant, the
+    authorities on which they rely do not appear to me so clear or
+    cogent, nor the analogies relied on so just, as to warrant the
+    conclusion arrived at. For it should never be forgotten that the
+    defendant in a criminal case, acquitted as to this charge by the
+    learned judge below, was entitled to every presumption in his
+    favour, and could not properly be condemned but by a judgment free
+    from all reasonable doubt. And this remark acquires additional
+    strength because the judgment will be final not only on him but on
+    the whole Church for all time, unless reversed by the Legislature.
+
+On the second point he thus speaks, in terms which for their guarded
+moderation are all the more worth notice:--
+
+    Upon the second point I have less to say, though it is to me much
+    the most important. The Report, I think, cannot be shown
+    conclusively to be wrong here, as it may be on the other; still it
+    does not seem to me to be shown conclusively to be right. You have
+    yourself given no reason in your second letter of the 8th March
+    for doubting at least.
+
+    Let me add that, in my opinion, on such a question as this, where
+    a conclusion is to be arrived at upon the true meaning of Rubrics
+    framed more than two centuries since, and certainly not with a
+    view to any such minute criticism as on these occasions is and
+    must be applied to them, and where the evidence of facts is by no
+    means clear, none probably can be arrived at free from reasonable
+    objection. What is the consequence? It will be asked, Is the
+    question to receive no judicial solution? I am not afraid to
+    answer, Better far that it should receive none than that injustice
+    should be done. The principles of English law furnish the
+    practical solution: dismiss the party charged, unless his
+    conviction can be based on grounds on which reasonable and
+    competent minds can rest satisfied and without scruple. And what
+    mighty mischief will result to countervail the application of this
+    rule of justice? For two centuries our Church has subsisted
+    without an answer to the question which alone gives importance to
+    this inquiry, and surely has not been without God's blessing for
+    that time, in spite of all much more serious shortcomings. Let us
+    remember that Charity, or to use perhaps a better word, Love, is
+    the greatest of all; if that prevail there need be little fear for
+    our Faith or our Hope.
+
+Having said this much, Sir John Coleridge proceeds to the second, and
+indeed the main object of his letter--to remonstrate against
+exaggeration in complaint, both of the particular decision and of the
+Court which gave it:--
+
+    I now return to your letter. You proceed to attempt to show that
+    the words of Keble to yourself, which you cite, are justified by
+    remarks in this Report and some previous judgments of the same
+    tribunal, which appear to you so inconsistent with each other as
+    to make it difficult to believe that the Court was impartial, or
+    "incapable of regarding the documents before it in the light of a
+    plastic material, which might be made to support conclusions held
+    to be advisable at the moment, and on independent grounds." I wish
+    these words had never been written. They will, I fear, be
+    understood as conveying your formed opinions; and coming from you,
+    and addressed to minds already excited and embittered, they will
+    be readily accepted, though they import the heaviest charges
+    against judges--some of them bishops--all of high and hitherto
+    unimpeached character. A very long experience of judicial life
+    makes me know that judges will often provoke and bitterly
+    disappoint both the suitors before them and the public, when
+    discharging their duty honestly and carefully, and a man is
+    scarcely fit for the station unless he can sit tolerably easy
+    under censures which even these may pass upon him. Yet,
+    imputations of partiality or corruption are somewhat hard to bear
+    when they are made by persons of your station and character. When
+    the Judicial Committee sits on appeals from the Spiritual Courts,
+    it _may_ certainly be under God's displeasure, the members _may_
+    be visited with judicial blindness, and deprived of the integrity
+    which in other times and cases they manifest. Against such a
+    supposition there is no direct argument, and I will not enter into
+    such a disputation. I have so much confidence in your generosity
+    and candour, on reflection, as to believe you would not desire I
+    should.
+
+    In the individual case I simply protest against the insinuation. I
+    add a word or two by way of general observation.
+
+    No doubt you have read the judgments in all the cases you allude
+    to carefully; but have you read the pleadings and arguments of the
+    counsel, so as to know accurately the points raised for the
+    consideration of those who were to decide? To know the offence
+    charged and the judgment pronounced may suffice in some cases for
+    an opinion by a competent person, whether the one warranted the
+    other; but more is required to warrant the imputation of
+    inconsistency, partiality, or indirect motives. He who takes this
+    on himself should know further how the pleadings and the arguments
+    presented the case for judgment, and made this or that particular
+    relevant in the discussion. Every one at all familiar with this
+    matter knows that a judgment not uncommonly fails to reflect the
+    private opinion of the judge on the whole of a great point,
+    because the issues of law or fact actually brought before him, and
+    which alone he was bound to decide, did not bring this before him.
+    And this rule, always binding, is, of course, never more so than
+    in regard to a Court of Final Appeal, which should be careful not
+    to conclude more than is regularly before it. Let me add that a
+    just and considerate person will wholly disregard the gossip which
+    flies about in regard to cases exciting much interest; passing
+    words in the course of an argument, forgotten when the judgment
+    comes to be considered, are too often caught up, as having guided
+    the final determination.
+
+Such words are a just rebuke to much of the inconsiderate talk which
+follows on any public act which touches the feelings, perhaps the
+highest and purest feelings of men with deep convictions. Perhaps Mr.
+Liddon's words were unguarded ones. But at the same time it is
+necessary to state without disguise what is the truth in this matter.
+It is necessary for the sake of justice and historical truth. The Court
+of Final Appeal is not like other courts. It is not a pure and simple
+court of law, though it is composed of great lawyers. It is doubtless a
+court where their high training and high professional honour come in,
+as they do elsewhere. But great lawyers are men, partisans and
+politicians, statesmen, if you like; and this is a court where they are
+not precluded, in the same degree as they are in the regular courts by
+the habits and prescriptions of the place, from thinking of what comes
+before them in its relation to public affairs. It is no mere invention
+of disappointed partisans, it is no idle charge of wilful unfairness,
+to say that considerations of high policy come into their
+deliberations; it has been the usual language, ever since the Gorham
+case, of men who cared little for the subject-matter of the questions
+debated; it is the language of those who urge the advantages of the
+Court. "It is a court," as the Bishop of Manchester said the other day,
+speaking in its praise, "composed of men who look at things not merely
+with the eyes of lawyers, but also with the eyes of statesmen."
+Precisely so; and for that reason they must be considered to have the
+responsibilities, not only of lawyers, but of statesmen, and their acts
+are proportionably open to discussion. Sir John Coleridge urges the
+impossibility of any other court; and certainly till we could be
+induced to trust an ecclesiastical court, composed of bishops or
+clergymen, in a higher degree than we could do at present, we see no
+alternative. But to say that a clerical court would be no improvement
+is not to prove that the present court is a satisfactory one. It may be
+difficult under our present circumstances to reform it. But though we
+may have reasons for making the best of it, we may be allowed to say
+that it is a singularly ill-imagined and ill-constructed court, and one
+in which the great features of English law and justice are not so
+conspicuous as they are elsewhere. Suitors do not complain in other
+courts either of the ruling, or sometimes of the language of judges, as
+they complain in this. But when this is made a ground for joining with
+the enemies of all that the English Church holds dear, to bring about a
+great break-up of the existing state of things, we agree with Sir John
+Coleridge in thinking that a great mistake is made; and if care is not
+taken, it may be an irreparable one. He writes:--
+
+    I hasten to my conclusion too long delayed, but a word must still
+    be added on a subject of not less consequence than any I have yet
+    touched on. You say, "Churchmen will to a very great extent indeed
+    find relief from the dilemma in a third course, viz. _co-operation
+    with the political forces_, which, year by year, more and more
+    steadily are working towards disestablishment. This is not a
+    menace; it is the statement of a simple fact." I am bound to
+    believe, and I do believe, you do not intend this as a menace; but
+    such a statement of a future course to depend on a contingency
+    cannot but read very much like one--and against your intention it
+    may well be understood as such. You do not say that _you_ are one
+    who will co-operate with the political party which now seeks to
+    disestablish the Church in accomplishing its purpose, and I do not
+    suppose you ever will. But on behalf, not so much of the clergy as
+    of the laity--on behalf of the worshippers in our churches, of the
+    sick to be visited at home--of the poor in their cottages, of our
+    children in their schools--of our society in general, I entreat
+    those of the clergy who are now feeling the most acutely in this
+    matter, not to suffer their minds to be so absorbed by the present
+    grievance as to take no thought of the evils of disestablishment.
+    I am not foolishly blind to the faults of the clergy--indeed I
+    fear I am sometimes censorious in regard to them--and some of
+    their faults I do think may be referable to Establishment; the
+    possession of house and land, and a sort of independence of their
+    parishioners, in some cases seems to tend to secularity. I regret
+    sometimes their partisanship at elections, their speeches at
+    public dinners. But what good gift of God is not liable to abuse
+    from men? Taken as a whole, we have owed, and we do owe, under
+    Him, to our Established clergy more than we can ever repay, much
+    of it rendered possible by their Establishment. I may refer, and
+    now with special force, to Education--their services in this
+    respect no one denies--and but for Establishment these, I think,
+    could not have been so effectively and systematically rendered. We
+    are now in a great crisis as to this all-important matter.
+    Concurring, as I do heartily, in the praise which has been
+    bestowed on Mr. Forster, and expecting that his great and arduous
+    office will be discharged with perfect impartiality by him, and
+    with a just sense of how much is due to the clergy in this
+    respect, still it cannot be denied that the powers conferred by
+    the Legislature on the holder of it are alarmingly great, even if
+    necessary; and who shall say in what a spirit they may be
+    exercised by his successor? For the general upholding of religious
+    education, in emergencies not improbable, to whom can we look in
+    general so confidently as to the parochial clergy? I speak now
+    specially in regard to parishes such as I am most familiar with,
+    in agricultural districts, small, not largely endowed, sometimes
+    without resident gentry, and with the land occupied by
+    rack-renting farmers, indifferent or hostile to education.
+
+In what Sir John Coleridge urges against the fatal step of welcoming
+disestablishment under an impatient sense of injustice we need not say
+that we concur most earnestly. But it cannot be too seriously
+considered by those who see the mischief of disestablishment, that as
+Sir John Coleridge also says, the English Churrh is, in one sense, a
+divided one; and that to pursue a policy of humiliating and crippling
+one of its great parties must at last bring mischief. The position of
+the High Church party is a remarkable one. It has had more against it
+than its rivals; yet it is probably the strongest of them all. It is
+said, probably with reason, to be the unpopular party. It has been the
+stock object of abuse and sarcasm with a large portion of the press. It
+has been equally obnoxious to Radical small shopkeepers and "true blue"
+farmers and their squires. It has been mobbed in churches and censured
+in Parliament. Things have gone against it, almost uniformly, before
+the tribunals. And unfortunately it cannot be said that it has been
+without its full share of folly and extravagance in some of its
+members. And yet it is the party which has grown; which has drawn some
+of its antagonists to itself, and has reacted on the ideas and habits
+of others; its members have gradually, as a matter of course, risen
+into important post and power. And it is to be noticed that, as a
+party, it has been the most tolerant. All parties are in their nature
+intolerant; none more so, where critical points arise, than Liberal
+ones. But in spite of the Dean of Westminster's surprise at High
+Churchmen claiming to be tolerant, we still think that, in the first
+place, they are really much less inclined to meddle with their
+neighbours than others of equally strong and deep convictions; and
+further, that they have become so more and more; and they have accepted
+the lessons of their experience; they have thrown off, more than any
+strong religious body, the intolerance which was natural to everybody
+once, and have learned, better than they did at one time, to bear with
+what they dislike and condemn. If a party like this comes to feel
+itself dealt with harshly and unfairly, sacrificed to popular clamour
+or the animosity of inveterate and unscrupulous opponents, it is
+certain that we shall be in great danger.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+MR. GLADSTONE'S LETTER ON THE ENGLISH CHURCH[7]
+
+
+  [7]
+  _Guardian_, 29th October 1884.
+
+Mr. Gladstone's Letter, read at the St. Asaph Diocesan Conference, will
+not have surprised those who have borne in mind his deep and
+unintermitted interest in the fortunes and prospects of the Church, and
+his habit of seeking relief from the pressure of one set of thoughts
+and anxieties by giving full play to his mental energies in another
+direction. Its composition and appearance at this moment are quite
+accounted for; it is a contribution to the business of the conference
+of his own diocese, and it was promised long before an autumn session
+on a great question between the two Houses was in view. Still the
+appearance of such a document from a person in Mr. Gladstone's position
+must, of course, invite attention and speculation. He may put aside the
+questions which the word "Disestablishment"--which was in the thesis
+given him to write upon--is likely to provoke--"Will it come? ought it
+to come? must it come? Is it near, or somewhat distant, or indefinitely
+remote?" On these questions he has not a word to say. But, all the
+same, people will naturally try to read between the lines, and to find
+out what was in the writer's thoughts about these questions. We cannot,
+however, see that there is anything to be gathered from the Letter as
+to the political aspect of the matter; he simply confines himself to
+the obvious lesson which passing events sufficiently bring with them,
+that whatever may come it is our business to be prepared.
+
+His anxieties are characteristic. The paper shows, we think, that it
+has not escaped him that disestablishment, however compensated as some
+sanguine people hope, would be a great disaster and ruin. It would be
+the failure and waste to the country of noble and astonishing efforts;
+it would be the break-up and collapse of a great and cheap system, by
+which light and human kindliness and intelligence are carried to vast
+tracts, that without its presence must soon become as stagnant and
+hopeless as many of the rural _communes_ of France; the blow would at
+the moment cripple and disorganise the Church for its work even in the
+towns. But though "happily improbable," it may come; and in such a
+contingency, what occupies Mr. Gladstone's thoughts is, not the
+question whether it would be disastrous, but whether it would be
+disgraceful. That is the point which disturbs and distresses him--the
+possibility that the end of our later Church history, the end of that
+wonderful experiment which has been going on from the sixteenth
+century, with such great vicissitudes, but after every shock with
+increasing improvement and hope, should at last be not only failure,
+but failure with dishonour; and this, he says, could only come in one
+of two ways. It might come from the Church having sunk into sloth and
+death, without faith, without conscience, without love. This, if it
+ever was really to be feared, is not the danger before us now.
+Activity, conviction, energy, self-devotion, these, and not apathetic
+lethargy, mark the temper of our times; and they are as conspicuous in
+the Church as anywhere else. But these qualities, as we have had ample
+experience, may develop into fierce and angry conflicts. It is our
+internal quarrels, Mr. Gladstone thinks, that create the most serious
+risk of disestablishment; and it is only our quarrels, which we have
+not good sense and charity enough to moderate and keep within bounds,
+which would make it "disgraceful."
+
+The main feature of the Letter is the historical retrospect which Mr.
+Gladstone gives of the long history, the long travail of the later
+English Church. Hardly in its first start, under the Tudors, but more
+and more as time went on, it instinctively, as it were, tried the great
+and difficult problem of Christian liberty. The Churches of the
+Continent, Roman and anti-Roman, were simple in their systems; only one
+sharply defined theology, only the disciples and representatives of one
+set of religious tendencies, would they allow to dwell within their
+borders; what was refractory and refused to harmonise was at once cast
+out; and for a certain time they were unvexed with internal
+dissensions. This, both in the case of the Roman, the Lutheran, and the
+Calvinistic Churches of the Continent, requires to be somewhat
+qualified; still, as compared with the rival schools of the English
+Church, Puritan and Anglican, the contrast is a true and a sharp one.
+Mr. Gladstone adopts from a German writer a view which is certainly not
+new to many in England, that "the Reformation, as a religious movement,
+took its shape in England, not in the sixteenth century but in the
+seventeenth." "It seems plain," he says, "that the great bulk of those
+burned under Mary were Puritans"; and he adds, what is not perhaps so
+capable of proof, that "under Elizabeth we have to look, with rare
+exceptions, among the Puritans and Recusants for an active and
+religious life." It was not till the Restoration, it was not till
+Puritanism had shown all its intolerance, all its narrowness, and all
+its helplessness, that the Church was able to settle the real basis and
+the chief lines of its reformed constitution. It is not, as Mr.
+Gladstone says, "a heroic history"; there is room enough in the
+looseness of some of its arrangements, and the incompleteness of
+others, for diversity of opinion and for polemical criticism. But the
+result, in fact, of this liberty and this incompleteness has been, not
+that the Church has declined lower and lower into indifference and
+negation, but that it has steadily mounted in successive periods to a
+higher level of purpose, to a higher standard of life and thought, of
+faith and work. Account for it as we may, with all drawbacks, with
+great intervals of seeming torpor, with much to be regretted and to be
+ashamed of, that is literally the history of the English Church since
+the Restoration settlement. It is not "heroic," but there are no Church
+annals of the same time more so, and there are none fuller of hope.
+
+But every system has its natural and specific danger, and the specific
+English danger, as it is the condition of vigorous English life, is
+that spirit of liberty which allows and attempts to combine very
+divergent tendencies of opinion. "The Church of England," Mr. Gladstone
+thinks, "has been peculiarly liable, on the one side and on the other,
+both to attack and to defection, and the probable cause is to be found
+in the degree in which, whether for worldly or for religious reasons,
+it was attempted in her case to combine divergent elements within her
+borders." She is still, as he says, "working out her system by
+experience"; and the exclusion of bitterness--even, as he says, of
+"savagery"--from her debates and controversies is hardly yet
+accomplished. There is at present, indeed, a remarkable lull, a "truce
+of God," which, it may be hoped, is of good omen; but we dare not be
+too sure that it is going to be permanent. In the meantime, those who
+tremble lest disestablishment should be the signal of a great break up
+and separation of her different parties cannot do better than meditate
+on Mr. Gladstone's very solemn words:--
+
+    The great maxim, _in omnibus caritas_, which is so necessary to
+    temper all religious controversy, ought to apply with a tenfold
+    force to the conduct of the members of the Church of England. In
+    respect to differences among themselves they ought, of course, in
+    the first place to remember that their right to differ is limited
+    by the laws of the system to which they belong; but within that
+    limit should they not also, each of them, recollect that his
+    antagonist has something to say; that the Reformation and the
+    counter-Reformation tendencies were, in the order of Providence,
+    placed here in a closer juxtaposition than anywhere else in the
+    Christian world; that a course of destiny so peculiar appears to
+    indicate on the part of the Supreme Orderer a peculiar purpose,
+    that not only no religious but no considerate or prudent man
+    should run the risk of interfering with such a purpose; that the
+    great charity which is a bounden duty everywhere in these matters
+    should here be accompanied and upheld by two ever-striving
+    handmaidens, a great Reverence and a great Patience.
+
+This is true, and of deep moment to those who guide and influence
+thought and feeling in the Church. But further, those in whose hands
+the "Supreme Orderer" has placed the springs and the restraints of
+political movement and of change, if they recognise at all this view of
+the English Church, ought to feel one duty paramount in regard to it.
+Never was the Church, they tell us, more active and more hopeful; well
+then, what politicians who care for her have to see to is that she
+shall have _time_ to work out effectually the tendencies which are
+visible in her now more than at any period of her history--that
+combination which Mr. Gladstone wishes for, of the deepest individual
+faith and energy, with forbearance and conciliation and the desire for
+peace. She has a right to claim from English rulers that she should
+have time to let these things work and bear fruit; if she has lost time
+before, she never was so manifestly in earnest in trying to make up for
+it as now. It is not talking, but working together, which brings
+different minds and tempers to understand one another's divergences;
+and it is this disposition to work together which shows itself and is
+growing now. But it needs time. What the Church has a right to ask from
+the arbiters of her temporal and political position in the country, if
+that is ultimately and inevitably to be changed, is that nothing
+precipitate, nothing impatient, should be done; that she should have
+time adequately to develop and fulfil what she now alone among
+Christian communities seems in a position to attempt.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+DISENDOWMENT[8]
+
+
+  [8]
+  _Guardian_, 14th October 1885.
+
+This generation has seen no such momentous change as that which has
+suddenly appeared to be at our very doors, and which people speak of as
+disestablishment. The word was only invented a few years ago, and was
+sneered at as a barbarism, worthy of the unpractical folly which it was
+coined to express. It has been bandied about a good deal lately,
+sometimes _de coeur léger_; and within the last six months it has
+assumed the substance and the weight of a formidable probability. Other
+changes, more or less serious, are awaiting us in the approaching
+future; but they are encompassed with many uncertainties, and all
+forecasts of their working are necessarily very doubtful. About this
+there is an almost brutal clearness and simplicity, as to what it
+means, as to what is intended by those who have pushed it into
+prominence, and as to what will follow from their having their way.
+
+Disestablishment has really come to mean, in the mouth of friends and
+foes, simple disendowment. It is well that the question should be set
+in its true terms, without being confused with vague and less important
+issues. It is not very easy to say what disestablishment by itself
+would involve, except the disappearance of Bishops from the Upper
+House, or the presence of other religious dignitaries, with equal rank
+and rights, alongside of them. Questions of patronage and
+ecclesiastical law might be difficult to settle; but otherwise a
+statute of mere disestablishment, not easy indeed to formulate, would
+leave the Church in the eyes of the country very much what it found it.
+Perhaps "My lord" might be more widely dropped in addressing Bishops;
+but otherwise, the aspect of the Church, its daily work, its
+organisations, would remain the same, and it would depend on the Church
+itself whether the consideration paid to it continues what it has been;
+whether it shall be diminished or increased. The privilege of being
+publicly recognised with special marks of honour by the State has been
+dearly paid for by the claim which the State has always, and sometimes
+unscrupulously, insisted on, of making the true interests of the Church
+subservient to its own passing necessities.
+
+But there is no haziness about the meaning of disendowment. Property is
+a tangible thing, and is subject to the four rules of arithmetic, and
+ultimately to the force of the strong arm. When you talk of
+disendowment, you talk of taking from the Church, not honour or
+privilege or influence, but visible things, to be measured and counted
+and pointed to, which now belong to it and which you want to belong to
+some one else. They belong to individuals because the individuals
+belong to a great body. There are, of course, many people who do not
+believe that such a body exists; or that if it does, it has been called
+into being and exists simply by the act of the State, like the army,
+and, like the army, liable to be disbanded by its master. But that is a
+view resting on a philosophical theory of a purely subjective
+character; it is as little the historical or legal view as it is the
+theological view. We have not yet lost our right in the nineteenth
+century to think of the Church of England as a continuous, historic,
+religious society, bound by ties which, however strained, are still
+unbroken with that vast Christendom from which as a matter of fact it
+sprung, and still, in spite of all differences, external and internal,
+and by force of its traditions and institutions, as truly one body as
+anything can be on earth. To this Church, this body, by right which at
+present is absolutely unquestionable, property belongs; property has
+been given from time immemorial down to yesterday. This property, in
+its bulk, with whatever abatements and allowances, it is intended to
+take from the Church. This is disendowment, and this is what is before
+us.
+
+It is well to realise as well as we can what is inevitably involved in
+this vast and, in modern England, unexampled change, which we are
+sometimes invited to view with philosophic calmness or resignation, as
+the unavoidable drift of the current of modern thought, or still more
+cheerfully to welcome, as the beginning of a new era in the prosperity
+and strength of the Church as a religious institution. We are entreated
+to be of good cheer. The Church will be more free; it will no longer be
+mixed up with sordid money matters and unpopular payments; it will no
+longer have the discredit of State control; the rights of the laity
+will come up and a blow will be struck at clericalism. With all our
+machinery shattered and ruined we shall be thrown more on individual
+energy and spontaneous originality of effort. Our new poverty will spur
+us into zeal. Above all, the Church will be delivered from the
+temptation, incident to wealth, of sticking to abuses for the sake of
+gold; of shrinking from principle and justice and enthusiasm, out of
+fear of worldly loss. It will no longer be a place for drones and
+hirelings. It is very kind of the revolutionists to wish all this good
+to the Church, though if the Church is so bad as to need all these good
+wishes for its improvement, it would be more consistent, and perhaps
+less cynical, to wish it ruined altogether. Yet even if the Church were
+likely to thrive better on no bread, there are reasons of public
+morality why it should not be robbed. But these prophecies and
+forecasts really belong to a sphere far removed from the mental
+activity of those who so easily indulge in them. These excellent
+persons are hardly fitted by habit and feeling to be judges of the
+probable course of Divine Providence, or the development of new
+religious energies and spiritual tendencies in a suddenly impoverished
+body. What they can foresee, and what we can foresee also is, that
+these _tabulae novae_ will be a great blow to the Church. They mean
+that, and that we understand.
+
+It is idle to talk as if it was to be no blow to the Church. The
+confiscation of Wesleyan and Roman Catholic Church property would be a
+real blow to Wesleyan or Roman Catholic interests; and in proportion as
+the body is greater the effects of the blow must be heavier and more
+signal. It is trifling with our patience to pretend to persuade us that
+such a confiscation scheme as is now recommended to the country would
+not throw the whole work of the Church into confusion and disaster, not
+perhaps irreparable, but certainly for the time overwhelming and
+perilous. People speak sometimes as if such a huge transfer of property
+was to be done with the stroke of a pen and the aid of a few office
+clerks; they forget what are the incidents of an institution which has
+lasted in England for more than a thousand years, and whose business
+extends to every aspect and degree of our very complex society from the
+highest to the lowest. Resources may be replaced, but for the time they
+must be crippled. Life may be rearranged for the new circumstances, but
+in the meanwhile all the ordinary assumptions have to be changed, all
+the ordinary channels of activity are stopped up or diverted.
+
+And why should this vast and far-reaching change be made? Is it
+unlawful for the Church to hold property? Other religious organisations
+hold it, and even the Salvation Army knows the importance of funds for
+its work. Is it State property which the State may resume for other
+uses? If anything is certain it is that the State, except in an
+inconsiderable degree, did not endow the Church, but consented in the
+most solemn way to its being endowed by the gifts of private donors, as
+it now consents to the endowment in this way of other religious bodies.
+Does the bigness of the property entitle the State to claim it? This is
+a formidable doctrine for other religious bodies, as they increase in
+influence and numbers. Is it vexatious that the Church should be richer
+and more powerful than the sects? It is not the fault of the Church
+that it is the largest and the most ancient body in England. There is
+but one real and adequate reason: it is the wish to disable and
+paralyse a great religious corporation, the largest and most powerful
+representative of Christianity in our English society, to exhibit it to
+the nation after centuries of existence at length defeated and humbled
+by the new masters' power, to deprive it of the organisation and the
+resources which it is using daily with increasing effect for impressing
+religious truth on the people, for winning their interest, their
+confidence, and their sympathy, for obtaining a hold on the generations
+which are coming. The Liberation Society might go on for years
+repeating their dreary catalogue of grievances and misstatements.
+Doubtless there is much for which they desire to punish the Church;
+doubtless, too, there are men among them who are persuaded that they
+would serve religion by discrediting and impoverishing the Church. But
+they are not the people with whom the Church has to reckon. The
+Liberationists might have long asked in vain for their pet
+"emancipation" scheme. They are stronger men than the Liberationists
+who are going in now for disendowment. They are men--we do them no
+wrong--who sincerely think Christianity mischievous, and who see in the
+power and resources of the Church a bulwark and representative of all
+religion which it is of the first importance to get rid of.
+
+This is the one adequate and consistent reason for the confiscation of
+the property of the Church. There is no other reason that will bear
+discussion to be given for what, without it, is a great moral and
+political wrong. In such a settled society as ours, where men reckon on
+what is their own, such a sweeping and wholesale transfer of property
+cannot be justified, on a mere balance of probable expediency in the
+use of it. Unless it is as a punishment for gross neglect and abuse, as
+was alleged in the partial confiscations of the sixteenth century, or
+unless it is called for as a step to break down what can no longer be
+tolerated, like slavery, there is no other name for it, in the estimate
+of justice, than that of a deep and irreparable wrong. This is
+certainly not the time to punish the Church when it never was more
+improving and more unsparing of sacrifice and effort. But it may be
+full time to stop a career which may render success more difficult for
+schemes ahead, which make no secret of their intention to dispense with
+religion. This, however, is not what most Englishmen wish, whether
+Liberals or Conservatives, or even Nonconformists; and without this end
+there is no more justice in disendowing a great religious corporation
+like the Church, than in disendowing the Duke of Bedford or the Duke of
+Westminster. Of course no one can deny the competence of Parliament to
+do either one or the other; but power does not necessarily carry with
+it justice, and justice means that while there are great and small,
+rich and poor, the State should equally protect all its members and all
+its classes, however different. Revolutions have no law; but a great
+wrong, deliberately inflicted in times of settled order, is more
+mischievous to the nation than even to those who suffer from it.
+History has shown us what follows from such gratuitous and wanton wrong
+in the bitter feeling of defeat and humiliation lasting through
+generations. But worse than this is the effect on the political
+morality of the nation; the corrupting and fatal consciousness of
+having once broken through the restraints of recognised justice, of
+having acquiesced in a tempting but high-handed wrong. The effects of
+disendowment concern England and its morality even more deeply than
+they do the Church.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE NEW COURT[9]
+
+
+  [9]
+  _Guardian_, 15th May 1889.
+
+The claim maintained by the Archbishop in his Judgment, by virtue of
+his metropolitical authority and by that alone, to cite, try, and
+sentence one of his suffragans, is undoubtedly what is called in slang
+language "a large order." Even by those who may have thought it
+inevitable, after the Watson case had been so distinctly accepted by
+the books as a precedent, it is yet felt as a surprise, in the sense in
+which a thing is often a surprise when, after being only talked about
+it becomes a reality. We can imagine some people getting up in the
+morning on last Saturday with one set of feelings, and going to bed
+with another. Bishops, then, who in spite of the alleged anarchy, are
+still looked upon with great reverence, as almost irresponsible in what
+they say and do officially, are, it seems, as much at the mercy of the
+law as the presbyters and deacons whom they have occasionally sent
+before the Courts. They, too, at the will of chance accusers who are
+accountable to no one, are liable to the humiliation, worry, and
+crushing law-bills of an ecclesiastical suit. Whatever may be thought
+of this now, it would have seemed extravagant and incredible to the
+older race of Bishops that their actions should be so called in
+question. They would have thought their dignity gravely assailed, if
+besides having to incur heavy expense in prosecuting offending
+clergymen, they had also to incur it in protecting themselves from the
+charge of being themselves offenders against Church law.
+
+The growth of law is always a mysterious thing; and an outsider and
+layman is disposed to ask where this great jurisdiction sprung up and
+grew into shape and power. In the Archbishop's elaborate and able
+Judgment it is indeed treated as something which had always been; but
+he was more successful in breaking down the force of alleged
+authorities, and inferences from them, on the opposite side, than he
+was in establishing clearly and convincingly his own contention.
+Considering the dignity and importance of the jurisdiction claimed, it
+is curious that so little is heard about it till the beginning of the
+eighteenth century. It is curious that in its two most conspicuous
+instances it should have been called into activity by those not
+naturally friendly to large ecclesiastical claims--by Low Churchmen of
+the Revolution against an offending Jacobite, and by a Puritan
+association against a High Churchman. There is no such clear and strong
+case as Bishop Watson's till we come to Bishop Watson. In his argument
+the Archbishop rested his claim definitely and forcibly on the
+precedent of Bishop Watson's case, and one or two cases which more or
+less followed it. That possibly is sufficient for his purpose; but it
+may still be asked--What did the Watson case itself grow out of? what
+were the precedents--not merely the analogies and supposed legal
+necessities, but the precedents--on which this exercise of
+metropolitical jurisdiction, distinct from the legatine power, rested?
+For it seems as if a formidable prerogative, not much heard of where we
+might expect to hear of it, not used by Cranmer and Laud, though
+approved by Cranmer in the _Reformatio Legum_, had sprung into being
+and energy in the hands of the mild Archbishop Tenison. Watson's case
+may be good law and bind the Archbishop. But it would have been more
+satisfactory if, in reviving a long-disused power, the Archbishop had
+been able to go behind the Watson case, and to show more certainly that
+the jurisdiction which he claimed and proposed to exercise in
+conformity with that case had, like the jurisdiction of other great
+courts of the Church and realm, been clearly and customarily exercised
+long before that case.
+
+The appearance of this great tribunal among us, a distinctly spiritual
+court of the highest dignity, cannot fail to be memorable. It is too
+early to forecast what its results may be. There may be before it an
+active and eventful career, or it may fall back into disuse and
+quiescence. It has jealous and suspicious rivals in the civil courts,
+never well disposed to the claim of ecclesiastical power or purely
+spiritual authority; and though its jurisdiction is not likely to be
+strained at present, it is easy to conceive occasions in the future
+which may provoke the interference of the civil court.
+
+But there is this interest about the present proceedings, that they
+illustrate with curious closeness, amid so much that is different, the
+way in which great spiritual prerogatives grew up in the Church. They
+may have ended disastrously; but at their first beginnings they were
+usually inevitable, innocent, blameless. Time after time the necessity
+arose of some arbiter among those who were themselves arbiters, rulers,
+judges. Time after time this necessity forced those in the first rank
+into this position, as being the only persons who could be allowed to
+take it, and so Archbishops, Metropolitans, Primates appeared, to
+preside at assemblies, to be the mouthpiece of a general sentiment, to
+decide between high authorities, to be the centre of appeals. The
+Papacy itself at its first beginning had no other origin. It interfered
+because it was asked to interfere; it judged because there was no one
+else to judge. And so necessities of a very different kind have forced
+the Archbishop of Canterbury of our day into a position which is new
+and strange to our experience, and which, however constitutional and
+reasonable it may be, must give every one who is at all affected by it
+a good deal to think about.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+MOZLEY'S BAMPTON LECTURES[10]
+
+
+I
+
+  [10]
+  _Eight Lectures on Miracles: the Bampton Lectures for 1865_. By the
+  Rev. J.B. Mozley, B.D. _The Times_, 5th and 6th June 1866.
+
+The way in which the subject of Miracles has been treated, and the
+place which they have had in our discussions, will remain a
+characteristic feature of both the religious and philosophical
+tendencies of thought among us. Miracles, if they are real things, are
+the most awful and august of realities. But, from various causes, one
+of which, perhaps, is the very word itself, and the way in which it
+binds into one vague and technical generality a number of most
+heterogeneous instances, miracles have lost much of their power to
+interest those who have thought most in sympathy with their generation.
+They have been summarily and loosely put aside, sometimes avowedly,
+more often still by implication. Even by those who accepted and
+maintained them, they have often been touched uncertainly and formally,
+as if people thought that they were doing a duty, but would like much
+better to talk about other things which really attracted and filled
+their minds. In the long course of theological war for the last two
+centuries, it is hardly too much to say that miracles, as a subject for
+discussion, have been degraded and worn down from their original
+significance; vulgarised by passing through the handling of not the
+highest order of controversialists, who battered and defaced what they
+bandied about in argument, which was often ingenious and acute, and
+often mere verbal sophistry, but which, in any case, seldom rose to the
+true height of the question. Used either as instruments of proof or as
+fair game for attack, they suffered in the common and popular feeling
+about them. Taken in a lump, and with little realising of all that they
+were and implied, they furnished a cheap and tempting material for
+"short and easy methods" on one side, and on the other side, as it is
+obvious, a mark for just as easy and tempting objections. They became
+trite. People got tired of hearing of them, and shy of urging them, and
+dwelt in preference on other grounds of argument. The more serious
+feeling and the more profound and original thought of the last half
+century no longer seemed to give them the value and importance which
+they had; on both sides a disposition was to be traced to turn aside
+from them. The deeper religion and the deeper and more enterprising
+science of the day combined to lower them from their old evidential
+place. The one threw the moral stress on moral grounds of belief, and
+seemed inclined to undervalue external proofs. The other more and more
+yielded to its repugnance to admit the interruption of natural law, and
+became more and more disinclined even to discuss the supernatural; and,
+curiously enough, along with this there was in one remarkable school of
+religious philosophy an increased readiness to believe in miracles as
+such, without apparently caring much for them as proofs. Of late,
+indeed, things have taken a different turn. The critical importance of
+miracles, after for a time having fallen out of prominence behind other
+questions, has once more made itself felt. Recent controversy has
+forced them again on men's thoughts, and has made us see that, whether
+they are accepted or denied, it is idle to ignore them. They mean too
+much to be evaded. Like all powerful arguments they cut two ways, and
+of all powerful arguments they are the most clearly two-edged. However
+we may limit their range, some will remain which we must face; which,
+according to what is settled about them, either that they are true or
+not true, will entirely change all that we think of religion. Writers
+on all sides have begun to be sensible that a decisive point requires
+their attention, and that its having suffered from an old-fashioned way
+of handling is no reason why it should not on its own merits engage
+afresh the interest of serious men, to whom it is certainly of
+consequence.
+
+The renewed attention of theological writers to the subject of miracles
+as an element of proof has led to some important discussions upon it,
+showing in their treatment of a well-worn inquiry that a change in the
+way of conducting it had become necessary. Of these productions we may
+place Mr. Mozley's _Bampton Lectures_ for last year among the most
+original and powerful. They are an example, and a very fine one, of a
+mode of theological writing which is characteristic of the Church of
+England, and almost peculiar to it. The distinguishing features of it
+are a combination of intense seriousness with a self-restrained, severe
+calmness, and of very vigorous and wide-ranging reasoning on the
+realities of the case with the least amount of care about artificial
+symmetry or scholastic completeness. Admirers of the Roman style call
+it cold, indefinite, wanting in dogmatic coherence, comprehensiveness,
+and grandeur. Admirers of the German style find little to praise in a
+cautious bit-by-bit method, content with the tests which have most
+affinity with common sense, incredulous of exhaustive theories, leaving
+a large margin for the unaccountable or the unexplained. But it has its
+merits, one of them being that, dealing very solidly and very acutely
+with large and real matters of experience, the interest of such
+writings endures as the starting-point and foundation for future work.
+Butler out of England is hardly known, certainly he is not much valued
+either as a divine or a philosopher; but in England, though we
+criticise him freely, it will be a long time before he is out of date.
+Mr. Mozley's book belongs to that class of writings of which Butler may
+be taken as the type. It is strong, genuine argument about difficult
+matters, fairly facing what _is_ difficult, fairly trying to grapple,
+not with what _appears_ the gist and strong point of a question, but
+with what really and at bottom _is_ the knot of it. It is a book the
+reasoning of which may not satisfy every one; but it is a book in which
+there is nothing plausible, nothing put in to escape the trouble of
+thinking out what really comes across the writer's path. This will not
+recommend it to readers who themselves are not fond of trouble; a book
+of hard thinking cannot be a book of easy reading; nor is it a book for
+people to go to who only want available arguments, or to see a question
+apparently settled in a convenient way. But we think it is a book for
+people who wish to see a great subject handled on a scale which befits
+it and with a perception of its real elements. It is a book which will
+have attractions for those who like to see a powerful mind applying
+itself without shrinking or holding back, without trick or reserve or
+show of any kind, as a wrestler closes body to body with his
+antagonist, to the strength of an adverse and powerful argument. A
+stern self-constraint excludes everything exclamatory, all glimpses and
+disclosures of what merely affects the writer, all advantages from an
+appeal, disguised and indirect perhaps, to the opinion of his own side.
+But though the work is not rhetorical, it is not the less eloquent; but
+it is eloquence arising from a keen insight at once into what is real
+and what is great, and from a singular power of luminous, noble, and
+expressive statement. There is no excitement about its close subtle
+trains of reasoning; and there is no affectation,--and therefore no
+affectation of impartiality. The writer has his conclusions, and he
+does not pretend to hold a balance between them and their opposites.
+But in the presence of such a subject he never loses sight of its
+greatness, its difficulty, its eventfulness; and these thoughts make
+him throughout his undertaking circumspect, considerate, and calm.
+
+The point of view from which the subject of miracles is looked at in
+these Lectures is thus stated in the preface. It is plain that two
+great questions arise--first, Are miracles possible? next, If they are,
+can any in fact be proved? These two branches of the inquiry involve
+different classes of considerations. The first is purely philosophical,
+and stops the inquiry at once if it can be settled in the negative. The
+other calls in also the aid of history and criticism. Both questions
+have been followed out of late with great keenness and interest, but it
+is the first which at present assumes an importance which it never had
+before, with its tremendous negative answer, revolutionising not only
+the past, but the whole future of mankind; and it is to the first that
+Mr. Mozley's work is mainly addressed.
+
+    The difficulty which attaches to miracles in the period of thought
+    through which we are now passing is one which is concerned not
+    with their evidence, but with their intrinsic credibility. There
+    has arisen in a certain class of minds an apparent perception of
+    the impossibility of suspensions of physical law. This is one
+    peculiarity of the time; another is a disposition to maintain the
+    disbelief of miracles upon a religious basis, and in a connection
+    with a declared belief in the Christian revelation.
+
+    The following Lectures, therefore, are addressed mainly to the
+    fundamental question of the credibility of Miracles, their use and
+    the evidences of them being only touched on subordinately and
+    collaterally. It was thought that such an aim, though in itself a
+    narrow and confined one, was most adapted to the particular need
+    of the day.
+
+As Mr. Mozley says, various points essential to the whole argument,
+such as testimony, and the criterion between true and false miracles,
+are touched upon; but what is characteristic of the work is the way in
+which it deals with the antecedent objection to the possibility and
+credibility of miracles. It is on this part of the subject that the
+writer strikes out a line for himself, and puts forth his strength. His
+argument may be described generally as a plea for reason against
+imagination and the broad impressions of custom. Experience, such
+experience as we have of the world and human life, has, in all ages,
+been really the mould of human thought, and with large exceptions, the
+main unconscious guide and controller of human belief; and in our own
+times it has been formally and scientifically recognised as such, and
+made the exclusive foundation of all possible philosophy. A philosophy
+of mere experience is not tolerant of miracles; its doctrines exclude
+them; but, what is of even greater force than its doctrines, the subtle
+and penetrating atmosphere of feeling and intellectual habits which
+accompanies it is essentially uncongenial and hostile to them. It is
+against the undue influence of such results of experience--an influence
+openly acting in distinct ideas and arguments, but of which the greater
+portion operates blindly, insensibly, and out of sight--that Mr. Mozley
+makes a stand on behalf of reason, to which it belongs in the last
+resort to judge of the lessons of experience. Reason, as it cannot
+create experience, so it cannot take its place and be its substitute;
+but what reason can do is to say within what limits experience is
+paramount as a teacher; and reason abdicates its functions if it
+declines to do so, for it was given us to work upon and turn to account
+the unmeaning and brute materials which experience gives us in the
+rough. The antecedent objection against miracles is, he says, one of
+experience, but not one of reason. And experience, flowing over its
+boundaries tyrannically and effacing its limits, is as dangerous to
+truth and knowledge as reason once was, when it owned no check in
+nature, and used no test but itself.
+
+Mr. Mozley begins by stating clearly the necessity for coming to a
+decision on the question of miracles. It cannot remain one of the open
+questions, at least of religion. There is, as has been said, a
+disposition to pass by it, and to construct a religion without
+miracles. The thing is conceivable. We can take what are as a matter of
+fact the moral results of Christianity, and of that singular power with
+which it has presided over the improvement of mankind, and alloying and
+qualifying them with other elements, not on the face of the matter its
+products, yet in many cases indirectly connected with its working, form
+something which we may acknowledge as a rule of life, and which may
+satisfy our inextinguishable longings after the unseen and eternal. It
+is true that such a religion presupposes Christianity, to which it owes
+its best and noblest features, and that, as far as we can see, it is
+inconceivable if Christianity had not first been. Still, we may say
+that alchemy preceded chemistry, and was not the more true for being
+the step to what is true. But what we cannot say of such a religion is
+that it takes the place of Christianity, and is such a religion as
+Christianity has been and claims to be. There must ever be all the
+difference in the world between a religion which is or professes to be
+a revelation, and one which cannot be called such. For a revelation is
+a direct work and message of God; but that which is the result of a
+process and progress of rinding out the truth by the experience of
+ages, or of correcting mistakes, laying aside superstitions and
+gradually reducing the gross mass of belief to its essential truth, is
+simply on a level with all other human knowledge, and, as it is about
+the unseen, can never be verified. If there has been no revelation,
+there may be religious hopes and misgivings, religious ideas or dreams,
+religious anticipations and trust; but the truth is, there cannot be a
+religion in the world. Much less can there be any such thing as
+Christianity. It is only when we look at it vaguely in outline, without
+having before our mind what it is in fact and in detail, that we can
+allow ourselves to think so. There is no transmuting its refractory
+elements into something which is not itself; and it is nothing if it is
+not primarily a direct message from God. Limit as we may the manner of
+this communication, still there remains what makes it different from
+all other human possessions of truth, that it was a direct message. And
+that, to whatever extent, involves all that is involved in the idea of
+miracles. It is, as Mr. Mozley says, inconceivable without miracles.
+
+    If, then, a person of evident integrity and loftiness of character
+    rose into notice in a particular country and community eighteen
+    centuries ago, who made these communications about himself--that
+    he had existed before his natural birth, from all eternity, and
+    before the world was, in a state of glory with God; that he was
+    the only-begotten Son of God; that the world itself had been made
+    by him; that he had, however, come down from heaven and assumed
+    the form and nature of man for a particular purpose--viz. to be
+    the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world; that he
+    thus stood in a mysterious and supernatural relation to the whole
+    of mankind; that through him alone mankind had access to God; that
+    he was the head of an invisible kingdom, into which he should
+    gather all the generations of righteous men who had lived in the
+    world; that on his departure from hence he should return to heaven
+    to prepare mansions there for them; and, lastly, that he should
+    descend again at the end of the world to judge the whole human
+    race, on which occasion all that were in their graves should hear
+    his voice and come forth, they that had done good unto the
+    resurrection of life, and they that had done evil unto the
+    resurrection of damnation,--if this person made these assertions
+    about himself, and all that was done was to make the assertions,
+    what would be the inevitable conclusion of sober reason respecting
+    that person? The necessary conclusion of sober reason respecting
+    that person would be that he was disordered in his understanding.
+    What other decision could we come to when a man, looking like one
+    of ourselves, and only exemplifying in his life and circumstances
+    the ordinary course of nature, said this about himself, but that
+    when reason had lost its balance a dream of extraordinary and
+    unearthly grandeur might be the result? By no rational being could
+    a just and benevolent life be accepted as proof of such
+    astonishing announcements. Miracles are the necessary complement
+    then of the truth of such announcements, which without them are
+    purposeless and abortive, the unfinished fragments of a design
+    which is nothing unless it is the whole. They are necessary to the
+    justification of such announcements, which, indeed, unless they
+    are supernatural truths, are the wildest delusions. The matter and
+    its guarantee are the two parts of a revelation, the absence of
+    either of which neutralises and undoes it.
+
+A revelation, in any sense in which it is more than merely a result of
+the natural progress of the human mind and the gradual clearing up of
+mistakes, cannot in the nature of things be without miracles, because
+it is not merely a discovery of ideas and rules of life, but of facts
+undiscoverable without it. It involves _constituent_ miracles, to use
+De Quincey's phrase, as part of its substance, and could not claim a
+bearing without _evidential_ or _polemic_ ones. No other portion or
+form of proof, however it may approve itself to the ideas of particular
+periods or minds, can really make up for this. The alleged sinlessness
+of the Teacher, the internal evidence from adaptation to human nature,
+the historical argument of the development of Christendom, are, as Mr.
+Mozley points out, by themselves inadequate, without that further
+guarantee which is contained in miracles, to prove the Divine origin of
+a religion. The tendency has been of late to fall back on these
+attractive parts of the argument, which admit of such varied handling
+and expression, and come home so naturally to the feelings of an age so
+busy and so keen in pursuing the secrets of human character, and so
+fascinated with its unfolding wonders. But take any of them, the
+argument from results, for instance, perhaps the most powerful of them
+all. "We cannot," as Mr. Mozley says, "rest too much upon it, so long
+as we do not charge it with more of the burden of proof than it is in
+its own nature equal to--viz. the whole. But that it cannot bear." The
+hard, inevitable question remains at the end, for the most attenuated
+belief in Christianity as a religion from God--what is the ultimate
+link which connects it directly with God? The readiness with which we
+throw ourselves on more congenial topics of proof does not show that,
+even to our own minds, these proofs could suffice by themselves,
+miracles being really taken away. The whole power of a complex argument
+and the reasons why it tells do not always appear on its face. It does
+not depend merely on what it states, but also on unexpressed,
+unanalysed, perhaps unrealised grounds, the real force of which would
+at once start forth if they were taken away. We are told of the obscure
+rays of the spectrum, rays which have their proof and their effect,
+only not the same proof and effect as the visible ones which they
+accompany; and the background and latent suppositions of a great
+argument are as essential to it as its more prominent and elaborate
+constructions. And they show their importance sometimes in a remarkable
+and embarrassing way, when, after a long debate, their presence at the
+bottom of everything, unnoticed and perhaps unallowed for, is at length
+disclosed by some obvious and decisive question, which some person had
+been too careless to think of, and another too shy to ask. We may not
+care to obtrude miracles; but take them away, and see what becomes of
+the argument for Christianity.
+
+    It must be remembered that when this part of Christian evidence
+    comes so forcibly home to us, and creates that inward assurance
+    which it does, it does this in connection with the proof of
+    miracles in the background, which though it may not for the time
+    be brought into actual view, is still known to be there, and to be
+    ready for use upon being wanted. The _indirect_ proof from results
+    has the greater force, and carries with it the deeper persuasion,
+    because it is additional and auxiliary to the _direct_ proof
+    behind it, upon which it leans all the time, though we may not
+    distinctly notice and estimate this advantage. Were the evidence
+    of moral result to be taken rigidly alone as the one single
+    guarantee for a Divine revelation, it would then be seen that we
+    had calculated its single strength too highly. If there is a
+    species of evidence which is directly appropriate to the thing
+    believed, we cannot suppose, on the strength of the indirect
+    evidence we possess, that we can do without the direct. But
+    miracles are the direct credentials of a revelation; the visible
+    supernatural is the appropriate witness to the invisible
+    supernatural--that proof which goes straight to the point, and, a
+    token being wanted of a Divine communication, is that token. We
+    cannot, therefore, dispense with this evidence. The position that
+    the revelation proves the miracles, and not the miracles the
+    revelation, admits of a good qualified meaning; but, taken
+    literally, it is a double offence against the rule that things are
+    properly proved by the proper proof of them; for a supernatural
+    fact _is_ the proper proof of a supernatural doctrine, while a
+    supernatural doctrine, on the other hand, is certainly _not_ the
+    proper proof of a supernatural fact.
+
+So that, whatever comes of the inquiry, miracles and revelation must go
+together. There is no separating them. Christianity may claim in them
+the one decisive proof that could be given of its Divine origin and the
+truth of its creed; but, at any rate, it must ever be responsible for
+them.
+
+    But suppose a person to say, and to say with truth, that his own
+    individual faith does not rest upon miracles, is he, therefore,
+    released from the defence of miracles? Is the question of their
+    truth or falsehood an irrelevant one to him? Is his faith secure
+    if they are disproved? By no means; if miracles were, although
+    only at the commencement, necessary to Christianity, and were
+    actually wrought, and therefore form part of the Gospel record and
+    are bound up with the Gospel scheme and doctrines, this part of
+    the structure cannot be abandoned without the sacrifice of the
+    other too. To shake the authority of one-half of this body of
+    statement is to shake the authority of the whole. Whether or not
+    the individual makes _use_ of them for the support of his own
+    faith, the miracles are there; and if they are there they must be
+    there either as true miracles or as false ones. If he does not
+    avail himself of their evidence, his belief is still affected by
+    their refutation. Accepting, as he does, the supernatural truths
+    of Christianity and its miracles upon the same report from the
+    same witnesses, upon the authority of the same documents, he
+    cannot help having at any rate this negative interest in them. For
+    if those witnesses and documents deceive us with regard to the
+    miracles, how can we trust them with regard to the doctrines? If
+    they are wrong upon the evidences of a revelation, how can we
+    depend upon their being right as to the nature of that revelation?
+    If their account of visible facts is to be received with an
+    explanation, is not their account of doctrines liable to a like
+    explanation? Revelation, then, even if it does not need the truth
+    of miracles for the benefit of their proof, still requires it in
+    order not to be crushed under the weight of their falsehood....
+    Thus miracles and the supernatural contents of Christianity must
+    stand or fall together. These two questions--the _nature_ of the
+    revelation, and the _evidence_ of the revelation--cannot be
+    disjoined. Christianity as a dispensation undiscoverable by human
+    reason, and Christianity as a dispensation authenticated by
+    miracles--these two are in necessary combination. If any do not
+    include the supernatural character of Christianity in their
+    definition of it, regarding the former only as one interpretation
+    of it or one particular traditional form of it, which is separable
+    from the essence--for Christianity as thus defined the support of
+    miracles is not wanted, because the moral truths are their own
+    evidence. But Christianity cannot be maintained as a revelation
+    undiscoverable by human reason, a revelation of a supernatural
+    scheme for man's salvation, without the evidence of miracles.
+
+The question of miracles, then, of the supernatural disclosed in the
+world of nature, is the vital point for everything that calls itself
+Christianity. It may be forgotten or disguised; but it is vain to keep
+it back and put it out of sight. It must be answered; and if we settle
+it that miracles are incredible, it is idle to waste our time about
+accommodations with Christianity, or reconstitutions of it. Let us be
+thankful for what it has done for the world; but let us put it away,
+both name and thing. It is an attempt after what is in the nature of
+things impossible to man--a revealed religion, authenticated by God.
+The shape which this negative answer takes is, as Mr. Mozley points
+out, much more definite now than it ever was. Miracles were formerly
+assailed and disbelieved on mixed and often confused grounds; from
+alleged defect of evidence, from their strangeness, or because they
+would be laughed at. Foes and defenders looked at them from the outside
+and in the gross; and perhaps some of those who defended them most
+keenly had a very imperfect sense of what they really were. The
+difficulty of accepting them now arises not mainly from want of
+external evidence, but from having more keenly realised what it is to
+believe a miracle. As Mr. Mozley says--
+
+    How is it that sometimes when the same facts and truths have been
+    before men all their lives, and produced but one impression, a
+    moment comes when they look different from what they did? Some
+    minds may abandon, while others retain, their fundamental position
+    with respect to those facts and truths, but to both they look
+    stranger; they excite a certain surprise which they did not once
+    do. The reasons of this change then it is not always easy for the
+    persons themselves to trace, but of the result they are conscious;
+    and in some this result is a change of belief.
+
+    An inward process of this kind has been going on recently in many
+    minds on the subject of miracles; and in some with the latter
+    result. When it came to the question--which every one must sooner
+    or later put to himself on this subject--Did these things really
+    take place? Are they matters of fact?--they have appeared to
+    themselves to be brought to a standstill, and to be obliged to own
+    an inner refusal of their whole reason to admit them among the
+    actual events of the past. This strong repugnance seemed to be the
+    witness of its own truth, to be accompanied by a clear and vivid
+    light, to be a law to the understanding, and to rule without
+    appeal the question of fact.... But when the reality of the past
+    is once apprehended and embraced, then the miraculous occurrences
+    in it are realised too; being realised they excite surprise, and
+    surprise, when it comes in, takes two directions--it either makes
+    belief more real, or it destroys belief. There is an element of
+    doubt in surprise; for this emotion arises _because_ an event is
+    strange, and an event is strange because it goes counter to and
+    jars with presumption. Shall surprise, then, give life to belief
+    or stimulus to doubt? The road of belief and unbelief in the
+    history of some minds thus partly lies over common ground; the two
+    go part of their journey together; they have a common perception
+    in the insight into the real astonishing nature of the facts with
+    which they deal. The majority of mankind, perhaps, owe their
+    belief rather to the outward influence of custom and education
+    than to any strong principle of faith within; and it is to be
+    feared that many, if they came to perceive how wonderful what they
+    believed was, would not find their belief so easy and so
+    matter-of-course a thing as they appear to find it. Custom throws
+    a film over the great facts of religion, and interposes a veil
+    between the mind and truth, which, by preventing wonder,
+    intercepts doubt too, and at the same time excludes from deep
+    belief and protects from disbelief. But deeper faith and disbelief
+    throw off in common the dependence on mere custom, draw aside the
+    interposing veil, place themselves face to face with the contents
+    of the past, and expose themselves alike to the ordeal of wonder.
+
+    It is evident that the effect which the visible order of nature
+    has upon some minds is, that as soon as they realise what a
+    miracle is, they are stopped by what appears to them a simple
+    sense of its impossibility. So long as they only believe by habit
+    and education, they accept a miracle without difficulty, because
+    they do not realise it as an event which actually took place in
+    the world; the alteration of the face of the world, and the whole
+    growth of intervening history, throw the miracles of the Gospel
+    into a remote perspective in which they are rather seen as a
+    picture than real occurrences. But as soon as they see that, if
+    these miracles are true, they once really happened, what they feel
+    then is the apparent sense of their impossibility. It is not a
+    question of evidence with them: when they realise, e.g., that
+    our Lord's resurrection, if true, was a visible fact or
+    occurrence, they have the seeming certain perception that it is an
+    impossible occurrence. "I cannot," a person says to himself in
+    effect, "tear myself from the type of experience and join myself
+    to another. I cannot quit order and law for what is eccentric.
+    There is a repulsion between such facts and my belief as strong as
+    that between physical substances. In the mere effort to conceive
+    these amazing scenes as real ones, I fall back upon myself and
+    upon that type of reality which the order of nature has impressed
+    upon me."
+
+The antagonism to the idea of miracles has grown stronger and more
+definite with the enlarged and more widely-spread conception of
+invariable natural law, and also, as Mr. Mozley points out, with that
+increased power in our time of realising the past, which is not the
+peculiarity of individual writers, but is "part of the thought of the
+time." But though it has been quickened and sharpened by these
+influences, it rests ultimately on that sense which all men have in
+common of the customary and regular in their experience of the world.
+The world, which we all know, stands alone, cut off from any other; and
+a miracle is an intrusion, "an interpolation of one order of things
+into another, confounding two systems which are perfectly distinct."
+The broad, deep resistance to it which is awakened in the mind when we
+look abroad on the face of nature is expressed in Emerson's phrase--"A
+miracle is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clouds or the
+falling rain." Who can dispute it? Yet the rejoinder is obvious, and
+has often been given--that neither is man. Man, who looks at nature and
+thinks and feels about its unconscious unfeeling order; man, with his
+temptations, his glory, and his shame, his heights of goodness, and
+depths of infamy, is not one with those innocent and soulless forces so
+sternly immutable--"the blowing clouds and falling rain." The two awful
+phenomena which Kant said struck him dumb--the starry heavens, and
+right and wrong--are vainly to be reduced to the same order of things.
+Nothing can be stranger than the contrast between the rigid, inevitable
+sequences of nature, apparently so elastic only because not yet
+perfectly comprehended, and the consciousness of man in the midst of
+it. Nothing can be stranger than the juxtaposition of physical law and
+man's sense of responsibility and choice. Man is an "insertion," an
+"interpolation in the physical system"; he is "insulated as an anomaly
+in the midst of matter and material law." Mr. Mozley's words are
+striking:--
+
+    The first appearance, then, of man in nature was the appearance of
+    a new being in nature; and this fact was relatively to the then
+    order of things miraculous; no more physical account can be given
+    of it than could be given of a resurrection to life now. What more
+    entirely new and eccentric fact, indeed, can be imagined than a
+    human soul first rising up amidst an animal and vegetable world?
+    Mere consciousness--was not that of itself a new world within the
+    old one? Mere knowledge--that nature herself became known to a
+    being within herself, was not that the same? Certainly man was not
+    all at once the skilled interpreter of nature, and yet there is
+    some interpretation of nature to which man as such is equal in
+    some degree. He derives an impression from the sight of nature
+    which an animal does not derive; for though the material spectacle
+    is imprinted on its retina, as it is on man's, it does not see
+    what man sees. The sun rose, then, and the sun descended, the
+    stars looked down upon the earth, the mountains climbed to heaven,
+    the cliffs stood upon the shore, the same as now, countless ages
+    before a single being existed who _saw_ it. The counterpart of
+    this whole scene was wanting--the understanding mind; that mirror
+    in which the whole was to be reflected; and when this arose it was
+    a new birth for creation itself, that it became _known_,--an image
+    in the mind of a conscious being. But even consciousness and
+    knowledge were a less strange and miraculous introduction into the
+    world than conscience.
+
+    Thus wholly mysterious in his entrance into this scene, man is
+    _now_ an insulation in it; he came in by no physical law, and his
+    freewill is in utter contrast to that law. What can be more
+    incomprehensible, more heterogeneous, a more ghostly resident in
+    nature, than the sense of right and wrong? What is it? Whence is
+    it? The obligation of man to sacrifice himself for right is a
+    truth which springs out of an abyss, the mere attempt to look down
+    into which confuses the reason. Such is the juxtaposition of
+    mysterious and physical contents in the same system. Man is alone,
+    then, in nature: he alone of all the creatures communes with a
+    Being out of nature; and he divides himself from all other
+    physical life by prophesying, in the face of universal visible
+    decay, his own immortality.
+
+And till this anomaly has been removed--that is, till the last trace of
+what is moral in man has disappeared under the analysis of science, and
+what ought to be is resolved into a mere aspect of what is, this deep
+exception to the dominion of physical law remains as prominent and
+undeniable as physical law itself.
+
+    It is, indeed, avowed by those who reduce man in nature, that upon
+    the admission of free-will, the objection to the miraculous is over,
+    and that it is absurd to allow exception to law in man, and reject
+    it in nature.
+
+But the broad, popular sense of natural order, and the instinctive and
+common repugnance to a palpable violation of it, have been forged and
+refined into the philosophical objection to miracles. Two great
+thinkers of past generations, two of the keenest and clearest
+intellects which have appeared since the Reformation, laid the
+foundations of it long ago. Spinoza urged the uselessness of miracles,
+and Hume their incredibility, with a guarded subtlety and longsighted
+refinement of statement which made them in advance of their age except
+with a few. But their reflections have fallen in with a more advanced
+stage of thought and a taste for increased precision and exactness, and
+they are beginning to bear their fruit. The great and telling objection
+to miracles is getting to be, not their want of evidence, but, prior to
+all question of evidence, the supposed impossibility of fitting them in
+with a scientific view of nature. Reason, looking at nature and
+experience, is said to raise an antecedent obstacle to them which no
+alleged proof of fact can get over. They cannot be, because they are so
+unlike to everything else in the world, even of the strangest kind, in
+this point--in avowedly breaking the order of nature. And reason cannot
+be admitted to take cognizance of their claims and to consider their
+character, their purpose, their results, their credentials, because the
+mere supposition of them violates the fundamental conception and
+condition of science, absolute and invariable law, as well as that
+common-sense persuasion which everybody has, whether philosopher or
+not, of the uniformity of the order of the world.
+
+
+II
+
+To make room for reason to come in and pronounce upon miracles on their
+own merits--to clear the ground for the consideration of their actual
+claims by disposing of the antecedent objection of impossibility, is
+Mr. Mozley's main object.
+
+    Whatever difficulty there is in believing in miracles in general
+    arises from the circumstance that they are in contradiction to or
+    unlike the order of nature. To estimate the force of this
+    difficulty, then, we must first understand what kind of belief it
+    is which we have in the order of nature; for the weight of the
+    objection to the miraculous must depend on the nature of the
+    belief to which the miraculous is opposed.
+
+His examination of the alleged impossibility of miracles may be
+described as a very subtle turning the tables on Hume and the empirical
+philosophy. For when it is said that it is contrary to reason to
+believe in a suspension of the order of nature, he asks on what ground
+do we believe in the order of nature; and Hume himself supplies the
+answer. There is nothing of which we have a firmer persuasion. It is
+the basis of human life and knowledge. We assume at each step, without
+a doubt, that the future will be like the past. But why? Hume has
+carefully examined the question, and can find no answer, except the
+fact that we do assume it. "I apprehend," says Mr. Mozley, accepting
+Hume's view of the nature of probability, "that when we examine the
+different reasons which may be assigned for this connection, i.e. for
+the belief that the future will be like the past, they all come at last
+to be mere statements of the belief itself, and not reasons to account
+for it."
+
+    Let us imagine the occurrence of a particular physical phenomenon
+    for the first time. Upon that single occurrence we should have but
+    the very faintest expectation of another. If it did occur again
+    once or twice, so far from counting on another recurrence, a
+    cessation would come as the more natural event to us. But let it
+    occur a hundred times, and we should feel no hesitation in
+    inviting persons from a distance to see it; and if it occurred
+    every day for years, its recurrence would then be a certainty to
+    us, its cessation a marvel. But what has taken place in the
+    interim to produce this total change in our belief? From the mere
+    repetition do we know anything more about its cause? No. Then what
+    have we got besides the past repetition itself? Nothing. Why,
+    then, are we so certain of its _future_ repetition? All we can say
+    is that the known casts its shadow before; we project into unborn
+    time the existing types, and the secret skill of nature intercepts
+    the darkness of the future by ever suspending before our eyes, as
+    it were in a mirror, a reflection of the past. We really look at a
+    blank before us, but the mind, full of the scene behind, sees it
+    again in front....
+
+    What ground of reason, then, can we assign for our expectation
+    that any part of the course of nature will the _next_ moment be
+    like what it has been up to _this_ moment, i.e. for our belief
+    in the uniformity of nature? None. No demonstrative reason can be
+    given, for the contrary to the recurrence of a fact of nature is
+    no contradiction. No probable reason can be given, for all
+    probable reasoning respecting the course of nature is founded
+    _upon_ this presumption of likeness, and therefore cannot be the
+    foundation of it. No reason can be given for this belief. It is
+    without a reason. It rests upon no rational ground and can be
+    traced to no rational principle. Everything connected with human
+    life depends upon this belief, every practical plan or purpose
+    that we form implies it, every provision we make for the future,
+    every safeguard and caution we employ against it, all calculation,
+    all adjustment of means to ends, supposes this belief; it is this
+    principle alone which renders our experience of the slightest use
+    to us, and without it there would be, so far as we are concerned,
+    no order of nature and no laws of nature; and yet this belief has
+    no more producible reason for it than a speculation of fancy. A
+    natural fact has been repeated; it will be repeated:--I am
+    conscious of utter darkness when I try to see why one of these
+    follows from the other: I not only see no reason, but I perceive
+    that I see none, though I can no more help the expectation than I
+    can stop the circulation of my blood. There is a premiss, and
+    there is a conclusion, but there is a total want of connection
+    between the two. The inference, then, from the one of these to the
+    other rests upon no ground of the understanding; by no search or
+    analysis, however subtle or minute, can we extract from any corner
+    of the human mind and intelligence, however remote, the very
+    faintest reason for it.
+
+Hume, who had urged with great force that miracles were contrary to
+that probability which is created by experience, had also said that
+this probability had no producible ground in reason; that, universal,
+unfailing, indispensable as it was to the course of human life, it was
+but an instinct which defied analysis, a process of thought and
+inference for which he vainly sought the rational steps. There is no
+absurdity, though the greatest impossibility, in supposing this order
+to stop to-morrow; and, if the world ends at all, its end will be in an
+increasing degree improbable up to the very last moment. But, if this
+whole ground of belief is in its own nature avowedly instinctive and
+independent of reason, what right has it to raise up a bar of
+intellectual necessity, and to shut out reason from entertaining the
+question of miracles? They may have grounds which appeal to reason; and
+an unintelligent instinct forbids reason from fairly considering what
+they are. Reason cannot get beyond the actual fact of the present state
+of things for believing in the order of nature; it professes to find no
+necessity for it; the interruption of that order, therefore, whether
+probable or not, is not against reason. Philosophy itself, says Mr.
+Mozley, cuts away the ground on which it had raised its preliminary
+objection to miracles.
+
+    And now the belief in the order of nature being thus, however
+    powerful and useful, an unintelligent impulse of which we can give
+    no rational account, in what way does this discovery affect the
+    question of miracles? In this way, that this belief not having
+    itself its foundation in reason, the ground is gone upon which it
+    could be maintained that miracles as opposed to the order of
+    nature were opposed to reason. There being no producible reason
+    why a new event should be like the hitherto course of nature, no
+    decision of reason is contradicted by its unlikeness. A miracle,
+    in being opposed to our experience, is not only not opposed to
+    necessary reasoning, but to any reasoning. Do I see by a certain
+    perception the connection between these two--It _has_ happened so,
+    it _will_ happen so; then may I reject a new reported fact which
+    has _not_ happened so as an impossibility. But if I do not see the
+    connection between these two by a certain perception, or by any
+    perception, I cannot. For a miracle to be rejected as such, there
+    must, at any rate, be some proposition in the mind of man which is
+    opposed to it; and that proposition can only spring from the
+    quarter to which we have been referring--that of elementary
+    experimental reasoning. But if this experimental reasoning is of
+    that nature which philosophy describes it as being of, i.e. if
+    it is not itself a process of reason, how can there from an
+    irrational process of the mind arise a proposition at all,--to
+    make which is the function of the rational faculty alone? There
+    cannot; and it is evident that the miraculous does not stand in
+    any opposition whatever to reason....
+
+    Thus step by step has philosophy loosened the connection of the
+    order of nature with the ground of reason, befriending, in exact
+    proportion as it has done this, the principle of miracles. In the
+    argument against miracles the first objection is that they are
+    against _law_; and this is answered by saying that we know nothing
+    in nature of law in the sense in which it prevents miracles. Law
+    can only prevent miracles by _compelling_ and making necessary the
+    succession of nature, i.e. in the sense of causation; but
+    science has itself proclaimed the truth that we see no causes in
+    nature, that the whole chain of physical succession is to the eye
+    of reason a rope of sand, consisting of antecedents and
+    consequents, but without a rational link or trace of necessary
+    connection between them. We only know of law in nature in the
+    sense of recurrences in nature, classes of facts, _like_ facts in
+    nature--a chain of which, the junction not being reducible to
+    reason, the interruption is not against reason. The claim of law
+    settled, the next objection in the argument against miracles is
+    that they are against _experience_; because we expect facts _like_
+    to those of our experience, and miracles are _unlike_ ones. The
+    weight, then, of the objection of unlikeness to experience depends
+    on the reason which can be produced for the expectation of
+    likeness; and to this call philosophy has replied by the summary
+    confession that we have _no_ reason. Philosophy, then, could not
+    have overthrown more thoroughly than it has done the order of
+    nature as a necessary course of things, or cleared the ground more
+    effectually for the principle of miracles.
+
+Nor, he argues, does this instinct change its nature, or become a
+necessary law of reason, when it takes the form of an inference from
+induction. For the last step of the inductive process, the creation of
+its supposed universal, is, when compared with the real standard of
+universality acknowledged by reason, an incomplete and more or less
+precarious process; "it gets out of facts something more than what they
+actually contain"; and it can give no reason for itself but what the
+common faith derived from experience can give, the anticipation of
+uniform recurrence. "The inductive principle," he says, "is only the
+unreasoning impulse applied to a scientifically ascertained fact,
+instead of to a vulgarly ascertained fact.... Science has led up to the
+fact, but there it stops, and for converting the fact into a law a
+totally unscientific principle comes in, the same as that which
+generalises the commonest observations in nature."
+
+    The scientific part of induction being only the pursuit of a
+    particular fact, miracles cannot in the nature of the case receive
+    any blow from the scientific part of induction; because the
+    existence of one fact does not interfere with the existence of
+    another dissimilar fact. That which _does_ resist the miraculous
+    is the _un_scientific part of induction, or the instinctive
+    generalisation upon this fact.... It does not belong to this
+    principle to lay down speculative positions, and to say what can
+    or cannot take place in the world. It does not belong to it to
+    control religious belief, or to determine that certain acts of God
+    for the revelation of His will to man, reported to have taken
+    place, have not taken place. Such decisions are totally out of its
+    sphere; it can assert the universal as a _law_, but the universal
+    as a law and the universal as a proposition are wholly distinct.
+    The one asserts the universal as a fact, the other as a
+    presumption; the one as an absolute certainty, the other as a
+    practical certainty, when there is no reason to expect the
+    contrary. The one contains and includes the particular, the other
+    does not; from the one we argue mathematically to the falsehood of
+    any opposite particular; from the other we do not.... For example,
+    one signal miracle, pre-eminent for its grandeur, crowned the
+    evidence of the supernatural character and office of our Lord--our
+    Lord's ascension--His going up with His body of flesh and bones
+    into the sky in the presence of His disciples. "He lifted up His
+    hands, and blessed them. And while He blessed them, He was parted
+    from them, and carried up into heaven. And they looked stedfastly
+    toward heaven as He went up, and a cloud received Him out of their
+    sight."
+
+    Here is an amazing scene, which strikes even the devout believer,
+    coming across it in the sacred page suddenly or by chance, amid
+    the routine of life, with a fresh surprise. Did, then, this event
+    really take place? Or is the evidence of it forestalled by the
+    inductive principle compelling us to remove the scene _as such_
+    out of the category of matters of fact? The answer is, that the
+    inductive principle is in its own nature only an _expectation_;
+    and that the expectation, that what is unlike our experience will
+    not happen, is quite consistent with its occurrence in fact. This
+    principle does not pretend to decide the question of fact, which
+    is wholly out of its province and beyond its function. It can only
+    decide the fact by the medium of a universal; the universal
+    proposition that no man has ascended to heaven. But this is a
+    statement which exceeds its power; it is as radically incompetent
+    to pronounce it as the taste or smell is to decide on matters of
+    sight; its function is practical, not logical. No antecedent
+    statement, then, which touches my belief in this scene, is allowed
+    by the laws of thought. Converted indeed into a universal
+    proposition, the inductive principle is omnipotent, and totally
+    annihilates every particular which does not come within its range.
+    The universal statement that no man has ascended into heaven
+    absolutely falsifies the fact that One Man has. But, thus
+    transmuted, the inductive principle issues out of this
+    metamorphose, a fiction not a truth; a weapon of air, which even
+    in the hands of a giant can inflict no blow because it is itself a
+    shadow. The object of assault receives the unsubstantial thrust
+    without a shock, only exposing the want of solidity in the
+    implement of war. The battle against the supernatural has been
+    going on long, and strong men have conducted it, and are
+    conducting it--but what they want is a weapon. The logic of
+    unbelief wants a universal. But no real universal is forthcoming,
+    and it only wastes its strength in wielding a fictitious one.
+
+It is not in reason, which refuses to pronounce upon the possible
+merely from experience of the actual, that the antecedent objection to
+miracles is rooted. Yet that the objection is a powerful one the
+consciousness of every reflecting mind testifies. What, then, is the
+secret of its force? In a lecture of singular power Mr. Mozley gives
+his answer. What tells beforehand against miracles is not reason, but
+imagination. Imagination is often thought to favour especially the
+supernatural and miraculous. It does do so, no doubt. But the truth is,
+that imagination tells both ways--as much against the miraculous as for
+it. The imagination, that faculty by which we give life and body and
+reality to our intellectual conceptions, takes its character from the
+intellectual conceptions with which it is habitually associated. It
+accepts the miraculous or shrinks from it and throws it off, according
+to the leaning of the mind of which it is the more vivid and, so to
+speak, passionate expression. And as it may easily exaggerate on one
+side, so it may just as easily do the same on the other. Every one is
+familiar with that imaginative exaggeration which fills the world with
+miracles. But there is another form of imagination, not so distinctly
+recognised, which is oppressed by the presence of unchanging succession
+and visible uniformity, which cannot shake off the yoke of custom or
+allow anything different to seem to it real. The sensitiveness and
+impressibility of the imagination are affected, and unhealthily
+affected, not merely by strangeness, but by sameness; to one as to the
+other it may "passively submit and surrender itself, give way to the
+mere form of attraction, and, instead of grasping something else, be
+itself grasped and mastered by some dominant idea." And it is then, in
+one case as much as in the other, "not a power, but a failing and
+weakness of nature."
+
+    The passive imagination, then, in the present case exaggerates a
+    practical expectation of the uniformity of nature, implanted in us
+    for practical ends, into a scientific or universal proposition;
+    and it does this by surrendering itself to the impression produced
+    by the constant spectacle of the regularity of visible nature. By
+    such a course a person allows the weight and pressure of this idea
+    to grow upon him till it reaches the point of actually restricting
+    his sense of possibility to the mould of physical order.... The
+    order of nature thus stamps upon some minds the idea of its
+    immutability simply by its repetition. The imagination we usually
+    indeed associate with the acceptance of the supernatural rather
+    than with the denial of it; but the passive imagination is in
+    truth neutral; it only increases the force and tightens the hold
+    of any impression upon us, to whatever class the impression may
+    belong, and surrenders itself to a superstitious or a physical
+    idea, as it may be. Materialism itself is the result of
+    imagination, which is so impressed by matter that it cannot
+    realise the existence of spirit.
+
+The great opponent, then, of miracles, considered as possible
+occurrences, is not reason, but something which on other great subjects
+is continually found on the opposite side to reason, resisting and
+counteracting it; that powerful overbearing sense of the actual and the
+real, which when it is opposed by reason is apt to make reason seem
+like the creator of mere ideal theories; which gives to arguments
+implying a different condition of things from one which is familiar to
+present experience the disadvantage of appearing like artificial and
+unsubstantial refinements of thought, such as, to the uncultivated
+mind, appear not merely metaphysical discussions, but what are known to
+be the most certain reasonings of physical and mathematical science. It
+is that measure of the probable, impressed upon us by the spectacle; to
+which we are accustomed all our lives long, of things as we find them,
+and which repels the possibility of a break or variation; that sense of
+probability which the keenest of philosophers declares to be incapable
+of rational analysis, and pronounces allied to irrational portions of
+our constitution, like custom, and the effect of time, and which is
+just as much an enemy to invention, to improvement, to a different
+state of things in the future, as it is to the belief and realising of
+a different state of things in the past. The antecedent objection to
+the miraculous is not reason, but an argument which limits and narrows
+the domain of reason; which excludes dry, abstract, passionless
+reason--with its appeals to considerations remote from common
+experience, its demands for severe reflection, its balancing and long
+chains of thought--from pronouncing on what seems to belong to the
+flesh and blood realities of life as we know it. Against this
+tyrannical influence, which may be in a vulgar and popular as in a
+scientific form, which may be the dull result of habit or the more
+specious effect of a sensitive and receptive imagination, but which in
+all cases is at bottom the same, Mr. Mozley claims to appeal to
+reason:--
+
+    To conclude, then, let us suppose an intelligent Christian of the
+    present day asked, not what evidence he has of miracles, but how
+    he can antecedently to all evidence think such amazing occurrences
+    _possible_, he would reply, "You refer me to a certain sense of
+    impossibility which you suppose me to possess, applying not to
+    mathematics but to facts. Now, on this head, I am conscious of a
+    certain natural resistance in my mind to events unlike the order
+    of nature. But I resist many things which I know to be certain:
+    infinity of space, infinity of time, eternity past, eternity
+    future, the very idea of a God and another world. If I take mere
+    resistance, therefore, for denial, I am confined in every quarter
+    of my mind; I cannot carry out the very laws of reason, I am
+    placed under conditions which are obviously false. I conclude,
+    therefore, that I may resist and believe at the same time. If
+    Providence has implanted in me a certain expectation of uniformity
+    or likeness in nature, there is implied in that very expectations
+    resistance to an _un_like event, which resistance does not cease
+    even when upon evidence I _believe_ the event, but goes on as a
+    mechanical impression, though the reason counterbalances it.
+    Resistance, therefore, is not disbelief, unless by an act of my
+    own reason I _give_ it an absolute veto, which I do _not_ do. My
+    reason is clear upon the point, that there is no disagreement
+    between itself and a miracle as such." ... Nor is it dealing
+    artificially with ourselves to exert a force upon our minds
+    against the false certainty of the resisting imagination--such a
+    force as is necessary to enable reason to stand its ground, and
+    bend back again that spring of impression against the miraculous
+    which has illegally tightened itself into a law to the
+    understanding. Reason does not always prevail spontaneously and
+    without effort even in questions of belief; so far from it, that
+    the question of faith against reason may often be more properly
+    termed the question of reason against imagination. It does not
+    seldom require faith to believe reason, isolated as she may be
+    amid vast irrational influences, the weight of custom, the power
+    of association, the strength of passion, the _vis inertiae_ of
+    sense, the mere force of the uniformity of nature as a
+    spectacle--those influences which make up that power of the world
+    which Scripture always speaks of as the antagonist of faith.
+
+The antecedent questions about miracles, before coming to the question
+of the actual evidence of any, are questions about which reason--reason
+disengaged and disembarrassed from the arbitrary veto of
+experience--has a right to give its verdict. Miracles presuppose the
+existence of God, and it is from reason alone that we get the idea of
+God; and the antecedent question then is, whether they are really
+compatible with the idea of God which reason gives us. Mr. Mozley
+remarks that the question of miracles is really "shut up in the
+enclosure of one assumption, that of the existence of God"; and that if
+we believe in a personal Deity with all power over nature, that belief
+brings along with it the possibility of His interrupting natural order
+for His own purposes. He also bids us observe that the idea of God
+which reason gives us is exposed to resistance of the same kind, and
+from precisely the same forces, in our mental constitution, as the idea
+of miracles. When reason has finished its overwhelming proof, still
+there is a step to be taken before the mind embraces the equally
+overwhelming conclusion--a step which calls for a distinct effort,
+which obliges the mind, satisfied as it may be, to beat back the
+counteracting pressure of what is visible and customary. After
+reason--not opposed to it or independent of it, but growing out of it,
+yet a distinct and further movement--comes faith. This is the case, not
+specially in religion, but in all subjects, where the conclusions of
+reason cannot be subjected to immediate verification. How often, as he
+observes, do we see persons "who, when they are in possession of the
+best arguments, and what is more, understand those arguments, are still
+shaken by almost any opposition, because they want the faculty to
+_trust_ an argument when they have got one."
+
+    Not, however, that the existence of a God is so clearly seen by
+    reason as to dispense with faith; not from any want of cogency in
+    the reasons, but from the amazing nature of the conclusion--that
+    it is so unparalleled, transcendent, and inconceivable a truth to
+    believe. It requires trust to commit oneself to the conclusion of
+    any reasoning, however strong, when such as this is the
+    conclusion: to put enough dependence and reliance upon any
+    premisses, to accept upon the strength of them so immense a
+    result. The issue of the argument is so astonishing that if we do
+    not tremble for its safety, it must be on account of a practical
+    principle in our minds which enables us to _confide_ and trust in
+    reasons, when they are really strong and good ones.... Faith, when
+    for convenience' sake we do distinguish it from reason, is not
+    distinguished from reason by the want of premisses, but by the
+    nature of the conclusions. Are our conclusions of the customary
+    type? Then custom imparts the full sense of security. Are they not
+    of the customary, but of a strange and unknown type? Then the
+    mechanical sense of security is wanting, and a certain trust is
+    required for reposing in them, which we call faith. But that which
+    draws these conclusions is in either case reason. We infer, we go
+    upon reasons, we use premisses in either case. The premisses of
+    faith are not so palpable as those of ordinary reason, but they
+    are as real and solid premisses all the same. Our faith in the
+    existence of a God and a future state is founded upon reasons as
+    much so as the belief in the commonest kind of facts. The reasons
+    are in themselves as strong, but, because the conclusions are
+    marvellous and are not seconded and backed by known parallels or
+    by experience, we do not so passively acquiesce in them; there is
+    an exertion of confidence in depending upon them and assuring
+    ourselves of their force. The inward energy of the reason has to
+    be evoked, when she can no longer lean upon the outward prop of
+    custom, but is thrown back upon herself and the intrinsic force of
+    her premisses. Which reason, not leaning upon custom, is faith;
+    she obtains the latter name when she depends entirely upon her own
+    insight into certain grounds, premisses, and evidences, and
+    follows it though it leads to transcendent, unparalleled, and
+    supernatural conclusions....
+
+    Indeed, does not our heart bear witness to the fact that to
+    believe in a God is an exercise of faith? That the universe was
+    produced by the will of a personal Being, that its infinite forces
+    are all the power of that one Being, its infinite relations the
+    perceptions of one Mind--would not this, if any truth could,
+    demand the application of the maxim, _Credo quia impossibile_?
+    Look at it only as a conception, and does the wildest fiction of
+    the imagination equal it? No premisses, no arguments therefore,
+    can so accommodate this truth to us as not to leave the belief in
+    it an act of mental ascent and trust, of faith as distinguished
+    from sight. _Divest_ reason of its trust, and the universe stops
+    at the impersonal stage--there is no God; and yet, if the first
+    step in religion is the greatest, how is it that the freest and
+    boldest speculator rarely declines it? How is it that the most
+    mysterious of all truths is a universally accepted one? What is it
+    which guards this truth? What is it which makes men shrink from
+    denying it? Why is atheism a crime? Is it that authority still
+    reigns upon one question, and that the voice of all ages is too
+    potent to be withstood?
+
+But the progress of civilisation and thought has impressed this amazing
+idea on the general mind. It is no matter-of-course conception. The
+difficulties attending it were long insuperable to the deepest thought
+as well as to popular belief; and the triumph of the modern and
+Christian idea of God is the result not merely of the eager forwardness
+of faith, but of the patient and inquiring waiting of reason. And the
+question, whether we shall pronounce the miraculous to be impossible as
+such, is really the question whether we shall once more let this belief
+go.
+
+    The conception of a limited Deity then, i.e. a Being really
+    circumscribed in power, and not verbally only by a confinement to
+    necessary truth, is at variance with our fundamental idea of a
+    God; to depart from which is to retrograde from modern thought to
+    ancient, and to go from Christianity back again to Paganism. The
+    God of ancient religion was either not a personal Being or not an
+    omnipotent Being; the God of modern religion is both. For, indeed,
+    civilisation is not opposed to faith. The idea of the Supreme
+    Being in the mind of European society now is more primitive, more
+    childlike, more imaginative than the idea of the ancient Brahman
+    or Alexandrian philosopher; it is an idea which both of these
+    would have derided as the notion of a child--a _negotiosus Deus_,
+    who interposes in human affairs and answers prayers. So far from
+    the philosophical conception of the Deity having advanced with
+    civilisation, and the poetical receded, the philosophical has
+    receded and the poetical advanced. The God of whom it is said,
+    "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them
+    is forgotten before God; but even the very hairs of your head are
+    numbered," is the object of modern worship. Nor, again, has
+    civilisation shown any signs of rejecting doctrine. Certain ages
+    are, indeed, called the ages of faith; but the bulk of society in
+    _this_ age believes that it lives under a supernatural
+    dispensation, and accepts truths which are not less supernatural,
+    though they have more proof, than some doctrines of the Middle
+    Ages; and, if so, _this_ is an age of faith. It is true that most
+    people do not live up to their faith now; neither did they in the
+    Middle Ages.
+
+    Has not modern philosophy, again, shown both more strength and
+    acuteness, and also more faith, than the ancient? I speak of the
+    main current. Those ancient thinkers who reduced the Supreme Being
+    to a negation, with all their subtlety, wanted strength, and
+    settled questions by an easier test than that of modern
+    philosophy. The merit of a modern metaphysician is, like that of a
+    good chemist or naturalist, accurate observation in noting the
+    facts of mind. Is there a contradiction in the idea of creation?
+    Is there a contradiction in the idea of a personal Infinite Being?
+    He examines his own mind, and if he does not see one, he passes
+    the idea. But the ancient speculators decided, without examination
+    of the true facts of mind, by a kind of philosophical fancy; and,
+    according to this loose criterion, the creation of matter and a
+    personal Infinite Being were impossibilities, for they mistook the
+    inconceivable for the impossible. And thus a stringent test has
+    admitted what a loose but capricious test discarded, and the true
+    notion of God has issued safe out of the crucible of modern
+    metaphysics. Reason has shown its strength, but then it has turned
+    that strength back upon itself; it has become its own critic; and
+    in becoming its own critic it has become its own check.
+
+    If the belief, then, in a personal Deity lies at the bottom of all
+    religious and virtuous practice, and if the removal of it would be
+    a descent for human nature, the withdrawal of its inspiration and
+    support, and a fall in its whole standard; the failure of the very
+    breath of moral life in the individual and in society; the decay
+    and degeneration of the very stock of mankind;--does a theory
+    which would withdraw miraculous action from the Deity interfere
+    with that belief? If it would, it is but prudent to count the cost
+    of that interference. Would a Deity deprived of miraculous action
+    possess action at all? And would a God who cannot act be a God? If
+    this would be the issue, such an issue is the very last which
+    religious men can desire. The question here has been all
+    throughout, not whether upon any ground, but whether upon a
+    religious ground and by religious believers, the miraculous as
+    such could be rejected. But to that there is but one answer--that
+    it is impossible in reason to separate religion from the
+    supernatural, and upon a religious basis to overthrow miracles....
+
+    And so we arrive again by another route at the old turning
+    question; for the question whether man is or is not the _vertex_
+    of nature, is the question whether there is or is not a God. Does
+    free agency stop at the human stage, or is there a sphere of
+    free-will above the human, in which, as in the human, not physical
+    law but spirit moves matter? And does that free-will penetrate the
+    universal frame invisibly to us, an omnipresent agent? If so,
+    every miracle in Scripture is as natural an event in the universe
+    as any chemical experiment in the physical world; if not, the seat
+    of the great Presiding Will is empty, and nature has no Personal
+    Head; man is her highest point; he finishes her ascent; though by
+    this very supremacy he falls, for under fate he is not free
+    himself; all nature either ascends to God, or descends to law. Is
+    there above the level of material causes a region of Providence?
+    If there is, nature there is moved by the Supreme Free Agent; and
+    of such a realm a miracle is the natural production.
+
+    Two rationales of miracles thus present themselves to our choice;
+    one more accommodating to the physical imagination and easy to
+    fall in with, on a level with custom, common conceptions, and
+    ordinary history, and requiring no ascent of the mind to embrace,
+    viz. the solution of miracles as the growth of fancy and legend;
+    the other requiring an ascent of the reason to embrace it, viz.
+    the rationale of the supremacy of a Personal Will in nature. The
+    one is the explanation to which we fall when we dare not trust our
+    reason, but mistake its inconceivable truths for sublime but
+    unsubstantial visions; the other is that to which we rise when we
+    dare trust our reason, and the evidences which it lays before us
+    of the existence of a Personal Supreme Being.
+
+The belief in a personal God thus bringing with it the possibility of
+miracles, what reason then has to judge is whether it can accept
+miracles as such, or any set of miracles, as worthy of a reasonable
+conception of the Divine Nature, and whether it can be fairly said that
+such miracles have answered a purpose which approves itself to our
+reason. Testimony will always speak at a disadvantage till we are
+assured on these points. Into the subject of testimony Mr. Mozley
+enters only in a general way, though his remarks on the relation of
+testimony to facts of so exceptional a nature as miracles, and also on
+the distinct peculiarities of Christian evidence as contrasted with the
+evidence of all other classes of alleged miracles, are marked by a
+characteristic combination of acuteness, precision, and broad practical
+sobriety and moderation. He rebukes with quiet and temperate and yet
+resolute plainness of statement the misplaced ingenuity which, on
+different sides, to serve very different causes, has tried to confuse
+and perplex the claims of the great Christian miracles by comparisons
+which it is really mere wantonness to make with later ones; for, be
+they what they may, it is certain that the Gospel miracles, in nature,
+in evidence, and in purpose and result, are absolutely unique in the
+world, and have nothing like them. And though the book mainly confines
+itself to its proper subject, the antecedent question of credibility,
+some of the most striking remarks in it relate to the way in which the
+purpose of miracles is visible in those of Christianity, and has been
+served by them. A miracle is an instrument--an instrument without which
+revelation is impossible; and Mr. Mozley meets Spinoza's objection to
+the unmeaning isolation of a miracle by insisting on the distinction,
+which Spinoza failed to see, between a miracle simply as a wonder for
+its own sake, and as a means, deriving its use and its value simply
+from the end which it was to serve. He observes that all the stupendous
+"marvels of nature do not speak to us in that way in which one miracle
+does, because they do not tell us that we are not like themselves"; and
+he remarks on the "perverse determination of Spinoza to look at
+miracles in that aspect which does not belong to them, and not to look
+at them in that aspect which does."
+
+    He compares miracles with nature, and then says how wise is the
+    order of nature, how meaningless the violation of it; how
+    expressive of the Almighty Mind the one, what a concealment of it
+    the other! But no one pretends to say that a miracle competes with
+    nature, in physical purpose and effectiveness. That is not its
+    object. But a miracle, though it does not profess to compete with
+    nature upon its rival's own ground, has a ghostly force and import
+    which nature has not. If real, it is a token, more pointed and
+    direct than physical order can be, of another world, and of Moral
+    Being and Will in that world.
+
+Thus, regarding miracles as means to fulfil a purpose, Mr. Mozley shows
+what has come of them. His lecture on "Miracles regarded in their
+Practical Result" is excelled by some of the others as examples of
+subtle and searching thought and well-balanced and compact argument;
+but it is a fine example of the way in which a familiar view can have
+fresh colour and force thrown into it by the way in which it is
+treated. He shows that it is impossible in fact to separate from the
+miracles in which it professed to begin, the greatest and deepest moral
+change which the world has ever known. This change was made not by
+miracles but by certain doctrines. The Epistle to the Romans surveyed
+the moral failure of the world; St. Paul looked on the chasm between
+knowledge and action, the "unbridged gulf, this incredible inability of
+man to do what was right, with profound wonder"; but in the face of
+this hopeless spectacle he dared to prophesy the moral elevation which
+we have witnessed, and the power to which he looked to bring it about
+was the Christian doctrines. St. Paul "takes what may be called the
+high view of human nature--i.e. what human nature is capable of when
+the proper motive and impulse is applied to it." He sees in Christian
+doctrine that strong force which is to break down "the _vis inertiae_
+of man, to set human nature going, to touch the spring of man's heart";
+and he compares with St. Paul's doctrines and hopefulness the doctrinal
+barrenness, the despair of Mohammedanism:--
+
+    If one had to express in a short compass the character of its
+    remarkable founder as a teacher, it would be that that great man
+    had no faith in human nature. There were two things which he
+    thought man could do and would do for the glory of God--transact
+    religious forms, and fight; and upon those two points he was
+    severe; but within the sphere of common practical life, where
+    man's great trial lies, his code exhibits the disdainful laxity of
+    a legislator who accommodates his rule to the recipient, and shows
+    his estimate of the recipient by the accommodation which he
+    adopts. Did we search history for a contrast, we could hardly
+    discover a deeper one than that between St. Paul's overflowing
+    standard of the capabilities of human nature and the oracular
+    cynicism of the great false Prophet. The writer of the Koran does,
+    indeed, if any discerner of hearts ever did, take the measure of
+    mankind; and his measure is the same that Satire has taken, only
+    expressed with the majestic brevity of one who had once lived in
+    the realm of Silence. "Man is weak," says Mahomet. And upon that
+    maxim he legislates.... The keenness of Mahomet's insight into
+    human nature, a wide knowledge of its temptations, persuasives,
+    influences under which it acts, a vast immense capacity of
+    forbearance for it, half grave half genial, half sympathy half
+    scorn, issue in a somewhat Horatian model, the character of the
+    man of experience who despairs of any change in man, and lays down
+    the maxim that we must take him as we find him. It was indeed his
+    supremacy in both faculties, the largeness of the passive nature
+    and the splendour of action, that constituted the secret of his
+    success. The breadth and flexibility of mind that could negotiate
+    with every motive of interest, passion, and pride in man is
+    surprising; there is boundless sagacity; what is wanting is hope,
+    a belief in the capabilities of human nature. There is no upward
+    flight in the teacher's idea of man. Instead of which, the notion
+    of the power of earth, and the impossibility of resisting it,
+    depresses his whole aim, and the shadow of the tomb falls upon the
+    work of the great false Prophet.
+
+    The idea of God is akin to the idea of man. "He knows us," says
+    Mahomet. God's _knowledge_, the vast _experience_, so to speak, of
+    the Divine Being, His infinite acquaintance with man's frailties
+    and temptations, is appealed to as the ground of confidence. "He
+    is the Wise, the Knowing One," "He is the Knowing, the Wise," "He
+    is easy to be reconciled." Thus is raised a notion of the Supreme
+    Being, which is rather an extension of the character of the
+    large-minded and sagacious man of the world than an extension of
+    man's virtue and holiness. He forgives because He knows too much
+    to be rigid, because sin universal ceases to be sin, and must be
+    given way to. Take a man who has had large opportunity of studying
+    mankind, and has come into contact with every form of human
+    weakness and corruption; such a man is indulgent as a simple
+    consequence of his knowledge, because nothing surprises him. So
+    the God of Mahomet forgives by reason of His vast knowledge.
+
+In contrast with the fruit of this he observes that "the prophecy in
+the Epistle to the Romans has been fulfilled, and that doctrine has
+been historically at the bottom of a great change of moral practice in
+mankind." The key has been found to set man's moral nature in action,
+to check and reverse that course of universal failure manifest before;
+and this key is Christian doctrine. "A stimulus has been given to human
+nature which has extracted an amount of action from it which no Greek
+or Roman could have believed possible." It is inconceivable that but
+for such doctrine such results as have been seen in Christendon would
+have followed; and were it now taken away we cannot see anything else
+that would have the faintest expectation of taking its place. "Could we
+commit mankind to a moral Deism without trembling for the result?" Can
+the enthusiasm for the divinity of human nature stand the test of
+clear, unsparing observation? Would it not issue in such an estimate of
+human nature as Mahomet took? "A deification of humanity upon its own
+grounds, an exaltation which is all height and no depth, wants power
+because it wants truth. It is not founded upon the facts of human
+nature, and therefore issues in vain and vapid aspiration, and injures
+the solidity of man's character." As he says, "The Gospel doctrine of
+the Incarnation and its effects alone unites the sagacious view of
+human nature with the enthusiastic." And now what is the historical
+root and basis from which this one great moral revolution in the
+world's history, so successful, so fruitful, so inexhaustible, has
+started?
+
+    But if, as the source and inspiration of practice, doctrine has
+    been the foundation of a new state of the world, and of that
+    change which distinguishes the world under Christianity from the
+    world before it, miracles, as the proof of that doctrine, stand
+    before us in a very remarkable and peculiar light. Far from being
+    mere idle feats of power to gratify the love of the marvellous;
+    far even from being mere particular and occasional rescues from
+    the operation of general laws,--they come before us as means for
+    accomplishing the largest and most important practical object that
+    has ever been accomplished in the history of mankind. They lie at
+    the bottom of the difference of the modern from the ancient world;
+    so far, i.e., as that difference is moral. We see as a fact a
+    change in the moral condition of mankind, which marks ancient and
+    modern society as two different states of mankind. What has
+    produced this change, and elicited this new power of action?
+    Doctrine. And what was the proof of that doctrine, or essential to
+    the proof of it? Miracles. The greatness of the result thus throws
+    light upon the propriety of the means, and shows the fitting
+    object which was presented for the introduction of such means--the
+    fitting occasion which had arisen for the use of them; for,
+    indeed, no more weighty, grand, or solemn occasion can be
+    conceived than the foundation of such a new order of things in the
+    world. Extraordinary action of Divine power for such an end has
+    the benefit of a justifying object of incalculable weight; which
+    though not of itself, indeed, proof of the fact, comes with
+    striking force upon the mind in connection with the proper proof.
+    It is reasonable, it is inevitable, that we should be impressed by
+    such a result; for it shows that the miraculous system has been a
+    practical one; that it has been a step in the ladder of man's
+    ascent, the means of introducing those powerful truths which have
+    set his moral nature in action.
+
+Of this work, remarkable in so many ways, we will add but one thing
+more. It is marked throughout with the most serious and earnest
+conviction, but it is without a single word, from first to last, of
+asperity or insinuation against opponents; and this, not from any
+deficiency of feeling as to the importance of the issue, but from a
+deliberate and resolutely maintained self-control, and from an
+overruling ever-present sense of the duty, on themes like these, of a
+more than judicial calmness.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+ECCE HOMO[11]
+
+
+  [11]
+  _Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. Guardian_,
+  7th February 1866.
+
+This is a dangerous book to review. The critic of it, if he is prudent,
+will feel that it is more than most books a touchstone of his own
+capacity, and that in giving his judgment upon it he cannot help giving
+his own measure and betraying what he is himself worth. All the
+unconscious guiding which a name, even if hitherto unknown, gives to
+opinion is wanting. The first aspect of the book is perplexing; closer
+examination does not clear up all the questions which present
+themselves; and many people, after they have read it through, will not
+feel quite certain what it means. Much of what is on the surface and
+much of what is inherent in the nature of the work will jar painfully
+on many minds; while others who begin to read it under one set of
+impressions may by the time they have got to the end complain of having
+been taken in. There can be no doubt on which side the book is; but it
+may be open to debate from which side it has come. The unknown champion
+who comes into the lists with barred vizor and no cognisance on his
+shield leaves it not long uncertain for which of the contending parties
+he appears; but his weapons and his manner of fighting are not the
+ordinary ones of the side which he takes; and there is a force in his
+arm, and a sweep in his stroke, which is not that of common men. The
+book is one which it is easy to take exception to, and perhaps still
+easier to praise at random; but the subject is put before us in so
+unusual a way, and one so removed from the ordinary grooves of thought,
+that in trying to form an adequate estimate of the work as a whole, a
+man feels as he does when he is in the presence of something utterly
+unfamiliar and unique, when common rules and inferences fail him, and
+in pronouncing upon which he must make something of a venture.
+
+In making our own venture we will begin with what seems to us
+incontestable. In the first place, but that it has been questioned, we
+should say that there could be no question of the surpassing ability
+which the book displays. It is far beyond the power of the average
+clever and practised writer of our days. It is the work of a man in
+whom thought, sympathy, and imagination are equally powerful and
+wealthy, and who exercises a perfect and easy command over his own
+conceptions, and over the apt and vivid language which is their
+expression. Few men have entered so deeply into the ideas and feelings
+of the time, or have looked at the world, its history and its
+conditions, with so large and piercing an insight. But it is idle to
+dwell on what must strike, at first sight, any one who but opens the
+book. We go on to observe, what is equally beyond dispute, the deep
+tone of religious seriousness which pervades the work. The writer's way
+of speaking is very different from that of the ascetic or the devotee;
+but no ascetic or devotee could be more profoundly penetrated with the
+great contrast between holiness and evil, and show more clearly in his
+whole manner of thinking the ineffaceable impression of the powers of
+the world to come. Whatever else the book may be, this much is plain on
+the face of it--it is the work of a mind of extreme originality, depth,
+refinement, and power; and it is also the work of a very religious man:
+Thomas à Kempis had not a more solemn sense of things unseen and of
+what is meant by the Imitation of Christ.
+
+What the writer wishes his book to be understood to be we must gather
+from his Preface:--
+
+    Those who feel dissatisfied with the current conceptions of
+    Christ, if they cannot rest content without a definite opinion,
+    may find it necessary to do what to persons not so dissatisfied it
+    seems audacious and perilous to do. They may be obliged to
+    reconsider the whole subject from the beginning, and placing
+    themselves in imagination at the time when he whom we call Christ
+    bore no such name, but was simply, as St. Luke describes him, a
+    young man of promise, popular with those who knew him, and
+    appearing to enjoy the Divine favour, to trace his biography from
+    point to point, and accept those conclusions about him, not which
+    church doctors or even apostles have sealed with their authority,
+    but which the facts themselves, critically weighed, appear to
+    warrant.
+
+    This is what the present writer undertook to do for the
+    satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good
+    many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that
+    there was no historical character whose motives, objects, and
+    feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which
+    proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others.
+
+    What is now published is a fragment. No theological questions
+    whatever are here discussed. Christ, as the creator of modern
+    theology and religion, will make the subject of another volume,
+    which, however, the author does not hope to publish for some time
+    to come. In the meanwhile he has endeavoured to furnish an answer
+    to the question, What was Christ's object in founding the Society
+    which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to attain that
+    object?
+
+Thus the book comes before us as a serious facing of difficulties. And
+that the writer lays stress on its being so viewed appears further from
+a letter which he wrote to the _Spectator_, repeating emphatically that
+the book is not one "written after the investigation was completed, but
+the _investigation_ itself." The letter may be taken to complete the
+statement of the Preface:--
+
+    I endeavoured in my Preface to describe the state of mind in which
+    I undertook my book. I said that the character and objects of
+    Christ were at that time altogether incomprehensible to me, and
+    that I wished to try whether an independent investigation would
+    relieve my perplexity. Perhaps I did not distinctly enough state
+    that _Ecce Homo_ is not a book written after the investigation was
+    completed, but the _investigation_ itself.
+
+    The Life of Christ is partly easy to understand and partly
+    difficult. This being so, what would a man do who wished to study
+    it methodically? Naturally he would take the easy part first. He
+    would collect, arrange, and carefully consider all the facts which
+    are simple, and until he has done this, he would carefully avoid
+    all those parts of his subject which are obscure, and which cannot
+    be explained without making bold hypotheses. By this course he
+    would limit the problem, and in the meanwhile arrive at a probable
+    opinion concerning the veracity of the documents, and concerning
+    the characteristics, both intellectual and moral, of the person
+    whose high pretensions he wished to investigate.
+
+    This is what I have done. I have postponed altogether the hardest
+    questions connected with Christ, as questions which cannot
+    properly be discussed until a considerable quantity of evidence
+    has been gathered about his character and views. If this evidence,
+    when collected, had appeared to be altogether conflicting and
+    inconsistent, I should have been saved the trouble of proceeding
+    any further; I should have said that Christ is a myth. If it had
+    been consistent, and had disclosed to me a person of mean and
+    ambitious aims, I should have said, Christ is a deceiver. Again,
+    if it had exhibited a person of weak understanding and strong
+    impulsive sensibility, I should have said Christ is a bewildered
+    enthusiast.
+
+    In all these cases you perceive my method would have saved me a
+    good deal of trouble. As it is, I certainly feel bound to go on,
+    though, as I say in my Preface, my progress will necessarily be
+    slow. But I am much engaged and have little time for theological
+    study. But pray do not suppose that postponing questions is only
+    another name for evading them. I think I have gained much by this
+    postponement. I have now a very definite notion of Christ's
+    character and that of his followers. I shall be able to judge how
+    far he was likely to deceive himself or them. It is possible I may
+    have put others, who can command more time than I, in a condition
+    to take up the subject where for the present I leave it.
+
+    You say my picture suffers by my method. But _Ecce Homo_ is not a
+    picture: it is the very opposite of a picture; it is an analysis.
+    It may be, you will answer, that the title suggests a picture.
+    This may perhaps be true, and if so, it is no doubt a fault, but a
+    fault in the title, not in the book. For titles are put to books,
+    not books to titles.
+
+Thus it appears that the writer found it his duty to investigate those
+awful questions which every thinking man feels to be full of the
+"incomprehensible" and unfathomable, but which many thinking men, for
+various reasons both good and bad, shrink from attempting to
+investigate, accepting on practical and very sufficient grounds the
+religious conclusions which are recommended and sanctioned by the
+agreement of Christendom. And finding it his duty to investigate them
+at all, he saw that he was bound to investigate in earnest. But under
+what circumstances this happened, from what particular pressure of
+need, and after what previous belief or state of opinion, we are not
+told. Whether from being originally on the doubting side--on the
+irreligious side we cannot suppose he ever could have been--he has
+risen through his investigation into belief; or whether, originally on
+the believing side, he found the aspect so formidable, to himself or to
+the world, of the difficulties and perplexities which beset belief,
+that he turned to bay upon the foes that dogged him--must be left to
+conjecture. It is impossible to question that he has been deeply
+impressed with the difficulties of believing; it is impossible to
+question that doubt has been overborne and trampled under foot. But
+here we have the record, it would not be accurate to say of the
+struggle, but of that resolute and unflinching contemplation of the
+realities of the case which decided it. Such plunging into such a
+question must seem, as he says, to those who do not need it, "audacious
+and perilous"; for if you plunge into a question in earnest, and do not
+under a thin disguise take a side, you must, whatever your bias and
+expectation, take your chance of the alternative answers which may come
+out. It is a simple fact that there are many people who feel
+"dissatisfied with the current conceptions" of our Lord--whether
+reasonably and justly dissatisfied is another question; but whatever we
+think of it they remain dissatisfied. In such emergencies it is
+conceivable that a man who believes, yet keenly realises and feels what
+disturbs or destroys the belief of others, should dare to put himself
+in their place; should enter the hospital and suffer the disease which
+makes such ravages; should descend into the shades and face the
+spectres. No one can deny the risk of dwelling on such thoughts as he
+must dwell on; but if he feels warmly with his kind, he may think it
+even a duty to face the risk. To any one accustomed to live on his
+belief it cannot but be a hard necessity, full of pain and difficulty,
+first to think and then to speak of what he believes, as if it _might
+not_ be, or _could be_ otherwise; but the changes of time bring up ever
+new hard necessities; and one thing is plain, that if ever such an
+investigation is undertaken, it ought to be a real one, in good earnest
+and not in play. If a man investigates at all, both for his own sake
+and for the sake of the effect of his investigation on others, he must
+accept the fair conditions of investigation. We may not ourselves be
+able to conceive the possibility of taking, even provisionally, a
+neutral position; but looking at what is going on all round us, we
+ought to be able to enlarge our thoughts sufficiently to take in the
+idea that a believing mind may feel it a duty to surrender itself
+boldly to the intellectual chances and issues of the inquiry, and to
+"let its thoughts take their course in the confidence that they will
+come home at last." It may be we ourselves who "have not faith enough
+to be patient of doubt"; there may be others who feel that if what they
+believe is real, they need not be afraid of the severest revisal and
+testing of the convictions on which they rest; who feel that, in the
+circumstances of the time, it is not left to their choice whether these
+convictions shall be sifted unsparingly and to the uttermost; and who
+think it a venture not unworthy of a Christian, to descend even to the
+depths to go through the thoughts of doubters, if so be that he may
+find the spell that shall calm them. We do not say that this book is
+the production of such a state of mind; we only think that it may be.
+One thing is clear, wherever the writer's present lot is cast, he has
+that in him which not only enables him, but forces him, to sympathise
+with what he sees in the opposite camp. If he is what is called a
+Liberal, his whole heart is yet pouring itself forth towards the great
+truths of Christianity. If he is what is called orthodox, his whole
+intellect is alive to the right and duty of freedom of thought. He will
+therefore attract and repel on both sides. And he appears to feel that
+the position of double sympathy gives him a special advantage, to
+attract to each side what is true in its opposite, and to correct in
+each what is false or inadequate.
+
+What, then, is this investigation, and what course does it follow? At
+the first aspect, we might take it for one of those numerous attempts
+on the Liberal side, partly impatient, partly careless of Christianity,
+to put a fresh look on the Christian history, and to see it with new
+eyes. The writer's language is at starting neutral; he speaks of our
+Lord in the language indeed of the New Testament, but not in the usual
+language of later Christian writers. All through, the colour and tone
+is absolutely modern; and what would naturally be expressed in familiar
+theological terms is for the most part studiously put in other words.
+Persons acquainted with the writings of the late Mr. Robertson might be
+often reminded of his favourite modes of teaching; of his maxim that
+truth is made up of two opposites which seem contradictories; of the
+distinction which he was so fond of insisting upon between principles
+and rules; above all, of his doctrine that the true way to rise to the
+faith in our Lord's Divine Nature was by first realising His Human
+Life. But the resemblance is partial, if not superficial, and gives way
+on closer examination before broad and characteristic features of an
+entirely different significance. That one which at first arrests
+attention, and distinguishes this writer's line of thought from the
+common Liberal way of dealing with the subject, is that from the first
+page of the book to its last line the work of Christ is viewed, not
+simply as the foundation of a religious system, the introduction of
+certain great principles, the elevation of religious ideas, the
+delivery of Divine truths, the exhibition of a life and example, but as
+the call and creation of a definite, concrete, organised society of
+men. The subject, of investigation is not merely the character and
+history of the Person, but the Person as connected with His work.
+Christ is regarded not simply in Himself or in His teaching, as the
+Founder of a philosophy, a morality, a theology in the abstract, but as
+the Author of a Divine Society, the Body which is called by His Name,
+the Christian Church Universal, a real and visible company of men,
+which, however we may understand it, exists at this moment as it has
+existed since His time, marked by His badges, governed by His laws, and
+working out His purpose. The writer finds the two joined in fact, and
+he finds them also joined in the recorded history of Christ's plan. The
+book might almost be described as the beginning of a new _De Civitate
+Dei_, written with the further experience of fourteen centuries and
+from the point of view of our own generation. This is one remarkable
+peculiarity of this investigation; another is the prominence given to
+the severe side of the Person and character of whom he writes, and what
+is even more observable, the way in which both the severity and the
+gentleness are apprehended and harmonised.
+
+We are familiar with the attempts to resolve the Christianity of the
+New Testament into philanthropy; and, on the other hand, writers like
+Mr. Carlyle will not let us forget that the world is as dark and evil
+as the Bible draws it. This writer feels both in one. No one can show
+more sympathy with enlarged and varied ideas of human happiness, no one
+has connected them more fearlessly with Christian principles, or
+claimed from those principles more unlimited developments, even for the
+physical well-being of men. No one has extended wider the limits of
+Christian generosity, forbearance, and tolerance. But, on the other
+hand, what is striking is, that all this is compatible, and is made to
+appear so, with the most profound and terrible sense of evil, with
+indignation and scorn which is scathing where it kindles and strikes,
+with a capacity and energy of deliberate religious hatred against what
+is impure and false and ungodly, which mark one who has dared to
+realise and to sympathise with the wrath of Jesus Christ.
+
+The world has been called in these later days, and from opposite
+directions, to revise its judgments about Jesus Christ. Christians, on
+the one hand, have been called to do it by writers of whom M. Ernest
+Renan is the most remarkable and the most unflinching. But the
+sceptical and the unbelieving have likewise been obliged to change
+their ground and their tone, and no one with any self-respect or care
+for his credit even as a thinker and a man would like to repeat the
+superficial and shallow flippancy and irreligion of the last century.
+Two things have been specially insisted on. We have been told that if
+we are to see the truth of things as it is, we must disengage our minds
+from the deeply rooted associations and conceptions of a later
+theology, and try to form our impressions first-hand and unprompted
+from the earliest documents which we can reach. It has been further
+urged on us, in a more believing spirit, that we should follow the
+order by which in fact truth was unfolded, and rise from the full
+appreciation of our Lord's human nature to the acknowledgment of His
+Divine nature. It seems to us that the writer of this book has felt the
+force of both these appeals, and that his book is his answer to them.
+Here is the way in which he responds to both--to the latter indirectly,
+but with a significance which no one can mistake; to the former
+directly and avowedly. He undertakes, isolating himself from current
+beliefs, and restricting himself to the documents from which, if from
+any source at all, the original facts about Christ are to be learned,
+to examine what the genuine impression is which an attempt to realise
+the statements about him leaves on the mind. This has been done by
+others, with results supposed to be unfavourable to Christianity. He
+has been plainly moved by these results, though not a hint is given of
+the existence of Renan or Strauss. But the effect on his own mind has
+been to drive him back on a closer survey of the history in its first
+fountains, and to bring him from it filled more than ever with wonder
+at its astonishing phenomena, to protest against the poverty and
+shallowness of the most ambitious and confident of these attempts. They
+leave the historical Character which they pourtray still unsounded, its
+motives, objects, and feelings absolutely incomprehensible. He accepts
+the method to reverse the product. "Look at Christ historically,"
+people say; "see Him as He really was." The answer here is, "Well, I
+will look at Him with whatever aid a trained historical imagination can
+look at Him. I accept your challenge; I admit your difficulties. I will
+dare to do what you do. I will try and look at the very facts
+themselves, with singleness and 'innocence of the eye,' trying to see
+nothing more than I really see, and trying to see all that my eye falls
+on. I will try to realise indeed what is recorded of Him. And _this_ is
+what I see. This is the irresistible impression from the plainest and
+most elementary part of the history, if we are to accept any history at
+all. A miracle could not be more unlike the order of our experience
+than the Character set before us is unique and unapproachable in all
+known history. Further, all that makes the superiority of the modern
+world to the ancient, and is most permanent and pregnant with
+improvement in it, may be traced to the appearance of that Character,
+and to the work which He planned and did. You ask for a true picture of
+Him, drawn with freedom, drawn with courage; here, if you dare look at
+it, is what those who wrote of Him showed Him to be. Renan has tried to
+draw this picture. Take the Gospels as they stand; treat them simply as
+biographies; look, and see, and think of what they tell, and then ask
+yourself about Renan's picture, and what it looks like when placed side
+by side with the truth."
+
+This, as we have ventured to express it in our own words, seems to be
+the writer's position. It is at any rate the effect of his book, to our
+minds. The inquiry, it must always be remembered, is a preliminary one,
+dealing, as he says, with the easiest and obvious elements of the
+problem; and much that seems inadequate and unsatisfactory may be
+developed hereafter. He starts from what, to those who already have the
+full belief, must appear a low level. He takes, as it will be seen, the
+documents as they stand. He takes little more than the first three
+Gospels, and these as a whole, without asking minute questions about
+them. The mythical theory he dismisses as false to nature, in dealing
+with such a Character and such results. He talks in his preface of
+"critically weighing" the facts; but the expression is misleading. It
+is true that we may talk of criticism of character; but the words
+naturally suggest that close cross-questioning of documents and details
+which has produced such remarkable results in modern investigations;
+and of this there is none. It is a work in no sense of criticism; it is
+a work of what he calls the "trained historical imagination"; a work of
+broad and deep knowledge of human nature and the world it works in and
+creates about it; a work of steady and large insight into character,
+and practical judgment on moral likelihoods. He answers Strauss as he
+answers Renan, by producing the interpretation of a character, so
+living, so in accordance with all before and after, that it overpowers
+and sweeps away objections; a picture, an analysis or outline, if he
+pleases, which justifies itself and is its own evidence, by its
+originality and internal consistency. Criticism in detail does not
+affect him. He assumes nothing of the Gospels, except that they are
+records; neither their inspiration in any theological sense, nor their
+authorship, nor their immunity from mistake, nor the absolute purity of
+their texts. But taking them as a whole he discerns in them a Character
+which, if you accept them at all and on any terms, you cannot mistake.
+Even if the copy is ever so imperfect, ever so unskilful, ever so
+blurred and defaced, there is no missing the features any more than a
+man need miss the principle of a pattern because it is rudely or
+confusedly traced. He looks at these "biographies" as a geologist might
+do at a disturbed series of strata; and he feeds his eye upon them till
+he gets such a view of the coherent whole as will stand independent of
+the right or wrong disposition of the particular fragments. To the mind
+which discerns the whole, the regulating principle, the general curves
+and proportions of the strata may be just as visible after the
+disturbance as before it. The Gospels bring before us the visible and
+distinct outlines of a life which, after all efforts to alter the idea
+of it, remains still the same; they present certain clusters of leading
+ideas and facts so embedded in their substance that no criticism of
+detail can possibly get rid of them, without absolutely obliterating
+the whole record. It is this leading idea, or cluster of ideas, to be
+gained by intent gazing, which the writer disengages from all questions
+of criticism in the narrow sense of the word, and sets before us as
+explaining the history of Christianity, and as proving themselves by
+that explanation. That the world has been moved we know. "Give me," he
+seems to say, "the Character which is set forth in the Gospels, and I
+can show how He moved it":--
+
+    It is in the object of the present treatise to exhibit Christ's
+    career in outline. No other career ever had so much unity; no
+    other biography is so simple or can so well afford to dispense
+    with details. Men in general take up scheme after scheme, as
+    circumstances suggest one or another, and therefore most
+    biographies are compelled to pass from one subject to another, and
+    to enter into a multitude of minute questions, to divide the life
+    carefully into periods by chronological landmarks accurately
+    determined, to trace the gradual development of character and
+    ripening or change of opinions. But Christ formed one plan and
+    executed it; no important change took place in his mode of
+    thinking, speaking, or acting; at least the evidence before us
+    does not enable us to trace any such change. It is possible,
+    indeed, for students of his life to find details which they may
+    occupy themselves with discussing; they may map out the chronology
+    of it, and devise methods of harmonising the different accounts;
+    but such details are of little importance compared with the one
+    grand question, what was Christ's plan, and throw scarcely any
+    light upon that question. What was Christ's plan is the main
+    question which will be investigated in the present treatise, and
+    that vision of universal monarchy which we have just been
+    considering affords an appropriate introduction to it....
+
+    We conclude then, that Christ in describing himself as a king, and
+    at the same time as king of the Kingdom of God--in other words as
+    a king representing the Majesty of the Invisible King of a
+    theocracy--claimed the character first of Founder, next of
+    Legislator; thirdly, in a certain high and peculiar sense, of
+    Judge, of a new divine society.
+
+    In defining as above the position which Christ assumed, we have
+    not entered into controvertible matter. We have not rested upon
+    single passages, nor drawn upon the fourth Gospel. To deny that
+    Christ did undertake to found and to legislate for a new
+    theocratic society, and that he did claim the office of Judge of
+    mankind, is indeed possible, but only to those who altogether deny
+    the credibility of the extant biographies of Christ. If those
+    biographies be admitted to be generally trustworthy, then Christ
+    undertook to be what we have described; if not, then of course
+    this, but also every other account of him falls to the ground.
+
+We have said that he starts from a low level; and he restricts himself
+so entirely at the opening to facts which do not involve dispute, that
+his views of them are necessarily incomplete, and, so to say,
+provisional and deliberate understatements. He begins no higher than
+the beginning of the public ministry, the Baptism, and the Temptation;
+and his account of these leaves much to say, though it suggests much of
+what is left unsaid. But he soon gets to the proper subject of his
+book--the absolute uniqueness of Him whose equally unique work has been
+the Christian Church. And this uniqueness he finds in the combination
+of "unbounded personal pretensions," and the possession, claimed and
+believed, of boundless power, with an absolutely unearthly use of His
+pretensions and His power, and with a goodness which has proved to be,
+and still is, the permanent and ever-flowing source of moral elevation
+and improvement in the world. He early comes across the question of
+miracles, and, as he says, it is impossible to separate the claim to
+them and the belief in them from the story. We find Christ, he says,
+"describing himself as a king, and at the same time as king of the
+Kingdom of God"; calling forth and founding a new and divine society,
+and claiming to be, both now and hereafter, the Judge without appeal of
+all mankind; "he considered, in short, heaven and hell to be in his
+hands." And we find, on the other hand, that as such He has been
+received. To such an astonishing chain of phenomena miracles naturally
+belong:--
+
+    When we contemplate this scheme as a whole, and glance at the
+    execution and results of it, three things strike us with
+    astonishment. First, its prodigious originality, if the expression
+    may be used. What other man has had the courage or elevation of
+    mind to say, "I will build up a state by the mere force of my
+    will, without help from the kings of the world, without taking
+    advantage of any of the secondary causes which unite men
+    together--unity of interest or speech, or blood-relationship. I
+    will make laws for my state which shall never be repealed, and I
+    will defy all the powers of destruction that are at work in the
+    world to destroy what I build"?
+
+    Secondly, we are astonished at the calm confidence with which the
+    scheme was carried out. The reason why statesmen can seldom work
+    on this vast scale is that it commonly requires a whole lifetime
+    to gain that ascendency over their fellow-men which such schemes
+    presuppose. Some of the leading organisers of the world have said,
+    "I will work my way to supreme power, and then I will execute
+    great plans." But Christ overleaped the first stage altogether. He
+    did not work his way to royalty, but simply said to all men, "I am
+    your king." He did not struggle forward to a position in which he
+    could found a new state, but simply founded it.
+
+    Thirdly, we are astonished at the prodigious success of the
+    scheme. It is not more certain that Christ presented himself to
+    men as the founder, legislator, and judge of a divine society than
+    it is certain that men have accepted him in these characters, that
+    the divine society has been founded, that it has lasted nearly two
+    thousand years, that it has extended over a large and the most
+    highly-civilised portion of the earth's surface, and that it
+    continues full of vigour at the present day.
+
+    Between the astonishing design and its astonishing success there
+    intervenes an astonishing instrumentality--that of miracles. It
+    will be thought by some that in asserting miracles to have been
+    actually wrought by Christ we go beyond what the evidence, perhaps
+    beyond what any possible evidence, is able to sustain. Waiving,
+    then, for the present, the question whether miracles were actually
+    wrought, we may state a fact which is fully capable of being
+    established by ordinary evidence, and which is actually
+    established by evidence as ample as any historical fact
+    whatever--the fact, namely, that Christ _professed_ to work
+    miracles. We may go further, and assert with confidence that
+    Christ was believed by his followers really to work miracles, and
+    that it was mainly on this account that they conceded to Him the
+    pre-eminent dignity and authority which he claimed. The accounts
+    which we have of these miracles may be exaggerated; it is possible
+    that in some special cases stories have been related which have no
+    foundation whatever; but on the whole, miracles play so important
+    a part in Christ's scheme, that any theory which would represent
+    them as due entirely to the imagination of his followers or of a
+    later age destroys the credibility of the documents not partially
+    but wholly, and leaves Christ a personage as mythical as Hercules.
+    Now, the present treatise aims to show that the Christ of the
+    Gospels is not mythical, by showing that the character those
+    biographies portray is in all its large features strikingly
+    consistent, and at the same time so peculiar as to be altogether
+    beyond the reach of invention both by individual genius and still
+    more by what is called the "consciousness of an age." Now, if the
+    character depicted in the Gospels is in the main real and
+    historical, they must be generally trustworthy, and if so, the
+    responsibility of miracles is fixed on Christ. In this case the
+    reality of the miracles themselves depends in a great degree on
+    the opinion we form of Christ's veracity, and this opinion must
+    arise gradually from the careful examination of his whole life.
+    For our present purpose, which is to investigate the plan which
+    Christ formed and the way in which he executed it, it matters
+    nothing whether the miracles were real or imaginary; in either
+    case, being believed to be real, they had the same effect.
+    Provisionally, therefore, we may speak of them as real.
+
+Without the belief in miracles, as he says, it is impossible to
+conceive the history of the Church:--
+
+    If we suppose that Christ really performed no miracles, and that
+    those which are attributed to him were the product of
+    self-deception mixed in some proportion or other with imposture,
+    then no doubt the faith of St. Paul and St. John was an empty
+    chimera, a mere misconception; but it is none the less true that
+    those apparent miracles were essential to Christ's success, and
+    that had he not pretended to perform them the Christian Church
+    would never have been founded, and the name of Jesus of Nazareth
+    would be known at this day only to the curious in Jewish
+    antiquities.
+
+But he goes on to point out what was the use which Christ made of
+miracles, and how it was that they did not, as they might have done,
+even impede His purpose of founding His kingdom on men's consciences
+and not on their terrors. In one of the most remarkable passages
+perhaps ever written on the Gospel miracles as they are seen when
+simply looked at as they are described, the writer says:--
+
+    He imposed upon himself a strict restraint in the dse of his
+    supernatural powers. He adopted the principle that he was not sent
+    to destroy men's lives but to save them, and rigidly abstained in
+    practice from inflicting any kind of damage or harm. In this course
+    he persevered so steadily that it became generally understood.
+    Every one knew that this _king_, whose royal pretensions were so
+    prominent, had an absolutely unlimited patience, and that he would
+    endure the keenest criticism, the bitterest and most malignant
+    personal attacks. Men's mouths were open to discuss his claims and
+    character with perfect freedom; so far from regarding him with that
+    excessive fear which might have prevented them from receiving his
+    doctrine intelligently, they learnt gradually to treat him, even
+    while they acknowledged his extraordinary power, with a reckless
+    animosity which they would have been afraid to show towards an
+    ordinary enemy. With curious inconsistency they openly charged him
+    with being leagued with the devil; in other words, they acknowledged
+    that he was capable of boundless mischief, and yet they were so
+    little afraid of him that they were ready to provoke him to use his
+    whole power against themselves. The truth was that they believed
+    him to be disarmed by his own deliberate resolution, and they
+    judged rightly. He punished their malice only by verbal reproofs,
+    and they gradually gathered courage to attack the life of one whose
+    miraculous powers they did not question.
+
+    Meantime, while this magnanimous self-restraint saved him from
+    false friends and mercenary or servile flatterers, and saved the
+    kingdom which he founded from the corruption of self-interest and
+    worldliness, it gave him a power over the good such as nothing
+    else could have given. For the noblest and most amiable thing that
+    can be seen is power mixed with gentleness, the reposing,
+    self-restraining attitude of strength. These are the "fine strains
+    of honour," these are "the graces of the gods"--
+
+        To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air.
+        And yet to charge the sulphur with a bolt
+        That shall but rive an oak.
+
+    And while he did no mischief under any provocation, his power
+    flowed in acts of beneficence on every side. Men could approach
+    near to him, could eat and drink with him, could listen to his
+    talk and ask him questions, and they found him not accessible
+    only, but warmhearted, and not occupied so much with his own plans
+    that he could not attend to a case of distress or mental
+    perplexity. They found him full of sympathy and appreciation,
+    dropping words of praise, ejaculations of admiration, tears. He
+    surrounded himself with those who had tasted of his bounty, sick
+    people whom he had cured, lepers whose death-in-life, demoniacs
+    whose hell-in-life, he had terminated with a single powerful word.
+    Among these came loving hearts who thanked him for friends and
+    relatives rescued for them out of the jaws of premature death, and
+    others whom he had saved, by a power which did not seem different,
+    from vice and degradation.
+
+    This temperance in the use of supernatural power is the
+    masterpiece of Christ. It is a moral miracle superinduced upon a
+    physical one. This repose in greatness makes him surely the most
+    sublime image ever offered to the human imagination. And it is
+    precisely this trait which gave him his immense and immediate
+    ascendency over men. If the question be put--Why was Christ so
+    successful?--Why did men gather round him at his call, form
+    themselves into a new society according to his wish, and accept
+    him with unbounded devotion as their legislator and judge? some
+    will answer, Because of the miracles which attested his divine
+    character; others, Because of the intrinsic beauty and divinity of
+    the great law of love which he propounded. But miracles, as we
+    have seen, have not by themselves this persuasive power. That a
+    man possesses a strange power which I cannot understand is no
+    reason why I should receive his words as divine oracles of truth.
+    The powerful man is not of necessity also wise; his power may
+    terrify and yet not convince. On the other hand, the law of love,
+    however divine, was but a precept. Undoubtedly it deserved that
+    men should accept it for its intrinsic worth, but men are not
+    commonly so eager to receive the words of wise men nor so
+    unbounded in their gratitude to them. It was neither for his
+    miracles nor for the beauty of his doctrine that Christ was
+    worshipped. Nor was it for his winning personal character, nor for
+    the persecutions he endured, nor for his martyrdom. It was for the
+    inimitable unity which all these things made when taken together.
+    In other words, it was for this that he whose power and greatness
+    as shown in his miracles were overwhelming denied himself the use
+    of his power, treated it as a slight thing, walked among men as
+    though he were one of them, relieved them in distress, taught them
+    to love each other, bore with undisturbed patience a perpetual
+    hailstorm of calumny; and when his enemies grew fiercer, continued
+    still to endure their attacks in silence, until, petrified and
+    bewildered with astonishment, men saw him arrested and put to
+    death with torture, refusing steadfastly to use in his own behalf
+    the power he conceived he held for the benefit of others. It was
+    the combination of greatness and self-sacrifice which won their
+    hearts, the mighty powers held under a mighty control, the
+    unspeakable condescension, the _Cross_ of _Christ_.
+
+And he goes on to describe the effect upon the world; and what it was
+that "drew all men unto Him":--
+
+    To sum up the results of this chapter. We began by remarking that
+    an astonishing plan met with an astonishing success, and we raised
+    the question to what instrumentality that success was due. Christ
+    announced himself as the Founder and Legislator of a new Society,
+    and as the Supreme Judge of men. Now by what means did he procure
+    that these immense pretensions should be allowed? He might have
+    done it by sheer power, he might have adopted persuasion, and
+    pointed out the merits of the scheme and of the legislation he
+    proposed to introduce. But he adopted a third plan, which had the
+    effect not merely of securing obedience, but of exciting
+    enthusiasm and devotion. He laid men under an immense
+    _obligation_. He convinced them that he was a person of altogether
+    transcendent greatness, one who needed nothing at their hands, one
+    whom it was impossible to benefit by conferring riches, or fame,
+    or dominion upon him, and that, being so great, he had devoted
+    himself of mere benevolence to their good. He showed them that for
+    their sakes he lived a hard and laborious life, and exposed
+    himself to the utmost malice of powerful men. They saw him hungry,
+    though they believed him able to turn the stones into bread; they
+    saw his royal pretensions spurned, though they believed that he
+    could in a moment take into his hand all the kingdoms of the world
+    and the glory of them; they saw his life in danger; they saw him
+    at last expire in agonies, though they believed that, had he so
+    willed it, no danger could harm him, and that had he thrown
+    himself from the topmost pinnacle of the temple he would have been
+    softly received in the arms of ministering angels. Witnessing his
+    sufferings, and convinced by the miracles they saw him work that
+    they were voluntarily endured, men's hearts were touched, and pity
+    for weakness blending strangely with wondering admiration of
+    unlimited power, an agitation of gratitude, sympathy, and
+    astonishment, such as nothing else could ever excite, sprang up in
+    them; and when, turning from his deeds to his words, they found
+    this very self-denial which had guided his own life prescribed as
+    the principle which should guide theirs, gratitude broke forth in
+    joyful obedience, self-denial produced self-denial, and the Law
+    and Lawgiver together were enshrined in their inmost hearts for
+    inseparable veneration.
+
+It is plain that whatever there is novel in such a line of argument
+must depend upon the way in which it is handled; and it is the
+extraordinary and sustained power with which this is done which gives
+its character to the book. The writer's method consists in realising
+with a depth of feeling and thought which it would not be easy to
+match, what our Lord was in His human ministry, as that ministry is set
+before us by those who witnessed it; and next, in showing in detail the
+connection of that ministry, which wrought so much by teaching, but
+still more by the Divine example, "not sparing words but resting most
+on deeds," with all that is highest, purest, and best in the morality
+of Christendom, and with what is most fruitful and most hopeful in the
+differences between the old world and our own. We cannot think we are
+wrong when we say that no one could speak of our Lord as this writer
+speaks, with the enthusiasm, the overwhelming sense of His
+inexpressible authority, of His unapproachable perfection, with the
+profound faith which lays everything at His feet, and not also believe
+all that the Divine Society which Christ founded has believed about
+Him. And though for the present his subject is history, and human
+morality as it appears to have been revolutionised and finally fixed by
+that history, and not the theology which subsequent in date is yet the
+foundation of both, it is difficult to imagine any reader going along
+with him and not breaking out at length into the burst, "My Lord and my
+God." If it is not so, then the phenomenon is strange indeed; for a
+belief below the highest and truest has produced an appreciation, a
+reverence, an adoration which the highest belief has only produced in
+the choicest examples of those who have had it, and by the side of
+which the ordinary exhibitions of the divine history are pale and
+feeble. To few, indeed, as it seems to us, has it been given to feel,
+and to make others feel, what in all the marvellous complexity of high
+and low, and in all the Divine singleness of His goodness and power,
+the Son of Man appeared in the days of His flesh. It is not more vivid
+or more wonderful than what the Gospels with so much detail tell us of
+that awful ministry in real flesh and blood, with a human soul and with
+all the reality of man's nature; but most of us, after all, read the
+Gospels with sealed and unwondering eyes. But, dwelling on the Manhood,
+so as almost to overpower us with the contrast between the distinct and
+living truth and the dead and dull familiarity of our thoughts of
+routine and custom, he does so in such a way that it is impossible to
+doubt, though the word Incarnation never occurs in the volume, that all
+the while he has before his thoughts the "taking of the manhood into
+God." What is the Gospel picture?
+
+    And let us pause once more to consider that which remains
+    throughout a subject of ever-recurring astonishment, the unbounded
+    personal pretensions which Christ advances. It is common in human
+    history to meet with those who claim some superiority over their
+    fellows. Men assert a pre-eminence over their fellow-citizens or
+    fellow-countrymen and become rulers of those who at first were
+    their equals, but they dream of nothing greater than some partial
+    control over the actions of others for the short space of a
+    lifetime. Few indeed are those to whom it is given to influence
+    future ages. Yet some men have appeared who have been "as levers
+    to uplift the earth and roll it in another course." Homer by
+    creating literature, Socrates by creating science, Caesar by
+    carrying civilisation inland from the shores of the Mediterranean,
+    Newton by starting science upon a career of steady progress, may
+    be said to have attained this eminence. But these men gave a
+    single impact like that which is conceived to have first set the
+    planets in motion; Christ claims to be a perpetual attractive
+    power like the sun which determines their orbit. They contributed
+    to men some discovery and passed away; Christ's discovery is
+    himself. To humanity struggling with its passions and its destiny
+    he says, Cling to me, cling ever closer to me. If we believe St.
+    John, he represented himself as the Light of the world, as the
+    Shepherd of the souls of men, as the Way to immortality, as the
+    Vine or Life-tree of humanity. And if we refuse to believe that he
+    used those words, we cannot deny, without rejecting all the
+    evidence before us, that he used words which have substantially
+    the same meaning. We cannot deny that he commanded men to leave
+    everything and attach themselves to him; that he declared himself
+    king, master, and judge of men; that he promised to give rest to
+    all the weary and heavy-laden; that he instructed his followers to
+    hope for life from feeding on his body and blood.
+
+    But it is doubly surprising to observe that these enormous
+    pretensions were advanced by one whose special peculiarity, not
+    only among his contemporaries but among the remarkable men that
+    have appeared before and since, was an almost feminine tenderness
+    and humility. This characteristic was remarked, as we have seen,
+    by the Baptist, and Christ himself was fully conscious of it. Yet
+    so clear to him was his own dignity and infinite importance to the
+    human race as an objective fact with which his own opinion of
+    himself had nothing to do, that in the same breath in which he
+    asserts it in the most unmeasured language, he alludes, apparently
+    with entire unconsciousness, to his _humility_. "Take my yoke upon
+    you, and learn of me; _for I am meek and lowly of heart_." And
+    again, when speaking to his followers of the arrogance of the
+    Pharisees, he says, "They love to be called Rabbi; but be not you
+    called Rabbi: _for one is your master, even Christ_."
+
+    Who is the humble man? It is he who resists with special
+    watchfulness and success the temptations which the conditions of
+    his life may offer to exaggerate his own importance.... If he
+    judged himself correctly, and if the Baptist described him well
+    when he compared him to a lamb, and, we may add, if his
+    biographers have delineated his character faithfully, Christ was
+    one naturally contented with obscurity, wanting the restless
+    desire for distinction and eminence which is common in great men,
+    hating to put forward personal claims, disliking competition and
+    "disputes who should be greatest," finding something bombastic in
+    the titles of royalty, fond of what is simple and homely, of
+    children, of poor people, occupying himself so much with the
+    concerns of others, with the relief of sickness and want, that the
+    temptation to exaggerate the importance of his own thoughts and
+    plans was not likely to master him; lastly, entertaining for the
+    human race a feeling so singularly fraternal that he was likely to
+    reject as a sort of treason the impulse to set himself in any
+    manner above them. Christ, it appears, was this humble man. When
+    we have fully pondered the fact we may be in a condition to
+    estimate the force of the evidence which, submitted to his mind,
+    could induce him, in direct opposition to all his tastes and
+    instincts, to lay claim, persistently, with the calmness of entire
+    conviction, in opposition to the whole religious world, in spite
+    of the offence which his own followers conceived, to a dominion
+    more transcendent, more universal, more complete, than the most
+    delirious votary of glory ever aspired to in his dreams.
+
+And what is it that our Lord has done for man by being so truly man?
+
+    This then it is which is wanted to raise the feeling of humanity
+    into an enthusiasm; when the precept of love has been given, an
+    image must be set before the eyes of those who are called upon to
+    obey it, an ideal or type of man which may be noble and amiable
+    enough to raise the whole race and make the meanest member of it
+    sacred with reflected glory.
+
+    Did not Christ do this? Did the command to love go forth to those
+    who had never seen a human being they could revere? Could his
+    followers turn upon him and say, How can we love a creature so
+    degraded, full of vile wants and contemptible passions, whose
+    little life is most harmlessly spent when it is an empty round of
+    eating and sleeping; a creature destined for the grave and for
+    oblivion when his allotted term of fretfulness and folly has
+    expired? Of this race Christ himself was a member, and to this day
+    is it not the best answer to all blasphemers of the species, the
+    best consolation when our sense of its degradation is keenest,
+    that a human brain was behind his forehead, and a human heart
+    beating in his breast, and that within the whole creation of God
+    nothing more elevated or more attractive has yet been found than
+    he? And if it be answered that there was in his nature something
+    exceptional and peculiar, that humanity must not be measured by
+    the stature of Christ, let us remember that it was precisely thus
+    that he wished it to be measured, delighting to call himself the
+    Son of Man, delighting to call the meanest of mankind his
+    brothers. If some human beings are abject and contemptible, if it
+    be incredible to us that they can have any high dignity or
+    destiny, do we regard them from so great a height as Christ? Are
+    we likely to be more pained by their faults and deficiencies than
+    he was? Is our standard higher than his? And yet he associated by
+    preference with the meanest of the race; no contempt for them did
+    he ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear than
+    the best and wisest to the common Father, no doubt that they were
+    naturally capable of rising to a moral elevation like his own.
