• \ 'V . a . •: ... Vi ^ i \ \ * *0 ■N •v X X- V -■ %v*\V * X V - * > -v . X, , ^ ' J \ •fc 4 s ? \ I LIBRARY ©lico tofjicui j^ciniiumu PRINCETON, N J. The Stephen Collins Donation. AC 8 . S73 1843 Stephon James, 1789-185< essays aM { - 'N I ■ •* W> % \ ;x »► f f •» r 0 / * / 0 CRITICAL J- JAMES STEPHEN. t PHILADELPHIA: CAREY AND HART. 1843. Wm. S. Young, Printer, CONTENTS. Life of William Wilberforce, ..... . 13 The Lives of Whitfield and Froude, . 58 D’Aubigne’s History of the Great Reformation, . 100 Life and Times of Richard Baxter, .... . 150 Physical Theory of Another Life, .... . 197 The Port-Royalists, . . 248 Ignatius Loyola and his Associates, . 314 Taylor’s Edwin the Fair, . . 386 Digitized by the Internet Archive v in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/criticalmiscella00step_1 MISCELLANIES, BY JAMES STEPHEN. LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE BY HIS SONS.* (Edinburgh Review, 1838.) These volumes record the Life of a man who, in an age fertile beyond most others in illustrious characters, reached, by paths till then unexplored, an eminence never before at¬ tained by any private member of the British Parliament. We believe we shall render an acceptable service to our readers, by placing them in possession of a general outline of this biography. William Wilberforce was born at Hull on the 24th of August, 1759. His father, a merchant of that town, traced his descent from a family which had for many generations possessed a large estate at Wilberfoss, in the East Riding of the county of York. From that place was derived the name which the taste, or caprice of his later progenitors, modulated into the form in which it was borne by their celebrated descendant. His mother was nearly allied to many persons of consideration; amongst whom are num¬ bered the present Bishops of Winchester and Chester, and the members of the great London banking-house, of which Lord Carrington was the head. * Life of William Wilberforce. By his Sons Robert Isaac Wilberforce, M. A., Vicar of East Furlough, late Fellow of Oriel (Allege; and Samuel Wilberforce, M. A-, Rector of Brighstonr* 4 vols. bvo. London, ItiikL 14 stetiien’s miscellanies. The father of William Wilberforce died before his son had completed his tenth year; and the ample patrimony which he then inherited was afterwards largely increased on the death of a paternal uncle, to whose guardianship his childhood was committed. By that kinsman he was placed at a school in the immediate neighbourhood of his own residence at Wimbledon, in Surry. The following are the characteristic terms in which, at the distance of many years, the pupil recorded his recollections of this first stage of his literary education: — “ Mr. Chalmers, the master, himself a Scotchman, had an usher of the same nation, whose red beard, for he scarcely shaved once a month, I shall never forget. They taught French, Arith¬ metic, and Latin. With Greek we did not much meddle. It was frequented chiefly by the sons of merchants, and they taught therefore every thing, and nothing. Here I continued some time as a parlour boarder. I was sent at first among the lodgers, and I can remember, even now, the nauseous food with which we were supplied, and which I could not eat without sickness.” His early years were not, however, to pass away with¬ out some impressions more important, if not more abiding, than those which had been left on his sensitive nerves by the red beard of one of his Scotch teachers, and by the ill savour of the dinners of the other. His uncle’s wife was a disciple of George Whitfield, and under her pious care he acquired a familiarity with the Sacred Writings, and a habit of devotion of which the results were perceptible throughout the whole of his more mature life. While still a school-boy, he had written several religious letters, “ much in accordance with the opinions which he subsequently adopted,” and which, but for his peremptory interdict, the zeal of some indiscreet friend would have given to the world. “ If I had staid with my uncle, I should probably have been a bigoted despised Methodist,” is the conclusion which Mr. Wilberforce formed on looking back to this period, after an interval of nearly thirty years. His mo¬ ther’s foresight, apprehending this result, induced her to withdraw him from his uncle’s house, and to place him under the charge of the master of the endowed school at Pocklington, in Yorkshire, — a sound and well-beneficed di¬ vine, whose orthodoxy would seem to have been entirely unalloyed by the rigours of Methodism. The boy was LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 15 encouraged to lead a life of idleness and pleasure, wasting his time in a round of visits to the neighbouring gentry, to whom he was recommended by his social talents, espe¬ cially by his rare skill in singing; while, during his school vacations, the religious impressions of his childhood were combated by a constant succession of such convivial gaie¬ ties as the town of Hull could afford. Ill as this discipline was calculated to lay the foundation of good intellectual habits, it was still less adapted to substitute for the excite- ment and dogmatism of Whitfield’s system, a piety resting on a nobler and more secure basis. One remarkable indi¬ cation, however, was given of the character by which his future life was to be distinguished. He placed in the hands of a schoolfellow, (who survives to record the fact,) a letter to be conveyed to the editor of the York paper, which he stated to be “ in condemnation of the odious traffic in hu¬ man flesh.” — On the same authority he is reported to have “ greatly excelled ail the other 'boys in his compositions, though seldom beginning them till the eleventh hour.” From sehool Mr. Wilberforce was transferred at the age of seventeen, to St. John’s College, Cambridge. We trust that the picture which he has drawn of the education of a young gentleman of fortune, in an English university, to¬ wards the close of the last century, will seem an incredible fiction to the present members of that learned society. “ The Fellows of the College,” he says, “ did not act towards me the part of Christians, or even of honest men. Their ob¬ ject seemed to be to make and keep me idle. If ever I appeared studious, they would say to me — £ Why, in the world should a man of your fortune trouble himself with fagging?’ I w'as a good classic, and acquitted myself well in the College examinations, but mathematics, which my mind greatly needed, I almost entirely neglected, and was told that I was too clever to require them.” With such a preparation for the duties of active life, Mr. Wilberforce passed at a single step from the University to the House of Commons* The general election of 1780, occurring within less than a month from the completion of his twenty-first year, “ the affection of his townsmen, ‘ not unaided by’ an expenditure of from eight to nine thousand pounds,” placed him at the head of the poll for “ the town and county of Hull,” Although at this time Mr. Wilber¬ force states himself to have been “so ignorant of general 16 Stephen’s miscellanies. society as to have come up to London stored with argu¬ ments to prove the authenticity of Rowley’s Poems,” yet so rich and so accomplished an aspirant could not long be excluded from the mysteries of the world of fashion which now burst upon him. Five clubs enrolled him among their members. He “chatted, played at cards, or gambled” with Fox, Sheridan, and Fitzpatrick — fascinated the Prince of Wales by his singing at Devonshire House — produced inimitable imitations of Lord North’s voice and manner — sang catches with Lord Sandwich — exchanged epigrams with Mrs. C reeve — partook of a Shaksperian dinner at the Boar, in East Cheap — “shirked the Duchess of Gordon” — and danced till five in the morning at Almack’s. The lassitude of fashionable life was effectually relieved by the duties or amusements of a Parliamentary career, not unat¬ tended by some brilliant success. Too rich to look to public service as a means of subsistence, and, at this pe¬ riod, ambitious rather of distinction than of eminence, Mr. Wilberforce enjoyed the rare luxury of complete indepen¬ dence. Though a decided opponent of the North American war, he voted with Lord North against Sir Fletcher Nor¬ ton’s re-election as Speaker, and opposed Mr. Pitt on the second occasion of his addressing the House, although he was already numbered amongst the most intimate of his friends. This alliance, commenced apparently at the Uni¬ versity, had ripened into an affectionate union which none of the vicissitudes of political life could afterwards dissolve. They partook in each other’s labours and amusements, and the zest with which Mr. Pitt indulged in these relaxations, throws a new and unexpected light on his character. They joined together in founding a club, at which, for two suc¬ cessive winters, Pitt spent his evenings, while, at Mr. Wil- berforce’s villa at Wimbledon, he was established rather as an inmate than as a guest. There he indulged himself even in boisterous gaiety; and it strangely disturbs our associations to read of the son and rival of Lord Chatham rising early in the morning to sow the flower-beds with the fragments of a dress-hat with which Lord Harrowby had come down from the opera. There also were arranged fishing and shooting parties; in one of which the future champion of the anti-Gallican war narrowly escaped an untimely grave from the misdirected gun of his friend. On the banks of Windermere also, Mr. Wilberforce pos- LirE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 17 sessed a residence, where the Parliamentary vacation found him “surrounded with a goodly assortment of books.” But the discovery was already made that the autumnal ennui of the fashionable world might find relief among the lakes and mountains of Westmoreland, and “boating, riding, and continual parties” fully occupied the time which had been devoted to retirement and study. From these amici fures temporis Mr. Wilberforce escaped, in the autumn of 1783, to pass a few weeks with Mr. Pitt in France. They readily found introductions to the supper table of Marie Antoinette, and the other festivities of Fontainbleau. Louis XVI. does not appear to have made a very flattering impression on his young guests. H The King,” says Mr. Wilberforce, in a letter written about that time, “ is so strange a being of the hog kind, that it is worth going a hundred miles for a sight of him, especially a boar-hunting.” At Paris “ he received with interest the hearty greetings which Dr. Franklin tendered to a rising member of the English Parliament, who had opposed the American war.” Graver cares awaited Mr. Wilberforce’s rettirn to Eng- land. He arrived in time to second Mr. Pitt’s opposition to the India Bill, and to support him in his memorable struggle against the majority of the House of Commons. The Coalition was now the one subject of popular invec¬ tive; and, at a public meeting in the Castle-yard at York, in March, 1784, Mr. Wilberforce condemned their mea¬ sures, in a speech which was received with the loudest applause. The praise of James Boswell is characteristic at once of the speaker and of the critic. In an account of the scene which ho transmitted to Mr. Dundas, “ I saw,” writes Boswell, “ what seemed a mere shrimp, mount upon the table, but, as I listened, he grew and grew, until the shrimp became a whale.” A still more convincing attes¬ tation to his eloquence is to be found in the consequences to which it led. Mr. Wilberforce attended the meeting with the avowed purpose of defeating, at the approaching election, the predominant influence of the great Whig fami¬ lies of Yorkshire, and with the secret design of becoming a candidate for the county. During his speech the cry of “ Wilberforce and Liberty” was raised by the crowd; and the transition was obvious and readily made, to “ Wilber¬ force and the Representation of Yorkshire.” The current of popular favour flowed strongly in his support. He was 18 Stephen’s miscellanies. the opponent of the Coalition and the India Bill, and the friend and zealous partisan of Mr. Pitt; then rich in here¬ ditary honours, in personal renown, and in the brightest promise. Large subscriptions defrayed the expense of the contest, and, without venturing to the poll, his Whig op¬ ponents surrendered to him a seat, which he continued to occupy, without intermission, for many successive Parlia¬ ments. With this memorable triumph Mr. Wilberforce closed his twenty-fifth year, and returned to London in possession of whatever could gratify the wishes, or exalt the hopes of a candidate for fame, on the noblest theatre of civil action which the world had thrown open to the ambition of private men. The time had, however, arrived at which a new direction was to be given to the thoughts and pursuits of this favour¬ ite of nature and fortune. Before taking his seat in the House of Commons, as member for the county of York, Mr. Wilberforce, accompanied by some female relations, and by Isaac Milner, the late Dean of Carlisle^ undertook a journey to the south of France, and thence through Swit¬ zerland to the German Spa. This expedition, interrupted by a temporary return to England, during the winter of 1784-5, continued some months, and forms a memorable era in his life. The lessons which he had learned in child¬ hood at Wimbledon had left an indelible impression on a mind peculiarly susceptible of every tender and profound emotion. The dissipation of his subsequent days had re¬ tarded the growth of those seeds of early piety, but had not entirely choked them. To the companions of his youth many indications had occasionally been given, that their gay associate was revolving deeper thoughts than formed the staple of their ordinary social intercourse. These were now to take entire possession of his mind, and to regulate the whole of his future conduct. The opinions of Whit¬ field had found a more impressive expositor than the good aunt who had originally explained and enforced them. Isaac Milner was a remarkable man, and hut for the early possession of three great ecclesiastical sinecures, which enabled him to gratify his constitutional indolence, would probably have attained considerable distinction in physical and in theological science. In a narrow collegiate circle he exercised a colloquial despotism akin to that which Johnson had established, and to which Parr aspired, amongst LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 19 the men of letters and the statesmen of their age. But Mil¬ ner’s dogmatism was relieved by a tenderness of heart not inferior to that of the great moralist