tihrary of Cho theological ^tminaxy PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY BR 759 .T84 1885 Tulloch, John, 1823-1886. Movements of religious thought in Britain during t^v. :..;■; .;/«•• MOVEMENT^-..oji,„Li- OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN BRITAIN DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ST. GILES' LECTURES JOHN TULLOCH, D.D., LLD. SENIOR PRINCIPAL IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1885 TO Mrs. OLIPHANT, AUTHOR OF 'the CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,' 'A BELEAGUERED CITY,' ' LIFE OF EDWARD IRVING,' ' THE LITERARY HISTORY OF ENGLAND, 1790-1825,' ETC. My dear Mrs. Oliphant, It is a great pleasure to me to be allowed to associate your name with these Lectures. Slight as they are, I have been reminded more than once, during their pre- paration, of a large subject which used to engage our discussion many years ago, and in the treatment of which you were to bear what would have proved by far the most interesting part. This, like many other pro- jects, is not now likely to be attempted ; but the thought of it has brought you and our long friendship much to my mind. iv Dedication. If I were to express all the admiration I feel for your genius, and still more all the esteem I have learned to cherish for your character, I should use language which I know you would refuse to read ; but I may at least be allowed to say thus publicly, that I know of no writer to whose large powers, spiritual insight, and purity of thought, and subtle discrimination of many of the best aspects of our social life and character, our generation owes so much as it does to you. Always faithfully yours, JOHN TULLOCH. University, St. Andrews, August 1885. CONTENTS. LECTURE I. COLERIDGE AND HIS SCHOOL. PAGE 1-4 4 6 7 8 Scope of the present course, The beginnings of the century — Wordsworth, Coleridge early abandoned poetry, ..... Extent of his influence on religious thought, .... Defects in his character : Lamb : Carlyle, .... State of religion at beginning of the century, .... g Coleridge exercised a definite influence on Religious Thought by — ( I.) A renovation of cunent Christian ideas, . . . 11-24 His spiritual philosophy, ..... 11 Severance of religion from the highest spiritual life in man by the Evangelical School, .... 13 Coleridge maintained their essential kinship, . . 14 Instance his exposition of the doctrines of Sin and Redemption, 20 He recognised a province of the Unknown, . . 23 (2.) An advance in Biblical study, .... 24-30 Confessions of an Inquirijtg Spii'it, ... 24 Futility of the theory of literal Inspiration, . 27 Alleged difficulty of the selective process, . 28 Its necessity, . 29 vi Contents. PAGE (3.) By an enlarged conception of the church, . . 30-33 Essay on The Constitution of Church and State, . 31 National Church and Christian Church, ... 32 His Disciples — Julius Charles Hare: John Sterling, 34-38 LECTURE II. THE EARLY ORIEL SCHOOL AND ITS CONGENERS. Whately and the Early Oriel Movement, .... 41 The ' Noetics ' — Dr. Hawkins : Copleston : Arnold, . 42 Blanco White, 45 Whately — his youth. Limited tastes in literature, ... 46 Comparison with Coleridge, ...... 48 His critical work On Some of the Difficulties in the lVritinr;s of the Apostle Paid, 49 Logic and Scriptural truth, ...... 51 His character and influence, ...... 52 Arnold — His friendship with W^hately, ..... 53 * Is Arnold a Christian ? ' 54 His insistance on the relation of Christianity to every- day life, ......... 56 His idea of the Church, ....... 58 Work in Biblical criticism, 61 Hampden — Motives for his persecution, .... 65 The Bampton Lectures of 1832, on The Scholastic Phi- losophy in relation to Christian Theology, ... 67 The outciy of 1836, 71 Value of his critical work, ...... 74 Thirlwall — His early studies — translation of Schleiermacher — character and influence, ...... 75-79 Milman, .......... 79-85 His History of the fews, ...... 81 Coil toils. Vll LECTURE III THE OXFORD OR ANGLO-CATHOLIC MOVEMENT Its beginnings, ...... Newman and Pusey — their early views, Pusey's German studies, and original Liberalism Newman's religious and personal influence, . R. H. Froude — his influence on Newman, His character, ..... Keble — his ascendancy at Oxford, Character, The Christian Year, .... Points of Contact with Newman, . Course of the movement — political events, Keble's Assize Sennon — followed by I'rat Times, ...... Newman as a tract-writer, Leadership of Dr. Pusey, Dogmatic principles at root, . Newman's ascendancy — Sermon.s, . Progress towards Rome, Tract 90 — consequences. Rise of the Younger Anglican School, . Newman's Anglo-Catholicism essentially e transitional, ..... Significance and effects of the Oxford movement, ts for /// ternal anc 86 89 89 92 95 96 99 100 102 103 104 106 107 109 III 114 "5 117 120 121 122 Vlll Contents. LECTURE IV. MOVEMENT OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN SCOTLAND. PAGE Intellectual energies of Scotland manifested in religious move- ments, .... 125 Naturalistic tendencies — George Combe, . . . . 127 Heresies abounding, ........ 128 Thomas Erskine — his character and friendships, . . . 129 His first book — emphasising the subjective aspects of religion, 133 Further applications — criticism of his views, . . . 140 John Macleod Campbell — his ministry and doctrines, , . 145 Prosecution — his defence, . . . . . . 150 Edward Irving, 156-160 The anonymous True Plan of a Living Temple and other works, 1 63 Deposition of their author, Mr. Wright of Borthwick, . 165 Character and gains of this epoch, . , . . . 167 LECTURE V. THOMAS CARLYLE AS A RELIGIOUS TEACHER. Introductoiy — Religious thought outside the Church, . , 169 Thomas Carlyle — Parentage and inherited characteristics, . 172 Early religious experience, 175 His ' Conversion ' (1821), 180 Life at Hoddam Hill (1826), 182 Marriage — Literaiy struggles, 185 Sartor Resartus — Remarks on his style, . . . 185 Rectorial address (1865) and subsequent popularity, . 187 Contents. IX His characteristics and influence — (l.) As literary man, His views on literature, ..... Discovered a new literary tune and spirit, German literature — results, .... (2.) As religious teacher, . . . ■ . Effect on individuals, ..... Views on historic religions, .... Explanation of his attitude towards Christianity, Insistance on a Divine order, .... Worship of Supreme force, .... Summary, 190-195 190 191 193 196-208 196 198 200 202 204 205-208 LECTURE VI. JOHN STUART MILL AND HIS SCPIOOL. The upbringing of John Stuart Mill and that of Carlyle — a comparison and contrast, James Mill's unbelief, John Stuart Mill — his early education, . Subsequent logical training, . The crisis of his life — his 'Conversion,' . Modification in his opinions — Works, Criticism of the ground-assumption of his pliilosui affecting morals and religion. His special views on religion, His contribution to religious thought, George Grote— his want of spiritual experience, More a Millite than John Stuart Mill himself G. H. Lewes — his philosophy, Character as a thinker, .... y as 209 211 217 218 222 225 237 243 247 250 251 252 Contents, LECTURE VII. BROAD CHURCH^ F. D. MAURICE AND CHARLES KINGSLEY. Sceptical reaction from the Oxford movement, Francis Newman : Clough : Matthew Arnold's poems George Eliot and her circle, .... Extent of her hold on religion, Counter-influence — The ' Broad ' Church, The Maurice household — religious divergence F. D. Maurice — his religious experience, Fundamental Principles of his religious creed — (i.) Principle of * Universal Redemption,' (2.) The desire for unity. His creed positive and dogmatic. The Maurice-Kingsley vSchool, like the Platonists, reconstructive and apologetic, Attitude assumed in his Theological Essays, His significance and work as a religious thinker, His life — connection with the Oxford movement Charles Kingsley — his relations with Maurice, Intensely religious character of Maurice, Kingsley as a religious teacher, .... Cambridge PAGH 254 256 256 259 260 263 266 268 271 276 277 280 282 284 286 291 293 LECTURE VIII. BROAD CHURCH' Continued: F. W. ROBERTSON AND BISHOP EWING. Robertson — early life and opinions, Ministry at Winchester — asceticism, Geneva, . . . . . Cheltenham — change of views. 295 297 299 300 Contents. XI His spiritual sb'uggles — the Tyrol, . Brighton — power as a preacher, Cha7-acte7-istics as a preacher — (l.) Expansive intellectual faculty, . (2.) Spiritual intensity, . (3.) Sincerity and love of truth, His theological standpoint, His attitude towards dogma, . Bishop Ewing — his religious characteristics, . Religious Thought since i860, Its scientific character, . . . • . Fundamental Questions, .... NeM'' spiritual movement — Dr. James Martineau, Dean Stanley and Mr. Jowett, Concluding remarks, ..... 303 306 309 3" 315 316 320-326 327-334 328 328 329 331 334 MOVEMENTS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 1820-60. ST. GILES' LECTURES, I. COLERIDGE AND HIS SCHOOL. T HAVE undertaken to give in a course of eight lectures some account of the Movements of Religious Thought in our country during the present century. As the subject is in any view a large one, and presents many aspects, it is important at the outset to indicate its exact character and the limits within which I propose to treat it. Our subject then is the Movements of Religious Thought — not of Religion — within the century. Re- ligion is a wide word, with some meanings of which we have nothing to do. The expression ' Religious Thought ' may be also more or less widely interpreted ; but on any interpretation it leaves outside much be- longing to religion and its life and movement in the world. It leaves outside, for example, not only the large field of practical Christian action, but also that of ec- clesiastical and politico-ecclesiastical parties. With A 2 Movements of Religious Thottght. these, properly speaking, we have nothing to do. It is only when their motif or spirit, as in the Oxford movement, is inextricably intertwined with impulses of new or revived thought, that we touch upon them. A movement of religious thought implies the rise of some fresh life within the sphere of such thought — some new wave of opinion either within the Church, or deeply affecting it from without, modifying its past conceptions. It is a moulding influence, leaving behind it definite traces, and working its way more or less into the national consciousness, so that this con- sciousness remains affected even if the movement itself disappears. It is this character which gives signi- ficance to our subject, and will be found to lend to it interest for all who are really concerned with religious questions and the progress of higher civilisation. Thus definite in subject, our lectures are limited locally. The movements of which I am to speak are movements within our country alone. The large field of Continental criticism and speculation in matters of religion is not before us, although it may be impossible at times to refrain from stretching our view towards it. Further, our lectures run within definite chrono- logical limits ; and this claims particular notice. They have nothing to do with the last twenty-five years, or immediately preceding generation. They only reach to i860 at the utmost, about which time a marked change took place in the current of philo- sophical and religious speculation, a change which may generally, and for our present purpose, be indicated by the word now so common — Evolution. New schools of thoucrht have arisen in all directions. Coleridge and his School. 3 in philosophy, ethics, and theology, more or less affected by the idea which this word denotes. But all these schools in the meantime are beyond our scope. It was undesirable to attempt to embrace a more extended field within one course of lectures ; and my only fear is that the course will be found not too limited, but too diversified and ample. From Coleridge to John Stuart Mill, from Newman to Maurice, from Carlyle to Kingsley and Frederick Robertson, carries us so wide afield that we shall have to complain not of lack of material, but of an embarrassment of rich material. The interest and importance of the subject can hardly be doubted by any who understand it. The movements of religious thought in our own country lie at least very close to us and the life and work of all our churches. We cannot escape the influence of those movements whatever be our own position. Even those who most disown all connection with modern Thought are sometimes found strongly re- flecting its influences, — more frequently perhaps mis- taking its real meaning. It seems to be the duty therefore of all intelligent persons to try in some degree to understand the impulses moving their time. Such and such opinions, it is often said, are * in the air.' The thought of our own time, in its evolving phases or folds of varied hue, bathes us like an atmo- sphere. It wraps us round, penetrating often to our inmost sentiments. A certain class of minds remain indifferent, — secure within their well-worn armour of traditionary prejudgment. Another class is apt to be carried away altogether, and lose their old moorings. But religious thought is happily not at the 4 Movements of Religious Thought. mercy of either of these classes. Rightly viewed, it is typified neither by tradition nor revolution. It is a continuous power in human life and history, moving onwards with the ever accumulating growths of human knowledge and of spiritual experience ; ever new yet old ; linking age to age, it is to be hoped, in happier and more benign intelligence. Let me further say that I do not mean to charac- terise what may be right or wrong in these movements. I only venture to describe them, and set them fairly before you as I myself understand them. Particularly my aim will be to show in a purely historical spirit how naturally they connect themselves with one another, and so far explain each other and them- selves in the circumstances of their rise and course. I do not myself believe in movements of thought brought about by man's device, nor in the appli- cation of such commonplaces as ' orthodox ' and ' heterodox ' to the description of such movements. I believe in the continuous movement of the Divine Spirit enlarging, correcting, and modifying human opinion. We speak of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as marking distinct phases of thought ; but we have to remember that such classifications are conven- tional and so far inapplicable. The intellectual revival particularly identified with our century had begun before the close of the last century, and it was not till twenty years after our era commenced that any new movement can be traced in the sphere of religious thought. The flush of new insight and passion, arising from the larger and closer study of Coleridge mid his School. 5 Nature and Humanity born of the French Revolu- tion, poured itself forth in poetry long before the larger and intenser spirit of the time showed itself in other directions. It may be said that Words- worth gave voice to a higher thought not only about nature but about religion. The ' Solitary among the Mountains ' is a preacher and not only a singer. He goes to the heart of religion and lays anew its founda- tion in the natural instincts of man. But while the poetry both of Wordsworth and Coleridge was instinct with a new life of religious feeling, and may be said to have given a new radiancy to its central principles,^ it did not initiate any distinctive movement. In religious opinions Wordsworth soon fell back upon, if he ever consciously departed from, the old lines of Anglican tradition. The vague pantheism of the * Excursion' implies rather a lack of distinctive dogma than any fresh insight into religious problems or capacity of co-ordinating them in a new manner. And so soon as the need of definite religious con- ceptions came to the poet, the Church in her custom- ary theology became his satisfactory refuge. The * Ecclesiastical Sonnets ' mark this definite stage in his spiritual development. Wordsworth did for the religious thought of his time something more and better perhaps than giving it any definite impulse. While leaving it in the old channels he gave it a richer and deeper volume. He showed with what vital affinity religion cleaves to humanity in all its true and simple phases when uncontaminated by conceit or frivolity. Nature and man alike were to him essentially religious, or only conceivable as the out- ^ ' Admiration, Hope, and Love.' See The Excursion, B. iv. 6 Movements of Religious Thought. come of a Spirit of Life, ' the Soul of all the worlds.' ^ Wordsworth in short remained, as he began, a poet. He did not enter into the sphere of religious thought or busy himself with its issues. Coleridge's career presents a marked contrast to that of his friend. He may be said to have aban- doned poetry just when Wordsworth in his quiet settle- ment at Grasmere(i799) was consecrating his life to it. Fellows in quickening the poetic revival of their time, they were soon widely separated in life and pursuit. Whether it be true, according to De Quincey, that Coleridge's poetical power was killed by the habit of opium-eating, it is certainly true that * the harp of Quantock ' ^ was never again struck save for a brief moment. The poet Coleridge passed into the lec- turer, and political and literary critic, and then, during the final period of his Hfe, from i8i6 to 1834, into the philosopher and theologian. It is this latter period of his life that alone concerns us. I need not say how differently Coleridge has been estimated as a religious thinker. Carlyle's caricature of the Sage as he sat ' on the brow of Highgate Hill ' in those years,^ is known to all ; and a severely 1 The Excursion, B. ix. 2 Not only the Ancient Mariner and the first part of Christahel, but also Kubla Khan were composed at Nether Stowey among the Quantock Hills in 1797. The second part of Christabel belongs to the year iSoo, and was written at Keswick, although not published till i8i6. Nothing of the same quality was ever produced by Coleridge, although he continued to write verses. ^ The value of Carlyle's description may now be judged more fairly in the light of his own Life and Letters, and the indiscriminate and savage assaults which he has made on so many reputations. * It may be found,' said a reviewer of the Life of John Sterling in the AWth British Revie7i\ Feb. 1 852, with a prescient insight too unhappily realised by Coleridge mid his School. 7 critical, but, as we must judge, superficial estimate has been lately given by Mr. Traill in the series of ' English Men of Letters.' Our business is not so much to attempt any criticism of the value of Coleridge's thought as to describe it as a new power. That it was such a power is beyond all question. It is not merely the testimony of such men as Arch- deacon Hare and John Sterling, of Newman and of John Stuart Mill, but it is the fact that the later streams of religious thought in England are all more or less coloured by his influence. They flow in deeper and different channels since he lived. Not only are some of- those streams directly trace- able to him, and said to derive all their vitality from his principles, but those which are most opposed to him have been moulded more or less by the im- press of his religious genius. There was much in the man Coleridge himself to provoke, animadver- sion ; there may have been aspects of his teaching that lend themselves to ridicule ; but if a genius, seminal as his has been in the world of thought and of criticism as well as poetry, is not to excite our reverence, there is little that remains for us to rever- ence in the intellectual world. And when literature regains the higher tone of our earlier national life, the tone of Hooker and of Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be again acknowledged, in Julius Mr. Froude's biogiaphic labours, ' It may be found when the secrets of another Sanctuary are unveiled, that if there was not much "pious" or "partly courteous snuffle" in the discourse there, there was yet in plenty "a confused unintelligible flood of utterance threatening to swamp all known land-marks of thought and drown the world and us " — a vast vituperative commotion which made noise in the ear without bringing much light or life to the heart.' 8 Movements of Religious Thought. Hare's words, as 'a true sovereign of English thought.' He will take rank in the same line of spiritual genius. He has the same elevation of feeling, the same profound grasp of moral and spiritual ideas, the same wide range of vision. He has in short, the same love of wisdom, the same insight, the same largeness — never despising nature, or art, or literature for the sake of religion, still less ever despising religion for the sake of culture. In read- ing over Coleridge's prose works again, especially his Aids to Reflection, and his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, — returning to them after a long past familiarity, — I am particularly struck with their massive and large intellectuality, akin to our older Elizabethan literature. There is a constant play of great power, of imagination as well as reason, of spiritual insight as well as logical subtlety. To speak of Coleridge as an -eminently healthy writer in the higher regions of thought may seem absurd to some who think mainly of his life, and the fatal failure which characterised it. It is the shadow of this failure of manliness in his conduct, as in that of his lifelong friend Charles Lamb, which no doubt prompted the great genius who carried manliness, if little sweetness, from his Annandale home, to paint both the one and the other in such darkened colours. We have not a word to say on behalf of the failings of either. They were deplorable and unworthy ; but it is the fact notwithstanding that the minds of both retained a serenity and a certain touch of respectful- ness which are lacking in their Scottish cotemporary. They were both finer-edged than Carlyle. They in- herited a more delicate and polite personal culture ; Coleridge and his School, 9 and delicacy can never be far distant from true manli- ness. Neither of them could have written of the treasures of old religion as Carlyle did in his Life of Sterling ; whether they accepted for themselves these treasures or not, they would have spared the tender faith of others, and respected an ancient Ideal. And be sure, this is the higher attitude. Nothing which has ever deeply interested humanity, or profoundly moved it, is treated with contempt by a wise and good man. It may call for and deserve rejection, but never insult. Unhappily this attitude of mind, reserved as well as critical, reverent as well as bold, has been conspicuously absent in some of the most powerful and best-known writers of our era. The Aids to Reflection summon us, both by title and contents, to thoughtfulness. It is a book which none but a thinker on Divine things will ever like. It is such a book as all such thinkers have prized. To many it has given a new force of religious insight, while for its time, beyond all doubt, it created a real epoch in Christian thought. It did this certainly not from any merits as a literary composition, for it is fragmentary throughout ; and the thought of the volume is nowhere wrought into a complete system. But it had life in it ; and the living seed, scattered and desultory as it was, brought forth fruit in many minds. The Evangelical movement, which in the last cen- tury kindled so many hearts, and wrought such living Christian energy in many lives, survived into the present century under the vigorous guidance of Wil- berforce and Simeon of Cambridge. It was still active, living, and powerful, although it had lost its lo Movements of Religious Thought. first freshness. Nor was the AngUcan tradition, as personified in men hke Keble, so weak as has been sometimes assumed. There was more quiet and effec- tive rehgion throughout the land than our gener- ahsations sometimes allow; witness, for example, amone the Unitarians such a man as Frederick Maurice's father. There was, however, a lack of earnest movement save in the Evangelical direction. The testimony of Newman in England, the career of Chalmers in Scotland, may be held as evidence of this. From the Evangelical Succession — Wilberforce on the one side, and Romaine and Thomas Scott on the other — came the first impulses which in the second decade of our century moved these great minds. Evangelicalism was, in short, the only type of aggressive religion then, or for some time, pre- vailing, although its aggressiveness was more of a practical than of an intellectual kind. Intel- lectually there was little or no directing power in the sphere of religion. In the course of the next fifteen years, or onwards from 1810 to 1830, there sprang up a great variety of new influences : Whately and Arnold in England, Thomas Erskine in Scot- land, Newman and the whole Anelo-Catholic host some years later. We shall have occasion to advert to all. But the movement which sprang from Cole- ridge claims our first attention. It stands upon the whole in advance of the others. It has been the most fertile and pervasive. All the other move- ments may be said to have borrowed more or less from Coleridge. Whatever he borrowed was from Germany, or from long-past sources of our own literature. Coleridge and his School. 1 1 What, then, were the characteristics of the Cole- ridgian movement? In what respects is it true that Coleridge gave a definite impulse to the religious thought of his time ? In three respects, as it appears to us : 1st, by a renovation of current Christian ideas ; 2dl}', by an advance in Biblical study ; and, 3^/;/, by an enlarged conception of the Church. (i.) Coleridge, we know, was a man of many ambi- tions never realised ; but of all his ambitions, the most persistent was that of laying anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy.* This was 'the great work' to which he frequently alluded as having given * the preparation of more than twenty years of his life.' ^ Like other great tasks projected by him, it was very imperfectly accomplished ; and there will always be those in consequence who fail to understand his influ- ence as a leader of thought. We are certainly not bound to take Coleridge at his own value, nor to attach the same importance as he did to some of his speculations. He failed to do justice to them in more senses than one. Nor can Mr. Green's volumes, reverent and studious as they are, be taken in place of an adequate exposition by the author himself His more abstract speculations, we confess, do not much interest us. It has indeed been said that Coleridge's speculative philosophy lies at the founda- tion of all his theology.^ This may be so ; to a large extent it is so ; but no one knew better than Coleridge himself that there was nothing new in his Platonic ^ Spiritual Philosophy, founded on the Teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By Jos. Henry Green, F.R.S., D.C.L. 1865. '^ This idea is elaborated in a clever, but somewhat narrow book, Modern Anglican Theology, by the Rev. James H. Rigg. 1857. 1 2 Movements of Religious Thoitght. realism. It was merely a restoration, of the old religious metaphysic which had preceded * the me- chanical systems,' ^ which became dominant in the reign of Charles the Second. He himself constantly claims to do nothing more than re-assert the prin- ciples of Hooker, of Henry More, of John Smith, and Leighton, all of whom he speaks of as * Platonizing divines ! ' But the religious teaching of Coleridge came upon his generation as a new breath, not merely or mainly because he revived these ancient principles, but because he vitalised anew their appli- cation to Christianity, so as to transform it from a mere creed, or collection of articles, into a living mode of thought, embracing all human activity. Coleridge is misjudged when looked upon as a mere theosophic dreamer or ontologist. His Tran- scendentalism, borrowed from Kant and Schelling, his famous distinction of the Reason and the Under- standing, his speculative analysis of the Trinitarian idea, are not without their significance ; but these were not the factors that made his teaching^ influ- ential. Coleridge was no mere metaphysician. He was a great interpreter of spiritual facts — a student of spiritual life, quickened by a peculiarly vivid and painful experience; and he saw in Christianity, rightly conceived, at once the true explanation of the facts of our spiritual being, and the true remedy for their dis- order. He brought human nature, in all the breadth of its activities, once more near to Christianity, and found in the latter not merely a means of salvation in any limited evangelical sense, but the highest Truth and Health — a perfect Philosophy. His main power ^ See particularly his own statement. Coleridge and his School. 1 3 lay in this subjective direction, just as here it was that his age was most needing stimulus and guidance. The Evangelical School, with all its merits, had conceived of Christianitv rather as something; super- added to the highest life of humanity than as the perfect development of that life; as a scheme for human salvation authenticated by miracles, and, so to speak, interpolated into human history rather than a divine philosophy, witnessing to itself from the beginning in ail the higher phases of that history. And so Philosophy, and no less Literature, and Art, and Science, were conceived apart from religion. The world and the Church were not only antagonistic in the biblical sense, as the embodiments of the Carnal and the Divdne Spirit — which they must ever be ; but they were, so to speak, severed portions of life divided by outward signs and badges ; and those who joined the one or the other were supposed to be clearly marked off All who know the writings of the Evan- gelical School of the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth century, from the poetry of Cowper and the letters of his friend Newton, to the writings of Romaine, John Foster, and Wilberforce, and even Chalmers, will know how such commonplaces everywhere reappear in them. That they were associated with the most devout and beautiful lives, that they even served to foster a peculiar ardour of Christian feeling and love of God, cannot be disputed. But they were essentially narrow and false.. They destroyed the largeness and unity of human experience. They not merely separated religion from art and philosophy, but they tended to separate* it from morality. 14 Movements of Religious TJiougkt. Coleridge's most distinctive work was to restore the broken harmony between reason and reUgion, by enlarging the conception of both, but of the latter especially, — by showing how man is essentially a religious being having a definite spiritual constitu- tion, apart from which the very idea of rehgion becomes impossible. Religion is not therefore some- thing brought to man ; it is his highest education. Religion, he says, was designed ' to improve the nature and faculties of man, in order to the right governing of our actions, to the securing the peace and progress, external and internal, of individuals and of communities.' ^ Christianity is in the highest degree adapted to this end ; and nothing can be a part of it that is not duly proportioned thereto. In thus vindicating the rationality of religion, Coleridge had a twofold task before him as every such thinker has. He had to assert against the Epicurean and Empirical School the spiritual constitution of human nature, and against the fanatical or hyper- evangelical school the reasonable working of spiritual influence. He had to maintain, on the one hand, the essential divinity of man, that * there is more in him than can be rationally referred to the life of nature and the mechanism of organisation,' and on the other hand to show that this higher life of the spirit is throughout rational — that it is superstition and not true religion which professes to resolve * men's faith and practice ' into the illumination of such a spirit as they can give no " account of, — such as does not enlighten their reason or enable them to render their doctrine intelligible to others. He fights, in short, ^ Aids to Reflection (ed. 1848), vol. i. p. 143. Coleridge and his School. 1 5 alike against materialistic negation and credulous enthusiasm. The former he meets with the assertion of ' a spirituality in man,' — a self-power or Will at the root of -all his being. ' If there be ought spiritual in man, the will must be such. If there be a will, there must be a spirituality in man.' He assumes both positions, seeing clearly — what all who radically deal with such a question must see — that it becomes in the end an alternative postulate on one side and the other. The theologian cannot prove his case, because the very terms in which it must be proved are already denied ab initio by the materialist. But no more can the materialist, for the same reason, refute the spiritual thinker. There can be no argument where no common premiss is granted. Coleridge was quite alive to this, yet he validly appeals to common experi- ence. * I assume,' he says, ' a something the proof of which no man' can give to another, yet every man may find for himself If any man assert that he has no such experience, I am bound to disbelieve him, I cannot do otherwise without unsettling the foundation of my own moral nature. For I either find it as an essential of the humanity common to him and to me, or I have not found it at all. . . . All the significant objections of the materialist and necessi- tarian,' he adds, * are contained in the term morality, and all the objections of the infidel in the term religion. These very terms imply something granted, which the objector in each case supposes not granted. A moral philosophy is only such because it assumes a principle of morality, a will in man, and so a Christian philosophy or theology has its own assump- 1 6 Move^nents of Religious Thought. tions resting on three ultimate facts, namely, the reality of the law of conscience ; the existence of a responsible will as the subject of that law ; and lastly, the existence of God.' . . . ' The first is a fact of con- sciousness ; the second, a fact of reason necessarily concluded from the first ; and the third, a fact of history interpreted by both.' These were the radical data of the religious philosophy of Coleridge. They imply a general conception of religion which was revolutionaiy for his age, simple and ancient as the principles are. The evangelical tradition brought religion to man from the outside. It took no concern of man's spiritual constitution beyond the fact that he was a sinner and in danger of hell. Coleridge started from a similar but larger experience, including not only sin, but the whole spiritual basis on which sin rests. * I profess a deep conviction,' he says, ' that man is a fallen creature,' * not by accident of bodily constitution or any other cause, but as diseased in his will — in that will which is the true and only strict synonyme of the word I, or the intelligent Self This ' intelligent self is a fundamental conception lying at the root of his system of thought. Sin is an attribute of it, and cannot be conceived apart from it, and conscience, or the original sense of right and wrong, governing the will. Apart from these internal realities there is no religion, and the function of the Christian Revela- tion is to build up the spiritual life out of these realities — ^to remedy the evil, to enlighten the con- science, to educate the will. This effective power of religion comes directly from God in Christ. Here Coleridge joins the Evangelical School, as Coleridge and Ids School. 1 7 indeed every school of living Christian Faith. This was the element of truth he found in the doctrine of Election as handled ' practically, morally, humanly,' by Leighton. Every true Christian, he argues, must attribute his distinction not in any degree to himself — ' his own resolves and strivings,' ' his own will and understanding,' still less to ' his own comparative excel- lence,' — but to God, ' the Being in whom the promise of life originated, and on whom its fulfilment de- pends.' Election so far is a truth of experience. 'This the conscience requires; this the highest interests of morality demand.' So far it is a question of facts with which the speculative reason has nothing to do. But when the theological reasoner abandons the ground of fact and 'the safe circle of religion and practical reason for the shifting sandwastes and mirages of speculative theology ' — then he uses words without meaning. He can have no insight into the workings or plans of a Being who is neither an object of his senses nor a part of his self-con- sciousness. Nothing can show better than this brief exposition how closely Coleridge in his theology clung to a base of spiritual experience, and sought to measure even the most abstruse Christian mysteries by facts. The same thing may be shown by referring to his doctrine of the Trinity, which has been supposed the most transcendental and, so to speak, *Neo-PIatonist' of all his doctrines. But truly speaking his Trinitarianism like his doctrine of Election is a moraj. rather than a speculative truth. The Trinitarian idea was indeed true to him notionally. The full analysis of the notion ' God ' seemed to him to involve it. * I find a B 1 8 Movements of Religions ThotcgliL certain notion in my mind, and say that is what I understand by the term God. From books and con- versation I find that the learned generally connect the same notion with the same word. I then apply the rules laid down by the masters of logic for the involution and evolution of terms, and prove (to as many as agree with my premisses) that the notion "God" involves the notion "Trinity." ' So he argued, and many times recurred to the same Transcendental analysis. But the truer and more urgent spiritual basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, even to his own mind, was not its notional but its moral necessity. Christ could only be a Saviour as being Divine. Sal- vation is a Divine vv^ork. 'The idea of Redemption involves belief in the Divinity of our Lord. And our Lord's Divinity again involves the Trinitarian idea, because in and through this idea alone the Divinity of Christ can be received without breach of faith in the Unity of the Godhead.' In other words, the best evidence of the doctrine of the Trinity is the compulsion of the spiritual conscience which demands a Divine Saviour ; and only in and through the great idea of Trinity in Unity does this demand become consistent with Christian Monotheism.^ These doctrines are merely used in illustration, as they are by Coleridge himself in his Aids to Reflec- ^This was a favourite thought with Coleridge, as, for example, in his Literary Remains (vol. i. pp. 393-4) : — ' The Trinity of Persons in the Unity of the Godhead would have been a necessary idea of my speculative reason. God must have had co-eternally an adequate idea of Himself in and through which He created all things. But this would have been a mere speculative idea. Solely in consequence of our redemption does the Trinity become a doctrine, the belief of which as real is commanded by conscience.' Coleridge and his School, 19 tion. We do not dwell upon them. But nothing can show in a stronger light the general character of the change which he wrought in the conception of Christianity. From being a mere traditional creed, with Anglican and Evangelical, and it may be added Unitarian, alike, it became a living expression of the spiritual consciousness. In a sense, of course, it had always been so. The Evangelical made much of its living power, but only in a practical and not in a rational sense. It is the distinction of Coleridge to have once more in his age made Christian doctrine alive to the Reason as well as the Conscience, — tenable as a philosophy as well as an evangel. And this he did by interpreting Christianity in the light of our moral and spiritual life. There are aspects of Christian truth beyond us. Exejint in mystcria. But all Christian truth must have vital touch with our spiritual being, and be so far at least capable of being rendered in its terms, or, in other words, be conformable to reason. There was nothing absolutely new in this luminous conception ; but it marked a revolution of religious thought in the earlier part of our century. The great principle of the Evangelical Theology was that theological dogmas were true or false without any reference to a subjective standard of judgment. They were true as pure data of Revelation, or as the propositions of an authorised creed settled long ago. Reason had, so far, nothing to do with them. Christian truth, it was supposed, lay at hand in the Bible, an appeal to which settled everything. Coleridge did not undervalue the Bible. He gave it an intelligent reverence. But he no less reverenced 20 Moverne^its of Religious Thought. the spiritual consciousness or Divine light in man, and to put out this light, as the Evangelical had gone far to do, was to destroy all reasonable faith. This must rest not merely on objective data, but on internal experience. It must have not merely authority without, but rationale within. It must answer to the highest aspiration of human reason, as well as the most urgent necessities of human life. It must inter- pret reason and find expression in the voice of our higher humanity, and so enlarge itself as to meet all its needs. If we turn for a moment to the special exposition of the doctrines of Sin and Redemption which Cole- ridge has given in the Aids to Reflection, it is still mainly with the view of bringing out more clearly his general conception of Christianity as a living move- ment of thought rather than a mere series of articles or a traditionary creed. In dealing first with the question of sin he shows how its very idea is only tenable on the ground of such a spiritual constitution in man as he has already asserted. It is only the recognition of a true will in man — a spirit or supernatural in man, although 'not necessarily miraculous,' — which renders sin possible. 'These views of the spirit and of the will as spiritual,' he says more than once, 'are the groundwork of my scheme.' There was nothing more significant or funda- mental in all his theology. If there is not always a supernatural element in man in the shape of spirit and will, no miracles or anything else can ever au- thenticate the supernatural to him. A mere formal orthodoxy, therefore, hanging upon the evidence of miracles, is a suspension bridge without any real Coleridge and his School, 2 1 support. So all questions between Infidelity and Christianity are questions here at the root, and not what are called ' critical ' questions as to whether this or that view of the Bible be right, or this or that traditionary dogma be true. Such questions are truly speaking inter-Christian questions, the freest views of which all churches must learn to tolerate. The really vital question is whether there is a divine root in man at all — a spiritual centre answering to a higher spiritual centre in the universe. All contro- versies of any importance come back to this. Cole- ridge would have been a great Christian thinker if for no other reason than this, that he brought all theological problems back to this living centre, and showed how they diverged from it. Apart from this postulate, sin was inconceivable to him; and in the same manner all sin was to him sin of origin or ' original sin.' It is the essential property of the will that it can originate. The phrase original sin is there- fore *a pleonasm.' If sin was not original, or from within the will itself, it would not deserve the name. * A state or act that has not its origin in the will may be a calamity, deformity, disease, or mis- chief; but a sin it cannot be.' We may be pardoned for adducing a still longer illustration of his mode of argument. * A moral evil is an evil that has its origin in a will. An evil com- mon to all must have a ground common to all. But the actual existence of moral evil we are bound in conscience to admit; and that there is an evil com- mon to all is a fact, and this evil must therefore have a common ground. Now this evil ground cannot originate in the Divine will; it must therefore be 22 Movements of Religious Thought. referred to the will of man. And this evil ground we call original sin. It is a mystery, that is a fact which we see but cannot explain, and the doctrine a truth which we apprehend, but can neither com- prehend nor communicate. And such by the quality of the subject (namely, a responsible will) it must be, if it be truth at all.' This inwardness is no less characteristic of Cole- ridg-e's treatment of the doctrine of Atonement or Redemption. It is intelligible so far as it comes within the range of spiritual experience, just as the doctrine of sin is. So far, its nature and effects are amply described or figured in the New Testament, especially by St. Paul. And the apostle's language, as might be expected, * takes its predominant colours from his own experience, and the experience of those whom he addressed.' * His figures, images, analogies, and references,' are all more or less borrowed from this source. He describes the Atonement of Christ under four principal metaphors : — i. Sin-offerings, sacrificial expiation. 