+    There is nothing of which a man may be prouder than of this; it is
+    the most hopeful and redeeming fact in history; it is precisely
+    what was wanting to raise the love of man as man to enthusiasm. An
+    eternal glory has been shed upon the human race by the love Christ
+    bore to it And it was because the Edict of Universal Love went
+    forth to men whose hearts were in no cynical mood, but possessed
+    with a spirit of devotion to a man, that words which at any other
+    time, however grandly they might sound, would have been but words,
+    penetrated so deeply, and along with the law of love the power of
+    love was given. Therefore also the first Christians were enabled
+    to dispense with philosophical phrases, and instead of saying that
+    they loved the ideal of man in man, could simply say and feel that
+    they loved Christ in every man.
+
+    We have here the very kernel of the Christian moral scheme. We
+    have distinctly before us the end Christ proposed to himself, and
+    the means he considered adequate to the attainment of it....
+
+    But how to give to the meagre and narrow hearts of men such
+    enlargement? How to make them capable of a universal sympathy?
+    Christ believed it possible to bind men to their kind, but on one
+    condition--that they were first bound fast to himself. He stood
+    forth as the representative of men, he identified himself with the
+    cause and with the interests of all human beings; he was destined,
+    as he began before long obscurely to intimate, to lay down his
+    life for them. Few of us sympathise originally and directly with
+    this devotion; few of us can perceive in human nature itself any
+    merit sufficient to evoke it. But it is not so hard to love and
+    venerate him who felt it. So vast a passion of love, a devotion so
+    comprehensive, elevated, deliberate, and profound, has not
+    elsewhere been in any degree approached save by some of his
+    imitators. And as love provokes love, many have found it possible
+    to conceive for Christ an attachment the closeness of which no
+    words can describe, a veneration so possessing and absorbing the
+    man within them, that they have said, "I live no more, but Christ
+    lives in me."
+
+And what, in fact, has been the result, after the utmost and freest
+abatement for the objections of those who criticise the philosophical
+theories or the practical effects of Christianity?
+
+    But that Christ's method, when rightly applied, is really of
+    mighty force may be shown by an argument which the severest censor
+    of Christians will hardly refuse to admit. Compare the ancient
+    with the modern world: "Look on this picture and on that." The
+    broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into
+    prominence. Among all the men of the ancient heathen world there
+    were scarcely one or two to whom we might venture to apply the
+    epithet "holy." In other words, there were not more than one or
+    two, if any, who, besides being virtuous in their actions, were
+    possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides
+    abstaining from vice, regarded even a vicious thought with horror.
+    Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this
+    higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few
+    will maintain that it has been exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth
+    is that there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country
+    since the time of Christ, where a century has passed without
+    exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence
+    has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at
+    times like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has
+    Christ failed? or can Christianity die?
+
+The principle of feeling and action which Christ implanted in that
+Divine Society which He founded, or in other words, His morality, had
+two peculiarities; it sprang, and it must spring still, from what this
+writer calls all through an "enthusiasm"; and this enthusiasm was
+kindled and maintained by the influence of a Person. There can be no
+goodness without impulses to goodness, any more than these impulses are
+enough without being directed by truth and reason; but the impulses
+must come before the guidance, and "Christ's Theocracy" is described
+"as a great attempt to set all the virtues of the world on this basis,
+and to give it a visible centre and fountain." He thus describes how
+personal influence is the great instrument of moral quickening and
+elevation:--
+
+    How do men become for the most part "pure, generous, and humane"?
+    By personal, not by logical influences. They have been reared by
+    parents who had these qualities, they have lived in a society
+    which had a high tone, they have been accustomed to see just acts
+    done, to hear gentle words spoken, and the justness and the
+    gentleness have passed into their hearts, and slowly moulded their
+    habits and made their moral discernment clear; they remember
+    commands and prohibitions which it is a pleasure to obey for the
+    sake of those who gave them; often they think of those who may be
+    dead and say, "How would this action appear to him? Would he
+    approve that word or disapprove it?" To such no baseness appears a
+    small baseness because its consequences may be small, nor does the
+    yoke of law seem burdensome although it is ever on their necks,
+    nor do they dream of covering a sin by an atoning act of virtue.
+    Often in solitude they blush when some impure fancy sails across
+    the clear heaven of their minds, because they are never alone,
+    because the absent Examples, the Authorities they still revere,
+    rule not their actions only but their inmost hearts; because their
+    conscience is indeed awake and alive, representing all the
+    nobleness with which they stand in sympathy, and reporting their
+    most hidden indecorum before a public opinion of the absent and
+    the dead.
+
+    Of these two influences--that of Reason and that of Living
+    Example--which would a wise reformer reinforce? Christ chose the
+    last He gathered all men into a common relation to himself, and
+    demanded that each should set him on the pedestal of his heart,
+    giving a lower place to all other objects of worship, to father
+    and mother, to husband or wife. In him should the loyalty of all
+    hearts centre; he should be their pattern, their Authority and
+    Judge. Of him and his service should no man be ashamed, but to
+    those who acknowledged it morality should be an easy yoke, and the
+    law of right as spontaneous as the law of life; sufferings should
+    be easy to bear, and the loss of worldly friends repaired by a new
+    home in the bosom of the Christian kingdom; finally, in death
+    itself their sleep should be sweet upon whose tombstone it could
+    be written "Obdormivit in Christo."
+
+In his treatment of this part of the subject, the work of Christ as the
+true Creator, through the Christian Church, of living morality, what is
+peculiar and impressive is the way in which sympathy with Christianity
+in its antique and original form, in its most austere, unearthly,
+exacting aspects, is combined with sympathy with the practical
+realities of modern life, with its boldness, its freedom, its love of
+improvement, its love of truth. It is no common grasp which can embrace
+both so easily and so firmly. He is one of those writers whose strong
+hold on their ideas is shown by the facility with which they can afford
+to make large admissions, which are at first sight startling. Nowhere
+are more tremendous passages written than in this book about the
+corruptions of that Christianity which yet the writer holds to be the
+one hope and safeguard of mankind. He is not afraid to pursue his
+investigation independently of any inquiry into the peculiar claims to
+authority of the documents on which it rests. He at once goes to their
+substance and their facts, and the Person and Life and Character which
+they witness to. He is not afraid to put Faith on exactly the same
+footing as Life, neither higher nor lower, as the title to membership
+in the Church; a doctrine which, if it makes imperfect and rudimentary
+faith as little a disqualification as imperfect and inconsistent life,
+obviously does not exclude the further belief that deliberate heresy is
+on the same level with deliberate profligacy. But the clear sense of
+what is substantial, the power of piercing through accidents and
+conditions to the real kernel of the matter, the scornful disregard of
+all entanglement of apparent contradictions and inconsistencies, enable
+him to bring out the lesson which he finds before him with overpowering
+force. He sees before him immense mercy, immense condescension, immense
+indulgence; but there are also immense requirements--requirements not
+to be fulfilled by rule or exhausted by the lapse of time, and which
+the higher they raise men the more they exact--an immense seriousness
+and strictness, an immense care for substance and truth, to the
+disregard, if necessary, of the letter and the form. The "Dispensation
+of the Spirit" has seldom had an interpreter more in earnest and more
+determined to see meaning in his words. We have room but for two
+illustrations. He is combating the notion that the work of Christianity
+and the Church nowadays is with the good, and that it is waste of hope
+and strength to try to reclaim the bad and the lost:--
+
+    Once more, however, the world may answer, Christ may be consistent
+    in this, but is he wise? It may be true that he does demand an
+    enthusiasm, and that such an enthusiasm may be capable of
+    awakening the moral sense in hearts in which it seemed dead. But
+    if, notwithstanding this demand, only a very few members of the
+    Christian Church are capable of the enthusiasm, what use in
+    imposing on the whole body a task which the vast majority are not
+    qualified to perform? Would it not be well to recognise the fact
+    which we cannot alter, and to abstain from demanding from frail
+    human nature what human nature cannot render? Would it not be well
+    for the Church to impose upon its ordinary members only ordinary
+    duties? When the Bernard or the Whitefield appears let her by all
+    means find occupation for him. Let her in such cases boldly invade
+    the enemy's country. But in ordinary times would it not be well
+    for her to confine herself to more modest and practicable
+    undertakings? There is much for her to do even though she should
+    honestly confess herself unable to reclaim the lost. She may
+    reclaim the young, administer reproof to slight lapses, maintain a
+    high standard of virtue, soften manners, diffuse enlightenment.
+    Would it not be well for her to adapt her ends to her means?
+
+    No, it would not be well; it would be fatal to do so; and Christ
+    meant what he said, and said what was true, when he pronounced the
+    Enthusiasm of Humanity to be everything, and the absence of it to
+    be the absence of everything. The world understands its own
+    routine well enough; what it does not understand is the mode of
+    changing that routine. It has no appreciation of the nature or
+    measure of the power of enthusiasm, and on this matter it learns
+    nothing from experience, but after every fresh proof of that
+    power, relapses from its brief astonishment into its old
+    ignorance, and commits precisely the same miscalculation on the
+    next occasion. The power of enthusiasm is, indeed, far from being
+    unlimited; in some cases it is very small....
+
+    But one power enthusiasm has almost without limit--the power of
+    propagating itself; and it was for this that Christ depended on
+    it. He contemplated a Church in which the Enthusiasm of Humanity
+    should not be felt by two or three only, but widely. In whatever
+    heart it might be kindled, he calculated that it would pass
+    rapidly into other hearts, and that as it can make its heat felt
+    outside the Church, so it would preserve the Church itself from
+    lukewarmncss. For a lukewarm Church he would not condescend to
+    legislate, nor did he regard it as at all inevitable that the
+    Church should become lukewarm. He laid it as a duty upon the
+    Church to reclaim the lost, because he did not think it utopian to
+    suppose that the Church might be not in its best members only, but
+    through its whole body, inspired by that ardour of humanity that
+    can charm away the bad passions of the wildest heart, and open to
+    the savage and the outlaw lurking in moral wildernesses an
+    entrancing view of the holy and tranquil order that broods over
+    the streets and palaces of the city of God....
+
+    Christianity is an enthusiasm or it is nothing; and if there
+    sometimes appear in the history of the Church instances of a tone
+    which is pure and high without being enthusiastic, of a mood of
+    Christian feeling which is calmly favourable to virtue without
+    being victorious against vice, it will probably be found that all
+    that is respectable in such a mood is but the slowly-subsiding
+    movement of an earlier enthusiasm, and all that is produced by the
+    lukewarmness of the time itself is hypocrisy and corrupt
+    conventionalism.
+
+    Christianity, then, would sacrifice its divinity if it abandoned
+    its missionary character and became a mere educational
+    institution. Surely this Article of Conversion is the true
+    _articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae_. When the power of
+    reclaiming the lost dies out of the Church, it ceases to be the
+    Church. It may remain a useful institution, though it is most
+    likely to become an immoral and mischievous one. Where the power
+    remains, there, whatever is wanting, it may still be said that
+    "the tabernacle of God is with men."
+
+One more passage about those who in all Churches and sects think that
+all that Christ meant by His call was to give them a means to do what
+the French call _faire son salut_:--
+
+    It appears throughout the Sermon on the Mount that there was a
+    class of persons whom Christ regarded with peculiar aversion--the
+    persons who call themselves one thing and are another. He
+    describes them by a word which originally meant an "actor."
+    Probably it may in Christ's time have already become current in
+    the sense which we give to the word "hypocrite." But no doubt
+    whenever it was used the original sense of the word was distinctly
+    remembered. And in this Sermon, whenever Christ denounces any
+    vice, it is with the words "Be not you like the actors." In common
+    with all great reformers, Christ felt that honesty in word and
+    deed was the fundamental virtue; dishonesty, including
+    affectation, self-consciousness, love of stage effect, the one
+    incurable vice. Our thoughts, words, and deeds are to be of a
+    piece. For example, if we would pray to God, let us go into some
+    inner room where none but God shall see us; to pray at the corner
+    of the streets, where the passing crowd may admire our devotion,
+    is to _act_ a prayer. If we would keep down the rebellious flesh
+    by fasting, this concerns ourselves only; it is acting to parade
+    before the world our self-mortification. And if we would put down
+    sin let us put it down in ourselves first; it is only the actor
+    who begins by frowning at it in others. But there are subtler
+    forms of hypocrisy, which Christ does not denounce, probably
+    because they have sprung since out of the corruption of a subtler
+    creed. The hypocrite of that age wanted simply money or credit
+    with the people. His ends were those of the vulgar, though his
+    means were different Christ endeavoured to cure both alike of
+    their vulgarity by telling them of other riches and another
+    happiness laid up in heaven. Some, of course, would neither
+    understand nor regard his words, others would understand and
+    receive them. But a third class would receive them without
+    understanding them, and instead of being cured of their avarice
+    and sensuality, would simply transfer them to new objects of
+    desire. Shrewd enough to discern Christ's greatness, instinctively
+    believing what he said to be true, they would set out with a
+    triumphant eagerness in pursuit of the heavenly riches, and laugh
+    at the short-sighted and weak-minded speculator who contented
+    himself with the easy but insignificant profits of a worldly life.
+    They would practise assiduously the rules by which Christ said
+    heaven was to be won. They would patiently turn the left cheek,
+    indefatigibly walk the two miles, they would bless with effusion
+    those who cursed them, and pray fluently for those who used them
+    spitefully. To love their enemies, to love any one, they would
+    certainly find impossible, but the outward signs of love might
+    easily be learnt. And thus there would arise a new class of
+    actors, not like those whom Christ denounced, exhibiting before an
+    earthly audience and receiving their pay from human managers, but
+    hoping to be paid for their performance out of the incorruptible
+    treasures, and to impose by their dramatic talent upon their
+    Father in heaven.
+
+We have said that one peculiarity of this work is the connection which
+is kept in view from the first between the Founder and His work;
+between Christ and the Christian Church. He finds it impossible to
+speak of Him without that still existing witness of His having come,
+which is only less wonderful and unique than Himself. This is where,
+for the present, he leaves the subject:--
+
+    For the New Jerusalem, as we witness it, is no more exempt from
+    corruption than was the Old.... First the rottenness of dying
+    superstitions, their barbaric manners, their intellectualism
+    preferring system and debate to brotherhood, strangling
+    Christianity with theories and framing out of it a charlatan's
+    philosophy which madly tries to stop the progress of science--all
+    these corruptions have in the successive ages of its long life
+    infected the Church, and many new and monstrous perversions of
+    individual character have disgraced it. The creed which makes
+    human nature richer and larger makes men at the same time capable
+    of profounder sins; admitted into a holier sanctuary, they are
+    exposed to the temptation of a greater sacrilege; awakened to the
+    sense of new obligations, they sometimes lose their simple respect
+    for the old ones; saints that have resisted the subtlest
+    temptations sometimes begin again, as it were, by yielding without
+    a struggle to the coarsest; hypocrisy has become tenfold more
+    ingenious and better supplied with disguises; in short, human
+    nature has inevitably developed downwards as well as upwards, and
+    if the Christian ages be compared with those of heathenism, they
+    are found worse as well as better, and it is possible to make it a
+    question whether mankind has gained on the whole....
+
+    But the triumph of the Christian Church is that it is
+    _there_--that the most daring of all speculative dreams, instead
+    of being found impracticable, has been carried into effect, and
+    when carried into effect, instead of being confined to a few
+    select spirits, has spread itself over a vast space of the earth's
+    surface, and when thus diffused, instead of giving place after an
+    age or two to something more adapted to a later time, has endured
+    for two thousand years, and at the end of two thousand years,
+    instead of lingering as a mere wreck spared by the tolerance of
+    the lovers of the past, still displays vigour and a capacity of
+    adjusting itself to new conditions, and lastly, in all the
+    transformations it undergoes, remains visibly the same thing and
+    inspired by its Founder's universal and unquenchable spirit.
+
+    It is in this and not in any freedom from abuses that the divine
+    power of Christianity appears. Again, it is in this, and not in
+    any completeness or all-sufficiency....
+
+    But the achievement of Christ in founding by his single will and
+    power a structure so durable and so universal, is like no other
+    achievement which history records. The masterpieces of the men of
+    action are coarse and common in comparison with it, and the
+    masterpieces of speculation flimsy and insubstantial. When we
+    speak of it the commonplaces of admiration fail us altogether.
+    Shall we speak of the originality of the design, of the skill
+    displayed in the execution? All such terms are inadequate.
+    Originality and contriving skill operated indeed, but, as it were,
+    implicitly. The creative effort which produced that against which,
+    it is said, the gates of hell shall not prevail, cannot be
+    analysed. No architects' designs were furnished for the New
+    Jerusalem, no committee drew up rules for the Universal
+    Commonwealth. If in the works of Nature we can trace the
+    indications of calculation, of a struggle with difficulties, of
+    precaution, of ingenuity, then in Christ's work it may be that the
+    same indications occur. But these inferior and secondary powers
+    were not consciously exercised; they were implicitly present in
+    the manifold yet single creative act. The inconceivable work was
+    done in calmness; before the eyes of men it was noiselessly
+    accomplished, attracting little attention. Who can describe that
+    which unites men? Who has entered into the formation of speech
+    which is the symbol of their union? Who can describe exhaustively
+    the origin of civil society? He who can do these things can
+    explain the origin of the Christian Church. For others it must be
+    enough to say, "the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed." No
+    man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded
+    together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard
+    the chink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended _out of heaven from
+    God_.
+
+And here we leave this remarkable book. It seems to us one of those
+which permanently influence opinion, not so much by argument as such,
+as by opening larger views of the familiar and the long-debated, by
+deepening the ordinary channels of feeling, and by bringing men back to
+seriousness and rekindling their admiration, their awe, their love,
+about what they know best. We have not dwelt on minute criticisms about
+points to which exception might be taken. We have not noticed even
+positions on which, without further explanation, we should more or less
+widely disagree. The general scope of it, and the seriousness as well
+as the grandeur and power with which the main idea is worked out, seem
+to make mere secondary objections intolerable. It is a fragment, with
+the disadvantages of a fragment. What is put before us is far from
+complete, and it needs to be completed. In part at least an answer has
+been given to the question _what_ Christ was; but the question remains,
+not less important, and of which the answer is only here foreshadowed,
+_who_ He was. But so far as it goes, what it does is this: in the face
+of all attempts to turn Christianity into a sentiment or a philosophy,
+it asserts, in a most remarkable manner, a historical religion and a
+historical Church; but it also seeks, in a manner equally remarkable,
+to raise and elevate the thoughts of all, on all sides, about Christ,
+as He showed Himself in the world, and about what Christianity was
+meant to be; to touch new springs of feeling; to carry back the Church
+to its "hidden fountains," and pierce through the veils which hide from
+us the reality of the wonders in which it began.
+
+The book is indeed a protest against the stiffness of all cast-iron
+systems, and a warning against trusting in what is worn out. But it
+shows how the modern world, so complex, so refined, so wonderful, is,
+in all that it accounts good, but a reflection of what is described in
+the Gospels, and its civilisation, but an application of the laws of
+Christ, changing, it may be, indefinitely in outward form, but
+depending on their spirit as its ever-living spring. If we have
+misunderstood this book, and its cautious understatements are not
+understatements at all, but represent the limits beyond which the
+writer does not go, we can only say again it is one-of the strangest
+among books. If we have not misunderstood him, we have before us a
+writer who has a right to claim deference from those who think deepest
+and know most, when he pleads before them that not Philosophy can save
+and reclaim the world, but Faith in a Divine Person who is worthy of
+it, allegiance to a Divine Society which He founded, and union of
+hearts in the object for which He created it.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE AUTHOR OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ON A NEW REFORMATION[12]
+
+
+  [12]
+  _Guardian_, 6th March 1889.
+
+Mrs. Ward, in the _Nineteenth Century_, develops with warmth and force
+the theme and serious purpose of _Robert Elsmere_; and she does so,
+using the same literary method which she used, certainly with effect,
+in the story itself. Every age has its congenial fashion of discussing
+the great questions which affect, or seem to affect, the fate of
+mankind. According to the time and its circumstances, it is a _Summa
+Theologiae_, or a _Divina Commedia_, or a _Novum Organum_, or a
+Calvin's _Institutes_, or a Locke _On the Understanding_, or an
+_Encyclopedia_, or a _Candide_, which sets people thinking more than
+usual and comparing their thoughts. Long ago in the history of human
+questioning, Plato and Cicero discovered the advantages over dry
+argument of character and easy debate, and so much of story as clothed
+abstractions and hard notions with human life and affections. It is a
+weighty precedent. And as the prophetess of a "New Reformation" Mrs.
+Ward has reverted to what is substantially the same method. She is
+within her right. We do not blame her for putting her argument into the
+shape of a novel, and bringing out the points of her case in the trials
+and passionate utterances of imaginary persons, or in a conversation
+about their mental history. But she must take the good with the bad.
+Such a method has its obvious advantages, in freedom, and convenience,
+and range of illustration. It has its disadvantages. The dealer in
+imagination may easily become the unconscious slave of imagination;
+and, living in a self-constructed world, may come to forget that there
+is any other; and the temptation to unfairness becomes enormous when
+all who speak, on one side or the other, only speak as you make or let
+them speak.
+
+It is to imagination that _Robert Elsmere_ makes its main appeal,
+undoubtedly a powerful and pathetic one. It bids us ask ourselves what,
+with the phenomena before us, we can conceive possible and real. It
+implies, of course, much learning, with claims of victory in the
+spheres of history and science, with names great in criticism, of whom
+few readers probably can estimate the value, though all may be affected
+by the formidable array. But it is not in these things, as with a book
+like _Supernatural Religion_, that the gist of the argument lies. The
+alleged results of criticism are taken for granted; whether rightly or
+wrongly the great majority of readers certainly cannot tell. But then
+the effect of the book, or the view which it represents, begins.
+Imagine a man, pure-minded, earnest, sensitive, self-devoted, plunged
+into the tremendous questions of our time. Bit by bit he finds what he
+thought to be the truth of truths breaking away. In the darkness and
+silence with which nature covers all beyond the world of experience he
+thought he had found light and certainty from on high. He thought that
+he had assurances and pledges which could not fail him, that God was in
+the world, governed it, loved it, showed Himself in it He thought he
+had a great and authentic story to fall back upon, and a Sacred Book,
+which was its guaranteed witness, and by which God still spoke to his
+soul. He thought that, whatever he did not know, he knew this, and this
+was a hope to live and die in; with all that he saw round him, of pain
+and sin and misery, here was truth on which he could rest secure, in
+his fight with evil. Like the rest of us, he knew that terrible,
+far-reaching, heart-searching questions were abroad; that all that to
+him was sacred and unapproachable in its sanctity was not so to
+all--was not so, perhaps, to men whom he felt to be stronger and more
+knowing than himself--was not so, perhaps, to some who seemed to him to
+stand, in character and purpose, at a moral height above him. Still he
+thought himself in full possession of the truth which God had given
+him, till at length, in one way or another, the tide of questioning
+reached him. Then begins the long agony. He hears that what he never
+doubted is said to be incredible, and is absolutely given up. He finds
+himself bin-rounded by hostile powers of thought, by an atmosphere
+which insensibly but irresistibly governs opinion, by doubt and denial
+in the air, by keen and relentless intellect, before which he can only
+he silent; he sees and hears all round the disintegrating process going
+on in the creeds and institutions and intellectual statements of
+Christianity. He is assured, and sees some reason to believe it, that
+the intellect of the day is against him and his faith; and further,
+that unreality taints everything, belief and reasoning, and profession
+and conduct Step by step he is forced from one position and another;
+the process was a similar and a familiar one when the great Roman
+secession was going on fifty years ago. But now, in Robert Elsmere,
+comes the upshot. He is not landed, as some logical minds have been,
+which have gone through the same process, in mere unbelief or
+indifference. He is too good for that. Something of his old
+Christianity is too deeply engrained in him. He cannot go back from the
+moral standard to which it accustomed him. He will serve God in a
+Christian spirit and after the example of Christ, though not in what
+can claim to be called a Christian way. He is the beginner of one more
+of the numberless attempts to find a new mode of religion, purer than
+any of the old ones could be--of what Mrs. Ward calls in her new paper
+"A New Reformation."
+
+In this paper, which is more distinctly a dialogue on the Platonic
+model, she isolates the main argument on which the story was based, but
+without any distinct reference to any of the criticisms on her book.
+_Robert Elsmere_ rests on the achievements of historic criticism,
+chiefly German criticism. From the traditional, old-fashioned Christian
+way of regarding and using the old records which we call the Bible, the
+ground, we are told, is hopelessly and for ever cut away by German
+historical criticism. And the difference between the old and the modern
+way of regarding and using them is expressed by the difference between
+_bad translation_ and _good_; the old way of reading, quoting, and
+estimating ancient documents of all kinds was purblind, lifeless,
+narrow, mechanical, whereas the modern comparative and critical method
+not only is more sure in important questions of authenticity, but puts
+true life and character and human feeling and motives into the
+personages who wrote these documents, and of whom they speak. These
+books were entirely misunderstood, even if people knew the meaning of
+their words; now, at last, we can enter into their real spirit and
+meaning. And where such a change of method and point of view, as
+regards these documents, is wholesale and sweeping, it involves a
+wholesale and sweeping change in all that is founded on them. Revised
+ideas about the Bible mean a revised and reconstructed Christianity--"A
+New Reformation."
+
+Mrs. Ward lays more stress than everybody will agree to on what she
+likens to the difference between _good translation_ and _bad_, in
+dealing with the materials of history. Doubtless, in our time, the
+historical imagination, like the historical conscience, has been
+awakened. In history, as in other things, the effort after the real and
+the living has been very marked; it has sometimes resulted, as we know,
+in that parading of the real which we call the realistic. The mode of
+telling a story or stating a case varies, even characteristically, from
+age to age, from Macaulay to Hume, from Hume to Rapin, from Rapin to
+Holinshed or Hall; but after all, the story in its main features
+remains, after allowing for the differences in the mode of presenting
+it. German criticism, to which we are expected to defer, has its mode.
+It combines two elements--a diligent, searching, lawyer-like habit of
+cross-examination, laborious, complete and generally honest, which,
+when it is not spiteful or insolent, deserves all the praise it
+receives; but with it a sense of the probable, in dealing with the
+materials collected, and a straining after attempts to construct
+theories and to give a vivid reality to facts and relations, which are
+not always so admirable; which lead, in fact, sometimes to the height
+of paradox, or show mere incapacity to deal with the truth and depth of
+life, or make use of a poor and mean standard--_mesquin_ would be the
+French word--in the interpretation of actions and aims. It has
+impressed on us the lesson--not to be forgotten when we read Mrs.
+Ward's lists of learned names--that weight and not number is the test
+of good evidence. German learning is decidedly imposing. But after all
+there are Germans and Germans; and with all that there has been of
+great in German work there has been also a large proportion of what is
+bad--conceited, arrogant, shallow, childish. German criticism has been
+the hunting-ground of an insatiable love of sport--may we not say,
+without irreverence, the scene of the discovery of a good many mares'
+nests? When the question is asked, why all this mass of criticism has
+made so little impression on English thought, the answer is, because of
+its extravagant love of theorising, because of its divergences and
+variations, because of its negative results. Those who have been so
+eager to destroy have not been so successful in construction. Clever
+theories come to nothing; streams which began with much noise at last
+lose themselves in the sand. Undoubtedly, it presents a very important,
+and, in many ways, interesting class of intellectual phenomena, among
+the many groups of such inquiries, moral, philosophical, scientific,
+political, social, of which the world is full, and of which no sober
+thinker expects to see the end. If this vaunted criticism is still left
+to scholars, it is because it is still in the stage in which only
+scholars are competent to examine and judge it; it is not fit to be a
+factor in the practical thought and life of the mass of mankind.
+Answers, and not merely questions, are what we want, who have to live,
+and work, and die. Criticism has pulled about the Bible without
+restraint or scruple. We are all of us steeped in its daring
+assumptions and shrewd objections. Have its leaders yet given us an
+account which it is reasonable to receive, clear, intelligible,
+self-consistent and consistent with all the facts, of what this
+mysterious book is?
+
+Meanwhile, in the face of theories and conjectures and negative
+arguments, there is something in the world which is fact, and hard
+fact. The Christian Church is the most potent fact in the most
+important ages of the world's progress. It is an institution like the
+world itself, which has grown up by its own strength and according to
+its own principle of life, full of good and evil, having as the law of
+its fate to be knocked about in the stern development of events,
+exposed, like human society, to all kinds of vicissitudes and
+alternations, giving occasion to many a scandal, and shaking the faith
+and loyalty of many a son, showing in ample measure the wear and tear
+of its existence, battered, injured, sometimes degenerate, sometimes
+improved, in one way or another, since those dim and long distant days
+when its course began; but showing in all these ways what a real thing
+it is, never in the extremity of storms and ruin, never in the deepest
+degradation of its unfaithfulness, losing hold of its own central
+unchanging faith, and never in its worst days of decay and corruption
+losing hold of the power of self-correction and hope of recovery.
+_Solvitur ambulando_ is an argument to which Mrs. Ward appeals, in
+reply to doubts about the solidity of the "New Reformation." It could
+be urged more modestly if the march of the "New Reformation" had lasted
+for even half of one of the Christian centuries. The Church is in the
+world, as the family is in the world, as the State is in the world, as
+morality is in the world, a fact of the same order and greatness. Like
+these it has to make its account with the "all-dissolving" assaults of
+human thought. Like these it has to prove itself by living, and it does
+do so. In all its infinite influences and ministries, in infinite
+degrees and variations, it is the public source of light and good and
+hope. If there are select and aristocratic souls who can do without it,
+or owe it nothing, the multitude of us cannot. And the Christian Church
+is founded on a definite historic fact, that Jesus Christ who was
+crucified rose from the dead; and, coming from such an author, it comes
+to us, bringing with it the Bible. The fault of a book like _Robert
+Elsmere_ is that it is written with a deliberate ignoring that these
+two points are not merely important, but absolutely fundamental, in the
+problems with which it deals. With these not faced and settled it is
+like looking out at a prospect through a window of which all the glass
+is ribbed and twisted, distorting everything. It may be that even yet
+we imperfectly understand our wondrous Bible. It may be that we have
+yet much to learn about it. It may be that there is much that is very
+difficult about it. Let us reverently and fearlessly learn all we can
+about it. Let us take care not to misuse it, as it has been terribly
+misused. But coming to us from the company and with the sanction of
+Christ risen, it never can be merely like other books. A so-called
+Christianity, ignoring or playing with Christ's resurrection, and using
+the Bible as a sort of Homer, may satisfy a class of clever and
+cultivated persons. It may be to them the parent of high and noble
+thoughts, and readily lend itself to the service of mankind. But it is
+well in so serious a matter not to confuse things. This new religion
+may borrow from Christianity as it may borrow from Plato, or from
+Buddhism, or Confucianism, or even Islam. But it is not Christianity.
+_Robert Elsmere_ may be true to life, as representing one of those
+tragedies which happen in critical moments of history. But a
+Christianity which tells us to think of Christ doing good, but to
+forget and put out of sight Christ risen from the dead, is not true to
+life. It is as delusive to the conscience and the soul as it is
+illogical to reason.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+RENAN'S "VIE DE JÉSUS"[13]
+
+
+  [13]
+  _Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre I.--_Vie de Jésus_.
+  Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_, 9th September 1863.
+
+Unbelief is called upon nowadays, as well as belief, to give its
+account of the origin of that undeniable and most important fact which
+we call the Christian religion. And if it is true that in some respects
+the circumstances under which the controversy is carried on are, as it
+has been alleged, more than heretofore favourable to unbelief, it is
+also true that in some other respects the case of unbelief has
+difficulties which it had not once. It has to accept and admit, if it
+wishes to gain a favourable hearing from the present generation, the
+unique and surpassing moral grandeur, depth, and attractiveness of
+Christianity. The polemic method which set Christianity in broad
+contrast with what was supposed to be best and highest in human nature,
+and therefore found no difficulty in tracing to a bad source what was
+itself represented to be bad, is not a method suited to the ideas and
+feelings of our time; and the sneers and sarcasms of the last century,
+provoked by abuses and inconsistencies which have since received their
+ample and memorable punishment, cease to produce any effect on readers
+of the present day, except to call forth a passing feeling of
+repugnance at what is shallow and profane, mixed, it may be, sometimes,
+with an equally passing admiration for what is witty and brilliant.
+Even in M. Renan's view, Voltaire has done his work, and is out of
+date. Those who now attack Christianity have to attack it under the
+disadvantage of the preliminary admission that its essential and
+distinguishing elements are, on the whole, in harmony and not in
+discordance with the best conceptions of human duty and life, and that
+its course and progress have been, at any rate, concurrent with all
+that is best and most hopeful in human history. First allowing that as
+a fact it contains in it things than which we cannot imagine anything
+better, and without which we should never have reached to where we are,
+they then have to dispute its divine claims. No man could write
+persuasively on religion now, _against_ it any more than _for_ it, who
+did not show that he was fully penetrated not only with its august and
+beneficent aspect, but with the essential and everlasting truths which,
+in however imperfect shapes, or whencesoever derived, are embodied in
+it and are ministered by it to society.
+
+That Christianity is, as a matter of fact, a successful and a living
+religion, in a degree absolutely without parallel in any other
+religion, is the point from which its assailants have now to start.
+They have also to take account of the circumstance, to the recognition
+of which the whole course of modern thought and inquiry has brought us,
+that it has been successful, not by virtue merely of any outward and
+accidental favouring circumstances, but of its intrinsic power and of
+principles which are inseparable from its substance. This being the
+condition of the question, those who deny its claim to a direct Divine
+origin have to frame their theory of it so as to account, on principles
+supposed to be common to it and other religions, not merely for its
+rise and its conquests, but for those broad and startling differences
+which separate it, in character and in effects, from all other known
+religions. They have to show how that which is instinct with
+never-dying truth sprang out of what was false and mistaken, if not
+corrupt; how that which alone has revealed God to man's conscience had
+no other origin than what in other instances has led men through
+enthusiasm and imposture to a barren or a mischievous superstition.
+
+Such an attempt is the work before us--a work destined, probably, both
+from its ability and power and from its faults, to be for modern France
+what the work of Strauss was for Germany, the standard expression of an
+unbelief which shrinks with genuine distaste from the coarse and
+negative irreligion of older infidelity, and which is too refined, too
+profound and sympathetic in its views of human nature, to be insensible
+to those numberless points in which as a fact Christianity has given
+expression to the best and highest thoughts that man can have. Strauss,
+to account for what we see, imagined an idea, or a set of ideas,
+gradually worked out into the shape of a history, of which scarcely
+anything can be taken as real matter of fact, except the bare existence
+of the person who was clothed in the process of time with the
+attributes created by the idealising legend. Such a view is too vague
+and indistinct to satisfy French minds. A theory of this sort, to find
+general acceptance in France, must start with concrete history, and not
+be history held in solution in the cloudy shapes of myths which vanish
+as soon as touched. M. Renan's process is in the main the reverse of
+Strauss's. He undertakes to extract the real history recorded in the
+Gospels; and not only so, but to make it even more palpable and
+interesting, if not more wonderful, than it seems at first sight in the
+original records, by removing the crust of mistake and exaggeration
+which has concealed the true character of what the narrative records;
+by rewriting it according to those canons of what is probable and
+intelligible in human life and capacity which are recognised in the
+public whom he addresses.
+
+Two of these canons govern the construction of the book. One of them is
+the assumption that in no part of the history of man is the
+supernatural to be admitted. This, of course, is not peculiar to M.
+Renan, though he lays it down with such emphasis in all his works, and
+is so anxious to bring it into distinct notice on every occasion, that
+it is manifestly one which he is desirous to impress on all who read
+him, as one of the ultimate and unquestionable foundations of all
+historical inquiry. The other canon is one of moral likelihood, and it
+is, that it is credible and agreeable to what we gather from
+experience, that the highest moral elevation ever attained by man
+should have admitted along with it, and for its ends, conscious
+imposture. On the first of these assumptions, all that is miraculous in
+the Gospel narratives is, not argued about, or, except perhaps in one
+instance--the raising of Lazarus--attempted to be accounted for or
+explained, but simply left out and ignored. On the second, the fact
+from which there is no escape--that He whom M. Renan venerates with a
+sincerity which no one can doubt as the purest and greatest of moral
+reformers, did claim power from God to work miracles--is harmonised
+with the assumption that the claim could not possibly have been a true
+one.
+
+M. Renan professes to give an historical account of the way in which
+the deepest, purest, most enduring religious principles known among men
+were, not merely found out and announced, but propagated and impressed
+upon the foremost and most improved portions of mankind, by the power
+of a single character. It is impossible, without speaking of Jesus of
+Nazareth as Christians are used to do, to speak of His character and of
+the results of His appearance in loftier terms than this professed
+unbeliever in His Divine claims. But when the account is drawn out in
+detail, of a cause alleged to be sufficient to produce such effects,
+the apparent inadequacy of it is most startling. When we think of what
+Christianity is and has done, and that, in M. Renan's view, Christ, the
+Christ whom he imagines and describes, is all in all to Christianity,
+and then look to what he conceives to have been the original spring and
+creative impulse of its achievements, the first feeling is that no
+shifts that belief has sometimes been driven to, to keep within the
+range of the probable, are greater than those accepted by unbelief, in
+its most enlightened and reflecting representations. To suppose such an
+one as M. Renan paints, changing the whole course of history,
+overturning and converting the world, and founding the religion which
+M. Renan thinks the lasting religion of mankind, involves a force upon
+our imagination and reason to which it is not easy to find a parallel.
+
+His view is that a Galilean peasant, in advance of his neighbours and
+countrymen only in the purity, force, and singleness of purpose with
+which he realised the highest moral truths of Jewish religious wisdom,
+first charming a few simple provincials by the freshness and native
+beauty of his lessons, was then led on, partly by holy zeal against
+falsehood and wickedness, partly by enthusiastic delusions as to his
+own mission and office, to attack the institutions of Judaism, and
+perished in the conflict--and that this was the cause why Christianity
+and Christendom came to be and exist. This is the explanation which a
+great critical historian, fully acquainted with the history of other
+religions, presents, as a satisfactory one, of a phenomenon so
+astonishing and unique as that of a religion which has suited itself
+with undiminished vitality to the changes, moral, social, and
+political, which have marked the eighteen centuries of European
+history. There have been other enthusiasts for goodness and truth, more
+or less like the character which M. Renan draws in his book, but they
+have never yet founded a universal religion, or one which had the
+privilege of perpetual youth and unceasing self-renovation. There have
+been other great and imposing religions, commanding the allegiance for
+century after century of millions of men; but who will dare assert that
+any of these religions, that of Sakya-Mouni, of Mahomet, or that of the
+Vedas, could possibly be the religion, or satisfy the religious ideas
+and needs, of the civilised West?
+
+When M. Renan comes to detail he is as strangely insensible to what seem
+at first sight the simplest demands of probability. As it were by a sort
+of reaction to the minute realising of particulars which has been in
+vogue among some Roman Catholic writers, M. Renan realises too--realises
+with no less force and vividness, and, according to his point of view,
+with no less affectionate and tender interest. He popularises the
+Gospels; but not for a religious set of readers--nor, we must add, for
+readers of thought and sense, whether interested for or against
+Christianity, but for a public who study life in the subtle and highly
+wrought novels of modern times. He appeals from what is probable to
+those representations of human nature which aspire to pass beyond the
+conventional and commonplace, and especially he dwells on neglected and
+unnoticed examples of what is sweet and soft and winning. But it is hard
+to recognise the picture he has drawn in the materials out of which he
+has composed it. The world is tolerably familiar with them. If there is
+a characteristic, consciously or unconsciously acknowledged in the
+Gospel records, it is that of the gravity, the plain downright
+seriousness, the laborious earnestness, impressed from first to last on
+the story. When we turn from these to his pages it is difficult to
+exaggerate the astounding impression which his epithets and descriptions
+have on the mind. We are told that there is a broad distinction between
+the early Galilean days of hope in our Lord's ministry, and the later
+days of disappointment and conflict; and that if we look, we shall find
+in Galilee the "_fin et joyeux moraliste_," full of a "_conversation
+pleine de gaieté et de charme_," of "_douce gaieté et aimables
+plaisanteries_," with a "_prédication suave et douce, toute pleine de la
+nature et du parfum des champs_," creating out of his originality of
+mind his "_innocents aphorismes_," and the "_genre d'élicieux_" of
+parabolic teaching; "_le charmant docteur qui pardonnait à tous pourvu
+qu'on l'aimât_." He lived in what was then an earthly paradise, in "_la
+joyeuse Galilée_" in the midst of the "_nature ravissante_" which gave
+to everything about the Sea of Galilee "_un tour idyllique et
+charmant_." So the history of Christianity at its birth is a
+"_délicieuse pastorale_" an "_idylle_," a "_milieu enivrant_" of joy and
+hope. The master was surrounded by a "_bande de joyeux enfants_," a
+"_troupe gaie et vagabonde_," whose existence in the open air was a
+"perpetual enchantment." The disciples were "_ces petits comités de
+bonnes gens_," very simple, very credulous, and like their country full
+of a "_sentiment gai et tendre de la vie_," and of an "_imagination
+riante_." Everything is spoken of as "delicious"--"_délicieuse
+pastorale," "délicieuse beauté," "délicieuses sentences," "délicieuse
+théologie d'amour_." Among the "tender and delicate souls of the
+North"--it is not quite thus that Josephus describes the Galileans--was
+set up an "_aimable communisme_." Is it possible to imagine a more
+extravagant distortion than the following, both in its general effect
+and in the audacious generalisation of a very special incident, itself
+inaccurately conceived of?--
+
+    Il parcourait ainsi la Galilée au milieu _d'une fête perpétuelle_.
+    Il se servait d'une mule, monture en Orient si bonne et si sûre,
+    et dont le grand oeil noir, ombragé de longs cils, a beaucoup de
+    douceur. Ses disciples déployarent quelquefois autour de lui une
+    pompe rustique, dont leurs vêtements, tenant lieu de tapis,
+    faisaient les frais. Ils les mettaient sur la mule qui le portait,
+    ou les étendaient à terre sur son passage.
+
+History has seen strange hypotheses; but of all extravagant notions,
+that one that the world has been conquered by what was originally an
+idyllic gipsying party is the most grotesque. That these "_petits
+comités de bonnes gens_" though influenced by a great example and
+wakened out of their "delicious pastoral" by a heroic death, should
+have been able to make an impression on Judaean faith, Greek intellect,
+and Roman civilisation, and to give an impulse to mankind which has
+lasted to this day, is surely one of the most incredible hypotheses
+ever accepted, under the desperate necessity of avoiding an unwelcome
+alternative.
+
+M. Renan is willing to adopt everything in the Gospel history except
+what is miraculous. If he is difficult to satisfy as to the physical
+possibility or the proof of miracles, at least he is not hard to
+satisfy on points of moral likelihood; and he draws on his ample power
+of supposing the combination of moral opposites in order to get rid of
+the obstinate and refractory supernatural miracle. To some extent,
+indeed, he avails himself of that inexhaustible resource of unlimited
+guessing, by means of which he reverses the whole history, and makes it
+take a shape which it is hard to recognise in its original records. The
+feeding of the five thousand, the miracle described by all the four
+Evangelists, is thus curtly disposed of:--"Il se retira au désert.
+Beaucoup de monde l'y suivit. _Grâce à une extrème frugalité_ la troupe
+sainte y vécut; _on crut naturellement_ voir en cela un miracle." This
+is all he has to say. But miracles are too closely interwoven with the
+whole texture of the Gospel history to be, as a whole, thus disposed
+of. He has, of course, to admit that miracles are so mixed up with it
+that mere exaggeration is not a sufficient account of them. But be bids
+us remember that the time was one of great credulity, of slackness and
+incapacity in dealing with matters of evidence, a time when it might be
+said that there was an innocent disregard of exact and literal truth
+where men's souls and affections were deeply interested. But, even
+supposing that this accounted for a belief in certain miracles growing
+up--which it does not, for the time was not one of mere childlike and
+uninquiring belief, but was as perfectly familiar as we are with the
+notion of false claims to miraculous power which could not stand
+examination--still this does not meet the great difficulty of all, to
+which he is at last brought. It is undeniable that our Lord professed
+to work miracles. They were not merely attributed to Him by those who
+came after Him. If we accept in any degree the Gospel account, He not
+only wrought miracles, but claimed to do so; and M. Renan admits
+it--that is, he admits that the highest, purest, most Divine person
+ever seen on earth (for all this he declares in the most unqualified
+terms) stooped to the arts of Simon Magus or Apollonius of Tyana. He
+was a "thaumaturge"--"tard et à contre-coeur"--"avec une sorte de
+mauvaise humeur"--"en cachette"--"malgré lui"--"sentant le vanité de
+l'opinion"; but still a "thaumaturge." Moreover, He was so almost of
+necessity; for M. Renan holds that without the support of an alleged
+supernatural character and power, His work must have perished.
+Everything, to succeed and be realised, must, we are told, be fortified
+with something of alloy. We are reminded of the "loi fatale qui
+condamne l'idée à déchoir dès qu'elle cherche à convertir les hommes."
+"Concevoir de bien, en efifet, ne suffit pas; il faut le faire réussir
+parmi les hommes. Pour cela, des voies moins pures sont nécessaires."
+If the Great Teacher had kept to the simplicity of His early lessons,
+He would have been greater, but "the truth would not have been
+promulgated." "He had to choose between these two alternatives, either
+renouncing his mission or becoming a 'thaumaturge.'" The miracles
+"were a violence done to him by his age, a concession which was wrung
+from him by a passing necessity." And if we feel startled at such a
+view, we are reminded that we must not measure the sincerity of
+Orientals by our own rigid and critical idea of veracity; and that
+"such is the weakness of the human mind, that the best causes are not
+usually won but by bad reasons," and that the greatest of discoverers
+and founders have only triumphed over their difficulties "by daily
+taking account of men's weakness and by not always giving the true
+reasons of the truth."
+
+    L'histoire est impossible si l'on n'admet hautement qu'il y a pour
+    la sincerite plusieurs mesures. Toutes les grandes choses se font
+    par le peuple, or on ne conduit pas le peuple qu'en se prétant à
+    ses idées. Le philosophe, qui sachant cela, s'isole et se
+    retranche dans sa noblesse, est hautement louable. Mais celui qui
+    prend l'humanité avec ses illusions et cherche à agir sur elle et
+    avec elle, ne saurait être blamé. César savait fort bien qu'il
+    n'était pas fils de Vénus; la France ne serait pas ce qu'elle est
+    si l'on n'avait cru mille ans à la sainte ampoule de Reims. Il
+    nous est facile à nous autres, impuissants que nous sommes,
+    d'appeler cela mensonge, et fiers de notre timide honnêteté, de
+    traiter avec dédain les héros qui out accepté dans d'autres
+    conditions la lutte de la vie. Quand nous aurons fait avec nos
+    scrupules ce qu'ils firent avec leurs mensonges, nous aurons le
+    droit d'être pour eux sévères.
+
+Now let M. Renan or any one else realise what is involved, on his
+supposition, not merely, as he says, of "illusion or madness," but of
+wilful deceit and falsehood, in the history of Lazarus, even according
+to his lame and hesitating attempt to soften it down and extenuate it;
+and then put side by side with it the terms in which M. Renan has
+summed up the moral greatness of Him of whom he writes:--
+
+    La foi, l'enthousiasme, la constance de la première génération
+    chrétienne ne s'expliquent qu'en supposant à l'origine de tout le
+    mouvement un homme de proportions colossales.... Cette sublime
+    personne, qui chaque jour préside encore au destin du monde, il
+    est permis de l'appeler divine, non en ce sens que Jésus ait
+    absorbé tout le divin, mais en ce sens que Jésus est l'individu
+    qui a fait faire à son espèce le plus grand pas vers le divin....
+    Au milieu de cette uniforme vulgarité, des colonnes s'élèvent vers
+    le ciel et attestent une plus noble destinée. Jésus est la plus
+    haute de ces colonnes qui montrent à l'homme d'où il vient et où
+    il doit tendre. En lui s'est condensé tout ce qu'il y a de bon et
+    d'élevé dans notre nature.... Quels que puissent être les
+    phénomènes inattendus de l'avenir, Jésus ne sera pas surpassé....
+    Tous les siècles proclameront qu'entre les fils des hommes il n'en
+    est pas né de plus grand que Jésus.
+
+And of such an one we are told that it is a natural and reasonable view
+to take, not merely that He claimed a direct communication with God,
+which disordered reason could alone excuse Him for claiming, but that
+He based His whole mission on a pretension to such supernatural powers
+as a man could not pretend to without being conscious that they were
+delusions. The conscience of that age as to veracity or imposture was
+quite clear on such a point. Jew and Greek and Roman would have
+condemned as a deceiver one who, not having the power, took on him to
+say that by the finger of God he could raise the dead. And yet to a
+conscience immeasurably above his age, it seems, according to M. Renan,
+that this might be done. It is absurd to say that we must not judge
+such a proceeding by the ideas of our more exact and truth-loving age,
+when it would have been abundantly condemned by the ideas recognised in
+the religion and civilisation of the first century.
+
+M. Renan repeatedly declares that his great aim is to save religion by
+relieving it of the supernatural. He does not argue; but instead of the
+old familiar view of the Great History, he presents an opposite theory
+of his own, framed to suit that combination of the revolutionary and
+the sentimental which just now happens to be in favour in the unbelieving
+schools. And this is the result: a representation which boldly invests
+its ideal with the highest perfections of moral goodness, strength, and
+beauty, and yet does not shrink from associating with it also--and
+that, too, as the necessary and inevitable condition of success--a
+deliberate and systematic willingness to delude and insensibility to
+untruth. This is the religion and this is the reason which appeals to
+Christ in order to condemn Christianity.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+RENAN'S "LES APÔTRES"[14]
+
+
+  [14]
+  _Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre II.--_Les Apôtres_.
+  Par Ernest Renan. _Saturday Review_, 14th July 1866.
+
+In his recent volume, _Les Apôtres_, M. Renan has undertaken two tasks
+of very unequal difficulty. He accounts for the origin of the Christian
+belief and religion, and he writes the history of its first
+propagation. These are very different things, and to do one of them is
+by no means to do the other. M. Renan's historical sketch of the first
+steps of the Christian movement is, whatever we may think of its
+completeness and soundness, a survey of characters and facts, based on
+our ordinary experience of the ways in which men act and are
+influenced. Of course it opens questions and provokes dissent at every
+turn; but, after all, the history of a religion once introduced into
+the world is the history of the men who give it shape and preach it,
+who accept or oppose it. The spread and development of all religions
+have certain broad features in common, which admit of philosophical
+treatment simply as phenomena, and receive light from being compared
+with parallel examples of the same kind; and whether a man's historical
+estimate is right, and his picture accurate and true, depends on his
+knowledge of the facts, and his power to understand them and to make
+them understood. No one can dispute M. Renan's qualifications for being
+the historian of a religious movement. The study of religion as a
+phenomenon of human nature and activity has paramount attractions for
+him. His interest in it has furnished him with ample and varied
+materials for comparison and generalisation. He is a scholar and a man
+of learning, quick and wide in his sympathies, and he commands
+attention by the singular charm of his graceful and lucid style. When,
+therefore, he undertakes to relate how, as a matter of fact, the
+Christian Church grew up amid the circumstances of its first
+appearance, he has simply to tell the story of the progress of a
+religious cause; and this is a comparatively light task for him. But he
+also lays before us what he appears to consider an adequate account of
+the origin of the Christian belief. The Christian belief, it must be
+remembered, means, not merely the belief that there was such a person
+as he has described in his former, volume, but the belief that one who
+was crucified rose again from the dead, and lives for evermore above.
+It is in this belief that the Christian religion had its beginning;
+there is no connecting Christ and Christianity, except through the
+Resurrection. The origin, therefore, of the belief in the Resurrection,
+in the shape in which we have it, lies across M. Renan's path to
+account for; and neither the picture which he has drawn in his former
+volume, nor the history which he follows out in this, dispense him from
+the necessity of facing this essential and paramount element in the
+problem which he has to solve. He attempts to deal with this, the knot
+of the great question. But his attempt seems to us to disclose a more
+extraordinary insensibility to the real demands of the case, and to
+what we cannot help calling the pitiable inadequacy of his own
+explanation, than we could have conceived possible in so keen and
+practised a mind.
+
+The Resurrection, we repeat, bars the way in M. Renan's scheme for
+making an intelligible transition, from the life and character which he
+has sought to reproduce from the Gospels, to the first beginnings and
+preaching of Christianity. The Teacher, he says, is unique in wisdom,
+in goodness, in the height of his own moral stature and the Divine
+elevation of his aims. The religion is, with all abatements and
+imperfections, the only one known which could be the religion of
+humanity. After his portraiture of the Teacher, follows, naturally
+enough, as the result of that Teacher's influence and life, a religion
+of corresponding elevation and promise. The passage from a teaching
+such as M. Renan supposes to a religion such as he allows Christianity
+to be may be reasonably understood as a natural consequence of
+well-known causes, but for one thing--the interposition between the two
+of an alleged event which simply throws out all reasonings drawn from
+ordinary human experience. From the teaching and life of Socrates
+follow, naturally enough, schools of philosophy, and an impulse which
+has affected scientific thought ever since. From the preaching and life
+of Mahomet follows, equally naturally, the religion of Islam. In each
+case the result is seen to be directly and distinctly linked on to the
+influences which gave it birth, and nothing more than these influences
+is wanted, or makes any claim, to account for it. So M. Renan holds
+that all that is needed to account for Christianity is such a
+personality and such a career as he has described in his last volume.
+But the facts will not bend to this. Christianity hangs on to Christ
+not merely as to a Person who lived and taught and died, but as to a
+Person who rose again from death. That is of the very essence of its
+alleged derivation from Christ. It knows Christ only as Christ risen;
+the only reason of its own existence that it recognises is the
+Resurrection. The only claim the Apostles set forth for preaching to
+the world is that their Master who was crucified was alive once more.
+Every one knows that this was the burden of all their words, the
+corner-stone of all their work. We may believe them or not. We may take
+Christianity or leave it. But we cannot derive Christianity from
+Christ, without meeting, as the bond which connects the two, the
+Resurrection. But for the Resurrection, M. Renan's scheme might be
+intelligible. A Teacher unequalled for singleness of aim and nobleness
+of purpose lives and dies, and leaves the memory and the leaven of His
+teaching to disciples, who by them, even though in an ill-understood
+shape, and with incomparably inferior qualities themselves, purify and
+elevate the religious ideas and feelings of mankind. If that were all,
+if there were nothing but the common halo of the miraculous which is
+apt to gather about great names, the interpretation might be said to be
+coherent. But a theory of Christianity cannot neglect the most
+prominent fact connected with its beginning. It is impossible to leave
+it out of the account, in judging both of the Founder and of those whom
+his influence moulded and inspired.
+
+M. Renan has to account for the prominence given to the Resurrection in
+the earliest Christian teaching, without having recourse to the
+supposition of conscious imposture and a deliberate conspiracy to
+deceive; for such a supposition would not harmonise either with the
+portrait he has drawn of the Master, or with his judgment of the
+seriousness and moral elevation of the men who, immeasurably inferior
+as they were to Him, imbibed His spirit, and represented and
+transmitted to us His principles. And this is something much more than
+can be accounted for by the general disposition of the age to assume
+the supernatural and the miraculous. The way in which the Resurrection
+is circumstantially and unceasingly asserted, and made on every
+occasion and from the first the foundation of everything, is something
+very different from the vague legends which float about of kings or
+saints whom death has spared, or from a readiness to see the direct
+agency of heaven in health or disease. It is too precise, too
+matter-of-fact, too prosaic in the way in which it is told, to be
+resolved into ill-understood dreams and imaginations. The various
+recitals show little care to satisfy our curiosity, or to avoid the
+appearance of inconsistency in detail; but nothing can be more removed
+from vagueness and hesitation than their definite positive statements.
+It is with them that the writer on Christianity has to deal.
+
+M. Renan's method is--whilst of course not believing them, yet not
+supposing conscious fraud--to treat these records as the description of
+natural, unsought visions on the part of people who meant no harm, but
+who believed what they wished to believe. They are the story of a great
+mistake, but a mistake proceeding simply, in the most natural way in
+the world, from excess of "idealism" and attachment. Unaffected by the
+circumstance that there never were narratives less ideal, and more
+straightforwardly real--that they seem purposely framed to be a
+contrast to professed accounts of visions, and to exclude the
+possibility of their being confounded with such accounts; and that the
+alleged numbers who saw, the alleged frequency and repetition and
+variation of the instances, and the alleged time over which the
+appearances extended, and after which they absolutely ceased, make the
+hypothesis of involuntary and undesigned allusions of regret and
+passion infinitely different from what it might be in the case of one
+or two persons, or for a transitory period of excitement and
+crisis--unaffected by such considerations, M. Renan proceeds to tell,
+in his own way, the story of what he supposes to have occurred,
+without, of course, admitting the smallest real foundation for what was
+so positively asserted, but with very little reproach or discredit to
+the ardent and undoubting assertors. He begins with a statement which
+is meant to save the character of the Teacher. "Jesus, though he spoke
+unceasingly of resurrection, of new life, had never said quite clearly
+that he should rise again in the flesh." He says this with the texts
+before him, for he quotes them and classifies them in a note. But this
+is his point of departure, laid down without qualification. Yet if
+there is anything which the existing records do say distinctly, it is
+that Jesus Christ said over and over again that He should rise again,
+and that He fixed the time within which He should rise. M. Renan is not
+bound to believe them. But he must take them as he finds them; and on
+this capital point either we know nothing at all, and have no evidence
+to go upon, or the evidence is simply inverted by M. Renan's assertion.
+There may, of course, be reasons for believing one part of a man's
+evidence and disbelieving another; but there is nothing in this case
+but incompatibility with a theory to make this part of the evidence
+either more or less worthy of credit than any other part. What is
+certain is that it is in the last degree weak and uncritical to lay
+down, as the foundation and first pre-requisite of an historical view,
+a position which the records on which the view professes to be based
+emphatically and unambiguously contradict. Whatever we may think of it,
+the evidence undoubtedly is, if evidence there is at all, that Jesus
+Christ did say, though He could not get His disciples at the time to
+understand and believe Him, that He should rise again on the third day.
+What M. Renan had to do, if he thought the contrary, was not to assume,
+but to prove, that in these repeated instances in which they report His
+announcements, the Evangelists mistook or misquoted the words of their
+Master.
+
+He accepts, however, their statement that no one at first hoped that
+the words would be made good; and he proceeds to account for the
+extraordinary belief which, in spite of this original incredulity, grew
+up, and changed the course of things and the face of the world. We
+admire and respect many things in M. Renan; but it seems to us that his
+treatment of this matter is simply the _ne plus ultra_ of the
+degradation of the greatest of issues by the application to it of
+sentiment unworthy of a silly novel. In the first place, he lays down
+on general grounds that, though the disciples had confessedly given up
+all hope, it yet _was natural_ that they should expect to see their
+master alive again. "Mais I'enthousiasme et l'amour ne connaissent pas
+les situations sans issue." Do they not? Are death and separation such
+light things to triumph over that imagination finds it easy to cheat
+them? "Ils se jouent de l'impossible et, plutôt que d'abdiquer
+l'espérance, ils font violence à toute réalité." Is this an account of
+the world of fact or the world of romance? The disciples did not hope;
+but, says M. Renan, vague words about the future had dropped from their
+master, and these were enough to build upon, and to suggest that they
+would soon see him back. In vain it is said that in fact they did not
+expect it. "Une telle croyance était d'ailleurs si naturelle, que la
+foi des disciples aurait suffi pour la créer de toutes pièces." Was it
+indeed--in spite of Enoch and Elias, cases of an entirely different
+kind--so natural to think that the ruined leader of a crushed cause,
+whose hopeless followers had seen the last of him amid the lowest
+miseries of torment and scorn, should burst the grave?
+
+    Il devait arriver [he proceeds] pour Jésus ce qui arrive pour tous
+    les hommes qui ont captivé l'attention de leurs semblables. Le
+    monde, habitué a leur attribuer des vertus surhumaines, ne peut
+    admettre qu'ils aient subi la loi injuste, révoltante, inique, du
+    trépas commun.... La mort est chose si absurde quand elle frappe
+    l'homme de génie ou l'homme d'un grand coeur, que le peuple ne
+    croit pas à la possibilité d'une telle erreur de la nature. Les
+    héros ne meurent pas.
+
+The history of the world presents a large range of instances to test
+the singular assertion that death is so "absurd" that "the people"
+cannot believe that great and good men literally die. But would it be
+easy to match the strangeness of a philosopher and a man of genius
+gravely writing this down as a reason--not why, at the interval of
+centuries, a delusion should grow up--but why, on the very morrow of a
+crucifixion and burial, the disciples should have believed that all the
+dreadful work they had seen a day or two before was in very fact and
+reality reversed? We confess we do not know what human experience is if
+it countenances such a supposition as this.
+
+From this antecedent probability he proceeds to the facts. "The Sabbath
+day which followed the burial was occupied with these thoughts....
+Never was the rest of the Sabbath so fruitful." They all, the women
+especially, thought of him all day long in his bed of spices, watched
+over by angels; and the assurance grew that the wicked men who had
+killed him would not have their triumph, that he would not be left to
+decay, that he would be wafted on high to that Kingdom of the Father of
+which he had spoken. "Nous le verrons encore; nous entendrons sa voix
+charmante; c'est en vain qu'ils l'auront tué." And as, with the Jews, a
+future life implied a resurrection of the body, the shape which their
+hope took was settled. "Reconnaître que la mort pouvait être
+victorieuse de Jésus, de celui qui venait de supprimer son empire,
+c'était le comble de l'absurdité." It is, we suppose, irrelevant to
+remark that we find not the faintest trace of this sense of absurdity.
+The disciples, he says, had no choice between hopelessness and "an
+heroic affirmation"; and he makes the bold surmise that "un homme
+pénétrant aurait pu annoncer _dès le samedi_ que Jésus revivrait." This
+may be history, or philosophy, or criticism; what it is _not_ is the
+inference naturally arising from the only records we have of the time
+spoken of. But the force of historical imagination dispenses with the
+necessity of extrinsic support. "La petite société chrétienne, ce
+jour-là, opéra le véritable miracle: elle ressuscita Jésus en son coeur
+par l'amour intense qu'elle lui porta. Elle décida que Jésus ne
+mourrait pas." The Christian Church has done many remarkable things;
+but it never did anything so strange, or which so showed its power, as
+when it took that resolution.
+
+How was the decision, involuntary and unconscious, and guiltless of
+intentional deception, if we can conceive of such an attitude of mind,
+carried out? M. Renan might leave the matter in obscurity. But he sees
+his way, in spite of incoherent traditions and the contradictions which
+they present, to a "sufficient degree of probability." The belief in
+the Resurrection originated in an hallucination of the disordered fancy
+of Mary Magdalen, whose mind was thrown off its balance by her
+affection and sorrow; and, once suggested, the idea rapidly spread, and
+produced, through the Christian society, a series of corresponding
+visions, firmly believed to be real. But Mary Magdalen was the founder
+of it all:--
+
+    Elle eut, en ce moment solennel, une part d'action tout à fait
+    hors ligne. C'est elle qu'il faut suivre pas à pas; car elle
+    porta, ce jour-là, pendant une heure, tout le travail de la
+    conscience chrétienne; son témoignage décida la foi de
+    l'avenir.... La vision légère s'écarte et lui dit: "Ne me touche
+    pas!" Peu a peu l'ombre disparait. Mais le miracle de l'amour est
+    accompli. Ce que Céphas n'a pu faire, Marie l'a faite; elle a su
+    tirer la vie, la parole douce et pénétrante, du tombeau vide. Il
+    ne s'agit plus de conséquences à déduire ni de conjectures à
+    former. Marie a vu et entendu. La résurrection a son premier
+    témoin immédiat.
+
+He proceeds to criticise the accounts which ascribe the first vision to
+others; but in reality Mary Magdalen, he says, has done most, after the
+great Teacher, for the foundation of Christianity. "Queen and patroness
+of idealists," she was able to "impose upon all the sacred vision of
+her impassioned soul." All rests upon her first burst of entbusiasm,
+which gave the signal and kindled the faith of others. "Sa grande
+affirmation de femme, 'il est ressuscité,' a été la base de la foi de
+l'humanité":--
+
+    Paul ne parle pas de la vision de Marie et reporte tout l'honneur
+    de la première apparition sur Pierre. Mais cette expression est
+    très~inexacte. Pierre ne vit que le caveau vide, le suaire et le
+    linceul. Marie seule aima assez pour dépasser la nature et faire
+    revivre le fantome du maitre exquis. Dans ces sortes de crises
+    merveilleuses, voir après les autres n'est rien; tout le mérite
+    est de voir pour la première fois; car les autres modèlent ensuite
+    leur vision sur le type reçu. C'est le propre des belles
+    organisations de concevoir l'image promptement, avec justesse et
+    par une sorte de sens intime du dessin. La gloire de la
+    résurrection appartient donc à Marie de Magdala. Après Jésus,
+    c'est Marie qui a le plus fait pour la fondation du Christianisme.
+    L'ombre créée par les sens délicats de Madeleine plane encore sur
+    le monde.... Loin d'ici, raison impuissante! Ne va pas appliquer
+    une froide analyse à ce chef-d'oeuvre de l'idéalisme et de
+    l'amour. Si la sagesse renonce à consoler cette pauvre race
+    humaine, trahie par le sort, laisse la folie tenter l'aventure. Où
+    est le sage qui a donné au monde autant de joie, que la possédée
+    Marie de Magdala?
+
+He proceeds to describe, on the same supposition, the other events of
+the day, which he accepts as having in a certain very important sense
+happened, though, of course, only in the sense which excludes their
+reality. No doubt, for a series of hallucinations, anything will do in
+the way of explanation. The scene of the evening was really believed to
+have taken place as described, though it was the mere product of chance
+noises and breaths of air on minds intently expectant; and we are
+bidden to remember "that in these decisive hours a current of wind, a
+creaking window, an accidental rustle, settle the belief of nations for
+centuries." But at any rate it was a decisive hour:--
+
+    Tels furent les incidents de ce jour qui a fixé le sort de
+    l'humanité. L'opinion que Jésus était ressuscité s'y fonda d'une
+    manière irrévocable. La secte, qu'on avait cru éteindre en tuant
+    le maître, fut dès lors assurée d'un immense avenir.
+
+We are willing to admit that Christian writers have often spoken
+unreally and unsatisfactorily enough in their comments on this subject.
+But what Christian comment, hard, rigid, and narrow in its view of
+possibilities, ever equalled this in its baselessness and supreme
+absence of all that makes a view look like the truth? It puts the most
+extravagant strain on documents which, truly or falsely, but at any
+rate in the most consistent and uniform manner, assert something
+different. What they assert in every conceivable form, and with
+distinct detail, are facts; it is not criticism, but mere arbitrary
+license, to say that all these stand for visions. The issue of truth or
+falsehood is intelligible; the middle supposition of confusion and
+mistake in that which is the basis of everything, and is definitely and
+in such varied ways repeated, is trifling and incredible. We may
+disbelieve, if we please, St. Paul's enumeration of the appearances
+after the Resurrection; but to resolve it into a series of visions is
+to take refuge in the most unlikely of guesses. And, when we take into
+view the whole of the case--not merely the life and teaching out of
+which everything grew, but the aim and character of the movement which
+ensued, and the consequences of it, long tested and still continuing,
+to the history and development of mankind--we find it hard to measure
+the estimate of probability which is satisfied with the supposition
+that the incidents of one day of folly and delusion irrevocably decided
+the belief of ages, and the life and destiny of millions. Without the
+belief in the Resurrection there would have been no Christianity; if
+anything may be laid down as certain, this may. We should probably
+never have even heard of the great Teacher; He would not have been
+believed in, He would not have been preached to the world; the impulse
+to conversion would have been wanting; and all that was without
+parallel good and true and fruitful in His life would have perished,
+and have been lost in Judaea. And the belief in the Resurrection M.
+Renan thinks due to an hour of over-excited fancy in a woman agonized
+by sorrow and affection. When we are presented with an hypothesis on
+the basis of intrinsic probability, we cannot but remember that the
+power of delusion and self-deception, though undoubtedly shown in very
+remarkable instances, must yet be in a certain proportion to what it
+originates and produces, and that it is controlled by the numerous
+antagonistic influences of the world. Crazy women have founded
+superstitions; but we cannot help thinking that it would be more
+difficult than M. Renan supposes for crazy women to found a world-wide
+religion for ages, branching forth into infinite forms, and tested by
+its application to all varieties of civilisation, and to national and
+personal character. M. Renan points to La Salette. But the assumption
+would be a bold one that the La Salette people could have invented a
+religion for Christendom which would stand the wear of eighteen
+centuries, and satisfy such different minds. Pious frauds, as he says,
+may have built cathedrals. But you must take Christianity for what it
+has proved itself to be in its hard and unexampled trial. To start an
+order, a sect, an institution, even a local tradition or local set of
+miracles, on foundations already laid, is one thing; it is not the same
+to be the spring of the most serious and the deepest of moral movements
+for the improvement of the world, the most unpretending and the most
+careless of all outward form and show, the most severely searching and
+universal and lasting in its effects on mankind. To trace that back to
+the Teacher without the intervention of the belief in the Resurrection
+is manifestly impossible. We know what He is said to have taught; we
+know what has come of that teaching in the world at large; but if the
+link which connects the two be not a real one, it is vain to explain it
+by the dreams of affection. It was not a matter of a moment or an hour,
+but of days and weeks continually; not the assertion of one imaginative
+mourner or two, but of a numerous and variously constituted body of
+people. The story, if it was not true, was not delusion, but imposture.
+We certainly cannot be said to know much of what happens in the genesis
+of religions. But that between such a teacher and such teaching there
+should intervene such a gigantic falsehood, whether imposture or
+delusion, is unquestionably one of the hardest violations of
+probability conceivable, as well as one of the most desperate
+conclusions as regards the capacity of mankind for truth. Few thoughts
+can be less endurable than that the wisest and best of our race, men of
+the soberest and most serious tempers, and most candid and judicial
+minds, should have been the victims and dupes of the mad affection of a
+crazy Magdalen, of "ces touchantes démoniaques, ces pécheresses
+converties, ces vraies fondatrices du Christianisme." M. Renan shrinks
+from solving such a question by the hypothesis of conscious fraud. To
+solve it by sentiment is hardly more respectful either to the world or
+to truth.
+
+We have left ourselves no room to speak of the best part of M. Renan's
+new volume, his historical comment on the first period of Christianity.
+We do not pretend to go along with him in his general principles of
+judgment, or in many of his most important historical conclusions. But
+here he is, what he is not in the early chapters, on ground where his
+critical faculty comes fairly into play. He is, we think, continually
+paradoxical and reckless in his statements; and his book is more
+thickly strewn than almost any we know with half-truths, broad axioms
+which require much paring down to be of any use, but which are made by
+him to do duty for want of something stronger. But, from so keen and so
+deeply interested a writer, it is our own fault if we do not learn a
+good deal. And we may study in its full development that curious
+combination, of which M. Renan is the most conspicuous example, of
+profound veneration for Christianity and sympathy with its most
+characteristic aspects, with the scientific impulse to destroy in the
+public mind the belief in its truth.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+M. RENAN'S HIBBERT LECTURES[15]
+
+
+  [15]
+  _Guardian_, 14th April 1880.
+
+I
+
+The object of M. Renan's lectures at St. George's Hall is, as we
+understand him, not merely to present a historical sketch of the
+influence of Rome on the early Church, but to reconcile the historical
+imagination with the results of his own and kindred speculations on the
+origin of Christianity. He has, with a good faith which we do not
+question, investigated the subject and formed his conclusions upon it.
+He on the present occasion assumes these investigations, and that he,
+at any rate, is satisfied with their result. He hardly pretends to
+carry the mixed popular audience whom he addresses into any real
+inquiry into the grounds on which he has satisfied himself that the
+received account of Christianity is not the true one. But he is aware
+that all minds are more or less consciously impressed with the broad
+difficulty that, after all attempts to trace the origin of Christianity
+to agencies and influences of well-understood human character, the
+disproportion between causes and effects still continues to appear
+excessive. The great Christian tradition with its definite beliefs
+about the conditions of man's existence, which has shaped the fortunes
+and determined the future of mankind on earth, is in possession of the
+world as much as the great tradition of right and wrong, or of the
+family, or of the State. How did it get there? It is most astonishing
+that it should have done so, what is the account of it? Of course
+people may inquire into this question as they may inquire into the
+basis of morality, or the origin of the family or the State. But here,
+as on those subjects, reason, and that imagination which is one of the
+forces of reason, by making the mind duly sensible of the magnitude of
+ideas and alternatives, are exacting. M. Renan's task is to make the
+purely human origin of Christianity, its origin in the circumstances,
+the beliefs, the ideas, and the moral and political conditions of the
+first centuries, seem to us _natural_--as natural in the history of the
+world as other great and surprising events and changes--as natural as
+the growth and the fall of the Roman Empire, or as the Reformation, or
+the French Revolution. He is well qualified to sound the depths of his
+undertaking and to meet its heavy exigencies. With a fuller knowledge
+of books, and a closer familiarity than most men with the thoughts and
+the events of the early ages, with a serious value for the idea of
+religion as such, and certainly with no feeble powers of recalling the
+past and investing it with colour and life, he has to show how these
+things can be--how a religion with such attributes as he freely
+ascribes to the Gospel, so grand, so pure, so lasting, can have sprung
+up not merely _in_ but _from_ a most corrupt and immoral time, and can
+have its root in the most portentous and impossible of falsehoods. It
+must be said to be a bold undertaking.
+
+M. Renan has always aimed at doing justice to what he assailed;
+Christians, who realise what they believe, will say that he patronises
+their religion, and naturally they resent such patronage. Such candour
+adds doubtless to the literary effect of his method; but it is only due
+to him to acknowledge the fairness of his admissions. He starts with
+the declaration that there never was a nobler moment in human history
+than the beginnings of the Christian Church. It was the "most heroic
+episode in the annals of mankind." "Never did man draw forth from his
+bosom more devotion, more love of the ideal, than in the 150 years
+which elapsed between the sweet Galilean vision and the death of Marcus
+Aurelius." It was not only that the saints were admirable and beautiful
+in their lives; they had the secret of the future, and laid down the
+lines on which the goodness and hope of the coming world were to move."
+Never was the religious conscience more eminently creative, never did
+it lay down with more authority the law of future ages."
+
+Now, if this is not mere rhetoric, what does it come to? It means not
+merely that there was here a phenomenon, not only extraordinary but
+unique, in the development of human character, but that here was
+created or evolved what was to guide and form the religious ideas of
+mankind; here were the springs of what has reached through all the ages
+of expanding humanity to our own days, of what is best and truest and
+deepest and holiest. M. Renan, at any rate, does not think this an
+illusion of Christian prepossessions, a fancy picture of a mythic age
+of gold, of an unhistorical period of pure and primitive antiquity. Put
+this view of things by the side of any of the records or the literature
+of the time remaining to us; if not St. Paul's Epistles nor Tacitus nor
+Lucian, then Virgil and Horace and Cicero, or Seneca or Epictetus or
+Marcus Aurelius. Is it possible by any effort of imagination to body
+forth the links which can solidly connect the ideas which live and work
+and grow on one side, with the ideas which are represented by the facts
+and principles of the other side? Or is it any more possible to connect
+what we know of Christian ideas and convictions by a bond of natural
+and intelligible, if not necessary derivation, with what we know of
+Jewish ideas and Jewish habits of thought at the time in question? Yet
+that is the thing to be done, to be done rigorously, to be done clearly
+and distinctly, by those who are satisfied to find the impulses and
+faith which gave birth to Christianity amid the seething confusions of
+the time which saw its beginning; absolutely identical with those wild
+movements in origin and nature, and only by a strange, fortunate
+accident immeasurably superior to them.
+
+This question M. Renan has not answered; as far as we can see he has
+not perceived that it is the first question for him to answer, in
+giving a philosophical account of the history of Christianity. Instead,
+he tells us, and he is going still further to tell us, how Rome and its
+wonderful influences acted on Christianity, and helped to assure its
+victories. But, first of all, what is that Christianity, and whence did
+it come, which Rome so helped? It came, he says, from Judaism; "it was
+Judaism under its Christian form which Rome propagated without wishing
+it, yet with such mighty energy that from a certain epoch Romanism and
+Christianity became synonymous words"; it was Jewish monotheism, the
+religion the Roman hated and despised, swallowing up by its contrast
+all that was local, legendary, and past belief, and presenting one
+religious law to the countless nationalities of the Empire, which like
+itself was one, and like itself above all nationalities.
+
+This may all be true, and is partially true; but how did that hated and
+partial Judaism break through its trammels, and become a religion for
+all men, and a religion to which all men gathered? The Roman
+organisation was an admirable vehicle for Christianity; but the vehicle
+does not make that which it carries, or account for it. M. Renan's
+picture of the Empire abounds with all those picturesque details which
+he knows so well where to find, and knows so well, too, how to place in
+an interesting light. There were then, of course, conditions of the
+time more favourable to the Christian Church than would have been the
+conditions of other times. There was a certain increased liberty of
+thought, though there were also some pretty strong obstacles to it. M.
+Renan has Imperial proclivities, and reminds us truly enough that
+despotisms are sometimes more tolerant than democracies, and that
+political liberty is not the same as spiritual and mental freedom, and
+does not always favour it. It may be partially true, as he says, that
+"Virgil and Tibullus show that Roman harshness and cruelty were
+softening down"; that "equality and the rights of men were preached by
+the Stoics"; that "woman was more her own mistress, and slaves were
+better treated than in the days of Cato"; that "very humane and just
+laws were enacted under the very worst emperors; that Tiberius and Nero
+were able financiers"; that "after the terrible butcheries of the old
+centuries, mankind was crying with the voice of Virgil for peace and
+pity." A good many qualifications and abatements start up in our minds
+on reading these statements, and a good many formidable doubts suggest
+themselves, if we can at all believe what has come down to us of the
+history of these times. It is hard to accept quite literally the bold
+assertion that "love for the poor, sympathy with all men, almsgiving,
+were becoming virtues." But allow this as the fair and hopeful side of
+the Empire. Yet all this is a long way from accounting for the effects
+on the world of Christianity, even in the dim, vaporous form in which
+M. Renan imagines it, much more in the actual concrete reality in
+which, if we know anything, it appeared. "Christianity," he says,
+"responded to the cry for peace and pity of all weary and tender
+souls." No doubt it did; but what was it that responded, and what was
+its consolation, and whence was its power drawn? What was there in the
+known thoughts or hopes or motives of men at the time to furnish such a
+response? "Christianity," he says, "could only have been born and
+spread at a time when men had no longer a country"; "it was that
+explosion of social and religious ideas which became inevitable after
+Augustus had put an end to political struggles," after his policy had
+killed "patriotism." It is true enough that the first Christians,
+believing themselves subjects of an Eternal King and in view of an
+eternal world, felt themselves strangers and pilgrims in this; yet did
+the rest of the Roman world under the Caesars feel that they had no
+country, and was the idea of patriotism extinct in the age of Agricola?
+But surely the real question worth asking is, What was it amid the
+increasing civilisation and prosperous peace of Rome under the first
+Emperors which made these Christians relinquish the idea of a country?
+From whence did Christianity draw its power to set its followers in
+inflexible opposition to the intensest worship of the State that the
+world has ever known?
+
+To tell us the conditions under which all this occurred is not to tell
+us the cause of it. We follow with interest the sketches which M. Renan
+gives of these conditions, though it must be said that his
+generalisations are often extravagantly loose and misleading. We do
+indeed want to know more of those wonderful but hidden days which
+intervene between the great Advent, with its subsequent Apostolic age,
+and the days when the Church appears fully constituted and recognised.
+German research and French intelligence and constructiveness have done
+something to help us, but not much. But at the end of all such
+inquiries appears the question of questions, What was the beginning and
+root of it all? Christians have a reasonable answer to the question.
+There is none, there is not really the suggestion of one, in M. Renan's
+account of the connection of Christianity with the Roman world.
+
+
+II[16]
+
+  [16]
+  _Guardian_, 21st April 1880.
+
+M. Renan has pursued the line of thought indicated in his first
+lecture, and in his succeeding lectures has developed the idea that
+Christianity, as we know it, was born in Imperial Rome, and that in its
+visible form and active influence on the world it was the manifest
+product of Roman instincts and habits; it was the spirit of the Empire
+passing into a new body and accepting in exchange for political power,
+as it slowly decayed and vanished, a spiritual supremacy as unrivalled
+and as astonishing. The "Legend of the Roman Church--Peter and Paul,"
+"Rome the Centre in which Church Authority grew up," and "Rome the
+Capital of Catholicism," are the titles of the three lectures in which
+this thesis is explained and illustrated. A lecture on Marcus Aurelius,
+at the Royal Institution, though not one of the series, is obviously
+connected with it, and concludes M. Renan's work in England.
+
+Except the brilliant bits of writing which, judging from the full
+abstracts given in translation in the _Times_, appear to have been
+interspersed, and except the undoubting self-confidence and _aplomb_
+with which a historical survey, reversing the common ideas of mankind,
+was delivered, there was little new to be learned from M. Renan's
+treatment of his subject. Perhaps it may be described as the Roman
+Catholic theory of the rise of the Church, put in an infidel point of
+view. It is Roman Catholic in concentrating all interest, all the
+sources of influence and power in the Christian religion and Christian
+Church, from the first moment at Rome. But for Rome the Christian
+Church would not have existed. The Church is inconceivable without
+Rome, and Rome as the seat and centre of its spiritual activity.
+Everything else is forgotten. There were Christian Churches all over
+the Empire, in Syria, in Egypt, in Africa, in Asia Minor, in Gaul, in
+Greece. A great body of Christian literature, embodying the ideas and
+character of Christians all over the Empire, was growing up, and this
+was not Roman and had nothing to do with Rome; it was Greek as much as
+Latin, and local, not metropolitan, in its characteristics.
+Christianity was spreading here, there, and everywhere, slowly and
+imperceptibly as the tide comes in, or as cells multiply in the growing
+tissues of organised matter; it was spreading under its many distinct
+guides and teachers, and taking possession of the cities and provinces
+of the Empire. All this great movement, the real foundation of all that
+was to be, is overlooked and forgotten in the attention which is fixed
+on Rome and confined to it. As in the Roman Catholic view, M. Renan
+brings St. Paul and St. Peter together to Rome, to found that great
+Imperial Church in which the manifold and varied history of Christendom
+is merged and swallowed up. Only, of course, M. Renan brings them there
+as "fanatics" instead of Apostles and martyrs. We know something about
+St. Peter and St. Paul. We know them at any rate from their writings.
+In M. Renan's representation they stand opposed to one another as
+leaders of factions, to whose fierce hatreds and jealousies there is
+nothing comparable. "All the differences," he is reported to say,
+"which divide orthodox folks, heretics, schismatics, in our own day,
+are as nothing compared with the dissension between Peter and Paul." It
+is, as every one knows, no new story; but there it is in M. Renan in
+all its crudity, as if it were the most manifest and accredited of
+truths. M. Renan first brings St. Paul to Rome. "It was," he says, "a
+great event in the world's history, almost as pregnant with
+consequences as his conversion." How it was so M. Renan does not
+explain; but he brings St. Peter to Rome also, "following at the heels
+of St. Paul," to counteract and neutralise his influence. And who is
+this St. Peter? He represents the Jewish element; and what that element
+was at Rome M. Renan takes great pains to put before us. He draws an
+elaborate picture of the Jews and Jewish quarter of Rome--a "longshore
+population" of beggars and pedlars, with a Ghetto resembling the
+Alsatia of _The Fortunes of Nigel_, seething with dirt and fanaticism.
+These were St. Peter's congeners at Rome, whose ideas and claims,
+"timid trimmer" though he was, he came to Rome to support against the
+Hellenism and Protestantism of St. Paul. And at Rome they, both of
+them, probably, perished in Nero's persecution, and that is the history
+of the success of Christianity. "Only fanatics can found anything.
+Judaism lives on because of the intense frenzy of its prophets and
+annalists, Christianity by means of its martyrs."
+
+But a certain Clement arose after their deaths, to arrange a
+reconciliation between the fiercely antagonistic factions of St. Peter
+and St. Paul. How he harmonised them M. Renan leaves us to imagine; but
+he did reconcile them; he gathered in his own person the authority of
+the Roman Church; he lectured the Corinthian Church on its turbulence
+and insubordination; he anticipated, M. Renan remarked, almost in
+words, the famous saying of the French Archbishop of Rouen, "My clergy
+are my regiment, and they are drilled to obey like a regiment." On this
+showing, Clement might almost be described as the real founder of
+Christianity, of which neither St. Peter nor St. Paul, with their
+violent oppositions, can claim to be the complete representative; at
+any rate he was the first Pope, complete in all his attributes. And in
+accordance with this beginning M. Renan sees in the Roman Church,
+first, the centre in which Church authority grew up, and next, the
+capital of Catholicism. In Rome the congregation gave up its rights to
+its elders, and these rights the elders surrendered to the single ruler
+or Bishop. The creation of the Episcopate was eminently the work of
+Rome; and this Bishop of Rome caught the full spirit of the Caesar, on
+whose decay he became great; and troubling himself little about the
+deep questions which exercised the minds and wrung the hearts of
+thinkers and mystics, he made himself the foundation of order,
+authority, and subordination to all parts of the Imperial world.
+
+Such is M. Renan's explanation of the great march and triumph of the
+Christian Church. The Roman Empire, which we had supposed was the
+natural enemy of the Church, was really the founder of all that made
+the Church strong, and bequeathed to the Church its prerogatives and
+its spirit, and partly its machinery. We should hardly gather from this
+picture that there was, besides, a widespread Catholic Church, with its
+numerous centres of life and thought and teaching, and with very slight
+connection, in the early times, with the Church of the capital. And, in
+the next place, we should gather from it that there was little more in
+the Church than a powerful and strongly built system of centralised
+organisation and control; we should hardly suspect the existence of the
+real questions which interested or disturbed it; we should hardly
+suspect the existence of a living and all-engrossing theology, or the
+growth and energy in it of moral forces, or that the minds of
+Christians about the world were much more busy with the discipline of
+life, the teaching and meaning of the inspired words of Scripture, and
+the ever-recurring conflict with perverseness and error, than with
+their dependent connection on the Imperial Primacy of Rome, and the
+lessons they were to learn from it.
+
+Disguised as it may be, M. Renan's lectures represent not history, but
+scepticism as to all possibility of history. Pictures of a Jewish
+Ghetto, with its ragged mendicants smelling of garlic, in places where
+Christians have been wont to think of the Saints; ingenious
+explanations as to the way in which the "club" of the Christian Church
+surrendered its rights to a _bureau_ of its officers; exhortations to
+liberty and tolerance; side-glances at the contrasts of national gifts
+and destinies and futures in the first century and in the nineteenth;
+felicitous parallels and cunning epigrams, subtle combinations of the
+pathetic, the egotistical, and the cynical, all presented with calm
+self-reliance and in the most finished and distinguished of styles, may
+veil for the moment from the audience which such things amuse, and even
+interest, the hollowness which lies beneath. But the only meaning of
+the lectures is to point out more forcibly than ever that besides the
+obvious riddles of man's life there is one stranger and more appalling
+still--that a religion which M. Renan can never speak of without
+admiration and enthusiasm is based on a self-contradiction and deluding
+falsehood, more dreadful in its moral inconsistencies than the grave.
+
+We cannot help feeling that M. Renan himself is a true representative
+of that highly cultivated society of the Empire which would have
+crushed Christianity, and which Christianity, vanquished. He still owes
+something, and owns it, to what he has abandoned--"I am often tempted
+to say, as Job said, in our Latin version, _Etiam si occident me, in
+ipso sperabo_. But the next moment all is gone--all is but a symbol and
+a dream." There is no possibility of solving the religious problem. He
+relapses into profound disbelief of the worth and success of moral
+efforts after truth. His last word is an exhortation to tolerance for
+"fanatics," as the best mode of extinguishing them. "If, instead of
+leading _Polyeucte_ to punishment, the magistrate, with a smile and
+shake of the hand, had sent him home again, _Polyeucte_ would not have
+been caught offending again; perhaps, in his old age, he would even
+have laughed at his escapade, and would have become a sensible man." It
+is as obvious and natural in our days to dispose of such difficulties
+in this way with a smile and a sneer as it was in the first century
+with a shout--_"Christiani ad leones."_ But Corneille was as good a
+judge of the human heart as M. Renan. He had gauged the powers of faith
+and conviction; he certainly would have expected to find his
+_Polyeucte_ more obstinate.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+RENAN'S "SOUVENIRS D'ENFANCE"[17]
+
+
+  [17]
+  _Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse_. Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_,
+  18th July 1883.
+
+The sketches which M. Renan gives us of his early life are what we
+should have looked for from the writer of the _Vie de Jésus_. The story
+of the disintegration of a faith is supposed commonly to have something
+tragic about it. We expect it to be a story of heart-breaking
+disenchantments, of painful struggles, of fierce recoils against
+ancient beliefs and the teachers who bolstered them up; of indignation
+at having been so long deceived; of lamentation over years wasted in
+the service of falsehood. The confessions of St. Augustine, the
+biography of Blanco White, the letters of Lamennais, at least agree in
+the witness which they bear to the bitter pangs and anxieties amid
+which, in their case, the eventful change came about. Even Cardinal
+Newman's _Apologia_, self-restrained and severely controlled as it is,
+shows no doubtful traces of the conflicts and sorrows out of which he
+believed himself to have emerged to a calmer and surer light. But M.
+Renan's story is an idyl, not a tragedy. It is sunny, placid,
+contented. He calls his life the "_charmante promenade_" which the
+"cause of all good," whatever that may be, has granted him through the
+realities of existence. There are in it no storms of passion, no
+cruelties of circumstances, no deplorable mistakes, no complaints, no
+recriminations. His life flows on smoothly, peacefully, happily, with
+little of rapids and broken waters, gradually and in the most natural
+and inevitable way enlarging itself, moving in new and wider channels
+and with increased volume and force, but never detaching itself and
+breaking off from its beginnings. It is a spectacle which M. Renan, who
+has lived this life, takes a gentle pleasure in contemplating. He looks
+back on it with thankfulness, and also with amusement It makes a
+charming and complete picture. No part could be wanting without
+injuring the effect of the whole. It is the very ideal of the education
+of the Rousseau school--a child of nature, developing, amid the
+simplest and humblest circumstances of life, the finest gifts and most
+delicate graces of faith and reverence and purity--brought up by sages
+whose wisdom he could not in time help outrunning, but whose piety,
+sweetness, disinterestedness, and devoted labour left on his mind
+impressions which nothing could wear out; and at length, when the time
+came, passing naturally, and without passion or bitterness, from out of
+their faithful but too narrow discipline into a wider and ampler air,
+and becoming, as was fit, master and guide to himself, with light which
+they could not bear, and views of truth greater and deeper than they
+could conceive. But every stage of the progress, through the virtues of
+the teachers, and the felicitous disposition of the pupil, exhibits
+both in exactly the due relations in which each ought to be with the
+other, with none of the friction of rebellious and refractory temper on
+one side, or of unintelligent harshness on the other. He has nothing to
+regret in the schools through which he passed, in the preparations
+which he made there for the future, in the way in which they shaped his
+life. He lays down the maxim, "On ne doit jamais écrire que de ce qu'on
+aime." There is a serene satisfaction diffused through the book, which
+scarcely anything intervenes to break or disturb; he sees so much
+poetry in his life, so much content, so much signal and unlooked-for
+success, that he has little to tell except what is delightful and
+admirable. And then he is so certain that he is right: he can look down
+with so much good-humoured superiority on past and present, alike on
+what he calls "l'effroyable aventure du moyen âge," and on the march of
+modern society to the dead level of "Americanism." It need not be said
+that the story is told with all M. Renan's consummate charm of
+storytelling. All that it wants is depth of real feeling and
+seriousness--some sense of the greatness of what he has had to give up,
+not merely of its poetic beauty and tender associations. It hardly
+seems to occur to him that something more than his easy cheerfulness
+and his vivid historical imagination is wanted to solve for him the
+problems of the world, and that his gradual transition from the
+Catholicism of the seminary to the absolute rejection of the
+supernatural in religion does not, as he describes it, throw much light
+on the question of the hopes and destiny of mankind.
+
+The outline of his story is soon told. It is in general like that of
+many more who in France have broken away from religion. A clever
+studious boy, a true son of old Brittany--the most melancholy, the most
+tender, the most ardent, the most devout, not only of all French
+provinces, but of all regions in Europe--is passed on from the teaching
+of good, simple, hard-working country priests to the central
+seminaries, where the leaders of the French clergy are educated. He
+comes up a raw, eager, ignorant provincial, full of zeal for knowledge,
+full of reverence and faith, and first goes through the distinguished
+literary school of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, of which Dupanloup was
+the founder and the inspiring soul. Thence he passed under the more
+strictly professional discipline of St. Sulpice: first at the
+preparatory philosophical school at Issy, then to study scientific
+theology in the house of St. Sulpice itself at Paris. At St. Sulpice he
+showed special aptitudes for the study of Hebrew, in which he was
+assisted and encouraged by M. le Hir, "the most remarkable person," in
+his opinion, "whom the French clergy has produced in our days," a
+"savant and a saint," who had mastered the results of German criticism
+as they were found in the works of Gesenius and Ewald. On his faith all
+this knowledge had not made the faintest impression; but it was this
+knowledge which broke down M. Renan's, and finally led to his retiring
+from St. Sulpice. On the one side was the Bible and Catholic theology,
+carefully, scientifically, and consistently taught at St. Sulpice; on
+the other were the exegesis and the historical criticism of the German
+school. He came at length to the conclusion that the two are
+incompatible; that there was but a choice of alternatives; and purely
+on the ground of historical criticism, he says, not on any abstract
+objections to the supernatural, or to miracles, or to Catholic dogma,
+he gave up revealed religion. He gave it up not without regrets at the
+distress caused to friends, and at parting with much that was endeared
+to him by old associations, and by intrinsic beauty and value; but, as
+far as can be judged, without any serious sense of loss. He spent some
+time in obscurity, teaching, and studying laboriously, and at length
+beginning to write. Michel Lévy, the publisher, found him out, and
+opened to him a literary career, and in due time he became famous. He
+has had the ambiguous honour of making the Bible an object of such
+interest to French readers as it never was before, at the cost of
+teaching them to find in it a reflection of their own characteristic
+ways of looking at life and the world. It is not an easy thing to do
+with such a book as the Bible; but he has done it.
+
+As a mere history of a change of convictions, the _Souvenirs_ are
+interesting, but hardly of much importance. They are written with a
+kind of Epicurean serenity and dignity, avoiding all exaggeration and
+violence, profuse in every page in the delicacies and also in the
+reticences of respect, not too serious to exclude the perpetual
+suggestion of a well-behaved amused irony, not too much alive to the
+ridiculous and the self-contradictory to forget the attitude of
+composure due to the theme of the book. He warns his readers at the
+outset that they must not look for a stupid literalness in his account.
+"Ce qu'on dit de soi est toujours poésie"--the reflection of states of
+mind and varying humours, not the exact details of fact. "Tout est vrai
+dans ce petit volume, mais non de ce genre de verité qui est requis
+pour une _Biographie universelle_. Bien des choses ont été mises, afin
+qu'on sourie; si l'usage l'eût permis, j'aurais dû écrire plus d'une
+fois à la marge--_cum grano salis_". It is candid to warn us thus to
+read a little between the lines; but it is a curious and unconscious
+disclosure of his characteristic love of a mixture of the misty and the
+clear. The really pleasant part of it is his account, which takes up
+half the volume, of Breton ways and feelings half a century ago, an
+account which exactly tallies with the pictures of them in Souvestre's
+writings; and the kindliness and justice with which he speaks of his
+old Catholic and priestly teachers, not only in his boyish days at
+Tréguier, but in his seminary life in Paris. His account of this
+seminary life is unique in its picturesque vividness. He describes how,
+at St. Nicolas, under the fiery and irresistible Dupanloup, whom he
+speaks of with the reserved courtesy due to a distinguished person whom
+he much dislikes, his eager eyes were opened to the realities of
+literature, and to the subtle powers of form and style in writing,
+which have stood him in such stead, and have been the real secret of
+his own success.
+
+    Le monde s'ouvrit pour moi. Malgré sa prétention d'être un asile
+    fermé aux bruits du dehors, Saint-Nicolas était a cette époque la
+    maison la plus brillante et la plus mondaine. Paris y entrait à
+    pleins bords par les portes et les fenêtres, Paris tout entier,
+    moins la corruption, je me hâte de le dire, Paris avec ses
+    petitesses et ses grandeurs, ses hardiesses et ses chiffons, sa
+    force révolutionnaire et ses mollesses flasques. Mes vieux prêtres
+    de Bretagne savaient bien mieux les mathématiques et le latin que
+    mes nouveaux maîtres; mais ils vivaient dans des catacombes sans
+    lumière et sans air. Ici, l'atmosphère du siècle circulait
+    librement.... Au bout de quelque temps une chose tout à fait
+    inconnue m'etait révélée. Les mots, talent, éclat, réputation
+    eurent un sens pour moi. J'étais perdu pour l'idéal modeste que
+    mes anciens maîtres m'avaient inculqué.
+
+And he describes how Dupanloup brought his pupils perpetually into
+direct relations with himself and communicated to them something of his
+own enthusiasm. He gained the power over their hearts which a great
+general gains over his soldiers. His approval, his interest in a man,
+were the all-absorbing object, the all-sufficient reward; the one
+punishment feared was dismissal, always inflicted with courtesy and
+tact, from the honour and the joy of serving under him:--
+
+    Adoré de ses élèves, M. Dupanloup n'était pas toujours agréable à
+    ces collaborateurs. On m'a dit que, plus tard, dans son diocèse,
+    les choses se passèrent de la même manière, qu'il fut toujours
+    plus aimé de ses laïques que de ses prêtres. Il est certain qu'il
+    écrasait tout autour de lui. Mais sa violence même nous attachait;
+    car nous sentions que nous étions son but unique. Ce qu'il était,
+    c'était un éveilleur incomparable; pour tirer de chacun de ses
+    élèves la somme de ce qu'il pouvait donner, personne ne l'égalait.
+    Chacun de ses deux cents élèves existait distinct dans sa pensée;
+    il était pour chacun d'eux l'excitateur toujours présent, le motif
+    de vivre et de travailler. Il croyait au talent et en faisait la
+    base de la foi. Il répétait souvent que l'homme vaut en proportion
+    de sa faculté d'admirer. Son admiration n'était pas toujours assez
+    éclairée par la science; mais elle venait d'une grande chaleur
+    d'âme et d'un coeur vraiment possédé de l'amour du beau.... Les
+    défauts de l'éducation qu'il donnait étaient les défauts même de
+    son esprit. Il était trop peu rationnel, trop peu scientifique. On
+    eût dit que ses deux cents élèves étaient destinés à être tous
+    poètes, écrivains, orateurs.
+
+St. Nicolas was literary. Issy and St. Sulpice were severely
+philosophic and scientific, places of "_fortes études_"; and the writer
+thinks that they were more to his own taste than the more brilliant
+literary education given under Dupanloup. In one sense it may be so.
+They introduced him to exactness of thought and precision of
+expression, and they widened his horizon of possible and attainable
+knowledge. He passed, he says, from words to things. But he is a writer
+who owes so much to the form into which he throws his thoughts, to the
+grace and brightness and richness of his style, that he probably is a
+greater debtor to the master whom he admires and dislikes, Dupanloup,
+than to the modest, reserved, and rather dull Sulpician teachers, whom
+he loves and reveres and smiles at, whose knowledge of theology was
+serious, profound, and accurate, and whose characteristic temper was
+one of moderation and temperate reason, joined to a hatred of display,
+and a suspicion of all that seemed too clever and too brilliant. But
+his witness to their excellence, to their absolute self-devotion to
+their work, to their dislike of extravagance and exaggeration, to their
+good sense and cultivation, is ungrudging and warm. Of course he thinks
+them utterly out of date; but on their own ground he recognises that
+they were men of strength and solidity, the best and most thorough of
+teachers; the most sincere, the most humble, the most self-forgetting
+of priests:--
+
+    Beaucoup de mes jugements étonnent les gens du monde parcequ'ils
+    n'out pas vu ce que j'ai vu. J'ai vu à Saint-Sulpice, associés à
+    des idées étroites, je l'avoue, les miracles que nos races peuvent
+    produire en fait de bonté, de modestie, d'abnégation personelle.
+    Ce qu'il y a de vertu à Saint-Sulpice suffirait pour gouverner un
+    monde, et cela m'a rendu difficile pour ce que j'ai trouvé
+    ailleurs.
+
+M. Renan, as we have said, is very just to his education, and to the
+men who gave it. He never speaks of them except with respect and
+gratitude. It is seldom, indeed, that he permits himself anything like
+open disparagement of the men and the cause which he forsook. The
+shafts of his irony are reserved for men on his own side, for the
+radical violences of M. Clémenceau, and for the exaggerated reputation
+of Auguste Comte, "who has been set up as a man of the highest order of
+genius, for having said, in bad French, what all scientific thinkers
+for two hundred years have seen as clearly as himself." He attributes
+to his ecclesiastical training those excellences in his own temper and
+principles on which he dwells with much satisfaction and thankfulness.
+They are, he considers, the result of his Christian and "Sulpician"
+education, though the root on which they grew is for ever withered and
+dead. "La foi disparue, la morale reste.... C'est par le caractère que
+je suis resté essentiellement l'élève de mes anciens maîtres." He is
+proud of these virtues, and at the same time amused at the odd
+contradictions in which they have sometimes involved him:--
+
+    Il me plairait d'expliquer par le détail et de montrer comment la
+    gageure paradoxale de garder les vertus cléricales, sans la foi
+    qui leur sert de base et dans un monde pour lequel elles ne sont
+    pas faites, produisit, en ce que me concerne, les rencontres les
+    plus divertissantes. J'aimerais à raconter toutes les aventures
+    que mes vertus sulpiciennes m'amenèrent, et les tours singuliers
+    qu'elles m'ont joués. Après soixante ans de vie sérieuse on a le
+    droit de sourire; et où trouver une source de rire plus abondante,
+    plus à portée, plus inoffensive qu'en soimême? Si jamais un auteur
+    comique voulait amuser le public de mes ridicules, je ne lui
+    demanderais qu'une chose; c'est de me prendre pour collaborateur;
+    je lui conterais des choses vingt fois plus amusantes que celles
+    qu'il pourrait inventer.
+
+He dwells especially on four of these virtues which were, he thinks,
+graven ineffaceably on his nature at St. Sulpice. They taught him there
+not to care for money or success. They taught him the old-fashioned
+French politeness--that beautiful instinct of giving place to others,
+which is perishing in the democratic scramble for the best places, in
+the omnibus and the railway as in business and society. It is more
+curious to find that he thinks that they taught him to be modest.
+Except on the faith of his assertions, the readers of his book would
+not naturally have supposed that he believed himself specially endowed
+with this quality; it is at any rate the modesty which, if it shrinks
+into retirement from the pretensions of the crowd, goes along with a
+high and pitying sense of superiority, and a self-complacency of which
+the good humour never fails. His masters also taught him to value
+purity. For this he almost makes a sort of deprecating apology. He saw,
+indeed, "the vanity of this virtue as of all the others"; he admits
+that it is an unnatural virtue. But he says, "L'homme ne doit jamais se
+permettre deux hardiesses à la fois. Le libre penseur doit être réglé
+en ses moeurs." In this doctrine it may be doubted whether he will find
+many followers. An unnatural virtue, where nature only is recognised as
+a guide, is more likely to be discredited by his theory than
+recommended by his example, particularly if the state of opinion in
+France is such as is described in the following passage--a passage
+which in England few men, whatever they might think, would have the
+boldness to state as an acknowledged social phenomenon:--
+
+    Le monde, dont les jugements sont rarement tout à fait faux, voit
+    une sorte de ridicule à être vertueux quand on n'y est pas obligé
+    par un devoir professionnel. Le prêtre, ayant pour état d'être
+    chaste, comme le soldat d'être brave, est, d'après ces idées,
+    presque le seul qui puisse sans ridicule tenir à des principes sur
+    lesquels la morale et la mode se livrent les plus étranges
+    combats. Il est hors de doute qu'en ce point, comme en beaucoup
+    d'autres, mes principes clericaux, conservés dans le siècle, m'ont
+    nui aux yeux du monde.
+
+We have one concluding observation to make. This is a book of which the
+main interest, after all, depends on the way in which it touches on the
+question of questions, the truth and reality of the Christian religion.
+But from first to last it docs not show the faintest evidence that the
+writer ever really knew, or even cared, what religion is. Religion is
+not only a matter of texts, of scientific criticisms, of historical
+investigations, of a consistent theology. It is not merely a procession
+of external facts and events, a spectacle to be looked at from the
+outside. It is, if it is anything, the most considerable and most
+universal interest in the complex aggregate of human interests. It
+grows out of the deepest moral roots, out of the most characteristic
+and most indestructible spiritual elements, out of wants and needs and
+aspirations and hopes, without which man, as we know him, would not be
+man. When a man, in asking whether Christianity is true, leaves out all
+this side of the matter, when he shows that it has not come before him
+as a serious and importunate reality, when he shows that he is
+unaffected by those deep movements and misgivings and anxieties of the
+soul to which religion corresponds, and treats the whole matter as a
+question only of erudition and criticism, we may acknowledge him to be
+an original and acute critic, a brilliant master of historical
+representation; but he has never yet come face to face with the
+problems of religion. His love of truth may be unimpeachable, but he
+docs not know what he is talking about. M. Renan speaks of giving up
+his religion as a man might speak of accepting a new and unpopular
+physical hypothesis like evolution, or of making up his mind to give up
+the personality of Homer or the early history of Rome. Such an interior
+attitude of mind towards religion as is implied, for instance, in
+Bishop Butler's _Sermons on the Love of God_, or the _De Imitatione_ or
+Newman's _Parochial Sermons_ seems to him, as far as we can judge, an
+unknown and unattempted experience. It is easy to deal with a question
+if you leave out half the factors of it, and those the most difficult
+and the most serious. It is easy to be clear if you do not choose to
+take notice of the mysterious, and if you exclude from your
+consideration as vague and confused all that vast department of human
+concerns where we at best can only "see through a glass darkly." It is
+easy to find the world a pleasant and comfortable and not at all
+perplexing place, if your life has been, as M. Renan describes his own,
+a "charming promenade" through it; if, as he says, you are blessed with
+"a good humour not easily disturbed "; and you "have not suffered
+much"; and "nature has prepared cushions to soften shocks"; and you
+have "had so much enjoyment in this life that you really have no right
+to claim any compensation beyond it." That is M. Renan's experience of
+life--a life of which he looks forward to the perfection in the
+clearness and security of its possible denials of ancient beliefs, and
+in the immense development of its positive and experimental knowledge.
+How would Descartes have rejoiced, he says, if he could have seen some
+poor treatise on physics or cosmography of our day, and what would we
+not give to catch a glimpse of such an elementary schoolbook of a
+hundred years hence.
+
+But that is not at any rate the experience of all the world, nor does
+it appear likely ever to be within the reach of all the world. There is
+another aspect of life more familiar than this, an aspect which has
+presented itself to the vast majority of mankind, the awful view of it
+which is made tragic by pain and sorrow and moral evil; which, in the
+way in which religion looks at it, if it is sterner, is also higher and
+nobler, and is brightened by hope and purposes of love; a view which
+puts more upon men and requires more from them, but holds before them a
+destiny better than the perfection here of physical science. To minds
+which realise all this, it is more inconceivable than any amount of
+miracle that such a religion as Christianity should have emerged
+naturally out of the conditions of the first century. They refuse to
+settle such a question by the short and easy method on which M. Renan
+relies; they will not consent to put it on questions about the two
+Isaiahs, or about alleged discrepancies between the Evangelists; they
+will not think the claims of religion disposed of by M. Renan's canon,
+over and over again contradicted, that whether there can be or not,
+there _is_ no evidence of the supernatural in the world. To those who
+measure and feel the true gravity of the issues, it is almost
+unintelligible to find a man who has been face to face with
+Christianity all his life treating the deliberate condemnation of it
+almost gaily and with a light heart, and showing no regrets in having
+to give it up as a delusion and a dream. It is a poor and meagre end of
+a life of thought and study to come to the conclusion that the age in
+which he has lived is, if not one of the greatest, at least "the most
+amusing of all ages."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+LIFE OF FREDERICK ROBERTSON[18]
+
+
+  [18]
+  _Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson_. Edited by Stopford A.
+  Brooke. _Guardian_, 15th November 1865.
+
+If the proof of a successful exhibition of a strongly marked and
+original character be that it excites and sustains interest throughout,
+that our tastes are appealed to and our judgments called forth with
+great strength, that we pass continuously and rapidly, as we read, from
+deep and genuine admiration to equally deep and genuine dissent and
+disapprobation, that it allows us to combine a general but irresistible
+sense of excellence growing upon us through the book with an
+under-current of real and honest dislike and blame, then this book in a
+great measure satisfies the condition of success. It is undeniable that
+in what it shows us of Mr. Robertson there is much to admire, much to
+sympathise with, much to touch us, a good deal to instruct us. He is
+set before us, indeed, by the editor, as the ideal of all that a great
+Christian teacher and spiritual guide, all that a brave and wise and
+high-souled man, may be conceived to be. We cannot quite accept him as
+an example of such rare and signal achievement; and the fault of the
+book is the common one of warm-hearted biographers to wind their own
+feelings and those of their readers too high about their subject; to
+talk as if their hero's excellences were unknown till he appeared to
+display them, and to make up for the imperfect impression resulting
+from actual facts and qualities by insisting with overstrained emphasis
+on a particular interpretation of them. The book would be more truthful
+and more pleasing if the editor's connecting comments were more simply
+written, and made less pretension to intensity and energy of language.
+Yet with all drawbacks of what seem to us imperfect taste, an imperfect
+standard of character, and an imperfect appreciation of what there is
+in the world beyond a given circle of interests, the book does what a
+biography ought to do--it shows us a remarkable man, and it gives us
+the means of forming our own judgment about him. It is not a tame
+panegyric or a fancy picture.
+
+The main portion of the book consists of Mr. Robertson's own letters,
+and his own accounts of himself; and we are allowed to see him, in a
+great degree at least, as he really was. The editor draws a moral,
+indeed, and tells us what we ought to think about what we see; but we
+can use our own judgment about that. And, as so often happens in real
+life, what we see both attracts and repels; it calls forth,
+successively and in almost equal measure, warm sympathy and admiration,
+and distinct and hearty disagreement. At least there is nothing of
+commonplace--of what is commonplace yet in our generation; though there
+is a good deal that bids fair to become commonplace in the next. It is
+the record of a genuine spontaneous character, seeking its way, its
+duty, its perfection, with much sincerity and elevation of purpose, and
+many anxieties and sorrows, and not, we doubt not, without much of the
+fruits that come with real self-devotion; a record disclosing a man
+with great faults and conspicuous blanks in his nature, one with whose
+principles, taste, or judgment we constantly find ourselves having a
+vehement quarrel, just after having been charmed and conciliated by
+some unexpectedly powerful or refined statement of an important truth.
+We cannot think, and few besides his own friends will think, that he
+had laid his hand with so sure an accuracy and with so much promise
+upon the clue which others had lost or bungled over. But there is much
+to learn in his thoughts and words, and there is not less to learn from
+his life. It is the life of a man who did not spare himself in
+fulfilling what he received as his task, who sacrificed much in order
+to speak his message, as he thought, more worthily and to do his office
+more effectually, and whose career touches us the more from the shadow
+of suffering and early death that hangs over its aspirations and
+activity. A book which fairly shows us such a life is not of less value
+because it also shows us much that we regret and condemn.
+
+Mr. Robertson was brought up not only in the straitest traditions of
+the Evangelical school, but in the heat of its controversial warfare.
+His heart, when he was a boy, was set on entering the army; and one of
+his most characteristic points through life, shown in many very
+different forms, was his pugnacity, his keen perception of the
+"_certaminis gaudia_":--
+
+    "There is something of combativeness in me," he writes, "which
+    prevents the whole vigour being drawn out, except when I have an
+    antagonist to deal with, a falsehood to quell, or a wrong to
+    avenge. Never till then does my mind feel quite alive. Could I
+    have chosen my own period of the world to have lived in, and my
+    own type of life, it should be the feudal ages, and the life of a
+    Cid, the redresser of wrongs."
+
+    "On the other hand," writes his biographer, "when he met men who
+    despised Christianity, or who, like the Roman Catholics, held to
+    doctrines which he believed untrue, this very enthusiasm and
+    unconscious excitement swept him sometimes beyond himself. He
+    could not moderate his indignation down to the cool level of
+    ordinary life. Hence he was wanting at this time in the wise
+    tolerance which formed so conspicuous a feature of his maturer
+    manhood. He held to his own views with pertinacity. He believed
+    them to be true; and he almost refused to allow the possibility of
+    the views of others having truth in them also. He was more or less
+    one-sided at this period. With the Roman Catholic religion it was
+    war to the death, not in his later mode of warfare, by showing the
+    truth which lay beneath the error, but by denouncing the error. He
+    seems invariably, with the pugnacity of a young man, to have
+    attacked their faith; and the mode in which this was done was
+    startlingly different from that which afterwards he adopted."
+
+He yielded, after considerable resistance, to the wishes and advice of
+his friends, that he should prepare for orders. "With a romantic
+instinct of self-sacrifice," says his biographer, "he resolved to give
+up the idea of his whole life." This we can quite understand; but with
+that propensity of biographers to credit their subject with the
+desirable qualities which it may be supposed that they ought to have,
+besides those which they really have, the editor proceeds to observe
+that this would scarcely have happened had not Mr. Robertson's
+"_characteristic self-distrust_ disposed him to believe that he was
+himself the worst judge of his future profession." This is the way in
+which the true outline of a character is blurred and confused, in order
+to say something proper and becoming. Self-distrust was not among the
+graces or weaknesses of Mr. Robertson's nature, unless indeed we
+mistake for it the anxiety which even the stoutest heart may feel at a
+crisis, or the dissatisfaction which the proudest may feel at the
+interval between attempt and achievement.
+
+He was an undergraduate at Brasenose at the height of the Oxford
+movement. He was known there, so far as he was known at all, as a keen
+partisan of the Evangelical school; and though no one then suspected
+the power which was really in him, his party, not rich in men of
+strength or promise, made the most of a recruit who showed ability and
+entered heartily into their watchwords, and, it must be said, their
+rancour. He was conspicuous among the young men of his standing for the
+forwardness with which he took his side against "Tractarianism," and
+the vehemence of his dislike of it, and for the almost ostentatious and
+defiant prominence which he gave to the convictions and social habits
+of his school He expressed his scorn and disgust at the "donnishness,"
+the coldness, the routine, the want of heart, which was all that he
+could see at Oxford out of the one small circle of his friends. He
+despised the Oxford course of work, and would have nothing more to do
+with it than he could help--as he lived to regret afterwards. Yet even
+then he was in his tastes and the instinctive tendencies of his mind
+above his party. He was an admiring reader of Wordsworth and Shelley;
+he felt the strength of Aristotle and Plato; he is said to have
+appreciated Mr. Newman's preaching, and to have gallantly defended what
+he admired in him and his friends. His editor, indeed, Mr. Brooke,
+appears to be a little divided and embarrassed, between his wish to
+enforce Mr. Robertson's largeness of mind and heart, and his fear of
+giving countenance to suspicions that he was ever so little inclined to
+"High Churchism"; between his desire to show that Mr. Robertson
+estimated the High Church leaders as much as an intelligent man ought,
+and disliked their system as much as a sound-thinking Christian ought.
+We should have thought that he need not be so solicitous to "set at
+rest the question about Mr. Robertson's High Church tendencies." "I
+hate High Churchism," was one of his latest declarations, when
+professing his sympathy with individual High Churchmen. One thing,
+however, is quite clear--that in his early life his partisanship was
+thoroughgoing and unflinching enough to satisfy the fiercest and most
+fanatical of their opponents. Such a representation as this is simply
+misleading:--
+
+    The almost fierceness with which he speaks against the Tract
+    school is proof in him of the strength of the attraction it
+    possessed for him, just as afterwards at Brighton his attacks on
+    Evangelicalism are proof of the strength with which he once held
+    to that form of Christianity, and the force of the reaction with
+    which he abandoned it for ever. Out of these two reactions--when
+    their necessary ultra tendencies had been mellowed down by
+    time--emerged at last the clearness and the just balance of
+    principles with which he taught during 1848 and the following
+    years, at Brighton. He had probed both schools of theological
+    thought to their recesses, and had found them wanting. He spoke of
+    what he knew when he protested against both. He spoke also of what
+    he knew when he publicly recognised the Spirit of all good moving
+    in the lives of those whose opinions he believed to be erroneous.
+
+It is absurd to say, because he sometimes spoke of the "danger" he had
+been in from "Tractarianism," that he had felt in equal degree the
+"strength of attraction" towards the one school and towards the other,
+and it is equally absurd to talk of his "having probed both to their
+recesses." He read, and argued, and discussed the pamphlets of the
+controversy--the "replies," Mr. Brooke says, with more truth probably
+than he thought of in using the word--like other undergraduates who
+took interest in what was going on, and thought themselves fit to
+choose their side. With his tutor and friend, Mr. Churton, he read
+Taylor's _Ancient Christianity_, carefully looking out the passages
+from the Fathers. "I am reading the early Church history with
+Golightly," he says, "which is a very great advantage, as he has a fund
+of general information and is a close reader." But we must doubt
+whether this involved "probing to the recesses" the "Tractarian" side
+of the question. And we distrust the depth and the judgment, and the
+impartiality also of a man who is said to have read Newman's sermons
+continually with delight to the day of his death, and by whom no book
+was more carefully studied and more highly honoured than _The Christian
+Year_, and who yet to the last could see nothing better in the Church
+movement as a whole than, according to the vulgar view of it, a revival
+of forms partly useful, partly hurtful It seems to us the great
+misfortune of his life, and one which exercised its evil influence on
+him to the end, that, thrown young into the narrowest and weakest of
+religious schools, he found it at first so congenial to his vehement
+temperament, that he took so kindly to certain of its more unnatural
+and ungenerous ways, and thus was cut off from the larger and healthier
+influences of the society round him. Those were days when older men
+than he took their side too precipitately; but he found himself
+encouraged, even as an undergraduate, to dogmatise, to be positive, to
+hate, to speak evil. He learnt the lesson too well. This is the
+language of an undergraduate at the end of his university course;--
+
+    But I seem this term to have in a measure waked out of a long
+    trance, partly caused by my own gross inconsistencies, and partly
+    by the paralysing effects of this Oxford-delusion heresy, for such
+    it is I feel persuaded. And to know it a man must live here, and
+    he will see the promising and ardent men sinking one after another
+    in a deadly torpor, wrapped up in self-contemplation, dead to
+    their Redeemer, and useless to His Church, under the baneful
+    breath of this accursed upas tree. I say accursed, because I
+    believe that St. Paul would use the same language to Oxford as he
+    did to the Galatian Church, "I would they were even cut off which
+    trouble you"; accursed, because I believe that the curse of God
+    will fall on it He has denounced it on the Papal hereby, and he is
+    no respecter of persons, to punish the name and not the reality.
+    May He forgive me if I err, and lead me into all truth. But I do
+    not speak as one who has been in no clanger, and therefore cannot
+    speak very quietly. It is strange into what ramifications the
+    disbelief of external justification will extend; _we will_ make it
+    internal, whether it be by self-mortification, by works of
+    evangelical obedience, or by the sacraments, and that just at the
+    time when we suppose most that we are magnifying the work of the
+    Lord.
+
+Mr. Brooke rather likes to dwell, as it seems to us, in an unreal and
+disproportionate way, on Mr. Robertson's sufferings, in the latter part
+of his life, from the bitter and ungenerous attacks of which he was the
+object. "This is the man," he says in one place, "who was afterwards at
+Brighton driven into the deepest solitariness of heart, whom God
+thought fit to surround with slander and misunderstanding." He was, we
+doubt not, fiercely assailed by the Evangelical party, which he had
+left, and which he denounced in no gentle language; he was, as we can
+well believe, "constantly attacked, by some manfully, by others in an
+underhand manner, and was the victim of innuendoes and slander." We
+cannot, however, help thinking that Mr. Brooke unconsciously
+exaggerates the solitariness and want of sympathy which went with all
+this. Mr. Robertson had, and knew that he had, his ardent and
+enthusiastic admirers as well as his worrying and untiring opponents.
+But what we remark is this. It was the measure which he had meted out
+to others, in the fierceness of his zeal for Evangelicalism, which the
+Evangelicals afterwards meted out to him. They did not more talk evil
+of what they knew not and had taken no real pains to understand, than
+he had done of a body of men as able, as well-instructed, as
+deep-thinking, as brave, as earnest as himself in their war against sin
+and worldliness. The stupidity, the perverse ill-nature, the resolute
+ignorance, the audacious and fanatical application of Scripture
+condemnations, the reckless judging without a desire to do justice,
+which he felt and complained of so bitterly when turned against
+himself, he had sanctioned and largely shared in when the same party
+which attacked him in the end attacked the earlier revivers of
+thoughtful and earnest religion. Nor do we find that he ever expressed
+regret for a vehemence of condemnation which his after-knowledge must
+have shown him that he had no business to pass, because, even if he
+afterwards adhered to it, he had originally passed it on utterly false
+and inadequate grounds. He only became as fierce against the
+Evangelicals as he had been against the followers of Mr. Newman. He
+never unlearnt the habit of harsh reprobation which his Evangelical
+friends had encouraged. He only transferred its full force against
+themselves.
+
+He left Oxford and began his ministry, first at Winchester, and then at
+Cheltenham, full of Evangelical _formulae_ and Evangelical narrow zeal.
+It does not appear that, except as an earnest hard-working clergyman,
+he was in any way distinguished from numbers of the same class, though
+we are quite willing to believe that even then his preaching, in warmth
+and vigour, was above the average. But as he, or his biographer, says,
+he had not yet really begun to think. When he began to think, he did so
+with the rapidity, the intensity, the impatient fervid vehemence which
+lay all along at the bottom of his character. His Evangelical views
+appear to have snapped to pieces and dissolved with a violence and
+sudden abruptness entirely unaccounted for by anything which these
+volumes show us. He read Carlyle; but so did many other people. He
+found the religious world at Cheltenham not so pure as he had imagined
+it; but this is what must have happened anywhere, and is not enough to
+account for such a complete revolution of belief. He had a friend
+deeply read in German philosophy and criticism who is said to have
+exercised influence on him. Still, we repeat, the steps and processes
+of the change from the Evangelicalism of Cheltenham to a condition, at
+first, of almost absolute doubt, are very imperfectly explained:--
+
+    These letters were written in 1843. In the following year doubts
+    and questionings began to stir in his mind. He could not get rid
+    of them. They were forced upon him by his reading and his
+    intercourse with men. They grew and tortured him. His teaching in
+    the pulpit altered, and it became painful to him to preach. He was
+    reckoned of the Evangelical school, and he began to feel that his
+    position was becoming a false one. He felt the excellence and
+    earnestness, and gladly recognised the work of the nobler portion
+    of that party, but he felt also that he must separate from it. In
+    his strong reaction from its extreme tendencies, he understood
+    with a shock which upturned his whole inward life for a time, that
+    the system on which he had founded his whole faith and work could
+    never be received by him again. Within its pale, for him, there
+    was henceforward neither life, peace, nor reality. It was not,
+    however, till almost the end of his ministry at Cheltenham that
+    this became clearly manifest to him. It had been growing slowly
+    into a conviction. An outward blow--the sudden ruin of a
+    friendship which he had wrought, as he imagined, for ever into his
+    being--a blow from which he never afterwards wholly
+    recovered--accelerated the inward crisis, and the result was a
+    period of spiritual agony so awful that it not only shook his
+    health to its centre, but smote his spirit down into so profound a
+    darkness that of all his early faiths but one remained, "It must
+    be right to do right."
+
+This seems to have been in 1846, and in the beginning of the next year
+he had already taken his new line. The explanation does not explain
+much. We have no right to ask for more than his friends think fit to
+tell us of this turning-point of his life. But we observe that this
+deeply important passage is left with but little light and much
+manifest reticence. That the crisis took place we have his own touching
+and eloquent words to assure us. It left him also as firm in his
+altered convictions as he had been in his old ones. What caused it,
+what were its circumstances and characteristics, and what affected its
+course and results, we can only guess. But it was decisive and it was
+speedy. He spent a few months in Germany in the end of 1846, and in the
+beginning of 1847 the Bishop of Oxford was willing to appoint him to
+St. Ebbe's. But his stay there was short. Three months afterwards he
+accepted the chapel at Brighton which he held till his death in August
+1853.
+
+He was now the Robertson whom all the world knows, and the change was a
+most remarkable one. It seems strictly accurate to say that he started
+at once into a new man--new in all his views and tastes; new in the
+singular burst of power which at once shows itself in the keen, free,
+natural language of his letters and his other writings; new in the deep
+concentrated earnestness of character with which he seemed to grasp his
+peculiar calling and function. All the conventionalities of his old
+school, which hung very thick about him even to the end of his
+Cheltenham life, seem suddenly to drop off, and leave him, without a
+trace remaining on his mind, in the full use and delight of his new
+liberty. We cannot say that we are more inclined to agree with him in
+his later stage than in his earlier. And the rapid transformation of a
+most dogmatic and zealous Evangelical into an equally positive and
+enthusiastic "Broad Churchman" does not seem a natural or healthy
+process, and suggests impatience and self-confidence more than
+self-command and depth. But we get, without doubt, to a real man--a man
+whose words have a meaning, and stand for real things; whose language
+no longer echoes the pale dreary commonplaces of a school, but reveals
+thoughts which he has thought for himself, and the power of being able
+"to speak as he will." His mind seems to expand, almost at a bound, to
+all the manifold variety of interests of which the world is full. His
+letters on his own doings, on the books and subjects of the day, on the
+remarks or the circumstances of his friends, his criticism, his satire,
+his controversial or friendly discussions, are full of energy,
+versatility, refinement, boldness, and strength; and his remarkable
+power of clear, picturesque, expressive diction, not unworthy of our
+foremost masters of English, appears all at once, as it were, full
+grown. It is difficult to believe, as we read the later portions of his
+life, that we are reading about the same man who appeared, so short a
+time before, at the beginning, to promise at best to turn into a
+popular Evangelical preacher, above the average, perhaps, in taste and
+power, but not above the average in freedom from cramping and sour
+prejudices.
+
+Mr. Robertson had hold of some great truths, and he applied them, both
+in his own thoughts and self-development and in his popular teaching,
+with great force. He realised two things with a depth and intensity
+which give an awful life and power to all he said about religion. He
+realised with singular and pervading keenness that which a greater man
+than he speaks of as the first and the great discovery of the awakened
+soul--" the thought of two, and two only, supreme and luminously
+self-evident beings, himself and the Creator." "Alone with God,"
+expresses the feeling which calmed his own anxieties and animated his
+religious appeals to others. And he realised with equal earnestness the
+great truth which is spoken of by Mr. Brooke, though in language which
+to us has an unpleasant sound, in the following extract:
+
+    Yet, notwithstanding all this--which men called while he lived,
+    and now when he is dead will call, want of a clear and
+    well-defined system of theology--he had a fixed basis for his
+    teaching. It was the Divine-human Life of Christ. It is the fourth
+    principle mentioned in his letter, "that belief in the human
+    character of Christ must be antecedent to belief in His divine
+    origin." He felt that an historical Christianity was absolutely
+    essential; that only through a visible life of the Divines in the
+    flesh could God become intelligible to men; that Christ was God's
+    idea of our nature realised; that only when we fall back on the
+    glorious portrait of what has been, ran we be delivered from
+    despair of Humanity; that in Christ "all the blood of all the
+    nations ran," and all the powers of man were redeemed. Therefore
+    he grasped as the highest truth, on which to rest life and
+    thought, the reality expressed in the words, "the Word was made
+    Flesh." The Incarnation was to him the centre of all history, the
+    blossoming of Humanity. The Life which followed the Incarnation
+    was the explanation of the Life of God, and the only solution of
+    the problem of the Life of man. He did not speak much of loving
+    Christ; his love was fitly mingled with that veneration which
+    makes love perfect; his voice was solemn, and he paused before he
+    spoke His name in common talk; for what that name meant had become
+    the central thought of his intellect and the deepest realisation
+    of his spirit. He had spent a world of study, of reverent
+    meditation, of adoring contemplation, on the Gospel history.
+    Nothing comes forward more frequently in his letters than the way
+    in which he had entered into the human life of Christ. To that
+    everything is referred--by that everything is explained.
+
+In bringing home these great truths to the feelings of those who had
+lived insensible to them lay the chief value of his preaching. He
+awakened men to believe that there was freshness and reality in things
+which they had by use become dulled to. There are no doubt minds which
+rise to the truth most naturally and freely without the intervention of
+dogmatic expressions, and to these such expressions, as they are a
+limit and a warning, are also felt as a clog. Mr. Robertson's early
+experience had made him suspicious and irritable about dogma as such;
+and he prided himself on being able to dispense with it, while at the
+same time preserving the principle and inner truth which it was
+intended to convey. But in his ostentatious contempt of dogmatic
+precision and exactness, none but those who have not thought about the
+matter will see any proof of his strength or wisdom. Dogma, accurate,
+subtle, scientific, does not prevent a mind of the first order from
+breathing freshness of feeling, grandeur, originality, and the sense of
+reality, into the exposition of the truth which it represents. It is no
+fetter except to those minds which in their impulsiveness, their
+self-confidence, and their want of adequate grasp and sustained force,
+most need its salutary restraint. And no man has a right, however
+eloquent and impressive his speech may be, to talk against dogma till
+he shows that he does not confound accuracy of statement with
+conventional formalism. Mr. Robertson lays down the law pretty
+confidently about the blunders of everybody about him--Tractarian,
+Evangelical, Dissenter, Romanist, and Rationalist. We must say that the
+impression of every page of his letters is, that clear and "intuitive"
+as he was, he had not always understood what he condemned. He was
+especially satisfied with a view of Baptism which he thought rose above
+both extremes and took in the truth of both while it avoided their
+errors. But is it too much to say that a man who, not in the heat of
+rhetoric, but when preparing candidates for Confirmation, and piquing
+himself on his freedom from all prejudice, deliberately describes the
+common Church view of Baptism as implying a "magical" change, and
+actually illustrates what he means by the stories of magical changes in
+the _Arabian Nights_--who knowing, or able to read, all that has been
+said by divines on the subject from the days of Augustine, yet commits
+himself to the assertion that this is in fact what they hold and
+teach--is it too much to say that such a man, whatever may be his other
+gifts, has forfeited all claim to be considered capable of writing and
+expressing himself with accuracy, truth, and distinctness on
+theological questions? And if theological questions are to be dealt
+with, ought they not to be dealt with accurately, and not loosely?
+
+But we have lingered too long over these volumes. They are very
+instructive, sometimes very elevating, almost always very touching. The
+life which they describe greatly wanted discipline, self-restraint, and
+the wise and manly fear of overrating one's own novelties. But we see
+in it a life consecrated to duty, fulfilled with much pain and
+self-sacrifice, and adorned by warm and deep affections, by vigour and
+refinement of thought, and earnest love for truth and purity. No one
+can help feeling his profound and awful sense of things unseen, though
+in the philosophy by which he sought to connect things seen and things
+unseen, we cannot say that we can have much confidence. We have only
+one concluding remark to make, and that is not on him but on his
+biographer. An exaggerated tone, as we have said, seems to us to
+pervade the book. There is what seems to us an unhealthy attempt to
+create in the reader an impression of the exceptional severity of the
+sufferings of Mr. Robertson's life, of his loneliness, of his
+persecutions. But in this point much may fairly be pardoned to the
+affection of a friend. What, however, we can less excuse is the want of
+good feeling with which Mr. Brooke, in his account of Mr. Robertson's
+last days, allows himself to give an _ex parte_, account of a dispute
+between Mr. Robertson and the Vicar of Brighton, about the appointment
+of a curate, and not simply to insinuate, but distinctly declare that
+this dispute with its result was the fatal stroke which, in his state
+of ill-health, hastened his death. We say nothing about the rights of
+the story, for we never heard anything of them but what Mr. Brooke
+tells us. But there is an appearance of vindictiveness in putting it on
+record with this particular aspect which nothing in the story itself
+seems to us to justify. In describing Mr. Robertson's departure from
+Cheltenham, Mr. Brooke has plainly thought right to use much reticence.
+He would have done well to have used the same reticence about these
+quarrels at Brighton.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+LIFE OF BARON BUNSEN[19]
+
+
+  [19]
+  _A Memoir of Baron Bunsen_. By his Widow, Baroness Bunsen. _Saturday
+  Review_, 2nd May 1868.
+
+Bunsen was really one of those persons, more common two centuries ago
+than now, who could belong as much to an adopted country as to that in
+which they were born and educated. A German of the Germans, he yet
+succeeded in also making himself at home in England, in appreciating
+English interests, in assimilating English thought and traditions, and
+exercising an important influence at a critical time on one extremely
+important side of English life and opinion. He was less felicitous in
+allying the German with the Englishman, perhaps from personal
+peculiarities of impatience, self-assertion, and haste, than one who
+has since trodden in his steps and realised more completely and more
+splendidly some of the great designs which floated before his mind. But
+few foreigners have gained more fairly, by work and by sympathy, the
+_droit de cité_ in England than Bunsen.
+
+It is a great pity that books must be so long and so bulky, and though
+Bunsen's life was a very full and active one in all matters of
+intellectual interest, and in some of practical interest also, we
+cannot help thinking that his biography would have gained by greater
+exercise of self-denial on the part of his biographer. It is altogether
+too prolix, and the distinction is not sufficiently observed between
+what is interesting simply to the Bunsen family and their friends, and
+what is interesting to the public. One of the points in which
+biographers, and the present author among the number, make mistakes, is
+in their use of letters. They never know when to stop in giving
+correspondence. If we had only one or two letters of a remarkable map,
+they would be worth printing, even if they were very much like other
+people's letters. But when we have bundles and letter-books without end
+to select from, selection, in a work professedly biographical, becomes
+advisable. We want types and specimens of a man's letters; and when the
+specimen has been given, we want no more, unless what is given is for
+its own sake remarkable. A great number of Bunsen's early letters are
+printed. Some of them are of much interest, showing how early the germs
+were formed of ideas and plans which occupied his life, and what were
+the influences by which he was surrounded, and how he comported himself
+in regard to them. But many more of these letters are what any young
+man of thought and of an affectionate nature might have written; and we
+do not want to have it shown us, over and over again, merely that
+Bunsen was thoughtful and affectionate. A wise and severe economy in
+this matter would have produced at least the same effect, at much less
+cost to the reader.
+
+Bunsen was born in 1791, at Corbach, in the little principality of
+Waldeck, and grew up under the severe and simple training of a frugal
+German household, and with a solid and vigorous German education. He
+became in time Heyne's pupil at Göttingen, and very early showed the
+qualities which distinguished him in his after life--restless eagerness
+after knowledge and vast powers of labour, combined with large and
+ambitious, and sometimes vague, ideas, and with depth and fervour of
+religious sentiment. He entered on life when the reaction against the
+cold rationalistic theories of the age before him was stimulated by the
+excitement of the war of liberation; and in his deep and supreme
+interest in the Bible he kept to the last the stamp which he then
+received. More interesting than the recollections of a distinguished
+man's youth by his friends after he has become distinguished--which are
+seldom quite natural and not always trustworthy--are the contemporary
+records of the impressions made on _him_ in his youth by those who were
+distinguished men when he was young. In some of Bunsen's letters we
+have such impressions. Thus he writes of Heyne in 1813:--
+
+    Poor and lonely did I arrive in this place [Göttingen]. Heyne
+    received me, guided me, bore with me, encouraged me, showed me in
+    himself the example of a high and noble energy, and indefatigable
+    activity in a calling which was not that to which his merit
+    entitled him. He might have superintended and administered and
+    maintained an entire kingdom without more effort and with yet
+    greater efficiency than the University for which he lived; he was
+    too great for a mere philologer, and in general for a professor of
+    mere learning in the age into which he was cast, and he was more
+    distinguished in every other way than in this.... And what has he
+    established or founded at the cost of this exertion of faculties?
+    Learning annihilates itself, and the most perfect is the first
+    submerged; for the next age scales with ease the height which cost
+    the preceding the full vigour of life. Yet two things remain of
+    him and will not perish--the one, the tribute left by his free
+    spirit to the finest productions of the human mind; and what he
+    felt, thought, and has immortalised in many men of excellence gone
+    before. Read his explanations of Tischbein's engravings from
+    Homer, his last preface to Virgil, and especially his oration on
+    the death of Müller, and you will understand what I mean. I speak
+    not of his political instinct, made evident in his survey of the
+    public and private life of the ancients. The other memorial which
+    will subsist of him, more warm in life than the first, is the
+    remembrance of his generosity, to which numbers owe a deep
+    obligation.
+
+And of Schelling, about the same time, whom he had just seen in Munich:--
+
+    Schelling before all must be mentioned as having received me well,
+    after his fashion, giving me frequent occasions of becoming
+    acquainted with his philosophical views and judgments, in his own
+    original and peculiar manner. His mode of disputation is rough and
+    angular; his peremptoriness and his paradoxes terrible. Once he
+    undertook to explain animal magnetism, and for this purpose to
+    give an idea of Time, from which resulted that all is present and
+    in existence--the Present as existing in the actual moment; the
+    Future, as existing in a future moment. When I demanded the proof,
+    he referred me to the word _is_, which applies to existence, in
+    the sentence that "this _is_ future." Seckendorf, who was present
+    (with him I have become closely acquainted, to my great
+    satisfaction), attempted to draw attention to the confounding the
+    subjective (i.e. him who pronounces that sentence) with the
+    objective; or, rather, to point out a simple grammatical
+    misunderstanding--in short, declared the position impossible.
+    "Well," replied Schelling drily, "you have not understood me." Two
+    Professors (his worshippers), who were present, had meanwhile
+    endeavoured by their exclamations, "Only observe, all _is_, all
+    _exists_" (to which the wife of Schelling, a clever woman,
+    assented), to help me into conviction; and a vehement beating the
+    air--for arguing and holding fast by any firm point were out of
+    the question--would have arisen, if I had not contrived to escape
+    by giving a playful turn to the conversation. I am perfectly aware
+    that Schelling _could_ have expressed and carried through his real
+    opinion far better--i.e. rationally. I tell the anecdote merely
+    to give an idea of his manner in conversation.
+
+At Göttingen he was one of a remarkable set, comprising Lachmann,
+Lücke, Brandis, and some others, thought as much of at the time as
+their friends, but who failed to make their way to the front ranks of
+the world. Like others of his countrymen, Bunsen began to find "that
+the world's destinies were not without their effect on him," and to
+feel dissatisfied with the comparatively narrow sphere of even German
+learning. The thought grew, and took possession of him, of "bringing
+over, into his knowledge and into his fatherland, the solemn and
+distant East," and to "draw the East into the study of the entire
+course of humanity (particularly of European, and more especially of
+Teutonic humanity)," making Germany the "central point of this study."
+Vast plans of philological and historical study, involving, as the only
+means then possible of carrying them out, schemes of wide travel and
+long sojourn in the East, opened on him. Indian and Persian literature,
+the instinctive certainty of its connection with the languages and
+thought of the West, and the imperfection of means of study in Europe,
+drew him, as many more were drawn at the time, to seek the knowledge
+which they wanted in foreign and distant lands. With Bunsen, this wide
+and combined study of philology, history, and philosophy, which has
+formed one of the characteristic pursuits of our time, was from the
+first connected with the study of the Bible as its central point. In
+1815 came a decisive turning-point in his life--his acquaintance, and
+the beginning of his close connection, with Niebuhr, at Berlin; and
+from this time he felt himself a Prussian. "That State in Northern
+Germany," he writes to Brandis in 1815, "which gladly receives every
+German, from wheresoever he may come, and considers every one thus
+entering as a citizen born, is _the true Germany_":--
+
+    That such a State [he proceeds, in the true Bismarckian spirit]
+    should prove inconvenient to others of inferior importance, which
+    persist in continuing their isolated existence, regardless of the
+    will of Providence and of the general good, is of no consequence
+    whatever; nor even does it matter that, in its present management,
+    there are defects and imperfections.... We intend to be in Berlin
+    in three weeks; and there (in Prussia) am I resolved to fix my
+    destinies.
+
+After reading Persian for a short time in Paris with De Sacy, and after
+the failure of a plan of travel with Mr. Astor of New York, Bunsen
+joined Niebuhr at Florence in the end of 1816, and went on with him to
+Rome, where Niebuhr was Prussian envoy. There, enjoying Niebuhr's
+society, "equally sole in his kind with Rome," he took up his abode,
+and plunged into study. He gave up his plans of Oriental travel,
+finding he could do all that he wanted without them. Too much a
+student, as he writes to a friend, to think of marrying, which he could
+not do "without impairing his whole scheme of mental development," he
+nevertheless found his fate in an English lady, Miss Waddington, who
+became his wife. And, finally, when the health of his friend Brandis,
+Niebuhr's secretary in the Prussian Legation, broke down, Bunsen took
+his place, and entered on that combined path of study and diplomacy in
+which he continued for the greater part of his life.