himself; and was in¬ formed by a theology incomparably more profound, and more fitted to practical uses, than that of the redoubted o-rammarian. He was amongst the dearest of the friends of Mr. Wilberforce, and now became his preceptor and his spiritual guide. The day dreams on the subject of religious conversions, which they who list may hear on every side, are, like other dreams, the types of substantial realities. Though the workings of the Almighty hand are distinctly visible only to the omniscient eye, yet even our narrow faculties can often trace the movements of that perennial under-current which controls the sequences of human life, and imparts to them the character of moral discipline. In the compre¬ hensive scheme of the Supreme Governor of the world for the progressive advancement of the human race, are com¬ prised innumerable subordinate plans for the improvement of the individuals of which it is composed; and whether we conceive of these as the result of some preordained system, or as produced by the immediate interposition of God, we equally acknowledge the doctrine of Divine Providence, and refer to him as the author of those salutary revolutions of human character, of which the reality is beyond dispute. It is a simple matter of fact, of which these volumes afford the most conclusive proof, that, about the twenty-sixth year of his age, Mr. Wilberforce was the subject of such a change; and that it continued for half a century to give an altered direction to his whole system of thought and ac¬ tion. Waiving all discussion as to the mode in which the divine agency may have been employed to accomplish this result, it is more to our purpose to inquire in what the change really consisted, and what were the consequences for which it prepared the way. The basis of Mr. Wilberforce’s natural character was, an intense fellow-feeling with other men. No one more readily adopted the interests, sympathized with the affec¬ tions, or caught even the transient emotions of those with whom he associated. United to a melancholy tempera¬ ment, this disposition would have produced a moon-struck and sentimental “ Man of Feeling;” but, connected as it was with the most mercurial gaiety of heart, the effect was as 20 Stephen’s miscellanies. exhilarating as it was impressive. It was a combination of the deep emotions, real or pretended, of Rousseau, with the restless vivacity of Voltaire. Ever ready to weep with those that wept, his nature still more strongly prompted him to rejoice with those that rejoiced. A passionate lover of society, he might (to adopt, with some little qualifica¬ tion, a well-known phrase) have passed for the brother of every man, and for the lover of every woman with whom he conversed. Bayard himself could not have accosted a damsel of the houses of Longueville or Coligni with a more heart-felt and graceful reverence, than marked his address to every female, however homely or however humble. The most somnolent company was aroused and gladdened at his presence. The heaviest countenance reflected some animation from his eye; nor was any one so dull as not to yield some sparks of intellect when brought into communi¬ cation with him. Few men ever loved books more, or read them with a more insatiate thirst; yet, even in the solitude of his library, the social spirit never deserted him. The one great object of his studies was, to explore the springs of human action, and to trace their influence on the charac¬ ter and happiness of mankind. To this vivid sympathy in all human interests and feel¬ ings were united the talents by which it could be most gracefully exhibited. Mr. Wilberforce possessed histrionic powers of the highest order. If any caprice of fortune had called him to the stage, he would have ranked amongst its highest ornaments. lie would have been irresistible be¬ fore a jury, and the most popular of preachers. Ilis rich mellow voice, directed by an ear of singular accuracy, gave to his most familiar language a variety of cadence, and to his most serious discourse a depth of expression, which rendered it impossible not to listen. Pathos and drollery — solemn musings and playful fancies — yearnings of the soul over the tragic, and the most contagious mirth over the ludicrous events of life, all rapidly succeeding each other, and harmoniously because unconsciously blended, threw over his conversation a spell which no prejudice, dulness, or ill-humour could resist. The courtesy of the heart, and the refinement of the most polished society, united to great natural courage, and a not ungraceful con¬ sciousness of his many titles to respect, completed the charm which his presence infallibly exercised. LIFE OF WILLIAM WILEERFORCE. 21 To these unrivalled social powers was added a not less remarkable susceptibility of enjoyment, in whatever form it presented itself. The pleasures, such as they are, of a very fastidious taste, he did not cultivate. If Haydn was not to be had, a street ballad would seem to shoot quick¬ silver through his frame. In the absence of Pitt or Canning, he would delight himself in the talk of the most matter of fact man of his constituents from the Cloth hall at Leeds. With a keen perception of beauty and excellence in nature, literature, and art, the alchymy of his happy frame extract¬ ed some delight from the dullest pamphlet, the tamest scenery, and the heaviest speech. The curiosity and the interest of childhood, instead of wearing out as he grew older, seemed to be continually on the increase. This pe¬ culiarity is noticed by Sir James Mackintosh, with his ac¬ customed precision and delicacy of touch, in the following words: — ‘Do you remember Madame de Maintenon’s ex¬ clamation, “ Oh the misery of having to amuse an old king! — qui n’est pas amusable?” Now, if I was called upon to describe Wilberforce, I should say, he was the most “amusable” man I ever met with in my life. In¬ stead of having to think what subjects will interest him, it is perfectly impossible to hit on one that does not inte¬ rest him. I never saw any one who touched life at so many points; and it is the more remarkable in a man who is supposed to live absorbed in the contemplations of a fu¬ ture state. When he was in the House of Commons, he seemed to have the freshest mind of any man there. There was all. the charm of youth about him; and he is quite as remarkable in this bright evening of his days as when I saw him in his glory many years ago.’ Such a temperament combined with such an education, might have given the assurance of a brilliant career, but hardly of any enduring fame. Ordinary foresight might have predicted that he would be courted or feared by the two great parties in the House of Commons; that he would be at once the idol and the idolater of society; and that he would shine in Parliament and in the world, in the fore¬ most rank of intellectual voluptuaries. But that he should rise to be amongst the most laborious and eminent benefac¬ tors of mankind was beyond the divination of any human sagacity. It is to the mastery which religion acquired over his mind that this elevation is to be ascribed. 22 Stephen’s miscellanies. It is not wonderful that many have claimed,. Mr. Wilber- force as the ornament of that particular section ol the Christian Church which has assumed or acquired the dis¬ tinctive title of Evangelical; nor that they should resent as injurious to their party any more catholic view of his real character. That he became the secular head of this body is perfectly true; but no man was ever more exempt from bondage to any religious party. Immutably attached to the cardinal truths of revelation, he was in other respects a latitudinarian. “Strange,” he would say, “that Chris¬ tians have taken as the badge of separation the very Sacra¬ ment which their Redeemer instituted as the symbol ol their union.” And in this spirit, though a strict conformist to the Church of England, he occasionally attended the public worship of those who dissent from her communion, and maintained a cordial fellowship with Christians of every denomination. The opinion may, indeed, be hazarded that he was not profoundly learned in any branch of controver¬ sial theology, nor much qualified for success in such stu¬ dies. His mind had been little trained to systematic investigation either in moral or physical science. Though the practice of rhetoric was the business of his mature life, the study of logic had not been the occupation of his youth. Scepticism and suspended judgment were foreign to his mental habits. Perhaps no man ever examined more anxiously the meaning of the sacred writings, and proba¬ bly no one ever more readily admitted their authority. Finding in his own bosom ten thousand echoes to the doc¬ trines and precepts of the gospel, he wisely and gladly re¬ ceived this silent testimony to their truth, and gave them a reverential admission. Instead of consuming life in a pro¬ tracted scrutiny into the basis of his belief, he busied him¬ self in erecting upon it a superstructure of piety and of virtue. In fact, his creed differed little, if at all, from that of the vast majority of Protestants. The difference be¬ tween him and his fellow Christians consisted chiefly in the uses to which his religious opinions were applied. The reflections which most men habitually avoid he as habi¬ tually cherished. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say of him that God was in all his thoughts. He surveyed human life as the eye of an artist ranges over a landscape, re¬ ceiving innumerable intimations which escape any less prac¬ tised observer. In every faculty he recognised a sacred trust; in every material object an indication of the divine LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 23 wisdom and goodness; in every human being an heir of immortality; in every enjoyment a proof of the divine be¬ nignity; in every affliction an act of parental discipline. The early development of this habit of mind appears to have been attended with much dejection and protracted self-denial; but the gay and social spirit of the man gra¬ dually resumed its dominion. A piety so profound was never so entirely free from asceticism. It was allied to all the pursuits, and all the innocent pleasures of life, — we might almost say to all its blameless whims and humours. The frolic of earlier days had indeed subsided, and the in¬ destructible gaiety of his heart had assumed a more gentle and cautious character. But with a settled peace of mind, and a self-government continually gaining strength, he felt that perfect freedom which enabled him to give the reins to his constitutional vivacity; and the most devotional of men was at the same time the most playful and exhilarating companion. His presence was as fatal to dulness as to immorality. His mirth was as irresistible as the first laugh¬ ter of childhood. The sacred principles which he had now adopted were not sufficient entirely to cure those intellectual defects to which a neglected education and the too early enjoyment of wealth and leisure had given the force of inveterate habit. His conversation was remarkable for interminable digres¬ sions, and was no inapt index of the desultory temper of his'mind. But even this discursive temper was made sub¬ servient to the great objects of his life. It exhibited itself in the rapid transitions which he was continually making from one scheme of benevolence to another; and in that singular faculty^ which he possessed of living at once as the inhabitant of the visible and invisible worlds. From the shadows of earth to the realities of man’s future destiny he passed with a facility scarcely attainable to those who have been trained to more continuous habits of application. Be¬ tween the oratory' and the senate — devotional exercises and worldly pursuits — he had formed so intimate a connexion, that the web of his discourse was not rarely composed of very incongruous materials. But this fusion of religious with secular thoughts added to the spirit with which every duty was performed, and to the zest with which every enjoy¬ ment was welcomed; and if the want of good mental disci¬ pline was perceptible to the last, the triumph of Chris- 24 Stephen’s miscellanies. tianity was but the more conspicuous in that inflexible constancy of purpose with which he pursued the great works of benevolence to which his life was consecrated. No aspirant for the honours of literature, or for the digni¬ ties of the Woolsack, ever displayed more decision of cha¬ racter than marked his labours for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Some notice, however brief, of that great event is indis¬ pensable in the most rapid survey of the life of Mr, Wil- berforce. The aspirations of his school-boy days on this subject have been already noticed. That early impression was deep and abiding. At the commencement of his Par¬ liamentary career, in 1780, his inquiries into the system of colonial slavery had led him to conceive and to avow the hope that he should live to redress the wrongs of the Negro race. The direction of public opinion towards the accom¬ plishment of great political objects is one of those social acfs which, during the last half century, has almost assumed the character of a new invention. But the contrast between the magnitude of the design, and the poverty of the re¬ sources at his command, might have justified many an anxious foreboding, while, during the following six years, Mr. Wilberforce concerted plans for the abolition of the slave trade with James Ramsay, the first confessor and proto-martyr of the new faith, with Ignatius Latrobe, the missionary, in his lodging in Fetter Lane, or even with Sir Charles and Lady Middleton, at their mansion in Kent. Allies of greater apparent importance were afterwards ob¬ tained; and it was when seated with Mr. Pitt, “in conver¬ sation in the open air, at the root of an old tree at Holwood, just above the steep descent into the valley of Keston,” that Mr. Wilberforce resolved “to give notice, on a fit occasion, in the House of Commons, of his intention to bring the subject forward.” The experience of the next twenty years was, however, to convince him that it was not from the elo¬ quent statesman who, for nearly the whole of that period, directed the Government of this country, that effectual sup¬ port must be drawn; but from the persevering energy of men who, like Ramsay and Latrobe, could touch in the bosoms of others those sacred springs of action which were working in their own. Amongst such associates in this holy war are to be mentioned, with peculiar veneration, the names of Granville Sharpe and of Thomas Clarkson. LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 