2. Reconciliation, atonement, ■/.aTalXayrj. 3. Redemption, or ransom from slavery. 4. Satisfaction, payment of a debt. These phrases are not designed to convey to us all the Divine meaning of the Atonem.ent, for no phrases or figures can do this ; but they set forth its general aspects and design in so far as we, no less than the Jews and Greeks of the time, are interested in the doctrine. One and all they have an intelligible relation to our spiritual life, and so clothe the doctrine for us with a concrete living and practical meaning. But there are other relations and aspects of the doctrine of Atonement that transcend experience, and conse- Coleridge and his School, 23 quently our powers of understanding. And all that can be said here is Exit in niystcria. The rationahsm of Coleridge is at least a modest and self-limiting rationalism. It clears the ground within the range of spiritual experience, and floods this ground with the light of reason. There is no true doctrine that can contradict this light, or shelter itself from its penetra- tion. But there are aspects of Christian doctrine that outreach all grasp of reason, and before which reason must simply be silent. For example, the Divine Act in Redemption is * a Causative Act — a spiritual and transcendent mystery that passcth all understanding. ''WJio knoweth the mind of the Lord, or being his counsellor hath instructed him?'' Fccctiun est! This is all that can be said of the mystery of Redemp- tion, or of the doctrine of Atonement, on its Divine side. And here emerges another important principle of the Coleridgian theology. While so great an advocate of the rights of reason in theology, of the necessity, in other words, of moulding all its facts in a synthesis intelligible to the higher reason, he recognises strongly that there is a province of Divine truth beyond all such construction. We can never understand the fulness of Divine mystery, and it is hopeless to attempt to do so. While no mind was less agnostic in the modern sense of the term, he was yet, with all his vivid and large intuition, a Christian agnostic. Just because Christianity was Divine, a revelation, and not a mere human tradition, all its higher doctrines ended in a region beyond our clear knowledge. As he himself said, * If the doctrine is more than a hyperbolical phrase, it must do so.* 24 Movements of Religious Thought. There was great pregnancy in this as in his other conceptions ; and probably no more significant change awaits the theology of the future than the recognition of this province of the unknown, and the cessation of controversy as to matters which come within it, and therefore admit of no dogmatic settlement. (2.) But it is more than time to turn to the second aspect, in which Coleridge appears as a religious leader of the thought of the nineteenth century. The Con- fessions of an Inqniring Spirit were not published till six years after his death, in 1840; and it is curious to notice their accidental connection with the Confessions of a Beaiitifnl Soul, which had been translated by Carlyle some years before.^ These Confessions, in the shape of seven letters to a friend, gather together all that is valuable in the Biblical Criticism of the author scattered through his various writings ; and although it may be doubtful whether the volume has ever attained the circulation of the Aids to Reflec- tion, it is eminently deserving — small as it is, nay, because of its very brevity — of a place beside the larger work. It is eminently readable, terse and nervous, as well as eloquent in style. In none of his writings does Coleridge appear to greater advantage, or touch a more elevating strain, rising at times into solemn music. The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit were of course merely one indication of the rise of a true spirit of criticism in English theology. Arnold Whately, Thirlwall, and others, it will be seen were all astir in the same direction, even before the ^ In his well-known translation of Wilhelm Meister. • Coleridge and his School. 25 Confessions were published. The notion of verbal inspiration, or the infallible dictation of Holy Scrip- ture, could not possibly continue after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had begun. As soon as men plainly recognised the organic growth of all great facts, literary as well as others, it was inevitable that they should see the Scriptures in a new light, as a product of many phases of thought in course of more or less perfect development. A larger and more intelligent sense of the conditions attending the origin and progress of all civilisation, and of the immaturities through which religious as well as moral and social ideas advance, necessarily carried with it a changed perception of the characteristics of Scriptural revelation. The old Rabbinical notion of an infallible text was sure to disappear. The new critical method, besides, is in Coleridge's hands rather an idea — a happy and germinant thought — than a well-evolved system. Still to him belongs the honour of having first plainly and boldly an- nounced that the Scriptures were to be read and studied, like any other literature, in the light of their continuous growth, and the adaptation of their parts to one another. The divinity of Scripture appears all the more brightly when thus freely handled. * I take up this work,' he says, * with the purpose to read it for the first time as I should read any other work — as far at least as I can or dare. For I neither can, nor dare, throw off a strong and awful prepossession in its favour — certain as I am that a large part of the light and life, in and by which I see, love, and embrace the truths and the strengths co-organised into a living 26 Movements of Religious Thought. body of faith and knowledge has been directly or indirectly derived to me from this sacred volume.' All the more reason why we should not make a fetish of the Bible, as the Turk does of the Koran. Poor as reason may be in comparison with 'the power and splendour of the Scriptures/ yet it is and must be for him a true light. ' While there is a Light higher than all, even the Word that was in the beginning ; — the Light, of which light itself is but the shechinah and cloudy tabernacle ; ' — there is also a ' Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world ; ' and the spirit of man is declared to be ' the candle of the Lord.' ' If between this Word,' he says, * and the written Letter I shall anywhere seem to myself to find a discrepance, I will not conclude that such there actually is ; nor, on the other hand, will I fall under the condemnation of them that would lie for God, but seek as I may, be thankful for what I have — and wait' Such is the keynote of the volume. The supremacy of the Bible as a divinely inspired literature is plainly recognised from the first. Obviously it is a book above all other books in which deep answers to deep, and our inmost thoughts and most hidden griefs find not merely response, but guidance and assuagement. And whatever there finds us ' bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Spirit.' ' In the Bible,' he says again, * there is more \\-\2X finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together ; the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being ; and whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.' But there is much in the Bible that not only does Coleridge and his School, 2 7 not find us in the Coleridgian sense, but that seems full of contradictions, both moral and historical ; the psalms in which David curses his enemies ; the obviously exaggerated . ages attributed to the patri- archs ; and the incredible number of the armies said to be collected by Abijah and Jeroboam (2 Chron. xiii. 3), and other instances familiar to all students of Scripture. What is to be made of such features of the Bible? According to the old notion of its infalli- bility such parts of Scripture, no less than its most elevating utterances of * lovely hymn and choral song and accepted prayers of saint and prophet,' were to be received as dictated by the Holy Spirit. They were stamped with the same Divine authority. Coleridge rightly enough emphasises this view as that of the Fathers and Reformers alike; but he no less rightly points out that not one of them is consistent in hold- ing to their general doctrine. Their treatment of the Scriptures in detail constantly implies the fallacy of the Rabbinical tradition to which they yet clung. He no less forcibly points out that the Scriptures them- selves make no such pretension to infallibility, * expli- citly or by implication.' * On the contrary, they refer to older documents, and on all points express them- selves as sober-minded and veracious writers under ordinary circumstances are known to do.' The usual texts quoted, such as 2 Tim. iii. 16, have no real bearing on the subject. The little we know as to the origin and history of many of the books of the Bible, of ' the time of the formation and closing of the canon,' of its selectors and compilers, is all opposed to such a theory. Moreover, the very nature of the claim stultifies itself when examined. 28 Movements of Religiotts Thought. For ' how can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expression ? ' But it may be asked, as it has been often asked, where is this selective process to stop ? If the Bible as a whole is not infallibly inspired, how are we to know what is of Divine authority and what is not? The only answer to such a question is the answer of common sense given in all other cases. The higher thought and power of any writing is self- revealing. It is not to be mistaken. It takes cap- tive the reason as well as the conscience. If I speak enthusiastically of Shakespeare, and of the well-nigh divine wisdom of many of his plays, do I thereby re- ceive all that Shakespeare writes as elevating or good ? Do I pronounce any opinion as to the ques- tion respecting Titus Andronicus, or the larger portion of the three parts of Henry vi.? Shake- speare in ordinary speech stands for the unity of genius which his works represent. In this is also to be found the true explanation of the words of our Lord in speaking of Moses and the prophets. In using such expressions our Lord does not mean to indicate any opinion of the authenticity of the books of Moses, or of the infallible authority of all con- tained in the Old Testament; but only to appeal to the unity of Divine light which the Jews themselves recognised in the Holy Scriptures. They owned a Divine authority contained in certain writings. Moses was par excellence their Divine teacher. If only they had understood their own Scriptures, they would have known that Moses spake of Him. The argument thus used by our Lord was conclusive. In the light of their own belief it left no escape to Coleridge and J lis School. 29 them, and this was beyond doubt all that our Lord meant by such an appeal. To suppose that he im- plied further that there can be no doubt that Moses is the author of the Pentateuch as a whole, or that every word of it was dictated by God to Moses, is to suppose something not only absurd in itself, but utterly irrelevant to the purpose in view. So in effect Coleridge argued and with a force as irresistible as it was new in his day. But if the tenet of verbal inspiration has been so long received and acted on 'by Jew and Christian, Greek, Roman, and Protestant, why can it not now be received ? ' * For every reason,' answered Coleridge, ' that makes me prize and revere these Scriptures ; — prize them, love them, revere them beyond all other books.' Because such a tenet * falsifies at once the whole body of holy writ, with all its harmonious and symmetrical gradations.' It turns ' the breathing organism into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice,' which no man hath uttered, and no human heart hath conceived. It evacuates of all sense and efficacy the fact that the Bible is a Divine literature of many books ' composed in different and widely distant ages, under the greatest diversity of circumstances, and degrees of light and information.' So he argues in language I have partly quoted and partly summarised. And then he breaks forth into a magnificent passage about the song of Deborah, a passage of rare eloquence with all its desultoriness, but which will hardly bear separation from the context The wail of the Jewish heroine's maternal and patriotic love is heard under all her cursing and individualism — mercy rejoicing against judg- 30 Movements of Religious Thought. ment. In the very intensity of her primary affections is found the rare strength of her womanhood, and sweetness lies near to fierceness. Such passages pro- bably give us a far better idea of the occasional glory of the old man's talk as * he sat on the brow of High- gate Hill/ than any poor fragments that have been preserved. Direct and to the point it may never have been, but at times it rose into an organ swell with snatches of unutterable melody and power. The conclusion of the whole is that the divinity of Scripture resides not in the letter but in the spirit, in the unity of Divine impression which they convey. And historical criticism has precisely the same task in reference to the Bible as any other collection of ancient and sacred writings. An undevout criticism will no doubt blunder and misinterpret, as an ungenial and inappropriate criticism must always do in every direction. But a false can only be corrected by a true criticism, and a narrow and meagre ration- alism by a profound and enlightened sacred learning, capable of understanding the depths of the spiritual life, while rigorously testing all its conclusions and processes of development, both moral and historical, intellectual and ethical. (3.) But Coleridge contributed still another factor to the impulsion of religious thought in his time. He did much to revive the historic idea of the Church as an intellectual as well as a spiritual commonwealth. Like many other ideas of our older national life this had been depressed and lost sight of during the eighteenth century. The evangelical party, deficient in learning generally, was especially deficient in breadth of historical knowledge. Milner's History, Colcrido-e and his School. 31 if nothing else, serves to point this conclusion. The idea of the Church as the mother of philosophy, and arts, and learning, as well as the nurse of faith and piety, v/as unknown. It was a part of the evangelical creed, moreover, to leave aside as far as possible mere political and intellectual interests. These belonged to the world, and the main business of the religious man was with religion as a personal affair, of vast moment, but outside all other affairs. Coleridcfe o helped once more to bring the Church as he did the Gospel into larger room as a great spiritual power of manifold influence. The volume On the Constitution of Church and State according to the idea of each was published in 1830, and was the last volume which the author himself published. The Catholic emancipation question had greatly excited the public mind, and some friend had appealed to Coleridge expressing astonishment that he should be in opposition to the proposed measure. He replied that he is by no means unfriendly to Catholic emancipation, while yet ' scrupling the mean's proposed for its attainment' And in order to explain his difficulties he composed a long letter to his friend which is really an essay or treatise, beginning with the fundamental principles of his philosophy and ending with a description of antichrist. The essay is one of the least satisfactory of his composi- tions from a mere literary point of view, and is not even mentioned by Mr. Traill in his recent mono- graph. But amidst all its involutions and ramblings it is stimulating and full of thought on a subject which almost more than any other is liable to be de- graded by unworthy and sectarian treatment. Here, 32 Move77te7its of Religiotts TJwiight. as everywhere in Coleridge's writings, we are brought in contact with certain large conceptions which far more than cover the immediate subject in hand. It has been sometimes supposed that Coleridge's theory of the church merely revived the old theory of the Elizabethan age so powerfully advocated by Hooker, and specially espoused by Dr. Arnold in later times. According to this theory the church and state are really identical, the church being merely the state in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. But Coleridge's special theory is different from this, although allied to it. He distinguishes the Christian Church as such from any national church. The former is spiritual and catholic, the latter institutional and local. The former is opposed to the ' world,' the latter is an estate of the realm. The former has nothing to do with states and kingdoms. It is in this respect identical with the ' spiritual and invisible church kno^vn only to the Father of Spirits,' and the compensating counterpoise of all that is of the world. It is in short the Divine aggregate of what is really divine in all Christian communities and more or less ideally represented ' in every true church.' A national church again is the incorporation of all the learning and knowledge — intellectual and spiritual — in a country. Every nation, in order to its true health and civilisation, requires not only a land-owning or permanent class along with a commercial, industrial, and progressive class, but moreover, an educative class to represent all higher knowledge, * to guard the treasures of past civilisation,' to bind the national life together in its past, present, and future, and to communicate to all Coleridge and his School. 33 citizens a clear understanding of their rights and duties. This third estate of the realm Coleridge denominated the ' Clerisy,' and included not merely the clergy, but, in his own language, ' the learned of all denominations.' The knowledge which it was their function to cultivate and diffuse, embraced not only theology, although this pre-eminently as the head of all other knowledge, but law, music, mathematics, the physical sciences, ' all the so-called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and cultivation of which constitute the civilisation of a country.' This is at any rate a large conception of a national church. It is put forth by its author with all earnest- ness, although he admitted that it had never been anywhere realised. But it was his object ' to present the Idea of a national church as the only safe criterion by which we can judge of existing things.' It is only when * we are in full and clear possession of the ultimate aim of an institution ' that we can ascertain how far ' this aim has even been attained in other ways.' These, very briefly explained, are the main lines along which Coleridge moved the national mind in the third decade of this century. They may seem to some rather impalpable lines, and hardly calculated to touch the general mind. But they were influential, as the course of Christian literature has since proved. Like his own genius, they were diffusive rather than concentrative. The Coleridgian ideas permeated the general intellectual atmosphere, modifying old con- ceptions in criticism as well as theology, deepening if not always clarifying the channels of thought in many directions, but especially in the direction of c 34 Move7nents of Religious Thought. Christian problems. They acted in this way as a new circulation of spiritual air all round, rather than in conveying any new body of truth. The very ridicule of Carlyle testifies to the influence which they exercised over aspiring and younger minds. The very emphasis with which he repudiates the Coleridgian metaphysic probably indicates that he had felt some echo of it in his own heart. Of the more immediate disciples of Coleridge, there are only two that claim our attention here. Others, such as Edward Irving, Maurice, and Kingsley, will afterwards come under notice in their special places. Of all the disciples of Coleridge, Julius Charles Hare may be reckoned the most direct and confessed. He acknowledges his obligations to him everywhere. * Of all recent English writers, the one whose sanction I have chiefly desired is the great religious philo- sopher to whom the mind of our generation in Eng- land owes more than to any other man, and whose aim it was,' he says, * to spiritualise not only our philosophy but our theology, to raise them both above the empiricism into which they had fallen, and to set them free from the technical trammels of logical systems.' It was in 1846 that Hare thus wrote,^ and in his Life of Jolin Sterling, published two years later, he was equally emphatic in his admiration and enthusiasm for the * great Christian philosopher,' on Sterling's account as well as his own. Sterling was not content, he tells, to be a reverent student of Coleridge's writings, but ' when an opportunity 1 Preface to Mission of the Comforter. Coleridge and his School, 35 occurred, he sought out the old man in his oracular shrine at Highgate, and often saw him in the last years of his life ' — the fact, indeed, to which we owe the rival satiric description of the Highgate Sage and his pupils in Carlyle's better known life of the gifted friend of both these men. To what extent Hare himself had any personal intercourse with Coleridge does not appear ; but we see readily the influences which moved him towards the same line of thought. Born twenty-three years after Coleridge, or in 1795, Hare passed, after a brilliant career at school, to Cambridge in 1812, where he numbered among his fellow-students such men as Whewell and Thirlwall. Here it was, at his ' entrance into intellectual life,' that he enjoyed, as he says, the singular felicity, along with his com- peers, of having his thoughts stimulated and trained by Wordsworth and Coleridge, * in whom practical judgment, and moral dignity, and a sacred, love of truth, were so nobly wedded to the highest intel- lectual powers, ' ^ as opposed to the noxious influence of Byron, v/ith his * sentimental and self-ogling misanthropy.' The young Cambridge intellect of that day delighted to look to these pure masters of thought and song. Coleridge, indeed, had not yet entered on his theological stage, and Words- worth fortunately remained a poetic teacher all his life ; but early inclination towards the Lake, rather than the Byronic, school of poetry, naturally led to an admiration of Coleridge's later writings. Hare was also, along with his English master, a diligent student of German philosophy. He had ^ Mission of the Comforter^ 2,6 Movements of Religious ThoughL gone while quite a youth to Germany, and as, on the Wartburg, he saw the mark of Luther's ink- stand on the castle wall, he learned, as he after- wards said, *to throw inkstands at the devil/ Again, in 1832, before he settled on his living at Hurstmonceaux,^ he had gone abroad and made the friendship of Bunsen, and otherwise become further acquainted, not only with German philosophy, but with the new movement in German theology initiated by Schleiermacher. He was caught and greatly moved by all these fresh influences, and naturally turned to Coleridge as the chief leader in the fresh outburst of theological thought at home. With all Hare's noble enthusiasm and captivating spirit of Christian culture, it cannot be said that he is much of a leader of thought himself He is critical, didactic, philosophic in tone, always cul- tured. He writes at times with a fine, if desultory, eloquence ; and his books, especially the Guesses at TrutJi, which he published along with his brother first in 1828, were much read, and felt to be highly stimulating, forty years ago. I can never forget my own obligation to some of them ; yet it must be con- fessed that both author and writings are now some- what dim in the retrospect. They have not lived on, and this no doubt mainly because both reflected for the greater part the movement of his time rather than added any new and creative force to it. It was impossible for a mind so critical and scholarly as Hare's, with such a range of varied and interesting 1 This seems the proper spelling of this name (See Memorials of a Quiet Life, c. ill. p. 69), but it is often spelt, and even by Julius Hare himself, Herstmonceux. Coleridge and his School, 3 7 knowledge, one of the best classical tutors in his day at Cambridge, the translator, along with Thirl- wall, of Niebuhr's History of Rome, the student of Neander and Tholuck, as well as of Schleiermacher and Coleridge, not to own the breath of new life that was stirring everywhere the mental atmosphere around him, and to join in opening up new channels for it in which to circulate. It was his aim and ambition to lead, along with his master, the way to a more 'spiritual philosophy and theology;' and he has beyond doubt helped many on this way. But he has not made the way itself much clearer ; and it may be questioned whether his purely controversial writings, such as his Contest with Route against Dr. Newman, and his Vindication of Luther against Sir William Hamilton, have not more life in them than his more special contribution to thought. His un- doubted learning and great fairness of temper, with (it must be admitted) keen severity of judgment when his spirit was roused, gave him great success as a controversialist ; and whatever may be our legitimate admiration of our own Scottish philosopher, I do not think any impartial student can doubt that he fared badly indeed at the hands of the English archdeacon in his treatment of the great German Reformer. Here he met for once his own match in learning, and a far deeper insight than his own into the mean- ing of theological terms and conceptions. In one, and that a very interesting manner, Julius Hare, his brothers, and kinsfolk, have been recalled to vivid life again in our day. The Memorials of a Qniet Life, the picture of devout and rational piety there presented to us, has touched many hearts 38 Movements of Religious Thought, notwithstanding its somewhat tedious and minute detail. Augustus William Hare, the joint author with his brother of the Guesses at Truth, and author of the well-known Sermons to a Country Con- gregation (1837), claims a niche beside his brother as a helper in the revival of a more direct religious teaching. A more devoted, self-sacrificing, and loving Christian minister, never lived; and his Sermons were a new awakening to many hearts. There are no more moving glimpses of spiritual life to be found in any literature than those which he and his widow, and the other inmates of the Rectory at Hurstmonceaux, present to a congenial reader. Whatever may be our estimate of the force of thought which emanated from this source, a more beautiful family life — a happier combination of 'beautiful souls' — was never brought together. The life of religion was never better exemplified ; and in these days, when the veil has been lifted with such unhappy results on many interiors, it is well to be able to point to what religion may do for the most thoughtful and deeply- pondering minds, when its benign spirit has once possessed them. Of John Sterling a few words must suffice. His name cannot be omitted, and yet we cannot dwell on it, nor are we called upon to do so. There must have been an infinite attractiveness in the man to have drawn out as he did such treasures of affection from teachers so different as Hare and Maurice on the one side and Carlyle on the other. Maurice hardly ever alludes to him without something of a sob, as if he might have done more for him than he did ; Coleridge and his School. 39 and the hardier spirit of Carlyle melts Into tender- ness as he writes of him, * A man of perfect veracity,* he says, * in thought, word, and deed. Integrity towards all men, nay, integrity had refined with him into chivalrous generosity ; there was no guile or baseness anywhere found in him. A more perfectly transparent soul I have never known.' His *very faults grew beautiful.' Again, * I was struck with the kindly but restless swift-glancing eyes, which looked as if the spirits were all out coursing like a pack of many beagles beating every bush.' It must have been a loveable character which drew around him so much love. There must also' have seemed in Sterling a marvellous potency as '\!i, with due maturity, he might have done great things in literature if not in theology. But the brightness of his promise soon spent itself It may be doubted even whether if he had lived he would have achieved much. ' Over haste,' says Carlyle, * was his continual fault. Over haste and want of due strength.' His genius flashed and coruscated like sheet-lightning round a subject rather than went to the heart of it. He lacked depth and the capacity of continuous thought. He was moved, if not by ' every wind of doctrine,' by every breath of speculation that braced his intellectual lungs for a time. It was now Coleridge, and now Edward Irving, and now Schleiermacher, and now Carlyle that swept the strings of his mind and made them vibrate. We have already seen all that Coleridge was to him. He owed to him ' education,' — even * himself The Aids to Reflection was for many years his vade inccum. Of Schleiermacher as late as 1836 he says, ' he was on the whole the greatest spiritual teacher I have fallen 40 Movements of Religious Thought, in with.' And at last, when Carlyle's teaching had long displaced any other, he doubted whether he had ever * got any good of what he had heard or read of theology.' From his bright restless intellect all the bequests of Christian thinkers that once seemed to enrich him had been thrown off, and he went without theological help * into the great darkness.' And yet not without help, yea with better help than any theological reading could give him, if the story ^told in Hare's life, but untold by Carlyle, be true. * As it grew dark he appeared to be seeking for something, and on his sister asking him what he wanted, he said, " only the old Bible which I used so often at Hurstmonceaux in the cottages." ' Sterling was not destined to be any force of religious thought for his generation. With all his * sleepless intellectual vivacity,' he was ' not a thinker at all.' The words are Carlyle's and not ours. Yet he deserves to be remembered, as he will continue to be associated with the great Teacher who first kindled both his intellectual and religious enthusiasm. Carlyle has embalmed his name and discipleship in beautiful form, and the picture will remain while English literature lasts. But students of religious opinion will always also think of him as a disciple of Coleridge, and the friend of Maurice and Hare. II. THE EARLY ORIEL SCHOOL AND ITS CONGENERS. TN 1825, the same year in which the Aids to Reflection saw the Hght, appeared Whately's Essays Oft Some of the Peculiarities of the Cliristiait Religion. Three years later, or in 1828, appeared a further series of essays by the same writer On some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul. But even before the earHest of these years Whately had been Bampton Lecturer, and pubhshed in the usual manner his lectures On the Use and Abuse of Party Feeling in Religion (1822).^ In the third decade of the century, in short, Whately was something of a power in the theological world, as he had been long a power at Oxford. Entered at Oriel College as early as 1805 he became a Fellow in 181 1, and finding a congenial soil there in such minds as Davison — still somewhat remembered in connection with Discourses mi Prophecy, — and Copleston, after- wards Bishop of Llandaff, he may be said to have founded, or at least inspired with its most vigorous life the * old ' or * early Oriel School,' which made a name for itself before Newman and his immediate ^ His Historic Doubts respecting Napoleon Buonaparte — the most popular of all his books — was still earlier, 181 9. 41 42 Movements of Religious TJioiight. friends joined the society. Keble, indeed, was a fellow of the college at this early time, but it was the spirit not of Keble but of Whately that then ruled the place, and brought it fame. Arnold came as a youthful scholar from Corpus in 1815, and Hampden, who had been trained at Oriel from the first, had also entered it as a fellow the year before (1 814). A more remarkable combination of able men has seldom been brought together. In addition to the names already mentioned, that of Dr. Hawkins deserves to be signalised. Already significant as a man of ability before 1825,^ he succeeded Copleston as head of Oriel in 1828, and survived to our own time — a venerable figure, whose bright eyes and vivacious expression, bespeaking the sharp and kindly intelligence within, none can forget who ever came in contact with him. Through all changes he maintained the liberal traditions of the place, even when Newmanism was at its height. His writings are now forgotten, but his personal influence was powerful for more than one generation. It was Copleston, however, who was the original master-mind of the movement. His lectures and converse had been ' like a new spring of hfe ' to Whately on his entrance to the College; and long afterwards (1845), Whately wrote to him from Dublin : — " From you I have derived the main prin- ciples on which I have acted and speculated through ^ His Dissertation on Unauthoritative Tradition appeared as early as 1819. Various publications followed, especially, in 1833, Discourses tipon some of the principal objects and tcses of the Historical Scriptures of the Old Testament. Early Ojnel School and its Congencj's. 43 life.' ^ Another says of Copleston : — 'Under a polished and somewhat artificial scholarlike exterior, and an appearance of even overstrained caution, there lurked not only much energy of rhind and precision of judgment, but a strong tendency to liberalism in Church and State, and superiority to ordinary fears and prejudices. It was in this direction that he especially trained Whately's character ; ' ^ and Whately in his turn diffused the liberal spirit which he drank at the fountain-head. The new Oriel men were called 'Noetic' The School was the 'Noetic School;'^ and they seem to have rejoiced in the reputation of superior mental penetration and independence. 'Whether they were preaching from the University pulpit, or arguing in common rooms, or issuing pamphlets,' on passing occasions, they made a noise which arrested attention and filled with alarm many of the older University minds, who, Mr. Mozley says, 'felt the ground shaking under them.' 'Whately especially was claimed by his admirers to have a spiritual as well as mental pre-eminence,' and his presence infused terror among all 'who wished things to remain as th^y were in their own lifetime.' It is difficult now to realise the commotion once excited in the English theological mind by Whately and Arnold, and particularly by Hampden, now so little known ; but the alarm which they excited was very genuine at the time, as their influence upon the course of theological thought was very considerable. It is necessary, therefore, ^ Memoir of Copleston, p. 103. 2 Herman Merivale, Whately's Life, vol. i. p. 13. . ^Mozley's Reminiscences, vol. i. p. 18. 44 Movements of Religious Thought, that we should review this influence and try to estimate it. No view of the course of rehgious thought in our century which omitted these names would be at all complete. They stand together also as a common group or School connected with Oriel College, widely separated as were their respective activities in life. By 1820 Arnold had finally left Oriel and his work as a fellow, although he after- wards returned to Oxford as Professor of History (1841). In 1 83 1 Whately had become Arch- bishop of Dublin, and left Oxford permanently. Hampden alone remained in a succession of Uni- versity posts till 1847, when he became Bishop of Hereford. An intimate correspondence, however, continued to unite the friends. It was Whately's ear into which Hampden poured his troubles when they arose in 1836 on his appointment as Professor of Divinity. It was Arnold who came to his assistance at the same crisis in his powerful article in the EdinburgJi Reviezv, in the same year, on 'The Oxford Malignants.' The bonds of intel- lectual and religious fellowship, therefore, continued to unite them long after Oriel had been left behind, and a new sect, so to speak, had become identified with it. The two sects, in fact, ran closely into one another, as we have already indicated. Keble was the friend of Arnold, for whom he always expressed a warm regard ; and Whately was * the encouraging instructor' of Newman, who, according to the Car- dinal's own record, opened his mind and taught him to * use his reason.' In our next lecture we shall consider the band of Anglo-CathoUcs in the blaze of whose movement the ' Noetic ' School dis- Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 45 appeared. But to the members of this School we must first direct attention. There are other names intimately associated with the school which also deserve notice, as representative of liberal theological opinion. Chevalier Bunsen appears in the background, intimately connected with the critical movement of the time, and with not a few of the men in England engaged in it. Blanco White is another associate of significance. Singularly he was an inmate of Oriel College from about 1826 to 1 83 1. He then followed Whately to Dublin and lived in his house till the stirrings of his restless mind drove him to Liverpool and the Unitarianism in which he closed his strangely revolving career. Blanco White would make an interesting study by himself with all his spiritual vicissitudes and pathetic ways. But two masters of spiritual diagnosis, Neander^ and Mr. Gladstone,^ have already sketched him, and we cannot do more here than set him in his place and draw attention to him. Influence in some degree he must have been, for he was the most sensitive and radiating of mortals, either giving or receiving light every day of his X\i^. But curious and touching as he is in himself, I have failed to trace any definite impulse communicated by him to the Oriel School, or even to the religious thought of his time. Like many other men who have been trained in close systems of thought, when the spirit of doubt was awakened in him, he merely fell out of one system into another — Romanism, Atheism, Anglicanism, Unitarianism. He had little conception of true inquiry, or of the patience of thought which works "^Blanco White^ Berlin, 1848. 2 Gleanings, vol. ii. 46 Movements of Religious Thought, through all layers of systems to the core of truth beneath. Two names, however, deserve, along with the Oriel men already mentioned, a special space in this lec- ture — names belonging in their full brilliancy to the later history of the Church of England — but which emerged into prominence in the days of Whately and Arnold. Already before 1830 both Milman and Thirlwall had acquired a distinctive reputation. They had entered on new fields of critical specula- tion in regard to Scripture, and ruffled even to violence the surface of the religious world. We must therefore, before closing our present lecture, glance at the historian of the Jews and the translator of Schleiermacher's Essay on the Gospel of St. Luke. Richard Whately is the foremost name in our list. He was fifteen years younger than Coleridge, and eight years older than Arnold.^ He was born, so to speak, into the Church, his father having been a vicar, and also Prebendary of Bristol. He was the youngest child of a large clerical family, as Coleridge was, and weak and somewhat ailing as a child — another point of coincidence between the poet and logician. In all other respects no two men could be conceived less alike in youth and manhood, although very notably in both cases the * youth ' was the father of the 'man.' The boyhood of Coleridge as all know was given to poetry and metaphysics. There may have been as youthful poets — there never was as youthful a metaphysician. The boyhood of Whately was * Whately was born in 1787 ; Arnold in 1795 ; Coleridge in 1772. Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 47 given to arithmetic. There was something quite remarkable in his calculating faculty, which began to show itself between five and six. He could do the most difficult sums in his head before he knew any- thing of the names of the processes by which he worked them. He had his share also of castle-building, in the metaphysical line, as his powers matured; and became at times so absorbed in self-reflection, or in mental calculation, ' as to run against people in the street.' The extraordinary thing is that all his arithmetical precocity came to nothing. His powers of calculation entirely left him as he grew up. * The passion wore off,' he says ; * I was a perfect dunce at cyphering, and so have continued ever since.' He went to a good school near Bristol at nine years of age, and to Oxford when he was eighteen. He early contracted a great fondness for out-of-door wander- ings, and studies in natural history, which never left him. ' Of fishing he was particularly fond.' Through- out life he retained his love for exercise in the open air. It may be mentioned also that he retained through life, like many other men of concentrated habits of thought, the absence of mind which charac- terised him as a boy ; and to this feature in some degree is no doubt to be attributed such strange freaks as those with his climbing dog, in which he after- wards indulged even when a don at Oxford, to the consternation of all the more staid orderly behaved dons. He very early developed real powers, not only of scholarship but of thought. As one of his friends said to him, * From the beginning, and emphatically, Whately was a thinker. His favourite authors 48 Movements of Religious Thought, were few — Aristotle, Thucydides, Bacon, Bishop Butler, Warburton, Adam Smith.' Here, as in other things, unlike Coleridge, whose reading was always of an omnivorous character; yet strangely a like im- putation of plagiarism was made against both — in the case of Coleridge obviously because he forgot, in the plenitude of his philosophical reading, what was his own and what was others', — in the case of Whately because he was often falling upon thoughts which, if he had been more of a reader, he would have known that others had produced long ago. He was an Aristotelian in all the principles and methods of his philosophy, and to no man was the adage which he quotes in one of his early volumes more con- temptible; ' Errare malo cum Platone quam cum istis vera sentire.' In theology, as in other things, Whately was an active and fertile thinker, animated by an insatiable love of finding the truth and plainly stating it. In sheer grasp of faculty — in laying hold of ' some notion,' which he considered practically important — and following it out in all its details, — beating it plain till no one could fail to see it as he himself saw it, — he was unrivalled. Clearness, common sense, honesty, and strength of intellect were his great characteristics, and it is in virtue of these rather than in any depth or richness of new and living thought that he became a power first at Oxford and then in the theological ' world. Whereas Coleridge brought to the inter- pretation of Christianity the light of a fresh spiritual philosophy, and sought some synthesis of thought by which religion in its highest form should be seen not only to be in harmony with human nature, but to be Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 49 its only perfect flower and development, its true philosophy; — VVhately — taking the prevailing philo- sophy as he found it, — brought the daylight of ordinary reason and of historical fact to play upon the accumulated dogmas of traditionary religion, and to show how little they had, in many cases, to say for themselves. He was a subverter of prejudice and commonplace — of what he believed to be religious as well as irreligious mistake, more than anything else. The majority of people seemed to him, — as probably is always more or less the case, — to live in an atmosphere of theological delusion, mistaking their own conceits for essential religious principles, — making the New Testament writers responsible for notions that, to a just and intelligent criticism, had no existence there, and were indeed contrary to its spirit and teaching rightly interpreted. A whole cluster of beliefs came in this way under his destroying hand : for ex- ample, the belief of any priesthood under the Gospel other than the common priesthood of Christians alike ; the belief of verbal inspiration ; and again, of the Fourth Commandment as being the obliga- tory rule for the Christian Sunday. So also the common evangelical doctrines of Election, of Per- severance, of Assurance, and of Imputation, all drew upon them his incisive pen. He did not maintain that there were not truths in Scripture answering to these doctrines ; but the great aim of his volume On the Difficulties of St. Paul's zvritings was to show that the common evangelical ideas on these subjects were not Pauline. St. Paul's notion of election, he maintained, was entirely different from the common dogma which, in his view, virtually makes salvation D 50 Move77ients of Religious Thought. and election identical. Analysing at length the use of the Pauline word, he comes to the conclusion that it is to be interpreted always in a general sense of the body of the Church, * even as the whole nation of Israel was of old the chosen.' It has no relation to the final destiny of individuals. When * the Apostles address these converts universally as the " elect " or " chosen " of God, this must be understood of their being chosen out of the whole mass of the Gentiles to certain peculiar privileges.' But the result in each case depends upon the use of the privileges. *We are in his hands,' says the Predestinarian, ' as clay in the potter's who hath power of the same lump to make one vessel to honour and another to dishonour;' but this veiy passage, he argues, so far from favouring the predestinarian doctrine makes against it, * since the potter never makes any vessel for the express, purpose of being broken and destroyed.' On the contrary, the meaning of the statement is that he makes ' some to nobler and some to meaner uses : but all for some use, not with a design that it should be cast away and dashed to pieces.' Even so, * The Almighty, of his own arbitrary choice, causes some to be born to wealth or rank, others to poverty or obscurity, some in a heathen and others in a Christian country; the ad- vantages and privileges are various, and so far as we can see arbitrarily dispensed. But the final rewards or punishments depend, as we are plainly taught, on the use or abuse of those advantages.' It would be interesting, if we had time, to com- pare ■ Coleridge's and Whately's modes of treating this mysterious doctrine — the more inward, spiritual experiential treatment of the one, — the critical and Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 5 1 historical treatment of the other. No handhiig could well be more different in the two cases, and yet there is an affinity between them in end, if not in means. Both are alike opposed to the hyper-logical forms under which the doctrine has been chiefly transmitted to us. It was the aim of both, in this and other matters, to * free theology from its logical trammels,' to bring it in the one case to the test of spiritual experience, in the other to the test of historical criticism. Logician as Whately was, no man more strongly repudiated -the application of logical forms to Scrip- tural truth. One of the chief hurts of religion in his opinion had arisen from this very cause, and the conse- quent multiplication of * foolish and unlearned ques- tions ' in the theological world. Questions however * interesting and sublime,' which plainly * surpass the limits of our faculties,' should be left alone. There was in him as in Coleridge a strong vein of Christian agnos- ticism. All such questions gender strife and hopeless controversy, for how can men agree in bold theories respecting points on which they can have no correct knowledge, which are in fact unintelligible to them ? To this cause he attributes the heresies on the subject of the Trinity in the early Church, and especially denounces certain rash attempts made in his own day, — by Hervey, for example, the once well-known author of Meditations among the Tombs, — * to ex- plain on the abstract principle of justice ' the counsels of the Most High, on the equally incomprehensible mystery of the Atonement.^ We might give many illustrations of Whately's 1 Bamptoii Lectures (1^822), p. 179. 52 Movements of Religious Thought. mode of theological thought. It must suffice to emphasise its general character. Whately was un- doubtedly for his day a strong man, who believed that he had a reforming mission to accomplish in the Church, — to make men think more simply and sincerely about religion, — to teach them to look at Scripture with their own eyes, — and to destroy, as he conceived, grave errors both on the side of Puritanism and of Sacerdotalism. He had no fear of any man or of any party. The very limits of his theological as of his philosophical reading gave an intensity to his own principles, and a confidence in ventilating them, which a larger acquaintance with the history of theology, and of human nature in connection therewith, would pro- bably have abated. Certain it is that the special forms of opinion against which he strove were not killed in his day, and that some of them are as vigorous as ever. But this does not detract from the real force that he was, nor from the respect that is due to his constant courage and love of the truth. No man ever loved truth more, or more boldly followed it as he found it. No one more fully acted on his own principle that * fairness and candour ' are the best allies of truth, and that religion can never suffer from any theory on any subject that is really well founded and sound.^ He loved with all his heart what he held to be the verities of religion, and defended them with all his might; but he hated superstition in every form. The excesses of Anglo-Catholic Theology and of German Ration- alism were alike obnoxious to him. He closed equally with Newman and Strauss, and beat them with the pitiless and persistent force of his argument 1 Essays (1823), p. 27. Early Oriel School a7id its Congeners. 5 3 and ridicule/ One reason, no doubt, of the compara- tive neglect which has overtaken his works is that they had all in this way a more or less immediate and temporary purpose. They were called forth by the exigencies of circumstance or opinion in which his life was passed. Many of them, moreover, are neither more nor 4ess than tracts, such as his once well-known and highly popular Cautions for the Times. And no such writings, however lively, sugges- tive, and successful for the moment, have any future life before them. They perish in their use, and a second generation cannot find any interest in what may have even violently agitated or amused their predecessors. Dr. Arnold was Whately's great friend and frequent correspondent. The old days at Oriel, from 181 5 to 1820, had bound them closely together, and the bond was only severed by Arnold's sudden death in 1842. To Arnold as to Newman, in their first Oriel con- nection, Whately had been something of a master. Even after both had left Oriel,^ Arnold tells us that a visit to Whately was ' a marked era in the formation of his opinions.' Again, in the preface to his first volume of sermons, published in 1828, Arnold ex- presses his special obligation to the author of the Essays on the ivritings of St. Paul, and his apprehen- sion that some of his sentences were so like passages in the Essays that he might be accused of plagiarism. The truth was that his own views, while excogitated independently and before he had seen Dr. Whately's ^ See his Cmdions for the Times, as well as his Historic Doubts. '^ In 1S22, when Whately was temporarily resident at Halesworth, in Suffolk, a living to which he had been presented by his uncle. 54 Movements of Religious Thought volume, had yet been greatly helped, * confirmed, and extended,' by communication with his friend. When Whatelywas promoted to the Archbishopric of Dublin three years later, Arnold bears the warmest testimony to his fitness for that high office. He is ' a man so good and so great that no folly or wicked- ness will move him from his purpose,' and * in point of real essential holiness there does not live a truer Christian than Whately.' In this and other inward qualities most people would probably now-a-days reckon Arnold as the superior. The head-master of Rugby was certainly a good and holy man, if ever man was. We may dispute his breadth and calmness of temper, his knowledge of the world and of the history of human thought and character, — historian as he was ; we may even doubt the results of his teaching (they could hardly fail, in some respects, to have been deeply disappointing to himself if he had lived) ; but we cannot doubt the deep devotion and piety of his nature. There have been few more thoroughly Christian minds in our century, and it gives one a shock like a personal wound when we read a state- ment of Newman's, made in the fit of petulant zeal that seized him when abroad, before his mission at Oxford began. Some one, he tells us, said in his hearing that a certain interpretation of Scripture must be Christian 'because Dr. Arnold took it' He interposed, * But is he a Christian ? ' Arnold had his doubts in his youth ; he was never all his life a Christian after the pattern of Dr. Newman and his school ; but we can hardly think of a mind in recent times — unless it be Maurice's — more habitu- Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 5 5 ally under the influence of the Divine than that of Arnold. From the time that he took orders and settled at Laleham (1819-28), there was with him *a deep consciousness of the invisible world.' All his being was interpenetrated with religion. All the acts of his life were coloured by it.^ * No one could know him even a little,' said a friend, ' and not be struck by his absolute wrestling with evil, and, with the feeling of God's help on his side, scorning as well as hating it.' As he strove with evil, so he loved Christ, and clung to Him as the one supreme Object of thought, imagination, and affection. He was Christian to the core, and it was the very ardency of his Christian interest that kindled his fierceness alike against * Oxford malignancy ' and school-boy dis- honour. He could not bear that men should profess the Christian faith and yet act, whether for •a party purpose or school-boy gratification, in the face of Christian principle and precept. It was the same evident devotion to religion and its verities, as he felt them, that gave his liberal opinions so much weight. Men in general felt, when they heard of his free thoughts about Scripture and the Church, that here at least was the speech of a man who did not undervalue any religious obligation. It was known to be the aim of his life to make a public school Christian, and a more self-denying or devoted task could hardly be imagined than this. Whatever he wrote or said, there were those, and they were an increasing number, who said that it was a genuine religious impulse, and nothing else, that inspired him. If we ask more particularly what were the elements ^ See Life, vol. i. p. 30 et.seq. 56 Movements of Religioiis Thought, of Arnold's power in quickening religious thought, the answer must be first of all that he too vitalised as Coleridge did the Christian conceptions of his time. He did so, not by carrying them as the former did into a higher region of thought, or fitting them anew to the inner constitution of humanity, but in an equally real and important manner by showing how Christian ideas extend into every aspect of conduct and duty, transfusing and elevating the whole round of life. This was the key-note of his first volume of sermons,^ and it was more or less the key-note of all. Arnold's studies and tastes, much as he prized Coleridge, did not lead him towards the Coleridgian metaphysics. His views were objective and practical. Christianity, whether or not complete as a philosophy, was to him plainly perfect as an ethic or discipline. It took up the whole man, and there was no part of life beyond its inspiration and control. It was no affair of sects, or mere rule of the * religious life ' specially so called. All idea of isolating religion and keeping it select, — the employment, whether of evangelical or of Anglo-Catholic votary — was hateful to him. It Avas a life-blood permeating all human activity — school, college, politics, literature, — no less than what is commonly meant by the Church. So it was when he went into the pulpit ; he did not put on any clerical tone or separate himself from his other occupations as scholar, historian, inquirer. He was himself there as everywhere else, and sought to speak in simple unconventional words, as he would * in real life,' in 1 Published in 1S28. The last edition was issued by his daughter, Mrs. Forster, in 1878. . Early Oinel School and its Congenej^s. 57 serious conversation with a friend, or with those who asked his advice. There was of course nothing absolutely new in this way of conceiving and applying Christianity, no more than there was anything original in Coleridge's realistic philosophy. It had been a commonplace from the beginning that Christianity was a * religion of common life.' But not less certainly had it become in many quarters an esoteric or sec- tarian rather than a common religion; a religion of the cathedral or the conventicle ; of * the fathers ' or * reformers ; ' of the evangelical tea-circle or the Anglo- Catholic coterie. It bore a note of segregation and exclusion in many forms, and spoke in artificial and * pious ' phraseology. It required, therefore, if not origi- nality, yet something of vital force to bring it back to its primitive energy as not only 'the light of all our seeing,' but the inspiration of all our doing. Arnold and Augustus William Hare did more by their ser- mons to break down the old technicalities of the pulpit, and to spread a homely vital * common interest in Christian truths ' than any other preachers of their time. Men were made to feel in all ranks how much religion concerned them, — how closely it had to do with their everyday work, — and was designed to be the very breath of their being not merely on Sunday, — or at service and sacrament, — but in every form and expression of public and private activity. It was this vital and broad grasp of Christian truth that lay at the root of Arnold's well-known idea of the Church as only another name for the State in its perfect development. This seems now an astounding proposition, fitted to take the breath away from some 58 Movements of Religioits Thought. accepted public teachers. But, as we saw in our last lecture, large ideas of the Church had a charm for the highest intelligence of the opening century. The reign of sectarian commonplace had not yet begun, and thoughts which the genius of Hooker and of Burke has consecrated by their exposition were still deemed worthy of discussion. Neither these thinkers nor Arnold of course sought to identify the activities of the Church and the State. They knew very well that these were two bodies with distinct spheres of action. They knew also well that, as things are, they cannot be identical. What they meant was that the ideal of each of these bodies merges in that of the other. The State can only attain its true object, the highest welfare of man, when it acts * with the wisdom and goodness of the Church.' The Church can only attain the same ob- ject when * invested with the sovereign power of the State.' On the one hand Arnold repudiated strongly the merely secular view of the State * as providing only for physical ends ; ' on the other hand he hated if possible still more what he regarded as an anti- Christian view of the Church, that it should be ' ruled by a divinely appointed succession of priests or governors,' rather than * by national laws.' The national commonwealth as represented by Parlia- ment — which in this connection is the bete noire of modern ritualist and dissenter alike — was to him the fit sphere for the realisation of Christianity. In speaking of the Church as clothed with the powers of the State Arnold did not of course mean, as Anglican and Puritan had both meant in the seventeenth century, that the Church should enforce Early O^nel School and its Congeners, 59 legal penalties, or enact by its authority any uniform plan of church-government and discipline. This was quite inconsistent with his whole mode of thought, and with his special ideal of the Church. He would have the Church *a sovereign society,' not as exercis- ing separate powers, but because its powers were merged in those of a Christian State, all the public officers of which should feel themselves to be also * necessarily officers of the Church.' So it seemed to him that the superstitious distinction between clergy and laity would vanish, and so also their consequent jealousy of one another — their spheres being in fact the same, nothing being * too secular to claim exemption from the enforcement of Christian duty, nothing too spiritual to claim exemption from the control of the government of a Christian State.' Then, as Dean Stanley explains his position, * the whole nation, amidst much variety of form, ceremonial, and opinion, would at last feel that the great ends of Christian and national society now for the first time realised to their view were a far stronger bond of union between Christians, and a far deeper division from those who were not Christians, than any subordinate principle either of agreement or separation.' With such general views of the Church it may be imagined that Arnold's ecclesiastical outlook was by no means a happy one in the disturbed years thdt followed the passing of the Reform Bill. On the one hand he saw, as the liberal politicians of the day did, the urgency of Church reform. It did not appear to him that the Anglican establishment could live unless greatly modified, so as to make an open door for dissenters ; on the other hand, he prized the Church 6o Movements of Religious Thought, of England as one of the most precious institutions of the country ; and nowhere is there a more eloquent defence of the blessings of a parochial ministry than in the pamphlet which he published at that time. None of his writings made more noise, or gave more offence, than the Principles of CJiurch Reform. It offended equally churchmen and dissenters. Its latitudinarianism was obnoxious to the one; its defence of an Established Church, and its assaults upon sectarianism, obnoxious to the other. Its advocacy of large and liberal changes repelled the Conservatives ; its severe religious tone displeased the Liberals. One proposal which it contained raised a special outcry, namely, that the parish churches should be open to different forms of wor- .ship at different hours, with a view to the compre- hension of the dissenters. The plan has been long acted upon on the Continent; but to the average English Churchman there is something peculiarly exasperating in this suggestion. It stirs his wildest feelings as well as his most foolish prejudices. And the storm which descended on Arnold for this and other suggestions was of the most violent kind. It even penetrated Rugby, and for a time painfully interfered with the serenity of his school w^ork. 1 Yet, as it has been remarked, not a {&\n of the changes which Arnold then advocated for the in- creased efficiency of the Church of England have been since carried out with advantage ; such changes as the multiplication of bishoprics, the creation of subordinate or suffragan bishops, the revival of an inferior order of ministers or deacons, the use of churches on w^eek-days,' and a more simple order of Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 6 1 service than is enjoined at morning and evening prayer. So it is for the most part. The abuse of the reformer, as well ^s the blood of the martyr, becomes the seed of the Church, and when the evil day is past the good seed springs up to life. But we have still to notice the chief service of Arnold to the Christian intelligence of his time. He was not only a profoundly Christian man, breathing the vital atmosphere of Christian truth in all his teaching; nor was he only a church reformer; but he was perhaps more eminently a critical and historical student of Scripture. Here, too, he fol- lowed the wake of Coleridge after his own way. He did not borrow from this great teacher. There is hardly any evidence of Coleridge's direct in- fluence upon him ; and the Confessions of an In- quiring Spirit were not made public till 1840. But his own tastes and studies led him independently in the same direction. He was from the first an earnest student of Niebuhr's great History of Rome, and delighted in its critical method. He learned German, so as to be able to read it in the original. He cor- responded both with Bunsen and Julius Hare as to its merits. He made, moreover, Bunsen's personal acquaintance in 1827, and derived much stimulus from him in this and other respects. Yet withal Arnold remained, as did also Whately, and their common friend Hampden, entirely English in their spirit of theological inquiry ; and of German theology as a whole Arnold seems to have known almost nothing. So far he is different, not only from his friend Hare and Hare's collaborator Thirlwall, but also from Milman, as we shall see, who were well 62 Movements of Religious Thotight. versed in German theological research. If ever, indeed, there was a mind intensely English in the practical ethical bent underlying all his studies and all his work, it was Arnold's. His powers as an interpreter of Scripture therefore sprang from his own native instincts of inquiry and the clear moral sense which made him hate confusion of thought in all directions. He saw that the whole method of scriptural interpretation, as represented by the Evangelical and High Church Schools alike, was untenable. Scripture was made to mean any- thing, according to the preconceptions of each. Par- ticularly, it may be said, he had no respect for patristic interpretation. The whole patristic super- stition which once more rose to prominence in his day was strongly repelled by him. He recognised no special intelligence in the Ante-Nicene Church, still less in the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries. The interpretation of prophecy more than other parts of Scripture appeared to him a chaos, and to this, therefore, he devoted his main attention. His two sermons, with preface and notes, on this subject, published in 184.I, remain the most complete and systematic of any of his fragments on Exegetical Theology. Ten years before, he had drawn attention to the general subject in an essay affixed to his second volume of sermons. Then he was in the more aggressive mood that characterised his earlier years, and expressed himself so as to excite violent commotion in various quarters. In point of fact, there was nothing alarming in Arnold's essay ' on the Right Interpretation of the Scripture.' The only ex- ception to it that would be taken to it now-a-days, as Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 6"^ to certain recent interpretations of ' Ruling Ideas of Early Ages'^ in connection with the Old Testament, is that it does not grasp all the difficulties of the subject or set them in the full light of the his- torical method. It deals too much in ingenious explanation. Arnold's principle and method of interpretation are both in the right direction. He recognised clearly that Scripture is not to be regarded as a Koran or infallible code composed at one time, but as a literature of many fragments and times, and of divers authority. Its commands and teaching alike are to be judged according to the occasion and circum- stances in which they were given. In other words, they are to be interpreted not absolutely but relatively. The Bible, as to its text, structure, the authorship of its several parts, and its literary and didactic form, is to be read and understood like all other ancient literature ; and if this m.ay seem to render Scriptural interpretation a difficult and somewhat hopeless task, save for the scholarly and trained intelligence, the difficulty is no more than is to be found elsewhere. We cannot fully understand any ancient writings except in this manner. And the Bible has this advantage over all ancient writings, that while it can only be interpreted by the same processes, and is liable to similar uncertainties, there is more than enough in its pages for practical guidance to the simplest reader. In this sense, and in no other, is it true that * he that runneth may read ' and profit by it. In short, the divine side of Scripture, the side on ^ Riding Ideas of Ea)dy Ages and their relation to Old Testament Faith, by J. B. Mozley, D.D., late Professor of Divinity at Oxford. 64 Movements of Religious Thought. which it appeals to our spiritual life and JiJids us, as Coleridge said — is legible by every devout reader. But the human or literary side of it presents every- where difficulties of a similar character to those found in all literature of the remote past. These difficulties must be faced' in the same manner and by the very same processes as we must face similar difficulties in the works of Plato or Aristotle. It proves nothing against the truth to be found in these writings, that scholiasts and commentators have given very different versions of parts of them or of the prin- ciples they are supposed to teach. Nor is the per- plexity of commentators, in the case of the Bible or any other writing, a necessary index of the obscurity of the writers. Misreading of Scripture, no less than misreading of Plato, may come, and in point of fact does come, more frequently from reading into them ideas of our own than from any real obscurity in the texts themselves. How much this has been the case with Scripture it is needless to say. Dogmas have been brought to Scripture, and Scripture been made to square with them, instead of truth being sought carefully in its pages, or by comparison of Scripture with Scripture. To the true interpreter dogma is the end and never the beginning of Scriptural interpretation. In the strict sense, indeed, dogma is not found in Scripture at all. It is deduced from it ; but it is the product of much more than Scripture. There it only appears, in a limited 'concrete' sense, as bearing on religious feeling and character. We cannot too highly estimate the ser\nces of Arnold as a Biblical student in his time. His friend Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 65 Bonamy Price ^ has perhaps spoken of his work in this direction in somewhat extravagant terms, and with too Httle regard to the work of others. For the spirit of genuine historical criticism was in fact largely at work in the years that preceded the Oxford move- ment, not only in Coleridge, but in Hare and Thirlwall at Cambridge, and again in Whately and Milman. Yet more than any of these men, perhaps, Arnold combined with critical acumen and breadth of his- torical perception a devout, inspiring, and solemn appreciation of the spiritual side of Scripture. In exegesis he was certainly richer, if not stronger or clearer, than his friend Whately. The two sermons 'On the Interpretation of Prophecy' speak a deeper and more evangelical language than the essays * On the peculiar difficulties of St. Paul's writings.' There, as everywhere, Arnold is not only Christian, but delicately, pervasively, and in the right sense, if not in the commonplace sense of the word, evangelically Christian. To the impartial student of these, as indeed of all Arnold's sermons, it must remain a sad- dening thought that the religious world, both Anglo- Catholic and Puritan, should have once denounced such a teacher and called for his condemnation. But it was neither Whately nor Arnold, but the third of the friends, since comparatively forgotten, who called forth the loudest denunciations of the time. To the historian of religious opinion there is something highly significant in the successive agitations which were excited in the Church of Eng- land by Dr. Hampden. According to all unbiassed testimony, he was a particularly gentle and peace- 1 In a Letter, Life of Arnold, vol. i. p. 213. E 66 Movements of Religious Thought. loving man. Of all the contentions associated with his name, * his only part in them,' it has been said, ' was the pain they could not fail to occasion him.' He was, however, Mr. Mozley says, 'one of the most unprepos- sessing of men.' There was a certain stolidity about him that contrasted strongly with the bright, vivacious, and singularly loveable figures with whom the eyes of Oriel men were then familiarised. Even the less agree- able men had life, candour, and not a little humour. Hampden's face was inexpressive, his head was set deep on his broad shoulders, and his voice was harsh and unmodulated. Some one said of him that he 'stood before you like a milestone and brayed at you like a jackass.'^ We have quoted these words, cer- tainly not for any value they have, but as a piquant expression of old Oxford humour — I suppose. In Mr. Mozley's volumes there are not a few such sketches, but none more animated or inspired with more bitter- ness. The book, as a whole, is a readable collection of old stories and recollections of the famous men who then adorned Oriel ; but it is almost absolutely worth- less for any other purpose. Its judgments of men and things are neither candid nor intelligent. It fills one with astonishment that the author of such a book should at any time have had influence in con- nection with a theological or religious movement. Hampden was probably what is called a 'heavy man ; ' his books are certainly not light reading ; but so far from being unloveable, he seems to have been a singularly amiable and tender-hearted man. But what then was his special offence ? And why should he, more than any of the early Oriel School, ^Reminiscences, vol. i. p. 380. Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 67 have been the victim of persecution and annoyance ? The real reasons are not far to seek. His success, first in being appointed to the Chair of Divinity in 1836, and then, eleven years later, in being made Bishop of Hereford, was unacceptable to many/ His pamphlet, in 1834, advocating the admission of Dissenters to the University, was not only unacceptable but deeply offensive.^ The man who, at that date, wrote in Oxford as follows, could only be regarded equally by Anglicans and Puritans with much dislike. ' I do not scruple,' he says, ' to avow myself favourable to a removal of all tests, so far as they are employed as securities of Orthodoxy. Tests are no part of religious education.' But further, Hampden in his very earliest work on The Philosophical Evidence of Christianity (1827),^ and again, in his famous Bamp- ton Lectures (1832), assailed what has long been and continues to be the very apple of the traditional theologian's eye — the vast fabric of ' logical theology.' The whole aim of his Bampton Lectures was to explain how such a theology had grown up under the influence of the scholastic philosophy. It was, in 1 Was there not something also in his having snatched the Chair of Moral Philosophy from Newman in 1834? 2H.R.H. the Duke of Sussex wrote (June 1837) to Dr. Hampden: 'The unfair and unjust attacks on your "Bampton Lectures" were all the more disreputable, because unheard of until a public testimony of the approval of a liberal government had been conferred on you. I fear that jealousy, not justice, was the prompter to such acts,' Lord Radnor, in the House of Lords, said, ' He had no doubt that all the hostility to him (Dr. H.) arose from his advocating the admission of dissenters to the University.' ^ Essay on the Philosophical Evidence of Christianity ; or the credi- bility obtained to a Scriptural Revelation, from its coincidence with the facts of nature. 1827. 6S Movements of Religious Thought. his view, no Divine product nor even any directly derivative product of Divine revelation. It was largely a purely human compound, based on the logical terminology of the Patristic and Mediaeval schools, and instead of being a blessing to the Church it had, as he supposed and said, been in many ways a curse, ' the principal obstacle to the union and peace of the Church.' * The combination and analyses of words which the logical theology has produced have given occasion,' in his own words, ' to the passions of men to arm themselves in behalf of the phantoms thus called into being.' The wonder is not that such sentiments raised a commotion when they came to be understood, but that they should not have excited more attention when they were delivered. There was nothing essen- tially untrue or dangerous in them, but they touched to the very core the dogmatic spirit. Whately had assailed many popular theological errors, dogmas which he considered to be mistakenly iden- tified with the teaching of St. Paul. Arnold had proclaimed his dislike of theological technicalities by divesting his own preaching of them entirely, and setting forth in ordinary language and direct and simple forms for his parishioners, and afterwards for his schoolboys, what he believed to be the truth as it is in Jesus. Both had, by their broader interpreta- tions of Scripture, emphasised the distinction between the simple apostolic doctrine and later elaborate theologies. But Hampden did more than this. He explained, or endeavoured to explain, how the earlier Scriptural faith had passed into later creeds and theologies. And it is strange, but true, that to the Early Oinel School a7id its Congeners. 69 polemical Theologian explanation is often more exasperating than contradiction} Not only so, but the principle of explanation with which Hampden worked, not merely threatened this or that tradi- tional dogma, but was a solvent of all. The whole fabric of patristic, mediaeval, and Anglo-Catholic theology seemed to go down before it, and to be con- verted into nothing but a phantasmal terminology. The dogma of the Trinity, in its Athanasian form, vanished into a mere series of scholastic propositions. This, and nothing less than this, was the contention of his opponents afterwards. The famous pamphlet, Elucidation of Dr. Hampden' s Theological Statements^ attributed to Dr. Newman and denounced by Dr. Arnold, as containing a series of deliberate misrepre- sentations (' falsehoods ' is Arnold's word, but we shrink from using it), took up this ground. Dr. Pusey took the same ground. Samuel Wilberforce, Mr. Glad- stone, and many others happily forgotten, virtually took the same ground ; and this in face of Hampden's own statement in his lectures that the Trinitarian doctrine itself, in its scriptural simplicity, * emerged from the mists of human speculation, like the bold naked land on which an atmosphere of fog had for a while rested and then been dispersed.' The wonder, then, truly is, in the light of all that was afterwards said and written of the Bampton Lec- tures, that they passed at the time without hostile criticism. Not only did they do so, but, according to 1 Such a sentence as the following may be supposed to have been particularly exasperating: 'Whilst theologians of the schools have thought they were establishing religious truths by elaborate argumen- tation, they have been only multiplying and v rearranging theological language.' 70 Movements of Religious Thoitght, Dr. Hampden's friends, they were received by large and approving audiences. Even Mr. Mozley admits that *a considerable number went to hear the first lecture.' ^ Afterwards he says they were neither 1 It is hardly necessary to say that all that Mr. Mozley says as to Dr. Hampden is to be received with suspicion. A writer who still virtually asserts that the Bampton Lectures were inspired, if not com- posed, in great part by Blanco White, notwithstanding the testimony of Dr. Hampden's family to the contrary (his children having often played in his study while he was writing them), and the absolute dis- crepancy between such a style as that of the Lectures and Blanco White's writings, is really unworthy of credence. The story was a silly and false scandal at the time, which could only have sprung up in the atmosphere of ridiculous gossip often found at a University seat. It is not made any better by Mr. Mozley's new statements as to his being a witness to the great intimacy which prevailed between Hampden and Blanco White in 1831 and 1832, while Hampden was preparing the Lectures. Be it so. Because two men are friends, and take constant walks together, and even give and receive ' material assistance in the way of information,' is one to be accused of having given lectures, and published them as his own, while they were in reality those of his friend ? For if the plagiarism does not come to this, it comes to nothing. In gathering information, and even getting * material assistance,' surely any author is not only entitled, but bound to utilise his friends — if they are willing to be so utilised. But the whole charge was a silly one, hurtful to those who made it, and de- spicable in those who repeat it. It shows, moreover, a singular lack of intelligence in an Oxford litterateur or theologian. To any real insight or knowledge it is no more doubtful that the same mind which con- ceived and produced the Essay on * The Philosophical Evidence of Christianity,' when in London in 1829, conceived and produced the Bampton Lectures — with whatever assistance — in Oxford in 1832, than it is that these two books were published at their respective dates. An injurious and unworthy note in S. Wilberforce's Life, vol. i. pp. 468-9, has contributed to revive this scandal about the composition of Dr. Hampden's Lectures ; but it contains nothing new. The fact of the prevalence of the scandal — its * being spoken of,' — seems to a certain class of ecclesiastical critics evidence that it was true. Really this is only evidence of the facility with which the same class of minds pro- pagate what they wish to be true. Early Oriel School and its^ Congeners. 7 1 ' listened to nor read.' But the fact remains, that they were deUvered with some degree of approval three years before, and pubHshed two years before, they were found to contain the dangerous heresies after- wards attributed to them. Both Whately and Arnold dwell upon this fact, in evidence of the personal ran- cour that animated many of Dr. Hampden's oppo- nents, and of ' the folly and cruelty and baseness ' of the calumnious agitation with which he was assailed. There have been successive agitations of a similar kind in Oxford since 1836; Hampden himself, eleven years later (1847), when made Bishop of Hereford, was for a second time the victim of the same perse- cuting and unworthy spirit. But none of these attacks exceeded in noise and malignity the famous or infamous outburst which in 1836 assailed the Bampton Lectures of 1832. There have been, as Whately said, ' other persecutions as unjust and as cruel (for burning of heretics was happily not in the power of the Hampden persecutors); but for impu- dence I never knew the like. The exhibition of riotous and hostile feeling was * startling even to those who had not anticipated much greatness or goodness from human nature.'^ ' Was there ever,' says Arnold, * an accusation involving its unhappy promoters in such a dilemma of infamy, compromisers of mischievous principles in 1832, 1833, 1834, and 1835; or slan- derers of a good and most Christian man in 1836?' As soon as Hampden's appointment to the Divinity professorship was announced the outbreak began, under the stimulus and leadership of the High Church , party. Representations were addressed to 1 Whately. 72 Movements of Religioits Thought, Government, to the Archbishop, to the Bishops. A committee, which met in the common room of Corpus Christi College, was nominated to conduct the prose- cution against one who had asserted principles not only subversive of the authority of the Church, but of the whole fabric and reality of Christian truth. New- man and Pusey vied with each other in setting forth Dr. Hampden's errors. A Convocation was sum- moned^ to consider a Statute to be passed by the University depriving the author of his voice in the nomination of Select Preachers. The ' non-placet ' of the Proctors at the first meeting interposed to prevent the passing of the Statute. * Instantly,' writes Mr. Nassau Senior, who is not likely to have exaggerated the scene, * there arose shouts, screams, and groans from the galleries and the area, such as no deliberative Assembly probably ever heard before.' A second Convocation was called for May, when a change of proctors had taken place, and the obnoxious and, it is believed, ' illegal ' Statute was then passed. The press, of course, from different sides, whipped up the excitement ; and a debate in the House of Lords in the following year brought it to a height, and possibly helped in some degree to allay it. The fever heat, however, may be said to have continued for two years, and even when it calmed down, left embers still burn- ing and ready to flame forth again — as it did in 1847. Great names of statesmen as well as ecclesiastics were prominent in the fray, and came out of it with a some- what damaged reputation. The Archbishop (Howley) makes a poor figure throughout. The Duke of WeUington did not add to his glory. His attitude i March 22, 1836. Early Oi'iel School and its Congeners. 