+
+It may be questioned whether Bunsen's career answered altogether
+successfully to what he proposed to himself, or was in fact all that
+his friends and he himself thought it; but it was eminently one in
+which from the first he had laid down for himself a plan of life which
+he tenaciously followed through many changes and varieties of work,
+without ever losing sight of the purpose with which he began. He piqued
+himself on having early seen that a man ought to have an object to
+which to devote his whole life--"be it a dictionary like Johnson's or a
+history like Gibbon's"--and on having discerned and chosen his own
+object. And at an early time of his life in Rome he draws an outline of
+thought and inquiry, destined to break off into many different labours,
+in very much the same language in which he might have described it in
+the last year of his life:--
+
+    _The consciousness of God in the mind of man, and that which in
+    and through that consciousness He has accomplished, especially in
+    language and religion_, this was from the earliest time before my
+    mind. After having awhile fancied to attain my point, sometimes
+    here, sometimes there, at length (it was in the Christmas holidays
+    of 1812, after having gained the prize in November) I made a
+    general and comprehensive plan. I wished to go through and
+    represent heathen antiquity, in its principal phases, in three
+    great periods of the world's history, according to its languages,
+    its religious conceptions, and its political institutions; first
+    of all in the East, where the earliest expressions in each are
+    highly remarkable, although little known; then in the second great
+    epoch, among the Greeks and Romans; thirdly, among the Teutonic
+    nations, who put an end to the Roman Empire.
+
+    At first I thought of Christianity only as something which every
+    one, like the mother tongue, knows intuitively, and therefore not
+    as the object of a peculiar study. But in January 1816, when I for
+    the last time took into consideration all that belonged to my
+    plan, and wrote it down, I arrived at this conclusion, that as God
+    had caused the conception of Himself to be developed in the mind
+    of man in a twofold manner, the one through revelation to the
+    Jewish people through their patriarchs, the other through reason
+    in the heathen; so also must the inquiry and representation of
+    this development be twofold; and as God had kept these two ways
+    for a length of time independent and separate, so should we, in
+    the course of the examination, separate knowledge from man, and
+    his development from the doctrine of revelation and faith, firmly
+    trusting that God in the end would bring about the union of both.
+    This is now also my firm conviction, that we must not mix them or
+    bring them together forcibly, as many have done with well-meaning
+    zeal but unclear views, and as many in Germany with impure designs
+    are still doing.
+
+The design had its interruptions, both intellectual and practical. The
+plan was an ambitious one, too ambitious for Bunsen's time and powers,
+or even probably for our own more advanced stage of knowledge; and
+Bunsen ever found it hard to resist the attractions of a new object of
+interest, and did not always exhaust it, though he seldom touched
+anything without throwing light on it. Thus he was drawn by
+circumstances to devote a good deal of time, more than he intended, to
+the mere antiquarianism of Rome. By and by he found himself succeeding
+Niebuhr as the diplomatic representative of Prussia at Rome. And his
+attempt to meet the needs of his own strong devotional feelings by
+giving more warmth and interest to the German services at the embassy,
+"the congregation on the Capitoline Hill," led him, step by step, to
+those wider schemes for liturgical reform which influenced so
+importantly the course of his fortunes. They brought him, a young and
+unknown man, with little more than Niebuhr's good word, into direct and
+confidential communication with the King of Prussia, who was then
+intent on plans of the same kind, and who recognised in Bunsen, after
+some preliminary jealousy and misgivings, the man most fitted to assist
+in carrying them out. But though Bunsen, who started with the resolve
+of being both a student and a scholar, was driven, as he thought
+against his will, into paths which led him deeper and deeper into
+public life and diplomacy, his early plans were never laid aside even
+under the stress of official employment. Perhaps it may be difficult to
+strike the balance of what they lost or gained by it.
+
+The account of his life at Rome contains much that is interesting.
+There is the curious mixture of sympathy and antipathy in Bunsen's mind
+for the place itself; the antipathy of a German, a Protestant, and a
+free inquirer, for the Roman, the old Catholic, the narrow, timid,
+traditional spirit which pervaded everything in the great seat of
+clerical and Papal government; and the sympathy, scarcely less intense,
+not merely, or in the first place, for the classical aspects of Rome,
+but for its religious character, as still the central point of
+Christendom, full of the memorials and the savour of the early days of
+Christianity, mingling with what its many centuries of history have
+added to them; and for all that aroused the interest and touched the
+mind of one deeply busy with two great religious problems--the best
+forms for Christian worship, and the restoration, if possible, of some
+organisation and authority in Protestant Germany. For a long time
+Bunsen, like his master Niebuhr, was on the best terms with Cardinals,
+Monsignori, and Popes. The Roman services were no objects to him of
+abhorrence or indifference. He saw, in the midst of accretions, the
+remains of the more primitive devotion; and the architecture, the art,
+and the music, to be found only in Rome, were to him inexhaustible
+sources of delight. As may be supposed, letters like Bunsen's, and the
+recollections of his biographer, are full of interesting gossip;
+notices of famous people, and of things that happened in Rome in the
+days of the Emancipation and Reform Bills, Revolutions of Naples in
+'20 and France in '30, during the twenty years, from 1818 to 1838, in
+which the men of the great war and the restorations were going off the
+scene, and the men of the modern days--Liberals, High Churchmen,
+Ultra-montanes--were coming on. Those twenty years, of course, were not
+without their changes in Bunsen's own views. The man who had come to
+Rome, in position a poor and obscure student, had grown into the oracle
+of a highly cultivated society, whose acquaintance was eagerly sought
+by every one of importance who lived at Rome or visited it, and into
+the diplomatic representative of one of the great Powers. The scholar
+had come to have, not merely theories, but political and ecclesiastical
+aims. The disciple of Niebuhr, who at one time had seen all things very
+much as Niebuhr saw them in his sad later days of disgust at revolution
+and cynical despair of liberty, had come since under the influence of
+Arnold, and, as his letters to Arnold show, had taken into his own mind
+much of the more generous and hopeful, though vague, teaching of that
+equally fervid teacher of liberalism and of religion. These letters are
+of much interest. They show the dreams and the fears and antipathies of
+the time; they contain some remarkable anticipations, some equally
+remarkable miscalculations, and some ideas and proposals which, with
+our experience, excite our wonder that any one could have imagined them
+practicable. Every one knows that Bunsen's diplomatic career at Rome
+ended unfortunately. He was mixed up with the violent proceedings of
+the Prussian Government in the dispute with the Archbishop of Cologne
+about marriages between Protestants and Catholics, and he had the
+misfortune to offend equally both his own Court and that of Rome. It is
+possible that, as is urged in the biography before us, he was
+sacrificed to the blunders and the enmities of powers above him. But,
+for whatever reason, no clear account is given of the matter by his
+biographer, though a good deal is suggested; and in the absence of
+intelligible explanations the conclusion is natural that, though he may
+have been ill-used, he may also have been unequal to his position.
+
+But his ill-success or his ill-usage at Rome was more than compensated
+by the results to which it may be said to have led. Out of it
+ultimately came that which gave the decisive character to Bunsen's
+life--his settlement in London as Prussian Minister. On leaving Rome he
+came straight to England He came full of admiration and enthusiasm to
+"his Ithaca, his island fatherland," and he was flattered and delighted
+by the welcome he received, and by the power which he perceived in
+himself, beyond that of most foreigners, to appreciate and enjoy
+everything English. He liked everything--people, country, and
+institutions; even, as his biographer writes, our rooks. The zest of
+his enjoyment was not diminished by his keen sense of what appear to
+foreigners our characteristic defects--the want of breadth of interest
+and boldness of speculative thought which accompanies so much energy in
+public life and so much practical success; and he seems to have felt in
+himself a more than ordinary fitness to be a connecting link between
+the two nations--that he had much to teach Englishmen, and that they
+were worth teaching. He thoroughly sympathised with the earnestness and
+strong convictions of English religion; but he thought it lamentably
+destitute of rational grounds, of largeness of idea and of critical
+insight, enslaved to the letter, and afraid of inquiry. But, with all
+drawbacks, his visit to England made it a very attractive place to him;
+and when he was appointed by his Government Envoy to the Swiss
+Confederation, with strict injunctions "to do nothing," his eyes were
+oft on turned towards England. In 1840 the King of Prussia died, and
+Bunsen's friend and patron, the Crown Prince, became Frederic William
+IV. He resembled Bunsen in more ways than one; in his ardent religious
+sentiment, in his eagerness, in his undoubting and not always
+far-sighted self-confidence and self-assertion, and in a combination of
+practical vagueness of view and a want of understanding men, with a
+feverish imperiousness in carrying out a favourite plan. In 1841 he
+sent Bunsen to England to negotiate the ill-considered and precipitate
+arrangement for the Jerusalem bishopric; and on the successful
+conclusion of the negotiation, Bunsen was appointed permanently to be
+Prussian Minister in London. The manner of appointment was remarkable.
+The King sent three names to Lord Aberdeen and the English Court, and
+they selected Bunsen's.
+
+Thus Bunsen, who twenty-five years before had sat down a penniless
+student, almost in despair at the failure of his hopes as a travelling
+tutor, in Orgagna's _loggia_ at Florence, had risen, in spite of real
+difficulties and opposition, to a brilliant position in active
+political life; and the remarkable point is that, whether he was
+ambitious or not of this kind of advancement--and it would perhaps
+have been as well on his part to have implied less frequently that he
+was not--he was all along, above everything, the student and the
+theologian. What is even more remarkable is that, plunged into the
+whirl of London public life and society, he continued still to be, more
+even than the diplomatist, the student and theologian. The Prussian
+Embassy during the years that he occupied it, from 1841 to 1854, was
+not an idle place, and Bunsen was not a man to leave important State
+business to other hands. The French Revolution, the German Revolution,
+the Frankfort Assembly, the question of the revival of the Empire, the
+beginnings of the Danish quarrel and of the Crimean war, all fell
+within that time, and gave the Prussian Minister in such a centre as
+London plenty to think of, to do, and to write about. Yet all this time
+was a time of intense and unceasing activity in that field of
+theological controversy in which Bunsen took such delight. The
+diplomatist entrusted with the gravest affairs of a great Power in the
+most critical and difficult times, and fully alive to the interest and
+responsibility of his charge, also worked harder than most Professors,
+and was as positive and fiery in his religious theories and antipathies
+as the keenest and most dogmatic of scholastic disputants, he was busy
+about Egyptian chronology, about cuneiform writing, about comparative
+philology; he plunged with characteristic eagerness into English
+theological war; and such books as his _Church of the Future_, and his
+writings on Ignatius and Hippolytus, were not the least important of
+the works which marked the progress of the struggle of opinions here.
+But they represented only a very small part of the unceasing labour
+that was going on in the early morning hours in Carlton House Terrace.
+All this time the foundations were being laid and the materials
+gathered for books of wider scope and more permanent aim, too vast for
+him to accomplish even in his later years of leisure. It is an original
+and instructive picture; for though we boast statesmen who still carry
+on the great traditions of scholarship, and give room in their minds
+for the deeper and more solemn problems of religion and philosophy,
+they are not supposed to be able to carry on simultaneously their
+public business and their classical or scientific studies, and at any
+rate they do not attack the latter with the devouring zeal with which
+Bunsen taxed the efforts of hard-driven secretaries and readers to keep
+pace with his inexhaustible demands for more and more of the most
+abstruse materials of knowledge.
+
+The end of his London diplomatic career was, like the end of his Roman
+one, clouded with something like disgrace; and, like the Roman one, is
+left here unexplained. But it was for his happiness, probably, that his
+residence in England came to a close. He had found the poetry of his
+early notions about England, political and theological at least,
+gradually changing into prose. He found less and less to like, in what
+at first most attracted him, in the English Church; he and it, besides
+knowing one another better, were also changing. He probably increased
+his sympathies for England, and returned in a measure to his old
+kindness for it, by looking at it only from a distance. The labour of
+his later days, as vast and indefatigable as that of his earlier days,
+was devoted to his great work, which was, as it were, to popularise the
+Bible and revive interest in it by a change in the method of presenting
+it and commenting on it. To the last the Bible was the central point of
+his philosophical as well as his religious thoughts, as it had been in
+his first beginnings as a student at Gottingen and Rome. After a life
+of many trials, but of unusual prosperity and enjoyment, he died in the
+end of 1860. The account of his last days is a very touching one.
+
+We do not pretend to think Bunsen the great and consummate man that,
+naturally enough, he appears to his friends. We doubt whether he can be
+classed as a man in the first rank at all. We doubt whether he fully
+understood his age, and yet it is certain that he was confident and
+positive that he did understand it better than most men; and an undue
+confidence of this kind implies considerable defects both of intellect
+and character. He wanted the patient, cautious, judicial self-distrust
+which his studies eminently demanded, and of which he might have seen
+some examples in England. No one can read these volumes without seeing
+the disproportionate power which first impressions had with him; he was
+always ready to say that something, which had just happened or come
+before him, was the greatest or the most complete thing of its kind.
+Wonderfully active, wonderfully quick and receptive, full of
+imagination and of the power of combining and constructing, and never
+wearied out or dispirited, his mind took in large and grand ideas, and
+developed them with enthusiasm and success, and with all the resources
+of wide and varied knowledge; but the affluence and ingenuity of his
+thoughts indisposed him, as it indisposes many other able men, to the
+prosaic and uninteresting work of calling these thoughts into question,
+and cross-examining himself upon their grounds and tenableness. He
+tried too much; the multiplicity of his intellectual interests was too
+much for him, and he often thought that he was explaining when he was
+but weaving a wordy tissue, and "darkening counsel" as much as any of
+the theological sciolists whom he denounced. People, for instance,
+must, it seems to us, be very easily satisfied who find any fresh light
+in the attempt, not unfrequent in his letters, to adapt the Lutheran
+watchword of Justification by faith to modern ideas. He was very rapid,
+and this rapidity made him hasty and precipitate; it also made him apt
+to despise other men, and, what was of more consequence, the
+difficulties of the subject likewise. Others did not always find it
+easy to understand him; and it may fairly be questioned if he always
+sufficiently asked whether he understood himself. He was generous and
+large-spirited in intention, though not always so in fact.
+
+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.
+
+Sir John Coleridge knew Keble probably as long and as intimately as any
+one; and on the whole, he had the most entire sympathy with his
+friend's spirit, even where he disagreed with his opinions. He
+thoroughly understood and valued the real and living unity of a
+character which mostly revealed itself to the outer world by what
+seemed jerks and discordant traits. From early youth, through manhood
+to old age, he had watched and tested and loved that varied play and
+harmony of soul and mind, which was sometimes tender, sometimes stern,
+sometimes playful, sometimes eager; abounding with flashes of real
+genius, and yet always inclining by instinctive preference to things
+homely and humble; but which was always sound and unselfish and
+thorough, endeavouring to subject itself to the truth and will of God.
+To Sir John Coleridge all this was before him habitually as a whole; he
+could take it in, not by putting piece by piece together, but because
+he saw it. And besides being an old and affectionate and intelligent
+friend, he was also a discriminating one. In his circumstances he was
+as opposite to Keble as any one could be; he was a lawyer and man of
+the world, whose busy life at Westminster had little in common with the
+studies or pursuits of the divine and the country parson.
+
+Such an informant presents a picture entirely different in kind from
+the comments and criticisms of those who can judge only from Mr.
+Keble's writings and religious line, or from the rare occasions in
+which he took a public part. These appearances, to many who willingly
+acknowledge the charm which has drawn to him the admiration and
+affection of numbers externally most widely at variance with him, do
+not always agree together. People delight in his poetry who hate his
+theology. They cannot say too much of the tenderness, the depth, the
+truth, the quick and delicate spirit of love and purity, which have
+made his verses the best interpreters and soothers of modern religious
+feeling; yet, in the religious system from which his poetry springs,
+they find nothing but what seems to them dry, harsh, narrow, and
+antiquated. He attracts and he repels; and the attraction and repulsion
+are equally strong. They see one side, and he is irresistible in his
+simplicity, humbleness, unworldliness, and ever considerate charity,
+combined with so much keenness and freshness of thought, and such sure
+and unfailing truth of feeling. They see another, and he seems to them
+full of strange unreality, strained, exaggerated, morbid, bristling
+with a forced yet inflexible intolerance. At one moment he seems the
+very ideal of a Christian teacher, made to win the sympathy of all
+hearts; the next moment a barrier rises in the shape of some unpopular
+doctrine or some display of zealous severity, seeming to be a strange
+contrast to all that was before, which utterly astonishes and
+disappoints. Mr. Keble was very little known to the public in general,
+less so even than others whose names are associated with his; and it is
+evident that to the public in general he presented a strange assemblage
+of incoherent and seemingly irreconcilable qualities. His mind seemed
+to work and act in different directions; and the results at the end
+seemed to be with wide breaks and interruptions between them. But a
+book like this enables us to trace back these diverging lines to the
+centre from which they spring. What seemed to be in such sharp
+contradiction at the outside is seen to flow naturally from the
+perfectly homogeneous and consistent character within. Many people will
+of course except to the character. It is not the type likely to find
+favour in an age of activity, doubt, and change. But, as it was
+realised in Mr. Keble, there it is in Sir John Coleridge's pages,
+perfectly real, perfectly natural, perfectly whole and uniform, with
+nothing double or incongruous in it, though it unfolded itself in
+various and opposite ways. And its ideal was simply that which has been
+consecrated as the saintly character in the Christian Church since the
+days of St. John--the deepest and most genuine love of all that was
+good; the deepest and most genuine hatred of all that was believed to
+be evil.
+
+The picture which Sir John Coleridge puts before us, though deficient
+in what is striking and brilliant, is a sufficiently remarkable and
+uncommon one. It is the picture of a man of high cultivation and
+intellect, in whom religion was not merely something flavouring and
+elevating life, not merely a great element and object of spiritual
+activity, but really and unaffectedly the one absorbing interest, and
+the spring of every thought and purpose. Whether people like such a
+character or not, and whether or not they may think the religion wrong,
+or distorted and imperfect, if they would fairly understand the writer
+of the _Christian Year_ they must start from this point. He was a man
+who, without a particle of the religious cant of any school, without
+any self-consciousness or pretension or unnatural strain, literally
+passed his clays under the quick and pervading influence, for restraint
+and for stimulus, of the will and presence of God. With this his whole
+soul was possessed; its power over him had not to be invoked and
+stirred up; it acted spontaneously and unnoticed in him; it was
+dominant in all his activity; it quenched in him aims, and even, it may
+be, faculties; it continually hampered the free play of his powers and
+gifts, and made him often seem, to those who had not the key, awkward,
+unequal, and unintelligible. But for this awful sense of truth and
+reality unseen, which dwarfed to him all personal thoughts and all
+present things, he might have been a more finished writer, a more
+attractive preacher, a less indifferent foster-father to his own works.
+But it seemed to him a shame, in the presence of all that his thoughts
+habitually dwelt with, to think of the ordinary objects of authorship,
+of studying anything of this world for its own sake, of perfecting
+works of art, of cultivating the subtle forces and spells of language
+to give attractiveness to his writings. Abruptness, inadequacy, and
+obscurity of expression were light matters, and gave him little
+concern, compared with the haunting fear of unreal words. This "seeking
+first the kingdom of God and His righteousness," as he understood it,
+was the basis of all that he was; it was really and unaffectedly his
+governing principle, the root of his affections and his antipathies,
+just as to other men is the passion for scientific discovery or
+political life.
+
+But within these limits, and jealously restrained by these conditions,
+a strongly marked character, exuberant with power and life, and the
+play of individual qualities, displayed itself. There were two
+intellectual sides to his mind--one which made him a poet, quickness
+and delicacy of observation and sympathetic interpretation, the
+realising and anticipating power of deep feeling and penetrative
+imagination; the other, at first sight, little related to poetry, a
+hard-headed, ingenious, prosaic shrewdness and directness of common
+sense, dealing practically with things as they are and on the whole,
+very little curious about scientific questions and precision,
+argumentative in a fashion modelled on Bishop Butler, and full of
+logical resource, good and, often it must be owned, bad. It was a mind
+which unfolded first under the plain, manly discipline of an
+old-fashioned English country parsonage, where the unshowy piety and
+strong morality and modest theology of the middle age of Anglicanism,
+the school of Pearson, Bull, and Wilson, were supreme. And from this it
+came under the new influences of bold and independent thought which
+were beginning to stir at Oxford; influences which were at first
+represented by such men as Davison, Copleston, and, above all, Whately;
+influences which repelled Keble by what he saw of hardness,
+shallowness, and arrogance, and still more of self-sufficiency and
+intellectual display and conceit in the prevailing tone of speculation,
+but which nevertheless powerfully affected him, and of which he showed
+the traces to the last Sir John Coleridge is disappointing as to the
+amount of light which he throws on the process which was going on in
+Keble's mind during the fifteen years or so between his degree and the
+_Christian Year_; but there is one touch which refers to this period.
+Speaking in 1838 of Alexander Knox, and expressing dislike of his
+position, "as on the top of a high hill, seeing which way different
+schools tend," and "exercising a royal right of eclecticism over all,"
+he adds:--
+
+    I speak the more feelingly because I know I was myself inclined to
+    eclecticism at one time; and if it had not been for my father and
+    my brother, where I should have been now, who can say?
+
+But he was a man who, with a very vigorous and keen intellect, capable
+of making him a formidable disputant if he had been so minded, may be
+said not to have cared for his intellect. He used it at need, but he
+distrusted and undervalued it as an instrument and help. Goodness was
+to him the one object of desire and reverence; it was really his own
+measure of what he respected and valued; and where he recognised it,
+and in whatever shape, grave or gay, he cared not about seeming
+consistent in somehow or other paying it homage. People who knew him
+remember how, in this austere judge of heresy, burdened by the
+ever-pressing conviction of the "decay" of the Church and the distress
+of a time of change, tenderness, playfulness, considerateness, the
+restraint of a modesty which could not but judge, yet mistrusted its
+fitness, marked his ordinary intercourse. Overflowing with affection to
+his friends, and showing it in all kinds of unconventional and
+unexpected instances, keeping to the last a kind of youthful freshness
+as if he had never yet realised that he was not a boy, and shrunk from
+the formality and donnishness of grown-up life, he was the most refined
+and thoughtful of gentlemen, and in the midst of the fierce party
+battles of his day, with all his strong feeling of the tremendous
+significance of the strife, always a courteous and considerate
+opponent. Strong words he used, and used deliberately. But those were
+the days when the weapons of sarcasm and personal attack were freely
+handled. The leaders of the High Church movement were held up to
+detestation as the Oxford Malignants, and they certainly showed
+themselves fully able to give their assailants as good as they brought;
+yet Mr. Keble, involved in more than one trying personal controversy,
+feeling as sternly and keenly as any one about public questions, and
+tried by disappointment and the break up of the strongest ties, never
+lost his evenness of temper, never appeared in the arena of personal
+recrimination. In all the prominent part which he took, and in the
+resolute and sometimes wrathful tone in which he defended what seemed
+harsh measures, he may have dropped words which to opponents seemed
+severe ones, but never any which even they could call a scornful one or
+a sneer.
+
+It was in keeping with all that he was--a mark of imperfection it may
+be, yet part of the nobleness and love of reality in a man who felt so
+deeply the weakness and ignorance of man--that he cared so little about
+the appearances of consistency. Thus, bound as he was by principle to
+show condemnation when he thought that a sacred cause was invaded, he
+was always inclining to conciliate his wrath with his affectionateness,
+and his severity with his consideration of circumstances and his own
+mistrust of himself. He was, of all men holding strong opinions, one of
+the most curiously and unexpectedly tolerant, wherever he could
+contrive to invent an excuse for tolerance, or where long habitual
+confidence was weighed against disturbing appearances. Sir John
+Coleridge touches this in the following extract, which is
+characteristic:--
+
+    On questions of this kind especially [University Reform], his
+    principles were uncompromising; if a measure offended against what
+    he thought honest, or violated what he thought sacred, good motives
+    in the framers he would not admit as palliation, nor would he
+    be comforted by an opinion of mine that measures mischievous
+    in their logical consequences were never in the result so
+    mischievous, or beneficial measures so beneficial, as had been
+    foretold. So he writes playfully to me at an earlier time:--
+
+        "Hurrell Froude and I took into consideration your opinion
+        that 'there are good men of all parties,' and agreed that it
+        is a bad doctrine for these days; the time being come in
+        which, according to John Miller, 'scoundrels must be called
+        scoundrels'; and, moreover, we have stigmatised the said
+        opinion by the name of the Coleridge Heresy. So hold it any
+        longer at your peril."
+
+    I think it fair to set down these which were, in truth, formed
+    opinions, and not random sayings; but it would be most unfair if
+    one concluded from them, written and spoken in the freedom of
+    friendly intercourse, that there was anything sour in his spirit,
+    or harsh and narrow in his practice; when you discussed any of
+    these things with him, the discussion was pretty sure to end, not
+    indeed with any insincere concession of what he thought right and
+    true, but in consideration for individuals and depreciation of
+    himself.
+
+And the same thing comes out in the interesting letter in which the
+Solicitor-General describes his last recollections of Keble:--
+
+    There was, I am sure, no trace of failing then to be discerned in
+    his apprehension, or judgment, or discourse. He was an old man who
+    had been very ill, who was still physically weak, and who needed
+    care; but he was the same Mr. Keble I had always known, and whom,
+    for aught that appeared, I might hope still to know for many years
+    to come. Little bits of his tenderness, flashes of his fun,
+    glimpses of his austerer side, I seem to recall, but I cannot put
+    them upon paper.... Once I remember walking with him just the same
+    short walk, from his house to Sir William's, and our conversation
+    fell upon Charles I., with regard to whose truth and honour I had
+    used some expressions in a review, which had, as I heard,
+    displeased him. I referred to this, and he said it was true. I
+    replied that I was very sorry to displease him by anything I said
+    or thought; but that if the Naseby letters were genuine, I could
+    not think that what I said was at all too strong, and that a man
+    could but do his best to form an honest opinion upon historical
+    evidence, and, if he had to speak, to express that opinion. On
+    this he said, with a tenderness and humility not only most
+    touching, but to me most embarrassing, that "It might be so; what
+    was he to judge of other men; he was old, and things were now
+    looked at very differently; that he knew he had many things to
+    unlearn and learn afresh; and that I must not mind what he had
+    said, for that in truth belief in the heroes of his youth had
+    become part of him." I am afraid these are my words, and not his;
+    and I cannot give his way of speaking, which to any one with a
+    heart, I think, would have been as overcoming as it was to me.
+
+This same carelessness about appearances seems to us to be shown in
+Keble's theological position in his later years. A more logical, or a
+more plausible, but a less thoroughly real man might easily have
+drifted into Romanism. There was much in the circumstances round him,
+in the admissions which he had made, to lead that way; and his
+chivalrous readiness to take the beaten or unpopular side would help
+the tendency. But he was a man who gave great weight to his instinctive
+perception of what was right and wrong; and he was also a man who, when
+he felt sure of his duty, did not care a straw about what the world
+thought of appearances, or required as a satisfaction of seeming
+consistency. In him was eminently illustrated the characteristic
+strength and weakness of English religion, which naturally comes out in
+that form of it which is called Anglicanism; that poor Anglicanism, the
+butt and laughing-stock of all the clever and high-flying converts to
+Rome, of all the clever and high-flying Liberals, and of all those poor
+copyists of the first, far from clever, though very high-flying, who
+now give themselves out as exclusive heirs of the great name of
+Catholic; sneered at on all sides as narrow, meagre, shattered, barren;
+which certainly does not always go to the bottom of questions, and is
+too much given to "hunting-up" passages for _catenas_ of precedents and
+authorities; but which yet has a strange, obstinate, tenacious moral
+force in it; which, without being successful in formulating theories or
+in solving fallacies, can pierce through pretences and shams; and which
+in England seems the only shape in which intense religious faith can
+unfold itself and connect itself with morality and duty, without
+seeming to wear a peculiar dress of its own, and putting a barrier of
+self-chosen watchwords and singularities between itself and the rest of
+the nation.
+
+It seems to us a great advantage to truth to have a character thus
+exhibited in its unstudied and living completeness, and exhibited
+directly, as the impression from life was produced on those before
+whose eyes it drew itself out day by day in word and act, as the
+occasion presented itself. There is, no doubt, a more vivid and
+effective way; one in which the Dean of Westminster is a great master,
+though it is not the method which he followed in what is probably his
+most perfect work, the _Life of Dr. Arnold_--the method of singling out
+points, and placing them, if possible, under a concentrated light, and
+in strong contrast and relief. Thus in Keble's case it is easy, and
+doubtless to many observers natural and tempting, to put side by side,
+with a strange mixture of perplexity and repulsion, _The Christian
+Year_, and the treatise _On Eucharistical Adoration_; to compare even
+in Keble's poetry, his tone on nature and human life, on the ways of
+children and the thoughts of death, with that on religious error and
+ecclesiastical divergences from the Anglican type; and to dwell on the
+contrast between Keble bearing his great gifts with such sweetness and
+modesty, and touching with such tenderness and depth the most delicate
+and the purest of human feelings, and Keble as the editor of Fronde's
+_Remains_, forward against Dr. Hampden, breaking off a friendship of
+years with Dr. Arnold, stiff against Liberal change and indulgent to
+ancient folly and error, the eulogist of patristic mysticism and Bishop
+Wilson's "discipline," and busy in the ecclesiastical agitations and
+legal wranglings of our later days, about Jerusalem Bishoprics and
+Courts of Final Appeal and ritual details, about Gorham judgments,
+_Essays and Reviews_ prosecutions, and Colenso scandals. The objection
+to this method of contrast is that it does not give the whole truth. It
+does not take notice that, in appreciating a man like Keble, the thing
+to start from is that his ideal and model and rule of character was
+neither more nor less than the old Christian one. It was simply what
+was accepted as right and obvious and indisputable, not by Churchmen
+only, but by all earnest believers up to our own days. Given certain
+conditions of Christian faith and duty which he took for granted as
+much as the ordinary laws of morality, then the man's own individual
+gifts or temper or leanings displayed themselves. But when people talk
+of Keble being narrow and rigid and harsh and intolerant, they ought
+first to recollect that he had been brought up with the ideas common to
+all whom he ever heard of or knew as religious people. All earnest
+religious conviction must seem narrow to those who do not share it. It
+was nothing individual or peculiar, either to him or his friends, to
+have strong notions about defending what they believed that they had
+received as the truth; and they were people who knew what they were
+about, too, and did not take things up at random. In this he was not
+different from Hooker, or Jeremy Taylor, or Bishop Butler, or Baxter,
+or Wesley, or Dr. Chalmers; it may be added, that he was not different
+from Dr. Arnold or Archbishop Whately. It must not be forgotten that
+till of late years there was always supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be
+such a thing as false doctrine, and that intolerance of it, within the
+limits of common justice, was always held as much part of the Christian
+character as devotion and charity. Men differed widely as to what was
+false doctrine, but they did not differ much as to there being such a
+thing, and as to what was to be thought of it. Keble, like other people
+of his time, took up his system, and really, considering that the ideal
+which he honestly and earnestly aimed at was the complete system of the
+Catholic Church, it is an abuse of words to call it, whatever else it
+may be called, a narrow system. There may be a wider system still, in
+the future; but it is at least premature to say that a man is narrow
+because he accepts in good faith the great traditional ideas and
+doctrines of the Christian Church; for of everything that can yet be
+called a religious system, in the sense commonly understood, as an
+embodiment of definite historical revelation, it is not easy to
+conceive a less narrow one. And, accepting it as the truth, it was
+dearer to him than life. That he was sensitively alive to whatever
+threatened or opposed it, and was ready to start up like a soldier,
+ready to do battle against any odds and to risk any unpopularity or
+misconstruction, was only the sure and natural result of that deep love
+and loyalty and thorough soundness of heart with which he loved his
+friends, but what he believed to be truth and God's will better than
+his friends. But it is idle and shallow to confuse the real narrowness
+which springs from a harsh temper or a cramped and self-sufficient
+intellect, and which is quite compatible with the widest theoretical
+latitude, and the inevitable appearance of narrowness and severity
+which must always be one side which a man of strong convictions and
+earnest purpose turns to those whose strong convictions and earnest
+purpose are opposite to his.
+
+Mr. Keble, saintly as was his character, if ever there was such a
+character, belonged, as we all do, to his day and generation. The
+aspect of things and the thoughts of men change; enlarging, we are
+always apt to think, but perhaps really also contracting in some
+directions where they once were larger. In Mr. Keble, the service which
+he rendered to his time consisted, not merely, as it is sometimes
+thought, in soothing and refining it, but in bracing it. He was the
+preacher and example of manly hardness, simplicity, purpose in the
+religious character. It may be that his hatred of evil--of hollowness,
+impurity, self-will, conceit, ostentation--was greater than was always
+his perception of various and mingled good, or his comprehension of
+those middle things and states which are so much before us now. But the
+service cannot be overrated, to all parties, of the protest which his
+life and all his words were against dangers which were threatening all
+parties, and not least the Liberal party--the danger of shallowness and
+superficial flippancy; the danger of showy sentiment and insincerity,
+of worldly indifference to high duties and calls. With the one great
+exception of Arnold--Keble's once sympathetic friend, though afterwards
+parted from him--the religious Liberals of our time have little reason
+to look back with satisfaction to the leaders, able and vigorous as
+some of them were, who represented their cause then. They owe to Keble,
+as much as do those who are more identified with his theology, the
+inestimable service of having interpreted religion by a genuine life,
+corresponding in its thoroughness and unsparing, unpretending
+devotedness, as well as in its subtle vividness of feeling, to the
+great object which religion professes to contemplate.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+MAURICE'S THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS[21]
+
+
+  [21]
+  _Theological Essays_. By F.D. Maurice. _Guardian_, 7th September 1853.
+
+The purpose of this volume of essays is to consider the views
+entertained by Unitarians of what are looked upon by Christians
+generally as fundamental truths; to examine what force there is in
+Unitarian objections, and what mistakes are involved in the popular
+notions and representations of those fundamental truths; and so,
+without entering into controversy, for which Mr. Maurice declares
+himself entirely indisposed, and in the utility of which he entirely
+disbelieves, to open the way for a deeper and truer, and more serious
+review, by all parties, of either the differences or the misunderstandings
+which keep them asunder. It is a work, the writer considers, as
+important as any which he has undertaken: "No labour I have been
+engaged in has occupied me so much, or interested me more deeply;"
+and with his estimate of his subject we are not disposed to disagree.
+
+We always rise from the perusal of one of Mr. Maurice's books with the
+feeling that he has shown us one great excellence, and taught us one
+great lesson. He has shown us an example of serious love of truth, and
+an earnest sense of its importance, and of his own responsibility in
+speaking of it. Most readers, whatever else they may think, must have
+their feeling of the wide and living interest of a theological or moral
+subject quickened by Mr. Maurice's thoughts on it. This is the
+excellence. The lesson is this--to look into the meaning of our
+familiar words, and to try to use them with a real meaning. Not that
+Mr. Maurice always shows us how; but it is difficult for conscience to
+escape being continually reminded of the duty. And it is in these two
+things that the value of Mr. Maurice's writings mainly consists. The
+enforcing of them has been, to our mind, his chief "mission," and his
+most valuable contribution to the needs of his generation.
+
+In this volume they are exhibited, as in his former ones; and in this
+he shows also, as he has shown before, his earnest desire to find a way
+whereby, without compromising truth or surrendering sacred convictions
+of the heart, serious men of very different sides might be glad to find
+themselves in some points mistaken, in order that they might find
+themselves at one. This philosophy, not of comprehension but of
+conciliation, the craving after which has awakened in the Church,
+whenever mental energy has been quickened, the philosophy in which
+Clement of Alexandria and Origin, and, we may add, St. Augustine, made
+many earnest essays, is certainly no unworthy aim for the theologian of
+our days. He would, indeed, deserve largely of the Church who should
+show us a solid and safe way to it.
+
+But while we are far from denouncing or suspecting the wish or the
+design, we are bound to watch jealously and criticise narrowly the
+execution. For we all know what such plans have come to before now. And
+it is for the interest of all serious and earnest people on all sides,
+that there should be no needless and additional confusion introduced
+into theology--such confusion as is but too likely to follow, when a
+design of conciliation, with the aim of which so many, for good reasons
+or bad ones, are sure to sympathise, is carried out by hands that are
+not equal to it. With the fullest sense of the serious truthfulness of
+those who differ from us, of the real force of many of their objections
+and criticisms on our proceedings, our friends, and our ideas, it is
+far better to hold our peace, than from impatience at what we feel to
+be the vulnerable point of our own side, to rush into explanations
+before we are sure of our power adequately to explain.
+
+And to this charge it seems to us that Mr. Maurice is open. There is
+sense and manliness in his disclaimer of proselytism; and there is a
+meaning in which we can agree with his account of truth. "If I could
+persuade all Dissenters," he says, "to become members of my Church
+to-morrow, I should be very sorry to do it. I believe the chances are
+they might leave it the next day. I do not wish to make them think as I
+think. But I want that they and I should be what we pretend to be, and
+then I doubt not we should find that there is a common ground for us
+all far beneath our thinkings. For truth I hold not to be that which
+every man troweth, but to be that which lies at the bottom of all men's
+trowings, that in which those trowings have their only meeting-point."
+He would make as clear as can be that deep substructure, and leave the
+sight of it to work its natural effect on the honest heart. A noble
+aim; but surely requiring, if anything can, the clear eye, the steady
+hand, the heart as calm as earnest. Surely a work in which the greatest
+exactness and precision, as well as largeness of thought, would not be
+too much. For if we but take away the "trowings" without coming down to
+the central foundation, or lose ourselves, and mistake a new "trowing"
+of our own for it, it is hardly a sufficient degree of blame to say
+that we have done no good.
+
+And in these qualities of exactness and precision it does seem to us
+that Mr. Maurice is, for his purpose, fatally deficient. His criticisms
+are often acute, his thrusts on each side often very home ones, and
+but too full of truth; his suggestions often full of thought and
+instruction; his balancings and contrasts of errors and truths, if
+sometimes too artificial, yet generally striking. But when we come to
+seek for the reconciling truth, which one side has overlaid and
+distorted, and the other ignorantly shrunk back from, but which, when
+placed in its real light and fairly seen, is to attract the love and
+homage of both, we seem--not to grasp a shadow--Mr. Maurice is too
+earnest and real a believer for that--but to be very much where we
+were, except that a cloud of words surrounds us. His positive
+statements seem like a running protest against being obliged to commit
+himself and come to the point; like a continual assertion of the
+hopelessness and uselessness of a definite form of speaking about the
+matter in hand. Take, for instance, the following short statement:--
+
+    "My object," he says, speaking of the words which he has taken as
+    the subject of his essays, "has been to examine the language with
+    which we are most familiar, and which has been open to most
+    objections, especially from Unitarians. Respecting the Conception
+    I have been purposely silent; not because I have any doubt about
+    that article, or am indifferent to it, but because I believe the
+    word '_miraculous_,' which we _ordinarily connect with it, suggests
+    an untrue meaning; because I think the truth is conveyed to us
+    most safely in the simple language of the Evangelists_; and because
+    that language taken in connection with the rest of their story,
+    offers itself, I suspect, to a majority of those who have taken
+    in the idea of an Incarnation, as the _only natural and rational_
+    account of the method by which the eternal Son of God could have
+    taken human flesh."
+
+Now, would not Mr. Maurice have done better if he had enounced the
+definite meaning, or shade of meaning, which he considers short of, or
+different from, our _ordinary_ meaning of _miraculous_, as applied to
+this subject, and yet the same as that suggested by the Gospel account?
+We have no doubt what Mr. Maurice does believe on this sacred subject.
+But we are puzzled by what he means to disavow, as an "_untrue
+meaning_" of the word _miraculous_, as applied to what he believes.
+And  the Unitarians whom he addresses must, we think, be puzzled too.
+
+We have quoted this passage because it is a short one, and therefore a
+convenient one for a short notice like this. But the same tormenting
+indistinctness pervades the attempts generally to get a meaning or a
+position, which shall be substantially and in its living force the same
+as the popular and orthodox article, yet convict it of confusion or
+formalism; and which shall give to the Unitarian what he aims at by his
+negation of the popular article, without leaving him any longer a
+reason for denying it. The essay on Inspiration is an instance of this.
+Mr. Maurice says very truly, that it is necessary to face the fact that
+important questions are asked on the subject, very widely, and by
+serious people; that popular notions are loose and vague about it; that
+it is a dangerous thing to take refuge in a hard theory, if it is an
+inconsistent and inadequate one; that if doubts do grow up, they are
+hardly to be driven away by assertions. He accepts the challenge to
+state his own view of Inspiration, and devotes many pages to doing so.
+In these page's are many true and striking things. So far as we
+understand, there is not a statement that we should contradict. But we
+have searched in vain for a passage which might give, in Mr. Maurice's
+words, a distinct answer to the question of friend or opponent, What do
+you mean by the "Inspiration of the Bible?" Mr. Maurice tells us a most
+important truth--that that same Great Person by whose "holy
+inspiration" all true Christians still hope to be taught, inspired the
+prophets. He protests against making it necessary to say that there is
+a _generic_ difference between one kind of Inspiration and the other,
+or "setting up the Bible as a book which encloses all that may be
+lawfully called Inspiration." He looks on the Bible as a link--a great
+one, yet a link, joining on to what is before and what comes after--in
+God's method of teaching man His truth. He cares little about phrases
+like "verbal inspiration" and "plenary inspiration"--"forms of speech
+which are pretty toys for those that have leisure to play with them;
+and if they are not made so hard as to do mischief, the use of them
+should not be checked. But they do not belong to business." He bids us,
+instead, give men "the Book of Life," and "have courage to tell them
+that there is a Spirit with them who will guide them into all truth."
+Great and salutary lessons. But we must say that they have been long in
+the world, and, it must be said, are as liable to be misunderstood as
+any other "popular" notions on the subject. If there is nothing more to
+say on the subject--if it is one where, though we see and are sure of a
+truth, yet we must confess it to be behind a veil, as yet indistinct
+and not to be grasped, let us manfully say so, and wait till God reveal
+even this unto us. But it is not a wise or a right course to raise
+expectations of being able to say something, not perhaps new, but
+satisfactory, when the questions which are really being asked, which
+are the professed occasion of the answer, remain, in their Intellectual
+difficulty, entirely unresolved. Mr. Maurice is no trifler; when he
+throws hard words about,--when at the close of this essay he paints to
+himself the disappointment of some "Unitarian listener, who had hoped
+that Mr. Maurice was going to join him in cursing his enemies, and
+found that he had blessed them these three times,"--he ought to
+consider whether the result has not been, and very naturally, to leave
+both parties more convinced than before of the hollowness of all
+professions to enter into, and give weight to, the difficulties and the
+claims of opposite sides.
+
+Mr. Maurice has not done justice, as it seems to us, in this case, to
+the difficulty of the Unitarian. In other cases he makes free with the
+common belief of Christendom, and claims sacrifices which are as
+needless as they are unwarrantable. If there is a belief rooted in the
+minds of Christians, it is that of a future judgment. If there is an
+expectation which Scripture and the Creed sanction in the plainest
+words, it is that this present world is to have an end, and that then,
+a time now future, Christ will judge quick and dead. Say as much as can
+be said of the difficulty of conceiving such a thing, it really amounts
+to no more than the difficulty of conceiving what will happen, and how
+we shall be dealt with, when this familiar world passes away. And this
+belief in a "_final_ judgment, _unlike any other that has ever been in
+the world_," Mr. Maurice would have us regard as a misinterpretation of
+Bible and Creed--a "dream" which St. Paul would never "allow us" to
+entertain, but would "compel" us instead "to look upon everyone of what
+we rightly call 'God's judgments' as _essentially resembling it in kind
+and principle_." "Our eagerness to deny this," he continues, "to make
+out an altogether peculiar and unprecedented judgment at the end of the
+world, has obliged us first _to practise the most violent outrages upon
+the language of Scripture_, insisting that words cannot really mean
+what, according to all ordinary rules of construction, they must mean."
+It really must be said that the "outrage," if so it is to be called, is
+not on the side of the popular belief. And why does this belief seem
+untenable to Mr. Maurice? Because it seems inconsistent to him with a
+truth which he states and enforces with no less earnestness than
+reason, that Christ is every moment judging us--that His tribunal is
+one before which we in our inmost "being are standing now--and that the
+time will come when we shall know that it is so, and when all that has
+concealed the Judge from us shall be taken away." Doubtless Christ is
+always with us--always seeing us--always judging us. Doubtless
+"everywhere" in Scripture the idea is kept before us of judgment in its
+fullest, largest, most natural sense, as "importing" not merely passing
+sentence, and awarding reward or penalty, but "discrimination and
+discovery. Everywhere that discrimination or discovery is supposed to
+be exercised over the man himself, over his internal character, over
+his meaning and will." Granted, also, that men have, in their attempts
+to figure to themselves the "great assize," sometimes made strange
+work, and shown how carnal their thoughts are, both in what they
+expected, and in the influence they allowed it to have over them. But
+what of all this? Correct these gross ideas, but leave the words of
+Scripture in their literal meaning, and do not say that all those who
+receive them as the announcement of what is to be, under conditions now
+inconceivable to man, _must_ understand "the substitution of a mere
+external trial or examination" for the inward and daily trial of our
+hearts, as a mere display of "earthly pomp and ceremonial"--a
+resumption by Christ "of earthly conditions"; or that, because they
+believe that at "some distant unknown period they shall be brought into
+the presence of One who is now" not "far from them," but out of
+sight--how, or in what manner they know not--therefore they _must_
+suppose that He "is not now fulfilling the office of a Judge, whatever
+else may be committed to Him."
+
+Mr. Maurice is aiming at a high object. He would reconcile the old and
+the new. He would disencumber what is popular of what is vulgar,
+confused, sectarian, and preserve and illustrate it by disencumbering
+it. He calls on us not to be afraid of the depths and heights, the
+freedom and largeness, the "spirit and the truth," of our own theology.
+It is a warning and a call which every age wants. We sympathise with
+his aim, with much of his positive teaching, with some of his aversions
+and some of his fears. We do not respect him the less for not being
+afraid of being called hard names. But certainly such a writer has
+need, in no common degree, of conforming himself to that wise maxim,
+which holds in writing as well as in art--"Know what you want to do,
+then do it."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE[22]
+
+
+  [22]
+  _Saturday Review_, 6th April 1872.
+
+This Easter week we have lost a man about whom opinions and feelings
+were much divided, who was by many of the best and most thoughtful
+among us looked on as the noblest and greatest of recent English
+teachers, and who certainly had that rare gift of inspiring enthusiasm
+and trust among honest and powerful minds in search of guidance, which
+belongs to none but to men of a very high order. Professor Maurice has
+ended a life of the severest and most unceasing toil, still working to
+the utmost that failing bodily strength allowed--still to the last in
+harness. The general public, though his name is familiar to them,
+probably little measure the deep and passionate affection with which he
+was regarded by the circle of his friends and by those whose thoughts
+and purposes he had moulded; or the feeling which his loss causes in
+them of a blank, great and not to be filled up, not only personally for
+themselves, but in the agencies which are working most hopefully in
+English society. But even those who knew him least, and only from the
+outside, and whose points of view least coincided with his, must feel
+that there has been, now that we look back on his course, something
+singularly touching and even pathetic in the combination shown in all
+that he did, of high courage and spirit, and of unwearied faith and
+vigour, with the deepest humility and with the sincerest
+disinterestedness and abnegation, which never allowed him to seek
+anything great for himself, and, in fact, distinguished and honoured as
+he was, never found it. For the sake of his generation we may regret
+that he did not receive the public recognition and honour which were
+assuredly his due; but in truth his was one of those careers which, for
+their own completeness and consistency, gain rather than lose by
+escaping the distractions and false lights of what is called
+preferment.
+
+The two features which strike us at the moment as characteristic of Mr.
+Maurice as a writer and teacher, besides the vast range both of his
+reading and thought, and the singularly personal tone and language of
+all that he wrote, are, first, the combination in him of the most
+profound and intense religiousness with the most boundless claim and
+exercise of intellectual liberty; and next, the value which he set,
+exemplifying his estimate in his own long and laborious course, on
+processes and efforts, as compared with conclusions and definite
+results, in that pursuit of truth which was to him the most sacred of
+duties. There is no want of earnest and fervent religion among us,
+intelligent, well-informed, deliberate, as well as of religion, to
+which these terms can hardly be applied. And there is also no want of
+the boldest and most daring freedom of investigation and judgment. But
+what Mr. Maurice seemed to see himself, and what he endeavoured to
+impress on others, was that religion and liberty are no natural
+enemies, but that the deepest and most absorbing forms of historical
+and traditional religion draw strength and seriousness of meaning, and
+binding obligation, from an alliance, frank and unconditional, with
+what seem to many the risks, the perilous risks and chances, of
+freedom.
+
+It was a position open to obvious and formidable criticism; but against
+this criticism is to be set the fact, that in a long and energetic
+life, in which amidst great trials and changes there was a singular
+uniformity and consistency of character maintained, he did unite the
+two--the most devout Christianity with the most fearless and
+unshrinking boldness in facing the latest announcements and
+possibilities of modern thought. That he always satisfactorily
+explained his point of view to others is more than can be said; but he
+certainly satisfied numbers of keen and anxious thinkers, who were
+discontented and disheartened both by religion as it is presented by
+our great schools and parties, and by science as its principles and
+consequences are expounded by the leading philosophical authorities of
+the day. The other point to which we have adverted partly explains the
+influence which he had with such minds. He had no system to formulate
+or to teach. He was singularly ready to accept, as adequate expressions
+of those truths in whose existence he so persistently believed, the old
+consecrated forms in which simpler times had attempted to express them.
+He believed that these truths are wider and vaster than the human mind
+which is to be made wiser and better by them. And his aim was to reach
+up to an ever more exact, and real, and harmonious hold of these
+truths, which in their essential greatness he felt to be above him; to
+reach to it in life as much as in thought. And so to the end he was
+ever striving, not so much to find new truths as to find the heart and
+core of old ones, the truth of the truth, the inner life and
+significance of the letter, of which he was always loth to refuse the
+traditional form. In these efforts at unfolding and harmonising there
+was considerable uniformity; no one could mistake Mr. Maurice's manner
+of presenting the meaning and bearing of an article of the Creed for
+the manner of any one else; but the result of this way of working, in
+the effect of the things which he said, and in his relations to
+different bodies of opinion and thought both in the Church and in
+society, was to give the appearance of great and important changes in
+his teaching and his general point of view, as life went on. This
+governing thought of his, of the immeasurably transcendent compass and
+height of all truths compared with the human mind and spirit which was
+to bow to them and to gain life and elevation by accepting them,
+explains the curious and at present almost unique combination in him,
+of deep reverence for the old language of dogmatic theology, and an
+energetic maintenance of its fitness and value, with dissatisfaction,
+equally deep and impartially universal, at the interpretations put on
+this dogmatic language by modern theological schools, and at the modes
+in which its meaning is applied by them both in directing thought and
+influencing practice. This habit of distinguishing sharply and
+peremptorily between dogmatic language and the popular reading of it at
+any given time is conspicuous in his earliest as in his latest handling
+of these subjects; in the pamphlet of 1835, _Subscription no Bondage_,
+explaining and defending the old practice at Oxford; and in the papers
+and letters, which have appeared from him in periodicals, on the
+Athanasian Creed, and which are, we suppose, almost his last writings.
+
+The world at large thought Mr. Maurice obscure and misty, and was, as
+was natural, impatient of such faults. The charge was, no doubt, more
+than partially true; and nothing but such genuine strength and
+comprehensive power as his could have prevented it from being a fatal
+one to his weight and authority. But it is not uninstructive to
+remember what was very much at the root of it. It had its origin, not
+altogether, but certainly in a great degree, in two of his moral
+characteristics. One was his stubborn, conscientious determination, at
+any cost of awkwardness, or apparent inconsistency, or imperfection of
+statement, to say out what he had to say, neither more nor less, just
+as he thought it, and just as he felt it, with the most fastidious care
+for truthful accuracy of meaning. He never would suffer what he
+considered either the connection or the balance and adjustment of
+varied and complementary truths to be sacrificed to force or point of
+expression; and he had to choose sometimes, as all people have, between
+a blurred, clumsy, and ineffective picture and a consciously incomplete
+and untrue one. His choice never wavered; and as the artist's aim was
+high, and his skill not always equally at his command, he preferred the
+imperfection which left him the consciousness of honesty. The other
+cause which threw a degree of haze round his writings was the personal
+shape into which he was so fond of throwing his views. He shrunk from
+their enunciation as arguments and conclusions which claimed on their
+own account and by their own title the deference of all who read them;
+and he submitted them as what he himself had found and had been granted
+to see--the lessons and convictions of his own experience. Sympathy is,
+no doubt, a great bond among all men; but, after all, men's experience
+and their points of view are not all alike, and when we are asked to
+see with another's eyes, it is not always easy. Mr. Maurice's desire to
+give the simplest and most real form to his thoughts as they arose in
+his own mind contributed more often than he supposed to prevent others
+from entering into his meaning. He asked them to put themselves in his
+place. He did not sufficiently put himself in theirs.
+
+But he has taught us great lessons, of the sacredness, the largeness,
+and, it may be added, the difficulty of truth; lessons of sympathy with
+one another, of true humility and self-conquest in the busy and
+unceasing activity of the intellectual faculties. He has left no school
+and no system, but he has left a spirit and an example. We speak of him
+here only as those who knew him as all the world knew him; but those
+who were his friends are never tired of speaking of his grand
+simplicity of character, of his tenderness and delicacy, of the
+irresistible spell of lovableness which won all within its reach. They
+remember how he spoke, and how he read; the tones of a voice of
+singularly piercing clearness, which was itself a power of
+interpretation, which revealed his own soul and went straight to the
+hearts of hearers. He has taken his full share in the controversies of
+our days, and there must be many opinions both about the line which he
+took, and even sometimes about the temper in which he carried on
+debate. But it is nothing but the plainest justice to say that he was a
+philosopher, a theologian, and, we may add, a prophet, of whom, for his
+great gifts, and, still more, for his noble and pure use of them, the
+modern English Church may well be proud.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+SIR RICHARD CHURCH[23]
+
+
+  [23]
+  _Guardian_, 26th March 1873.
+
+General Sir Richard Church died last week at Athens. Many English
+travellers in the East find their way to Athens; most of them must have
+heard his name repeated there as the name of one closely associated
+with the later fortunes of the Greek nation, and linking the present
+with times now distant; some of them may have seen him, and may
+remember the slight wiry form which seemed to bear years so lightly,
+the keen eye and grisled moustache and soldierly bearing, and perhaps
+the antique and ceremonious courtesy, stately yet cordial, recalling a
+type of manners long past, with which he welcomed those who had a claim
+on his attentions or friendly offices. Five and forty years ago his
+name was much in men's mouths. He was prominent in a band of
+distinguished men, who represented a new enthusiasm in Europe. Less by
+what they were able to do than by their character and their unreserved
+self-devotion and sacrifice, they profoundly affected public opinion,
+and disarmed the jealousy of absolutist courts and governments in
+favour of a national movement, which, whether disappointment may have
+followed its success, was one of the most just and salutary of
+revolutions--the deliverance of a Christian nation from the hopeless
+tyranny of the Turks.
+
+He was one of the few remaining survivors of the generation which had
+taken part in the great French war and in the great changes resulting
+from it--changes which have in time given way to vaster alterations,
+and been eclipsed by them. He began his military life as a boy-ensign
+in one of the regiments forming part of the expedition which, under Sir
+Ralph Abercromby, drove the French out of Egypt in 1801; and on the
+shores of the Mediterranean, where his career began, it was for the
+most part continued and finished. His genius led him to the more
+irregular and romantic forms of military service; he had the gift of
+personal influence, and the power of fascinating and attaching to
+himself, with extraordinary loyalty, the people of the South. His
+adventurous temper, his sympathetic nature, his chivalrous courtesy,
+his thorough trustworthiness and sincerity, his generosity, his high
+spirit of nobleness and honour, won for him, from Italians and Greeks,
+not only that deep respect which was no unusual tribute from them to
+English honesty and strength and power of command, but that love, and
+that affectionate and almost tender veneration, for which strong and
+resolute Englishmen have not always cared from races of whose
+characteristic faults they were impatient.
+
+His early promise in the regular service was brilliant; as a young
+staff-officer, and by a staff-officer's qualities of sagacity,
+activity, and decision, he did distinguished service at Maida; and had
+he followed the movement which made Spain the great battle-ground for
+English soldiers, he had every prospect of earning a high place among
+those who fought under Wellington. But he clung to the Mediterranean.
+He was employed in raising and organising those foreign auxiliary corps
+which it was thought were necessary to eke out the comparatively scanty
+numbers of the English armies, and to keep up threatening
+demonstrations on the outskirts of the French Empire. It was in this
+service that his connection with the Greek people was first formed, and
+his deep and increasing interest in its welfare created. He was
+commissioned to form first one, and then a second, regiment of Greek
+irregulars; and from the Ionian Islands, from the mainland of Albania,
+from the Morea, chiefs and bands, accustomed to the mountain warfare,
+half patriotic, half predatory, carried on by the more energetic Greek
+highlanders against the Turks, flocked to the English standards. The
+operations in which they were engaged were desultory, and of no great
+account in the general result of the gigantic contest; but they made
+Colonel Church's name familiar to the Greek population, who were
+hoping, amid the general confusion, for an escape from the tyranny of
+the Turks. But his connection with Greece was for some time delayed.
+His peculiar qualifications pointed him out as a fit man to be a medium
+of communication between the English Government and the foreign armies
+which were operating on the outside of the circle within which the
+decisive struggle was carried on against Napoleon; and he was the
+English Military Commissioner attached to the Austrian armies in Italy
+in 1814 and 1815.
+
+At the Peace, his eagerness for daring and adventurous enterprise was
+tempted by great offers from the Neapolitan Government. The war had
+left brigandage, allied to a fierce spirit of revolutionary
+freemasonry, all-powerful in the south of Italy; and a stern and
+resolute, yet perfectly honest and just hand, was needed to put it
+down. He accepted the commission; he was reckless of conspiracy and
+threats of assassination; he was known to be no sanguinary and
+merciless lover of severity, but he was known also to be fearless and
+inexorable against crime; and, not without some terrible examples, yet
+with complete success, he delivered the south of Italy from the
+scourge. But his thoughts had always been turned towards Greece; at
+last the call came, and he threw himself with all his hopes and all his
+fortunes into a struggle which more than any other that history can
+show engaged at the time the interest of Europe. His first efforts
+resulted in a disastrous defeat against overwhelming odds, for which,
+as is natural, he has been severely criticised; his critics have shown
+less quickness in perceiving the qualities which he displayed after
+it--his unshaken, silent fortitude, the power with which he kept
+together and saved the wrecks of his shattered and disheartened
+volunteer army, the confidence in himself with which he inspired them,
+the skill with which he extricated them from their dangers in the face
+of a strong and formidable enemy, the humanity which he strove so
+earnestly by word and example to infuse into the barbarous warfare
+customary between Greeks and Turks, the tenacity with which he clung to
+the fastnesses of Western Greece, obtaining by his perseverance from
+the diplomacy of Europe a more favourable line of boundary for the new
+nation which it at length recognised. To this cause he gave up
+everything; personal risks cannot be counted; but he threw away all
+prospects in England; he made no bargains; he sacrificed freely to the
+necessities of the struggle any pecuniary resource that he could
+command, neither requiring nor receiving any repayment. He threw in his
+lot with the people for whom he had surrendered everything, in order to
+take part in their deliverance. Since his arrival in Greece in 1827 he
+has never turned his face westwards. He took the part which is perhaps
+the only becoming and justifiable one for the citizen of one State who
+permits himself to take arms, even in the cause of independence, for
+another; having fought for the Greeks, he lived with them, and shared,
+for good and for evil, their fortunes.
+
+For more than forty years he has resided at Athens under the shadow of
+the great rock of the Acropolis. Distinguished by all the honours the
+Greek nation could bestow, military or political, he has lived in
+modest retirement, only on great emergencies taking any prominent part
+in the political questions of Greece, but always throwing his influence
+on the side of right and honesty. The course of things in Greece was
+not always what an educated Englishman could wish it to be. But
+whatever his judgment, or, on occasion, his action might be, there
+never could be a question, with his friends any more than with his
+opponents--enemies he could scarcely be said to have--as to the
+straightforwardness, the pure motives, the unsullied honour of anything
+that he did or anything that he advised. The Greeks saw among them one
+deeply sympathising with all that they cared for, commanding, if he had
+pleased to work for it, considerable influence out of Greece, the
+intimate friend of a Minister like Sir Edmund Lyons, yet keeping free
+from the temptation to make that use of influence which seems so
+natural to politicians in a place like Athens; thinking much of Greece
+and of the interests of his friends there, but thinking as much of
+truth and justice and conscience; hating intrigue and trick, and
+shaming by his indignant rebuke any proposal of underhand courses that
+might be risked in his presence.
+
+The course of things, the change of ideas and of men, threw him more
+and more out of any forward and prominent place in the affairs of
+Greece. But his presence in Athens was felt everywhere. There was a man
+who had given up everything for Greece and sought nothing in return.
+His blameless unselfishness, his noble elevation of character, were a
+warning and a rebuke to the faults which have done so much mischief to
+the progress of the nation; and yet every Greek in Athens knew that no
+one among them was more jealous of the honour of the nation or more
+anxious for its good. To a new political society, freshly exposed to
+the temptations of party struggles for power, no greater service can be
+rendered than a public life absolutely clear from any suspicion of
+self-seeking, governed uninterruptedly and long by public spirit,
+public ends, and a strong sense of duty. Such a service General Church
+has rendered to his adopted country. During his residence among them
+for nearly half a century they have become familiar, not in word, but
+in living reality, with some of the best things which the West has to
+impart to the East. They have had among them an example of English
+principle, English truth, English high-souled disinterestedness, and
+that noble English faith which, in a great cause, would rather hope in
+vain than not hope at all. They have learned to venerate all this, and,
+some of them, to love it.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+DEATH OF BISHOP WILBERFORCE[24]
+
+
+  [24]
+  _Guardian_, 23rd July 1873.
+
+The beautiful summer weather which came on us at the beginning of this
+week gives by contrast a strange and terrible point to the calamity,
+the announcement of which sent such a shock through the whole country
+on Monday last. Summer days in all their brilliance seemed come at
+last, after a long waiting which made them the more delightful. But as
+people came down to breakfast on that morning, or as they gathered at
+railway stations on their way to business, the almost incredible
+tidings met them that the Bishop of Winchester was dead; that he had
+been killed by a fall from his horse. In a moment, by the most trivial
+of accidents, one of the foremost and most stirring men of our
+generation had passed away from the scene in which his part was so
+large a one. With everything calm and peaceful round him, in the midst
+of the keen but tranquil enjoyment of a summer evening ride with a
+friend through some of the most charming scenery in England, looking
+forward to meeting another friend, and to the pleasure which a quiet
+Sunday brings to hard-worked men in fine weather, and a pleasant
+country house, the blow fell. The moment before, as Lord Granville
+remarks, he had given expression to the fulness of his enjoyment. He
+was rejoicing in the fine weather, he was keenly noticing the beauty of
+the scenery at every point of the way; with his characteristic love of
+trees he was noticing the different kinds and the soils which suited
+them; especially he was greatly pleased with his horse. There comes a
+slight dip in the smooth turf; the horse stumbles and recovers himself
+unhurt; but in that short interval of time all has vanished, all things
+earthly, from that quick eye and that sensitive and sympathetic mind.
+It is indeed tragic. He is said to have thought with distress of a
+lingering end. He was spared it. He died as a soldier dies.
+
+A shock like this brings with it also a shock of new knowledge and
+appreciation of things. We are made to feel with a new force what it is
+that we have lost, and to understand more exactly what is the
+proportion of what we have lost to what we still retain. To friends and
+opponents the Bishop of Winchester could not but be, under any
+circumstances, a person of the greatest importance. But few of us,
+probably, measured fully and accurately the place which he filled among
+us. We are better aware of it now when he has been taken away from us.
+Living among us, and acting before us from day to day, the object of
+each day's observation and criticism, under each day's varying
+circumstances and feelings, within our reach always if we wanted to see
+him or to hear him, he was presented to our thoughts in that partial
+disclosure, and that everyday homeliness, which as often disguise the
+true and complete significance of a character, as they give substance
+and reality to our conceptions of it. As the man's course moves on, we
+are apt to lose in our successive judgments of the separate steps of
+it--it may be stops of great immediate interest--our sense of its
+connection and tendency, of the true measure of it as a whole, of the
+degree in which character is growing and rising, or, on the other hand,
+falling or standing still. The Bishop of Winchester had many
+admirers--many who deeply loved and trusted him--many who, in the face
+of a good deal of suspicion and hostile comment, stoutly insisted on
+the high estimate which they had formed of him. But even among them,
+and certainly in the more indifferent public, there were few who had
+rightly made it clear to their own minds what he had really grown to be
+both in the Church and the country.
+
+For it is obvious, at the first glance now that he is gone, that there
+is no one who can fill the place which he filled. It seems to us beyond
+dispute that he has been the greatest Bishop the English Church has
+seen for a century and a half. We do not say the greatest man, but the
+greatest Bishop; the one among the leaders of the English Church who
+most adequately understood the relations of his office, not only to the
+Church, but to his times and his country, and who most adequately
+fulfilled his own conception of them. We are very far from saying this
+because of his exuberant outfit of powers and gifts; because of his
+versatility, his sympathetic nature, his eager interest in all that
+interested his fellows, his inexhaustible and ready resources of
+thought and speech, of strong and practical good sense, of brilliant or
+persuasive or pathetic eloquence. In all this he had equals and rivals,
+though perhaps he had not many in the completeness and balance of his
+powers. Nor do we say anything of those gifts, partly of the intellect,
+but also of the soul and temper and character, by which he was able at
+once to charm without tiring the most refined and fastidious society,
+to draw to him the hearts of hard-working and anxious clergymen, and to
+enchain the attention of the dullest and most ignorant of rustic
+congregations. All these are, as it seems to us, the subordinate, and
+not the most interesting, parts of what he was; they were on the
+surface and attracted notice, and the parts were often mistaken for the
+whole. Nor do we forget what often offended even equitable judges,
+disliking all appearance of management and mere adroitness--or what was
+often objected against his proceedings by opponents at least as
+unscrupulous as they wished him to be thought. We are far from thinking
+that his long career was free from either mistakes or faults; it is not
+likely that a course steered amid such formidable and perplexing
+difficulties, and steered with such boldness and such little attempt to
+evade them, should not offer repeated occasions not only for
+ill-natured, but for grave and serious objections.
+
+But looking over that long course of his Episcopate, from 1845 to the
+present year, we see in him, in an eminent and unique degree, two
+things. He had a distinct and statesmanlike idea of Church policy; and
+he had a new idea of the functions of a Bishop, and of what a Bishop
+might do and ought to do. And these two ideas he steadily kept in view
+and acted upon with increasing clearness in his purpose and unflagging
+energy in action. He grasped in all its nobleness and fulness and
+height the conception of the Church as a great religious society of
+Divine origin, with many sides and functions, with diversified gifts
+and ever new relations to altering times, but essentially, and above
+all things, a religious society. To serve that society, to call forth
+in it the consciousness of its calling and its responsibilities, to
+strengthen and put new life into its organisation, to infuse ardour and
+enthusiasm and unity into its efforts, to encourage and foster
+everything that harmonised with its principle and purpose, to watch
+against the counteracting influences of self-willed or ignorant
+narrowness, to adjust its substantial rights and its increasing
+activity to the new exigencies of political changes, to elicit from the
+Church all that could command the respect and win the sympathy and
+confidence of Englishmen, and make its presence recognised as a supreme
+blessing by those whom nothing but what was great and real in its
+benefits would satisfy--this was the aim from which, however perplexed
+or wavering or inconsistent he may have been at times, he never really
+swerved. In the breadth and largeness of his principle, in the freedom
+and variety of its practical applications, in the distinctness of his
+purposes and the intensity of his convictions, he was an example of
+high statesmanship common in no age of the Church, and in no branch of
+it. And all this rested on the most profound personal religion as its
+foundation, a religion which became in time one of very definite
+doctrinal preferences, but of wide sympathies, and which was always of
+very exacting claims for the undivided work and efforts of a lifetime.
+
+When he became Bishop he very soon revolutionised the old notion of a
+Bishop's duties. He threw himself without any regard to increasing
+trouble and labour on the great power of personal influence. In every
+corner of his diocese he made himself known and felt; in all that
+interested its clergy or its people he took his part more and more. He
+went forth to meet men; he made himself their guest and companion as
+well as their guide and chief; he was more often to be found moving
+about his diocese than he was to be found at his own home at Cuddesdon.
+The whole tone of communication between Bishop and people rose at once
+in freedom and in spiritual elevation and earnestness; it was at once
+less formal and more solemnly practical. He never spared his personal
+presence; always ready to show himself, always ready to bring the rarer
+and more impressive rites of the Church, such as Ordination, within the
+view of people at a distance from his Palace or Cathedral, he was never
+more at his ease than in a crowd of new faces, and never exhausted and
+worn out in what he had to say to fresh listeners. Gathering men about
+him at one time; turning them to account, assigning them tasks,
+pressing the willing, shaming the indolent or the reluctant, at
+another; travelling about with the rapidity and system of an officer
+inspecting his positions, he infused into the diocese a spirit and zeal
+which nothing but such labour and sympathy could give, and bound it
+together by the bands of a strong and wise organisation.
+
+What he did was but a very obvious carrying out of the idea of the
+Episcopal office; but it had not seemed necessary once, and his merit
+was that he saw both that it was necessary and practicable. It is he
+who set the standard of what is now expected, and is more or less
+familiar, in all Bishops. And as he began so he went on to the last. He
+never flagged, he never grew tired of the continual and varied
+intercourse which he kept up with his clergy and people. To the last he
+worked his diocese as much as possible not from a distance, but from
+local points which brought him into closer communication with his
+flock. London, with its great interests and its great attractions,
+social and political, never kept away one who was so keenly alive to
+them, and so prominent in all that was eventful in his time, from
+attending to the necessities and claims of his rural parishes. What his
+work was to the very last, how much there was in him of unabated force,
+of far-seeing judgment, of noble boldness and earnestness, of power
+over the souls and minds of men in many ways divided, a letter from Dr.
+Monsell[25] in our columns shows.
+
+He had a great and all-important place in a very critical moment, to
+which he brought a seriousness of purpose, a power and ripeness of
+counsel, and a fearlessness distinctly growing up to the last. It is
+difficult to see who will bend the bow which he has dropped.
+
+  [25]
+  ... The shock that the sudden announcement of an event so
+  solemn must ever give, was tenfold great to one who, like myself,
+  had been, during the past week, closely associated with him in
+  anxious deliberations as to the best means of meeting the various
+  difficulties and dangers with which the Church is at present
+  surrounded.
+
+  He had gathered round him, as was his annual wont, his Archdeacons
+  and Rural Deans, to deliberate for the Church's interests; and in
+  his opening address, and conduct of a most important meeting, never
+  had he shone out more clearly in intellectual vigour, in theological
+  soundness, in moral boldness, in Christian gentleness and love.
+
+  ... He spoke upon the gravest questions of the day--questions which
+  require more than they generally receive, delicate handling. He
+  divided from the evil of things, which some in the spirit of party
+  condemn wholesale, the hidden good which lies wrapt up in them, and
+  which it would be sin as well as folly to sweep away. He made every
+  man who heard him feel the blessing of having in the Church such a
+  veteran leader, and drew forth from more than one there the openly
+  expressed hope that as he had in bygone days been the bold and
+  cautious controller of an earlier movement in the right direction,
+  so now he would save to the Church some of her precious things which
+  rude men would sweep away, and help her to regain what is essential
+  to her spiritual existence without risking the sacredness of private
+  life, the purity of private thoughts, the sense of direct
+  responsibility between God and the soul, which are some of the most
+  distinctive characteristics of our dear Church of England.
+
+  From his council chamber in Winchester House I went direct with him
+  to the greater council chamber of St. Stephen's to hear him there
+  vindicate the rights and privileges of his order, and beat back the
+  assaults of those who, in high places, think that by a speech in, or
+  a vote of, either house they can fashion the Church as they please.
+  Never did he speak with more point and power; and never did he seem
+  to have won more surely the entire sympathy of the house.
+
+  To gather in overwhelming numbers round him in the evening his
+  London clergy and their families, to meet them all with the kind
+  cordiality of a real father and friend, to run on far into the
+  middle of the night in this laborious endeavour to please--was "the
+  last effort of his toilsome day."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+RETIREMENT OF THE PROVOST OF ORIEL[26]
+
+
+  [26]
+  _Guardian_, 4th November 1874.
+
+Dr. Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, has resigned the Provostship. He has
+held it from 1828, within four years of half a century. The time during
+which he has presided over his college has been one of the most
+eventful periods in the history of the University; it has been a time
+of revolt against custom, of reform, of keen conflict, of deep changes;
+and in all connected with these he has borne a part, second to none in
+prominence, in importance, and we must add, in dignity. No name of
+equal distinction has disappeared from the list of Heads of Houses
+since the venerable President of Magdalen passed away. But Dr. Routh,
+though he watched with the keenest intelligence, and not without
+sympathy, all that went on in the days into which his life had been
+prolonged, watched it with the habits and thoughts of days long
+departed; he had survived from the days of Bishop Horne and Dr. Parr
+far into our new and strange century, to which he did not belong, and
+he excited its interest as a still living example of what men were
+before the French Revolution. The eminence of the Provost of Oriel is
+of another kind. He calls forth interest because among all recent
+generations of Oxford men, and in all their restless and exciting
+movements, he has been a foremost figure. He belongs to modern Oxford,
+its daring attempts, its fierce struggles, its successes, and its
+failures. He was a man of whom not only every one heard, but whom every
+one saw; for he was much in public, and his unsparing sense of public
+duty made him regularly present in his place at Council, at
+Convocation, at the University Church, at College chapel. The outward
+look of Oxford will be altered by the disappearance in its ceremonies
+and gatherings of his familiar form and countenance.
+
+He would anywhere have been a remarkable man. His active and
+independent mind, with its keen, discriminating, practical
+intelligence, was formed and disciplined amid that company of
+distinguished scholars and writers who, at Oxford, in the second decade
+of the century were revolted by the scandalous inertness and
+self-indulgence of the place, with its magnificent resources squandered
+and wasted, its stupid orthodoxy of routine, its insensibility to the
+questions and the dangers rising all round; men such as Keble, Arnold,
+Davison, Copleston, Whately. These men, different as they were from one
+another, all represented the awakening but still imperfect
+consciousness that a University life ought to be something higher than
+one of literary idleness, given up to the frivolities of mere elegant
+scholarship, and to be crowned at last by comfortable preferment; that
+there was much difficult work to be seriously thought about and done,
+and that men were placed at Oxford under heavy responsibilities to use
+their thoughts and their leisure for the direct service of their
+generation. Clever fops and dull pedants joined in sneering at this new
+activity and inquisitiveness of mind, and this grave interest and
+employment of intellect on questions and in methods outside the
+customary line of University studies and prejudices; but the men were
+too powerful, and their work too genuine and effective, and too much in
+harmony with the temper and tendencies of the time, to be stopped by
+impertinence and obstructiveness. Dr. Hawkins was one of those who made
+the Oriel Common-room a place of keen discussion and brilliant
+conversation, and, for those days, of bold speculation; while the
+College itself reflected something of the vigour and accomplishments of
+the Common-room. Dr. Newman, in the _Apologia_, has told us, in
+touching terms of acknowledgment, what Dr. Hawkins was when, fifty
+years ago, the two minds first came into close contact, and what
+intellectual services he believed Dr. Hawkins had rendered him. He
+tells us, too, how Dr. Hawkins had profoundly impressed him by a work
+in which, with characteristic independence and guarded caution equally
+characteristic, he cuts across popular prejudices and confusions of
+thought, and shows himself original in discerning and stating an
+obvious truth which had escaped other people--his work on
+_Unauthoritative Tradition_. His logical acuteness, his habits of
+disciplined accuracy, abhorrent and impatient of all looseness of
+thinking and expression, his conscientious efforts after substantial
+reality in his sharpest distinctions, his capacity for taking trouble,
+his serious and strong sense of the debt involved in the possession of
+intellectual power--all this would have made him eminent, whatever the
+times in which he lived.
+
+But the times in which we live and what they bring with them mould most
+of us; and the times shaped the course of the Provost of Oriel, and
+turned his activity into a channel of obstinate and prolonged
+antagonism, of resistance and protest, most conscientious but most
+uncompromising, against two great successive movements, both of which
+he condemned as unbalanced and recoiled from as revolutionary--the
+Tractarian first, and then the Liberal movement in Oxford. Of the
+former, it is not perhaps too much to say that he was in Oxford, at
+least, the ablest and most hurtful opponent. From his counsels, from
+his guarded and measured attacks, from the power given him by a partial
+agreement against popular fallacies with parts of its views, from his
+severe and unflinching determination, it received its heaviest blows
+and suffered its greatest losses. He detested what he held to be its
+anti-Liberal temper, and its dogmatic assertions; he resented its
+taking out of his hands a province of theology which he and Whately had
+made their own, that relating to the Church; he thought its tone of
+feeling and its imaginative and poetical side exaggerated or childish;
+and he could not conceive of its position except as involving palpable
+dishonesty. No one probably guided with such clear and self-possessed
+purpose that policy of extreme measures, which contributed to bring
+about, if it did not itself cause, the break-up of 1845. Then succeeded
+the great Liberal tide with its demands for extensive and immediate
+change, its anti-ecclesiastical spirit, its scarcely disguised
+scepticism, its daring philosophical and critical enterprises. By
+degrees it became clear that the impatience and intolerance which had
+purged the University of so many Churchmen had, after all, left the
+Church movement itself untouched, to assume by degrees proportions
+scarcely dreamed of when it began; but that what the defeat of the
+Tractarians really had done was, to leave the University at the mercy
+of Liberals to whom what had been called Liberalism in the days of
+Whately was mere blind and stagnant Conservatism.
+
+One war was no sooner over than the Provost of Oriel found another even
+more formidable on his hands. The most dauntless and most unshaken of
+combatants, he faced his new antagonists with the same determination,
+the same unshrinking sense of duty with which he had fought his old
+ones. He used the high authority and influence which his position and
+his character justly gave him, to resist or to control, as far as he
+could, the sweeping changes which, while bringing new life into Oxford,
+have done so much to break up her connection of centuries with the
+Church. He boldly confronted the new spirit of denial and unbelief. He
+wrote, he preached, he published, as he had done against other
+adversaries, always with measured and dignified argument, but not
+shrinking from plain-spoken severity of condemnation. Never sparing
+himself labour when he thought duty called, he did not avail himself of
+the privilege of advancing years to leave the war to be carried on by
+younger champions.
+
+It is impossible for those who may at times have found themselves most
+strongly, and perhaps most painfully, opposed to him, not to admire and
+revere one who, through so long a career has, in what he held to be his
+duty to the Church and to religion, fought so hard, encountered such
+troubles, given up so many friendships and so much ease, and who, while
+a combatant to the last, undiscouraged by odds and sometimes by
+ill-success, has brought to the weariness and disappointment of old age
+an increasing gentleness and kindliness of spirit, which is one of the
+rarest tokens and rewards of patient and genuine self-discipline. A man
+who has set himself steadily and undismayed to stem and bring to reason
+the two most powerful currents of conviction and feeling which have
+agitated his times, leaves an impressive example of zeal and
+fearlessness, even to those against whom he has contended. What is the
+upshot which has come of these efforts, and whether the controversies
+of the moment have not in his case, as in others, diverted and absorbed
+faculties which might have been turned to calmer and more permanent
+tasks, we do not inquire.
+
+Perhaps a life of combat never does all that the combatant thinks it
+ought to accomplish, or compensates for the sacrifices it entails. In
+the case of the Provost of Oriel, he had, with all his great and noble
+qualities, one remarkable want, which visibly impaired his influence
+and his persuasiveness. He was out of sympathy with the rising
+aspirations and tendencies of the time on the two opposite sides; he
+was suspicious and impatient of them. He was so sensible of their weak
+points, the logical difficulties which they brought with them, their
+precipitate and untested assumptions, the extravagance and unsoundness
+of character which often seemed inseparable from them, that he seldom
+did justice to them viewed in their complete aspect, or was even alive
+to what was powerful and formidable in the depth, the complexity, and
+the seriousness of the convictions and enthusiasm which carried them
+onwards. In truth, for a man of his singular activity and reach of
+mind, he was curiously indifferent to much that most interested his
+contemporaries in thought and literature; he did not understand it, and
+he undervalued it as if it belonged merely to the passing fashions of
+the hour.
+
+This long career is now over. Warfare is always a rude trade, and men
+on all sides who have had to engage in it must feel at the end how much
+there is to be forgiven and needing forgiveness; how much now appears
+harsh, unfair, violent, which once appeared only necessary and just. A
+hard hitter like the Provost of Oriel must often have left behind the
+remembrance of his blows. But we venture to say that, even in those who
+suffered from them, he has left remembrances of another and better
+sort. He has left the recollection of a pure, consistent, laborious
+life, elevated in its aim and standard, and marked by high public
+spirit and a rigid and exacting sense of duty. In times when it was
+wanted, he set in his position in the University an example of modest
+and sober simplicity of living; and no one who ever knew him can doubt
+the constant presence, in all his thoughts, of the greatness of things
+unseen, or his equally constant reference of all that he did to the
+account which he was one day to give at his Lord's judgment-seat. We
+trust that he may be spared to enjoy the rest which a weaker or less
+conscientious man would have claimed long ago.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+MARK PATTISON[27]
+
+
+  [27]
+  _Guardian_, 6th August 1884.
+
+The Rector of Lincoln, who died at Harrogate this day week, was a man
+about whom judgments are more than usually likely to be biassed by
+prepossessions more or less unconscious, and only intelligible to the
+mind of the judge. There are those who are in danger of dealing with
+him too severely. There are also those whose temptation will be to
+magnify and possibly exaggerate his gifts and acquirements--great as
+they undoubtedly were,--the use that he made of them, and the place
+which he filled among his contemporaries. One set of people finds it
+not easy to forget that he had been at one time closer than most young
+men of his generation to the great religious leaders whom they are
+accustomed to revere; that he was of a nature fully to understand and
+appreciate both their intellectual greatness and their moral and
+spiritual height; that he had shared to the full their ideas and hopes;
+that they, too, had measured his depth of character, and grasp, and
+breadth, and subtlety of mind; and that the keenest judge among them of
+men and of intellect had pirlud him out as one of the most original and
+powerful of a number of very able contemporaries. Those who remember
+this cannot easily pardon the lengths of dislike and hitterness to
+which in after life Pattison allowed himself to be carried against the
+cause which once had his hearty allegiance, and in which, if he had
+discovered, as he thought, its mistakes and its weakness, he had once
+recognised with all his soul the nobler side. And on the other hand,
+the partisans of the opposite movement, into whose interests he so
+disastrously, as it seems to us, and so unreservedly threw himself,
+naturally welcomed and made the most of such an accession to their
+strength, and such an unquestionable addition to their literary fame.
+To have detached such a man from the convictions which he had so
+professedly and so earnestly embraced, and to have enlisted him as
+their determined and implacable antagonist--to be able to point to him
+in him maturity and strength of his powers as one who, having known its
+best aspects, had deliberately despaired of religion, and had turned
+against its representatives the scorn and hatred of a passionate
+nature, whose fires burned all the more fiercely under its cold crust
+of reserve and sarcasm--this was a triumph of no common order; and it
+might conceivably blind those who could rejoice in it to the
+comparative value of qualities which, at any rate, were very rare and
+remarkable ones.
+
+Pattison was a man who, in many ways, did not do himself justice. As a
+young man, his was a severe and unhopeful mind, and the tendency to
+despond was increased by circumstances. There was something in the
+quality of his unquestionable ability which kept him for long out of
+the ordinary prizes of an Oxford career; in the class list, in the
+higher competition for Fellowships, he was not successful. There are
+those who long remembered the earnest pleading of the Latin letters
+which it was the custom to send in when a man stood for a Fellowship,
+and in which Pattison set forth his ardent longing for knowledge, and
+his narrow and unprosperous condition as a poor student. He always came
+very near; indeed, he more than once won the vote of the best judges;
+but he just missed the prize. To the bitter public disappointments of
+1845 were added the vexations caused by private injustice and
+ill-treatment. He turned fiercely on those who, as he thought, had
+wronged him, and he began to distrust men, and to be on the watch for
+proofs of hollowness and selfishness in the world and in the Church.
+Yet at this time, when people were hearing of his bitter and unsparing
+sayings in Oxford, he was from time to time preaching in village
+churches, and preaching sermons which both his educated and his simple
+hearers thought unlike those of ordinary men in their force, reality,
+and earnestness. But with age and conflict the disposition to harsh and
+merciless judgments strengthened and became characteristic. This,
+however, should be remembered: where he revered ho revered with genuine
+and unstinted reverence; where he saw goodness in which he believed he
+gave it ungrudging honour. He had real pleasure in recognising height
+and purity of character, and true intellectual force, and he maintained
+his admiration when the course of things had placed wide intervals
+between him and those to whom it had been given. His early friendships,
+where they could be retained, he did retain warmly and generously even
+to the last; he seemed almost to draw a line between them and other
+things in the world. The truth, indeed, was that beneath that icy and
+often cruel irony there was at bottom a most warm and affectionate
+nature, yearning for sympathy, longing for high and worthy objects,
+which, from the misfortunes especially of his early days, never found
+room to expand and unfold itself. Let him see and feel that anything
+was real--character, purpose, cause--and at any rate it was sure of his
+respect, probably of his interest. But the doubt whether it was real
+was always ready to present itself to his critical and suspicious mind;
+and these doubts grew with his years.
+
+People have often not given Pattison credit for the love that was in
+him for what was good and true; it is not to be wondered at, but the
+observation has to be made. On the other hand, a panegyrie, like that
+which we reprint from the _Times_, sets too high an estimate on his
+intellectual qualities, and on the position which they gave him. He was
+full of the passion for knowledge; he was very learned, very acute in
+his judgment on what his learning brought before him, very versatile,
+very shrewd, very subtle; too full of the truth of his subject to care
+about seeming to be original; but, especially in his poetical
+criticisms, often full of that best kind of originality which consists
+in seeing and pointing out novelty in what is most familiar and trite.
+But, not merely as a practical but as a speculative writer, he was apt
+to be too much under the empire and pressure of the one idea which at
+the moment occupied and interested his mind. He could not resist it; it
+came to him with exclusive and overmastering force; he did not care to
+attend to what limited it or conflicted with it. And thus, with all the
+force and sagacity of his University theories, they were not always
+self-consistent, and they were often one-sided and exaggerated. He was
+not a leader whom men could follow, however much they might rejoice at
+the blows which he might happen to deal, sometimes unexpectedly, at
+things which they disliked. And this holds of more serious things than
+even University reform and reconstruction.
+
+And next, though every competent reader must do justice to Pattison's
+distinction as a man of letters, as a writer of English prose, and as a
+critic of what is noble and excellent and what is base and poor in
+literature, there is a curious want of completeness, a frequent crudity
+and hardness, a want, which is sometimes a surprising want, of good
+sense and good taste, which form unwelcome blemishes in his work, and
+just put it down below the line of first-rate excellence which it ought
+to occupy. Morally, in that love of reality, and of all that is high
+and noble in character, which certainly marked him, he was much better
+than many suppose, who know only the strength of his animosities and
+the bitterness of his sarcasm. Intellectually, in reach, and fulness,
+and solidity of mental power, it may be doubted whether he was so great
+as it has recently been the fashion to rate him.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+PATTISON'S ESSAYS[28]
+
+
+  [28]
+  _Essays by the late Mark Pattison, sometime Rector of Lincoln
+  College_. Collected and arranged by Henry Nettleship, M.A., Corpus
+  Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. _Guardian_, 1st May
+  1889.
+
+This is a very interesting but a very melancholy collection of papers.
+They are the remains of the work of a man of first-rate intellect,
+whose powers, naturally of a high order, had been diligently and wisely
+cultivated, whose mind was furnished in a very rare degree with all
+that reading, wide and critical, could give, and which embraced in the
+circle of its interest all that is important to human life and society.
+Mr. Pattison had no vulgar standard of what knowledge is, and what
+goodness is. He was high, sincere, exacting, even austere, in his
+estimates of either; and when he was satisfied he paid honour with
+sometimes unexpected frankness and warmth. But from some unfortunate
+element in his temperament, or from the effect upon it of untoward and
+unkindly circumstances at those critical epochs of mental life, when
+character is taking its bent for good and all, he was a man in whose
+judgment severity--and severity expressing itself in angry scorn--was
+very apt to outrun justice. Longing for sympathy and not ill-fitted for
+it, capable of rare exertions in helping those whom he could help, he
+passed through life with a reputation for cynicism which, while he
+certainly exhibited it, he no less certainly would, if he had known
+how, have escaped from. People could easily tell what would incur his
+dislike and opposition, what would provoke his slow, bitter, merciless
+sarcasm; it was never easy to tell what would satisfy him, what would
+attract his approval, when he could be tempted to see the good side of
+a thing. It must not be forgotten that he had gone through a trial to
+which few men are equal. He had passed from the extreme ranks and the
+strong convictions of the Oxford movement--convictions of which the
+translation of Aquinas's _Catena Aurea_, still printed in the list of
+his works, is a memorial--to the frankest form of Liberal thought. As
+he himself writes, we cannot give up early beliefs, much less the deep
+and deliberate convictions of manhood, without some shock to the
+character. In his case the change certainly worked. It made him hate
+what he had left, and all that was like it, with the bitterness of one
+who has been imposed upon, and has been led to commit himself to what
+he now feels to be absurd and contemptible, and the bitterness of this
+disappointment gave an edge to all his work. There seems through all
+his criticism, powerful as it is, a tone of harshness, a readiness to
+take the worst construction, a sad consciousness of distrust and
+suspicion of all things round him, which greatly weakens the effect of
+his judgment. If a man will only look for the worst side, he will only
+find the worst side; but we feel that we act reasonably by not
+accepting such a teacher as our guide, however ably he may state his
+case. There is a want of equitableness and fairness in his stern and
+sometimes cruel condemnations; and yet not religion only, but the
+wisest wisdom of the world tells of the indispensable value of this
+equitableness, this old Greek virtue of [Greek: epieikeia], in our
+views of men and things. It is not religion only, but common sense
+which says that "sweetness and light," kindliness, indulgence,
+sympathy, are necessary for moral and spiritual health. Scorn,
+indignation, keenly stinging sarcasm, doubtless have their place in a
+world in which untruth and baseness abound and flourish; but to live on
+these is poison, at least to oneself.
+
+These fierce antipathies warped his judgment in strange and unexpected
+ways. Among these papers is a striking one on Calvin. If any character
+in history might be expected to have little attraction for him it is
+Calvin. Dogmatist, persecutor, tyrant, the proud and relentless
+fanatic, who more than any one consecrated harsh narrowness in religion
+by cruel theories about God, what was there to recommend him to a lover
+of liberty who had no patience for ecclesiastical pretensions of any
+kind, and who tells us that Calvin's "sins against human liberty are of
+the deepest dye"? For if Laud chastised his adversaries with whips,
+Calvin chastised his with scorpions. Perhaps it is unreasonable to be
+suprised, yet we are taken by surprise, when we find a thinker like Mr.
+Pattison drawn by strong sympathy to Calvin and setting him up among
+the heroes and liberators of humanity. Mr. Pattison is usually fair in
+details, that is, he does not suppress bad deeds or qualities in those
+whom he approves, or good deeds or qualities in those whom he hates: it
+is in his general judgments that his failing comes out. He makes no
+attempt to excuse the notorious features of Calvin's rule at Geneva;
+but Mr. Pattison reads into his character a purpose and a grandeur
+which place him far above any other man of his day. To recommend him to
+our very different ways of thinking, Mr. Pattison has the courage to
+allege that his interest in dogmatic theology was a subordinate matter,
+and that the "renovation of character," the "moral purification of
+humanity," was the great guiding idea of him who taught that out of the
+mass of human kind only a predestined remnant could possibly be saved.
+It is a singular interpretation of the mind of the author of the
+_Institutes_:--
+
+    The distinction of Calvin as a Reformer is not to be sought in the
+    doctrine which now bears his name, or in any doctrinal peculiarity.
+    His great merit lies _in his comparative neglect of dogma. He
+    seized the idea of reformation as a real renovation of human
+    character_. The moral purification of humanity as the original
+    idea of Christianity is the guiding idea of his system.... He
+    swept away at once the sacramental machinery of material media of
+    salvation which the middle-age Church had provided in such
+    abundance, and which Luther frowned upon, but did not reject. He
+    was not satisfied to go back only to the historical origin of
+    Christianity, but would found human virtue on the eternal
+    antemundane will of God.
+
+Again:--
+
+    Calvin thought neither of fame or fortune. The narrowness of his
+    views and the disinterestedness of his soul alike precluded him
+    from regarding Geneva as a stage for the gratification of personal
+    ambition. This abegnation of self was one great part of his
+    success.
+
+And then Mr. Pattison goes on to describe in detail how, governed and
+possessed by one idea, and by a theory, to oppose which was "moral
+depravity," he proceeded to establish his intolerable system of
+discipline, based on dogmatic grounds--meddlesome, inquisitorial,
+petty, cruel--over the interior of every household in Geneva. What is
+there fascinating, or even imposing, in such a character? It is the
+common case of political and religious bigots, whether Jacobin, or
+Puritan, or Jesuit, poor in thought and sympathy and strong in will,
+fixing their yoke on a society, till the plague becomes unbearable. He
+seeks nothing for himself and, forsooth, he makes sacrifices. But he
+gets what he wants, his idea carried out; and self-sacrifice is of what
+we care for, and not of what we do not care for. And to keep up this
+supposed character of high moral purpose, we are told of Calvin's
+"comparative neglect of dogma," of his seizing the idea of a "real
+reformation of human character," a "moral purification of humanity," as
+the guiding idea of his system. Can anything be more unhistorical than
+to suggest that the father and source of all Western Puritan theology
+"neglected dogma," and was more of a moralist than a divine? It is not
+even true that he "swept away at once the sacramental machinery" of
+mediaeval and Lutheran teaching; Calvin writes of the Eucharist in
+terms which would astonish some of his later followers. But what is the
+reason why Mr. Pattison attributes to the historical Calvin so much
+that does not belong to him, and, in spite of so much that repels, is
+yet induced to credit him with such great qualities? The reason is to
+be found in the intense antipathy with which Mr. Pattison regarded what
+he calls "the Catholic reaction" over Europe, and in the fact that
+undoubtedly Calvin's system and influence was the great force which
+resisted both what was bad and false in it, and also what was good,
+true, generous, humane. Calvinism opposed the "Catholic reaction"
+point-blank, and that was enough to win sympathy for it, even from Mr.
+Pattison.
+
+The truth is that what Popery is to the average Protestant, and what
+Protestant heresy is to the average Roman Catholic, the "Catholic
+reaction," the "Catholic revival" in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries and in our own, is to Mr. Pattison's final judgment. It was
+not only a conspiracy against human liberty, but it brought with it the
+degradation and ruin of genuine learning. It is the all-sufficing cause
+and explanation of the mischief and evil doings which he has to set
+before us. Yet after the violence, the ignorance, the injustice, the
+inconsistencies of that great ecclesiastical revolution which we call
+by the vague name of Reformation, a "Catholic reaction" was inevitable.
+It was not conceivable that common sense and certain knowledge would
+submit for ever to be overcrowed by the dogmas and assertions of the
+new teachers. Like other powerful and wide and strongly marked
+movements, like the Reformation which it combated, it was a very mixed
+thing. It produced some great evils and led to some great crimes. It
+started that fatal religious militia, the Jesuit order, which,
+notwithstanding much heroic self-sacrifice, has formed a permanent bar
+to all possible reunion of Christendom, has fastened its yoke on the
+Papacy itself, and has taught the Church, as a systematic doctrine, to
+put its trust in the worst expedients of human policy. The religious
+wars in France and Germany, the relentless massacres of the Low
+Countries and the St. Bartholomew, the consecration of treason and
+conspiracy, were, without doubt, closely connected with the "Catholic
+reaction." But if this great awakening and stimulating influence raised
+new temptations to human passion and wickedness, it was not only in the
+service of evil that this new zeal was displayed. The Council of Trent,
+whatever its faults, and it had many, was itself a real reformation.
+The "Catholic revival" meant the rekindling of earnest religion and
+care for a good life in thousands of souls. If it produced the Jesuits,
+it as truly produced Port Royal and the Benedictines. Europe would be
+indeed greatly the poorer if it wanted some of the most conspicuous
+products of the Catholic revival.
+
+It is Mr. Pattison's great misfortune that through obvious faults of
+temper he has missed the success which naturally might have seemed
+assured to him, of dealing with these subjects in a large and
+dispassionate way. Scholar, thinker, student as he is, conversant with
+all literature, familiar with books and names which many well-read
+persons have never heard of, he has his bitter prejudices, like the
+rest of us, Protestants or Catholics; and what he hates is continually
+forcing itself into his mind. He tells, with great and pathetic force,
+the terrible story of the judicial murder of Calas at Toulouse, and of
+Voltaire's noble and successful efforts to bring the truth to light,
+and to repair, as far as could be repaired, its infamous injustice. It
+is a story which shows to what frightful lengths fanaticism may go in
+leading astray even the tribunals of justice. But unhappily the story
+can be paralleled in all times of the world's history; and though the
+Toulouse mob and Judges were Catholics, their wickedness is no more a
+proof against the Catholic revival than Titus Oates and the George
+Gordon riots are against Protestantism, or the Jacobin tribunals
+against Republican justice. But Mr. Pattison cannot conclude his
+account without an application. Here you have an example of what the
+Catholic revival does. It first breaks Calas on the wheel; and then,
+because Voltaire took up his cause, it makes modern Frenchmen, if they
+are Catholics, believe that Calas deserved it:--
+
+    It is part of that general Catholic revival which has been working
+    for some years, and which like a fog is spreading over the face of
+    opinion.... The memory of Calas had been vindicated by Voltaire and
+    the Encyclopedists. That was quite enough for the Catholics....
+    It is the characteristic of Catholicism that it supersedes reason,
+    and prejudges all matters by the application of fixed principles.
+
+    It is no use that M. Coquerel flatters himself that he has set the
+    matter at rest. He flatters himself in vain; he ought to know his
+    Catholic countrymen better:--
+
+    We have little doubt that as long as the Catholic religion shall
+    last their little manuals of falsified history will continue to
+    repeat that Jean Calas murdered his son because he had become a
+    convert to the Catholic faith.
+
+    Are little manuals of falsified history confined only to one set
+    of people? Is not John Foxe still proof against the assaults of
+    Dr. Maitland? The habit of _à priori_ judgments as to historical
+    facts is, as Mr. Pattison truly says, "fatal to truth and
+    integrity." It is most mischievous when it assumes a philosophic
+    gravity and warps the criticism of a distinguished scholar.
+
+This fixed habit of mind is the more provoking because, putting aside
+the obtrusive and impertinent injustice to which it leads, Mr.
+Pattison's critical work is of so high a character. His extensive and
+accurate reading, the sound common sense with which he uses his
+reading, and the modesty and absence of affectation and display which
+seem to be a law of his writing, place him very high. Perhaps he
+believes too much in books and learning, in the power which they exert,
+and what they can do to enable men to reach the higher conquests of
+moral and religious truth--perhaps he forgets, in the amplitude of his
+literary resources, that behind the records of thought and feeling
+there are the living mind and thought themselves, still clothed with
+their own proper force and energy, and working in defiance of our
+attempts to classify, to judge, or to explain: that there are the real
+needs, the real destinies of mankind, and the questions on which they
+depend--of which books are a measure indeed, but an imperfect one. As
+an instance, we might cite his "Essay on the Theology of
+Germany"--elaborate, learned, extravagant in its praise and in its
+scorn, full of the satisfaction of a man in possession of a startling
+and little known subject, but with the contradictions of a man who in
+spite of his theories believes more than his theories. But, as a
+student who deals with books and what books can teach, it is a pleasure
+to follow him; his work is never slovenly or superficial; the reader
+feels that he is in the hands of a man who thoroughly knows what he is
+talking about, and both from conscience and from disposition is anxious
+above all to be accurate and discriminative. If he fails, as he often
+seems to us to do, in the justice and balance of his appreciation of
+the phenomena before him, if his statements and generalisations are
+crude and extravagant, it is that passion and deep aversions have
+overpowered the natural accuracy of his faculty of judgment.
+
+The feature which is characteristic in all his work is his profound
+value for learning, the learning of books, of documents, of all
+literature. He is a thinker, a clear and powerful one; he is a
+philosopher, who has explored the problems of abstract science with
+intelligence and interest, and fully recognises their importance; he
+has taken the measure of the political and social questions which the
+progress of civilisation has done so little to solve; he is at home
+with the whole range of literature, keen and true in observation and
+criticism; he has strongly marked views about education, and he took a
+leading part in the great changes which have revolutionised Oxford. He
+is all this; but beyond and more than all this he is a devotee of
+learning, as other men are of science or politics, deeply penetrated
+with its importance, keenly alive to the neglect of it, full of faith
+in the services which it can render to mankind, fiercely indignant at
+what degrades, or supplants, or enfeebles it. Learning, with the severe
+and bracing discipline without which it is impossible, learning
+embracing all efforts of human intellect--those which are warning
+beacons as well those which have elevated and enlightened the human
+mind--is the thing which attracts and satisfies him as nothing else
+does; not mere soulless erudition, but a great supply and command of
+varied facts, marshalled and turned to account by an intelligence which
+knows their use. The absence of learning, or the danger to learning, is
+the keynote of a powerful but acrid survey of the history and prospects
+of the Anglican Church, for which, in spite of its one-sidedness and
+unfairness, Churchmen may find not a little which it will be useful to
+lay to heart. Dissatisfaction with the University system, in its
+provision for the encouragement of learning and for strengthening and
+protecting its higher interests, is the stimulus to his essay on Oxford
+studies, which is animated with the idea of the University as a true
+home of real learning, and is full of the hopes, the animosities, and,
+it may be added, the disappointments of a revolutionary time. He exults
+over the destruction of the old order; but his ideal is too high, he is
+too shrewd an observer, too thorough and well-trained a judge of what
+learning really means, to be quite satisfied with the new.
+
+The same devotion to learning shows itself in a feature of his literary
+work, which is almost characteristic--the delight which he takes in
+telling the detailed story of the life of some of the famous working
+scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These men, whose
+names are known to the modern world chiefly in notes to classical
+authors, or occasionally in some impertinent sneer, he likes to
+contemplate as if they were alive. To him they are men with individual
+differences, each with a character and fortunes of his own, sharers to
+the full in the struggles and vicissitudes of life. He can appreciate
+their enormous learning, their unwearied labour, their sense of honour
+in their profession; and the editor of texts, the collator of various
+readings and emendations, the annotator who to us perhaps seems but a
+learned pedant appears to him as a man of sound and philosophic
+thought, of enthusiasm for truth and light--perhaps of genius--a man,
+too, with human affections and interests, with a history not devoid of
+romance. There is something touching in Mr. Pattison's affection for
+those old scholars, to whom the world has done scant justice. His own
+chief literary venture was the life of one of the greatest of them,
+Isaac Casaubon. We have in these volumes sketches, not so elaborate, of
+several others, the younger Scaliger, Muretus, Huet, and the great
+French printers, the Stephenses; and in these sketches we are also
+introduced to a number of their contemporaries, with characteristic
+observations on them, implying an extensive and first-hand knowledge of
+what they were, and an acquaintance with what was going on in the
+scholar world of the day. The most important of these sketches is the
+account of Justus Scaliger. There is first a review article, very
+vigorous and animated. But Mr. Pattison had intended a companion volume
+to his Casaubon; and of this, which was never completed, we have some
+fragments, not equal in force and compactness to the original sketch.
+But sketch and fragments together present a very vivid picture of this
+remarkable person, whose temper and extravagant vanity his biographer
+admits, but who was undoubtedly a marvel both of knowledge and of the
+power to use it, and to whom we owe the beginning of order and system
+in chronology. Scaliger was to Mr. Pattison the type of the real
+greatness of the scholar, a greatness not the less real that the world
+could hardly understand it. He certainly leaves Scaliger before us,
+with his strange ways of working, his hold of the ancient languages as
+if they were mother tongues, his pride and slashing sarcasm, and his
+absurd claim of princely descent, with lineaments not soon forgotten;
+but it is amusing to meet once more, in all seriousness, Mr. Pattison's
+_bête noire_ of the Catholic reaction, in the quarrels between Scaliger
+and some shallow but clever and scurrilous Jesuits, whom he had
+provoked by exposing the False Decretals and the False Dionysius, and
+who revenged themselves by wounding him in his most sensitive part, his
+claim to descent from the Princes of Verona. Doubtless the religious
+difference envenomed the dispute, but it did not need the "Catholic
+reaction" to account for such ignoble wrangles in those days.
+
+These remains show what a historian of literature we have lost in Mr.
+Pattison. He was certainly capable of doing much more than the
+specimens of work which he has left behind; but what he has left is of
+high value. Wherever the disturbing and embittering elements are away,
+it is hard to say which is the more admirable, the patient and
+sagacious way in which he has collected and mastered his facts, or the
+wise and careful judgment which he passes on them. We hear of people
+being spoilt by their prepossessions, their party, their prejudices,
+the necessities of their political and ecclesiastical position; Mr.
+Pattison is a warning that a man may claim the utmost independence, and
+yet be maimed in his power of being just and reasonable by other things
+than party. As it is, he has left us a collection of interesting and
+valuable studies, disastrously and indelibly disfigured by an
+implacable bitterness, in which he but too plainly found the greatest
+satisfaction.
+
+Mr. Pattison used in his later years to give an occasional lecture to a
+London audience. One of the latest was one addressed, we believe, to a
+class of working people on poetry, in which he dwelt on its healing and
+consoling power. It was full of Mr. Pattison's clearness and directness
+of thought, and made a considerable impression on some who only knew it
+from an abstract in the newspapers; and it was challenged by a
+working-man in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, who urged against it with some
+power the argument of despair. Perhaps the lecture was not written; but
+if it was, and our recollection of it is at all accurate, it was not
+unworthy of a place in this collection.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+BISHOP FRAZER[29]
+
+
+  [29]
+  _Guardian_, 28th October 1885.
+
+Every one must be deeply touched by the Bishop of Manchester's sudden,
+and, to most of us, unexpected death; those not the least who,
+unhappily, found themselves in opposition to him in many important
+matters. For, in spite of much that many people must wish otherwise in
+his career as Bishop, it was really a very remarkable one. Its leading
+motive was high and genuine public spirit, and a generous wish to be in
+full and frank sympathy with all the vast masses of his diocese; to put
+himself on a level with them, as man with man, in all their interests,
+to meet them fearlessly and heartily, to raise their standard of
+justice and large-heartedness by showing them that in their life of
+toil he shared the obligation and the burden of labour, and felt bound
+by his place to be as unsparing and unselfish a worker as any of his
+flock. Indeed, he was as original as Bishop Wilberforce, though in a
+different direction, in introducing a new type and ideal of Episcopal
+work, and a great deal of his ideal he realised. It is characteristic
+of him that one of his first acts was to remove the Episcopal residence
+from a mansion and park in the country to a house in Manchester. There
+can be no doubt that he was thoroughly in touch with the working
+classes in Lancashire, in a degree to which no other Bishop, not even
+Bishop Wilberforce, had reached. There was that in the frankness and
+boldness of his address which disarmed their keen suspicion of a
+Bishop's inevitable assumption of superiority, and put them at their
+ease with him. He was always ready to meet them, and to speak off-hand
+and unconventionally, and as they speak, not always with a due
+foresight of consequences or qualifications. If he did sometimes in
+this way get into a scrape, he did not much mind it, and they liked him
+the better for it. He was perfectly fearless in his dealings with them;
+in their disputes, in which he often was invited to take a part, he
+took the part which seemed to him the right one, whether or not it
+might be the unpopular one. Very decided, very confident in his
+opinions and the expression of them, there yet was apparent a curious
+and almost touching consciousness of a deficiency in some of the
+qualities--knowledge, leisure, capacity for the deeper and subtler
+tasks of thought--necessary to give a strong speaker the sense of being
+on sure ground. But he trusted to his manly common sense; and this,
+with the populations with which he had to deal, served him well, at
+least in the main and most characteristic part of his work.
+
+And for his success in this part of his work--in making the crowds in
+Manchester feel that their Bishop was a man like themselves, quite
+alive to their wants and claims and feelings, and not so unlike them in
+his broad and strong utterances--his Episcopate deserves full
+recognition and honour. He set an example which we may hope to see
+followed and improved upon. But unfortunately there was also a less
+successful side. He was a Bishop, an overseer of a flock of many ways
+of life and thought, a fellow-worker with them, sympathetic, laborious,
+warm-hearted. But he was also a Bishop of the Church of Christ, an
+institution with its own history, its great truths to keep and deliver,
+its characteristic differences from the world which it is sent to
+correct and to raise to higher levels than those of time and nature.
+There is no reason why this side of the Episcopal office should not be
+joined to that in which Bishop Frazer so signally excelled. But for
+this part of it he was not well qualified, and much in his performance
+of it must be thought of with regret. The great features of Christian
+truth had deeply impressed him; and to its lofty moral call he
+responded with conviction and earnestness. But an acquaintance with
+what he has to interpret and guard which may suffice for a layman is
+not enough for a Bishop; and knowledge, the knowledge belonging to his
+profession, the deeper and more varied knowledge which makes a man
+competent to speak as a theologian, Bishop Frazer did not possess. He
+rather disbelieved in it, and thought it useless, or, it might be,
+mischievous. He resented its intrusion into spheres where he could only
+see the need of the simplest and least abstruse language. But facts are
+not what we may wish them, but what they are; and questions, if they
+are asked, may have to be answered, with toil, it may be, and
+difficulty, like the questions, assuredly not always capable of easy
+and transparent statement, of mathematical or physical science; and
+unless Christianity is a dream and its history one vast delusion, such
+facts and such questions have made what we call theology. But to the
+Bishop's practical mind they were without interest, and he could not
+see how they could touch and influence living religion. And did not
+care to know about them; he was impatient, and even scornful, when
+stress was laid on them; he was intolerant when he thought they
+competed with the immediate realities of religion. And this want of
+knowledge and of respect for knowledge was a serious deficiency. It
+gave sometimes a tone of thoughtless flippancy to his otherwise earnest
+language. And as he was not averse to controversy, or, at any rate,
+found himself often involved in it, he was betrayed sometimes into
+assertions and contradictions of the most astounding inaccuracy, which
+seriously weakened his authority when he was called upon to accept the
+responsibility of exerting it.
+
+Partly for this reason, partly from a certain vivacity of temper, he
+certainly showed himself, in spite of his popular qualities, less equal
+than many others of his brethren to the task of appeasing and assuaging
+religious strife. The difficulties in Manchester were not greater than
+in other dioceses; there was not anything peculiar in them; there was
+nothing but what a patient and generous arbiter, with due knowledge of
+the subject, might have kept from breaking out into perilous scandals.
+Unhappily he failed; and though he believed that he had only done his
+duty, his failure was a source of deep distress to himself and to
+others. But now that he has passed away, it is but bare justice to say
+that no one worked up more conscientiously to his own standard. He gave
+himself, when he was consecrated, ten or twelve years of work, and then
+he hoped for retirement. He has had fifteen, and has fallen at his
+post. And to the last, the qualities which gave his character such a
+charm in his earlier time had not disappeared. There seemed to be
+always something of the boy about him, in his simplicity, his confiding
+candour and frankness with his friends, his warm-hearted and kindly
+welcome, his mixture of humility with a sense of power. Those who can
+remember him in his younger days still see, in spite of all the storms
+and troubles of his later ones, the image of the undergraduate and the
+young bachelor, who years ago made a start of such brilliant promise,
+and who has fulfilled so much of it, if not all. These things at any
+rate lasted to the end--his high and exacting sense of public duty, and
+his unchanging affection for his old friends.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+NEWMAN'S "APOLOGIA"[30]
+
+
+  [30]
+  _Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ_. By John Henry Newman, D.D. _Guardian_, 22nd
+  June 1864.
+
+We have not noticed before Dr. Newman's _Apologia_, which has been
+coming out lately in weekly numbers, because we wished, when we spoke
+of it, to speak of it as a whole. The special circumstances out of
+which it arose may have prescribed the mode of publication. It may have
+been thought more suitable, in point of form, to answer a pamphlet by a
+series of pamphlets rather than at once by a set octavo of several
+hundred pages. But the real subject which Dr. Newman has been led to
+handle is one which will continue to be of the deepest interest long
+after the controversy which suggested it is forgotten. The real subject
+is the part played in the great Church movement by him who was the
+leading mind in it; and it was unsatisfactory to speak of this till all
+was said, and we could look on the whole course described. Such a
+subject might have well excused a deliberate and leisurely volume to
+itself; perhaps in this way we should have gained, in the laying out
+and concentration of the narrative, and in what helps to bring it as a
+whole before our thoughts. But a man's account of himself is never so
+fresh and natural as when it is called out by the spur and pressure of
+an accidental and instant necessity, and is directed to a purpose and
+quickened by feelings which belong to immediate and passing
+circumstances. The traces of hurried work are of light account when
+they are the guarantees that a man is not sitting down to draw a
+picture of himself, but stating his case in sad and deep earnest out of
+the very fulness of his heart.
+
+The aim of the book is to give a minute and open account of the steps
+and changes by which Dr. Newman passed from the English Church to the
+Roman. The history of a change of opinion has often been written from
+the most opposite points of view; but in one respect this book seems to
+stand alone. Let it be remembered what it is, the narrative and the
+justification of a great conversion; of a change involving an entire
+reversal of views, judgments, approvals, and condemnations; a change
+which, with all ordinary men, involves a reversal, at least as great,
+of their sympathies and aversions, of what they tolerate and speak
+kindly of. Let it be considered what changes of feeling most changes of
+religion compel and consecrate; how men, commonly and very naturally,
+look back on what they have left and think they have escaped from, with
+the aversion of a captive to his prison; how they usually exaggerate
+and make absolute their divergence from what they think has betrayed,
+fooled, and degraded them; how easily they are tempted to visit on it
+and on those who still cling to it their own mistakes and faults. Let
+it be remembered that there was here to be told not only the history of
+a change, but the history of a deep disappointment, of the failure of a
+great design, of the breakdown of hopes the most promising and the most
+absorbing; and this, not in the silence of a man's study, but in the
+fever and contention of a great struggle wrought up to the highest
+pitch of passion and fierceness, bringing with it on all sides and
+leaving behind it, when over, the deep sense of wrong. It is no history
+of a mere intellectual movement, or of a passage from strong belief to
+a weakened and impaired one, to uncertainty, or vagueness, or
+indifference; it is not the account of a change by a man who is half
+sorry for his change, and speaks less hostilely of what he has left
+because he feels less friendly towards what he has joined. There is no
+reserved thought to be discerned in the background of disappointment or
+a wish to go back again to where he once was. It is a book which
+describes how a man, zealous and impatient for truth, thought he had
+found it in one Church, then thought that his finding was a delusion,
+and sought for it and believed he had gained it in another. What it
+shows us is no serene readjustment of abstract doctrines, but the wreck
+and overturning of trust and conviction and the practical grounds of
+life, accompanied with everything to provoke, embitter, and exasperate.
+It need not be said that what Dr. Newman holds he is ready to carry out
+to the end, or that he can speak severely of men and systems.
+
+Let all this be remembered, and also that there is an opposition
+between what he was and what he is, which is usually viewed as
+irreconcilable, and which, on the ordinary assumptions about it, is so;
+and we venture to say that there is not another instance to be quoted,
+of the history of a conversion, in which he who tells his conversion
+has so retained his self-possession, his temper, his mastery over his
+own real judgment and thoughts, his ancient and legitimate sympathies,
+his superiority to the natural and inevitable temptations of so altered
+a position; which is so generous to what he feels to be strong and good
+in what he has nevertheless abandoned, so fearless about letting his
+whole case come out, so careless about putting himself in the right in
+detail; which is so calm, and kindly, and measured, with such a quiet
+effortless freedom from the stings of old conflicts, which bears so few
+traces of that bitterness and antipathy which generally--and we need
+hardly wonder at it--follows the decisive breaking with that on which a
+man's heart was stayed, and for which he would once have died.
+
+There is another thing to be said, and we venture to say it out
+plainly, because Dr. Newman himself has shown that he knows quite well
+what he has been doing. While he has written what will command the
+sympathy and the reverence of every one, however irreconcilably opposed
+to him, to whom a great and noble aim and the trials of a desperate and
+self-sacrificing struggle to compass it are objects of admiration and
+honour, it is undeniable that ill-nature or vindictiveness or stupidity
+will find ample materials of his own providing to turn against him.
+Those who know Dr. Newman's powers and are acquainted with his career,
+and know to what it led him, and yet persist in the charge of
+insincerity and dishonesty against one who probably has made the
+greatest sacrifice of our generation to his convictions of truth, will
+be able to pick up from his own narrative much that they would not
+otherwise have known, to confirm and point the old familiar views
+cherished by dislike or narrowness. This is inevitable when a man takes
+the resolution of laying himself open so unreservedly, and with so
+little care as to what his readers think of what he tells them, so that
+they will be persuaded that he was ever, even from his boyhood, deeply
+conscious of the part which he was performing in the sight of his
+Maker. Those who smile at the belief of a deep and religious mind in
+the mysterious interventions and indications of Providence in the
+guidance of human life, will open their eyes at the feeling which leads
+him to tell the story of his earliest recollections of Roman Catholic
+peculiarities, and of the cross imprinted on his exercise-book. Those
+who think that everything about religion and their own view of religion
+is such plain sailing, so palpable and manifest, that all who are not
+fools or knaves must be of their own opinion, will find plenty to
+wonder at in the confessions of awful perplexity which equally before
+and after his change Dr. Newman makes. Those who have never doubted,
+who can no more imagine the practical difficulties accompanying a great
+change of belief than they can imagine a change of belief itself, will
+meet with much that to them will seem beyond pardon, in the actual
+events of a change, involving such issues and such interests, made so
+deliberately and cautiously, with such hesitation and reluctance, and
+in so long a time; they will be able to point to many moments in it
+when it will be easy to say that more or less ought to have been said,
+more or less ought to have been done. Much more will those who are on
+the side of doubt, who acquiesce in, or who desire the overthrow of
+existing hopes and beliefs, rejoice in such a frank avowal of the
+difficulties of religion and the perplexities of so earnest a believer,
+and make much of their having driven such a man to an alternative so
+obnoxious and so monstrous to most Englishmen. It is a book full of
+minor premisses, to which many opposite majors will be fitted. But
+whatever may be thought of many details, the effect and lesson of the
+whole will not be lost on minds of any generosity, on whatever side
+they may be; they will be touched with the confiding nobleness which
+has kept back nothing, which has stated its case with its weak points
+and its strong, and with full consciousness of what was weak as well as
+of what was strong, which has surrendered its whole course of conduct,
+just as it has been, to be scrutinised, canvassed, and judged. What we
+carry away from following such a history is something far higher and
+more solemn than any controversial inferences; and it seems almost like
+a desecration to make, as we say, capital out of it, to strengthen mere
+argument, to confirm a theory, or to damage an opponent.
+
+The truth, in fact, is, that the interest is personal much more than
+controversial. Those who read it as a whole, and try to grasp the
+effect of all its portions compared together and gathered into one,
+will, it seems to us, find it hard to bend into a decisive triumph for
+any of the great antagonist systems which appear in collision. There
+can be no doubt of the perfect conviction with which Dr. Newman has
+taken his side for good. But while he states the effect of arguments on
+his own mind, he leaves the arguments in themselves as they were, and
+touches on them, not for the sake of what they are worth, but to
+explain the movements and events of his own course. Not from any
+studied impartiality, which is foreign to his character, but from his
+strong and keen sense of what is real and his determined efforts to
+bring it out, he avoids the temptation--as it seems to us, who still
+believe that he was more right once than he is now--to do injustice to
+his former self and his former position. At any rate, the arguments to
+be drawn from this narrative, for or against England, or for or against
+Rome, seem to us very evenly balanced. Of course, such a history has
+its moral. But the moral is not the ordinary vulgar one of the history
+of a religious change. It is not the supplement or disguise of a
+polemical argument. It is the deep want and necessity in our age of the
+Church, even to the most intensely religious and devoted minds, of a
+sound and secure intellectual basis for the faith which they value more
+than life and all things. We hope that we are strong enough to afford
+to judge fairly of such a spectacle, and to lay to heart its warnings,
+even though the particular results seem to go against what we think
+most right. It is a mortification and a trial to the English Church to
+have seen her finest mind carried away and lost to her, but it is a
+mortification which more confident and peremptory systems than hers
+have had to undergo; the parting was not without its compensations if
+only that it brought home so keenly to many the awfulness and the
+seriousness of truth; and surely never did any man break so utterly
+with a Church, who left so many sympathies behind him and took so many
+with him, who continued to feel so kindly and with such large-hearted
+justice to those from whom his changed position separated him in this
+world for ever.
+
+The _Apologia_ is the history of a great battle against Liberalism,
+understanding by Liberalism the tendencies of modern thought to destroy
+the basis of revealed religion, and ultimately of all that can be
+called religion at all. The question which he professedly addresses
+himself to set at rest, that of his honesty, is comparatively of slight
+concern to those who knew him, except so far that they must be
+interested that others, who did not know him, should not be led to do a
+revolting injustice. The real interest is to see how one who felt so
+keenly the claims both of what is new and what is old, who, with such
+deep and unusual love and trust for antiquity, took in with quick
+sympathy, and in its most subtle and most redoubtable shapes, the
+intellectual movement of modern times, could continue to feel the force
+of both, and how he would attempt to harmonise them. Two things are
+prominent in the whole history. One is the fact of religion, early and
+deeply implanted in the writer's mind, absorbing and governing it
+without rival throughout. He speaks of an "inward conversion" at the
+age of fifteen, "of which I was conscious, and of which I am still more
+certain than that I have hands and feet." It was the religion of dogma
+and of a definite creed which made him "rest in the thought of two, and
+two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my
+Creator"--which completed itself with the idea of a visible Church and
+its sacramental system. Religion, in this aspect of it, runs unchanged
+from end to end of the scene of change:--
+
+    I have changed in many things; in this I have not. From the age of
+    fifteen dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I
+    know no other religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other
+    sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream
+    and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without the fact
+    of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being. What
+    I held in 1816 I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. Please God I
+    shall hold it to the end. Even when I was under Dr. Whately's
+    influence I had no temptation to be less zealous for the dogmas of
+    the faith.
+
+The other thing is the haunting necessity, in an age of thought and
+innovation, of a philosophy of religion, equally deep, equally
+comprehensive and thorough, with the invading powers which it was
+wanted to counteract; a philosophy, not on paper or in theory, but
+answering to and vouched for by the facts of real life. In the English
+Church he found, we think that we may venture to say, the religion
+which to him was life, but not the philosophy which he wanted. The
+_Apologia_ is the narrative of his search for it. Two strongly marked
+lines of thought are traceable all through, one modern in its scope and
+sphere, the other ancient. The leading subject of his modern thought is
+the contest with liberal unbelief; contrasted with this was his strong
+interest in Christian antiquity, his deep attachment to the creed, the
+history, and the moral temper of the early Church. The one line of
+thought made him, and even now makes him, sympathise with Anglicanism,
+which is in the same boat with him, holds the same principle of the
+unity and continuity of revealed truth, and is doing the same work,
+though, as he came to think in the end, feebly and hopelessly. The
+other, more and more, carried him away from Anglicanism; and the
+contrast and opposition between it and the ancient Church, in
+organisation, in usage, and in that general tone of feeling which
+quickens and gives significance and expression to forms, overpowered
+more and more the sense of affinity, derived from the identity of
+creeds and sacraments and leading points of Church polity, and from the
+success with which the best and greatest Anglican writers had
+appropriated and assimilated the theology of the Fathers. But though he
+urges the force of ecclesiastical precedents in a startling way, as in
+the account which he gives of the effect of the history of the
+Monophysites on his view of the tenableness of the Anglican theory,
+absolutely putting out of consideration the enormous difference of
+circumstances between the cases which are compared, and giving the
+instance in question a force and importance which seem to be in
+singular contrast with the general breadth and largeness of his
+reasoning, it was not the halting of an ecclesiastical theory which
+dissatisfied him with the English Church.
+
+Anglicanism was not daring enough for him. With his ideas of the coming
+dangers and conflicts, he wanted something bold and thoroughgoing,
+wide-reaching in its aims, resolute in its language, claiming and
+venturing much. Anglicanism was not that. It had given up as
+impracticable much that the Church had once attempted. It did not
+pretend to rise so high, to answer such great questions, to lay down
+such precise definitions. Wisely modest, or timidly uncertain--mindful
+of the unalterable limits of our human condition, _we_ say; forgetful,
+_he_ thought, or doubting, or distrustful, of the gifts and promises of
+a supernatural dispensation--it certainly gave no such complete and
+decisive account of the condition and difficulties of religion and the
+world, as had been done once, and as there were some who did still.
+There were problems which it did not profess to solve; there were
+assertions which others boldly risked, and which it shrunk from making;
+there were demands which it ventured not to put forward. Again, it was
+not refined enough for him; it had little taste for the higher forms of
+the saintly ideal; it wanted the austere and high-strung-virtues; it
+was contented, for the most part, with the domestic type of excellence,
+in which goodness merged itself in the interests and business of the
+common world, and, working in them, took no care to disengage itself or
+mark itself off, as something distinct from them and above them. Above
+all, Anglicanism was too limited; it was local, insular, national; its
+theory was made for its special circumstances; and he describes in a
+remarkable passage how, in contrast with this, there rung in his ears
+continually the proud self-assertion of the other side, _Securus
+judicat orbis terrarum_. What he wanted, what it was the aim of his
+life to find, was a great and effective engine against Liberalism; for
+years he tried, with eager but failing hope, to find it in the theology
+and working of the English Church; when he made up his mind that
+Anglicanism was not strong enough for the task, he left it for a system
+which had one strong power; which claimed to be able to shut up
+dangerous thought.
+
+Very sorrowful, indeed, is the history, told so openly, so simply, so
+touchingly, of the once promising advance, of the great breakdown. And
+yet, to those who still cling to what he left, regret is not the only
+feeling. For he has the nobleness and the generosity to say what he
+_did_ find in the English Church, as well as what he did not find. He
+has given her up for good, but he tells and he shows, with no grudging
+frankness, what are the fruits of her discipline. "So I went on for
+years, up to 1841. It was, in a human point of view, the happiest time
+of my life.... I did not suppose that such sunshine would last, though I
+knew not what would be its termination. It was the time of plenty, and
+during its seven years I tried to lay up as much as I could for the
+dearth which was to follow it." He explains and defends what to us seem
+the fatal marks against Rome; but he lets us see with what force, and
+for how long, they kept alive his own resistance to an attraction which
+to him was so overwhelming. And he is at no pains to conceal--it seems
+even to console him to show--what a pang and wrench it cost him to
+break from that home under whose shadow his spiritual growth had
+increased. He has condemned us unreservedly; but there must, at any
+rate, be some wonderful power and charm about that which he loved with
+a love which is not yet extinguished; else how could he write of the
+past as he does? He has shown that he can understand, though he is
+unable to approve, that others should feel that power still.
+
+Dr. Newman has stated, with his accustomed force and philosophical
+refinement, what he considers the true idea of that infallibility,
+which he looks upon as the only power in the world which can make head
+against and balance Liberalism--which "can withstand and baffle the
+fierce energy of passion, and the all-corroding, all-dissolving
+scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries;" which he considers
+"as a provision, adapted by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve
+religion in the world, and to restrain that freedom of thought which is
+one of the greatest of our natural gifts, from its own suicidal
+excesses." He says, as indeed is true, that it is "a tremendous power,"
+though he argues that, in fact, its use is most wisely and beneficially
+limited. And doubtless, whatever the difficulty of its proof may be,
+and to us this proof seems simply beyond possibility, it is no mere
+power upon paper. It acts and leaves its mark; it binds fast and
+overthrows for good. But when, put at its highest, it is confronted
+with the "giant evil" which it is supposed to be sent into the world to
+repel, we can only say that, to a looker-on, its failure seems as
+manifest as the existence of the claim to use it. It no more does its
+work, in the sense of _succeeding_ and triumphing, than the less
+magnificent "Establishments" do. It keeps _some_ check--it fails on a
+large scale and against the real strain and pinch of the mischief; and
+they, too, keep _some_ check, and are not more fairly beaten than it
+is, in "making a stand against the wild living intellect of man."
+
+Without infallibility, it is said, men will turn freethinkers and
+heretics; but don't they, _with_ it? and what is the good of the engine
+if it will not do its work? And if it is said that this is the fault of
+human nature, which resists what provokes and checks it, still that
+very thing, which infallibility was intended to counteract, goes on
+equally, whether it comes into play or not. Meanwhile, truth does stay
+in the world, the truth that there has been among us a Divine Person,
+of whom the Church throughout Christendom is the representative,
+memorial, and the repeater of His message; doubtless, the means of
+knowledge are really guarded; yet we seem to receive that message as we
+receive the witness of moral truth; and it would not be contrary to the
+analogy of things here if we had often got to it at last through
+mistakes. But when it is reached, there it is, strong in its own power;
+and it is difficult to think that if it is not strong enough in itself
+to stand, it can be protected by a claim of infallibility. A future, of
+which infallibility is the only hope and safeguard, seems to us indeed
+a prospect of the deepest gloom.
+
+Dr. Newman, in a very remarkable passage, describes the look and
+attitude of invading Liberalism, and tells us why he is not forward in
+the conflict. "It seemed to be a time of all others in which Christians
+had a call to be patient, in which they had no other way of helping
+those who were alarmed than that of exhorting them to have a little
+faith and fortitude, and 'to beware,' as the poet says, 'of dangerous
+steps.'" And he interprets "recent acts of the highest Catholic
+authority" as meaning that there is nothing to do just now but to sit
+still and trust. Well; but the _Christian Year_ will do that much for
+us, just as well.
+
+People who talk glibly of the fearless pursuit of truth may here see a
+real example of a life given to it--an example all the more solemn and
+impressive if they think that the pursuit was in vain. It is easy to
+declaim about it, and to be eloquent about lies and sophistries; but it
+is shallow to forget that truth has its difficulties. To hear some
+people talk, it might be thought that truth was a thing to be made out
+and expressed at will, under any circumstances, at any time, amid any
+complexities of facts or principles, by half an hour's choosing to be
+attentive, candid, logical, and resolute; as if there was not a chance
+of losing what perhaps you have, as well as of gaining what you think
+you need. If they would look about them, if they would look into
+themselves, they would recognise that Truth is an awful and formidable
+goddess to all men and to all systems; that all have their weak points
+where virtually, more or less consciously, more or less dexterously,
+they shrink from meeting her eye; that even when we make sacrifice of
+everything for her sake, we find that she still encounters us with
+claims, seemingly inconsistent with all that she has forced us to
+embrace--with appearances which not only convict us of mistake, but
+seem to oblige us to be tolerant of what we cannot really assent to.
+
+She gives herself freely to the earnest and true-hearted inquirer; but
+to those who presume on the easiness of her service, she has a side of
+strong irony. You common-sense men, she seems to say, who see no
+difficulties in the world, you little know on what shaky ground you
+stand, and how easily you might be reduced to absurdity. You critical
+and logical intellects, who silence all comers and cannot be answered,
+and can show everybody to be in the wrong--into what monstrous and
+manifest paradoxes are you not betrayed, blind to the humble facts
+which upset your generalisations, not even seeing that dulness itself
+can pronounce you mistaken!
+
+In the presence of such a narrative as this, sober men will think more
+seriously than ever about charging their most extreme opponents with
+dishonesty and disregard to truth.
+
+As we said before, this history seems to us to leave the theological
+question just where it was. The objections to Rome, which Dr. Newman
+felt so strongly once, but which yielded to other considerations, we
+feel as strongly still. The substantial points of the English theory,
+which broke down to his mind, seem to us as substantial and trustworthy
+as before. He failed, but we believe that, in spite of everything,
+England is the better for his having made his trial. Even Liberalism
+owes to the movement of which he was the soul much of what makes it now
+such a contrast, in largeness of mind and warmth, to the dry,
+repulsive, narrow, material Liberalism of the Reform era. He, and he
+mainly, has been the source, often unrecognised and unsuspected, of
+depth and richness and beauty, and the strong passion for what is
+genuine and real, in our religious teaching. Other men, other
+preachers, have taken up his thoughts and decked them out, and had the
+credit of being greater than their master.
+
+In looking back on the various turns and vicissitudes of his English
+course, we, who inherit the fruits of that glorious failure, should
+speak respectfully and considerately where we do not agree with him,
+and with deep gratitude--all the more that now so much lies between
+us--where we do. But the review makes us feel more than ever that the
+English Church, whose sturdy strength he underrated, and whose
+irregular theories provoked him, was fully worthy of the interest and
+the labours of the leader who despaired of her. Anglicanism has so far
+outlived its revolutions, early and late ones, has marched on in a
+distinct path, has developed a theology, has consolidated an
+organisation, has formed a character and tone, has been the organ of a
+living spirit. The "magnetic storms" of thought which sweep over the
+world may be destructive and dangerous to it, as much as, but not more
+than, to other bodies which claim to be Churches and to represent the
+message of God. But there is nothing to make us think that, in the
+trials which may be in store, the English Church will fail while others
+hold their own.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+DR. NEWMAN ON THE "EIRENICON"[31]
+
+
+  [31]
+  _The Times_, 31st March 1866.
+
+Dr. Pusey's Appeal has received more than one answer. These answers,
+from the Roman Catholic side, are--what it was plain that they would
+be--assurances to him that he looks at the question from an entirely
+mistaken point of view; that it is, of course, very right and good of
+him to wish for peace and union, but that there is only one way of
+peace and union--unconditional submission. He may have peace and union
+for himself at any moment, if he will; so may the English Church, or
+the Greek Church, or any other religious body, organised or
+unorganised.
+
+The way is always open; there is no need to write long books or make
+elaborate proposals about union. Union means becoming Catholic;
+becoming Catholic means acknowledging the exclusive claims of the Pope
+or the Roman Church. In the long controversy one party has never for an
+instant wavered in the assertion that it could not, and never would, be
+in the wrong. The way to close the controversy, and the only one, is to
+admit that Dr. Pusey shall have any amount of assurance and proof that
+the Roman position and Roman doctrine and practice are the right ones.
+
+His misapprehensions shall be corrected; his ignorance of what is Roman
+theology fully, and at any length, enlightened. There is no desire to
+shrink from the fullest and most patient argument in its favour, and he
+may call it, if he likes, explanation. But there is only one practical
+issue to what he has proposed--not to stand bargaining for impossible
+conditions, but thankfully and humbly to join himself to the true
+Church while he may. It is only the way in which the answer is given
+that varies. Here characteristic differences appear. The authorities of
+the Roman Catholic Church swell out to increased magnificence, and
+nothing can exceed the suavity and the compassionate scorn with which
+they point out the transparent absurdity and the audacity of such
+proposals. The Holy Office at Rome has not, it may be, yet heard of Dr.
+Pusey; it may regret, perhaps, that it did not wait for so
+distinguished a mark for its censure; but its attention has been drawn
+to some smaller offenders of the same way of thinking, and it has been
+induced to open all the floodgates of its sonorous and antiquated
+verbiage to sweep away and annihilate a poor little London
+periodical--"_ephemeridem cui titulus, 'The Union Review_.'" The
+Archbishop of Westminster, not deigning to name Dr. Pusey, has seized
+the opportunity to reiterate emphatically, in stately periods and with
+a polished sarcasm, his boundless contempt for the foolish people who
+dare to come "with swords wreathed in myrtle" between the Catholic
+Church and "her mission to the great people of England." On the other
+hand, there have been not a few Roman Catholics who have listened with
+interest and sympathy to what Dr. Pusey had to say, and, though
+obviously they had but one answer to give, have given it with a sense
+of the real condition and history of the Christian world, and with the
+respect due to a serious attempt to look evils in the face. But there
+is only one person on the Roman Catholic side whose reflections on the
+subject English readers in general would much care to know. Anybody
+could tell beforehand what Archbishop Manning would say; but people
+could not feel so certain what Dr. Newman might say.
+
+Dr. Newman has given his answer; and his answer is, of course, in
+effect the same as that of the rest of his co-religionists. He offers
+not the faintest encouragement to Dr. Pusey's sanguine hopes. If it is
+possible to conceive that one side could move in the matter, it is
+absolutely certain that the other would be inflexible. Any such dealing
+on equal terms with the heresy and schism of centuries is not to be
+thought of; no one need affect surprise at the refusal. What Dr. Pusey
+asks is, in fact, to pull the foundation out from under the whole
+structure of Roman Catholic pretensions. Dr. Newman does not waste
+words to show that the plan of the _Eirenicon_ is impossible. He
+evidently assumes that it is so, and we agree with him. But there are
+different ways of dispelling a generous dream, and telling a serious
+man who is in earnest that he is mistaken. Dr. Newman does justice, as
+he ought to do, to feelings and views which none can enter into better
+than he, whatever he may think of them now. He does justice to the
+understanding and honesty, as well as the high aims, of an old friend,
+once his comrade in difficult and trying times, though now long parted
+from him by profound differences, and to the motives which prompted so
+venturous an attempt as the _Eirenicon_ to provoke public discussion on
+the reunion of Christendom. He is capable of measuring the real state
+of the facts, and the mischiefs and evils for which a remedy is wanted,
+by a more living rule than the suppositions and consequences of a
+cut-and-dried theory. Rightly or wrongly he argues--at least, he gives
+us something to think of. Perhaps not the least of his merit is that he
+writes simply and easily in choice and varied English, instead of
+pompously ringing the changes on a set of _formulae_ which beg the
+question, and dinning into our ears the most extravagant assertions of
+foreign ecclesiastical arrogance. We may not always think him fair, or
+a sound reasoner, but he is conciliatory, temperate, and often
+fearlessly candid. He addresses readers who will challenge and examine
+what he says, not those whose minds are cowed and beaten down before
+audacity in proportion to its coolness, and whom paradox, the more
+extreme the better, fascinates and drags captive. To his old friend he
+is courteous, respectful, sympathetic; where the occasion makes it
+fitting, affectionate, even playful, as men are who can afford to let
+their real feelings come out, and have not to keep up appearances.
+Unflinching he is in maintaining his present position as the upholder
+of the exclusive claims of the Roman Church to represent the Catholic
+Church of the Creeds; but he has the good sense and good feeling to
+remember that he once shared the views of those whom he now
+controverts, and that their present feelings about the divisions of
+Christendom were once his own. Such language as the following is plain,
+intelligible, and manly. Of course, he has his own position, and must
+see things according to it. But he recognises the right of conscience
+in those who, having gone a long way with him, find that they can go no
+further, and he pays a compliment, becoming as from himself, and not
+without foundation in fact, to the singular influence which, from
+whatever cause, Dr. Pusey's position gives him, and which, we may add,
+imposes on him, in more ways than one, very grave responsibilities:--
+
+    You, more than any one else alive, have been the present and
+    untiring agent by whom a great work has been effected in it; and,
+    far more than is usual, you have received in your lifetime, as
+    well as merited, the confidence of your brethren. You cannot speak
+    merely for yourself; your antecedents, your existing influence,
+    are a pledge to us that what you may determine will be the
+    determination of a multitude. Numbers, too, for whom you cannot
+    properly be said to speak, will be moved by your authority or your
+    arguments; and numbers, again, who are of a school more recent
+    than your own, and who are only not your followers because they
+    have outstripped you in their free speeches and demonstrative acts
+    in our behalf, will, for the occasion, accept you as their
+    spokesman. There is no one anywhere--among ourselves, in your own
+    body, or, I suppose, in the Greek Church--who can affect so vast a
+    circle of men, so virtuous, so able, so learned, so zealous, as
+    come, more or less, under your influence; and I cannot pay them
+    all a greater compliment than to tell them they ought all to be
+    Catholics, nor do them a more affectionate service than to pray
+    that they may one day become such....