25 To the former was committed the presidency of the society charged with the duty of collecting and diffusing informa¬ tion; while Mr. Clarkson became the zealous and indefa¬ tigable agent of that body. To Mr. Wilberforce himself was assigned the general superintendence of the cause, both in and out of Parliament. In 1789, he first proposed the abolition of the slave trade to the House of Commons, in a speech which Burke re¬ warded with one of those imperishable eulogies which he alone had the skill and the authority to pronounce. But a victory over Guinea merchants was not to be numbered amongst the triumphs of eloquence. Unable to withstand the current of popular feeling which the novelty as much as the nature of the proposal had stirred, they sagaciously resolved to await the subsidence of this unwonted enthu¬ siasm; soliciting only a suspension of the measure until Parliament should be in possession of the facts which they undertook to substantiate. To this Fabian policy, ever changing in its aspect, but uniform in its design, the slave traders were indebted for the prolongation of their guilty commerce. Nearly two years were worn away in the ex¬ amination of their own witnesses; and when Mr. Wilber¬ force had, with difficulty, succeeded in transferring the inquiry from the bar of the House of Commons to the less dilatory tribunal of a select Committee, he had to struggle laboriously for permission to produce testimony in refutation of the evidence of his antagonists. It was not, therefore, till April, 1791, that the question was directly brought to issue; when a proof was given of the foresight with which the Guinea merchants had calculated on the gradual subsi¬ dence of the public indignation. Ominous were the fore¬ bodings with which the friends of Mr. Wilberforce looked forward to the approaching debate. By the master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, his position was compared to that of “ Episcopius in the infamous Synod of Dort while John Wesley exhorted him to proceed to the conflict as a new “Athanasius contra munchim They had well divined the temper of the times. The slave traders triumphed by an overwhelming majority. In the political tumults of those days, the voice of humanity was no longer audible, and common sense had ceased to discharge its office. The bad faith and fickleness of the French Government had in¬ volved St. Domingo in confusion and bloodshed; and be- 3 26 Stephen’s miscellanies. cause the elements of society had broken loose in that colony, it was judged dangerous fo arrest the accumulation of the materials of similar discord within our own! Even Mr. Pitt avowed his opinion that it was wise to await more tranquil times before the slave trade should be abolished. It was in vain that Mr. Wilberforce urged on the House of Commons, in 1792, the true inference from the calamitous state of St. Domingo. His measure for the immediate abolition of the slave trade was again defeated. Those were days in which every change was branded as a revo¬ lution — when the most sacred rules of moral or political conduct, if adduced in favour of any reform, were denounced and abhorred as “French principles.” Reason, however, having gradually regained her domi¬ nion, the procrastinating system of the slave traders assumed a new shape, and obtained, in the person of Mr. Dundas, its most formidable advocate. With perverse ingenuity, he proposed to substitute a gradual for an immediate aboli¬ tion ; fixing a remote period lor the entire cessation of the trade. Yet even in this cautious form the bill found a cold reception in the house of Peers, where, after consuming the session in the examination of two witnesses, their Lord- ships postponed the measure till the following year. With the arrival of that period, Mr. Wilberforce had to sustain three successive defeats. The House of Commons rejected first, the main proposal of an immediate abolition of the trade; then, a motion restricting the number of slaves to be annually imported into our own colonies; and, finally, a plan for prohibiting the employment of British capital in the introduction of slaves into foreign settlements. His perseverance, however, was not fruitless. A deep impres¬ sion had been made by his past efforts; and, in 1794, the House of Commons, for the first time, passed a bill of im¬ mediate abolition. The defenders of the slave trade were again rescued from the impending blow by the interposition of the Peers; amongst whom a melancholy pre-eminence was thenceforth to be assigned to a member of the Royal House, who lived to redeem his early error, by assenting, in the decline of life, to the introduction of the law for the abolition of slavery. Thus far the difficulties of the contest had chiefly arisen from the influence or the arts of his enemies; but Mr. Wil¬ berforce had now to sustain the more depressing weight of LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 27 the secession of one of his most effective auxiliaries. Suf¬ fering under nervous debility, and influenced by other mo¬ tives, of which an explanation is to be found in his “ History of the Abolition of the slave trade,” Mr. Clarkson was re¬ luctantly compelled to retire from the field. With what deep regret he abandoned the contest may be learnt from his own volumes; and earnest as must have been his aspi¬ ration for its success, he was unable, during the eleven years which followed, to resume his place amidst the cham¬ pions of the cause, though he lived to witness and to share in the triumph. Providence had gifted Mr. Wilberforce with greater ner¬ vous energy; and though sustaining labours not less severe, and a public responsibility incomparably more anxious than that under which the health of his colleague had given way, he returned to the conflict with unabated resolution. In 1795, and in the following year, he again laboured in vain to induce the House of Commons to resume the ground which they had already taken; nor could his all-believing charity repress the honest indignation with which he re¬ cords that a body of his supporters, sufficient to have car¬ ried the bill, had been enticed from their places in the House, by the new opera of the “Two Hunchbacks,” in which a conspicuous part was assigned to the great vocalist of that day, Signior Portugallo. A rivalry more formidable even than that of the Hay-market had now ari-sen. Paro¬ dying his father’s celebrated maxim, Mr. Pitt was engaged in conquering Europe in the West Indies; and, with the acquisition of new colonies, the slave trade acquired an in¬ creased extent, and its supporters had obtained augmented Parliamentary interest. The result was to subject Mr. Wilberforce, in the debate of 1797, to a defeat more signal than any of those which he had hitherto endured. His opponents eagerly sei-zed this opportunity to render it irre¬ parable. On the motion of Mr. Charles Ellis, an address to the Crown was carried, which transferred to the legisla¬ tive bodies of the different colonies the task of preparing for the very measure which they had leagued together to frustrate. It was with extreme difficulty, and not without the most strenuous remonstrances, that Mr. Wilberforce dissuaded Mr. Pitt from lending his support to this extra¬ vagant project. To increase the value of his Transatlantic conquests, he had thrown open the intercourse between 28 Stephen’s miscellanies. our colonies and those of Spain, and had offered, in the newly acquired islands, fresh lands, on which the slave tra¬ ders might effect further settlements; and though, by cease¬ less importunity, Mr. YVilberforce obtained the revocation of the first of these measures, and the suspension of the second, yet the cupidity of the slave traders, and their in- liuence in the national councils were largely increased by these new prospects of gain. Their augmented powers were attested by the ill success which attended Mr. Wil- berforce’s annual motions in 1798 and 1799. The contest had now endured for twelve years. Ten successive efforts had been fruitlessly made to obtain the concurrence of the Legislature in arresting this gigantic evil. Hopeless of success by perseverance in the same tactics, and yet incapable of retiring from the duty he had assumed, Mr. Wilberf'orce now addressed himself to the project of effecting, by a compromise, the end which seemed un¬ attainable by direct and open hostilities. The year 1800 was accordingly consumed in negotiations with the chief West India proprietors, of which the object was to win their concurrence in limiting the duration of the trade to a period of five or at most seven years. Delusive hopes of success cheered him for awhile, but it was ere long1 appa¬ rent that the phalanx of his enemies was too firm to be penetrated. The peace of Amiens had brought to the Court of London a minister from the French Republic, who en¬ couraged the hope that it might be possible to arrange a general convention of all the European powers for the abandonment of the traffic. Long and anxious were the endeavours made by Mr. Wilberforce for maturing this project. It is needless to say that they were unavailing. The season of 1801 was about to close, and the end in view appeared more distant than at any former time. Mr Ad¬ dington seems to have regarded the great expedition to St. Domingo as a kind of sedative, which would paralyze the resistance of the oppressed negroes throughout the West Indies; and feared to check the operation of this anodyne. The charm which these medical analogies exercised over the then occupant of the Treasury bench did not, however, extend its influence to Mr. Wilberforce. He announced his purpose to resume the Parliamentary contest in the year 1802, when the attempt was accordingly made, though under the most discouraging circumstances. The wit and LIFE OF WILLIAM W1LBERFORCE. 29 eloquence of Mr. Canning, remonstrating against the set¬ tlement of new lands in Trinidad, had been repelled by the passive resistance of the then Minister, and the time occu¬ pied in this discussion had delayed, until the dissolution of Parliament interrupted the further progress of the Abolition Act. The tumult of war in the succeeding year silenced every other sound; and the advocate of the slaves was condemned to a reluctant silence, whilst every voice was raised in reprobation of Bonaparte, and in resentment for the insult offered to Lord Whitworth. At length the auguries of success became distinct and frequent. Mr. Pitt had re¬ turned to office, the dread of Jacobinism no longer haunted the public mind, but above all, the proprietors in the Car- ribbean Islands had made the discovery, that by encou¬ raging the slave trade, they were creating in the planters of the conquered colonies the most dangerous rivals in their monopoly of the British market. The union with Ireland had added a new host of friends. Not a single representa¬ tive from that country withheld his assistance. Amidst all these encouragements, Mr. Wilberforce again appealed to the House of Commons, and carried the bill with over¬ whelming majorities. Cordial were now the congratula¬ tions of his friends of every class, from the aged John Newton, of St. Mary Woolnoth, to Jeremy Bentham, whose celebrity as the most original thinker of his age was then in its early dawn. But the Peers had not yet yielded to the influence of Christian or Moral Philosophy. “ The de¬ bate,” says Mr. Wilberforce’s Diary, “was opened by the Chancellor in a very threatening speech, because over¬ rating property, and full of all moral blunders. He showed himself to labour with feelings as if he was the legitimate guardian of property — Lord Stanhope’s a wild speech— Lord Hawkesbury spoke honourably and handsomely.— Westmoreland like himself, coarse and bullying, but not without talent. Grenville spoke like a man of high and honourable principles, who, like a truly great statesman, regarded right and'politic as identical.” Blunders and bul¬ lying, however, prevailed; and the question was adjourned to the following session. Before its arrival Lord Brougham, then travelling on the Continent as an American, and even “ venturing to pass a week in the same house with several French Gene¬ rals,” had offered Mr. Wilberforce his assistance in pursuing 3* 30 stethen’s miscellanies. various collateral inquiries throughout Holland and Ger¬ many, and in “ the great scenes of bondage (as it is called) Poland, Russia, and Hungary.” To this most potent ally many others were added. Mr. Stephen and Mr. Macaulay were unremitting in the use of the pen and the press. The classical knowledge of Mr. Robert Grant was put under con¬ tribution, to illustrate the state of slavery in the ancient world ; and even the daughters of Lord Muncaster were enlisted in the service of methodizing the contents of all African tra¬ vels, ancient and modern. High and sanguine as were the hopes of Mr. Wilberforce, he had yet another disap¬ pointment to sustain. The House of Commons of 1805 receding from their former resolutions, rejected his bill, and drew from him in his private journals, language of dis¬ tress and pain such as no former defeat had been able to extort. The death of Mr. Pitt approached; an event which the most calm and impartial judgment must now regard as the necessary precursor of the liberation of Africa. For se¬ venteen years since the commencement of the contest, he had guided the counsels of this country. Successful in al¬ most every other Parliamentary conflict, and triumphing over the most formidable antagonists, he had been com¬ pelled, by the Dundases and Jenkinsons, and Roses, who on every other subject quailed under his eye, to go to the grave without obliterating that which he himself had de¬ nounced as the deepest stain on our national character, and the most enormous guilt recorded in the history of man¬ kind. During that long period, millions of innocent vic¬ tims had perished. Had he perilled his political existence on the issue, no rational man can doubt that an amount of guilt, of misery, of disgrace, and of loss, would have been spared to England and to the civilized world, such as no other man ever had it in his power to arrest. The political antagonists of Mr. Pitt were men of a dif¬ ferent temper; and although in the Cabinet of Mr. Fox there were not wanting those who opposed him on this sub¬ ject, yet it was an opposition which, in the full tide of suc¬ cess, he could afford to disregard and to pardon. Had it en¬ dangered for a single session the abolition of the slave trade, these names, eminent as one at least of them was, would infallibly have been erased from the list of his Administra¬ tion. Mr. Fox’s Ministry had scarcely taken their places LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 31 when Lord Grenville introduced into the House of Lords, and speedily carried two bills, of which the first abolished the slave trade with all foreign powers, and the second for¬ bade the employment in that traffic of any British shipping which had not already been engaged in it; whilst the House of Commons, resolved that the slave trade was “contrary to the principles of justice, humanity, and sound policy; and that they would proceed to abolish it with all practicable expedition.” Faithfully was this pledge redeemed. The death of Mr. Fox did not even delay its fulfilment. Early in 1807 that great statesman, to whom at the distance of twenty-six years it was reserved to propose the abolition of slavery itself, introduced into the House of Commons a bill which placed on the British statute-book the final con¬ demnation of the trade in slaves. Amidst the acclamations of Parliament, the enthusiastic congratulations of his friends, and the applauses of the world, Mr. YVilberforce witnessed the success of the great object of his life with emotions, and in a spirit, which could not have found admission into a mind less pure and elevated than his own. The friendly shouts of victory which arose on every side were scarcely ob¬ served or heeded in the delightful consciousness of having rendered to mankind a service of unequalled magnitude. He retired to prostrate himself before the Giver of all good things, in profound humility and thankfulness, — wondering at the unmerited bounty of God, who had carried him through twenty years of unremitting labour, and bestowed on him a name of imperishable glory. There are those who have disputed his title to the sta¬ tion thus assigned to him. Amongst the most recent is to be numbered one whose esteem is of infinitely too high va¬ lue to be lightly disregarded, and whose judgment will car¬ ry with it no common authority. Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, in his life of Charles Lamb, referring to an interview which took place between Lamb and Mr. Clarkson, uses the fol¬ lowing expressions: — “There he also met with the true an- nihilator of the slave trade, Thomas Clarkson, who was then enjoying a necessary respite from his stupendous labours in a cottage on the borders of Ulswater. Lamb had no taste for oratorical philanthropy, but he felt the grandeur and simplicity of Clarkson’s character.” The contrast which is thus drawn between “the true annihilator of the slave trade,” and the oratorical philan- 32 Stephen’s miscellanies. thropists who declaimed against it, does not rest merely on the authority of Mr. Talfourd. The great names of Wordsworth and Southey, with many minor writers, may be quoted in support of the same opinion. Nay, Mr. Clarkson lias claimed for himself a place in the history of this great measure which affords no light countenance to the preten¬ sions thus preferred in his behalf. In a map prefixed to his “ History of the Abolition of the Slave trade,” that gi¬ gantic evil is represented under the image of a mound placed at the confluence of four rivers, whose united force is bearing it away. Of these streams one takes, near its source, the name of Clarkson, into which the rivulet of Wilberforce is seen to fall much lower down. His sons reclaim against this hydrography, and propose to correct the map by converting the tributary flood into the main channel. The discussion has, we think, been inevitably forced upon them; but it is one into which we decline to enter. It may be sufficient to state what are the positions which the biographers of Mr. Wilberforce have asserted, and, as we think, substantiated. They maintain, then, that his attention had been directed to the abolition of the slave trade for some time before the subject had engaged Mr. Clarkson’s notice — that he had been co-operating with Mr. Pitt for the advancement of the measure long before his ac¬ quaintance with Mr. Clarkson commenced, and for at least two years before the period at which Mr. Clarkson takes to himself the credit of having made a convert of that great Minister— that many of Mr. Clarkson’s exertions were un¬ dertaken at the instance and at the expense of Mr. Wilber¬ force, and conducted under his written instructions, — and that from 1794 to 1805, when the victory was already won, Mr. Clarkson did not in fact participate at all in any of the labours which were unceasingly pursued by Mr. Wilberforce during the whole of that period. Thus far there seems no ground for dispute. In these volumes will be found a correspondence, the publication of which we cannot condemn, although we think that nothing but the filial duty of vindicating their father’s highest title to re¬ nown could have justified his sons in giving it to the world. The effect of it is to show that Mr. Clarkson’s services were remunerated by a large subscription; and that his private interests on this occasion wrere urged on Mr. Wilberforce with an importunity of which it would be painful to transfer LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 33 the record to these pages. Remembering the advanced age, the eminent services, and the spotless character of that venerable and excellent man, we must be permitted to ex¬ press our very deep regret that the ill-judged encomiums of his friends should have contributed to the publication ot any thing which could for a moment disturb the serenity of the closing scenes of a life distinguished, as we believe, by the exercise of every social and domestic virtue, and the most unwearied beneficence to men of every condition and every country. Quitting the unwelcome contrast thus forced upon us, it is due to the memory of Mr. Wilberforce to state, that no man ever so little merited that condemnation which the language of Mr. Talfourd must be supposed to convey. He was indeed associated with those whose aid would have insured the triumph of energies incomparably inferior to his. To mention no humbler names, he was aided by the genius and philanthropy of Henry Brougham, and by the affection and self-denial and unexampled energy of his bro¬ ther-in-law Mr. Stephen, and of Mr. Zachary Macaulay. It may farther be admitted, that systematic and very continu¬ ous labours were not consonant with his intellectual cha¬ racter or with the habits of his life. But to the office which he had undertaken, he brought qualifications still more rare, and of far higher importance. It was within the reach of ordinary talents to collect, to examine, and to digest evi¬ dence, and to prepare and distribute popular publications. But it required a mind as versatile and active, and powers as varied as were those of Mr. Wilberforce, to harmonize all minds, to quicken the zeal of some, and to repress the intemperance of others; — to negotiate with statesmen of all political parties, and, above all, to maintain for twenty successive years the lofty principles of the contest unsullied even by the seeming admixture of any lower aims. The political position assigned to him by his constituency in Yorkshire, the multitude and intimacy of his personal friendships, the animal spirits which knew no ebb, the in¬ sinuating graces of his conversation, the graceful flow ol his natural eloquence, and an address at once the gayest, the most winning, and the most affectionate, marked him out as the single man of his age, to whom it would have been possible to conduct such a struggle through all its ceaseless difficulties and disappointments. These volumes 34 Stephen’s miscellanies. abound in proofs the most conclusive that, not merely in the House of Commons, but in every other society, he lived for this great object — that he was the centre of a vast correspondence, employing and directing innumerable agents — enlisting in his service the whole circle of his connexions, surrounded by a body of secretaries (called by Mr. Pitt his “ white negroes,”) preparing or revising publications of every form, from folios of reports and evidence to news¬ paper paragraphs — engaged in every collateral project by which his main end could be promoted — now superintend¬ ing the deliberations of the Voluntary Society for the Abo¬ lition of the Slave Trade, — and then labouring from ses¬ sion to session in Parliamentary Committees, and occasion¬ ally passing (in opposition to his natural temper) weeks of the most laborious seclusion, to prepare himself for his more public labours. A life of more devoted diligence has scarcely been recorded of any man; unless, indeed, we are to understand all mental industry as confined to those ex¬ ertions which chain the labourer to his desk. Though Mr. Wilberforce survived the abolition of the slave trade for more than twenty-five years, he did not re¬ tain his seat in the House of Commons for much more than half of that period. The interval between the enactment of this law, and the close of his Parliamentary labours, was devoted to a ceaseless watchfulness over the interests of the African race. Our space forbids us to pursue in any detail the history of those exertions. But it is important to notice, that although declining strength compelled him to relinquish to others the chief conduct of the warfare against slavery itself, his efforts for its extinction were con¬ tinued in every form, until the introduction into Parliament, of the law which declared, that from the 1st of August, 1834, “slavery should be utterly, and for ever abolished, and unlawful throughout the British colonies, possessions, and plantations abroad.” The measure had already been received with acclamation in the House of Commons, ere he was summoned to his final reward; and it was one of the subjects of the last conversation in which he ever engaged. It would have not been compatible with the character of Mr. Wilberforce, nor a fulfilment of the mission with which he believed himself to be invested, if he had concentrated his efforts for the good of mankind on any single object, LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFOBCE. 35 however arduous. “ God has set before me the reforma¬ tion of my country’s manners,” is the solemn persuasion which he recorded in his twenty-seventh year, and from which, to the last hour of his life, he never swerved. Du¬ ring- that period Great Britain underwent internal changes more important than had occurred during any two pre¬ ceding centuries. Agriculture, commerce, manufactures, re¬ venue, and population expanded with unexampled elasticity. Never before had the physical powers of nature been so largely subjugated to the physical wants of mankind, and never was the necessity more urgent for some corresponding increase of the moral powers of the conqueror. The steam-engine would have been a curse rather than a bless¬ ing, if the age which it has enriched had continued sta¬ tionary in religious and intellectual improvement. Watt and Arkwright would have been but equivocal benefactors of their fellow-countrymen without the co-operation of Bell and Lancaster. England would have used like a giant the giant’s strength which she was acquiring. Wealth and sensuality, hard-heartedness, on the one side, must have been brought into a fearful conflict with poverty, ignorance, and discontent, on the other. But the result has been otherwise, and these islands have become not merely the hive of productive industry, but the centre of efforts of un¬ equalled magnitude to advance the highest interests of the human race. If in elevating the moral and religious cha¬ racter of our people during the last century, the first place be due to the illustrious founder of methodism, the second may be justly claimed for Mr. Wilberforce. No two men can be named who in their respective generations exer¬ cised an influence so extensive, permanent, and beneficial over public opinion. In walks of life the most dissimilar, and by means widely different, they concurred in pro¬ posing to themselves the same great end, and pursued it in the same spirit. Their views of Christian doctrine scarce¬ ly differed. They inculcated the same severe, though af¬ fectionate, morality; and were animated by the same holy principles, fervent zeal, and constitutional hilarity of tem¬ per. No one who believes that the courses of the world are guided by a supreme and benevolent intelligence, will hesitate to admit, that each of these men was appointed by Providence to execute a high and sacred trust, and pre¬ pared for its discharge by those gifts of nature and fortune 36 Stephen’s miscellanies. which the circumstances of their times peculiarly demand¬ ed. The career of Wesley has been celebrated by the ge¬ nerous enthusiasm of his disciples, and the colder, though more discriminating admiration of Southey. In these vo¬ lumes is to be found a record not less impressive of the la¬ bours of Mr. Wilberforce toexaltand purify the national cha¬ racter. Amongst the innumerable schemes of benevolence which were projected during the last half century, there is scarcely one of the more considerable in which he does not appear to have largely participated. Now establishing schools for pupils of every age, and Christians of all de¬ nominations, and then engaged in plans for the circulation of the Scriptures, and the diffusion of Christian knowledge. The half-civilized inhabitants of the recesses of London, the prisoners in her jails, the sick and destitute in their crowded lodgings, the poor of Ireland, the heathen nations refined or barbarous, the convicts in New Holland, and the Indians on the Red River, all in their turn, or rather all at once, were occupying his mind, exhausting his purse, and engaging his time and influence for schemes for their relief or improvement. The mere enumeration of the plans in which he was immersed, and of the societies formed for their accomplishment, presents such a mass and multitude of complicated affairs, as inevitably tosuggest the conclusion that no one man, nor indeed any hundred men, could conduct or understand, or remember, them all. There is, however, no miracle to explain. Living in the centre of political action, and surrounded by innumerable friends, agents, and supporters, Mr. Wilberforce was relieved from all the more toilsome duties of these countless underta¬ kings. He may be said to have constituted himself, and to have been acknowledged, by others, as a voluntary minis¬ ter of public instruction and public charities. No depart¬ ment in Downing street was ever administered with equal success; — none certainly by agents equally zealous, perse¬ vering, and effective. His authority was maintained by the reverence and affection of his fellow labourers, and by the wisdom of his counsels, his