73 in the House of Lords in reference to Dr. Hampden's explanations was neither magnanimous nor intelligent. Mr. Gladstone, long afterwards, in 1856, had the grace to write to Dr. Hampden, expressing regret for his concurrence in the vote of the University. He had not taken actual part in it, but was only prevented from doing so 'by an accident.' The letter is alike honourable to the writer, and to the Bishop, all whose 'heretical ' troubles were by this time past. There is one other famous name in the renewed persecution of 1847 that bore to the last the unhappy dint of en- counter with Dr. Hampden. It is one of the melan- choly lessons of the history of religious opinion that the interests, or supposed interests, of Christian Faith should too often overcome the interests of righteous- ness and fair dealing. And it is sad, but true, that the names of Samuel Wilberforce and John Henry Newman should both bear the scar of 'unfairness ' in dealing with this matter, which the most ingenious defences of their friends have wholly failed to remove.^ 1 In vindication of what is said in the text as to Dr. Newman, it is enough to quote a single sentence from a letter of Bishop Wilberforce to the Bishop of Exeter, when the movement against Dr. Hampden so entirely collapsed in 1848. He is defending himself to his friend for his having withdrawn the prosecution against Dr. Hampden : — ' I can only account for my words, seeming to mean more by my writing in some indignation at the tmfairness of the Extracts [by which Dr. New- man sought to condemn Dr. Hampden], an unfairness I had pointed out to Nezvman in 1 836.' This is the .statement not of an enemy, or of Dr. Arnold, but of a friend, and in 1836 a co-operator. Further, as to Dr. Wilberforce himself, and the eclipse which his name suffered in connec- tion with the second prosecution of Dr. Hampden, I would refer readers to vol. i. c. vi., of the well-known Life. It is one of the saddest chap- ters in an entertaining, but by no means edifying, book. The dislike of Dr. Hampden by High Church writers to this day is quite ' pheno- menal,' as the newspapers say. Witness a review of Dr. Mozley's 74 Movements of Religions Thought. In comparison with his host of persecutors, the character of Hampden himself, uninteresting as he may have been, shines forth with consistent lustre. I will venture on a further statement, which is true at least to my own experience, astounding as it may be to conventional theologians on one side and the other, that there are seeds of thought in Dr. Hampden's writings far more fertile and enduring than any to be found in the writings of his chief opponents. There is hardly one of the principles for which he contended — the supremacy of Scripture over tradition — the in- dependence of spiritual religion both of theological nomenclature and Sacramental usage — above all the great distinction of the truth as it is in Scripture from the later dogmatic forms in which it has been embodied, that have not since more or less commended themselves to all rational theologians. Forgotten as they now are, and never in any sense popular, the student of Christian thought will always turn to the Bampton Lectures of 1832 with interest and profit. A few v/ords must suffice for the two other names which, although not belonging to the Oriel school, were so far animated by the same spirit at the same time. These names in their full significance belong, we have already said, to a later period in the history of religious opinion. They are rightly noticed here, however, because both struck, in the years of the ' noetic' school, a note of theological advance which Letters, in the Spectato7' of 15th Nov. 1884, where he is roundly abused not only as *a dull writer and confused thinker — but an intolerant bigot till he became a bishop ' ! How strangely inextinguishable is the fire of old ecclesiastical feuds ! Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 75 resounded widely amid the so-called 'heretical' noises of the time. Thirlwall's translation of Schleiermacher's Essay on St. Luke, with a lengthened introduction, appeared in 1825. The translator was not then even a clergyman. He was a student at Lincoln's Inn, in preparation for the career of the barrister. Connop Thirlwall, however, had from his early Cambridge days been almost as much interested in theology as in literature and history. Pascal's ThotigJiis was one of his choicest studies. He contemplated learning- Hebrew while still at school. His visit to Germany and acquaintance with Bunsen before 1820, not to speak of his 'inseparable' friendship with Julius Charles Hare, strengthened his interest in sacred and critical studies ; and shortly after the publication of the Essay on St. Luke, he abandoned the legal for a clerical career. The publication of this essay, according to Dean Perowne, the editor of Thirlwall's very interesting letters, 'was an epoch in the history of English theology,' as well as in Thirl- wall's own life.^ The volome is entirely critical in its ^ The latter statement is made specially in allusion to the fact that the publication of the essay may be said to have procured for him his bishopric. Lord Melbourne, who had taken an interest in his career from the first, read the Essay, with the Introduction, and was much struck by both. He had wished, therefore, to promote Thirlwall even earlier to the Episcopal bench, but the bishops whom he con- sulted 'expressed a want of confidence' in the orthodoxy of the volume! In 1840, however, when the See of St. David's fell vacant, he appointed him at once to the vacancy, and a graphic account has been preserved (see Torrens's Memoirs of Viscount Melbourne, vol. ii. pp. 330-332) of the interview which took place between the Premier and the Bishop-designate. When Thirlwall waited upon him, Mel- bourne was in bed, surrounded with letters and newspapers, but immediately opened the conversation. ' Very glad to see you ; sit down, sit down ; hope you are come to say you accept ; I only wish 76 Movements of Religious Thought. character, and could hardly have been read beyond the circle of the learned. The explanation of the interest which it created is to be found in the prevalent stagnation of the theological atmosphere at the time, and the current notions that any critical inquiry into the composition of the books of Scrip- ture, and of the Gospels in particular, was inimical to the full acceptance of their sacred character. Biblical criticism, notwithstanding the labours of Bishop Marsh in the beginning of the century, was so dead in England that even Christian scholars shrank from any real sifting into sources or text. The inquiries of German theologians, so far as known, were looked upon with suspicion. The Bampton Lecturer of 1824, Mr. Conybeare, had sounded a note of alarm regarding them, which was taken up, as we shall see in our next lecture, by Hugh James Rose and others. The sacerdotal influences which were beginning to move Oxford Avere equally hostile with Puritanism to all German criticism and divinity. Then as always, even to our own time, German theologians you to understand that I don't intend, if I know it, to make a hetero- dox bishop. I don't hke heterodox bishops. As men they may be very good anywhere else, but I don't think they have any business on the bench. I take great interest,' he continued, 'in theological ques- tions,' pointing to a pile of folio editions of the Fathers. ' They are excellent reading, and very amusing ; some time or other we must have a talk about them. I sent your edition of Schleiermacher to Lambeth, and asked the Primate to tell me candidly what he thought of it ; and, look, here are his notes on the margin ; pretty copious too. He does not concur in all your opinions, but he says there is nothing heterodox in your book.' It is a fact deserving notice that it was to Lord Melbourne also that Hampden's appointment as Regius Professor of Divinity was owing, and expressly on the ground ' of profound theological knowledge,' combined with ' a liberal spirit of inquiry tempered by due caution ' ! Early Oriel School and its Congeners, "jj of the most varying tendency were slumped together as equally heterodox. As Thirlwall himself wrote, * It would almost seem as if at Oxford the knowledge of German subjected a Divine to the same suspicion of heterodoxy which was attached some centuries back to the knowledge of Greek.' Particularly the hypo- theses which had then begun in Germany, and which were destined to run in such endless series, as to the composition of the Gospels, and their relation to one another, were viewed with jealousy as being, in the words of a once well-known book,^ 'not only detri- mental to the character of the sacred writers, but also as diminishing the value and importance of their testimony, and further, as tending to sap the inspira- tion of the New Testament.' The mere fact that the Biblical studies of the age were mainly pursued under the guidance of this book — not without value in its day, but entirely uncritical in its spirit and method — is the best evidence of how low these studies had sunk, and how little the theological mind of the time was prepared to welcome such an Essay as Thirlwall introduced to it. His 'Introduction' is a singularly enhghtened, closely reasoned, and wise piece of writing, like all the theological disquisitions in the shape of ' Charges,' that long afterwards came from his pen. He admits at once the inconsistency of such inquiries as those of Schleiermacher and his forerunner Eichhorn and others with the long prevailing doctrine of verbal inspira- tion — a doctrine, however, which, although still generally received, he esteems so entirely abandoned 1 Home's Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures (1818). 78 Movements of Religious Thought by the learned as not to require refutation. Nor does he think the more flexible theories of inspira- tion as divided into 'inspiration of suggestion' and 'inspiration of superintendency' any more tenable in the face of the facts which the text of Scripture brings before us. He turns rather with approval to the 'old opinion' that Scripture is indeed inspired, but only in its substance and spirit, — 'in the continual presence and action of what is most vital and essen- tial in Christianity itself.' And this, the only true and tenable view consistent with the actual character of the Biblical Literature, has no need, he says, to fear 'any investigation into the mutual relation and origin of the Gospels.' This was a strong and bold attitude in 1825, before Coleridge's Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit had seen the light. It shows plainly how the critical spirit was working in many minds. There is no evidence of Coleridge having exercised any special influence over Thirlwall, notwithstanding the latter's close friend- ship with Hare, and participation in many of his sym- pathies. The connection of the two friends was on the side of philology and history rather than of philo- sophy. Thirlwall's mind, moreover, was cast in a quite different mould. Its highest attribute was a dry light without any mystic depths or philosophic aspirations. Changing his career after mature deliberation, he carried with him into the Church the same compass and balance of judicial faculty which would have made him one of the greatest lawyers, as they made him, intellectually, the greatest bishop of his time. No one on the contemporary bench can be named with him in mere intellectual magnanimity and power. Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 79 There were other non-Episcopal names greater in theological insight and in the sustained contributions which they made to sacred literature. But there were none who brought a more massive learning or more rational lucidity to the discussion of theological questions. He was a true Christian sage, fitted to take his place in the innermost circle of the sages of all time. And it was well, as Dean Stanley says, that this was so, and that a bishop of such massive intellectuality and large wisdom should have been one of the ruling spirits of our time. The name of Milman does not pale beside that of Thirlwall. There are those indeed who esteem it a still more brilliant name in sacred literature. So far both were alike. They never acquired the sort of popular distinction that waits on the leaders of great ecclesiastical parties, — men of the stamp of the late Dr. Wilberforce or Dr. Pusey. Distinction of this kind was alien to their nature. Just because they were men of large intel- lectual vision, and bore the crown of literary as well as theological genius, they were unfitted to be party men, or to soil their garments in the mire of ecclesias- tical contention. Both spent their lives more or less in their study, rather than in the religious world. And so there has not come to either the kind of fame which resounds in this world, and which is apt to be the reverberation of a common noise, rather than the intelligent appreciation of intelligent minds. Milman is probably less known than even Thirl- wall. I have met with people of education, and some degree of culture, who were, if not ignorant of his name, ignorant of all he has done. They 8o Movements of Religious Thought, were astonished to hear him spoken of as a great historian. They had never read a word of his History of Latin Christianity, nor even of his History of the Jews. They had never heard of him as one of the greatest names that the Church of England has ever produced. In combination of pure genius with learn- ing, of sweep of thought with picturesque and power- ful variety of literary culture and expression, he has always seemed to me by far the first of modern English churchmen. Henry Hart Milman was educated at Oxford, and was a conspicuous man there during both the earlier and later Oriel movements. He was distinguished as a poet as early as 1820; and although his poetry has failed to live, save in a few hymns, it remains an interesting monument of the early glow and splendour of his genius. TJie Fall of Jerusalem and The Martyr of Antioch contain passages of great power and beauty; but, like the poetic efforts of a great female genius of our times, they are lacking in creative art and movement. They are poetical essays, rather than poems springing spontaneously and irre- sistibly out of the heart and imagination of the writer. Poems of this secondary class, however fine in part, never survive. Already, in 1827, Milman was Bamp- ton Lecturer as well as Poet; and his genius seems to have been recognised by the different schools of thought that had risen or were rising within the Univer- sity. The eleve of Brazenose College, and Professor of Poetry, did not however join himself to any of these schools. Before the date of his Bampton Lectures he had already diverged into paths of inquiry entirely separating him from traditionary Anglicanism. An Early OiHel School audits Congeners. 8i Anglo-Catholic of the Keble or Newman type he could never have been with all his poetic and con- crete tastes. But he did not any more connect himself with the ' Noetic ' school. Whately and Hampden could hardly have been congenial to him. From the first, however, he belonged to the school of inquiry and not of tradition. He had imbibed the same critical spirit and love of original historic research that we find in Arnold, and Hare and Thirlwall. He had made himself, as they had done, familiar with German learning, and entered as early they had done upon the application of its principles to history. Not only so, but he had chosen for this purpose the most difficult of all departments, the history of the Jews, which, as he himself said, had been looked upon as forbidden ground. He resolved that there was nothing in so-called sacred history, any more than in the history of Greece or Rome, to exempt it from the laws of criticism. The same principles which proved so fertile in the one case would yield no less rich results in the other. This was the key-note to the great work to which he had consecrated his life, while Whately was still busy with his Essays, and Arnold was writing his Ser- mons. The History of the Jews, in three small volumes of the Family Library, was published in 1829. No sooner were the volumes made public than they raised a wild commotion, not only in England, but in Scotland. All the current religious magazines assailed them as subversive of the supernatural in Scripture, and generally tending to minimise or de- grade the idea of Divine Revelation. The Christian f 82 Movements of Religious Thought. Instructor, the once well-known organ of the evan- gelical party in the Church of Scotland, while ac- knowledging the ' captivating style of the book, and the felicity and attractiveness of its historical pictures, is forced deeply to lament that it should ever have seen the light, especially as part of the Family Library, intended for domestic use.' So violent proved the noise against the book, and so persistent the prejudices with which it was assailed, that the publisher was forced to stop the series of which it formed a part. What then is the real character of the book ? It is a charming and attractive narrative. Forty years ago it charmed me more than I can well recall and express. For the first time one felt the heroes of the Old Testament, and the institutions and usages of the Hebrew people described with a vividness and reality that made them live before the mind's eye and brought them within the sphere of fact, rather than of pulpit convention. Strange, this was one of the very accusations against the History. It spoke of Abraham as an ' Eastern Sheik ' or ' Emir,' of the ' quiet and easy Isaac,' of the * cautious, observant, subtle, and kind Jacob.' It pointed to the undoubted fact that we do not find even in Abraham * that nice and lofty sense of veracity which came with a later civilisation.' It explained the overthrow of the cities of Sodom by the inflammable character of the soil on which, and of the materials with which, they were built. It made nothing of the then received chronology of the Bible, which has really no higher authority than Archbishop Ussher in the seventeenth century. It recognised the exaggeration of the Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 83 Scriptural numbers so obvious to every intelligent reader, and naturally arising out of the circumstances. 'All kinds of numbers,' as the author afterwards explained,^ ' are uncertain in ancient mss., and have been subject to much greater corruption than any other part of the text.' And so long ago as the time of Bishop Burnet, the matter was left to the free judg- ment of the clergy of the Church of England. It explained naturally the passage of the Red Sea, and generally brought the light of criticism to bear upon * the Eastern veil of Allegory ' in which much of the narrative of the Old Testament is invested. Doubt- less at the time these were startling features in a * History of the Jews,' and those who are familiar with the state of the religious world then and long after- wards will not wonder at the violent excitement which it raised. In truth, however, Milman, in the light of such Old Testament criticism as we are now familiar with, must be pronounced a highly conservative his- torian. Our modern schools would, I fear, judge him ' unscientific' He repudiated in good faith any anti- supernatural bias, and deliberately separated himself from the extreme school of modern criticism. Its spirit of endless analysis and love for turning every- thing upside down was thoroughly uncongenial to his mind. He had too much imagination as well as faith and sobriety of temper for such -work ; and he remained to the end what he was plainly from the first, an historical genius who, while urged by his critical powers to sift everything to the bottom and to take nothing for granted merely because it was con- nected with traditional theology, was yet no less urged ^ New Edition, Preface, 1863. 84 Movements of Religious Thought. by his poetic and concrete tastes to paint a picture rather than give a mere tableau of critical processes. Erudite as any German, and familiar to the time of his death (1868) with the latest results of German critical speculation, he was yet, in the moulding power of his great intellect and his large knowledge of life and literature — in short, in his gifts as an historic artist, — as unlike as possible to the common type of German theologian. He was thoroughly English in his tastes ; and his main distinction, like that of Whately and Arnold and Hampden, was his clear recognition of the difference between a simple and traditional Christianity, between what is essential to religion, and what is temporary and extraneous to it. This thought pervades his earlier History; it is emphasised in the Preface to the new and enlarged edition of 1863. It is the closing thought of his great History of Latin Christianity. What- ever part of our ancient dogmatic systems, he says, may fall into disuse ' as beyond the proper range of human thought and language,' and however far the * Semitic portions ' of the sacred records may have to submit to ' wider interpretation ' ' in order to harmonise them with the irrefutable conclusions of science,' the ' unshadowed essence ' of Divine Truth as enshrined in the W'Ords of Christ, 'the primal and indefeasible truths of Christianity,' will live for ever. All else is transient and mutable — dogmatic form — sacramental usage — ecclesiastical rite. That which in its very nature is changing, and which the history of the Church shows to have already changed many times, cannot be enduring. But the ' truth as it is in Jesus ' ' shall not pass away,' * clearer, fuller, more Early Oriel School and its Congeners. 85 comprehensive and balanced' as may become our view of it Here the very note of the 'Noetic' School is struck, and Milman therefore deserves a place by the side of it. He is greater than most if not all of the School, but it is the same liberal spn-it which speaks in it and in him. III. OXFORD OR ANGLO-CATHOLIC MOVEMENT. 'X 7^ 7" HAT is known as the Oxford Movement had its first beginnings in the same centre of in- tellectual life as the early Oriel School. It sprang as a secondary crop from the same soil. The early Oriel men had all attained to maturity by the year 1825. Hampden, the youngest, was then thirty-two years of age.^ Keble was the oldest of the new Oxford group,^ and chronologically, as we before remarked, may be said to blend the schools. He was a fellow of Oriel before either Arnold or Hampden.^ The same ' Oriel Common Room ' where so many ' learned and able, not rarely subtle and disputatious conversations took place,' found those men frequently together in the later years of the second decade of the century.* Who can tell whether the seeds of the great reaction against liberalism, which Keble formally commenced, may not have been sown as far back as those discussions ? But the author of the Christian Yeaj" did not need any 1 Born 1793. 2 Born 1792. Pusey was born 1800; J. H. Newman 1801. ^ Keble was elected Probationer Fellow in 181 1. Hampden became fellow in 1814; Arnold in 1815. * Keble fancied that he had quitted Oxford officially in 1 81 7, but he became College tutor in the end of the year, and remained more or less closely connected with the College till 1823, 86 Oxford or Anglo- Catholic Movement. 87 provocation to the course on which he entered. He was from the first an Anghcan of the Anghcans. UnUke Newman, he had no evangehcal or liberal preconceptions to get rid of He was a Tory of the old school, to whom the Church of England was not only dear, but to whom there was no other Church.^ The Christian Year had already appeared in 1827, and when the strain of the liberal storm came in 1832, and all the spirit of the young Oxford Church- men was stirred within them, it was only natural that he, quiet but intensely dogmatic as he was, should have taken a temporary lead. Dr. Newman has expressly signalised his famous Assize Sermon in the summer^ of 1833, and published under the title of National Apostasy, as the formal beginning of the movement.^ The same master hand has sketched the general influences under which the movement arose. The new literary spirit of the time, the poetry of the Lake School, the mediaeval romanticism of Sir Walter Scott, the philosophy of Coleridge, all bore their share in deepening men's thoughts and awakening the thirst after nobler ideas in religion as in other things. It is a special tribute to the far-reaching genius of our countryman that his romances should have not only been the delight of thousands, but should have stimulated the enthusiasm for a richer culture, and prepared the mental soil everywhere for ^ Yet he says in one of his letters to his biographer, Sir J. T. Coleridge, * I was myself inclined to Eclecticism at one time.' A very mild inclination of this sort may have marked his earliest Oriel days, but no trace of it remains in any of his writings. '^ 14th July. 3 Apologia, p. lOO. 88 Movements of Religious Thought. larger conceptions of society and of the Cliurch. As may be supposed, the opinion expressed by Newman of Coleridge is a modified, while a highly significant one. 'While history in prose and verse,' he says, *was thus made the instrument of church feehngs and opinions, a philosophical basis for the same was laid in England by a very original thinker, who, while he indulged a liberty of speculation which no Chris- tian can tolerate, yet after all instilled a higher philo- sophy into inquiring minds than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept. In this way he made trial of his age, and succeeded in interesting its genius in the cause of Catholic truth.' ^ During the crisis which followed the Reform Bill of 1832, there were evidently two currents of religious opinion running strongly — the one more or less in sympathy with the prevailing liberalism, and the other strongly against it. This latter current was reactionary; but it was something more. It was negative — opposed to liberalism in Church and State — but it also contained within itself a new and crea- tive conservatism, one of the chief principles of which was a fresh organisation of the Church.^ This is apparent to all in the sequel of events. But what is less understood is the extent to which these two currents crossed one another and intermingled before they took their respective directions. They not only for a time lay side by side in the bosom of Oriel ^ Apologia, p. 185, quoted from an Article by himself in the British Critic, 1 839. ^ This is true of Scotland as well as England. The parallelism between the rise of High Churchism in England and Scotland during ;2-42 has yet to be intelligently described. Oxford or Anglo- Catholic Movement. 89 College, but both the men who in the end led the conservative reaction for a time inclined to liberalism. Dr. Newman has told us this of himself He says, indeed, that whatever may have been Whately's influence over him, he was never inclined to his theo- logy. Yet in the very same breath he tells us that there was a time in his Oriel experience when he was beginning * to prefer intellectual excellence to moral.* He ' was drifting in the direction of liberalism,' and commonly understood, as we shall see, to be a follower of Whately. The case of Dr. Pusey is a more remarkable one. This great theologian and leader, so identified with the highest development of the dogmatic spirit in England, was, in the beginning of his career, supposed to be and vigorously denounced as a theological liberal. And there was good ground for the supposition. From the time that he obtained his Oriel fellowship in 1822, to the date of his first pubhcation in 1828, the line of his main inquiry and thought ran in an eminently rational direction. He had been abroad — attracted, like other young minds of the time, by the phenomena of German theology, — and he gave the result of his studies to the world in a brief ' Historical inquiry into the probable causes of the Rationalist character of German Theology.' A second and larger part was added in 1830, after the author had become Regius Professor of Hebrew — an office retained by him during his long life. The motif of Dr. Pusey's book was not indeed a vindication of German Theology m its rationalistic developments. It was, however, a defence of it from the indiscriminate assaults contained in ' Discourses preached before the University of Cambridge, by 90 Movements of Religious Thought, Hugh James Rose,' and published by him in 1825, under the title of TJie State of Protestantism in Germany. Rose has been panegyrised by Dr. New- man. He was, so to speak, a Tractarian before the Tractarians, a man of warmth and energy, with fine sensibilities, and an enthusiastic love of what he believed to be divine truth. He must have had many high qualities to have left such an impression as he has done, not only on Dr. Newman's mind, but on many minds of a different order. But he had also many of the vices of his school, invincible prejudice, incapacity of discrimination, ignorance of historic method, lack of tolerance and sympathy beyond the range of the Church of England.^ In contrast to Rose's book, Pusey's is an eminently fair, reasonable, and candid inquiry, liberal, in the best sense of the word, as recognising what is good no less than what is bad in German theology, and especially as setting the worst phases of German rationalism in the light of the causes which have operated in pro- ducing them. The author was no more in love with rationalism than Mr. Rose, but he understood, as the ^ The spirit of Rose's book may be judged from the following sentence : — ' If it be essential to a Protestant Church to possess a con- stant power of varying her belief ' (by which he means revising her standards of belief), * let us remember that ours is assuredly no Protestant Church.' We can, of course, only judge of Rose from his book, which is not in any sense a good or worthy book ; but a man is so often much better than his books, especially if they are polemical, that the feeling entertained by some of Hugh James Rose that he was the most intelligent and high-minded of the theologians who set the Anglo-Catholic movement agoing, and that its course would have been different if he had been spared, may be well founded. Bishop Words- worth of St. Andrews has expressed this opinion strongly to the writer. Oxford or Anglo- Catholic Movement, 91 former did not do, all the phenomena which went under that name, what varying shades of truth and falsehood they presented, and by what intelligible links they were connected with one another. Nothing, indeed, is more remarkable in Dr. Pusey's work than the breadth and power of historical analysis it dis- plays, its extreme fairness ; and even to this day, when so many accounts have been given of the historical development of German theology from different points of view, it still deserves perusal. The result, as may be supposed, was that Pusey was denounced as a defender of Rationalism. The liberal spirit which he had shown in the study of strange opinions could only proceed from a theological liberal. He was accused, among other things, of ' an intemperate opposition to all articles ' — a * hatred of all systems' — of impugning 'the inspiration of the his- torical parts of Scripture' — of speaking of 'a new era of theology' (as if there could be such a thing), * of scattering doubts on the truth of the genuineness of Scripture.' This was the reward of his dealing fairly with a difficult subject. It is pathetic to think of his early and his later career, and how little his experience of the poisoned weapons with which he had been assailed in his youthful and more intelli- gent enthusiasm, should have taught him the Chris- tian duty of always understanding what he opposed, and of fairly construing the motives of those who differed from him. Doubtless the dogmatic temper was strong in him from the first, notwithstanding his large knowledge, and the higher historical temper which he everywhere shows. His place in the new movement will appear definitely as we advance. In 92 Movements of Religious Thought the meantime we must turn to the true soul of the first stage of the movement — Newman himself, and his friend Richard Hurrell Froude. The Apologia pro vita sua is still our best text-book on the subject. Mr. Mozley's Reminiscences have added hardly any- thing of substantive importance to its history. John Henry Newman is almost as old as the cen- tury, having been born in the beginning of i8oi. The son of a London banker, who had married the daughter * of a well-known Huguenot family,' he was surrounded by reUgious influences from his youth, and at the age of fifteen became, under Calvinistic guidance, and the study especially of a work of Romaine's, the subject of ' an inward conversion,' of which he says (1864), 'I am still more certain than that I have hands and feet' Five years before, Dr. Chalmers, very much under the same influences, but at a more mature age, became the subject of a similar change. Newman retained his Calvinistic impressions till the age of twenty-one, although never accepting certain conclusions supposed to be identified with Calvinism — the doctrine of reprobation, for example. A well-known evangelical writer — greatly studied and admired in the beginning of this century — Thomas Scott, now chiefly remembered for his Scrip- ture Commentary, * made a deeper impression on his mind than any other.' To him (' humanly speaking'), he says, * I almost owe my soul' His death in 1821 *' came upon me as a disappointment as well as a sorrow. I hung upon the lips of Daniel Wilson, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, as in two sermons at St. John's Chapel he gave the history of Scott's life and death. I had been possessed of his Essays from Oxford or Anglo- Catholic Movement, 93 a boy ; his commentary I bought when I was an under-graduate.' Newman early showed a dogmatic as well as a religious turn. He made a collection of Scripture texts in proof of the doctrine of the Trinity before he was sixteen, and a few months later he drew up a series of texts in support of each verse of the Athan- asian Creed. Two other books, he says, greatly delighted him — Joseph Milner's Church History, and Newton on the Propliccies. There are, I dare say, some here who remember how common these books were in all religious households fifty years ago. They recall the fragrance of a home piety from the tender thought of which no good mind would willingly part. Newman tells us how much he was enamoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine and the other Fathers in Milner's History, and how he learned from Newton to identify the Pope with Antichrist, a doctrine by which, he adds, his imagination ' was stained up to the year 1843,' or till he w^as forty- two years of age. At the age of twenty-one (1822), nearly two years after he had taken his degree, * he came,' as he tells us, * under very different influences.' He passed from Trinity College, where he had graduated, into Oriel as a fellow, and joined the band of liberal thinkers who had been so long working there. How far he was repelled by the atmosphere of the place at first — and how far for a time he came to sympathise with its intellectual spirit — it is difficult to say beyond what he has himself told us. During his first year of resi- dence he says that, ' though proud of his College,' he * was not at home there.' He was very much alone, 94 Move^nents of Religious Thought. and used to walk by himself. Again, we have seen, he describes himself as, some years later, leaning to Intellectualism, and even as * drifting in the direction of liberalism.' With all the apparent frankness of the Apologia, there is no doubt much still to learn as to those years, and the full history of Newman's religious opinions will only be known when we know more of the steps of his transition from Evangelicalism to High Churchism, and how far he took liberalism on his way. During much of the time at Oriel that followed his appointment as a fellow, or from 1823 to the end of 1827, he was, according to his brother- in-law,^ identified with Whately. * It would not have been easy,' he says, 'to state the difference between their respective views.' Newman's religiousness, how- ever, was always ' conspicuous,' and his instinct to conserve and build the fabric of Divine Truth, as well as to analyse and expose any part that seemed unsound. He hated from the first any movement of destruction. * He used to talk of the men who lash the waters to frighten the fish, when they have made no prepara- tion to catch them.' Probably no one who then knew Newman could have told which way he would go in the end. With a keenly inquisitive mind disposed to search to the root of religious problems, he was too logical, too dogmatic, to be satisfied with Whately's position; and the latter soon discovered that New- man's was a spirit beyond his leading. He may have been wrong in saying that Newman was looking ' to be the head of a party ' himself; and yet there is a side of his character that suggests this view. He had a great love of personal influence. From the first he ^ Mr. Mozley married in 1836 Newman's elder sister. Oxford or Anglo- Catholic Movement. 95 attracted by his personality rather than by his intelli- gence — by the authority rather than the rationality of his opinions. He never seems to have understood any other kind of influence. In this kind he was supreme. He did not require to go in search of friends or fol- lowers. They gathered spontaneously around him, and there almost necessarily sprang out of this feature of his character a high ambition. Copleston seems dimly to have seen such a future in him, and all to have recognised beneath his shyness the growth of a new power. The same year (1827) which saw the publication of Keble's wonderful volume is marked by a decisive advance in Newman's views. Illness and bereavement, he says, came to him with awakening effect. He had made the acquaintance of Hurrell Froude the year before, and began to feel the sway of his impe- tuous genius. In 1828 Hurrell Froude brought him and Keble together. Keble had previously been rather shy of him, he says, ' in consequence of the marks which I bore upon rne of the evangelical and liberal schools;' but their conjunction, under the guidance of Froude, laid the springs of the movement which burst forth five years later. Henceforth New- man bore no more traces either of Evangelicalism or Liberalism. All fell away from him in the rush of new thoughts which were to carry him forward in his destined path. Of Richard Hurrell Froude it is difficult to speak with confidence. He was, no doubt, as his brother tells us, 'gifted, brilliant, enthusiastic — an intel- lectual autocrat,' with the dashing, audacious charac- teristics of such a nature. Newman's estimate is 96 Movements of Religioits Thought. more detailed. * He was a man,' he says, ' of the highest gifts — so truly many-sided that it would be presumptuous in me to attempt to describe him, except under those aspects in which he came before me. Nor have I here to speak of the gentleness and tenderness of nature, the playfulness, the free elastic force and graceful versatility of mind, and the patient, winning considerateness in discussion, which endeared him to those to whom he opened his heart.' Again, he says, he was ' a man of high genius, brimful and overflowing with ideas and views, in him original, and which were too many and too strong even for his bodily strength, and which crowded and jostled against each other in their effort after distinct shape and expression. His opinions arrested and influenced me even when they did not gain my assent.' The two volumes of Remains published after his death, in 1836, so far bear out this impression, of a lively and versatile genius, warm-hearted and dashing. But the faults of such a genius are still more con- spicuous than the merits. The volumes are full of violent misjudgments, riotous prejudice, silly in- trospection, and here and thereof downright nonsense. It fills one with amazement, I confess, that men like Keble and Newman should have sanctioned, even taken a pleasure in their publication. Many of the sayings are more like those of a foolish, clever boy than anything else. Bred in ecclesiastical toryism, with 'the contempt of an intellectual aristocrat for private judgment and the rights of man,' Hurrell Fronde's Oxford learning seems not only to have fostered his essentially narrow spirit, but to have added to it a species of intellectual petulance which Oxford or Anglo-Catholic MovemeuL 97 would be offensive, if it were not ludicrous in absurdity.^ It is impossible to estimate highly the promise of such a genius ; and the Remains are now, with all their crude jauntiness, very dull reading. They have none of the bright vivacity of Sterling's essays, or the spontaneous humour that might redeem their petulance. There are no seeds of thought in them — nothing, for happy suggestiveness or rich if imma- ture power, fitted to live in any mortal memory. The extravagance is often little more than ignorance, and the audacity, impudence. Probably the author would have become wiser if he had lived. He seems to have had ample knowledge on such subjects as Church Architecture and Ancient Liturgies. Confessedly his * religious views never reached their ultimate conclu- sion.' It must remain doubtful, however, whether a man, so lacking in sense at the age of thirty-two, would have ever grown into wise activity. The combination which he presents of formal deference to authority with essential irreverence is especially to be noted. Episcopacy is sacred to him, but the individual bishop contemptible. All is right which he thinks right — nothing good which does not commend itself to his uninformed and headstrong judgment. To what this spirit has come in ecclesiastical England it is needless to say. The strange thing is that a 1 Witness the following : — * Really I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and more. How beautifully the Ediiiburgh Review [1835] has shown up Luther, Melanchthon, and Co.' 'Your trumpery principle about Scripture being the sole rule of Faith,' etc. Again, of a different kind : * Looked with greediness to see if there was goose on the table. Meant to have kept a fast, and did abstam from dinner, but at tea, ate buttered toast.' G 98 Movements of Religious Thought. temper like this, so conspicuously typified in Froude, and so largely represented in the party which he helped to form, should have believed that it was destined to regenerate English Christianity, and to make it once more a living national power. Newman evidently saw the weak points of his friend, if not exactly in the same light as we have pre- sented them. He confesses that Froude had no turn for theology as such, and ' no appreciation of the writings of the Fathers, or of the detail and develop- ment of doctrine.' His great qualities were personal rather than intellectual. He was the knight-errant of the party — eager, courageous, opposed to what he thought shams or sophistries, all unconscious, like knight-errants in general, that his enemies were those of his own disordered brain mainly. His impetuosity, however, gave him a sort of influence. With a singular and sad simplicity Newman says : 'It is difficult to enumerate the precise addition to my theological creed, which I derived from a friend to whom I owe so much. He made me look with admiration towards the Church of Rome, and in the same degree to dislike the Reformation. He fixed deep in me the idea of devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and he led me gradually to believ^e in the Real Presence.' Froude could hardly communicate what he did not possess. If he had no turn for theology, he could hardly make any worthy addition to any- body's creed ; but his insatiable eagerness made a deep impression upon his friend, and helped to incline him towards Rome. Probably the road thither might have been found earlier if he had lived. 