+
+    I recollect well what an outcast I seemed to myself when I took
+    down from the shelves of my library the volumes of St. Athanasius
+    or St. Basil, and set myself to study them; and how, on the
+    contrary, when at length I was brought into Catholicism, I kissed
+    them with delight, with a feeling that in them I had more than all
+    that I had lost, and, as though I were directly addressing the
+    glorious saints who bequeathed them to the Church, I said to the
+    inanimate pages, "You are now mine, and I am now yours, beyond any
+    mistake." Such, I conceive, would be the joy of the persons I
+    speak of if they could wake up one morning and find themselves
+    possessed by right of Catholic traditions and hopes, without
+    violence to their own sense of duty; and certainly I am the last
+    man to say that such violence is in any case lawful, that the
+    claims of conscience are not paramount, or that any one may
+    overleap what he deliberately holds to be God's command, in order
+    to make his path easier for him or his heart lighter.
+
+    I am the last man to quarrel with this jealous deference to the
+    voice of our conscience, whatever judgment others may form of us
+    in consequence, for this reason, because their case, as it at
+    present stands, has as you know been my own. You recollect well
+    what hard things were said against us twenty-five years ago which
+    we knew in our hearts we did not deserve. Hence, I am now in the
+    position of the fugitive Queen in the well-known passage, who,
+    "_haud ignara mali_" herself, had learned to sympathise with those
+    who were inheritors of her past wanderings.
+
+Dr. Newman's hopes, and what most of his countrymen consider the hopes
+of truth and religion, are not the same. His wish is, of course, that
+his friend should follow him; a wish in which there is not the
+slightest reason to think that he will be gratified. But differently as
+we must feel as to the result, we cannot help sharing the evident
+amusement with which Dr. Newman recalls a few of the compliments which
+were lavished on him by some of his present co-religionists when he was
+trying to do them justice, and was even on the way to join them. He
+reprints with sly and mischievous exactness a string of those glib
+phrases of controversial dislike and suspicion which are common to all
+parties, and which were applied to him by "priests, good men, whose
+zeal outstripped their knowledge, and who in consequence spoke
+confidently, when they would have been wiser had they suspended their
+adverse judgment of those whom they were soon to welcome as brothers in
+communion." It is a trifle, but it strikes us as characteristic. Dr.
+Newman is one of the very few who have carried into his present
+communion, to a certain degree at least, an English habit of not
+letting off the blunders and follies of his own side, and of daring to
+think that a cause is better served by outspoken independence of
+judgment than by fulsome, unmitigated puffing. It might be well if even
+in him there were a little more of this habit. But, so far as it goes,
+it is the difference between him and most of those who are leaders on
+his side. Indirectly he warns eager controversialists that they are not
+always the wisest and the most judicious and far-seeing of men; and we
+cannot quarrel with him, however little we may like the occasion, for
+the entertainment which he feels in inflicting on his present brethren
+what they once judged and said of him, and in reminding them that their
+proficiency in polemical rhetoric did not save them from betraying the
+shallowness of their estimate and the shortness of their foresight.
+
+When he comes to discuss the _Eirenicon_, Dr. Newman begins with a
+complaint which seems to us altogether unreasonable. He seems to think
+it hard that Dr. Pusey should talk of peace and reunion, and yet speak
+so strongly of what he considers the great corruptions of the Roman
+Church. In ordinary controversy, says Dr. Newman, we know what we are
+about and what to expect; "'_Caedimur, et totidem plagis consumimus
+hostem_.' We give you a sharp cut and you return it.... But we at least
+have not professed to be composing an _Eirenicon_, when we treated you
+as foes." Like Archbishop Manning, Dr. Newman is reminded "of the sword
+wreathed in myrtle;" but Dr. Pusey, he says, has improved on the
+ancient device,--"Excuse me, you discharge your olive-branch as if from
+a catapult."
+
+This is, no doubt, exactly what Dr. Pusey has done. Going much further
+than the great majority of his countrymen will go with him in
+admissions in favour of the Roman Catholic Church, he has pointed out
+with a distinctness and force, never, perhaps, exceeded, what is the
+impassable barrier which, as long as it lasts, makes every hope of
+union idle. The practical argument against Rome is stated by him in a
+shape which comes home to the consciences of all, whatever their
+theological training and leanings, who have been brought up in English
+ways and ideas of religion. But why should he not? He is desirous of
+union--the reunion of the whole of Christendom. He gives full credit to
+the Roman communion--much more credit than most of his brethren think
+him justified in giving--for what is either defensible or excellent in
+it. Dr. Newman must be perfectly aware that Dr. Pusey has gone to the
+very outside of what our public feeling in England will bear in favour
+of efforts for reconciliation, and he nowhere shows any sign that he is
+thinking of unconditional submission. How, then, can he be expected to
+mince matters and speak smoothly when he comes to what he regards as
+the real knot of the difficulty, the real and fatal bar to all
+possibility of a mutual understanding? If his charges are untrue or
+exaggerated in detail or colouring, that is another matter; but the
+whole of his pleading for peace presupposes that there are great and
+serious obstacles to it in what is practically taught and authorised in
+the Roman Church; and it is rather hard to blame him for "not making
+the best of things," and raising difficulties in the way of the very
+object which he seeks, because he states the truth about these
+obstacles. We are afraid that we must be of Dr. Newman's opinion that
+the _Eirenicon_ is not calculated to lead, in our time at least, to
+what it aims at--the reunion of Christendom; but this arises from the
+real obstacles themselves, not from Dr. Pusey's way of stating them.
+There may be no way to peace, but surely if there is, though it implies
+giving full weight to your sympathies, and to the points on which you
+may give way, it also involves the possibility of speaking out plainly,
+and also of being listened to, on the points on which you really
+disagree. Does Dr. Newman think that all Dr. Pusey felt he had to do
+was to conciliate Roman Catholics? Does it follow, because objections
+are intemperately and unfairly urged on the Protestant side, that
+therefore they are not felt quite as much in earnest by sober and
+tolerant people, and that they may not be stated in their real force
+without giving occasion for the remark that this is reviving the old
+cruel war against Rome, and rekindling a fierce style of polemics which
+is now out of date? And how is Dr. Pusey to state these objections if,
+when he goes into them, not in a vague declamatory way, but showing his
+respect and seriousness by his guarded and full and definite manner of
+proof, he is to be met by the charge that he does not show sufficient
+consideration? All this may be a reason for thinking it vain to write
+an Eirenicon at all. But if one is to be attempted, it certainly will
+not do to make it a book of compliments. Its first condition is that if
+it makes light of lesser difficulties it should speak plainly about
+greater ones.
+
+But this is, after all, a matter of feeling. No doubt, as Dr. Newman
+says, people are not pleased or conciliated by elaborate proofs that
+they are guilty of something very wrong or foolish. What is of more
+interest is to know the effect on a man like Dr. Newman of such a
+display of the prevailing tendency of religious thought and devotion in
+his communion as Dr. Pusey has given from Roman Catholic writers. And
+it is plain that, whoever else is satisfied with them, these tendencies
+are not entirely satisfactory to Dr. Newman. That rage for foreign
+ideas and foreign usages which has come over a section of his friends,
+the loudest and perhaps the ablest section of them, has no charms for
+him. He asserts resolutely and rather sternly his right to have an
+opinion of his own, and declines to commit himself, or to allow that
+his cause is committed, to a school of teaching which happens for the
+moment to have the talk to itself; and he endeavours at great length to
+present a view of the teaching of his Church which shall be free, if
+not from all Dr. Pusey's objections, yet from a certain number of them,
+which to Dr. Newman himself appear grave. After disclaiming or
+correcting certain alleged admissions of his own, on which Dr. Pusey
+had placed a construction too favourable to the Anglican Church, Dr.
+Newman comes to a passage which seems to rouse him. A convert, says Dr.
+Pusey, must take things as he finds them in his new communion, and it
+would be unbecoming in him to criticise. This statement gives Dr.
+Newman the opportunity of saying that, except with large qualifications,
+he does not accept it for himself. Of course, he says, there are
+considerations of modesty, of becomingness, of regard to the feelings
+of others with equal or greater claims than himself, which bind a
+convert as they bind any one who has just gained admission into a
+society of his fellow men. He has no business "to pick and choose," and
+to set himself up as a judge of everything in his new position. But
+though every man of sense who thought he had reason for so great a
+change would be generous and loyal in accepting his new religion as a
+whole, in time he comes "to have a right to speak as well as to hear;"
+and for this right, both generally and in his own case, he stands up
+very resolutely:--
+
+    Also, in course of time a new generation rises round him, and
+    there is no reason why he should not know as much, and decide
+    questions with as true an instinct, as those who perhaps number
+    fewer years than he does Easter communions. He has mastered the
+    fact and the nature of the differences of theologian from
+    theologian, school from school, nation from nation, era from era.
+    He knows that there is much of what may be called fashion in
+    opinions and practices, according to the circumstances of time and
+    place, according to current politics, the character of the Pope of
+    the day, or the chief Prelates of a particular country; and that
+    fashions change. His experience tells him that sometimes what is
+    denounced in one place as a great offence, or preached up as a
+    first principle, has in another nation been immemorially regarded
+    in just a contrary sense, or has made no sensation at all, one way
+    or the other, when brought before public opinion; and that loud
+    talkers, in the Church as elsewhere, are apt to carry all before
+    them, while quiet and conscientious persons commonly have to give
+    way. He perceives that, in matters which happen to be in debate,
+    ecclesiastical authority watches the state of opinion and the
+    direction and course of controversy, and decides accordingly; so
+    that in certain cases to keep back his own judgment on a point is
+    to be disloyal to his superiors.
+
+    So far generally; now in particular as to myself. After twenty
+    years of Catholic life, I feel no delicacy in giving my opinion on
+    any point when there is a call for me,--and the only reason why I
+    have not done so sooner or more often than I have, is that there
+    has been no call. I have now reluctantly come to the conclusion
+    that your Volume _is_ a call. Certainly, in many instances in
+    which theologian differs from theologian, and country from
+    country, I have a definite judgment of my own; I can say so
+    without offence to any one, for the very reason that from the
+    nature of the case it is impossible to agree with all of them. I
+    prefer English habits of belief and devotion to foreign, from the
+    same causes, and by the same right, which justifies foreigners in
+    preferring their own. In following those of my people, I show less
+    singularity, and create less disturbance than if I made a flourish
+    with what is novel and exotic. And in this line of conduct I am
+    but availing myself of the teaching which I fell in with on
+    becoming a Catholic; and it is a pleasure to me to think that what
+    I hold now, and would transmit after me if I could, is only what I
+    received then.
+
+He observes that when he first joined the Roman Catholic Church the
+utmost delicacy was observed in giving him advice; and the only warning
+which he can recollect was from the Vicar-General of the London
+district, who cautioned him against books of devotion of the Italian
+school, which were then just coming into England, and recommended him
+to get, as safe guides, the works of Bishop Hay. Bishop Hay's name is
+thus, probably for the first time, introduced to the general English
+public. It is difficult to forbear a smile at the great Oxford teacher,
+the master of religious thought and feeling to thousands, being gravely
+set to learn his lesson of a more perfect devotion, how to meditate and
+how to pray, from "the works of Bishop Hay"; it is hardly more easy to
+forbear a smile at his recording it. But Bishop Hay was a sort of
+symbol, and represents, he says, English as opposed to foreign habits
+of thought; and to these English habits he not only gives his
+preference, but he maintains that they are more truly those of the
+whole Roman Catholic body in England than the more showy and extreme
+doctrines of a newer school. Dr. Pusey does wrong, he says, in taking
+this new school as the true exponent of Roman Catholic ideas. That it
+is popular he admits, but its popularity is to be accounted for by
+personal qualifications in its leaders for gaining the ear of the
+world, without supposing that they speak for their body.
+
+    Though I am a convert, then, I think I have a right to speak out;
+    and that the more because other converts have spoken for a long
+    time, while I have not spoken; and with still more reason may I
+    speak without offence in the case of your present criticisms of
+    us, considering that in the charges you bring the only two English
+    writers you quote in evidence are both of them converts, younger
+    in age than myself. I put aside the Archbishop of course, because
+    of his office. These two authors are worthy of all consideration,
+    at once from their character and from their ability. In their
+    respective lines they are perhaps without equals at this
+    particular time; and they deserve the influence they possess. One
+    is still in the vigour of his powers; the other has departed amid
+    the tears of hundreds. It is pleasant to praise them for their
+    real qualifications; but why do you rest on them as authorities?
+    Because the one was "a popular writer"; but is there not
+    sufficient reason for this in the fact of his remarkable gifts, of
+    his poetical fancy, his engaging frankness, his playful wit, his
+    affectionateness, his sensitive piety, without supposing that the
+    wide diffusion of his works arises out of his particular
+    sentiments about the Blessed Virgin? And as to our other friend,
+    do not his energy, acuteness, and theological reading, displayed
+    on the vantage ground of the historic _Dublin Review_, fully
+    account for the sensation he has produced, without supposing that
+    any great number of our body go his lengths in their view of the
+    Pope's infallibility? Our silence as regards their writings is
+    very intelligible; it is not agreeable to protest, in the sight of
+    the world, against the writings of men in our own communion whom
+    we love and respect. But the plain fact is this--they came to the
+    Church, and have thereby saved their souls; but they are in no
+    sense spokesmen for English Catholics, and they must not stand in
+    the place of those who have a real title to such an office.
+
+And he appeals from them, as authorities, to a list of much more sober
+and modest writers, though, it may be, the names of all of them are not
+familiar to the public. He enumerates as the "chief authors of the
+passing generation," "Cardinal Wiseman, Dr. Ullathorne, Dr. Lingard,
+Mr. Tierney, Dr. Oliver, Dr. Rock, Dr. Waterworth, Dr. Husenbeth, Mr.
+Flanagan." If these well-practised and circumspect veterans in the
+ancient controversy are not original and brilliant, at least they are
+safe; and Dr. Newman will not allow the flighty intellectualism which
+takes more hold of modern readers to usurp their place, and for himself
+he sturdily and bluffly declines to give up his old standing-ground for
+any one:--
+
+    I cannot, then, without remonstrance, allow you to identify the
+    doctrine of our Oxford friends in question, on the two subjects I
+    have mentioned, with the present spirit or the prospective creed
+    of Catholics; or to assume, as you do, that because they are
+    thoroughgoing and relentless in their statements, therefore they
+    are the harbingers of a new age, when to show a deference for
+    Antiquity will be thought little else than a mistake. For myself,
+    hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my
+    stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of
+    their time is not yet an old almanac to me. Of course I maintain
+    the value and authority of the "Schola," as one of the _loci
+    theologici_; still I sympathise with Petavius in preferring to its
+    "contentious and subtle theology" that "more elegant and fruitful
+    teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite antiquity."
+    The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down
+    the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder
+    quite as serviceable for that purpose now as it was twenty years
+    ago. Though I hold, as you remark, a process of development in
+    Apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not
+    supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them.
+
+Is he right in saying that he is not responsible as a Roman Catholic
+for the extravagances that Dr. Pusey dwells upon? He is, it seems to
+us, and he is not. No doubt the Roman Catholic system is in practice a
+wide one, and he has a right, which we are glad to see that he is
+disposed to exercise, to maintain the claims of moderation and
+soberness, and to decline to submit his judgment to the fashionable
+theories of the hour. A stand made for independence and good sense
+against the pressure of an exacting and overbearing dogmatism is a good
+thing for everybody, though made in a camp with which we have nothing
+to do. He goes far enough, indeed, as it is. Still, it is something
+that a great writer, of whose genius and religious feeling Englishmen
+will one day be even prouder than they are now, should disconnect
+himself from the extreme follies of his party, and attempt to represent
+what is the nobler and more elevated side of the system to which he has
+attached himself. But it seems to us much more difficult for him to
+release his cause from complicity with the doctrines which he dislikes
+and fears. We have no doubt that he is not alone, and that there are
+numbers of his English brethren who are provoked and ashamed at the
+self-complacent arrogance and childish folly shown in exaggerating and
+caricaturing doctrines which are, in the eyes of most Englishmen,
+extravagant enough in themselves. But the question is whether he or the
+innovators represent the true character and tendencies of their
+religious system. It must be remembered that with a jealous and touchy
+Government, like that of the Roman Church, which professes the duty and
+boasts of the power to put down all dangerous ideas and language, mere
+tolerance means much. Dr. Newman speaks as an Englishman when he writes
+thus:--
+
+    This is specially the case with great ideas. You may stifle them;
+    or you may refuse them elbow-room; or you may torment them with
+    your continual meddling; or you may let them have free course and
+    range, and be content, instead of anticipating their excesses, to
+    expose and restrain those excesses after they have occurred. But
+    you have only this alternative; and for myself, I prefer much,
+    wherever it is possible, to be first generous and then just; to
+    grant full liberty of thought, and to call it to account when
+    abused.
+
+But that has never been the principle of his Church. At least, the
+liberty which it has allowed has been a most one-sided liberty. It has
+been the liberty to go any length in developing the favourite opinions
+about the power of the Pope, or some popular form of devotion; but as
+to other ideas, not so congenial, "great" ones and little ones too, the
+lists of the Roman Index bear witness to the sensitive vigilance which
+took alarm even at remote danger. And those whose pride it is that they
+are ever ready and able to stop all going astray must be held
+responsible for the going astray which they do not stop, especially
+when it coincides with what they wish and like.
+
+But these extreme writers do not dream of tolerance. They stoutly and
+boldly maintain that they but interpret in the only natural and
+consistent manner the mind of their Church; and no public or official
+contradiction meets them. There may be a disapproving opinion in their
+own body, but it does not show itself. The disclaimer of even such a
+man as Dr. Newman is in the highest degree guarded and qualified. They
+are the people who can excite attention and gain a hearing, though it
+be an adverse one. They have the power to make themselves the most
+prominent and accredited representatives of their creed, and, if
+thoroughgoing boldness and ability are apt to attract the growth of
+thought and conviction, they are those who are likely to mould its
+future form. Sober prudent people may prefer the caution of Dr.
+Newman's "chief authors," but to the world outside most of these will
+be little more than names, and the advanced party, which talks most
+strongly about the Pope's infallibility and devotion to St. Mary, has
+this to say for itself. Popular feeling everywhere in the Roman
+communion appears to go with it, and authority both in Rome and in
+England shelters and sanctions it. Nothing can be more clearly and
+forcibly stated than the following assertions of the unimpeachable
+claim of "dominant opinions" in the Roman Catholic system by the
+highest Roman Catholic authority in England. "It is an ill-advised
+overture of peace," writes Archbishop Manning,
+
+    to assail the popular, prevalent, and dominant opinions,
+    devotions, and doctrines of the Catholic Church with hostile
+    criticism.... The presence and assistance of the Holy Ghost, which
+    secures the Church within the sphere of faith and morals, invests
+    it also with instincts and a discernment which preside over its
+    worship and doctrines, its practices and customs. We may be sure
+    that whatever is prevalent in the Church, under the eye of its
+    public authority, practised by the people, and not censured by its
+    pastors, is at least conformable to faith and innocent as to
+    morals. Whosoever rises up to condemn such practices and opinions
+    thereby convicts himself of the private spirit which is the root
+    of heresy. But if it be ill-advised to assail the mind of the
+    Church, it is still more so to oppose its visible Head. There can
+    be no doubt that the Sovereign Pontiff has declared the same
+    opinion as to the temporal power as that which is censured in
+    others, and that he defined the Immaculate Conception, and that he
+    believes in his own infallibility. If these things be our
+    reproach, we share it with the Vicar of Jesus Christ. They are not
+    our private opinions, nor the tenets of a school, but the mind of
+    the Pontiff, as they were of his predecessors, as they will be of
+    those who come after him.--Archbishop Manning's _Pastoral_, pp.
+    64-66, 1866.
+
+To maintain his liberty against extreme opinions generally is one of
+Dr. Newman's objects in writing his letter; the other is to state
+distinctly what he holds and what he does not hold, as regards the
+subject on which Dr. Pusey's appeal has naturally made so deep an
+impression:--
+
+    I do so, because you say, as I myself have said in former years,
+    that "That vast system as to the Blessed Virgin ... to all of us
+    has been the special _crux_ of the Roman system" (p. 101). Here, I
+    say, as on other points, the Fathers are enough for me. I do not
+    wish to say more than they, and will not say less. You, I know,
+    will profess the same; and thus we can join issue on a clear and
+    broad principle, and may hope to come to some intelligible result.
+    We are to have a treatise on the subject of Our Lady soon from the
+    pen of the Most Rev. Prelate; but that cannot interfere with such
+    a mere argument from the Fathers as that to which I shall confine
+    myself here. Nor, indeed, as regards that argument itself, do I
+    profess to be offering you any new matter, any facts which have
+    not been used by others,--by great divines, as Petavius, by living
+    writers, nay, by myself on other occasions. I write afresh,
+    nevertheless, and that for three reasons--first, because I wish to
+    contribute to the accurate statement and the full exposition of
+    the argument in question; next, because I may gain a more patient
+    hearing than has sometimes been granted to better men than myself;
+    lastly, because there just now seems a call on me, under my
+    circumstances, to avow plainly what I do and what I do not hold
+    about the Blessed Virgin, that others may know, did they come to
+    stand where I stand, what they would and what they would not be
+    bound to hold concerning her.
+
+If this "vast system" is a _crux_ to any one, we cannot think that even
+Dr. Newman's explanation will make it easier. He himself recoils, as
+any Englishman of sense and common feeling must, at the wild
+extravagances into which this devotion has run. But he accepts and
+defends, on the most precarious grounds, the whole system of thought
+out of which they have sprung by no very violent process of growth. He
+cannot, of course, stop short of accepting the definition of the
+Immaculate Conception as an article of faith, and, though he
+emphatically condemns, with a warmth and energy of which no one can
+doubt the sincerity, a number of revolting consequences drawn from the
+theology of which that dogma is the expression, he is obliged to defend
+everything up to that. For a professed disciple of the Fathers this is
+not easy. If anything is certain, it is that the place which the
+Blessed Virgin occupies in the Roman Catholic system--popular or
+authoritative, if it is possible fairly to urge such a distinction in a
+system which boasts of all-embracing authority--is something perfectly
+different from anything known in the first four centuries. In all the
+voluminous writings on theology which remain from them we may look in
+vain for any traces of that feeling which finds words in the common
+hymn, "_Ave, marls Stella_" and which makes her fill so large a space
+in the teaching and devotion of the Roman Church. Dr. Newman attempts
+to meet this difficulty by a distinction. The doctrine, he says, was
+there, the same then as now; it is only the feelings, behaviour, and
+usages, the practical consequences naturally springing from the
+doctrine, which have varied or grown:--
+
+    I fully grant that the _devotion_ towards the Blessed Virgin has
+    increased among Catholics with the progress of centuries. I do not
+    allow that the _doctrine_ concerning her has undergone a growth,
+    for I believe it has been in substance one and the same from the
+    beginning.
+
+There is, doubtless, such a distinction, though whether available for
+Dr. Newman's purpose is another matter. But when we recollect that
+modern "doctrine," besides defining the Immaculate Conception, places
+her next in glory to the Throne of God, and makes her the Queen of
+Heaven, and the all-prevailing intercessor with her Son, the assertion
+as to "doctrine" is a bold one. It rests, as it seems to us, simply on
+Dr. Newman identifying his own inferences from the language of the
+ancient writers whom he quotes with the language itself. They say a
+certain thing--that Mary is the "second Eve." Dr. Newman, with all the
+theology and all the controversies of eighteen centuries in his mind,
+deduces from this statement a number of refined consequences as to her
+sinlessness, and greatness, and reward, which seem to him to flow from
+it, and says that it means all these consequences. Mr. Ruskin somewhere
+quotes the language of an "eminent Academician," who remarks, in answer
+to some criticism on a picture, "that if you look for curves, you will
+see curves; and if you look for angles, you will see angles." So it is
+here. The very dogma of the Immaculate Conception itself Dr. Newman
+sees indissolubly involved in the "rudimentary teaching" which insists
+on the parallelism between Eve and Mary:--
+
+    Was not Mary as fully endowed as Eve?... If Eve was (as Bishop
+    Bull and others maintain) raised above human nature by that
+    indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that
+    Mary had a greater grace?... And if Eve had this supernatural
+    inward gift given her from the moment of her personal existence,
+    is it possible to deny that Mary, too, had this gift from the very
+    first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to
+    resist this inference:--well, this is simply and literally the
+    doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I say the doctrine of the
+    Immaculate Conception is in its substance this, and nothing more
+    or less than this (putting aside the question of degrees of
+    grace), and it really does seem to me bound up in that doctrine of
+    the Fathers, that Mary is the second Eve.
+
+It seems obvious to remark that the Fathers are not even alleged to
+have themselves drawn this irresistible inference; and next, that even
+if it be drawn, there is a long interval between it and the elevation
+of the Mother of Jesus Christ to the place to which modern Roman
+doctrine raises her. Possibly, the Fathers might have said, as many
+people will say now, that, in a matter of this kind, it is idle to draw
+inferences when we are, in reality, utterly without the knowledge to
+make them worth anything. At any rate, if they had drawn them, we
+should have found some traces of it in their writings, and we find
+none. We find abundance of poetical addresses and rhetorical
+amplification, which makes it all the more remarkable that the plain
+dogmatic view of her position, which is accepted by the Roman Church,
+does not appear in them. We only find a "rudimentary doctrine," which,
+naturally enough, gives the Blessed Virgin a very high and sacred place
+in the economy of the Incarnation. But how does the doctrine, as it is
+found in even their rhetorical passages, go a step beyond what would be
+accepted by any sober reader of the New Testament? They speak of what
+she was; they do not presume to say what she is. What Protestant could
+have the slightest difficulty in saying not only what Justin says, and
+Tertullian copies from him, and Irenaeus enlarges upon, but what Dr.
+Newman himself says of her awful and solitary dignity, always excepting
+the groundless assumption which, from her office in this world takes
+for granted, first her sinlessness, and then a still higher office in
+the next? We do not think that, as a matter of literary criticism, Dr.
+Newman is fair in his argument from the Fathers. He lays great stress
+on Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Irenaeus, as three independent
+witnesses from different parts of the world; whereas it is obvious that
+Tertullian at any rate copies almost literally from Justin Martyr, and
+it is impossible to compare a mere incidental point of rhetorical, or,
+if it be so, argumentative illustration, occurring once or twice in a
+long treatise, with a doctrine, such as that of the Incarnation itself,
+on which the whole treatise is built, and of which it is full. The
+wonder is, indeed, that the Fathers, considering how much they wrote,
+said so little of her; scarcely less is it a wonder, then, that the New
+Testament says so little, but from this little the only reason which
+would prevent a Protestant reader of the New Testament from accepting
+the highest statement of her historical dignity is the reaction from
+the development of them into the consequences which have been notorious
+for centuries in the unreformed Churches. Protestants, left to
+themselves, are certainly not prone to undervalue the saints of
+Scripture; it has been the presence of the great system of popular
+worship confronting them which has tied their tongues in this matter.
+Yet Anglican theologians like Mr. Keble, popular poets like Wordsworth,
+broad Churchmen like Mr. Robertson, have said things which even Roman
+Catholics might quote as expressions of their feeling. But Dr. Newman
+must know that many things may be put, and put most truly, into the
+form of poetical expression which will not bear hardening into a dogma.
+A Protestant may accept and even amplify the ideas suggested by
+Scripture about the Blessed Virgin; but he may feel that he cannot tell
+how the Redeemer was preserved from sinful taint; what was the grace
+bestowed on His mother; or what was the reward and prerogative which
+ensued to her. But it is just these questions which the Roman doctrine
+undertakes to answer without a shadow of doubt, and which Dr. Newman
+implies that the theology of the Fathers answered as unambiguously.
+
+But from what has happened in the history of religion, we do not think
+that Protestants in general who do not shrink from high language about
+Abraham, Moses, or David, would find anything unnatural or
+objectionable in the language of the early Christian writers about the
+Mother of our Lord, though possibly it might not be their own; but the
+interval from this language to that certain knowledge of her present
+office in the economy of grace which is implied in what Dr. Newman
+considers the "doctrine" about her is a very long one. The step to the
+modern "devotion" in its most chastened form is longer still. We cannot
+follow the subtle train of argument which says that because the
+"doctrine" of the second century called her the "second Eve," therefore
+the devotion which sets her upon the altars of Christendom in the
+nineteenth is a right development of the doctrine. What is wanted is
+not the internal thread of the process, but the proof and confirmation
+from without that it was the right process; and this link is just what
+is wanting, except on a supposition which begs the question. It is
+conceivable that this step from "doctrine" to "devotion" may have been
+a mistake. It is conceivable that the "doctrine" may have been held in
+the highest form without leading to the devotion; for Dr. Newman, of
+course, thinks that Athanasius and Augustine held "the doctrine," yet,
+as he says, "we have no proof that Athanasius himself had any special
+devotion to the Blessed Virgin," and in another place he repeats his
+doubts whether St. Chrysostom or St. Athanasius invoked her; "nay," he
+adds, "I should like to know whether St. Augustine, in all his
+voluminous writings, invokes her once." What has to be shown is, that
+this step was not a mistake; that it was inevitable and legitimate.
+
+"This being the faith of the Fathers about the Blessed Virgin," says
+Dr. Newman, "we need not wonder that it should in no long time be
+transmuted into devotion." The Fathers expressed a historical fact
+about her in the term [Greek: Theotokos]; therefore, argues the later
+view, she is the source of our present grace now. It is the _rationale_
+of this inference, which is not an immediate or obvious one, which is
+wanted. And Dr. Newman gives it us in the words of Bishop Butler:--
+
+    Christianity is eminently an objective religion. For the most part
+    it tells us of persons and facts in simple words, and leaves the
+    announcement to produce its effect on such hearts as are prepared
+    to receive it. This, at least, is its general character; and
+    Butler recognises it as such in his _Analogy_, when speaking of
+    the Second and Third Persons of the Holy Trinity:--"The internal
+    worship," he says, "to the Son and Holy Ghost is no farther matter
+    of pure revealed command than as the relations they stand in to us
+    are matters of pure revelation; but the relations being known, the
+    obligations to such internal worship are _obligations of reason
+    arising out of those relations themselves_."
+
+We acknowledge the pertinency of the quotation. So true is it that "the
+relations being known," the obligations of worship arise of themselves
+from these relations, that if the present relation of the Blessed
+Virgin to mankind has always been considered to be what modern Roman
+theology considers it, it is simply inconceivable that devotion to her
+should not have been universal long before St. Athanasius and St.
+Augustine; and equally inconceivable, to take Dr. Newman's remarkable
+illustration, that if the real position of St. Joseph is next to her,
+it should have been reserved for the nineteenth century, if not,
+indeed, to find it out, at least to acknowledge it; but the whole
+question is about the fact of the "relations" themselves. If we believe
+that the Second and Third Persons are God, we do not want to be told to
+worship them. But such a relation as Dr. Newman supposes in the case of
+the Blessed Virgin does not flow of itself from the idea contained, for
+instance, in the word [Greek: Theotokos], and even if it did, we should
+still want to be told, in the case of a creature, and remembering the
+known jealousy of religion of even the semblance of creature worship,
+what _are_ the "religious regards," which, not flowing from the nature
+of the case, but needing to be distinctly authorised, are right and
+binding.
+
+The question is of a dogmatic and a popular system. We most fully admit
+that, with Dr. Newman or any other of the numberless well-trained and
+excellent men in the Roman Church, the homage to the Mother does not
+interfere with the absolutely different honour rendered to the Son. We
+readily acknowledge the elevating and refining beauty of that
+character, of which the Virgin Mother is the type, and the services
+which that ideal has rendered to mankind, though we must emphatically
+say that a man need not be a Roman Catholic to feel and to express the
+charm of that moral beauty. But here we have a doctrine as definite and
+precise as any doctrine can be, and a great system of popular devotion,
+giving a character to a great religious communion. Dr. Newman is not
+merely developing and illustrating an idea: he is asserting a definite
+revealed fact about the unseen world, and defending its consequences in
+a very concrete and practical shape. And the real point is what proof
+has he given us that this is a revealed fact; that it is so, and that
+we have the means of knowing it? He has given us certain language of
+the early writers, which he says is a tradition, though it is only what
+any Protestant might have been led to by reading his Bible. But between
+that language, taken at its highest, and the belief and practice which
+his Church maintains, there is a great gap. The "Second Eve," the
+[Greek: Theotokos], are names of high dignity; but enlarge upon them as
+we may, there is between them and the modern "Regina Coeli" an interval
+which nothing but direct divine revelation can possibly fill; and of
+this divine revelation the only evidence is the fact that there is the
+doctrine. So awful and central an article of belief needs corresponding
+proof. In Dr. Newman's eloquent pages we have much collateral thought
+on the subject--sometimes instinct with his delicacy of perception and
+depth of feeling, sometimes strangely over-refined and irrelevant, but
+always fresh and instructive, whether to teach or to warn. The one
+thing which is missing in them is direct proof.
+
+He does not satisfy us, but he does greatly interest us in his way of
+dealing with the practical consequences of his doctrine, in the
+manifold development of devotion in his communion. What he tells us
+reveals two things. By this devotion he is at once greatly attracted,
+and he is deeply shocked. No one can doubt the enthusiasm with which he
+has thrown himself into that devotion, an enthusiasm which, if it was
+at one time more vehement and defiant than it is now, is still a most
+intense element in his religious convictions. Nor do we feel entitled
+to say that in him it interferes with religious ideas and feelings of a
+higher order, which we are accustomed to suppose imperilled by it. It
+leads him, indeed, to say things which astonish us, not so much by
+their extreme language as by the absence, as it seems to us, of any
+ground to say them at all. It forces him into a championship for
+statements, in defending which the utmost that can be done is to frame
+ingenious pleas, or to send back a vigorous retort. It tempts him at
+times to depart from his generally broad and fair way of viewing
+things, as when he meets the charge that the Son is forgotten for the
+Mother, not merely by a denial, but by the rejoinder that when the
+Mother is not honoured as the Roman Church honours her the honour of
+the Son fails. It would have been better not to have reprinted the
+following extract from a former work, even though it were singled out
+for approval by the late Cardinal. The italics are his own:--
+
+    I have spoken more on this subject in my _Essay on Development_,
+    p. 438, "Nor does it avail to object that, in this contrast of
+    devotional exercises, the human is sure to supplant the Divine,
+    from the infirmity of our nature; for, I repeat, the question is
+    one of fact, whether it has done so. And next, it must be asked,
+    _whether the character of Protestant devotion towards Our Lord has
+    been that of worship at all_; and not rather such as we pay to an
+    excellent human being.... Carnal minds will ever create a carnal
+    worship for themselves, and to forbid them the service of the
+    saints will have no tendency to teach them the worship of God.
+    Moreover, ... great and constant as is the devotion which the
+    Catholic pays to St. Mary, it has a special province, and _has far
+    more connection with the public services and the festive aspect of
+    Christianity_, and with certain extraordinary offices which she
+    holds, _than with what is strictly personal and primary in religion_".
+    Our late Cardinal, on my reception, singled out to me this last
+    sentence, for the expression of his especial approbation.
+
+Can Dr. Newman defend the first of these two assertions, when he
+remembers such books of popular Protestant devotion as Wesley's Hymns,
+or the German hymn-books of which we have examples in the well-known
+_Lyra Germanica_? Can he deny the second when he remembers the
+exercises of the "Mois de Marie" in French churches, or if he has heard
+a fervid and earnest preacher at the end of them urge on a church full
+of young people, fresh from Confirmation and first Communion, a special
+and personal self-dedication to the great patroness for protection amid
+the daily trials of life, in much the same terms as in an English
+Church they might be exhorted to commit themselves to the Redeemer of
+mankind? Right or wrong, such devotion is not a matter of the "festive
+aspect" of religion, but most eminently of what is "personal and
+primary" in it; and surely of such a character is a vast proportion of
+the popular devotion here spoken of.
+
+But for himself, no doubt, he has accepted this _cultus_ on its most
+elevated and refined side. He himself makes the distinction, and says
+that there is "a healthy" and an "artificial" form of it; a devotion
+which does not shock "solid piety and Christian good sense; I cannot
+help calling this the English style." And when other sides are
+presented to him, he feels what any educated Englishman who allows his
+English feelings play is apt to feel about them. What is more, he has
+the boldness to say so. He makes all kinds of reserves to save the
+credit of those with whom he cannot sympathise. He speaks of the
+privileges of Saints; the peculiarities of national temperament; the
+distinctions between popular language and that used by scholastic
+writers, or otherwise marked by circumstances; the special characters
+of some of the writers quoted, their "ruthless logic," or their
+obscurity; the inculpated passages are but few and scattered in
+proportion to their context; they are harsh, but sound worse than they
+mean; they are hardly interpreted and pressed. He reminds Dr. Pusey
+that there is not much to choose between the Oriental Churches and Rome
+on this point, and that of the two the language of the Eastern is the
+most florid; luxuriant, and unguarded. But, after all, the true feeling
+comes out at last, "And now, at length," he says, "coming to the
+statements, not English, but foreign, which offend you, I will frankly
+say that I read some of those which you quote with grief and almost
+anger." They are "perverse sayings," which he hates. He fills a page
+and a half with a number of them, and then deliberately pronounces his
+rejection of them.
+
+    After such explanations, and with such authorities to clear my
+    path, I put away from me as you would wish, without any
+    hesitation, as matters in which my heart and reason have no part
+    (when taken in their literal and absolute sense, as any Protestant
+    would naturally take them, and as the writers doubtless did not
+    use them), such sentences and phrases as these:--that the mercy of
+    Mary is infinite, that God has resigned into her hands His
+    omnipotence, that (unconditionally) it is safer to seek her than
+    her Son, that the Blessed Virgin is superior to God, that He is
+    (simply) subject to her command, that our Lord is now of the same
+    disposition as His Father towards sinners--viz. a disposition to
+    reject them, while Mary takes His place as an Advocate with the
+    Father and Son; that the Saints are more ready to intercede with
+    Jesus than Jesus with the Father, that Mary is the only refuge of
+    those with whom God is angry; that Mary alone can obtain a
+    Protestant's conversion; that it would have sufficed for the
+    salvation of men if our Lord had died, not to obey His Father, but
+    to defer to the decree of His Mother, that she rivals our Lord in
+    being God's daughter, not by adoption, but by a kind of nature;
+    that Christ fulfilled the office of Saviour by imitating her
+    virtues; that, as the Incarnate God bore the image of His Father,
+    so He bore the image of His Mother; that redemption derived from
+    Christ indeed its sufficiency, but from Mary its beauty and
+    loveliness; that as we are clothed with the merits of Christ so we
+    are clothed with the merits of Mary; that, as He is Priest, in
+    like manner is she Priestess; that His body and blood in the
+    Eucharist are truly hers, and appertain to her; that as He is
+    present and received therein, so is she present and received
+    therein; that Priests are ministers as of Christ, so of Mary; that
+    elect souls are, born of God and Mary; that the Holy Ghost brings
+    into fruitfulness His action by her, producing in her and by her
+    Jesus Christ in His members; that the kingdom of God in our souls,
+    as our Lord speaks, is really the kingdom of Mary in the soul--and
+    she and the Holy Ghost produce in the soul extraordinary
+    things--and when the Holy Ghost finds Mary in a soul He flies
+    there.
+
+    Sentiments such as these I never knew of till I read your book,
+    nor, as I think, do the vast majority of English Catholics know
+    them. They seem to me like a bad dream. I could not have conceived
+    them to be said. I know not to what authority to go for them, to
+    Scripture, or to the Fathers, or to the decrees of Councils, or to
+    the consent of schools, or to the tradition of the faithful, or to
+    the Holy See, or to Reason. They defy all the _loci theologici_.
+    There is nothing of them in the Missal, in the Roman Catechism, in
+    the Roman _Raccolta_, in the Imitation of Christ, in Gother,
+    Challoner, Milner, or Wiseman, so far as I am aware. They do but
+    scare and confuse me. I should not be holier, more spiritual, more
+    sure of perseverance, if I twisted my moral being into the
+    reception of them; I should but be guilty of fulsome frigid
+    flattery towards the most upright and noble of God's creatures if
+    I professed them--and of stupid flattery too; for it would be like
+    the compliment of painting up a young and beautiful princess with
+    the brow of a Plato and the muscle of an Achilles. And I should
+    expect her to tell one of her people in waiting to turn me off her
+    service without warning. Whether thus to feel be the _scandalum
+    parvulorum_ in my case, or the _scandalum Pharisaeorum_, I leave
+    others to decide; but I will say plainly that I had rather believe
+    (which is impossible) that there is no God at all, than that Mary
+    is greater than God. I will have nothing to do with statements,
+    which can only be explained by being explained away. I do not,
+    however, speak of these statements, as they are found in their
+    authors, for I know nothing of the originals, and cannot believe
+    that they have meant what you say; but I take them as they lie in
+    your pages. Were any of them, the sayings of Saints in ecstasy, I
+    should know they had a good meaning; still I should not repeat
+    them myself; but I am looking at them, not as spoken by the
+    tongues of Angels, but according to that literal sense which they
+    bear in the mouths of English men and English women. And, as
+    spoken by man to man in England in the nineteenth century, I
+    consider them calculated to prejudice inquirers, to frighten the
+    unlearned, to unsettle consciences, to provoke blasphemy, and to
+    work the loss of souls.
+
+Of course; it is what might be expected of him. But Dr. Newman has
+often told us that we must take the consequences of our principles and
+theories, and here are some of the consequences which meet him; and, as
+he says, they "scare and confuse him." He boldly disavows them with no
+doubtful indignation. But what other voice but his, of equal authority
+and weight, has been lifted up to speak the plain truth about them?
+Why, if they are wrong, extravagant, dangerous, is his protest
+solitary? His communion has never been wanting in jealousy of dangerous
+doctrines, and it is vain to urge that these things and things like
+them have been said in a corner. The Holy Office is apt to detect
+mischief in small writers as well as great, even if these teachers were
+as insignificant as Dr. Newman would gladly make them. Taken as a
+whole, and in connection with notorious facts, these statements are
+fair examples of manifest tendencies, which certainly are not on the
+decline. And if a great and spreading popular _cultus_, encouraged and
+urged on beyond all former precedent, is in danger of being developed
+by its warmest and most confident advocates into something of which
+unreason is the lightest fault, is there not ground for interfering?
+Doubtless Roman writers maybe quoted by Dr. Newman, who felt that there
+was a danger, and we are vaguely told about some checks given to one or
+two isolated extravagances, which, however, in spite of the checks, do
+not seem to be yet extinct. But Allocutions and Encyclicals are not for
+errors of this kind. Dr. Newman says that "it is wiser for the most
+part to leave these excesses to the gradual operation of public
+opinion,--that is, to the opinion of educated and sober Catholics; and
+this seems to me the healthiest way of putting them down." We quite
+agree with him; but his own Church does not think so; and we want to
+see some evidence of a public opinion in it capable of putting them
+down. As it is, he is reduced to say that "the line cannot be logically
+drawn between the teaching of the Fathers on the subject and our own;"
+an assertion which, if it were true, would be more likely to drag down
+one teaching than to prop up the other; he has to find reasons, and
+doubtless they are to be found thick as blackberries, for accounting
+for one extravagance, softening down another, declining to judge a
+third. But in the meantime the "devotion" in its extreme form, far
+beyond what he would call the teaching of his Church, has its way; it
+maintains its ground; it becomes the mark of the bold, the advanced,
+the refined, as well as of the submissive and the crowd; it roots
+itself under the shelter of an authority which would stop it if it was
+wrong; it becomes "dominant"; it becomes at length part of that "mind
+of the living Church" which, we are told, it is heresy to impugn,
+treason to appeal from, and the extravagance of impertinent folly to
+talk of reforming.
+
+It is very little use, then, for Dr. Newman to tell Dr. Pusey or any
+one else, "You may safely trust us English Catholics as to this
+devotion." "English Catholics," as such,--it is the strength and the
+weakness of their system,--have really the least to say in the matter.
+The question is not about trusting "us English Catholics," but the
+Pope, and the Roman Congregation, and those to whom the Roman
+authorities delegate their sanction and give their countenance. If Dr.
+Newman is able, as we doubt not he is desirous, to elevate the tone of
+his own communion and put to shame some of its fashionable excesses, he
+will do a great work, in which we wish him every success, though the
+result of it might not really be to bring the body of his countrymen
+nearer to it. But the substance of Dr. Pusey's charges remain after all
+unanswered, and there is no getting over them while they remain. They
+are of that broad, palpable kind against which the refinements of
+argumentative apology play in vain. They can only be met by those who
+feel their force, on some principle equally broad. Dr. Newman suggests
+such a ground in the following remarks, which, much as they want
+qualification and precision, have a basis of reality in them:--
+
+    It is impossible, I say, in a doctrine like this, to draw the line
+    cleanly between truth and error, right and wrong. This is ever the
+    case in concrete matters which have life. Life in this world is
+    motion, and involves a continual process of change. Living things
+    grow into their perfection, into their decline, into their death.
+    No rule of art will suffice to stop the operation of this natural
+    law, whether in the material world or in the human mind.... What
+    has power to stir holy and refined souls is potent also with the
+    multitude, and the religion of the multitude is ever vulgar and
+    abnormal; it ever will be tinctured with fanaticism and
+    superstition while men are what they are. A people's religion is
+    ever a corrupt religion. If you are to have a Catholic Church you
+    must put up with fish of every kind, guests good and bad, vessels
+    of gold, vessels of earth. You may beat religion out of men, if you
+    will, and then their excesses will take a different direction; but
+    if you make use of religion to improve them, they will make use of
+    religion to corrupt it. And then you will have effected that
+    compromise of which our countrymen report so unfavourably from
+    abroad,--a high grand faith and worship which compels their
+    admiration, and puerile absurdities among the people which excite
+    their contempt.
+
+It is like Dr. Newman to put his case in this broad way, making large
+admissions, allowing for much inevitable failure. That is, he defends
+his Church as he would defend Christianity generally, taking it as a
+great practical system must be in this world, working with human nature
+as it is. His reflection is, no doubt, one suggested by a survey of the
+cause of all religion. The coming short of the greatest promisee, the
+debasement of the noblest ideals, are among the commonplaces of
+history. Christianity cannot be maintained without ample admissions of
+failure and perversion. But it is one thing to make this admission for
+Christianity generally, an admission which the New Testament in
+foretelling its fortunes gives us abundant ground for making; and quite
+another for those who maintain the superiority of one form of
+Christianity above all others, to claim that they may leave out of the
+account its characteristic faults. It is quite true that all sides
+abundantly need to appeal for considerate judgment to the known
+infirmity of human nature; but amid the conflicting pretensions which
+divide Christendom no one side can ask to have for itself the exclusive
+advantage of this plea. All may claim the benefit of it, but if it is
+denied to any it must be denied to all. In this confused and imperfect
+world other great popular systems of religion besides the Roman may use
+it in behalf of shortcomings, which, though perhaps very different, are
+yet not worse. It is obvious that the theory of great and living ideas,
+working with a double edge, and working for mischief at last, holds
+good for other things besides the special instance on which Dr. Newman
+comments. It is to be further observed that to claim the benefit of
+this plea is to make the admission that you come under the common law
+of human nature as to mistake, perversion, and miscarriage, and this in
+the matter of religious guidance the Roman theory refuses to do. It
+claims for its communion as its special privilege an exemption from
+those causes of corruption of which history is the inexorable witness,
+and to which others admit themselves to be liable; an immunity from
+going wrong, a supernatural exception from the common tendency of
+mankind to be led astray, from the common necessity to correct and
+reform themselves when they are proved wrong. How far this is realised,
+not on paper and in argument, but in fact, is indeed one of the most
+important questions for the world, and it is one to which the world
+will pay more heed than to the best writing about it There are not
+wanting signs, among others of a very different character, of an honest
+and philosophical recognition of this by some of the ablest writers of
+the Roman communion. The day on which the Roman Church ceases to
+maintain that what it holds must be truth because it holds it, and
+admits itself subject to the common condition by which God has given
+truth to men, will be the first hopeful day for the reunion of
+Christendom.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+NEWMAN'S PAROCHIAL SERMONS[32]
+
+
+  [32]
+  _Parochial and Plain Sermons_. By John Henry Newman, B.D., formerly
+  Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford. Edited by W.J. Copeland, B.D. _Saturday
+  Review_, 5th June 1869.
+
+Dr. Newman's Sermons stand by themselves in modern English literature;
+it might be said, in English literature generally. There have been
+equally great masterpieces of English writing in this form of
+composition, and there have been preachers whose theological depth,
+acquaintance with the heart, earnestness, tenderness, and power have
+not been inferior to his. But the great writers do not touch, pierce,
+and get hold of minds as he does, and those who are famous for the
+power and results of their preaching do not write as he does. His
+sermons have done more perhaps than any one thing to mould and quicken
+and brace the religious temper of our time; they have acted with equal
+force on those who were nearest and on those who were farthest from him
+in theological opinion. They have altered the whole manner of feeling
+towards religious subjects. We know now that they were the beginning,
+the signal and first heave, of a vast change that was to come over the
+subject; of a demand from religion of a thoroughgoing reality of
+meaning and fulfilment, which is familiar to us, but was new when it
+was first made. And, being this, these sermons are also among the very
+finest examples of what the English language of our day has done in the
+hands of a master. Sermons of such intense conviction and directness of
+purpose, combined with such originality and perfection on their purely
+literary side, are rare everywhere. Remarkable instances, of course,
+will occur to every one of the occasional exhibition of this
+combination, but not in so sustained and varied and unfailing a way.
+Between Dr. Newman and the great French school there is this
+difference--that they are orators, and he is as far as anything can be
+in a great preacher from an orator. Those who remember the tones and
+the voice in which the sermons were heard at St. Mary's--we may refer
+to Professor Shairp's striking account in his volume on Keble, and to a
+recent article in the _Dublin Review_--can remember how utterly unlike
+an orator in all outward ways was the speaker who so strangely moved
+them. The notion of judging of Dr. Newman as an orator never crossed
+their minds. And this puts a difference between him and a remarkable
+person whose name has sometimes been joined with his--Mr. F. Robertson.
+Mr. Robertson was a great preacher, but he was not a writer.
+
+It is difficult to realise at present the effect produced originally by
+these sermons. The first feeling was that of their difference in manner
+from the customary sermon. People knew what an eloquent sermon was, or
+a learned sermon, or a philosophical sermon, or a sermon full of
+doctrine or pious unction. Chalmers and Edward Irving and Robert Hall
+were familiar names; the University pulpit and some of the London
+churches had produced examples of forcible argument and severe and
+finished composition; and of course instances were abundant everywhere
+of the good, sensible, commonplace discourse; of all that was heavy,
+dull, and dry, and of all that was ignorant, wild, fanatical, and
+irrational. But no one seemed to be able, or to be expected, unless he
+avowedly took the buffoonery line which some of the Evangelical
+preachers affected, to speak in the pulpit with the directness and
+straightforward unconventionality with which men speak on the practical
+business of life. With all the thought and vigour and many beauties
+which were in the best sermons, there was always something forced,
+formal, artificial about them; something akin to that mild pomp which
+usually attended their delivery, with beadles in gowns ushering the
+preacher to the carpeted pulpit steps, with velvet cushions, and with
+the rustle and fulness of his robes. No one seemed to think of writing
+a sermon as he would write an earnest letter. A preacher must approach
+his subject in a kind of roundabout make-believe of preliminary and
+preparatory steps, as if he was introducing his hearers to what they
+had never heard of; make-believe difficulties and objections were
+overthrown by make-believe answers; an unnatural position both in
+speaker and hearers, an unreal state of feeling and view of facts, a
+systematic conventional exaggeration, seemed almost impossible to be
+avoided; and those who tried to escape being laboured and grandiloquent
+only escaped it, for the most part, by being vulgar or slovenly. The
+strong severe thinkers, jealous for accuracy, and loathing clap-trap as
+they loathed loose argument, addressed and influenced intelligence; but
+sermons are meant for heart and souls as well as minds, and to the
+heart, with its trials and its burdens, men like Whately never found
+their way. Those who remember the preaching of those days, before it
+began to be influenced by the sermons at St. Mary's, will call to mind
+much that was interesting, much that was ingenious, much correction of
+inaccurate and confused views, much manly encouragement to high
+principle and duty, much of refined and scholarlike writing. But for
+soul and warmth, and the imaginative and poetical side of the religious
+life, you had to go where thought and good sense were not likely to be
+satisfied.
+
+The contrast of Mr. Newman's preaching was not obvious at first. The
+outside form and look was very much that of the regular best Oxford
+type--calm, clear, and lucid in expression, strong in its grasp,
+measured in statement, and far too serious to think of rhetorical
+ornament. But by degrees much more opened. The range of experience from
+which the preacher drew his materials, and to which he appealed, was
+something wider, subtler, and more delicate than had been commonly
+dealt with in sermons. With his strong, easy, exact, elastic language,
+the instrument of a powerful and argumentative mind, he plunged into
+the deep realities of the inmost spiritual life, of which cultivated
+preachers had been shy. He preached so that he made you feel without
+doubt that it was the most real of worlds to him; he made you feel in
+time, in spite of yourself, that it was a real world with which you too
+had concern. He made you feel that he knew what he was speaking about;
+that his reasonings and appeals, whether you agreed with them or not,
+were not the language of that heated enthusiasm with which the world is
+so familiar; that he was speaking words which were the result of
+intellectual scrutiny, balancings, and decisions, as well as of moral
+trials, of conflicts and suffering within; words of the utmost
+soberness belonging to deeply gauged and earnestly formed purposes. The
+effect of his sermons, as compared with the common run at the time, was
+something like what happens when in a company you have a number of
+people giving their views and answers about some question before them.
+You have opinions given of various worth and expressed with varying
+power, precision, and distinctness, some clever enough, some clumsy
+enough, but all more or less imperfect and unattractive in tone, and
+more or less falling short of their aim; and then, after it all, comes
+a voice, very grave, very sweet, very sure and clear, under whose words
+the discussion springs up at once to a higher level, and in which we
+recognise at once a mind, face to face with realities, and able to
+seize them and hold them fast.
+
+The first notable feature in the external form of this preaching was
+its terse unceremonious directness. Putting aside the verbiage and
+dulled circumlocution and stiff hazy phraseology of pulpit etiquette
+and dignity, it went straight to its point. There was no waste of time
+about customary formalities. The preacher had something to say, and
+with a kind of austere severity he proceeded to say it. This, for
+instance, is the sort of way in which a sermon would begin:--
+
+    Hypocrisy is a serious word. We are accustomed to consider the
+    hypocrite as a hateful, despicable character, and an uncommon one.
+    How is it, then, that our Blessed Lord, when surrounded by an
+    innumerable multitude, began, _first of all_, to warn His disciples
+    against hypocrisy, as though they were in especial danger of
+    becoming like those base deceivers the Pharisees? Thus an
+    instructive subject is opened to our consideration, which I will
+    now pursue.--Vol. I. Serm. X.
+
+The next thing was that, instead of rambling and straggling over a
+large subject, each sermon seized a single thought, or definite view,
+or real difficulty or objection, and kept closely and distinctly to it;
+and at the same time treated it with a largeness and grasp and ease
+which only a full command over much beyond it could give. Every sermon
+had a purpose and an end which no one could misunderstand. Singularly
+devoid of anything like excitement--calm, even, self-controlled--there
+was something in the preacher's resolute concentrated way of getting
+hold of a single defined object which reminded you of the rapid spring
+or unerring swoop of some strong-limbed or swift-winged creature on its
+quarry. Whatever you might think that he did with it, or even if it
+seemed to escape from him, you could have no doubt what he sought to
+do; there was no wavering, confused, uncertain bungling in that
+powerful and steady hand. Another feature was the character of the
+writer's English. We have learned to look upon Dr. Newman as one of the
+half-dozen or so of the innumerable good writers of the time who have
+fairly left their mark as masters on the language. Little, assuredly,
+as the writer originally thought of such a result, the sermons have
+proved a permanent gift to our literature, of the purest English, full
+of spring, clearness, and force. A hasty reader would perhaps at first
+only notice a very light, strong, easy touch, and might think, too,
+that it was a negligent one. But it was not negligence; real negligence
+means at bottom bad work, and bad work will not stand the trial of
+time. There are two great styles--the self-conscious, like that of
+Gibbon or Macaulay, where great success in expression is accompanied by
+an unceasing and manifest vigilance that expression shall succeed, and
+where you see at each step that there is or has been much care and work
+in the mind, if not on the paper; and the unconscious, like that of
+Pascal or Swift or Hume, where nothing suggests at the moment that the
+writer is thinking of anything but his subject, and where the power of
+being able to say just what he wants to say seems to come at the
+writer's command, without effort, and without his troubling himself
+more about it than about the way in which he holds his pen. But both
+are equally the fruit of hard labour and honest persevering
+self-correction; and it is soon found out whether the apparent
+negligence comes of loose and slovenly habits of mind, or whether it
+marks the confidence of one who has mastered his instrument, and can
+forget himself and let himself go in using it. The free unconstrained
+movement of Dr. Newman's style tells any one who knows what writing is
+of a very keen and exact knowledge of the subtle and refined secrets of
+language. With all that uncared-for play and simplicity, there was a
+fulness, a richness, a curious delicate music, quite instinctive and
+unsought for; above all, a precision and sureness of expression which
+people soon began to find were not within the power of most of those
+who tried to use language. Such English, graceful with the grace of
+nerve, flexibility, and power, must always have attracted attention;
+but it had also an ethical element which was almost inseparable from
+its literary characteristics. Two things powerfully determined the
+style of these sermons. One was the intense hold which the vast
+realities of religion had gained on the writer's mind, and the perfect
+truth with which his personality sank and faded away before their
+overwhelming presence; the other was the strong instinctive shrinking,
+which was one of the most remarkable and certain marks of the beginners
+of the Oxford movement, from anything like personal display, any
+conscious aiming at the ornamental and brilliant, any show of gifts or
+courting of popular applause. Morbid and excessive or not, there can be
+no doubt of the stern self-containing severity which made them turn
+away, not only with fear, but with distaste and repugnance, from all
+that implied distinction or seemed to lead to honour; and the control
+of this austere spirit is visible, in language as well as matter, in
+every page of Dr. Newman's sermons.
+
+Indeed, form and matter are closely connected in the sermons, and
+depend one on another, as they probably do in all work of a high order.
+The matter makes and shapes the form with which it clothes itself. The
+obvious thing which presents itself in reading them is that, from first
+to last, they are a great systematic attempt to raise the whole level
+of religious thought and religious life. They carry in them the
+evidence of a great reaction and a scornful indignant rising up against
+what were going about and were currently received as adequate ideas of
+religion. The dryness and primness and meagreness of the common Church
+preaching, correct as it was in its outlines of doctrine, and sober and
+temperate in tone, struck cold on a mind which had caught sight, in the
+New Testament, of the spirit and life of its words. The recoil was even
+stronger from the shallowness and pretentiousness and self-display of
+what was popularly accepted as earnest religion; morally the preacher
+was revolted at its unctuous boasts and pitiful performance, and
+intellectually by its narrowness and meanness of thought and its
+thinness of colour in all its pictures of the spiritual life. From
+first to last, in all manner of ways, the sermons are a protest, first
+against coldness, but even still more against meanness, in religion.
+With coldness they have no sympathy, yet coldness may be broad and
+large and lofty in its aspects; but they have no tolerance for what
+makes religion little and poor and superficial, for what contracts its
+horizon and dwarfs its infinite greatness and vulgarises its mystery.
+Open the sermons where we will, different readers will rise from them
+with very different results; there will be among many the strongest and
+most decisive disagreement; there may be impatience at dogmatic
+harshness, indignation at what seems overstatement and injustice,
+rejection of arguments and conclusions; but there will always be the
+sense of an unfailing nobleness in the way in which the writer thinks
+and speaks. It is not only that he is in earnest; it is that he has
+something which really is worth being in earnest for. He placed the
+heights of religion very high. If you have a religion like
+Christianity--this is the pervading note--think of it, and have it,
+worthily. People will differ from the preacher endlessly as to how this
+is to be secured. But that they will learn this lesson from the
+sermons, with a force with which few other writers have taught it, and
+that this lesson has produced its effect in our time, there can be no
+doubt. The only reason why it may not perhaps seem so striking to
+readers of this day is that the sermons have done their work, and we do
+not feel what they had to counteract, because they have succeeded in
+great measure in counteracting it. It is not too much to say that they
+have done more than anything else to revolutionise the whole idea of
+preaching in the English Church. Mr. Robertson, in spite of himself,
+was as much the pupil of their school as Mr. Liddon, though both are so
+widely different from their master.
+
+The theology of these sermons is a remarkable feature about them. It is
+remarkable in this way, that, coming from a teacher like Dr. Newman, it
+is nevertheless a theology which most religious readers, except the
+Evangelicals and some of the more extreme Liberal thinkers, can either
+accept heartily or be content with, as they would be content with St.
+Augustine or Thomas à Kempis--content, not because they go along with
+it always, but because it is large and untechnical, just and
+well-measured in the proportions and relative importance of its parts.
+People of very different opinions turn to them, as being on the whole
+the fullest, deepest, most comprehensive approximation they can find to
+representing Christianity in a practical form. Their theology is
+nothing new; nor does it essentially change, though one may observe
+differences, and some important ones, in the course of the volumes,
+which embrace a period from 1825 to 1842. It is curious, indeed, to
+observe how early the general character of the sermons was determined,
+and how in the main it continues the same. Some of the first in point
+of date are among the "Plain Sermons"; and though they may have been
+subsequently retouched, yet there the keynote is plainly struck of that
+severe and solemn minor which reigns throughout. Their theology is
+throughout the accepted English theology of the Prayer-book and the
+great Church divines--a theology fundamentally dogmatic and
+sacramental, but jealously keeping the balance between obedience and
+faith; learned, exact, and measured, but definite and decided. The
+novelty was in the application of it, in the new life breathed into it,
+in the profound and intense feelings called forth by its ideas and
+objects, in the air of vastness and awe thrown about it, in the
+unexpected connection of its creeds and mysteries with practical life,
+in the new meaning given to the old and familiar, in the acceptance in
+thorough earnest, and with keen purpose to call it into action, of what
+had been guarded and laid by with dull reverence. Dr. Newman can hardly
+be called in these sermons an innovator on the understood and
+recognised standard of Anglican doctrine; he accepted its outlines as
+Bishop Wilson, for instance, might have traced them. What he did was
+first to call forth from it what it really meant, the awful heights and
+depths of its current words and forms; and next, to put beside them
+human character and its trials, not as they were conventionally
+represented and written about, but as a piercing eye and sympathising
+spirit saw them in the light of our nineteenth century, and in the
+contradictory and complicated movements, the efforts and failures, of
+real life. He took theology for granted, as a Christian preacher has a
+right to do; he does not prove it, and only occasionally meets
+difficulties, or explains; but, taking it for granted, he took it at
+its word, in its relation to the world of actual experience.
+
+Utterly dissatisfied with what he found current as religion, Dr. Newman
+sought, without leaving the old paths, to put before people a strong
+and energetic religion based, not on feeling or custom, but on reason
+and conscience, and answering, in the vastness of its range, to the
+mysteries of human nature, and in its power to man's capacities and
+aims. The Liberal religion of that day, with its ideas of natural
+theology or of a cold critical Unitarianism, was a very shallow one;
+the Evangelical, trusting to excitement, had worn out its excitement
+and had reached the stage when its formulas, poor ones at the best, had
+become words without meaning. Such views might do in quiet, easy-going
+times, if religion were an exercise at will of imagination or thought,
+an indulgence, an ornament, an understanding, a fashion; not if it
+corresponded to such a state of things as is implied in the Bible, or
+to man's many-sided nature as it is shown in Shakspeare. The sermons
+reflect with merciless force the popular, superficial, comfortable
+thing called religion which the writer saw before him wherever he
+looked, and from which his mind recoiled. Such sermons as those on the
+"Self-wise Enquirer" and the "Religion of the Day," with its famous
+passage about the age not being sufficiently "gloomy and fierce in its
+religion," have the one-sided and unmeasured exaggeration which seems
+inseparable from all strong expressions of conviction, and from all
+deep and vehement protests against general faults; but, qualify and
+limit them as we may, their pictures were not imaginary ones, and there
+was, and is, but too much to justify them. From all this trifling with
+religion the sermons called on men to look into themselves. They
+appealed to conscience; and they appealed equally to reason and
+thought, to recognise what conscience is, and to deal honestly with it.
+They viewed religion as if projected on a background of natural and
+moral mystery, and surrounded by it--an infinite scene, in which our
+knowledge is like the Andes and Himalayas in comparison with the mass
+of the earth, and in which conscience is our final guide and arbiter.
+No one ever brought out so impressively the sense of the impenetrable
+and tremendous vastness of that amid which man plays his part. In such
+sermons as those on the "Intermediate State," the "Invisible World,"
+the "Greatness and Littleness of Human Life," the "Individuality of the
+Soul," the "Mysteriousness of our Present Being," we may see
+exemplified the enormous irruption into the world of modern thought of
+the unknown and the unknowable, as much as in the writers who, with far
+different objects, set against it the clearness and certainty of what
+we do know. But, beyond all, the sermons appealed to men to go back
+into their own thoughts and feelings, and there challenged them; were
+not the preacher's words the echoes and interpreting images of their
+own deepest, possibly most perplexing and baffling, experience? From
+first to last this was his great engine and power; from first to last
+he boldly used it. He claimed to read their hearts; and people felt
+that he did read them, their follies and their aspirations, the blended
+and tangled web of earnestness and dishonesty, of wishes for the best
+and truest, and acquiescence in makeshifts; understating what ordinary
+preachers make much of, bringing into prominence what they pass by
+without being able to see or to speak of it; keeping before his hearers
+the risk of mismanaging their hearts, of "all kinds of unlawful
+treatment of the soul." What a contrast to ordinary ways of speaking on
+a familiar theological doctrine is this way of bringing it into
+immediate relation to real feeling:--
+
+    It is easy to speak of human nature as corrupt in the general, to
+    admit it in the general, and then get quit of the subject; as if,
+    the doctrine being once admitted, there was nothing more to be done
+    with it. But, in truth, we can have no real apprehension of the
+    doctrine of our corruption till we view the structure of our minds,
+    part by part; and dwell upon and draw out the signs of our
+    weakness, inconsistency, and ungodliness, which are such as can
+    arise from nothing but some strange original defect in our original
+    nature.... We are in the dark about ourselves. When we act, we are
+    groping in the dark, and may meet with a fall any moment. Here and
+    there, perhaps, we see a little; or in our attempts to influence
+    and move our minds, we are making experiments (as it were) with
+    some delicate and dangerous instrument, which works we do not know
+    how, and may produce unexpected and disastrous effects. The
+    management of our hearts is quite above us. Under these
+    circumstances it becomes our comfort to look up to God. "Thou, God,
+    seest me." Such was the consolation of the forlorn Hagar in the
+    wilderness. He knoweth whereof we are made, and He alone can uphold
+    us. He sees with most appalling distinctness all our sins, all the
+    windings and recesses of evil within us; yet it is our only comfort
+    to know this, and to trust Him for help against ourselves.--Vol. I.
+    Serm. XIII.
+
+The preacher contemplates human nature, not in the stiff formal
+language in which it had become conventional with divines to set out
+its shortcomings and dangers, but as a great novelist contemplates and
+tries to describe it; taking in all its real contradictions and
+anomalies, its subtle and delicate shades; fixing upon the things which
+strike us in ourselves or our neighbours as ways of acting and marks of
+character; following it through its wide and varying range, its
+diversified and hidden folds and subtle self-involving realities of
+feeling and shiftiness; touching it in all its complex sensibilities,
+anticipating its dim consciousnesses, half-raising veils which hide
+what it instinctively shrinks from, sending through it unexpected
+thrills and shocks; large-hearted in indulgence, yet exacting; most
+tender, yet most severe. And against all this real play of nature he
+sets in their full force and depth the great ideas of God, of sin, and
+of the Cross; and, appealing not to the intelligence of an aristocracy
+of choice natures, but to the needs and troubles and longings which
+make all men one, he claimed men's common sympathy for the heroic in
+purpose and standard. He warned them against being fastidious, where
+they should be hardy. He spoke in a way that all could understand of
+brave ventures, of resolutely committing themselves to truth and duty.
+
+The most practical of sermons, the most real and natural in their way
+of dealing with life and conduct, they are also intensely dogmatic. The
+writer's whole teaching presupposes, as we all know, a dogmatic
+religion; and these sermons are perhaps the best vindication of it
+which our time, disposed to think of dogmas with suspicion, has seen.
+For they show, on a large scale and in actual working instances, how
+what is noblest, most elevated, most poetical, most free and searching
+in a thinker's way of regarding the wonderful scene of life, falls in
+naturally, and without strain, with a great dogmatic system like that
+of the Church. Such an example does not prove that system to be true,
+but it proves that a dogmatic system, as such, is not the cast-iron,
+arbitrary, artificial thing which it is often assumed to be. It is,
+indeed, the most shallow of all commonplaces, intelligible in ordinary
+minds, but unaccountable in those of high power and range, whether they
+believe or not, that a dogmatic religion is of course a hard, dry,
+narrow, unreal religion, without any affinities to poetry or the truth
+of things, or to the deeper and more sacred and powerful of human
+thoughts. If dogmas are not true, that is another matter; but it is the
+fashion to imply that dogmas are worthless, mere things of the past,
+without sense or substance or interest, because they are dogmas. As if
+Dante was not dogmatic in form and essence; as if the grandest and
+worthiest religious prose in the English language was not that of
+Hooker, nourished up amid the subtleties, but also amid the vast
+horizons and solemn heights, of scholastic divinity. A dogmatic system
+is hard in hard hands, and shallow in shallow minds, and barren in dull
+ones, and unreal and empty to preoccupied and unsympathising ones; we
+dwarf and distort ideas that we do not like, and when we have put them
+in our own shapes and in our own connection, we call them unmeaning or
+impossible. Dogmas are but expedients, common to all great departments
+of human thought, and felt in all to be necessary, for representing
+what are believed as truths, for exhibiting their order and
+consequences, for expressing the meaning of terms, and the relations of
+thought. If they are wrong, they are, like everything else in the
+world, open to be proved wrong; if they are inadequate, they are open
+to correction; but it is idle to sneer at them for being what they must
+be, if religious facts and truths are to be followed out by the
+thoughts and expressed by the language of man. And what dogmas are in
+unfriendly and incapable hands is no proof of what they may be when
+they are approached as things instinct with truth and life; it is no
+measure of the way in which they may be inextricably interwoven with
+the most unquestionably living thought and feeling, as in these
+sermons. Jealous, too, as the preacher is for Church doctrines as the
+springs of Christian life, no writer of our time perhaps has so
+emphatically and impressively recalled the narrow limits within which
+human language can represent Divine realities. No one that we know of
+shows that he has before his mind with such intense force and
+distinctness the idea of God; and in proportion as a mind takes in and
+submits itself to the impression of that awful vision, the gulf widens
+between all possible human words and that which they attempt to
+express:--
+
+    When we have deduced what we deduce by our reason from the study of
+    visible nature, and then read what we read in His inspired word,
+    and find the two apparently discordant, _this_ is the feeling I
+    think we ought to have on our minds;--not an impatience to do what
+    is beyond our powers, to weigh evidence, sum up, balance, decide,
+    reconcile, to arbitrate between the two voices of God,--but a sense
+    of the utter nothingness of worms such as we are; of our plain and
+    absolute incapacity to contemplate things _as they really are_; a
+    perception of our emptiness before the great Vision of God; of our
+    "comeliness being turned into corruption, and our retaining no
+    strength"; a conviction that what is put before us, whether in
+    nature or in grace, is but an intimation, useful for particular
+    purposes, useful for practice, useful in its department, "until the
+    day break and the shadows flee away"; useful in such a way that
+    both the one and the other representation may at once be used, as
+    two languages, as two separate approximations towards the Awful
+    Unknown Truth, such as will not mislead us in their respective
+    provinces.--Vol. II. Serm. XVIII.
+
+    "I cannot persuade myself," he says, commenting on a mysterious
+    text of Scripture, "thus to dismiss so solemn a passage" (i.e. by
+    saying that it is "all figurative"). "It seems a presumption to say
+    of dim notices about the unseen world, 'they only mean this or
+    that,' as if one had ascended into the third heaven, or had stood
+    before the throne of God. No; I see herein a deep mystery, a hidden
+    truth, which I cannot handle or define, shining 'as jewels at the
+    bottom of the great deep,' darkly and tremulously, yet really
+    there. And for this very reason, while it is neither pious nor
+    thankful to explain away the words which convey it, while it is a
+    duty to use them, not less a duty is it to use them humbly,
+    diffidently, and teachably, with the thought of God before us, and
+    of our own nothingness."--Vol. III. Serm. XXV.
+
+There are two great requisites for treating properly the momentous
+questions and issues which have been brought before our generation. The
+first is accuracy--accuracy of facts, of terms, of reasoning; plain
+close dealing with questions in their real and actual conditions;
+clear, simple, honest, measured statements about things as we find
+them. The other is elevation, breadth, range of thought; a due sense of
+what these questions mean and involve; a power of looking at things
+from a height; a sufficient taking into account of possibilities, of
+our ignorance, of the real proportions of things. We have plenty of the
+first; we are for the most part lamentably deficient in the second. And
+of this, these sermons are, to those who have studied them, almost
+unequalled examples. Many people, no doubt, would rise from their
+perusal profoundly disagreeing with their teaching; but no one, it
+seems to us, could rise from them--with their strong effortless
+freedom, their lofty purpose, their generous standard, their deep and
+governing appreciation of divine things, their thoroughness, their
+unselfishness, their purity, their austere yet piercing sympathy--and
+not feel his whole ways of thinking about religion permanently enlarged
+and raised. He will feel that he has been with one who "told him what
+he knew about himself and what he did not know; has read to him his
+wants or feelings, and comforted him by the very reading; has made him
+feel that there was a higher life than this life, and a brighter world
+than we can see; has encouraged him, or sobered him, or opened a way to
+the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed." They show a man who saw very
+deeply into the thought of his time, and who, if he partly recoiled
+from it and put it back, at least equally shared it. Dr. Newman has
+been accused of being out of sympathy with his age, and of disparaging
+it. In reality, no one has proved himself more keenly sensitive to its
+greatness and its wonders; only he believed that he saw something
+greater still. We are not of those who can accept the solution which he
+has accepted of the great problems which haunt our society; but he saw
+better than most men what those problems demand, and the variety of
+their often conflicting conditions. Other men, perhaps, have succeeded
+better in what they aimed at; but no one has attempted more, with
+powers and disinterestedness which justified him in attempting it. The
+movement which he led, and of which these sermons are the
+characteristic monument, is said to be a failure; but there are
+failures, and even mistakes, which are worth many successes of other
+sorts, and which are more fruitful and permanent in their effects.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+CARDINAL NEWMAN[33]
+
+
+  [33]
+  _Guardian_, 21st May 1879.
+
+It is not wonderful that people should be impressed by the vicissitudes
+and surprises and dramatic completeness of Cardinal Newman's career.
+It is not wonderful that he should be impressed by this himself. That
+he who left us in despair and indignation in 1845 should have passed
+through a course of things which has made him, Roman Catholic as he
+is, a man of whom Englishmen are so proud in 1879, is even more
+extraordinary than that the former Fellow of Oriel should now be
+surrounded with the pomp and state of a Cardinal. There is only one
+other career in our time which, with the greatest possible contrasts in
+other points, suggests in its strangeness and antecedent improbabilities
+something of a parallel. It is the train of events which has made
+"Disraeli the Younger" the most powerful Minister whom England has seen
+in recent years. But Lord Beaconsfield has aimed at what he has
+attained to, and has fought his way to it through the chances and
+struggles of a stirring public life. Cardinal Newman's life has been
+from first to last the life of the student and recluse. He has lived in
+the shade. He has sought nothing for himself. He has shrunk from the
+thought of advancement. The steps to the high places of the world have
+not offered themselves to him, and he has been content to be let alone.
+Early in his course his rare gifts of mind, his force of character, his
+power over hearts and sympathies, made him for a while a prominent
+person. Then came a series of events which seemed to throw him out of
+harmony with the great mass of his countrymen. He appeared to be, if not
+forgotten, yet not thought of, except by a small number of friends--old
+friends who had known him too well and too closely ever to forget, and
+new friends gathered round him by the later circumstances of his life
+and work. People spoke of him as a man who had made a great mistake and
+failed; who had thrown up influence and usefulness here, and had not
+found it there; too subtle, too imaginative for England, too
+independent for Rome. He seemed to have so sunk out of interest and
+account that off-hand critics, in the easy gaiety of their heart, might
+take liberties with his name.
+
+Then came the first surprise. The _Apologia_ was read with the keenest
+interest by those who most differed from the writer's practical
+conclusions; twenty years had elapsed since he had taken the unpopular
+step which seemed to condemn him to obscurity; and now he emerged from
+it, challenging not in vain the sympathy of his countrymen. They
+awoke, it may be said--at least the younger generation of them--to
+what he really was; the old jars and bitternesses had passed out of
+remembrance; they only felt that they had one among them who could
+write--for few of them ever heard his wonderful voice--in a way which
+made English hearts respond quickly and warmly. And the strange thing
+was that the professed, the persistent denouncer of Liberalism, was
+welcomed back to his rightful place among Englishmen by none more
+warmly than by many Liberals. Still, though his name was growing more
+familiar year by year, the world did not see much more of him. The
+head of a religious company, of an educational institution at
+Birmingham, he lived in unpretending and quiet simplicity, occupied
+with the daily business of his house, with his books, with his
+correspondence, with finishing off his many literary and theological
+undertakings. Except in some chance reference in a book or newspaper
+which implied how considerable a person the world thought him, he was
+not heard of. People asked about him, but there was nothing to tell.
+Then at last, neglected by Pius IX., he was remembered by Leo XIII.
+The Pope offered him the Cardinalship, he said, because he thought it
+would be "grateful to the Catholics of England, and to England
+itself." And he was not mistaken. Probably there is not a single thing
+that the Pope could do which would be so heartily welcomed.
+
+After breaking with England and all things English in wrath and sorrow,
+nearly thirty-five years ago, after a long life of modest retirement,
+unmarked by any public honours, at length before he dies Dr. Newman is
+recognised by Protestant England as one of its greatest men. It watches
+with interest his journey to Rome, his proceedings at Rome. In a crowd
+of new Cardinals--men of eminence in their own communion--he is the
+only one about whom Englishmen know or care anything. His words, when
+he speaks, pass _verbatim_ along the telegraph wires, like the words of
+the men who sway the world. We read of the quiet Oxford scholar's arms
+emblazoned on vestment and furniture as those of a Prince of the
+Church, and of his motto--_Cor ad cor loquitur_. In that motto is the
+secret of all that he is to his countrymen. For that skill of which he
+is such a master, in the use of his and their "sweet mother tongue," is
+something much more than literary accomplishment and power. It means
+that he has the key to what is deepest in their nature and most
+characteristic in them of feeling and conviction--to what is deeper
+than opinions and theories and party divisions; to what in their most
+solemn moments they most value and most believe in.
+
+His profound sympathy with the religiousness which still, with all the
+variations and all the immense shortcomings of English religion, marks
+England above all cultivated Christian nations, is really the bond
+between him and his countrymen, who yet for the most part think so
+differently from him, both about the speculative grounds and many of
+the practical details of religion. But it was natural for him, on an
+occasion like this, reviewing the past and connecting it with the
+present, to dwell on these differences. He repeated once more, and
+made it the keynote of his address, his old protest against
+"Liberalism in religion," the "doctrine that there is no positive
+truth in religion, but one creed is as good as another." He lamented
+the decay of the power of authority, the disappearance of religion
+from the sphere of political influence, from education, from
+legislation. He deplored the increasing impossibility of getting men
+to work together on a common religious basis. He pointed out the
+increasing seriousness and earnestness of the attempts to "supersede,
+to block out religion," by an imposing and high morality, claiming to
+dispense with it.
+
+He dwelt on the mischief and dangers; he expressed, as any Christian
+would, his fearlessness and faith in spite of them; but do we gather,
+even from such a speaker, and on such an occasion, anything of the
+remedy? The principle of authority is shaken, he tells us; what can he
+suggest to restore it? He under-estimates, probably, the part which
+authority plays, implicitly yet very really, in English popular
+religion, much more in English Church religion; and authority, even in
+Rome, is not everything, and does not reach to every subject. But
+authority in our days can be nothing without real confidence in it;
+and where confidence in authority has been lost, it is idle to attempt
+to restore it by telling men that authority is a good and necessary
+thing. It must be won back, not simply claimed. It must be regained,
+when forfeited, by the means by which it was originally gained. And
+the strange phenomenon was obviously present to his clear and candid
+mind, though he treated it as one which is disappearing, and must at
+length pass away, that precisely here in England, where the only
+religious authority he recognises has been thrown off, the hold of
+religion on public interest is most effective and most obstinately
+tenacious.
+
+What is the history of this? What is the explanation of it? Why is it
+that where "authority," as he understands it, has been longest
+paramount and undisputed, the public place and public force of
+religion have most disappeared; and that a "dozen men taken at random
+in the streets" of London find it easier, with all their various
+sects, to work together on a religious basis than a dozen men taken at
+random from the streets of Catholic Paris or Rome? Indeed, the public
+feeling towards himself, expressed in so many ways in the last few
+weeks, might suggest a question not undeserving of his thoughts. The
+mass of Englishmen are notoriously anti-Popish and anti-Roman. Their
+antipathies on this subject are profound, and not always reasonable.
+They certainly do not here halt between two opinions, or think that
+one creed is as good as another. What is it which has made so many of
+them, still retaining all their intense dislike to the system which
+Cardinal Newman has accepted, yet welcome so heartily his honours in
+it, notwithstanding that he has passed from England to Rome, and that
+he owes so much of what he is to England? Is it that they think it
+does not matter what a man believes, and whether a man turns Papist?
+Or is it not that, in spite of all that would repel and estrange, in
+spite of the oppositions of argument and the inconsistencies of
+speculation, they can afford to recognise in him, as in a high
+example, what they most sincerely believe in and most deeply prize,
+and can pay him the tribute of their gratitude and honour, even when
+unconvinced by his controversial reasonings, and unsatisfied by the
+theories which he has proposed to explain the perplexing and
+refractory anomalies of Church history? Is it not that with history,
+inexorable and unalterable behind them, condemning and justifying,
+supporting and warning all sides in turn, thoughtful men feel how much
+easier it is to point out and deplore our disasters than to see a way
+now to set them right? Is it not also that there are in the Christian
+Church bonds of affinity, subtler, more real and more prevailing than
+even the fatal legacies of the great schisms? Is it not that the
+sympathies which unite the author of the _Parochial Sermons_ and the
+interpreter of St. Athanasius with the disciples of Andrewes, and Ken,
+and Bull, of Butler and Wilson, are as strong and natural as the
+barriers which outwardly keep them asunder are to human eyes
+hopelessly insurmountable?
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+CARDINAL NEWMAN'S COURSE[34]
+
+
+  [34]
+  _Guardian_, 13th August 1890.
+
+The long life is closed. And men, according to their knowledge and
+intelligence, turn to seek for some governing idea or aspect of things,
+by which to interpret the movements and changes of a course which, in
+spite of its great changes, is felt at bottom to have been a uniform
+and consistent one. For it seems that, at starting, he is at once
+intolerant, even to harshness, to the Roman Church, and tolerant,
+though not sympathetic, to the English; then the parts are reversed,
+and he is intolerant to the English and tolerant to the Roman; and then
+at last, when he finally anchored in the Roman Church, he is seen
+as--not tolerant, for that would involve dogmatic points on which he
+was most jealous, but--sympathetic in all that was of interest to
+England, and ready to recognise what was good and high in the English
+Church.
+
+Is not the ultimate key to Newman's history his keen and profound sense
+of the life, society, and principles of action presented in the New
+Testament? To this New Testament life he saw, opposed and in contrast,
+the ways and assumptions of English life, religious as well as secular.
+He saw that the organisation of society had been carried, and was still
+being carried, to great and wonderful perfection; only it was the
+perfection of a society and way of life adapted to the present world,
+and having its ends here; only it was as different as anything can be
+from the picture which the writers of the New Testament, consciously
+and unconsciously, give of themselves and their friends. Here was a
+Church, a religion, a "Christian nation," professing to be identical in
+spirit and rules of faith and conduct with the Church and religion of
+the Gospels and Epistles; and what was the identity, beyond certain
+phrases and conventional suppositions? He could not see a trace in
+English society of that simple and severe hold of the unseen and the
+future which is the colour and breath, as well as the outward form, of
+the New Testament life. Nothing could be more perfect, nothing grander
+and nobler, than all the current arrangements for this life; its
+justice and order and increasing gentleness, its widening sympathies
+between men; but it was all for the perfection and improvement of this
+life; it would all go on, if what we experience now was our only scene
+and destiny. This perpetual antithesis haunted him, when he knew it, or
+when he did not. Against it the Church ought to be the perpetual
+protest, and the fearless challenge, as it was in the days of the New
+Testament. But the English Church had drunk in, he held, too deeply the
+temper, ideas, and laws of an ambitious and advancing civilisation; so
+much so as to be unfaithful to its special charge and mission. The
+prophet had ceased to rebuke, warn, and suffer; he had thrown in his
+lot with those who had ceased to be cruel and inhuman, but who thought
+only of making their dwelling-place as secure and happy as they could.
+The Church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate,
+liberal; jealous about the forms of its creeds, equally jealous of its
+secular rights, interested in the discussion of subordinate questions,
+and becoming more and more tolerant of differences; ready for works of
+benevolence and large charity, in sympathy with the agricultural poor,
+open-handed in its gifts; a willing fellow-worker with society in
+kindly deeds, and its accomplice in secularity. All this was admirable,
+but it was not the life of the New Testament, and it was _that_ which
+filled his thoughts. The English Church had exchanged religion for
+civilisation, the first century for the nineteenth, the New Testament
+as it is written, for a counterfeit of it interpreted by Paley or Mr.
+Simeon; and it seemed to have betrayed its trust.
+
+Form after form was tried by him, the Christianity of Evangelicalism,
+the Christianity of Whately, the Christianity of Hawkins, the
+Christianity of Keble and Pusey; it was all very well, but it was not
+the Christianity of the New Testament and of the first ages. He wrote
+the _Church of the Fathers_ to show they were not merely evidences of
+religion, but really living men; that they could and did live as they
+taught, and what was there like the New Testament or even the first
+ages now? Alas! there was nothing completely like them; but of all
+unlike things, the Church of England with its "smug parsons," and
+pony-carriages for their wives and daughters, seemed to him the most
+unlike: more unlike than the great unreformed Roman Church, with its
+strange, unscriptural doctrines and its undeniable crimes, and its
+alliance, wherever it could, with the world. But at least the Roman
+Church had not only preserved, but maintained at full strength through
+the centuries to our day two things of which the New Testament was
+full, and which are characteristic of it--devotion and self-sacrifice.
+The crowds at a pilgrimage, a shrine, or a "pardon" were much more like
+the multitudes who followed our Lord about the hills of Galilee--like
+them probably in that imperfect faith which we call superstition--than
+anything that could be seen in the English Church, even if the
+Salvation Army were one of its instruments. And the spirit which
+governed the Roman Church had prevailed on men to make the sacrifice of
+celibacy a matter of course, as a condition of ministering in a regular
+and systematic way not only to the souls, but to the bodies of men, not
+only for the Priesthood, but for educational Brotherhoods, and Sisters
+of the poor and of hospitals. Devotion and sacrifice, prayer and
+self-denying charity, in one word sanctity, are at once on the surface
+of the New Testament and interwoven with all its substance. He recoiled
+from a representation of the religion of the New Testament which to his
+eye was without them. He turned to where, in spite of every other
+disadvantage, he thought he found them. In S. Filippo Neri he could
+find a link between the New Testament and progressive civilisation. He
+could find no S. Filippo--so modern and yet so Scriptural--when he
+sought at home.
+
+His mind, naturally alive to all greatness, had early been impressed
+with the greatness of the Church of Rome. But in his early days it was
+the greatness of Anti-Christ. Then came the change, and his sense of
+greatness was satisfied by the commanding and undoubting attitude of
+the Roman system, by the completeness of its theory, by the sweep of
+its claims and its rule, by the even march of its vast administration.
+It could not and it did not escape him, that the Roman Church, with all
+the good things which it had, was, as a whole, as unlike the Church of
+the New Testament and of the first ages as the English. He recognised
+it frankly, and built up a great theory to account for the fact,
+incorporating and modernising great portions of the received Roman
+explanations of the fact. But what won his heart and his enthusiasm was
+one thing; what justified itself to his intellect was another. And it
+was the reproduction, partial, as it might be, yet real and
+characteristic, in the Roman Church of the life and ways of the New
+Testament, which was the irresistible attraction that tore him from the
+associations and the affections of half a lifetime.
+
+The final break with the English Church was with much heat and
+bitterness; and both sides knew too much each of the other to warrant
+the language used on each side. The English Church had received too
+much loyal and invaluable service from him in teaching and example to
+have insulted him, as many of its chief authorities did, with the
+charges of dishonesty and bad faith; his persecutors forgot that a
+little effort on his part might, if he had been what they called him,
+and had really been a traitor, have formed a large and compact party,
+whose secession might have caused fatal damage. And he, too, knew too
+much of the better side of English religious life to justify the fierce
+invective and sarcasm with which he assailed for a time the English
+Church as a mere system of comfortable and self-deceiving worldliness.
+
+But as time went over him in his new position two things made
+themselves felt. One was, that though there was a New Testament life,
+lived in the Roman Church with conspicuous truth and reality, yet the
+Roman Church, like the English, was administered and governed by
+men--men with passions and faults, men of mixed characters--who had,
+like their English contemporaries and rivals, ends and rules of action
+not exactly like those of the New Testament. The Roman Church had to
+accept, as much as the English, the modern conditions of social and
+political life, however different in outward look from those of the
+Sermon on the Mount. The other was the increasing sense that the
+civilisation of the West was as a whole, and notwithstanding grievous
+drawbacks, part of God's providential government, a noble and
+beneficent thing, ministering graciously to man's peace and order,
+which Christians ought to recognise as a blessing of their times such
+as their fathers had not, for which they ought to be thankful, and
+which, if they were wise, they would put to what, in his phrase, was an
+"Apostolical" use. In one of the angelical hymns in the _Dream of
+Gerontius_, he dwells on the Divine goodness which led men to found "a
+household and a fatherland, a city and a state" with an earnestness of
+sympathy, recalling the enumeration of the achievements of human
+thought and hand, and the arts of civil and social life--[Greek: kai
+phthegma kai aenemoen phronaema kai astynomous orgas]--dwelt on so
+fondly by Aeschylus and Sophocles.
+
+The force with which these two things made themselves felt as age came
+on--the disappointments attending his service to the Church, and the
+grandeur of the physical and social order of the world and its Divine
+sanction in spite of all that is evil and all that is so shortlived in
+it--produced a softening in his ways of thought and speech. Never for a
+moment did his loyalty and obedience to his Church, even when most
+tried, waver and falter. The thing is inconceivable to any one who ever
+knew him, and the mere suggestion would be enough to make him blaze
+forth in all his old fierceness and power. But perfectly satisfied of
+his position, and with his duties clearly defined, he could allow large
+and increasing play, in the leisure of advancing age, to his natural
+sympathies, and to the effect of the wonderful spectacle of the world
+around him. He was, after all, an Englishman; and with all his
+quickness to detect and denounce what was selfish and poor in English
+ideas and action, and with all the strength of his deep antipathies,
+his chief interests were for things English--English literature,
+English social life, English politics, English religion. He liked to
+identify himself, as far as it was possible, with things English, even
+with things that belonged to his own first days. He republished his
+Oxford sermons and treatises. He prized his honorary fellowship at
+Trinity; he enjoyed his visit to Oxford, and the welcome which he met
+there. He discerned how much the English Church counted for in the
+fight going on in England for the faith in Christ. There was in all
+that he said and did a gentleness, a forbearance, a kindly
+friendliness, a warm recognition of the honour paid him by his
+countrymen, ever since the _Apologia_ had broken down the prejudices
+which had prevented Englishmen from doing him justice. As with his
+chief antagonist at Oxford, Dr. Hawkins, advancing years brought with
+them increasing gentleness, and generosity, and courtesy. But through
+all this there was perceptible to those who watched a pathetic yearning
+for something which was not to be had: a sense, resigned--for so it was
+ordered--but deep and piercing, how far, not some of us, but all of us,
+are from the life of the New Testament: how much there is for religion
+to do, and how little there seems to be to do it.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+CARDINAL NEWMAN'S NATURALNESS[35]
+
+
+  [35]
+  _Guardian_, 20th August 1890.
+
+Every one feels what is meant when we speak of a person's ways being
+"natural," in contrast to being artificial, or overstrained, or
+studied, or affected. But it is easier to feel what is meant than to
+explain and define it. We sometimes speak as if it were a mere quality
+of manner; as if it belonged to the outside show of things, and denoted
+the atmosphere, clear and transparent, through which they are viewed.
+It corresponds to what is lucid in talk and style, and what ethically
+is straightforward and unpretentious. But it is something much more
+than a mere surface quality. When it is real and part of the whole
+character, and not put on from time to time for effect, it reaches a
+long way down to what is deepest and most significant in a man's moral
+nature. It is connected with the sense of truth, with honest
+self-judgment, with habits of self-discipline, with the repression of
+vanity, pride, egotism. It has no doubt to do with good taste and good
+manners, but it has as much to do with good morals--with the resolute
+habit of veracity with oneself--with the obstinate preference for
+reality over show, however tempting--with the wholesome power of being
+able to think little about oneself.
+
+It is common to speak of the naturalness and ease of Cardinal Newman's
+style in writing. It is, of course, the first thing that attracts
+notice when we open one of his books; and there are people who think it
+bald and thin and dry. They look out for longer words, and grander
+phrases, and more involved constructions, and neater epigrams. They
+expect a great theme to be treated with more pomp and majesty, and they
+are disappointed. But the majority of English readers seem to be agreed
+in recognising the beauty and transparent flow of his language, which
+matches the best French writing in rendering with sureness and without
+effort the thought of the writer. But what is more interesting than
+even the formation of such a style--a work, we may be sure, not
+accomplished without much labour--is the man behind the style. For the
+man and the style are one in this perfect naturalness and ease. Any one
+who has watched at all carefully the Cardinal's career, whether in old
+days or later, must have been struck with this feature of his
+character, his naturalness, the freshness and freedom with which he
+addressed a friend or expressed an opinion, the absence of all
+mannerism and formality; and, where he had to keep his dignity, both
+his loyal obedience to the authority which enjoined it and the
+half-amused, half-bored impatience that he should be the person round
+whom all these grand doings centred. It made the greatest difference in
+his friendships whether his friends met him on equal terms, or whether
+they brought with them too great conventional deference or solemnity of
+manner. "So and so is a very good fellow, but he is not a man to talk
+to in your shirt sleeves," was his phrase about an over-logical and
+over-literal friend. Quite aware of what he was to his friends and to
+the things with which he was connected, and ready with a certain
+quickness of temper which marked him in old days to resent anything
+unbecoming done to his cause or those connected with it, he would not
+allow any homage to be paid to himself. He was by no means disposed to
+allow liberties to be taken or to put up with impertinence; for all
+that bordered on the unreal, for all that was pompous, conceited,
+affected, he had little patience; but almost beyond all these was his
+disgust at being made the object of foolish admiration. He protested
+with whimsical fierceness against being made a hero or a sage; he was
+what he was, he said, and nothing more; and he was inclined to be rude
+when people tried to force him into an eminence which he refused. With
+his profound sense of the incomplete and the ridiculous in this world,
+and with a humour in which the grotesque and the pathetic sides of life
+were together recognised at every moment, he never hesitated to admit
+his own mistakes--his "floors" as he called them. All this ease and
+frankness with those whom he trusted, which was one of the lessons
+which he learnt from Hurrell Froude, an intercourse which implied a
+good deal of give and take--all this satisfied his love of freedom, his
+sense of the real. It was his delight to give himself free play with
+those whom he could trust; to feel that he could talk with "open
+heart," understood without explaining, appealing for a response which
+would not fail, though it was not heard. He could be stiff enough with
+those who he thought were acting a part, or pretending to more than
+they could perform. But he believed--what was not very easy to believe
+beforehand--that he could win the sympathy of his countrymen, though
+not their agreement with him; and so, with characteristic naturalness
+and freshness, he wrote the _Apologia_.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+LORD BLACHFORD[36]
+
+
+  [36]
+  _Guardian_, 27th Nov. 1889.
+
+Lord Blachford, whose death was announced last week, belonged to a
+generation of Oxford men of whom few now survive, and who, of very
+different characters and with very different careers and histories, had
+more in common than any set of contemporaries at Oxford since their
+time. Speaking roughly, they were almost the last product of the old
+training at public school and at college, before the new reforms set
+in; of a training confessedly imperfect and in some ways deplorably
+defective, but with considerable elements in it of strength and
+manliness, with keen instincts of contempt for all that savoured of
+affectation and hollowness, and with a sort of largeness and freedom
+about it, both in its outlook and its discipline, which suited vigorous
+and self-reliant natures in an exciting time, when debate ran high and
+the gravest issues seemed to be presenting themselves to English
+society. The reformed system which has taken its place at Oxford
+criticises, not without some justice, the limitations of the older one;
+the narrow range of its interests, the few books which men read, and
+the minuteness with which they were "got up." But if these men did not
+learn all that a University ought to teach its students, they at least
+learned two things. They learned to work hard, and they learned to make
+full use of what they knew. They framed an ideal of practical life,
+which was very variously acted upon, but which at any rate aimed at
+breadth of grasp and generosity of purpose, and at being thorough. This
+knot of men, who lived a good deal together, were recognised at the
+time as young men of much promise, and they looked forward to life with
+eagerness and high aspiration. They have fulfilled their promise; their
+names are mixed up with all the recent history of England; they have
+filled its great places and governed its policy during a large part of
+the Queen's long reign. Their names are now for the most part things of
+the past--Sidney Herbert, Lord Canning, Lord Dalhousie, Lord Elgin,
+Lord Cardwell, the Wilberforces, Mr. Hope Scott, Archbishop Tait. But
+they still have their representatives among us--Mr. Gladstone, Lord
+Selborne, Lord Sherbrooke, Sir Thomas Acland, Cardinal Manning. It is
+not often that a University generation or two can produce such a list
+of names of statesmen and rulers; and the list might easily be
+enlarged.
+
+To this generation Frederic Rogers belonged, not the least
+distinguished among his contemporaries; and he was early brought under
+an influence likely to stimulate in a high degree whatever powers a man
+possessed, and to impress a strong character with elevated and enduring
+ideas of life and duty. Mr. Newman, with Mr. Hurrell Froude and Mr.
+Robert Wilberforce, had recently been appointed tutors of their college
+by Dr. Copleston. They were in the first eagerness of their enthusiasm
+to do great things with the college, and the story goes that Mr.
+Newman, on the look-out for promising pupils, wrote to an Eton friend,
+asking him to recommend some good Eton men for admission at Oriel.
+Frederic Rogers, so the story goes, was one of those mentioned; at any
+rate, he entered at Oriel, and became acquainted with Mr. Newman as a
+tutor, and the admiration and attachment of the undergraduate ripened
+into the most unreserved and affectionate friendship of the grown
+man--a friendship which has lasted through all storms and difficulties,
+and through strong differences of opinion, till death only has ended
+it. From Mr. Newman his pupil caught that earnest devotion to the cause
+of the Church which was supreme with him through life. He entered
+heartily into Mr. Newman's purpose to lift the level of the English
+Church and its clergy. While Mr. Newman at Oxford was fighting the
+battle of the English Church, there was no one who was a closer friend
+than Rogers, no one in whom Mr. Newman had such trust, none whose
+judgment he so valued, no one in whose companionship he so delighted;
+and the master's friendship was returned by the disciple with a noble
+and tender, and yet manly honesty. There came, as we know, times which
+strained even that friendship; when the disciple, just at the moment
+when the master most needed and longed for sympathy and counsel, had to
+choose between his duty to his Church and the claims and ties of
+friendship. He could not follow in the course which his master and
+friend had found inevitable; and that deepest and most delightful
+friendship had to be given up. But it was given up, not indeed without
+great suffering on both sides, but without bitterness or unworthy
+thoughts. The friend had seen too closely the greatness and purity of
+his master's character to fail in tenderness and loyalty, even when he
+thought his master going most wrong. He recognised that the error,
+deplorable as he thought it, was the mistake of a lofty and unselfish
+soul; and in the height of the popular outcry against him he came
+forward, with a distant and touching reverence, to take his old
+friend's part and rebuke the clamour. And at length the time came when
+disagreements were left long behind and each person had finally taken
+his recognised place; and then the old ties were knit up again. It
+could not be the former friendship of every day and of absolute and
+unreserved confidence. But it was the old friendship of affection and
+respect renewed, and pleasure in the interchange of thoughts. It was a
+friendship of the antique type, more common, perhaps, even in the last
+century than with us, but enriched with Christian hopes and Christian
+convictions.
+
+Lord Blachford, in spite of his brilliant Oxford reputation, and though
+he was a singularly vigorous writer, with wide interests and very
+independent thought, has left nothing behind him in the way of
+literature. This was partly because he very early became a man of
+affairs; partly that his health interfered with habits of study. It
+used to be told at Oxford that when he was working for his Double First
+he could scarcely use his eyes, and had to learn much of his work by
+being read to. The result was that he was not a great reader; and a man
+ought to be a reader who is to be a writer. But, besides this, there
+was a strongly marked feature in his character which told in the same
+direction. There was a curious modesty about him which formed a
+contrast with other points; with a readiness and even eagerness to put
+forth and develop his thoughts on matters that interested him, with a
+perfect consciousness of his remarkable powers of statement and
+argument, with a constitutional impetuosity blended with caution which
+showed itself when anything appealed to his deeper feelings or called
+for his help; yet with all these impelling elements, his instinct was
+always to shrink from putting himself forward, except when it was a
+matter of duty. He accepted recognition when it came, but he never
+claimed it. And this reserve, which marked his social life, kept him
+back from saying in a permanent form much that he had to say, and that
+was really worth saying. Like many of the distinguished men of his day,
+he was occasionally a journalist. We have been reminded by the _Times_
+that he at one time wrote for that paper. And he was one of the men to
+whose confidence and hope in the English Church the _Guardian_ owes its
+existence.
+
+His life was the uneventful one of a diligent and laborious public
+servant, and then of a landlord keenly alive to the responsibilities of
+his position. He passed through various subordinate public employments,
+and finally succeeded Mr. Herman Merivale as permanent Under-Secretary
+for the Colonies. It is a great post, but one of which the work is done
+for the most part out of sight. Colonial Secretaries in Parliament come
+and go, and have the credit, often quite justly, of this or that
+policy. But the public know little of the permanent official who keeps
+the traditions and experience of the department, whose judgment is
+always an element, often a preponderating element, in eventful
+decisions, and whose pen drafts the despatches which go forth in the
+name of the Government. Sir Frederic Rogers, as he became in time, had
+to deal with some of the most serious colonial questions which arose
+and were settled while he was at the Colonial Office. He took great
+pains, among other things, to remove, or at least diminish, the
+difficulties which beset the _status_ of the Colonial Church and
+clergy, and to put its relations to the Church at home on a just and
+reasonable footing. There is a general agreement as to the industry and
+conspicuous ability with which his part of the work was done. Mr.
+Gladstone set an admirable example in recognising in an unexpected way
+faithful but unnoticed services, and at the same time paid a merited
+honour to the permanent staff of the public offices, when he named Sir
+Frederic Rogers for a peerage.
+
+Lord Blachford, for so he became on his retirement from the Colonial
+Office, cannot be said to have quitted entirely public life, as he
+always, while his strength lasted, acknowledged public claims on his
+time and industry. He took his part in two or three laborious
+Commissions, doing the same kind of valuable yet unseen work which he
+had done in office, guarding against blunders, or retrieving them,
+giving direction and purpose to inquiries, suggesting expedients. But
+his main employment was now at his own home. He came late in life to
+the position of a landed proprietor, and he at once set before himself
+as his object the endeavour to make his estate as perfect as it could
+be made--perfect in the way in which a naturally beautiful country and
+his own good taste invited him to make it, but beyond all, as perfect
+as might be, viewed as the dwelling-place of his tenants and the
+labouring poor. A keen and admiring student of political economy, his
+sympathies were always with the poor. He was always ready to challenge
+assumptions, such as are often loosely made for the convenience of the
+well-to-do. The solicitude which always pursued him was the thought of
+his cottages, and it was not satisfied till the last had been put in
+good order. The same spirit prompted him to allow labourers who could
+manage the undertaking to rent pasture for a few cows; and the
+experiment, he thought, had succeeded. The idea of justice and the
+general welfare had too strong a hold on his mind to allow him to be
+sentimental in dealing with the difficult questions connected with
+land. But if his labourers found him thoughtful of their comfort his
+farmers found him a good landlord--strict where he met with dishonesty
+and carelessness, but open-minded and reasonable in understanding their
+points of view, and frank, equitable, and liberal in meeting their
+wishes. Disclaiming all experience of country matters, and not minding
+if he fell into some mistakes, he made his care of his estate a model
+of the way in which a good man should discharge his duties to the land.
+
+His was one of those natures which have the gift of inspiring
+confidence in all who come near him; all who had to do with him felt
+that they could absolutely trust him. The quality which was at the
+bottom of his character as a man was his unswerving truthfulness; but
+upon this was built up a singularly varied combination of elements not
+often brought together, and seldom in such vigour and activity. Keen,
+rapid, penetrating, he was quick in detecting anything that rung hollow
+in language or feeling; and he did not care to conceal his dislike and
+contempt. But no one threw himself with more genuine sympathy into the
+real interests of other people. No matter what it was, ethical or
+political theory, the course of a controversy, the arrangement of a
+trust-deed, the oddities of a character, the marvels of natural
+science, he was always ready to go with his companion as far as he
+chose to go, and to take as much trouble as if the question started had
+been his own. Where his sense of truth was not wounded he was most
+considerate and indulgent; he seemed to keep through life his
+schoolboy's amused tolerance for mischief that was not vicious. No one
+entered more heartily into the absurdities of a grotesque situation; of
+no one could his friends be so sure that he would miss no point of a
+good story; and no one took in at once more completely or with deeper
+feeling the full significance of some dangerous incident in public
+affairs, or discerned more clearly the real drift of confused and
+ambiguous tendencies. He was conscious of the power of his intellect,
+and he liked to bring it to bear on what was before him; he liked to
+probe things to the bottom, and see how far his companion in
+conversation was able to go; but ready as he was with either argument
+or banter he never, unless provoked, forced the proof of his power on
+others. For others, indeed, of all classes and characters, so that they
+were true, he had nothing but kindness, geniality, forbearance, the
+ready willingness to meet them on equal terms. Those who had the
+privilege of his friendship remember how they were kept up in their
+standard and measure of duty by the consciousness of his opinion, his
+judgment, his eagerness to feel with them, his fearless, though it
+might be reluctant, expression of disagreement It was, indeed, that
+very marked yet most harmonious combination of severity and tenderness
+which gave such interest to his character. A strong love of justice, a
+deep and unselfish and affectionate gentleness and patience, are
+happily qualities not too rare. But to have known one at once so
+severely just and so indulgently tender and affectionate makes a mark
+in a man's life which he forgets at his peril.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited, _Edinburgh_.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Occasional Papers, by R.W. Church
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Occasional Papers, by R.W. Church
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Occasional Papers
+       Selected from The Guardian,  The Times, and The Saturday Review,
+       1846-1890
+
+
+Author: R.W. Church
+
+Release Date: April 3, 2004 [EBook #11771]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OCCASIONAL PAPERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by MBP, papeters, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+OCCASIONAL PAPERS
+
+SELECTED FROM
+THE GUARDIAN, THE TIMES, AND THE SATURDAY REVIEW
+1846-1890
+
+
+By the late
+R.W. CHURCH, M.A., D.C.L.
+Sometime Rector of Whatley, Dean of St. Paul's,
+Honorary Fellow of Oriel College
+
+
+In Two Vols.--VOL. II
+
+
+London
+Macmillan and Co., Limited
+New York: The Macmillan Company
+
+1897
+
+_First Edition February_ 1897
+_Reprinted April_ 1897
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I       MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ROYAL SUPREMACY
+
+II      JOYCE ON COURTS OF SPIRITUAL APPEAL
+
+III     PRIVY COUNCIL JUDGMENTS
+
+IV      SIR JOHN COLERIDGE ON THE PURCHAS CASE
+
+V       MR. GLADSTONE'S LETTER ON THE ENGLISH CHURCH
+
+VI      DISENDOWMENT
+
+VII     THE NEW COURT
+
+VIII    MOZLEY'S BAMPTON LECTURES
+
+IX      ECCE HOMO
+
+X       THE AUTHOR OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ON A NEW REFORMATION
+
+XI      RENAN'S "VIE DE JESUS"
+
+XII     RENAN'S "LES APOTRES"
+
+XIII    RENAN'S HIBBERT LECTURES
+
+XIV     RENAN'S "SOUVENIRS D'ENFANCE"
+
+XV      LIFE OF FREDERICK ROBERTSON
+
+XVI     LIFE OF BARON BUNSEN
+
+XVII    COLERIDGE'S MEMOIR OF KEBLE
+
+XVIII   MAURICE'S THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS
+
+XIX     FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE
+
+XX      SIR RICHARD CHURCH
+
+XXI     DEATH OF BISHOP WILBERFORCE
+
+XXII    RETIREMENT OF THE PROVOST OF ORIEL
+
+XXIII   MARK PATTISON
+
+XXIV    PATTISON'S ESSAYS
+
+XXV     BISHOP FRAZER
+
+XXVI    NEWMAN'S "APOLOGIA"
+
+XXVII   DR. NEWMAN ON THE "EIRENICON"
+
+XXVIII  NEWMAN'S PAROCHIAL SERMONS
+
+XXIX    CARDINAL NEWMAN
+
+XXX     CARDINAL NEWMAN'S COURSE
+
+XXXI    CARDINAL NEWMAN'S NATURALNESS
+
+XXXII   LORD BLACHFORD
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ROYAL SUPREMACY[1]
+
+
+  [1]
+  _Remarks on the Royal Supremacy, as it is Defined by Reason, History,
+  and the Constitution_. A Letter to the Lord Bishop of London, by
+  the Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone, M.P. for the University of Oxford.
+  _Guardian_, 10th July 1850.
+
+Mr. Gladstone has not disappointed the confidence of those who have
+believed of him that when great occasions presented themselves, of
+interest to the Church, he would not be found wanting. A statesman
+has a right to reserve himself and bide his time, and in doubtful
+circumstances may fairly ask us to trust his discretion as to when is
+his time. But there are critical seasons about whose seriousness there
+can be no doubt. One of these is now passing over the English Church.
+And Mr. Gladstone has recognised it, and borne himself in it with a
+manliness, earnestness, and temper which justify those who have never
+despaired of his doing worthy service to the Church, with whose cause
+he so early identified himself.
+
+The pamphlet before us, to which he has put his name, is the most
+important, perhaps, of all that have been elicited by the deep interest
+felt in the matter on which it treats. Besides its importance as the
+expression of the opinion, and, it must be added, the anxieties of a
+leading statesman, it has two intrinsic advantages. It undertakes to
+deal closely and strictly with those facts in the case mainly belonging
+to the period of the Reformation, on which the great stress has been
+laid in the arguments both against our liberty and our very being as a
+Church. And, further, it gives us on these facts, and, in connection
+with them, on the events of the crisis itself, the judgment and the
+anticipations of a mind at once deeply imbued with religious
+philosophy, and also familiar with the consideration of constitutional
+questions, and accustomed to view them in their practical entanglements
+as well as in their abstract and ideal forms. It is, indeed, thus only
+that the magnitude and the true extent of the relations of the present
+contest can be appreciated. The intrinsic greatness, indeed, of
+religious interests cannot receive addition of dignity here. But the
+manner of treating them may. And Mr. Gladstone has done what was both
+due to the question at issue, and in the highest degree important for
+its serious consideration and full elucidation, in raising it from a
+discussion of abstract principles to what it is no less--a real problem
+of English constitutional law.
+
+The following passage will show briefly the ground over which the
+discussion travels:--
+
+    The questions, then, that I seek to examine will be as follow:--
+
+    1. Did the statutes of the Reformation involve the abandonment of
+    the duty of the Church to be the guardian of her faith?
+
+    2. Is the present composition of the appellate tribunal conformable
+    either to reason or to the statutes of the Reformation, and the
+    spirit of the Constitution as expressed in them?
+
+    3. Is the Royal Supremacy, according to the Constitution, any bar
+    to the adjustment of the appellate jurisdiction in such a manner
+    as that it shall convey the sense of the Church in questions of
+    doctrine?
+
+    All these questions I humbly propose to answer in the negative,
+    and so to answer them in conformity with what I understand to be
+    the principles of our history and law. My endeavour will be to
+    show that the powers of the State so determined, in regard to the
+    legislative office of the Church (setting aside for the moment any
+    question as to the right of assent in the laity), are powers of
+    restraint; that the jurisdictions united and annexed to the Crown
+    are corrective jurisdictions; and that their exercise is subject
+    to the general maxim, that the laws ecclesiastical are to be
+    administered by ecclesiastical judges.
+
+Mr. Gladstone first goes into the question--What was done, and what was
+the understanding at the Reformation? All agree that this was a time of
+great changes, and that in the settlement resulting from them the State
+took, and the Church yielded, a great deal. And on the strength of this
+broad general fact, the details of the settlement have been treated
+with an _a priori_ boldness, not deficient often in that kind of
+precision which can be gained by totally putting aside inconvenient
+or perplexing elements, and having both its intellectual and moral
+recommendations to many minds; but highly undesirable where a great
+issue has been raised for the religion of millions, and the political
+constitution of a great nation. Men who are not lawyers seem to have
+thought that, by taking a lawyer's view, or what they considered such,
+of the Reformation Acts, they had disposed of the question for ever. It
+was, indeed, time for a statesman to step in, and protest, if only in
+the name of constitutional and political philosophy, against so narrow
+and unreal an abuse of law-texts--documents of the highest importance
+in right hands, and in their proper place, but capable, as all must
+know, of leading to inconceivable absurdity in speculation, and not
+impossibly fatal confusion in fact.
+
+The bulk of this pamphlet is devoted to the consideration of the language
+and effect, legal and constitutional, of those famous statutes with the
+titles of which recent controversy has made us so familiar. Mr.
+Gladstone makes it clear that it does not at all follow that because the
+Church conceded a great deal, she conceded, or even was expected to
+concede, indefinitely, whatever might be claimed. She conceded, but she
+conceded by compact;--a compact which supposed her power to concede, and
+secured to her untouched whatever was not conceded. And she did not
+concede, nor was asked for, her highest power, her legislative power.
+She did not concede, nor was asked to concede, that any but her own
+ministers--by the avowal of all drawing their spiritual authority from a
+source which nothing human could touch--should declare her doctrine, or
+should be employed in administering her laws. What she did concede was,
+not original powers of direction and guidance, but powers of restraint
+and correction;--under securities greater, both in form and in working,
+than those possessed at the time by any other body in England, for their
+rights and liberties--greater far than might have been expected, when
+the consequences of a long foreign supremacy--not righteously maintained
+and exercised, because at the moment unrighteously thrown off--increased
+the control which the Civil Government always must claim over the
+Church, by the sudden abstraction of a power which, though usurping, was
+spiritual; and presented to the ambition of a despotic King a number of
+unwarrantable prerogatives which the separation from the Pope had left
+without an owner.
+
+On the trite saying, meant at first to represent, roughly and
+invidiously, the effect of the Reformation, and lately urged as
+technically and literally true--"The assertion that in the time of
+Henry VIII. the See of Rome was both 'the source and centre of
+ecclesiastical jurisdiction,' and therefore the supreme judge of
+doctrine; and that this power of the Pope was transferred in its
+entireness to the Crown"--Mr. Gladstone remarks as follows:--
+
+    I will not ask whether the Pope was indeed at that time the
+    supreme judge of doctrine; it is enough for me that not very long
+    before the Council of Constance had solemnly said otherwise, in
+    words which, though they may be forgotten, cannot be annulled....
+
+    That the Pope was the source of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the
+    English Church before the Reformation is an assertion of the
+    gravest import, which ought not to have been thus taken for
+    granted.... The fact really is this:--A modern opinion, which, by
+    force of modern circumstances, has of late gained great favour in
+    the Church of Rome, is here dated back and fastened upon ages to
+    whose fixed principles it was unknown and alien; and the case of
+    the Church of England is truly hard when the Papal authority of
+    the Middle Ages is exaggerated far beyond its real and historical
+    scope, with the effect only of fastening that visionary
+    exaggeration, through the medium of another fictitious notion of
+    wholesale transfer of the Papal privileges to the Crown, upon us,
+    as the true and legal measure of the Royal Supremacy.
+
+    It appears to me that he who alleges in the gross that the Papal
+    prerogatives were carried over to the Crown at the Reformation,
+    greatly belies the laws and the people of that era. Their
+    unvarying doctrine was, that they were restoring the ancient regal
+    jurisdiction, and abolishing one that had been usurped. But there
+    is no evidence to show that these were identical in themselves, or
+    co-extensive in their range. In some respects the Crown obtained
+    at that period more than the Pope had ever had; for I am not aware
+    that the Convocation required his license to deliberate upon
+    canons, or his assent to their promulgation. In other respects the
+    Crown acquired less; for not the Crown, but the Archbishop of
+    Canterbury was appointed to exercise the power of dispensation in
+    things lawful, and to confirm Episcopal elections. Neither the
+    Crown nor the Archbishop succeeded to such Papal prerogatives as
+    were contrary to the law of the land; for neither the 26th of
+    Henry VIII. nor the 2nd of Elizabeth annexed to the Crown all the
+    powers of correction and reformation which had been actually
+    claimed by the Pope, but only such as "hath heretofore been or may
+    lawfully be exercised or used." ... The "ancient jurisdiction,"
+    and not the then recently claimed or exercised powers, was the
+    measure and the substance of what the Crown received from the
+    Legislature; and, with those ancient rights for his rule, no
+    impartial man would say that the Crown was the source of
+    ecclesiastical jurisdiction according to the statutes of the
+    Reformation. But the statutes of the Reformation era relating to
+    jurisdiction, having as statutes the assent of the laity, and
+    accepted by the canons of the clergy, are the standard to which
+    the Church has bound herself as a religious society to conform.
+
+The word "jurisdiction" has played an important part in the recent
+discussions; whether its meaning, with its various involved and
+associated ideas, by no means free from intricacy and confusion, have
+been duly unravelled and made clear, we may be permitted to doubt. A
+distinction of the canonists has been assumed by those who have used
+the word with most precision--_assumed_, though it is by no means a
+simple and indisputable one. Mr. Gladstone draws attention to this,
+when, after noticing that nowhere in the ecclesiastical legislation of
+Elizabeth is the claim made on behalf of the Crown to be the source of
+ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he admits that this _is_ the language of
+the school of English law, and offers an explanation of the fact. That
+which Acts of Parliament do not say, which is negatived in actual
+practice by contradictory and irreconcilable facts, is yet wanted by
+lawyers for the theoretic completeness of their idea and system of law.
+The fact is important as a reminder that what is one real aspect, or,
+perhaps, the most complete and consistent representation of a system
+on paper, may be inadequate and untrue as an exhibition of its real
+working and appearance in the world.
+
+    To sum up the whole, then, I contend that the Crown did not claim
+    by statute, either to be of right, or to become by convention, the
+    _source_ of that kind of action, which was committed by the
+    Saviour to the Apostolic Church, whether for the enactment of
+    laws, or for the administration of its discipline; but the claim
+    was, that all the canons of the Church, and all its judicial
+    proceedings, inasmuch as they were to form parts respectively of
+    the laws and of the legal administration of justice in the
+    kingdom, should run only with the assent and sanction of the
+    Crown. They were to carry with them a double force--a force of
+    coercion, visible and palpable; a force addressed to conscience,
+    neither visible nor palpable, and in its nature only capable of
+    being inwardly appreciated. Was it then unreasonable that they
+    should bear outwardly the tokens of that power to which they were
+    to be indebted for their outward observance, and should work only
+    within by that wholly different influence that governs the kingdom
+    which is not of this world, and flows immediately from its King?
+    ... But while, according to the letter and spirit of the law, such
+    appear to be the limits of the Royal Supremacy in regard to the
+    _legislative_, which is the highest, action of the Church, I do
+    not deny that in other branches it goes farther, and will now
+    assume that the supremacy in all causes, which is at least a claim
+    to control at every point the jurisdiction of the Church, may also
+    be construed to mean as much as that the Crown is the ultimate
+    source of jurisdiction of whatever kind.
+
+    Here, however, I must commence by stating that, as it appears to
+    me, Lord Coke and others attach to the very word jurisdiction a
+    narrower sense than it bears in popular acceptation, or in the
+    works of canonists--a sense which excludes altogether that of the
+    canonists; and also a sense which appears to be the genuine and
+    legitimate sense of the word in its first intention. Now, when we
+    are endeavouring to appreciate the force and scope of the legal
+    doctrine concerning ecclesiastical and spiritual jurisdiction, it
+    is plain that we must take the term employed in the sense of our
+    own law, and not in the different and derivative sense in which it
+    has been used by canonists and theologians. But canonists
+    themselves bear witness to the distinction which I have now
+    pointed out. The one kind is _Jurisdictio coactiva proprie dicta,
+    principibus data_; the other is _Jurisdictio improprie dicta ac
+    mere spiritualis, Ecclesiae ejusque Episcopis a Christo data_....
+
+    Properly speaking, I submit that there is no such thing as
+    jurisdiction in any private association of men, or anywhere else
+    than under the authority of the State. _Jus_ is the scheme of
+    rights subsisting between men in the relations, not of all, but of
+    civil society; and _jurisdicto_ is the authority to determine and
+    enunciate those rights from time to time. Church authority,
+    therefore, so long as it stands alone, is not in strictness of
+    speech, or according to history, jurisdiction, because it is not
+    essentially bound up with civil law.
+
+    But when the State and the Church came to be united, by the
+    conversion of nations, and the submission of the private
+    conscience to Christianity--when the Church placed her power of
+    self-regulation under the guardianship of the State, and the State
+    annexed its own potent sanction to rules, which without it would
+    have been matter of mere private contract, then _jus_ or civil
+    right soon found its way into the Church, and the respective
+    interests and obligations of its various orders, and of the
+    individuals composing them, were regulated by provisions forming
+    part of the law of the land. Matter ecclesiastical or spiritual
+    moulded in the forms of civil law, became the proper subject of
+    ecclesiastical or spiritual jurisdiction, properly so called.
+
+    Now, inasmuch as laws are abstractions until they are put into
+    execution, through the medium of executive and judicial authority,
+    it is evident that the cogency of the reasons for welding
+    together, so to speak, civil and ecclesiastical authority is much
+    more full with regard to these latter branches of power than with
+    regard to legislation. There had been in the Church, from its
+    first existence as a spiritual society, a right to govern, to
+    decide, to adjudge for spiritual purposes; that was a true,
+    self-governing authority; but it was not properly jurisdiction. It
+    naturally came to be included, or rather enfolded, in the term,
+    when for many centuries the secular arm had been in perpetual
+    co-operation with the tribunals of the Church. The thing to be
+    done, and the means by which it was done, were bound together; the
+    authority and the power being always united in fact, were treated
+    as an unity for the purposes of law. As the potentate possessing
+    not the head but the mouth or issue of a river, has the right to
+    determine what shall pass to or from the sea, so the State,
+    standing between an injunction of the Church and its execution,
+    had a right to refer that execution wholly to its own authority.
+
+    There was not contained or implied in such a doctrine any denial
+    of the original and proper authority of the Church for its own
+    self-government, or any assertion that it had passed to and become
+    the property of the Crown. But that authority, though not in its
+    source, yet in its exercise, had immersed itself in the forms of
+    law; had invoked and obtained the aid of certain elements of
+    external power, which belonged exclusively to the State, and for
+    the right and just use of which the State had a separate and
+    independent responsibility, so that it could not, without breach
+    of duty, allow them to be parted from itself. It was, therefore, I
+    submit, an intelligible and, under given circumstances, a
+    warrantable scheme of action, under which the State virtually
+    said: Church decrees, taking the form of law, and obtaining their
+    full and certain effect only in that form, can be executed only as
+    law, and while they are in process of being put into practice can
+    only be regarded as law, and therefore the whole power of their
+    execution, that is to say, all juris diction in matters
+    ecclesiastical and spiritual, must, according to the doctrine of
+    law, proceed from the fountain-head of law, namely, from the
+    Crown. In the last legal resort there can be but one origin for
+    all which is to be done in societies of men by force of legal
+    power; nor, if so, can doubt arise what that origin must be.
+
+    If you allege that the Church has a spiritual authority to
+    regulate doctrines and discipline, still, as you choose to back
+    that authority with the force of temporal law, and as the State is
+    exclusively responsible for the use of that force, you must be
+    content to fold up the authority of the Church in that exterior
+    form through which you desire it to take effect. From whatsoever
+    source it may come originally, it comes to the subject as law; it
+    therefore comes to him from the fountain of law.... The faith of
+    Christendom has been received in England; the discipline of the
+    Christian Church, cast into its local form, modified by statutes
+    of the realm, and by the common law and prerogative, has from time
+    immemorial been received in England; but we can view them only as
+    law, although you may look further back to the divine and
+    spiritual sanction, in virtue of which they acquired that social
+    position, which made it expedient that they should associate with
+    law and should therefore become law.
+
+But as to the doctrine itself, it is most obvious to notice that it is
+not more strange, and not necessarily more literally real, than those
+other legal views of royal prerogative and perfection, which are the
+received theory of all our great jurists--accepted by them for very
+good reasons, but not the less astounding when presented as naked and
+independent truths. It was natural enough that they should claim for
+the Crown the origination of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, considering
+what else they claimed for it. Mr. Allen can present us with a more
+than Chinese idea of royal power, when he draws it only from
+Blackstone:--
+
+    They may have heard [he says, speaking of the "unlearned in the
+    law"] that the law of England is founded in reason and wisdom. The
+    first lesson they are taught will inform them, that the law of
+    England attributes to the King absolute perfection, absolute
+    immortality, and legal ubiquity. They will be told that the King
+    of England is not only incapable of doing wrong, but of thinking
+    wrong. They will be informed that he never dies, that he is
+    invisible as well as immortal, and that in the eye of the law he
+    is present at one and the same instant in every court of justice
+    within his dominions.... They may have been told that the royal
+    prerogative in England is limited; but when they consult the sages
+    of the law, they will be assured that the legal authority of the
+    King of England is absolute and irresistible ... that all are
+    under him, while he is under none but God....
+
+    If they have had the benefit of a liberal education, they have
+    been taught that to obtain security for persons and property was
+    the great end for which men submitted to the restraints of civil
+    government; and they may have heard of the indispensable necessity
+    of an independent magistracy for the due administration of
+    justice; but when they direct their inquiries to the laws and
+    constitution of England, they will find it an established maxim in
+    that country that all jurisdiction emanates from the Crown. They
+    will be told that the King is not ony the chief, but the sole
+    magistrate of the nation; and that all others act by his
+    commission, and in subordination to him.[2]
+
+  [2]
+  _Allen on the Royal Prerogative_, pp. 1-3.
+
+"In the most limited monarchy," as he says truly the "King is
+represented in law books, as in theory an absolute sovereign." "Even
+now," says Mr. Gladstone, "after three centuries of progress toward
+democratic sway, the Crown has prerogatives by acting upon which,
+within their strict and unquestioned bounds, it might at any time throw
+the country into confusion. And so has each House of Parliament." But
+if the absolute supremacy of the Crown _in the legal point of mew
+exactly the same over temporal matters and causes as over spiritual_,
+is taken by no sane man to be a literal fact in temporal matters, it is
+violating the analogy of the Constitution, and dealing with the most
+important subjects in a mere spirit of narrow perverseness, to insist
+that it can have none but a literal meaning in ecclesiastical matters;
+and that the Church _did_ mean, though the State _did not_ to accept a
+despotic prerogative, unbounded by custom, convention, or law, and
+unchecked by acknowledged and active powers in herself. Yet such is the
+assumption, made in bitterness and vexation of spirit by some of those
+who have lately so hastily given up her cause; made with singular
+assurance by others, who, Liberals in all their political doctrines,
+have, for want of better arguments, invoked prerogative against the
+Church.
+
+What the securities and checks were that the Church, not less than the
+nation, contemplated and possessed, are not expressed in the theory
+itself of the royal prerogative; and, as in the ease of the nation, we
+might presume beforehand, that they would be found in practice rather
+than on paper. They were, however, real ones. "With the same theoretical
+laxity and practical security," as in the case of Parliaments and
+temporal judges, "was provision made for the conduct of Church
+affairs." Making allowance for the never absent disturbances arising
+out of political trouble and of personal character, the Church had very
+important means of making her own power felt in the administration of
+her laws, as well as in the making of them.
+
+    The real question, I apprehend, is this:--When the Church assented
+    to those great concessions which were embodied in our permanent
+    law at the Reformation, had she _adequate securities_ that the
+    powers so conveyed would be exercised, upon the whole, with a due
+    regard to the integrity of her faith, and of her office, which was
+    and has ever been a part of that faith? I do not ask whether these
+    securities were all on parchment or not--whether they were written
+    or unwritten--whether they were in statute, or in common law, or
+    in fixed usage, or in the spirit of the Constitution and in the
+    habits of the people--I ask the one vital question, whether,
+    whatever they were in form, they were in substance sufficient?
+
+    _The securities_ which the Church had were these: First, that the
+    assembling of the Convocation was obviously necessary for the
+    purposes of taxation; secondly and mainly, that the very solemn
+    and fundamental laws by which the jurisdiction of the See of Rome
+    was cut off, assigned to the spiritualty of the realm the care of
+    matters spiritual, as distinctly and formally as to the temporalty
+    the care of matters temporal; and that it was an understood
+    principle, and (as long as it continued) a regular usage of the
+    Constitution, that ecclesiastical laws should be administered by
+    ecclesiastical judges. These were the securities on which the
+    Church relied; on, which she had a right to rely; and on which,
+    for a long series of years, her alliance was justified by the
+    results.
+
+And further:--
+
+    The Church had this great and special security on which to rely,
+    that the Sovereigns of this country were, for a century after the
+    Reformation, amongst her best instructed, and even in some
+    instances her most devoted children: that all who made up the
+    governing body (with an insignificant exception) owned personal
+    allegiance to her, and that she might well rest on that personal
+    allegiance as warranting beforehand the expectation, which after
+    experience made good, that the office of the State towards her
+    would be discharged in a friendly and kindly spirit, and that the
+    principles of constitutional law and civil order would not be
+    strained against her, but fairly and fully applied in her behalf.
+
+These securities she now finds herself deprived of. This is the great
+change made in her position--made insensibly, and In a great measure,
+undesignedly--which has altered altogether the understanding on which
+she stood towards the Crown at the Reformation. It now turns out that
+that understanding, though it might have been deemed sufficient for the
+time, was not precise enough; and further, was not sufficiently looked
+after in the times which followed. And on us comes the duty of taking
+care that it be not finally extinguished; thrown off by the despair of
+one side, and assumed by the other as at length abandoned to their
+aggression.
+
+Mr. Gladstone comes to the question with the feelings of a statesman,
+conscious of the greatness and excellence of the State, and anxious
+that the Church should not provoke its jealousy, and in urging her
+claims should "take her stand, as to all matters of substance and
+principle, on the firm ground of history and law." It makes his
+judgment on the present state of things more solemn, and his conviction
+of the necessity of amending it more striking, when they are those of
+one so earnest for conciliation and peace. But on constitutional not
+less than on other grounds, he pronounces the strongest condemnation on
+the present formation of the Court of Appeal, which, working in a way
+which even its framers did not contemplate, has brought so much
+distress into the Church, and which yet, in defiance of principle, of
+consistency, and of the admission of its faultiness, is so recklessly
+maintained. Feeling and stating very strongly the evil sustained by the
+Church, from the suspension of her legislative powers,--"that loss of
+command over her work, and over the heart of the nation, which it has
+brought upon her,"--so strongly indeed that his words, coming from one
+familiar with the chances and hazards of a deliberative assembly, give
+new weight to the argument for the resumption of those powers,--feeling
+all this, he is ready to acquiesce in the measure beyond which the
+Bishops did not feel authorised to go, and which Mr. Gladstone regards
+as "representing the extremest point up to which the love of peace
+might properly carry the concessions of the Church":--
+
+    That which she is entitled in the spirit of the Constitution to
+    demand would be that the Queen's ecclesiastical laws shall be
+    administered by the Queen's ecclesiastical judges, of whom the
+    Bishops are the chief; and this, too, under the checks which the
+    sitting of a body appointed for ecclesiastical legislation would
+    impose.
+
+    But if it is not of vital necessity that a Church Legislature
+    should sit at the present time--if it is not of vital necessity
+    that all causes termed ecclesiastical should be treated under
+    special safeguards--if it is not of vital necessity that the
+    function of judgment should be taken out of the hands of the
+    existing court--let the Church frankly and at once subscribe to
+    every one of these great concessions, and reduce her demands to a
+    _minimum_ at the outset.
+
+    Laws ecclesiastical by ecclesiastical judges, let this be her
+    principle; it plants her on the ground of ancient times, of the
+    Reformation, of our continuous history, of reason and of right.
+    The utmost moderation, in the application of the principle, let
+    this he her temper, and then her case will be strong in the face
+    of God and man, and, come what may, she will conquer.... If, my
+    Lord, it be felt by the rulers of the Church, that a scheme like
+    this will meet sufficiently the necessities of her case, it must
+    be no small additional comfort to them to feel that their demand
+    is every way within the spirit of the Constitution, and short of
+    the terms which the great compact of the Reformation would
+    authorise you to seek. You, and not those who are against you,
+    will take your stand with Coke and Blackstone; you, and not they,
+    will wield the weapons of constitutional principle and law; you,
+    and not they, will be entitled to claim the honour of securing the
+    peace of the State no less than the faith of the Church; you, and
+    not they, will justly point the admonitory finger to those
+    remarkable words of the Institutes:--
+
+    "And certain it is, that this Kingdom hath been best governed, and
+    peace and quiet preserved, when both parties, that is, when the
+    justices of the temporal courts and the ecclesiastical judges have
+    kept themselves within their proper jurisdiction, without
+    encroaching or usurping one upon another; and where such
+    encroachments or usurpations have been made, they have been the
+    seeds of great trouble and inconvenience."
+
+    Because none can resist the principle of your proposal, who admit
+    that the Church has a sphere of proper jurisdiction at all, or any
+    duty beyond that of taking the rule of her doctrine and her
+    practice from the lips of ministers or parliaments. If it shall be
+    deliberately refused to adopt a proposition so moderate, so
+    guarded and restrained in the particular instance, and so
+    sustained by history, by analogy, and by common reason, in the
+    case of the faith of the Church, and if no preferable measure be
+    substituted, it can only be in consequence of a latent intention
+    that the voice of the Civil Power should be henceforward supreme
+    in the determination of Christian doctrine.
+
+We trust that such an assurance, backed as it is by the solemn and
+earnest warnings of one who is not an enthusiast or an agitator, but
+one of the leading men in the Parliament of England, will not be
+without its full weight with those on whom devolves the duty of guiding
+and leading us in this crisis. The Bishops of England have a great
+responsibility on them. Reason, not less than Christian loyalty and
+Christian charity, requires the fairest interpretation of their acts,
+and it may be of their hesitation,--the utmost consideration of their
+difficulties. But reason, not less than Christian loyalty and charity,
+expects that, having accepted the responsibilities of the Episcopate,
+they should not withdraw from them when they arrive; and that there
+should be neither shrinking nor rest nor compromise till the creed and
+the rights of the Church entrusted to their fidelity be placed, as far
+as depends on them, beyond danger.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+JOYCE ON COURTS OF SPIRITUAL APPEAL[3]
+
+
+  [3]
+  _Ecclesia Vindicata; a Treatise on Appeals in Matters Spiritual_.
+  By James Wayland Joyce. _Saturday Review_, 22nd October 1864.
+
+Nothing can be more natural than the extreme dissatisfaction felt by a
+large body of persons in the Church of England at the present Court of
+Final Appeal in matters of doctrine. The grievance, and its effect, may
+have been exaggerated; and the expressions of feeling about it
+certainly have not always been the wisest and most becoming. But as the
+Church of England is acknowledged to hold certain doctrines on matters
+of the highest importance, and, in common with all other religious
+bodies, claims the right of saying what are her own doctrines, it is
+not surprising that an arrangement which seems likely to end in handing
+over to indifferent or unfriendly judges the power of saying what those
+doctrines are, or even whether she has any doctrines at all, should
+create irritation and impatience. There is nothing peculiar to the
+English Church in the assumption, either that outsiders should not
+meddle with and govern what she professes to believe and teach, or
+that the proper and natural persons to deal with theological questions
+are the class set apart to teach and maintain her characteristic
+belief. Whatever may ultimately become of these assumptions, they
+unquestionably represent the ideas which have been derived from the
+earliest and the uniform practice of the Christian Church, and are held
+by most even of the sects which have separated from it. To any one who
+does not look upon the English Church as simply a legally constituted
+department of the State, like the army or navy or the department of
+revenue, and believes it to have a basis and authority of its own,
+antecedent to its rights by statute, there cannot but be a great
+anomaly in an arrangement which, when doctrinal questions are pushed to
+their final issues, seems to deprive her of any voice or control in the
+matters in which she is most interested, and commits them to the
+decision, not merely of a lay, but of a secular and not necessarily
+even Christian court, where the feeling about them is not unlikely to
+be that represented by the story, told by Mr. Joyce, of the eminent
+lawyer who said of some theological debate that he could only decide it
+"by tossing up a coin of the realm." The anomaly of such a court can
+hardly be denied, both as a matter of theory and--supposing it to
+matter at all what Church doctrine really is--as illustrated in some
+late results of its action. It is still more provoking to observe, as
+Mr. Joyce brings out in his historical sketch, that simple carelessness
+and blundering have conspired with the evident tendency of things to
+cripple and narrow the jurisdiction of the Church in what seems to be
+her proper sphere. The ecclesiastical appeals, before the Reformation,
+were to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction alone. They were given to the
+civil power by the Tudor legislation, but to the civil power acting, if
+not by the obligation of law, yet by usage and in fact, through
+ecclesiastical organs and judges. Lastly, by a recent change, of which
+its authors have admitted that they did not contemplate the effect,
+these appeals are now to the civil jurisdiction acting through purely
+civil courts. It is an aggravation of this, when the change which seems
+so formidable has become firmly established, to be told that it was,
+after all, the result of accident and inadvertence, and a "careless use
+of terms in drafting an Act of Parliament"; and that difficult and
+perilous theological questions have come, by "a haphazard chance,"
+before a court which was never meant to decide them. It cannot be
+doubted that those who are most interested in the Church of England
+feel deeply and strongly about keeping up what they believe to be the
+soundness and purity of her professed doctrine; and they think that,
+under fair conditions, they have clear and firm ground for making good
+their position. But it seems by no means unlikely that in the working
+of the Court of Final Appeal there will be found a means of evading the
+substance of questions, and of disposing of very important issues by a
+side wind, to the prejudice of what have hitherto been recognised as
+rightful claims. An arrangement which bears hard upon the Church
+theoretically, as a controversial argument in the hands of Dr. Manning
+or Mr. Binney, and as an additional proof of its Erastian subjection to
+the State, and which also works ill and threatens serious mischief, may
+fairly be regarded by Churchmen with jealousy and dislike, and be
+denounced as injurious to interests for which they have a right to
+claim respect. The complaint that the State is going to force new
+senses on theological terms, or to change by an unavowed process the
+meaning of acknowledged formularies in such a body as the English
+Church, is at least as deserving of attention as the reluctance of
+conscientious Dissenters to pay Church-rates.
+
+Mr. Joyce's book shows comprehensively and succinctly the history of
+the changes which have brought matters to their present point, and the
+look which they wear in the eyes of a zealous Churchman, disturbed both
+by the shock given to his ideas of fitness and consistency, and by the
+prospect of practical evils. It is a clergyman's view of the subject,
+but it is not disposed of by saying that it is a clergyman's view. It
+is incomplete and one-sided, and leaves out considerations of great
+importance which ought to be attended to in forming a judgment on the
+whole question; but it is difficult to say that, regarded simply in
+itself, the claim that the Church should settle her own controversies,
+and that Church doctrine should be judged of in Church courts, is not a
+reasonable one. The truth is that the present arrangement, if we think
+only of its abstract suitableness and its direct and ostensible claims
+to our respect, would need Swift himself to do justice to its exquisite
+unreasonableness. It is absurd to assume, as it is assumed in the whole
+of our ecclesiastical legislation, that the Church is bound to watch
+most jealously over doctrine, and then at the last moment to refuse her
+the natural means of guarding it. It is absurd to assume that the
+"spiritualty" are the only proper persons to teach doctrine, and then
+to act as if they were unfit to judge of doctrine. It is not easy, in
+the abstract, to see why articles which were trusted to clergymen to
+draw up may not be trusted to clergymen to explain, and why what there
+was learning and wisdom enough to do in the violent party times and
+comparative inexperience of the Reformation, cannot be safely left to
+the learning and wisdom of our day for correction or completion. If
+Churchmen and ecclesiastics may care too much for the things about
+which they dispute, it seems undeniable that lawyers who need not even
+be Christians, may care for them too little; and if the Churchmen make
+a mistake in the matter, at least it is their own affair, and they may
+be more fairly made to take the consequences of their own acts than of
+other people's. A strong case, if a strong case were all that was
+wanted, might be made out for a change in the authority which at
+present pronounces in the last resort on Church of England doctrine.