unfailing bounty, and his ever ready and affectionate sympathy. No man was less liable to the imputation of withdrawing from costly personal sacrifices to promote those schemes of philanthropy which the world, or at least his own world, would admire and celebrate. During a large part of his LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 37 life, Mr. Wilberforce appears to have devoted to acts of mu¬ nificence and charity, from a fourth to a third of his annual income; nor did he shrink from the humblest and most re¬ pulsive offices of kindness to the sick and the wretched with whom he was brought into contact. Yet we believe that no more genuine proof was ever given of his anxiety for the highest interests of mankind than in the publication of his “ Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country, contrasted with real Christianity.” This book appeared in 1797. The interest with which it was originally received might be readily explained by the sin¬ gularity of a very conspicuous member of Parliament un¬ dertaking to handle such a theme. But there must be some deeper cause for the continued popularity of an octavo vo¬ lume, of which, within half a century, fifty large editions, at the least, have been published in England and in the United States. The applauses of ecclesiastics of every class, from old John Newton to the then Bishop of London, might be yielded with liberal indulgence to so powerful and unexpected an auxiliary. But that could be no com¬ mon production which moved the author of the “Pursuits of Literature ” for once to quit his stilts, and to pour out a heartfelt tribute of praise in his unadulterated mother tongue; and which drew from Edmund Burke his grateful acknowledgments to the author for the comfort which he had diffused over the two last days of his eventful life. Yet they who shall search this book for deep theology, or profound investigation, will be disappointed. “ Philoso¬ phy,” says Abraham Tucker, “ may yet be styled the art of marshalling the ideas in the understanding, and religion that of disciplining the imagination.” In the first of these arts Mr. Wilberforce did not excej; in the second he has scarcely ever been surpassed. The first three chapters of this work appear to us decidedly inferior to the rest. He is there ppon adebateable land, — contrasting the inspired text with the prevalent opinions of his age on some parts of Christian doctrine. The accuracy of his own interpretations, or rather of those which are received by that part of the Church of England usually designated as Evangelical, being assumed throughout these discussions, they will scarcely convince such as read the New Testament in a different sense. But when he emerges from these defiles, and enters upon broad-j 4 38 STEPHEN^ MISCELLANIES. or grounds, comparing the precepts of revelation with the conventional morality of the world’s favoured children, he speaks (for it is throughout a spoken rather than a written style) with a persuasive energy which breathes the very spirit of the inspired volume. Here all is the mature re¬ sult of profound meditation; and his thoughts, if not always methodical and compact, are at least always poured out in language so earnest and affectionate, that philanthropy never yet assumed a more appropriate, or a more eloquent style, it is the expostulation of a brother. Unwelcome truth is delivered with scrupulous fidelity, and yet with a tenderness which demonstrates that the monitor feels the pain which he reluctantly inflicts. It is this tone of human sympathy breathing in every page which constitutes the essential charm of this book; and it is to the honour of our common nature that we are all disposed to love best that teacher, who, with the deepest compassion for our sorrows, has the least indulgence for the errors or the faults by which they have been occasioned. Whatever objections may have been raised to Mr. Wilberforce’s theological opinions, there is but one which can be stated to the exegelical part of his treatise. It is, that he has erected a standard too pure and too sublime for this world’s use, and proposes a scheme of Utopian perfection which is calculated, by discouraging hope, to repress exertion. The obvious answer is, that the design of every rule which can be given for the conduct of life is to afford an accurate measure of our deflection from the path of duty, and a trust-worthy guide for our return. Any system of religion or ethics which tolerated the slight¬ est compromise with moral evil, would be so far subver¬ sive of its own purpose; although it is from the general prevalence of moral evil that such systems derive their ex¬ istence and their value. - To mark distinctly the departure of the luxurious, busy, care-worn, and ambitious age to which we belong, from the theory and practice of Christian morality, was the task which Mr. Wilberforce proposed to himself. Never were the sensuality, the gloom, and the selfishness which fester below the polished surface of society, brought into more vivid contrast with the faith, and hope, and charity, which in their combination form the Christian character; and never was that contrast drawn with a firmer hand, with a more tender spirit, or with a purer inspiration for the happiness of mankind. LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 39 To all these philanthropic labours were added others, ad¬ dressed, though less directly, to the same ends, and under¬ taken and pursued in a similar spirit. In his political ca¬ reer, Mr. Wilberforce never ceased to aet and to speak as one to whom Providence had confided the sacred trust of advancing the moral character, and promoting the welfare of the age and nation to which he belonged. As a public speaker, he enjoyed great and well-merited celebrity. But it was not in the House of Commons that his powers in this kind were exhibited to the greatest advantage. In all the deliberations of Parliament may be discerned a tacit reference to the nature of Royal citation which has brought together the two Houses “ for the despatch of divers weighty and urgent affairs.” The knights and burgesses are em¬ phatically men of business, and have but little indulgence for anything which tasks the understanding, addresses itself to the heart, or elevates the imagination; — least of all for an os¬ tentatious display of the resources of the speaker’s mind. He who can contribute a pertinent fact, or a weighty argument, need not raise his style above the region of the pathos. The aspirant for fame must excel in perspicuity of statement, in promptitude in the exposure or invention of sophistry, and in a ready though abstemious use of wit, ridicule, and sar¬ casm. In these requisites for success Mr. Wilberforce was deficient. He had not much Statistical knowledge, nor was he familiar with any branch of Political Economy. His argumentation was not usually perspicuous, and was seldom energetic. The habit of digression, the parentheti¬ cal structure of his periods, and the minute qualifications suggested by his reverence for truth, impeded the liow of his discourse, and frequently obscured its design. His ex¬ quisite perception of the ridiculous kept him in the exer¬ cise of habitual self-denial, and, the satire which played upon his countenance was suppressed by his universal charity, before it could form itself into language. With these disadvantages he was still a great Parliamentary speaker; and there were occasions when, borne by some sudden impulse, or carried by diligent preparation over the diffuseness which usually encumbered him, he delight¬ ed and subdued his hearers. His reputation in the House of Commons rested, however, chiefly upon other grounds. In that assembly, any one speaks with immense advantage whose character, station, or presumed knowledge is such as 40 Stephen’s miscellanies. to give importance to his opinions. The dogmas of some men are of incomparably more value than the logic of others; and no member except the leaders of the great contending parties, addressed the House with an authority equal to that of Mr. Wilberforce. The homage rendered to his per¬ sonal character, his command over a small compact party, his representation of the county of York, the confidence of the great religious bodies in every part of England, and, above all, his independent neutrality, gave to his suffrage, an almost unexampled value. It was usually delivered with a demeanour of conscious dignity, unalloyed by the slight¬ est tinge of arrogance, and contrasting oddly enough with the insignificance of his slight and shapeless person. Yet the spell he exercised was partly drawn from still another source. Parliamentary eloquence is essentially colloquial; and, when most embellished or sustained, is rather pro¬ longed discourse than oratory properly so called. It was by a constant, perhaps an unavoidable observance of his tone, that Mr. Wilberforce exercised the charm which none could resist, but which many were unable to explain. His speeches in the House of Commons bore the closest re¬ semblance to his familiar conversation. There was the same earnest sincerity of manner, the same natural and va¬ ried cadences, the same animation and ease, and the same tone of polished society; and while his affectionate, lively, and graceful talk flowed on without the slightest appearance of effort or study, criticism itself scarcely perceived, or at least excused the redundancy of his language. But, as we have said, it was not in the House of Com¬ mons, that his powers as a public speaker had their high¬ est exercise. His habitual trains of thought, and the feelings which he most deeply cherished, could rarely find utterance in that scene of strife and turmoil. At the hus¬ tings, where the occasion justified the use of a more didactic style, there was much simple majesty in the uncompromi¬ sing avowal of his principles, and in the admonitions sug¬ gested by them. It was the grave eloquence of the pulpit applied to secular uses. But it was in the great assemblages held for religious and charitable objects that the current of his eloquence moved with the greatest impetus and volume. Here he at once felt his way to the hearts of the dense mass of eager and delighted listeners. In the fulness of the charity which believeth all things, giving credit to the LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 41 multitude for feelings as pure and benevolent as his own, he possessed the power of gracefully and decorously laying aside the reserve vvhieh habitually shrouded from the irre¬ verent and profane the more secret and cherished feelings of his heart. Nothing was ever more singular, or less framed upon any previous model of eloquence, than were some of those addresses in which the chastened style of the House of Commons (of all assemblies the most fasti¬ dious) was employed to give utterance to thoughts which, though best becoming the deepest solitude, retained, even in these crowded scenes, their delicacy not less than their beauty. The most ardent of his expressions bore the im¬ press of indubitable sincerity, and of calm and sober con¬ viction; instantly distinguishing them from the less genuine enthusiasm of others who dissolved their meaning in ecstasy, and soared beyond the reach of human comprehension into the third heavens of artificial rapture. It was an example perhaps as full of danger as of interest; and not a few are the offensive imitations which have been attempted of a model which could be followed successfully, or even inno¬ cently, by none whose bosoms did not really burn with the same heavenly affections, who did not practise the same severe observance of truth, or whose taste had not been refined to the same degree of sensibility. No part of Mr. Wilberforce’s biography will be read with greater interest than that which describes his political career. Holding for forty-three years a conspicuous place in the House of Commons, the current of public affairs as it flowed past him, reflected his character in a thousand different forms; and exhibited on the most tumultuous theatre of action, the influence of those sacred principles, with the workings of which we are for the most part con¬ versant only in more quiet and secluded scenes. “ From any one truth all truth may be inferred,” — a Ba¬ conian text, from which certain commentators of the last century concluded, that he who possessed a Bible might dispense with Grotius and with Locke; and that at the ap¬ proach of the Scriptures all other writings should disap¬ pear, as they had once vanished at the presence of the Koran. The opinion which precisely reverses this doc¬ trine is recommended by less ingenuity, and by no better logic. Mr. Wilberforce was far too wise a man to ima¬ gine that any revelation from God could be designed to 4* 42 Stephen’s miscellanies. supersede the duty of patient research into all other sources of knowledge. But neither did he ever reject the vast body of ethical precepts delivered by Divine inspiration, as irre¬ levant to the political questions with which he was daily conversant, lie invariably brought every conclusion drawn from other studies to the test of their consistency with the sacred oracles. They supplied him with an ordinate by which to measure every curve. They gave him what most public men egregiously want, — the firm hold of a body of unchanging opinions. In his case this advantage was pecu¬ liarly momentous. His neglected education, his inaptitude for severe and continuous mental labour, the strength of his sympathies, and his strong personal attachment to Mr. Pitt, all seemed to give the promise of a ductile, vacillating, uncertain course. Yet in reality no man ever pursued in Parliament a career more entirely guided by fixed princi¬ ples, or more frequently at variance with his habitual in¬ clinations. His connexions, both public and private, not less than his natural temper, disposed him to that line of policy which, in our days, assumes the title of “ conser¬ vative:” yet his conduct was almost invariably such as is now distinguished by the epithets “ liberal and reforming.” A Tory by predilection, he was in action a Whig. His heart was with Mr, Pitt; but on all the cardinal questions of the times, his vote was given to Mr. Fox. This conflict of sentiment with principle did not, how¬ ever, commence in the earlier days of Mr. Pitt’s adminis¬ tration; for the mortal foe of Jacobinism entered the House of Commons, as a Parliamentary reformer; and Mr. Wil- berforce executed a rapid journey from Nice to London in the winter of 1784 to support, by his eloquence and his vote, the Reform Bill which his friend introduced in the session of that year. The