'Subtleties 9.nd nice distinctions would not have stood in his Oxford or Anglo- Catholic Movement. 99 way. His course would have been direct and straight- forward.' ^ This does not tell us much, but it may be held as indicating the conclusion to which we point. Hurrell Froude would have needed no * nice distinc- tions/ because his mind was not of a distinguishing order. He had none of the scruples of wide know- ledge, or of the rational habit that looks on both sides of a question. He had no occasion to * minimise doctrines,' or make a wry face over principles, many of which he had already swallowed in all their enor- mity. The only question that can remain is whether, had he lived, he would not have carried his friend to Rome faster than he travelled. That he should ever have taken the lead, or competed with Newman as * the master spirit of the movement,' ^ is hardly to be imagined ; but his more downright and unhesitating impulses would almost certainly have driven the move- ment more rapidly towards its predestined goal. We have seen how Froude brought Newman and Keble together in 1828. And if he had never done anything else, this was something, as he supposed, to boast of ' If I was ever asked,' he said, ' what good deed I had ever done, I should say that I had brought Keble and Newman to understand each other.' Keble had been Hurrell Froude's tutor, both at Oxford and at his curacy of Southrop. He was eleven years older, and no doubt greatly influenced Froude, as Froude in turn, according to Newman, acted upon him. Both were Tories of the old Cava- lier or Anglo-Catholic stamp. They believed in the Church not merely as national, but exclusive. There ^ The Oxford Counter-Reformation, p. 176. F"roude'.s Short Studies, etc., vol. iii. 2 Mozley's Reminiscences, i. 125. lOO Movements of Religious Thought. was no other Church unless the Oriental or Roman Catholic. They were men of high and honourable spirit, and yet neither their reason nor their religion had taught them to acknowledge in men differing from them the same honourable and Christian motives they claimed for themselves. Froude, with outspoken impetuosity, did not hesitate to clothe his judgments in the harsh language which naturally became them. Keble's was a wiser and higher mind. He saw around him with a somewhat larger vision. In all personal relations he was one of the most tender and affectionate of men. Among his friends at Oxford he was not only admired but revered. ^ Newman relates with unconscious humour the estimate in which he was held. * There's Keble,' said a friend to him one day walking in High Street, ' and with what awe did I look at him ! ' Keble's personal character deserves all that can be said of it. It is of the type beautiful, and few could have known him without being the better for converse with such a high and gentle nature. His poetic and gracious gifts are embalmed in the Christian Year, which has touched so many hearts. There is an in- effable sweetness in its verse. Christian experience may outgrow the savour, but it lingers like a delight- ful fragrance in the memory. To Keble, as we have already said, more than to any other leader, the Oxford Movement was the natural outcome of a course of training and thought inbred in him from the first. There was no crisis or struggle in his life, only a deepening sense that Liberalism was evil and Anglo-Catholicism the only Christian power in the land. As a fellow and tutor at Oriel for about twelve Oxford or Anglo- Catholic Movement. loi years (i8i 1-1823), he had known the earUer Oriel spirit in its full power. If it attracted him at all, as he seems in one of his letters to imply/ it must have been for a very brief period, and the reaction must have soon followed. There was a gentle but immove- able obstinacy in his Anglican convictions. I have never seen in any one a more steadfast and unmoved faith — faith not only in the Christian but in the Anglican verities. And this is the secret of what must be called, even with his higher temper and range of intelligence, his intolerance. It has a sort of innocence. It is a Christian virtue. He has no idea how essentially offensive it is. Half cradled as the Church of England was in Puritanism, it is to him simply evil. He can see nothing great or good in it. Political opinions differing from his own are not merely mistaken — they are wrong, sinful. In his correspondence with his friend and biographer. Sir John Coleridge, he rebuts, — in a sort of playful way, but with no doubt as to his real meaning, — all idea that there may be good men on both sides of a question. He and his friends, he says, call this the Coleridgian heresy. By way of apology his bio- grapher says that his convictions were very deep- seated. They were ' stuff of the conscience.' No doubt. It is impossible not to feel that they were essential parts of his spiritual and intellectual nature ; but while this makes them intelligible and respect- able, it does not make them the less bigotries. A man is responsible for the culture of his reason, as well as of his sentiments* Keble seems never to have conceived of any religious truth beyond the Church ^ See preceding note, p. 87. I02 Movements of Religioics Thought. of England. All was false and wrong outside of it. He loved some who differed from him, among others, Arnold and Milman, who loved and admired him in turn, but it was with a sort of pity he gave them his affection, as if they were hopelessly in error. He delighted to see his little nephew under his teaching snapping at all the Round-heads, and kissing all the Cavaliers. You cannot be angry at bigotry like this, which smiles upon you, while it frowns on your opinions. But it is not admirable in itself It is mournful. It is only its powerless- ness that renders it innocuous. It is the child of ignorance, quite as much as of faith.^ Keble did much to encourage Newman in his career. The Christian Year strengthened in him * the two main intellectual truths ' which he had already learned from Butler — the sacramental or typical character of all material phenomena, and the influence of probability as the guide of life. All who know the volume will remember how constantly, and with what felicity of touch the sights and sounds oi Nature are made to minister to spiritual instruc- tion and discipline; how rich the natural symbolism of the hymns is everywhere ; so that Nature be- comes the mere veil of the higher life, the vesture of Divine communion, the parable of Divine mystery. All this met a deeply responsive chord in Newman, whose own poetry, with a deeper and more tragic vein, is full of the same symbolism. The principle ^ Even Mozley admits that Keble's ' sympathies were very one- sided ; ' and he mentions a curious instance of his intolerance, not otherwise recorded, so far as I know : ' that he induced a number of his neighbours and friends to sign a protest against Her Majesty choosing a Lutheran Prince for one of her sons' godfathers. Oxford or Anglo- Catholic Movemerit. 103 of probability again played a powerful part in the spiritual life of both. Accepted by faith and love, this principle became a source of religious certitude. Transmuted by trust it was turned into a ground of conviction. The same idea pervades many of Keble's sermons, and it was ultimately worked by Newman into the shape of a cardinal doctrine in his Grammar of Assent. It would be far too long to discuss it here. I have elsewhere carefully examined it/ and found it at the root — as I think all who probe it critically must find it — to be little more than a process of make-belief Only assent strongly enough to anything, and it will imbed itself in your mental constitution as a verity of the first order. But the further question always arises : What is the value of a principle of certitude which is, at bottom, planted neither in reason nor in evidence, but in the mere force of the grip which you yourself take of the thing believed ? Faith is good, but a faith that is neither enlightened nor deter- mined by facts in the shape of evidence, but simply by the blind assent with which the mind sets itself upon its object, may be as much a basis of superstition as of religion. The argument springing out of such faith is admitted by Dr. Newman himself to be merely ' one form of the argument from authority.' Such is a brief sketch of the chief figures engaged in the 'Oxford movement,' and, so far, of the prin- ciples which they represented. We must note, how- ever, more clearly than we have yet done, the several stages of the movement, the causes which led to it, and the objects at which it aimed. We cannot within our limits do more, or extend our view much beyond ^ Edinburgh Rcviezv, October 1S70. I04 Movements of Religious Thought. the time which may be said to be measured by the Tracts foi' the Times, or Tractarianism as it has been specially called. Some years before, or from 1828 to 1833, Keble, Newman, and Froude were all converging towards some definite action. Newman's spirit was warm- ing within him as the dogmatic principle took a firmer hold of his mind, and the Church seemed more and more threatened by the political agitation sur- rounding it. Meantime, however, he was busy with his studies on the Avians of the FoitrtJi Century, as Keble was busy in the preparation of his edition of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity. These studies deepened the Catholic tendencies of both, as they braced and fur- nished them for the struggle before them. All this time the political course of events was fretting them intolerably. Liberalism was not only *in the air,' but had proved its ascendency every- where. Sir Robert Peel, at the time member for Oxford, had been forced to give way and introduce his Bill for the Emancipation of the Catholics. This led, as may be imagined, to a violent commotion at Oxford ; heads of Houses divided against heads of Houses, and the Dogmatic party, with Keble and Newman in front, violently on the Orthodox side. In 1 83 1 and 1832 the political atmosphere became still more agitated. There was revolution in France; direct assaults upon the Church at home. 'The Whigs had come into power ; Lord Grey had told the Bishops to set their house in order, and some of the Prelates had been insulted and threatened in the streets of London.' ^ All these things made a deep impres- 1 Apologia, p. 93. Oxford 07^ Anglo- Catholic Movement. 105 sion upon the Oxford group, whom sympathy of feel- ing and opinion had by this time more or less banded together. Newman's mind was excited in the highest degree. 'The vital question,' he says/ was, How were we to keep the Church from being liberalised;' 'the true principles of churchmanship seemed so radically decayed, and there was such distraction in the councils of the clergy.' Keble was less passionately, but hardly less deeply, moved. Froude required no kindling against the V/higs. He was violent against them from the first. He could have forgiven the Reform Bill, if it had not been for his personal hatred of the Whigs.^ Here were the abundant materials of an outburst not merely ecclesiastical but political. It is impossible to ignore the political as well as the intellectual or theological side of the Oxford move- ment. It was a new Toryism, or designed to be such, as well as a new Sacerdotalism. Newman's and Froude's journey abroad in the end of 1832 and spring of 1833, seems strangely to have acted as a stimulus to their ecclesiastical and poli- tical excitement rather than as a distraction. In the Mediterranean, in Sicily, in Paris, 'England was in my thoughts solely,' Newman says. 'The Bill for the suppression of the Irish Sees was in progress, and filled my mind. I had fierce thoughts against the Liberals. A French vessel was at Algiers ; I would not even look at the Tricolour,' and so hateful was revolutionary Paris, with all its beauty, that he 'kept indoors the whole time ' he was there. It was at this time that he so far forgot his Christian charity as to speak of Arnold in the manner we related in our * Rtni \\. \.QihQ sui generis — a Divine particle implying a Divine Author. But even if this cannot be proved, it seems evident that a Divine Author or Creative Mind can only be argued on the basis that Mind is something more than any mere function of matter. What otherwise comes of the principle of Design ? — with which Mr. Mill, no less than the Theist, largely works. He is greatly in favour of Design in Creation, Repudiating all other evidences of Theism, he thinks that the argument from marks of Design in Nature is 'of a really scientific character.' He does not allow the ars^ument to the extent of the Christian Theist. The ' marks of Design ' appear to him to imply an Evil as well as a Good Power, or at least an imperfect Power. There is evidence of benevo- lent Design, but it is also evident he thinks that benevolent Design has been hemmed in and hindered by lack of adequate power or intractableness of material. But leaving aside the character of his con- clusion, of which we have already said enough, is there not a radical weakness at the root of any Design argu- ment in his hands ? for if mind be a mere quality or outcome of matter, we may certainly ask, with Hume, why should it be made ' the model of the universe ' ? What right have we to transfer it to natural pheno- mena at all as their explanation ? Design is only intelligible as the purposeful operation of an intelli- gent will. It is essentially the expression of such a will. And is this not already to own an intelligence Q 242 Movements of Religious Thought. behind the order of Nature? Does not Theism of any kind, in short, even such Theism as Mr. Mill's, imply a metaphysical basis — an intelligent will operating behind the changes of experience ; while a philosophy like Mr. Mill's, which ab initio denies that there is anything at all behind experience, and makes the will itself merely a phenomenon, really leaves no room for Will in Nature at all. No analogy of mere experi- ence can enable us to find in Nature what we do not recognise in ourselves. The whole fabric of Mr. Mill's Theism therefore tumbles to the ground. It is the old story again of Nulliis spiritus in Microcosmo, nidliis Dens in Macrocosmo. Blot out the Divine in Man, and no Divine can be found in Nature. Soul and God are essentially co-relative, and if soul is denied, God, or a Creative Mind, can nowhere be found. It is remarkable how far Mr. Mill is disposed to recognise Design in Nature — as in the forma- tion of the eye for example. Sight not being precedent, but subsequent to the organic struc- ture of the eye, this structure can only be ex- plained by an antecedent idea as the efficient cause. 'And this at once marks the organ as proceeding from an intelligent Will' But is not the idea of an intelligent Will essentially metaphysical ? It has no meaning as a mere educt of experience. Intelligence may be predicated on a mere basis of observation, but an intelligent Will — Mind as a creative or origi- nal agent — is something deeper than any mere ex- perience, and lies at the background of all experience. We cannot play with words in this manner; we cannot use ' Design ' and speak of ' an intelligent will,' and yet maintain a merely phenomenal basis. John StuaiH Mill and his School. 243 The distinction of the two systems of thought is radical, and there is no binding the two together. Atheism is the consistent result of PhenomenaHsm, and by its very premisses shuts out the Divine both in Man and Nature. It holds all life throughout in its everlasting grasp, and there is no getting behind it. Because, ex JiypotJiesi, there is nothing behind, — there is no metaphysic. There can hardly be a doubt therefore that what were supposed to be Mill's earlier views were the true logical outcome of his mode of thought, far more than the pallid Theism propounded by him in his posthumous essay, which recognised a Creator, but denied to Him either full benevolence, or the power to carry his benevolent purposes into effect. A God thus limited — whose hand is shortened that it can not save, is no God at all, and no religion worth speaking of could rest on such a basis. It may be asked, then, What is the value of Mr. Mill's thinking upon religion ? Is it not purely negative ? Even if it were so, it would claim our attention. The advocates of a thesis can never overlook the anti-thesis, and those who defend it. The very breadth of Mr. Mill's negations and the negations of his school has been of service to religious thought. The thoroughness of his logical analysis on one side has led to a more thorough analysis on the other side. The ideas of Order, of Miracle, of Free Will, have all come forth from his searching logic more clear and intelligible. They have been set in a higher light, and Christian reason has come to see hov/ unworthy were some of its old conceptions on such subjects. 244 Movements of Religious Thought, But Mr. J. S. Mill has not merely done this negative work in religious thought. He has done much more. The effect of his thoroughgoing criti- cism has been to make clearer than before the roots of the great opposing lines of thought, on which all higher speculation rests. In the end, on either side, a postulate stares us in the face. Man is either divine from the first — a free spiritual being standing apart from all nature, — or he is essentially material. On the latter basis, no religion in the old sense can be based. All attempts to find spirit in matter, if spirit is not already presupposed as prior to matter, is a mere futile imagination. All at- tempts to reach God through Nature, the Unseen through the seen, must necessarily fail. We can never gain from natural law anything but some product of that law. Once bring man v/ithin the chain of causation binding the life of nature, and there is no rational outlet towards the Divine. The Divine may be held by faith as an hypothesis running parallel with the natural ; but it cannot in such a case be established on any grounds of reason. This result was apparent enough long ago, when Hume de- lighted to emphasise the absolute separation between faith and reason; but it has been scientifically ex- hibited by Mill. He shrank from the downright atheism to which his principles inevitably lead ; but the real drift of these principles is nowhere obscure. Determinism in philosophy lands in the negation of all religion. Religion may be tacked on by faith or superstition to a Determinist Philosophy or Doctrine of Necessity ; but it cannot be rationally evolved from it. And thinkers like Baden Powell yohn Stttart Mill and his School, 245 in our own time, or Chalmers and Jonathan Ed- wards in former times, who attempted to combine Determinism with Christianity, have all failed, with whatever power of argument. They started from a wrong beginning. The marches between the great lines of thought have been thoroughly cleared by help of Mill's logic and other books of the same school. They are not likely to be obscured again ; and this of itself is to have done a great service to religious thought. But yet, again. Mill has done service in vindicating everywhere the moral side of religion. It was in fact his tendency in all his writings to confound morality with religion. Setting aside, as he did, the Divine as an imaginary sphere, and yet recognising so strongly the moral and social bonds that make so large a part of religion, it was inevitable that he should exalt these human aspects of the subject. They were estfmated not unduly in themselves, but dispro- portionately in comparison with others. But the very emphasis with which our philosopher dwelt on moral attributes in relation to the Divine Being, as well as to human society, was of great value. If it tended to bring down religion from heaven to earth, it also tended to purge the Heavenly Ideal of all grosser taint. Nothing could be further from the truth than the picture of the Christian God given by both the Mills ; but it is not to be denied that there lies in all rehgious systems an inclination to conceive of God more or less after an arbitrary manner, as dealing with mankind on other principles than those of pure Morality, notwithstanding that this moral concep- tion of the Divine is everywhere supreme in the 246 Movem-ents of Religions Thought, Gospels. This is a perilous inclination, and not undeserving the indignation it excited in their minds. The famous passage in the Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, which sent a thrill through many Christian hearts, had a tinge in it of that intellectual pride of which we have already spoken ; but it also breathed a fine moral intensity.^ Nothing but degradation can come to religion from lowering the Divine Ideal beneath the Ideal of the highest good that we can ourselves conceive. The true ideal of Christian thought is not only more real, but more perfect and beautiful than any human ideal whatever. We have spoken in the main of Mr. John Stuart Mill throughout this lecture, and rightly so ; for all the special influences of his school were concen- trated in him. He was himself more than all its other members. Two other names, however, claim to be mentioned before we close. The first of these, Mr. Grote's, is by itself, and m ^ * If, instead of the " glad tidings " that there exists a Being in whom all the excellencies which the highest human mind can ever conceive exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a Being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that the highest human morality, which we are capable of conceiving, does not sanction them, convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and, at the same time, call this Being by all the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. What- ever power such a Being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do. He shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no Being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures ; and if such a Being can sentence me to Hell for not so calling him, to Hell I will go.' — Exam, of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, pp. 123-4. John Stuart Mill mid his School. 247 connection with his own special province of Greek Hterature and history, a great name, inferior to none in the nineteenth century. But it has httle bearing comparatively upon our subject. Mr. George Grote was in philosophy and general intellectual spirit the pupil of James Mill. He came under his influence about 18 19, when Mill was about 46 years of age, in the very height of his intellectual power, and Grote himself was 25 years of age. Previously he had been devoted to his profession (banking) and study, but without showing any marked religious or political tendencies. His mother is said to have been strongly inclined to Calvinistic religion, of which there is no trace in the son. Possibly it may have inclined him, by way of reaction, as in similar cases, to the opposite principles which he soon imbibed. The original bond of union between Mill and Grote was Mr. David Ricardo, the well-known political economist, in connection with whose studies the younger mind chiefly sought instruction at the hands of one whom he felt to be a master. But the ascendancy of Mill's influence soon showed itself, not only in such subjects, but still more in the views adopted by Grote regarding Political Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics. According to Mrs. Grote, her husband soon found himself 'enthralled in the circle of Mill's speculations, and after a year or two of intimate commerce, there existed but little difference in point of opinion between master and pupil. The pupil not only imbibed what may be reasonably called the opinions, but no less the prejudices of his master.* ]\Ir. Mill entertained a profound feeling against the Established Church, and a corresponding dislike of 248 Movements of Religious Thought. its members, and Mr. Grote was carried away in the same * current of antipathy.' There is an unconscious irony in Mrs. Grote's description. She seems to think it creditable to her husband, rather than otherwise, that he should have shared Mill's narrow dogmatism and prejudices, no less than his reasoned conclusions. There is no evidence in Grote's life, as related by his widow, that he himself ever examined the reli- gious problems whose negative settlement he accepted with such a curious deference from James Mill. Masterly and critical as his intellect was in his own departments of study, he is a striking example of a common characteristic of the course of modern negative speculation. The basis of this speculation is professedly inquiry. It is supposed by those whom its current has swept away so abundantly in recent times to be the result of the irresistible progress of the human intellect. Yet no body of religious dis- ciples have ever followed the voice of authority with more unhesitating decision than a large proportion of the professed army of Modern Unbelief They have surrendered themselves with the most melancholy monotony to the voice of some master or other, with- out any genuine inquiry on their own part, or even any knowledge som.etimes of the real character of the conclusions from which they dissent. It is indeed a pitiful comment on the weakness of human nature that the anti- Christendom of modern times has re- produced in flagrant forms two of the worst vices of Mediaeval Christendom — its intolerance and vulgar deference to authority. Apparently the negations as to religion into which George Grote's mind settled thus early, under the JoJm Stuart Mill and his School. 249 teaching of James Mill, never left him. He dismissed altogether and with contempt the subject of Theology from his mind. The ' antipathies of his teacher,' it is admitted by Mrs. Grote, ' coloured his mind through the whole period of his ripe meridian age, and inspired and directed many of the important actions of his life.' This is a somewhat sad confession to make, but it is made without any shame, and is, no doubt, honest. There was a certain element of loyalty in Grote's devotion, and a certain simplicity — it is im- possible to say, largeness of mind — in the enthusiasm with which he maintained the negations of his early . creed, and even quarrelled with James Mill's illustrious son, as being a comparatively unfaithful advocate of 'the true faith,' according to his father. If there are any of John Stuart Mill's writings more nobly creditable to him than others — more marked by luminous and truly wise comprehension, it is his t^vo articles on Bentham and Coleridge, which ap- peared respectively in 1838 and in 1840, in ihtLofidon a7id Westminster Reviezu, and are found in the first volume of his collected Discussions. But for the very reason that all open minds must admire these writings, they were particularly offensive to the ' straitest sect ' of his father's school, and to none more so than to Grote and his wife. There is an un- pleasant revelation on this subject — to which we have already adverted — in Dr. Bain's volume.^ No ortho- dox teachers, at variance on some abstruse point of their common divinity, could use more disrespectful language to one another than Mrs. Grote does in con- veying her own and her husband's opinion of what V/. S. Mill: a Crifin'sm, pp. 56-57. 250 Movements of Religious Thotight, she is pleased to call ' the stuff and nonsense ' of these papers. Mr. Grote must be pronounced, therefore, more of a Millite than John Stuart Mill himself His attitude in the well-known controversy as to the Chair of Logic in University College in 1866, when Dr. James Martineau was a candidate, and was defeated almost entirely by his influence, is an unpleasant illustration of the same extreme tendency. The event is not one on which we are called to dwell ; but it is highly significant, as showing how thoroughly so great an intellect can shut out all the influence of higher religious specu- lation, and intrench itself with undeviating com- placency within the narrowest limits on so great a subject. This very intensity of negative dogmatism made Grote, to some extent, a power in his time even in relation to religion ; it is the warrant of our touching his career at all in a manner in which we would rather have refrained from doing, seeing how great a figure he is otherwise. But the limits within which he confined his mind on this subject prove sufficiently that he was not, in any real sense, a teacher, and he can hardly be said to have exercised any definite influence on the development of religious thought. George Henry Lewes was in all respects a different type of man, versatile, accomplished, in a sense learned — acute and ingenious as a philosophical thinker. We have no means of tracing the growth of his negative convictions, but they were fully matured in 1845, when the first volume of his BiograpJiical John Stuart Mill and his School. 251 History of Philosophy appeared. One of the chief notes of this book — in its earliest and latest form alike/ its characteristic note — was its antipathy to philosophical theology, and to all the fundamental conceptions on which it rests. Mr. Lewes's idea of the history of philosophy was very like the popular notion of the play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet missed out. He did not believe in any, higher or spiritual thought. AH metaphysic was to him an absurdity. It was merely * the art of amusing one's- self with method ' — ' I'art de s'egarer avec methode.' No definition can be wittier or truer, he thought. Mr. Lewes had studied John Stuart Mill's Logic and Comte's Cotirs de Philosophic Positive, and these he accepted as his philosophical Bible. All his earlier teaching — for he assumed in all his graver writines more or less the role of a teacher — was drawn from those two sources. He originated no special line of thought. He was the bold usher of the modern scientific spirit, and his influence chiefly consisted in the unalloyed enthusiasm with which he pushed its premisses to their legitimate conclusion. His popular Exposition of the Positive PJiilosophy, which first appeared in a succession of papers in the newspaper known as The Leader, probably introduced the name and the principles of Comte for the first time to many readers in this country. He had admirable gifts as a writer, whatever we may think of his powers as a thinker. His exposition was marked by a rare lucidity, and had the charm of interest, even when 1 It was first published in four small volumes in Knight's Shilling Series, and finally in two large library volumes in 1867. The History was greatly enlarged in its latest form. 252 Moveme7its of Religions ThoiigJit. least satisfactory. Much of a Frenchman in many of his ways, he had the French gift of facile and happy expression. We do not touch Mr. Lewes's later philosophical writings beginning with his important work on Pro- blems of Life ajid Mind m 1874. They do not come within our present period of review. But he was certainly a recognisable factor in the formation of negative opinion during the fifth and sixth decades of the century ; ^ nor is there any reason to doubt — doubtful as the fact long remained in many minds looking at his earlier writings — that he was a really earnest thinker almost religiously interested in the doctrines he expounded. Under the persiflage of his style he seems to have hidden a laborious and earnest purpose. This is placed beyond doubt by the reflected light which the recent life of George Eliot throws upon him as her studious companion for so many years. No candid reader can refuse to admit, — whatever estimate he may otherwise form of these volumes, — that Lewes's character and mental ambition both appear in a better aspect than many before would have been disposed to regard them. We may differ from him and the principles which lay at the root of all his mental work, but he was plainly a man who .had convic- tions, and who devoted his life with an increasing devotion to their propagation. He was by no means an original, nor perhaps, even in his latest efforts, a ^ * Mr. Lewes had a letter from a working man at Leicester who said that he and some fellow-students met together on a Sunday to read the book aloud {Biographical History of Philosophy) and discuss it.' — George Eliofs Life, vol. i. p. 467. yohn Stuart Mill and his School. 253 profound worker in the great modern anti-theological school. But at any rate it was not out of mere light- ness of heart that he joined the army of Negationists. He believed he had something better than any theology to give his generation, and if his belief was delusive it was at least no unworthy motive that inspired it Christian thought may learn a good deal even from works like Lewes's. There was an admirable directness and lucidity in many of his anti-theological arguments. His very exaggerations, — as in his frequent antitheses of law and will, science and moral freedom, — served to bring out confusions apt to underlie forms of Christian opinion, just as George Eliot's trenchant exposure of Cummingism served to bring out the crudi- ties of popular religion. Thought that is really true and well founded never suffers from such exposures. Its weaknesses are cast out in the fierce light that is made to beat upon it. Whatever it may have to throw away as useless encumbrance in the conflict, it comes out tried as by fire, and hence purified and enlarged in its central and essential principles. VII. 'Broad Church.' FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE AND CHARLES KINGSLEY. TT is remarkable within how brief a period all the forces of thought which we have reviewed in the preceding lectures were comprised. Our earliest starting-point was 1820, when Mr. Erskine's first book was published. But it can hardly be said that there was any movement of fresh intelligence in religion till the appearance of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection in 1825. This third decade of the century also marks the rise of the early Oriel School. The next decade gives us not only the rise but the decline of the original Oxford movement. Carlyle's characteristic principles were all worked out when he went to London in 1834; and John Stuart Mill, the latest factor in the series of movements, had elabor- ated his Logic and his cardinal doctrines by 1843. Even the BiograpJiical History of Philosophy, if it deserves to be mentioned, does not bring us later than the year 1845-6. It is true that the modifica- tions of religious opinion which began with Mr. Erskine and Coleridge had still, as we shall see in this lecture, a definite course to run ; while the negative mode of thought which had set in with 254 F. D. Maurice and Cha7des Kingsley. 255 the Mills, and was diligently propagated by Lewes and others, was far from having spent itself New and fertile developments were awaiting it in the writings of Mr. Herbert Spencer and others. But these developments belong to what may be called the scientific epoch of Negativism or Agnosticism, with which our present lectures are not concerned. What especially deserves notice at present is the rapidity with which a crowd of new ideas which only commenced with the end of the first quarter of the century developed themselves. It was 1825 before they had begun to move the national mind; by 1845 they had not spent their strength, but had attained to their full moinentuin. A period of about twenty years had seen them rise in quick succession and grow to their full height. There has been no more vital or germinant epoch in the history of British thought. The natural result followed. With the significant exception, — which now awaits our attention, — there set in a period of sceptical languor. The failure of the Oxford movement especially produced a strong reaction, which worked powerfully in many minds to the distrust of all religious truth. This was the time of which Mr. Froude speaks in his life of Carlyle, when he and a companion band of truth- seekers were driven into the vvnlderness in search of something in which they could believe — some cer- tainty on which they could stand. He and others found a refuge in Carlylism, but many found no such refuge. His own early volumes — now rarely met with — Tlie Shadozvs of the Clouds (1847) and the Nemesis of Faith (1849); the poems of Clough, 256 Movements of Religiotts Thought, who at this time broke away from Oxford and re- signed his fellowship ; the Phases of Faith of Francis Newman (1849), who then also parted with his early- Evangelicalism; the struggles after a higher beHef which meet us in the lives of Kingsley and Frederick Robertson; all testify to the sceptical weariness which in these years overtook many minds of the younger generation. No finer spirit than Clough's was ever wrecked on the ocean of doubt, and Frederick Robertson, we shall see, bore to the last the impress of the suffering through which he then passed. It was in the same years that John Sterling's faith disappeared; and Matthew Arnold's first poems, with all their divine despair, although not pub- lished till a later date (1853), were born of the same time of spiritual darkness, when the sun of faith went down on so many hearts. The recent life of George Eliot has served to bring into prominence some of the special disinte- grating influences of this time. George Eliot herself belongs upon the whole to the later or * Scientific ' era, which marks itself off from the period now under review. It was not till after 1855, and her conjunc- tion with such fellow- workers as Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Lewes, that her unbelief assumed a definite form. But she and her friends the Hennells and Brays bear ample testimony to the disintegration of belief in the preceding decade. An ardent Evan- gelical in 1840, she had left off her old faith in the following year, influenced in the main by a book of Charles Hennell's entitled An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity. There is no evidence of her having been attracted by the Oxford Theology; but /^ D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. 257 she had read with interest, and some disturbance of thought, Isaac Taylor's animadversions on that Theology in Ancioit Oirisiiaiiity (August 1840). Probably the contrast between the faith in which she had been brought up and the opinions of many of the Fathers w^as a somewhat harsh awakening to her, and while in this state of mind the views pre- sented by the Brays and the line of inquiry started by Mr. Hennell laid hold of her, and led her in the purely sceptical direction which she followed for the next ten years. Miss Evans herself, whatever we may think of her conclusions, was strong as a sceptic, as in all other respects. There is no weakness in any of her work. Her translation of Strauss, begun in 1843 and published in 1846, is a masterpiece of its kind, and no less her subsequent translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. But the influ- ences that surrounded her in those years were not of a high order. The Brays and Hennells were people of more than usual intellectuality ; but the Philosophy of Necessity by Charles Bray and Charles Hennell's Inquiry are neither of them very profound or inter- esting books. Mr. Bray reminds us, as a writer, of George Combe, and is a less original thinker of the same school. He was, as his recent biography shows, full of that singular self-elation characteristic of second-class intellectual men w4ien they hit, as they suppose, upon new veins of thought. Hennell's volume opened a line of inquiry in this country akin to that of Strauss and the Tubingen School hi Ger- many. It was translated into German under Strauss's own direction, and is not without a certain bald R 258 Moveme7its of Religious Thought, acuteness ; but its historical criticism, notwithstand- ing- the commendation of Geor«;e Eliot, is shallow and meagre, — one of its main features being the derivative connection of Christianity with the Essenes — a sup- position now proved quite baseless,^ as indeed, to any- one who understood either Essenism or Christianity, it was always a bad guess. Of all the sceptical group which surrounded George Eliot in those years there is not one save herself who will be remembered for anything that they did. The world had indeed forgotten them till brought to life again in her letters. Even Mackay's Progress of the Intellect, a work which she much admired, and reviewed for the * Westminster ' in 1859, is not only a dull book, but to a large extent on false lines. It seems strange that lesser illuminati of this kind, known to the world at the time mainly in con- nection with Mr. Chapman the publisher of the * Westminster,' and the series of anti- Christian volumes which issued from his press, should have influenced so much as they did a mind like George Eliot's. Sara Hennell,^ notwithstanding her chaotic style, is the only one besides George Eliot herself with any real genius. There is a sense of power in her, inarticulate as it often is, which explains her long mental association wnth the translator of Strauss and the author of Romola. In none of them, how- ever — not even in George Eliot — can we trace any large knowledge of the Christianity tliey so readily ' See Bishop Lightfoot's elaborate discussion of the subject, — The Epistle of St. Paul to the Colossians, p. II4 /?/ seq. 2 Particularly in Sara Hennell's Thoughts in Aid of Faith (i860) there are some striking and interesting trains of reflection. F. D, Maurice and Charles Kings ley. 259 abandoned, or any genuine historic insight into the problem of its origin. The originahty of Christ's character, in absolute distinction from all else in the Jewish thought or imagination of the time, is unappreciated. The spiritual side of Christianity in its sense of Sin and revelation of Divine Pity and forgiveness is unfelt. The transcendency of the Divine Life depicted in the Gospels finds no echo in their hearts. Religion even to George Eliot is not an inner power of Divine mystery awakening the conscience. It is at best an intellectual exercise, or a scenic picture, or a beautiful memory. Her early Evangelicalism peeled off her like an outer garment, leaving behind only a rich vein of dramatic experi- ence which she afterwards worked into her novels. There is no evidence of her great change having produced in her any spiritual anxiety. There is nothing indeed in autobiography more wonderful than the facility with which this remarkable woman parted first with her faith and then with the moral sanctions which do so much to consecrate life, while yet constantly idealising life in her letters, and taking such a large grasp of many of its moral realities. Her scepticism and then her eclectic Humanitarianism have a certain benignancy and elevation unlike vulgar infidelity of any kind. There are gleams of a higher life everywhere in her thought. There is much self- distrust, but no self-abasement. There is a strange externality, — as if the Divine had never come near to her save by outward form or picture, — never pierced to any dividing asunder of soul and spirit. Amidst all her sadness — and her life upon the whole is a very sad one — there are no depths of spiritual 2 Go Move77ie7its of Religious Thought, dread (of which dramatically — as in Romola — she had yet a vivid conception), or even of spiritual tenderness. We do not look to minds of this stamp — into which the arrows of conscience make only slight wounds — for a true estimate of Christianity either in its Divine character or origin. But amongst all the scepticism of this time, and in direct connection with it, there arose a new and povv^erful religious influence. This has received the name of the ' Broad Church ' movement, and, for the sake of convenience, we shall use the expression. It is necessary, however, to say that the name is not only apt to mislead, but was entirely disowned by the chief theologian to whom, with others, popular usage has applied it. As late as i860 Mr. Maurice says that he does not know what ' Broad Church ' means, but that if it means anything it must apply to fol- lowers of the Whately school, — -of which he was certainly not one. He was, beyond all doubt, right in this. Mr. Maurice's great deficiency as a theo- logian, as we shall have occasion to point out, is just his deficiency in certain critical qualities that be- longed to Whately and others, and gave an historic breadth to many of their conclusions. But the name *■ Broad Church ' has also come to denote a species of universalism — or breadth of doctrinal sentiment — which was not only not at variance with Mr. Maurice's standpoint, but may be held characteristic of the men to whom it is commonly applied. The name ' Broad Church ' is said to have been first used by Dean Stanley in an article in the Edin- burgh Review in July 1850 on the Gorham contro- F. D. Maurice a7zd Charles Kingsley. 