+
+But the difficulty is, not to see that the present state of things,
+which has come about almost by accident, is irregular and
+unsatisfactory, and that in it the civil power has stolen a march on
+the privileges which even Tudors and Hanoverians left to the Church,
+but to suggest what would be more just and more promising. A mixed
+tribunal, composed of laymen and ecclesiastics, would be in effect, as
+Mr. Joyce perceives, simply the present court with a sham colour of
+Church authority added to it; and he describes with candid force the
+confusion which might arise if the lawyers and divines took different
+sides, and how, in the unequal struggle, the latter might "find
+themselves hopelessly prostrate in the stronger grasp of their more
+powerful associates." His own scheme of a theological and
+ecclesiastical committee of reference, to which a purely legal tribunal
+might send down questions of doctrine to be answered, as "experts" or
+juries give answers about matters of science or matters of fact, is
+hardly more hopeful; for even he would not bind the legal court, as of
+course it could not be bound, to accept the doctrine of the
+ecclesiastical committee. He promises, indeed, on the authority of Lord
+Derby, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the lawyers would
+accept the answer of the divines; but whatever the scandal is now, it
+would be far greater if an unorthodox judgment were given in flat
+contradiction to the report of the committee of reference.
+
+As to a purely ecclesiastical Court of Appeal, in the present state of
+the Church both in England and all over the world, it ought to console
+those who must be well aware that here at least it is hardly to be
+looked for, to reflect how such courts act, after all, where they have
+the power to act, and how far things would have gone in a better or
+happier fashion among us if, instead of the Privy Council, there had
+been a tribunal of divines to give final judgment. The history of
+appeals to Rome, from the days of the Jansenists and Fenelon to those
+of Lamennais, may be no doubt satisfactory to those who believe it
+necessary to ascribe to the Pope the highest wisdom and the most
+consummate justice; but to those who venture to notice the real steps
+of the process, and the collateral considerations, political and local,
+which influenced the decision, the review is hardly calculated to make
+those who are debarred from it regret the loss of this unalloyed purity
+of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. And, as regards ourselves, it is true
+that an ecclesiastical tribunal would hardly have been ingenious enough
+to find the means of saying that Messrs. Wilson and Williams had not
+taught in contradiction to the doctrines of the English Church, and
+that they actually, under its present constitution, possessed the
+liberty which, under a different--and, as some people think, a
+better--constitution, they might possess. But it ought also to be borne
+in mind what other judgments ecclesiastical tribunals might have given.
+An ecclesiastical tribunal, unless it had been packed or accidentally
+one-sided, would probably have condemned Mr. Gorham. An ecclesiastical
+tribunal would almost certainly have expelled Archdeacon Denison from
+his preferments. Indeed, the judgment of the Six Doctors on Dr. Pusey,
+arbitrary and unconstitutional as it may be considered, was by no means
+a doubtful foreshadowing of what a verdict upon him would have been
+from any court that we can imagine formed of the high ecclesiastical
+authorities of the time. It undoubtedly seems the most natural thing in
+the world that a great religious body should settle, without hindrance,
+its own doctrines and control its own ministers; but it is also some
+compensation for the perversity with which the course of things has
+interfered with ideal completeness, that our condition, if it had been
+theoretically perfect, would have been perfectly intolerable.
+
+It would be highly unwise in those who direct the counsels of the
+Church of England to accept a practical disadvantage for the gain of a
+greater simplicity and consistency of system. The true moral to be
+deduced from the anomalies of ecclesiastical appeals seems to be, to
+have as little to do with them as possible. The idea of seeking a
+remedy for the perplexities of theology in judicial rulings, and the
+rage for having recourse to law courts, are of recent date in our
+controversies. They were revived among us as one of the results of the
+violent panic caused by the Oxford movement, and of the inconsiderate
+impatience of surprised ignorance which dictated extreme and forcible
+measures; and as this is a kind of game at which, when once started,
+both parties can play, the policy of setting the law in motion to
+silence theological opponents has become a natural and favourite one.
+But it may be some excuse for the legislators who, in 1833, in
+constructing a new Court of Appeal, so completely forgot or underrated
+the functions which it would be called to discharge in the decision of
+momentous doctrinal questions, that at the time no one thought much of
+carrying theological controversies to legal arbitrament. The experiment
+is a natural one to have been made in times of strong and earnest
+religious contention; but, now that it has had its course, it is not
+difficult to see that it was a mistaken one. There seems something
+almost ludicrously incongruous in bringing a theological question into
+the atmosphere and within the technical handling of a law court, and in
+submitting delicate and subtle attempts to grasp the mysteries of the
+unseen and the infinite, of God and the soul, of grace and redemption,
+to the hard logic and intentionally confined and limited view of
+forensic debate. Theological truth, in the view of all who believe in
+it, must always remain independent of a legal decision; and, therefore,
+as regards any real settlement, a theological question must come out of
+a legal sentence in a totally different condition from any others where
+the true and indisputable law of the case is, for the time at least,
+what the supreme tribunal has pronounced it to be. People chafed at not
+getting what they thought the plain broad conclusions from facts and
+documents accepted; they appealed to law from the uncertainty of
+controversy, and found law still more uncertain, and a good deal more
+dangerous. They thought that they were going to condemn crimes and
+expel wrongdoers; they found that these prosecutions inevitably assumed
+the character of the old political trials, which were but an indirect
+and very mischievous form of the struggle between two avowed parties,
+and in which, though the technical question was whether the accused had
+committed the crime, the real one was whether the alleged crime were a
+crime at all. Accordingly, wider considerations than those arising out
+of the strict merits of the case told upon the decision; and the
+negative judgment, and resolute evasion of a condemnation, in each of
+the cases which were of wide and serious importance, were proofs of the
+same tendency in English opinion which has made political trials,
+except in the most extreme cases, almost inconceivable. They mean that
+the questions raised must be fought out and settled in a different and
+more genuine way, and that law feels itself out of place when called to
+interfere in them. As all parties have failed in turning the law into a
+weapon, and yet as all parties have really gained much more than they
+have lost by the odd anomalies of our ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the
+wisest course would seem to be for those who feel the deep importance
+of doctrinal questions to leave the law alone, either as to employing
+it or attempting to change it. Controversy, argument, the display of
+the intrinsic and inherent strength of a great and varied system, are
+what all causes must in the last resort trust to. Lord Westbury will
+have done the Church of England more good than perhaps he thought of
+doing, if his _dicta_ make theologians see that they can be much better
+and more hopefully employed than in trying legal conclusions with
+unorthodox theorisers, or in busying themselves with inventing
+imaginary improvements for a Final Court of Appeal.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+PRIVY COUNCIL JUDGMENTS[4]
+
+
+  [4]
+  _A Collection of the Judgments of the Judicial Committee of the Privy
+  Council in Ecclesiastical Cases relating to Doctrine and Discipline;
+  with a Preface by the Lord Bishop of London, and an Historical
+  Introduction_. Edited by the Hon. G. Brodrick, Barrister-at-Law, and
+  Rev. the Hon. W.H. Fremantle, Chaplain to the Bishop of London.
+  _Guardian_, 15th February 1865.
+
+The Bishop of London has done a useful service in causing the various
+decisions of the present Court of Appeal to be collected into a volume.
+There is such an obvious convenience about the plan that it hardly
+needed the conventional reason given for it, that "the knowledge
+generally possessed on the subject of the Court is vague, and the
+sources from which accurate information can be obtained are little
+understood; and that people who discuss it ought in the first place to
+know what the Court is, and what it does." This is the mere customary
+formula of a preface turned into a rhetorical insinuation which would
+have been better away; most of those who care about the subject, and
+have expressed opinions about it, know pretty well the nature of the
+Court and the result of its working, and whatever variations there may
+be in the judgment passed upon it arise not from any serious
+imperfection of knowledge but from differences of principle. It was
+hardly suitable in a work like this to assume a mystery and obscurity
+about the subject where there is really none, and to claim superior
+exactness and authenticity of information about a matter which in all
+its substantial points is open to all the world. And we could conceive
+the design, well-intentioned as it is, carried out in a way more
+fitting to the gravity of the occasion which has suggested it. The
+Bishop says truly enough that the questions involved in the
+constitution of such a court are some of the most difficult with which
+statesmen have to deal. Therefore it seems to us that a collection of
+the decisions of such a court, put forth for the use of the Church and
+nation under the authority of the Bishop of London, ought to have had
+the dignity and the reserve of a work meant for permanence and for the
+use of men of various opinions, and ought not to have had even the
+semblance, as this book has, of an _ex parte_ pamphlet. The Bishop of
+London is, of course, quite right to let the Church know what he thinks
+about the Court of Final Appeal; and he is perfectly justified in
+recommending us, in forming our opinion, to study carefully the facts
+of the existing state of things; but it seems hardly becoming to make
+the facts a vehicle for indirectly forcing on us, in the shape of
+comments, a very definite and one-sided view of them, which is the very
+subject of vehement contradiction and dispute. It would have been
+better to have committed what was necessary in the way of explanation
+and illustration to some one of greater weight and experience than two
+clever young men of strong bias and manifest indisposition to respect
+or attend to, or even to be patient with, any aspect of the subject but
+their own in this complicated and eventful question, and who, partly
+from overlooking great and material elements in it, and partly from an
+imperfect apprehension of what they had to do, have failed to present
+even the matters of fact with which they deal with the necessary
+exactness and even-handedness. It seems to us that in a work intended
+for the general use of the Church and addressed to men of all opinions,
+they only remember to be thoroughgoing advocates and justifiers of the
+Court which happens to have grown into such important consequence to
+the English Church. The position is a perfectly legitimate one; but we
+think it had better not have been connected with a documentary work
+like the present, set forth by the direction and under the sanction of
+a Bishop of London.
+
+In looking over the cases which have been brought together into a
+connected series, the first point which is suggested by the review is
+the great and important change in the aspect and bearing of doctrinal
+controversies, and in the situation of the Church, as affected by them,
+which the creation and action of this Court have made. From making it
+almost a matter of principle and boast to dispense with any living
+judge of controversies, the Church has passed to having a very
+energetic one. Up to the Gorham judgment, it can hardly be said that
+the ruling of courts of law had had the slightest influence on the
+doctrinal position and character of the Church. Keen and fierce as had
+been the controversies in the Church up to that judgment, how often had
+a legal testing of her standards been seriously sought for or seriously
+appealed to? There had been accusations of heresy, trials,
+condemnations, especially in the times following the Reformation and
+preceding the Civil War; there had been appeals and final judgments
+given in such final courts as existed; but all without making any mark
+on the public mind or the received meaning of doctrines and
+formularies, and without leaving a trace except in law reports. They
+seem to have been forgotten as soon as the particular case was disposed
+of. The limits of supposed orthodox belief revived; but it was not the
+action of judicial decisions which either narrowed or enlarged them.
+Bishop Marsh's Calvinists never thought of having recourse to law. If
+the Church did not do entirely without a Court of Final Appeal, it is
+simply a matter of fact that the same weight and authority were not
+attached to the proceedings of such a court which are attached to them
+now. But since the Gorham case, the work of settling authoritatively,
+if not the meaning of doctrines and of formularies, at any rate the
+methods of interpreting and applying them, has been briskly going on in
+the courts, and a law laid down by judges without appeal has been
+insensibly fastening its hold upon us. The action of the courts is
+extolled as being all in the direction of liberty. Whatever this praise
+may be worth, it is to be observed that it is, after all, a wooden sort
+of liberty, and shuts up quite as much as it opens. It may save, in
+this case or that, individual liberty; but it does so by narrowing
+artificially the natural and common-sense grounds of argument in
+religious controversy, and abridging as much as possible the province
+of theology. Before the Gorham case, the Formularies in general were
+the standard and test, free to both sides, about baptismal
+regeneration. Both parties had the ground open to them, to make what
+they could of them by argument and reason. Discipline was limited by
+the Articles and Formularies, and in part by the authority of great
+divines and by the prevailing opinion of the Church, and by nothing
+else; these were the means which each side had to convince and persuade
+and silence the other, and each side might hope that in the course of
+time its sounder and better supported view might prevail. But now upon
+this state of things comes from without a dry, legal, narrow
+stereotyping, officially and by authority, of the sense to be put upon
+part of the documents in the controversy. You appeal to the
+Prayer-book; your opponent tells you, Oh, the Court of Appeal has ruled
+against you there: and that part of your case is withdrawn from you,
+and he need give himself no trouble to argue the matter with you.
+Against certain theological positions, perhaps of great weight, and
+theological evidence, comes, not only the doctrine of theological
+opponents, but the objection that they are bad law. The interpretation
+which, it may be, we have assumed all our lives, and which we know to
+be that of Fathers and divines, is suddenly pronounced not to be legal.
+The decision does not close the controversy, which goes on as keenly
+and with perhaps a little more exasperation than before; it simply
+stops off, by virtue of a legal construction, a portion of the field of
+argument for one party, which was, perhaps, supposed to have the
+strongest claim to it. The Gorham case bred others; and now, at last,
+after fifteen years, we have got, as may be seen in Messrs. Brodrick
+and Fremantle's book, a body of judicial _dicta_, interpretations,
+rules of exposition, and theological propositions, which have grown up
+in the course of these cases, and which in various ways force a meaning
+and construction on the theological standards and language of the
+Church, which in some instances they were never thought to have, and
+which they certainly never had authoritatively before. Besides her
+Articles and Prayer-hook, speaking the language of divines and open to
+each party to interpret according to the strength and soundness of
+their theological ground, we are getting a supplementary set of legal
+limitations and glosses, claiming to regulate theological argument if
+not teaching, and imposed upon us by the authority not of the Church or
+even of Parliament but of the Judges of the Privy Council. This, it
+strikes us, is a new position of things in the Church, a new
+understanding and a changed set of conditions on which to carry on
+controversies of doctrine; and it seems to us to have a serious
+influence not only on the responsibility of the Church for her own
+doctrine, but on the freedom and genuineness with which questions as to
+that doctrine are discussed. The Court is not to blame for this result;
+to do it justice, it has generally sought to decide as little as it
+could; and the interference of law with the province of pure theology
+is to be rather attributed to that mania for deciding, which of late
+has taken possession pretty equally of all parties. But the
+indisputable result is seen to be, after the experience of fifteen
+years, that law is taking a place in our theological disputes and our
+theological system which is new to it in our theological history; law,
+not laid down prospectively in general provisions, but emerging
+indirectly and incidentally out of constructions and judicial rulings
+on cases of pressing and hazardous exigency; law, applying its
+technical and deliberately narrow processes to questions which of
+course it cannot solve, but can only throw into formal and inadequate,
+if not unreal, terms; and laying down the limits of belief and
+assertion on matters about which hearts burn and souls tremble, by the
+mouth of judges whose consummate calmness and ability is only equalled
+by their profound and avowed want of sympathy for the theology of which
+their position makes them the expounders and final arbiters. A system
+has begun with respect to English Church doctrine, analogous to that by
+which Lord Stowell made the recent law of the sea, or that by which on
+a larger scale the rescripts and decrees of the Popes moulded the great
+system of the canon law.
+
+This is the first thing that strikes us on a comparative survey of this
+set of decisions. The second point is one which at first sight seems
+greatly to diminish the importance of this new condition of things, but
+which on further consideration is seen to have a more serious bearing
+than might have been thought. This is, the odd haphazard way in which
+points have come up for decision; the sort of apparent chance which has
+finally governed the issue of the various contentions; and the
+infinitesimally fine character of the few propositions of doctrine to
+which the Court has given the sanction of its ruling. Knowing what we
+all of us cannot help knowing, and seeing things which lawyers and
+judges are bound not to allow themselves to see or take account of, we
+find it difficult to repress the feeling of amazement, as we travel
+through the volume, to see Mr. Gorham let off, Mr. Heath deprived, then
+Dr. Williams and Mr. Wilson let off, and to notice the delicate
+technical point which brought to nought the laborious and at one time
+hopeful efforts of the worthy persons who tried to turn out Archdeacon
+Denison. And as to the matter of the decisions, though undoubtedly
+_dicta_ of great importance are laid down in the course of them, yet it
+is curious to observe the extremely minute and insignificant statements
+on which in the more important cases judgment is actually pronounced.
+The Gorham case was held to affect the position of a great party; but
+the language and theory actually examined and allowed would hardly, in
+legal strictness, authorise much more than the very peculiar views of
+Mr. Gorham himself. And in the last case, the outside lay world has
+hardly yet done wondering at the consummate feat of legal subtlety by
+which the issue whether the English Church teaches that the Bible is
+inspired was transmuted into the question whether it teaches that every
+single part of every single book is inspired. It might seem that
+rulings, of which the actual product in the way of doctrinal
+propositions was so small, were hardly subjects for any keen interest.
+But it would be shortsighted to regard the matter in this way. In the
+first place, whatever may have happened as yet, it is manifestly a
+serious thing for Church of England doctrine to have been thrown, on a
+scale which is quite new, into the domain of a court of law, to lie at
+the mercy of the confessed chances and uncertainties of legal
+interpretation, with nothing really effective to correct and remedy
+what may possibly be, without any fault in the judges, a fatally
+mischievous construction of the text and letter of her authoritative
+documents. In the next place, no one can fail to see, no one in fact
+affects to deny, that the general result of these recent decisions,
+capricious as their conclusions look at first sight, has been to make
+the Formularies mean much less than they were supposed to mean. The
+tendency of every English court, appealed to not as a court of equity
+but one of criminal jurisdiction, is naturally to be exacting and even
+narrow in the interpretation of language. The general impression left
+by these cases is that the lines of doctrine in the English Church are
+regarded by the judicial mind as very faint, and not much to be
+depended upon; and that these judgments may be the first steps in that
+insensible process by which the unpretending but subtle and powerful
+engine of interpretation has been applied by the courts to give a
+certain turn to law and policy; applied, in this instance, to undermine
+the definiteness and certainty of doctrine, and in the end, the
+understanding itself which has hitherto existed between the Church and
+the State, and has kept alive the idea of her distinct basis,
+functions, and rights.
+
+This is the view of matters which arises from an examination of the
+proceedings contained in this volume. What is the argument urged in the
+Historical Introduction to justify or recommend our acquiescence in it?
+It seems to us to consist mainly in a one-sided and exaggerated
+statement of the Supremacy claimed and brought in by Henry VIII., and
+of the effect in theory and fact which it ought to have on our notion
+of the Church and of Church right. The complaint of the present state
+of things is, that those who may be taken to represent the interests of
+the Church in such a matter as the character of her teaching are
+practically excluded from having any real influence in the decision of
+questions by which the character of that teaching is affected. The
+answer is that she has no right to claim a separate interest in the
+matter, and that the doctrine of the Royal Supremacy was meant to
+extinguish, and has extinguished, any pretence to such a claim. The
+_animus_ which pervades the work, and which is not obscurely disclosed
+in such things as footnotes and abridgments of legal arguments, is thus
+given--more freely, of course, than it would be proper to introduce in
+a book like this--in some remarks of Mr. Brodrick, one of the editors,
+at a recent discussion of the question of Ecclesiastical Appeals in a
+committee of the Social Science Association. He is reported to have
+spoken as follows:--
+
+    The Church of England being established by law, could not be
+    allowed any independence of action; and those who wished for it
+    were like people who wanted to have their cake and eat it. As to
+    the Privy Council, he had never heard its decisions charged with
+    error. What was complained of was that it had declined to take the
+    current opinions of theologians and make them part of the
+    Thirty-nine Articles. There was no need whatever for the Privy
+    Council to possess any special theological knowledge. The only
+    case where that knowledge was necessary was when it was alleged
+    that doctrines had been held in the Church without censure. That
+    was a case in which considerable theological lore was required;
+    but it was within the province of counsel to supply it. Divines
+    had now discovered, what lawyers could have told them long ago,
+    and what he knew some of them had been told--namely, that it would
+    not do to treat the Thirty-nine Articles as penal statutes;
+    because, if that were done, a coach might be easily driven through
+    them. If they had wished to maintain the authority of the
+    Articles, they would have done best to have kept quiet.
+
+The present Court of Appeal is deduced, in the Historical Introduction,
+as a natural and logical consequence, from Henry VIII.'s Supremacy.
+Undoubtedly it is scarcely possible to overstate the all-grasping
+despotism of Henry VIII., and if a precedent for anything reckless of
+all separate rights and independence should be wanted, it would never
+be sought in vain if looked for in the policy and legislation of that
+reign. So far the editors are right; the power over religion claimed by
+Henry VIII. will carry them wherever they want to go; it will give
+them, if they need it, as a still more logical and legitimate
+development of the Supremacy, the Court of High Commission. Only they
+ought to have remembered, as fair historians, that even in the days of
+the Supremacy the distinct nature and business of the Church and of
+Churchmen was never denied. Laymen were given powers over the Church
+and in the Church which were new; but the distinct province of the
+Church, if abridged and put under new control, was not abolished. Side
+by side with the facts showing the Supremacy and its exercise are a set
+of facts, for those who choose to see them, showing that the Church was
+still recognised, even by Henry VIII., as a body which he had not
+created, which he was obliged to take account of, and which filled a
+place utterly different from every other body in the State. Henry VIII.
+played the tyrant with his Churchmen as he did with his Parliament and
+with everybody else; and Churchmen, like everybody else, submitted to
+him. But the "Imperialism" of Henry VIII., though it went beyond even
+the Imperialism of Justinian and Charlemagne in its encroachments on
+the spiritual power, as little denied the fact of that power as they
+did. He recognised the distinct place and claims of the spiritualty;
+and, as we suppose that even the editors of this volume hardly feel
+themselves bound to make out the consistency of Henry, they might have
+spared themselves the weak and not very fair attempt to get rid of the
+force of the remarkable words in which this recognition is recorded in
+the first Statute of Appeals (24 Henry VIII. c. 12). The words would,
+no doubt, be worth but little, were it not that as a matter of fact a
+spiritualty did act and judge and lay down doctrine, and even while
+yielding to unworthy influence did keep up their corporate existence.
+
+But when the ecclesiastical legislation of Henry VIII. is referred to,
+not merely as the historical beginning of a certain state of things
+which has undergone great changes in the course of events, but as
+affording a sort of idea and normal pattern to which our own
+arrangements ought to conform, as supplying us with a theory of Church
+and State which holds good at least against the Church, it seems hard
+that the Church alone should not have the benefit of the entire
+alteration of circumstances since that theory was a reality. Those who
+talk about the Supremacy ought to remember what the Supremacy pretended
+to be. It was over _all_ causes and _all_ persons, civil as well as
+ecclesiastical. It held good certainly in theory, and to a great extent
+in practice, against the temporalty as much as against the spiritualty.
+Why then are we to invoke the Supremacy as then understood, in a
+question about courts of spiritual appeals, and not in questions about
+other courts and other powers in the nation? If the Supremacy, claimed
+and exercised as Henry claimed and exercised it, is good against the
+Church, it is good against many other things besides. If the Church
+inherits bonds and obligations, not merely by virtue of distinct
+statutes, but by the force of a general vague arbitrary theory of royal
+power, why has that power been expelled, or transformed into a mere
+fiction of law, in all other active branches of the national life?
+Unless the Church is simply, what even Henry VIII. did not regard it, a
+creation and delegate of the national power, without any roots and
+constitution of its own, why should the Church be denied the benefit of
+the common sense, and the change in ideas and usage, which have been so
+largely appealed to in civil matters? Why are we condemned to a theory
+which is not only out of date and out of harmony with all the
+traditions and convictions of modern times, hut which was in its own
+time tyrannous, revolutionary, and intolerable? Arguments in favour of
+the present Court, drawn from the reason of the thing, and the
+comparative fitness of the judges for their office, if we do not agree
+with them, at least we can understand. But precedents and arguments
+from the Supremacy of Henry VIII. suggest the question whether those
+who use them are ready to be taken at their word and to have back that
+Supremacy as it was; and whether the examples of policy of that reign
+are seemly to quote as adequate measures of the liberty and rights of
+any set of Englishmen.
+
+The question really calling for solution is--How to reconcile the just
+freedom of individual teachers in the Church with the maintenance of
+the right and duty of the Church to uphold the substantial meaning of
+her body of doctrine? In answering this question we can get no help
+from this volume. It simply argues that the present is practically the
+best of all possible courts; that it is a great improvement, which
+probably it is, on the Courts of Delegates; and that great confidence
+ought to be felt in its decisions. We are further shown how jealously
+and carefully the judges have guarded the right of the individual
+teacher. But it seems to us, according to the views put forward in this
+book, that as the price of all this--of great learning, weight, and
+ability in the judges--of great care taken of liberty--the Church is
+condemned to an interpretation of the Royal Supremacy which floats
+between the old arbitrary view of it and the modern Liberal one, and
+which uses each, as it happens to be most convenient, against the claim
+of the Church to protect her doctrine and exert a real influence on the
+authoritative declaration of it. We all need liberty, and we all ought
+to be ready to give the reasonable liberty which we profess to claim
+for ourselves. But it is a heavy price to pay for it, if the right and
+the power is to be taken out of the hands of the Church to declare what
+is the real meaning of what she supposes herself bound to teach.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SIR JOHN COLERIDGE ON THE PURCHAS CASE[5]
+
+
+  [5]
+  _Remarks on Some Parts of the Report of the Judicial Committee in
+  the Case of "Elphinstone against Purchas."_ A Letter to Canon Liddon,
+  from the Right Hon. Sir J.T. Coleridge. _Guardian_, 5th April 1871.
+
+No one has more right to speak with authority, or more deserves to be
+listened to at a difficult and critical moment for the Church, than Sir
+J.T. Coleridge. An eminent lawyer, and a most earnest and well-informed
+Churchman, he combines in an unusual way claims on the attention of all
+who care for the interests of religion, and for those, too, which are
+so deeply connected with them, the interests of England. The troubles
+created by the recent judgment have induced him to come forward from
+his retirement with words of counsel and warning.
+
+The gist of his Letter may be shortly stated. He is inclined to think
+the decision arrived at by the Judicial Committee a mistaken one. But
+he thinks that it would be a greater and a worse mistake to make this
+decision, wrong as it may be, a reason for looking favourably on
+disestablishment as a remedy for what is complained of. We are glad to
+note the judgment of so fair an observer and so distinguished a lawyer,
+himself a member of the Privy Council, both on the intrinsic
+suitableness and appropriateness of the position[6] which has been
+ruled to be illegal, and on the unsatisfactoriness of the
+interpretation itself, as a matter of judicial reading and
+construction. A great deal has been said, and it is plain that the
+topic is inexhaustible, on the unimportance of a position. We agree
+entirely--on condition that people remember the conditions and
+consequences of their assertion. Every single outward accompaniment of
+worship may, if you carry your assertion to its due level, be said to
+be in itself utterly unimportant; place and time and form and attitude
+are all things not belonging to the essence of the act itself, and are
+indefinitely changeable, as, in fact, the changes in them have been
+countless. Kneeling is not of the essence of prayer, but imagine, first
+prohibiting the posture of kneeling, and then remonstrating with those
+who complained of the prohibition, on the ground of postures being
+unimportant. It is obvious that when you have admitted to the full that
+a position is in itself unimportant, all kinds of reasons may come in
+on the further question whether it is right, fitting, natural. There
+are reasons why the position which has been so largely adopted of late
+is the natural and suitable one. Sir John Coleridge states them
+admirably:--
+
+  [6]
+  The Eastward Position at the celebration of the Holy Communion.
+
+    As to the place of standing at the consecration, my _feeling_ is
+    with them. It seems to me not desirable to make it essential or
+    even important that the people should see the breaking of the
+    bread, or the taking the cup into the hands of the priest, and
+    positively mischievous to encourage them in gazing on him, or
+    watching him with critical eyes while so employed. I much prefer
+    the _spirit of_ the Rubric of 1549--First Book of Edward
+    VI.--which says, "These words before rehearsed are to be said
+    turning still to the Altar, without any elevation, or showing the
+    Sacraments to the people." The use now enforced, I think, tends to
+    deprive the most solemn rite of our religion of one of its most
+    solemn particulars. Surely, whatever school we belong to, and even
+    if we consider the whole rite merely commemorative, it is a very
+    solemn idea to conceive the priest at the head of his flock, and,
+    as it were, a shepherd leading them on in heart and spirit,
+    imploring for them and with them the greatest blessing which man
+    is capable of receiving on earth; he alone uttering the
+    prayer--they meanwhile kneeling all, and in deep silence
+    listening, not gazing, rather with closed eyes--and with their
+    whole undistracted attention, joining in the prayer with one heart
+    and without sound until the united "Amen" breaks from them at the
+    close, and seals their union and assent.
+
+But, of course, comes the further question, whether, an English
+clergyman is authorised to use it. He is not authorised if the Prayer
+Book tells him not to. Of that there is no question. But if the Prayer
+Book not only seems to give him the liberty, but, by the _prima facie_
+look of its words, seems to prescribe it, the harshness of a ruling
+which summarily and under penalties prohibits it is not to be smoothed
+down by saying that the matter is unimportant. Sir John Coleridge's
+view of the two points will be read with interest:--
+
+    You will understand, of course, that I write in respect of the
+    Report recently made by the Judicial Committee in the Purchas
+    case. I am not about to defend it. No one, however, ought to
+    pronounce a condemnation of the solemn judgment of such a tribunal
+    without much consideration; and this remark applies with, special
+    force to myself, well knowing as I do those from whom it
+    proceeded, and having withdrawn from sharing in the labours of the
+    Committee only because age had impaired, with the strength of my
+    body, the faculties also of my mind; and so disabled me from the
+    proper discharge of any judicial duties. With this admission on my
+    part, I yet venture to say that I think Mr. Purchas has not had
+    justice done to him in two main points of the late appeal; I mean
+    the use of the vestments complained of and the side of the
+    communion-table which he faced when consecrating the elements for
+    the Holy Communion. Before I state my reasons, let me premise that
+    I am no Ritualist, in the now conventional use of the term. I do
+    not presume to judge of the motives of those to whom that name is
+    applied. From the information of common but undisputed report as
+    to some of the most conspicuous, I believe them entitled to all
+    praise for their pastoral devotedness and their laborious,
+    self-denying lives; still, I do not shrink from saying that I
+    think them misguided, and the cause of mischief in the Church. So
+    much for my _feeling_ in regard to the vestments. I prefer the
+    surplice at all times and in all ministrations.
+
+    This is _feeling_--and I see no word in the sober language of our
+    rubric which interferes with it--but my _feeling_ is of no
+    importance in the argument, and I mention it only in candour, to
+    show in what spirit I approach the argument.
+
+    Now Mr. Purchas has been tried before the Committee for offences
+    alleged to have been committed against the provisions of the "Act
+    of Uniformity"; of this Act the Common Prayer Book is part and
+    parcel. As to the vestments, his conduct was alleged to be in
+    derogation of the rubric as to the ornaments of the Church and the
+    ministers thereof, which ordains that such shall be retained and
+    be in use as were in the Church of England by the authority of
+    Parliament in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI. The
+    Act of Uniformity is to be construed by the same rules exactly as
+    any Act passed in the last session of Parliament. The clause in
+    question (by which I mean the rubric in question) is perfectly
+    unambiguous in language, free from all difficulty as to
+    construction; it therefore lets in no argument as to intention
+    otrier than that which the words themselves import. There might be
+    a seeming difficulty in _fact_, because it might not be known what
+    vestments were in use by authority of Parliament in the second
+    year of the reign of King Edward VI.; but this difficulty has been
+    removed. It is conceded in the Report that the vestments, the use
+    of which is now condemned, were in use by authority of Parliament
+    in that year. Having that fact, you are bound to construe the
+    rubric as if those vestments were specifically named in it,
+    instead of being only referred to. If an Act should be passed
+    to-morrow that the uniform of the Guards should henceforth be such
+    as was ordered for them by authority and used by them in the 1st
+    George I., you would first ascertain what that uniform was; and,
+    having ascertained it, you would not inquire into the changes
+    which may have been made, many or few, with or without lawful
+    authority, between the 1st George I. and the passing of the new
+    Act. All these, that Act, specifying the earlier date, would have
+    made wholly immaterial. It would have seemed strange, I suppose,
+    if a commanding officer, disobeying the statute, had said in his
+    defence, "There have been many changes since the reign of George
+    I.; and as to 'retaining,' we put a gloss on that, and thought it
+    might mean only retaining to the Queen's use; so we have put the
+    uniforms safely in store." But I think it would have seemed more
+    strange to punish and mulct him severely if he had obeyed the law
+    and put no gloss on plain words.
+
+    This case stands on the same principle. The rubric indeed seems to
+    me to imply with some clearness that in the long interval between
+    Edward VI. and the 14th Charles II. there had been many changes;
+    but it does not stay to specify them, or distinguish between what
+    was mere evasion and what was lawful; it quietly passes them all
+    by, and goes back to the legalised usage of the second year of
+    Edward VI. What had prevailed since, whether by an Archbishop's
+    gloss, by Commissions, or even Statutes, whether, in short, legal
+    or illegal, it makes quite immaterial.
+
+    I forbear to go through the long inquiry which these last words
+    remind one of--not, I am sure, out of any disrespectful feeling to
+    the learned and reverend authors of the Report, but because it
+    seems to me wholly irrelevant to the point for decision. This
+    alone I must add, that even were the inquiry relevant, the
+    authorities on which they rely do not appear to me so clear or
+    cogent, nor the analogies relied on so just, as to warrant the
+    conclusion arrived at. For it should never be forgotten that the
+    defendant in a criminal case, acquitted as to this charge by the
+    learned judge below, was entitled to every presumption in his
+    favour, and could not properly be condemned but by a judgment free
+    from all reasonable doubt. And this remark acquires additional
+    strength because the judgment will be final not only on him but on
+    the whole Church for all time, unless reversed by the Legislature.
+
+On the second point he thus speaks, in terms which for their guarded
+moderation are all the more worth notice:--
+
+    Upon the second point I have less to say, though it is to me much
+    the most important. The Report, I think, cannot be shown
+    conclusively to be wrong here, as it may be on the other; still it
+    does not seem to me to be shown conclusively to be right. You have
+    yourself given no reason in your second letter of the 8th March
+    for doubting at least.
+
+    Let me add that, in my opinion, on such a question as this, where
+    a conclusion is to be arrived at upon the true meaning of Rubrics
+    framed more than two centuries since, and certainly not with a
+    view to any such minute criticism as on these occasions is and
+    must be applied to them, and where the evidence of facts is by no
+    means clear, none probably can be arrived at free from reasonable
+    objection. What is the consequence? It will be asked, Is the
+    question to receive no judicial solution? I am not afraid to
+    answer, Better far that it should receive none than that injustice
+    should be done. The principles of English law furnish the
+    practical solution: dismiss the party charged, unless his
+    conviction can be based on grounds on which reasonable and
+    competent minds can rest satisfied and without scruple. And what
+    mighty mischief will result to countervail the application of this
+    rule of justice? For two centuries our Church has subsisted
+    without an answer to the question which alone gives importance to
+    this inquiry, and surely has not been without God's blessing for
+    that time, in spite of all much more serious shortcomings. Let us
+    remember that Charity, or to use perhaps a better word, Love, is
+    the greatest of all; if that prevail there need be little fear for
+    our Faith or our Hope.
+
+Having said this much, Sir John Coleridge proceeds to the second, and
+indeed the main object of his letter--to remonstrate against
+exaggeration in complaint, both of the particular decision and of the
+Court which gave it:--
+
+    I now return to your letter. You proceed to attempt to show that
+    the words of Keble to yourself, which you cite, are justified by
+    remarks in this Report and some previous judgments of the same
+    tribunal, which appear to you so inconsistent with each other as
+    to make it difficult to believe that the Court was impartial, or
+    "incapable of regarding the documents before it in the light of a
+    plastic material, which might be made to support conclusions held
+    to be advisable at the moment, and on independent grounds." I wish
+    these words had never been written. They will, I fear, be
+    understood as conveying your formed opinions; and coming from you,
+    and addressed to minds already excited and embittered, they will
+    be readily accepted, though they import the heaviest charges
+    against judges--some of them bishops--all of high and hitherto
+    unimpeached character. A very long experience of judicial life
+    makes me know that judges will often provoke and bitterly
+    disappoint both the suitors before them and the public, when
+    discharging their duty honestly and carefully, and a man is
+    scarcely fit for the station unless he can sit tolerably easy
+    under censures which even these may pass upon him. Yet,
+    imputations of partiality or corruption are somewhat hard to bear
+    when they are made by persons of your station and character. When
+    the Judicial Committee sits on appeals from the Spiritual Courts,
+    it _may_ certainly be under God's displeasure, the members _may_
+    be visited with judicial blindness, and deprived of the integrity
+    which in other times and cases they manifest. Against such a
+    supposition there is no direct argument, and I will not enter into
+    such a disputation. I have so much confidence in your generosity
+    and candour, on reflection, as to believe you would not desire I
+    should.
+
+    In the individual case I simply protest against the insinuation. I
+    add a word or two by way of general observation.
+
+    No doubt you have read the judgments in all the cases you allude
+    to carefully; but have you read the pleadings and arguments of the
+    counsel, so as to know accurately the points raised for the
+    consideration of those who were to decide? To know the offence
+    charged and the judgment pronounced may suffice in some cases for
+    an opinion by a competent person, whether the one warranted the
+    other; but more is required to warrant the imputation of
+    inconsistency, partiality, or indirect motives. He who takes this
+    on himself should know further how the pleadings and the arguments
+    presented the case for judgment, and made this or that particular
+    relevant in the discussion. Every one at all familiar with this
+    matter knows that a judgment not uncommonly fails to reflect the
+    private opinion of the judge on the whole of a great point,
+    because the issues of law or fact actually brought before him, and
+    which alone he was bound to decide, did not bring this before him.
+    And this rule, always binding, is, of course, never more so than
+    in regard to a Court of Final Appeal, which should be careful not
+    to conclude more than is regularly before it. Let me add that a
+    just and considerate person will wholly disregard the gossip which
+    flies about in regard to cases exciting much interest; passing
+    words in the course of an argument, forgotten when the judgment
+    comes to be considered, are too often caught up, as having guided
+    the final determination.
+
+Such words are a just rebuke to much of the inconsiderate talk which
+follows on any public act which touches the feelings, perhaps the
+highest and purest feelings of men with deep convictions. Perhaps Mr.
+Liddon's words were unguarded ones. But at the same time it is
+necessary to state without disguise what is the truth in this matter.
+It is necessary for the sake of justice and historical truth. The Court
+of Final Appeal is not like other courts. It is not a pure and simple
+court of law, though it is composed of great lawyers. It is doubtless a
+court where their high training and high professional honour come in,
+as they do elsewhere. But great lawyers are men, partisans and
+politicians, statesmen, if you like; and this is a court where they are
+not precluded, in the same degree as they are in the regular courts by
+the habits and prescriptions of the place, from thinking of what comes
+before them in its relation to public affairs. It is no mere invention
+of disappointed partisans, it is no idle charge of wilful unfairness,
+to say that considerations of high policy come into their
+deliberations; it has been the usual language, ever since the Gorham
+case, of men who cared little for the subject-matter of the questions
+debated; it is the language of those who urge the advantages of the
+Court. "It is a court," as the Bishop of Manchester said the other day,
+speaking in its praise, "composed of men who look at things not merely
+with the eyes of lawyers, but also with the eyes of statesmen."
+Precisely so; and for that reason they must be considered to have the
+responsibilities, not only of lawyers, but of statesmen, and their acts
+are proportionably open to discussion. Sir John Coleridge urges the
+impossibility of any other court; and certainly till we could be
+induced to trust an ecclesiastical court, composed of bishops or
+clergymen, in a higher degree than we could do at present, we see no
+alternative. But to say that a clerical court would be no improvement
+is not to prove that the present court is a satisfactory one. It may be
+difficult under our present circumstances to reform it. But though we
+may have reasons for making the best of it, we may be allowed to say
+that it is a singularly ill-imagined and ill-constructed court, and one
+in which the great features of English law and justice are not so
+conspicuous as they are elsewhere. Suitors do not complain in other
+courts either of the ruling, or sometimes of the language of judges, as
+they complain in this. But when this is made a ground for joining with
+the enemies of all that the English Church holds dear, to bring about a
+great break-up of the existing state of things, we agree with Sir John
+Coleridge in thinking that a great mistake is made; and if care is not
+taken, it may be an irreparable one. He writes:--
+
+    I hasten to my conclusion too long delayed, but a word must still
+    be added on a subject of not less consequence than any I have yet
+    touched on. You say, "Churchmen will to a very great extent indeed
+    find relief from the dilemma in a third course, viz. _co-operation
+    with the political forces_, which, year by year, more and more
+    steadily are working towards disestablishment. This is not a
+    menace; it is the statement of a simple fact." I am bound to
+    believe, and I do believe, you do not intend this as a menace; but
+    such a statement of a future course to depend on a contingency
+    cannot but read very much like one--and against your intention it
+    may well be understood as such. You do not say that _you_ are one
+    who will co-operate with the political party which now seeks to
+    disestablish the Church in accomplishing its purpose, and I do not
+    suppose you ever will. But on behalf, not so much of the clergy as
+    of the laity--on behalf of the worshippers in our churches, of the
+    sick to be visited at home--of the poor in their cottages, of our
+    children in their schools--of our society in general, I entreat
+    those of the clergy who are now feeling the most acutely in this
+    matter, not to suffer their minds to be so absorbed by the present
+    grievance as to take no thought of the evils of disestablishment.
+    I am not foolishly blind to the faults of the clergy--indeed I
+    fear I am sometimes censorious in regard to them--and some of
+    their faults I do think may be referable to Establishment; the
+    possession of house and land, and a sort of independence of their
+    parishioners, in some cases seems to tend to secularity. I regret
+    sometimes their partisanship at elections, their speeches at
+    public dinners. But what good gift of God is not liable to abuse
+    from men? Taken as a whole, we have owed, and we do owe, under
+    Him, to our Established clergy more than we can ever repay, much
+    of it rendered possible by their Establishment. I may refer, and
+    now with special force, to Education--their services in this
+    respect no one denies--and but for Establishment these, I think,
+    could not have been so effectively and systematically rendered. We
+    are now in a great crisis as to this all-important matter.
+    Concurring, as I do heartily, in the praise which has been
+    bestowed on Mr. Forster, and expecting that his great and arduous
+    office will be discharged with perfect impartiality by him, and
+    with a just sense of how much is due to the clergy in this
+    respect, still it cannot be denied that the powers conferred by
+    the Legislature on the holder of it are alarmingly great, even if
+    necessary; and who shall say in what a spirit they may be
+    exercised by his successor? For the general upholding of religious
+    education, in emergencies not improbable, to whom can we look in
+    general so confidently as to the parochial clergy? I speak now
+    specially in regard to parishes such as I am most familiar with,
+    in agricultural districts, small, not largely endowed, sometimes
+    without resident gentry, and with the land occupied by
+    rack-renting farmers, indifferent or hostile to education.
+
+In what Sir John Coleridge urges against the fatal step of welcoming
+disestablishment under an impatient sense of injustice we need not say
+that we concur most earnestly. But it cannot be too seriously
+considered by those who see the mischief of disestablishment, that as
+Sir John Coleridge also says, the English Churrh is, in one sense, a
+divided one; and that to pursue a policy of humiliating and crippling
+one of its great parties must at last bring mischief. The position of
+the High Church party is a remarkable one. It has had more against it
+than its rivals; yet it is probably the strongest of them all. It is
+said, probably with reason, to be the unpopular party. It has been the
+stock object of abuse and sarcasm with a large portion of the press. It
+has been equally obnoxious to Radical small shopkeepers and "true blue"
+farmers and their squires. It has been mobbed in churches and censured
+in Parliament. Things have gone against it, almost uniformly, before
+the tribunals. And unfortunately it cannot be said that it has been
+without its full share of folly and extravagance in some of its
+members. And yet it is the party which has grown; which has drawn some
+of its antagonists to itself, and has reacted on the ideas and habits
+of others; its members have gradually, as a matter of course, risen
+into important post and power. And it is to be noticed that, as a
+party, it has been the most tolerant. All parties are in their nature
+intolerant; none more so, where critical points arise, than Liberal
+ones. But in spite of the Dean of Westminster's surprise at High
+Churchmen claiming to be tolerant, we still think that, in the first
+place, they are really much less inclined to meddle with their
+neighbours than others of equally strong and deep convictions; and
+further, that they have become so more and more; and they have accepted
+the lessons of their experience; they have thrown off, more than any
+strong religious body, the intolerance which was natural to everybody
+once, and have learned, better than they did at one time, to bear with
+what they dislike and condemn. If a party like this comes to feel
+itself dealt with harshly and unfairly, sacrificed to popular clamour
+or the animosity of inveterate and unscrupulous opponents, it is
+certain that we shall be in great danger.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+MR. GLADSTONE'S LETTER ON THE ENGLISH CHURCH[7]
+
+
+  [7]
+  _Guardian_, 29th October 1884.
+
+Mr. Gladstone's Letter, read at the St. Asaph Diocesan Conference, will
+not have surprised those who have borne in mind his deep and
+unintermitted interest in the fortunes and prospects of the Church, and
+his habit of seeking relief from the pressure of one set of thoughts
+and anxieties by giving full play to his mental energies in another
+direction. Its composition and appearance at this moment are quite
+accounted for; it is a contribution to the business of the conference
+of his own diocese, and it was promised long before an autumn session
+on a great question between the two Houses was in view. Still the
+appearance of such a document from a person in Mr. Gladstone's position
+must, of course, invite attention and speculation. He may put aside the
+questions which the word "Disestablishment"--which was in the thesis
+given him to write upon--is likely to provoke--"Will it come? ought it
+to come? must it come? Is it near, or somewhat distant, or indefinitely
+remote?" On these questions he has not a word to say. But, all the
+same, people will naturally try to read between the lines, and to find
+out what was in the writer's thoughts about these questions. We cannot,
+however, see that there is anything to be gathered from the Letter as
+to the political aspect of the matter; he simply confines himself to
+the obvious lesson which passing events sufficiently bring with them,
+that whatever may come it is our business to be prepared.
+
+His anxieties are characteristic. The paper shows, we think, that it
+has not escaped him that disestablishment, however compensated as some
+sanguine people hope, would be a great disaster and ruin. It would be
+the failure and waste to the country of noble and astonishing efforts;
+it would be the break-up and collapse of a great and cheap system, by
+which light and human kindliness and intelligence are carried to vast
+tracts, that without its presence must soon become as stagnant and
+hopeless as many of the rural _communes_ of France; the blow would at
+the moment cripple and disorganise the Church for its work even in the
+towns. But though "happily improbable," it may come; and in such a
+contingency, what occupies Mr. Gladstone's thoughts is, not the
+question whether it would be disastrous, but whether it would be
+disgraceful. That is the point which disturbs and distresses him--the
+possibility that the end of our later Church history, the end of that
+wonderful experiment which has been going on from the sixteenth
+century, with such great vicissitudes, but after every shock with
+increasing improvement and hope, should at last be not only failure,
+but failure with dishonour; and this, he says, could only come in one
+of two ways. It might come from the Church having sunk into sloth and
+death, without faith, without conscience, without love. This, if it
+ever was really to be feared, is not the danger before us now.
+Activity, conviction, energy, self-devotion, these, and not apathetic
+lethargy, mark the temper of our times; and they are as conspicuous in
+the Church as anywhere else. But these qualities, as we have had ample
+experience, may develop into fierce and angry conflicts. It is our
+internal quarrels, Mr. Gladstone thinks, that create the most serious
+risk of disestablishment; and it is only our quarrels, which we have
+not good sense and charity enough to moderate and keep within bounds,
+which would make it "disgraceful."
+
+The main feature of the Letter is the historical retrospect which Mr.
+Gladstone gives of the long history, the long travail of the later
+English Church. Hardly in its first start, under the Tudors, but more
+and more as time went on, it instinctively, as it were, tried the great
+and difficult problem of Christian liberty. The Churches of the
+Continent, Roman and anti-Roman, were simple in their systems; only one
+sharply defined theology, only the disciples and representatives of one
+set of religious tendencies, would they allow to dwell within their
+borders; what was refractory and refused to harmonise was at once cast
+out; and for a certain time they were unvexed with internal
+dissensions. This, both in the case of the Roman, the Lutheran, and the
+Calvinistic Churches of the Continent, requires to be somewhat
+qualified; still, as compared with the rival schools of the English
+Church, Puritan and Anglican, the contrast is a true and a sharp one.
+Mr. Gladstone adopts from a German writer a view which is certainly not
+new to many in England, that "the Reformation, as a religious movement,
+took its shape in England, not in the sixteenth century but in the
+seventeenth." "It seems plain," he says, "that the great bulk of those
+burned under Mary were Puritans"; and he adds, what is not perhaps so
+capable of proof, that "under Elizabeth we have to look, with rare
+exceptions, among the Puritans and Recusants for an active and
+religious life." It was not till the Restoration, it was not till
+Puritanism had shown all its intolerance, all its narrowness, and all
+its helplessness, that the Church was able to settle the real basis and
+the chief lines of its reformed constitution. It is not, as Mr.
+Gladstone says, "a heroic history"; there is room enough in the
+looseness of some of its arrangements, and the incompleteness of
+others, for diversity of opinion and for polemical criticism. But the
+result, in fact, of this liberty and this incompleteness has been, not
+that the Church has declined lower and lower into indifference and
+negation, but that it has steadily mounted in successive periods to a
+higher level of purpose, to a higher standard of life and thought, of
+faith and work. Account for it as we may, with all drawbacks, with
+great intervals of seeming torpor, with much to be regretted and to be
+ashamed of, that is literally the history of the English Church since
+the Restoration settlement. It is not "heroic," but there are no Church
+annals of the same time more so, and there are none fuller of hope.
+
+But every system has its natural and specific danger, and the specific
+English danger, as it is the condition of vigorous English life, is
+that spirit of liberty which allows and attempts to combine very
+divergent tendencies of opinion. "The Church of England," Mr. Gladstone
+thinks, "has been peculiarly liable, on the one side and on the other,
+both to attack and to defection, and the probable cause is to be found
+in the degree in which, whether for worldly or for religious reasons,
+it was attempted in her case to combine divergent elements within her
+borders." She is still, as he says, "working out her system by
+experience"; and the exclusion of bitterness--even, as he says, of
+"savagery"--from her debates and controversies is hardly yet
+accomplished. There is at present, indeed, a remarkable lull, a "truce
+of God," which, it may be hoped, is of good omen; but we dare not be
+too sure that it is going to be permanent. In the meantime, those who
+tremble lest disestablishment should be the signal of a great break up
+and separation of her different parties cannot do better than meditate
+on Mr. Gladstone's very solemn words:--
+
+    The great maxim, _in omnibus caritas_, which is so necessary to
+    temper all religious controversy, ought to apply with a tenfold
+    force to the conduct of the members of the Church of England. In
+    respect to differences among themselves they ought, of course, in
+    the first place to remember that their right to differ is limited
+    by the laws of the system to which they belong; but within that
+    limit should they not also, each of them, recollect that his
+    antagonist has something to say; that the Reformation and the
+    counter-Reformation tendencies were, in the order of Providence,
+    placed here in a closer juxtaposition than anywhere else in the
+    Christian world; that a course of destiny so peculiar appears to
+    indicate on the part of the Supreme Orderer a peculiar purpose,
+    that not only no religious but no considerate or prudent man
+    should run the risk of interfering with such a purpose; that the
+    great charity which is a bounden duty everywhere in these matters
+    should here be accompanied and upheld by two ever-striving
+    handmaidens, a great Reverence and a great Patience.
+
+This is true, and of deep moment to those who guide and influence
+thought and feeling in the Church. But further, those in whose hands
+the "Supreme Orderer" has placed the springs and the restraints of
+political movement and of change, if they recognise at all this view of
+the English Church, ought to feel one duty paramount in regard to it.
+Never was the Church, they tell us, more active and more hopeful; well
+then, what politicians who care for her have to see to is that she
+shall have _time_ to work out effectually the tendencies which are
+visible in her now more than at any period of her history--that
+combination which Mr. Gladstone wishes for, of the deepest individual
+faith and energy, with forbearance and conciliation and the desire for
+peace. She has a right to claim from English rulers that she should
+have time to let these things work and bear fruit; if she has lost time
+before, she never was so manifestly in earnest in trying to make up for
+it as now. It is not talking, but working together, which brings
+different minds and tempers to understand one another's divergences;
+and it is this disposition to work together which shows itself and is
+growing now. But it needs time. What the Church has a right to ask from
+the arbiters of her temporal and political position in the country, if
+that is ultimately and inevitably to be changed, is that nothing
+precipitate, nothing impatient, should be done; that she should have
+time adequately to develop and fulfil what she now alone among
+Christian communities seems in a position to attempt.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+DISENDOWMENT[8]
+
+
+  [8]
+  _Guardian_, 14th October 1885.
+
+This generation has seen no such momentous change as that which has
+suddenly appeared to be at our very doors, and which people speak of as
+disestablishment. The word was only invented a few years ago, and was
+sneered at as a barbarism, worthy of the unpractical folly which it was
+coined to express. It has been bandied about a good deal lately,
+sometimes _de coeur leger_; and within the last six months it has
+assumed the substance and the weight of a formidable probability. Other
+changes, more or less serious, are awaiting us in the approaching
+future; but they are encompassed with many uncertainties, and all
+forecasts of their working are necessarily very doubtful. About this
+there is an almost brutal clearness and simplicity, as to what it
+means, as to what is intended by those who have pushed it into
+prominence, and as to what will follow from their having their way.
+
+Disestablishment has really come to mean, in the mouth of friends and
+foes, simple disendowment. It is well that the question should be set
+in its true terms, without being confused with vague and less important
+issues. It is not very easy to say what disestablishment by itself
+would involve, except the disappearance of Bishops from the Upper
+House, or the presence of other religious dignitaries, with equal rank
+and rights, alongside of them. Questions of patronage and
+ecclesiastical law might be difficult to settle; but otherwise a
+statute of mere disestablishment, not easy indeed to formulate, would
+leave the Church in the eyes of the country very much what it found it.
+Perhaps "My lord" might be more widely dropped in addressing Bishops;
+but otherwise, the aspect of the Church, its daily work, its
+organisations, would remain the same, and it would depend on the Church
+itself whether the consideration paid to it continues what it has been;
+whether it shall be diminished or increased. The privilege of being
+publicly recognised with special marks of honour by the State has been
+dearly paid for by the claim which the State has always, and sometimes
+unscrupulously, insisted on, of making the true interests of the Church
+subservient to its own passing necessities.
+
+But there is no haziness about the meaning of disendowment. Property is
+a tangible thing, and is subject to the four rules of arithmetic, and
+ultimately to the force of the strong arm. When you talk of
+disendowment, you talk of taking from the Church, not honour or
+privilege or influence, but visible things, to be measured and counted
+and pointed to, which now belong to it and which you want to belong to
+some one else. They belong to individuals because the individuals
+belong to a great body. There are, of course, many people who do not
+believe that such a body exists; or that if it does, it has been called
+into being and exists simply by the act of the State, like the army,
+and, like the army, liable to be disbanded by its master. But that is a
+view resting on a philosophical theory of a purely subjective
+character; it is as little the historical or legal view as it is the
+theological view. We have not yet lost our right in the nineteenth
+century to think of the Church of England as a continuous, historic,
+religious society, bound by ties which, however strained, are still
+unbroken with that vast Christendom from which as a matter of fact it
+sprung, and still, in spite of all differences, external and internal,
+and by force of its traditions and institutions, as truly one body as
+anything can be on earth. To this Church, this body, by right which at
+present is absolutely unquestionable, property belongs; property has
+been given from time immemorial down to yesterday. This property, in
+its bulk, with whatever abatements and allowances, it is intended to
+take from the Church. This is disendowment, and this is what is before
+us.
+
+It is well to realise as well as we can what is inevitably involved in
+this vast and, in modern England, unexampled change, which we are
+sometimes invited to view with philosophic calmness or resignation, as
+the unavoidable drift of the current of modern thought, or still more
+cheerfully to welcome, as the beginning of a new era in the prosperity
+and strength of the Church as a religious institution. We are entreated
+to be of good cheer. The Church will be more free; it will no longer be
+mixed up with sordid money matters and unpopular payments; it will no
+longer have the discredit of State control; the rights of the laity
+will come up and a blow will be struck at clericalism. With all our
+machinery shattered and ruined we shall be thrown more on individual
+energy and spontaneous originality of effort. Our new poverty will spur
+us into zeal. Above all, the Church will be delivered from the
+temptation, incident to wealth, of sticking to abuses for the sake of
+gold; of shrinking from principle and justice and enthusiasm, out of
+fear of worldly loss. It will no longer be a place for drones and
+hirelings. It is very kind of the revolutionists to wish all this good
+to the Church, though if the Church is so bad as to need all these good
+wishes for its improvement, it would be more consistent, and perhaps
+less cynical, to wish it ruined altogether. Yet even if the Church were
+likely to thrive better on no bread, there are reasons of public
+morality why it should not be robbed. But these prophecies and
+forecasts really belong to a sphere far removed from the mental
+activity of those who so easily indulge in them. These excellent
+persons are hardly fitted by habit and feeling to be judges of the
+probable course of Divine Providence, or the development of new
+religious energies and spiritual tendencies in a suddenly impoverished
+body. What they can foresee, and what we can foresee also is, that
+these _tabulae novae_ will be a great blow to the Church. They mean
+that, and that we understand.
+
+It is idle to talk as if it was to be no blow to the Church. The
+confiscation of Wesleyan and Roman Catholic Church property would be a
+real blow to Wesleyan or Roman Catholic interests; and in proportion as
+the body is greater the effects of the blow must be heavier and more
+signal. It is trifling with our patience to pretend to persuade us that
+such a confiscation scheme as is now recommended to the country would
+not throw the whole work of the Church into confusion and disaster, not
+perhaps irreparable, but certainly for the time overwhelming and
+perilous. People speak sometimes as if such a huge transfer of property
+was to be done with the stroke of a pen and the aid of a few office
+clerks; they forget what are the incidents of an institution which has
+lasted in England for more than a thousand years, and whose business
+extends to every aspect and degree of our very complex society from the
+highest to the lowest. Resources may be replaced, but for the time they
+must be crippled. Life may be rearranged for the new circumstances, but
+in the meanwhile all the ordinary assumptions have to be changed, all
+the ordinary channels of activity are stopped up or diverted.
+
+And why should this vast and far-reaching change be made? Is it
+unlawful for the Church to hold property? Other religious organisations
+hold it, and even the Salvation Army knows the importance of funds for
+its work. Is it State property which the State may resume for other
+uses? If anything is certain it is that the State, except in an
+inconsiderable degree, did not endow the Church, but consented in the
+most solemn way to its being endowed by the gifts of private donors, as
+it now consents to the endowment in this way of other religious bodies.
+Does the bigness of the property entitle the State to claim it? This is
+a formidable doctrine for other religious bodies, as they increase in
+influence and numbers. Is it vexatious that the Church should be richer
+and more powerful than the sects? It is not the fault of the Church
+that it is the largest and the most ancient body in England. There is
+but one real and adequate reason: it is the wish to disable and
+paralyse a great religious corporation, the largest and most powerful
+representative of Christianity in our English society, to exhibit it to
+the nation after centuries of existence at length defeated and humbled
+by the new masters' power, to deprive it of the organisation and the
+resources which it is using daily with increasing effect for impressing
+religious truth on the people, for winning their interest, their
+confidence, and their sympathy, for obtaining a hold on the generations
+which are coming. The Liberation Society might go on for years
+repeating their dreary catalogue of grievances and misstatements.
+Doubtless there is much for which they desire to punish the Church;
+doubtless, too, there are men among them who are persuaded that they
+would serve religion by discrediting and impoverishing the Church. But
+they are not the people with whom the Church has to reckon. The
+Liberationists might have long asked in vain for their pet
+"emancipation" scheme. They are stronger men than the Liberationists
+who are going in now for disendowment. They are men--we do them no
+wrong--who sincerely think Christianity mischievous, and who see in the
+power and resources of the Church a bulwark and representative of all
+religion which it is of the first importance to get rid of.
+
+This is the one adequate and consistent reason for the confiscation of
+the property of the Church. There is no other reason that will bear
+discussion to be given for what, without it, is a great moral and
+political wrong. In such a settled society as ours, where men reckon on
+what is their own, such a sweeping and wholesale transfer of property
+cannot be justified, on a mere balance of probable expediency in the
+use of it. Unless it is as a punishment for gross neglect and abuse, as
+was alleged in the partial confiscations of the sixteenth century, or
+unless it is called for as a step to break down what can no longer be
+tolerated, like slavery, there is no other name for it, in the estimate
+of justice, than that of a deep and irreparable wrong. This is
+certainly not the time to punish the Church when it never was more
+improving and more unsparing of sacrifice and effort. But it may be
+full time to stop a career which may render success more difficult for
+schemes ahead, which make no secret of their intention to dispense with
+religion. This, however, is not what most Englishmen wish, whether
+Liberals or Conservatives, or even Nonconformists; and without this end
+there is no more justice in disendowing a great religious corporation
+like the Church, than in disendowing the Duke of Bedford or the Duke of
+Westminster. Of course no one can deny the competence of Parliament to
+do either one or the other; but power does not necessarily carry with
+it justice, and justice means that while there are great and small,
+rich and poor, the State should equally protect all its members and all
+its classes, however different. Revolutions have no law; but a great
+wrong, deliberately inflicted in times of settled order, is more
+mischievous to the nation than even to those who suffer from it.
+History has shown us what follows from such gratuitous and wanton wrong
+in the bitter feeling of defeat and humiliation lasting through
+generations. But worse than this is the effect on the political
+morality of the nation; the corrupting and fatal consciousness of
+having once broken through the restraints of recognised justice, of
+having acquiesced in a tempting but high-handed wrong. The effects of
+disendowment concern England and its morality even more deeply than
+they do the Church.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE NEW COURT[9]
+
+
+  [9]
+  _Guardian_, 15th May 1889.
+
+The claim maintained by the Archbishop in his Judgment, by virtue of
+his metropolitical authority and by that alone, to cite, try, and
+sentence one of his suffragans, is undoubtedly what is called in slang
+language "a large order." Even by those who may have thought it
+inevitable, after the Watson case had been so distinctly accepted by
+the books as a precedent, it is yet felt as a surprise, in the sense in
+which a thing is often a surprise when, after being only talked about
+it becomes a reality. We can imagine some people getting up in the
+morning on last Saturday with one set of feelings, and going to bed
+with another. Bishops, then, who in spite of the alleged anarchy, are
+still looked upon with great reverence, as almost irresponsible in what
+they say and do officially, are, it seems, as much at the mercy of the
+law as the presbyters and deacons whom they have occasionally sent
+before the Courts. They, too, at the will of chance accusers who are
+accountable to no one, are liable to the humiliation, worry, and
+crushing law-bills of an ecclesiastical suit. Whatever may be thought
+of this now, it would have seemed extravagant and incredible to the
+older race of Bishops that their actions should be so called in
+question. They would have thought their dignity gravely assailed, if
+besides having to incur heavy expense in prosecuting offending
+clergymen, they had also to incur it in protecting themselves from the
+charge of being themselves offenders against Church law.
+
+The growth of law is always a mysterious thing; and an outsider and
+layman is disposed to ask where this great jurisdiction sprung up and
+grew into shape and power. In the Archbishop's elaborate and able
+Judgment it is indeed treated as something which had always been; but
+he was more successful in breaking down the force of alleged
+authorities, and inferences from them, on the opposite side, than he
+was in establishing clearly and convincingly his own contention.
+Considering the dignity and importance of the jurisdiction claimed, it
+is curious that so little is heard about it till the beginning of the
+eighteenth century. It is curious that in its two most conspicuous
+instances it should have been called into activity by those not
+naturally friendly to large ecclesiastical claims--by Low Churchmen of
+the Revolution against an offending Jacobite, and by a Puritan
+association against a High Churchman. There is no such clear and strong
+case as Bishop Watson's till we come to Bishop Watson. In his argument
+the Archbishop rested his claim definitely and forcibly on the
+precedent of Bishop Watson's case, and one or two cases which more or
+less followed it. That possibly is sufficient for his purpose; but it
+may still be asked--What did the Watson case itself grow out of? what
+were the precedents--not merely the analogies and supposed legal
+necessities, but the precedents--on which this exercise of
+metropolitical jurisdiction, distinct from the legatine power, rested?
+For it seems as if a formidable prerogative, not much heard of where we
+might expect to hear of it, not used by Cranmer and Laud, though
+approved by Cranmer in the _Reformatio Legum_, had sprung into being
+and energy in the hands of the mild Archbishop Tenison. Watson's case
+may be good law and bind the Archbishop. But it would have been more
+satisfactory if, in reviving a long-disused power, the Archbishop had
+been able to go behind the Watson case, and to show more certainly that
+the jurisdiction which he claimed and proposed to exercise in
+conformity with that case had, like the jurisdiction of other great
+courts of the Church and realm, been clearly and customarily exercised
+long before that case.
+
+The appearance of this great tribunal among us, a distinctly spiritual
+court of the highest dignity, cannot fail to be memorable. It is too
+early to forecast what its results may be. There may be before it an
+active and eventful career, or it may fall back into disuse and
+quiescence. It has jealous and suspicious rivals in the civil courts,
+never well disposed to the claim of ecclesiastical power or purely
+spiritual authority; and though its jurisdiction is not likely to be
+strained at present, it is easy to conceive occasions in the future
+which may provoke the interference of the civil court.
+
+But there is this interest about the present proceedings, that they
+illustrate with curious closeness, amid so much that is different, the
+way in which great spiritual prerogatives grew up in the Church. They
+may have ended disastrously; but at their first beginnings they were
+usually inevitable, innocent, blameless. Time after time the necessity
+arose of some arbiter among those who were themselves arbiters, rulers,
+judges. Time after time this necessity forced those in the first rank
+into this position, as being the only persons who could be allowed to
+take it, and so Archbishops, Metropolitans, Primates appeared, to
+preside at assemblies, to be the mouthpiece of a general sentiment, to
+decide between high authorities, to be the centre of appeals. The
+Papacy itself at its first beginning had no other origin. It interfered
+because it was asked to interfere; it judged because there was no one
+else to judge. And so necessities of a very different kind have forced
+the Archbishop of Canterbury of our day into a position which is new
+and strange to our experience, and which, however constitutional and
+reasonable it may be, must give every one who is at all affected by it
+a good deal to think about.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+MOZLEY'S BAMPTON LECTURES[10]
+
+
+I
+
+  [10]
+  _Eight Lectures on Miracles: the Bampton Lectures for 1865_. By the
+  Rev. J.B. Mozley, B.D. _The Times_, 5th and 6th June 1866.
+
+The way in which the subject of Miracles has been treated, and the
+place which they have had in our discussions, will remain a
+characteristic feature of both the religious and philosophical
+tendencies of thought among us. Miracles, if they are real things, are
+the most awful and august of realities. But, from various causes, one
+of which, perhaps, is the very word itself, and the way in which it
+binds into one vague and technical generality a number of most
+heterogeneous instances, miracles have lost much of their power to
+interest those who have thought most in sympathy with their generation.
+They have been summarily and loosely put aside, sometimes avowedly,
+more often still by implication. Even by those who accepted and
+maintained them, they have often been touched uncertainly and formally,
+as if people thought that they were doing a duty, but would like much
+better to talk about other things which really attracted and filled
+their minds. In the long course of theological war for the last two
+centuries, it is hardly too much to say that miracles, as a subject for
+discussion, have been degraded and worn down from their original
+significance; vulgarised by passing through the handling of not the
+highest order of controversialists, who battered and defaced what they
+bandied about in argument, which was often ingenious and acute, and
+often mere verbal sophistry, but which, in any case, seldom rose to the
+true height of the question. Used either as instruments of proof or as
+fair game for attack, they suffered in the common and popular feeling
+about them. Taken in a lump, and with little realising of all that they
+were and implied, they furnished a cheap and tempting material for
+"short and easy methods" on one side, and on the other side, as it is
+obvious, a mark for just as easy and tempting objections. They became
+trite. People got tired of hearing of them, and shy of urging them, and
+dwelt in preference on other grounds of argument. The more serious
+feeling and the more profound and original thought of the last half
+century no longer seemed to give them the value and importance which
+they had; on both sides a disposition was to be traced to turn aside
+from them. The deeper religion and the deeper and more enterprising
+science of the day combined to lower them from their old evidential
+place. The one threw the moral stress on moral grounds of belief, and
+seemed inclined to undervalue external proofs. The other more and more
+yielded to its repugnance to admit the interruption of natural law, and
+became more and more disinclined even to discuss the supernatural; and,
+curiously enough, along with this there was in one remarkable school of
+religious philosophy an increased readiness to believe in miracles as
+such, without apparently caring much for them as proofs. Of late,
+indeed, things have taken a different turn. The critical importance of
+miracles, after for a time having fallen out of prominence behind other
+questions, has once more made itself felt. Recent controversy has
+forced them again on men's thoughts, and has made us see that, whether
+they are accepted or denied, it is idle to ignore them. They mean too
+much to be evaded. Like all powerful arguments they cut two ways, and
+of all powerful arguments they are the most clearly two-edged. However
+we may limit their range, some will remain which we must face; which,
+according to what is settled about them, either that they are true or
+not true, will entirely change all that we think of religion. Writers
+on all sides have begun to be sensible that a decisive point requires
+their attention, and that its having suffered from an old-fashioned way
+of handling is no reason why it should not on its own merits engage
+afresh the interest of serious men, to whom it is certainly of
+consequence.
+
+The renewed attention of theological writers to the subject of miracles
+as an element of proof has led to some important discussions upon it,
+showing in their treatment of a well-worn inquiry that a change in the
+way of conducting it had become necessary. Of these productions we may
+place Mr. Mozley's _Bampton Lectures_ for last year among the most
+original and powerful. They are an example, and a very fine one, of a
+mode of theological writing which is characteristic of the Church of
+England, and almost peculiar to it. The distinguishing features of it
+are a combination of intense seriousness with a self-restrained, severe
+calmness, and of very vigorous and wide-ranging reasoning on the
+realities of the case with the least amount of care about artificial
+symmetry or scholastic completeness. Admirers of the Roman style call
+it cold, indefinite, wanting in dogmatic coherence, comprehensiveness,
+and grandeur. Admirers of the German style find little to praise in a
+cautious bit-by-bit method, content with the tests which have most
+affinity with common sense, incredulous of exhaustive theories, leaving
+a large margin for the unaccountable or the unexplained. But it has its
+merits, one of them being that, dealing very solidly and very acutely
+with large and real matters of experience, the interest of such
+writings endures as the starting-point and foundation for future work.
+Butler out of England is hardly known, certainly he is not much valued
+either as a divine or a philosopher; but in England, though we
+criticise him freely, it will be a long time before he is out of date.
+Mr. Mozley's book belongs to that class of writings of which Butler may
+be taken as the type. It is strong, genuine argument about difficult
+matters, fairly facing what _is_ difficult, fairly trying to grapple,
+not with what _appears_ the gist and strong point of a question, but
+with what really and at bottom _is_ the knot of it. It is a book the
+reasoning of which may not satisfy every one; but it is a book in which
+there is nothing plausible, nothing put in to escape the trouble of
+thinking out what really comes across the writer's path. This will not
+recommend it to readers who themselves are not fond of trouble; a book
+of hard thinking cannot be a book of easy reading; nor is it a book for
+people to go to who only want available arguments, or to see a question
+apparently settled in a convenient way. But we think it is a book for
+people who wish to see a great subject handled on a scale which befits
+it and with a perception of its real elements. It is a book which will
+have attractions for those who like to see a powerful mind applying
+itself without shrinking or holding back, without trick or reserve or
+show of any kind, as a wrestler closes body to body with his
+antagonist, to the strength of an adverse and powerful argument. A
+stern self-constraint excludes everything exclamatory, all glimpses and
+disclosures of what merely affects the writer, all advantages from an
+appeal, disguised and indirect perhaps, to the opinion of his own side.
+But though the work is not rhetorical, it is not the less eloquent; but
+it is eloquence arising from a keen insight at once into what is real
+and what is great, and from a singular power of luminous, noble, and
+expressive statement. There is no excitement about its close subtle
+trains of reasoning; and there is no affectation,--and therefore no
+affectation of impartiality. The writer has his conclusions, and he
+does not pretend to hold a balance between them and their opposites.
+But in the presence of such a subject he never loses sight of its
+greatness, its difficulty, its eventfulness; and these thoughts make
+him throughout his undertaking circumspect, considerate, and calm.
+
+The point of view from which the subject of miracles is looked at in
+these Lectures is thus stated in the preface. It is plain that two
+great questions arise--first, Are miracles possible? next, If they are,
+can any in fact be proved? These two branches of the inquiry involve
+different classes of considerations. The first is purely philosophical,
+and stops the inquiry at once if it can be settled in the negative. The
+other calls in also the aid of history and criticism. Both questions
+have been followed out of late with great keenness and interest, but it
+is the first which at present assumes an importance which it never had
+before, with its tremendous negative answer, revolutionising not only
+the past, but the whole future of mankind; and it is to the first that
+Mr. Mozley's work is mainly addressed.
+
+    The difficulty which attaches to miracles in the period of thought
+    through which we are now passing is one which is concerned not
+    with their evidence, but with their intrinsic credibility. There
+    has arisen in a certain class of minds an apparent perception of
+    the impossibility of suspensions of physical law. This is one
+    peculiarity of the time; another is a disposition to maintain the
+    disbelief of miracles upon a religious basis, and in a connection
+    with a declared belief in the Christian revelation.
+
+    The following Lectures, therefore, are addressed mainly to the
+    fundamental question of the credibility of Miracles, their use and
+    the evidences of them being only touched on subordinately and
+    collaterally. It was thought that such an aim, though in itself a
+    narrow and confined one, was most adapted to the particular need
+    of the day.
+
+As Mr. Mozley says, various points essential to the whole argument,
+such as testimony, and the criterion between true and false miracles,
+are touched upon; but what is characteristic of the work is the way in
+which it deals with the antecedent objection to the possibility and
+credibility of miracles. It is on this part of the subject that the
+writer strikes out a line for himself, and puts forth his strength. His
+argument may be described generally as a plea for reason against
+imagination and the broad impressions of custom. Experience, such
+experience as we have of the world and human life, has, in all ages,
+been really the mould of human thought, and with large exceptions, the
+main unconscious guide and controller of human belief; and in our own
+times it has been formally and scientifically recognised as such, and
+made the exclusive foundation of all possible philosophy. A philosophy
+of mere experience is not tolerant of miracles; its doctrines exclude
+them; but, what is of even greater force than its doctrines, the subtle
+and penetrating atmosphere of feeling and intellectual habits which
+accompanies it is essentially uncongenial and hostile to them. It is
+against the undue influence of such results of experience--an influence
+openly acting in distinct ideas and arguments, but of which the greater
+portion operates blindly, insensibly, and out of sight--that Mr. Mozley
+makes a stand on behalf of reason, to which it belongs in the last
+resort to judge of the lessons of experience. Reason, as it cannot
+create experience, so it cannot take its place and be its substitute;
+but what reason can do is to say within what limits experience is
+paramount as a teacher; and reason abdicates its functions if it
+declines to do so, for it was given us to work upon and turn to account
+the unmeaning and brute materials which experience gives us in the
+rough. The antecedent objection against miracles is, he says, one of
+experience, but not one of reason. And experience, flowing over its
+boundaries tyrannically and effacing its limits, is as dangerous to
+truth and knowledge as reason once was, when it owned no check in
+nature, and used no test but itself.
+
+Mr. Mozley begins by stating clearly the necessity for coming to a
+decision on the question of miracles. It cannot remain one of the open
+questions, at least of religion. There is, as has been said, a
+disposition to pass by it, and to construct a religion without
+miracles. The thing is conceivable. We can take what are as a matter of
+fact the moral results of Christianity, and of that singular power with
+which it has presided over the improvement of mankind, and alloying and
+qualifying them with other elements, not on the face of the matter its
+products, yet in many cases indirectly connected with its working, form
+something which we may acknowledge as a rule of life, and which may
+satisfy our inextinguishable longings after the unseen and eternal. It
+is true that such a religion presupposes Christianity, to which it owes
+its best and noblest features, and that, as far as we can see, it is
+inconceivable if Christianity had not first been. Still, we may say
+that alchemy preceded chemistry, and was not the more true for being
+the step to what is true. But what we cannot say of such a religion is
+that it takes the place of Christianity, and is such a religion as
+Christianity has been and claims to be. There must ever be all the
+difference in the world between a religion which is or professes to be
+a revelation, and one which cannot be called such. For a revelation is
+a direct work and message of God; but that which is the result of a
+process and progress of rinding out the truth by the experience of
+ages, or of correcting mistakes, laying aside superstitions and
+gradually reducing the gross mass of belief to its essential truth, is
+simply on a level with all other human knowledge, and, as it is about
+the unseen, can never be verified. If there has been no revelation,
+there may be religious hopes and misgivings, religious ideas or dreams,
+religious anticipations and trust; but the truth is, there cannot be a
+religion in the world. Much less can there be any such thing as
+Christianity. It is only when we look at it vaguely in outline, without
+having before our mind what it is in fact and in detail, that we can
+allow ourselves to think so. There is no transmuting its refractory
+elements into something which is not itself; and it is nothing if it is
+not primarily a direct message from God. Limit as we may the manner of
+this communication, still there remains what makes it different from
+all other human possessions of truth, that it was a direct message. And
+that, to whatever extent, involves all that is involved in the idea of
+miracles. It is, as Mr. Mozley says, inconceivable without miracles.
+
+    If, then, a person of evident integrity and loftiness of character
+    rose into notice in a particular country and community eighteen
+    centuries ago, who made these communications about himself--that
+    he had existed before his natural birth, from all eternity, and
+    before the world was, in a state of glory with God; that he was
+    the only-begotten Son of God; that the world itself had been made
+    by him; that he had, however, come down from heaven and assumed
+    the form and nature of man for a particular purpose--viz. to be
+    the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world; that he
+    thus stood in a mysterious and supernatural relation to the whole
+    of mankind; that through him alone mankind had access to God; that
+    he was the head of an invisible kingdom, into which he should
+    gather all the generations of righteous men who had lived in the
+    world; that on his departure from hence he should return to heaven
+    to prepare mansions there for them; and, lastly, that he should
+    descend again at the end of the world to judge the whole human
+    race, on which occasion all that were in their graves should hear
+    his voice and come forth, they that had done good unto the
+    resurrection of life, and they that had done evil unto the
+    resurrection of damnation,--if this person made these assertions
+    about himself, and all that was done was to make the assertions,
+    what would be the inevitable conclusion of sober reason respecting
+    that person? The necessary conclusion of sober reason respecting
+    that person would be that he was disordered in his understanding.
+    What other decision could we come to when a man, looking like one
+    of ourselves, and only exemplifying in his life and circumstances
+    the ordinary course of nature, said this about himself, but that
+    when reason had lost its balance a dream of extraordinary and
+    unearthly grandeur might be the result? By no rational being could
+    a just and benevolent life be accepted as proof of such
+    astonishing announcements. Miracles are the necessary complement
+    then of the truth of such announcements, which without them are
+    purposeless and abortive, the unfinished fragments of a design
+    which is nothing unless it is the whole. They are necessary to the
+    justification of such announcements, which, indeed, unless they
+    are supernatural truths, are the wildest delusions. The matter and
+    its guarantee are the two parts of a revelation, the absence of
+    either of which neutralises and undoes it.
+
+A revelation, in any sense in which it is more than merely a result of
+the natural progress of the human mind and the gradual clearing up of
+mistakes, cannot in the nature of things be without miracles, because
+it is not merely a discovery of ideas and rules of life, but of facts
+undiscoverable without it. It involves _constituent_ miracles, to use
+De Quincey's phrase, as part of its substance, and could not claim a
+bearing without _evidential_ or _polemic_ ones. No other portion or
+form of proof, however it may approve itself to the ideas of particular
+periods or minds, can really make up for this. The alleged sinlessness
+of the Teacher, the internal evidence from adaptation to human nature,
+the historical argument of the development of Christendom, are, as Mr.
+Mozley points out, by themselves inadequate, without that further
+guarantee which is contained in miracles, to prove the Divine origin of
+a religion. The tendency has been of late to fall back on these
+attractive parts of the argument, which admit of such varied handling
+and expression, and come home so naturally to the feelings of an age so
+busy and so keen in pursuing the secrets of human character, and so
+fascinated with its unfolding wonders. But take any of them, the
+argument from results, for instance, perhaps the most powerful of them
+all. "We cannot," as Mr. Mozley says, "rest too much upon it, so long
+as we do not charge it with more of the burden of proof than it is in
+its own nature equal to--viz. the whole. But that it cannot bear." The
+hard, inevitable question remains at the end, for the most attenuated
+belief in Christianity as a religion from God--what is the ultimate
+link which connects it directly with God? The readiness with which we
+throw ourselves on more congenial topics of proof does not show that,
+even to our own minds, these proofs could suffice by themselves,
+miracles being really taken away. The whole power of a complex argument
+and the reasons why it tells do not always appear on its face. It does
+not depend merely on what it states, but also on unexpressed,
+unanalysed, perhaps unrealised grounds, the real force of which would
+at once start forth if they were taken away. We are told of the obscure
+rays of the spectrum, rays which have their proof and their effect,
+only not the same proof and effect as the visible ones which they
+accompany; and the background and latent suppositions of a great
+argument are as essential to it as its more prominent and elaborate
+constructions. And they show their importance sometimes in a remarkable
+and embarrassing way, when, after a long debate, their presence at the
+bottom of everything, unnoticed and perhaps unallowed for, is at length
+disclosed by some obvious and decisive question, which some person had
+been too careless to think of, and another too shy to ask. We may not
+care to obtrude miracles; but take them away, and see what becomes of
+the argument for Christianity.
+
+    It must be remembered that when this part of Christian evidence
+    comes so forcibly home to us, and creates that inward assurance
+    which it does, it does this in connection with the proof of
+    miracles in the background, which though it may not for the time
+    be brought into actual view, is still known to be there, and to be
+    ready for use upon being wanted. The _indirect_ proof from results
+    has the greater force, and carries with it the deeper persuasion,
+    because it is additional and auxiliary to the _direct_ proof
+    behind it, upon which it leans all the time, though we may not
+    distinctly notice and estimate this advantage. Were the evidence
+    of moral result to be taken rigidly alone as the one single
+    guarantee for a Divine revelation, it would then be seen that we
+    had calculated its single strength too highly. If there is a
+    species of evidence which is directly appropriate to the thing
+    believed, we cannot suppose, on the strength of the indirect
+    evidence we possess, that we can do without the direct. But
+    miracles are the direct credentials of a revelation; the visible
+    supernatural is the appropriate witness to the invisible
+    supernatural--that proof which goes straight to the point, and, a
+    token being wanted of a Divine communication, is that token. We
+    cannot, therefore, dispense with this evidence. The position that
+    the revelation proves the miracles, and not the miracles the
+    revelation, admits of a good qualified meaning; but, taken
+    literally, it is a double offence against the rule that things are
+    properly proved by the proper proof of them; for a supernatural
+    fact _is_ the proper proof of a supernatural doctrine, while a
+    supernatural doctrine, on the other hand, is certainly _not_ the
+    proper proof of a supernatural fact.
+
+So that, whatever comes of the inquiry, miracles and revelation must go
+together. There is no separating them. Christianity may claim in them
+the one decisive proof that could be given of its Divine origin and the
+truth of its creed; but, at any rate, it must ever be responsible for
+them.
+
+    But suppose a person to say, and to say with truth, that his own
+    individual faith does not rest upon miracles, is he, therefore,
+    released from the defence of miracles? Is the question of their
+    truth or falsehood an irrelevant one to him? Is his faith secure
+    if they are disproved? By no means; if miracles were, although
+    only at the commencement, necessary to Christianity, and were
+    actually wrought, and therefore form part of the Gospel record and
+    are bound up with the Gospel scheme and doctrines, this part of
+    the structure cannot be abandoned without the sacrifice of the
+    other too. To shake the authority of one-half of this body of
+    statement is to shake the authority of the whole. Whether or not
+    the individual makes _use_ of them for the support of his own
+    faith, the miracles are there; and if they are there they must be
+    there either as true miracles or as false ones. If he does not
+    avail himself of their evidence, his belief is still affected by
+    their refutation. Accepting, as he does, the supernatural truths
+    of Christianity and its miracles upon the same report from the
+    same witnesses, upon the authority of the same documents, he
+    cannot help having at any rate this negative interest in them. For
+    if those witnesses and documents deceive us with regard to the
+    miracles, how can we trust them with regard to the doctrines? If
+    they are wrong upon the evidences of a revelation, how can we
+    depend upon their being right as to the nature of that revelation?
+    If their account of visible facts is to be received with an
+    explanation, is not their account of doctrines liable to a like
+    explanation? Revelation, then, even if it does not need the truth
+    of miracles for the benefit of their proof, still requires it in
+    order not to be crushed under the weight of their falsehood....
+    Thus miracles and the supernatural contents of Christianity must
+    stand or fall together. These two questions--the _nature_ of the
+    revelation, and the _evidence_ of the revelation--cannot be
+    disjoined. Christianity as a dispensation undiscoverable by human
+    reason, and Christianity as a dispensation authenticated by
+    miracles--these two are in necessary combination. If any do not
+    include the supernatural character of Christianity in their
+    definition of it, regarding the former only as one interpretation
+    of it or one particular traditional form of it, which is separable
+    from the essence--for Christianity as thus defined the support of
+    miracles is not wanted, because the moral truths are their own
+    evidence. But Christianity cannot be maintained as a revelation
+    undiscoverable by human reason, a revelation of a supernatural
+    scheme for man's salvation, without the evidence of miracles.
+
+The question of miracles, then, of the supernatural disclosed in the
+world of nature, is the vital point for everything that calls itself
+Christianity. It may be forgotten or disguised; but it is vain to keep
+it back and put it out of sight. It must be answered; and if we settle
+it that miracles are incredible, it is idle to waste our time about
+accommodations with Christianity, or reconstitutions of it. Let us be
+thankful for what it has done for the world; but let us put it away,
+both name and thing. It is an attempt after what is in the nature of
+things impossible to man--a revealed religion, authenticated by God.
+The shape which this negative answer takes is, as Mr. Mozley points
+out, much more definite now than it ever was. Miracles were formerly
+assailed and disbelieved on mixed and often confused grounds; from
+alleged defect of evidence, from their strangeness, or because they
+would be laughed at. Foes and defenders looked at them from the outside
+and in the gross; and perhaps some of those who defended them most
+keenly had a very imperfect sense of what they really were. The
+difficulty of accepting them now arises not mainly from want of
+external evidence, but from having more keenly realised what it is to
+believe a miracle. As Mr. Mozley says--
+
+    How is it that sometimes when the same facts and truths have been
+    before men all their lives, and produced but one impression, a
+    moment comes when they look different from what they did? Some
+    minds may abandon, while others retain, their fundamental position
+    with respect to those facts and truths, but to both they look
+    stranger; they excite a certain surprise which they did not once
+    do. The reasons of this change then it is not always easy for the
+    persons themselves to trace, but of the result they are conscious;
+    and in some this result is a change of belief.
+
+    An inward process of this kind has been going on recently in many
+    minds on the subject of miracles; and in some with the latter
+    result. When it came to the question--which every one must sooner
+    or later put to himself on this subject--Did these things really
+    take place? Are they matters of fact?--they have appeared to
+    themselves to be brought to a standstill, and to be obliged to own
+    an inner refusal of their whole reason to admit them among the
+    actual events of the past. This strong repugnance seemed to be the
+    witness of its own truth, to be accompanied by a clear and vivid
+    light, to be a law to the understanding, and to rule without
+    appeal the question of fact.... But when the reality of the past
+    is once apprehended and embraced, then the miraculous occurrences
+    in it are realised too; being realised they excite surprise, and
+    surprise, when it comes in, takes two directions--it either makes
+    belief more real, or it destroys belief. There is an element of
+    doubt in surprise; for this emotion arises _because_ an event is
+    strange, and an event is strange because it goes counter to and
+    jars with presumption. Shall surprise, then, give life to belief
+    or stimulus to doubt? The road of belief and unbelief in the
+    history of some minds thus partly lies over common ground; the two
+    go part of their journey together; they have a common perception
+    in the insight into the real astonishing nature of the facts with
+    which they deal. The majority of mankind, perhaps, owe their
+    belief rather to the outward influence of custom and education
+    than to any strong principle of faith within; and it is to be
+    feared that many, if they came to perceive how wonderful what they
+    believed was, would not find their belief so easy and so
+    matter-of-course a thing as they appear to find it. Custom throws
+    a film over the great facts of religion, and interposes a veil
+    between the mind and truth, which, by preventing wonder,
+    intercepts doubt too, and at the same time excludes from deep
+    belief and protects from disbelief. But deeper faith and disbelief
+    throw off in common the dependence on mere custom, draw aside the
+    interposing veil, place themselves face to face with the contents
+    of the past, and expose themselves alike to the ordeal of wonder.
+
+    It is evident that the effect which the visible order of nature
+    has upon some minds is, that as soon as they realise what a
+    miracle is, they are stopped by what appears to them a simple
+    sense of its impossibility. So long as they only believe by habit
+    and education, they accept a miracle without difficulty, because
+    they do not realise it as an event which actually took place in
+    the world; the alteration of the face of the world, and the whole
+    growth of intervening history, throw the miracles of the Gospel
+    into a remote perspective in which they are rather seen as a
+    picture than real occurrences. But as soon as they see that, if
+    these miracles are true, they once really happened, what they feel
+    then is the apparent sense of their impossibility. It is not a
+    question of evidence with them: when they realise, e.g., that
+    our Lord's resurrection, if true, was a visible fact or
+    occurrence, they have the seeming certain perception that it is an
+    impossible occurrence. "I cannot," a person says to himself in
+    effect, "tear myself from the type of experience and join myself
+    to another. I cannot quit order and law for what is eccentric.
+    There is a repulsion between such facts and my belief as strong as
+    that between physical substances. In the mere effort to conceive
+    these amazing scenes as real ones, I fall back upon myself and
+    upon that type of reality which the order of nature has impressed
+    upon me."
+
+The antagonism to the idea of miracles has grown stronger and more
+definite with the enlarged and more widely-spread conception of
+invariable natural law, and also, as Mr. Mozley points out, with that
+increased power in our time of realising the past, which is not the
+peculiarity of individual writers, but is "part of the thought of the
+time." But though it has been quickened and sharpened by these
+influences, it rests ultimately on that sense which all men have in
+common of the customary and regular in their experience of the world.
+The world, which we all know, stands alone, cut off from any other; and
+a miracle is an intrusion, "an interpolation of one order of things
+into another, confounding two systems which are perfectly distinct."
+The broad, deep resistance to it which is awakened in the mind when we
+look abroad on the face of nature is expressed in Emerson's phrase--"A
+miracle is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clouds or the
+falling rain." Who can dispute it? Yet the rejoinder is obvious, and
+has often been given--that neither is man. Man, who looks at nature and
+thinks and feels about its unconscious unfeeling order; man, with his
+temptations, his glory, and his shame, his heights of goodness, and
+depths of infamy, is not one with those innocent and soulless forces so
+sternly immutable--"the blowing clouds and falling rain." The two awful
+phenomena which Kant said struck him dumb--the starry heavens, and
+right and wrong--are vainly to be reduced to the same order of things.
+Nothing can be stranger than the contrast between the rigid, inevitable
+sequences of nature, apparently so elastic only because not yet
+perfectly comprehended, and the consciousness of man in the midst of
+it. Nothing can be stranger than the juxtaposition of physical law and
+man's sense of responsibility and choice. Man is an "insertion," an
+"interpolation in the physical system"; he is "insulated as an anomaly
+in the midst of matter and material law." Mr. Mozley's words are
+striking:--
+
+    The first appearance, then, of man in nature was the appearance of
+    a new being in nature; and this fact was relatively to the then
+    order of things miraculous; no more physical account can be given
+    of it than could be given of a resurrection to life now. What more
+    entirely new and eccentric fact, indeed, can be imagined than a
+    human soul first rising up amidst an animal and vegetable world?
+    Mere consciousness--was not that of itself a new world within the
+    old one? Mere knowledge--that nature herself became known to a
+    being within herself, was not that the same? Certainly man was not
+    all at once the skilled interpreter of nature, and yet there is
+    some interpretation of nature to which man as such is equal in
+    some degree. He derives an impression from the sight of nature
+    which an animal does not derive; for though the material spectacle
+    is imprinted on its retina, as it is on man's, it does not see
+    what man sees. The sun rose, then, and the sun descended, the
+    stars looked down upon the earth, the mountains climbed to heaven,
+    the cliffs stood upon the shore, the same as now, countless ages
+    before a single being existed who _saw_ it. The counterpart of
+    this whole scene was wanting--the understanding mind; that mirror
+    in which the whole was to be reflected; and when this arose it was
+    a new birth for creation itself, that it became _known_,--an image
+    in the mind of a conscious being. But even consciousness and
+    knowledge were a less strange and miraculous introduction into the
+    world than conscience.
+
+    Thus wholly mysterious in his entrance into this scene, man is
+    _now_ an insulation in it; he came in by no physical law, and his
+    freewill is in utter contrast to that law. What can be more
+    incomprehensible, more heterogeneous, a more ghostly resident in
+    nature, than the sense of right and wrong? What is it? Whence is
+    it? The obligation of man to sacrifice himself for right is a
+    truth which springs out of an abyss, the mere attempt to look down
+    into which confuses the reason. Such is the juxtaposition of
+    mysterious and physical contents in the same system. Man is alone,
+    then, in nature: he alone of all the creatures communes with a
+    Being out of nature; and he divides himself from all other
+    physical life by prophesying, in the face of universal visible
+    decay, his own immortality.
+
+And till this anomaly has been removed--that is, till the last trace of
+what is moral in man has disappeared under the analysis of science, and
+what ought to be is resolved into a mere aspect of what is, this deep
+exception to the dominion of physical law remains as prominent and
+undeniable as physical law itself.
+
+    It is, indeed, avowed by those who reduce man in nature, that upon
+    the admission of free-will, the objection to the miraculous is over,
+    and that it is absurd to allow exception to law in man, and reject
+    it in nature.
+
+But the broad, popular sense of natural order, and the instinctive and
+common repugnance to a palpable violation of it, have been forged and
+refined into the philosophical objection to miracles. Two great
+thinkers of past generations, two of the keenest and clearest
+intellects which have appeared since the Reformation, laid the
+foundations of it long ago. Spinoza urged the uselessness of miracles,
+and Hume their incredibility, with a guarded subtlety and longsighted
+refinement of statement which made them in advance of their age except
+with a few. But their reflections have fallen in with a more advanced
+stage of thought and a taste for increased precision and exactness, and
+they are beginning to bear their fruit. The great and telling objection
+to miracles is getting to be, not their want of evidence, but, prior to
+all question of evidence, the supposed impossibility of fitting them in
+with a scientific view of nature. Reason, looking at nature and
+experience, is said to raise an antecedent obstacle to them which no
+alleged proof of fact can get over. They cannot be, because they are so
+unlike to everything else in the world, even of the strangest kind, in
+this point--in avowedly breaking the order of nature. And reason cannot
+be admitted to take cognizance of their claims and to consider their
+character, their purpose, their results, their credentials, because the
+mere supposition of them violates the fundamental conception and
+condition of science, absolute and invariable law, as well as that
+common-sense persuasion which everybody has, whether philosopher or
+not, of the uniformity of the order of the world.
+
+
+II
+
+To make room for reason to come in and pronounce upon miracles on their
+own merits--to clear the ground for the consideration of their actual
+claims by disposing of the antecedent objection of impossibility, is
+Mr. Mozley's main object.
+
+    Whatever difficulty there is in believing in miracles in general
+    arises from the circumstance that they are in contradiction to or
+    unlike the order of nature. To estimate the force of this
+    difficulty, then, we must first understand what kind of belief it
+    is which we have in the order of nature; for the weight of the
+    objection to the miraculous must depend on the nature of the
+    belief to which the miraculous is opposed.
+
+His examination of the alleged impossibility of miracles may be
+described as a very subtle turning the tables on Hume and the empirical
+philosophy. For when it is said that it is contrary to reason to
+believe in a suspension of the order of nature, he asks on what ground
+do we believe in the order of nature; and Hume himself supplies the
+answer. There is nothing of which we have a firmer persuasion. It is
+the basis of human life and knowledge. We assume at each step, without
+a doubt, that the future will be like the past. But why? Hume has
+carefully examined the question, and can find no answer, except the
+fact that we do assume it. "I apprehend," says Mr. Mozley, accepting
+Hume's view of the nature of probability, "that when we examine the
+different reasons which may be assigned for this connection, i.e. for
+the belief that the future will be like the past, they all come at last
+to be mere statements of the belief itself, and not reasons to account
+for it."
+
+    Let us imagine the occurrence of a particular physical phenomenon
+    for the first time. Upon that single occurrence we should have but
+    the very faintest expectation of another. If it did occur again
+    once or twice, so far from counting on another recurrence, a
+    cessation would come as the more natural event to us. But let it
+    occur a hundred times, and we should feel no hesitation in
+    inviting persons from a distance to see it; and if it occurred
+    every day for years, its recurrence would then be a certainty to
+    us, its cessation a marvel. But what has taken place in the
+    interim to produce this total change in our belief? From the mere
+    repetition do we know anything more about its cause? No. Then what
+    have we got besides the past repetition itself? Nothing. Why,
+    then, are we so certain of its _future_ repetition? All we can say
+    is that the known casts its shadow before; we project into unborn
+    time the existing types, and the secret skill of nature intercepts
+    the darkness of the future by ever suspending before our eyes, as
+    it were in a mirror, a reflection of the past. We really look at a
+    blank before us, but the mind, full of the scene behind, sees it
+    again in front....
+
+    What ground of reason, then, can we assign for our expectation
+    that any part of the course of nature will the _next_ moment be
+    like what it has been up to _this_ moment, i.e. for our belief
+    in the uniformity of nature? None. No demonstrative reason can be
+    given, for the contrary to the recurrence of a fact of nature is
+    no contradiction. No probable reason can be given, for all
+    probable reasoning respecting the course of nature is founded
+    _upon_ this presumption of likeness, and therefore cannot be the
+    foundation of it. No reason can be given for this belief. It is
+    without a reason. It rests upon no rational ground and can be
+    traced to no rational principle. Everything connected with human
+    life depends upon this belief, every practical plan or purpose
+    that we form implies it, every provision we make for the future,
+    every safeguard and caution we employ against it, all calculation,
+    all adjustment of means to ends, supposes this belief; it is this
+    principle alone which renders our experience of the slightest use
+    to us, and without it there would be, so far as we are concerned,
+    no order of nature and no laws of nature; and yet this belief has
+    no more producible reason for it than a speculation of fancy. A
+    natural fact has been repeated; it will be repeated:--I am
+    conscious of utter darkness when I try to see why one of these
+    follows from the other: I not only see no reason, but I perceive
+    that I see none, though I can no more help the expectation than I
+    can stop the circulation of my blood. There is a premiss, and
+    there is a conclusion, but there is a total want of connection
+    between the two. The inference, then, from the one of these to the
+    other rests upon no ground of the understanding; by no search or
+    analysis, however subtle or minute, can we extract from any corner
+    of the human mind and intelligence, however remote, the very
+    faintest reason for it.
+
+Hume, who had urged with great force that miracles were contrary to
+that probability which is created by experience, had also said that
+this probability had no producible ground in reason; that, universal,
+unfailing, indispensable as it was to the course of human life, it was
+but an instinct which defied analysis, a process of thought and
+inference for which he vainly sought the rational steps. There is no
+absurdity, though the greatest impossibility, in supposing this order
+to stop to-morrow; and, if the world ends at all, its end will be in an
+increasing degree improbable up to the very last moment. But, if this
+whole ground of belief is in its own nature avowedly instinctive and
+independent of reason, what right has it to raise up a bar of
+intellectual necessity, and to shut out reason from entertaining the
+question of miracles? They may have grounds which appeal to reason; and
+an unintelligent instinct forbids reason from fairly considering what
+they are. Reason cannot get beyond the actual fact of the present state
+of things for believing in the order of nature; it professes to find no
+necessity for it; the interruption of that order, therefore, whether
+probable or not, is not against reason. Philosophy itself, says Mr.
+Mozley, cuts away the ground on which it had raised its preliminary
+objection to miracles.
+
+    And now the belief in the order of nature being thus, however
+    powerful and useful, an unintelligent impulse of which we can give
+    no rational account, in what way does this discovery affect the
+    question of miracles? In this way, that this belief not having
+    itself its foundation in reason, the ground is gone upon which it
+    could be maintained that miracles as opposed to the order of
+    nature were opposed to reason. There being no producible reason
+    why a new event should be like the hitherto course of nature, no
+    decision of reason is contradicted by its unlikeness. A miracle,
+    in being opposed to our experience, is not only not opposed to
+    necessary reasoning, but to any reasoning. Do I see by a certain
+    perception the connection between these two--It _has_ happened so,
+    it _will_ happen so; then may I reject a new reported fact which
+    has _not_ happened so as an impossibility. But if I do not see the
+    connection between these two by a certain perception, or by any
+    perception, I cannot. For a miracle to be rejected as such, there
+    must, at any rate, be some proposition in the mind of man which is
+    opposed to it; and that proposition can only spring from the
+    quarter to which we have been referring--that of elementary
+    experimental reasoning. But if this experimental reasoning is of
+    that nature which philosophy describes it as being of, i.e. if
+    it is not itself a process of reason, how can there from an
+    irrational process of the mind arise a proposition at all,--to
+    make which is the function of the rational faculty alone? There
+    cannot; and it is evident that the miraculous does not stand in
+    any opposition whatever to reason....
+
+    Thus step by step has philosophy loosened the connection of the
+    order of nature with the ground of reason, befriending, in exact
+    proportion as it has done this, the principle of miracles. In the
+    argument against miracles the first objection is that they are
+    against _law_; and this is answered by saying that we know nothing
+    in nature of law in the sense in which it prevents miracles. Law
+    can only prevent miracles by _compelling_ and making necessary the
+    succession of nature, i.e. in the sense of causation; but
+    science has itself proclaimed the truth that we see no causes in
+    nature, that the whole chain of physical succession is to the eye
+    of reason a rope of sand, consisting of antecedents and
+    consequents, but without a rational link or trace of necessary
+    connection between them. We only know of law in nature in the
+    sense of recurrences in nature, classes of facts, _like_ facts in
+    nature--a chain of which, the junction not being reducible to
+    reason, the interruption is not against reason. The claim of law
+    settled, the next objection in the argument against miracles is
+    that they are against _experience_; because we expect facts _like_
+    to those of our experience, and miracles are _unlike_ ones. The
+    weight, then, of the objection of unlikeness to experience depends
+    on the reason which can be produced for the expectation of
+    likeness; and to this call philosophy has replied by the summary
+    confession that we have _no_ reason. Philosophy, then, could not
+    have overthrown more thoroughly than it has done the order of
+    nature as a necessary course of things, or cleared the ground more
+    effectually for the principle of miracles.
+
+Nor, he argues, does this instinct change its nature, or become a
+necessary law of reason, when it takes the form of an inference from
+induction. For the last step of the inductive process, the creation of
+its supposed universal, is, when compared with the real standard of
+universality acknowledged by reason, an incomplete and more or less
+precarious process; "it gets out of facts something more than what they
+actually contain"; and it can give no reason for itself but what the
+common faith derived from experience can give, the anticipation of
+uniform recurrence. "The inductive principle," he says, "is only the
+unreasoning impulse applied to a scientifically ascertained fact,
+instead of to a vulgarly ascertained fact.... Science has led up to the
+fact, but there it stops, and for converting the fact into a law a
+totally unscientific principle comes in, the same as that which
+generalises the commonest observations in nature."
+
+    The scientific part of induction being only the pursuit of a
+    particular fact, miracles cannot in the nature of the case receive
+    any blow from the scientific part of induction; because the
+    existence of one fact does not interfere with the existence of
+    another dissimilar fact. That which _does_ resist the miraculous
+    is the _un_scientific part of induction, or the instinctive
+    generalisation upon this fact.... It does not belong to this
+    principle to lay down speculative positions, and to say what can
+    or cannot take place in the world. It does not belong to it to
+    control religious belief, or to determine that certain acts of God
+    for the revelation of His will to man, reported to have taken
+    place, have not taken place. Such decisions are totally out of its
+    sphere; it can assert the universal as a _law_, but the universal
+    as a law and the universal as a proposition are wholly distinct.
+    The one asserts the universal as a fact, the other as a
+    presumption; the one as an absolute certainty, the other as a
+    practical certainty, when there is no reason to expect the
+    contrary. The one contains and includes the particular, the other
+    does not; from the one we argue mathematically to the falsehood of
+    any opposite particular; from the other we do not.... For example,
+    one signal miracle, pre-eminent for its grandeur, crowned the
+    evidence of the supernatural character and office of our Lord--our
+    Lord's ascension--His going up with His body of flesh and bones
+    into the sky in the presence of His disciples. "He lifted up His
+    hands, and blessed them. And while He blessed them, He was parted
+    from them, and carried up into heaven. And they looked stedfastly
+    toward heaven as He went up, and a cloud received Him out of their
+    sight."
+
+    Here is an amazing scene, which strikes even the devout believer,
+    coming across it in the sacred page suddenly or by chance, amid
+    the routine of life, with a fresh surprise. Did, then, this event
+    really take place? Or is the evidence of it forestalled by the
+    inductive principle compelling us to remove the scene _as such_
+    out of the category of matters of fact? The answer is, that the
+    inductive principle is in its own nature only an _expectation_;
+    and that the expectation, that what is unlike our experience will
+    not happen, is quite consistent with its occurrence in fact. This
+    principle does not pretend to decide the question of fact, which
+    is wholly out of its province and beyond its function. It can only
+    decide the fact by the medium of a universal; the universal
+    proposition that no man has ascended to heaven. But this is a
+    statement which exceeds its power; it is as radically incompetent
+    to pronounce it as the taste or smell is to decide on matters of
+    sight; its function is practical, not logical. No antecedent
+    statement, then, which touches my belief in this scene, is allowed
+    by the laws of thought. Converted indeed into a universal
+    proposition, the inductive principle is omnipotent, and totally
+    annihilates every particular which does not come within its range.
+    The universal statement that no man has ascended into heaven
+    absolutely falsifies the fact that One Man has. But, thus
+    transmuted, the inductive principle issues out of this
+    metamorphose, a fiction not a truth; a weapon of air, which even
+    in the hands of a giant can inflict no blow because it is itself a
+    shadow. The object of assault receives the unsubstantial thrust
+    without a shock, only exposing the want of solidity in the
+    implement of war. The battle against the supernatural has been
+    going on long, and strong men have conducted it, and are
+    conducting it--but what they want is a weapon. The logic of
+    unbelief wants a universal. But no real universal is forthcoming,
+    and it only wastes its strength in wielding a fictitious one.
+
+It is not in reason, which refuses to pronounce upon the possible
+merely from experience of the actual, that the antecedent objection to
+miracles is rooted. Yet that the objection is a powerful one the
+consciousness of every reflecting mind testifies. What, then, is the
+secret of its force? In a lecture of singular power Mr. Mozley gives
+his answer. What tells beforehand against miracles is not reason, but
+imagination. Imagination is often thought to favour especially the
+supernatural and miraculous. It does do so, no doubt. But the truth is,
+that imagination tells both ways--as much against the miraculous as for
+it. The imagination, that faculty by which we give life and body and
+reality to our intellectual conceptions, takes its character from the
+intellectual conceptions with which it is habitually associated. It
+accepts the miraculous or shrinks from it and throws it off, according
+to the leaning of the mind of which it is the more vivid and, so to
+speak, passionate expression. And as it may easily exaggerate on one
+side, so it may just as easily do the same on the other. Every one is
+familiar with that imaginative exaggeration which fills the world with
+miracles. But there is another form of imagination, not so distinctly
+recognised, which is oppressed by the presence of unchanging succession
+and visible uniformity, which cannot shake off the yoke of custom or
+allow anything different to seem to it real. The sensitiveness and
+impressibility of the imagination are affected, and unhealthily
+affected, not merely by strangeness, but by sameness; to one as to the
+other it may "passively submit and surrender itself, give way to the
+mere form of attraction, and, instead of grasping something else, be
+itself grasped and mastered by some dominant idea." And it is then, in
+one case as much as in the other, "not a power, but a failing and
+weakness of nature."
+
+    The passive imagination, then, in the present case exaggerates a
+    practical expectation of the uniformity of nature, implanted in us
+    for practical ends, into a scientific or universal proposition;
+    and it does this by surrendering itself to the impression produced
+    by the constant spectacle of the regularity of visible nature. By
+    such a course a person allows the weight and pressure of this idea
+    to grow upon him till it reaches the point of actually restricting
+    his sense of possibility to the mould of physical order.... The
+    order of nature thus stamps upon some minds the idea of its
+    immutability simply by its repetition. The imagination we usually
+    indeed associate with the acceptance of the supernatural rather
+    than with the denial of it; but the passive imagination is in
+    truth neutral; it only increases the force and tightens the hold
+    of any impression upon us, to whatever class the impression may
+    belong, and surrenders itself to a superstitious or a physical
+    idea, as it may be. Materialism itself is the result of
+    imagination, which is so impressed by matter that it cannot
+    realise the existence of spirit.
+
+The great opponent, then, of miracles, considered as possible
+occurrences, is not reason, but something which on other great subjects
+is continually found on the opposite side to reason, resisting and
+counteracting it; that powerful overbearing sense of the actual and the
+real, which when it is opposed by reason is apt to make reason seem
+like the creator of mere ideal theories; which gives to arguments
+implying a different condition of things from one which is familiar to
+present experience the disadvantage of appearing like artificial and
+unsubstantial refinements of thought, such as, to the uncultivated
+mind, appear not merely metaphysical discussions, but what are known to
+be the most certain reasonings of physical and mathematical science. It
+is that measure of the probable, impressed upon us by the spectacle; to
+which we are accustomed all our lives long, of things as we find them,
+and which repels the possibility of a break or variation; that sense of
+probability which the keenest of philosophers declares to be incapable
+of rational analysis, and pronounces allied to irrational portions of
+our constitution, like custom, and the effect of time, and which is
+just as much an enemy to invention, to improvement, to a different
+state of things in the future, as it is to the belief and realising of
+a different state of things in the past. The antecedent objection to
+the miraculous is not reason, but an argument which limits and narrows
+the domain of reason; which excludes dry, abstract, passionless
+reason--with its appeals to considerations remote from common
+experience, its demands for severe reflection, its balancing and long
+chains of thought--from pronouncing on what seems to belong to the
+flesh and blood realities of life as we know it. Against this
+tyrannical influence, which may be in a vulgar and popular as in a
+scientific form, which may be the dull result of habit or the more
+specious effect of a sensitive and receptive imagination, but which in
+all cases is at bottom the same, Mr. Mozley claims to appeal to
+reason:--
+
+    To conclude, then, let us suppose an intelligent Christian of the
+    present day asked, not what evidence he has of miracles, but how
+    he can antecedently to all evidence think such amazing occurrences
+    _possible_, he would reply, "You refer me to a certain sense of
+    impossibility which you suppose me to possess, applying not to
+    mathematics but to facts. Now, on this head, I am conscious of a
+    certain natural resistance in my mind to events unlike the order
+    of nature. But I resist many things which I know to be certain:
+    infinity of space, infinity of time, eternity past, eternity
+    future, the very idea of a God and another world. If I take mere
+    resistance, therefore, for denial, I am confined in every quarter
+    of my mind; I cannot carry out the very laws of reason, I am
+    placed under conditions which are obviously false. I conclude,
+    therefore, that I may resist and believe at the same time. If
+    Providence has implanted in me a certain expectation of uniformity
+    or likeness in nature, there is implied in that very expectations
+    resistance to an _un_like event, which resistance does not cease
+    even when upon evidence I _believe_ the event, but goes on as a
+    mechanical impression, though the reason counterbalances it.
+    Resistance, therefore, is not disbelief, unless by an act of my
+    own reason I _give_ it an absolute veto, which I do _not_ do. My
+    reason is clear upon the point, that there is no disagreement
+    between itself and a miracle as such." ... Nor is it dealing
+    artificially with ourselves to exert a force upon our minds
+    against the false certainty of the resisting imagination--such a
+    force as is necessary to enable reason to stand its ground, and
+    bend back again that spring of impression against the miraculous
+    which has illegally tightened itself into a law to the
+    understanding. Reason does not always prevail spontaneously and
+    without effort even in questions of belief; so far from it, that
+    the question of faith against reason may often be more properly
+    termed the question of reason against imagination. It does not
+    seldom require faith to believe reason, isolated as she may be
+    amid vast irrational influences, the weight of custom, the power
+    of association, the strength of passion, the _vis inertiae_ of
+    sense, the mere force of the uniformity of nature as a
+    spectacle--those influences which make up that power of the world
+    which Scripture always speaks of as the antagonist of faith.
+
+The antecedent questions about miracles, before coming to the question
+of the actual evidence of any, are questions about which reason--reason
+disengaged and disembarrassed from the arbitrary veto of
+experience--has a right to give its verdict. Miracles presuppose the
+existence of God, and it is from reason alone that we get the idea of
+God; and the antecedent question then is, whether they are really
+compatible with the idea of God which reason gives us. Mr. Mozley
+remarks that the question of miracles is really "shut up in the
+enclosure of one assumption, that of the existence of God"; and that if
+we believe in a personal Deity with all power over nature, that belief
+brings along with it the possibility of His interrupting natural order
+for His own purposes. He also bids us observe that the idea of God
+which reason gives us is exposed to resistance of the same kind, and
+from precisely the same forces, in our mental constitution, as the idea
+of miracles. When reason has finished its overwhelming proof, still
+there is a step to be taken before the mind embraces the equally
+overwhelming conclusion--a step which calls for a distinct effort,
+which obliges the mind, satisfied as it may be, to beat back the
+counteracting pressure of what is visible and customary. After
+reason--not opposed to it or independent of it, but growing out of it,
+yet a distinct and further movement--comes faith. This is the case, not
+specially in religion, but in all subjects, where the conclusions of
+reason cannot be subjected to immediate verification. How often, as he
+observes, do we see persons "who, when they are in possession of the
+best arguments, and what is more, understand those arguments, are still
+shaken by almost any opposition, because they want the faculty to
+_trust_ an argument when they have got one."
+
+    Not, however, that the existence of a God is so clearly seen by
+    reason as to dispense with faith; not from any want of cogency in
+    the reasons, but from the amazing nature of the conclusion--that
+    it is so unparalleled, transcendent, and inconceivable a truth to
+    believe. It requires trust to commit oneself to the conclusion of
+    any reasoning, however strong, when such as this is the
+    conclusion: to put enough dependence and reliance upon any
+    premisses, to accept upon the strength of them so immense a
+    result. The issue of the argument is so astonishing that if we do
+    not tremble for its safety, it must be on account of a practical
+    principle in our minds which enables us to _confide_ and trust in
+    reasons, when they are really strong and good ones.... Faith, when
+    for convenience' sake we do distinguish it from reason, is not
+    distinguished from reason by the want of premisses, but by the
+    nature of the conclusions. Are our conclusions of the customary
+    type? Then custom imparts the full sense of security. Are they not
+    of the customary, but of a strange and unknown type? Then the
+    mechanical sense of security is wanting, and a certain trust is
+    required for reposing in them, which we call faith. But that which
+    draws these conclusions is in either case reason. We infer, we go
+    upon reasons, we use premisses in either case. The premisses of
+    faith are not so palpable as those of ordinary reason, but they
+    are as real and solid premisses all the same. Our faith in the
+    existence of a God and a future state is founded upon reasons as
+    much so as the belief in the commonest kind of facts. The reasons
+    are in themselves as strong, but, because the conclusions are
+    marvellous and are not seconded and backed by known parallels or
+    by experience, we do not so passively acquiesce in them; there is
+    an exertion of confidence in depending upon them and assuring
+    ourselves of their force. The inward energy of the reason has to
+    be evoked, when she can no longer lean upon the outward prop of
+    custom, but is thrown back upon herself and the intrinsic force of
+    her premisses. Which reason, not leaning upon custom, is faith;
+    she obtains the latter name when she depends entirely upon her own
+    insight into certain grounds, premisses, and evidences, and
+    follows it though it leads to transcendent, unparalleled, and
+    supernatural conclusions....
+
+    Indeed, does not our heart bear witness to the fact that to
+    believe in a God is an exercise of faith? That the universe was
+    produced by the will of a personal Being, that its infinite forces
+    are all the power of that one Being, its infinite relations the
+    perceptions of one Mind--would not this, if any truth could,
+    demand the application of the maxim, _Credo quia impossibile_?
+    Look at it only as a conception, and does the wildest fiction of
+    the imagination equal it? No premisses, no arguments therefore,
+    can so accommodate this truth to us as not to leave the belief in
+    it an act of mental ascent and trust, of faith as distinguished
+    from sight. _Divest_ reason of its trust, and the universe stops
+    at the impersonal stage--there is no God; and yet, if the first
+    step in religion is the greatest, how is it that the freest and
+    boldest speculator rarely declines it? How is it that the most
+    mysterious of all truths is a universally accepted one? What is it
+    which guards this truth? What is it which makes men shrink from
+    denying it? Why is atheism a crime? Is it that authority still
+    reigns upon one question, and that the voice of all ages is too
+    potent to be withstood?
+
+But the progress of civilisation and thought has impressed this amazing
+idea on the general mind. It is no matter-of-course conception. The
+difficulties attending it were long insuperable to the deepest thought
+as well as to popular belief; and the triumph of the modern and
+Christian idea of God is the result not merely of the eager forwardness
+of faith, but of the patient and inquiring waiting of reason. And the
+question, whether we shall pronounce the miraculous to be impossible as
+such, is really the question whether we shall once more let this belief
+go.
+
+    The conception of a limited Deity then, i.e. a Being really
+    circumscribed in power, and not verbally only by a confinement to
+    necessary truth, is at variance with our fundamental idea of a
+    God; to depart from which is to retrograde from modern thought to
+    ancient, and to go from Christianity back again to Paganism. The
+    God of ancient religion was either not a personal Being or not an
+    omnipotent Being; the God of modern religion is both. For, indeed,
+    civilisation is not opposed to faith. The idea of the Supreme
+    Being in the mind of European society now is more primitive, more
+    childlike, more imaginative than the idea of the ancient Brahman
+    or Alexandrian philosopher; it is an idea which both of these
+    would have derided as the notion of a child--a _negotiosus Deus_,
+    who interposes in human affairs and answers prayers. So far from
+    the philosophical conception of the Deity having advanced with
+    civilisation, and the poetical receded, the philosophical has
+    receded and the poetical advanced. The God of whom it is said,
+    "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them
+    is forgotten before God; but even the very hairs of your head are
+    numbered," is the object of modern worship. Nor, again, has
+    civilisation shown any signs of rejecting doctrine. Certain ages
+    are, indeed, called the ages of faith; but the bulk of society in
+    _this_ age believes that it lives under a supernatural
+    dispensation, and accepts truths which are not less supernatural,
+    though they have more proof, than some doctrines of the Middle
+    Ages; and, if so, _this_ is an age of faith. It is true that most
+    people do not live up to their faith now; neither did they in the
+    Middle Ages.
+
+    Has not modern philosophy, again, shown both more strength and
+    acuteness, and also more faith, than the ancient? I speak of the
+    main current. Those ancient thinkers who reduced the Supreme Being
+    to a negation, with all their subtlety, wanted strength, and
+    settled questions by an easier test than that of modern
+    philosophy. The merit of a modern metaphysician is, like that of a
+    good chemist or naturalist, accurate observation in noting the
+    facts of mind. Is there a contradiction in the idea of creation?
+    Is there a contradiction in the idea of a personal Infinite Being?
+    He examines his own mind, and if he does not see one, he passes
+    the idea. But the ancient speculators decided, without examination
+    of the true facts of mind, by a kind of philosophical fancy; and,
+    according to this loose criterion, the creation of matter and a
+    personal Infinite Being were impossibilities, for they mistook the
+    inconceivable for the impossible. And thus a stringent test has
+    admitted what a loose but capricious test discarded, and the true
+    notion of God has issued safe out of the crucible of modern
+    metaphysics. Reason has shown its strength, but then it has turned
+    that strength back upon itself; it has become its own critic; and
+    in becoming its own critic it has become its own check.
+
+    If the belief, then, in a personal Deity lies at the bottom of all
+    religious and virtuous practice, and if the removal of it would be
+    a descent for human nature, the withdrawal of its inspiration and
+    support, and a fall in its whole standard; the failure of the very
+    breath of moral life in the individual and in society; the decay
+    and degeneration of the very stock of mankind;--does a theory
+    which would withdraw miraculous action from the Deity interfere
+    with that belief? If it would, it is but prudent to count the cost
+    of that interference. Would a Deity deprived of miraculous action
+    possess action at all? And would a God who cannot act be a God? If
+    this would be the issue, such an issue is the very last which
+    religious men can desire. The question here has been all
+    throughout, not whether upon any ground, but whether upon a
+    religious ground and by religious believers, the miraculous as
+    such could be rejected. But to that there is but one answer--that
+    it is impossible in reason to separate religion from the
+    supernatural, and upon a religious basis to overthrow miracles....
+
+    And so we arrive again by another route at the old turning
+    question; for the question whether man is or is not the _vertex_
+    of nature, is the question whether there is or is not a God. Does
+    free agency stop at the human stage, or is there a sphere of
+    free-will above the human, in which, as in the human, not physical
+    law but spirit moves matter? And does that free-will penetrate the
+    universal frame invisibly to us, an omnipresent agent? If so,
+    every miracle in Scripture is as natural an event in the universe
+    as any chemical experiment in the physical world; if not, the seat
+    of the great Presiding Will is empty, and nature has no Personal
+    Head; man is her highest point; he finishes her ascent; though by
+    this very supremacy he falls, for under fate he is not free
+    himself; all nature either ascends to God, or descends to law. Is
+    there above the level of material causes a region of Providence?
+    If there is, nature there is moved by the Supreme Free Agent; and
+    of such a realm a miracle is the natural production.
+
+    Two rationales of miracles thus present themselves to our choice;
+    one more accommodating to the physical imagination and easy to
+    fall in with, on a level with custom, common conceptions, and
+    ordinary history, and requiring no ascent of the mind to embrace,
+    viz. the solution of miracles as the growth of fancy and legend;
+    the other requiring an ascent of the reason to embrace it, viz.
+    the rationale of the supremacy of a Personal Will in nature. The
+    one is the explanation to which we fall when we dare not trust our
+    reason, but mistake its inconceivable truths for sublime but
+    unsubstantial visions; the other is that to which we rise when we
+    dare trust our reason, and the evidences which it lays before us
+    of the existence of a Personal Supreme Being.
+
+The belief in a personal God thus bringing with it the possibility of
+miracles, what reason then has to judge is whether it can accept
+miracles as such, or any set of miracles, as worthy of a reasonable
+conception of the Divine Nature, and whether it can be fairly said that
+such miracles have answered a purpose which approves itself to our
+reason. Testimony will always speak at a disadvantage till we are
+assured on these points. Into the subject of testimony Mr. Mozley
+enters only in a general way, though his remarks on the relation of
+testimony to facts of so exceptional a nature as miracles, and also on
+the distinct peculiarities of Christian evidence as contrasted with the
+evidence of all other classes of alleged miracles, are marked by a
+characteristic combination of acuteness, precision, and broad practical
+sobriety and moderation. He rebukes with quiet and temperate and yet
+resolute plainness of statement the misplaced ingenuity which, on
+different sides, to serve very different causes, has tried to confuse
+and perplex the claims of the great Christian miracles by comparisons
+which it is really mere wantonness to make with later ones; for, be
+they what they may, it is certain that the Gospel miracles, in nature,
+in evidence, and in purpose and result, are absolutely unique in the
+world, and have nothing like them. And though the book mainly confines
+itself to its proper subject, the antecedent question of credibility,
+some of the most striking remarks in it relate to the way in which the
+purpose of miracles is visible in those of Christianity, and has been
+served by them. A miracle is an instrument--an instrument without which
+revelation is impossible; and Mr. Mozley meets Spinoza's objection to
+the unmeaning isolation of a miracle by insisting on the distinction,
+which Spinoza failed to see, between a miracle simply as a wonder for
+its own sake, and as a means, deriving its use and its value simply
+from the end which it was to serve. He observes that all the stupendous
+"marvels of nature do not speak to us in that way in which one miracle
+does, because they do not tell us that we are not like themselves"; and
+he remarks on the "perverse determination of Spinoza to look at
+miracles in that aspect which does not belong to them, and not to look
+at them in that aspect which does."
+
+    He compares miracles with nature, and then says how wise is the
+    order of nature, how meaningless the violation of it; how
+    expressive of the Almighty Mind the one, what a concealment of it
+    the other! But no one pretends to say that a miracle competes with
+    nature, in physical purpose and effectiveness. That is not its
+    object. But a miracle, though it does not profess to compete with
+    nature upon its rival's own ground, has a ghostly force and import
+    which nature has not. If real, it is a token, more pointed and
+    direct than physical order can be, of another world, and of Moral
+    Being and Will in that world.
+
+Thus, regarding miracles as means to fulfil a purpose, Mr. Mozley shows
+what has come of them. His lecture on "Miracles regarded in their
+Practical Result" is excelled by some of the others as examples of
+subtle and searching thought and well-balanced and compact argument;
+but it is a fine example of the way in which a familiar view can have
+fresh colour and force thrown into it by the way in which it is
+treated. He shows that it is impossible in fact to separate from the
+miracles in which it professed to begin, the greatest and deepest moral
+change which the world has ever known. This change was made not by
+miracles but by certain doctrines. The Epistle to the Romans surveyed
+the moral failure of the world; St. Paul looked on the chasm between
+knowledge and action, the "unbridged gulf, this incredible inability of
+man to do what was right, with profound wonder"; but in the face of
+this hopeless spectacle he dared to prophesy the moral elevation which
+we have witnessed, and the power to which he looked to bring it about
+was the Christian doctrines. St. Paul "takes what may be called the
+high view of human nature--i.e. what human nature is capable of when
+the proper motive and impulse is applied to it." He sees in Christian
+doctrine that strong force which is to break down "the _vis inertiae_
+of man, to set human nature going, to touch the spring of man's heart";
+and he compares with St. Paul's doctrines and hopefulness the doctrinal
+barrenness, the despair of Mohammedanism:--
+
+    If one had to express in a short compass the character of its
+    remarkable founder as a teacher, it would be that that great man
+    had no faith in human nature. There were two things which he
+    thought man could do and would do for the glory of God--transact
+    religious forms, and fight; and upon those two points he was
+    severe; but within the sphere of common practical life, where
+    man's great trial lies, his code exhibits the disdainful laxity of
+    a legislator who accommodates his rule to the recipient, and shows
+    his estimate of the recipient by the accommodation which he
+    adopts. Did we search history for a contrast, we could hardly
+    discover a deeper one than that between St. Paul's overflowing
+    standard of the capabilities of human nature and the oracular
+    cynicism of the great false Prophet. The writer of the Koran does,
+    indeed, if any discerner of hearts ever did, take the measure of
+    mankind; and his measure is the same that Satire has taken, only
+    expressed with the majestic brevity of one who had once lived in
+    the realm of Silence. "Man is weak," says Mahomet. And upon that
+    maxim he legislates.... The keenness of Mahomet's insight into
+    human nature, a wide knowledge of its temptations, persuasives,
+    influences under which it acts, a vast immense capacity of
+    forbearance for it, half grave half genial, half sympathy half
+    scorn, issue in a somewhat Horatian model, the character of the
+    man of experience who despairs of any change in man, and lays down
+    the maxim that we must take him as we find him. It was indeed his
+    supremacy in both faculties, the largeness of the passive nature
+    and the splendour of action, that constituted the secret of his
+    success. The breadth and flexibility of mind that could negotiate
+    with every motive of interest, passion, and pride in man is
+    surprising; there is boundless sagacity; what is wanting is hope,
+    a belief in the capabilities of human nature. There is no upward
+    flight in the teacher's idea of man. Instead of which, the notion
+    of the power of earth, and the impossibility of resisting it,
+    depresses his whole aim, and the shadow of the tomb falls upon the
+    work of the great false Prophet.
+
+    The idea of God is akin to the idea of man. "He knows us," says
+    Mahomet. God's _knowledge_, the vast _experience_, so to speak, of
+    the Divine Being, His infinite acquaintance with man's frailties
+    and temptations, is appealed to as the ground of confidence. "He
+    is the Wise, the Knowing One," "He is the Knowing, the Wise," "He
+    is easy to be reconciled." Thus is raised a notion of the Supreme
+    Being, which is rather an extension of the character of the
+    large-minded and sagacious man of the world than an extension of
+    man's virtue and holiness. He forgives because He knows too much
+    to be rigid, because sin universal ceases to be sin, and must be
+    given way to. Take a man who has had large opportunity of studying
+    mankind, and has come into contact with every form of human
+    weakness and corruption; such a man is indulgent as a simple
+    consequence of his knowledge, because nothing surprises him. So
+    the God of Mahomet forgives by reason of His vast knowledge.
+
+In contrast with the fruit of this he observes that "the prophecy in
+the Epistle to the Romans has been fulfilled, and that doctrine has
+been historically at the bottom of a great change of moral practice in
+mankind." The key has been found to set man's moral nature in action,
+to check and reverse that course of universal failure manifest before;
+and this key is Christian doctrine. "A stimulus has been given to human
+nature which has extracted an amount of action from it which no Greek
+or Roman could have believed possible." It is inconceivable that but
+for such doctrine such results as have been seen in Christendon would
+have followed; and were it now taken away we cannot see anything else
+that would have the faintest expectation of taking its place. "Could we
+commit mankind to a moral Deism without trembling for the result?" Can
+the enthusiasm for the divinity of human nature stand the test of
+clear, unsparing observation? Would it not issue in such an estimate of
+human nature as Mahomet took? "A deification of humanity upon its own
+grounds, an exaltation which is all height and no depth, wants power
+because it wants truth. It is not founded upon the facts of human
+nature, and therefore issues in vain and vapid aspiration, and injures
+the solidity of man's character." As he says, "The Gospel doctrine of
+the Incarnation and its effects alone unites the sagacious view of
+human nature with the enthusiastic." And now what is the historical
+root and basis from which this one great moral revolution in the
+world's history, so successful, so fruitful, so inexhaustible, has
+started?
+
+    But if, as the source and inspiration of practice, doctrine has
+    been the foundation of a new state of the world, and of that
+    change which distinguishes the world under Christianity from the
+    world before it, miracles, as the proof of that doctrine, stand
+    before us in a very remarkable and peculiar light. Far from being
+    mere idle feats of power to gratify the love of the marvellous;
+    far even from being mere particular and occasional rescues from
+    the operation of general laws,--they come before us as means for
+    accomplishing the largest and most important practical object that
+    has ever been accomplished in the history of mankind. They lie at
+    the bottom of the difference of the modern from the ancient world;
+    so far, i.e., as that difference is moral. We see as a fact a
+    change in the moral condition of mankind, which marks ancient and
+    modern society as two different states of mankind. What has
+    produced this change, and elicited this new power of action?
+    Doctrine. And what was the proof of that doctrine, or essential to
+    the proof of it? Miracles. The greatness of the result thus throws
+    light upon the propriety of the means, and shows the fitting
+    object which was presented for the introduction of such means--the
+    fitting occasion which had arisen for the use of them; for,
+    indeed, no more weighty, grand, or solemn occasion can be
+    conceived than the foundation of such a new order of things in the
+    world. Extraordinary action of Divine power for such an end has
+    the benefit of a justifying object of incalculable weight; which
+    though not of itself, indeed, proof of the fact, comes with
+    striking force upon the mind in connection with the proper proof.
+    It is reasonable, it is inevitable, that we should be impressed by
+    such a result; for it shows that the miraculous system has been a
+    practical one; that it has been a step in the ladder of man's
+    ascent, the means of introducing those powerful truths which have
+    set his moral nature in action.
+
+Of this work, remarkable in so many ways, we will add but one thing
+more. It is marked throughout with the most serious and earnest
+conviction, but it is without a single word, from first to last, of
+asperity or insinuation against opponents; and this, not from any
+deficiency of feeling as to the importance of the issue, but from a
+deliberate and resolutely maintained self-control, and from an
+overruling ever-present sense of the duty, on themes like these, of a
+more than judicial calmness.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+ECCE HOMO[11]
+
+
+  [11]
+  _Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. Guardian_,
+  7th February 1866.
+
+This is a dangerous book to review. The critic of it, if he is prudent,
+will feel that it is more than most books a touchstone of his own
+capacity, and that in giving his judgment upon it he cannot help giving
+his own measure and betraying what he is himself worth. All the
+unconscious guiding which a name, even if hitherto unknown, gives to
+opinion is wanting. The first aspect of the book is perplexing; closer
+examination does not clear up all the questions which present
+themselves; and many people, after they have read it through, will not
+feel quite certain what it means. Much of what is on the surface and
+much of what is inherent in the nature of the work will jar painfully
+on many minds; while others who begin to read it under one set of
+impressions may by the time they have got to the end complain of having
+been taken in. There can be no doubt on which side the book is; but it
+may be open to debate from which side it has come. The unknown champion
+who comes into the lists with barred vizor and no cognisance on his
+shield leaves it not long uncertain for which of the contending parties
+he appears; but his weapons and his manner of fighting are not the
+ordinary ones of the side which he takes; and there is a force in his
+arm, and a sweep in his stroke, which is not that of common men. The
+book is one which it is easy to take exception to, and perhaps still
+easier to praise at random; but the subject is put before us in so
+unusual a way, and one so removed from the ordinary grooves of thought,
+that in trying to form an adequate estimate of the work as a whole, a
+man feels as he does when he is in the presence of something utterly
+unfamiliar and unique, when common rules and inferences fail him, and
+in pronouncing upon which he must make something of a venture.
+
+In making our own venture we will begin with what seems to us
+incontestable. In the first place, but that it has been questioned, we
+should say that there could be no question of the surpassing ability
+which the book displays. It is far beyond the power of the average
+clever and practised writer of our days. It is the work of a man in
+whom thought, sympathy, and imagination are equally powerful and
+wealthy, and who exercises a perfect and easy command over his own
+conceptions, and over the apt and vivid language which is their
+expression. Few men have entered so deeply into the ideas and feelings
+of the time, or have looked at the world, its history and its
+conditions, with so large and piercing an insight. But it is idle to
+dwell on what must strike, at first sight, any one who but opens the
+book. We go on to observe, what is equally beyond dispute, the deep
+tone of religious seriousness which pervades the work. The writer's way
+of speaking is very different from that of the ascetic or the devotee;
+but no ascetic or devotee could be more profoundly penetrated with the
+great contrast between holiness and evil, and show more clearly in his
+whole manner of thinking the ineffaceable impression of the powers of
+the world to come. Whatever else the book may be, this much is plain on
+the face of it--it is the work of a mind of extreme originality, depth,
+refinement, and power; and it is also the work of a very religious man:
+Thomas a Kempis had not a more solemn sense of things unseen and of
+what is meant by the Imitation of Christ.
+
+What the writer wishes his book to be understood to be we must gather
+from his Preface:--
+
+    Those who feel dissatisfied with the current conceptions of
+    Christ, if they cannot rest content without a definite opinion,
+    may find it necessary to do what to persons not so dissatisfied it
+    seems audacious and perilous to do. They may be obliged to
+    reconsider the whole subject from the beginning, and placing
+    themselves in imagination at the time when he whom we call Christ
+    bore no such name, but was simply, as St. Luke describes him, a
+    young man of promise, popular with those who knew him, and
+    appearing to enjoy the Divine favour, to trace his biography from
+    point to point, and accept those conclusions about him, not which
+    church doctors or even apostles have sealed with their authority,
+    but which the facts themselves, critically weighed, appear to
+    warrant.
+
+    This is what the present writer undertook to do for the
+    satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good
+    many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that
+    there was no historical character whose motives, objects, and
+    feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which
+    proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others.
+
+    What is now published is a fragment. No theological questions
+    whatever are here discussed. Christ, as the creator of modern
+    theology and religion, will make the subject of another volume,
+    which, however, the author does not hope to publish for some time
+    to come. In the meanwhile he has endeavoured to furnish an answer
+    to the question, What was Christ's object in founding the Society
+    which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to attain that
+    object?
+
+Thus the book comes before us as a serious facing of difficulties. And
+that the writer lays stress on its being so viewed appears further from
+a letter which he wrote to the _Spectator_, repeating emphatically that
+the book is not one "written after the investigation was completed, but
+the _investigation_ itself." The letter may be taken to complete the
+statement of the Preface:--
+
+    I endeavoured in my Preface to describe the state of mind in which
+    I undertook my book. I said that the character and objects of
+    Christ were at that time altogether incomprehensible to me, and
+    that I wished to try whether an independent investigation would
+    relieve my perplexity. Perhaps I did not distinctly enough state
+    that _Ecce Homo_ is not a book written after the investigation was
+    completed, but the _investigation_ itself.
+
+    The Life of Christ is partly easy to understand and partly
+    difficult. This being so, what would a man do who wished to study
+    it methodically? Naturally he would take the easy part first. He
+    would collect, arrange, and carefully consider all the facts which
+    are simple, and until he has done this, he would carefully avoid
+    all those parts of his subject which are obscure, and which cannot
+    be explained without making bold hypotheses. By this course he
+    would limit the problem, and in the meanwhile arrive at a probable
+    opinion concerning the veracity of the documents, and concerning
+    the characteristics, both intellectual and moral, of the person
+    whose high pretensions he wished to investigate.
+
+    This is what I have done. I have postponed altogether the hardest
+    questions connected with Christ, as questions which cannot
+    properly be discussed until a considerable quantity of evidence
+    has been gathered about his character and views. If this evidence,
+    when collected, had appeared to be altogether conflicting and
+    inconsistent, I should have been saved the trouble of proceeding
+    any further; I should have said that Christ is a myth. If it had
+    been consistent, and had disclosed to me a person of mean and
+    ambitious aims, I should have said, Christ is a deceiver. Again,
+    if it had exhibited a person of weak understanding and strong
+    impulsive sensibility, I should have said Christ is a bewildered
+    enthusiast.
+
+    In all these cases you perceive my method would have saved me a
+    good deal of trouble. As it is, I certainly feel bound to go on,
+    though, as I say in my Preface, my progress will necessarily be
+    slow. But I am much engaged and have little time for theological
+    study. But pray do not suppose that postponing questions is only
+    another name for evading them. I think I have gained much by this
+    postponement. I have now a very definite notion of Christ's
+    character and that of his followers. I shall be able to judge how
+    far he was likely to deceive himself or them. It is possible I may
+    have put others, who can command more time than I, in a condition
+    to take up the subject where for the present I leave it.
+
+    You say my picture suffers by my method. But _Ecce Homo_ is not a
+    picture: it is the very opposite of a picture; it is an analysis.
+    It may be, you will answer, that the title suggests a picture.
+    This may perhaps be true, and if so, it is no doubt a fault, but a
+    fault in the title, not in the book. For titles are put to books,
+    not books to titles.