following broken sentences from his diary record the result: “ At Pitt’s all day — it goes on well — sat up late chatting with Pitt — his hopes of the country and noble patriotic heart — to town — Pitt’s — houses — Parliamentary reform — terribly disappointed and beat — extremely fatigued — spoke extremely ill, but com¬ mended — called at Pitt’s — met poor Wyvill.” Of this “ ill- spoken but commended speech,” the following sentence is preserved: “ The consequence of this measure,” he said, “ will be that the freedom of opinion will be restored, and party connexions in a great measure vanish, for party on LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 43 one side begets party on the other;” — a prophecy which, rightly understood, is perceptibly advancing towards its fulfilment. The ill success of Mr. Pitt’s proposal did not damp the zeal of Mr. Wil'oerforce. He introduced into the House of Commons, and even succeeded in carrying there two of the most important enactments of the Reform Bill, in which, at the distance of nearly half a century, Lord Grey obtained the reluctant concurrence of the Peers. One of these measures provided for a general registration of voters; the others for holding the poll, at the same time, in several different parts of the same county. From the commencement of the war with France is to be dated the dissolution of the political alliance which had, till then, been maintained with little interruption between Mr. Wilberforce and Mr. Pitt. Partaking more deeply than most men of the prevalent abhorrence of the revolu¬ tionary doctrines of that day, Mr. Wilberforce’s resistance to the war was decided and persevering. A written mes¬ sage from Mr. Pitt, delivered on the first debate on that question, “assuring him that his speaking then might do irreparable mischief, and promising that he should have another opportunity before war should be declared,” de¬ feated his purpose of protesting publicly against the ap¬ proaching hostilities. Accident prevented the redemption of the pledge, but Mr. Wilberforce’s purposes remained unshaken. “ Our Government,” he says in a letter on this subject, “had been for some months before the breaking out of the war, negotiating with the principal European powers, for the purpose of obtaining a joint representation to France, assuring her that if she would formally engage to keep within her limits, and not molest her neighbours, she should be suffered to settle her own internal govern¬ ment and constitution without interference. I never w'as so earnest with Mr. Pitt on any other occasion as I was in my entreaties before the war broke out, that he would openly declare in the House of Commons that he had been, and then was negotiating this treaty, I urged on him that the declaration might possibly produce an immediate effect in France, where it was manifest there prevailed an opinion that we were meditating some interference with their in¬ ternal affairs, and the restoration of Louis to his throne. At all events, I hoped that in the first lucid interval, France would see how little reason there was for continuing the 44 Stephen’s miscellanies. war with Great Britain; and, at least, the declaration must silence all but the most determined oppositionists in this country. How far this expectation would have been realized you may estimate by Mr. Fox’s language when Mr. Pitt, at my instance, did make the declaration last winter (1799.) ‘ If,’ he said, * the Right Honourable Gentleman had made the declaration now delivered, to France, as well as to Russia, Austria, and Prussia, I should have nothing more to say or to desire.’ ” Experience and reflection confirmed these original im¬ pressions. After the war had continued “ for a year, Mr. Wilberforce was engaged in making up his mind cautious¬ ly and maturely, and, therefore, slowly as to the best con¬ duct to be observed by Great Britain in the present critical emergency. With what a severe self-examination he was accustomed to conduct these inquiries, may be learnt from an entry made at that period in his private journal. “It is a proof to me of my secret ambition, that though I fore¬ see how much I shall suffer in my feelings throughout from differing from Pitt, and how indifferent a figure I shall most likely make, yet that motives of ambition will insinuate themselves. Give me, O Lord, a true sense of the comparative value of earthly and of heavenly things; this will render me sober-minded, and fix my affections on things above.” Such was the solemn preparation with which he ap¬ proached this momentous question, and moved in the ses¬ sion of 1794 an amendment to the address recommending a more pacific policy. The failure of that attempt did not shake his purpose; for after the interval of a few days he voted with Mr. Grey on a direct motion for the re-esta¬ blishment of peace. The genuine self-denial with which this submission to a clear sense of duty was attended, Mr. Wilberforce has thus touchingly described. “ No one who has not seen a good deal of public life, and felt how diffi¬ cult and painful it is to differ widely from those with whom you wish to agree, can judge at what an expense of feeling such duties are performed. Wednesday, February 4, dined at Lord Camden’s. Pepper, and Lady Arden, Steele, &c. I felt queer, and all day out of spirits — wrong! but hurt by the idea of Pitt’s alienation — 12th, party of the old firm at the Speaker’s; I not there.” LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 45 Mr. Pitt’s alienation was not the only, nor the most se¬ vere penalty which Mr. Wilberforce had to pay on this oc¬ casion. The sarcasms of Windham, — the ironical compli¬ ments of Burke, — a cold reception from the King, — and even Fox’s congratulation upon his approaching alliance with the opposition, might have been endured. But it was more hard to bear the rebukes, however tenderly conveyed, of his friend and early guide, the Dean of Carlisle; the re¬ proaches of the whole body of his clerical allies for the countenance which they conceived him to have given to the enemies of religion and of order; and the earnest re¬ monstrances of many of his most powerful supporters in Yorkshire. The temper so accessible to all kindly influ¬ ences was, however, sustained by the invigorating voice of an approving conscience. He resumed his pacific pro¬ posals in the spring of 1795, and though still defeated, it was by a decreasing majority. Before the close of that year, Mr. Pitt himself had become a convert to the opi¬ nions of his friend. The war had ceased to be popular, and Lord Malmesbury’s negotiation followed. The failure of that attempt at length convinced Mr. Wilberforce that the war was inevitable; and thenceforward his opposition to it ceased. The same independent spirit raised him, on less momen¬ tous occasions, above the influence of the admiration and strong personal attachment which he never withheld from Mr. Pitt at any period of their lives. Though the Minister was “ furious ” on the occasion, he voted and spoke against the motion for augmenting the income of the Prince of Wales. Though fully anticipating the ridicule which was the immediate consequence of the attempt, he moved the House of Commons to interfere for the liberation of Lafay- ette, when confined in the gaol of Olmuky. Though, at the suggestion of Bishop Prettyman, Mr. Pitt pledged him¬ self to introduce a bill which would have silenced every dissenting minister to whom the magistrates might have thought proper to refuse a license, Mr. Wilberforce resisted, and with eventful success, this encroachment on the prin¬ ciples of toleration. Though the whole belligerent policy of Mr. Pitt, on the resumption of the war, rested on conti¬ nental alliances, cemented by subsidies from the British Treasury, that system found in Mr. Wilberforce the most strenuous and uncompromising opponent. On the revival 4G Stephen’s miscellanies. of hostilities in 1803, he supported Mr. Fox not merely with his vote, but with a speech which he subsequently published. The impeachment of Lord Melville brought him into a direct and painful hostility to those with whom he had lived in youthful intimacy, and who still retained their hold on his heart. Mr. Pitt was his chosen friend — Lord Melville his early companion. But even on this oc¬ casion, though compelled to watch the movements of the “ fascinating eye ” and “ the agitated countenance ” turned reproachfully to him from the Treasury Bench, he delivered one of the most memorable of his Parliamentary speeches, — in which the sternest principles of public morality were so touchingly combined with compassion for the errors he condemned, that the effect was irresistible; and the casting vote of the Speaker can scarcely be said with greater truth to have determined the decision of the House. Nothing more truly, in the spirit of the pure and lofty principles by which he was guided is recorded of him, than his defence to the charge of inconsistency for declining to join the deputation which carried up to the King the sub¬ sequent address for the removal of Lord Melville from the Royal Councils. “lama little surprised that it should be imputed as a fault to any that they did not accompany the procession to St. James’s. I should have thought that men’s own feelings might have suggested to them that it was a case in which the heart might be permitted to give a lesson to the judgment. My country might justly demand that, in my decision on Lord Melville’s conduct, I should be go¬ verned by the rules of justice, and the principles of the constitution, without suffering party considerations, perso¬ nal friendship, or any extrinsic motive whatever to inter¬ fere; that in all that was substantial I should deem myself as in the exercise of a judicial office. But when the sen¬ tence of the law is past, is not that sufficient? Am I to join in the execution of it? Is it to be expected of me that I am to stifle the natural feelings of the heart, and not even to shed a tear over the very sentence I am pronouncing ? I know not what Spartan virtue or stoical pride might re¬ quire; but I know that I am taught a different, ay, and a better lesson by a greater than either Lycurgus or Zeno. Christianity enforces no such sacrifice. She requires us indeed to do justice, but to love mercy. I learnt not in her school to triumph even over a conquered enemy, and must I join the triumph over a fallen friend?” LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 47 We might, with the aid of these volumes, trace Mr. Wil- berforce’s political career through all the memorable con¬ troversies of his times, and prove beyond the reach of con¬ tradiction, that every vote was given under such a sense of responsibility to the Supreme Lawgiver as raised him above the influence of those human affections, which scarcely any man felt more keenly. He was supported by the acclama¬ tions of no party, for in turn he resisted all. Even the great religious bodies who acknowledged him as their leader were frequently dissatisfied with a course which, while it adorned their principles, conceded nothing to their prejudices. The errors into which he may have fallen were in no single case debased by any selfish motive, and were ever on the side of peace and of the civil and religious liberties of mankind. But those indications of human character which it chiefly concerns us to study, are not, after all, to be discovered in places where men act together in large masses, and under strong excitement. Mr. Wilberforce’s interior life is ex- hibited in this biography with a minuteness of self-dissec¬ tion which we think hardly possible to contemplate with¬ out some degree of pain. It was his habit to note, in the most careless and elliptical language, every passing occur¬ rence, however trivial, apparently as a mere aid to recollec¬ tion. But his journals also contain the results of a most unsparing self-examination, and record the devotional feel¬ ings with which his mind was habitually possessed. They bear that impress of perfect sincerity, without which they would have been altogether worthless. The suppression of them would have disappointed the expectations of a very large body of readers; and the sacred profession of the editors gives peculiar authority to their judgment as to the advantage of such disclosures. To their filial piety the whole work, indeed almost every line of it, bears conclusive testimony. We feel, however, an invincible repugnance to the transfer into these pages of the secret communings of a close self-observer with his Maker. The Church of Rome is wise in proclaiming the sanctity of the Confessional. The morbid anatomy of the human heart (for such it must ap¬ pear to every one who dares to explore its recesses) is at best a cheerless study. It would require some fortitude in any man to state how much of our mutual affection and esteem depends upon our imperfect knowledge of each 48 Stephen’s miscellanies. other. The same creative wisdom which shelters from every human eye the workings of our animal frame, has not less closely shrouded from observation the movements of our spiritual nature. The lowly and contrite spirit is a shrine in which he who inhabiteth eternity condescends to dwell, but where we at least are accustomed to regard every other presence as profane. There is, we think, great danger in such publications. For one man who, like Mr. Wilber- force, will honestly lay bare his conscience on paper, there are at least one hundred, living with the fear or the hope of the biographer before their eyes, who will apply them¬ selves to the same task in a very different spirit. The desire of posthumous, or of living fame, will dictate the ac¬ knowledgment of faults, which the reader is to regard as venial, while he is to admire the sagacity with which they are dictated, and the tenderness of conscience with which they are deplored. We may be wrong; but both expe¬ rience and probability seem to us to show that the publica¬ tion of the religious journals of one honest man, is likely to make innumerable hypocrites. The domestic life of Mr. Wilberforce is a delightful ob¬ ject of contemplation, though it cannot be reduced into the form of distinct narration. From his twenty-sixth year his biography consists rather of a description of habits than of a succession of events. No man had less to do with adventure, or was more completely independent of any such resource. The leisure which he could withdraw from the service of the public was concentrated upon his large and happy household, and on the troops of friends who thronged the hospitable mansion in which he lived in the neighbourhood of London. The following sketch of his domestic retirement pos¬ sesses a truth which will be at once recognised by every one who was accustomed to associate with him in such scenes: — “Who that ever joined him in his hour of daily exer¬ cise cannot see him now as he walked round his garden at Highwood, now in animated and even playful conversa¬ tion, and then drawing from his copious pockets (to contain Dalrymple’s State Papers was their standard measure) a Psalter, a Horace, a Shakspeare, or Cowper, and reading or reciting chosen passages, and then catching at long LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 49 stored dower leaves as the wind blew them from the pages, or standing by a favourite gumcistus to repair the loss. Then he would point out the harmony of the -tints, the beauty of the pencilling and the perfection of the colouring, and sum up all into those ascriptions of praise to the Almighty which were ever welling from his grateful heart. He loved flowers with all the simple delight of childhood. He would hover from bed to bed over his favourites, and when he came in, even from his shortest walk, he deposit¬ ed a few that he had gathered safely in his room before he joined the breakfast table. Often he would say as he en¬ joyed their fragrance, 4 How good is God to us. What should we think of a friend who had furnished us with a magnificent house and all we needed, and then coming in to see that all had been provided according to his wishes, should be hurt to find that no scents had been placed in the rooms? Yet so has God dealt with us — lovely flowers are the smiles of his goodness.’” The following letter to one of his children exhibits Mr. Wilberforce in one of those characters in which he ex¬ celled most men: — “ Battersea, Rise, Sept. 14, 1814. 