261 versy. His words were to the effect that the Church of England was * by the very condition of its being neither High nor Low, but Broad.' In the original use of the word, therefore, there was no intention of characterising any party. The meaning rather was that the Church of England was of no party, and embraced by its constitution and history all the dif- ferent sides of spiritual truth. In this sense the name would not have been repudiated, but would have been willingly accepted by Mr. Maurice.^ His whole teach- ing was a protest against party spirit or sectarianism of every kind. A few years after Dean Stanley's article, however, there appeared in the same review a striking paper by Mr. Conybeare on ' Church Parties,' and here the name was distinctly applied in a party sense as denoting a succession of Liberal no less than Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical teachers, which have always prevailed within the English Church, This is the historic and best sense of the word, if it is to be used in a party sense at all. It will be apparent, as we proceed, how far Maurice and Kingsley are rightly identified with the great succes- sion of liberal thinkers in the Church of England. Maurice's early associations identify him with the broadest principles of the Church of England. No less than his friend Sterling he was an admiring student of Coleridge, and deeply indebted to his writings. Mr. John Stuart Mill welcomed them both ^ This is plain from his own language in speaking of the English Church being broad enough to comprehend persons so unlike as Whately and Julius Hare, meaning thereby, as he is careful to explain, that *she can claim their talents and different qualities of mind for her service.' 262 Movements of Religious Thought. as Coleridglans to the debates in which he.dehghted in 1 826. In those debates Maurice himself tells us that * he defended Coleridge's metaphysics ' against the utili- tarians. He elsewhere says that Coleridge ^ had done much to preserve him from infidelity. In dedicating the second edition of his first work, Tlie Kingdoui of Christ, to Mr. Derwent Coleridge, he speaks at length of his indebtedness to his father, while at the same timxC saying that he had never enjoyed the privilege of personal intercourse with him, and offering certain criticisms on his writings. To the Aids to Reflection especially he expresses * deep and solemn obligations.' Whatever other influences, therefore, affected Maurice, he struck his mental roots deeply in Coleridge. Not only so ; but in contrast to his friend John Sterling, he never abandoned the impulse thus communicated to him. He remained Coleridgian in the basis of his thought. It was the Coleridgian movement, under whatever modifications, that he and Kingsley really carried forward. The life of Coleridge's thought survived the ecclesiastical turmoil of the fourth decade of the century, and the scepticism that followed, till it emerged strong again in their hands. It became a new birth of religion in many of the stronger minds of the age when Anglican- ism was discredited and for a time in arrest, and Evangelical Christianity had sunk into such teaching as that of Dr. Cumming and the slanderous ortho- doxy of the Record. It was the virtue of what has been called * Broad Churchism ' that it attracted such minds. It came as a religious power to them, when the power of religion was at ebb-tide ^ Life, vol. i. p. 177. F, D. Maiirice and Charles Kingsley, 263 in other directions. Maurice and Kingsley and Frederick Robertson became the reUgious teachers of a generation in danger of forgetting rehgion alto- gether. They were strong while others were com- paratively weak. Tennyson himself, in the whole spirit of his poetry, is the sufficient evidence of this powerful wave of religious tendency, and its ascend- ency over the higher minds of the time. 'Strong Son of God, Immortal Love,' might be taken as the keynote of the movement, and the closing verse of ' In Memoriam ' as a summary of its thought — * That God which ever lives and loves. One God, one law, one element, And one far-off Divine event To which the whole creation moves,' ^ While Coleridge formed the basis of Maurice's thought, there were other and powerful influences of a peculiar kind, that mingled in his religious culture. Few men have had a stranger religious up-bringing. His father was a Unitarian minister of the tolerant unaggressive type, which preceded Priestley and Bel- sham, a man. of varied culture, and self-sacrificing if not zealous life. Calmly restful in his own con- victions, he was content to preach the great moralities and duties of religion, as was customary in his time. His enthusiasm went out, like that of so many others of his class, into politics rather than religion. He would have been glad to lead a peace- ^ See other verses still more significant of the * Broad Church ' point of view, LI v., LV,, LVL, and the well-known lines — * Our little systems have their day ; They have their day and cease to be : They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.' 264 Movements of Religious Thought, ful, busy, religious life after his own fashion, farm- ing, preaching, and keeping a school for boys. He was devoted to the good of his children, and worked hard for them, but ail the while a singular trial was preparing for him in the bosom of his own family. His elder daughters (there were three older than Frederick), and then his wife, aban- doned his Unitarian creed, and withdrew from his ministiy. They wrote to him that they could no longer 'attend a Unitarian place of worship,' or even *take the Communion with him.' The picture, as presented by Colonel Maurice, is a very painful one, on which we would rather not comment. If there was any type of religious thought more obnoxious than another to the Unitarian father and minister, it v/as Calvinism, yet to Calvinism they all betook themselves, though by different roads. Each daughter 'took up a position peculiar to herself The eldest joined the Church of England ; the second (Anne) became a Baptist under Mr. Foster, the famous Essayist; and Mary, the third, was not 'exactly in sympathy with either of the others.' After various experiences, however, she also joined the Church of England, as all the younger members of the family seem to have done. This strongly marked religious individualism — an inheritance from the mother — ex- plains a good deal in Mr. Maurice. No man could be in a sense less self-asserting than he was. His shy humility was from early years a marked feature of his character. But along with an almost morbid self- depreciation there was also from the first — certainly from the time that he turned his thoughts to the Church — an intense spirit of religious confidence. F. D. Maurice and Charles Kmgsley. 265 Generalising from his own family experiences, he was led to certain conclusions which he held as absolute truths. These conclusions were entirely un- Hke those to which his sisters and mother had come. But they were held w^th the same tenacity and dis- regard of consequences. If more enlightened, they were not the less downright. When his mother assured her astonished husband that* Calvinism zvas true' she said what her son would never have said — but the spirit of the saying may be traced in many of his utterances. More than this, the singular bigotry of his sisters — we cannot give it any lesser name — reappears in at least one act of his life — his rebaptism at the age of twenty-six, when he at length finally joined the Church of England, and began to prepare for her ministry. This is a truly painful incident in Mr. Maurice's career — of itself enough to^show how far he was from theologians of the Whately and historical Latitudinarian school. What would any of them, Bishop Butler, or Tenison, or even Tait in our own time, have thought of such an act ? If the baptismal rite of his father — always, as we are told, performed * in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost ' — was not enough, what made it not enough ? His father's imperfect faith. But is the efficacy of a rite to be judged by the precise faith of the celebrant ? Or was the rite only effica- cious in the Church of England ? But what was this but to fall into the worst error he attributed to Dr. Pusey and the Tractarians ? ' I think I was directed to do it by the Holy Spirit,' is all he says in defence of the act in a letter to one of his sisters. But what 266 Movements of Religious Thought. is this but an assertion of his own private judgment in a form which admits of no answer ? In addition to the influence of Coleridge and of his own peculiar family experiences, there was a third and very important factor in the formation of Maurice's theology. If Coleridge laid the foundation, and the strong religious individualism which he inherited gave direction to his thought, it ultimately took much of its form from Mr. Erskine's writings and the theology in Scotland with which Mr. Erskine was identified. It is difficult to fix the pre- cise period when Mr. Erskine's mode of thinking began to touch Mr. Maurice ; but very early in his career, before he had turned his attention to theology as a study, it was brought under his notice in connec- tion with his mother's religious difficulties and his own painful feelings arising therefrom. For a time, and while still a youth, these difficulties so clouded his own mind, that he wrote to a lady in an extremely gloomy tone as to his own spiritual condition and prospects.^ The lady was a friend of Mr. Erskine, whose first book had then appeared, and she replied questioning his authority for the dark suggestion he had made of his being destined to misery, here and hereafter. Her argument was exactly in the spirit of Mr. Erskine, and obviously impressed him. Later, when at Oxford in 1830, he formed the acquaintance of Mr. Bruce, afterwards Lord Elgin, Governor-General of India, and through him became directly acquainted with Mr. Erskine's books, notably at the time with the volume entitled TJie Brazen Serpent, which produced a very important effect upon 1 Vol. i. p. 43. /^ D. Maujnce and Charles Kingsley. 267 his mind. Long afterwards, in an autobiographical letter written for his son/ he says of the impres- sions he then received, ' I was led to ask myself what a Gospel to mankind must be ; whether it must not have some other ground than the fall of Adam, and the sinful nature of man. I was helped much in finding "an answer to the question by Mr. Erskine's books — I did not then know him personally — and by the sermons of Mr. Campbell. The English Church I thought was the witness for that universal redemp- tion which the Scotch Presbyterians had declared to be incompatible with their Confessions.' ^ From this time onwards he was deeply pondering the prospect before him of becoming a minister in the Church of England, which he became three years later.^ All the influences which had mingled in his life continued to work powerfully, and none more so than the larger view of the Gospel, which was opened to him as he believed in Mr. Erskine's writings. In letters to his father and mother, he explains at length 'the firmly fixing basis ' of his thoughts; and it may truly be said, as is virtually said by his son, that he never swerved from this basis. There are few, even of his after controversies, the germs of which cannot be found in these letters. He was already nearly thirty years of age, and multiplied as were his subsequent activities, the position in which he now stood when he began his ministry, was the position in which he always stood. Let us endeavour then, if we can, to state this position clearly. Of all writers there is none to whose fundamental principle it is more necessary to get an initial clue than to Mr. » In 1878. 2 Vol. i. p. 183. 3 In January 1834. 268 Movements of Religious Thought, Maurice's. Even with such a clue his marvellous subtlety is often evasive ; without it, it is hopeless to read a coherent meaning into his several writings and controversies. There are at least two fundamental principles that lie at the basis of all his thought. The first and most important of these, as well as the most pervading, is nowhere more clearly expressed than in a letter to his mother at this time (December 1833). His mother, as we have already seen, had embraced with his elder sisters an extreme type of Calvinism. She had done so, however, like Cowper, without deriving any comfort from her supralapsarian doctrine. Believing in Election as absolutely fixed, she could not yet realise that she was one of the Elect. A more painful state of mind can hardly be im.agined. His mother's spiritual distress was a constant pain to the son, while it increased his love and reverence for her. It was especially painful in the light of the larger views that he believed had come to him.self Nay, how far may those larger views not have been welcome to him as a reaction from the narrow and dreadful doctrine which had fascinated the minds of both his mother and sisters, and even for a time thrown a shadow over I himself? In any case it is against the background of such a doctrine that he draws out the great antithetic principle on which all his own theology lay — the principle it may be called of ' universal redemption.' We use this expression because it is used by him- self. But like many general expressions it is misleading and indefinite. It is necessary to clear it up therefore in his own language, if not exactly /^ D. Maurice mid Charles Kingsley. 269 his own order of expression. * Now, my dearest mother,' he says, ' you wish or long to beheve your- self in Christ, but you are afraid to do so, because you think there is some experience that you are in him necessary to warrant that belief. Now if any man, or an angel from heaven, preach this doctrine to you, let him be accursed. You have this warrant for believing yourself in Christ, that you cannot do one loving act, you cannot obey one of God's commandments, you cannot pray, you cannot hope, you cannot love if you are not in him, . , . What then do I assert ? Is there no difference between the believer and the unbeliever ? Yes, the greatest difference. But the difference is not about the fact, but precisely in the belief of the fact. God tells us " In Him, that is in Christ, I have created all things, whether they be in heaven or on earth. Christ is the head of every man," Some men believe this, some men disbelieve it. Those men who disbe- lieve it walk after the flesh. They do not believe that they are joined to an Almighty Lord of Life — One who is mightier than the world, the flesh, and the devil — One who is nearer to them than their own flesh. . . . But though tens of hundreds of thousands of men so live, we are forbidden by Christian truth and the Catholic Church to call this the real state of any man. The truth is tJiat every man is in Christ ; the condemnation of every man is that he will not own the truth — he will not act as if it were trne that except he were joined to Christ he could not think, breathe, live a single hour.' ^ Here, in these emphatic words to his mother, we ^ Vol. i, pp. 155-6. 2 70 Movements of Religions Thought. get to the heart of Mr. Maurice's theology. It is the very antithesis of that of his mother. Men generally, she believed, were not related to Christ. Man, as man merely, was ' under the wrath and curse of God.' With him, on the contrary, man is divinely created in Christ from the first. Man, as man, is the child of God.^ He does not need ' to become a child of God ; ' he needs only to recognise the fact that he already is such. Maurice's quarrel with the popular theology through all his life was mainly on this fundamental ground. It taught, he supposed, whether in the form of High Church Anghcanism or Calvinism, that man had * to become a child of God.' Instead of becrin- ning with the divine constitution of man in Christ, it began with the fallen evil condition of man out of which Christ came to redeem his people, and so went wrong radically from the first. In one case man was represented as becoming a child of God by baptism, in the other by conscious conversion. The theology of the Bible and of the Catholic creeds was in his view against these extremes alike. Both were untrue ; but popular Protestantism still more so than Anglicanism. He himself was ' never a Calvinist,' as his son truly says, although its shadow passed over him. He had certain affinities with it, especially with the manner in which — in contrast, as he supposed, with Arminianism — it sets forth God and not man^ in the forefront of sah'ation. He also appreciated its strong grasp of moral realities. But all that was cardinal in his own theology was opposed to it. On the other hand, it seemed for a time ^ See Erskmcs Letters, vol. ii. p. 322. '^ Ibid. p. 93. J^. D. Maurice and Charles Kmgsley. 271 as if he might have been caught in the High Church enthusiasm which prevailed just after he began his ministry. The High Church party had certain hopes of him at first, so much so that they did what they could in the beginning of 1837 to promote his election to the Chair of Political Enonoigiy at Oxford. They recognised his spiritual genius, and they were grateful for the help he had given them by his pamphlet Subscription no Bondage. But Dr. Pusey's tract on Baptism drove him from their side. He recurs over and over again to the pain this tract gave him. Baptism was, as may be imagined, a sensitive point with Maurice. Much of his argument in his first book, TJie Kingdom of Christ, turns upon its true meaning. He attached infinite importance to it as ' the sign of admission into a spiritual and universal kingdom grounded upon our Lord's incarna- tion ' (of which he considered the Church of England the true representative). But the doctrine of an opus opcratnm was peculiarly repulsive to him. It implied the subversion of his fundamental principle still more than the necessity of conscious conversion. For it presupposed the communication of a new nature instead of the recognition of an original and real relation. In his own words it converted a sacrament into an event.^ To him this was the destruction of the spiritual life and of the idea of the Church as a communion of self-renunciation and holy discipline. The second great principle which may be said to lie at the foundation of Maurice's thought was his desire for unity .^ He was ' haunted all his hfe,' he ^Kingdom of Chi'ist, vol. i. p. 428. ^ Life^ vol. i. p. 41 ; vol. ii. p. 632. 272 Movements of Religio2ts Tho7tght. says, * by this desire.' He had seen the evils of dis- union in his father's family. He thought he could also trace there the true secret of unity. In a letter as early as 1834:^ *I would wish to live and die for the assertion of this truth ; that the universal Church is just as much a reality as any particular nation is ; that the Church is the witness for the true constitution of man as man, a child of God, an heir of heaven, and taking up his pardon by baptism ; that the world is a miserable accursed rebellious order which denies this foundation, which will create a foundation of self-will, choice, taste, opinion ; that in the world there can be no com- munion ; that in the Church there can be universal communion — communion in one body by one spirit. For this our Church of England is now, as I think, the only firm consistent witness.' So thought also the Newmanites. With them too — with Newman him- self in particular — the note of unity was ultimately the governing note in the idea of the Church. But the ideas of unity were entirely different in the two cases. Newman and his followers sought unity in a great external organism, uniform in doctrine, government, and worship. All outside of this organism was heretical and schismatic, and so, as Maurice thought, in the very effort to reach unity, they restricted and endangered it. They imperilled the very thing they so much prized. The true idea, according to him, was to be found not in any nega- tions or hard lines of demarcation indicating the true Church, but in the conciliation of what was positive in all Christians, and the rejection of their * Life^ vol. i. p. 166, F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, 273 negations. This was how his peculiar family ex- perience worked. Divided as his sisters were, they were in the substance of their faith united. It was their negations alone that divided them. In their affirmations they were at one. And so, out of the training of his home, as he himself admits,^ there came the very depth of his belief in that which he declared to be ' the centre of all his belief He sought everywhere in the positive side of thought a source of unity very much on the old principle attributed to Leibnitz, and laid down by J. S. Mill in his paper on Coleridge, * that thinking people were for the most part right in what they affirmed, wrong in what they denied.' In similar language Maurice says of the Anglo-Catholics, ' I sometimes feel a longing desire to set them right when I think they are mis- apprehending or frightening away sincere dissenters ; to say " you need not weaken one of your assertions, you may make them stronger, and yet by just this or that little alteration give them a (really) Catholic instead of an exclusive form." ' Again his pupil, Mr. Strachey, makes the principle very clear, writing of Maurice's views on Baptism.^ ' His object,' he says, '(and this is his method on all subjects), is to show that in each of the party views there is a great truth asserted, that he agrees with each party in the assertion, and maintains that it cannot de- fend them too strongly ; but he says each is wrong when it becomes the denier of the truth of the others, and when it assumes its portion of the truth to be the whole.' This principle, that true Catholicity lay in leaving * Life^ vol. i. p. 41. ^ lb. p. 203. S 2 74 Movements of Religious Thought. aside negations and bringing together the positive aspects of truth, entered deeply into Maurice's whole turn of thinking. Applied to religion in general, and not merely to different parties within the Christian Church, it is the germ of the higher thought of one of his best books, The Religions of the World, to which many young thinkers were indebted nearly forty years ago (1847), before so much was known as now upon the subject. It runs through all his most elaborate work, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy. It was always springing up as a genial and fertile seed in his varied life of thought and controversy. It has a latitudinarian side, and to many minds will seem inseparable from the ordinary idea which would make room wathin the Church for a variety of opinions. But this was not Maurice's interpretation of his own principle. He had no patience with the inclusion of * all kind of opinions.' This is of the nature of pro- fane liberalism. Unity must come from the centre — Christ. On this positive ground all may unite, but there can be no union otherwise. Christ, as being the head of every man, is the centre of universal fellow- ship, and there is no other centre. And so the two main principles with which he worked run into one another. They are not independent but inter- dependent principles. He expresses this plainly in the following very characteristic passage : — * If the person whom I then meet fraternises elsew^here on another principle, that is nothing to me. But if the same person said to me, " Let us meet to-morrow at some meeting of the Bible Society : I am an Inde- pendent, or a Baptist, or a Quaker; you, I know, are an Episcopalian ; but let us forget our differences and F. D. Maurice and Charles Ki7tgsley. 275 meet on the ground of our common Christianity," — I should say instantly, I will do no such thing. I con- sider that your whole scheme is a flat contradiction and a lie. You come forward with the avowal that you fraternise on some other ground than that of our union in Christ, and then you ask me to fraternise with you on that ground. I consider your sects — one and all of them — as an outrage on the Christian principle, as a denial of it. And what is the common Christianity which you speak of?" The mere caput mortuum of all systems. You do not really mean us to unite in Christ as being members of his body; you mean us to unite in holding certain notions about Christ.' 1 Here again we get to the very core of Mr. Maurice's thought — his strange mixture of universalism, and yet dogmatism — of generousness and yet severity. He could embrace all men in his Christian charity, but they must not bring their opinions to him to be tolerated. His own faith does not rest on any opinion or ' notions,' as he maintains, but on certain divine facts. That Christ zvas the essential ground of all human life, that man is created in him from the first, and has only to recognise his creative birthright ; that all men being thus equally in Christ are members of his body, united in his fellowship, if they will only own the ground of their common life — these were not opinions with him, they were of the nature of facts admitting of no question. They run through all his theology. They reappear in sermons, essays, and treatises. They furnish the key to most of his work as a Christian philanthropist as well as a Christian 1 Life, vol. i. p. 258-259. 276 Movements of Religious Thought, preacher. His profound faith in them moulds all his thought, philosophical as well as religious, explains his views about creeds, about the Church, about sects ; his indignation alike at the Record, and at Hansel's Bampton Lectures. There never was a more mistaken idea of any man than that which associated Maurice with a negative or half-believing theology. He was the most posi- tive if not the most definite of thinkers. He was essentially affirmative, starting from Christ as the great affirmation both of thought and life. Man only finds himself in Clirist, only finds his brother there ; the true life of the individual, of the family, of the nation, of the Church, all come from the same centre and rest on it. The Catholic creeds witness to this Divine reality in all its comprehensive meaning ; he can see nothing in them but this glorious witness. Their very negations become glorified in the light of this faith. The Scriptures everywhere speak with the same voice. Scholar and thinker as he was, no man was ever less of a purely historical critic. He saw everywhere a reflection of his favourite ideas. No Alexandrian divine of the second or third century — no Evangelical or Anglican traditionalist of later times, ever dealt more arbitrarily with the develop- ment of Divine Revelation, or imposed his own mean- ings more confidently on Patriarchs and Prophets. His vivid faith in the Divine — the strength of his root- convictions, amounting to a species of infallibility — made him see from Genesi's to Revelation only the same substance of Divine dogma. Maurice's theology was therefore profoundly dog- matic. It was wide, generous, in a sense universal, F, D. Maurice a7id Charles Kingsley. 277 but it took its rise in positive principles of the most absolute kind. He is often accused of haziness and uncertainty. His idea of God was supposed by Dr. Candlish to vanish in a mere mist of * Charity ' which left no room for a Moral Governor of the universe. There is a certain ground for this assertion when we examine the details of his theological system ; but no theological system could rest more on certain great propositions, w^hich were, as w^e have said, of the nature of facts rather than propositions to Maurice himself They were realistic in the highest degree, like the general ideas of Platonism. He supposed himself to have a far greater regard for facts than Coleridge ; ^ but his very facts were realised abstrac- tions rather than objective certainties. There was beyond doubt a certain analogy between the school which gathered around Mr. Maurice and that of the Cambridge Piatonists in the seventeenth century. It is not only that many common ideas lay at the root of their thinking, but they had many of the same personal excellencies and defects. They had the same elevation, the same wide tolerance and charity, the same ideal enthusiasm, but also some- thing of the same esoteric character, the same con- sciousness that they were a group by themselves, pursuing a common object. With all his hatred of sects Maurice had something in him not indeed of the spirit of the sectary (no man could be freer from all the baser qualities which that name denotes), but of the spirit of an inner brotherhood. He and those w^ho w'orked w^ith him were all more or less a 'peculiar people' with special sympathies and * Life^ vol. i. p. 203. 278 Movements of Religious Thought. special aims in common. This same spirit is rife in the Cambridge Platonists, and one of the ' notes ' of the group. But in a far higher respect they had also much in common. The truly great work of the Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century was apologetic and not dogmatic. This was also the special mission of Maurice and his school. They advanced theological inquiry by their rational spirit — their openness to intellectual movement on all sides — their fearless assertion of the rights of Theology in the face of Modern Science, more than in any other way. Just as Cudworth and More were the living witnesses to the Divine reasonableness of Christianity against the fashionable Empiricism of their day, so Maurice and Kingsley, in the midst of an atmo- sphere of low-breathed Scepticism on one side and of mere formal theology on the other, were witnesses for a Christianity which had nothing to fear from the progress of Knowledge. To the unbelief and traditionalism of their time they presented a lofty front of Christian ideality — a reassertion of Divine fact — of man's essential Divinity in Christ, as lying at the basis of all true thought. This, as it appears to us, is the true point of view from which to regard the early Broad Church move- ment. It was essentially a reconstructive movement of Christian ideas which were losing their hold on contemporary minds. Evangelicalism for the time had lost its power. Anglicanism was passing through a crisis. The moment of creative influence was gone for both. As Kingsley says in one of his letters,^ — * Decent Anglicanism and decent Evangelicalism ^ Life^ vol. i. p. 143. F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, 279 were each playing the part of Canute to the tide rising around them. Men were despairing both of the rehgion and the social life of the country.' The real struggle was no longer, as in the preceding decade, ' between Popery and Protestantism, but between Atheism and Christ' This may or may not be an exaggerated picture, but it was the picture that presented itself to many living and strong men like Kingsley just entering upon his career in 1846. It was the aspect in which he and many others saw the world around them. In such circumstances the Maurice-Kingsley school elaborated their thought and took up their work. Under similar pressure as to whether Chris- tianity remained any longer living, we shall see that Frederick Robertson spent his noble energies as a Christian preacher. It is as Christian Apologists, therefore, that they ought to be viewed and esti- mated in the history of modern religious thought. Unhappily they were taken by the old orthodox school for the most part differently. The prophetic side of their character and work, their truly divine insight, their living hold of the Divine Constitu- tion of man and the world, were overlooked, and all the details of their theology polemically ex- amined — examined and condemned from a point of view which they themselves deliberately rejected. It was Mr. Maurice's aim, in view of the half Christian or wholly materialised forms of thought around him, to reconstruct the Christian ideal that it might take its place once more in the human heart as the only power by which men can live and die. This was what he sought after more 28o Movements of Religiotis Thought. than anything else. It was the aim in which he suc- ceeded so far as he succeeded at all. His teaching came as a new life-blood to many who could accept neither Anglicanism nor Evangelicalism. It gave them a Divine Philosophy by which they could work. It helped them not only to believe in God, but to realise God as the fact of facts, and Christ as * Strong Son of God, immortal Love,' the * Divine Archetype of Humanity,' in whom all human wellbeing lies. But the religious world, so far from being grateful for this service, for the most part assailed him and those who agreed with him as dangerous teachers. They looked upon them as imperilling the Ark of God rather than rallying to its defence. The case cannot be more clearly put than in rela- tion to Maurice's Essays, and the painful discussions which they raised. In these Essays Mr. Maurice was thinking, as he tells us, of the Unitarians. It was his aim to convince the Unitarians that if they held to Christ and Christianity at all they must hold to them in a deeper sense than they did. Christ is more than they professed to own if he is the Christ at all — the manifestation of the Father — the revealer of His will and character to man. The author may or may not have been successful in his aim and argu- ment. But at any rate the issues which were raised against him by Dr. Candlish and others were irrelevant issues. They virtually came to this : But you are utterly wrong in so far as you disagree with the old Theology, and fail to recognise that God is the Moral Governor of the universe as well as the Creator and Father of men, and that in order to uphold the great principles of his government sin must F, D. Maurice and. Charles Kingsley. 281 be dealt with quite differently from what you sup- pose, and the offices and the work of Christ quite differently conceived. The hostile critics were right in many respects. They were able to make many points against Mr. Maurice in the light of the Puritan theology. But then it was not the Puritan theology that Mr. Maurice was thinking of He had deliberately set aside Calvinism at the outset of his ministry. He could find no life for his own soul either in the Evangelical or the 'Anglican tradi- tion. It was not the theology of either, but theo- logy itself that he was contending for. He was thinking of those who had not got the length of St. Paul, still less of Calvin — who did not see God as he did in the light of a Father at all, and who, however they might reverence Christ, did not recog- nise in him any kind of a Saviour. Even if it were true that Mr. Maurice's theology fell short of the Puritan, or even of the Pauline theo- logy, it would by no means follow that it was to be reprobated as these critics reprobated it. If it did rest, as some of them contended, on Platonic or Neo- Platonic forms of thought, it may be asked, Did it do so more than the theology of Clement of Alexandria and Origen ; and must we deem these teachers less Christian because they adopted certain ideas of Platonism in the expression of Christian doctrine? What ancient theologian did not do so ? Is Tertullian more orthodox than Clement, or St. Augustine than Gregory of Nazianzus ? Is St. John not a quite different type of theologian from St. Paul ? and St James from either ? And even so, is Mr. Maurice less Christian as a theologian because he does not 282 Movements of Religious Thought, speak in the same language or expound the same ideas as those which belong to a wholl}' different school ? If I am asked to pronounce an opinion I must often agree with his orthodox critics against Mr. Maurice. Sin is certainly more than selfishness, and the atonement more than the perfect surrender of self-will to God. It is a satisfaction of Divine justice as well as a surrender to Divine love. God is not merely Love but Law, and Divine righteousness is strong not merely to make men righteous but to punish all unrighteousness. If it be a question between the Maurician theology and the Pauline theology, there can be no doubt that there are elements in the latter, the full significance of which Mr. Maurice failed to see. But then there are no less elements in the popular theology which St. Paul would have disowned, and St. John certainly not have understood. The idea that theology is a fixed science, with hard and fast propositions partaking of the nature of infallibility, is a superstition which cannot face the light of modern criticism. The true attitude of the Christian thinker to Maurice and his teaching is that of gratitude and not of controversial cavil. He became a power in the spiritual world when other powers were comparatively inoperative. Whatever may have been the errors of his theology, they were .errors of Divine excess. Instead of minimising man's relation to the Divine, he emphasised it. It required this note of emphasis to draw men's thoughts to theology at all, and to make it once more a factor in human thought and life. In adopting such a Hne of argument I am aware that F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. 283 I am doing what Maurice himself would not have done. He was too intensely dogmatic in his own con- victions to accept any explanation of the peculiarities of his creed. His creed was, as he always maintained, the Church's creed. He was not content to be toler- ated. He was right. Other theologians were wrong. His intense spiritual activity, his theological courage, came out of his unwavering dogmatism. He would have repudiated, therefore, any apology for the pecu- liarities of his dogmatic system arising out of the cir- cumstances of his time, and the character of his own education. But while I feel bound so far to vindicate his position as a Christian thinker, I am not bound to do so on his own terms. I can see how his dogmatic position arose, and what force there was in it in a time of materialistic scepticism, but I also see wherein it was undue and onesided. My business is to judge him, and the other thinkers who have passed under our review, historically and not dogmatically. I can acknowledge, therefore, what was good in his theo- logy w^ithout accepting it ; I feel bound to set forth his value as a Christian thinker without agreeing with him. If there is one lesson more than another that the study of Christian opinion enforces, it is how far men, equally Christian, may differ in theological opinion, nay — how inevitably in the progress of thought, theology, like philosophy, changes its point of view without losing its essential Christian char- acter. It is but a poor weapon to fight with when you disagree with a theologian, to tell him he is no longer a Christian. It is a weapon, moreover, which can be too easily exchanged in conflict. Both Maurice and Kingsley were really, as Bunsen said of 284 Movements of Religioics Thought. them, exponents of ' the deepest elements ' of con- temporary rehgious thought, and it was this, and nothing less than this, that gave them their signi- ficance and influence. But it is now more than time to sum up certain facts of Maurice's life, and to glance at his relations with Kingsley, in so far as they illustrate the move- ment associated with their names. Maurice's theo- logy was virtually complete from the outset of his career as a clergyman. A student first at Cambridge (1823-6), and then at Oxford (1829-32), he spent the interval in London as editor first of the Loiidon Literary Chronicle, and then of the AtJienmini, with which the Literary Chronicle was united (1828), His great abilities had been recognised at Cambridge. He was the inspiring spirit there of a society called the * Apostles' Club ; ' and there is an interesting letter from Arthur Hallam to Mr. Gladstone in June 1830, speaking of his influence over many of his com- panions. Mr. Gladstone himself witnesses to the fascination which he exercised later at Oxford over those who came in contact with him. After his ordination (1834) he was much disturbed, with others, by the proposal to abolish the subscription at the Universities of the Thirty-nine Articles. It was at this crisis that he was brought for a time into close relation with the leaders of the Oxford movement. Considering that it was the necessity for subscribing these Articles which had precluded him from taking his degree at Cambridge, he might have been sup- posed favourable to the intended legislation. But, on the contrary, he now showed at the outset that F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. 285 strange turn for paradox which never left him in connection with public movements. The Articles had acquired to him a sudden importance as *a declaration of the terms on which the University pro- posed to teach its pupils, and upon which terms they must agree to learn.' It was * fairer to express these terms than to conceal them.' They had appeared to him at Cambridge prohibitory, as binding down the student to certain conclusions beyond which he was not to advance, but now they seemed ' helps to him in pursuing his studies.' This extraordinary refinement in argument, the tendency to see things in a different light from other people, and even from his own first plain impression, was an unhappy characteristic of Maurice all through his life. It led him, at a later time, to glorify the Athanasian Creed as peculiarly inclusive of his own faith and deepest conviction. There was nothing disingenuous in this ; but there was an absence of plain sense and of that historical point of view, of the excess of which he com- plained in his friend Dean Stanley. Hailed by the Oxford School for the time as an ally, he soon found how much at variance he was with them. They were thinking in the main of how Subscription kept all but themselves out of the Church. He was thinking as usual of the good that might be got out of the Articles as guides to higher study. They availed themselves of whatever help was to be got out of his early pamphlet. Subscription tio Bondage ; but he and Dr. Pusey soon came to blows ; and the latter is said to have denounced him and his assumed zeal for Church privilege in no measured terms. ^ Maurice's first charge was the chaplaincy of Guy's 286 Movements of Religious Thought. Hospital, which he held for eleven years/ during a portion of which time he was also Professor of English Literature at King's College. In the latter year he became Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn, and one of the Professors of Theology in King's College. He is particularly careful to point out in one of his letters that he was chosen to the latter post without his own seeking. It desei'ves also to be said that before his appointment he had already make known ^ his peculiar interpretation of the phrase * Eternal life,' which was afterwards concerned in his dismissal from the College. Before that time he had been both Warburton and Boyle Lecturer; and it was as Boyle Lecturer that he produced the most popular of all his books already referred to, TJie Religions of the World. In 1844 he made the acquaintance of Charles Kingsley in circumstances related in the lives of both of them. Kingsley had been working at Eversley as curate for about two years in the midst of lovely scenery, but in an utterly neglected parish. Not a grown-up man or woman in it could read when he began his ministry. The church was nearly empty ; the communicants few ; the water for Holy Baptism held in a cracked kitchen basin ; and the alms collected in an old wooden saucer. No wonder that the parish was overrun with dissent of an extremely ignorant type. When Kingsley was settled in it as rector in the summer of 1844, he set himself with characteristic vigour to redeem the parish and the church. He was then twent}^-five years of age, four- 1 June 1835 to 1846. * In a pamphlet on Mr. Ward's case at Oxford. K D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. 