+
+Thus it appears that the writer found it his duty to investigate those
+awful questions which every thinking man feels to be full of the
+"incomprehensible" and unfathomable, but which many thinking men, for
+various reasons both good and bad, shrink from attempting to
+investigate, accepting on practical and very sufficient grounds the
+religious conclusions which are recommended and sanctioned by the
+agreement of Christendom. And finding it his duty to investigate them
+at all, he saw that he was bound to investigate in earnest. But under
+what circumstances this happened, from what particular pressure of
+need, and after what previous belief or state of opinion, we are not
+told. Whether from being originally on the doubting side--on the
+irreligious side we cannot suppose he ever could have been--he has
+risen through his investigation into belief; or whether, originally on
+the believing side, he found the aspect so formidable, to himself or to
+the world, of the difficulties and perplexities which beset belief,
+that he turned to bay upon the foes that dogged him--must be left to
+conjecture. It is impossible to question that he has been deeply
+impressed with the difficulties of believing; it is impossible to
+question that doubt has been overborne and trampled under foot. But
+here we have the record, it would not be accurate to say of the
+struggle, but of that resolute and unflinching contemplation of the
+realities of the case which decided it. Such plunging into such a
+question must seem, as he says, to those who do not need it, "audacious
+and perilous"; for if you plunge into a question in earnest, and do not
+under a thin disguise take a side, you must, whatever your bias and
+expectation, take your chance of the alternative answers which may come
+out. It is a simple fact that there are many people who feel
+"dissatisfied with the current conceptions" of our Lord--whether
+reasonably and justly dissatisfied is another question; but whatever we
+think of it they remain dissatisfied. In such emergencies it is
+conceivable that a man who believes, yet keenly realises and feels what
+disturbs or destroys the belief of others, should dare to put himself
+in their place; should enter the hospital and suffer the disease which
+makes such ravages; should descend into the shades and face the
+spectres. No one can deny the risk of dwelling on such thoughts as he
+must dwell on; but if he feels warmly with his kind, he may think it
+even a duty to face the risk. To any one accustomed to live on his
+belief it cannot but be a hard necessity, full of pain and difficulty,
+first to think and then to speak of what he believes, as if it _might
+not_ be, or _could be_ otherwise; but the changes of time bring up ever
+new hard necessities; and one thing is plain, that if ever such an
+investigation is undertaken, it ought to be a real one, in good earnest
+and not in play. If a man investigates at all, both for his own sake
+and for the sake of the effect of his investigation on others, he must
+accept the fair conditions of investigation. We may not ourselves be
+able to conceive the possibility of taking, even provisionally, a
+neutral position; but looking at what is going on all round us, we
+ought to be able to enlarge our thoughts sufficiently to take in the
+idea that a believing mind may feel it a duty to surrender itself
+boldly to the intellectual chances and issues of the inquiry, and to
+"let its thoughts take their course in the confidence that they will
+come home at last." It may be we ourselves who "have not faith enough
+to be patient of doubt"; there may be others who feel that if what they
+believe is real, they need not be afraid of the severest revisal and
+testing of the convictions on which they rest; who feel that, in the
+circumstances of the time, it is not left to their choice whether these
+convictions shall be sifted unsparingly and to the uttermost; and who
+think it a venture not unworthy of a Christian, to descend even to the
+depths to go through the thoughts of doubters, if so be that he may
+find the spell that shall calm them. We do not say that this book is
+the production of such a state of mind; we only think that it may be.
+One thing is clear, wherever the writer's present lot is cast, he has
+that in him which not only enables him, but forces him, to sympathise
+with what he sees in the opposite camp. If he is what is called a
+Liberal, his whole heart is yet pouring itself forth towards the great
+truths of Christianity. If he is what is called orthodox, his whole
+intellect is alive to the right and duty of freedom of thought. He will
+therefore attract and repel on both sides. And he appears to feel that
+the position of double sympathy gives him a special advantage, to
+attract to each side what is true in its opposite, and to correct in
+each what is false or inadequate.
+
+What, then, is this investigation, and what course does it follow? At
+the first aspect, we might take it for one of those numerous attempts
+on the Liberal side, partly impatient, partly careless of Christianity,
+to put a fresh look on the Christian history, and to see it with new
+eyes. The writer's language is at starting neutral; he speaks of our
+Lord in the language indeed of the New Testament, but not in the usual
+language of later Christian writers. All through, the colour and tone
+is absolutely modern; and what would naturally be expressed in familiar
+theological terms is for the most part studiously put in other words.
+Persons acquainted with the writings of the late Mr. Robertson might be
+often reminded of his favourite modes of teaching; of his maxim that
+truth is made up of two opposites which seem contradictories; of the
+distinction which he was so fond of insisting upon between principles
+and rules; above all, of his doctrine that the true way to rise to the
+faith in our Lord's Divine Nature was by first realising His Human
+Life. But the resemblance is partial, if not superficial, and gives way
+on closer examination before broad and characteristic features of an
+entirely different significance. That one which at first arrests
+attention, and distinguishes this writer's line of thought from the
+common Liberal way of dealing with the subject, is that from the first
+page of the book to its last line the work of Christ is viewed, not
+simply as the foundation of a religious system, the introduction of
+certain great principles, the elevation of religious ideas, the
+delivery of Divine truths, the exhibition of a life and example, but as
+the call and creation of a definite, concrete, organised society of
+men. The subject, of investigation is not merely the character and
+history of the Person, but the Person as connected with His work.
+Christ is regarded not simply in Himself or in His teaching, as the
+Founder of a philosophy, a morality, a theology in the abstract, but as
+the Author of a Divine Society, the Body which is called by His Name,
+the Christian Church Universal, a real and visible company of men,
+which, however we may understand it, exists at this moment as it has
+existed since His time, marked by His badges, governed by His laws, and
+working out His purpose. The writer finds the two joined in fact, and
+he finds them also joined in the recorded history of Christ's plan. The
+book might almost be described as the beginning of a new _De Civitate
+Dei_, written with the further experience of fourteen centuries and
+from the point of view of our own generation. This is one remarkable
+peculiarity of this investigation; another is the prominence given to
+the severe side of the Person and character of whom he writes, and what
+is even more observable, the way in which both the severity and the
+gentleness are apprehended and harmonised.
+
+We are familiar with the attempts to resolve the Christianity of the
+New Testament into philanthropy; and, on the other hand, writers like
+Mr. Carlyle will not let us forget that the world is as dark and evil
+as the Bible draws it. This writer feels both in one. No one can show
+more sympathy with enlarged and varied ideas of human happiness, no one
+has connected them more fearlessly with Christian principles, or
+claimed from those principles more unlimited developments, even for the
+physical well-being of men. No one has extended wider the limits of
+Christian generosity, forbearance, and tolerance. But, on the other
+hand, what is striking is, that all this is compatible, and is made to
+appear so, with the most profound and terrible sense of evil, with
+indignation and scorn which is scathing where it kindles and strikes,
+with a capacity and energy of deliberate religious hatred against what
+is impure and false and ungodly, which mark one who has dared to
+realise and to sympathise with the wrath of Jesus Christ.
+
+The world has been called in these later days, and from opposite
+directions, to revise its judgments about Jesus Christ. Christians, on
+the one hand, have been called to do it by writers of whom M. Ernest
+Renan is the most remarkable and the most unflinching. But the
+sceptical and the unbelieving have likewise been obliged to change
+their ground and their tone, and no one with any self-respect or care
+for his credit even as a thinker and a man would like to repeat the
+superficial and shallow flippancy and irreligion of the last century.
+Two things have been specially insisted on. We have been told that if
+we are to see the truth of things as it is, we must disengage our minds
+from the deeply rooted associations and conceptions of a later
+theology, and try to form our impressions first-hand and unprompted
+from the earliest documents which we can reach. It has been further
+urged on us, in a more believing spirit, that we should follow the
+order by which in fact truth was unfolded, and rise from the full
+appreciation of our Lord's human nature to the acknowledgment of His
+Divine nature. It seems to us that the writer of this book has felt the
+force of both these appeals, and that his book is his answer to them.
+Here is the way in which he responds to both--to the latter indirectly,
+but with a significance which no one can mistake; to the former
+directly and avowedly. He undertakes, isolating himself from current
+beliefs, and restricting himself to the documents from which, if from
+any source at all, the original facts about Christ are to be learned,
+to examine what the genuine impression is which an attempt to realise
+the statements about him leaves on the mind. This has been done by
+others, with results supposed to be unfavourable to Christianity. He
+has been plainly moved by these results, though not a hint is given of
+the existence of Renan or Strauss. But the effect on his own mind has
+been to drive him back on a closer survey of the history in its first
+fountains, and to bring him from it filled more than ever with wonder
+at its astonishing phenomena, to protest against the poverty and
+shallowness of the most ambitious and confident of these attempts. They
+leave the historical Character which they pourtray still unsounded, its
+motives, objects, and feelings absolutely incomprehensible. He accepts
+the method to reverse the product. "Look at Christ historically,"
+people say; "see Him as He really was." The answer here is, "Well, I
+will look at Him with whatever aid a trained historical imagination can
+look at Him. I accept your challenge; I admit your difficulties. I will
+dare to do what you do. I will try and look at the very facts
+themselves, with singleness and 'innocence of the eye,' trying to see
+nothing more than I really see, and trying to see all that my eye falls
+on. I will try to realise indeed what is recorded of Him. And _this_ is
+what I see. This is the irresistible impression from the plainest and
+most elementary part of the history, if we are to accept any history at
+all. A miracle could not be more unlike the order of our experience
+than the Character set before us is unique and unapproachable in all
+known history. Further, all that makes the superiority of the modern
+world to the ancient, and is most permanent and pregnant with
+improvement in it, may be traced to the appearance of that Character,
+and to the work which He planned and did. You ask for a true picture of
+Him, drawn with freedom, drawn with courage; here, if you dare look at
+it, is what those who wrote of Him showed Him to be. Renan has tried to
+draw this picture. Take the Gospels as they stand; treat them simply as
+biographies; look, and see, and think of what they tell, and then ask
+yourself about Renan's picture, and what it looks like when placed side
+by side with the truth."
+
+This, as we have ventured to express it in our own words, seems to be
+the writer's position. It is at any rate the effect of his book, to our
+minds. The inquiry, it must always be remembered, is a preliminary one,
+dealing, as he says, with the easiest and obvious elements of the
+problem; and much that seems inadequate and unsatisfactory may be
+developed hereafter. He starts from what, to those who already have the
+full belief, must appear a low level. He takes, as it will be seen, the
+documents as they stand. He takes little more than the first three
+Gospels, and these as a whole, without asking minute questions about
+them. The mythical theory he dismisses as false to nature, in dealing
+with such a Character and such results. He talks in his preface of
+"critically weighing" the facts; but the expression is misleading. It
+is true that we may talk of criticism of character; but the words
+naturally suggest that close cross-questioning of documents and details
+which has produced such remarkable results in modern investigations;
+and of this there is none. It is a work in no sense of criticism; it is
+a work of what he calls the "trained historical imagination"; a work of
+broad and deep knowledge of human nature and the world it works in and
+creates about it; a work of steady and large insight into character,
+and practical judgment on moral likelihoods. He answers Strauss as he
+answers Renan, by producing the interpretation of a character, so
+living, so in accordance with all before and after, that it overpowers
+and sweeps away objections; a picture, an analysis or outline, if he
+pleases, which justifies itself and is its own evidence, by its
+originality and internal consistency. Criticism in detail does not
+affect him. He assumes nothing of the Gospels, except that they are
+records; neither their inspiration in any theological sense, nor their
+authorship, nor their immunity from mistake, nor the absolute purity of
+their texts. But taking them as a whole he discerns in them a Character
+which, if you accept them at all and on any terms, you cannot mistake.
+Even if the copy is ever so imperfect, ever so unskilful, ever so
+blurred and defaced, there is no missing the features any more than a
+man need miss the principle of a pattern because it is rudely or
+confusedly traced. He looks at these "biographies" as a geologist might
+do at a disturbed series of strata; and he feeds his eye upon them till
+he gets such a view of the coherent whole as will stand independent of
+the right or wrong disposition of the particular fragments. To the mind
+which discerns the whole, the regulating principle, the general curves
+and proportions of the strata may be just as visible after the
+disturbance as before it. The Gospels bring before us the visible and
+distinct outlines of a life which, after all efforts to alter the idea
+of it, remains still the same; they present certain clusters of leading
+ideas and facts so embedded in their substance that no criticism of
+detail can possibly get rid of them, without absolutely obliterating
+the whole record. It is this leading idea, or cluster of ideas, to be
+gained by intent gazing, which the writer disengages from all questions
+of criticism in the narrow sense of the word, and sets before us as
+explaining the history of Christianity, and as proving themselves by
+that explanation. That the world has been moved we know. "Give me," he
+seems to say, "the Character which is set forth in the Gospels, and I
+can show how He moved it":--
+
+    It is in the object of the present treatise to exhibit Christ's
+    career in outline. No other career ever had so much unity; no
+    other biography is so simple or can so well afford to dispense
+    with details. Men in general take up scheme after scheme, as
+    circumstances suggest one or another, and therefore most
+    biographies are compelled to pass from one subject to another, and
+    to enter into a multitude of minute questions, to divide the life
+    carefully into periods by chronological landmarks accurately
+    determined, to trace the gradual development of character and
+    ripening or change of opinions. But Christ formed one plan and
+    executed it; no important change took place in his mode of
+    thinking, speaking, or acting; at least the evidence before us
+    does not enable us to trace any such change. It is possible,
+    indeed, for students of his life to find details which they may
+    occupy themselves with discussing; they may map out the chronology
+    of it, and devise methods of harmonising the different accounts;
+    but such details are of little importance compared with the one
+    grand question, what was Christ's plan, and throw scarcely any
+    light upon that question. What was Christ's plan is the main
+    question which will be investigated in the present treatise, and
+    that vision of universal monarchy which we have just been
+    considering affords an appropriate introduction to it....
+
+    We conclude then, that Christ in describing himself as a king, and
+    at the same time as king of the Kingdom of God--in other words as
+    a king representing the Majesty of the Invisible King of a
+    theocracy--claimed the character first of Founder, next of
+    Legislator; thirdly, in a certain high and peculiar sense, of
+    Judge, of a new divine society.
+
+    In defining as above the position which Christ assumed, we have
+    not entered into controvertible matter. We have not rested upon
+    single passages, nor drawn upon the fourth Gospel. To deny that
+    Christ did undertake to found and to legislate for a new
+    theocratic society, and that he did claim the office of Judge of
+    mankind, is indeed possible, but only to those who altogether deny
+    the credibility of the extant biographies of Christ. If those
+    biographies be admitted to be generally trustworthy, then Christ
+    undertook to be what we have described; if not, then of course
+    this, but also every other account of him falls to the ground.
+
+We have said that he starts from a low level; and he restricts himself
+so entirely at the opening to facts which do not involve dispute, that
+his views of them are necessarily incomplete, and, so to say,
+provisional and deliberate understatements. He begins no higher than
+the beginning of the public ministry, the Baptism, and the Temptation;
+and his account of these leaves much to say, though it suggests much of
+what is left unsaid. But he soon gets to the proper subject of his
+book--the absolute uniqueness of Him whose equally unique work has been
+the Christian Church. And this uniqueness he finds in the combination
+of "unbounded personal pretensions," and the possession, claimed and
+believed, of boundless power, with an absolutely unearthly use of His
+pretensions and His power, and with a goodness which has proved to be,
+and still is, the permanent and ever-flowing source of moral elevation
+and improvement in the world. He early comes across the question of
+miracles, and, as he says, it is impossible to separate the claim to
+them and the belief in them from the story. We find Christ, he says,
+"describing himself as a king, and at the same time as king of the
+Kingdom of God"; calling forth and founding a new and divine society,
+and claiming to be, both now and hereafter, the Judge without appeal of
+all mankind; "he considered, in short, heaven and hell to be in his
+hands." And we find, on the other hand, that as such He has been
+received. To such an astonishing chain of phenomena miracles naturally
+belong:--
+
+    When we contemplate this scheme as a whole, and glance at the
+    execution and results of it, three things strike us with
+    astonishment. First, its prodigious originality, if the expression
+    may be used. What other man has had the courage or elevation of
+    mind to say, "I will build up a state by the mere force of my
+    will, without help from the kings of the world, without taking
+    advantage of any of the secondary causes which unite men
+    together--unity of interest or speech, or blood-relationship. I
+    will make laws for my state which shall never be repealed, and I
+    will defy all the powers of destruction that are at work in the
+    world to destroy what I build"?
+
+    Secondly, we are astonished at the calm confidence with which the
+    scheme was carried out. The reason why statesmen can seldom work
+    on this vast scale is that it commonly requires a whole lifetime
+    to gain that ascendency over their fellow-men which such schemes
+    presuppose. Some of the leading organisers of the world have said,
+    "I will work my way to supreme power, and then I will execute
+    great plans." But Christ overleaped the first stage altogether. He
+    did not work his way to royalty, but simply said to all men, "I am
+    your king." He did not struggle forward to a position in which he
+    could found a new state, but simply founded it.
+
+    Thirdly, we are astonished at the prodigious success of the
+    scheme. It is not more certain that Christ presented himself to
+    men as the founder, legislator, and judge of a divine society than
+    it is certain that men have accepted him in these characters, that
+    the divine society has been founded, that it has lasted nearly two
+    thousand years, that it has extended over a large and the most
+    highly-civilised portion of the earth's surface, and that it
+    continues full of vigour at the present day.
+
+    Between the astonishing design and its astonishing success there
+    intervenes an astonishing instrumentality--that of miracles. It
+    will be thought by some that in asserting miracles to have been
+    actually wrought by Christ we go beyond what the evidence, perhaps
+    beyond what any possible evidence, is able to sustain. Waiving,
+    then, for the present, the question whether miracles were actually
+    wrought, we may state a fact which is fully capable of being
+    established by ordinary evidence, and which is actually
+    established by evidence as ample as any historical fact
+    whatever--the fact, namely, that Christ _professed_ to work
+    miracles. We may go further, and assert with confidence that
+    Christ was believed by his followers really to work miracles, and
+    that it was mainly on this account that they conceded to Him the
+    pre-eminent dignity and authority which he claimed. The accounts
+    which we have of these miracles may be exaggerated; it is possible
+    that in some special cases stories have been related which have no
+    foundation whatever; but on the whole, miracles play so important
+    a part in Christ's scheme, that any theory which would represent
+    them as due entirely to the imagination of his followers or of a
+    later age destroys the credibility of the documents not partially
+    but wholly, and leaves Christ a personage as mythical as Hercules.
+    Now, the present treatise aims to show that the Christ of the
+    Gospels is not mythical, by showing that the character those
+    biographies portray is in all its large features strikingly
+    consistent, and at the same time so peculiar as to be altogether
+    beyond the reach of invention both by individual genius and still
+    more by what is called the "consciousness of an age." Now, if the
+    character depicted in the Gospels is in the main real and
+    historical, they must be generally trustworthy, and if so, the
+    responsibility of miracles is fixed on Christ. In this case the
+    reality of the miracles themselves depends in a great degree on
+    the opinion we form of Christ's veracity, and this opinion must
+    arise gradually from the careful examination of his whole life.
+    For our present purpose, which is to investigate the plan which
+    Christ formed and the way in which he executed it, it matters
+    nothing whether the miracles were real or imaginary; in either
+    case, being believed to be real, they had the same effect.
+    Provisionally, therefore, we may speak of them as real.
+
+Without the belief in miracles, as he says, it is impossible to
+conceive the history of the Church:--
+
+    If we suppose that Christ really performed no miracles, and that
+    those which are attributed to him were the product of
+    self-deception mixed in some proportion or other with imposture,
+    then no doubt the faith of St. Paul and St. John was an empty
+    chimera, a mere misconception; but it is none the less true that
+    those apparent miracles were essential to Christ's success, and
+    that had he not pretended to perform them the Christian Church
+    would never have been founded, and the name of Jesus of Nazareth
+    would be known at this day only to the curious in Jewish
+    antiquities.
+
+But he goes on to point out what was the use which Christ made of
+miracles, and how it was that they did not, as they might have done,
+even impede His purpose of founding His kingdom on men's consciences
+and not on their terrors. In one of the most remarkable passages
+perhaps ever written on the Gospel miracles as they are seen when
+simply looked at as they are described, the writer says:--
+
+    He imposed upon himself a strict restraint in the dse of his
+    supernatural powers. He adopted the principle that he was not sent
+    to destroy men's lives but to save them, and rigidly abstained in
+    practice from inflicting any kind of damage or harm. In this course
+    he persevered so steadily that it became generally understood.
+    Every one knew that this _king_, whose royal pretensions were so
+    prominent, had an absolutely unlimited patience, and that he would
+    endure the keenest criticism, the bitterest and most malignant
+    personal attacks. Men's mouths were open to discuss his claims and
+    character with perfect freedom; so far from regarding him with that
+    excessive fear which might have prevented them from receiving his
+    doctrine intelligently, they learnt gradually to treat him, even
+    while they acknowledged his extraordinary power, with a reckless
+    animosity which they would have been afraid to show towards an
+    ordinary enemy. With curious inconsistency they openly charged him
+    with being leagued with the devil; in other words, they acknowledged
+    that he was capable of boundless mischief, and yet they were so
+    little afraid of him that they were ready to provoke him to use his
+    whole power against themselves. The truth was that they believed
+    him to be disarmed by his own deliberate resolution, and they
+    judged rightly. He punished their malice only by verbal reproofs,
+    and they gradually gathered courage to attack the life of one whose
+    miraculous powers they did not question.
+
+    Meantime, while this magnanimous self-restraint saved him from
+    false friends and mercenary or servile flatterers, and saved the
+    kingdom which he founded from the corruption of self-interest and
+    worldliness, it gave him a power over the good such as nothing
+    else could have given. For the noblest and most amiable thing that
+    can be seen is power mixed with gentleness, the reposing,
+    self-restraining attitude of strength. These are the "fine strains
+    of honour," these are "the graces of the gods"--
+
+        To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air.
+        And yet to charge the sulphur with a bolt
+        That shall but rive an oak.
+
+    And while he did no mischief under any provocation, his power
+    flowed in acts of beneficence on every side. Men could approach
+    near to him, could eat and drink with him, could listen to his
+    talk and ask him questions, and they found him not accessible
+    only, but warmhearted, and not occupied so much with his own plans
+    that he could not attend to a case of distress or mental
+    perplexity. They found him full of sympathy and appreciation,
+    dropping words of praise, ejaculations of admiration, tears. He
+    surrounded himself with those who had tasted of his bounty, sick
+    people whom he had cured, lepers whose death-in-life, demoniacs
+    whose hell-in-life, he had terminated with a single powerful word.
+    Among these came loving hearts who thanked him for friends and
+    relatives rescued for them out of the jaws of premature death, and
+    others whom he had saved, by a power which did not seem different,
+    from vice and degradation.
+
+    This temperance in the use of supernatural power is the
+    masterpiece of Christ. It is a moral miracle superinduced upon a
+    physical one. This repose in greatness makes him surely the most
+    sublime image ever offered to the human imagination. And it is
+    precisely this trait which gave him his immense and immediate
+    ascendency over men. If the question be put--Why was Christ so
+    successful?--Why did men gather round him at his call, form
+    themselves into a new society according to his wish, and accept
+    him with unbounded devotion as their legislator and judge? some
+    will answer, Because of the miracles which attested his divine
+    character; others, Because of the intrinsic beauty and divinity of
+    the great law of love which he propounded. But miracles, as we
+    have seen, have not by themselves this persuasive power. That a
+    man possesses a strange power which I cannot understand is no
+    reason why I should receive his words as divine oracles of truth.
+    The powerful man is not of necessity also wise; his power may
+    terrify and yet not convince. On the other hand, the law of love,
+    however divine, was but a precept. Undoubtedly it deserved that
+    men should accept it for its intrinsic worth, but men are not
+    commonly so eager to receive the words of wise men nor so
+    unbounded in their gratitude to them. It was neither for his
+    miracles nor for the beauty of his doctrine that Christ was
+    worshipped. Nor was it for his winning personal character, nor for
+    the persecutions he endured, nor for his martyrdom. It was for the
+    inimitable unity which all these things made when taken together.
+    In other words, it was for this that he whose power and greatness
+    as shown in his miracles were overwhelming denied himself the use
+    of his power, treated it as a slight thing, walked among men as
+    though he were one of them, relieved them in distress, taught them
+    to love each other, bore with undisturbed patience a perpetual
+    hailstorm of calumny; and when his enemies grew fiercer, continued
+    still to endure their attacks in silence, until, petrified and
+    bewildered with astonishment, men saw him arrested and put to
+    death with torture, refusing steadfastly to use in his own behalf
+    the power he conceived he held for the benefit of others. It was
+    the combination of greatness and self-sacrifice which won their
+    hearts, the mighty powers held under a mighty control, the
+    unspeakable condescension, the _Cross_ of _Christ_.
+
+And he goes on to describe the effect upon the world; and what it was
+that "drew all men unto Him":--
+
+    To sum up the results of this chapter. We began by remarking that
+    an astonishing plan met with an astonishing success, and we raised
+    the question to what instrumentality that success was due. Christ
+    announced himself as the Founder and Legislator of a new Society,
+    and as the Supreme Judge of men. Now by what means did he procure
+    that these immense pretensions should be allowed? He might have
+    done it by sheer power, he might have adopted persuasion, and
+    pointed out the merits of the scheme and of the legislation he
+    proposed to introduce. But he adopted a third plan, which had the
+    effect not merely of securing obedience, but of exciting
+    enthusiasm and devotion. He laid men under an immense
+    _obligation_. He convinced them that he was a person of altogether
+    transcendent greatness, one who needed nothing at their hands, one
+    whom it was impossible to benefit by conferring riches, or fame,
+    or dominion upon him, and that, being so great, he had devoted
+    himself of mere benevolence to their good. He showed them that for
+    their sakes he lived a hard and laborious life, and exposed
+    himself to the utmost malice of powerful men. They saw him hungry,
+    though they believed him able to turn the stones into bread; they
+    saw his royal pretensions spurned, though they believed that he
+    could in a moment take into his hand all the kingdoms of the world
+    and the glory of them; they saw his life in danger; they saw him
+    at last expire in agonies, though they believed that, had he so
+    willed it, no danger could harm him, and that had he thrown
+    himself from the topmost pinnacle of the temple he would have been
+    softly received in the arms of ministering angels. Witnessing his
+    sufferings, and convinced by the miracles they saw him work that
+    they were voluntarily endured, men's hearts were touched, and pity
+    for weakness blending strangely with wondering admiration of
+    unlimited power, an agitation of gratitude, sympathy, and
+    astonishment, such as nothing else could ever excite, sprang up in
+    them; and when, turning from his deeds to his words, they found
+    this very self-denial which had guided his own life prescribed as
+    the principle which should guide theirs, gratitude broke forth in
+    joyful obedience, self-denial produced self-denial, and the Law
+    and Lawgiver together were enshrined in their inmost hearts for
+    inseparable veneration.
+
+It is plain that whatever there is novel in such a line of argument
+must depend upon the way in which it is handled; and it is the
+extraordinary and sustained power with which this is done which gives
+its character to the book. The writer's method consists in realising
+with a depth of feeling and thought which it would not be easy to
+match, what our Lord was in His human ministry, as that ministry is set
+before us by those who witnessed it; and next, in showing in detail the
+connection of that ministry, which wrought so much by teaching, but
+still more by the Divine example, "not sparing words but resting most
+on deeds," with all that is highest, purest, and best in the morality
+of Christendom, and with what is most fruitful and most hopeful in the
+differences between the old world and our own. We cannot think we are
+wrong when we say that no one could speak of our Lord as this writer
+speaks, with the enthusiasm, the overwhelming sense of His
+inexpressible authority, of His unapproachable perfection, with the
+profound faith which lays everything at His feet, and not also believe
+all that the Divine Society which Christ founded has believed about
+Him. And though for the present his subject is history, and human
+morality as it appears to have been revolutionised and finally fixed by
+that history, and not the theology which subsequent in date is yet the
+foundation of both, it is difficult to imagine any reader going along
+with him and not breaking out at length into the burst, "My Lord and my
+God." If it is not so, then the phenomenon is strange indeed; for a
+belief below the highest and truest has produced an appreciation, a
+reverence, an adoration which the highest belief has only produced in
+the choicest examples of those who have had it, and by the side of
+which the ordinary exhibitions of the divine history are pale and
+feeble. To few, indeed, as it seems to us, has it been given to feel,
+and to make others feel, what in all the marvellous complexity of high
+and low, and in all the Divine singleness of His goodness and power,
+the Son of Man appeared in the days of His flesh. It is not more vivid
+or more wonderful than what the Gospels with so much detail tell us of
+that awful ministry in real flesh and blood, with a human soul and with
+all the reality of man's nature; but most of us, after all, read the
+Gospels with sealed and unwondering eyes. But, dwelling on the Manhood,
+so as almost to overpower us with the contrast between the distinct and
+living truth and the dead and dull familiarity of our thoughts of
+routine and custom, he does so in such a way that it is impossible to
+doubt, though the word Incarnation never occurs in the volume, that all
+the while he has before his thoughts the "taking of the manhood into
+God." What is the Gospel picture?
+
+    And let us pause once more to consider that which remains
+    throughout a subject of ever-recurring astonishment, the unbounded
+    personal pretensions which Christ advances. It is common in human
+    history to meet with those who claim some superiority over their
+    fellows. Men assert a pre-eminence over their fellow-citizens or
+    fellow-countrymen and become rulers of those who at first were
+    their equals, but they dream of nothing greater than some partial
+    control over the actions of others for the short space of a
+    lifetime. Few indeed are those to whom it is given to influence
+    future ages. Yet some men have appeared who have been "as levers
+    to uplift the earth and roll it in another course." Homer by
+    creating literature, Socrates by creating science, Caesar by
+    carrying civilisation inland from the shores of the Mediterranean,
+    Newton by starting science upon a career of steady progress, may
+    be said to have attained this eminence. But these men gave a
+    single impact like that which is conceived to have first set the
+    planets in motion; Christ claims to be a perpetual attractive
+    power like the sun which determines their orbit. They contributed
+    to men some discovery and passed away; Christ's discovery is
+    himself. To humanity struggling with its passions and its destiny
+    he says, Cling to me, cling ever closer to me. If we believe St.
+    John, he represented himself as the Light of the world, as the
+    Shepherd of the souls of men, as the Way to immortality, as the
+    Vine or Life-tree of humanity. And if we refuse to believe that he
+    used those words, we cannot deny, without rejecting all the
+    evidence before us, that he used words which have substantially
+    the same meaning. We cannot deny that he commanded men to leave
+    everything and attach themselves to him; that he declared himself
+    king, master, and judge of men; that he promised to give rest to
+    all the weary and heavy-laden; that he instructed his followers to
+    hope for life from feeding on his body and blood.
+
+    But it is doubly surprising to observe that these enormous
+    pretensions were advanced by one whose special peculiarity, not
+    only among his contemporaries but among the remarkable men that
+    have appeared before and since, was an almost feminine tenderness
+    and humility. This characteristic was remarked, as we have seen,
+    by the Baptist, and Christ himself was fully conscious of it. Yet
+    so clear to him was his own dignity and infinite importance to the
+    human race as an objective fact with which his own opinion of
+    himself had nothing to do, that in the same breath in which he
+    asserts it in the most unmeasured language, he alludes, apparently
+    with entire unconsciousness, to his _humility_. "Take my yoke upon
+    you, and learn of me; _for I am meek and lowly of heart_." And
+    again, when speaking to his followers of the arrogance of the
+    Pharisees, he says, "They love to be called Rabbi; but be not you
+    called Rabbi: _for one is your master, even Christ_."
+
+    Who is the humble man? It is he who resists with special
+    watchfulness and success the temptations which the conditions of
+    his life may offer to exaggerate his own importance.... If he
+    judged himself correctly, and if the Baptist described him well
+    when he compared him to a lamb, and, we may add, if his
+    biographers have delineated his character faithfully, Christ was
+    one naturally contented with obscurity, wanting the restless
+    desire for distinction and eminence which is common in great men,
+    hating to put forward personal claims, disliking competition and
+    "disputes who should be greatest," finding something bombastic in
+    the titles of royalty, fond of what is simple and homely, of
+    children, of poor people, occupying himself so much with the
+    concerns of others, with the relief of sickness and want, that the
+    temptation to exaggerate the importance of his own thoughts and
+    plans was not likely to master him; lastly, entertaining for the
+    human race a feeling so singularly fraternal that he was likely to
+    reject as a sort of treason the impulse to set himself in any
+    manner above them. Christ, it appears, was this humble man. When
+    we have fully pondered the fact we may be in a condition to
+    estimate the force of the evidence which, submitted to his mind,
+    could induce him, in direct opposition to all his tastes and
+    instincts, to lay claim, persistently, with the calmness of entire
+    conviction, in opposition to the whole religious world, in spite
+    of the offence which his own followers conceived, to a dominion
+    more transcendent, more universal, more complete, than the most
+    delirious votary of glory ever aspired to in his dreams.
+
+And what is it that our Lord has done for man by being so truly man?
+
+    This then it is which is wanted to raise the feeling of humanity
+    into an enthusiasm; when the precept of love has been given, an
+    image must be set before the eyes of those who are called upon to
+    obey it, an ideal or type of man which may be noble and amiable
+    enough to raise the whole race and make the meanest member of it
+    sacred with reflected glory.
+
+    Did not Christ do this? Did the command to love go forth to those
+    who had never seen a human being they could revere? Could his
+    followers turn upon him and say, How can we love a creature so
+    degraded, full of vile wants and contemptible passions, whose
+    little life is most harmlessly spent when it is an empty round of
+    eating and sleeping; a creature destined for the grave and for
+    oblivion when his allotted term of fretfulness and folly has
+    expired? Of this race Christ himself was a member, and to this day
+    is it not the best answer to all blasphemers of the species, the
+    best consolation when our sense of its degradation is keenest,
+    that a human brain was behind his forehead, and a human heart
+    beating in his breast, and that within the whole creation of God
+    nothing more elevated or more attractive has yet been found than
+    he? And if it be answered that there was in his nature something
+    exceptional and peculiar, that humanity must not be measured by
+    the stature of Christ, let us remember that it was precisely thus
+    that he wished it to be measured, delighting to call himself the
+    Son of Man, delighting to call the meanest of mankind his
+    brothers. If some human beings are abject and contemptible, if it
+    be incredible to us that they can have any high dignity or
+    destiny, do we regard them from so great a height as Christ? Are
+    we likely to be more pained by their faults and deficiencies than
+    he was? Is our standard higher than his? And yet he associated by
+    preference with the meanest of the race; no contempt for them did
+    he ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear than
+    the best and wisest to the common Father, no doubt that they were
+    naturally capable of rising to a moral elevation like his own.
+    There is nothing of which a man may be prouder than of this; it is
+    the most hopeful and redeeming fact in history; it is precisely
+    what was wanting to raise the love of man as man to enthusiasm. An
+    eternal glory has been shed upon the human race by the love Christ
+    bore to it And it was because the Edict of Universal Love went
+    forth to men whose hearts were in no cynical mood, but possessed
+    with a spirit of devotion to a man, that words which at any other
+    time, however grandly they might sound, would have been but words,
+    penetrated so deeply, and along with the law of love the power of
+    love was given. Therefore also the first Christians were enabled
+    to dispense with philosophical phrases, and instead of saying that
+    they loved the ideal of man in man, could simply say and feel that
+    they loved Christ in every man.
+
+    We have here the very kernel of the Christian moral scheme. We
+    have distinctly before us the end Christ proposed to himself, and
+    the means he considered adequate to the attainment of it....
+
+    But how to give to the meagre and narrow hearts of men such
+    enlargement? How to make them capable of a universal sympathy?
+    Christ believed it possible to bind men to their kind, but on one
+    condition--that they were first bound fast to himself. He stood
+    forth as the representative of men, he identified himself with the
+    cause and with the interests of all human beings; he was destined,
+    as he began before long obscurely to intimate, to lay down his
+    life for them. Few of us sympathise originally and directly with
+    this devotion; few of us can perceive in human nature itself any
+    merit sufficient to evoke it. But it is not so hard to love and
+    venerate him who felt it. So vast a passion of love, a devotion so
+    comprehensive, elevated, deliberate, and profound, has not
+    elsewhere been in any degree approached save by some of his
+    imitators. And as love provokes love, many have found it possible
+    to conceive for Christ an attachment the closeness of which no
+    words can describe, a veneration so possessing and absorbing the
+    man within them, that they have said, "I live no more, but Christ
+    lives in me."
+
+And what, in fact, has been the result, after the utmost and freest
+abatement for the objections of those who criticise the philosophical
+theories or the practical effects of Christianity?
+
+    But that Christ's method, when rightly applied, is really of
+    mighty force may be shown by an argument which the severest censor
+    of Christians will hardly refuse to admit. Compare the ancient
+    with the modern world: "Look on this picture and on that." The
+    broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into
+    prominence. Among all the men of the ancient heathen world there
+    were scarcely one or two to whom we might venture to apply the
+    epithet "holy." In other words, there were not more than one or
+    two, if any, who, besides being virtuous in their actions, were
+    possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides
+    abstaining from vice, regarded even a vicious thought with horror.
+    Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this
+    higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few
+    will maintain that it has been exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth
+    is that there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country
+    since the time of Christ, where a century has passed without
+    exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence
+    has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at
+    times like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has
+    Christ failed? or can Christianity die?
+
+The principle of feeling and action which Christ implanted in that
+Divine Society which He founded, or in other words, His morality, had
+two peculiarities; it sprang, and it must spring still, from what this
+writer calls all through an "enthusiasm"; and this enthusiasm was
+kindled and maintained by the influence of a Person. There can be no
+goodness without impulses to goodness, any more than these impulses are
+enough without being directed by truth and reason; but the impulses
+must come before the guidance, and "Christ's Theocracy" is described
+"as a great attempt to set all the virtues of the world on this basis,
+and to give it a visible centre and fountain." He thus describes how
+personal influence is the great instrument of moral quickening and
+elevation:--
+
+    How do men become for the most part "pure, generous, and humane"?
+    By personal, not by logical influences. They have been reared by
+    parents who had these qualities, they have lived in a society
+    which had a high tone, they have been accustomed to see just acts
+    done, to hear gentle words spoken, and the justness and the
+    gentleness have passed into their hearts, and slowly moulded their
+    habits and made their moral discernment clear; they remember
+    commands and prohibitions which it is a pleasure to obey for the
+    sake of those who gave them; often they think of those who may be
+    dead and say, "How would this action appear to him? Would he
+    approve that word or disapprove it?" To such no baseness appears a
+    small baseness because its consequences may be small, nor does the
+    yoke of law seem burdensome although it is ever on their necks,
+    nor do they dream of covering a sin by an atoning act of virtue.
+    Often in solitude they blush when some impure fancy sails across
+    the clear heaven of their minds, because they are never alone,
+    because the absent Examples, the Authorities they still revere,
+    rule not their actions only but their inmost hearts; because their
+    conscience is indeed awake and alive, representing all the
+    nobleness with which they stand in sympathy, and reporting their
+    most hidden indecorum before a public opinion of the absent and
+    the dead.
+
+    Of these two influences--that of Reason and that of Living
+    Example--which would a wise reformer reinforce? Christ chose the
+    last He gathered all men into a common relation to himself, and
+    demanded that each should set him on the pedestal of his heart,
+    giving a lower place to all other objects of worship, to father
+    and mother, to husband or wife. In him should the loyalty of all
+    hearts centre; he should be their pattern, their Authority and
+    Judge. Of him and his service should no man be ashamed, but to
+    those who acknowledged it morality should be an easy yoke, and the
+    law of right as spontaneous as the law of life; sufferings should
+    be easy to bear, and the loss of worldly friends repaired by a new
+    home in the bosom of the Christian kingdom; finally, in death
+    itself their sleep should be sweet upon whose tombstone it could
+    be written "Obdormivit in Christo."
+
+In his treatment of this part of the subject, the work of Christ as the
+true Creator, through the Christian Church, of living morality, what is
+peculiar and impressive is the way in which sympathy with Christianity
+in its antique and original form, in its most austere, unearthly,
+exacting aspects, is combined with sympathy with the practical
+realities of modern life, with its boldness, its freedom, its love of
+improvement, its love of truth. It is no common grasp which can embrace
+both so easily and so firmly. He is one of those writers whose strong
+hold on their ideas is shown by the facility with which they can afford
+to make large admissions, which are at first sight startling. Nowhere
+are more tremendous passages written than in this book about the
+corruptions of that Christianity which yet the writer holds to be the
+one hope and safeguard of mankind. He is not afraid to pursue his
+investigation independently of any inquiry into the peculiar claims to
+authority of the documents on which it rests. He at once goes to their
+substance and their facts, and the Person and Life and Character which
+they witness to. He is not afraid to put Faith on exactly the same
+footing as Life, neither higher nor lower, as the title to membership
+in the Church; a doctrine which, if it makes imperfect and rudimentary
+faith as little a disqualification as imperfect and inconsistent life,
+obviously does not exclude the further belief that deliberate heresy is
+on the same level with deliberate profligacy. But the clear sense of
+what is substantial, the power of piercing through accidents and
+conditions to the real kernel of the matter, the scornful disregard of
+all entanglement of apparent contradictions and inconsistencies, enable
+him to bring out the lesson which he finds before him with overpowering
+force. He sees before him immense mercy, immense condescension, immense
+indulgence; but there are also immense requirements--requirements not
+to be fulfilled by rule or exhausted by the lapse of time, and which
+the higher they raise men the more they exact--an immense seriousness
+and strictness, an immense care for substance and truth, to the
+disregard, if necessary, of the letter and the form. The "Dispensation
+of the Spirit" has seldom had an interpreter more in earnest and more
+determined to see meaning in his words. We have room but for two
+illustrations. He is combating the notion that the work of Christianity
+and the Church nowadays is with the good, and that it is waste of hope
+and strength to try to reclaim the bad and the lost:--
+
+    Once more, however, the world may answer, Christ may be consistent
+    in this, but is he wise? It may be true that he does demand an
+    enthusiasm, and that such an enthusiasm may be capable of
+    awakening the moral sense in hearts in which it seemed dead. But
+    if, notwithstanding this demand, only a very few members of the
+    Christian Church are capable of the enthusiasm, what use in
+    imposing on the whole body a task which the vast majority are not
+    qualified to perform? Would it not be well to recognise the fact
+    which we cannot alter, and to abstain from demanding from frail
+    human nature what human nature cannot render? Would it not be well
+    for the Church to impose upon its ordinary members only ordinary
+    duties? When the Bernard or the Whitefield appears let her by all
+    means find occupation for him. Let her in such cases boldly invade
+    the enemy's country. But in ordinary times would it not be well
+    for her to confine herself to more modest and practicable
+    undertakings? There is much for her to do even though she should
+    honestly confess herself unable to reclaim the lost. She may
+    reclaim the young, administer reproof to slight lapses, maintain a
+    high standard of virtue, soften manners, diffuse enlightenment.
+    Would it not be well for her to adapt her ends to her means?
+
+    No, it would not be well; it would be fatal to do so; and Christ
+    meant what he said, and said what was true, when he pronounced the
+    Enthusiasm of Humanity to be everything, and the absence of it to
+    be the absence of everything. The world understands its own
+    routine well enough; what it does not understand is the mode of
+    changing that routine. It has no appreciation of the nature or
+    measure of the power of enthusiasm, and on this matter it learns
+    nothing from experience, but after every fresh proof of that
+    power, relapses from its brief astonishment into its old
+    ignorance, and commits precisely the same miscalculation on the
+    next occasion. The power of enthusiasm is, indeed, far from being
+    unlimited; in some cases it is very small....
+
+    But one power enthusiasm has almost without limit--the power of
+    propagating itself; and it was for this that Christ depended on
+    it. He contemplated a Church in which the Enthusiasm of Humanity
+    should not be felt by two or three only, but widely. In whatever
+    heart it might be kindled, he calculated that it would pass
+    rapidly into other hearts, and that as it can make its heat felt
+    outside the Church, so it would preserve the Church itself from
+    lukewarmncss. For a lukewarm Church he would not condescend to
+    legislate, nor did he regard it as at all inevitable that the
+    Church should become lukewarm. He laid it as a duty upon the
+    Church to reclaim the lost, because he did not think it utopian to
+    suppose that the Church might be not in its best members only, but
+    through its whole body, inspired by that ardour of humanity that
+    can charm away the bad passions of the wildest heart, and open to
+    the savage and the outlaw lurking in moral wildernesses an
+    entrancing view of the holy and tranquil order that broods over
+    the streets and palaces of the city of God....
+
+    Christianity is an enthusiasm or it is nothing; and if there
+    sometimes appear in the history of the Church instances of a tone
+    which is pure and high without being enthusiastic, of a mood of
+    Christian feeling which is calmly favourable to virtue without
+    being victorious against vice, it will probably be found that all
+    that is respectable in such a mood is but the slowly-subsiding
+    movement of an earlier enthusiasm, and all that is produced by the
+    lukewarmness of the time itself is hypocrisy and corrupt
+    conventionalism.
+
+    Christianity, then, would sacrifice its divinity if it abandoned
+    its missionary character and became a mere educational
+    institution. Surely this Article of Conversion is the true
+    _articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae_. When the power of
+    reclaiming the lost dies out of the Church, it ceases to be the
+    Church. It may remain a useful institution, though it is most
+    likely to become an immoral and mischievous one. Where the power
+    remains, there, whatever is wanting, it may still be said that
+    "the tabernacle of God is with men."
+
+One more passage about those who in all Churches and sects think that
+all that Christ meant by His call was to give them a means to do what
+the French call _faire son salut_:--
+
+    It appears throughout the Sermon on the Mount that there was a
+    class of persons whom Christ regarded with peculiar aversion--the
+    persons who call themselves one thing and are another. He
+    describes them by a word which originally meant an "actor."
+    Probably it may in Christ's time have already become current in
+    the sense which we give to the word "hypocrite." But no doubt
+    whenever it was used the original sense of the word was distinctly
+    remembered. And in this Sermon, whenever Christ denounces any
+    vice, it is with the words "Be not you like the actors." In common
+    with all great reformers, Christ felt that honesty in word and
+    deed was the fundamental virtue; dishonesty, including
+    affectation, self-consciousness, love of stage effect, the one
+    incurable vice. Our thoughts, words, and deeds are to be of a
+    piece. For example, if we would pray to God, let us go into some
+    inner room where none but God shall see us; to pray at the corner
+    of the streets, where the passing crowd may admire our devotion,
+    is to _act_ a prayer. If we would keep down the rebellious flesh
+    by fasting, this concerns ourselves only; it is acting to parade
+    before the world our self-mortification. And if we would put down
+    sin let us put it down in ourselves first; it is only the actor
+    who begins by frowning at it in others. But there are subtler
+    forms of hypocrisy, which Christ does not denounce, probably
+    because they have sprung since out of the corruption of a subtler
+    creed. The hypocrite of that age wanted simply money or credit
+    with the people. His ends were those of the vulgar, though his
+    means were different Christ endeavoured to cure both alike of
+    their vulgarity by telling them of other riches and another
+    happiness laid up in heaven. Some, of course, would neither
+    understand nor regard his words, others would understand and
+    receive them. But a third class would receive them without
+    understanding them, and instead of being cured of their avarice
+    and sensuality, would simply transfer them to new objects of
+    desire. Shrewd enough to discern Christ's greatness, instinctively
+    believing what he said to be true, they would set out with a
+    triumphant eagerness in pursuit of the heavenly riches, and laugh
+    at the short-sighted and weak-minded speculator who contented
+    himself with the easy but insignificant profits of a worldly life.
+    They would practise assiduously the rules by which Christ said
+    heaven was to be won. They would patiently turn the left cheek,
+    indefatigibly walk the two miles, they would bless with effusion
+    those who cursed them, and pray fluently for those who used them
+    spitefully. To love their enemies, to love any one, they would
+    certainly find impossible, but the outward signs of love might
+    easily be learnt. And thus there would arise a new class of
+    actors, not like those whom Christ denounced, exhibiting before an
+    earthly audience and receiving their pay from human managers, but
+    hoping to be paid for their performance out of the incorruptible
+    treasures, and to impose by their dramatic talent upon their
+    Father in heaven.
+
+We have said that one peculiarity of this work is the connection which
+is kept in view from the first between the Founder and His work;
+between Christ and the Christian Church. He finds it impossible to
+speak of Him without that still existing witness of His having come,
+which is only less wonderful and unique than Himself. This is where,
+for the present, he leaves the subject:--
+
+    For the New Jerusalem, as we witness it, is no more exempt from
+    corruption than was the Old.... First the rottenness of dying
+    superstitions, their barbaric manners, their intellectualism
+    preferring system and debate to brotherhood, strangling
+    Christianity with theories and framing out of it a charlatan's
+    philosophy which madly tries to stop the progress of science--all
+    these corruptions have in the successive ages of its long life
+    infected the Church, and many new and monstrous perversions of
+    individual character have disgraced it. The creed which makes
+    human nature richer and larger makes men at the same time capable
+    of profounder sins; admitted into a holier sanctuary, they are
+    exposed to the temptation of a greater sacrilege; awakened to the
+    sense of new obligations, they sometimes lose their simple respect
+    for the old ones; saints that have resisted the subtlest
+    temptations sometimes begin again, as it were, by yielding without
+    a struggle to the coarsest; hypocrisy has become tenfold more
+    ingenious and better supplied with disguises; in short, human
+    nature has inevitably developed downwards as well as upwards, and
+    if the Christian ages be compared with those of heathenism, they
+    are found worse as well as better, and it is possible to make it a
+    question whether mankind has gained on the whole....
+
+    But the triumph of the Christian Church is that it is
+    _there_--that the most daring of all speculative dreams, instead
+    of being found impracticable, has been carried into effect, and
+    when carried into effect, instead of being confined to a few
+    select spirits, has spread itself over a vast space of the earth's
+    surface, and when thus diffused, instead of giving place after an
+    age or two to something more adapted to a later time, has endured
+    for two thousand years, and at the end of two thousand years,
+    instead of lingering as a mere wreck spared by the tolerance of
+    the lovers of the past, still displays vigour and a capacity of
+    adjusting itself to new conditions, and lastly, in all the
+    transformations it undergoes, remains visibly the same thing and
+    inspired by its Founder's universal and unquenchable spirit.
+
+    It is in this and not in any freedom from abuses that the divine
+    power of Christianity appears. Again, it is in this, and not in
+    any completeness or all-sufficiency....
+
+    But the achievement of Christ in founding by his single will and
+    power a structure so durable and so universal, is like no other
+    achievement which history records. The masterpieces of the men of
+    action are coarse and common in comparison with it, and the
+    masterpieces of speculation flimsy and insubstantial. When we
+    speak of it the commonplaces of admiration fail us altogether.
+    Shall we speak of the originality of the design, of the skill
+    displayed in the execution? All such terms are inadequate.
+    Originality and contriving skill operated indeed, but, as it were,
+    implicitly. The creative effort which produced that against which,
+    it is said, the gates of hell shall not prevail, cannot be
+    analysed. No architects' designs were furnished for the New
+    Jerusalem, no committee drew up rules for the Universal
+    Commonwealth. If in the works of Nature we can trace the
+    indications of calculation, of a struggle with difficulties, of
+    precaution, of ingenuity, then in Christ's work it may be that the
+    same indications occur. But these inferior and secondary powers
+    were not consciously exercised; they were implicitly present in
+    the manifold yet single creative act. The inconceivable work was
+    done in calmness; before the eyes of men it was noiselessly
+    accomplished, attracting little attention. Who can describe that
+    which unites men? Who has entered into the formation of speech
+    which is the symbol of their union? Who can describe exhaustively
+    the origin of civil society? He who can do these things can
+    explain the origin of the Christian Church. For others it must be
+    enough to say, "the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed." No
+    man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded
+    together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard
+    the chink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended _out of heaven from
+    God_.
+
+And here we leave this remarkable book. It seems to us one of those
+which permanently influence opinion, not so much by argument as such,
+as by opening larger views of the familiar and the long-debated, by
+deepening the ordinary channels of feeling, and by bringing men back to
+seriousness and rekindling their admiration, their awe, their love,
+about what they know best. We have not dwelt on minute criticisms about
+points to which exception might be taken. We have not noticed even
+positions on which, without further explanation, we should more or less
+widely disagree. The general scope of it, and the seriousness as well
+as the grandeur and power with which the main idea is worked out, seem
+to make mere secondary objections intolerable. It is a fragment, with
+the disadvantages of a fragment. What is put before us is far from
+complete, and it needs to be completed. In part at least an answer has
+been given to the question _what_ Christ was; but the question remains,
+not less important, and of which the answer is only here foreshadowed,
+_who_ He was. But so far as it goes, what it does is this: in the face
+of all attempts to turn Christianity into a sentiment or a philosophy,
+it asserts, in a most remarkable manner, a historical religion and a
+historical Church; but it also seeks, in a manner equally remarkable,
+to raise and elevate the thoughts of all, on all sides, about Christ,
+as He showed Himself in the world, and about what Christianity was
+meant to be; to touch new springs of feeling; to carry back the Church
+to its "hidden fountains," and pierce through the veils which hide from
+us the reality of the wonders in which it began.
+
+The book is indeed a protest against the stiffness of all cast-iron
+systems, and a warning against trusting in what is worn out. But it
+shows how the modern world, so complex, so refined, so wonderful, is,
+in all that it accounts good, but a reflection of what is described in
+the Gospels, and its civilisation, but an application of the laws of
+Christ, changing, it may be, indefinitely in outward form, but
+depending on their spirit as its ever-living spring. If we have
+misunderstood this book, and its cautious understatements are not
+understatements at all, but represent the limits beyond which the
+writer does not go, we can only say again it is one-of the strangest
+among books. If we have not misunderstood him, we have before us a
+writer who has a right to claim deference from those who think deepest
+and know most, when he pleads before them that not Philosophy can save
+and reclaim the world, but Faith in a Divine Person who is worthy of
+it, allegiance to a Divine Society which He founded, and union of
+hearts in the object for which He created it.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE AUTHOR OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ON A NEW REFORMATION[12]
+
+
+  [12]
+  _Guardian_, 6th March 1889.
+
+Mrs. Ward, in the _Nineteenth Century_, develops with warmth and force
+the theme and serious purpose of _Robert Elsmere_; and she does so,
+using the same literary method which she used, certainly with effect,
+in the story itself. Every age has its congenial fashion of discussing
+the great questions which affect, or seem to affect, the fate of
+mankind. According to the time and its circumstances, it is a _Summa
+Theologiae_, or a _Divina Commedia_, or a _Novum Organum_, or a
+Calvin's _Institutes_, or a Locke _On the Understanding_, or an
+_Encyclopedia_, or a _Candide_, which sets people thinking more than
+usual and comparing their thoughts. Long ago in the history of human
+questioning, Plato and Cicero discovered the advantages over dry
+argument of character and easy debate, and so much of story as clothed
+abstractions and hard notions with human life and affections. It is a
+weighty precedent. And as the prophetess of a "New Reformation" Mrs.
+Ward has reverted to what is substantially the same method. She is
+within her right. We do not blame her for putting her argument into the
+shape of a novel, and bringing out the points of her case in the trials
+and passionate utterances of imaginary persons, or in a conversation
+about their mental history. But she must take the good with the bad.
+Such a method has its obvious advantages, in freedom, and convenience,
+and range of illustration. It has its disadvantages. The dealer in
+imagination may easily become the unconscious slave of imagination;
+and, living in a self-constructed world, may come to forget that there
+is any other; and the temptation to unfairness becomes enormous when
+all who speak, on one side or the other, only speak as you make or let
+them speak.
+
+It is to imagination that _Robert Elsmere_ makes its main appeal,
+undoubtedly a powerful and pathetic one. It bids us ask ourselves what,
+with the phenomena before us, we can conceive possible and real. It
+implies, of course, much learning, with claims of victory in the
+spheres of history and science, with names great in criticism, of whom
+few readers probably can estimate the value, though all may be affected
+by the formidable array. But it is not in these things, as with a book
+like _Supernatural Religion_, that the gist of the argument lies. The
+alleged results of criticism are taken for granted; whether rightly or
+wrongly the great majority of readers certainly cannot tell. But then
+the effect of the book, or the view which it represents, begins.
+Imagine a man, pure-minded, earnest, sensitive, self-devoted, plunged
+into the tremendous questions of our time. Bit by bit he finds what he
+thought to be the truth of truths breaking away. In the darkness and
+silence with which nature covers all beyond the world of experience he
+thought he had found light and certainty from on high. He thought that
+he had assurances and pledges which could not fail him, that God was in
+the world, governed it, loved it, showed Himself in it He thought he
+had a great and authentic story to fall back upon, and a Sacred Book,
+which was its guaranteed witness, and by which God still spoke to his
+soul. He thought that, whatever he did not know, he knew this, and this
+was a hope to live and die in; with all that he saw round him, of pain
+and sin and misery, here was truth on which he could rest secure, in
+his fight with evil. Like the rest of us, he knew that terrible,
+far-reaching, heart-searching questions were abroad; that all that to
+him was sacred and unapproachable in its sanctity was not so to
+all--was not so, perhaps, to men whom he felt to be stronger and more
+knowing than himself--was not so, perhaps, to some who seemed to him to
+stand, in character and purpose, at a moral height above him. Still he
+thought himself in full possession of the truth which God had given
+him, till at length, in one way or another, the tide of questioning
+reached him. Then begins the long agony. He hears that what he never
+doubted is said to be incredible, and is absolutely given up. He finds
+himself bin-rounded by hostile powers of thought, by an atmosphere
+which insensibly but irresistibly governs opinion, by doubt and denial
+in the air, by keen and relentless intellect, before which he can only
+he silent; he sees and hears all round the disintegrating process going
+on in the creeds and institutions and intellectual statements of
+Christianity. He is assured, and sees some reason to believe it, that
+the intellect of the day is against him and his faith; and further,
+that unreality taints everything, belief and reasoning, and profession
+and conduct Step by step he is forced from one position and another;
+the process was a similar and a familiar one when the great Roman
+secession was going on fifty years ago. But now, in Robert Elsmere,
+comes the upshot. He is not landed, as some logical minds have been,
+which have gone through the same process, in mere unbelief or
+indifference. He is too good for that. Something of his old
+Christianity is too deeply engrained in him. He cannot go back from the
+moral standard to which it accustomed him. He will serve God in a
+Christian spirit and after the example of Christ, though not in what
+can claim to be called a Christian way. He is the beginner of one more
+of the numberless attempts to find a new mode of religion, purer than
+any of the old ones could be--of what Mrs. Ward calls in her new paper
+"A New Reformation."
+
+In this paper, which is more distinctly a dialogue on the Platonic
+model, she isolates the main argument on which the story was based, but
+without any distinct reference to any of the criticisms on her book.
+_Robert Elsmere_ rests on the achievements of historic criticism,
+chiefly German criticism. From the traditional, old-fashioned Christian
+way of regarding and using the old records which we call the Bible, the
+ground, we are told, is hopelessly and for ever cut away by German
+historical criticism. And the difference between the old and the modern
+way of regarding and using them is expressed by the difference between
+_bad translation_ and _good_; the old way of reading, quoting, and
+estimating ancient documents of all kinds was purblind, lifeless,
+narrow, mechanical, whereas the modern comparative and critical method
+not only is more sure in important questions of authenticity, but puts
+true life and character and human feeling and motives into the
+personages who wrote these documents, and of whom they speak. These
+books were entirely misunderstood, even if people knew the meaning of
+their words; now, at last, we can enter into their real spirit and
+meaning. And where such a change of method and point of view, as
+regards these documents, is wholesale and sweeping, it involves a
+wholesale and sweeping change in all that is founded on them. Revised
+ideas about the Bible mean a revised and reconstructed Christianity--"A
+New Reformation."
+
+Mrs. Ward lays more stress than everybody will agree to on what she
+likens to the difference between _good translation_ and _bad_, in
+dealing with the materials of history. Doubtless, in our time, the
+historical imagination, like the historical conscience, has been
+awakened. In history, as in other things, the effort after the real and
+the living has been very marked; it has sometimes resulted, as we know,
+in that parading of the real which we call the realistic. The mode of
+telling a story or stating a case varies, even characteristically, from
+age to age, from Macaulay to Hume, from Hume to Rapin, from Rapin to
+Holinshed or Hall; but after all, the story in its main features
+remains, after allowing for the differences in the mode of presenting
+it. German criticism, to which we are expected to defer, has its mode.
+It combines two elements--a diligent, searching, lawyer-like habit of
+cross-examination, laborious, complete and generally honest, which,
+when it is not spiteful or insolent, deserves all the praise it
+receives; but with it a sense of the probable, in dealing with the
+materials collected, and a straining after attempts to construct
+theories and to give a vivid reality to facts and relations, which are
+not always so admirable; which lead, in fact, sometimes to the height
+of paradox, or show mere incapacity to deal with the truth and depth of
+life, or make use of a poor and mean standard--_mesquin_ would be the
+French word--in the interpretation of actions and aims. It has
+impressed on us the lesson--not to be forgotten when we read Mrs.
+Ward's lists of learned names--that weight and not number is the test
+of good evidence. German learning is decidedly imposing. But after all
+there are Germans and Germans; and with all that there has been of
+great in German work there has been also a large proportion of what is
+bad--conceited, arrogant, shallow, childish. German criticism has been
+the hunting-ground of an insatiable love of sport--may we not say,
+without irreverence, the scene of the discovery of a good many mares'
+nests? When the question is asked, why all this mass of criticism has
+made so little impression on English thought, the answer is, because of
+its extravagant love of theorising, because of its divergences and
+variations, because of its negative results. Those who have been so
+eager to destroy have not been so successful in construction. Clever
+theories come to nothing; streams which began with much noise at last
+lose themselves in the sand. Undoubtedly, it presents a very important,
+and, in many ways, interesting class of intellectual phenomena, among
+the many groups of such inquiries, moral, philosophical, scientific,
+political, social, of which the world is full, and of which no sober
+thinker expects to see the end. If this vaunted criticism is still left
+to scholars, it is because it is still in the stage in which only
+scholars are competent to examine and judge it; it is not fit to be a
+factor in the practical thought and life of the mass of mankind.
+Answers, and not merely questions, are what we want, who have to live,
+and work, and die. Criticism has pulled about the Bible without
+restraint or scruple. We are all of us steeped in its daring
+assumptions and shrewd objections. Have its leaders yet given us an
+account which it is reasonable to receive, clear, intelligible,
+self-consistent and consistent with all the facts, of what this
+mysterious book is?
+
+Meanwhile, in the face of theories and conjectures and negative
+arguments, there is something in the world which is fact, and hard
+fact. The Christian Church is the most potent fact in the most
+important ages of the world's progress. It is an institution like the
+world itself, which has grown up by its own strength and according to
+its own principle of life, full of good and evil, having as the law of
+its fate to be knocked about in the stern development of events,
+exposed, like human society, to all kinds of vicissitudes and
+alternations, giving occasion to many a scandal, and shaking the faith
+and loyalty of many a son, showing in ample measure the wear and tear
+of its existence, battered, injured, sometimes degenerate, sometimes
+improved, in one way or another, since those dim and long distant days
+when its course began; but showing in all these ways what a real thing
+it is, never in the extremity of storms and ruin, never in the deepest
+degradation of its unfaithfulness, losing hold of its own central
+unchanging faith, and never in its worst days of decay and corruption
+losing hold of the power of self-correction and hope of recovery.
+_Solvitur ambulando_ is an argument to which Mrs. Ward appeals, in
+reply to doubts about the solidity of the "New Reformation." It could
+be urged more modestly if the march of the "New Reformation" had lasted
+for even half of one of the Christian centuries. The Church is in the
+world, as the family is in the world, as the State is in the world, as
+morality is in the world, a fact of the same order and greatness. Like
+these it has to make its account with the "all-dissolving" assaults of
+human thought. Like these it has to prove itself by living, and it does
+do so. In all its infinite influences and ministries, in infinite
+degrees and variations, it is the public source of light and good and
+hope. If there are select and aristocratic souls who can do without it,
+or owe it nothing, the multitude of us cannot. And the Christian Church
+is founded on a definite historic fact, that Jesus Christ who was
+crucified rose from the dead; and, coming from such an author, it comes
+to us, bringing with it the Bible. The fault of a book like _Robert
+Elsmere_ is that it is written with a deliberate ignoring that these
+two points are not merely important, but absolutely fundamental, in the
+problems with which it deals. With these not faced and settled it is
+like looking out at a prospect through a window of which all the glass
+is ribbed and twisted, distorting everything. It may be that even yet
+we imperfectly understand our wondrous Bible. It may be that we have
+yet much to learn about it. It may be that there is much that is very
+difficult about it. Let us reverently and fearlessly learn all we can
+about it. Let us take care not to misuse it, as it has been terribly
+misused. But coming to us from the company and with the sanction of
+Christ risen, it never can be merely like other books. A so-called
+Christianity, ignoring or playing with Christ's resurrection, and using
+the Bible as a sort of Homer, may satisfy a class of clever and
+cultivated persons. It may be to them the parent of high and noble
+thoughts, and readily lend itself to the service of mankind. But it is
+well in so serious a matter not to confuse things. This new religion
+may borrow from Christianity as it may borrow from Plato, or from
+Buddhism, or Confucianism, or even Islam. But it is not Christianity.
+_Robert Elsmere_ may be true to life, as representing one of those
+tragedies which happen in critical moments of history. But a
+Christianity which tells us to think of Christ doing good, but to
+forget and put out of sight Christ risen from the dead, is not true to
+life. It is as delusive to the conscience and the soul as it is
+illogical to reason.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+RENAN'S "VIE DE JESUS"[13]
+
+
+  [13]
+  _Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre I.--_Vie de Jesus_.
+  Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_, 9th September 1863.
+
+Unbelief is called upon nowadays, as well as belief, to give its
+account of the origin of that undeniable and most important fact which
+we call the Christian religion. And if it is true that in some respects
+the circumstances under which the controversy is carried on are, as it
+has been alleged, more than heretofore favourable to unbelief, it is
+also true that in some other respects the case of unbelief has
+difficulties which it had not once. It has to accept and admit, if it
+wishes to gain a favourable hearing from the present generation, the
+unique and surpassing moral grandeur, depth, and attractiveness of
+Christianity. The polemic method which set Christianity in broad
+contrast with what was supposed to be best and highest in human nature,
+and therefore found no difficulty in tracing to a bad source what was
+itself represented to be bad, is not a method suited to the ideas and
+feelings of our time; and the sneers and sarcasms of the last century,
+provoked by abuses and inconsistencies which have since received their
+ample and memorable punishment, cease to produce any effect on readers
+of the present day, except to call forth a passing feeling of
+repugnance at what is shallow and profane, mixed, it may be, sometimes,
+with an equally passing admiration for what is witty and brilliant.
+Even in M. Renan's view, Voltaire has done his work, and is out of
+date. Those who now attack Christianity have to attack it under the
+disadvantage of the preliminary admission that its essential and
+distinguishing elements are, on the whole, in harmony and not in
+discordance with the best conceptions of human duty and life, and that
+its course and progress have been, at any rate, concurrent with all
+that is best and most hopeful in human history. First allowing that as
+a fact it contains in it things than which we cannot imagine anything
+better, and without which we should never have reached to where we are,
+they then have to dispute its divine claims. No man could write
+persuasively on religion now, _against_ it any more than _for_ it, who
+did not show that he was fully penetrated not only with its august and
+beneficent aspect, but with the essential and everlasting truths which,
+in however imperfect shapes, or whencesoever derived, are embodied in
+it and are ministered by it to society.
+
+That Christianity is, as a matter of fact, a successful and a living
+religion, in a degree absolutely without parallel in any other
+religion, is the point from which its assailants have now to start.
+They have also to take account of the circumstance, to the recognition
+of which the whole course of modern thought and inquiry has brought us,
+that it has been successful, not by virtue merely of any outward and
+accidental favouring circumstances, but of its intrinsic power and of
+principles which are inseparable from its substance. This being the
+condition of the question, those who deny its claim to a direct Divine
+origin have to frame their theory of it so as to account, on principles
+supposed to be common to it and other religions, not merely for its
+rise and its conquests, but for those broad and startling differences
+which separate it, in character and in effects, from all other known
+religions. They have to show how that which is instinct with
+never-dying truth sprang out of what was false and mistaken, if not
+corrupt; how that which alone has revealed God to man's conscience had
+no other origin than what in other instances has led men through
+enthusiasm and imposture to a barren or a mischievous superstition.
+
+Such an attempt is the work before us--a work destined, probably, both
+from its ability and power and from its faults, to be for modern France
+what the work of Strauss was for Germany, the standard expression of an
+unbelief which shrinks with genuine distaste from the coarse and
+negative irreligion of older infidelity, and which is too refined, too
+profound and sympathetic in its views of human nature, to be insensible
+to those numberless points in which as a fact Christianity has given
+expression to the best and highest thoughts that man can have. Strauss,
+to account for what we see, imagined an idea, or a set of ideas,
+gradually worked out into the shape of a history, of which scarcely
+anything can be taken as real matter of fact, except the bare existence
+of the person who was clothed in the process of time with the
+attributes created by the idealising legend. Such a view is too vague
+and indistinct to satisfy French minds. A theory of this sort, to find
+general acceptance in France, must start with concrete history, and not
+be history held in solution in the cloudy shapes of myths which vanish
+as soon as touched. M. Renan's process is in the main the reverse of
+Strauss's. He undertakes to extract the real history recorded in the
+Gospels; and not only so, but to make it even more palpable and
+interesting, if not more wonderful, than it seems at first sight in the
+original records, by removing the crust of mistake and exaggeration
+which has concealed the true character of what the narrative records;
+by rewriting it according to those canons of what is probable and
+intelligible in human life and capacity which are recognised in the
+public whom he addresses.
+
+Two of these canons govern the construction of the book. One of them is
+the assumption that in no part of the history of man is the
+supernatural to be admitted. This, of course, is not peculiar to M.
+Renan, though he lays it down with such emphasis in all his works, and
+is so anxious to bring it into distinct notice on every occasion, that
+it is manifestly one which he is desirous to impress on all who read
+him, as one of the ultimate and unquestionable foundations of all
+historical inquiry. The other canon is one of moral likelihood, and it
+is, that it is credible and agreeable to what we gather from
+experience, that the highest moral elevation ever attained by man
+should have admitted along with it, and for its ends, conscious
+imposture. On the first of these assumptions, all that is miraculous in
+the Gospel narratives is, not argued about, or, except perhaps in one
+instance--the raising of Lazarus--attempted to be accounted for or
+explained, but simply left out and ignored. On the second, the fact
+from which there is no escape--that He whom M. Renan venerates with a
+sincerity which no one can doubt as the purest and greatest of moral
+reformers, did claim power from God to work miracles--is harmonised
+with the assumption that the claim could not possibly have been a true
+one.
+
+M. Renan professes to give an historical account of the way in which
+the deepest, purest, most enduring religious principles known among men
+were, not merely found out and announced, but propagated and impressed
+upon the foremost and most improved portions of mankind, by the power
+of a single character. It is impossible, without speaking of Jesus of
+Nazareth as Christians are used to do, to speak of His character and of
+the results of His appearance in loftier terms than this professed
+unbeliever in His Divine claims. But when the account is drawn out in
+detail, of a cause alleged to be sufficient to produce such effects,
+the apparent inadequacy of it is most startling. When we think of what
+Christianity is and has done, and that, in M. Renan's view, Christ, the
+Christ whom he imagines and describes, is all in all to Christianity,
+and then look to what he conceives to have been the original spring and
+creative impulse of its achievements, the first feeling is that no
+shifts that belief has sometimes been driven to, to keep within the
+range of the probable, are greater than those accepted by unbelief, in
+its most enlightened and reflecting representations. To suppose such an
+one as M. Renan paints, changing the whole course of history,
+overturning and converting the world, and founding the religion which
+M. Renan thinks the lasting religion of mankind, involves a force upon
+our imagination and reason to which it is not easy to find a parallel.
+
+His view is that a Galilean peasant, in advance of his neighbours and
+countrymen only in the purity, force, and singleness of purpose with
+which he realised the highest moral truths of Jewish religious wisdom,
+first charming a few simple provincials by the freshness and native
+beauty of his lessons, was then led on, partly by holy zeal against
+falsehood and wickedness, partly by enthusiastic delusions as to his
+own mission and office, to attack the institutions of Judaism, and
+perished in the conflict--and that this was the cause why Christianity
+and Christendom came to be and exist. This is the explanation which a
+great critical historian, fully acquainted with the history of other
+religions, presents, as a satisfactory one, of a phenomenon so
+astonishing and unique as that of a religion which has suited itself
+with undiminished vitality to the changes, moral, social, and
+political, which have marked the eighteen centuries of European
+history. There have been other enthusiasts for goodness and truth, more
+or less like the character which M. Renan draws in his book, but they
+have never yet founded a universal religion, or one which had the
+privilege of perpetual youth and unceasing self-renovation. There have
+been other great and imposing religions, commanding the allegiance for
+century after century of millions of men; but who will dare assert that
+any of these religions, that of Sakya-Mouni, of Mahomet, or that of the
+Vedas, could possibly be the religion, or satisfy the religious ideas
+and needs, of the civilised West?
+
+When M. Renan comes to detail he is as strangely insensible to what seem
+at first sight the simplest demands of probability. As it were by a sort
+of reaction to the minute realising of particulars which has been in
+vogue among some Roman Catholic writers, M. Renan realises too--realises
+with no less force and vividness, and, according to his point of view,
+with no less affectionate and tender interest. He popularises the
+Gospels; but not for a religious set of readers--nor, we must add, for
+readers of thought and sense, whether interested for or against
+Christianity, but for a public who study life in the subtle and highly
+wrought novels of modern times. He appeals from what is probable to
+those representations of human nature which aspire to pass beyond the
+conventional and commonplace, and especially he dwells on neglected and
+unnoticed examples of what is sweet and soft and winning. But it is hard
+to recognise the picture he has drawn in the materials out of which he
+has composed it. The world is tolerably familiar with them. If there is
+a characteristic, consciously or unconsciously acknowledged in the
+Gospel records, it is that of the gravity, the plain downright
+seriousness, the laborious earnestness, impressed from first to last on
+the story. When we turn from these to his pages it is difficult to
+exaggerate the astounding impression which his epithets and descriptions
+have on the mind. We are told that there is a broad distinction between
+the early Galilean days of hope in our Lord's ministry, and the later
+days of disappointment and conflict; and that if we look, we shall find
+in Galilee the "_fin et joyeux moraliste_," full of a "_conversation
+pleine de gaiete et de charme_," of "_douce gaiete et aimables
+plaisanteries_," with a "_predication suave et douce, toute pleine de la
+nature et du parfum des champs_," creating out of his originality of
+mind his "_innocents aphorismes_," and the "_genre d'elicieux_" of
+parabolic teaching; "_le charmant docteur qui pardonnait a tous pourvu
+qu'on l'aimat_." He lived in what was then an earthly paradise, in "_la
+joyeuse Galilee_" in the midst of the "_nature ravissante_" which gave
+to everything about the Sea of Galilee "_un tour idyllique et
+charmant_." So the history of Christianity at its birth is a
+"_delicieuse pastorale_" an "_idylle_," a "_milieu enivrant_" of joy and
+hope. The master was surrounded by a "_bande de joyeux enfants_," a
+"_troupe gaie et vagabonde_," whose existence in the open air was a
+"perpetual enchantment." The disciples were "_ces petits comites de
+bonnes gens_," very simple, very credulous, and like their country full
+of a "_sentiment gai et tendre de la vie_," and of an "_imagination
+riante_." Everything is spoken of as "delicious"--"_delicieuse
+pastorale," "delicieuse beaute," "delicieuses sentences," "delicieuse
+theologie d'amour_." Among the "tender and delicate souls of the
+North"--it is not quite thus that Josephus describes the Galileans--was
+set up an "_aimable communisme_." Is it possible to imagine a more
+extravagant distortion than the following, both in its general effect
+and in the audacious generalisation of a very special incident, itself
+inaccurately conceived of?--
+
+    Il parcourait ainsi la Galilee au milieu _d'une fete perpetuelle_.
+    Il se servait d'une mule, monture en Orient si bonne et si sure,
+    et dont le grand oeil noir, ombrage de longs cils, a beaucoup de
+    douceur. Ses disciples deployarent quelquefois autour de lui une
+    pompe rustique, dont leurs vetements, tenant lieu de tapis,
+    faisaient les frais. Ils les mettaient sur la mule qui le portait,
+    ou les etendaient a terre sur son passage.
+
+History has seen strange hypotheses; but of all extravagant notions,
+that one that the world has been conquered by what was originally an
+idyllic gipsying party is the most grotesque. That these "_petits
+comites de bonnes gens_" though influenced by a great example and
+wakened out of their "delicious pastoral" by a heroic death, should
+have been able to make an impression on Judaean faith, Greek intellect,
+and Roman civilisation, and to give an impulse to mankind which has
+lasted to this day, is surely one of the most incredible hypotheses
+ever accepted, under the desperate necessity of avoiding an unwelcome
+alternative.
+
+M. Renan is willing to adopt everything in the Gospel history except
+what is miraculous. If he is difficult to satisfy as to the physical
+possibility or the proof of miracles, at least he is not hard to
+satisfy on points of moral likelihood; and he draws on his ample power
+of supposing the combination of moral opposites in order to get rid of
+the obstinate and refractory supernatural miracle. To some extent,
+indeed, he avails himself of that inexhaustible resource of unlimited
+guessing, by means of which he reverses the whole history, and makes it
+take a shape which it is hard to recognise in its original records. The
+feeding of the five thousand, the miracle described by all the four
+Evangelists, is thus curtly disposed of:--"Il se retira au desert.
+Beaucoup de monde l'y suivit. _Grace a une extreme frugalite_ la troupe
+sainte y vecut; _on crut naturellement_ voir en cela un miracle." This
+is all he has to say. But miracles are too closely interwoven with the
+whole texture of the Gospel history to be, as a whole, thus disposed
+of. He has, of course, to admit that miracles are so mixed up with it
+that mere exaggeration is not a sufficient account of them. But be bids
+us remember that the time was one of great credulity, of slackness and
+incapacity in dealing with matters of evidence, a time when it might be
+said that there was an innocent disregard of exact and literal truth
+where men's souls and affections were deeply interested. But, even
+supposing that this accounted for a belief in certain miracles growing
+up--which it does not, for the time was not one of mere childlike and
+uninquiring belief, but was as perfectly familiar as we are with the
+notion of false claims to miraculous power which could not stand
+examination--still this does not meet the great difficulty of all, to
+which he is at last brought. It is undeniable that our Lord professed
+to work miracles. They were not merely attributed to Him by those who
+came after Him. If we accept in any degree the Gospel account, He not
+only wrought miracles, but claimed to do so; and M. Renan admits
+it--that is, he admits that the highest, purest, most Divine person
+ever seen on earth (for all this he declares in the most unqualified
+terms) stooped to the arts of Simon Magus or Apollonius of Tyana. He
+was a "thaumaturge"--"tard et a contre-coeur"--"avec une sorte de
+mauvaise humeur"--"en cachette"--"malgre lui"--"sentant le vanite de
+l'opinion"; but still a "thaumaturge." Moreover, He was so almost of
+necessity; for M. Renan holds that without the support of an alleged
+supernatural character and power, His work must have perished.
+Everything, to succeed and be realised, must, we are told, be fortified
+with something of alloy. We are reminded of the "loi fatale qui
+condamne l'idee a dechoir des qu'elle cherche a convertir les hommes."
+"Concevoir de bien, en efifet, ne suffit pas; il faut le faire reussir
+parmi les hommes. Pour cela, des voies moins pures sont necessaires."
+If the Great Teacher had kept to the simplicity of His early lessons,
+He would have been greater, but "the truth would not have been
+promulgated." "He had to choose between these two alternatives, either
+renouncing his mission or becoming a 'thaumaturge.'" The miracles
+"were a violence done to him by his age, a concession which was wrung
+from him by a passing necessity." And if we feel startled at such a
+view, we are reminded that we must not measure the sincerity of
+Orientals by our own rigid and critical idea of veracity; and that
+"such is the weakness of the human mind, that the best causes are not
+usually won but by bad reasons," and that the greatest of discoverers
+and founders have only triumphed over their difficulties "by daily
+taking account of men's weakness and by not always giving the true
+reasons of the truth."
+
+    L'histoire est impossible si l'on n'admet hautement qu'il y a pour
+    la sincerite plusieurs mesures. Toutes les grandes choses se font
+    par le peuple, or on ne conduit pas le peuple qu'en se pretant a
+    ses idees. Le philosophe, qui sachant cela, s'isole et se
+    retranche dans sa noblesse, est hautement louable. Mais celui qui
+    prend l'humanite avec ses illusions et cherche a agir sur elle et
+    avec elle, ne saurait etre blame. Cesar savait fort bien qu'il
+    n'etait pas fils de Venus; la France ne serait pas ce qu'elle est
+    si l'on n'avait cru mille ans a la sainte ampoule de Reims. Il
+    nous est facile a nous autres, impuissants que nous sommes,
+    d'appeler cela mensonge, et fiers de notre timide honnetete, de
+    traiter avec dedain les heros qui out accepte dans d'autres
+    conditions la lutte de la vie. Quand nous aurons fait avec nos
+    scrupules ce qu'ils firent avec leurs mensonges, nous aurons le
+    droit d'etre pour eux severes.
+
+Now let M. Renan or any one else realise what is involved, on his
+supposition, not merely, as he says, of "illusion or madness," but of
+wilful deceit and falsehood, in the history of Lazarus, even according
+to his lame and hesitating attempt to soften it down and extenuate it;
+and then put side by side with it the terms in which M. Renan has
+summed up the moral greatness of Him of whom he writes:--
+
+    La foi, l'enthousiasme, la constance de la premiere generation
+    chretienne ne s'expliquent qu'en supposant a l'origine de tout le
+    mouvement un homme de proportions colossales.... Cette sublime
+    personne, qui chaque jour preside encore au destin du monde, il
+    est permis de l'appeler divine, non en ce sens que Jesus ait
+    absorbe tout le divin, mais en ce sens que Jesus est l'individu
+    qui a fait faire a son espece le plus grand pas vers le divin....
+    Au milieu de cette uniforme vulgarite, des colonnes s'elevent vers
+    le ciel et attestent une plus noble destinee. Jesus est la plus
+    haute de ces colonnes qui montrent a l'homme d'ou il vient et ou
+    il doit tendre. En lui s'est condense tout ce qu'il y a de bon et
+    d'eleve dans notre nature.... Quels que puissent etre les
+    phenomenes inattendus de l'avenir, Jesus ne sera pas surpasse....
+    Tous les siecles proclameront qu'entre les fils des hommes il n'en
+    est pas ne de plus grand que Jesus.
+
+And of such an one we are told that it is a natural and reasonable view
+to take, not merely that He claimed a direct communication with God,
+which disordered reason could alone excuse Him for claiming, but that
+He based His whole mission on a pretension to such supernatural powers
+as a man could not pretend to without being conscious that they were
+delusions. The conscience of that age as to veracity or imposture was
+quite clear on such a point. Jew and Greek and Roman would have
+condemned as a deceiver one who, not having the power, took on him to
+say that by the finger of God he could raise the dead. And yet to a
+conscience immeasurably above his age, it seems, according to M. Renan,
+that this might be done. It is absurd to say that we must not judge
+such a proceeding by the ideas of our more exact and truth-loving age,
+when it would have been abundantly condemned by the ideas recognised in
+the religion and civilisation of the first century.
+
+M. Renan repeatedly declares that his great aim is to save religion by
+relieving it of the supernatural. He does not argue; but instead of the
+old familiar view of the Great History, he presents an opposite theory
+of his own, framed to suit that combination of the revolutionary and
+the sentimental which just now happens to be in favour in the unbelieving
+schools. And this is the result: a representation which boldly invests
+its ideal with the highest perfections of moral goodness, strength, and
+beauty, and yet does not shrink from associating with it also--and
+that, too, as the necessary and inevitable condition of success--a
+deliberate and systematic willingness to delude and insensibility to
+untruth. This is the religion and this is the reason which appeals to
+Christ in order to condemn Christianity.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+RENAN'S "LES APOTRES"[14]
+
+
+  [14]
+  _Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre II.--_Les Apotres_.
+  Par Ernest Renan. _Saturday Review_, 14th July 1866.
+
+In his recent volume, _Les Apotres_, M. Renan has undertaken two tasks
+of very unequal difficulty. He accounts for the origin of the Christian
+belief and religion, and he writes the history of its first
+propagation. These are very different things, and to do one of them is
+by no means to do the other. M. Renan's historical sketch of the first
+steps of the Christian movement is, whatever we may think of its
+completeness and soundness, a survey of characters and facts, based on
+our ordinary experience of the ways in which men act and are
+influenced. Of course it opens questions and provokes dissent at every
+turn; but, after all, the history of a religion once introduced into
+the world is the history of the men who give it shape and preach it,
+who accept or oppose it. The spread and development of all religions
+have certain broad features in common, which admit of philosophical
+treatment simply as phenomena, and receive light from being compared
+with parallel examples of the same kind; and whether a man's historical
+estimate is right, and his picture accurate and true, depends on his
+knowledge of the facts, and his power to understand them and to make
+them understood. No one can dispute M. Renan's qualifications for being
+the historian of a religious movement. The study of religion as a
+phenomenon of human nature and activity has paramount attractions for
+him. His interest in it has furnished him with ample and varied
+materials for comparison and generalisation. He is a scholar and a man
+of learning, quick and wide in his sympathies, and he commands
+attention by the singular charm of his graceful and lucid style. When,
+therefore, he undertakes to relate how, as a matter of fact, the
+Christian Church grew up amid the circumstances of its first
+appearance, he has simply to tell the story of the progress of a
+religious cause; and this is a comparatively light task for him. But he
+also lays before us what he appears to consider an adequate account of
+the origin of the Christian belief. The Christian belief, it must be
+remembered, means, not merely the belief that there was such a person
+as he has described in his former, volume, but the belief that one who
+was crucified rose again from the dead, and lives for evermore above.
+It is in this belief that the Christian religion had its beginning;
+there is no connecting Christ and Christianity, except through the
+Resurrection. The origin, therefore, of the belief in the Resurrection,
+in the shape in which we have it, lies across M. Renan's path to
+account for; and neither the picture which he has drawn in his former
+volume, nor the history which he follows out in this, dispense him from
+the necessity of facing this essential and paramount element in the
+problem which he has to solve. He attempts to deal with this, the knot
+of the great question. But his attempt seems to us to disclose a more
+extraordinary insensibility to the real demands of the case, and to
+what we cannot help calling the pitiable inadequacy of his own
+explanation, than we could have conceived possible in so keen and
+practised a mind.
+
+The Resurrection, we repeat, bars the way in M. Renan's scheme for
+making an intelligible transition, from the life and character which he
+has sought to reproduce from the Gospels, to the first beginnings and
+preaching of Christianity. The Teacher, he says, is unique in wisdom,
+in goodness, in the height of his own moral stature and the Divine
+elevation of his aims. The religion is, with all abatements and
+imperfections, the only one known which could be the religion of
+humanity. After his portraiture of the Teacher, follows, naturally
+enough, as the result of that Teacher's influence and life, a religion
+of corresponding elevation and promise. The passage from a teaching
+such as M. Renan supposes to a religion such as he allows Christianity
+to be may be reasonably understood as a natural consequence of
+well-known causes, but for one thing--the interposition between the two
+of an alleged event which simply throws out all reasonings drawn from
+ordinary human experience. From the teaching and life of Socrates
+follow, naturally enough, schools of philosophy, and an impulse which
+has affected scientific thought ever since. From the preaching and life
+of Mahomet follows, equally naturally, the religion of Islam. In each
+case the result is seen to be directly and distinctly linked on to the
+influences which gave it birth, and nothing more than these influences
+is wanted, or makes any claim, to account for it. So M. Renan holds
+that all that is needed to account for Christianity is such a
+personality and such a career as he has described in his last volume.
+But the facts will not bend to this. Christianity hangs on to Christ
+not merely as to a Person who lived and taught and died, but as to a
+Person who rose again from death. That is of the very essence of its
+alleged derivation from Christ. It knows Christ only as Christ risen;
+the only reason of its own existence that it recognises is the
+Resurrection. The only claim the Apostles set forth for preaching to
+the world is that their Master who was crucified was alive once more.
+Every one knows that this was the burden of all their words, the
+corner-stone of all their work. We may believe them or not. We may take
+Christianity or leave it. But we cannot derive Christianity from
+Christ, without meeting, as the bond which connects the two, the
+Resurrection. But for the Resurrection, M. Renan's scheme might be
+intelligible. A Teacher unequalled for singleness of aim and nobleness
+of purpose lives and dies, and leaves the memory and the leaven of His
+teaching to disciples, who by them, even though in an ill-understood
+shape, and with incomparably inferior qualities themselves, purify and
+elevate the religious ideas and feelings of mankind. If that were all,
+if there were nothing but the common halo of the miraculous which is
+apt to gather about great names, the interpretation might be said to be
+coherent. But a theory of Christianity cannot neglect the most
+prominent fact connected with its beginning. It is impossible to leave
+it out of the account, in judging both of the Founder and of those whom
+his influence moulded and inspired.
+
+M. Renan has to account for the prominence given to the Resurrection in
+the earliest Christian teaching, without having recourse to the
+supposition of conscious imposture and a deliberate conspiracy to
+deceive; for such a supposition would not harmonise either with the
+portrait he has drawn of the Master, or with his judgment of the
+seriousness and moral elevation of the men who, immeasurably inferior
+as they were to Him, imbibed His spirit, and represented and
+transmitted to us His principles. And this is something much more than
+can be accounted for by the general disposition of the age to assume
+the supernatural and the miraculous. The way in which the Resurrection
+is circumstantially and unceasingly asserted, and made on every
+occasion and from the first the foundation of everything, is something
+very different from the vague legends which float about of kings or
+saints whom death has spared, or from a readiness to see the direct
+agency of heaven in health or disease. It is too precise, too
+matter-of-fact, too prosaic in the way in which it is told, to be
+resolved into ill-understood dreams and imaginations. The various
+recitals show little care to satisfy our curiosity, or to avoid the
+appearance of inconsistency in detail; but nothing can be more removed
+from vagueness and hesitation than their definite positive statements.
+It is with them that the writer on Christianity has to deal.
+
+M. Renan's method is--whilst of course not believing them, yet not
+supposing conscious fraud--to treat these records as the description of
+natural, unsought visions on the part of people who meant no harm, but
+who believed what they wished to believe. They are the story of a great
+mistake, but a mistake proceeding simply, in the most natural way in
+the world, from excess of "idealism" and attachment. Unaffected by the
+circumstance that there never were narratives less ideal, and more
+straightforwardly real--that they seem purposely framed to be a
+contrast to professed accounts of visions, and to exclude the
+possibility of their being confounded with such accounts; and that the
+alleged numbers who saw, the alleged frequency and repetition and
+variation of the instances, and the alleged time over which the
+appearances extended, and after which they absolutely ceased, make the
+hypothesis of involuntary and undesigned allusions of regret and
+passion infinitely different from what it might be in the case of one
+or two persons, or for a transitory period of excitement and
+crisis--unaffected by such considerations, M. Renan proceeds to tell,
+in his own way, the story of what he supposes to have occurred,
+without, of course, admitting the smallest real foundation for what was
+so positively asserted, but with very little reproach or discredit to
+the ardent and undoubting assertors. He begins with a statement which
+is meant to save the character of the Teacher. "Jesus, though he spoke
+unceasingly of resurrection, of new life, had never said quite clearly
+that he should rise again in the flesh." He says this with the texts
+before him, for he quotes them and classifies them in a note. But this
+is his point of departure, laid down without qualification. Yet if
+there is anything which the existing records do say distinctly, it is
+that Jesus Christ said over and over again that He should rise again,
+and that He fixed the time within which He should rise. M. Renan is not
+bound to believe them. But he must take them as he finds them; and on
+this capital point either we know nothing at all, and have no evidence
+to go upon, or the evidence is simply inverted by M. Renan's assertion.
+There may, of course, be reasons for believing one part of a man's
+evidence and disbelieving another; but there is nothing in this case
+but incompatibility with a theory to make this part of the evidence
+either more or less worthy of credit than any other part. What is
+certain is that it is in the last degree weak and uncritical to lay
+down, as the foundation and first pre-requisite of an historical view,
+a position which the records on which the view professes to be based
+emphatically and unambiguously contradict. Whatever we may think of it,
+the evidence undoubtedly is, if evidence there is at all, that Jesus
+Christ did say, though He could not get His disciples at the time to
+understand and believe Him, that He should rise again on the third day.
+What M. Renan had to do, if he thought the contrary, was not to assume,
+but to prove, that in these repeated instances in which they report His
+announcements, the Evangelists mistook or misquoted the words of their
+Master.
+
+He accepts, however, their statement that no one at first hoped that
+the words would be made good; and he proceeds to account for the
+extraordinary belief which, in spite of this original incredulity, grew
+up, and changed the course of things and the face of the world. We
+admire and respect many things in M. Renan; but it seems to us that his
+treatment of this matter is simply the _ne plus ultra_ of the
+degradation of the greatest of issues by the application to it of
+sentiment unworthy of a silly novel. In the first place, he lays down
+on general grounds that, though the disciples had confessedly given up
+all hope, it yet _was natural_ that they should expect to see their
+master alive again. "Mais I'enthousiasme et l'amour ne connaissent pas
+les situations sans issue." Do they not? Are death and separation such
+light things to triumph over that imagination finds it easy to cheat
+them? "Ils se jouent de l'impossible et, plutot que d'abdiquer
+l'esperance, ils font violence a toute realite." Is this an account of
+the world of fact or the world of romance? The disciples did not hope;
+but, says M. Renan, vague words about the future had dropped from their
+master, and these were enough to build upon, and to suggest that they
+would soon see him back. In vain it is said that in fact they did not
+expect it. "Une telle croyance etait d'ailleurs si naturelle, que la
+foi des disciples aurait suffi pour la creer de toutes pieces." Was it
+indeed--in spite of Enoch and Elias, cases of an entirely different
+kind--so natural to think that the ruined leader of a crushed cause,
+whose hopeless followers had seen the last of him amid the lowest
+miseries of torment and scorn, should burst the grave?
+
+    Il devait arriver [he proceeds] pour Jesus ce qui arrive pour tous
+    les hommes qui ont captive l'attention de leurs semblables. Le
+    monde, habitue a leur attribuer des vertus surhumaines, ne peut
+    admettre qu'ils aient subi la loi injuste, revoltante, inique, du
+    trepas commun.... La mort est chose si absurde quand elle frappe
+    l'homme de genie ou l'homme d'un grand coeur, que le peuple ne
+    croit pas a la possibilite d'une telle erreur de la nature. Les
+    heros ne meurent pas.
+
+The history of the world presents a large range of instances to test
+the singular assertion that death is so "absurd" that "the people"
+cannot believe that great and good men literally die. But would it be
+easy to match the strangeness of a philosopher and a man of genius
+gravely writing this down as a reason--not why, at the interval of
+centuries, a delusion should grow up--but why, on the very morrow of a
+crucifixion and burial, the disciples should have believed that all the
+dreadful work they had seen a day or two before was in very fact and
+reality reversed? We confess we do not know what human experience is if
+it countenances such a supposition as this.
+
+From this antecedent probability he proceeds to the facts. "The Sabbath
+day which followed the burial was occupied with these thoughts....
+Never was the rest of the Sabbath so fruitful." They all, the women
+especially, thought of him all day long in his bed of spices, watched
+over by angels; and the assurance grew that the wicked men who had
+killed him would not have their triumph, that he would not be left to
+decay, that he would be wafted on high to that Kingdom of the Father of
+which he had spoken. "Nous le verrons encore; nous entendrons sa voix
+charmante; c'est en vain qu'ils l'auront tue." And as, with the Jews, a
+future life implied a resurrection of the body, the shape which their
+hope took was settled. "Reconnaitre que la mort pouvait etre
+victorieuse de Jesus, de celui qui venait de supprimer son empire,
+c'etait le comble de l'absurdite." It is, we suppose, irrelevant to
+remark that we find not the faintest trace of this sense of absurdity.
+The disciples, he says, had no choice between hopelessness and "an
+heroic affirmation"; and he makes the bold surmise that "un homme
+penetrant aurait pu annoncer _des le samedi_ que Jesus revivrait." This
+may be history, or philosophy, or criticism; what it is _not_ is the
+inference naturally arising from the only records we have of the time
+spoken of. But the force of historical imagination dispenses with the
+necessity of extrinsic support. "La petite societe chretienne, ce
+jour-la, opera le veritable miracle: elle ressuscita Jesus en son coeur
+par l'amour intense qu'elle lui porta. Elle decida que Jesus ne
+mourrait pas." The Christian Church has done many remarkable things;
+but it never did anything so strange, or which so showed its power, as
+when it took that resolution.
+
+How was the decision, involuntary and unconscious, and guiltless of
+intentional deception, if we can conceive of such an attitude of mind,
+carried out? M. Renan might leave the matter in obscurity. But he sees
+his way, in spite of incoherent traditions and the contradictions which
+they present, to a "sufficient degree of probability." The belief in
+the Resurrection originated in an hallucination of the disordered fancy
+of Mary Magdalen, whose mind was thrown off its balance by her
+affection and sorrow; and, once suggested, the idea rapidly spread, and
+produced, through the Christian society, a series of corresponding
+visions, firmly believed to be real. But Mary Magdalen was the founder
+of it all:--
+
+    Elle eut, en ce moment solennel, une part d'action tout a fait
+    hors ligne. C'est elle qu'il faut suivre pas a pas; car elle
+    porta, ce jour-la, pendant une heure, tout le travail de la
+    conscience chretienne; son temoignage decida la foi de
+    l'avenir.... La vision legere s'ecarte et lui dit: "Ne me touche
+    pas!" Peu a peu l'ombre disparait. Mais le miracle de l'amour est
+    accompli. Ce que Cephas n'a pu faire, Marie l'a faite; elle a su
+    tirer la vie, la parole douce et penetrante, du tombeau vide. Il
+    ne s'agit plus de consequences a deduire ni de conjectures a
+    former. Marie a vu et entendu. La resurrection a son premier
+    temoin immediat.
+
+He proceeds to criticise the accounts which ascribe the first vision to
+others; but in reality Mary Magdalen, he says, has done most, after the
+great Teacher, for the foundation of Christianity. "Queen and patroness
+of idealists," she was able to "impose upon all the sacred vision of
+her impassioned soul." All rests upon her first burst of entbusiasm,
+which gave the signal and kindled the faith of others. "Sa grande
+affirmation de femme, 'il est ressuscite,' a ete la base de la foi de
+l'humanite":--
+
+    Paul ne parle pas de la vision de Marie et reporte tout l'honneur
+    de la premiere apparition sur Pierre. Mais cette expression est
+    tres~inexacte. Pierre ne vit que le caveau vide, le suaire et le
+    linceul. Marie seule aima assez pour depasser la nature et faire
+    revivre le fantome du maitre exquis. Dans ces sortes de crises
+    merveilleuses, voir apres les autres n'est rien; tout le merite
+    est de voir pour la premiere fois; car les autres modelent ensuite
+    leur vision sur le type recu. C'est le propre des belles
+    organisations de concevoir l'image promptement, avec justesse et
+    par une sorte de sens intime du dessin. La gloire de la
+    resurrection appartient donc a Marie de Magdala. Apres Jesus,
+    c'est Marie qui a le plus fait pour la fondation du Christianisme.
+    L'ombre creee par les sens delicats de Madeleine plane encore sur
+    le monde.... Loin d'ici, raison impuissante! Ne va pas appliquer
+    une froide analyse a ce chef-d'oeuvre de l'idealisme et de
+    l'amour. Si la sagesse renonce a consoler cette pauvre race
+    humaine, trahie par le sort, laisse la folie tenter l'aventure. Ou
+    est le sage qui a donne au monde autant de joie, que la possedee
+    Marie de Magdala?
+
+He proceeds to describe, on the same supposition, the other events of
+the day, which he accepts as having in a certain very important sense
+happened, though, of course, only in the sense which excludes their
+reality. No doubt, for a series of hallucinations, anything will do in
+the way of explanation. The scene of the evening was really believed to
+have taken place as described, though it was the mere product of chance
+noises and breaths of air on minds intently expectant; and we are
+bidden to remember "that in these decisive hours a current of wind, a
+creaking window, an accidental rustle, settle the belief of nations for
+centuries." But at any rate it was a decisive hour:--
+
+    Tels furent les incidents de ce jour qui a fixe le sort de
+    l'humanite. L'opinion que Jesus etait ressuscite s'y fonda d'une
+    maniere irrevocable. La secte, qu'on avait cru eteindre en tuant
+    le maitre, fut des lors assuree d'un immense avenir.
+
+We are willing to admit that Christian writers have often spoken
+unreally and unsatisfactorily enough in their comments on this subject.
+But what Christian comment, hard, rigid, and narrow in its view of
+possibilities, ever equalled this in its baselessness and supreme
+absence of all that makes a view look like the truth? It puts the most
+extravagant strain on documents which, truly or falsely, but at any
+rate in the most consistent and uniform manner, assert something
+different. What they assert in every conceivable form, and with
+distinct detail, are facts; it is not criticism, but mere arbitrary
+license, to say that all these stand for visions. The issue of truth or
+falsehood is intelligible; the middle supposition of confusion and
+mistake in that which is the basis of everything, and is definitely and
+in such varied ways repeated, is trifling and incredible. We may
+disbelieve, if we please, St. Paul's enumeration of the appearances
+after the Resurrection; but to resolve it into a series of visions is
+to take refuge in the most unlikely of guesses. And, when we take into
+view the whole of the case--not merely the life and teaching out of
+which everything grew, but the aim and character of the movement which
+ensued, and the consequences of it, long tested and still continuing,
+to the history and development of mankind--we find it hard to measure
+the estimate of probability which is satisfied with the supposition
+that the incidents of one day of folly and delusion irrevocably decided
+the belief of ages, and the life and destiny of millions. Without the
+belief in the Resurrection there would have been no Christianity; if
+anything may be laid down as certain, this may. We should probably
+never have even heard of the great Teacher; He would not have been
+believed in, He would not have been preached to the world; the impulse
+to conversion would have been wanting; and all that was without
+parallel good and true and fruitful in His life would have perished,
+and have been lost in Judaea. And the belief in the Resurrection M.
+Renan thinks due to an hour of over-excited fancy in a woman agonized
+by sorrow and affection. When we are presented with an hypothesis on
+the basis of intrinsic probability, we cannot but remember that the
+power of delusion and self-deception, though undoubtedly shown in very
+remarkable instances, must yet be in a certain proportion to what it
+originates and produces, and that it is controlled by the numerous
+antagonistic influences of the world. Crazy women have founded
+superstitions; but we cannot help thinking that it would be more
+difficult than M. Renan supposes for crazy women to found a world-wide
+religion for ages, branching forth into infinite forms, and tested by
+its application to all varieties of civilisation, and to national and
+personal character. M. Renan points to La Salette. But the assumption
+would be a bold one that the La Salette people could have invented a
+religion for Christendom which would stand the wear of eighteen
+centuries, and satisfy such different minds. Pious frauds, as he says,
+may have built cathedrals. But you must take Christianity for what it
+has proved itself to be in its hard and unexampled trial. To start an
+order, a sect, an institution, even a local tradition or local set of
+miracles, on foundations already laid, is one thing; it is not the same
+to be the spring of the most serious and the deepest of moral movements
+for the improvement of the world, the most unpretending and the most
+careless of all outward form and show, the most severely searching and
+universal and lasting in its effects on mankind. To trace that back to
+the Teacher without the intervention of the belief in the Resurrection
+is manifestly impossible. We know what He is said to have taught; we
+know what has come of that teaching in the world at large; but if the
+link which connects the two be not a real one, it is vain to explain it
+by the dreams of affection. It was not a matter of a moment or an hour,
+but of days and weeks continually; not the assertion of one imaginative
+mourner or two, but of a numerous and variously constituted body of
+people. The story, if it was not true, was not delusion, but imposture.
+We certainly cannot be said to know much of what happens in the genesis
+of religions. But that between such a teacher and such teaching there
+should intervene such a gigantic falsehood, whether imposture or
+delusion, is unquestionably one of the hardest violations of
+probability conceivable, as well as one of the most desperate
+conclusions as regards the capacity of mankind for truth. Few thoughts
+can be less endurable than that the wisest and best of our race, men of
+the soberest and most serious tempers, and most candid and judicial
+minds, should have been the victims and dupes of the mad affection of a
+crazy Magdalen, of "ces touchantes demoniaques, ces pecheresses
+converties, ces vraies fondatrices du Christianisme." M. Renan shrinks
+from solving such a question by the hypothesis of conscious fraud. To
+solve it by sentiment is hardly more respectful either to the world or
+to truth.
+
+We have left ourselves no room to speak of the best part of M. Renan's
+new volume, his historical comment on the first period of Christianity.
+We do not pretend to go along with him in his general principles of
+judgment, or in many of his most important historical conclusions. But
+here he is, what he is not in the early chapters, on ground where his
+critical faculty comes fairly into play. He is, we think, continually
+paradoxical and reckless in his statements; and his book is more
+thickly strewn than almost any we know with half-truths, broad axioms
+which require much paring down to be of any use, but which are made by
+him to do duty for want of something stronger. But, from so keen and so
+deeply interested a writer, it is our own fault if we do not learn a
+good deal. And we may study in its full development that curious
+combination, of which M. Renan is the most conspicuous example, of
+profound veneration for Christianity and sympathy with its most
+characteristic aspects, with the scientific impulse to destroy in the
+public mind the belief in its truth.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+M. RENAN'S HIBBERT LECTURES[15]
+
+
+  [15]
+  _Guardian_, 14th April 1880.
+
+I
+
+The object of M. Renan's lectures at St. George's Hall is, as we
+understand him, not merely to present a historical sketch of the
+influence of Rome on the early Church, but to reconcile the historical
+imagination with the results of his own and kindred speculations on the
+origin of Christianity. He has, with a good faith which we do not
+question, investigated the subject and formed his conclusions upon it.
+He on the present occasion assumes these investigations, and that he,
+at any rate, is satisfied with their result. He hardly pretends to
+carry the mixed popular audience whom he addresses into any real
+inquiry into the grounds on which he has satisfied himself that the
+received account of Christianity is not the true one. But he is aware
+that all minds are more or less consciously impressed with the broad
+difficulty that, after all attempts to trace the origin of Christianity
+to agencies and influences of well-understood human character, the
+disproportion between causes and effects still continues to appear
+excessive. The great Christian tradition with its definite beliefs
+about the conditions of man's existence, which has shaped the fortunes
+and determined the future of mankind on earth, is in possession of the
+world as much as the great tradition of right and wrong, or of the
+family, or of the State. How did it get there? It is most astonishing
+that it should have done so, what is the account of it? Of course
+people may inquire into this question as they may inquire into the
+basis of morality, or the origin of the family or the State. But here,
+as on those subjects, reason, and that imagination which is one of the
+forces of reason, by making the mind duly sensible of the magnitude of
+ideas and alternatives, are exacting. M. Renan's task is to make the
+purely human origin of Christianity, its origin in the circumstances,
+the beliefs, the ideas, and the moral and political conditions of the
+first centuries, seem to us _natural_--as natural in the history of the
+world as other great and surprising events and changes--as natural as
+the growth and the fall of the Roman Empire, or as the Reformation, or
+the French Revolution. He is well qualified to sound the depths of his
+undertaking and to meet its heavy exigencies. With a fuller knowledge
+of books, and a closer familiarity than most men with the thoughts and
+the events of the early ages, with a serious value for the idea of
+religion as such, and certainly with no feeble powers of recalling the
+past and investing it with colour and life, he has to show how these
+things can be--how a religion with such attributes as he freely
+ascribes to the Gospel, so grand, so pure, so lasting, can have sprung
+up not merely _in_ but _from_ a most corrupt and immoral time, and can
+have its root in the most portentous and impossible of falsehoods. It
+must be said to be a bold undertaking.
+
+M. Renan has always aimed at doing justice to what he assailed;
+Christians, who realise what they believe, will say that he patronises
+their religion, and naturally they resent such patronage. Such candour
+adds doubtless to the literary effect of his method; but it is only due
+to him to acknowledge the fairness of his admissions. He starts with
+the declaration that there never was a nobler moment in human history
+than the beginnings of the Christian Church. It was the "most heroic
+episode in the annals of mankind." "Never did man draw forth from his
+bosom more devotion, more love of the ideal, than in the 150 years
+which elapsed between the sweet Galilean vision and the death of Marcus
+Aurelius." It was not only that the saints were admirable and beautiful
+in their lives; they had the secret of the future, and laid down the
+lines on which the goodness and hope of the coming world were to move."
+Never was the religious conscience more eminently creative, never did
+it lay down with more authority the law of future ages."
+
+Now, if this is not mere rhetoric, what does it come to? It means not
+merely that there was here a phenomenon, not only extraordinary but
+unique, in the development of human character, but that here was
+created or evolved what was to guide and form the religious ideas of
+mankind; here were the springs of what has reached through all the ages
+of expanding humanity to our own days, of what is best and truest and
+deepest and holiest. M. Renan, at any rate, does not think this an
+illusion of Christian prepossessions, a fancy picture of a mythic age
+of gold, of an unhistorical period of pure and primitive antiquity. Put
+this view of things by the side of any of the records or the literature
+of the time remaining to us; if not St. Paul's Epistles nor Tacitus nor
+Lucian, then Virgil and Horace and Cicero, or Seneca or Epictetus or
+Marcus Aurelius. Is it possible by any effort of imagination to body
+forth the links which can solidly connect the ideas which live and work
+and grow on one side, with the ideas which are represented by the facts
+and principles of the other side? Or is it any more possible to connect
+what we know of Christian ideas and convictions by a bond of natural
+and intelligible, if not necessary derivation, with what we know of
+Jewish ideas and Jewish habits of thought at the time in question? Yet
+that is the thing to be done, to be done rigorously, to be done clearly
+and distinctly, by those who are satisfied to find the impulses and
+faith which gave birth to Christianity amid the seething confusions of
+the time which saw its beginning; absolutely identical with those wild
+movements in origin and nature, and only by a strange, fortunate
+accident immeasurably superior to them.
+
+This question M. Renan has not answered; as far as we can see he has
+not perceived that it is the first question for him to answer, in
+giving a philosophical account of the history of Christianity. Instead,
+he tells us, and he is going still further to tell us, how Rome and its
+wonderful influences acted on Christianity, and helped to assure its
+victories. But, first of all, what is that Christianity, and whence did
+it come, which Rome so helped? It came, he says, from Judaism; "it was
+Judaism under its Christian form which Rome propagated without wishing
+it, yet with such mighty energy that from a certain epoch Romanism and
+Christianity became synonymous words"; it was Jewish monotheism, the
+religion the Roman hated and despised, swallowing up by its contrast
+all that was local, legendary, and past belief, and presenting one
+religious law to the countless nationalities of the Empire, which like
+itself was one, and like itself above all nationalities.
+
+This may all be true, and is partially true; but how did that hated and
+partial Judaism break through its trammels, and become a religion for
+all men, and a religion to which all men gathered? The Roman
+organisation was an admirable vehicle for Christianity; but the vehicle
+does not make that which it carries, or account for it. M. Renan's
+picture of the Empire abounds with all those picturesque details which
+he knows so well where to find, and knows so well, too, how to place in
+an interesting light. There were then, of course, conditions of the
+time more favourable to the Christian Church than would have been the
+conditions of other times. There was a certain increased liberty of
+thought, though there were also some pretty strong obstacles to it. M.
+Renan has Imperial proclivities, and reminds us truly enough that
+despotisms are sometimes more tolerant than democracies, and that
+political liberty is not the same as spiritual and mental freedom, and
+does not always favour it. It may be partially true, as he says, that
+"Virgil and Tibullus show that Roman harshness and cruelty were
+softening down"; that "equality and the rights of men were preached by
+the Stoics"; that "woman was more her own mistress, and slaves were
+better treated than in the days of Cato"; that "very humane and just
+laws were enacted under the very worst emperors; that Tiberius and Nero
+were able financiers"; that "after the terrible butcheries of the old
+centuries, mankind was crying with the voice of Virgil for peace and
+pity." A good many qualifications and abatements start up in our minds
+on reading these statements, and a good many formidable doubts suggest
+themselves, if we can at all believe what has come down to us of the
+history of these times. It is hard to accept quite literally the bold
+assertion that "love for the poor, sympathy with all men, almsgiving,
+were becoming virtues." But allow this as the fair and hopeful side of
+the Empire. Yet all this is a long way from accounting for the effects
+on the world of Christianity, even in the dim, vaporous form in which
+M. Renan imagines it, much more in the actual concrete reality in
+which, if we know anything, it appeared. "Christianity," he says,
+"responded to the cry for peace and pity of all weary and tender
+souls." No doubt it did; but what was it that responded, and what was
+its consolation, and whence was its power drawn? What was there in the
+known thoughts or hopes or motives of men at the time to furnish such a
+response? "Christianity," he says, "could only have been born and
+spread at a time when men had no longer a country"; "it was that
+explosion of social and religious ideas which became inevitable after
+Augustus had put an end to political struggles," after his policy had
+killed "patriotism." It is true enough that the first Christians,
+believing themselves subjects of an Eternal King and in view of an
+eternal world, felt themselves strangers and pilgrims in this; yet did
+the rest of the Roman world under the Caesars feel that they had no
+country, and was the idea of patriotism extinct in the age of Agricola?
+But surely the real question worth asking is, What was it amid the
+increasing civilisation and prosperous peace of Rome under the first
+Emperors which made these Christians relinquish the idea of a country?
+From whence did Christianity draw its power to set its followers in
+inflexible opposition to the intensest worship of the State that the
+world has ever known?
+
+To tell us the conditions under which all this occurred is not to tell
+us the cause of it. We follow with interest the sketches which M. Renan
+gives of these conditions, though it must be said that his
+generalisations are often extravagantly loose and misleading. We do
+indeed want to know more of those wonderful but hidden days which
+intervene between the great Advent, with its subsequent Apostolic age,
+and the days when the Church appears fully constituted and recognised.
+German research and French intelligence and constructiveness have done
+something to help us, but not much. But at the end of all such
+inquiries appears the question of questions, What was the beginning and
+root of it all? Christians have a reasonable answer to the question.
+There is none, there is not really the suggestion of one, in M. Renan's
+account of the connection of Christianity with the Roman world.
+
+
+II[16]
+
+  [16]
+  _Guardian_, 21st April 1880.
+
+M. Renan has pursued the line of thought indicated in his first
+lecture, and in his succeeding lectures has developed the idea that
+Christianity, as we know it, was born in Imperial Rome, and that in its
+visible form and active influence on the world it was the manifest
+product of Roman instincts and habits; it was the spirit of the Empire
+passing into a new body and accepting in exchange for political power,
+as it slowly decayed and vanished, a spiritual supremacy as unrivalled
+and as astonishing. The "Legend of the Roman Church--Peter and Paul,"
+"Rome the Centre in which Church Authority grew up," and "Rome the
+Capital of Catholicism," are the titles of the three lectures in which
+this thesis is explained and illustrated. A lecture on Marcus Aurelius,
+at the Royal Institution, though not one of the series, is obviously
+connected with it, and concludes M. Renan's work in England.
+
+Except the brilliant bits of writing which, judging from the full
+abstracts given in translation in the _Times_, appear to have been
+interspersed, and except the undoubting self-confidence and _aplomb_
+with which a historical survey, reversing the common ideas of mankind,
+was delivered, there was little new to be learned from M. Renan's
+treatment of his subject. Perhaps it may be described as the Roman
+Catholic theory of the rise of the Church, put in an infidel point of
+view. It is Roman Catholic in concentrating all interest, all the
+sources of influence and power in the Christian religion and Christian
+Church, from the first moment at Rome. But for Rome the Christian
+Church would not have existed. The Church is inconceivable without
+Rome, and Rome as the seat and centre of its spiritual activity.
+Everything else is forgotten. There were Christian Churches all over
+the Empire, in Syria, in Egypt, in Africa, in Asia Minor, in Gaul, in
+Greece. A great body of Christian literature, embodying the ideas and
+character of Christians all over the Empire, was growing up, and this
+was not Roman and had nothing to do with Rome; it was Greek as much as
+Latin, and local, not metropolitan, in its characteristics.
+Christianity was spreading here, there, and everywhere, slowly and
+imperceptibly as the tide comes in, or as cells multiply in the growing
+tissues of organised matter; it was spreading under its many distinct
+guides and teachers, and taking possession of the cities and provinces
+of the Empire. All this great movement, the real foundation of all that
+was to be, is overlooked and forgotten in the attention which is fixed
+on Rome and confined to it. As in the Roman Catholic view, M. Renan
+brings St. Paul and St. Peter together to Rome, to found that great
+Imperial Church in which the manifold and varied history of Christendom
+is merged and swallowed up. Only, of course, M. Renan brings them there
+as "fanatics" instead of Apostles and martyrs. We know something about
+St. Peter and St. Paul. We know them at any rate from their writings.
+In M. Renan's representation they stand opposed to one another as
+leaders of factions, to whose fierce hatreds and jealousies there is
+nothing comparable. "All the differences," he is reported to say,
+"which divide orthodox folks, heretics, schismatics, in our own day,
+are as nothing compared with the dissension between Peter and Paul." It
+is, as every one knows, no new story; but there it is in M. Renan in
+all its crudity, as if it were the most manifest and accredited of
+truths. M. Renan first brings St. Paul to Rome. "It was," he says, "a
+great event in the world's history, almost as pregnant with
+consequences as his conversion." How it was so M. Renan does not
+explain; but he brings St. Peter to Rome also, "following at the heels
+of St. Paul," to counteract and neutralise his influence. And who is
+this St. Peter? He represents the Jewish element; and what that element
+was at Rome M. Renan takes great pains to put before us. He draws an
+elaborate picture of the Jews and Jewish quarter of Rome--a "longshore
+population" of beggars and pedlars, with a Ghetto resembling the
+Alsatia of _The Fortunes of Nigel_, seething with dirt and fanaticism.
+These were St. Peter's congeners at Rome, whose ideas and claims,
+"timid trimmer" though he was, he came to Rome to support against the
+Hellenism and Protestantism of St. Paul. And at Rome they, both of
+them, probably, perished in Nero's persecution, and that is the history
+of the success of Christianity. "Only fanatics can found anything.
+Judaism lives on because of the intense frenzy of its prophets and
+annalists, Christianity by means of its martyrs."
+
+But a certain Clement arose after their deaths, to arrange a
+reconciliation between the fiercely antagonistic factions of St. Peter
+and St. Paul. How he harmonised them M. Renan leaves us to imagine; but
+he did reconcile them; he gathered in his own person the authority of
+the Roman Church; he lectured the Corinthian Church on its turbulence
+and insubordination; he anticipated, M. Renan remarked, almost in
+words, the famous saying of the French Archbishop of Rouen, "My clergy
+are my regiment, and they are drilled to obey like a regiment." On this
+showing, Clement might almost be described as the real founder of
+Christianity, of which neither St. Peter nor St. Paul, with their
+violent oppositions, can claim to be the complete representative; at
+any rate he was the first Pope, complete in all his attributes. And in
+accordance with this beginning M. Renan sees in the Roman Church,
+first, the centre in which Church authority grew up, and next, the
+capital of Catholicism. In Rome the congregation gave up its rights to
+its elders, and these rights the elders surrendered to the single ruler
+or Bishop. The creation of the Episcopate was eminently the work of
+Rome; and this Bishop of Rome caught the full spirit of the Caesar, on
+whose decay he became great; and troubling himself little about the
+deep questions which exercised the minds and wrung the hearts of
+thinkers and mystics, he made himself the foundation of order,
+authority, and subordination to all parts of the Imperial world.
+
+Such is M. Renan's explanation of the great march and triumph of the
+Christian Church. The Roman Empire, which we had supposed was the
+natural enemy of the Church, was really the founder of all that made
+the Church strong, and bequeathed to the Church its prerogatives and
+its spirit, and partly its machinery. We should hardly gather from this
+picture that there was, besides, a widespread Catholic Church, with its
+numerous centres of life and thought and teaching, and with very slight
+connection, in the early times, with the Church of the capital. And, in
+the next place, we should gather from it that there was little more in
+the Church than a powerful and strongly built system of centralised
+organisation and control; we should hardly suspect the existence of the
+real questions which interested or disturbed it; we should hardly
+suspect the existence of a living and all-engrossing theology, or the
+growth and energy in it of moral forces, or that the minds of
+Christians about the world were much more busy with the discipline of
+life, the teaching and meaning of the inspired words of Scripture, and
+the ever-recurring conflict with perverseness and error, than with
+their dependent connection on the Imperial Primacy of Rome, and the
+lessons they were to learn from it.
+
+Disguised as it may be, M. Renan's lectures represent not history, but
+scepticism as to all possibility of history. Pictures of a Jewish
+Ghetto, with its ragged mendicants smelling of garlic, in places where
+Christians have been wont to think of the Saints; ingenious
+explanations as to the way in which the "club" of the Christian Church
+surrendered its rights to a _bureau_ of its officers; exhortations to
+liberty and tolerance; side-glances at the contrasts of national gifts
+and destinies and futures in the first century and in the nineteenth;
+felicitous parallels and cunning epigrams, subtle combinations of the
+pathetic, the egotistical, and the cynical, all presented with calm
+self-reliance and in the most finished and distinguished of styles, may
+veil for the moment from the audience which such things amuse, and even
+interest, the hollowness which lies beneath. But the only meaning of
+the lectures is to point out more forcibly than ever that besides the
+obvious riddles of man's life there is one stranger and more appalling
+still--that a religion which M. Renan can never speak of without
+admiration and enthusiasm is based on a self-contradiction and deluding
+falsehood, more dreadful in its moral inconsistencies than the grave.
+
+We cannot help feeling that M. Renan himself is a true representative
+of that highly cultivated society of the Empire which would have
+crushed Christianity, and which Christianity, vanquished. He still owes
+something, and owns it, to what he has abandoned--"I am often tempted
+to say, as Job said, in our Latin version, _Etiam si occident me, in
+ipso sperabo_. But the next moment all is gone--all is but a symbol and
+a dream." There is no possibility of solving the religious problem. He
+relapses into profound disbelief of the worth and success of moral
+efforts after truth. His last word is an exhortation to tolerance for
+"fanatics," as the best mode of extinguishing them. "If, instead of
+leading _Polyeucte_ to punishment, the magistrate, with a smile and
+shake of the hand, had sent him home again, _Polyeucte_ would not have
+been caught offending again; perhaps, in his old age, he would even
+have laughed at his escapade, and would have become a sensible man." It
+is as obvious and natural in our days to dispose of such difficulties
+in this way with a smile and a sneer as it was in the first century
+with a shout--_"Christiani ad leones."_ But Corneille was as good a
+judge of the human heart as M. Renan. He had gauged the powers of faith
+and conviction; he certainly would have expected to find his
+_Polyeucte_ more obstinate.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+RENAN'S "SOUVENIRS D'ENFANCE"[17]
+
+
+  [17]
+  _Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse_. Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_,
+  18th July 1883.
+
+The sketches which M. Renan gives us of his early life are what we
+should have looked for from the writer of the _Vie de Jesus_. The story
+of the disintegration of a faith is supposed commonly to have something
+tragic about it. We expect it to be a story of heart-breaking
+disenchantments, of painful struggles, of fierce recoils against
+ancient beliefs and the teachers who bolstered them up; of indignation
+at having been so long deceived; of lamentation over years wasted in
+the service of falsehood. The confessions of St. Augustine, the
+biography of Blanco White, the letters of Lamennais, at least agree in
+the witness which they bear to the bitter pangs and anxieties amid
+which, in their case, the eventful change came about. Even Cardinal
+Newman's _Apologia_, self-restrained and severely controlled as it is,
+shows no doubtful traces of the conflicts and sorrows out of which he
+believed himself to have emerged to a calmer and surer light. But M.
+Renan's story is an idyl, not a tragedy. It is sunny, placid,
+contented. He calls his life the "_charmante promenade_" which the
+"cause of all good," whatever that may be, has granted him through the
+realities of existence. There are in it no storms of passion, no
+cruelties of circumstances, no deplorable mistakes, no complaints, no
+recriminations. His life flows on smoothly, peacefully, happily, with
+little of rapids and broken waters, gradually and in the most natural
+and inevitable way enlarging itself, moving in new and wider channels
+and with increased volume and force, but never detaching itself and
+breaking off from its beginnings. It is a spectacle which M. Renan, who
+has lived this life, takes a gentle pleasure in contemplating. He looks
+back on it with thankfulness, and also with amusement It makes a
+charming and complete picture. No part could be wanting without
+injuring the effect of the whole. It is the very ideal of the education
+of the Rousseau school--a child of nature, developing, amid the
+simplest and humblest circumstances of life, the finest gifts and most
+delicate graces of faith and reverence and purity--brought up by sages
+whose wisdom he could not in time help outrunning, but whose piety,
+sweetness, disinterestedness, and devoted labour left on his mind
+impressions which nothing could wear out; and at length, when the time
+came, passing naturally, and without passion or bitterness, from out of
+their faithful but too narrow discipline into a wider and ampler air,
+and becoming, as was fit, master and guide to himself, with light which
+they could not bear, and views of truth greater and deeper than they
+could conceive. But every stage of the progress, through the virtues of
+the teachers, and the felicitous disposition of the pupil, exhibits
+both in exactly the due relations in which each ought to be with the
+other, with none of the friction of rebellious and refractory temper on
+one side, or of unintelligent harshness on the other. He has nothing to
+regret in the schools through which he passed, in the preparations
+which he made there for the future, in the way in which they shaped his
+life. He lays down the maxim, "On ne doit jamais ecrire que de ce qu'on
+aime." There is a serene satisfaction diffused through the book, which
+scarcely anything intervenes to break or disturb; he sees so much
+poetry in his life, so much content, so much signal and unlooked-for
+success, that he has little to tell except what is delightful and
+admirable. And then he is so certain that he is right: he can look down
+with so much good-humoured superiority on past and present, alike on
+what he calls "l'effroyable aventure du moyen age," and on the march of
+modern society to the dead level of "Americanism." It need not be said
+that the story is told with all M. Renan's consummate charm of
+storytelling. All that it wants is depth of real feeling and
+seriousness--some sense of the greatness of what he has had to give up,
+not merely of its poetic beauty and tender associations. It hardly
+seems to occur to him that something more than his easy cheerfulness
+and his vivid historical imagination is wanted to solve for him the
+problems of the world, and that his gradual transition from the
+Catholicism of the seminary to the absolute rejection of the
+supernatural in religion does not, as he describes it, throw much light
+on the question of the hopes and destiny of mankind.
+
+The outline of his story is soon told. It is in general like that of
+many more who in France have broken away from religion. A clever
+studious boy, a true son of old Brittany--the most melancholy, the most
+tender, the most ardent, the most devout, not only of all French
+provinces, but of all regions in Europe--is passed on from the teaching
+of good, simple, hard-working country priests to the central
+seminaries, where the leaders of the French clergy are educated. He
+comes up a raw, eager, ignorant provincial, full of zeal for knowledge,
+full of reverence and faith, and first goes through the distinguished
+literary school of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, of which Dupanloup was
+the founder and the inspiring soul. Thence he passed under the more
+strictly professional discipline of St. Sulpice: first at the
+preparatory philosophical school at Issy, then to study scientific
+theology in the house of St. Sulpice itself at Paris. At St. Sulpice he
+showed special aptitudes for the study of Hebrew, in which he was
+assisted and encouraged by M. le Hir, "the most remarkable person," in
+his opinion, "whom the French clergy has produced in our days," a
+"savant and a saint," who had mastered the results of German criticism
+as they were found in the works of Gesenius and Ewald. On his faith all
+this knowledge had not made the faintest impression; but it was this
+knowledge which broke down M. Renan's, and finally led to his retiring
+from St. Sulpice. On the one side was the Bible and Catholic theology,
+carefully, scientifically, and consistently taught at St. Sulpice; on
+the other were the exegesis and the historical criticism of the German
+school. He came at length to the conclusion that the two are
+incompatible; that there was but a choice of alternatives; and purely
+on the ground of historical criticism, he says, not on any abstract
+objections to the supernatural, or to miracles, or to Catholic dogma,
+he gave up revealed religion. He gave it up not without regrets at the
+distress caused to friends, and at parting with much that was endeared
+to him by old associations, and by intrinsic beauty and value; but, as
+far as can be judged, without any serious sense of loss. He spent some
+time in obscurity, teaching, and studying laboriously, and at length
+beginning to write. Michel Levy, the publisher, found him out, and
+opened to him a literary career, and in due time he became famous. He
+has had the ambiguous honour of making the Bible an object of such
+interest to French readers as it never was before, at the cost of
+teaching them to find in it a reflection of their own characteristic
+ways of looking at life and the world. It is not an easy thing to do
+with such a book as the Bible; but he has done it.
+
+As a mere history of a change of convictions, the _Souvenirs_ are
+interesting, but hardly of much importance. They are written with a
+kind of Epicurean serenity and dignity, avoiding all exaggeration and
+violence, profuse in every page in the delicacies and also in the
+reticences of respect, not too serious to exclude the perpetual
+suggestion of a well-behaved amused irony, not too much alive to the
+ridiculous and the self-contradictory to forget the attitude of
+composure due to the theme of the book. He warns his readers at the
+outset that they must not look for a stupid literalness in his account.
+"Ce qu'on dit de soi est toujours poesie"--the reflection of states of
+mind and varying humours, not the exact details of fact. "Tout est vrai
+dans ce petit volume, mais non de ce genre de verite qui est requis
+pour une _Biographie universelle_. Bien des choses ont ete mises, afin
+qu'on sourie; si l'usage l'eut permis, j'aurais du ecrire plus d'une
+fois a la marge--_cum grano salis_". It is candid to warn us thus to
+read a little between the lines; but it is a curious and unconscious
+disclosure of his characteristic love of a mixture of the misty and the
+clear. The really pleasant part of it is his account, which takes up
+half the volume, of Breton ways and feelings half a century ago, an
+account which exactly tallies with the pictures of them in Souvestre's
+writings; and the kindliness and justice with which he speaks of his
+old Catholic and priestly teachers, not only in his boyish days at
+Treguier, but in his seminary life in Paris. His account of this
+seminary life is unique in its picturesque vividness. He describes how,
+at St. Nicolas, under the fiery and irresistible Dupanloup, whom he
+speaks of with the reserved courtesy due to a distinguished person whom
+he much dislikes, his eager eyes were opened to the realities of
+literature, and to the subtle powers of form and style in writing,
+which have stood him in such stead, and have been the real secret of
+his own success.
+
+    Le monde s'ouvrit pour moi. Malgre sa pretention d'etre un asile
+    ferme aux bruits du dehors, Saint-Nicolas etait a cette epoque la
+    maison la plus brillante et la plus mondaine. Paris y entrait a
+    pleins bords par les portes et les fenetres, Paris tout entier,
+    moins la corruption, je me hate de le dire, Paris avec ses
+    petitesses et ses grandeurs, ses hardiesses et ses chiffons, sa
+    force revolutionnaire et ses mollesses flasques. Mes vieux pretres
+    de Bretagne savaient bien mieux les mathematiques et le latin que
+    mes nouveaux maitres; mais ils vivaient dans des catacombes sans
+    lumiere et sans air. Ici, l'atmosphere du siecle circulait
+    librement.... Au bout de quelque temps une chose tout a fait
+    inconnue m'etait revelee. Les mots, talent, eclat, reputation
+    eurent un sens pour moi. J'etais perdu pour l'ideal modeste que
+    mes anciens maitres m'avaient inculque.
+
+And he describes how Dupanloup brought his pupils perpetually into
+direct relations with himself and communicated to them something of his
+own enthusiasm. He gained the power over their hearts which a great
+general gains over his soldiers. His approval, his interest in a man,
+were the all-absorbing object, the all-sufficient reward; the one
+punishment feared was dismissal, always inflicted with courtesy and
+tact, from the honour and the joy of serving under him:--
+
+    Adore de ses eleves, M. Dupanloup n'etait pas toujours agreable a
+    ces collaborateurs. On m'a dit que, plus tard, dans son diocese,
+    les choses se passerent de la meme maniere, qu'il fut toujours
+    plus aime de ses laiques que de ses pretres. Il est certain qu'il
+    ecrasait tout autour de lui. Mais sa violence meme nous attachait;
+    car nous sentions que nous etions son but unique. Ce qu'il etait,
+    c'etait un eveilleur incomparable; pour tirer de chacun de ses
+    eleves la somme de ce qu'il pouvait donner, personne ne l'egalait.
+    Chacun de ses deux cents eleves existait distinct dans sa pensee;
+    il etait pour chacun d'eux l'excitateur toujours present, le motif
+    de vivre et de travailler. Il croyait au talent et en faisait la
+    base de la foi. Il repetait souvent que l'homme vaut en proportion
+    de sa faculte d'admirer. Son admiration n'etait pas toujours assez
+    eclairee par la science; mais elle venait d'une grande chaleur
+    d'ame et d'un coeur vraiment possede de l'amour du beau.... Les
+    defauts de l'education qu'il donnait etaient les defauts meme de
+    son esprit. Il etait trop peu rationnel, trop peu scientifique. On
+    eut dit que ses deux cents eleves etaient destines a etre tous
+    poetes, ecrivains, orateurs.
+
+St. Nicolas was literary. Issy and St. Sulpice were severely
+philosophic and scientific, places of "_fortes etudes_"; and the writer
+thinks that they were more to his own taste than the more brilliant
+literary education given under Dupanloup. In one sense it may be so.
+They introduced him to exactness of thought and precision of
+expression, and they widened his horizon of possible and attainable
+knowledge. He passed, he says, from words to things. But he is a writer
+who owes so much to the form into which he throws his thoughts, to the
+grace and brightness and richness of his style, that he probably is a
+greater debtor to the master whom he admires and dislikes, Dupanloup,
+than to the modest, reserved, and rather dull Sulpician teachers, whom
+he loves and reveres and smiles at, whose knowledge of theology was
+serious, profound, and accurate, and whose characteristic temper was
+one of moderation and temperate reason, joined to a hatred of display,
+and a suspicion of all that seemed too clever and too brilliant. But
+his witness to their excellence, to their absolute self-devotion to
+their work, to their dislike of extravagance and exaggeration, to their
+good sense and cultivation, is ungrudging and warm. Of course he thinks
+them utterly out of date; but on their own ground he recognises that
+they were men of strength and solidity, the best and most thorough of
+teachers; the most sincere, the most humble, the most self-forgetting
+of priests:--
+
+    Beaucoup de mes jugements etonnent les gens du monde parcequ'ils
+    n'out pas vu ce que j'ai vu. J'ai vu a Saint-Sulpice, associes a
+    des idees etroites, je l'avoue, les miracles que nos races peuvent
+    produire en fait de bonte, de modestie, d'abnegation personelle.
+    Ce qu'il y a de vertu a Saint-Sulpice suffirait pour gouverner un
+    monde, et cela m'a rendu difficile pour ce que j'ai trouve
+    ailleurs.
+
+M. Renan, as we have said, is very just to his education, and to the
+men who gave it. He never speaks of them except with respect and
+gratitude. It is seldom, indeed, that he permits himself anything like
+open disparagement of the men and the cause which he forsook. The
+shafts of his irony are reserved for men on his own side, for the
+radical violences of M. Clemenceau, and for the exaggerated reputation
+of Auguste Comte, "who has been set up as a man of the highest order of
+genius, for having said, in bad French, what all scientific thinkers
+for two hundred years have seen as clearly as himself." He attributes
+to his ecclesiastical training those excellences in his own temper and
+principles on which he dwells with much satisfaction and thankfulness.
+They are, he considers, the result of his Christian and "Sulpician"
+education, though the root on which they grew is for ever withered and
+dead. "La foi disparue, la morale reste.... C'est par le caractere que
+je suis reste essentiellement l'eleve de mes anciens maitres." He is
+proud of these virtues, and at the same time amused at the odd
+contradictions in which they have sometimes involved him:--
+
+    Il me plairait d'expliquer par le detail et de montrer comment la
+    gageure paradoxale de garder les vertus clericales, sans la foi
+    qui leur sert de base et dans un monde pour lequel elles ne sont
+    pas faites, produisit, en ce que me concerne, les rencontres les
+    plus divertissantes. J'aimerais a raconter toutes les aventures
+    que mes vertus sulpiciennes m'amenerent, et les tours singuliers
+    qu'elles m'ont joues. Apres soixante ans de vie serieuse on a le
+    droit de sourire; et ou trouver une source de rire plus abondante,
+    plus a portee, plus inoffensive qu'en soimeme? Si jamais un auteur
+    comique voulait amuser le public de mes ridicules, je ne lui
+    demanderais qu'une chose; c'est de me prendre pour collaborateur;
+    je lui conterais des choses vingt fois plus amusantes que celles
+    qu'il pourrait inventer.
+
+He dwells especially on four of these virtues which were, he thinks,
+graven ineffaceably on his nature at St. Sulpice. They taught him there
+not to care for money or success. They taught him the old-fashioned
+French politeness--that beautiful instinct of giving place to others,
+which is perishing in the democratic scramble for the best places, in
+the omnibus and the railway as in business and society. It is more
+curious to find that he thinks that they taught him to be modest.
+Except on the faith of his assertions, the readers of his book would
+not naturally have supposed that he believed himself specially endowed
+with this quality; it is at any rate the modesty which, if it shrinks
+into retirement from the pretensions of the crowd, goes along with a
+high and pitying sense of superiority, and a self-complacency of which
+the good humour never fails. His masters also taught him to value
+purity. For this he almost makes a sort of deprecating apology. He saw,
+indeed, "the vanity of this virtue as of all the others"; he admits
+that it is an unnatural virtue. But he says, "L'homme ne doit jamais se
+permettre deux hardiesses a la fois. Le libre penseur doit etre regle
+en ses moeurs." In this doctrine it may be doubted whether he will find
+many followers. An unnatural virtue, where nature only is recognised as
+a guide, is more likely to be discredited by his theory than
+recommended by his example, particularly if the state of opinion in
+France is such as is described in the following passage--a passage
+which in England few men, whatever they might think, would have the
+boldness to state as an acknowledged social phenomenon:--
+
+    Le monde, dont les jugements sont rarement tout a fait faux, voit
+    une sorte de ridicule a etre vertueux quand on n'y est pas oblige
+    par un devoir professionnel. Le pretre, ayant pour etat d'etre
+    chaste, comme le soldat d'etre brave, est, d'apres ces idees,
+    presque le seul qui puisse sans ridicule tenir a des principes sur
+    lesquels la morale et la mode se livrent les plus etranges
+    combats. Il est hors de doute qu'en ce point, comme en beaucoup
+    d'autres, mes principes clericaux, conserves dans le siecle, m'ont
+    nui aux yeux du monde.
+
+We have one concluding observation to make. This is a book of which the
+main interest, after all, depends on the way in which it touches on the
+question of questions, the truth and reality of the Christian religion.
+But from first to last it docs not show the faintest evidence that the
+writer ever really knew, or even cared, what religion is. Religion is
+not only a matter of texts, of scientific criticisms, of historical
+investigations, of a consistent theology. It is not merely a procession
+of external facts and events, a spectacle to be looked at from the
+outside. It is, if it is anything, the most considerable and most
+universal interest in the complex aggregate of human interests. It
+grows out of the deepest moral roots, out of the most characteristic
+and most indestructible spiritual elements, out of wants and needs and
+aspirations and hopes, without which man, as we know him, would not be
+man. When a man, in asking whether Christianity is true, leaves out all
+this side of the matter, when he shows that it has not come before him
+as a serious and importunate reality, when he shows that he is
+unaffected by those deep movements and misgivings and anxieties of the
+soul to which religion corresponds, and treats the whole matter as a
+question only of erudition and criticism, we may acknowledge him to be
+an original and acute critic, a brilliant master of historical
+representation; but he has never yet come face to face with the
+problems of religion. His love of truth may be unimpeachable, but he
+docs not know what he is talking about. M. Renan speaks of giving up
+his religion as a man might speak of accepting a new and unpopular
+physical hypothesis like evolution, or of making up his mind to give up
+the personality of Homer or the early history of Rome. Such an interior
+attitude of mind towards religion as is implied, for instance, in
+Bishop Butler's _Sermons on the Love of God_, or the _De Imitatione_ or
+Newman's _Parochial Sermons_ seems to him, as far as we can judge, an
+unknown and unattempted experience. It is easy to deal with a question
+if you leave out half the factors of it, and those the most difficult
+and the most serious. It is easy to be clear if you do not choose to
+take notice of the mysterious, and if you exclude from your
+consideration as vague and confused all that vast department of human
+concerns where we at best can only "see through a glass darkly." It is
+easy to find the world a pleasant and comfortable and not at all
+perplexing place, if your life has been, as M. Renan describes his own,
+a "charming promenade" through it; if, as he says, you are blessed with
+"a good humour not easily disturbed "; and you "have not suffered
+much"; and "nature has prepared cushions to soften shocks"; and you
+have "had so much enjoyment in this life that you really have no right
+to claim any compensation beyond it." That is M. Renan's experience of
+life--a life of which he looks forward to the perfection in the
+clearness and security of its possible denials of ancient beliefs, and
+in the immense development of its positive and experimental knowledge.
+How would Descartes have rejoiced, he says, if he could have seen some
+poor treatise on physics or cosmography of our day, and what would we
+not give to catch a glimpse of such an elementary schoolbook of a
+hundred years hence.