44 My very dear — - . 44 1 do not relish the idea that you are the only one of my children who has not written to me during my absence, and that you should be the only one to whom I should not write. I therefore take up my pen, though but for a few moments, to assure you that I do not suspect your silence to have arisen from the want of affection for me, any more than that which I myself have hitherto observed has pro¬ ceeded from this source. There is a certain demon called procrastination, who inhabits a castle in the air at Sandgate, as well as at so many other places, and I suspect that you have been carried up some day (at the tail of your kite per¬ haps,) and lodged in that same habitation, which has fine large rooms in it from which there are beautiful prospects in all directions; and probably you will not quit a dwell¬ ing-place that you like so well, till you hear that I am on my way to Sandgate. You will meet the to-morrow man there (it just occurs to me,) and I hope you will have pre¬ vailed on him to tell you the remainder of that pleasant story, a part of which Miss Edgeworth has related, though I greatly fear he would still partake so far of the o 50 Stephen's miscellanies. spirit of the place as to leave a part untold till — to-morrow. But I am trifling sadly, since I am this morning unusually pressed for time, I will therefore only guard my dear boy seriously against procrastination, one of the most dangerous assailants of usefulness, and assure him that I am to-day, to-morrow, and always while I exist, his affectionate Father. W. WlLBERFORCE.” Mr. Wilberforce excelled in the arts of hospitality, and delighted in the practice of them. His cordial welcome taught the most casual guest to feel that he was at home ; and the mass of his friends and acquaintance could scarcely suppose that there was a domestic sanctuary still more sacred and privileged than that into which they were ad¬ mitted. Amongst them are not a few obscure, with some illustrious names; and of the latter Mr. Pitt is by far the most conspicuous. There is no one filling so large a space in recent history as Mr. Pitt, with whose private habits the world is so little acquainted. These volumes do not contribute much to dispel the obscurity. We find him indeed at one time passing an evening in classical studies or amusements with Mr. Ganning; and at another, cutting walks through his plantations at Holwood, with the aid of Mr. Wilberforce and Lord Grenville. But on the whole, the William Pitt of this work is the austere Minister with whom we were already acquainted, and not the man himself in his natural or in his emancipated state. The following extract of a letter from Mr. Wilberforce is almost the only passage which gives us an intimation of the careless familiarity in which for many years they lived together: — “ And now after having transacted my business with the Minister, a word or two to the man — a character in which, if it is more pleasant to you, it is no less pleasant to me to address you. I wish you may be passing your time half as salubriously and comfortably as I am at Gisborne’s, where I am breathing good air, eating good mutton, keeping good hours, and enjoying the company of good friends. You have only two of the four at command, nor these al¬ ways in so pure a state as in Needwood Forest; your town mutton being apt to be woolly, and your town friends to be interested: however, I sincerely believe you are, through the goodness of Providence, better off in the latter pnrticu- LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 51 lar, than has been the fate of ninety-nine Ministers out of a hundred ; and as for the former, the quantity you lay in may in some degree atone for the quality; and it is a sign that neither in friends nor mutton you have yet lost your taste. Indeed, I shall reckon it a bad symptom of your moral or corporal state, as the case may be, when your palate is so vitiated, that you cannot distinguish the true from the false flavour. All this is sad stuff, but you must allow us gentlemen who live in forests to be a little figura¬ tive. I will only add, however, (that I may not quite exhaust your patience,) that I hope you will never cease to relish me, and do me the justice to believe the ingre¬ dients are good, though vou may not altogether approve of the cooking. Yours ever, W, Wilberforce.” “ P. S. Remember me to all friends. I hope you have no more gout, &c. If you will at any time give me a line (though it be but a mouthful,) I shall be glad of it. You will think me be-Burked like yourself,” On the occasion of Mr. Pitt’s duel with Mr. Tierney, Mr. Wilberforce had designed to bring the subject under the notice of the House of Commons. The intention was defeated by the following kind and characteristic letter: — “ My dear Wilberforce:— “ I am not the person to argue with you on a subject in which I am a good deal concerned. I hope too that I am incapable of doubting your kindness to me (however mis¬ taken I may think it,) if you let any sentiment of that sort, actuate you on the present occasion. I must suppose that some such feeling has inadvertently operated upon you, because whatever may be your general sentiments on sub¬ jects of this nature, they can have acquired no new tone or additional argument from any thing that has passed in this transaction. You must be supposed to bring this forward in reference to the individual cage. “ In doing so, you will be accessary in loading one of the parties with unfair and unmerited obloquy. With re¬ spect to the other party, myself, I feel it a real duty to say to you frankly that your motion is one for my removal. If any step on the subject is proposed in Parliament and agreed to, I shall feel from that moment that I can be of no more use out of office than in it; for in it according to the feelings I entertain, I could be of none. I state to you, 52 Stephen’s miscellanies. as I think I ought, distinctly and explicitly what I feel. I hope I need not repeat what I always feel personally to yourself. — Your’s ever, William Pitt.” “ Downing Street, Wednesday, May 30, 1798, IIP. M.” The following passage is worth transcribing as a graphic, though slight sketch of Mr. Pitt, from the pen of one who knew him so well: — “ When a statement had been made to the House of the cruel practices approaching certainly to torture, by which the discovery of concealed arms had been enforced in Ire¬ land, John Claudius Beresford rose to reply, and said with a force and honesty, the impression of which I never can forget, ‘ 1 fear, and feel deep shame in making the avowal — I fear it is too true — 1 defend it not— -but I trust I may be permitted to refer, as some palliation of these atrocities, to the state of my unhappy country, where rebellion and its attendant horrors had roused on both sides to the highest pitch all the strongest passions of our nature.’ I was with Pitt in the House of Lords when Lord Clare replied to a similar charge — ‘ Well, suppose it were so; but surely,’ &c. I shall never forget Pitt’s look. He turned round to me with that indignant stare which sometimes marked his countenance, and stalked out of the House.” It is not generally known that at the period of Lord Melville’s trial a coolness almost approaching to estrange¬ ment had arisen between that minister and Mr. Pitt. The following extract from one of Mr. Wilberforce’s Diaries on this subject affords an authentic and curious illustration of Mr. Pitt’s character:— “ I had perceived above a year before that Lord Melville had not the power over Pitt’s mind, which he once pos¬ sessed. Pitt was taking me to Lord Camden’s, and in our tete-a-tete he gave me an account of the negotiations which had been on foot to induce him to enter Addington’s Ad¬ ministration. When they quitted office in 1801, Dundas proposed taking as his motto, Jam rude donatus . Pitt suggested to him that having always been an active man, he would probably wish again to come into office, and then that his having taken such a motto would be made a ground for ridicule. Dundas assented, and took another motto. Addington had not long been in office, before Pitt’s expec- LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 53 tation was fulfilled, and Dundas undertook to bring Pitt into the plan ; which was to appoint some third person head, and bring in Pitt and Addington on equal terms under him. Dundas, accordingly, confiding in his knowledge of all Pitt’s ways and feelings, set out for W aimer Castle; and after dinner, and port wine, began cautiously to open his pro¬ posals. But he saw it would not do, and stopped abruptly. ‘ Really,’ said Pitt with a sly severity, and it was almost the only sharp thing I ever heard him say of any friend, ‘ I had not the curiosity to ask what I was to be.”’ Amongst the letters addressed to Mr. Wilberforce, to be found in these volumes, is one written by John Wesley from his death-bed, on the day before he sank into the lethargy from which he was never roused. They are pro¬ bably the last written words of that extraordinary man. “ My dear Sir, “ February 24, 1791. “ Unless Divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum , I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise, in opposing that execra¬ ble villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils; and if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? Oh! be not weary of well-doing. Go on in the name of God, and in the power of his might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away before it. That He who has guided you from your youth up, may continue to strengthen you in this and all things, is the prayer of, dear sir, your affectionate servant, John Wesley.” From a very different correspondent, Jeremy Bentham, Mr. Wilberforce received two notes, for which, as they are the only examples we have seen in print of his episto¬ lary style, we must find a place, “ Kind Sir, “ The next time you happen on Mr. Attorney-General in the House or elsewhere, be pleased to take a spike — * the longer and sharper the better — and apply it to him by way of memento , that the Penitentiary Contract Bill has, for I know not what length of time, been slicking in his 5* 54 Stephen’s miscellanies. hands; and you will much oblige your humble servant to command, Jeremy Bentham.” “ N. B. A corking-pin was, yesterday, applied by Mr. Abbot.” “ I sympathize with your now happily promising exer¬ tions in behalf of the race of innocents, whose lot it has hitherto been to be made the subject-matter of depredation, for the purpose of being treated worse than the authors of such crimes are treated for those crimes in other places.” There are, in this work, some occasional additions to the stock of political anecdotes. Of these we transcribe the following specimens : — “ Franklin signed the peace of Paris in his old spotted velvet coat (it being the time of a court-mourning, which rendered it more particular.) ‘ What,’ said my friend the negotiator, ‘ is the meaning of that harlequin coat?’ ‘ It is that in which he was abused by Wedderburne.’ He showed much rancour and personal enmity to this country — would not grant the common passports for trade, which were, how¬ ever, easily got from Jay or Adams. “ Dined with Lord Camden; he, very chatty and pleasant. Abused Thurlow for his duplicity and mystery. Said the King had said to him occasionally he had wished Thurlow and Pitt to agree ; for that both were necessary to him— one in the Lords, the other in the Commons. Thurlow will never do any thing to oblige Lord Camden, because he is a friend of Pitt’s. Lord Camden himself, though he speaks of Pitt with evident affection, seems rather to com¬ plain of his being too much under the influence of any one who is about him; particularly of Dundas, who prefers his countrymen whenever he can. — Lord Camden is sure that Lord Bute got money by the peace of Paris. He can ac¬ count for his sinking near .