287 teen years younger than Maurice. He had passed through a wholly different order of experience. Brought up within the Church, and at Maurice's earlier university, he had felt the spirit of the time. The scepticism that was in the air, as the first life of the Oxford movement died down, strongly assailed him. The doctrine of the Trinity especially, and what then seemed to him the ' bigotry, cruelty, and quibbling ' of the Athanasian Creed — to which strangely, like Maurice, he too afterwards became vehemently attached — formed his special difficulty. His doubts, as told by himself, do not interest us greatly. They were hard and painful, as they were truly earnest; but there is also a superficial air — an absence of deeper questioning — about them. His mind as yet evidently had not got beyond the out- side of theological questions. He balances the alter- natives between Tractarianism and Deism — but, in point of fact, the former never attracted him. He was repelled by its ' ascetic view of sacred ties/ an aspect in which it continued to be always repulsive to him. The books that chiefly helped him in his difficulties were, in addition to Carlyle's writings, which were a significant factor in his intellectual development, Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, and Maurice's Kingdom of Christ,^ just then published. He had thought of a colonial Hfe in his temporary despair ; but already, in 1 841, he could say that he was 'saved from the wild pride and darkling tempests of Scepticism.' His ordination and settlement at Eversley took place in the following year. * He always said that he owed more to Maurice's Kingdom of Christ thaii to any book he had ever read, — Life, vol. i. p. 84. 288 Movements of Religious Thought In the midst of his parish difficulties he naturally- turned to the author of the Kingdom of Christ for advice. Strangely, Mr. Maurice was living, in the summer of 1844, in the elder Kingsley's rectory at Chelsea, where he had gone from Guy's Hospital for change of air for his w^ife and children. In writing to Maurice he apologised for addressing one so much his superior ; ' but where,' he added, * shall the young priest go for advice but to the elder prophet ? To your works I am indebted for the foundation of any coherent view of the world of God, the meaning of the Church of England, and the spiritual phenomena of the present and past ages.' There was no exaggeration in this statement. The more the lives of the two men are studied together, the more completely does it appear that Maurice w^as really, as styled by himself, Kingsley's ' Master ' in Theology. There was much in the Eversley Rector with which Maurice had nothing to do, — his eye for nature and colour, his love of sport, his revels by the side of a country stream or by the sea-side, — all those poetic elements which were un- doubtedly the highest in Kingsley, and made him the man of genius that he was. He had also an objective turn, both scientific and historical, which Maurice barely understood. Kingsley, in short, was a poet — which no imagination can conceive Maurice being, with the deep reflective involvements of his mind, always returning upon themselves w^th a torment- ing ingenuity. But there was little in Kingsley's theology which did not come more or less directly from Maurice, as he himself confesses. When he first began to feel the need of a theology, he applied F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, 289 to Maurice. In 1853, when the Theological Essays appeared, he wrote : ' Maurice's Essays will con- stitute an epoch. If the Church of England rejects them her doom is fixed. She will rot and die as the Alexandrian did before her. If she accept them not as a code complete, but as hints to- wards a new method of thought, she may save herself still' And twelve years later, in 1865, when both had done the best they were ever to do, in theology and other things, it is still to Maurice he looks as his theological master. ' Your letter com- forted me,' he writes, ' for (strange as it may seem to me to say so) the only thing I really care for — the only thing which gives me comfort — is theology in the strict sense ; though God knows I . know little enough of it. I wish one thing, that you would define for me what you mean by being "baptized into a name." The preposition in its transcendental sense puzzles me. I sometimes seem to grasp it and some- times again lose it from the very unrealistic turn of mind which I have. As to the Trinity I do under- stand you. You first taught me that the doctrine was a live thing, and not a mere formula to be swallowed by the undigesting reason; and from the time that I learnt from you that a Father meant a real father, a Son a real son, and a Holy Spirit a real spirit who was really good and holy, I have been able to draw all sorts of practical lessons from it in the pulpit, and ground all my morality and a great deal of my natural philosophy upon it, and shall do so more. The procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, for instance, is most practically important to me. If the Spirit proceeds only from T 290 Movements of Religions Thoiight, the Father, the whole theorem of the Trinity as well as its practical results fall to pieces in my mind. I don't mean that good men in the Greek Church are not better than I. On the contrary, I believe that every good man therein believes in the procession from both Father and Son, whether he thinks he does so or not.' This letter is very interesting both on its own account and as showing how Kingsley retained the attitude of a theological pupil to Maurice. And the attitude remained to the end. In the Christian Socialist movement which brought them into such intimate fellowship in 1850, Kingsley is the inspiring as well as the inspired. He almost takes the place of leader for a time in his young and eager enthusiasm. But in theology he is throughout dependent on Maurice, and many letters pass between them on the subject. There is especially an interest- ing series in 1855, following Maurice's expulsion from King'$ College. Kingsley was then again under grave doubts concerning, among other things, Maurice's view^s of Sacrifice, published in reply to the attacks m^ade upon him by Dr. Candlish. Addressing his ' dear, dear Kingsley,' Maurice takes comfort in his friend's struggles after clearer views, assured that being true to himself and to God, He will guide him into all truth. ' Do not be in the least disturbed,' he says, * because books of mine about Sacrifice, or anything else, do not satisfy you, or show you the way out of your confusions. Why should they ? Is not the death of Christ, and your death and mine, a depth immeasurably below my soundings ? And what have I done, if I have done F. D, Maurice and Charles Kingsley. 291 anything truly and honestly, but beseech people not to try and measure it, but simply cast themselves upon the love of God which is manifested in it, and trust it when there is nothing else in heaven above or earth beneath to rest upon ? ' Again he says, ' I am a Puritan almost incapable of enjoyment, though in principle justifying enjoyment as God's gift to his creatures. God has given you infinite faculties of enjoyment. But he has given you with these the higher part of being manly, and of caring for your fellow-men, and their miseries and sins. What I fear (perhaps most unreasonably) for you is that the first gift may devour the second, and that your sympathy with what is beautiful in nature and human society should make you less able to stand out against these, more tolerant of that which is eating into the hearts of individuals and nations. Godliness I am certain is the true support of manliness.' Kingsley's name had become associated with what was called 'muscular Christianity.' The elder teacher evidently desires to caution him, as well as to emphasise his own peculiar point of view. The two men now, and at all times, stand before us in clear con- trast, if the light around Maurice be wavering, as it often is. The precise contents of his thought, even in this familiar letter, are not easy to give. How singular and even more than usually vague the manner in which he speaks of the death of Christ ! But then what an intense spiritual glow there is in his words ! Whatever may be his intellectual hesitations, however difficult it may be to fix him down to definite pro- positions which any one could venture to repeat, there is never any hesitation as to his own intense 292 Movements of Religious Thought faith, his realisation of the Divine love as a solid reality — a ' rock,' as he says in the same letter, ' to hold fast by, although the whole world and himself should be lost out of sight and go to the bottom.' All his subtleties and inconsistencies, as they appear to us, about the forms of Divine truth, never for a moment darken his spiritual vision. And this is Maurice throughout. The Divine Foundation is never doubtful to him, however strange, wavering, or paradoxical the expression of his formal opinions may sometimes be. Of all men of our time he seems to me to have realised God most vividly. I do not say in his personal life — I do not venture to judge him or any man in this respect — but as the centre of all knowledge and all Hfe, as the core of all human good, personal, domestic, social, national, ecclesiastical. Everything was from God with him, and all its strength came straight out of God. Religion above all he never allowed to shut out God from him as many do, as he constantly complained all religious parties did. The Bible had all its meaning to him as a direct revelation from God. It was God he everywhere saw moving through its pages and instructing^ him — a living- God, with whom he could converse, and to whom he could go as having the words of eternal life. It was this that made him so jealous of certain modes of historical criticism, which it must be confessed he did not fully appre- ciate. It was this that made him prefer the word 'theology' to religion, which always seemed to him to have something of a Pagan meaning. It was this also that made him so often say that all his know- ledge and thought began in theology. It was said F. D. Maurice and Charles Kmgsley. 293 of Spinoza, by Novalis that he was a ' God-intoxi- cated man,' but of all modern men Maurice seems to me to have most deserved this name. He lived as few men have ever lived in the Divine. He was, as Mr. Glad- stone has said of him, applying words from Dante, *a spiritual spendour.' The Divine embraced him. He did not need to strive after it like most men. It was the Alpha and Omega of all his being — the only reality in comparison with which all other things were shadowy. It was this more than anything that made him the spiritual power that he was. In the presence of Maurice it was hardly possible to doubt of a Divine sphere, — of a spiritual life. While the commercial world by its selfishness was denying God, and the religious world by its slanders degrading Him, and the scientific world by its theories hiding Him from view, or proclaiming Him unknown, there was a reality in Maurice's faith that left no room for doubt. I know of no life, with all the intellectual puzzles which it presents, so intensely and powerfully Divine. Kingsley was far less intense and theological. He had a broader nature, which took in more of the variety and beauty of life. He had, as Maurice acknowledged, a far higher capacity of natural en- joyment. But he too in everything — in his novel- writing, in his social efforts, in his history and science, as well as in his sermons — was a witness to the Divine. He did not glow, as Maurice did, with a Divine radiance in all he did ; he had neither his ' Master's ' subtlety nor his profundity ; but he was more intelligible, healthy, and broad- minded, and he carried the spirit of Christianity as 294 Movements of Religio2ts Thought. heartily, if not as profoundly, into all his work. Maurice was more of the Prophet both in his tender- ness and occasional fierceness — Kingsley more of the Poet. Yet with all his more concrete poetic sympathies, the pupil was earnest as the theological master he delighted to honor. One who knew him well has said of him — *The two most distinctive features of his religious teaching were that the world is God's world and not the Devil's, and that manliness is entirely compatible with godliness.' The former was the manner in which he applied the great prin- ciple of his teacher that humanity and the world are originally constituted in Christ and belong to God, whatever footing the Devil may have got in them ; the second was, in a sense, his own peculiar gospel, springing out of his own high courage and love of natural life. There was a true message in both truths for his generation. They taught that Nature and life were from God at a time when science on the one hand, and asceticism on the other, tended to sever them from His presence. If Maurice dis- cerned more deeply the Divine constitution of things, Kingsley, by his poetic and living sympathies, made the Divine more visible everywhere around us. VIII. * Broad Church ' — continued. FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON AND BISHOP EWING. HTHERE is no life that mirrors more completely the spiritual conflicts of the fifth decade of our century than that of Frederick W. Robertson. And yet at first his opinions seemed set in a fixed groove. Trained in an evangelical family, he remained more or less an Evangelical till he was 27 years of age. He passed through Oxford at the time when the Anglo-Catholic movement was rising to its height. He was fascinated by it, but remained firm to the principles of his youth. He carried the same prin- ciples into the exercise of his early ministry, and it was not till after he had been a clergyman for some years that he was caught and carried away by the spirit of his time. He was of Scottish parentage, and partly educated at the Edinburgh Academy.^ His father was a soldier, and he himself looked forward, as a boy, to the same profession. His heart, in 1 Frederick W, Robertson, Suffolk, appears as second in the prize list of the Edinburgh Academy, 1832 : his friend George R. Moncriefif, standing first. There are two sets of verses — one in Latin, the other in English — attached to his name, but neither of remarkable merit. 295 296 Moveme7its of Religious Tlwitght, fact, was passionately set on a soldier's career, and it was only with great reluctance that he abandoned the prospect. At first he especially recoiled from entering the Church — yet this seemed not only to his father, but to all who knew him best, the pro- fession for which he was most fitted ; and at last his own heart, under a sense of duty, however, rather than enthusiasm, inclined in the same direction. The singular purity and devoutness of his character, his deep religious convictions which made him say, even while ardently cherishing the idea of entering the army, that his object was not ' to win laurels, but to do good ; ' his spirit of self-sacrifice and earnestness in all he did, led his friends, no doubt, to the conclu- sion which they impressed upon him and which he ultimately accepted. He was from a boy a prayerful student of the Bible, and sought to regulate by it his own life and the lives of others. When travel- ling with a companion in his twenty-first year, the same year that he entered the University (1837), he collected the servants of the several inns at which they stayed to prayer in the evening. At Oxford he established a society for prayer and conversation on the Scriptures. His direct study of the Scriptures and the confidence with which he read in them certain great principles, were evidently the main means by which he resisted the influence of Newmanism. He was carried, as he himself afterwards said, to the brink of the precipice,^ but was held back by the force of his early training and a certain Pauline simplicity and severity of biblical thought characteristic of his youth. ^ Life, vol. i.p. 1 20. F. W. Robertso7i and Bishop Ewing. 297 Robertson's first ministry was at Winchester, where he accepted a curacy in July 1840. He carried with him into his work, as his biographer says, * a grave and awful sense of responsibility.' His religious character, always earnest, had deepened at Oxford. The death of one of his sisters and her happiness and peace in dying had affected him greatly. Amidst all the temptations of his young life at Paris (where he was for some time), as well as at Oxford, he had led a consistent Christian life and grown in Christian ex- perience. Especially there were already developed in him two features of character which were afterwards very conspicuous — ' hatred and resistance of evil, and a reverence and effort for purity.' There was some- thing striking in the strength of his feelings in both these respects during all his life. He was never so moved as when he had ' to quell a falsehood or avenge a wrong.' Any injury to woman was especially re- sented by him. He had, as his biographer remarks, a singular chasteness of spirit which gave him, in a large degree, his insight into moral truth, and the fineness with which he could discriminate its more delicate shades. Vigorous in health when young, and with many soldierly qualities and great love of adventure, he was yet constitutionally of a sad temperament, the result of a singularly susceptible nervous organisation which vibrated acutely in response to every influence of nature and life. A more highly strung mind can hardly be imagined, reaching from intense enjoyment to painful depression. He seemed always haunted by an unfulfilled ideal, and yet his natural fulness of feehng went forth in a power of realising all the higher pleasures of life in a remarkable degree. * The woof 298 Movements of Religions Thonght, of his own life ' was dark ' — as he said of life in general — but it was ' shot with a warp of gold.' During all the time of his ministry at Winchester he laboured more or less under a feeling of oppres- sive responsibility. He lived rigorously, frequently refraining from adequate food and sleep, compelling himself to rise early, and systematising his whole Hfe under a sense of religious devotion. He gave certain days to prayer on definite subjects, and read daily books of devotion with scrupulous adherence to a plan. He read particularly such books as the lives of Martyn and Brainerd, and the Imitation of Christ. He continued his Greek and Hebrew studies ; he visited the poor diligently ; he grudged no self-denial to do the work to which he had been called. ' Only one thing was worth living for,' he said to a friend, 'to do God's work, and gradually grow in conformity to his image by mortification, and self-denial, and prayer. When that is accomplished, the sooner we leave this scene of weary struggle the better. Till then, welcome battle, conflict, victory.' ^ Men seldom think, and still seldomer write, in this way after the first years of youth ; the words breathe the intense zeal of his youthful ministry. From the first Robertson showed special, if not marked, gifts as a preacher. He spoke so that men listened to him. His voice was always musical and impressive ; his heart was in what he said ; and while he preached the ordinary Evangelical doctrines he was free from the peculiar phraseology of the school. There was, however, little or no play of thought in his Winchester sermons. They ran on the usual ^ Life, vol. i. p. 61, F. W. Roberts 071 and Bishop Ewhig. 299 lines, were full of ' doctrinal analysis and general description of the love of Christ,' and in no way indicated his future power. Even his letters of this time are said to be ' scarcely worth reading.' All that he was yet to be remained dormant The routine of his work absorbed him, and his rigorous abstinence and Puritan severity in deal- ing with himself laid the seeds of after disease. * It is painful,' says his biographer, ' to read his diary, in which all his inward life is mapped out in divisions, his sins and errors labelled, selfishness discovered in all his efforts and resolves, and lists made out of the graces and gifts which he needed especially.' ^ The result of all this was that after about a year he fell ill. He thought himself attacked by the family malady — consumption, which carried off his two sisters. He did not care to live long, and the sense of the shortness of his time only made him redouble his efforts. But his rector,^ and others more considerate of his health than himself, at length forced him to take a continental holiday. He made a visit to the Rhine and Switzerland, which is chiefly memorable as serving to bring out his keen antagonism at once to Roman Catholicism and Ger- man Neology. He was bold in converse with men on spiritual subjects. He never shrank from making known his sentiments, and in his intense opposition to Popery sometimes indulged in a pugnacity of debate which was not without its risks. As unlike as possible to his later attitude, he was at this time ^ Life, vol. i. p. 67. 2 Mr. Nicholson, Rector of the united parishes of St. Maurice St. Mary Kalendar, and St. Peter's, Colebrook. 300 Movements of Religious Thought. a polemic on behalf of ordinary British Protestantism in season and out of season. At Geneva he plunged eagerly into the religious questions which then agi- tated the city. He had many conversations with Cesar Malan and others less orthodox, and maintained always with zeal his own views. * I have just returned from another long discussion with Malan before several persons, which I do not like, because calmness in argument is then always difficult. You think of your own victory instead of the truth. However, I only fenced, and allowed him to cross-question me. He does it in the most affectionate and earnest manner ; but I could not yield, because I believe all I said leaned upon God's truth. He said — and there was much pathetic foresight in the prophecy, little as young Robertson, in the midst of all his enthu- siasm, felt it at the time — ' Mon tres-cher frere, vous avez une triste vie et un triste ministere.' Geneva proved the farthest point of his travels at this time. He there met a young lady, daughter of a Northamptonshire Baronet, and after a brief acquaintance married her. It has always been sup- posed that the deep sadness of his life had something to do with this sudden event ; but the veil has not been lifted for us, and we have no right to try to lift it. He returned almost immediately after his marriage, and settled at Cheltenham; and here, after a brief interval, he began the second stage of his ministry in circumstances that seemed to promise happiness and usefulness. He was greatly attached to his rector, the Rev. Archibald Boyd, afterwards rector at St. James's, Paddington, and latterly Dean of Exeter. He looked up to him for a time with the greatest F. W. Robertson aiid Bishop Ewing. 30 1 respect, and was even disposed to learn from him as a preacher. His own preaching at Cheltenham from the first evidently struck a higher key than that of his Winchester ministry. There are many testi- monies to this effect One friend writes, ' I had a prejudice against him, through no fault of his, but I was not merely struck but startled by his sermon. The high order of thought, the large and clear con- ception, the breadth of view, the passion held in leash, the tremulously earnest tone, the utter forgetfulness of self in his subject, and the abundance of the heart out of which the mouth speaks, made me feel indeed that here indeed was one whom it would be well to miss no opportunity of hearing. From the first he largely swayed those minds that had any point of contact with him.' It seemed as if he had found a fitting sphere for his powers. But gradually he fell into his old depression. There were evidently external as well as internal causes for this, which are not fully explained ; the relations with his Rector, at first so cordial, seem to have altered. He took it into his head that his sermons were not intelligible to the con- gregation. The admirers of the Rector's preaching were plainly no admirers of his — the two men were quite different in their cast of thought, and the ladies who fluttered around the Incumbent did not care for the Curate. The idea that he was more or less of a failure assailed him. ' Sad and dispirited,' is an entry in his diary in 1845, after he had been about three years in Cheltenham. During all this time his intellectual powers were rapidly growing. Carlyle's books became favourite studies. German literature and theology opened 302 Movements of Religious TJiought. up their treasures to him. * He began to hew out his own path to his convictions.' How far this new spirit, which made itself felt no doubt in his ser- mons, may have had to do with his discomfort in the discharge of his duty, is not said ; but there can be little doubt that the change that was gradually pass- ing over his thought was the main factor in the mental disturbance that now overtook him. Since 1843, his attitude towards the Evangelical party had begun to alter. Of this date he says, 'As to the state of the Evangelical clergy, I think it lamentable. I see sentiment instead of principle, a miserable mawkish religion superseding a state which once was healthy. Their adherents I love less than themselves, for they are but copies of their faults in a large edition. I stand nearly alone, a Theological Ishmael. The Tractarians despise me, and the Evan- gelicals somewhat loudly express their doubts of me.' This is the earliest indication of Robertson's decided dissatisfaction with his old views. The change had begun within a year of the commencement of his ministry at Cheltenham. The three years which followed were destined to see a complete revolution in his thought. Doubts came to him in quick succession. The study of German, the enlarged study of Scripture, a deeper acquaintance with his own heart, dissatisfac- tion apparently with the Rector's teaching and modes of action, which had at first so much attracted him, seem all to have contributed to the result. His ser- mons altered, and it became painful for him to preach. The reaction was violent in his case, in proportion to the unhesitating acceptance which he had given to the Evangelical doctrines. The whole system on F. W. Robei^tson and Bishop Eiuing. 303 which he had founded his faith and his work fell away under him irretrievably, and after a struggle to maintain the old with the new, he gave way entirely, and plunged into a state 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.' In such a state it was impossible for him to con- tinue preaching. The state of his health alone for- bade this ; and there was nothing for him but once more to leave the scene of his ministry, and seek for some assuagement of his trouble in continental travel. There is no picture of the spiritual struggles of this time, when Froude, and Clough, and Sterling were all in the death-throes of their early faith, to be com- pared in touching interest with that of Frederick Robertson. He has himself told the story of it, and the tremulous depths of his language bring us very near his heart. He went down into the darkness, and all light for a time seemed to leave him — all save the sense of right and good. * If there be no God and no future state, yet even then it is better to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be true than false, better to be brave than to be a coward.' So he felt, and from this moral basis he fought his way again upward towards the light. Robertson's character stands singularly free in this great crisis from all trace of lower feeling or self- involution — from all that vanity, pride, or presumption which so frequently accompany such states even in large minds. There is no trace in him of mere intel- 304 Movements of Religions Thmtght. lectualism, still less of sentimentalism, as if it were something fine to be the victim of Divine despair, nor is there, as we may see in George Eliot, any sense of superiority over the logic of superstition, — only a profound and unutterable misery, as of one from whom a divine treasure had been stolen, and to whom there had come ' a fearful loneliness of spirit,' from which the stars of hope had gone out one by one. He was driven into the wilderness by sheer force of spiritual perplexity ; he passed out of sight of men and books, that he might fight with his doubts in calm resolution. ' He did not seek for sympathy. He was accustomed, as he said, to con- sume his own smoke.' I know nothing more touch- ing in biography than his lonely wanderings in the Tyrol amidst scenery the excitement of which seemed only for a time to deepen his mental unrest. It is a strange and painful yet exalting experience when the weary heart carries with it the pressure of an intoler- able self-consciousness into such scenes of solemn beauty, and feels the glory around only to deepen the awe of life and the burden of thought. The clouds, instead of being driven away, seem for a time only to gather shape and consistency ; but all the while Nature is doing its healing work, and the brain once more rallying its exhausted forces, till, with the return of health, it is found that the scenes through which we have passed have wrought like magic, bringing not only peace, but expansion and maturity of intellect.^ 1 As he himself says in one of his letters, vol. i. p. 274 — ' The soul collects its mightiest forces by being thrown in upon itself, and coerced solitude often matures the mental and moral character marvellously.' F. TV. Robeidson and Bishop Ewing. 305 The autumn that Robertson spent in the Tyrol and at Heidelberg in 1846 was the turning-point of his life. His Evangelical faith was gone before he left England — worn out of his heart and mind by many causes. The great principles of morality, or Ursacherij as he called them, were alone left to him ; all else was gone. * Who was Christ ? What are miracles? What do you mean by inspiration? Is the resurrection a fact or a myth ? What saves a man — his own character, or that of another ? Is the next life individual consciousness or continua- tion of the consciousness of the universe ? ' These and many other questions — to which he says ^Krause would return one answer, Neander another, and Dr. Chalmers another ' — tormented him. They had come upon him not suddenly. He writes to a friend, the same apparently who had introduced him to Ger- manism, that he must not distress himself, as if he were responsible for his doubts. But if the sense of religious difficulties had been gradually growing in his mind before, it was his experience and ministry at Cheltenham that ripened them. He may have known something of them before; but there is nothing less like real spiritual perplexity than the sort of way in which young minds sometimes play with difficulties. And it was only when driven from Cheltenham in the autumn of 1846 that the rain descended and the floods came, and the wind beat upon his house till it shook to its founda- tions. It was only then certainly, and after much spiritual struggle, that he began to build again from the foundation. His whole spiritual and intel- lectual nature underwent a change, He laid hold U 3o6 Movements of Religious Thought. of religious questions in a way he had never done before. His vision was enlarged, his grasp became stronger, richer, more penetrating. All the ser- mons and writings by which he is known are after this date. He had realised his own wish. As a friend and he looked at the summit of Skiddaw enveloped in a mist, on the eve of his departure to the Continent, he said to him, ' I would not have my head, like the peak of that mountain, involved in cloud for all that you could offer me.' * I would,' rejoined Robertson quickly, ' for by and by the cloud and mist will roll away, and the sun will come down upon it in all his glory.' So it proved with him. The cloud rolled away : he emerged into a radi- ance, which did not always abide with him in its fulness, but which never again left him. Up to this point he was only a promising preacher. Henceforth he became, beyond all question, one of the spiritual thinkers of his time— strong in every fibre of in- tellectual and religious life. In the silence and solitude of the mountains of the Tyrol his * soul, left to explore its own recesses, and to feel its nothing- ness in the presence of the Infinite,' had laid its foun- dations deep and sure. He was two months at Oxford before settling at Brighton ; and here he enjoyed for the first time the full freedom of preaching. He began rapidly to draw attention. The undergraduates were throng- ing the church, and beginning to hang upon his words, when the sudden change to Brighton came. He began his ministry there in the autumji of 1847. He was still only 31 ; but his mind now opened at once to its full powers. His genius was never F, W. Robertson and Bishop Ewing. 307 brighter or more * productive ' than during his first two years at Brighton. His inborn gifts of eloquence — of luminous intelligence — his capacity of swaying the human heart and of bringing light to the most difficult subjects, all came forth in their full develop- ment He seemed as if he knew that his time would be short ; and, ' unhasting, yet unresting,' he gave himself to make full proof of his ministry. It was as a preacher that Frederick Robertson became one of the spiritual forces of his time. He was also active as a philanthropist — as a friend of working men, who gathered around him in numbers and with eager admiration. He delivered lectures on Poetry, and he published an analysis of Tennyson's hi Meinoriani of rare value. His literary powers were of the highest order, especially his faculty for poetic criticism. His theological learning was ample, and thoroughly his own, and at one time he projected a work on * Inspiration.' But it was in the pulpit that he put forth all his intellectual and spiritual strength, and his * Sermons ' remain the permanent memorial of his genius and of the strong impulses of new and living thought that came from him. It is as a preacher, therefore, that we are alone called upon to estimate him. What then were the elements of his rare and almost unexampled influence, not merely while he lived, but since his death ? For of him, of all preachers, may it be truly said, that ' being dead, he yet speaketh.' His sermons, which, with a single ex- ception, have all been published since his death, and many of them m an imperfect form, have not only perpetuated his fame, but spread the influence 3o8 Movements of Religious TJumght. of his thought far and wide beyond any bounds to which his Hving voice could have extended. We have already spoken of his impressive voice and manner. His voice is described as 'low pitched, deep and penetrating, seldom rising ; but when it did, going forth in a deep volume of sound like a great bell,' thrilling from the repression rather than excitement of feeling. Like many other men with no ear for music, he was yet a subtle master of sound, just as he was peculiarly susceptible to its witchery in others. There were states in which it would move him indescribably, and so * linger upon his ear that he could not sleep at night' This was only a part of his singular sensibility to all sense- impressions — all influences of form and colour as well as sound. Brightness, beauty of any kind, affected him directly, and it made all the difference in the world to him whether he had to compose in a room facing to the north or the south. It was this same sensitiveness that gave him such an exquisite perception of natural scenery, so that its glow or terror, its wildness or sweetness, touched him to the very quick. There is nothing in his sermons and lec- tures more exquisite than some of his reminiscences of his wanderings in the Tyrol. They are like bits of sudden glory thrown upon a canvas, never for their own sake merely, but as illustrating some hidden chords of feeling or some fresh development of truth. None but the eye of an artist could have seized the picture, and no one but with rare gifts as a thinker could have fitted the picture to the argument. Apart from voice, Robertson's external charac- teristics as a preacher were not specially effective. F. W, Robe7Hson and Bishop Ewing. 309 He was entirely without oratorical parade. He had hardly any gesture save a slow motion of his hand upwards, and when worn and ill in his last years, a fatal disease consuming both brain and heart, he stood almost motionless in the pulpit, * his pale thin face and tall emaciated form seeming, as he spoke, to be glowing as alabaster glows when lit up by an in- ward fire.' 'When he began his sermon, he held in his hand a small slip of paper with a few notes upon it. He referred to it now and then ; but before ten minutes had gone by, it was crushed to uselessness in his grasp, for he knit his fingers together over it, as he knit his words over his thought.' It was in all the nobler qualities of thought, insight, and feeling that he excelled, as it is these qualities that still live in his sermons and have made them such a marvellous power. He was characteristically a Thinker in the Pulpit. He went straight to the heart of every subject that he touched, and with a rare combination of imaginative and dialectic power brought out all its meaning. He felt a truth before he expressed it ; but when once he felt it, and by patient study had made it his own, he wrought it with the most admirable logic — a logic closely linked, yet living in every link — into the minds of his hearers. This live glowing concatenated sequence of thought is seen in all his greater sermons. It could only have been forged in a brain stirred to its depths, — on fire with the ideas which possessed him for the time, — yet never mastered by, always mastering, his subject. This impress of creative force as he proceeded in his sermons gives them their wonderful perfection of form amidst all their hurrying energy. 3IO Movements of Religions Thought. They are many of them great as Hterary composi- tions with a Hving movement rare even in the higher hterature. The truth is, they were hterally the crea- tion of moments of inspired utterance. We cannot imagine them written in cold blood. Their organisa- tion shows a heated yet controlled enthusiasm. ' He disentangled his subject, as he advanced, from the crowd of images and thoughts which clustered round it. He exercised a severe choice over this crowd, and rejected what was superabundant. There was no confusion in his mind. Step by step he led his hearers from point to point till at last he placed them on the summit where they could see all the landscape of his subject in luminous and connected order. He hated an isolated thought. He was not happy till he had ranged it under a principle. Once there it was found to be linked to a thousand others. Hence arose his affluence of ideas, his ability for seizing remote analogies, his wide grasp and lucid arrange- ment of his subject, his power of making it, if abstruse, clear, if common, great ; if great, not too great for human nature's daily food. For he was not only a thinker, but the thinker for men. All thought he directed to human ends. Far above his keenness of sympathy for the true and beautiful was his sympathy for the true and beautiful in union with living hearts.' ^ If the highest work of thought is to illuminate a sub- ject — to pierce to its heart, and unfold in creative order all its parts, and not merely to tell you about it and what others have thought of it — to make alive a new order of ideas and not merely explain an old order — then Frederick Robertson is certainly the ^Zi/c', vol. i. pp. 193-4. F. W. Robertson and Bishop Ewing. 3 1 1 greatest thinker who has appeared in the pulpit in modern times. Other preachers may have been more eloquent in the ordinary sense, more capable of sway- ing with delight varied audiences, but there are no sermons comparable to his in sustained elevation of thought. There are none that carry readers so steadily on the wings of spiritual and imaginative reason till they enter into the very life of the subject, and see eye to eye with the preacher. How vividly, for example, do we realise the contrasted attitude of Jew and Gentile to the Cross of Christ in his famous sermons * The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.' How does * The Star in the East ' assume meaning as he expounds it? With what a freshness does he discourse of * Christ's Estimate of Sin,' and his creative vision of the Divine capacities that still lived in humanity amidst all its sinful ruin ? How does the loneliness of Christ shadow us, and the sacrifice of Christ fill our hearts as he speaks of them ? His thought was not only thorough. It not only went into a subject and round it, and embraced it in all its essential bearings, but it pictured it. It made it alive. It pierced it through and through at once with light and life. But this divine rationality — rare as it is — would not have made Robertson's sermons all the power they have been apart from other and still higher qualities. With all his intellectuality he is never far from the depths of the spiritual life. And he touches these depths — the secrets of the heart, the sorrows of sin, aspirations after holiness, not only with an exquisite tenderness, sympathy, and penetrating knowledge, 3 1 2 Movements of Religious TJiought. but above all with a simplicity, directness, and honesty that leave almost all preachers behind. We know of no sermons that search the heart, we do not say more . delicately, but with a straighter, clearer delicacy than Robertson's. Newman can play upon richer and more Jtangled chords of spiritual feeling, he can awaken and startle the conscience with more solemnity, but there are intricacies and not unfre- quently sophistries in Newman's most moving appeals. It is the image of the Church or the authority of dogma that plays with him the part of spiritual judge. You require to be a Churchman to feel the full force of what he says. He often deals obliquely with the conscience, and delights to take it at a disad- vantage. In Robertson the play of spiritual feeling is direct as it is intense. There is not a trace of sophistry in the most subtle of his spiritual analyses or the most powerful of his spiritual appeals. Our common spiritual nature, and the great chords of feeling that he in it, and not mere churchly feeling or over-drilled conscience, are the subjects with which he deals. Above all it is Christ himself, the living Christ, and not any mere image of his authority or notion about him, with which he plies the heart. ' My whole heart's expression,' he says in one of his letters,^ * is " none but Christ," not in so-called evan- gelical sense, but in a deeper real sense — the mind of Christ; to feel as He felt; to judge the world, and to estimate the world's maxims as He judged and esti- mated. To realise that is to feel none but Christ ! But then in proportion as a man does that, he is stripping himself of garment after garment till his 1 Vol. i. p. 154. F. IV. Robertson and Bishop Ewiftg. 