+
+But that is not at any rate the experience of all the world, nor does
+it appear likely ever to be within the reach of all the world. There is
+another aspect of life more familiar than this, an aspect which has
+presented itself to the vast majority of mankind, the awful view of it
+which is made tragic by pain and sorrow and moral evil; which, in the
+way in which religion looks at it, if it is sterner, is also higher and
+nobler, and is brightened by hope and purposes of love; a view which
+puts more upon men and requires more from them, but holds before them a
+destiny better than the perfection here of physical science. To minds
+which realise all this, it is more inconceivable than any amount of
+miracle that such a religion as Christianity should have emerged
+naturally out of the conditions of the first century. They refuse to
+settle such a question by the short and easy method on which M. Renan
+relies; they will not consent to put it on questions about the two
+Isaiahs, or about alleged discrepancies between the Evangelists; they
+will not think the claims of religion disposed of by M. Renan's canon,
+over and over again contradicted, that whether there can be or not,
+there _is_ no evidence of the supernatural in the world. To those who
+measure and feel the true gravity of the issues, it is almost
+unintelligible to find a man who has been face to face with
+Christianity all his life treating the deliberate condemnation of it
+almost gaily and with a light heart, and showing no regrets in having
+to give it up as a delusion and a dream. It is a poor and meagre end of
+a life of thought and study to come to the conclusion that the age in
+which he has lived is, if not one of the greatest, at least "the most
+amusing of all ages."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+LIFE OF FREDERICK ROBERTSON[18]
+
+
+  [18]
+  _Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson_. Edited by Stopford A.
+  Brooke. _Guardian_, 15th November 1865.
+
+If the proof of a successful exhibition of a strongly marked and
+original character be that it excites and sustains interest throughout,
+that our tastes are appealed to and our judgments called forth with
+great strength, that we pass continuously and rapidly, as we read, from
+deep and genuine admiration to equally deep and genuine dissent and
+disapprobation, that it allows us to combine a general but irresistible
+sense of excellence growing upon us through the book with an
+under-current of real and honest dislike and blame, then this book in a
+great measure satisfies the condition of success. It is undeniable that
+in what it shows us of Mr. Robertson there is much to admire, much to
+sympathise with, much to touch us, a good deal to instruct us. He is
+set before us, indeed, by the editor, as the ideal of all that a great
+Christian teacher and spiritual guide, all that a brave and wise and
+high-souled man, may be conceived to be. We cannot quite accept him as
+an example of such rare and signal achievement; and the fault of the
+book is the common one of warm-hearted biographers to wind their own
+feelings and those of their readers too high about their subject; to
+talk as if their hero's excellences were unknown till he appeared to
+display them, and to make up for the imperfect impression resulting
+from actual facts and qualities by insisting with overstrained emphasis
+on a particular interpretation of them. The book would be more truthful
+and more pleasing if the editor's connecting comments were more simply
+written, and made less pretension to intensity and energy of language.
+Yet with all drawbacks of what seem to us imperfect taste, an imperfect
+standard of character, and an imperfect appreciation of what there is
+in the world beyond a given circle of interests, the book does what a
+biography ought to do--it shows us a remarkable man, and it gives us
+the means of forming our own judgment about him. It is not a tame
+panegyric or a fancy picture.
+
+The main portion of the book consists of Mr. Robertson's own letters,
+and his own accounts of himself; and we are allowed to see him, in a
+great degree at least, as he really was. The editor draws a moral,
+indeed, and tells us what we ought to think about what we see; but we
+can use our own judgment about that. And, as so often happens in real
+life, what we see both attracts and repels; it calls forth,
+successively and in almost equal measure, warm sympathy and admiration,
+and distinct and hearty disagreement. At least there is nothing of
+commonplace--of what is commonplace yet in our generation; though there
+is a good deal that bids fair to become commonplace in the next. It is
+the record of a genuine spontaneous character, seeking its way, its
+duty, its perfection, with much sincerity and elevation of purpose, and
+many anxieties and sorrows, and not, we doubt not, without much of the
+fruits that come with real self-devotion; a record disclosing a man
+with great faults and conspicuous blanks in his nature, one with whose
+principles, taste, or judgment we constantly find ourselves having a
+vehement quarrel, just after having been charmed and conciliated by
+some unexpectedly powerful or refined statement of an important truth.
+We cannot think, and few besides his own friends will think, that he
+had laid his hand with so sure an accuracy and with so much promise
+upon the clue which others had lost or bungled over. But there is much
+to learn in his thoughts and words, and there is not less to learn from
+his life. It is the life of a man who did not spare himself in
+fulfilling what he received as his task, who sacrificed much in order
+to speak his message, as he thought, more worthily and to do his office
+more effectually, and whose career touches us the more from the shadow
+of suffering and early death that hangs over its aspirations and
+activity. A book which fairly shows us such a life is not of less value
+because it also shows us much that we regret and condemn.
+
+Mr. Robertson was brought up not only in the straitest traditions of
+the Evangelical school, but in the heat of its controversial warfare.
+His heart, when he was a boy, was set on entering the army; and one of
+his most characteristic points through life, shown in many very
+different forms, was his pugnacity, his keen perception of the
+"_certaminis gaudia_":--
+
+    "There is something of combativeness in me," he writes, "which
+    prevents the whole vigour being drawn out, except when I have an
+    antagonist to deal with, a falsehood to quell, or a wrong to
+    avenge. Never till then does my mind feel quite alive. Could I
+    have chosen my own period of the world to have lived in, and my
+    own type of life, it should be the feudal ages, and the life of a
+    Cid, the redresser of wrongs."
+
+    "On the other hand," writes his biographer, "when he met men who
+    despised Christianity, or who, like the Roman Catholics, held to
+    doctrines which he believed untrue, this very enthusiasm and
+    unconscious excitement swept him sometimes beyond himself. He
+    could not moderate his indignation down to the cool level of
+    ordinary life. Hence he was wanting at this time in the wise
+    tolerance which formed so conspicuous a feature of his maturer
+    manhood. He held to his own views with pertinacity. He believed
+    them to be true; and he almost refused to allow the possibility of
+    the views of others having truth in them also. He was more or less
+    one-sided at this period. With the Roman Catholic religion it was
+    war to the death, not in his later mode of warfare, by showing the
+    truth which lay beneath the error, but by denouncing the error. He
+    seems invariably, with the pugnacity of a young man, to have
+    attacked their faith; and the mode in which this was done was
+    startlingly different from that which afterwards he adopted."
+
+He yielded, after considerable resistance, to the wishes and advice of
+his friends, that he should prepare for orders. "With a romantic
+instinct of self-sacrifice," says his biographer, "he resolved to give
+up the idea of his whole life." This we can quite understand; but with
+that propensity of biographers to credit their subject with the
+desirable qualities which it may be supposed that they ought to have,
+besides those which they really have, the editor proceeds to observe
+that this would scarcely have happened had not Mr. Robertson's
+"_characteristic self-distrust_ disposed him to believe that he was
+himself the worst judge of his future profession." This is the way in
+which the true outline of a character is blurred and confused, in order
+to say something proper and becoming. Self-distrust was not among the
+graces or weaknesses of Mr. Robertson's nature, unless indeed we
+mistake for it the anxiety which even the stoutest heart may feel at a
+crisis, or the dissatisfaction which the proudest may feel at the
+interval between attempt and achievement.
+
+He was an undergraduate at Brasenose at the height of the Oxford
+movement. He was known there, so far as he was known at all, as a keen
+partisan of the Evangelical school; and though no one then suspected
+the power which was really in him, his party, not rich in men of
+strength or promise, made the most of a recruit who showed ability and
+entered heartily into their watchwords, and, it must be said, their
+rancour. He was conspicuous among the young men of his standing for the
+forwardness with which he took his side against "Tractarianism," and
+the vehemence of his dislike of it, and for the almost ostentatious and
+defiant prominence which he gave to the convictions and social habits
+of his school He expressed his scorn and disgust at the "donnishness,"
+the coldness, the routine, the want of heart, which was all that he
+could see at Oxford out of the one small circle of his friends. He
+despised the Oxford course of work, and would have nothing more to do
+with it than he could help--as he lived to regret afterwards. Yet even
+then he was in his tastes and the instinctive tendencies of his mind
+above his party. He was an admiring reader of Wordsworth and Shelley;
+he felt the strength of Aristotle and Plato; he is said to have
+appreciated Mr. Newman's preaching, and to have gallantly defended what
+he admired in him and his friends. His editor, indeed, Mr. Brooke,
+appears to be a little divided and embarrassed, between his wish to
+enforce Mr. Robertson's largeness of mind and heart, and his fear of
+giving countenance to suspicions that he was ever so little inclined to
+"High Churchism"; between his desire to show that Mr. Robertson
+estimated the High Church leaders as much as an intelligent man ought,
+and disliked their system as much as a sound-thinking Christian ought.
+We should have thought that he need not be so solicitous to "set at
+rest the question about Mr. Robertson's High Church tendencies." "I
+hate High Churchism," was one of his latest declarations, when
+professing his sympathy with individual High Churchmen. One thing,
+however, is quite clear--that in his early life his partisanship was
+thoroughgoing and unflinching enough to satisfy the fiercest and most
+fanatical of their opponents. Such a representation as this is simply
+misleading:--
+
+    The almost fierceness with which he speaks against the Tract
+    school is proof in him of the strength of the attraction it
+    possessed for him, just as afterwards at Brighton his attacks on
+    Evangelicalism are proof of the strength with which he once held
+    to that form of Christianity, and the force of the reaction with
+    which he abandoned it for ever. Out of these two reactions--when
+    their necessary ultra tendencies had been mellowed down by
+    time--emerged at last the clearness and the just balance of
+    principles with which he taught during 1848 and the following
+    years, at Brighton. He had probed both schools of theological
+    thought to their recesses, and had found them wanting. He spoke of
+    what he knew when he protested against both. He spoke also of what
+    he knew when he publicly recognised the Spirit of all good moving
+    in the lives of those whose opinions he believed to be erroneous.
+
+It is absurd to say, because he sometimes spoke of the "danger" he had
+been in from "Tractarianism," that he had felt in equal degree the
+"strength of attraction" towards the one school and towards the other,
+and it is equally absurd to talk of his "having probed both to their
+recesses." He read, and argued, and discussed the pamphlets of the
+controversy--the "replies," Mr. Brooke says, with more truth probably
+than he thought of in using the word--like other undergraduates who
+took interest in what was going on, and thought themselves fit to
+choose their side. With his tutor and friend, Mr. Churton, he read
+Taylor's _Ancient Christianity_, carefully looking out the passages
+from the Fathers. "I am reading the early Church history with
+Golightly," he says, "which is a very great advantage, as he has a fund
+of general information and is a close reader." But we must doubt
+whether this involved "probing to the recesses" the "Tractarian" side
+of the question. And we distrust the depth and the judgment, and the
+impartiality also of a man who is said to have read Newman's sermons
+continually with delight to the day of his death, and by whom no book
+was more carefully studied and more highly honoured than _The Christian
+Year_, and who yet to the last could see nothing better in the Church
+movement as a whole than, according to the vulgar view of it, a revival
+of forms partly useful, partly hurtful It seems to us the great
+misfortune of his life, and one which exercised its evil influence on
+him to the end, that, thrown young into the narrowest and weakest of
+religious schools, he found it at first so congenial to his vehement
+temperament, that he took so kindly to certain of its more unnatural
+and ungenerous ways, and thus was cut off from the larger and healthier
+influences of the society round him. Those were days when older men
+than he took their side too precipitately; but he found himself
+encouraged, even as an undergraduate, to dogmatise, to be positive, to
+hate, to speak evil. He learnt the lesson too well. This is the
+language of an undergraduate at the end of his university course;--
+
+    But I seem this term to have in a measure waked out of a long
+    trance, partly caused by my own gross inconsistencies, and partly
+    by the paralysing effects of this Oxford-delusion heresy, for such
+    it is I feel persuaded. And to know it a man must live here, and
+    he will see the promising and ardent men sinking one after another
+    in a deadly torpor, wrapped up in self-contemplation, dead to
+    their Redeemer, and useless to His Church, under the baneful
+    breath of this accursed upas tree. I say accursed, because I
+    believe that St. Paul would use the same language to Oxford as he
+    did to the Galatian Church, "I would they were even cut off which
+    trouble you"; accursed, because I believe that the curse of God
+    will fall on it He has denounced it on the Papal hereby, and he is
+    no respecter of persons, to punish the name and not the reality.
+    May He forgive me if I err, and lead me into all truth. But I do
+    not speak as one who has been in no clanger, and therefore cannot
+    speak very quietly. It is strange into what ramifications the
+    disbelief of external justification will extend; _we will_ make it
+    internal, whether it be by self-mortification, by works of
+    evangelical obedience, or by the sacraments, and that just at the
+    time when we suppose most that we are magnifying the work of the
+    Lord.
+
+Mr. Brooke rather likes to dwell, as it seems to us, in an unreal and
+disproportionate way, on Mr. Robertson's sufferings, in the latter part
+of his life, from the bitter and ungenerous attacks of which he was the
+object. "This is the man," he says in one place, "who was afterwards at
+Brighton driven into the deepest solitariness of heart, whom God
+thought fit to surround with slander and misunderstanding." He was, we
+doubt not, fiercely assailed by the Evangelical party, which he had
+left, and which he denounced in no gentle language; he was, as we can
+well believe, "constantly attacked, by some manfully, by others in an
+underhand manner, and was the victim of innuendoes and slander." We
+cannot, however, help thinking that Mr. Brooke unconsciously
+exaggerates the solitariness and want of sympathy which went with all
+this. Mr. Robertson had, and knew that he had, his ardent and
+enthusiastic admirers as well as his worrying and untiring opponents.
+But what we remark is this. It was the measure which he had meted out
+to others, in the fierceness of his zeal for Evangelicalism, which the
+Evangelicals afterwards meted out to him. They did not more talk evil
+of what they knew not and had taken no real pains to understand, than
+he had done of a body of men as able, as well-instructed, as
+deep-thinking, as brave, as earnest as himself in their war against sin
+and worldliness. The stupidity, the perverse ill-nature, the resolute
+ignorance, the audacious and fanatical application of Scripture
+condemnations, the reckless judging without a desire to do justice,
+which he felt and complained of so bitterly when turned against
+himself, he had sanctioned and largely shared in when the same party
+which attacked him in the end attacked the earlier revivers of
+thoughtful and earnest religion. Nor do we find that he ever expressed
+regret for a vehemence of condemnation which his after-knowledge must
+have shown him that he had no business to pass, because, even if he
+afterwards adhered to it, he had originally passed it on utterly false
+and inadequate grounds. He only became as fierce against the
+Evangelicals as he had been against the followers of Mr. Newman. He
+never unlearnt the habit of harsh reprobation which his Evangelical
+friends had encouraged. He only transferred its full force against
+themselves.
+
+He left Oxford and began his ministry, first at Winchester, and then at
+Cheltenham, full of Evangelical _formulae_ and Evangelical narrow zeal.
+It does not appear that, except as an earnest hard-working clergyman,
+he was in any way distinguished from numbers of the same class, though
+we are quite willing to believe that even then his preaching, in warmth
+and vigour, was above the average. But as he, or his biographer, says,
+he had not yet really begun to think. When he began to think, he did so
+with the rapidity, the intensity, the impatient fervid vehemence which
+lay all along at the bottom of his character. His Evangelical views
+appear to have snapped to pieces and dissolved with a violence and
+sudden abruptness entirely unaccounted for by anything which these
+volumes show us. He read Carlyle; but so did many other people. He
+found the religious world at Cheltenham not so pure as he had imagined
+it; but this is what must have happened anywhere, and is not enough to
+account for such a complete revolution of belief. He had a friend
+deeply read in German philosophy and criticism who is said to have
+exercised influence on him. Still, we repeat, the steps and processes
+of the change from the Evangelicalism of Cheltenham to a condition, at
+first, of almost absolute doubt, are very imperfectly explained:--
+
+    These letters were written in 1843. In the following year doubts
+    and questionings began to stir in his mind. He could not get rid
+    of them. They were forced upon him by his reading and his
+    intercourse with men. They grew and tortured him. His teaching in
+    the pulpit altered, and it became painful to him to preach. He was
+    reckoned of the Evangelical school, and he began to feel that his
+    position was becoming a false one. He felt the excellence and
+    earnestness, and gladly recognised the work of the nobler portion
+    of that party, but he felt also that he must separate from it. In
+    his strong reaction from its extreme tendencies, he understood
+    with a shock which upturned his whole inward life for a time, that
+    the system on which he had founded his whole faith and work could
+    never be received by him again. Within its pale, for him, there
+    was henceforward neither life, peace, nor reality. It was not,
+    however, till almost the end of his ministry at Cheltenham that
+    this became clearly manifest to him. It had been growing slowly
+    into a conviction. An outward blow--the sudden ruin of a
+    friendship which he had wrought, as he imagined, for ever into his
+    being--a blow from which he never afterwards wholly
+    recovered--accelerated the inward crisis, and the result was a
+    period of spiritual agony so awful that it not only shook his
+    health to its centre, but smote his spirit down into so profound a
+    darkness that of all his early faiths but one remained, "It must
+    be right to do right."
+
+This seems to have been in 1846, and in the beginning of the next year
+he had already taken his new line. The explanation does not explain
+much. We have no right to ask for more than his friends think fit to
+tell us of this turning-point of his life. But we observe that this
+deeply important passage is left with but little light and much
+manifest reticence. That the crisis took place we have his own touching
+and eloquent words to assure us. It left him also as firm in his
+altered convictions as he had been in his old ones. What caused it,
+what were its circumstances and characteristics, and what affected its
+course and results, we can only guess. But it was decisive and it was
+speedy. He spent a few months in Germany in the end of 1846, and in the
+beginning of 1847 the Bishop of Oxford was willing to appoint him to
+St. Ebbe's. But his stay there was short. Three months afterwards he
+accepted the chapel at Brighton which he held till his death in August
+1853.
+
+He was now the Robertson whom all the world knows, and the change was a
+most remarkable one. It seems strictly accurate to say that he started
+at once into a new man--new in all his views and tastes; new in the
+singular burst of power which at once shows itself in the keen, free,
+natural language of his letters and his other writings; new in the deep
+concentrated earnestness of character with which he seemed to grasp his
+peculiar calling and function. All the conventionalities of his old
+school, which hung very thick about him even to the end of his
+Cheltenham life, seem suddenly to drop off, and leave him, without a
+trace remaining on his mind, in the full use and delight of his new
+liberty. We cannot say that we are more inclined to agree with him in
+his later stage than in his earlier. And the rapid transformation of a
+most dogmatic and zealous Evangelical into an equally positive and
+enthusiastic "Broad Churchman" does not seem a natural or healthy
+process, and suggests impatience and self-confidence more than
+self-command and depth. But we get, without doubt, to a real man--a man
+whose words have a meaning, and stand for real things; whose language
+no longer echoes the pale dreary commonplaces of a school, but reveals
+thoughts which he has thought for himself, and the power of being able
+"to speak as he will." His mind seems to expand, almost at a bound, to
+all the manifold variety of interests of which the world is full. His
+letters on his own doings, on the books and subjects of the day, on the
+remarks or the circumstances of his friends, his criticism, his satire,
+his controversial or friendly discussions, are full of energy,
+versatility, refinement, boldness, and strength; and his remarkable
+power of clear, picturesque, expressive diction, not unworthy of our
+foremost masters of English, appears all at once, as it were, full
+grown. It is difficult to believe, as we read the later portions of his
+life, that we are reading about the same man who appeared, so short a
+time before, at the beginning, to promise at best to turn into a
+popular Evangelical preacher, above the average, perhaps, in taste and
+power, but not above the average in freedom from cramping and sour
+prejudices.
+
+Mr. Robertson had hold of some great truths, and he applied them, both
+in his own thoughts and self-development and in his popular teaching,
+with great force. He realised two things with a depth and intensity
+which give an awful life and power to all he said about religion. He
+realised with singular and pervading keenness that which a greater man
+than he speaks of as the first and the great discovery of the awakened
+soul--" the thought of two, and two only, supreme and luminously
+self-evident beings, himself and the Creator." "Alone with God,"
+expresses the feeling which calmed his own anxieties and animated his
+religious appeals to others. And he realised with equal earnestness the
+great truth which is spoken of by Mr. Brooke, though in language which
+to us has an unpleasant sound, in the following extract:
+
+    Yet, notwithstanding all this--which men called while he lived,
+    and now when he is dead will call, want of a clear and
+    well-defined system of theology--he had a fixed basis for his
+    teaching. It was the Divine-human Life of Christ. It is the fourth
+    principle mentioned in his letter, "that belief in the human
+    character of Christ must be antecedent to belief in His divine
+    origin." He felt that an historical Christianity was absolutely
+    essential; that only through a visible life of the Divines in the
+    flesh could God become intelligible to men; that Christ was God's
+    idea of our nature realised; that only when we fall back on the
+    glorious portrait of what has been, ran we be delivered from
+    despair of Humanity; that in Christ "all the blood of all the
+    nations ran," and all the powers of man were redeemed. Therefore
+    he grasped as the highest truth, on which to rest life and
+    thought, the reality expressed in the words, "the Word was made
+    Flesh." The Incarnation was to him the centre of all history, the
+    blossoming of Humanity. The Life which followed the Incarnation
+    was the explanation of the Life of God, and the only solution of
+    the problem of the Life of man. He did not speak much of loving
+    Christ; his love was fitly mingled with that veneration which
+    makes love perfect; his voice was solemn, and he paused before he
+    spoke His name in common talk; for what that name meant had become
+    the central thought of his intellect and the deepest realisation
+    of his spirit. He had spent a world of study, of reverent
+    meditation, of adoring contemplation, on the Gospel history.
+    Nothing comes forward more frequently in his letters than the way
+    in which he had entered into the human life of Christ. To that
+    everything is referred--by that everything is explained.
+
+In bringing home these great truths to the feelings of those who had
+lived insensible to them lay the chief value of his preaching. He
+awakened men to believe that there was freshness and reality in things
+which they had by use become dulled to. There are no doubt minds which
+rise to the truth most naturally and freely without the intervention of
+dogmatic expressions, and to these such expressions, as they are a
+limit and a warning, are also felt as a clog. Mr. Robertson's early
+experience had made him suspicious and irritable about dogma as such;
+and he prided himself on being able to dispense with it, while at the
+same time preserving the principle and inner truth which it was
+intended to convey. But in his ostentatious contempt of dogmatic
+precision and exactness, none but those who have not thought about the
+matter will see any proof of his strength or wisdom. Dogma, accurate,
+subtle, scientific, does not prevent a mind of the first order from
+breathing freshness of feeling, grandeur, originality, and the sense of
+reality, into the exposition of the truth which it represents. It is no
+fetter except to those minds which in their impulsiveness, their
+self-confidence, and their want of adequate grasp and sustained force,
+most need its salutary restraint. And no man has a right, however
+eloquent and impressive his speech may be, to talk against dogma till
+he shows that he does not confound accuracy of statement with
+conventional formalism. Mr. Robertson lays down the law pretty
+confidently about the blunders of everybody about him--Tractarian,
+Evangelical, Dissenter, Romanist, and Rationalist. We must say that the
+impression of every page of his letters is, that clear and "intuitive"
+as he was, he had not always understood what he condemned. He was
+especially satisfied with a view of Baptism which he thought rose above
+both extremes and took in the truth of both while it avoided their
+errors. But is it too much to say that a man who, not in the heat of
+rhetoric, but when preparing candidates for Confirmation, and piquing
+himself on his freedom from all prejudice, deliberately describes the
+common Church view of Baptism as implying a "magical" change, and
+actually illustrates what he means by the stories of magical changes in
+the _Arabian Nights_--who knowing, or able to read, all that has been
+said by divines on the subject from the days of Augustine, yet commits
+himself to the assertion that this is in fact what they hold and
+teach--is it too much to say that such a man, whatever may be his other
+gifts, has forfeited all claim to be considered capable of writing and
+expressing himself with accuracy, truth, and distinctness on
+theological questions? And if theological questions are to be dealt
+with, ought they not to be dealt with accurately, and not loosely?
+
+But we have lingered too long over these volumes. They are very
+instructive, sometimes very elevating, almost always very touching. The
+life which they describe greatly wanted discipline, self-restraint, and
+the wise and manly fear of overrating one's own novelties. But we see
+in it a life consecrated to duty, fulfilled with much pain and
+self-sacrifice, and adorned by warm and deep affections, by vigour and
+refinement of thought, and earnest love for truth and purity. No one
+can help feeling his profound and awful sense of things unseen, though
+in the philosophy by which he sought to connect things seen and things
+unseen, we cannot say that we can have much confidence. We have only
+one concluding remark to make, and that is not on him but on his
+biographer. An exaggerated tone, as we have said, seems to us to
+pervade the book. There is what seems to us an unhealthy attempt to
+create in the reader an impression of the exceptional severity of the
+sufferings of Mr. Robertson's life, of his loneliness, of his
+persecutions. But in this point much may fairly be pardoned to the
+affection of a friend. What, however, we can less excuse is the want of
+good feeling with which Mr. Brooke, in his account of Mr. Robertson's
+last days, allows himself to give an _ex parte_, account of a dispute
+between Mr. Robertson and the Vicar of Brighton, about the appointment
+of a curate, and not simply to insinuate, but distinctly declare that
+this dispute with its result was the fatal stroke which, in his state
+of ill-health, hastened his death. We say nothing about the rights of
+the story, for we never heard anything of them but what Mr. Brooke
+tells us. But there is an appearance of vindictiveness in putting it on
+record with this particular aspect which nothing in the story itself
+seems to us to justify. In describing Mr. Robertson's departure from
+Cheltenham, Mr. Brooke has plainly thought right to use much reticence.
+He would have done well to have used the same reticence about these
+quarrels at Brighton.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+LIFE OF BARON BUNSEN[19]
+
+
+  [19]
+  _A Memoir of Baron Bunsen_. By his Widow, Baroness Bunsen. _Saturday
+  Review_, 2nd May 1868.
+
+Bunsen was really one of those persons, more common two centuries ago
+than now, who could belong as much to an adopted country as to that in
+which they were born and educated. A German of the Germans, he yet
+succeeded in also making himself at home in England, in appreciating
+English interests, in assimilating English thought and traditions, and
+exercising an important influence at a critical time on one extremely
+important side of English life and opinion. He was less felicitous in
+allying the German with the Englishman, perhaps from personal
+peculiarities of impatience, self-assertion, and haste, than one who
+has since trodden in his steps and realised more completely and more
+splendidly some of the great designs which floated before his mind. But
+few foreigners have gained more fairly, by work and by sympathy, the
+_droit de cite_ in England than Bunsen.
+
+It is a great pity that books must be so long and so bulky, and though
+Bunsen's life was a very full and active one in all matters of
+intellectual interest, and in some of practical interest also, we
+cannot help thinking that his biography would have gained by greater
+exercise of self-denial on the part of his biographer. It is altogether
+too prolix, and the distinction is not sufficiently observed between
+what is interesting simply to the Bunsen family and their friends, and
+what is interesting to the public. One of the points in which
+biographers, and the present author among the number, make mistakes, is
+in their use of letters. They never know when to stop in giving
+correspondence. If we had only one or two letters of a remarkable map,
+they would be worth printing, even if they were very much like other
+people's letters. But when we have bundles and letter-books without end
+to select from, selection, in a work professedly biographical, becomes
+advisable. We want types and specimens of a man's letters; and when the
+specimen has been given, we want no more, unless what is given is for
+its own sake remarkable. A great number of Bunsen's early letters are
+printed. Some of them are of much interest, showing how early the germs
+were formed of ideas and plans which occupied his life, and what were
+the influences by which he was surrounded, and how he comported himself
+in regard to them. But many more of these letters are what any young
+man of thought and of an affectionate nature might have written; and we
+do not want to have it shown us, over and over again, merely that
+Bunsen was thoughtful and affectionate. A wise and severe economy in
+this matter would have produced at least the same effect, at much less
+cost to the reader.
+
+Bunsen was born in 1791, at Corbach, in the little principality of
+Waldeck, and grew up under the severe and simple training of a frugal
+German household, and with a solid and vigorous German education. He
+became in time Heyne's pupil at Goettingen, and very early showed the
+qualities which distinguished him in his after life--restless eagerness
+after knowledge and vast powers of labour, combined with large and
+ambitious, and sometimes vague, ideas, and with depth and fervour of
+religious sentiment. He entered on life when the reaction against the
+cold rationalistic theories of the age before him was stimulated by the
+excitement of the war of liberation; and in his deep and supreme
+interest in the Bible he kept to the last the stamp which he then
+received. More interesting than the recollections of a distinguished
+man's youth by his friends after he has become distinguished--which are
+seldom quite natural and not always trustworthy--are the contemporary
+records of the impressions made on _him_ in his youth by those who were
+distinguished men when he was young. In some of Bunsen's letters we
+have such impressions. Thus he writes of Heyne in 1813:--
+
+    Poor and lonely did I arrive in this place [Goettingen]. Heyne
+    received me, guided me, bore with me, encouraged me, showed me in
+    himself the example of a high and noble energy, and indefatigable
+    activity in a calling which was not that to which his merit
+    entitled him. He might have superintended and administered and
+    maintained an entire kingdom without more effort and with yet
+    greater efficiency than the University for which he lived; he was
+    too great for a mere philologer, and in general for a professor of
+    mere learning in the age into which he was cast, and he was more
+    distinguished in every other way than in this.... And what has he
+    established or founded at the cost of this exertion of faculties?
+    Learning annihilates itself, and the most perfect is the first
+    submerged; for the next age scales with ease the height which cost
+    the preceding the full vigour of life. Yet two things remain of
+    him and will not perish--the one, the tribute left by his free
+    spirit to the finest productions of the human mind; and what he
+    felt, thought, and has immortalised in many men of excellence gone
+    before. Read his explanations of Tischbein's engravings from
+    Homer, his last preface to Virgil, and especially his oration on
+    the death of Mueller, and you will understand what I mean. I speak
+    not of his political instinct, made evident in his survey of the
+    public and private life of the ancients. The other memorial which
+    will subsist of him, more warm in life than the first, is the
+    remembrance of his generosity, to which numbers owe a deep
+    obligation.
+
+And of Schelling, about the same time, whom he had just seen in Munich:--
+
+    Schelling before all must be mentioned as having received me well,
+    after his fashion, giving me frequent occasions of becoming
+    acquainted with his philosophical views and judgments, in his own
+    original and peculiar manner. His mode of disputation is rough and
+    angular; his peremptoriness and his paradoxes terrible. Once he
+    undertook to explain animal magnetism, and for this purpose to
+    give an idea of Time, from which resulted that all is present and
+    in existence--the Present as existing in the actual moment; the
+    Future, as existing in a future moment. When I demanded the proof,
+    he referred me to the word _is_, which applies to existence, in
+    the sentence that "this _is_ future." Seckendorf, who was present
+    (with him I have become closely acquainted, to my great
+    satisfaction), attempted to draw attention to the confounding the
+    subjective (i.e. him who pronounces that sentence) with the
+    objective; or, rather, to point out a simple grammatical
+    misunderstanding--in short, declared the position impossible.
+    "Well," replied Schelling drily, "you have not understood me." Two
+    Professors (his worshippers), who were present, had meanwhile
+    endeavoured by their exclamations, "Only observe, all _is_, all
+    _exists_" (to which the wife of Schelling, a clever woman,
+    assented), to help me into conviction; and a vehement beating the
+    air--for arguing and holding fast by any firm point were out of
+    the question--would have arisen, if I had not contrived to escape
+    by giving a playful turn to the conversation. I am perfectly aware
+    that Schelling _could_ have expressed and carried through his real
+    opinion far better--i.e. rationally. I tell the anecdote merely
+    to give an idea of his manner in conversation.
+
+At Goettingen he was one of a remarkable set, comprising Lachmann,
+Luecke, Brandis, and some others, thought as much of at the time as
+their friends, but who failed to make their way to the front ranks of
+the world. Like others of his countrymen, Bunsen began to find "that
+the world's destinies were not without their effect on him," and to
+feel dissatisfied with the comparatively narrow sphere of even German
+learning. The thought grew, and took possession of him, of "bringing
+over, into his knowledge and into his fatherland, the solemn and
+distant East," and to "draw the East into the study of the entire
+course of humanity (particularly of European, and more especially of
+Teutonic humanity)," making Germany the "central point of this study."
+Vast plans of philological and historical study, involving, as the only
+means then possible of carrying them out, schemes of wide travel and
+long sojourn in the East, opened on him. Indian and Persian literature,
+the instinctive certainty of its connection with the languages and
+thought of the West, and the imperfection of means of study in Europe,
+drew him, as many more were drawn at the time, to seek the knowledge
+which they wanted in foreign and distant lands. With Bunsen, this wide
+and combined study of philology, history, and philosophy, which has
+formed one of the characteristic pursuits of our time, was from the
+first connected with the study of the Bible as its central point. In
+1815 came a decisive turning-point in his life--his acquaintance, and
+the beginning of his close connection, with Niebuhr, at Berlin; and
+from this time he felt himself a Prussian. "That State in Northern
+Germany," he writes to Brandis in 1815, "which gladly receives every
+German, from wheresoever he may come, and considers every one thus
+entering as a citizen born, is _the true Germany_":--
+
+    That such a State [he proceeds, in the true Bismarckian spirit]
+    should prove inconvenient to others of inferior importance, which
+    persist in continuing their isolated existence, regardless of the
+    will of Providence and of the general good, is of no consequence
+    whatever; nor even does it matter that, in its present management,
+    there are defects and imperfections.... We intend to be in Berlin
+    in three weeks; and there (in Prussia) am I resolved to fix my
+    destinies.
+
+After reading Persian for a short time in Paris with De Sacy, and after
+the failure of a plan of travel with Mr. Astor of New York, Bunsen
+joined Niebuhr at Florence in the end of 1816, and went on with him to
+Rome, where Niebuhr was Prussian envoy. There, enjoying Niebuhr's
+society, "equally sole in his kind with Rome," he took up his abode,
+and plunged into study. He gave up his plans of Oriental travel,
+finding he could do all that he wanted without them. Too much a
+student, as he writes to a friend, to think of marrying, which he could
+not do "without impairing his whole scheme of mental development," he
+nevertheless found his fate in an English lady, Miss Waddington, who
+became his wife. And, finally, when the health of his friend Brandis,
+Niebuhr's secretary in the Prussian Legation, broke down, Bunsen took
+his place, and entered on that combined path of study and diplomacy in
+which he continued for the greater part of his life.
+
+It may be questioned whether Bunsen's career answered altogether
+successfully to what he proposed to himself, or was in fact all that
+his friends and he himself thought it; but it was eminently one in
+which from the first he had laid down for himself a plan of life which
+he tenaciously followed through many changes and varieties of work,
+without ever losing sight of the purpose with which he began. He piqued
+himself on having early seen that a man ought to have an object to
+which to devote his whole life--"be it a dictionary like Johnson's or a
+history like Gibbon's"--and on having discerned and chosen his own
+object. And at an early time of his life in Rome he draws an outline of
+thought and inquiry, destined to break off into many different labours,
+in very much the same language in which he might have described it in
+the last year of his life:--
+
+    _The consciousness of God in the mind of man, and that which in
+    and through that consciousness He has accomplished, especially in
+    language and religion_, this was from the earliest time before my
+    mind. After having awhile fancied to attain my point, sometimes
+    here, sometimes there, at length (it was in the Christmas holidays
+    of 1812, after having gained the prize in November) I made a
+    general and comprehensive plan. I wished to go through and
+    represent heathen antiquity, in its principal phases, in three
+    great periods of the world's history, according to its languages,
+    its religious conceptions, and its political institutions; first
+    of all in the East, where the earliest expressions in each are
+    highly remarkable, although little known; then in the second great
+    epoch, among the Greeks and Romans; thirdly, among the Teutonic
+    nations, who put an end to the Roman Empire.
+
+    At first I thought of Christianity only as something which every
+    one, like the mother tongue, knows intuitively, and therefore not
+    as the object of a peculiar study. But in January 1816, when I for
+    the last time took into consideration all that belonged to my
+    plan, and wrote it down, I arrived at this conclusion, that as God
+    had caused the conception of Himself to be developed in the mind
+    of man in a twofold manner, the one through revelation to the
+    Jewish people through their patriarchs, the other through reason
+    in the heathen; so also must the inquiry and representation of
+    this development be twofold; and as God had kept these two ways
+    for a length of time independent and separate, so should we, in
+    the course of the examination, separate knowledge from man, and
+    his development from the doctrine of revelation and faith, firmly
+    trusting that God in the end would bring about the union of both.
+    This is now also my firm conviction, that we must not mix them or
+    bring them together forcibly, as many have done with well-meaning
+    zeal but unclear views, and as many in Germany with impure designs
+    are still doing.
+
+The design had its interruptions, both intellectual and practical. The
+plan was an ambitious one, too ambitious for Bunsen's time and powers,
+or even probably for our own more advanced stage of knowledge; and
+Bunsen ever found it hard to resist the attractions of a new object of
+interest, and did not always exhaust it, though he seldom touched
+anything without throwing light on it. Thus he was drawn by
+circumstances to devote a good deal of time, more than he intended, to
+the mere antiquarianism of Rome. By and by he found himself succeeding
+Niebuhr as the diplomatic representative of Prussia at Rome. And his
+attempt to meet the needs of his own strong devotional feelings by
+giving more warmth and interest to the German services at the embassy,
+"the congregation on the Capitoline Hill," led him, step by step, to
+those wider schemes for liturgical reform which influenced so
+importantly the course of his fortunes. They brought him, a young and
+unknown man, with little more than Niebuhr's good word, into direct and
+confidential communication with the King of Prussia, who was then
+intent on plans of the same kind, and who recognised in Bunsen, after
+some preliminary jealousy and misgivings, the man most fitted to assist
+in carrying them out. But though Bunsen, who started with the resolve
+of being both a student and a scholar, was driven, as he thought
+against his will, into paths which led him deeper and deeper into
+public life and diplomacy, his early plans were never laid aside even
+under the stress of official employment. Perhaps it may be difficult to
+strike the balance of what they lost or gained by it.
+
+The account of his life at Rome contains much that is interesting.
+There is the curious mixture of sympathy and antipathy in Bunsen's mind
+for the place itself; the antipathy of a German, a Protestant, and a
+free inquirer, for the Roman, the old Catholic, the narrow, timid,
+traditional spirit which pervaded everything in the great seat of
+clerical and Papal government; and the sympathy, scarcely less intense,
+not merely, or in the first place, for the classical aspects of Rome,
+but for its religious character, as still the central point of
+Christendom, full of the memorials and the savour of the early days of
+Christianity, mingling with what its many centuries of history have
+added to them; and for all that aroused the interest and touched the
+mind of one deeply busy with two great religious problems--the best
+forms for Christian worship, and the restoration, if possible, of some
+organisation and authority in Protestant Germany. For a long time
+Bunsen, like his master Niebuhr, was on the best terms with Cardinals,
+Monsignori, and Popes. The Roman services were no objects to him of
+abhorrence or indifference. He saw, in the midst of accretions, the
+remains of the more primitive devotion; and the architecture, the art,
+and the music, to be found only in Rome, were to him inexhaustible
+sources of delight. As may be supposed, letters like Bunsen's, and the
+recollections of his biographer, are full of interesting gossip;
+notices of famous people, and of things that happened in Rome in the
+days of the Emancipation and Reform Bills, Revolutions of Naples in
+'20 and France in '30, during the twenty years, from 1818 to 1838, in
+which the men of the great war and the restorations were going off the
+scene, and the men of the modern days--Liberals, High Churchmen,
+Ultra-montanes--were coming on. Those twenty years, of course, were not
+without their changes in Bunsen's own views. The man who had come to
+Rome, in position a poor and obscure student, had grown into the oracle
+of a highly cultivated society, whose acquaintance was eagerly sought
+by every one of importance who lived at Rome or visited it, and into
+the diplomatic representative of one of the great Powers. The scholar
+had come to have, not merely theories, but political and ecclesiastical
+aims. The disciple of Niebuhr, who at one time had seen all things very
+much as Niebuhr saw them in his sad later days of disgust at revolution
+and cynical despair of liberty, had come since under the influence of
+Arnold, and, as his letters to Arnold show, had taken into his own mind
+much of the more generous and hopeful, though vague, teaching of that
+equally fervid teacher of liberalism and of religion. These letters are
+of much interest. They show the dreams and the fears and antipathies of
+the time; they contain some remarkable anticipations, some equally
+remarkable miscalculations, and some ideas and proposals which, with
+our experience, excite our wonder that any one could have imagined them
+practicable. Every one knows that Bunsen's diplomatic career at Rome
+ended unfortunately. He was mixed up with the violent proceedings of
+the Prussian Government in the dispute with the Archbishop of Cologne
+about marriages between Protestants and Catholics, and he had the
+misfortune to offend equally both his own Court and that of Rome. It is
+possible that, as is urged in the biography before us, he was
+sacrificed to the blunders and the enmities of powers above him. But,
+for whatever reason, no clear account is given of the matter by his
+biographer, though a good deal is suggested; and in the absence of
+intelligible explanations the conclusion is natural that, though he may
+have been ill-used, he may also have been unequal to his position.
+
+But his ill-success or his ill-usage at Rome was more than compensated
+by the results to which it may be said to have led. Out of it
+ultimately came that which gave the decisive character to Bunsen's
+life--his settlement in London as Prussian Minister. On leaving Rome he
+came straight to England He came full of admiration and enthusiasm to
+"his Ithaca, his island fatherland," and he was flattered and delighted
+by the welcome he received, and by the power which he perceived in
+himself, beyond that of most foreigners, to appreciate and enjoy
+everything English. He liked everything--people, country, and
+institutions; even, as his biographer writes, our rooks. The zest of
+his enjoyment was not diminished by his keen sense of what appear to
+foreigners our characteristic defects--the want of breadth of interest
+and boldness of speculative thought which accompanies so much energy in
+public life and so much practical success; and he seems to have felt in
+himself a more than ordinary fitness to be a connecting link between
+the two nations--that he had much to teach Englishmen, and that they
+were worth teaching. He thoroughly sympathised with the earnestness and
+strong convictions of English religion; but he thought it lamentably
+destitute of rational grounds, of largeness of idea and of critical
+insight, enslaved to the letter, and afraid of inquiry. But, with all
+drawbacks, his visit to England made it a very attractive place to him;
+and when he was appointed by his Government Envoy to the Swiss
+Confederation, with strict injunctions "to do nothing," his eyes were
+oft on turned towards England. In 1840 the King of Prussia died, and
+Bunsen's friend and patron, the Crown Prince, became Frederic William
+IV. He resembled Bunsen in more ways than one; in his ardent religious
+sentiment, in his eagerness, in his undoubting and not always
+far-sighted self-confidence and self-assertion, and in a combination of
+practical vagueness of view and a want of understanding men, with a
+feverish imperiousness in carrying out a favourite plan. In 1841 he
+sent Bunsen to England to negotiate the ill-considered and precipitate
+arrangement for the Jerusalem bishopric; and on the successful
+conclusion of the negotiation, Bunsen was appointed permanently to be
+Prussian Minister in London. The manner of appointment was remarkable.
+The King sent three names to Lord Aberdeen and the English Court, and
+they selected Bunsen's.
+
+Thus Bunsen, who twenty-five years before had sat down a penniless
+student, almost in despair at the failure of his hopes as a travelling
+tutor, in Orgagna's _loggia_ at Florence, had risen, in spite of real
+difficulties and opposition, to a brilliant position in active
+political life; and the remarkable point is that, whether he was
+ambitious or not of this kind of advancement--and it would perhaps
+have been as well on his part to have implied less frequently that he
+was not--he was all along, above everything, the student and the
+theologian. What is even more remarkable is that, plunged into the
+whirl of London public life and society, he continued still to be, more
+even than the diplomatist, the student and theologian. The Prussian
+Embassy during the years that he occupied it, from 1841 to 1854, was
+not an idle place, and Bunsen was not a man to leave important State
+business to other hands. The French Revolution, the German Revolution,
+the Frankfort Assembly, the question of the revival of the Empire, the
+beginnings of the Danish quarrel and of the Crimean war, all fell
+within that time, and gave the Prussian Minister in such a centre as
+London plenty to think of, to do, and to write about. Yet all this time
+was a time of intense and unceasing activity in that field of
+theological controversy in which Bunsen took such delight. The
+diplomatist entrusted with the gravest affairs of a great Power in the
+most critical and difficult times, and fully alive to the interest and
+responsibility of his charge, also worked harder than most Professors,
+and was as positive and fiery in his religious theories and antipathies
+as the keenest and most dogmatic of scholastic disputants, he was busy
+about Egyptian chronology, about cuneiform writing, about comparative
+philology; he plunged with characteristic eagerness into English
+theological war; and such books as his _Church of the Future_, and his
+writings on Ignatius and Hippolytus, were not the least important of
+the works which marked the progress of the struggle of opinions here.
+But they represented only a very small part of the unceasing labour
+that was going on in the early morning hours in Carlton House Terrace.
+All this time the foundations were being laid and the materials
+gathered for books of wider scope and more permanent aim, too vast for
+him to accomplish even in his later years of leisure. It is an original
+and instructive picture; for though we boast statesmen who still carry
+on the great traditions of scholarship, and give room in their minds
+for the deeper and more solemn problems of religion and philosophy,
+they are not supposed to be able to carry on simultaneously their
+public business and their classical or scientific studies, and at any
+rate they do not attack the latter with the devouring zeal with which
+Bunsen taxed the efforts of hard-driven secretaries and readers to keep
+pace with his inexhaustible demands for more and more of the most
+abstruse materials of knowledge.
+
+The end of his London diplomatic career was, like the end of his Roman
+one, clouded with something like disgrace; and, like the Roman one, is
+left here unexplained. But it was for his happiness, probably, that his
+residence in England came to a close. He had found the poetry of his
+early notions about England, political and theological at least,
+gradually changing into prose. He found less and less to like, in what
+at first most attracted him, in the English Church; he and it, besides
+knowing one another better, were also changing. He probably increased
+his sympathies for England, and returned in a measure to his old
+kindness for it, by looking at it only from a distance. The labour of
+his later days, as vast and indefatigable as that of his earlier days,
+was devoted to his great work, which was, as it were, to popularise the
+Bible and revive interest in it by a change in the method of presenting
+it and commenting on it. To the last the Bible was the central point of
+his philosophical as well as his religious thoughts, as it had been in
+his first beginnings as a student at Gottingen and Rome. After a life
+of many trials, but of unusual prosperity and enjoyment, he died in the
+end of 1860. The account of his last days is a very touching one.
+
+We do not pretend to think Bunsen the great and consummate man that,
+naturally enough, he appears to his friends. We doubt whether he can be
+classed as a man in the first rank at all. We doubt whether he fully
+understood his age, and yet it is certain that he was confident and
+positive that he did understand it better than most men; and an undue
+confidence of this kind implies considerable defects both of intellect
+and character. He wanted the patient, cautious, judicial self-distrust
+which his studies eminently demanded, and of which he might have seen
+some examples in England. No one can read these volumes without seeing
+the disproportionate power which first impressions had with him; he was
+always ready to say that something, which had just happened or come
+before him, was the greatest or the most complete thing of its kind.
+Wonderfully active, wonderfully quick and receptive, full of
+imagination and of the power of combining and constructing, and never
+wearied out or dispirited, his mind took in large and grand ideas, and
+developed them with enthusiasm and success, and with all the resources
+of wide and varied knowledge; but the affluence and ingenuity of his
+thoughts indisposed him, as it indisposes many other able men, to the
+prosaic and uninteresting work of calling these thoughts into question,
+and cross-examining himself upon their grounds and tenableness. He
+tried too much; the multiplicity of his intellectual interests was too
+much for him, and he often thought that he was explaining when he was
+but weaving a wordy tissue, and "darkening counsel" as much as any of
+the theological sciolists whom he denounced. People, for instance,
+must, it seems to us, be very easily satisfied who find any fresh light
+in the attempt, not unfrequent in his letters, to adapt the Lutheran
+watchword of Justification by faith to modern ideas. He was very rapid,
+and this rapidity made him hasty and precipitate; it also made him apt
+to despise other men, and, what was of more consequence, the
+difficulties of the subject likewise. Others did not always find it
+easy to understand him; and it may fairly be questioned if he always
+sufficiently asked whether he understood himself. He was generous and
+large-spirited in intention, though not always so in fact.
+
+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.
+
+Sir John Coleridge knew Keble probably as long and as intimately as any
+one; and on the whole, he had the most entire sympathy with his
+friend's spirit, even where he disagreed with his opinions. He
+thoroughly understood and valued the real and living unity of a
+character which mostly revealed itself to the outer world by what
+seemed jerks and discordant traits. From early youth, through manhood
+to old age, he had watched and tested and loved that varied play and
+harmony of soul and mind, which was sometimes tender, sometimes stern,
+sometimes playful, sometimes eager; abounding with flashes of real
+genius, and yet always inclining by instinctive preference to things
+homely and humble; but which was always sound and unselfish and
+thorough, endeavouring to subject itself to the truth and will of God.
+To Sir John Coleridge all this was before him habitually as a whole; he
+could take it in, not by putting piece by piece together, but because
+he saw it. And besides being an old and affectionate and intelligent
+friend, he was also a discriminating one. In his circumstances he was
+as opposite to Keble as any one could be; he was a lawyer and man of
+the world, whose busy life at Westminster had little in common with the
+studies or pursuits of the divine and the country parson.
+
+Such an informant presents a picture entirely different in kind from
+the comments and criticisms of those who can judge only from Mr.
+Keble's writings and religious line, or from the rare occasions in
+which he took a public part. These appearances, to many who willingly
+acknowledge the charm which has drawn to him the admiration and
+affection of numbers externally most widely at variance with him, do
+not always agree together. People delight in his poetry who hate his
+theology. They cannot say too much of the tenderness, the depth, the
+truth, the quick and delicate spirit of love and purity, which have
+made his verses the best interpreters and soothers of modern religious
+feeling; yet, in the religious system from which his poetry springs,
+they find nothing but what seems to them dry, harsh, narrow, and
+antiquated. He attracts and he repels; and the attraction and repulsion
+are equally strong. They see one side, and he is irresistible in his
+simplicity, humbleness, unworldliness, and ever considerate charity,
+combined with so much keenness and freshness of thought, and such sure
+and unfailing truth of feeling. They see another, and he seems to them
+full of strange unreality, strained, exaggerated, morbid, bristling
+with a forced yet inflexible intolerance. At one moment he seems the
+very ideal of a Christian teacher, made to win the sympathy of all
+hearts; the next moment a barrier rises in the shape of some unpopular
+doctrine or some display of zealous severity, seeming to be a strange
+contrast to all that was before, which utterly astonishes and
+disappoints. Mr. Keble was very little known to the public in general,
+less so even than others whose names are associated with his; and it is
+evident that to the public in general he presented a strange assemblage
+of incoherent and seemingly irreconcilable qualities. His mind seemed
+to work and act in different directions; and the results at the end
+seemed to be with wide breaks and interruptions between them. But a
+book like this enables us to trace back these diverging lines to the
+centre from which they spring. What seemed to be in such sharp
+contradiction at the outside is seen to flow naturally from the
+perfectly homogeneous and consistent character within. Many people will
+of course except to the character. It is not the type likely to find
+favour in an age of activity, doubt, and change. But, as it was
+realised in Mr. Keble, there it is in Sir John Coleridge's pages,
+perfectly real, perfectly natural, perfectly whole and uniform, with
+nothing double or incongruous in it, though it unfolded itself in
+various and opposite ways. And its ideal was simply that which has been
+consecrated as the saintly character in the Christian Church since the
+days of St. John--the deepest and most genuine love of all that was
+good; the deepest and most genuine hatred of all that was believed to
+be evil.
+
+The picture which Sir John Coleridge puts before us, though deficient
+in what is striking and brilliant, is a sufficiently remarkable and
+uncommon one. It is the picture of a man of high cultivation and
+intellect, in whom religion was not merely something flavouring and
+elevating life, not merely a great element and object of spiritual
+activity, but really and unaffectedly the one absorbing interest, and
+the spring of every thought and purpose. Whether people like such a
+character or not, and whether or not they may think the religion wrong,
+or distorted and imperfect, if they would fairly understand the writer
+of the _Christian Year_ they must start from this point. He was a man
+who, without a particle of the religious cant of any school, without
+any self-consciousness or pretension or unnatural strain, literally
+passed his clays under the quick and pervading influence, for restraint
+and for stimulus, of the will and presence of God. With this his whole
+soul was possessed; its power over him had not to be invoked and
+stirred up; it acted spontaneously and unnoticed in him; it was
+dominant in all his activity; it quenched in him aims, and even, it may
+be, faculties; it continually hampered the free play of his powers and
+gifts, and made him often seem, to those who had not the key, awkward,
+unequal, and unintelligible. But for this awful sense of truth and
+reality unseen, which dwarfed to him all personal thoughts and all
+present things, he might have been a more finished writer, a more
+attractive preacher, a less indifferent foster-father to his own works.
+But it seemed to him a shame, in the presence of all that his thoughts
+habitually dwelt with, to think of the ordinary objects of authorship,
+of studying anything of this world for its own sake, of perfecting
+works of art, of cultivating the subtle forces and spells of language
+to give attractiveness to his writings. Abruptness, inadequacy, and
+obscurity of expression were light matters, and gave him little
+concern, compared with the haunting fear of unreal words. This "seeking
+first the kingdom of God and His righteousness," as he understood it,
+was the basis of all that he was; it was really and unaffectedly his
+governing principle, the root of his affections and his antipathies,
+just as to other men is the passion for scientific discovery or
+political life.
+
+But within these limits, and jealously restrained by these conditions,
+a strongly marked character, exuberant with power and life, and the
+play of individual qualities, displayed itself. There were two
+intellectual sides to his mind--one which made him a poet, quickness
+and delicacy of observation and sympathetic interpretation, the
+realising and anticipating power of deep feeling and penetrative
+imagination; the other, at first sight, little related to poetry, a
+hard-headed, ingenious, prosaic shrewdness and directness of common
+sense, dealing practically with things as they are and on the whole,
+very little curious about scientific questions and precision,
+argumentative in a fashion modelled on Bishop Butler, and full of
+logical resource, good and, often it must be owned, bad. It was a mind
+which unfolded first under the plain, manly discipline of an
+old-fashioned English country parsonage, where the unshowy piety and
+strong morality and modest theology of the middle age of Anglicanism,
+the school of Pearson, Bull, and Wilson, were supreme. And from this it
+came under the new influences of bold and independent thought which
+were beginning to stir at Oxford; influences which were at first
+represented by such men as Davison, Copleston, and, above all, Whately;
+influences which repelled Keble by what he saw of hardness,
+shallowness, and arrogance, and still more of self-sufficiency and
+intellectual display and conceit in the prevailing tone of speculation,
+but which nevertheless powerfully affected him, and of which he showed
+the traces to the last Sir John Coleridge is disappointing as to the
+amount of light which he throws on the process which was going on in
+Keble's mind during the fifteen years or so between his degree and the
+_Christian Year_; but there is one touch which refers to this period.
+Speaking in 1838 of Alexander Knox, and expressing dislike of his
+position, "as on the top of a high hill, seeing which way different
+schools tend," and "exercising a royal right of eclecticism over all,"
+he adds:--
+
+    I speak the more feelingly because I know I was myself inclined to
+    eclecticism at one time; and if it had not been for my father and
+    my brother, where I should have been now, who can say?
+
+But he was a man who, with a very vigorous and keen intellect, capable
+of making him a formidable disputant if he had been so minded, may be
+said not to have cared for his intellect. He used it at need, but he
+distrusted and undervalued it as an instrument and help. Goodness was
+to him the one object of desire and reverence; it was really his own
+measure of what he respected and valued; and where he recognised it,
+and in whatever shape, grave or gay, he cared not about seeming
+consistent in somehow or other paying it homage. People who knew him
+remember how, in this austere judge of heresy, burdened by the
+ever-pressing conviction of the "decay" of the Church and the distress
+of a time of change, tenderness, playfulness, considerateness, the
+restraint of a modesty which could not but judge, yet mistrusted its
+fitness, marked his ordinary intercourse. Overflowing with affection to
+his friends, and showing it in all kinds of unconventional and
+unexpected instances, keeping to the last a kind of youthful freshness
+as if he had never yet realised that he was not a boy, and shrunk from
+the formality and donnishness of grown-up life, he was the most refined
+and thoughtful of gentlemen, and in the midst of the fierce party
+battles of his day, with all his strong feeling of the tremendous
+significance of the strife, always a courteous and considerate
+opponent. Strong words he used, and used deliberately. But those were
+the days when the weapons of sarcasm and personal attack were freely
+handled. The leaders of the High Church movement were held up to
+detestation as the Oxford Malignants, and they certainly showed
+themselves fully able to give their assailants as good as they brought;
+yet Mr. Keble, involved in more than one trying personal controversy,
+feeling as sternly and keenly as any one about public questions, and
+tried by disappointment and the break up of the strongest ties, never
+lost his evenness of temper, never appeared in the arena of personal
+recrimination. In all the prominent part which he took, and in the
+resolute and sometimes wrathful tone in which he defended what seemed
+harsh measures, he may have dropped words which to opponents seemed
+severe ones, but never any which even they could call a scornful one or
+a sneer.
+
+It was in keeping with all that he was--a mark of imperfection it may
+be, yet part of the nobleness and love of reality in a man who felt so
+deeply the weakness and ignorance of man--that he cared so little about
+the appearances of consistency. Thus, bound as he was by principle to
+show condemnation when he thought that a sacred cause was invaded, he
+was always inclining to conciliate his wrath with his affectionateness,
+and his severity with his consideration of circumstances and his own
+mistrust of himself. He was, of all men holding strong opinions, one of
+the most curiously and unexpectedly tolerant, wherever he could
+contrive to invent an excuse for tolerance, or where long habitual
+confidence was weighed against disturbing appearances. Sir John
+Coleridge touches this in the following extract, which is
+characteristic:--
+
+    On questions of this kind especially [University Reform], his
+    principles were uncompromising; if a measure offended against what
+    he thought honest, or violated what he thought sacred, good motives
+    in the framers he would not admit as palliation, nor would he
+    be comforted by an opinion of mine that measures mischievous
+    in their logical consequences were never in the result so
+    mischievous, or beneficial measures so beneficial, as had been
+    foretold. So he writes playfully to me at an earlier time:--
+
+        "Hurrell Froude and I took into consideration your opinion
+        that 'there are good men of all parties,' and agreed that it
+        is a bad doctrine for these days; the time being come in
+        which, according to John Miller, 'scoundrels must be called
+        scoundrels'; and, moreover, we have stigmatised the said
+        opinion by the name of the Coleridge Heresy. So hold it any
+        longer at your peril."
+
+    I think it fair to set down these which were, in truth, formed
+    opinions, and not random sayings; but it would be most unfair if
+    one concluded from them, written and spoken in the freedom of
+    friendly intercourse, that there was anything sour in his spirit,
+    or harsh and narrow in his practice; when you discussed any of
+    these things with him, the discussion was pretty sure to end, not
+    indeed with any insincere concession of what he thought right and
+    true, but in consideration for individuals and depreciation of
+    himself.
+
+And the same thing comes out in the interesting letter in which the
+Solicitor-General describes his last recollections of Keble:--
+
+    There was, I am sure, no trace of failing then to be discerned in
+    his apprehension, or judgment, or discourse. He was an old man who
+    had been very ill, who was still physically weak, and who needed
+    care; but he was the same Mr. Keble I had always known, and whom,
+    for aught that appeared, I might hope still to know for many years
+    to come. Little bits of his tenderness, flashes of his fun,
+    glimpses of his austerer side, I seem to recall, but I cannot put
+    them upon paper.... Once I remember walking with him just the same
+    short walk, from his house to Sir William's, and our conversation
+    fell upon Charles I., with regard to whose truth and honour I had
+    used some expressions in a review, which had, as I heard,
+    displeased him. I referred to this, and he said it was true. I
+    replied that I was very sorry to displease him by anything I said
+    or thought; but that if the Naseby letters were genuine, I could
+    not think that what I said was at all too strong, and that a man
+    could but do his best to form an honest opinion upon historical
+    evidence, and, if he had to speak, to express that opinion. On
+    this he said, with a tenderness and humility not only most
+    touching, but to me most embarrassing, that "It might be so; what
+    was he to judge of other men; he was old, and things were now
+    looked at very differently; that he knew he had many things to
+    unlearn and learn afresh; and that I must not mind what he had
+    said, for that in truth belief in the heroes of his youth had
+    become part of him." I am afraid these are my words, and not his;
+    and I cannot give his way of speaking, which to any one with a
+    heart, I think, would have been as overcoming as it was to me.
+
+This same carelessness about appearances seems to us to be shown in
+Keble's theological position in his later years. A more logical, or a
+more plausible, but a less thoroughly real man might easily have
+drifted into Romanism. There was much in the circumstances round him,
+in the admissions which he had made, to lead that way; and his
+chivalrous readiness to take the beaten or unpopular side would help
+the tendency. But he was a man who gave great weight to his instinctive
+perception of what was right and wrong; and he was also a man who, when
+he felt sure of his duty, did not care a straw about what the world
+thought of appearances, or required as a satisfaction of seeming
+consistency. In him was eminently illustrated the characteristic
+strength and weakness of English religion, which naturally comes out in
+that form of it which is called Anglicanism; that poor Anglicanism, the
+butt and laughing-stock of all the clever and high-flying converts to
+Rome, of all the clever and high-flying Liberals, and of all those poor
+copyists of the first, far from clever, though very high-flying, who
+now give themselves out as exclusive heirs of the great name of
+Catholic; sneered at on all sides as narrow, meagre, shattered, barren;
+which certainly does not always go to the bottom of questions, and is
+too much given to "hunting-up" passages for _catenas_ of precedents and
+authorities; but which yet has a strange, obstinate, tenacious moral
+force in it; which, without being successful in formulating theories or
+in solving fallacies, can pierce through pretences and shams; and which
+in England seems the only shape in which intense religious faith can
+unfold itself and connect itself with morality and duty, without
+seeming to wear a peculiar dress of its own, and putting a barrier of
+self-chosen watchwords and singularities between itself and the rest of
+the nation.
+
+It seems to us a great advantage to truth to have a character thus
+exhibited in its unstudied and living completeness, and exhibited
+directly, as the impression from life was produced on those before
+whose eyes it drew itself out day by day in word and act, as the
+occasion presented itself. There is, no doubt, a more vivid and
+effective way; one in which the Dean of Westminster is a great master,
+though it is not the method which he followed in what is probably his
+most perfect work, the _Life of Dr. Arnold_--the method of singling out
+points, and placing them, if possible, under a concentrated light, and
+in strong contrast and relief. Thus in Keble's case it is easy, and
+doubtless to many observers natural and tempting, to put side by side,
+with a strange mixture of perplexity and repulsion, _The Christian
+Year_, and the treatise _On Eucharistical Adoration_; to compare even
+in Keble's poetry, his tone on nature and human life, on the ways of
+children and the thoughts of death, with that on religious error and
+ecclesiastical divergences from the Anglican type; and to dwell on the
+contrast between Keble bearing his great gifts with such sweetness and
+modesty, and touching with such tenderness and depth the most delicate
+and the purest of human feelings, and Keble as the editor of Fronde's
+_Remains_, forward against Dr. Hampden, breaking off a friendship of
+years with Dr. Arnold, stiff against Liberal change and indulgent to
+ancient folly and error, the eulogist of patristic mysticism and Bishop
+Wilson's "discipline," and busy in the ecclesiastical agitations and
+legal wranglings of our later days, about Jerusalem Bishoprics and
+Courts of Final Appeal and ritual details, about Gorham judgments,
+_Essays and Reviews_ prosecutions, and Colenso scandals. The objection
+to this method of contrast is that it does not give the whole truth. It
+does not take notice that, in appreciating a man like Keble, the thing
+to start from is that his ideal and model and rule of character was
+neither more nor less than the old Christian one. It was simply what
+was accepted as right and obvious and indisputable, not by Churchmen
+only, but by all earnest believers up to our own days. Given certain
+conditions of Christian faith and duty which he took for granted as
+much as the ordinary laws of morality, then the man's own individual
+gifts or temper or leanings displayed themselves. But when people talk
+of Keble being narrow and rigid and harsh and intolerant, they ought
+first to recollect that he had been brought up with the ideas common to
+all whom he ever heard of or knew as religious people. All earnest
+religious conviction must seem narrow to those who do not share it. It
+was nothing individual or peculiar, either to him or his friends, to
+have strong notions about defending what they believed that they had
+received as the truth; and they were people who knew what they were
+about, too, and did not take things up at random. In this he was not
+different from Hooker, or Jeremy Taylor, or Bishop Butler, or Baxter,
+or Wesley, or Dr. Chalmers; it may be added, that he was not different
+from Dr. Arnold or Archbishop Whately. It must not be forgotten that
+till of late years there was always supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be
+such a thing as false doctrine, and that intolerance of it, within the
+limits of common justice, was always held as much part of the Christian
+character as devotion and charity. Men differed widely as to what was
+false doctrine, but they did not differ much as to there being such a
+thing, and as to what was to be thought of it. Keble, like other people
+of his time, took up his system, and really, considering that the ideal
+which he honestly and earnestly aimed at was the complete system of the
+Catholic Church, it is an abuse of words to call it, whatever else it
+may be called, a narrow system. There may be a wider system still, in
+the future; but it is at least premature to say that a man is narrow
+because he accepts in good faith the great traditional ideas and
+doctrines of the Christian Church; for of everything that can yet be
+called a religious system, in the sense commonly understood, as an
+embodiment of definite historical revelation, it is not easy to
+conceive a less narrow one. And, accepting it as the truth, it was
+dearer to him than life. That he was sensitively alive to whatever
+threatened or opposed it, and was ready to start up like a soldier,
+ready to do battle against any odds and to risk any unpopularity or
+misconstruction, was only the sure and natural result of that deep love
+and loyalty and thorough soundness of heart with which he loved his
+friends, but what he believed to be truth and God's will better than
+his friends. But it is idle and shallow to confuse the real narrowness
+which springs from a harsh temper or a cramped and self-sufficient
+intellect, and which is quite compatible with the widest theoretical
+latitude, and the inevitable appearance of narrowness and severity
+which must always be one side which a man of strong convictions and
+earnest purpose turns to those whose strong convictions and earnest
+purpose are opposite to his.
+
+Mr. Keble, saintly as was his character, if ever there was such a
+character, belonged, as we all do, to his day and generation. The
+aspect of things and the thoughts of men change; enlarging, we are
+always apt to think, but perhaps really also contracting in some
+directions where they once were larger. In Mr. Keble, the service which
+he rendered to his time consisted, not merely, as it is sometimes
+thought, in soothing and refining it, but in bracing it. He was the
+preacher and example of manly hardness, simplicity, purpose in the
+religious character. It may be that his hatred of evil--of hollowness,
+impurity, self-will, conceit, ostentation--was greater than was always
+his perception of various and mingled good, or his comprehension of
+those middle things and states which are so much before us now. But the
+service cannot be overrated, to all parties, of the protest which his
+life and all his words were against dangers which were threatening all
+parties, and not least the Liberal party--the danger of shallowness and
+superficial flippancy; the danger of showy sentiment and insincerity,
+of worldly indifference to high duties and calls. With the one great
+exception of Arnold--Keble's once sympathetic friend, though afterwards
+parted from him--the religious Liberals of our time have little reason
+to look back with satisfaction to the leaders, able and vigorous as
+some of them were, who represented their cause then. They owe to Keble,
+as much as do those who are more identified with his theology, the
+inestimable service of having interpreted religion by a genuine life,
+corresponding in its thoroughness and unsparing, unpretending
+devotedness, as well as in its subtle vividness of feeling, to the
+great object which religion professes to contemplate.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+MAURICE'S THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS[21]
+
+
+  [21]
+  _Theological Essays_. By F.D. Maurice. _Guardian_, 7th September 1853.
+
+The purpose of this volume of essays is to consider the views
+entertained by Unitarians of what are looked upon by Christians
+generally as fundamental truths; to examine what force there is in
+Unitarian objections, and what mistakes are involved in the popular
+notions and representations of those fundamental truths; and so,
+without entering into controversy, for which Mr. Maurice declares
+himself entirely indisposed, and in the utility of which he entirely
+disbelieves, to open the way for a deeper and truer, and more serious
+review, by all parties, of either the differences or the misunderstandings
+which keep them asunder. It is a work, the writer considers, as
+important as any which he has undertaken: "No labour I have been
+engaged in has occupied me so much, or interested me more deeply;"
+and with his estimate of his subject we are not disposed to disagree.
+
+We always rise from the perusal of one of Mr. Maurice's books with the
+feeling that he has shown us one great excellence, and taught us one
+great lesson. He has shown us an example of serious love of truth, and
+an earnest sense of its importance, and of his own responsibility in
+speaking of it. Most readers, whatever else they may think, must have
+their feeling of the wide and living interest of a theological or moral
+subject quickened by Mr. Maurice's thoughts on it. This is the
+excellence. The lesson is this--to look into the meaning of our
+familiar words, and to try to use them with a real meaning. Not that
+Mr. Maurice always shows us how; but it is difficult for conscience to
+escape being continually reminded of the duty. And it is in these two
+things that the value of Mr. Maurice's writings mainly consists. The
+enforcing of them has been, to our mind, his chief "mission," and his
+most valuable contribution to the needs of his generation.
+
+In this volume they are exhibited, as in his former ones; and in this
+he shows also, as he has shown before, his earnest desire to find a way
+whereby, without compromising truth or surrendering sacred convictions
+of the heart, serious men of very different sides might be glad to find
+themselves in some points mistaken, in order that they might find
+themselves at one. This philosophy, not of comprehension but of
+conciliation, the craving after which has awakened in the Church,
+whenever mental energy has been quickened, the philosophy in which
+Clement of Alexandria and Origin, and, we may add, St. Augustine, made
+many earnest essays, is certainly no unworthy aim for the theologian of
+our days. He would, indeed, deserve largely of the Church who should
+show us a solid and safe way to it.
+
+But while we are far from denouncing or suspecting the wish or the
+design, we are bound to watch jealously and criticise narrowly the
+execution. For we all know what such plans have come to before now. And
+it is for the interest of all serious and earnest people on all sides,
+that there should be no needless and additional confusion introduced
+into theology--such confusion as is but too likely to follow, when a
+design of conciliation, with the aim of which so many, for good reasons
+or bad ones, are sure to sympathise, is carried out by hands that are
+not equal to it. With the fullest sense of the serious truthfulness of
+those who differ from us, of the real force of many of their objections
+and criticisms on our proceedings, our friends, and our ideas, it is
+far better to hold our peace, than from impatience at what we feel to
+be the vulnerable point of our own side, to rush into explanations
+before we are sure of our power adequately to explain.
+
+And to this charge it seems to us that Mr. Maurice is open. There is
+sense and manliness in his disclaimer of proselytism; and there is a
+meaning in which we can agree with his account of truth. "If I could
+persuade all Dissenters," he says, "to become members of my Church
+to-morrow, I should be very sorry to do it. I believe the chances are
+they might leave it the next day. I do not wish to make them think as I
+think. But I want that they and I should be what we pretend to be, and
+then I doubt not we should find that there is a common ground for us
+all far beneath our thinkings. For truth I hold not to be that which
+every man troweth, but to be that which lies at the bottom of all men's
+trowings, that in which those trowings have their only meeting-point."
+He would make as clear as can be that deep substructure, and leave the
+sight of it to work its natural effect on the honest heart. A noble
+aim; but surely requiring, if anything can, the clear eye, the steady
+hand, the heart as calm as earnest. Surely a work in which the greatest
+exactness and precision, as well as largeness of thought, would not be
+too much. For if we but take away the "trowings" without coming down to
+the central foundation, or lose ourselves, and mistake a new "trowing"
+of our own for it, it is hardly a sufficient degree of blame to say
+that we have done no good.
+
+And in these qualities of exactness and precision it does seem to us
+that Mr. Maurice is, for his purpose, fatally deficient. His criticisms
+are often acute, his thrusts on each side often very home ones, and
+but too full of truth; his suggestions often full of thought and
+instruction; his balancings and contrasts of errors and truths, if
+sometimes too artificial, yet generally striking. But when we come to
+seek for the reconciling truth, which one side has overlaid and
+distorted, and the other ignorantly shrunk back from, but which, when
+placed in its real light and fairly seen, is to attract the love and
+homage of both, we seem--not to grasp a shadow--Mr. Maurice is too
+earnest and real a believer for that--but to be very much where we
+were, except that a cloud of words surrounds us. His positive
+statements seem like a running protest against being obliged to commit
+himself and come to the point; like a continual assertion of the
+hopelessness and uselessness of a definite form of speaking about the
+matter in hand. Take, for instance, the following short statement:--
+
+    "My object," he says, speaking of the words which he has taken as
+    the subject of his essays, "has been to examine the language with
+    which we are most familiar, and which has been open to most
+    objections, especially from Unitarians. Respecting the Conception
+    I have been purposely silent; not because I have any doubt about
+    that article, or am indifferent to it, but because I believe the
+    word '_miraculous_,' which we _ordinarily connect with it, suggests
+    an untrue meaning; because I think the truth is conveyed to us
+    most safely in the simple language of the Evangelists_; and because
+    that language taken in connection with the rest of their story,
+    offers itself, I suspect, to a majority of those who have taken
+    in the idea of an Incarnation, as the _only natural and rational_
+    account of the method by which the eternal Son of God could have
+    taken human flesh."
+
+Now, would not Mr. Maurice have done better if he had enounced the
+definite meaning, or shade of meaning, which he considers short of, or
+different from, our _ordinary_ meaning of _miraculous_, as applied to
+this subject, and yet the same as that suggested by the Gospel account?
+We have no doubt what Mr. Maurice does believe on this sacred subject.
+But we are puzzled by what he means to disavow, as an "_untrue
+meaning_" of the word _miraculous_, as applied to what he believes.
+And  the Unitarians whom he addresses must, we think, be puzzled too.
+
+We have quoted this passage because it is a short one, and therefore a
+convenient one for a short notice like this. But the same tormenting
+indistinctness pervades the attempts generally to get a meaning or a
+position, which shall be substantially and in its living force the same
+as the popular and orthodox article, yet convict it of confusion or
+formalism; and which shall give to the Unitarian what he aims at by his
+negation of the popular article, without leaving him any longer a
+reason for denying it. The essay on Inspiration is an instance of this.
+Mr. Maurice says very truly, that it is necessary to face the fact that
+important questions are asked on the subject, very widely, and by
+serious people; that popular notions are loose and vague about it; that
+it is a dangerous thing to take refuge in a hard theory, if it is an
+inconsistent and inadequate one; that if doubts do grow up, they are
+hardly to be driven away by assertions. He accepts the challenge to
+state his own view of Inspiration, and devotes many pages to doing so.
+In these page's are many true and striking things. So far as we
+understand, there is not a statement that we should contradict. But we
+have searched in vain for a passage which might give, in Mr. Maurice's
+words, a distinct answer to the question of friend or opponent, What do
+you mean by the "Inspiration of the Bible?" Mr. Maurice tells us a most
+important truth--that that same Great Person by whose "holy
+inspiration" all true Christians still hope to be taught, inspired the
+prophets. He protests against making it necessary to say that there is
+a _generic_ difference between one kind of Inspiration and the other,
+or "setting up the Bible as a book which encloses all that may be
+lawfully called Inspiration." He looks on the Bible as a link--a great
+one, yet a link, joining on to what is before and what comes after--in
+God's method of teaching man His truth. He cares little about phrases
+like "verbal inspiration" and "plenary inspiration"--"forms of speech
+which are pretty toys for those that have leisure to play with them;
+and if they are not made so hard as to do mischief, the use of them
+should not be checked. But they do not belong to business." He bids us,
+instead, give men "the Book of Life," and "have courage to tell them
+that there is a Spirit with them who will guide them into all truth."
+Great and salutary lessons. But we must say that they have been long in
+the world, and, it must be said, are as liable to be misunderstood as
+any other "popular" notions on the subject. If there is nothing more to
+say on the subject--if it is one where, though we see and are sure of a
+truth, yet we must confess it to be behind a veil, as yet indistinct
+and not to be grasped, let us manfully say so, and wait till God reveal
+even this unto us. But it is not a wise or a right course to raise
+expectations of being able to say something, not perhaps new, but
+satisfactory, when the questions which are really being asked, which
+are the professed occasion of the answer, remain, in their Intellectual
+difficulty, entirely unresolved. Mr. Maurice is no trifler; when he
+throws hard words about,--when at the close of this essay he paints to
+himself the disappointment of some "Unitarian listener, who had hoped
+that Mr. Maurice was going to join him in cursing his enemies, and
+found that he had blessed them these three times,"--he ought to
+consider whether the result has not been, and very naturally, to leave
+both parties more convinced than before of the hollowness of all
+professions to enter into, and give weight to, the difficulties and the
+claims of opposite sides.
+
+Mr. Maurice has not done justice, as it seems to us, in this case, to
+the difficulty of the Unitarian. In other cases he makes free with the
+common belief of Christendom, and claims sacrifices which are as
+needless as they are unwarrantable. If there is a belief rooted in the
+minds of Christians, it is that of a future judgment. If there is an
+expectation which Scripture and the Creed sanction in the plainest
+words, it is that this present world is to have an end, and that then,
+a time now future, Christ will judge quick and dead. Say as much as can
+be said of the difficulty of conceiving such a thing, it really amounts
+to no more than the difficulty of conceiving what will happen, and how
+we shall be dealt with, when this familiar world passes away. And this
+belief in a "_final_ judgment, _unlike any other that has ever been in
+the world_," Mr. Maurice would have us regard as a misinterpretation of
+Bible and Creed--a "dream" which St. Paul would never "allow us" to
+entertain, but would "compel" us instead "to look upon everyone of what
+we rightly call 'God's judgments' as _essentially resembling it in kind
+and principle_." "Our eagerness to deny this," he continues, "to make
+out an altogether peculiar and unprecedented judgment at the end of the
+world, has obliged us first _to practise the most violent outrages upon
+the language of Scripture_, insisting that words cannot really mean
+what, according to all ordinary rules of construction, they must mean."
+It really must be said that the "outrage," if so it is to be called, is
+not on the side of the popular belief. And why does this belief seem
+untenable to Mr. Maurice? Because it seems inconsistent to him with a
+truth which he states and enforces with no less earnestness than
+reason, that Christ is every moment judging us--that His tribunal is
+one before which we in our inmost "being are standing now--and that the
+time will come when we shall know that it is so, and when all that has
+concealed the Judge from us shall be taken away." Doubtless Christ is
+always with us--always seeing us--always judging us. Doubtless
+"everywhere" in Scripture the idea is kept before us of judgment in its
+fullest, largest, most natural sense, as "importing" not merely passing
+sentence, and awarding reward or penalty, but "discrimination and
+discovery. Everywhere that discrimination or discovery is supposed to
+be exercised over the man himself, over his internal character, over
+his meaning and will." Granted, also, that men have, in their attempts
+to figure to themselves the "great assize," sometimes made strange
+work, and shown how carnal their thoughts are, both in what they
+expected, and in the influence they allowed it to have over them. But
+what of all this? Correct these gross ideas, but leave the words of
+Scripture in their literal meaning, and do not say that all those who
+receive them as the announcement of what is to be, under conditions now
+inconceivable to man, _must_ understand "the substitution of a mere
+external trial or examination" for the inward and daily trial of our
+hearts, as a mere display of "earthly pomp and ceremonial"--a
+resumption by Christ "of earthly conditions"; or that, because they
+believe that at "some distant unknown period they shall be brought into
+the presence of One who is now" not "far from them," but out of
+sight--how, or in what manner they know not--therefore they _must_
+suppose that He "is not now fulfilling the office of a Judge, whatever
+else may be committed to Him."
+
+Mr. Maurice is aiming at a high object. He would reconcile the old and
+the new. He would disencumber what is popular of what is vulgar,
+confused, sectarian, and preserve and illustrate it by disencumbering
+it. He calls on us not to be afraid of the depths and heights, the
+freedom and largeness, the "spirit and the truth," of our own theology.
+It is a warning and a call which every age wants. We sympathise with
+his aim, with much of his positive teaching, with some of his aversions
+and some of his fears. We do not respect him the less for not being
+afraid of being called hard names. But certainly such a writer has
+need, in no common degree, of conforming himself to that wise maxim,
+which holds in writing as well as in art--"Know what you want to do,
+then do it."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE[22]
+
+
+  [22]
+  _Saturday Review_, 6th April 1872.
+
+This Easter week we have lost a man about whom opinions and feelings
+were much divided, who was by many of the best and most thoughtful
+among us looked on as the noblest and greatest of recent English
+teachers, and who certainly had that rare gift of inspiring enthusiasm
+and trust among honest and powerful minds in search of guidance, which
+belongs to none but to men of a very high order. Professor Maurice has
+ended a life of the severest and most unceasing toil, still working to
+the utmost that failing bodily strength allowed--still to the last in
+harness. The general public, though his name is familiar to them,
+probably little measure the deep and passionate affection with which he
+was regarded by the circle of his friends and by those whose thoughts
+and purposes he had moulded; or the feeling which his loss causes in
+them of a blank, great and not to be filled up, not only personally for
+themselves, but in the agencies which are working most hopefully in
+English society. But even those who knew him least, and only from the
+outside, and whose points of view least coincided with his, must feel
+that there has been, now that we look back on his course, something
+singularly touching and even pathetic in the combination shown in all
+that he did, of high courage and spirit, and of unwearied faith and
+vigour, with the deepest humility and with the sincerest
+disinterestedness and abnegation, which never allowed him to seek
+anything great for himself, and, in fact, distinguished and honoured as
+he was, never found it. For the sake of his generation we may regret
+that he did not receive the public recognition and honour which were
+assuredly his due; but in truth his was one of those careers which, for
+their own completeness and consistency, gain rather than lose by
+escaping the distractions and false lights of what is called
+preferment.
+
+The two features which strike us at the moment as characteristic of Mr.
+Maurice as a writer and teacher, besides the vast range both of his
+reading and thought, and the singularly personal tone and language of
+all that he wrote, are, first, the combination in him of the most
+profound and intense religiousness with the most boundless claim and
+exercise of intellectual liberty; and next, the value which he set,
+exemplifying his estimate in his own long and laborious course, on
+processes and efforts, as compared with conclusions and definite
+results, in that pursuit of truth which was to him the most sacred of
+duties. There is no want of earnest and fervent religion among us,
+intelligent, well-informed, deliberate, as well as of religion, to
+which these terms can hardly be applied. And there is also no want of
+the boldest and most daring freedom of investigation and judgment. But
+what Mr. Maurice seemed to see himself, and what he endeavoured to
+impress on others, was that religion and liberty are no natural
+enemies, but that the deepest and most absorbing forms of historical
+and traditional religion draw strength and seriousness of meaning, and
+binding obligation, from an alliance, frank and unconditional, with
+what seem to many the risks, the perilous risks and chances, of
+freedom.
+
+It was a position open to obvious and formidable criticism; but against
+this criticism is to be set the fact, that in a long and energetic
+life, in which amidst great trials and changes there was a singular
+uniformity and consistency of character maintained, he did unite the
+two--the most devout Christianity with the most fearless and
+unshrinking boldness in facing the latest announcements and
+possibilities of modern thought. That he always satisfactorily
+explained his point of view to others is more than can be said; but he
+certainly satisfied numbers of keen and anxious thinkers, who were
+discontented and disheartened both by religion as it is presented by
+our great schools and parties, and by science as its principles and
+consequences are expounded by the leading philosophical authorities of
+the day. The other point to which we have adverted partly explains the
+influence which he had with such minds. He had no system to formulate
+or to teach. He was singularly ready to accept, as adequate expressions
+of those truths in whose existence he so persistently believed, the old
+consecrated forms in which simpler times had attempted to express them.
+He believed that these truths are wider and vaster than the human mind
+which is to be made wiser and better by them. And his aim was to reach
+up to an ever more exact, and real, and harmonious hold of these
+truths, which in their essential greatness he felt to be above him; to
+reach to it in life as much as in thought. And so to the end he was
+ever striving, not so much to find new truths as to find the heart and
+core of old ones, the truth of the truth, the inner life and
+significance of the letter, of which he was always loth to refuse the
+traditional form. In these efforts at unfolding and harmonising there
+was considerable uniformity; no one could mistake Mr. Maurice's manner
+of presenting the meaning and bearing of an article of the Creed for
+the manner of any one else; but the result of this way of working, in
+the effect of the things which he said, and in his relations to
+different bodies of opinion and thought both in the Church and in
+society, was to give the appearance of great and important changes in
+his teaching and his general point of view, as life went on. This
+governing thought of his, of the immeasurably transcendent compass and
+height of all truths compared with the human mind and spirit which was
+to bow to them and to gain life and elevation by accepting them,
+explains the curious and at present almost unique combination in him,
+of deep reverence for the old language of dogmatic theology, and an
+energetic maintenance of its fitness and value, with dissatisfaction,
+equally deep and impartially universal, at the interpretations put on
+this dogmatic language by modern theological schools, and at the modes
+in which its meaning is applied by them both in directing thought and
+influencing practice. This habit of distinguishing sharply and
+peremptorily between dogmatic language and the popular reading of it at
+any given time is conspicuous in his earliest as in his latest handling
+of these subjects; in the pamphlet of 1835, _Subscription no Bondage_,
+explaining and defending the old practice at Oxford; and in the papers
+and letters, which have appeared from him in periodicals, on the
+Athanasian Creed, and which are, we suppose, almost his last writings.
+
+The world at large thought Mr. Maurice obscure and misty, and was, as
+was natural, impatient of such faults. The charge was, no doubt, more
+than partially true; and nothing but such genuine strength and
+comprehensive power as his could have prevented it from being a fatal
+one to his weight and authority. But it is not uninstructive to
+remember what was very much at the root of it. It had its origin, not
+altogether, but certainly in a great degree, in two of his moral
+characteristics. One was his stubborn, conscientious determination, at
+any cost of awkwardness, or apparent inconsistency, or imperfection of
+statement, to say out what he had to say, neither more nor less, just
+as he thought it, and just as he felt it, with the most fastidious care
+for truthful accuracy of meaning. He never would suffer what he
+considered either the connection or the balance and adjustment of
+varied and complementary truths to be sacrificed to force or point of
+expression; and he had to choose sometimes, as all people have, between
+a blurred, clumsy, and ineffective picture and a consciously incomplete
+and untrue one. His choice never wavered; and as the artist's aim was
+high, and his skill not always equally at his command, he preferred the
+imperfection which left him the consciousness of honesty. The other
+cause which threw a degree of haze round his writings was the personal
+shape into which he was so fond of throwing his views. He shrunk from
+their enunciation as arguments and conclusions which claimed on their
+own account and by their own title the deference of all who read them;
+and he submitted them as what he himself had found and had been granted
+to see--the lessons and convictions of his own experience. Sympathy is,
+no doubt, a great bond among all men; but, after all, men's experience
+and their points of view are not all alike, and when we are asked to
+see with another's eyes, it is not always easy. Mr. Maurice's desire to
+give the simplest and most real form to his thoughts as they arose in
+his own mind contributed more often than he supposed to prevent others
+from entering into his meaning. He asked them to put themselves in his
+place. He did not sufficiently put himself in theirs.
+
+But he has taught us great lessons, of the sacredness, the largeness,
+and, it may be added, the difficulty of truth; lessons of sympathy with
+one another, of true humility and self-conquest in the busy and
+unceasing activity of the intellectual faculties. He has left no school
+and no system, but he has left a spirit and an example. We speak of him
+here only as those who knew him as all the world knew him; but those
+who were his friends are never tired of speaking of his grand
+simplicity of character, of his tenderness and delicacy, of the
+irresistible spell of lovableness which won all within its reach. They
+remember how he spoke, and how he read; the tones of a voice of
+singularly piercing clearness, which was itself a power of
+interpretation, which revealed his own soul and went straight to the
+hearts of hearers. He has taken his full share in the controversies of
+our days, and there must be many opinions both about the line which he
+took, and even sometimes about the temper in which he carried on
+debate. But it is nothing but the plainest justice to say that he was a
+philosopher, a theologian, and, we may add, a prophet, of whom, for his
+great gifts, and, still more, for his noble and pure use of them, the
+modern English Church may well be proud.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+SIR RICHARD CHURCH[23]
+
+
+  [23]
+  _Guardian_, 26th March 1873.
+
+General Sir Richard Church died last week at Athens. Many English
+travellers in the East find their way to Athens; most of them must have
+heard his name repeated there as the name of one closely associated
+with the later fortunes of the Greek nation, and linking the present
+with times now distant; some of them may have seen him, and may
+remember the slight wiry form which seemed to bear years so lightly,
+the keen eye and grisled moustache and soldierly bearing, and perhaps
+the antique and ceremonious courtesy, stately yet cordial, recalling a
+type of manners long past, with which he welcomed those who had a claim
+on his attentions or friendly offices. Five and forty years ago his
+name was much in men's mouths. He was prominent in a band of
+distinguished men, who represented a new enthusiasm in Europe. Less by
+what they were able to do than by their character and their unreserved
+self-devotion and sacrifice, they profoundly affected public opinion,
+and disarmed the jealousy of absolutist courts and governments in
+favour of a national movement, which, whether disappointment may have
+followed its success, was one of the most just and salutary of
+revolutions--the deliverance of a Christian nation from the hopeless
+tyranny of the Turks.
+
+He was one of the few remaining survivors of the generation which had
+taken part in the great French war and in the great changes resulting
+from it--changes which have in time given way to vaster alterations,
+and been eclipsed by them. He began his military life as a boy-ensign
+in one of the regiments forming part of the expedition which, under Sir
+Ralph Abercromby, drove the French out of Egypt in 1801; and on the
+shores of the Mediterranean, where his career began, it was for the
+most part continued and finished. His genius led him to the more
+irregular and romantic forms of military service; he had the gift of
+personal influence, and the power of fascinating and attaching to
+himself, with extraordinary loyalty, the people of the South. His
+adventurous temper, his sympathetic nature, his chivalrous courtesy,
+his thorough trustworthiness and sincerity, his generosity, his high
+spirit of nobleness and honour, won for him, from Italians and Greeks,
+not only that deep respect which was no unusual tribute from them to
+English honesty and strength and power of command, but that love, and
+that affectionate and almost tender veneration, for which strong and
+resolute Englishmen have not always cared from races of whose
+characteristic faults they were impatient.
+
+His early promise in the regular service was brilliant; as a young
+staff-officer, and by a staff-officer's qualities of sagacity,
+activity, and decision, he did distinguished service at Maida; and had
+he followed the movement which made Spain the great battle-ground for
+English soldiers, he had every prospect of earning a high place among
+those who fought under Wellington. But he clung to the Mediterranean.
+He was employed in raising and organising those foreign auxiliary corps
+which it was thought were necessary to eke out the comparatively scanty
+numbers of the English armies, and to keep up threatening
+demonstrations on the outskirts of the French Empire. It was in this
+service that his connection with the Greek people was first formed, and
+his deep and increasing interest in its welfare created. He was
+commissioned to form first one, and then a second, regiment of Greek
+irregulars; and from the Ionian Islands, from the mainland of Albania,
+from the Morea, chiefs and bands, accustomed to the mountain warfare,
+half patriotic, half predatory, carried on by the more energetic Greek
+highlanders against the Turks, flocked to the English standards. The
+operations in which they were engaged were desultory, and of no great
+account in the general result of the gigantic contest; but they made
+Colonel Church's name familiar to the Greek population, who were
+hoping, amid the general confusion, for an escape from the tyranny of
+the Turks. But his connection with Greece was for some time delayed.
+His peculiar qualifications pointed him out as a fit man to be a medium
+of communication between the English Government and the foreign armies
+which were operating on the outside of the circle within which the
+decisive struggle was carried on against Napoleon; and he was the
+English Military Commissioner attached to the Austrian armies in Italy
+in 1814 and 1815.
+
+At the Peace, his eagerness for daring and adventurous enterprise was
+tempted by great offers from the Neapolitan Government. The war had
+left brigandage, allied to a fierce spirit of revolutionary
+freemasonry, all-powerful in the south of Italy; and a stern and
+resolute, yet perfectly honest and just hand, was needed to put it
+down. He accepted the commission; he was reckless of conspiracy and
+threats of assassination; he was known to be no sanguinary and
+merciless lover of severity, but he was known also to be fearless and
+inexorable against crime; and, not without some terrible examples, yet
+with complete success, he delivered the south of Italy from the
+scourge. But his thoughts had always been turned towards Greece; at
+last the call came, and he threw himself with all his hopes and all his
+fortunes into a struggle which more than any other that history can
+show engaged at the time the interest of Europe. His first efforts
+resulted in a disastrous defeat against overwhelming odds, for which,
+as is natural, he has been severely criticised; his critics have shown
+less quickness in perceiving the qualities which he displayed after
+it--his unshaken, silent fortitude, the power with which he kept
+together and saved the wrecks of his shattered and disheartened
+volunteer army, the confidence in himself with which he inspired them,
+the skill with which he extricated them from their dangers in the face
+of a strong and formidable enemy, the humanity which he strove so
+earnestly by word and example to infuse into the barbarous warfare
+customary between Greeks and Turks, the tenacity with which he clung to
+the fastnesses of Western Greece, obtaining by his perseverance from
+the diplomacy of Europe a more favourable line of boundary for the new
+nation which it at length recognised. To this cause he gave up
+everything; personal risks cannot be counted; but he threw away all
+prospects in England; he made no bargains; he sacrificed freely to the
+necessities of the struggle any pecuniary resource that he could
+command, neither requiring nor receiving any repayment. He threw in his
+lot with the people for whom he had surrendered everything, in order to
+take part in their deliverance. Since his arrival in Greece in 1827 he
+has never turned his face westwards. He took the part which is perhaps
+the only becoming and justifiable one for the citizen of one State who
+permits himself to take arms, even in the cause of independence, for
+another; having fought for the Greeks, he lived with them, and shared,
+for good and for evil, their fortunes.
+
+For more than forty years he has resided at Athens under the shadow of
+the great rock of the Acropolis. Distinguished by all the honours the
+Greek nation could bestow, military or political, he has lived in
+modest retirement, only on great emergencies taking any prominent part
+in the political questions of Greece, but always throwing his influence
+on the side of right and honesty. The course of things in Greece was
+not always what an educated Englishman could wish it to be. But
+whatever his judgment, or, on occasion, his action might be, there
+never could be a question, with his friends any more than with his
+opponents--enemies he could scarcely be said to have--as to the
+straightforwardness, the pure motives, the unsullied honour of anything
+that he did or anything that he advised. The Greeks saw among them one
+deeply sympathising with all that they cared for, commanding, if he had
+pleased to work for it, considerable influence out of Greece, the
+intimate friend of a Minister like Sir Edmund Lyons, yet keeping free
+from the temptation to make that use of influence which seems so
+natural to politicians in a place like Athens; thinking much of Greece
+and of the interests of his friends there, but thinking as much of
+truth and justice and conscience; hating intrigue and trick, and
+shaming by his indignant rebuke any proposal of underhand courses that
+might be risked in his presence.
+
+The course of things, the change of ideas and of men, threw him more
+and more out of any forward and prominent place in the affairs of
+Greece. But his presence in Athens was felt everywhere. There was a man
+who had given up everything for Greece and sought nothing in return.
+His blameless unselfishness, his noble elevation of character, were a
+warning and a rebuke to the faults which have done so much mischief to
+the progress of the nation; and yet every Greek in Athens knew that no
+one among them was more jealous of the honour of the nation or more
+anxious for its good. To a new political society, freshly exposed to
+the temptations of party struggles for power, no greater service can be
+rendered than a public life absolutely clear from any suspicion of
+self-seeking, governed uninterruptedly and long by public spirit,
+public ends, and a strong sense of duty. Such a service General Church
+has rendered to his adopted country. During his residence among them
+for nearly half a century they have become familiar, not in word, but
+in living reality, with some of the best things which the West has to
+impart to the East. They have had among them an example of English
+principle, English truth, English high-souled disinterestedness, and
+that noble English faith which, in a great cause, would rather hope in
+vain than not hope at all. They have learned to venerate all this, and,
+some of them, to love it.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+DEATH OF BISHOP WILBERFORCE[24]
+
+
+  [24]
+  _Guardian_, 23rd July 1873.
+
+The beautiful summer weather which came on us at the beginning of this
+week gives by contrast a strange and terrible point to the calamity,
+the announcement of which sent such a shock through the whole country
+on Monday last. Summer days in all their brilliance seemed come at
+last, after a long waiting which made them the more delightful. But as
+people came down to breakfast on that morning, or as they gathered at
+railway stations on their way to business, the almost incredible
+tidings met them that the Bishop of Winchester was dead; that he had
+been killed by a fall from his horse. In a moment, by the most trivial
+of accidents, one of the foremost and most stirring men of our
+generation had passed away from the scene in which his part was so
+large a one. With everything calm and peaceful round him, in the midst
+of the keen but tranquil enjoyment of a summer evening ride with a
+friend through some of the most charming scenery in England, looking
+forward to meeting another friend, and to the pleasure which a quiet
+Sunday brings to hard-worked men in fine weather, and a pleasant
+country house, the blow fell. The moment before, as Lord Granville
+remarks, he had given expression to the fulness of his enjoyment. He
+was rejoicing in the fine weather, he was keenly noticing the beauty of
+the scenery at every point of the way; with his characteristic love of
+trees he was noticing the different kinds and the soils which suited
+them; especially he was greatly pleased with his horse. There comes a
+slight dip in the smooth turf; the horse stumbles and recovers himself
+unhurt; but in that short interval of time all has vanished, all things
+earthly, from that quick eye and that sensitive and sympathetic mind.
+It is indeed tragic. He is said to have thought with distress of a
+lingering end. He was spared it. He died as a soldier dies.
+
+A shock like this brings with it also a shock of new knowledge and
+appreciation of things. We are made to feel with a new force what it is
+that we have lost, and to understand more exactly what is the
+proportion of what we have lost to what we still retain. To friends and
+opponents the Bishop of Winchester could not but be, under any
+circumstances, a person of the greatest importance. But few of us,
+probably, measured fully and accurately the place which he filled among
+us. We are better aware of it now when he has been taken away from us.
+Living among us, and acting before us from day to day, the object of
+each day's observation and criticism, under each day's varying
+circumstances and feelings, within our reach always if we wanted to see
+him or to hear him, he was presented to our thoughts in that partial
+disclosure, and that everyday homeliness, which as often disguise the
+true and complete significance of a character, as they give substance
+and reality to our conceptions of it. As the man's course moves on, we
+are apt to lose in our successive judgments of the separate steps of
+it--it may be stops of great immediate interest--our sense of its
+connection and tendency, of the true measure of it as a whole, of the
+degree in which character is growing and rising, or, on the other hand,
+falling or standing still. The Bishop of Winchester had many
+admirers--many who deeply loved and trusted him--many who, in the face
+of a good deal of suspicion and hostile comment, stoutly insisted on
+the high estimate which they had formed of him. But even among them,
+and certainly in the more indifferent public, there were few who had
+rightly made it clear to their own minds what he had really grown to be
+both in the Church and the country.
+
+For it is obvious, at the first glance now that he is gone, that there
+is no one who can fill the place which he filled. It seems to us beyond
+dispute that he has been the greatest Bishop the English Church has
+seen for a century and a half. We do not say the greatest man, but the
+greatest Bishop; the one among the leaders of the English Church who
+most adequately understood the relations of his office, not only to the
+Church, but to his times and his country, and who most adequately
+fulfilled his own conception of them. We are very far from saying this
+because of his exuberant outfit of powers and gifts; because of his
+versatility, his sympathetic nature, his eager interest in all that
+interested his fellows, his inexhaustible and ready resources of
+thought and speech, of strong and practical good sense, of brilliant or
+persuasive or pathetic eloquence. In all this he had equals and rivals,
+though perhaps he had not many in the completeness and balance of his
+powers. Nor do we say anything of those gifts, partly of the intellect,
+but also of the soul and temper and character, by which he was able at
+once to charm without tiring the most refined and fastidious society,
+to draw to him the hearts of hard-working and anxious clergymen, and to
+enchain the attention of the dullest and most ignorant of rustic
+congregations. All these are, as it seems to us, the subordinate, and
+not the most interesting, parts of what he was; they were on the
+surface and attracted notice, and the parts were often mistaken for the
+whole. Nor do we forget what often offended even equitable judges,
+disliking all appearance of management and mere adroitness--or what was
+often objected against his proceedings by opponents at least as
+unscrupulous as they wished him to be thought. We are far from thinking
+that his long career was free from either mistakes or faults; it is not
+likely that a course steered amid such formidable and perplexing
+difficulties, and steered with such boldness and such little attempt to
+evade them, should not offer repeated occasions not only for
+ill-natured, but for grave and serious objections.
+
+But looking over that long course of his Episcopate, from 1845 to the
+present year, we see in him, in an eminent and unique degree, two
+things. He had a distinct and statesmanlike idea of Church policy; and
+he had a new idea of the functions of a Bishop, and of what a Bishop
+might do and ought to do. And these two ideas he steadily kept in view
+and acted upon with increasing clearness in his purpose and unflagging
+energy in action. He grasped in all its nobleness and fulness and
+height the conception of the Church as a great religious society of
+Divine origin, with many sides and functions, with diversified gifts
+and ever new relations to altering times, but essentially, and above
+all things, a religious society. To serve that society, to call forth
+in it the consciousness of its calling and its responsibilities, to
+strengthen and put new life into its organisation, to infuse ardour and
+enthusiasm and unity into its efforts, to encourage and foster
+everything that harmonised with its principle and purpose, to watch
+against the counteracting influences of self-willed or ignorant
+narrowness, to adjust its substantial rights and its increasing
+activity to the new exigencies of political changes, to elicit from the
+Church all that could command the respect and win the sympathy and
+confidence of Englishmen, and make its presence recognised as a supreme
+blessing by those whom nothing but what was great and real in its
+benefits would satisfy--this was the aim from which, however perplexed
+or wavering or inconsistent he may have been at times, he never really
+swerved. In the breadth and largeness of his principle, in the freedom
+and variety of its practical applications, in the distinctness of his
+purposes and the intensity of his convictions, he was an example of
+high statesmanship common in no age of the Church, and in no branch of
+it. And all this rested on the most profound personal religion as its
+foundation, a religion which became in time one of very definite
+doctrinal preferences, but of wide sympathies, and which was always of
+very exacting claims for the undivided work and efforts of a lifetime.
+
+When he became Bishop he very soon revolutionised the old notion of a
+Bishop's duties. He threw himself without any regard to increasing
+trouble and labour on the great power of personal influence. In every
+corner of his diocese he made himself known and felt; in all that
+interested its clergy or its people he took his part more and more. He
+went forth to meet men; he made himself their guest and companion as
+well as their guide and chief; he was more often to be found moving
+about his diocese than he was to be found at his own home at Cuddesdon.
+The whole tone of communication between Bishop and people rose at once
+in freedom and in spiritual elevation and earnestness; it was at once
+less formal and more solemnly practical. He never spared his personal
+presence; always ready to show himself, always ready to bring the rarer
+and more impressive rites of the Church, such as Ordination, within the
+view of people at a distance from his Palace or Cathedral, he was never
+more at his ease than in a crowd of new faces, and never exhausted and
+worn out in what he had to say to fresh listeners. Gathering men about
+him at one time; turning them to account, assigning them tasks,
+pressing the willing, shaming the indolent or the reluctant, at
+another; travelling about with the rapidity and system of an officer
+inspecting his positions, he infused into the diocese a spirit and zeal
+which nothing but such labour and sympathy could give, and bound it
+together by the bands of a strong and wise organisation.
+
+What he did was but a very obvious carrying out of the idea of the
+Episcopal office; but it had not seemed necessary once, and his merit
+was that he saw both that it was necessary and practicable. It is he
+who set the standard of what is now expected, and is more or less
+familiar, in all Bishops. And as he began so he went on to the last. He
+never flagged, he never grew tired of the continual and varied
+intercourse which he kept up with his clergy and people. To the last he
+worked his diocese as much as possible not from a distance, but from
+local points which brought him into closer communication with his
+flock. London, with its great interests and its great attractions,
+social and political, never kept away one who was so keenly alive to
+them, and so prominent in all that was eventful in his time, from
+attending to the necessities and claims of his rural parishes. What his
+work was to the very last, how much there was in him of unabated force,
+of far-seeing judgment, of noble boldness and earnestness, of power
+over the souls and minds of men in many ways divided, a letter from Dr.
+Monsell[25] in our columns shows.
+
+He had a great and all-important place in a very critical moment, to
+which he brought a seriousness of purpose, a power and ripeness of
+counsel, and a fearlessness distinctly growing up to the last. It is
+difficult to see who will bend the bow which he has dropped.
+
+  [25]
+  ... The shock that the sudden announcement of an event so
+  solemn must ever give, was tenfold great to one who, like myself,
+  had been, during the past week, closely associated with him in
+  anxious deliberations as to the best means of meeting the various
+  difficulties and dangers with which the Church is at present
+  surrounded.
+
+  He had gathered round him, as was his annual wont, his Archdeacons
+  and Rural Deans, to deliberate for the Church's interests; and in
+  his opening address, and conduct of a most important meeting, never
+  had he shone out more clearly in intellectual vigour, in theological
+  soundness, in moral boldness, in Christian gentleness and love.
+
+  ... He spoke upon the gravest questions of the day--questions which
+  require more than they generally receive, delicate handling. He
+  divided from the evil of things, which some in the spirit of party
+  condemn wholesale, the hidden good which lies wrapt up in them, and
+  which it would be sin as well as folly to sweep away. He made every
+  man who heard him feel the blessing of having in the Church such a
+  veteran leader, and drew forth from more than one there the openly
+  expressed hope that as he had in bygone days been the bold and
+  cautious controller of an earlier movement in the right direction,
+  so now he would save to the Church some of her precious things which
+  rude men would sweep away, and help her to regain what is essential
+  to her spiritual existence without risking the sacredness of private
+  life, the purity of private thoughts, the sense of direct
+  responsibility between God and the soul, which are some of the most
+  distinctive characteristics of our dear Church of England.
+
+  From his council chamber in Winchester House I went direct with him
+  to the greater council chamber of St. Stephen's to hear him there
+  vindicate the rights and privileges of his order, and beat back the
+  assaults of those who, in high places, think that by a speech in, or
+  a vote of, either house they can fashion the Church as they please.
+  Never did he speak with more point and power; and never did he seem
+  to have won more surely the entire sympathy of the house.
+
+  To gather in overwhelming numbers round him in the evening his
+  London clergy and their families, to meet them all with the kind
+  cordiality of a real father and friend, to run on far into the
+  middle of the night in this laborious endeavour to please--was "the
+  last effort of his toilsome day."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+RETIREMENT OF THE PROVOST OF ORIEL[26]
+
+
+  [26]
+  _Guardian_, 4th November 1874.
+
+Dr. Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, has resigned the Provostship. He has
+held it from 1828, within four years of half a century. The time during
+which he has presided over his college has been one of the most
+eventful periods in the history of the University; it has been a time
+of revolt against custom, of reform, of keen conflict, of deep changes;
+and in all connected with these he has borne a part, second to none in
+prominence, in importance, and we must add, in dignity. No name of
+equal distinction has disappeared from the list of Heads of Houses
+since the venerable President of Magdalen passed away. But Dr. Routh,
+though he watched with the keenest intelligence, and not without
+sympathy, all that went on in the days into which his life had been
+prolonged, watched it with the habits and thoughts of days long
+departed; he had survived from the days of Bishop Horne and Dr. Parr
+far into our new and strange century, to which he did not belong, and
+he excited its interest as a still living example of what men were
+before the French Revolution. The eminence of the Provost of Oriel is
+of another kind. He calls forth interest because among all recent
+generations of Oxford men, and in all their restless and exciting
+movements, he has been a foremost figure. He belongs to modern Oxford,
+its daring attempts, its fierce struggles, its successes, and its
+failures. He was a man of whom not only every one heard, but whom every
+one saw; for he was much in public, and his unsparing sense of public
+duty made him regularly present in his place at Council, at
+Convocation, at the University Church, at College chapel. The outward
+look of Oxford will be altered by the disappearance in its ceremonies
+and gatherings of his familiar form and countenance.
+
+He would anywhere have been a remarkable man. His active and
+independent mind, with its keen, discriminating, practical
+intelligence, was formed and disciplined amid that company of
+distinguished scholars and writers who, at Oxford, in the second decade
+of the century were revolted by the scandalous inertness and
+self-indulgence of the place, with its magnificent resources squandered
+and wasted, its stupid orthodoxy of routine, its insensibility to the
+questions and the dangers rising all round; men such as Keble, Arnold,
+Davison, Copleston, Whately. These men, different as they were from one
+another, all represented the awakening but still imperfect
+consciousness that a University life ought to be something higher than
+one of literary idleness, given up to the frivolities of mere elegant
+scholarship, and to be crowned at last by comfortable preferment; that
+there was much difficult work to be seriously thought about and done,
+and that men were placed at Oxford under heavy responsibilities to use
+their thoughts and their leisure for the direct service of their
+generation. Clever fops and dull pedants joined in sneering at this new
+activity and inquisitiveness of mind, and this grave interest and
+employment of intellect on questions and in methods outside the
+customary line of University studies and prejudices; but the men were
+too powerful, and their work too genuine and effective, and too much in
+harmony with the temper and tendencies of the time, to be stopped by
+impertinence and obstructiveness. Dr. Hawkins was one of those who made
+the Oriel Common-room a place of keen discussion and brilliant
+conversation, and, for those days, of bold speculation; while the
+College itself reflected something of the vigour and accomplishments of
+the Common-room. Dr. Newman, in the _Apologia_, has told us, in
+touching terms of acknowledgment, what Dr. Hawkins was when, fifty
+years ago, the two minds first came into close contact, and what
+intellectual services he believed Dr. Hawkins had rendered him. He
+tells us, too, how Dr. Hawkins had profoundly impressed him by a work
+in which, with characteristic independence and guarded caution equally
+characteristic, he cuts across popular prejudices and confusions of
+thought, and shows himself original in discerning and stating an
+obvious truth which had escaped other people--his work on
+_Unauthoritative Tradition_. His logical acuteness, his habits of
+disciplined accuracy, abhorrent and impatient of all looseness of
+thinking and expression, his conscientious efforts after substantial
+reality in his sharpest distinctions, his capacity for taking trouble,
+his serious and strong sense of the debt involved in the possession of
+intellectual power--all this would have made him eminent, whatever the
+times in which he lived.
+
+But the times in which we live and what they bring with them mould most
+of us; and the times shaped the course of the Provost of Oriel, and
+turned his activity into a channel of obstinate and prolonged
+antagonism, of resistance and protest, most conscientious but most
+uncompromising, against two great successive movements, both of which
+he condemned as unbalanced and recoiled from as revolutionary--the
+Tractarian first, and then the Liberal movement in Oxford. Of the
+former, it is not perhaps too much to say that he was in Oxford, at
+least, the ablest and most hurtful opponent. From his counsels, from
+his guarded and measured attacks, from the power given him by a partial
+agreement against popular fallacies with parts of its views, from his
+severe and unflinching determination, it received its heaviest blows
+and suffered its greatest losses. He detested what he held to be its
+anti-Liberal temper, and its dogmatic assertions; he resented its
+taking out of his hands a province of theology which he and Whately had
+made their own, that relating to the Church; he thought its tone of
+feeling and its imaginative and poetical side exaggerated or childish;
+and he could not conceive of its position except as involving palpable
+dishonesty. No one probably guided with such clear and self-possessed
+purpose that policy of extreme measures, which contributed to bring
+about, if it did not itself cause, the break-up of 1845. Then succeeded
+the great Liberal tide with its demands for extensive and immediate
+change, its anti-ecclesiastical spirit, its scarcely disguised
+scepticism, its daring philosophical and critical enterprises. By
+degrees it became clear that the impatience and intolerance which had
+purged the University of so many Churchmen had, after all, left the
+Church movement itself untouched, to assume by degrees proportions
+scarcely dreamed of when it began; but that what the defeat of the
+Tractarians really had done was, to leave the University at the mercy
+of Liberals to whom what had been called Liberalism in the days of
+Whately was mere blind and stagnant Conservatism.
+
+One war was no sooner over than the Provost of Oriel found another even
+more formidable on his hands. The most dauntless and most unshaken of
+combatants, he faced his new antagonists with the same determination,
+the same unshrinking sense of duty with which he had fought his old
+ones. He used the high authority and influence which his position and
+his character justly gave him, to resist or to control, as far as he
+could, the sweeping changes which, while bringing new life into Oxford,
+have done so much to break up her connection of centuries with the
+Church. He boldly confronted the new spirit of denial and unbelief. He
+wrote, he preached, he published, as he had done against other
+adversaries, always with measured and dignified argument, but not
+shrinking from plain-spoken severity of condemnation. Never sparing
+himself labour when he thought duty called, he did not avail himself of
+the privilege of advancing years to leave the war to be carried on by
+younger champions.
+
+It is impossible for those who may at times have found themselves most
+strongly, and perhaps most painfully, opposed to him, not to admire and
+revere one who, through so long a career has, in what he held to be his
+duty to the Church and to religion, fought so hard, encountered such
+troubles, given up so many friendships and so much ease, and who, while
+a combatant to the last, undiscouraged by odds and sometimes by
+ill-success, has brought to the weariness and disappointment of old age
+an increasing gentleness and kindliness of spirit, which is one of the
+rarest tokens and rewards of patient and genuine self-discipline. A man
+who has set himself steadily and undismayed to stem and bring to reason
+the two most powerful currents of conviction and feeling which have
+agitated his times, leaves an impressive example of zeal and
+fearlessness, even to those against whom he has contended. What is the
+upshot which has come of these efforts, and whether the controversies
+of the moment have not in his case, as in others, diverted and absorbed
+faculties which might have been turned to calmer and more permanent
+tasks, we do not inquire.
+
+Perhaps a life of combat never does all that the combatant thinks it
+ought to accomplish, or compensates for the sacrifices it entails. In
+the case of the Provost of Oriel, he had, with all his great and noble
+qualities, one remarkable want, which visibly impaired his influence
+and his persuasiveness. He was out of sympathy with the rising
+aspirations and tendencies of the time on the two opposite sides; he
+was suspicious and impatient of them. He was so sensible of their weak
+points, the logical difficulties which they brought with them, their
+precipitate and untested assumptions, the extravagance and unsoundness
+of character which often seemed inseparable from them, that he seldom
+did justice to them viewed in their complete aspect, or was even alive
+to what was powerful and formidable in the depth, the complexity, and
+the seriousness of the convictions and enthusiasm which carried them
+onwards. In truth, for a man of his singular activity and reach of
+mind, he was curiously indifferent to much that most interested his
+contemporaries in thought and literature; he did not understand it, and
+he undervalued it as if it belonged merely to the passing fashions of
+the hour.
+
+This long career is now over. Warfare is always a rude trade, and men
+on all sides who have had to engage in it must feel at the end how much
+there is to be forgiven and needing forgiveness; how much now appears
+harsh, unfair, violent, which once appeared only necessary and just. A
+hard hitter like the Provost of Oriel must often have left behind the
+remembrance of his blows. But we venture to say that, even in those who
+suffered from them, he has left remembrances of another and better
+sort. He has left the recollection of a pure, consistent, laborious
+life, elevated in its aim and standard, and marked by high public
+spirit and a rigid and exacting sense of duty. In times when it was
+wanted, he set in his position in the University an example of modest
+and sober simplicity of living; and no one who ever knew him can doubt
+the constant presence, in all his thoughts, of the greatness of things
+unseen, or his equally constant reference of all that he did to the
+account which he was one day to give at his Lord's judgment-seat. We
+trust that he may be spared to enjoy the rest which a weaker or less
+conscientious man would have claimed long ago.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+MARK PATTISON[27]
+
+
+  [27]
+  _Guardian_, 6th August 1884.
+
+The Rector of Lincoln, who died at Harrogate this day week, was a man
+about whom judgments are more than usually likely to be biassed by
+prepossessions more or less unconscious, and only intelligible to the
+mind of the judge. There are those who are in danger of dealing with
+him too severely. There are also those whose temptation will be to
+magnify and possibly exaggerate his gifts and acquirements--great as
+they undoubtedly were,--the use that he made of them, and the place
+which he filled among his contemporaries. One set of people finds it
+not easy to forget that he had been at one time closer than most young
+men of his generation to the great religious leaders whom they are
+accustomed to revere; that he was of a nature fully to understand and
+appreciate both their intellectual greatness and their moral and
+spiritual height; that he had shared to the full their ideas and hopes;
+that they, too, had measured his depth of character, and grasp, and
+breadth, and subtlety of mind; and that the keenest judge among them of
+men and of intellect had pirlud him out as one of the most original and
+powerful of a number of very able contemporaries. Those who remember
+this cannot easily pardon the lengths of dislike and hitterness to
+which in after life Pattison allowed himself to be carried against the
+cause which once had his hearty allegiance, and in which, if he had
+discovered, as he thought, its mistakes and its weakness, he had once
+recognised with all his soul the nobler side. And on the other hand,
+the partisans of the opposite movement, into whose interests he so
+disastrously, as it seems to us, and so unreservedly threw himself,
+naturally welcomed and made the most of such an accession to their
+strength, and such an unquestionable addition to their literary fame.
+To have detached such a man from the convictions which he had so
+professedly and so earnestly embraced, and to have enlisted him as
+their determined and implacable antagonist--to be able to point to him
+in him maturity and strength of his powers as one who, having known its
+best aspects, had deliberately despaired of religion, and had turned
+against its representatives the scorn and hatred of a passionate
+nature, whose fires burned all the more fiercely under its cold crust
+of reserve and sarcasm--this was a triumph of no common order; and it
+might conceivably blind those who could rejoice in it to the
+comparative value of qualities which, at any rate, were very rare and
+remarkable ones.
+
+Pattison was a man who, in many ways, did not do himself justice. As a
+young man, his was a severe and unhopeful mind, and the tendency to
+despond was increased by circumstances. There was something in the
+quality of his unquestionable ability which kept him for long out of
+the ordinary prizes of an Oxford career; in the class list, in the
+higher competition for Fellowships, he was not successful. There are
+those who long remembered the earnest pleading of the Latin letters
+which it was the custom to send in when a man stood for a Fellowship,
+and in which Pattison set forth his ardent longing for knowledge, and
+his narrow and unprosperous condition as a poor student. He always came
+very near; indeed, he more than once won the vote of the best judges;
+but he just missed the prize. To the bitter public disappointments of
+1845 were added the vexations caused by private injustice and
+ill-treatment. He turned fiercely on those who, as he thought, had
+wronged him, and he began to distrust men, and to be on the watch for
+proofs of hollowness and selfishness in the world and in the Church.
+Yet at this time, when people were hearing of his bitter and unsparing
+sayings in Oxford, he was from time to time preaching in village
+churches, and preaching sermons which both his educated and his simple
+hearers thought unlike those of ordinary men in their force, reality,
+and earnestness. But with age and conflict the disposition to harsh and
+merciless judgments strengthened and became characteristic. This,
+however, should be remembered: where he revered ho revered with genuine
+and unstinted reverence; where he saw goodness in which he believed he
+gave it ungrudging honour. He had real pleasure in recognising height
+and purity of character, and true intellectual force, and he maintained
+his admiration when the course of things had placed wide intervals
+between him and those to whom it had been given. His early friendships,
+where they could be retained, he did retain warmly and generously even
+to the last; he seemed almost to draw a line between them and other
+things in the world. The truth, indeed, was that beneath that icy and
+often cruel irony there was at bottom a most warm and affectionate
+nature, yearning for sympathy, longing for high and worthy objects,
+which, from the misfortunes especially of his early days, never found
+room to expand and unfold itself. Let him see and feel that anything
+was real--character, purpose, cause--and at any rate it was sure of his
+respect, probably of his interest. But the doubt whether it was real
+was always ready to present itself to his critical and suspicious mind;
+and these doubts grew with his years.
+
+People have often not given Pattison credit for the love that was in
+him for what was good and true; it is not to be wondered at, but the
+observation has to be made. On the other hand, a panegyrie, like that
+which we reprint from the _Times_, sets too high an estimate on his
+intellectual qualities, and on the position which they gave him. He was
+full of the passion for knowledge; he was very learned, very acute in
+his judgment on what his learning brought before him, very versatile,
+very shrewd, very subtle; too full of the truth of his subject to care
+about seeming to be original; but, especially in his poetical
+criticisms, often full of that best kind of originality which consists
+in seeing and pointing out novelty in what is most familiar and trite.
+But, not merely as a practical but as a speculative writer, he was apt
+to be too much under the empire and pressure of the one idea which at
+the moment occupied and interested his mind. He could not resist it; it
+came to him with exclusive and overmastering force; he did not care to
+attend to what limited it or conflicted with it. And thus, with all the
+force and sagacity of his University theories, they were not always
+self-consistent, and they were often one-sided and exaggerated. He was
+not a leader whom men could follow, however much they might rejoice at
+the blows which he might happen to deal, sometimes unexpectedly, at
+things which they disliked. And this holds of more serious things than
+even University reform and reconstruction.
+
+And next, though every competent reader must do justice to Pattison's
+distinction as a man of letters, as a writer of English prose, and as a
+critic of what is noble and excellent and what is base and poor in
+literature, there is a curious want of completeness, a frequent crudity
+and hardness, a want, which is sometimes a surprising want, of good
+sense and good taste, which form unwelcome blemishes in his work, and
+just put it down below the line of first-rate excellence which it ought
+to occupy. Morally, in that love of reality, and of all that is high
+and noble in character, which certainly marked him, he was much better
+than many suppose, who know only the strength of his animosities and
+the bitterness of his sarcasm. Intellectually, in reach, and fulness,
+and solidity of mental power, it may be doubted whether he was so great
+as it has recently been the fashion to rate him.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+PATTISON'S ESSAYS[28]
+
+
+  [28]
+  _Essays by the late Mark Pattison, sometime Rector of Lincoln
+  College_. Collected and arranged by Henry Nettleship, M.A., Corpus
+  Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. _Guardian_, 1st May
+  1889.
+
+This is a very interesting but a very melancholy collection of papers.
+They are the remains of the work of a man of first-rate intellect,
+whose powers, naturally of a high order, had been diligently and wisely
+cultivated, whose mind was furnished in a very rare degree with all
+that reading, wide and critical, could give, and which embraced in the
+circle of its interest all that is important to human life and society.
+Mr. Pattison had no vulgar standard of what knowledge is, and what
+goodness is. He was high, sincere, exacting, even austere, in his
+estimates of either; and when he was satisfied he paid honour with
+sometimes unexpected frankness and warmth. But from some unfortunate
+element in his temperament, or from the effect upon it of untoward and
+unkindly circumstances at those critical epochs of mental life, when
+character is taking its bent for good and all, he was a man in whose
+judgment severity--and severity expressing itself in angry scorn--was
+very apt to outrun justice. Longing for sympathy and not ill-fitted for
+it, capable of rare exertions in helping those whom he could help, he
+passed through life with a reputation for cynicism which, while he
+certainly exhibited it, he no less certainly would, if he had known
+how, have escaped from. People could easily tell what would incur his
+dislike and opposition, what would provoke his slow, bitter, merciless
+sarcasm; it was never easy to tell what would satisfy him, what would
+attract his approval, when he could be tempted to see the good side of
+a thing. It must not be forgotten that he had gone through a trial to
+which few men are equal. He had passed from the extreme ranks and the
+strong convictions of the Oxford movement--convictions of which the
+translation of Aquinas's _Catena Aurea_, still printed in the list of
+his works, is a memorial--to the frankest form of Liberal thought. As
+he himself writes, we cannot give up early beliefs, much less the deep
+and deliberate convictions of manhood, without some shock to the
+character. In his case the change certainly worked. It made him hate
+what he had left, and all that was like it, with the bitterness of one
+who has been imposed upon, and has been led to commit himself to what
+he now feels to be absurd and contemptible, and the bitterness of this
+disappointment gave an edge to all his work. There seems through all
+his criticism, powerful as it is, a tone of harshness, a readiness to
+take the worst construction, a sad consciousness of distrust and
+suspicion of all things round him, which greatly weakens the effect of
+his judgment. If a man will only look for the worst side, he will only
+find the worst side; but we feel that we act reasonably by not
+accepting such a teacher as our guide, however ably he may state his
+case. There is a want of equitableness and fairness in his stern and
+sometimes cruel condemnations; and yet not religion only, but the
+wisest wisdom of the world tells of the indispensable value of this
+equitableness, this old Greek virtue of [Greek: epieikeia], in our
+views of men and things. It is not religion only, but common sense
+which says that "sweetness and light," kindliness, indulgence,
+sympathy, are necessary for moral and spiritual health. Scorn,
+indignation, keenly stinging sarcasm, doubtless have their place in a
+world in which untruth and baseness abound and flourish; but to live on
+these is poison, at least to oneself.
+
+These fierce antipathies warped his judgment in strange and unexpected
+ways. Among these papers is a striking one on Calvin. If any character
+in history might be expected to have little attraction for him it is
+Calvin. Dogmatist, persecutor, tyrant, the proud and relentless
+fanatic, who more than any one consecrated harsh narrowness in religion
+by cruel theories about God, what was there to recommend him to a lover
+of liberty who had no patience for ecclesiastical pretensions of any
+kind, and who tells us that Calvin's "sins against human liberty are of
+the deepest dye"? For if Laud chastised his adversaries with whips,
+Calvin chastised his with scorpions. Perhaps it is unreasonable to be
+suprised, yet we are taken by surprise, when we find a thinker like Mr.
+Pattison drawn by strong sympathy to Calvin and setting him up among
+the heroes and liberators of humanity. Mr. Pattison is usually fair in
+details, that is, he does not suppress bad deeds or qualities in those
+whom he approves, or good deeds or qualities in those whom he hates: it
+is in his general judgments that his failing comes out. He makes no
+attempt to excuse the notorious features of Calvin's rule at Geneva;
+but Mr. Pattison reads into his character a purpose and a grandeur
+which place him far above any other man of his day. To recommend him to
+our very different ways of thinking, Mr. Pattison has the courage to
+allege that his interest in dogmatic theology was a subordinate matter,
+and that the "renovation of character," the "moral purification of
+humanity," was the great guiding idea of him who taught that out of the
+mass of human kind only a predestined remnant could possibly be saved.
+It is a singular interpretation of the mind of the author of the
+_Institutes_:--
+
+    The distinction of Calvin as a Reformer is not to be sought in the
+    doctrine which now bears his name, or in any doctrinal peculiarity.
+    His great merit lies _in his comparative neglect of dogma. He
+    seized the idea of reformation as a real renovation of human
+    character_. The moral purification of humanity as the original
+    idea of Christianity is the guiding idea of his system.... He
+    swept away at once the sacramental machinery of material media of
+    salvation which the middle-age Church had provided in such
+    abundance, and which Luther frowned upon, but did not reject. He
+    was not satisfied to go back only to the historical origin of
+    Christianity, but would found human virtue on the eternal
+    antemundane will of God.
+
+Again:--
+
+    Calvin thought neither of fame or fortune. The narrowness of his
+    views and the disinterestedness of his soul alike precluded him
+    from regarding Geneva as a stage for the gratification of personal
+    ambition. This abegnation of self was one great part of his
+    success.
+
+And then Mr. Pattison goes on to describe in detail how, governed and
+possessed by one idea, and by a theory, to oppose which was "moral
+depravity," he proceeded to establish his intolerable system of
+discipline, based on dogmatic grounds--meddlesome, inquisitorial,
+petty, cruel--over the interior of every household in Geneva. What is
+there fascinating, or even imposing, in such a character? It is the
+common case of political and religious bigots, whether Jacobin, or
+Puritan, or Jesuit, poor in thought and sympathy and strong in will,
+fixing their yoke on a society, till the plague becomes unbearable. He
+seeks nothing for himself and, forsooth, he makes sacrifices. But he
+gets what he wants, his idea carried out; and self-sacrifice is of what
+we care for, and not of what we do not care for. And to keep up this
+supposed character of high moral purpose, we are told of Calvin's
+"comparative neglect of dogma," of his seizing the idea of a "real
+reformation of human character," a "moral purification of humanity," as
+the guiding idea of his system. Can anything be more unhistorical than
+to suggest that the father and source of all Western Puritan theology
+"neglected dogma," and was more of a moralist than a divine? It is not
+even true that he "swept away at once the sacramental machinery" of
+mediaeval and Lutheran teaching; Calvin writes of the Eucharist in
+terms which would astonish some of his later followers. But what is the
+reason why Mr. Pattison attributes to the historical Calvin so much
+that does not belong to him, and, in spite of so much that repels, is
+yet induced to credit him with such great qualities? The reason is to
+be found in the intense antipathy with which Mr. Pattison regarded what
+he calls "the Catholic reaction" over Europe, and in the fact that
+undoubtedly Calvin's system and influence was the great force which
+resisted both what was bad and false in it, and also what was good,
+true, generous, humane. Calvinism opposed the "Catholic reaction"
+point-blank, and that was enough to win sympathy for it, even from Mr.
+Pattison.
+
+The truth is that what Popery is to the average Protestant, and what
+Protestant heresy is to the average Roman Catholic, the "Catholic
+reaction," the "Catholic revival" in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries and in our own, is to Mr. Pattison's final judgment. It was
+not only a conspiracy against human liberty, but it brought with it the
+degradation and ruin of genuine learning. It is the all-sufficing cause
+and explanation of the mischief and evil doings which he has to set
+before us. Yet after the violence, the ignorance, the injustice, the
+inconsistencies of that great ecclesiastical revolution which we call
+by the vague name of Reformation, a "Catholic reaction" was inevitable.
+It was not conceivable that common sense and certain knowledge would
+submit for ever to be overcrowed by the dogmas and assertions of the
+new teachers. Like other powerful and wide and strongly marked
+movements, like the Reformation which it combated, it was a very mixed
+thing. It produced some great evils and led to some great crimes. It
+started that fatal religious militia, the Jesuit order, which,
+notwithstanding much heroic self-sacrifice, has formed a permanent bar
+to all possible reunion of Christendom, has fastened its yoke on the
+Papacy itself, and has taught the Church, as a systematic doctrine, to
+put its trust in the worst expedients of human policy. The religious
+wars in France and Germany, the relentless massacres of the Low
+Countries and the St. Bartholomew, the consecration of treason and
+conspiracy, were, without doubt, closely connected with the "Catholic
+reaction." But if this great awakening and stimulating influence raised
+new temptations to human passion and wickedness, it was not only in the
+service of evil that this new zeal was displayed. The Council of Trent,
+whatever its faults, and it had many, was itself a real reformation.
+The "Catholic revival" meant the rekindling of earnest religion and
+care for a good life in thousands of souls. If it produced the Jesuits,
+it as truly produced Port Royal and the Benedictines. Europe would be
+indeed greatly the poorer if it wanted some of the most conspicuous
+products of the Catholic revival.
+
+It is Mr. Pattison's great misfortune that through obvious faults of
+temper he has missed the success which naturally might have seemed
+assured to him, of dealing with these subjects in a large and
+dispassionate way. Scholar, thinker, student as he is, conversant with
+all literature, familiar with books and names which many well-read
+persons have never heard of, he has his bitter prejudices, like the
+rest of us, Protestants or Catholics; and what he hates is continually
+forcing itself into his mind. He tells, with great and pathetic force,
+the terrible story of the judicial murder of Calas at Toulouse, and of
+Voltaire's noble and successful efforts to bring the truth to light,
+and to repair, as far as could be repaired, its infamous injustice. It
+is a story which shows to what frightful lengths fanaticism may go in
+leading astray even the tribunals of justice. But unhappily the story
+can be paralleled in all times of the world's history; and though the
+Toulouse mob and Judges were Catholics, their wickedness is no more a
+proof against the Catholic revival than Titus Oates and the George
+Gordon riots are against Protestantism, or the Jacobin tribunals
+against Republican justice. But Mr. Pattison cannot conclude his
+account without an application. Here you have an example of what the
+Catholic revival does. It first breaks Calas on the wheel; and then,
+because Voltaire took up his cause, it makes modern Frenchmen, if they
+are Catholics, believe that Calas deserved it:--
+
+    It is part of that general Catholic revival which has been working
+    for some years, and which like a fog is spreading over the face of
+    opinion.... The memory of Calas had been vindicated by Voltaire and
+    the Encyclopedists. That was quite enough for the Catholics....
+    It is the characteristic of Catholicism that it supersedes reason,
+    and prejudges all matters by the application of fixed principles.
+
+    It is no use that M. Coquerel flatters himself that he has set the
+    matter at rest. He flatters himself in vain; he ought to know his
+    Catholic countrymen better:--
+
+    We have little doubt that as long as the Catholic religion shall
+    last their little manuals of falsified history will continue to
+    repeat that Jean Calas murdered his son because he had become a
+    convert to the Catholic faith.
+
+    Are little manuals of falsified history confined only to one set
+    of people? Is not John Foxe still proof against the assaults of
+    Dr. Maitland? The habit of _a priori_ judgments as to historical
+    facts is, as Mr. Pattison truly says, "fatal to truth and
+    integrity." It is most mischievous when it assumes a philosophic
+    gravity and warps the criticism of a distinguished scholar.
+
+This fixed habit of mind is the more provoking because, putting aside
+the obtrusive and impertinent injustice to which it leads, Mr.
+Pattison's critical work is of so high a character. His extensive and
+accurate reading, the sound common sense with which he uses his
+reading, and the modesty and absence of affectation and display which
+seem to be a law of his writing, place him very high. Perhaps he
+believes too much in books and learning, in the power which they exert,
+and what they can do to enable men to reach the higher conquests of
+moral and religious truth--perhaps he forgets, in the amplitude of his
+literary resources, that behind the records of thought and feeling
+there are the living mind and thought themselves, still clothed with
+their own proper force and energy, and working in defiance of our
+attempts to classify, to judge, or to explain: that there are the real
+needs, the real destinies of mankind, and the questions on which they
+depend--of which books are a measure indeed, but an imperfect one. As
+an instance, we might cite his "Essay on the Theology of
+Germany"--elaborate, learned, extravagant in its praise and in its
+scorn, full of the satisfaction of a man in possession of a startling
+and little known subject, but with the contradictions of a man who in
+spite of his theories believes more than his theories. But, as a
+student who deals with books and what books can teach, it is a pleasure
+to follow him; his work is never slovenly or superficial; the reader
+feels that he is in the hands of a man who thoroughly knows what he is
+talking about, and both from conscience and from disposition is anxious
+above all to be accurate and discriminative. If he fails, as he often
+seems to us to do, in the justice and balance of his appreciation of
+the phenomena before him, if his statements and generalisations are
+crude and extravagant, it is that passion and deep aversions have
+overpowered the natural accuracy of his faculty of judgment.
+
+The feature which is characteristic in all his work is his profound
+value for learning, the learning of books, of documents, of all
+literature. He is a thinker, a clear and powerful one; he is a
+philosopher, who has explored the problems of abstract science with
+intelligence and interest, and fully recognises their importance; he
+has taken the measure of the political and social questions which the
+progress of civilisation has done so little to solve; he is at home
+with the whole range of literature, keen and true in observation and
+criticism; he has strongly marked views about education, and he took a
+leading part in the great changes which have revolutionised Oxford. He
+is all this; but beyond and more than all this he is a devotee of
+learning, as other men are of science or politics, deeply penetrated
+with its importance, keenly alive to the neglect of it, full of faith
+in the services which it can render to mankind, fiercely indignant at
+what degrades, or supplants, or enfeebles it. Learning, with the severe
+and bracing discipline without which it is impossible, learning
+embracing all efforts of human intellect--those which are warning
+beacons as well those which have elevated and enlightened the human
+mind--is the thing which attracts and satisfies him as nothing else
+does; not mere soulless erudition, but a great supply and command of
+varied facts, marshalled and turned to account by an intelligence which
+knows their use. The absence of learning, or the danger to learning, is
+the keynote of a powerful but acrid survey of the history and prospects
+of the Anglican Church, for which, in spite of its one-sidedness and
+unfairness, Churchmen may find not a little which it will be useful to
+lay to heart. Dissatisfaction with the University system, in its
+provision for the encouragement of learning and for strengthening and
+protecting its higher interests, is the stimulus to his essay on Oxford
+studies, which is animated with the idea of the University as a true
+home of real learning, and is full of the hopes, the animosities, and,
+it may be added, the disappointments of a revolutionary time. He exults
+over the destruction of the old order; but his ideal is too high, he is
+too shrewd an observer, too thorough and well-trained a judge of what
+learning really means, to be quite satisfied with the new.
+
+The same devotion to learning shows itself in a feature of his literary
+work, which is almost characteristic--the delight which he takes in
+telling the detailed story of the life of some of the famous working
+scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These men, whose
+names are known to the modern world chiefly in notes to classical
+authors, or occasionally in some impertinent sneer, he likes to
+contemplate as if they were alive. To him they are men with individual
+differences, each with a character and fortunes of his own, sharers to
+the full in the struggles and vicissitudes of life. He can appreciate
+their enormous learning, their unwearied labour, their sense of honour
+in their profession; and the editor of texts, the collator of various
+readings and emendations, the annotator who to us perhaps seems but a
+learned pedant appears to him as a man of sound and philosophic
+thought, of enthusiasm for truth and light--perhaps of genius--a man,
+too, with human affections and interests, with a history not devoid of
+romance. There is something touching in Mr. Pattison's affection for
+those old scholars, to whom the world has done scant justice. His own
+chief literary venture was the life of one of the greatest of them,
+Isaac Casaubon. We have in these volumes sketches, not so elaborate, of
+several others, the younger Scaliger, Muretus, Huet, and the great
+French printers, the Stephenses; and in these sketches we are also
+introduced to a number of their contemporaries, with characteristic
+observations on them, implying an extensive and first-hand knowledge of
+what they were, and an acquaintance with what was going on in the
+scholar world of the day. The most important of these sketches is the
+account of Justus Scaliger. There is first a review article, very
+vigorous and animated. But Mr. Pattison had intended a companion volume
+to his Casaubon; and of this, which was never completed, we have some
+fragments, not equal in force and compactness to the original sketch.
+But sketch and fragments together present a very vivid picture of this
+remarkable person, whose temper and extravagant vanity his biographer
+admits, but who was undoubtedly a marvel both of knowledge and of the
+power to use it, and to whom we owe the beginning of order and system
+in chronology. Scaliger was to Mr. Pattison the type of the real
+greatness of the scholar, a greatness not the less real that the world
+could hardly understand it. He certainly leaves Scaliger before us,
+with his strange ways of working, his hold of the ancient languages as
+if they were mother tongues, his pride and slashing sarcasm, and his
+absurd claim of princely descent, with lineaments not soon forgotten;
+but it is amusing to meet once more, in all seriousness, Mr. Pattison's
+_bete noire_ of the Catholic reaction, in the quarrels between Scaliger
+and some shallow but clever and scurrilous Jesuits, whom he had
+provoked by exposing the False Decretals and the False Dionysius, and
+who revenged themselves by wounding him in his most sensitive part, his
+claim to descent from the Princes of Verona. Doubtless the religious
+difference envenomed the dispute, but it did not need the "Catholic
+reaction" to account for such ignoble wrangles in those days.
+
+These remains show what a historian of literature we have lost in Mr.
+Pattison. He was certainly capable of doing much more than the
+specimens of work which he has left behind; but what he has left is of
+high value. Wherever the disturbing and embittering elements are away,
+it is hard to say which is the more admirable, the patient and
+sagacious way in which he has collected and mastered his facts, or the
+wise and careful judgment which he passes on them. We hear of people
+being spoilt by their prepossessions, their party, their prejudices,
+the necessities of their political and ecclesiastical position; Mr.
+Pattison is a warning that a man may claim the utmost independence, and
+yet be maimed in his power of being just and reasonable by other things
+than party. As it is, he has left us a collection of interesting and
+valuable studies, disastrously and indelibly disfigured by an
+implacable bitterness, in which he but too plainly found the greatest
+satisfaction.
+
+Mr. Pattison used in his later years to give an occasional lecture to a
+London audience. One of the latest was one addressed, we believe, to a
+class of working people on poetry, in which he dwelt on its healing and
+consoling power. It was full of Mr. Pattison's clearness and directness
+of thought, and made a considerable impression on some who only knew it
+from an abstract in the newspapers; and it was challenged by a
+working-man in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, who urged against it with some
+power the argument of despair. Perhaps the lecture was not written; but
+if it was, and our recollection of it is at all accurate, it was not
+unworthy of a place in this collection.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+BISHOP FRAZER[29]
+
+
+  [29]
+  _Guardian_, 28th October 1885.
+
+Every one must be deeply touched by the Bishop of Manchester's sudden,
+and, to most of us, unexpected death; those not the least who,
+unhappily, found themselves in opposition to him in many important
+matters. For, in spite of much that many people must wish otherwise in
+his career as Bishop, it was really a very remarkable one. Its leading
+motive was high and genuine public spirit, and a generous wish to be in
+full and frank sympathy with all the vast masses of his diocese; to put
+himself on a level with them, as man with man, in all their interests,
+to meet them fearlessly and heartily, to raise their standard of
+justice and large-heartedness by showing them that in their life of
+toil he shared the obligation and the burden of labour, and felt bound
+by his place to be as unsparing and unselfish a worker as any of his
+flock. Indeed, he was as original as Bishop Wilberforce, though in a
+different direction, in introducing a new type and ideal of Episcopal
+work, and a great deal of his ideal he realised. It is characteristic
+of him that one of his first acts was to remove the Episcopal residence
+from a mansion and park in the country to a house in Manchester. There
+can be no doubt that he was thoroughly in touch with the working
+classes in Lancashire, in a degree to which no other Bishop, not even
+Bishop Wilberforce, had reached. There was that in the frankness and
+boldness of his address which disarmed their keen suspicion of a
+Bishop's inevitable assumption of superiority, and put them at their
+ease with him. He was always ready to meet them, and to speak off-hand
+and unconventionally, and as they speak, not always with a due
+foresight of consequences or qualifications. If he did sometimes in
+this way get into a scrape, he did not much mind it, and they liked him
+the better for it. He was perfectly fearless in his dealings with them;
+in their disputes, in which he often was invited to take a part, he
+took the part which seemed to him the right one, whether or not it
+might be the unpopular one. Very decided, very confident in his
+opinions and the expression of them, there yet was apparent a curious
+and almost touching consciousness of a deficiency in some of the
+qualities--knowledge, leisure, capacity for the deeper and subtler
+tasks of thought--necessary to give a strong speaker the sense of being
+on sure ground. But he trusted to his manly common sense; and this,
+with the populations with which he had to deal, served him well, at
+least in the main and most characteristic part of his work.
+
+And for his success in this part of his work--in making the crowds in
+Manchester feel that their Bishop was a man like themselves, quite
+alive to their wants and claims and feelings, and not so unlike them in
+his broad and strong utterances--his Episcopate deserves full
+recognition and honour. He set an example which we may hope to see
+followed and improved upon. But unfortunately there was also a less
+successful side. He was a Bishop, an overseer of a flock of many ways
+of life and thought, a fellow-worker with them, sympathetic, laborious,
+warm-hearted. But he was also a Bishop of the Church of Christ, an
+institution with its own history, its great truths to keep and deliver,
+its characteristic differences from the world which it is sent to
+correct and to raise to higher levels than those of time and nature.
+There is no reason why this side of the Episcopal office should not be
+joined to that in which Bishop Frazer so signally excelled. But for
+this part of it he was not well qualified, and much in his performance
+of it must be thought of with regret. The great features of Christian
+truth had deeply impressed him; and to its lofty moral call he
+responded with conviction and earnestness. But an acquaintance with
+what he has to interpret and guard which may suffice for a layman is
+not enough for a Bishop; and knowledge, the knowledge belonging to his
+profession, the deeper and more varied knowledge which makes a man
+competent to speak as a theologian, Bishop Frazer did not possess. He
+rather disbelieved in it, and thought it useless, or, it might be,
+mischievous. He resented its intrusion into spheres where he could only
+see the need of the simplest and least abstruse language. But facts are
+not what we may wish them, but what they are; and questions, if they
+are asked, may have to be answered, with toil, it may be, and
+difficulty, like the questions, assuredly not always capable of easy
+and transparent statement, of mathematical or physical science; and
+unless Christianity is a dream and its history one vast delusion, such
+facts and such questions have made what we call theology. But to the
+Bishop's practical mind they were without interest, and he could not
+see how they could touch and influence living religion. And did not
+care to know about them; he was impatient, and even scornful, when
+stress was laid on them; he was intolerant when he thought they
+competed with the immediate realities of religion. And this want of
+knowledge and of respect for knowledge was a serious deficiency. It
+gave sometimes a tone of thoughtless flippancy to his otherwise earnest
+language. And as he was not averse to controversy, or, at any rate,
+found himself often involved in it, he was betrayed sometimes into
+assertions and contradictions of the most astounding inaccuracy, which
+seriously weakened his authority when he was called upon to accept the
+responsibility of exerting it.
+
+Partly for this reason, partly from a certain vivacity of temper, he
+certainly showed himself, in spite of his popular qualities, less equal
+than many others of his brethren to the task of appeasing and assuaging
+religious strife. The difficulties in Manchester were not greater than
+in other dioceses; there was not anything peculiar in them; there was
+nothing but what a patient and generous arbiter, with due knowledge of
+the subject, might have kept from breaking out into perilous scandals.
+Unhappily he failed; and though he believed that he had only done his
+duty, his failure was a source of deep distress to himself and to
+others. But now that he has passed away, it is but bare justice to say
+that no one worked up more conscientiously to his own standard. He gave
+himself, when he was consecrated, ten or twelve years of work, and then
+he hoped for retirement. He has had fifteen, and has fallen at his
+post. And to the last, the qualities which gave his character such a
+charm in his earlier time had not disappeared. There seemed to be
+always something of the boy about him, in his simplicity, his confiding
+candour and frankness with his friends, his warm-hearted and kindly
+welcome, his mixture of humility with a sense of power. Those who can
+remember him in his younger days still see, in spite of all the storms
+and troubles of his later ones, the image of the undergraduate and the
+young bachelor, who years ago made a start of such brilliant promise,
+and who has fulfilled so much of it, if not all. These things at any
+rate lasted to the end--his high and exacting sense of public duty, and
+his unchanging affection for his old friends.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+NEWMAN'S "APOLOGIA"[30]
+
+
+  [30]
+  _Apologia pro Vita Sua_. By John Henry Newman, D.D. _Guardian_, 22nd
+  June 1864.
+
+We have not noticed before Dr. Newman's _Apologia_, which has been
+coming out lately in weekly numbers, because we wished, when we spoke
+of it, to speak of it as a whole. The special circumstances out of
+which it arose may have prescribed the mode of publication. It may have
+been thought more suitable, in point of form, to answer a pamphlet by a
+series of pamphlets rather than at once by a set octavo of several
+hundred pages. But the real subject which Dr. Newman has been led to
+handle is one which will continue to be of the deepest interest long
+after the controversy which suggested it is forgotten. The real subject
+is the part played in the great Church movement by him who was the
+leading mind in it; and it was unsatisfactory to speak of this till all
+was said, and we could look on the whole course described. Such a
+subject might have well excused a deliberate and leisurely volume to
+itself; perhaps in this way we should have gained, in the laying out
+and concentration of the narrative, and in what helps to bring it as a
+whole before our thoughts. But a man's account of himself is never so
+fresh and natural as when it is called out by the spur and pressure of
+an accidental and instant necessity, and is directed to a purpose and
+quickened by feelings which belong to immediate and passing
+circumstances. The traces of hurried work are of light account when
+they are the guarantees that a man is not sitting down to draw a
+picture of himself, but stating his case in sad and deep earnest out of
+the very fulness of his heart.
+
+The aim of the book is to give a minute and open account of the steps
+and changes by which Dr. Newman passed from the English Church to the
+Roman. The history of a change of opinion has often been written from
+the most opposite points of view; but in one respect this book seems to
+stand alone. Let it be remembered what it is, the narrative and the
+justification of a great conversion; of a change involving an entire
+reversal of views, judgments, approvals, and condemnations; a change
+which, with all ordinary men, involves a reversal, at least as great,
+of their sympathies and aversions, of what they tolerate and speak
+kindly of. Let it be considered what changes of feeling most changes of
+religion compel and consecrate; how men, commonly and very naturally,
+look back on what they have left and think they have escaped from, with
+the aversion of a captive to his prison; how they usually exaggerate
+and make absolute their divergence from what they think has betrayed,
+fooled, and degraded them; how easily they are tempted to visit on it
+and on those who still cling to it their own mistakes and faults. Let
+it be remembered that there was here to be told not only the history of
+a change, but the history of a deep disappointment, of the failure of a
+great design, of the breakdown of hopes the most promising and the most
+absorbing; and this, not in the silence of a man's study, but in the
+fever and contention of a great struggle wrought up to the highest
+pitch of passion and fierceness, bringing with it on all sides and
+leaving behind it, when over, the deep sense of wrong. It is no history
+of a mere intellectual movement, or of a passage from strong belief to
+a weakened and impaired one, to uncertainty, or vagueness, or
+indifference; it is not the account of a change by a man who is half
+sorry for his change, and speaks less hostilely of what he has left
+because he feels less friendly towards what he has joined. There is no
+reserved thought to be discerned in the background of disappointment or
+a wish to go back again to where he once was. It is a book which
+describes how a man, zealous and impatient for truth, thought he had
+found it in one Church, then thought that his finding was a delusion,
+and sought for it and believed he had gained it in another. What it
+shows us is no serene readjustment of abstract doctrines, but the wreck
+and overturning of trust and conviction and the practical grounds of
+life, accompanied with everything to provoke, embitter, and exasperate.
+It need not be said that what Dr. Newman holds he is ready to carry out
+to the end, or that he can speak severely of men and systems.
+
+Let all this be remembered, and also that there is an opposition
+between what he was and what he is, which is usually viewed as
+irreconcilable, and which, on the ordinary assumptions about it, is so;
+and we venture to say that there is not another instance to be quoted,
+of the history of a conversion, in which he who tells his conversion
+has so retained his self-possession, his temper, his mastery over his
+own real judgment and thoughts, his ancient and legitimate sympathies,
+his superiority to the natural and inevitable temptations of so altered
+a position; which is so generous to what he feels to be strong and good
+in what he has nevertheless abandoned, so fearless about letting his
+whole case come out, so careless about putting himself in the right in
+detail; which is so calm, and kindly, and measured, with such a quiet
+effortless freedom from the stings of old conflicts, which bears so few
+traces of that bitterness and antipathy which generally--and we need
+hardly wonder at it--follows the decisive breaking with that on which a
+man's heart was stayed, and for which he would once have died.
+
+There is another thing to be said, and we venture to say it out
+plainly, because Dr. Newman himself has shown that he knows quite well
+what he has been doing. While he has written what will command the
+sympathy and the reverence of every one, however irreconcilably opposed
+to him, to whom a great and noble aim and the trials of a desperate and
+self-sacrificing struggle to compass it are objects of admiration and
+honour, it is undeniable that ill-nature or vindictiveness or stupidity
+will find ample materials of his own providing to turn against him.
+Those who know Dr. Newman's powers and are acquainted with his career,
+and know to what it led him, and yet persist in the charge of
+insincerity and dishonesty against one who probably has made the
+greatest sacrifice of our generation to his convictions of truth, will
+be able to pick up from his own narrative much that they would not
+otherwise have known, to confirm and point the old familiar views
+cherished by dislike or narrowness. This is inevitable when a man takes
+the resolution of laying himself open so unreservedly, and with so
+little care as to what his readers think of what he tells them, so that
+they will be persuaded that he was ever, even from his boyhood, deeply
+conscious of the part which he was performing in the sight of his
+Maker. Those who smile at the belief of a deep and religious mind in
+the mysterious interventions and indications of Providence in the
+guidance of human life, will open their eyes at the feeling which leads
+him to tell the story of his earliest recollections of Roman Catholic
+peculiarities, and of the cross imprinted on his exercise-book. Those
+who think that everything about religion and their own view of religion
+is such plain sailing, so palpable and manifest, that all who are not
+fools or knaves must be of their own opinion, will find plenty to
+wonder at in the confessions of awful perplexity which equally before
+and after his change Dr. Newman makes. Those who have never doubted,
+who can no more imagine the practical difficulties accompanying a great
+change of belief than they can imagine a change of belief itself, will
+meet with much that to them will seem beyond pardon, in the actual
+events of a change, involving such issues and such interests, made so
+deliberately and cautiously, with such hesitation and reluctance, and
+in so long a time; they will be able to point to many moments in it
+when it will be easy to say that more or less ought to have been said,
+more or less ought to have been done. Much more will those who are on
+the side of doubt, who acquiesce in, or who desire the overthrow of
+existing hopes and beliefs, rejoice in such a frank avowal of the
+difficulties of religion and the perplexities of so earnest a believer,
+and make much of their having driven such a man to an alternative so
+obnoxious and so monstrous to most Englishmen. It is a book full of
+minor premisses, to which many opposite majors will be fitted. But
+whatever may be thought of many details, the effect and lesson of the
+whole will not be lost on minds of any generosity, on whatever side
+they may be; they will be touched with the confiding nobleness which
+has kept back nothing, which has stated its case with its weak points
+and its strong, and with full consciousness of what was weak as well as
+of what was strong, which has surrendered its whole course of conduct,
+just as it has been, to be scrutinised, canvassed, and judged. What we
+carry away from following such a history is something far higher and
+more solemn than any controversial inferences; and it seems almost like
+a desecration to make, as we say, capital out of it, to strengthen mere
+argument, to confirm a theory, or to damage an opponent.
+
+The truth, in fact, is, that the interest is personal much more than
+controversial. Those who read it as a whole, and try to grasp the
+effect of all its portions compared together and gathered into one,
+will, it seems to us, find it hard to bend into a decisive triumph for
+any of the great antagonist systems which appear in collision. There
+can be no doubt of the perfect conviction with which Dr. Newman has
+taken his side for good. But while he states the effect of arguments on
+his own mind, he leaves the arguments in themselves as they were, and
+touches on them, not for the sake of what they are worth, but to
+explain the movements and events of his own course. Not from any
+studied impartiality, which is foreign to his character, but from his
+strong and keen sense of what is real and his determined efforts to
+bring it out, he avoids the temptation--as it seems to us, who still
+believe that he was more right once than he is now--to do injustice to
+his former self and his former position. At any rate, the arguments to
+be drawn from this narrative, for or against England, or for or against
+Rome, seem to us very evenly balanced. Of course, such a history has
+its moral. But the moral is not the ordinary vulgar one of the history
+of a religious change. It is not the supplement or disguise of a
+polemical argument. It is the deep want and necessity in our age of the
+Church, even to the most intensely religious and devoted minds, of a
+sound and secure intellectual basis for the faith which they value more
+than life and all things. We hope that we are strong enough to afford
+to judge fairly of such a spectacle, and to lay to heart its warnings,
+even though the particular results seem to go against what we think
+most right. It is a mortification and a trial to the English Church to
+have seen her finest mind carried away and lost to her, but it is a
+mortification which more confident and peremptory systems than hers
+have had to undergo; the parting was not without its compensations if
+only that it brought home so keenly to many the awfulness and the
+seriousness of truth; and surely never did any man break so utterly
+with a Church, who left so many sympathies behind him and took so many
+with him, who continued to feel so kindly and with such large-hearted
+justice to those from whom his changed position separated him in this
+world for ever.
+
+The _Apologia_ is the history of a great battle against Liberalism,
+understanding by Liberalism the tendencies of modern thought to destroy
+the basis of revealed religion, and ultimately of all that can be
+called religion at all. The question which he professedly addresses
+himself to set at rest, that of his honesty, is comparatively of slight
+concern to those who knew him, except so far that they must be
+interested that others, who did not know him, should not be led to do a
+revolting injustice. The real interest is to see how one who felt so
+keenly the claims both of what is new and what is old, who, with such
+deep and unusual love and trust for antiquity, took in with quick
+sympathy, and in its most subtle and most redoubtable shapes, the
+intellectual movement of modern times, could continue to feel the force
+of both, and how he would attempt to harmonise them. Two things are
+prominent in the whole history. One is the fact of religion, early and
+deeply implanted in the writer's mind, absorbing and governing it
+without rival throughout. He speaks of an "inward conversion" at the
+age of fifteen, "of which I was conscious, and of which I am still more
+certain than that I have hands and feet." It was the religion of dogma
+and of a definite creed which made him "rest in the thought of two, and
+two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my
+Creator"--which completed itself with the idea of a visible Church and
+its sacramental system. Religion, in this aspect of it, runs unchanged
+from end to end of the scene of change:--
+
+    I have changed in many things; in this I have not. From the age of
+    fifteen dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I
+    know no other religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other
+    sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream
+    and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without the fact
+    of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being. What
+    I held in 1816 I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. Please God I
+    shall hold it to the end. Even when I was under Dr. Whately's
+    influence I had no temptation to be less zealous for the dogmas of
+    the faith.
+
+The other thing is the haunting necessity, in an age of thought and
+innovation, of a philosophy of religion, equally deep, equally
+comprehensive and thorough, with the invading powers which it was
+wanted to counteract; a philosophy, not on paper or in theory, but
+answering to and vouched for by the facts of real life. In the English
+Church he found, we think that we may venture to say, the religion
+which to him was life, but not the philosophy which he wanted. The
+_Apologia_ is the narrative of his search for it. Two strongly marked
+lines of thought are traceable all through, one modern in its scope and
+sphere, the other ancient. The leading subject of his modern thought is
+the contest with liberal unbelief; contrasted with this was his strong
+interest in Christian antiquity, his deep attachment to the creed, the
+history, and the moral temper of the early Church. The one line of
+thought made him, and even now makes him, sympathise with Anglicanism,
+which is in the same boat with him, holds the same principle of the
+unity and continuity of revealed truth, and is doing the same work,
+though, as he came to think in the end, feebly and hopelessly. The
+other, more and more, carried him away from Anglicanism; and the
+contrast and opposition between it and the ancient Church, in
+organisation, in usage, and in that general tone of feeling which
+quickens and gives significance and expression to forms, overpowered
+more and more the sense of affinity, derived from the identity of
+creeds and sacraments and leading points of Church polity, and from the
+success with which the best and greatest Anglican writers had
+appropriated and assimilated the theology of the Fathers. But though he
+urges the force of ecclesiastical precedents in a startling way, as in
+the account which he gives of the effect of the history of the
+Monophysites on his view of the tenableness of the Anglican theory,
+absolutely putting out of consideration the enormous difference of
+circumstances between the cases which are compared, and giving the
+instance in question a force and importance which seem to be in
+singular contrast with the general breadth and largeness of his
+reasoning, it was not the halting of an ecclesiastical theory which
+dissatisfied him with the English Church.
+
+Anglicanism was not daring enough for him. With his ideas of the coming
+dangers and conflicts, he wanted something bold and thoroughgoing,
+wide-reaching in its aims, resolute in its language, claiming and
+venturing much. Anglicanism was not that. It had given up as
+impracticable much that the Church had once attempted. It did not
+pretend to rise so high, to answer such great questions, to lay down
+such precise definitions. Wisely modest, or timidly uncertain--mindful
+of the unalterable limits of our human condition, _we_ say; forgetful,
+_he_ thought, or doubting, or distrustful, of the gifts and promises of
+a supernatural dispensation--it certainly gave no such complete and
+decisive account of the condition and difficulties of religion and the
+world, as had been done once, and as there were some who did still.
+There were problems which it did not profess to solve; there were
+assertions which others boldly risked, and which it shrunk from making;
+there were demands which it ventured not to put forward. Again, it was
+not refined enough for him; it had little taste for the higher forms of
+the saintly ideal; it wanted the austere and high-strung-virtues; it
+was contented, for the most part, with the domestic type of excellence,
+in which goodness merged itself in the interests and business of the
+common world, and, working in them, took no care to disengage itself or
+mark itself off, as something distinct from them and above them. Above
+all, Anglicanism was too limited; it was local, insular, national; its
+theory was made for its special circumstances; and he describes in a
+remarkable passage how, in contrast with this, there rung in his ears
+continually the proud self-assertion of the other side, _Securus
+judicat orbis terrarum_. What he wanted, what it was the aim of his
+life to find, was a great and effective engine against Liberalism; for
+years he tried, with eager but failing hope, to find it in the theology
+and working of the English Church; when he made up his mind that
+Anglicanism was not strong enough for the task, he left it for a system
+which had one strong power; which claimed to be able to shut up
+dangerous thought.
+
+Very sorrowful, indeed, is the history, told so openly, so simply, so
+touchingly, of the once promising advance, of the great breakdown. And
+yet, to those who still cling to what he left, regret is not the only
+feeling. For he has the nobleness and the generosity to say what he
+_did_ find in the English Church, as well as what he did not find. He
+has given her up for good, but he tells and he shows, with no grudging
+frankness, what are the fruits of her discipline. "So I went on for
+years, up to 1841. It was, in a human point of view, the happiest time
+of my life.... I did not suppose that such sunshine would last, though I
+knew not what would be its termination. It was the time of plenty, and
+during its seven years I tried to lay up as much as I could for the
+dearth which was to follow it." He explains and defends what to us seem
+the fatal marks against Rome; but he lets us see with what force, and
+for how long, they kept alive his own resistance to an attraction which
+to him was so overwhelming. And he is at no pains to conceal--it seems
+even to console him to show--what a pang and wrench it cost him to
+break from that home under whose shadow his spiritual growth had
+increased. He has condemned us unreservedly; but there must, at any
+rate, be some wonderful power and charm about that which he loved with
+a love which is not yet extinguished; else how could he write of the
+past as he does? He has shown that he can understand, though he is
+unable to approve, that others should feel that power still.
+
+Dr. Newman has stated, with his accustomed force and philosophical
+refinement, what he considers the true idea of that infallibility,
+which he looks upon as the only power in the world which can make head
+against and balance Liberalism--which "can withstand and baffle the
+fierce energy of passion, and the all-corroding, all-dissolving
+scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries;" which he considers
+"as a provision, adapted by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve
+religion in the world, and to restrain that freedom of thought which is
+one of the greatest of our natural gifts, from its own suicidal
+excesses." He says, as indeed is true, that it is "a tremendous power,"
+though he argues that, in fact, its use is most wisely and beneficially
+limited. And doubtless, whatever the difficulty of its proof may be,
+and to us this proof seems simply beyond possibility, it is no mere
+power upon paper. It acts and leaves its mark; it binds fast and
+overthrows for good. But when, put at its highest, it is confronted
+with the "giant evil" which it is supposed to be sent into the world to
+repel, we can only say that, to a looker-on, its failure seems as
+manifest as the existence of the claim to use it. It no more does its
+work, in the sense of _succeeding_ and triumphing, than the less
+magnificent "Establishments" do. It keeps _some_ check--it fails on a
+large scale and against the real strain and pinch of the mischief; and
+they, too, keep _some_ check, and are not more fairly beaten than it
+is, in "making a stand against the wild living intellect of man."
+
+Without infallibility, it is said, men will turn freethinkers and
+heretics; but don't they, _with_ it? and what is the good of the engine
+if it will not do its work? And if it is said that this is the fault of
+human nature, which resists what provokes and checks it, still that
+very thing, which infallibility was intended to counteract, goes on
+equally, whether it comes into play or not. Meanwhile, truth does stay
+in the world, the truth that there has been among us a Divine Person,
+of whom the Church throughout Christendom is the representative,
+memorial, and the repeater of His message; doubtless, the means of
+knowledge are really guarded; yet we seem to receive that message as we
+receive the witness of moral truth; and it would not be contrary to the
+analogy of things here if we had often got to it at last through
+mistakes. But when it is reached, there it is, strong in its own power;
+and it is difficult to think that if it is not strong enough in itself
+to stand, it can be protected by a claim of infallibility. A future, of
+which infallibility is the only hope and safeguard, seems to us indeed
+a prospect of the deepest gloom.
+
+Dr. Newman, in a very remarkable passage, describes the look and
+attitude of invading Liberalism, and tells us why he is not forward in
+the conflict. "It seemed to be a time of all others in which Christians
+had a call to be patient, in which they had no other way of helping
+those who were alarmed than that of exhorting them to have a little
+faith and fortitude, and 'to beware,' as the poet says, 'of dangerous
+steps.'" And he interprets "recent acts of the highest Catholic
+authority" as meaning that there is nothing to do just now but to sit
+still and trust. Well; but the _Christian Year_ will do that much for
+us, just as well.
+
+People who talk glibly of the fearless pursuit of truth may here see a
+real example of a life given to it--an example all the more solemn and
+impressive if they think that the pursuit was in vain. It is easy to
+declaim about it, and to be eloquent about lies and sophistries; but it
+is shallow to forget that truth has its difficulties. To hear some
+people talk, it might be thought that truth was a thing to be made out
+and expressed at will, under any circumstances, at any time, amid any
+complexities of facts or principles, by half an hour's choosing to be
+attentive, candid, logical, and resolute; as if there was not a chance
+of losing what perhaps you have, as well as of gaining what you think
+you need. If they would look about them, if they would look into
+themselves, they would recognise that Truth is an awful and formidable
+goddess to all men and to all systems; that all have their weak points
+where virtually, more or less consciously, more or less dexterously,
+they shrink from meeting her eye; that even when we make sacrifice of
+everything for her sake, we find that she still encounters us with
+claims, seemingly inconsistent with all that she has forced us to
+embrace--with appearances which not only convict us of mistake, but
+seem to oblige us to be tolerant of what we cannot really assent to.
+
+She gives herself freely to the earnest and true-hearted inquirer; but
+to those who presume on the easiness of her service, she has a side of
+strong irony. You common-sense men, she seems to say, who see no
+difficulties in the world, you little know on what shaky ground you
+stand, and how easily you might be reduced to absurdity. You critical
+and logical intellects, who silence all comers and cannot be answered,
+and can show everybody to be in the wrong--into what monstrous and
+manifest paradoxes are you not betrayed, blind to the humble facts
+which upset your generalisations, not even seeing that dulness itself
+can pronounce you mistaken!
+
+In the presence of such a narrative as this, sober men will think more
+seriously than ever about charging their most extreme opponents with
+dishonesty and disregard to truth.
+
+As we said before, this history seems to us to leave the theological
+question just where it was. The objections to Rome, which Dr. Newman
+felt so strongly once, but which yielded to other considerations, we
+feel as strongly still. The substantial points of the English theory,
+which broke down to his mind, seem to us as substantial and trustworthy
+as before. He failed, but we believe that, in spite of everything,
+England is the better for his having made his trial. Even Liberalism
+owes to the movement of which he was the soul much of what makes it now
+such a contrast, in largeness of mind and warmth, to the dry,
+repulsive, narrow, material Liberalism of the Reform era. He, and he
+mainly, has been the source, often unrecognised and unsuspected, of
+depth and richness and beauty, and the strong passion for what is
+genuine and real, in our religious teaching. Other men, other
+preachers, have taken up his thoughts and decked them out, and had the
+credit of being greater than their master.
+
+In looking back on the various turns and vicissitudes of his English
+course, we, who inherit the fruits of that glorious failure, should
+speak respectfully and considerately where we do not agree with him,
+and with deep gratitude--all the more that now so much lies between
+us--where we do. But the review makes us feel more than ever that the
+English Church, whose sturdy strength he underrated, and whose
+irregular theories provoked him, was fully worthy of the interest and
+the labours of the leader who despaired of her. Anglicanism has so far
+outlived its revolutions, early and late ones, has marched on in a
+distinct path, has developed a theology, has consolidated an
+organisation, has formed a character and tone, has been the organ of a
+living spirit. The "magnetic storms" of thought which sweep over the
+world may be destructive and dangerous to it, as much as, but not more
+than, to other bodies which claim to be Churches and to represent the
+message of God. But there is nothing to make us think that, in the
+trials which may be in store, the English Church will fail while others
+hold their own.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+DR. NEWMAN ON THE "EIRENICON"[31]
+
+
+  [31]
+  _The Times_, 31st March 1866.
+
+Dr. Pusey's Appeal has received more than one answer. These answers,
+from the Roman Catholic side, are--what it was plain that they would
+be--assurances to him that he looks at the question from an entirely
+mistaken point of view; that it is, of course, very right and good of
+him to wish for peace and union, but that there is only one way of
+peace and union--unconditional submission. He may have peace and union
+for himself at any moment, if he will; so may the English Church, or
+the Greek Church, or any other religious body, organised or
+unorganised.
+
+The way is always open; there is no need to write long books or make
+elaborate proposals about union. Union means becoming Catholic;
+becoming Catholic means acknowledging the exclusive claims of the Pope
+or the Roman Church. In the long controversy one party has never for an
+instant wavered in the assertion that it could not, and never would, be
+in the wrong. The way to close the controversy, and the only one, is to
+admit that Dr. Pusey shall have any amount of assurance and proof that
+the Roman position and Roman doctrine and practice are the right ones.
+
+His misapprehensions shall be corrected; his ignorance of what is Roman
+theology fully, and at any length, enlightened. There is no desire to
+shrink from the fullest and most patient argument in its favour, and he
+may call it, if he likes, explanation. But there is only one practical
+issue to what he has proposed--not to stand bargaining for impossible
+conditions, but thankfully and humbly to join himself to the true
+Church while he may. It is only the way in which the answer is given
+that varies. Here characteristic differences appear. The authorities of
+the Roman Catholic Church swell out to increased magnificence, and
+nothing can exceed the suavity and the compassionate scorn with which
+they point out the transparent absurdity and the audacity of such
+proposals. The Holy Office at Rome has not, it may be, yet heard of Dr.
+Pusey; it may regret, perhaps, that it did not wait for so
+distinguished a mark for its censure; but its attention has been drawn
+to some smaller offenders of the same way of thinking, and it has been
+induced to open all the floodgates of its sonorous and antiquated
+verbiage to sweep away and annihilate a poor little London
+periodical--"_ephemeridem cui titulus, 'The Union Review_.'" The
+Archbishop of Westminster, not deigning to name Dr. Pusey, has seized
+the opportunity to reiterate emphatically, in stately periods and with
+a polished sarcasm, his boundless contempt for the foolish people who
+dare to come "with swords wreathed in myrtle" between the Catholic
+Church and "her mission to the great people of England." On the other
+hand, there have been not a few Roman Catholics who have listened with
+interest and sympathy to what Dr. Pusey had to say, and, though
+obviously they had but one answer to give, have given it with a sense
+of the real condition and history of the Christian world, and with the
+respect due to a serious attempt to look evils in the face. But there
+is only one person on the Roman Catholic side whose reflections on the
+subject English readers in general would much care to know. Anybody
+could tell beforehand what Archbishop Manning would say; but people
+could not feel so certain what Dr. Newman might say.
+
+Dr. Newman has given his answer; and his answer is, of course, in
+effect the same as that of the rest of his co-religionists. He offers
+not the faintest encouragement to Dr. Pusey's sanguine hopes. If it is
+possible to conceive that one side could move in the matter, it is
+absolutely certain that the other would be inflexible. Any such dealing
+on equal terms with the heresy and schism of centuries is not to be
+thought of; no one need affect surprise at the refusal. What Dr. Pusey
+asks is, in fact, to pull the foundation out from under the whole
+structure of Roman Catholic pretensions. Dr. Newman does not waste
+words to show that the plan of the _Eirenicon_ is impossible. He
+evidently assumes that it is so, and we agree with him. But there are
+different ways of dispelling a generous dream, and telling a serious
+man who is in earnest that he is mistaken. Dr. Newman does justice, as
+he ought to do, to feelings and views which none can enter into better
+than he, whatever he may think of them now. He does justice to the
+understanding and honesty, as well as the high aims, of an old friend,
+once his comrade in difficult and trying times, though now long parted
+from him by profound differences, and to the motives which prompted so
+venturous an attempt as the _Eirenicon_ to provoke public discussion on
+the reunion of Christendom. He is capable of measuring the real state
+of the facts, and the mischiefs and evils for which a remedy is wanted,
+by a more living rule than the suppositions and consequences of a
+cut-and-dried theory. Rightly or wrongly he argues--at least, he gives
+us something to think of. Perhaps not the least of his merit is that he
+writes simply and easily in choice and varied English, instead of
+pompously ringing the changes on a set of _formulae_ which beg the
+question, and dinning into our ears the most extravagant assertions of
+foreign ecclesiastical arrogance. We may not always think him fair, or
+a sound reasoner, but he is conciliatory, temperate, and often
+fearlessly candid. He addresses readers who will challenge and examine
+what he says, not those whose minds are cowed and beaten down before
+audacity in proportion to its coolness, and whom paradox, the more
+extreme the better, fascinates and drags captive. To his old friend he
+is courteous, respectful, sympathetic; where the occasion makes it
+fitting, affectionate, even playful, as men are who can afford to let
+their real feelings come out, and have not to keep up appearances.
+Unflinching he is in maintaining his present position as the upholder
+of the exclusive claims of the Roman Church to represent the Catholic
+Church of the Creeds; but he has the good sense and good feeling to
+remember that he once shared the views of those whom he now
+controverts, and that their present feelings about the divisions of
+Christendom were once his own. Such language as the following is plain,
+intelligible, and manly. Of course, he has his own position, and must
+see things according to it. But he recognises the right of conscience
+in those who, having gone a long way with him, find that they can go no
+further, and he pays a compliment, becoming as from himself, and not
+without foundation in fact, to the singular influence which, from
+whatever cause, Dr. Pusey's position gives him, and which, we may add,
+imposes on him, in more ways than one, very grave responsibilities:--
+
+    You, more than any one else alive, have been the present and
+    untiring agent by whom a great work has been effected in it; and,
+    far more than is usual, you have received in your lifetime, as
+    well as merited, the confidence of your brethren. You cannot speak
+    merely for yourself; your antecedents, your existing influence,
+    are a pledge to us that what you may determine will be the
+    determination of a multitude. Numbers, too, for whom you cannot
+    properly be said to speak, will be moved by your authority or your
+    arguments; and numbers, again, who are of a school more recent
+    than your own, and who are only not your followers because they
+    have outstripped you in their free speeches and demonstrative acts
+    in our behalf, will, for the occasion, accept you as their
+    spokesman. There is no one anywhere--among ourselves, in your own
+    body, or, I suppose, in the Greek Church--who can affect so vast a
+    circle of men, so virtuous, so able, so learned, so zealous, as
+    come, more or less, under your influence; and I cannot pay them
+    all a greater compliment than to tell them they ought all to be
+    Catholics, nor do them a more affectionate service than to pray
+    that they may one day become such....
+
+    I recollect well what an outcast I seemed to myself when I took
+    down from the shelves of my library the volumes of St. Athanasius
+    or St. Basil, and set myself to study them; and how, on the
+    contrary, when at length I was brought into Catholicism, I kissed
+    them with delight, with a feeling that in them I had more than all
+    that I had lost, and, as though I were directly addressing the
+    glorious saints who bequeathed them to the Church, I said to the
+    inanimate pages, "You are now mine, and I am now yours, beyond any
+    mistake." Such, I conceive, would be the joy of the persons I
+    speak of if they could wake up one morning and find themselves
+    possessed by right of Catholic traditions and hopes, without
+    violence to their own sense of duty; and certainly I am the last
+    man to say that such violence is in any case lawful, that the
+    claims of conscience are not paramount, or that any one may
+    overleap what he deliberately holds to be God's command, in order
+    to make his path easier for him or his heart lighter.
+
+    I am the last man to quarrel with this jealous deference to the
+    voice of our conscience, whatever judgment others may form of us
+    in consequence, for this reason, because their case, as it at
+    present stands, has as you know been my own. You recollect well
+    what hard things were said against us twenty-five years ago which
+    we knew in our hearts we did not deserve. Hence, I am now in the
+    position of the fugitive Queen in the well-known passage, who,
+    "_haud ignara mali_" herself, had learned to sympathise with those
+    who were inheritors of her past wanderings.
+
+Dr. Newman's hopes, and what most of his countrymen consider the hopes
+of truth and religion, are not the same. His wish is, of course, that
+his friend should follow him; a wish in which there is not the
+slightest reason to think that he will be gratified. But differently as
+we must feel as to the result, we cannot help sharing the evident
+amusement with which Dr. Newman recalls a few of the compliments which
+were lavished on him by some of his present co-religionists when he was
+trying to do them justice, and was even on the way to join them. He
+reprints with sly and mischievous exactness a string of those glib
+phrases of controversial dislike and suspicion which are common to all
+parties, and which were applied to him by "priests, good men, whose
+zeal outstripped their knowledge, and who in consequence spoke
+confidently, when they would have been wiser had they suspended their
+adverse judgment of those whom they were soon to welcome as brothers in
+communion." It is a trifle, but it strikes us as characteristic. Dr.
+Newman is one of the very few who have carried into his present
+communion, to a certain degree at least, an English habit of not
+letting off the blunders and follies of his own side, and of daring to
+think that a cause is better served by outspoken independence of
+judgment than by fulsome, unmitigated puffing. It might be well if even
+in him there were a little more of this habit. But, so far as it goes,
+it is the difference between him and most of those who are leaders on
+his side. Indirectly he warns eager controversialists that they are not
+always the wisest and the most judicious and far-seeing of men; and we
+cannot quarrel with him, however little we may like the occasion, for
+the entertainment which he feels in inflicting on his present brethren
+what they once judged and said of him, and in reminding them that their
+proficiency in polemical rhetoric did not save them from betraying the
+shallowness of their estimate and the shortness of their foresight.
+
+When he comes to discuss the _Eirenicon_, Dr. Newman begins with a
+complaint which seems to us altogether unreasonable. He seems to think
+it hard that Dr. Pusey should talk of peace and reunion, and yet speak
+so strongly of what he considers the great corruptions of the Roman
+Church. In ordinary controversy, says Dr. Newman, we know what we are
+about and what to expect; "'_Caedimur, et totidem plagis consumimus
+hostem_.' We give you a sharp cut and you return it.... But we at least
+have not professed to be composing an _Eirenicon_, when we treated you
+as foes." Like Archbishop Manning, Dr. Newman is reminded "of the sword
+wreathed in myrtle;" but Dr. Pusey, he says, has improved on the
+ancient device,--"Excuse me, you discharge your olive-branch as if from
+a catapult."
+
+This is, no doubt, exactly what Dr. Pusey has done. Going much further
+than the great majority of his countrymen will go with him in
+admissions in favour of the Roman Catholic Church, he has pointed out
+with a distinctness and force, never, perhaps, exceeded, what is the
+impassable barrier which, as long as it lasts, makes every hope of
+union idle. The practical argument against Rome is stated by him in a
+shape which comes home to the consciences of all, whatever their
+theological training and leanings, who have been brought up in English
+ways and ideas of religion. But why should he not? He is desirous of
+union--the reunion of the whole of Christendom. He gives full credit to
+the Roman communion--much more credit than most of his brethren think
+him justified in giving--for what is either defensible or excellent in
+it. Dr. Newman must be perfectly aware that Dr. Pusey has gone to the
+very outside of what our public feeling in England will bear in favour
+of efforts for reconciliation, and he nowhere shows any sign that he is
+thinking of unconditional submission. How, then, can he be expected to
+mince matters and speak smoothly when he comes to what he regards as
+the real knot of the difficulty, the real and fatal bar to all
+possibility of a mutual understanding? If his charges are untrue or
+exaggerated in detail or colouring, that is another matter; but the
+whole of his pleading for peace presupposes that there are great and
+serious obstacles to it in what is practically taught and authorised in
+the Roman Church; and it is rather hard to blame him for "not making
+the best of things," and raising difficulties in the way of the very
+object which he seeks, because he states the truth about these
+obstacles. We are afraid that we must be of Dr. Newman's opinion that
+the _Eirenicon_ is not calculated to lead, in our time at least, to
+what it aims at--the reunion of Christendom; but this arises from the
+real obstacles themselves, not from Dr. Pusey's way of stating them.
+There may be no way to peace, but surely if there is, though it implies
+giving full weight to your sympathies, and to the points on which you
+may give way, it also involves the possibility of speaking out plainly,
+and also of being listened to, on the points on which you really
+disagree. Does Dr. Newman think that all Dr. Pusey felt he had to do
+was to conciliate Roman Catholics? Does it follow, because objections
+are intemperately and unfairly urged on the Protestant side, that
+therefore they are not felt quite as much in earnest by sober and
+tolerant people, and that they may not be stated in their real force
+without giving occasion for the remark that this is reviving the old
+cruel war against Rome, and rekindling a fierce style of polemics which
+is now out of date? And how is Dr. Pusey to state these objections if,
+when he goes into them, not in a vague declamatory way, but showing his
+respect and seriousness by his guarded and full and definite manner of
+proof, he is to be met by the charge that he does not show sufficient
+consideration? All this may be a reason for thinking it vain to write
+an Eirenicon at all. But if one is to be attempted, it certainly will
+not do to make it a book of compliments. Its first condition is that if
+it makes light of lesser difficulties it should speak plainly about
+greater ones.
+
+But this is, after all, a matter of feeling. No doubt, as Dr. Newman
+says, people are not pleased or conciliated by elaborate proofs that
+they are guilty of something very wrong or foolish. What is of more
+interest is to know the effect on a man like Dr. Newman of such a
+display of the prevailing tendency of religious thought and devotion in
+his communion as Dr. Pusey has given from Roman Catholic writers. And
+it is plain that, whoever else is satisfied with them, these tendencies
+are not entirely satisfactory to Dr. Newman. That rage for foreign
+ideas and foreign usages which has come over a section of his friends,
+the loudest and perhaps the ablest section of them, has no charms for
+him. He asserts resolutely and rather sternly his right to have an
+opinion of his own, and declines to commit himself, or to allow that
+his cause is committed, to a school of teaching which happens for the
+moment to have the talk to itself; and he endeavours at great length to
+present a view of the teaching of his Church which shall be free, if
+not from all Dr. Pusey's objections, yet from a certain number of them,
+which to Dr. Newman himself appear grave. After disclaiming or
+correcting certain alleged admissions of his own, on which Dr. Pusey
+had placed a construction too favourable to the Anglican Church, Dr.
+Newman comes to a passage which seems to rouse him. A convert, says Dr.
+Pusey, must take things as he finds them in his new communion, and it
+would be unbecoming in him to criticise. This statement gives Dr.
+Newman the opportunity of saying that, except with large qualifications,
+he does not accept it for himself. Of course, he says, there are
+considerations of modesty, of becomingness, of regard to the feelings
+of others with equal or greater claims than himself, which bind a
+convert as they bind any one who has just gained admission into a
+society of his fellow men. He has no business "to pick and choose," and
+to set himself up as a judge of everything in his new position. But
+though every man of sense who thought he had reason for so great a
+change would be generous and loyal in accepting his new religion as a
+whole, in time he comes "to have a right to speak as well as to hear;"
+and for this right, both generally and in his own case, he stands up
+very resolutely:--
+
+    Also, in course of time a new generation rises round him, and
+    there is no reason why he should not know as much, and decide
+    questions with as true an instinct, as those who perhaps number
+    fewer years than he does Easter communions. He has mastered the
+    fact and the nature of the differences of theologian from
+    theologian, school from school, nation from nation, era from era.
+    He knows that there is much of what may be called fashion in
+    opinions and practices, according to the circumstances of time and
+    place, according to current politics, the character of the Pope of
+    the day, or the chief Prelates of a particular country; and that
+    fashions change. His experience tells him that sometimes what is
+    denounced in one place as a great offence, or preached up as a
+    first principle, has in another nation been immemorially regarded
+    in just a contrary sense, or has made no sensation at all, one way
+    or the other, when brought before public opinion; and that loud
+    talkers, in the Church as elsewhere, are apt to carry all before
+    them, while quiet and conscientious persons commonly have to give
+    way. He perceives that, in matters which happen to be in debate,
+    ecclesiastical authority watches the state of opinion and the
+    direction and course of controversy, and decides accordingly; so
+    that in certain cases to keep back his own judgment on a point is
+    to be disloyal to his superiors.
+
+    So far generally; now in particular as to myself. After twenty
+    years of Catholic life, I feel no delicacy in giving my opinion on
+    any point when there is a call for me,--and the only reason why I
+    have not done so sooner or more often than I have, is that there
+    has been no call. I have now reluctantly come to the conclusion
+    that your Volume _is_ a call. Certainly, in many instances in
+    which theologian differs from theologian, and country from
+    country, I have a definite judgment of my own; I can say so
+    without offence to any one, for the very reason that from the
+    nature of the case it is impossible to agree with all of them. I
+    prefer English habits of belief and devotion to foreign, from the
+    same causes, and by the same right, which justifies foreigners in
+    preferring their own. In following those of my people, I show less
+    singularity, and create less disturbance than if I made a flourish
+    with what is novel and exotic. And in this line of conduct I am
+    but availing myself of the teaching which I fell in with on
+    becoming a Catholic; and it is a pleasure to me to think that what
+    I hold now, and would transmit after me if I could, is only what I
+    received then.
+
+He observes that when he first joined the Roman Catholic Church the
+utmost delicacy was observed in giving him advice; and the only warning
+which he can recollect was from the Vicar-General of the London
+district, who cautioned him against books of devotion of the Italian
+school, which were then just coming into England, and recommended him
+to get, as safe guides, the works of Bishop Hay. Bishop Hay's name is
+thus, probably for the first time, introduced to the general English
+public. It is difficult to forbear a smile at the great Oxford teacher,
+the master of religious thought and feeling to thousands, being gravely
+set to learn his lesson of a more perfect devotion, how to meditate and
+how to pray, from "the works of Bishop Hay"; it is hardly more easy to
+forbear a smile at his recording it. But Bishop Hay was a sort of
+symbol, and represents, he says, English as opposed to foreign habits
+of thought; and to these English habits he not only gives his
+preference, but he maintains that they are more truly those of the
+whole Roman Catholic body in England than the more showy and extreme
+doctrines of a newer school. Dr. Pusey does wrong, he says, in taking
+this new school as the true exponent of Roman Catholic ideas. That it
+is popular he admits, but its popularity is to be accounted for by
+personal qualifications in its leaders for gaining the ear of the
+world, without supposing that they speak for their body.
+
+    Though I am a convert, then, I think I have a right to speak out;
+    and that the more because other converts have spoken for a long
+    time, while I have not spoken; and with still more reason may I
+    speak without offence in the case of your present criticisms of
+    us, considering that in the charges you bring the only two English
+    writers you quote in evidence are both of them converts, younger
+    in age than myself. I put aside the Archbishop of course, because
+    of his office. These two authors are worthy of all consideration,
+    at once from their character and from their ability. In their
+    respective lines they are perhaps without equals at this
+    particular time; and they deserve the influence they possess. One
+    is still in the vigour of his powers; the other has departed amid
+    the tears of hundreds. It is pleasant to praise them for their
+    real qualifications; but why do you rest on them as authorities?
+    Because the one was "a popular writer"; but is there not
+    sufficient reason for this in the fact of his remarkable gifts, of
+    his poetical fancy, his engaging frankness, his playful wit, his
+    affectionateness, his sensitive piety, without supposing that the
+    wide diffusion of his works arises out of his particular
+    sentiments about the Blessed Virgin? And as to our other friend,
+    do not his energy, acuteness, and theological reading, displayed
+    on the vantage ground of the historic _Dublin Review_, fully
+    account for the sensation he has produced, without supposing that
+    any great number of our body go his lengths in their view of the
+    Pope's infallibility? Our silence as regards their writings is
+    very intelligible; it is not agreeable to protest, in the sight of
+    the world, against the writings of men in our own communion whom
+    we love and respect. But the plain fact is this--they came to the
+    Church, and have thereby saved their souls; but they are in no
+    sense spokesmen for English Catholics, and they must not stand in
+    the place of those who have a real title to such an office.
+
+And he appeals from them, as authorities, to a list of much more sober
+and modest writers, though, it may be, the names of all of them are not
+familiar to the public. He enumerates as the "chief authors of the
+passing generation," "Cardinal Wiseman, Dr. Ullathorne, Dr. Lingard,
+Mr. Tierney, Dr. Oliver, Dr. Rock, Dr. Waterworth, Dr. Husenbeth, Mr.
+Flanagan." If these well-practised and circumspect veterans in the
+ancient controversy are not original and brilliant, at least they are
+safe; and Dr. Newman will not allow the flighty intellectualism which
+takes more hold of modern readers to usurp their place, and for himself
+he sturdily and bluffly declines to give up his old standing-ground for
+any one:--
+
+    I cannot, then, without remonstrance, allow you to identify the
+    doctrine of our Oxford friends in question, on the two subjects I
+    have mentioned, with the present spirit or the prospective creed
+    of Catholics; or to assume, as you do, that because they are
+    thoroughgoing and relentless in their statements, therefore they
+    are the harbingers of a new age, when to show a deference for
+    Antiquity will be thought little else than a mistake. For myself,
+    hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my
+    stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of
+    their time is not yet an old almanac to me. Of course I maintain
+    the value and authority of the "Schola," as one of the _loci
+    theologici_; still I sympathise with Petavius in preferring to its
+    "contentious and subtle theology" that "more elegant and fruitful
+    teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite antiquity."
+    The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down
+    the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder
+    quite as serviceable for that purpose now as it was twenty years
+    ago. Though I hold, as you remark, a process of development in
+    Apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not
+    supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them.
+
+Is he right in saying that he is not responsible as a Roman Catholic
+for the extravagances that Dr. Pusey dwells upon? He is, it seems to
+us, and he is not. No doubt the Roman Catholic system is in practice a
+wide one, and he has a right, which we are glad to see that he is
+disposed to exercise, to maintain the claims of moderation and
+soberness, and to decline to submit his judgment to the fashionable
+theories of the hour. A stand made for independence and good sense
+against the pressure of an exacting and overbearing dogmatism is a good
+thing for everybody, though made in a camp with which we have nothing
+to do. He goes far enough, indeed, as it is. Still, it is something
+that a great writer, of whose genius and religious feeling Englishmen
+will one day be even prouder than they are now, should disconnect
+himself from the extreme follies of his party, and attempt to represent
+what is the nobler and more elevated side of the system to which he has
+attached himself. But it seems to us much more difficult for him to
+release his cause from complicity with the doctrines which he dislikes
+and fears. We have no doubt that he is not alone, and that there are
+numbers of his English brethren who are provoked and ashamed at the
+self-complacent arrogance and childish folly shown in exaggerating and
+caricaturing doctrines which are, in the eyes of most Englishmen,
+extravagant enough in themselves. But the question is whether he or the
+innovators represent the true character and tendencies of their
+religious system. It must be remembered that with a jealous and touchy
+Government, like that of the Roman Church, which professes the duty and
+boasts of the power to put down all dangerous ideas and language, mere
+tolerance means much. Dr. Newman speaks as an Englishman when he writes
+thus:--
+
+    This is specially the case with great ideas. You may stifle them;
+    or you may refuse them elbow-room; or you may torment them with
+    your continual meddling; or you may let them have free course and
+    range, and be content, instead of anticipating their excesses, to
+    expose and restrain those excesses after they have occurred. But
+    you have only this alternative; and for myself, I prefer much,
+    wherever it is possible, to be first generous and then just; to
+    grant full liberty of thought, and to call it to account when
+    abused.
+
+But that has never been the principle of his Church. At least, the
+liberty which it has allowed has been a most one-sided liberty. It has
+been the liberty to go any length in developing the favourite opinions
+about the power of the Pope, or some popular form of devotion; but as
+to other ideas, not so congenial, "great" ones and little ones too, the
+lists of the Roman Index bear witness to the sensitive vigilance which
+took alarm even at remote danger. And those whose pride it is that they
+are ever ready and able to stop all going astray must be held
+responsible for the going astray which they do not stop, especially
+when it coincides with what they wish and like.
+
+But these extreme writers do not dream of tolerance. They stoutly and
+boldly maintain that they but interpret in the only natural and
+consistent manner the mind of their Church; and no public or official
+contradiction meets them. There may be a disapproving opinion in their
+own body, but it does not show itself. The disclaimer of even such a
+man as Dr. Newman is in the highest degree guarded and qualified. They
+are the people who can excite attention and gain a hearing, though it
+be an adverse one. They have the power to make themselves the most
+prominent and accredited representatives of their creed, and, if
+thoroughgoing boldness and ability are apt to attract the growth of
+thought and conviction, they are those who are likely to mould its
+future form. Sober prudent people may prefer the caution of Dr.
+Newman's "chief authors," but to the world outside most of these will
+be little more than names, and the advanced party, which talks most
+strongly about the Pope's infallibility and devotion to St. Mary, has
+this to say for itself. Popular feeling everywhere in the Roman
+communion appears to go with it, and authority both in Rome and in
+England shelters and sanctions it. Nothing can be more clearly and
+forcibly stated than the following assertions of the unimpeachable
+claim of "dominant opinions" in the Roman Catholic system by the
+highest Roman Catholic authority in England. "It is an ill-advised
+overture of peace," writes Archbishop Manning,
+
+    to assail the popular, prevalent, and dominant opinions,
+    devotions, and doctrines of the Catholic Church with hostile
+    criticism.... The presence and assistance of the Holy Ghost, which
+    secures the Church within the sphere of faith and morals, invests
+    it also with instincts and a discernment which preside over its
+    worship and doctrines, its practices and customs. We may be sure
+    that whatever is prevalent in the Church, under the eye of its
+    public authority, practised by the people, and not censured by its
+    pastors, is at least conformable to faith and innocent as to
+    morals. Whosoever rises up to condemn such practices and opinions
+    thereby convicts himself of the private spirit which is the root
+    of heresy. But if it be ill-advised to assail the mind of the
+    Church, it is still more so to oppose its visible Head. There can
+    be no doubt that the Sovereign Pontiff has declared the same
+    opinion as to the temporal power as that which is censured in
+    others, and that he defined the Immaculate Conception, and that he
+    believes in his own infallibility. If these things be our
+    reproach, we share it with the Vicar of Jesus Christ. They are not
+    our private opinions, nor the tenets of a school, but the mind of
+    the Pontiff, as they were of his predecessors, as they will be of
+    those who come after him.--Archbishop Manning's _Pastoral_, pp.
+    64-66, 1866.
+
+To maintain his liberty against extreme opinions generally is one of
+Dr. Newman's objects in writing his letter; the other is to state
+distinctly what he holds and what he does not hold, as regards the
+subject on which Dr. Pusey's appeal has naturally made so deep an
+impression:--
+
+    I do so, because you say, as I myself have said in former years,
+    that "That vast system as to the Blessed Virgin ... to all of us
+    has been the special _crux_ of the Roman system" (p. 101). Here, I
+    say, as on other points, the Fathers are enough for me. I do not
+    wish to say more than they, and will not say less. You, I know,
+    will profess the same; and thus we can join issue on a clear and
+    broad principle, and may hope to come to some intelligible result.
+    We are to have a treatise on the subject of Our Lady soon from the
+    pen of the Most Rev. Prelate; but that cannot interfere with such
+    a mere argument from the Fathers as that to which I shall confine
+    myself here. Nor, indeed, as regards that argument itself, do I
+    profess to be offering you any new matter, any facts which have
+    not been used by others,--by great divines, as Petavius, by living
+    writers, nay, by myself on other occasions. I write afresh,
+    nevertheless, and that for three reasons--first, because I wish to
+    contribute to the accurate statement and the full exposition of
+    the argument in question; next, because I may gain a more patient
+    hearing than has sometimes been granted to better men than myself;
+    lastly, because there just now seems a call on me, under my
+    circumstances, to avow plainly what I do and what I do not hold
+    about the Blessed Virgin, that others may know, did they come to
+    stand where I stand, what they would and what they would not be
+    bound to hold concerning her.
+
+If this "vast system" is a _crux_ to any one, we cannot think that even
+Dr. Newman's explanation will make it easier. He himself recoils, as
+any Englishman of sense and common feeling must, at the wild
+extravagances into which this devotion has run. But he accepts and
+defends, on the most precarious grounds, the whole system of thought
+out of which they have sprung by no very violent process of growth. He
+cannot, of course, stop short of accepting the definition of the
+Immaculate Conception as an article of faith, and, though he
+emphatically condemns, with a warmth and energy of which no one can
+doubt the sincerity, a number of revolting consequences drawn from the
+theology of which that dogma is the expression, he is obliged to defend
+everything up to that. For a professed disciple of the Fathers this is
+not easy. If anything is certain, it is that the place which the
+Blessed Virgin occupies in the Roman Catholic system--popular or
+authoritative, if it is possible fairly to urge such a distinction in a
+system which boasts of all-embracing authority--is something perfectly
+different from anything known in the first four centuries. In all the
+voluminous writings on theology which remain from them we may look in
+vain for any traces of that feeling which finds words in the common
+hymn, "_Ave, marls Stella_" and which makes her fill so large a space
+in the teaching and devotion of the Roman Church. Dr. Newman attempts
+to meet this difficulty by a distinction. The doctrine, he says, was
+there, the same then as now; it is only the feelings, behaviour, and
+usages, the practical consequences naturally springing from the
+doctrine, which have varied or grown:--
+
+    I fully grant that the _devotion_ towards the Blessed Virgin has
+    increased among Catholics with the progress of centuries. I do not
+    allow that the _doctrine_ concerning her has undergone a growth,
+    for I believe it has been in substance one and the same from the
+    beginning.
+
+There is, doubtless, such a distinction, though whether available for
+Dr. Newman's purpose is another matter. But when we recollect that
+modern "doctrine," besides defining the Immaculate Conception, places
+her next in glory to the Throne of God, and makes her the Queen of
+Heaven, and the all-prevailing intercessor with her Son, the assertion
+as to "doctrine" is a bold one. It rests, as it seems to us, simply on
+Dr. Newman identifying his own inferences from the language of the
+ancient writers whom he quotes with the language itself. They say a
+certain thing--that Mary is the "second Eve." Dr. Newman, with all the
+theology and all the controversies of eighteen centuries in his mind,
+deduces from this statement a number of refined consequences as to her
+sinlessness, and greatness, and reward, which seem to him to flow from
+it, and says that it means all these consequences. Mr. Ruskin somewhere
+quotes the language of an "eminent Academician," who remarks, in answer
+to some criticism on a picture, "that if you look for curves, you will
+see curves; and if you look for angles, you will see angles." So it is
+here. The very dogma of the Immaculate Conception itself Dr. Newman
+sees indissolubly involved in the "rudimentary teaching" which insists
+on the parallelism between Eve and Mary:--
+
+    Was not Mary as fully endowed as Eve?... If Eve was (as Bishop
+    Bull and others maintain) raised above human nature by that
+    indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that
+    Mary had a greater grace?... And if Eve had this supernatural
+    inward gift given her from the moment of her personal existence,
+    is it possible to deny that Mary, too, had this gift from the very
+    first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to
+    resist this inference:--well, this is simply and literally the
+    doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I say the doctrine of the
+    Immaculate Conception is in its substance this, and nothing more
+    or less than this (putting aside the question of degrees of
+    grace), and it really does seem to me bound up in that doctrine of
+    the Fathers, that Mary is the second Eve.
+
+It seems obvious to remark that the Fathers are not even alleged to
+have themselves drawn this irresistible inference; and next, that even
+if it be drawn, there is a long interval between it and the elevation
+of the Mother of Jesus Christ to the place to which modern Roman
+doctrine raises her. Possibly, the Fathers might have said, as many
+people will say now, that, in a matter of this kind, it is idle to draw
+inferences when we are, in reality, utterly without the knowledge to
+make them worth anything. At any rate, if they had drawn them, we
+should have found some traces of it in their writings, and we find
+none. We find abundance of poetical addresses and rhetorical
+amplification, which makes it all the more remarkable that the plain
+dogmatic view of her position, which is accepted by the Roman Church,
+does not appear in them. We only find a "rudimentary doctrine," which,
+naturally enough, gives the Blessed Virgin a very high and sacred place
+in the economy of the Incarnation. But how does the doctrine, as it is
+found in even their rhetorical passages, go a step beyond what would be
+accepted by any sober reader of the New Testament? They speak of what
+she was; they do not presume to say what she is. What Protestant could
+have the slightest difficulty in saying not only what Justin says, and
+Tertullian copies from him, and Irenaeus enlarges upon, but what Dr.
+Newman himself says of her awful and solitary dignity, always excepting
+the groundless assumption which, from her office in this world takes
+for granted, first her sinlessness, and then a still higher office in
+the next? We do not think that, as a matter of literary criticism, Dr.
+Newman is fair in his argument from the Fathers. He lays great stress
+on Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Irenaeus, as three independent
+witnesses from different parts of the world; whereas it is obvious that
+Tertullian at any rate copies almost literally from Justin Martyr, and
+it is impossible to compare a mere incidental point of rhetorical, or,
+if it be so, argumentative illustration, occurring once or twice in a
+long treatise, with a doctrine, such as that of the Incarnation itself,
+on which the whole treatise is built, and of which it is full. The
+wonder is, indeed, that the Fathers, considering how much they wrote,
+said so little of her; scarcely less is it a wonder, then, that the New
+Testament says so little, but from this little the only reason which
+would prevent a Protestant reader of the New Testament from accepting
+the highest statement of her historical dignity is the reaction from
+the development of them into the consequences which have been notorious
+for centuries in the unreformed Churches. Protestants, left to
+themselves, are certainly not prone to undervalue the saints of
+Scripture; it has been the presence of the great system of popular
+worship confronting them which has tied their tongues in this matter.
+Yet Anglican theologians like Mr. Keble, popular poets like Wordsworth,
+broad Churchmen like Mr. Robertson, have said things which even Roman
+Catholics might quote as expressions of their feeling. But Dr. Newman
+must know that many things may be put, and put most truly, into the
+form of poetical expression which will not bear hardening into a dogma.
+A Protestant may accept and even amplify the ideas suggested by
+Scripture about the Blessed Virgin; but he may feel that he cannot tell
+how the Redeemer was preserved from sinful taint; what was the grace
+bestowed on His mother; or what was the reward and prerogative which
+ensued to her. But it is just these questions which the Roman doctrine
+undertakes to answer without a shadow of doubt, and which Dr. Newman
+implies that the theology of the Fathers answered as unambiguously.
+
+But from what has happened in the history of religion, we do not think
+that Protestants in general who do not shrink from high language about
+Abraham, Moses, or David, would find anything unnatural or
+objectionable in the language of the early Christian writers about the
+Mother of our Lord, though possibly it might not be their own; but the
+interval from this language to that certain knowledge of her present
+office in the economy of grace which is implied in what Dr. Newman
+considers the "doctrine" about her is a very long one. The step to the
+modern "devotion" in its most chastened form is longer still. We cannot
+follow the subtle train of argument which says that because the
+"doctrine" of the second century called her the "second Eve," therefore
+the devotion which sets her upon the altars of Christendom in the
+nineteenth is a right development of the doctrine. What is wanted is
+not the internal thread of the process, but the proof and confirmation
+from without that it was the right process; and this link is just what
+is wanting, except on a supposition which begs the question. It is
+conceivable that this step from "doctrine" to "devotion" may have been
+a mistake. It is conceivable that the "doctrine" may have been held in
+the highest form without leading to the devotion; for Dr. Newman, of
+course, thinks that Athanasius and Augustine held "the doctrine," yet,
+as he says, "we have no proof that Athanasius himself had any special
+devotion to the Blessed Virgin," and in another place he repeats his
+doubts whether St. Chrysostom or St. Athanasius invoked her; "nay," he
+adds, "I should like to know whether St. Augustine, in all his
+voluminous writings, invokes her once." What has to be shown is, that
+this step was not a mistake; that it was inevitable and legitimate.
+
+"This being the faith of the Fathers about the Blessed Virgin," says
+Dr. Newman, "we need not wonder that it should in no long time be
+transmuted into devotion." The Fathers expressed a historical fact
+about her in the term [Greek: Theotokos]; therefore, argues the later
+view, she is the source of our present grace now. It is the _rationale_
+of this inference, which is not an immediate or obvious one, which is
+wanted. And Dr. Newman gives it us in the words of Bishop Butler:--
+
+    Christianity is eminently an objective religion. For the most part
+    it tells us of persons and facts in simple words, and leaves the
+    announcement to produce its effect on such hearts as are prepared
+    to receive it. This, at least, is its general character; and
+    Butler recognises it as such in his _Analogy_, when speaking of
+    the Second and Third Persons of the Holy Trinity:--"The internal
+    worship," he says, "to the Son and Holy Ghost is no farther matter
+    of pure revealed command than as the relations they stand in to us
+    are matters of pure revelation; but the relations being known, the
+    obligations to such internal worship are _obligations of reason
+    arising out of those relations themselves_."
+
+We acknowledge the pertinency of the quotation. So true is it that "the
+relations being known," the obligations of worship arise of themselves
+from these relations, that if the present relation of the Blessed
+Virgin to mankind has always been considered to be what modern Roman
+theology considers it, it is simply inconceivable that devotion to her
+should not have been universal long before St. Athanasius and St.
+Augustine; and equally inconceivable, to take Dr. Newman's remarkable
+illustration, that if the real position of St. Joseph is next to her,
+it should have been reserved for the nineteenth century, if not,
+indeed, to find it out, at least to acknowledge it; but the whole
+question is about the fact of the "relations" themselves. If we believe
+that the Second and Third Persons are God, we do not want to be told to
+worship them. But such a relation as Dr. Newman supposes in the case of
+the Blessed Virgin does not flow of itself from the idea contained, for
+instance, in the word [Greek: Theotokos], and even if it did, we should
+still want to be told, in the case of a creature, and remembering the
+known jealousy of religion of even the semblance of creature worship,
+what _are_ the "religious regards," which, not flowing from the nature
+of the case, but needing to be distinctly authorised, are right and
+binding.
+
+The question is of a dogmatic and a popular system. We most fully admit
+that, with Dr. Newman or any other of the numberless well-trained and
+excellent men in the Roman Church, the homage to the Mother does not
+interfere with the absolutely different honour rendered to the Son. We
+readily acknowledge the elevating and refining beauty of that
+character, of which the Virgin Mother is the type, and the services
+which that ideal has rendered to mankind, though we must emphatically
+say that a man need not be a Roman Catholic to feel and to express the
+charm of that moral beauty. But here we have a doctrine as definite and
+precise as any doctrine can be, and a great system of popular devotion,
+giving a character to a great religious communion. Dr. Newman is not
+merely developing and illustrating an idea: he is asserting a definite
+revealed fact about the unseen world, and defending its consequences in
+a very concrete and practical shape. And the real point is what proof
+has he given us that this is a revealed fact; that it is so, and that
+we have the means of knowing it? He has given us certain language of
+the early writers, which he says is a tradition, though it is only what
+any Protestant might have been led to by reading his Bible. But between
+that language, taken at its highest, and the belief and practice which
+his Church maintains, there is a great gap. The "Second Eve," the
+[Greek: Theotokos], are names of high dignity; but enlarge upon them as
+we may, there is between them and the modern "Regina Coeli" an interval
+which nothing but direct divine revelation can possibly fill; and of
+this divine revelation the only evidence is the fact that there is the
+doctrine. So awful and central an article of belief needs corresponding
+proof. In Dr. Newman's eloquent pages we have much collateral thought
+on the subject--sometimes instinct with his delicacy of perception and
+depth of feeling, sometimes strangely over-refined and irrelevant, but
+always fresh and instructive, whether to teach or to warn. The one
+thing which is missing in them is direct proof.
+
+He does not satisfy us, but he does greatly interest us in his way of
+dealing with the practical consequences of his doctrine, in the
+manifold development of devotion in his communion. What he tells us
+reveals two things. By this devotion he is at once greatly attracted,
+and he is deeply shocked. No one can doubt the enthusiasm with which he
+has thrown himself into that devotion, an enthusiasm which, if it was
+at one time more vehement and defiant than it is now, is still a most
+intense element in his religious convictions. Nor do we feel entitled
+to say that in him it interferes with religious ideas and feelings of a
+higher order, which we are accustomed to suppose imperilled by it. It
+leads him, indeed, to say things which astonish us, not so much by
+their extreme language as by the absence, as it seems to us, of any
+ground to say them at all. It forces him into a championship for
+statements, in defending which the utmost that can be done is to frame
+ingenious pleas, or to send back a vigorous retort. It tempts him at
+times to depart from his generally broad and fair way of viewing
+things, as when he meets the charge that the Son is forgotten for the
+Mother, not merely by a denial, but by the rejoinder that when the
+Mother is not honoured as the Roman Church honours her the honour of
+the Son fails. It would have been better not to have reprinted the
+following extract from a former work, even though it were singled out
+for approval by the late Cardinal. The italics are his own:--
+
+    I have spoken more on this subject in my _Essay on Development_,
+    p. 438, "Nor does it avail to object that, in this contrast of
+    devotional exercises, the human is sure to supplant the Divine,
+    from the infirmity of our nature; for, I repeat, the question is
+    one of fact, whether it has done so. And next, it must be asked,
+    _whether the character of Protestant devotion towards Our Lord has
+    been that of worship at all_; and not rather such as we pay to an
+    excellent human being.... Carnal minds will ever create a carnal
+    worship for themselves, and to forbid them the service of the
+    saints will have no tendency to teach them the worship of God.
+    Moreover, ... great and constant as is the devotion which the
+    Catholic pays to St. Mary, it has a special province, and _has far
+    more connection with the public services and the festive aspect of
+    Christianity_, and with certain extraordinary offices which she
+    holds, _than with what is strictly personal and primary in religion_".
+    Our late Cardinal, on my reception, singled out to me this last
+    sentence, for the expression of his especial approbation.
+
+Can Dr. Newman defend the first of these two assertions, when he
+remembers such books of popular Protestant devotion as Wesley's Hymns,
+or the German hymn-books of which we have examples in the well-known
+_Lyra Germanica_? Can he deny the second when he remembers the
+exercises of the "Mois de Marie" in French churches, or if he has heard
+a fervid and earnest preacher at the end of them urge on a church full
+of young people, fresh from Confirmation and first Communion, a special
+and personal self-dedication to the great patroness for protection amid
+the daily trials of life, in much the same terms as in an English
+Church they might be exhorted to commit themselves to the Redeemer of
+mankind? Right or wrong, such devotion is not a matter of the "festive
+aspect" of religion, but most eminently of what is "personal and
+primary" in it; and surely of such a character is a vast proportion of
+the popular devotion here spoken of.
+
+But for himself, no doubt, he has accepted this _cultus_ on its most
+elevated and refined side. He himself makes the distinction, and says
+that there is "a healthy" and an "artificial" form of it; a devotion
+which does not shock "solid piety and Christian good sense; I cannot
+help calling this the English style." And when other sides are
+presented to him, he feels what any educated Englishman who allows his
+English feelings play is apt to feel about them. What is more, he has
+the boldness to say so. He makes all kinds of reserves to save the
+credit of those with whom he cannot sympathise. He speaks of the
+privileges of Saints; the peculiarities of national temperament; the
+distinctions between popular language and that used by scholastic
+writers, or otherwise marked by circumstances; the special characters
+of some of the writers quoted, their "ruthless logic," or their
+obscurity; the inculpated passages are but few and scattered in
+proportion to their context; they are harsh, but sound worse than they
+mean; they are hardly interpreted and pressed. He reminds Dr. Pusey
+that there is not much to choose between the Oriental Churches and Rome
+on this point, and that of the two the language of the Eastern is the
+most florid; luxuriant, and unguarded. But, after all, the true feeling
+comes out at last, "And now, at length," he says, "coming to the
+statements, not English, but foreign, which offend you, I will frankly
+say that I read some of those which you quote with grief and almost
+anger." They are "perverse sayings," which he hates. He fills a page
+and a half with a number of them, and then deliberately pronounces his
+rejection of them.
+
+    After such explanations, and with such authorities to clear my
+    path, I put away from me as you would wish, without any
+    hesitation, as matters in which my heart and reason have no part
+    (when taken in their literal and absolute sense, as any Protestant
+    would naturally take them, and as the writers doubtless did not
+    use them), such sentences and phrases as these:--that the mercy of
+    Mary is infinite, that God has resigned into her hands His
+    omnipotence, that (unconditionally) it is safer to seek her than
+    her Son, that the Blessed Virgin is superior to God, that He is
+    (simply) subject to her command, that our Lord is now of the same
+    disposition as His Father towards sinners--viz. a disposition to
+    reject them, while Mary takes His place as an Advocate with the
+    Father and Son; that the Saints are more ready to intercede with
+    Jesus than Jesus with the Father, that Mary is the only refuge of
+    those with whom God is angry; that Mary alone can obtain a
+    Protestant's conversion; that it would have sufficed for the
+    salvation of men if our Lord had died, not to obey His Father, but
+    to defer to the decree of His Mother, that she rivals our Lord in
+    being God's daughter, not by adoption, but by a kind of nature;
+    that Christ fulfilled the office of Saviour by imitating her
+    virtues; that, as the Incarnate God bore the image of His Father,
+    so He bore the image of His Mother; that redemption derived from
+    Christ indeed its sufficiency, but from Mary its beauty and
+    loveliness; that as we are clothed with the merits of Christ so we
+    are clothed with the merits of Mary; that, as He is Priest, in
+    like manner is she Priestess; that His body and blood in the
+    Eucharist are truly hers, and appertain to her; that as He is
+    present and received therein, so is she present and received
+    therein; that Priests are ministers as of Christ, so of Mary; that
+    elect souls are, born of God and Mary; that the Holy Ghost brings
+    into fruitfulness His action by her, producing in her and by her
+    Jesus Christ in His members; that the kingdom of God in our souls,
+    as our Lord speaks, is really the kingdom of Mary in the soul--and
+    she and the Holy Ghost produce in the soul extraordinary
+    things--and when the Holy Ghost finds Mary in a soul He flies
+    there.
+
+    Sentiments such as these I never knew of till I read your book,
+    nor, as I think, do the vast majority of English Catholics know
+    them. They seem to me like a bad dream. I could not have conceived
+    them to be said. I know not to what authority to go for them, to
+    Scripture, or to the Fathers, or to the decrees of Councils, or to
+    the consent of schools, or to the tradition of the faithful, or to
+    the Holy See, or to Reason. They defy all the _loci theologici_.
+    There is nothing of them in the Missal, in the Roman Catechism, in
+    the Roman _Raccolta_, in the Imitation of Christ, in Gother,
+    Challoner, Milner, or Wiseman, so far as I am aware. They do but
+    scare and confuse me. I should not be holier, more spiritual, more
+    sure of perseverance, if I twisted my moral being into the
+    reception of them; I should but be guilty of fulsome frigid
+    flattery towards the most upright and noble of God's creatures if
+    I professed them--and of stupid flattery too; for it would be like
+    the compliment of painting up a young and beautiful princess with
+    the brow of a Plato and the muscle of an Achilles. And I should
+    expect her to tell one of her people in waiting to turn me off her
+    service without warning. Whether thus to feel be the _scandalum
+    parvulorum_ in my case, or the _scandalum Pharisaeorum_, I leave
+    others to decide; but I will say plainly that I had rather believe
+    (which is impossible) that there is no God at all, than that Mary
+    is greater than God. I will have nothing to do with statements,
+    which can only be explained by being explained away. I do not,
+    however, speak of these statements, as they are found in their
+    authors, for I know nothing of the originals, and cannot believe
+    that they have meant what you say; but I take them as they lie in
+    your pages. Were any of them, the sayings of Saints in ecstasy, I
+    should know they had a good meaning; still I should not repeat
+    them myself; but I am looking at them, not as spoken by the
+    tongues of Angels, but according to that literal sense which they
+    bear in the mouths of English men and English women. And, as
+    spoken by man to man in England in the nineteenth century, I
+    consider them calculated to prejudice inquirers, to frighten the
+    unlearned, to unsettle consciences, to provoke blasphemy, and to
+    work the loss of souls.
+
+Of course; it is what might be expected of him. But Dr. Newman has
+often told us that we must take the consequences of our principles and
+theories, and here are some of the consequences which meet him; and, as
+he says, they "scare and confuse him." He boldly disavows them with no
+doubtful indignation. But what other voice but his, of equal authority
+and weight, has been lifted up to speak the plain truth about them?
+Why, if they are wrong, extravagant, dangerous, is his protest
+solitary? His communion has never been wanting in jealousy of dangerous
+doctrines, and it is vain to urge that these things and things like
+them have been said in a corner. The Holy Office is apt to detect
+mischief in small writers as well as great, even if these teachers were
+as insignificant as Dr. Newman would gladly make them. Taken as a
+whole, and in connection with notorious facts, these statements are
+fair examples of manifest tendencies, which certainly are not on the
+decline. And if a great and spreading popular _cultus_, encouraged and
+urged on beyond all former precedent, is in danger of being developed
+by its warmest and most confident advocates into something of which
+unreason is the lightest fault, is there not ground for interfering?
+Doubtless Roman writers maybe quoted by Dr. Newman, who felt that there
+was a danger, and we are vaguely told about some checks given to one or
+two isolated extravagances, which, however, in spite of the checks, do
+not seem to be yet extinct. But Allocutions and Encyclicals are not for
+errors of this kind. Dr. Newman says that "it is wiser for the most
+part to leave these excesses to the gradual operation of public
+opinion,--that is, to the opinion of educated and sober Catholics; and
+this seems to me the healthiest way of putting them down." We quite
+agree with him; but his own Church does not think so; and we want to
+see some evidence of a public opinion in it capable of putting them
+down. As it is, he is reduced to say that "the line cannot be logically
+drawn between the teaching of the Fathers on the subject and our own;"
+an assertion which, if it were true, would be more likely to drag down
+one teaching than to prop up the other; he has to find reasons, and
+doubtless they are to be found thick as blackberries, for accounting
+for one extravagance, softening down another, declining to judge a
+third. But in the meantime the "devotion" in its extreme form, far
+beyond what he would call the teaching of his Church, has its way; it
+maintains its ground; it becomes the mark of the bold, the advanced,
+the refined, as well as of the submissive and the crowd; it roots
+itself under the shelter of an authority which would stop it if it was
+wrong; it becomes "dominant"; it becomes at length part of that "mind
+of the living Church" which, we are told, it is heresy to impugn,
+treason to appeal from, and the extravagance of impertinent folly to
+talk of reforming.
+
+It is very little use, then, for Dr. Newman to tell Dr. Pusey or any
+one else, "You may safely trust us English Catholics as to this
+devotion." "English Catholics," as such,--it is the strength and the
+weakness of their system,--have really the least to say in the matter.
+The question is not about trusting "us English Catholics," but the
+Pope, and the Roman Congregation, and those to whom the Roman
+authorities delegate their sanction and give their countenance. If Dr.
+Newman is able, as we doubt not he is desirous, to elevate the tone of
+his own communion and put to shame some of its fashionable excesses, he
+will do a great work, in which we wish him every success, though the
+result of it might not really be to bring the body of his countrymen
+nearer to it. But the substance of Dr. Pusey's charges remain after all
+unanswered, and there is no getting over them while they remain. They
+are of that broad, palpable kind against which the refinements of
+argumentative apology play in vain. They can only be met by those who
+feel their force, on some principle equally broad. Dr. Newman suggests
+such a ground in the following remarks, which, much as they want
+qualification and precision, have a basis of reality in them:--
+
+    It is impossible, I say, in a doctrine like this, to draw the line
+    cleanly between truth and error, right and wrong. This is ever the
+    case in concrete matters which have life. Life in this world is
+    motion, and involves a continual process of change. Living things
+    grow into their perfection, into their decline, into their death.
+    No rule of art will suffice to stop the operation of this natural
+    law, whether in the material world or in the human mind.... What
+    has power to stir holy and refined souls is potent also with the
+    multitude, and the religion of the multitude is ever vulgar and
+    abnormal; it ever will be tinctured with fanaticism and
+    superstition while men are what they are. A people's religion is
+    ever a corrupt religion. If you are to have a Catholic Church you
+    must put up with fish of every kind, guests good and bad, vessels
+    of gold, vessels of earth. You may beat religion out of men, if you
+    will, and then their excesses will take a different direction; but
+    if you make use of religion to improve them, they will make use of
+    religion to corrupt it. And then you will have effected that
+    compromise of which our countrymen report so unfavourably from
+    abroad,--a high grand faith and worship which compels their
+    admiration, and puerile absurdities among the people which excite
+    their contempt.
+
+It is like Dr. Newman to put his case in this broad way, making large
+admissions, allowing for much inevitable failure. That is, he defends
+his Church as he would defend Christianity generally, taking it as a
+great practical system must be in this world, working with human nature
+as it is. His reflection is, no doubt, one suggested by a survey of the
+cause of all religion. The coming short of the greatest promisee, the
+debasement of the noblest ideals, are among the commonplaces of
+history. Christianity cannot be maintained without ample admissions of
+failure and perversion. But it is one thing to make this admission for
+Christianity generally, an admission which the New Testament in
+foretelling its fortunes gives us abundant ground for making; and quite
+another for those who maintain the superiority of one form of
+Christianity above all others, to claim that they may leave out of the
+account its characteristic faults. It is quite true that all sides
+abundantly need to appeal for considerate judgment to the known
+infirmity of human nature; but amid the conflicting pretensions which
+divide Christendom no one side can ask to have for itself the exclusive
+advantage of this plea. All may claim the benefit of it, but if it is
+denied to any it must be denied to all. In this confused and imperfect
+world other great popular systems of religion besides the Roman may use
+it in behalf of shortcomings, which, though perhaps very different, are
+yet not worse. It is obvious that the theory of great and living ideas,
+working with a double edge, and working for mischief at last, holds
+good for other things besides the special instance on which Dr. Newman
+comments. It is to be further observed that to claim the benefit of
+this plea is to make the admission that you come under the common law
+of human nature as to mistake, perversion, and miscarriage, and this in
+the matter of religious guidance the Roman theory refuses to do. It
+claims for its communion as its special privilege an exemption from
+those causes of corruption of which history is the inexorable witness,
+and to which others admit themselves to be liable; an immunity from
+going wrong, a supernatural exception from the common tendency of
+mankind to be led astray, from the common necessity to correct and
+reform themselves when they are proved wrong. How far this is realised,
+not on paper and in argument, but in fact, is indeed one of the most
+important questions for the world, and it is one to which the world
+will pay more heed than to the best writing about it There are not
+wanting signs, among others of a very different character, of an honest
+and philosophical recognition of this by some of the ablest writers of
+the Roman communion. The day on which the Roman Church ceases to
+maintain that what it holds must be truth because it holds it, and
+admits itself subject to the common condition by which God has given
+truth to men, will be the first hopeful day for the reunion of
+Christendom.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+NEWMAN'S PAROCHIAL SERMONS[32]
+
+
+  [32]
+  _Parochial and Plain Sermons_. By John Henry Newman, B.D., formerly
+  Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford. Edited by W.J. Copeland, B.D. _Saturday
+  Review_, 5th June 1869.
+
+Dr. Newman's Sermons stand by themselves in modern English literature;
+it might be said, in English literature generally. There have been
+equally great masterpieces of English writing in this form of
+composition, and there have been preachers whose theological depth,
+acquaintance with the heart, earnestness, tenderness, and power have
+not been inferior to his. But the great writers do not touch, pierce,
+and get hold of minds as he does, and those who are famous for the
+power and results of their preaching do not write as he does. His
+sermons have done more perhaps than any one thing to mould and quicken
+and brace the religious temper of our time; they have acted with equal
+force on those who were nearest and on those who were farthest from him
+in theological opinion. They have altered the whole manner of feeling
+towards religious subjects. We know now that they were the beginning,
+the signal and first heave, of a vast change that was to come over the
+subject; of a demand from religion of a thoroughgoing reality of
+meaning and fulfilment, which is familiar to us, but was new when it
+was first made. And, being this, these sermons are also among the very
+finest examples of what the English language of our day has done in the
+hands of a master. Sermons of such intense conviction and directness of
+purpose, combined with such originality and perfection on their purely
+literary side, are rare everywhere. Remarkable instances, of course,
+will occur to every one of the occasional exhibition of this
+combination, but not in so sustained and varied and unfailing a way.
+Between Dr. Newman and the great French school there is this
+difference--that they are orators, and he is as far as anything can be
+in a great preacher from an orator. Those who remember the tones and
+the voice in which the sermons were heard at St. Mary's--we may refer
+to Professor Shairp's striking account in his volume on Keble, and to a
+recent article in the _Dublin Review_--can remember how utterly unlike
+an orator in all outward ways was the speaker who so strangely moved
+them. The notion of judging of Dr. Newman as an orator never crossed
+their minds. And this puts a difference between him and a remarkable
+person whose name has sometimes been joined with his--Mr. F. Robertson.
+Mr. Robertson was a great preacher, but he was not a writer.
+
+It is difficult to realise at present the effect produced originally by
+these sermons. The first feeling was that of their difference in manner
+from the customary sermon. People knew what an eloquent sermon was, or
+a learned sermon, or a philosophical sermon, or a sermon full of
+doctrine or pious unction. Chalmers and Edward Irving and Robert Hall
+were familiar names; the University pulpit and some of the London
+churches had produced examples of forcible argument and severe and
+finished composition; and of course instances were abundant everywhere
+of the good, sensible, commonplace discourse; of all that was heavy,
+dull, and dry, and of all that was ignorant, wild, fanatical, and
+irrational. But no one seemed to be able, or to be expected, unless he
+avowedly took the buffoonery line which some of the Evangelical
+preachers affected, to speak in the pulpit with the directness and
+straightforward unconventionality with which men speak on the practical
+business of life. With all the thought and vigour and many beauties
+which were in the best sermons, there was always something forced,
+formal, artificial about them; something akin to that mild pomp which
+usually attended their delivery, with beadles in gowns ushering the
+preacher to the carpeted pulpit steps, with velvet cushions, and with
+the rustle and fulness of his robes. No one seemed to think of writing
+a sermon as he would write an earnest letter. A preacher must approach
+his subject in a kind of roundabout make-believe of preliminary and
+preparatory steps, as if he was introducing his hearers to what they
+had never heard of; make-believe difficulties and objections were
+overthrown by make-believe answers; an unnatural position both in
+speaker and hearers, an unreal state of feeling and view of facts, a
+systematic conventional exaggeration, seemed almost impossible to be
+avoided; and those who tried to escape being laboured and grandiloquent
+only escaped it, for the most part, by being vulgar or slovenly. The
+strong severe thinkers, jealous for accuracy, and loathing clap-trap as
+they loathed loose argument, addressed and influenced intelligence; but
+sermons are meant for heart and souls as well as minds, and to the
+heart, with its trials and its burdens, men like Whately never found
+their way. Those who remember the preaching of those days, before it
+began to be influenced by the sermons at St. Mary's, will call to mind
+much that was interesting, much that was ingenious, much correction of
+inaccurate and confused views, much manly encouragement to high
+principle and duty, much of refined and scholarlike writing. But for
+soul and warmth, and the imaginative and poetical side of the religious
+life, you had to go where thought and good sense were not likely to be
+satisfied.
+
+The contrast of Mr. Newman's preaching was not obvious at first. The
+outside form and look was very much that of the regular best Oxford
+type--calm, clear, and lucid in expression, strong in its grasp,
+measured in statement, and far too serious to think of rhetorical
+ornament. But by degrees much more opened. The range of experience from
+which the preacher drew his materials, and to which he appealed, was
+something wider, subtler, and more delicate than had been commonly
+dealt with in sermons. With his strong, easy, exact, elastic language,
+the instrument of a powerful and argumentative mind, he plunged into
+the deep realities of the inmost spiritual life, of which cultivated
+preachers had been shy. He preached so that he made you feel without
+doubt that it was the most real of worlds to him; he made you feel in
+time, in spite of yourself, that it was a real world with which you too
+had concern. He made you feel that he knew what he was speaking about;
+that his reasonings and appeals, whether you agreed with them or not,
+were not the language of that heated enthusiasm with which the world is
+so familiar; that he was speaking words which were the result of
+intellectual scrutiny, balancings, and decisions, as well as of moral
+trials, of conflicts and suffering within; words of the utmost
+soberness belonging to deeply gauged and earnestly formed purposes. The
+effect of his sermons, as compared with the common run at the time, was
+something like what happens when in a company you have a number of
+people giving their views and answers about some question before them.
+You have opinions given of various worth and expressed with varying
+power, precision, and distinctness, some clever enough, some clumsy
+enough, but all more or less imperfect and unattractive in tone, and
+more or less falling short of their aim; and then, after it all, comes
+a voice, very grave, very sweet, very sure and clear, under whose words
+the discussion springs up at once to a higher level, and in which we
+recognise at once a mind, face to face with realities, and able to
+seize them and hold them fast.
+
+The first notable feature in the external form of this preaching was
+its terse unceremonious directness. Putting aside the verbiage and
+dulled circumlocution and stiff hazy phraseology of pulpit etiquette
+and dignity, it went straight to its point. There was no waste of time
+about customary formalities. The preacher had something to say, and
+with a kind of austere severity he proceeded to say it. This, for
+instance, is the sort of way in which a sermon would begin:--
+
+    Hypocrisy is a serious word. We are accustomed to consider the
+    hypocrite as a hateful, despicable character, and an uncommon one.
+    How is it, then, that our Blessed Lord, when surrounded by an
+    innumerable multitude, began, _first of all_, to warn His disciples
+    against hypocrisy, as though they were in especial danger of
+    becoming like those base deceivers the Pharisees? Thus an
+    instructive subject is opened to our consideration, which I will
+    now pursue.--Vol. I. Serm. X.
+
+The next thing was that, instead of rambling and straggling over a
+large subject, each sermon seized a single thought, or definite view,
+or real difficulty or objection, and kept closely and distinctly to it;
+and at the same time treated it with a largeness and grasp and ease
+which only a full command over much beyond it could give. Every sermon
+had a purpose and an end which no one could misunderstand. Singularly
+devoid of anything like excitement--calm, even, self-controlled--there
+was something in the preacher's resolute concentrated way of getting
+hold of a single defined object which reminded you of the rapid spring
+or unerring swoop of some strong-limbed or swift-winged creature on its
+quarry. Whatever you might think that he did with it, or even if it
+seemed to escape from him, you could have no doubt what he sought to
+do; there was no wavering, confused, uncertain bungling in that
+powerful and steady hand. Another feature was the character of the
+writer's English. We have learned to look upon Dr. Newman as one of the
+half-dozen or so of the innumerable good writers of the time who have
+fairly left their mark as masters on the language. Little, assuredly,
+as the writer originally thought of such a result, the sermons have
+proved a permanent gift to our literature, of the purest English, full
+of spring, clearness, and force. A hasty reader would perhaps at first
+only notice a very light, strong, easy touch, and might think, too,
+that it was a negligent one. But it was not negligence; real negligence
+means at bottom bad work, and bad work will not stand the trial of
+time. There are two great styles--the self-conscious, like that of
+Gibbon or Macaulay, where great success in expression is accompanied by
+an unceasing and manifest vigilance that expression shall succeed, and
+where you see at each step that there is or has been much care and work
+in the mind, if not on the paper; and the unconscious, like that of
+Pascal or Swift or Hume, where nothing suggests at the moment that the
+writer is thinking of anything but his subject, and where the power of
+being able to say just what he wants to say seems to come at the
+writer's command, without effort, and without his troubling himself
+more about it than about the way in which he holds his pen. But both
+are equally the fruit of hard labour and honest persevering
+self-correction; and it is soon found out whether the apparent
+negligence comes of loose and slovenly habits of mind, or whether it
+marks the confidence of one who has mastered his instrument, and can
+forget himself and let himself go in using it. The free unconstrained
+movement of Dr. Newman's style tells any one who knows what writing is
+of a very keen and exact knowledge of the subtle and refined secrets of
+language. With all that uncared-for play and simplicity, there was a
+fulness, a richness, a curious delicate music, quite instinctive and
+unsought for; above all, a precision and sureness of expression which
+people soon began to find were not within the power of most of those
+who tried to use language. Such English, graceful with the grace of
+nerve, flexibility, and power, must always have attracted attention;
+but it had also an ethical element which was almost inseparable from
+its literary characteristics. Two things powerfully determined the
+style of these sermons. One was the intense hold which the vast
+realities of religion had gained on the writer's mind, and the perfect
+truth with which his personality sank and faded away before their
+overwhelming presence; the other was the strong instinctive shrinking,
+which was one of the most remarkable and certain marks of the beginners
+of the Oxford movement, from anything like personal display, any
+conscious aiming at the ornamental and brilliant, any show of gifts or
+courting of popular applause. Morbid and excessive or not, there can be
+no doubt of the stern self-containing severity which made them turn
+away, not only with fear, but with distaste and repugnance, from all
+that implied distinction or seemed to lead to honour; and the control
+of this austere spirit is visible, in language as well as matter, in
+every page of Dr. Newman's sermons.
+
+Indeed, form and matter are closely connected in the sermons, and
+depend one on another, as they probably do in all work of a high order.
+The matter makes and shapes the form with which it clothes itself. The
+obvious thing which presents itself in reading them is that, from first
+to last, they are a great systematic attempt to raise the whole level
+of religious thought and religious life. They carry in them the
+evidence of a great reaction and a scornful indignant rising up against
+what were going about and were currently received as adequate ideas of
+religion. The dryness and primness and meagreness of the common Church
+preaching, correct as it was in its outlines of doctrine, and sober and
+temperate in tone, struck cold on a mind which had caught sight, in the
+New Testament, of the spirit and life of its words. The recoil was even
+stronger from the shallowness and pretentiousness and self-display of
+what was popularly accepted as earnest religion; morally the preacher
+was revolted at its unctuous boasts and pitiful performance, and
+intellectually by its narrowness and meanness of thought and its
+thinness of colour in all its pictures of the spiritual life. From
+first to last, in all manner of ways, the sermons are a protest, first
+against coldness, but even still more against meanness, in religion.
+With coldness they have no sympathy, yet coldness may be broad and
+large and lofty in its aspects; but they have no tolerance for what
+makes religion little and poor and superficial, for what contracts its
+horizon and dwarfs its infinite greatness and vulgarises its mystery.
+Open the sermons where we will, different readers will rise from them
+with very different results; there will be among many the strongest and
+most decisive disagreement; there may be impatience at dogmatic
+harshness, indignation at what seems overstatement and injustice,
+rejection of arguments and conclusions; but there will always be the
+sense of an unfailing nobleness in the way in which the writer thinks
+and speaks. It is not only that he is in earnest; it is that he has
+something which really is worth being in earnest for. He placed the
+heights of religion very high. If you have a religion like
+Christianity--this is the pervading note--think of it, and have it,
+worthily. People will differ from the preacher endlessly as to how this
+is to be secured. But that they will learn this lesson from the
+sermons, with a force with which few other writers have taught it, and
+that this lesson has produced its effect in our time, there can be no
+doubt. The only reason why it may not perhaps seem so striking to
+readers of this day is that the sermons have done their work, and we do
+not feel what they had to counteract, because they have succeeded in
+great measure in counteracting it. It is not too much to say that they
+have done more than anything else to revolutionise the whole idea of
+preaching in the English Church. Mr. Robertson, in spite of himself,
+was as much the pupil of their school as Mr. Liddon, though both are so
+widely different from their master.
+
+The theology of these sermons is a remarkable feature about them. It is
+remarkable in this way, that, coming from a teacher like Dr. Newman, it
+is nevertheless a theology which most religious readers, except the
+Evangelicals and some of the more extreme Liberal thinkers, can either
+accept heartily or be content with, as they would be content with St.
+Augustine or Thomas a Kempis--content, not because they go along with
+it always, but because it is large and untechnical, just and
+well-measured in the proportions and relative importance of its parts.
+People of very different opinions turn to them, as being on the whole
+the fullest, deepest, most comprehensive approximation they can find to
+representing Christianity in a practical form. Their theology is
+nothing new; nor does it essentially change, though one may observe
+differences, and some important ones, in the course of the volumes,
+which embrace a period from 1825 to 1842. It is curious, indeed, to
+observe how early the general character of the sermons was determined,
+and how in the main it continues the same. Some of the first in point
+of date are among the "Plain Sermons"; and though they may have been
+subsequently retouched, yet there the keynote is plainly struck of that
+severe and solemn minor which reigns throughout. Their theology is
+throughout the accepted English theology of the Prayer-book and the
+great Church divines--a theology fundamentally dogmatic and
+sacramental, but jealously keeping the balance between obedience and
+faith; learned, exact, and measured, but definite and decided. The
+novelty was in the application of it, in the new life breathed into it,
+in the profound and intense feelings called forth by its ideas and
+objects, in the air of vastness and awe thrown about it, in the
+unexpected connection of its creeds and mysteries with practical life,
+in the new meaning given to the old and familiar, in the acceptance in
+thorough earnest, and with keen purpose to call it into action, of what
+had been guarded and laid by with dull reverence. Dr. Newman can hardly
+be called in these sermons an innovator on the understood and
+recognised standard of Anglican doctrine; he accepted its outlines as
+Bishop Wilson, for instance, might have traced them. What he did was
+first to call forth from it what it really meant, the awful heights and
+depths of its current words and forms; and next, to put beside them
+human character and its trials, not as they were conventionally
+represented and written about, but as a piercing eye and sympathising
+spirit saw them in the light of our nineteenth century, and in the
+contradictory and complicated movements, the efforts and failures, of
+real life. He took theology for granted, as a Christian preacher has a
+right to do; he does not prove it, and only occasionally meets
+difficulties, or explains; but, taking it for granted, he took it at
+its word, in its relation to the world of actual experience.
+
+Utterly dissatisfied with what he found current as religion, Dr. Newman
+sought, without leaving the old paths, to put before people a strong
+and energetic religion based, not on feeling or custom, but on reason
+and conscience, and answering, in the vastness of its range, to the
+mysteries of human nature, and in its power to man's capacities and
+aims. The Liberal religion of that day, with its ideas of natural
+theology or of a cold critical Unitarianism, was a very shallow one;
+the Evangelical, trusting to excitement, had worn out its excitement
+and had reached the stage when its formulas, poor ones at the best, had
+become words without meaning. Such views might do in quiet, easy-going
+times, if religion were an exercise at will of imagination or thought,
+an indulgence, an ornament, an understanding, a fashion; not if it
+corresponded to such a state of things as is implied in the Bible, or
+to man's many-sided nature as it is shown in Shakspeare. The sermons
+reflect with merciless force the popular, superficial, comfortable
+thing called religion which the writer saw before him wherever he
+looked, and from which his mind recoiled. Such sermons as those on the
+"Self-wise Enquirer" and the "Religion of the Day," with its famous
+passage about the age not being sufficiently "gloomy and fierce in its
+religion," have the one-sided and unmeasured exaggeration which seems
+inseparable from all strong expressions of conviction, and from all
+deep and vehement protests against general faults; but, qualify and
+limit them as we may, their pictures were not imaginary ones, and there
+was, and is, but too much to justify them. From all this trifling with
+religion the sermons called on men to look into themselves. They
+appealed to conscience; and they appealed equally to reason and
+thought, to recognise what conscience is, and to deal honestly with it.
+They viewed religion as if projected on a background of natural and
+moral mystery, and surrounded by it--an infinite scene, in which our
+knowledge is like the Andes and Himalayas in comparison with the mass
+of the earth, and in which conscience is our final guide and arbiter.
+No one ever brought out so impressively the sense of the impenetrable
+and tremendous vastness of that amid which man plays his part. In such
+sermons as those on the "Intermediate State," the "Invisible World,"
+the "Greatness and Littleness of Human Life," the "Individuality of the
+Soul," the "Mysteriousness of our Present Being," we may see
+exemplified the enormous irruption into the world of modern thought of
+the unknown and the unknowable, as much as in the writers who, with far
+different objects, set against it the clearness and certainty of what
+we do know. But, beyond all, the sermons appealed to men to go back
+into their own thoughts and feelings, and there challenged them; were
+not the preacher's words the echoes and interpreting images of their
+own deepest, possibly most perplexing and baffling, experience? From
+first to last this was his great engine and power; from first to last
+he boldly used it. He claimed to read their hearts; and people felt
+that he did read them, their follies and their aspirations, the blended
+and tangled web of earnestness and dishonesty, of wishes for the best
+and truest, and acquiescence in makeshifts; understating what ordinary
+preachers make much of, bringing into prominence what they pass by
+without being able to see or to speak of it; keeping before his hearers
+the risk of mismanaging their hearts, of "all kinds of unlawful
+treatment of the soul." What a contrast to ordinary ways of speaking on
+a familiar theological doctrine is this way of bringing it into
+immediate relation to real feeling:--
+
+    It is easy to speak of human nature as corrupt in the general, to
+    admit it in the general, and then get quit of the subject; as if,
+    the doctrine being once admitted, there was nothing more to be done
+    with it. But, in truth, we can have no real apprehension of the
+    doctrine of our corruption till we view the structure of our minds,
+    part by part; and dwell upon and draw out the signs of our
+    weakness, inconsistency, and ungodliness, which are such as can
+    arise from nothing but some strange original defect in our original
+    nature.... We are in the dark about ourselves. When we act, we are
+    groping in the dark, and may meet with a fall any moment. Here and
+    there, perhaps, we see a little; or in our attempts to influence
+    and move our minds, we are making experiments (as it were) with
+    some delicate and dangerous instrument, which works we do not know
+    how, and may produce unexpected and disastrous effects. The
+    management of our hearts is quite above us. Under these
+    circumstances it becomes our comfort to look up to God. "Thou, God,
+    seest me." Such was the consolation of the forlorn Hagar in the
+    wilderness. He knoweth whereof we are made, and He alone can uphold
+    us. He sees with most appalling distinctness all our sins, all the
+    windings and recesses of evil within us; yet it is our only comfort
+    to know this, and to trust Him for help against ourselves.--Vol. I.
+    Serm. XIII.
+
+The preacher contemplates human nature, not in the stiff formal
+language in which it had become conventional with divines to set out
+its shortcomings and dangers, but as a great novelist contemplates and
+tries to describe it; taking in all its real contradictions and
+anomalies, its subtle and delicate shades; fixing upon the things which
+strike us in ourselves or our neighbours as ways of acting and marks of
+character; following it through its wide and varying range, its
+diversified and hidden folds and subtle self-involving realities of
+feeling and shiftiness; touching it in all its complex sensibilities,
+anticipating its dim consciousnesses, half-raising veils which hide
+what it instinctively shrinks from, sending through it unexpected
+thrills and shocks; large-hearted in indulgence, yet exacting; most
+tender, yet most severe. And against all this real play of nature he
+sets in their full force and depth the great ideas of God, of sin, and
+of the Cross; and, appealing not to the intelligence of an aristocracy
+of choice natures, but to the needs and troubles and longings which
+make all men one, he claimed men's common sympathy for the heroic in
+purpose and standard. He warned them against being fastidious, where
+they should be hardy. He spoke in a way that all could understand of
+brave ventures, of resolutely committing themselves to truth and duty.
+
+The most practical of sermons, the most real and natural in their way
+of dealing with life and conduct, they are also intensely dogmatic. The
+writer's whole teaching presupposes, as we all know, a dogmatic
+religion; and these sermons are perhaps the best vindication of it
+which our time, disposed to think of dogmas with suspicion, has seen.
+For they show, on a large scale and in actual working instances, how
+what is noblest, most elevated, most poetical, most free and searching
+in a thinker's way of regarding the wonderful scene of life, falls in
+naturally, and without strain, with a great dogmatic system like that
+of the Church. Such an example does not prove that system to be true,
+but it proves that a dogmatic system, as such, is not the cast-iron,
+arbitrary, artificial thing which it is often assumed to be. It is,
+indeed, the most shallow of all commonplaces, intelligible in ordinary
+minds, but unaccountable in those of high power and range, whether they
+believe or not, that a dogmatic religion is of course a hard, dry,
+narrow, unreal religion, without any affinities to poetry or the truth
+of things, or to the deeper and more sacred and powerful of human
+thoughts. If dogmas are not true, that is another matter; but it is the
+fashion to imply that dogmas are worthless, mere things of the past,
+without sense or substance or interest, because they are dogmas. As if
+Dante was not dogmatic in form and essence; as if the grandest and
+worthiest religious prose in the English language was not that of
+Hooker, nourished up amid the subtleties, but also amid the vast
+horizons and solemn heights, of scholastic divinity. A dogmatic system
+is hard in hard hands, and shallow in shallow minds, and barren in dull
+ones, and unreal and empty to preoccupied and unsympathising ones; we
+dwarf and distort ideas that we do not like, and when we have put them
+in our own shapes and in our own connection, we call them unmeaning or
+impossible. Dogmas are but expedients, common to all great departments
+of human thought, and felt in all to be necessary, for representing
+what are believed as truths, for exhibiting their order and
+consequences, for expressing the meaning of terms, and the relations of
+thought. If they are wrong, they are, like everything else in the
+world, open to be proved wrong; if they are inadequate, they are open
+to correction; but it is idle to sneer at them for being what they must
+be, if religious facts and truths are to be followed out by the
+thoughts and expressed by the language of man. And what dogmas are in
+unfriendly and incapable hands is no proof of what they may be when
+they are approached as things instinct with truth and life; it is no
+measure of the way in which they may be inextricably interwoven with
+the most unquestionably living thought and feeling, as in these
+sermons. Jealous, too, as the preacher is for Church doctrines as the
+springs of Christian life, no writer of our time perhaps has so
+emphatically and impressively recalled the narrow limits within which
+human language can represent Divine realities. No one that we know of
+shows that he has before his mind with such intense force and
+distinctness the idea of God; and in proportion as a mind takes in and
+submits itself to the impression of that awful vision, the gulf widens
+between all possible human words and that which they attempt to
+express:--
+
+    When we have deduced what we deduce by our reason from the study of
+    visible nature, and then read what we read in His inspired word,
+    and find the two apparently discordant, _this_ is the feeling I
+    think we ought to have on our minds;--not an impatience to do what
+    is beyond our powers, to weigh evidence, sum up, balance, decide,
+    reconcile, to arbitrate between the two voices of God,--but a sense
+    of the utter nothingness of worms such as we are; of our plain and
+    absolute incapacity to contemplate things _as they really are_; a
+    perception of our emptiness before the great Vision of God; of our
+    "comeliness being turned into corruption, and our retaining no
+    strength"; a conviction that what is put before us, whether in
+    nature or in grace, is but an intimation, useful for particular
+    purposes, useful for practice, useful in its department, "until the
+    day break and the shadows flee away"; useful in such a way that
+    both the one and the other representation may at once be used, as
+    two languages, as two separate approximations towards the Awful
+    Unknown Truth, such as will not mislead us in their respective
+    provinces.--Vol. II. Serm. XVIII.
+
+    "I cannot persuade myself," he says, commenting on a mysterious
+    text of Scripture, "thus to dismiss so solemn a passage" (i.e. by
+    saying that it is "all figurative"). "It seems a presumption to say
+    of dim notices about the unseen world, 'they only mean this or
+    that,' as if one had ascended into the third heaven, or had stood
+    before the throne of God. No; I see herein a deep mystery, a hidden
+    truth, which I cannot handle or define, shining 'as jewels at the
+    bottom of the great deep,' darkly and tremulously, yet really
+    there. And for this very reason, while it is neither pious nor
+    thankful to explain away the words which convey it, while it is a
+    duty to use them, not less a duty is it to use them humbly,
+    diffidently, and teachably, with the thought of God before us, and
+    of our own nothingness."--Vol. III. Serm. XXV.
+
+There are two great requisites for treating properly the momentous
+questions and issues which have been brought before our generation. The
+first is accuracy--accuracy of facts, of terms, of reasoning; plain
+close dealing with questions in their real and actual conditions;
+clear, simple, honest, measured statements about things as we find
+them. The other is elevation, breadth, range of thought; a due sense of
+what these questions mean and involve; a power of looking at things
+from a height; a sufficient taking into account of possibilities, of
+our ignorance, of the real proportions of things. We have plenty of the
+first; we are for the most part lamentably deficient in the second. And
+of this, these sermons are, to those who have studied them, almost
+unequalled examples. Many people, no doubt, would rise from their
+perusal profoundly disagreeing with their teaching; but no one, it
+seems to us, could rise from them--with their strong effortless
+freedom, their lofty purpose, their generous standard, their deep and
+governing appreciation of divine things, their thoroughness, their
+unselfishness, their purity, their austere yet piercing sympathy--and
+not feel his whole ways of thinking about religion permanently enlarged
+and raised. He will feel that he has been with one who "told him what
+he knew about himself and what he did not know; has read to him his
+wants or feelings, and comforted him by the very reading; has made him
+feel that there was a higher life than this life, and a brighter world
+than we can see; has encouraged him, or sobered him, or opened a way to
+the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed." They show a man who saw very
+deeply into the thought of his time, and who, if he partly recoiled
+from it and put it back, at least equally shared it. Dr. Newman has
+been accused of being out of sympathy with his age, and of disparaging
+it. In reality, no one has proved himself more keenly sensitive to its
+greatness and its wonders; only he believed that he saw something
+greater still. We are not of those who can accept the solution which he
+has accepted of the great problems which haunt our society; but he saw
+better than most men what those problems demand, and the variety of
+their often conflicting conditions. Other men, perhaps, have succeeded
+better in what they aimed at; but no one has attempted more, with
+powers and disinterestedness which justified him in attempting it. The
+movement which he led, and of which these sermons are the
+characteristic monument, is said to be a failure; but there are
+failures, and even mistakes, which are worth many successes of other
+sorts, and which are more fruitful and permanent in their effects.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+CARDINAL NEWMAN[33]
+
+
+  [33]
+  _Guardian_, 21st May 1879.
+
+It is not wonderful that people should be impressed by the vicissitudes
+and surprises and dramatic completeness of Cardinal Newman's career.
+It is not wonderful that he should be impressed by this himself. That
+he who left us in despair and indignation in 1845 should have passed
+through a course of things which has made him, Roman Catholic as he
+is, a man of whom Englishmen are so proud in 1879, is even more
+extraordinary than that the former Fellow of Oriel should now be
+surrounded with the pomp and state of a Cardinal. There is only one
+other career in our time which, with the greatest possible contrasts in
+other points, suggests in its strangeness and antecedent improbabilities
+something of a parallel. It is the train of events which has made
+"Disraeli the Younger" the most powerful Minister whom England has seen
+in recent years. But Lord Beaconsfield has aimed at what he has
+attained to, and has fought his way to it through the chances and
+struggles of a stirring public life. Cardinal Newman's life has been
+from first to last the life of the student and recluse. He has lived in
+the shade. He has sought nothing for himself. He has shrunk from the
+thought of advancement. The steps to the high places of the world have
+not offered themselves to him, and he has been content to be let alone.
+Early in his course his rare gifts of mind, his force of character, his
+power over hearts and sympathies, made him for a while a prominent
+person. Then came a series of events which seemed to throw him out of
+harmony with the great mass of his countrymen. He appeared to be, if not
+forgotten, yet not thought of, except by a small number of friends--old
+friends who had known him too well and too closely ever to forget, and
+new friends gathered round him by the later circumstances of his life
+and work. People spoke of him as a man who had made a great mistake and
+failed; who had thrown up influence and usefulness here, and had not
+found it there; too subtle, too imaginative for England, too
+independent for Rome. He seemed to have so sunk out of interest and
+account that off-hand critics, in the easy gaiety of their heart, might
+take liberties with his name.
+
+Then came the first surprise. The _Apologia_ was read with the keenest
+interest by those who most differed from the writer's practical
+conclusions; twenty years had elapsed since he had taken the unpopular
+step which seemed to condemn him to obscurity; and now he emerged from
+it, challenging not in vain the sympathy of his countrymen. They
+awoke, it may be said--at least the younger generation of them--to
+what he really was; the old jars and bitternesses had passed out of
+remembrance; they only felt that they had one among them who could
+write--for few of them ever heard his wonderful voice--in a way which
+made English hearts respond quickly and warmly. And the strange thing
+was that the professed, the persistent denouncer of Liberalism, was
+welcomed back to his rightful place among Englishmen by none more
+warmly than by many Liberals. Still, though his name was growing more
+familiar year by year, the world did not see much more of him. The
+head of a religious company, of an educational institution at
+Birmingham, he lived in unpretending and quiet simplicity, occupied
+with the daily business of his house, with his books, with his
+correspondence, with finishing off his many literary and theological
+undertakings. Except in some chance reference in a book or newspaper
+which implied how considerable a person the world thought him, he was
+not heard of. People asked about him, but there was nothing to tell.
+Then at last, neglected by Pius IX., he was remembered by Leo XIII.
+The Pope offered him the Cardinalship, he said, because he thought it
+would be "grateful to the Catholics of England, and to England
+itself." And he was not mistaken. Probably there is not a single thing
+that the Pope could do which would be so heartily welcomed.
+
+After breaking with England and all things English in wrath and sorrow,
+nearly thirty-five years ago, after a long life of modest retirement,
+unmarked by any public honours, at length before he dies Dr. Newman is
+recognised by Protestant England as one of its greatest men. It watches
+with interest his journey to Rome, his proceedings at Rome. In a crowd
+of new Cardinals--men of eminence in their own communion--he is the
+only one about whom Englishmen know or care anything. His words, when
+he speaks, pass _verbatim_ along the telegraph wires, like the words of
+the men who sway the world. We read of the quiet Oxford scholar's arms
+emblazoned on vestment and furniture as those of a Prince of the
+Church, and of his motto--_Cor ad cor loquitur_. In that motto is the
+secret of all that he is to his countrymen. For that skill of which he
+is such a master, in the use of his and their "sweet mother tongue," is
+something much more than literary accomplishment and power. It means
+that he has the key to what is deepest in their nature and most
+characteristic in them of feeling and conviction--to what is deeper
+than opinions and theories and party divisions; to what in their most
+solemn moments they most value and most believe in.
+
+His profound sympathy with the religiousness which still, with all the
+variations and all the immense shortcomings of English religion, marks
+England above all cultivated Christian nations, is really the bond
+between him and his countrymen, who yet for the most part think so
+differently from him, both about the speculative grounds and many of
+the practical details of religion. But it was natural for him, on an
+occasion like this, reviewing the past and connecting it with the
+present, to dwell on these differences. He repeated once more, and
+made it the keynote of his address, his old protest against
+"Liberalism in religion," the "doctrine that there is no positive
+truth in religion, but one creed is as good as another." He lamented
+the decay of the power of authority, the disappearance of religion
+from the sphere of political influence, from education, from
+legislation. He deplored the increasing impossibility of getting men
+to work together on a common religious basis. He pointed out the
+increasing seriousness and earnestness of the attempts to "supersede,
+to block out religion," by an imposing and high morality, claiming to
+dispense with it.
+
+He dwelt on the mischief and dangers; he expressed, as any Christian
+would, his fearlessness and faith in spite of them; but do we gather,
+even from such a speaker, and on such an occasion, anything of the
+remedy? The principle of authority is shaken, he tells us; what can he
+suggest to restore it? He under-estimates, probably, the part which
+authority plays, implicitly yet very really, in English popular
+religion, much more in English Church religion; and authority, even in
+Rome, is not everything, and does not reach to every subject. But
+authority in our days can be nothing without real confidence in it;
+and where confidence in authority has been lost, it is idle to attempt
+to restore it by telling men that authority is a good and necessary
+thing. It must be won back, not simply claimed. It must be regained,
+when forfeited, by the means by which it was originally gained. And
+the strange phenomenon was obviously present to his clear and candid
+mind, though he treated it as one which is disappearing, and must at
+length pass away, that precisely here in England, where the only
+religious authority he recognises has been thrown off, the hold of
+religion on public interest is most effective and most obstinately
+tenacious.
+
+What is the history of this? What is the explanation of it? Why is it
+that where "authority," as he understands it, has been longest
+paramount and undisputed, the public place and public force of
+religion have most disappeared; and that a "dozen men taken at random
+in the streets" of London find it easier, with all their various
+sects, to work together on a religious basis than a dozen men taken at
+random from the streets of Catholic Paris or Rome? Indeed, the public
+feeling towards himself, expressed in so many ways in the last few
+weeks, might suggest a question not undeserving of his thoughts. The
+mass of Englishmen are notoriously anti-Popish and anti-Roman. Their
+antipathies on this subject are profound, and not always reasonable.
+They certainly do not here halt between two opinions, or think that
+one creed is as good as another. What is it which has made so many of
+them, still retaining all their intense dislike to the system which
+Cardinal Newman has accepted, yet welcome so heartily his honours in
+it, notwithstanding that he has passed from England to Rome, and that
+he owes so much of what he is to England? Is it that they think it
+does not matter what a man believes, and whether a man turns Papist?
+Or is it not that, in spite of all that would repel and estrange, in
+spite of the oppositions of argument and the inconsistencies of
+speculation, they can afford to recognise in him, as in a high
+example, what they most sincerely believe in and most deeply prize,
+and can pay him the tribute of their gratitude and honour, even when
+unconvinced by his controversial reasonings, and unsatisfied by the
+theories which he has proposed to explain the perplexing and
+refractory anomalies of Church history? Is it not that with history,
+inexorable and unalterable behind them, condemning and justifying,
+supporting and warning all sides in turn, thoughtful men feel how much
+easier it is to point out and deplore our disasters than to see a way
+now to set them right? Is it not also that there are in the Christian
+Church bonds of affinity, subtler, more real and more prevailing than
+even the fatal legacies of the great schisms? Is it not that the
+sympathies which unite the author of the _Parochial Sermons_ and the
+interpreter of St. Athanasius with the disciples of Andrewes, and Ken,
+and Bull, of Butler and Wilson, are as strong and natural as the
+barriers which outwardly keep them asunder are to human eyes
+hopelessly insurmountable?
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+CARDINAL NEWMAN'S COURSE[34]
+
+
+  [34]
+  _Guardian_, 13th August 1890.
+
+The long life is closed. And men, according to their knowledge and
+intelligence, turn to seek for some governing idea or aspect of things,
+by which to interpret the movements and changes of a course which, in
+spite of its great changes, is felt at bottom to have been a uniform
+and consistent one. For it seems that, at starting, he is at once
+intolerant, even to harshness, to the Roman Church, and tolerant,
+though not sympathetic, to the English; then the parts are reversed,
+and he is intolerant to the English and tolerant to the Roman; and then
+at last, when he finally anchored in the Roman Church, he is seen
+as--not tolerant, for that would involve dogmatic points on which he
+was most jealous, but--sympathetic in all that was of interest to
+England, and ready to recognise what was good and high in the English
+Church.
+
+Is not the ultimate key to Newman's history his keen and profound sense
+of the life, society, and principles of action presented in the New
+Testament? To this New Testament life he saw, opposed and in contrast,
+the ways and assumptions of English life, religious as well as secular.
+He saw that the organisation of society had been carried, and was still
+being carried, to great and wonderful perfection; only it was the
+perfection of a society and way of life adapted to the present world,
+and having its ends here; only it was as different as anything can be
+from the picture which the writers of the New Testament, consciously
+and unconsciously, give of themselves and their friends. Here was a
+Church, a religion, a "Christian nation," professing to be identical in
+spirit and rules of faith and conduct with the Church and religion of
+the Gospels and Epistles; and what was the identity, beyond certain
+phrases and conventional suppositions? He could not see a trace in
+English society of that simple and severe hold of the unseen and the
+future which is the colour and breath, as well as the outward form, of
+the New Testament life. Nothing could be more perfect, nothing grander
+and nobler, than all the current arrangements for this life; its
+justice and order and increasing gentleness, its widening sympathies
+between men; but it was all for the perfection and improvement of this
+life; it would all go on, if what we experience now was our only scene
+and destiny. This perpetual antithesis haunted him, when he knew it, or
+when he did not. Against it the Church ought to be the perpetual
+protest, and the fearless challenge, as it was in the days of the New
+Testament. But the English Church had drunk in, he held, too deeply the
+temper, ideas, and laws of an ambitious and advancing civilisation; so
+much so as to be unfaithful to its special charge and mission. The
+prophet had ceased to rebuke, warn, and suffer; he had thrown in his
+lot with those who had ceased to be cruel and inhuman, but who thought
+only of making their dwelling-place as secure and happy as they could.
+The Church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate,
+liberal; jealous about the forms of its creeds, equally jealous of its
+secular rights, interested in the discussion of subordinate questions,
+and becoming more and more tolerant of differences; ready for works of
+benevolence and large charity, in sympathy with the agricultural poor,
+open-handed in its gifts; a willing fellow-worker with society in
+kindly deeds, and its accomplice in secularity. All this was admirable,
+but it was not the life of the New Testament, and it was _that_ which
+filled his thoughts. The English Church had exchanged religion for
+civilisation, the first century for the nineteenth, the New Testament
+as it is written, for a counterfeit of it interpreted by Paley or Mr.
+Simeon; and it seemed to have betrayed its trust.
+
+Form after form was tried by him, the Christianity of Evangelicalism,
+the Christianity of Whately, the Christianity of Hawkins, the
+Christianity of Keble and Pusey; it was all very well, but it was not
+the Christianity of the New Testament and of the first ages. He wrote
+the _Church of the Fathers_ to show they were not merely evidences of
+religion, but really living men; that they could and did live as they
+taught, and what was there like the New Testament or even the first
+ages now? Alas! there was nothing completely like them; but of all
+unlike things, the Church of England with its "smug parsons," and
+pony-carriages for their wives and daughters, seemed to him the most
+unlike: more unlike than the great unreformed Roman Church, with its
+strange, unscriptural doctrines and its undeniable crimes, and its
+alliance, wherever it could, with the world. But at least the Roman
+Church had not only preserved, but maintained at full strength through
+the centuries to our day two things of which the New Testament was
+full, and which are characteristic of it--devotion and self-sacrifice.
+The crowds at a pilgrimage, a shrine, or a "pardon" were much more like
+the multitudes who followed our Lord about the hills of Galilee--like
+them probably in that imperfect faith which we call superstition--than
+anything that could be seen in the English Church, even if the
+Salvation Army were one of its instruments. And the spirit which
+governed the Roman Church had prevailed on men to make the sacrifice of
+celibacy a matter of course, as a condition of ministering in a regular
+and systematic way not only to the souls, but to the bodies of men, not
+only for the Priesthood, but for educational Brotherhoods, and Sisters
+of the poor and of hospitals. Devotion and sacrifice, prayer and
+self-denying charity, in one word sanctity, are at once on the surface
+of the New Testament and interwoven with all its substance. He recoiled
+from a representation of the religion of the New Testament which to his
+eye was without them. He turned to where, in spite of every other
+disadvantage, he thought he found them. In S. Filippo Neri he could
+find a link between the New Testament and progressive civilisation. He
+could find no S. Filippo--so modern and yet so Scriptural--when he
+sought at home.
+
+His mind, naturally alive to all greatness, had early been impressed
+with the greatness of the Church of Rome. But in his early days it was
+the greatness of Anti-Christ. Then came the change, and his sense of
+greatness was satisfied by the commanding and undoubting attitude of
+the Roman system, by the completeness of its theory, by the sweep of
+its claims and its rule, by the even march of its vast administration.
+It could not and it did not escape him, that the Roman Church, with all
+the good things which it had, was, as a whole, as unlike the Church of
+the New Testament and of the first ages as the English. He recognised
+it frankly, and built up a great theory to account for the fact,
+incorporating and modernising great portions of the received Roman
+explanations of the fact. But what won his heart and his enthusiasm was
+one thing; what justified itself to his intellect was another. And it
+was the reproduction, partial, as it might be, yet real and
+characteristic, in the Roman Church of the life and ways of the New
+Testament, which was the irresistible attraction that tore him from the
+associations and the affections of half a lifetime.
+
+The final break with the English Church was with much heat and
+bitterness; and both sides knew too much each of the other to warrant
+the language used on each side. The English Church had received too
+much loyal and invaluable service from him in teaching and example to
+have insulted him, as many of its chief authorities did, with the
+charges of dishonesty and bad faith; his persecutors forgot that a
+little effort on his part might, if he had been what they called him,
+and had really been a traitor, have formed a large and compact party,
+whose secession might have caused fatal damage. And he, too, knew too
+much of the better side of English religious life to justify the fierce
+invective and sarcasm with which he assailed for a time the English
+Church as a mere system of comfortable and self-deceiving worldliness.
+
+But as time went over him in his new position two things made
+themselves felt. One was, that though there was a New Testament life,
+lived in the Roman Church with conspicuous truth and reality, yet the
+Roman Church, like the English, was administered and governed by
+men--men with passions and faults, men of mixed characters--who had,
+like their English contemporaries and rivals, ends and rules of action
+not exactly like those of the New Testament. The Roman Church had to
+accept, as much as the English, the modern conditions of social and
+political life, however different in outward look from those of the
+Sermon on the Mount. The other was the increasing sense that the
+civilisation of the West was as a whole, and notwithstanding grievous
+drawbacks, part of God's providential government, a noble and
+beneficent thing, ministering graciously to man's peace and order,
+which Christians ought to recognise as a blessing of their times such
+as their fathers had not, for which they ought to be thankful, and
+which, if they were wise, they would put to what, in his phrase, was an
+"Apostolical" use. In one of the angelical hymns in the _Dream of
+Gerontius_, he dwells on the Divine goodness which led men to found "a
+household and a fatherland, a city and a state" with an earnestness of
+sympathy, recalling the enumeration of the achievements of human
+thought and hand, and the arts of civil and social life--[Greek: kai
+phthegma kai aenemoen phronaema kai astynomous orgas]--dwelt on so
+fondly by Aeschylus and Sophocles.
+
+The force with which these two things made themselves felt as age came
+on--the disappointments attending his service to the Church, and the
+grandeur of the physical and social order of the world and its Divine
+sanction in spite of all that is evil and all that is so shortlived in
+it--produced a softening in his ways of thought and speech. Never for a
+moment did his loyalty and obedience to his Church, even when most
+tried, waver and falter. The thing is inconceivable to any one who ever
+knew him, and the mere suggestion would be enough to make him blaze
+forth in all his old fierceness and power. But perfectly satisfied of
+his position, and with his duties clearly defined, he could allow large
+and increasing play, in the leisure of advancing age, to his natural
+sympathies, and to the effect of the wonderful spectacle of the world
+around him. He was, after all, an Englishman; and with all his
+quickness to detect and denounce what was selfish and poor in English
+ideas and action, and with all the strength of his deep antipathies,
+his chief interests were for things English--English literature,
+English social life, English politics, English religion. He liked to
+identify himself, as far as it was possible, with things English, even
+with things that belonged to his own first days. He republished his
+Oxford sermons and treatises. He prized his honorary fellowship at
+Trinity; he enjoyed his visit to Oxford, and the welcome which he met
+there. He discerned how much the English Church counted for in the
+fight going on in England for the faith in Christ. There was in all
+that he said and did a gentleness, a forbearance, a kindly
+friendliness, a warm recognition of the honour paid him by his
+countrymen, ever since the _Apologia_ had broken down the prejudices
+which had prevented Englishmen from doing him justice. As with his
+chief antagonist at Oxford, Dr. Hawkins, advancing years brought with
+them increasing gentleness, and generosity, and courtesy. But through
+all this there was perceptible to those who watched a pathetic yearning
+for something which was not to be had: a sense, resigned--for so it was
+ordered--but deep and piercing, how far, not some of us, but all of us,
+are from the life of the New Testament: how much there is for religion
+to do, and how little there seems to be to do it.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+CARDINAL NEWMAN'S NATURALNESS[35]
+
+
+  [35]
+  _Guardian_, 20th August 1890.
+
+Every one feels what is meant when we speak of a person's ways being
+"natural," in contrast to being artificial, or overstrained, or
+studied, or affected. But it is easier to feel what is meant than to
+explain and define it. We sometimes speak as if it were a mere quality
+of manner; as if it belonged to the outside show of things, and denoted
+the atmosphere, clear and transparent, through which they are viewed.
+It corresponds to what is lucid in talk and style, and what ethically
+is straightforward and unpretentious. But it is something much more
+than a mere surface quality. When it is real and part of the whole
+character, and not put on from time to time for effect, it reaches a
+long way down to what is deepest and most significant in a man's moral
+nature. It is connected with the sense of truth, with honest
+self-judgment, with habits of self-discipline, with the repression of
+vanity, pride, egotism. It has no doubt to do with good taste and good
+manners, but it has as much to do with good morals--with the resolute
+habit of veracity with oneself--with the obstinate preference for
+reality over show, however tempting--with the wholesome power of being
+able to think little about oneself.
+
+It is common to speak of the naturalness and ease of Cardinal Newman's
+style in writing. It is, of course, the first thing that attracts
+notice when we open one of his books; and there are people who think it
+bald and thin and dry. They look out for longer words, and grander
+phrases, and more involved constructions, and neater epigrams. They
+expect a great theme to be treated with more pomp and majesty, and they
+are disappointed. But the majority of English readers seem to be agreed
+in recognising the beauty and transparent flow of his language, which
+matches the best French writing in rendering with sureness and without
+effort the thought of the writer. But what is more interesting than
+even the formation of such a style--a work, we may be sure, not
+accomplished without much labour--is the man behind the style. For the
+man and the style are one in this perfect naturalness and ease. Any one
+who has watched at all carefully the Cardinal's career, whether in old
+days or later, must have been struck with this feature of his
+character, his naturalness, the freshness and freedom with which he
+addressed a friend or expressed an opinion, the absence of all
+mannerism and formality; and, where he had to keep his dignity, both
+his loyal obedience to the authority which enjoined it and the
+half-amused, half-bored impatience that he should be the person round
+whom all these grand doings centred. It made the greatest difference in
+his friendships whether his friends met him on equal terms, or whether
+they brought with them too great conventional deference or solemnity of
+manner. "So and so is a very good fellow, but he is not a man to talk
+to in your shirt sleeves," was his phrase about an over-logical and
+over-literal friend. Quite aware of what he was to his friends and to
+the things with which he was connected, and ready with a certain
+quickness of temper which marked him in old days to resent anything
+unbecoming done to his cause or those connected with it, he would not
+allow any homage to be paid to himself. He was by no means disposed to
+allow liberties to be taken or to put up with impertinence; for all
+that bordered on the unreal, for all that was pompous, conceited,
+affected, he had little patience; but almost beyond all these was his
+disgust at being made the object of foolish admiration. He protested
+with whimsical fierceness against being made a hero or a sage; he was
+what he was, he said, and nothing more; and he was inclined to be rude
+when people tried to force him into an eminence which he refused. With
+his profound sense of the incomplete and the ridiculous in this world,
+and with a humour in which the grotesque and the pathetic sides of life
+were together recognised at every moment, he never hesitated to admit
+his own mistakes--his "floors" as he called them. All this ease and
+frankness with those whom he trusted, which was one of the lessons
+which he learnt from Hurrell Froude, an intercourse which implied a
+good deal of give and take--all this satisfied his love of freedom, his
+sense of the real. It was his delight to give himself free play with
+those whom he could trust; to feel that he could talk with "open
+heart," understood without explaining, appealing for a response which
+would not fail, though it was not heard. He could be stiff enough with
+those who he thought were acting a part, or pretending to more than
+they could perform. But he believed--what was not very easy to believe
+beforehand--that he could win the sympathy of his countrymen, though
+not their agreement with him; and so, with characteristic naturalness
+and freshness, he wrote the _Apologia_.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+LORD BLACHFORD[36]
+
+
+  [36]
+  _Guardian_, 27th Nov. 1889.
+
+Lord Blachford, whose death was announced last week, belonged to a
+generation of Oxford men of whom few now survive, and who, of very
+different characters and with very different careers and histories, had
+more in common than any set of contemporaries at Oxford since their
+time. Speaking roughly, they were almost the last product of the old
+training at public school and at college, before the new reforms set
+in; of a training confessedly imperfect and in some ways deplorably
+defective, but with considerable elements in it of strength and
+manliness, with keen instincts of contempt for all that savoured of
+affectation and hollowness, and with a sort of largeness and freedom
+about it, both in its outlook and its discipline, which suited vigorous
+and self-reliant natures in an exciting time, when debate ran high and
+the gravest issues seemed to be presenting themselves to English
+society. The reformed system which has taken its place at Oxford
+criticises, not without some justice, the limitations of the older one;
+the narrow range of its interests, the few books which men read, and
+the minuteness with which they were "got up." But if these men did not
+learn all that a University ought to teach its students, they at least
+learned two things. They learned to work hard, and they learned to make
+full use of what they knew. They framed an ideal of practical life,
+which was very variously acted upon, but which at any rate aimed at
+breadth of grasp and generosity of purpose, and at being thorough. This
+knot of men, who lived a good deal together, were recognised at the
+time as young men of much promise, and they looked forward to life with
+eagerness and high aspiration. They have fulfilled their promise; their
+names are mixed up with all the recent history of England; they have
+filled its great places and governed its policy during a large part of
+the Queen's long reign. Their names are now for the most part things of
+the past--Sidney Herbert, Lord Canning, Lord Dalhousie, Lord Elgin,
+Lord Cardwell, the Wilberforces, Mr. Hope Scott, Archbishop Tait. But
+they still have their representatives among us--Mr. Gladstone, Lord
+Selborne, Lord Sherbrooke, Sir Thomas Acland, Cardinal Manning. It is
+not often that a University generation or two can produce such a list
+of names of statesmen and rulers; and the list might easily be
+enlarged.
+
+To this generation Frederic Rogers belonged, not the least
+distinguished among his contemporaries; and he was early brought under
+an influence likely to stimulate in a high degree whatever powers a man
+possessed, and to impress a strong character with elevated and enduring
+ideas of life and duty. Mr. Newman, with Mr. Hurrell Froude and Mr.
+Robert Wilberforce, had recently been appointed tutors of their college
+by Dr. Copleston. They were in the first eagerness of their enthusiasm
+to do great things with the college, and the story goes that Mr.
+Newman, on the look-out for promising pupils, wrote to an Eton friend,
+asking him to recommend some good Eton men for admission at Oriel.
+Frederic Rogers, so the story goes, was one of those mentioned; at any
+rate, he entered at Oriel, and became acquainted with Mr. Newman as a
+tutor, and the admiration and attachment of the undergraduate ripened
+into the most unreserved and affectionate friendship of the grown
+man--a friendship which has lasted through all storms and difficulties,
+and through strong differences of opinion, till death only has ended
+it. From Mr. Newman his pupil caught that earnest devotion to the cause
+of the Church which was supreme with him through life. He entered
+heartily into Mr. Newman's purpose to lift the level of the English
+Church and its clergy. While Mr. Newman at Oxford was fighting the
+battle of the English Church, there was no one who was a closer friend
+than Rogers, no one in whom Mr. Newman had such trust, none whose
+judgment he so valued, no one in whose companionship he so delighted;
+and the master's friendship was returned by the disciple with a noble
+and tender, and yet manly honesty. There came, as we know, times which
+strained even that friendship; when the disciple, just at the moment
+when the master most needed and longed for sympathy and counsel, had to
+choose between his duty to his Church and the claims and ties of
+friendship. He could not follow in the course which his master and
+friend had found inevitable; and that deepest and most delightful
+friendship had to be given up. But it was given up, not indeed without
+great suffering on both sides, but without bitterness or unworthy
+thoughts. The friend had seen too closely the greatness and purity of
+his master's character to fail in tenderness and loyalty, even when he
+thought his master going most wrong. He recognised that the error,
+deplorable as he thought it, was the mistake of a lofty and unselfish
+soul; and in the height of the popular outcry against him he came
+forward, with a distant and touching reverence, to take his old
+friend's part and rebuke the clamour. And at length the time came when
+disagreements were left long behind and each person had finally taken
+his recognised place; and then the old ties were knit up again. It
+could not be the former friendship of every day and of absolute and
+unreserved confidence. But it was the old friendship of affection and
+respect renewed, and pleasure in the interchange of thoughts. It was a
+friendship of the antique type, more common, perhaps, even in the last
+century than with us, but enriched with Christian hopes and Christian
+convictions.
+
+Lord Blachford, in spite of his brilliant Oxford reputation, and though
+he was a singularly vigorous writer, with wide interests and very
+independent thought, has left nothing behind him in the way of
+literature. This was partly because he very early became a man of
+affairs; partly that his health interfered with habits of study. It
+used to be told at Oxford that when he was working for his Double First
+he could scarcely use his eyes, and had to learn much of his work by
+being read to. The result was that he was not a great reader; and a man
+ought to be a reader who is to be a writer. But, besides this, there
+was a strongly marked feature in his character which told in the same
+direction. There was a curious modesty about him which formed a
+contrast with other points; with a readiness and even eagerness to put
+forth and develop his thoughts on matters that interested him, with a
+perfect consciousness of his remarkable powers of statement and
+argument, with a constitutional impetuosity blended with caution which
+showed itself when anything appealed to his deeper feelings or called
+for his help; yet with all these impelling elements, his instinct was
+always to shrink from putting himself forward, except when it was a
+matter of duty. He accepted recognition when it came, but he never
+claimed it. And this reserve, which marked his social life, kept him
+back from saying in a permanent form much that he had to say, and that
+was really worth saying. Like many of the distinguished men of his day,
+he was occasionally a journalist. We have been reminded by the _Times_
+that he at one time wrote for that paper. And he was one of the men to
+whose confidence and hope in the English Church the _Guardian_ owes its
+existence.
+
+His life was the uneventful one of a diligent and laborious public
+servant, and then of a landlord keenly alive to the responsibilities of
+his position. He passed through various subordinate public employments,
+and finally succeeded Mr. Herman Merivale as permanent Under-Secretary
+for the Colonies. It is a great post, but one of which the work is done
+for the most part out of sight. Colonial Secretaries in Parliament come
+and go, and have the credit, often quite justly, of this or that
+policy. But the public know little of the permanent official who keeps
+the traditions and experience of the department, whose judgment is
+always an element, often a preponderating element, in eventful
+decisions, and whose pen drafts the despatches which go forth in the
+name of the Government. Sir Frederic Rogers, as he became in time, had
+to deal with some of the most serious colonial questions which arose
+and were settled while he was at the Colonial Office. He took great
+pains, among other things, to remove, or at least diminish, the
+difficulties which beset the _status_ of the Colonial Church and
+clergy, and to put its relations to the Church at home on a just and
+reasonable footing. There is a general agreement as to the industry and
+conspicuous ability with which his part of the work was done. Mr.
+Gladstone set an admirable example in recognising in an unexpected way
+faithful but unnoticed services, and at the same time paid a merited
+honour to the permanent staff of the public offices, when he named Sir
+Frederic Rogers for a peerage.
+
+Lord Blachford, for so he became on his retirement from the Colonial
+Office, cannot be said to have quitted entirely public life, as he
+always, while his strength lasted, acknowledged public claims on his
+time and industry. He took his part in two or three laborious
+Commissions, doing the same kind of valuable yet unseen work which he
+had done in office, guarding against blunders, or retrieving them,
+giving direction and purpose to inquiries, suggesting expedients. But
+his main employment was now at his own home. He came late in life to
+the position of a landed proprietor, and he at once set before himself
+as his object the endeavour to make his estate as perfect as it could
+be made--perfect in the way in which a naturally beautiful country and
+his own good taste invited him to make it, but beyond all, as perfect
+as might be, viewed as the dwelling-place of his tenants and the
+labouring poor. A keen and admiring student of political economy, his
+sympathies were always with the poor. He was always ready to challenge
+assumptions, such as are often loosely made for the convenience of the
+well-to-do. The solicitude which always pursued him was the thought of
+his cottages, and it was not satisfied till the last had been put in
+good order. The same spirit prompted him to allow labourers who could
+manage the undertaking to rent pasture for a few cows; and the
+experiment, he thought, had succeeded. The idea of justice and the
+general welfare had too strong a hold on his mind to allow him to be
+sentimental in dealing with the difficult questions connected with
+land. But if his labourers found him thoughtful of their comfort his
+farmers found him a good landlord--strict where he met with dishonesty
+and carelessness, but open-minded and reasonable in understanding their
+points of view, and frank, equitable, and liberal in meeting their
+wishes. Disclaiming all experience of country matters, and not minding
+if he fell into some mistakes, he made his care of his estate a model
+of the way in which a good man should discharge his duties to the land.
+
+His was one of those natures which have the gift of inspiring
+confidence in all who come near him; all who had to do with him felt
+that they could absolutely trust him. The quality which was at the
+bottom of his character as a man was his unswerving truthfulness; but
+upon this was built up a singularly varied combination of elements not
+often brought together, and seldom in such vigour and activity. Keen,
+rapid, penetrating, he was quick in detecting anything that rung hollow
+in language or feeling; and he did not care to conceal his dislike and
+contempt. But no one threw himself with more genuine sympathy into the
+real interests of other people. No matter what it was, ethical or
+political theory, the course of a controversy, the arrangement of a
+trust-deed, the oddities of a character, the marvels of natural
+science, he was always ready to go with his companion as far as he
+chose to go, and to take as much trouble as if the question started had
+been his own. Where his sense of truth was not wounded he was most
+considerate and indulgent; he seemed to keep through life his
+schoolboy's amused tolerance for mischief that was not vicious. No one
+entered more heartily into the absurdities of a grotesque situation; of
+no one could his friends be so sure that he would miss no point of a
+good story; and no one took in at once more completely or with deeper
+feeling the full significance of some dangerous incident in public
+affairs, or discerned more clearly the real drift of confused and
+ambiguous tendencies. He was conscious of the power of his intellect,
+and he liked to bring it to bear on what was before him; he liked to
+probe things to the bottom, and see how far his companion in
+conversation was able to go; but ready as he was with either argument
+or banter he never, unless provoked, forced the proof of his power on
+others. For others, indeed, of all classes and characters, so that they
+were true, he had nothing but kindness, geniality, forbearance, the
+ready willingness to meet them on equal terms. Those who had the
+privilege of his friendship remember how they were kept up in their
+standard and measure of duty by the consciousness of his opinion, his
+judgment, his eagerness to feel with them, his fearless, though it
+might be reluctant, expression of disagreement It was, indeed, that
+very marked yet most harmonious combination of severity and tenderness
+which gave such interest to his character. A strong love of justice, a
+deep and unselfish and affectionate gentleness and patience, are
+happily qualities not too rare. But to have known one at once so
+severely just and so indulgently tender and affectionate makes a mark
+in a man's life which he forgets at his peril.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited, _Edinburgh_.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Occasional Papers, by R.W. Church
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