3 1 3 soul becomes naked of that which once seemed part of himself; he is not only giving up prejudice after prejudice, but also renouncing sympathy after sym- pathy with friends whose smile and approbation were once his life.' There is in this last sentence a touch of exag- geration. He was apt to generalise too painfully from his own experience. But there was no exag- geration in the intensity with which he sought for himself nearness to Christ. The peculiar directness of his love to Christ was the root of all his life and effort. * It was a conscious personal realised devo- tion,' too sacred to speak much about. It filled his whole soul and left him alone with the overpowering consciousness of the Divine Presence. It was this feeling that dictated his famous words when he spoke in the Town Hall of Brighton to the working men about infidel publications. ' I refuse to permit discus- sion respecting the love which a Christian man bears to his Redeemer — a love more delicate far than the love which was ever borne to sister or the adoration with which he regards his God — a reverence more sacred than ever man bore to mother.' This supreme feel- ing towards Christ pervades all Robertson's sermons. Every subject is brought more or less into direct relation with Christ, and s^lows or darkens in the licrht of His presence. It was his hold of the ' mind of Christ,' and the flashes of insight that constantly came from this source that made him so helpful as well as powerful a preacher. Above all he dealt with these two great realities — * Christ and the soul.' Closely allied with this was his love of the truth in all things. To do and say the right thing because it 3 1 4 Movements of Religiotts Thought. is right — * to dare to gaze on the splendour of the naked truth without putting a veil before it to terrify any by mystery and vagueness — to live by love and not by fear — that is the life of a true brave man who will take Christ and his mind for the truth instead of the clamour either of the worldly world or the religious world.' He had no pet commonplaces to enforce either of tradition or doctrine. His aim was to see every question in the pure light of the gospel — to show how Christ had grasped the pro- blems of thought and of society at their root, and given forth fertile principles applying to all time. He liked to be regarded as a teacher rather than a preacher. He hated using fine words about religion, or being supposed a fine talker. In the reaction which frequently came to him after preaching he was disposed to undervalue it altogether, and even to speak of it with contempt, He seemed to himself at times to do so little good, and the buzz that besets popularity in the pulpit rung painfully in his ears. It was impossible to offend him more than to speak of him as a popular preacher. He hated the idea. There was to him a sort of degradation in it ; and much of the indignant scorn and pride which rushed out some- times in his words took their keenness from this source. There was a certain morbid feeling in this as in other points, but it all came of the deep truthfulness of the man, in whom the oratorical instinct, powerful as it was, never overpowered for a moment the higher qualities of sense, judgment, taste, and reason. His theological standpoint is in some respects difficult to define. His biographer says, ' he was the F. W. Robertson and Bishop Ewing. 3 1 5 child of no theological father. He owned no master but Christ ; and he did not care, provided he fought under him the good fight, to what regiment he belongfed.' The term ' Broad Church,' used as a dis- tinctive party name, is used of him, as throughout, with reserve. He was certainly neither Tractarian nor Evangelical ; and in this sense he was ' broad ' — that he interpreted Christianity and the Church in the widest sense both historically and spiritually. All men who own their spiritual heritage in baptism were to him the children of a common God and Father. They were neither ' made the children of God ' by baptism, nor was there any doubt as to their position. He approved of the Gorham decision not because he agreed with Mr. Gorham, but because it left the question open. If he differed from Mr. Gorham he certainly differed also from the Bishop of Exeter. Baptism, he said, is the special revelation of the great truth that all who are born into the world are children of God by right. The truth or fact is not dependent on the sacrament, nor on the faith of the recipient. It is a fact before we beheve it, else how could we be asked to believe it ? But it must be acknowledged and acted upon. We must believe it and live it. When the Catechism says, ' My bap- tism, wherein I was made a child of God,' the meaning is the same as in the saying, ' the Queen is 7nade Queen at her coronation.' She was Queen before; nay, if she had not been Queen, coronation could not make her Queen.^ Against this view he set the Tractarian as implying the magical creation of a nature at the moment of baptism ; and the ^ See Sermons on Baptism, second Series, and Letters, vol. ii. et seq. 3 1 6 Movements of Religious Thought. Evangelical as doing the same, but only in select cases. Either view appeared to him to destroy the essential nature of Christianity. His position was virtually the same as Mr. Maurice's, but he seized it with a healthier breadth. Maurice equally repudiated any magical efificacy in the rite, but he fell back into a species of ritualistic magic in attaching a special efficacy to the sacrament as administered in the Church of England. Robertson neither implies nor asserts any such restriction. His explanation of baptism was closely connected with his whole view of dogma. He did not reject dogma even when its form repelled him. He tried to find its inner and comprehensive meaning. There was to him a certain verity underlying all dogma. The whole verity no dogma could express or measure. It only tried to do so. It was a proxi- mate, tentative, or partial, but never complete or final interpretation of Divine Truth. So he always asked of a dogma. What does it really mean ? Not what did it mean in the language of those who spoke it. * How in my language can I put into form the underlying truth — in corrected form if possible, — but in only approximate form after air ... * God's truth must be boundless. Trac- tarians and Evangelicals suppose that it is a pond which you can walk round and say, " I hold the truth." What, all ! Yes, all ; there it is circumscribed, defined, proved, quite large enough to be the im- measurable Gospel of the Lord of the Universe ! ' ^ There is wisdom as well as breadth in such words — a higher wisdom than many identified with the ' Broad ^ Vol. ii. p. 41. F. W. Robertson and Bishop Eiuing. 3 1 7 Church ' knew. Neither Maurice nor Kingsley ever reached the true rational standpoint as to creeds and formulas. They failed to understand the profound dis- trust that a certain order of spiritual minds have of all statements, like the Athanasian Creed, which profess to sum up Divine Truth. Useful as ' aids to faith,' they are intolerable as limitations of faith. They are really water-marks of the Christian consciousness of the past. To make them ' ponds ' enclosing that consciousness for all ages, is to mistake both their real origin and the nature of Divine truth. For this truth, as Robert- son steadily maintained, is of the nature of poetry, ' to be felt and not proved.' ^ It is to be realised not as propositions addressed to the intellect, but as the witness of God's Spirit to man's spirit. And so all Robertson's teaching was suggestive rather than dog- matic. He sought to bring men face to face with the truth not in sharp doctrinal outlines, but in the ful- ness of its spirit and life, which, — allowing in his view differences of opinion, — united men by a pervasive spirit of love to Christ and to one another.' He had none of that dread of different sorts of opinion ' that Mr. Maurice had, — which he and Newman alike stig- matised as ' Liberalism.' He did not shrink from the word ' Liberal ' in religion. It expressed the generous recognition of difference and expansion of opinion here as in other things. He knew very well, that, whatever words we may use, it is simply a fact — which no theory whatever can alter — that men will differ in religious opinion, and that the higher view, therefore, is to admit the validity of dogmatic differences, and to point to the true Centre, the Spirit of Christ, in ^ Vol. ii. p. 165. 3 1 8 Movements of Religious Thought. which all differences, if they do not disappear, assume their true proportion. This aspect of Robertson's teaching, we agree with his biographer in thinking, will prove the most lasting of all. It has radiated upon all schools of Christian thought a softening influence. It has indicated the true point of contact for diverse lines of Christian teaching. Boldly and confidently as he dealt with many Chris- tian dogmas, the atonement, the doctrine of sin, the doctrine of the sacraments, of absolution, of im- puted righteousness, of apostolical succession, and rich as is the light of thought which he has thrown around many of them, he never supposed that he had exhausted their meaning, or said the last word regard- ing them. Such solutions as he gave he knew to be partial like all other solutions. 'The time might come when they would cease to be adequate. The solution that was fitting for one age might be unfitting for another.' He kept his mind open to still higher and more comprehensive explanations. He looked forward 'to an advance of the Christian Church — not into new truths, but into wider and more tolerant views of those old truths which in themselves are incapable of change.' Robertson's genius was thus not only rich, but eminently expansive. It was generous and Catholic to the core. He might speak at times bitterly against Evangelicalism. If there was unfairness in his mind at all, it was in some of his criticisms of Evangelical doctrine. But this was a natural reaction against what he considered its injurious commonplaces, and the suffering they had inflicted upon him. He was upon the whole highly just in speech as he was F. W. Robertson and Bishop Eivmg. 3 1 9 fearless in thought.^ He exhibited the combination so rare at all times of intense spirituality with a large critical and historical faculty. He had a true appreciation, — far more so than other teachers with whom he has been classed, — of the natural conditions underlying the development of Divine revelation and of dogmatic thought He was no man of a school, with esoteric thoughts and private modes of inter- pretation destined to be swept away by the progress of criticism. He was Christian in the widest sense, with his mind alive to all the influences of knowledge, nature, or life. He stood in the van of critical as well as spiritual progress, content to vindicate re- ligion in the light of history and of conscience. He had no wish to disturb old dogmas in order to substi- tute dogmas of his own. He rather tried to make the best use of them he could — knowing how impossible is exactitude in matters of religious opinion. His aim was not to displace violently any central points of faith, but to make the old live as far as possible with the new. He sought to broaden down ' from pre- cedent to precedent,' recognising the universal truth hidden in the saying, * I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.' His biographer testifies that he never brought forward in the pulpit an opinion which was only fermenting in his mind. * He waited till the must became wine.' He endea- voured as far as in him lay, without sacrificing truth, not to shock the minds of any who were resting peacefully in an *' early heaven and in happy views.' He was tender of weak consciences, and all honest 1 ' I desire for myself,' he says, ' that I may be true and fearless ' (vol, ii. p. 249). 320 Moveniaits of Religions ThoiigJit. opinions. Liberal, in short, in all the tendency of his thought, with a mind open to every fresh impulse of truth and progress, he was yet wise in his liberalism. He knew that the law of all progress is rooted in the past, and that men will advance in religion as in everything else not by displacement but by expan- sion, by building the temple of truth to a loftier height, not by subverting it and beginning once more from the naked soil. Few minds have enriched Christian thought more in our time, or given it a more healthy or sounder impulse. Robertson died in the summer of 1853. Twelve years afterwards, when his sermons had spread far and wide,^ a kindred spirit wrote of his Life and Letters, which had been sent to him by his daughter, that no ' present of thought ' could be more valuable. ' Robertson helps me,' said Bishop Ewing, * to a deeper realisation of that underlying life of the soul which is not dependent on externals, but which gives to all circumstances their true colour and signi- ficance, forming as it were God within ourselves.' Alexander Ewing had begun his ministry, a year or two before Robertson — in the Scottish Episcopal Church. He was ordained a deacon at Inverness in the autumn of 1838. But the former had nearly completed his brief career before the latter came to be known as a remarkable man. Ordained a Priest in 1 841, he became Bishop of Argyll and the Isles in 1 Eleven editions of the first volume of his sermons had been published before his Life and Letters appeared. Their circulation in America has also been very wide ; and their republication in the Tauchnitz edition of Enghsh shows still more perhaps their wide -spread popularity. F. W, Robertson and Bishop Ewing. 321 1846; but it was not till nearly ten years later that he began to show any of that definite influence which he continued to exercise with growing effect, not only in Scotland and in his own communion, but through- out England, till his death. He cannot be said to have been an original force in the Christian thought of the century. If Thomas Erskine and Macleod Campbell had not lived, Alexander Ewing would certainly not have been the teacher that he was ; yet there was a sense in which he improved their teaching. With less power of thought and less theological knowledge — bishop as he was — he had yet upon the whole a healthier, manlier, and more natural turn of mind than either. He was more of a man among men, more free from the spirit of coterie, with a wider range of purely human feeling, more rational and broadly sympathetic, with bursts of poetry in his heart. He made Erskine's acquaintance in Carlyle's company in 1855, and an intimate friendship soon sprung up between them, in which Macleod Campbell shared. He expresses in his letters repeated obliga- tions to both of them. The three friends especially met at Pollok, the residence of Sir John Maxwell, in the neighbourhood of Glasgow ; and Bishop Ewing has left us, in one of his Present Day Papers, a pleasant sketch of the charms of the old residence and its dignified, thoughtful, and genial host. The sketch might stand almost as a companion to that memorable one of Falkland, and his theological friends at Tew, near Oxford, so well known in Clarendon's descrip- tion.^ Here the friends discoursed of the greatness of ' Clarendon's Life, vol, i. pp. 42-50. Clarendon Press ed. See also Rational Theology in England^ vol. i. pp. 118-29. X 32 2 Movements of Religioiis Thought. the Divine love, and how the Divine love was only another name for the Divine righteousness and holiness ; how all the attributes of God in one sense equally condemned the sinner and equally sought his salvation ; and how the popular theology had gone astray in arraying one attribute against another, instead of holding them closely in unity. Both Erskine and Campbell had by this time ripened in thought. Without changing their original stand- point, they had both grown in knowledge of men, and books, and theologies other than their own. Campbell had just published his great work on TJie Nature of the Atonement, which has affected so many minds far beyond his own school, and deepened and enriched, it may be said without exaggeration, the thought of Christendom on this great subject. We can easily understand how the youngest mind of the three was stimulated, and, as he says himself, ' bettered ' by such high converse. Happily there were elements of higher thought in Ewing from the first, and still more happily his intellectual and spiritual nature continued to grow with a healthy spontaneity. Notwithstanding all that he owed to both Campbell and Erskine, he did not allow himself to be confined by leading-strings of any kind. He sympathised with the freer tendencies of Robertson — and of Jowett, of whom he was an early friend, — no less than with the special universalism of the Row School. He had a truer appreciation of the limits of dogmatic authority and of the natural historical origin of dogma than either of his Pollok friends. The free air of history and of life was more congenial to him. Systems of any kind, new as well p. W. Robertson and Bishop Ewing. 323 as old, were uncongenial. ' I do not think there is any vitality in the Athanasian formula/ he says in a letter to Archbishop Tait. * It is holding up the skeleton of the dead amidst the living. To the great majority of those who attend our Churches, the techni- cal phrases of the Creed are quite as unintelligible as are the special legal expressions in a legal deed, or the terms in a physician's prescription. I would keep it as .an old and curious heirloom in a charter-chest.' The hyper-dogmatic language which has incrusted the great facts of the Atonement and of revelation was to him mere ' materialistic substitutions ' for the facts themselves. * Balances and equivalents,' he said, ' had made of none effect the direct revela- tion of the forgiveness of sins.' With Bishop Ewing as with Robertson the centre of religious truth was the 'underlying life of the soul' in communion with God, the 'mind of Christ' within us. This was above all the teaching of his significant series of discourses, Revelation considered as light. All external authority — dogma, church, sacrament — is lower than this, — at the best only scaffolding to be taken down when the * true light that lighteth every man' has shone into our hearts. 'Revelation,' he says, 'does not come from the Church, but to the Church. She is a witness, not a source. . . . Chris- tianity is to be that which Christ was on earth. . . . It is the communication of a divine life through the manifestation of a divine life. It is the raising up of a divine life in our souls, through the knowledge of the divine life in the Son ; the spirit of the Son enter- ing into our spirits, and we becoming sons also in our measure.' If there is any difficulty as to this inner 324 Movements of Religious Thought, authority— this Hght within us reveahng the Hght of God — there is at least no substitute for it. No external authority, — no mere dogma, — can be any- thing to us till it has taken hold of us and become a part of the divine light within us. Or if we make it anything without its first having become this, we lose the very nature of religion in trying violently to seize its good. There is and can be no religion to any man in accepting any law but that which is 'written on his heart,' and to which his own spirit witnesses as divine. And so it is that ' Standards of Doctrine ' do often more harm than good ; and by their very definitions and externalities lead the mind away from God instead of to Him. It was such growing spirituality and freedom that gave Bishop Ewing so much infiuence. He constantly proclaimed the power of Christianity to stand by itself It was the ' light of life.' It was the highest thought and the highest ethic in the world, and able to vindicate itself To cry after 'dogmatic authority ' is to ciy for the Hght of a candle when the sun is shining. Episcopacy and Presbytery have their re- spective merits. But they are only at the best ' material apparatus.' ' Let us rise to higher things,' he said in one of his Charges ; * let us live in that region which makes the face to shine, and where the heart says, ' I have seen the Lord.' In this spirit it lay very near his heart to promote something of the nature of a union between the Episcopal Church and the national Church of Scotland — a matter in which I, with some others, shared his confidence. Nothing came, or indeed could come, of this project at the time ; but the spirit in which Bishop Ewing entered into it F. W. Robertson and Bishop Ezving. 325 was in the highest degree liberal and praiseworthy. His idea as to church-government was the old rational idea found at once in Scripture and common sense, and alone verifiable fi-om history, that while one form of government may be better than another — more calculated to insure the well-h€\\\^ of the Church — the form itself did not enter into the being of the Church. He himself believed Episcopacy to be the best form; but this not only did not pre- vent his hearty co-operation with his Presbyterian brethren, but made him all the more seek for oppor- tunities of such co-operation. Among his last desires was to testify in the College Chapel at Glasgow to the power of a common faith uniting his own Church and the Church of Scotland, and he was only prevented doing so by an act of Bishop Wilson of Glasgow refusing him permission to do so. He was much impressed and pained by what took place on this occasion. Writing to a friend, he expresses him- self as follows : — * I cannot say how much it has im- pressed me with the feeling that these apparently innocent things — Apostolic Succession and High views (as they are called) of the Christian Sacra- ments — are really aiiticJiristian in their operation. When they take shape in actual life, they reveal their meaning to be a doctrine of election, which is just so much worse than the common one that it is external and official, and which, moreover, renders the sacraments themselves uncertain in their efficacy by demanding the co-operation of the will of the minister, if the reception of them is to be savingly beneficial. How destructive the doctrine must be of all simple and immediate fellowship between 326 Movements of Religious Thought. man and man and between man and God, I need not say.' Bishop Ewing may not stand in the foremost rank of Christian thinkers ; his theological education was of too desultory character ; the mass of his thought was too slight. But his vivid intuitions of the Divine, his broad Catholicity, his intensely human and truth-loving aspirations, gave him a significant place among those who have understood the needs of our time, and who have laboured to promote a more enlightened view of Christianity. Resting in one or two central truths, the light of his own life, his mind was open on all sides to further light and knowledge. He was singularly progressive in all the aspects of his thought, while holding firmly to the Head and Centre of all Christian thought — Christ. There can be no higher attitude of mind. What he said of his friend Dr. Macleod Campbell was eminently true of himself, that he sought to interpret Revelation ' in the light of its facts ' rather than of past theories. So in all theology he got near to God. He was satisfied that the Divine substance of Truth remained unimpaired however imperfect the vehicle of it might be proved to be. He and Camp- bell and Robertson did much to prepare the way for the free exercise of historical criticism on the letter of Scripture by showing how independent of all such criticism is the essence of Divine truth — ' how little the treasure itself is affected by the nature of the vessel containing it.' This disengagement of the spirit from the letter — of the heavenly treasure from the earthly vessel, is destined to be a fertile principle in the future of Theology, and to pave the way at F, W. Robertson and Bishop Ewing. 327 once for tlie free rights of criticism and the rightful demands of faith. ^ With Bishop Ewing's name we might close our review. In even including him we have gone some- what beyond our limits, inasmuch as his chief activity was towards the close of his life, and so beyond the period we have set to ourselves in these lectures. With the year 1 860 at the latest a series of new lines of religious thought set in. There is a new outbreak of * Liberalism ' at Oxford, marked by the publica- tion of Essays and Rcviezus. The note of this Liberalism is not merely a freer application of the principles of historical criticism to Scripture and 1 Bishop Ewing was confessedly indebted — for the clearness of his views as to the distinction between Revelation and Theology, and the true character of Theology — to the Rev. Frederick Myers, whose Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology were published in his series of Present-day Papers. Frederick Myers was incumbent of St. John's, Keswick, from 1838 to 1851, and may be known to some of our readers as the author of a remarkable book, Lectures on Great Men. But he deserves still more to be known as a Christian Thinker, the significance of whose position might well have occupied us in these Lectures if it had been of a wider or more public character. His Catholic Thonghts on the Bible and Theology, although written and privately printed as far back as 1848, were only published after Bishop Ewing's death, and have unhappily never attained to much popularity. This is gi-eatly to be regretted, for there are few books at once so devout and enlightened — so spiritually penetrative and yet so rational in the treatment of the basis and structure of theology. What theology is and alone can be ' as a science ; ' its necessary imper- fection and indeterminateness ; its consequent liability to modification as time and knowledge advance ; the distinction between the Bible and Revelation, and again between the facts of Revelation and the dogmas into which they have been woven, are all set forth with admirable perspicuity and grasp of thought. It is strange that a thinker so really wise and powerful should have attracted so little attention. J 28 Movements of Religious Thought. dogma, but specially the bearing of scientific dis- covery and method upon the study of Theology. And this 'scientific' note is more or less a characteristic of subsequent speculation down to the present time. The great ideal of Evolution, underlying all processes of thought as well as of Nature, came into promi- nence. ' The side of the angels ' became a party badge, and the conflict of opinion passed in the main away from such topics as had hitherto arrayed, on different sides, Evangelical, High Church,^ and Broad Church, to far more fundamental questions, — the lines of which are not too strongly marked as Theistic on the one hand, and Atheistic on the other. It was not the intention of Essays and Reviews to stir such fundamental questions ; nor can it be said that they were in themselves fairly calculated to do so.^ All will now admit that much of the panic which the volume created was false and unnatural — a panic of fashion as much as of sincere religion. Like all such panics it was little creditable either to the good sense, or the critical and historical know- ledge of English Christendom. But the effect was nevertheless what we have stated. The volume was treated by the Westminster Revieiv as a rednctio ad absurdwn of the Broad Church position. The in- sinuations of Negativism awoke the alarm and pro- ^ The junction of High Church and Low Church in an unworthy assault against Free thought within the Church, which followed Essays and Reviews, of itself marks the difference of the times. 2 I have the best reason for knowing that the editor of Essays and Reviews had no revolutionary intention in regard to English theology. It was the disturbance of the religious world, largely consequent upon Frederic Harrison's article in the Westminster Review, that alone gave such sinister significance to the volume. F. W. Robertson and Bishop Ewing. 329 voKed the violence of orthodoxy, and so questions of criticism and history were transformed into questions affecting the very existence not only of Christianity but of religion, — such questions as the possibility of miracle, and whether any Divine theory of the world is tenable. It is in this deeper groove that religious thought has mainly run during the last twenty-five years, with thinkers like Herbert Spencer, and Pro- fessors Tyndall and Huxley, and Matthew Arnold on one side, and on the other a group of Theistic thinkers, of whom one of the most conspicuous and distin- guished is certainly Dr. James Martineau, who has recently added a new and valuable contribution to the cause of Spiritual Philosophy.^ This deeper conflict was no doubt opened by the Mills and their school within the earlier period we have reviewed, but it has recently passed into wider and larger phases. Materialism fights with bolder and more far-reaching weapons than it has ever before done, and the fight is one for life or death to Religion in the old sense of the word. It overshadows, therefore, every other con- troversy in minds who understand it, or who have any perception of the powerful forces at work. But other forces have also been in active operation, and will remain to be described by any future his- torian of religious thought. Religion, so far from losing its hold of the higher consciousness of our time, has not only survived, but it may be said has gathered strength under all the assaults — scientific and literary — which have menaced it. Our Churches were never stronger in intelligence, in life, in the per- ception of difficulties to be encountered in the world » Types of Ethical Theory, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1885. 330 Movements of Reiigioits Thought. of thought and of action — of philosophy and phil- anthropy alike; in the restoration of faith and the restoration of Society. Not only so; but there has grown up in the ^ wake of the Broad Church movement a school of historical Criticism repre- sented by such men as Bishop Lightfoot, with kindred scholars in England and Scotland, who have brought to the study of Scripture, and the problems of Revelation, resources of learning and of insight destined to large results. Different from the older school of Maurice and Kingsley, these Christian scholars — in the spirit of Bishop Ewing, but with ampler knowledge — are seeking for the meaning of Scripture not in any new theories, but in a closer study of its own facts. They are making the Books of the Old Testament and the New Testament alike alive in the light of the circumstances of their origin, and of the contemporary ideas of their respective times. They are, in other words, resuscitating the Divine Thought which has been the life of the world in its original framework, — and in its growth and progressiveness from lower to higher stages of de- velopment, — and so not only making this Thought itself more living and intelligible, but laying the foundation of some new and more living co-ordina- tion of it in the future. This is a true spring of advance, which will not wear out as the older form of Broad Churchism has already almost done. That Christian criticism, applying the same methods of study to the Bible which have been applied to all other ancient literature, has a great and fruitful work before it, cannot be doubted by any who hold at once to criticism and to Christianit}\ F. W. Robertson and Bis Jwp Ezvijig. 331 Among those who led the way in this line of historical Criticism was undoubtedly Dean Stanley. Some have, consequently, expressed astonishment that we have not given to him a prominent place in our review. The astonishment was so far natural, as one at least of Dean Stanley's most significant books appeared within the fifth decade of this century, at the time when the Broad Church movement in its original form was acquiring prominence, viz., his Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age} There is none of his many interesting writings which more dis- tinctly indicates the line of thought which he followed throughout. It is instinct with a rare insight into the phenomena of the Apostolic time, and the bear- ing of these phenomena upon the true interpretation of Christian thought for all time. Like all his historic studies, it presents at once a picture of the past, and a mirror of the future. This volume and his biography of his great master, Arnold (1844), were undoubtedly among the most quickening features of the new movement of thought, v/hich carried forward the Christian intelligence after the collapse of the ' Oxford ' Tractarianism. But the new school of historical Criticism to which Stanley belongs has only made itself conspicuous since i860, while by this date the earlier Broad Church movement had put forth all the freshness of its thought. Stanley's main work — his Lectures on the History of the Jezvish Church — was only commenced to be published in 1862. The new historical epoch in theology may be said to begin in 1855, with the publication of Stanley's » Published in 1847, 332 Movemeftts of Religious Thought. second important work of historical criticism — The Epistles of St. Paul to the Coiinthians — and Mr. Jowett's no less important volumes on the Pauline Epistles to the Thessaloniajis, Galatians, and Rouiaiis, in the same year. These volumes were hailed at the time as mark- ing a new era in British Theological Literature, and they deserve to be reckoned in this light. They reproduced in a higher form all that was good in the Whately school, with a richer insight into the essential characteristics of New Testament thought, and a far clearer and more illuminating hold of the spiritual and historical position of the great Apostle, — of the true meaning of his teaching, and the development of his doctrine. From this time has greatly advanced that profounder study of the New Testament, v/hich looks beyond its traditional to its real aspects, and its organic relations to contemporary usage and opinion — which sees in it a living litera- ture, and not a mere repertory of doctrinal texts — and aims to separate the essential from the accidental of Divine Thought, untrammelled by later notions and controversial fictions. The text of Scripture has been studied in its own meaning, and not in support of dogmas which were the growth of long after cen- turies, and would have been wholly unintelligible to the writers credited with them. The spirit has been liberated from the letter, and the very form and pres- sure of divine truth as originally presented to the world, brought near to us. This has been espe- cially true of the New Testament age and its marvellous phenomena. Other writers, whom we need not mention, have brought resources of exe- gesis to their task, superior to those of Stanley; F. W. Robertson and Bishop Ewing. ^t^-i^ but no candid student can ever forget how much we owe to his vivid picture of Biblical history and of Christian Institutions in their rise and growth ; and much as he afterwards did, he never did anything better of its kind, than the picture which he gave in his volumes on the Epistles to the Corinthians, of the Apostolical time, with its conflicts of opinion and dis- orders of practice — particularly his sketch of the primitive eucharist, as * we see the banquet spread in the late evening' with its strange blending of the earthly and the heavenly. Nowhere is the first fresh- ness of the Gospel seen in more living struggle with Greek intellectuality and Jewish obstinacy, taking colour and modification from both, yet under all hindrances changing the face of the world. Again the presentation of Pauline thought in its depth, range, and power, yet with the garments of Rabbinical scholasticism here and there encumbering it, was made hardly less vivid to us in Mr. Jowett's volumes. There were those who detected in these volumes traces of an underlying philosophy which tended to deflect here and there the straight spiritual meaning of the apostle — and also a tendency to minimise that meaning in its full scope : but no real student of the volumes can doubt that upon the whole Mr. Jowett tried faithfully to apply his own canon, that the true use of philosophy in reference to religion is ' to restore its simplicity, by freeing it from those per- plexities which the love of system, or past philo- sophies, or the imperfections of language, or the mere lapse of ages, may have introduced into it' Both writers mark for us a turning-point in the criticism of Scripture and the renascence of Christian 334 Movements of Religious Thought. ideas nearly contemporary with the influx of new ideas in philosophy and science, which have also acted so powerfully in recent years. They fitly close, therefore, the older period and open the new. We have adverted to them only in this point of view, and with no intention of estimating their full im- portance. They will claim such an estimate from any one who may afterwards venture to review the more recent forces of thought which are still operat- ing around us. Meanwhile these lectures, desultory and imperfect as they have been, may help to awaken some intel- ligent comprehension of the movements of religious thought during the earlier portion of our century. They show how natural is the growth of this thought in its varying phases, springing up under manifold influences in the national consciousness ; and how it is marked upon the whole by a character of advance. It is only stagnant in times of stagnation and low religious vitality. There are eternal truths, no doubt, in religion as in ethics ; but it is in the very nature of these truths, and the deeper inquiry which they continually excite, to take ever new expression. We have been slow in Scotland to recognise this inevitable law of development in religious thought, supposing ourselves a centre to which others moved rather than a part of the common movement. There was good in the old Puritan idea of religious immo- bility. It has kept us strong and righteous-minded in many things, but it has not been without evil conse- quences. It has made us the hardest religious con- troversialists in the Christian world — severe upon F. W. Robertson and Bishop Eiuing. 335 one another — repellent where we ought to have been sympathetic, and uncharitable where we ought to hav^e held each other by the hand. It is needless, however, to mourn the past. Let us try to build — if not for ourselves, for our children's children — some fairer temple of Christian thought and worship, in which they may dwell together in unity. But let us not deceive ourselves. Unity can never come from dogma, as our forefathers unhappily imagined. Dogma splits rather than unites from its very nature.^ It is the creature of intellect, and the intellect can never rest. It remains unsatisfied with its own work, and is always turning up afresh the soil of past opinion. The spirit of Christ can alone bind together the fragments of Truth, as they mirror themselves in our partial reason. ^ If these lectures have brought home to any the conviction of how much larger the truth of God is than their own changing notions of it, and how the movements of Christian thought are for this very end — that we may prove all things, and hold fast that which is good — they will not be without fruit. We need not be afraid that any intelligent study of opinions differing from our own will make us indifferent to the truth. The truth itself can only be seen by a large vision. What we perhaps all need most to learn is not satisfaction with our opinions — that is easily acquired by most — but the capacity of looking beyond our own horizon ; of searching for deeper foundations of our ordinary beliefs, and a ^ ' Opinions are but a poor cement of human souls.' — George Eliot, — Life, vol. ii. p. 1 1 8. 336 Movements of Religious Thought. more symDathetic appreciation of the beliefs of others. While cherishing, therefore, what we our- selves feel to be true, let us keep our minds open to all truth, and especially to the teaching of Him who is ' the Way, the Truth, and the Life.' INDEX, Arnold, Matthew, 207, 256, 329. Arnold, Dr. Thomas, 32, 44, 53-65. {See Contents, Lecture 11.) Bentham, 170, 218. Bray, Charles, 257. ' Broad' Church— origin of the term, 260. Buller, Charles, 222. Bunsen, Chevalier, 45. Campbell, John Macleod, 145-156, 159, 321. Candlish, Dr., 280, 290. Carlyle, Thomas, 6, 8, 133, 157, 169-208 {see Contents, Lecture v.), 209, 210. Chalmers, Dr., 134, 143, 161, 178. Church, Richard William (now Dean of St. Paul's), I20. Clough, A. H.,256. Coleridge, 6-34 {see Contents, Lecture i .), 157, 170, 262. Combe, George, 127. Comte, 240. Conybeare, J. J., 76. Copleston, Bishop of LlandafF, 42. Eliot, George, 253, 256-260, 304. Erskine, Thomas, 127*, 129-144, 187, 266, 321. Essays and Revie^vs, 327. Ewing, Bishop, 320-327. Fkoude, J. A., 188, 196, 255. Froude, R. H., 95-99, 105. Gladstone, W. E., 45, 69, 73, 120, 123, 284. Gorham, Rev. Mr., 315, Green, Joseph Henry, on Coleridge, 11. Grote, George, 246-250. Hall, Robert, 169. Hamilton, Sir William, 37. Hampden, Bishop, 44, 65-74. Hare, A. W., 38. Hare, J. C, 8, 34-38. Harrison, Frederic, 328. Hawkins, Dr., 42. Hayward, Abraham, 222. Hennell, Charles and Sara, 256-258. Irving, Edward, 150, 156-160, 178. JowETT, Rev. Benjamin (Professor), 333. Keble, John, 42, 86, 99-102, 105, 112. Kingsley, Charles, 229, 278, 286-294. Lamb, Charles, 8. Leslie, Sir John, 127, 133. Lewes, G. H., 250-253. Lightfoot, Bishop, 330. Malan, Cesar, 300. Martineau, James, 250, 329. Maurice, F. D., 129, 142, 222, 225, 260, 294. {See Contents, Lecture vii.) Mearns, Dr., 135. Melbourne, Viscount, 75. Mill, James, 209-216. Mill, John Stuart, 171, 193, 209-253. {Sec Contents, Lecture vi.) Milman, H. H., 79-85. Mozley, J. B., 63, 120. Mozley, T. {Reminiscences), 66, 70. Myers, Rev. Frederick, 327. 33^ Index. Newman, J. H , 54, 69, Zd, passim [see Contents, Lecture iii.), 272, 312. Newman, Francis W., 122, 256. '■■ Noetics," the, 43, iii. Oakeley, Rev. F., 120. Oxford Movement. {See Contents, Lec- ture III.) Palmer, William, 106. Pusey, Dr., 89, 91, 109, 112, 271, 285. Robertson, F. W., 279, 295-320. {See Contents, Lecture viii.) Rose, H. J., 76, 9 ). Row Heresy, the. (5^<' Campbell.) SCHLEIERMACHER, 36, 75. Scott, A. J. (afterwards Principal of Owens College), 150, 154. Scott, Sir Walter, 87, 125, 194. Shairp, Principal, 151. Shee, Sergeant, 222. Smith, Dr. Pye, 169. Spencer, Herbert, 228, 255. Stanley, Dean, 79, 331. Sterling, John, 38-40, 222, 225. Story, Robert (of Roseneath), 150. Strachey, Edward, 273. Taylor, W. (of Norwich), 194. Tennyson, Alfred, 263. Thirlwall, Bishop, 75-79, 221. Thomson, Dr. Andrew, 131, 143, 161. Tracts for the Times, 106, passim. Traill, H. D., on Coleridge, 7, 31. Ward, Rev. W. G., 120. Whately, Archbishop, ^1, passim ; 46-53. White, Blanco, 45, 70. Wilberforce (Bishop), 69, 70, 73, 79. Wilson, Bishop (of Glasgow), 325. Wordsworth, 5, 225, 238. Wright, Thos. (of Borthwick), 162-166. OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF among the Indo-European Eaces. By CHARLES FRANCIS KEARY, M.A., of the British Museum. One vol, crotvn Svo., - _ - - $2,50. Mr. Keary's Book is not simply a series of essays in comparative myth- ology, it is a history of the legendary beliefs of the Indo-European races drawn from their language and literature. 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