£300,000 in land and houses ; and his paternal estate in the island which bears his name was not above £1500 a-year, and he is a life-tenant only of Wortley, which may be £8000 or £10,000. Lord Cam¬ den does not believe Lord Bute has any the least connexion with the King now, whatever he may have had. Lord Thurlow is giving constant dinners to the Judges, to gain them over to his party, * * * * was applied to by * * * *, a wretched sort of dependant of the Prince of Wales, to know if he would lend him money on the joint bond of the Prince and the dukes of York and Clarence, to receive LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 55 double the sum lent, whenever the King should die, and either the Prince of Wales, the Dukes of York and Cla¬ rence, come into the inheritance. The sum intended to be raised is ^6200,000. “ ’Tis only a hollow truce, not a peace, that is made between Thurlow and Pitt. They can have no confidence in each other.” It is perhaps the most impressive circumstance in Mr. Wilberforce’s character, that the lively interest with which he engaged in all these political occurrences was combined with a consciousness not less habitual or intense of their inherent vanity. There is a seeming paradox in the soli¬ citude with which he devoted so much of his life to secular pursuits, and the very light esteem in which he held them. The solution of the enigma is to be found in his unremitting habits of devotion. No man could more scrupulously obey the precept which Mr. Taylor has given to his “ statesman ” — To observe a “ Sabbatical day in every week, and a Sab¬ batical hour in every day.” Those days and hours gave him back to the world, not merely with recruited energy, but in a frame of mind the most favourable to the right dis- charge of its duties. Things in themselves the most trivial, wearisome, or even offensive, had, in his solitude, assumed a solemn interest from their connexion with the future des¬ tinies of mankind, whilliant and alluring objects of human ambition had been brought into a humiliating contrast with the great ends for which life is given, and with the immor¬ tal hopes by which it should be sustained. Nothing can be more heartfelt than the delight with which he breathed the pure air of these devotional retirements. Nothing more soothing than the tranquillity which they diffused over a mind harassed with the vexations of a political life. Mr. Wilberforce retired from Parliament in the year 1825. The remainder of his life was passed in the bosom of his family. He did not entirely escape those sorrows which so usually thicken as the shadows grow long, for he sur¬ vived both his daughters; and, from that want of worldly wisdom which always characterized him, he lost a very considerable part of his fortune in speculations in which he had nothing but the gratification of parental kindness to gain or to hope. But never were such reverses more effec¬ tually baffled by the invulnerable peace of a cheerful and self-approving heart. There were not wanting external 56 Stephen’s miscellanies. circumstances which marked the change; but the most close and intimate observer could never perceive on his countenance even a passing shade of dejection or anxiety on that account. He might, indeed, have been supposed to be unconscious that he had lost any thing, had not his altered fortunes occasionally suggested to him remarks on the Divine goodness, by which the seeming calamity had been converted into a blessing to his children and to him¬ self. It afforded him a welcome apology for withdrawing from society at large, to gladden, by his almost constant presence, the homes of his sons by whom his life has been recorded. There, surrounded by his children and his grande children, he yielded himself to the current of each succes¬ sive inclination; for he had now acquired that rare maturity of the moral stature in which the conflict between inclina- nation and duty is over, and virtue and self-indulgence are the same. Some decline of his intellectual powers was perceptible to the friends of his earlier and more active days; but “To things immortal time can do no wrong, And that which never is to die, for ever must be young,” Looking back with gratitude, sometimes eloquent, but more often from the depth of the emotion faltering on the tongue, to his long career of usefulness, of honour, and enjoyment, he watched with grave serenity the ebb of the current which was fast bearing him to his eternal reward. He died in his seventy-fifth year, in undisturbed tranquillity, after a very brief illness, and without any indication of bodily suffering. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the presence of a large number of the members of both Houses of Parlia¬ ment; nor was the solemn ritual of the church ever pro¬ nounced over the grave of any of her children with more affecting or more appropriate truth. Never was recited, on a more fit occasion, the sublime benediction — “ 1 heard a voice from heaven saying, Write, blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, for they rest from their labours, and their works do follow them.” The volumes to which we have been chiefly indebted for this very rapid epitome of some of the events of Mr. Wilberforce’s life, will have to undergo a severe ordeal. There are numberless persons who assert a kind of pro¬ perty in his reputation, and who will resent as almost a personal wrong any exhibition of his character which may LIFE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 57 fall short of their demands. We believe, however, though not esteeming ourselves the best possible judges, that even this powerful party will be satisfied. They will find in this portraiture of their great leader much to fulfil their ex¬ pectations. Impartial judges will, we think, award to the book the praise of fidelity, and diligence, and unaffected modesty. Studiously withdrawing themselves from the notice of their readers, the biographers of Mr. Wilberforce have not sought occasion to display the fruits of their theo¬ logical or literary studies. Their taste has been executed with ability, and with deep affection. No one can read such a narrative without interest, and many will peruse it with enthusiasm. It contains several extracts from Mr. Wilberforce’s speeches and throws much occasional light on the political history of England during the last half cen¬ tury. It brings us into acquaintance with a circle in which were projected and matured many of the great schemes of benevolence by which our age has been distinguished, and shows how partial is the distribution of renown in the world in which we are living. A more equal dispensation of justice would have awarded a far more conspicuous place amongst the benefactors of mankind to the names of Mr. Stephen and Mr. Macaulay, than has ever yet been as¬ signed to them. Biography, considered as an art, has been destroyed by the greatest of all biographers, James Boswell. His suc¬ cess must be forgotten before Plutarch or Isaac Walton will find either rivals or imitators. Yet memoirs, into which every thing illustrative of the character or fortunes of the person to be described is drawn, can never take a perma¬ nent place in literature, unless the hero be himself as pic¬ turesque as Johnson, nor unless the writer be gifted with the dramatic powers of Boswell. Mr. Wilberforce was an admirable subject for graphic sketches in this style; but the hand of a son could not have drawn them without im¬ propriety, and they have never been delineated by others. A tradition, already fading, alone preserves the memory of those social powers which worked as a spell on every one who approached him, and drew from Madame de Stael the declaration that he was the most eloquent and the wittiest converser she had met in England. But the memory of his influence in the councils of the state, of his holy character, and of his services to mankind, rests upon an imperishable basis, and will descend with honour to the latest times. THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE.* (Edinburgh Review, 1833.) If the enemies of Christianity in the commencement of the last century failed to accomplish its overthrow, they were at least successful in producing what at present ap¬ pears to have been a strange and unreasonable panic. Middleton, Bolingbroke, and Mandeville, have now lost their terrors; and (in common with the heroes of the Dun- ciad) Chubb, Toland, Collins, and Woolston, are remem¬ bered only on account of the brilliancy of the Aulo-du-fe at which they suffered. To these writers, however, be¬ longs the credit of having suggested to Clarke his inquiries into the elementary truth on which all religion depends ; and by them Warburton was provoked to “ demonstrate ” the Divine legation of Moses. They excited Newton to explore the fulfilment of Prophecy, and Lardner to accumu¬ late the proofs of the Credibility of the Gospels. A great¬ er than any of these, Joseph Butler, was induced, by the same adversaries, to investigate the analogy of natural and revealed religion, and Berkeley and Sherlock, with a long catalogue of more obscure names, crowded to the rescue of the me¬ naced citadel of the Faith. But in this anxiety to strengthen its defences, the garrison not only declined to attempt new conquests, but withdrew from much of their ancient domi¬ nion. In this its apologetic age, English Theology was distinguished by an unwonted timidity and coldness. The alliance which it had maintained from the days of Jewel to those of Leighton, with philosophy and eloquence, with wit and poetry, was dissolved. Taylor and Hall, Donne and Hooker, Baxter and Howe, had spoken as men having * The Life and Times of the Rev. George Whitfield, M. A. By Robert Philip. 8vo. London, 1838. Remains of the Rev. Richard Hurrell Froude, M. A. Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1838. THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 59 authority) and with an unclouded faith in their Divine Mis¬ sion. In that confidence they had grappled with every difficulty, and had wielded with equal energy and ease all the resources of genius and of learning. Alternately searching the depths of the heart, and playing over the mere surface of the mind, they relieved the subtleties of logic by a quibble or a pun, and illuminated, by intense flashes of wit, the metaphysical abysses which it was their delight to tread. Even when directing the spiritual affections to their highest exercise, they hazarded any quaint conceit which crossed their path, and yielded to every impulse of fancy or of passion. But Divinity was no longer to retain the foremost place in English literature. The Tillotsons and Seekers of a later age were alike distrustful of their readers and of themselves. Tame, cautious, and correct, they rose above the Tatlers and Spectators of their times, because on such themes it was impossible to be frivolous; but they can be hardly said to have contributed as largely as Steele and Addison to guide the opinions, or to form the charac¬ ter of their generation. This depression of theology was aided by the state of political parties under the two first princes of the House of Brunswick. Low and High Church were but other names for Whigs and Tories; and while Hoadley and At~ terbury wrangled about the principles of the Revolution, the sacred subjects which formed the pretext of their disputes were desecrated in the feelings of the multitude, who wit¬ nessed and enjoyed the controversy. Secure from farther persecution, and deeply attached to the new order of things, the Dissenters were no longer roused to religious zeal by invidious secular distinctions; and Doddington and Watts lamented the decline of their congregations from the standard of their ancient piety. The former victims of bi¬ gotry had become its proselytes, and anathemas were di¬ rected against the Pope and the Pretender, with still great¬ er acrimony than against the Evil One, with whom good Protestants of all denominations associated them. The theology of any age at once ascertains and regulates its moral stature; and, at the period of which we speak, the austere virtues of the Puritans, and the more meek and social, though not less devout spirit of the Worthies of the Church of England, if still to be detected in the recesses of private life, were discountenanced by the general habits 60 Stephen’s miscellanies. of society. The departure of the more pure and generous influences of earlier times may be traced no where more clearly than in those works of fiction, in which the pre¬ vailing profligacy of manners was illustrated by Fielding, Sterne, and Smollet; and proved, though with more honest purposes, by Richardson and Defoe. It was at this period that the Alma Mater of Laud and Sacheverel was nourishing in her bosom a little band of pupils destined to accomplish a momentous revolution in the national character. Wesley had already attained the dawn of manhood when, in 1714, his future rival and coad¬ jutor, George Whitfield, was born at a tavern in Gloucester, of which his father was the host. The death of the elder Whitfield within two years from that time, left the child to the care of his mother, who took upon herself the manage¬ ment of the “ Bell Inn though as her son has gratefully recorded, she “ prudently kept him, in his tender years, from intermeddling with the tavern business.” In such a situation he almost inevitably fell into vices and follies, which have been exaggerated as much by the vehemence of his own confessions, as by the malignity of his enemies. They exhibit some curious indications of his future cha¬ racter. He robbed his mother, but part of the money was given to the poor. He stole books, but they were books of devotion. Irritated by the unlucky tricks of his play¬ fellows, who, he says, in the language of David, “ com¬ passed him about like bees,” he converted into a prayer the prophetic imprecation of the Psalmist — “ In the name of the Lord I will destroy them.” The mind in which devotional feelings and bad passions were thus strongly knit together, was consigned in early youth, to the culture of the master of the grammar-school of St. Mary de Crypt, in his native city; and there were given the first auspices of his future eminence. He studied the English dramatic writers, and represented their female characters with ap¬ plause; and when the mayor and aldermen were to be ha¬ rangued by one of the scholars, the embryo field-preacher was selected to extol the merits, and to gratify the taste of their worships. His erratic propensities were developed almost as soon as his powers of elocution. Wearied with the studies of the grammar-school, he extorted his mother’s reluctant consent to return to the tavern; and there, he says, “ I put on my blue apron and my snuffers, washed mops, THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 61 cleaned rooms, and, in one word, became professed and common Drawer for nigh a year and a half.” The tapster was, of course, occasionally tipsy, and always in request; but as even the flow of the tap may not be perennial, he found leisure to compose sermons, and stole from the night some hours for the study of the Bible. At the Bell Inn there dwelt a sister-in-law of Whitfield’s, with whom it was his fortune or his fault to quarrel; and to sooth his troubled spirit he “ would retire and weep before the Lord, as Hagar when flying from Sarah.” From the presence of this Sarah he accordingly fled to Bristol, and betook himself to the study of Thomas a Kempis; but returning once more to Gloucester, exchanged Divinity for the drama, and then abandoned the dramatists for his Ions1 * neglected school-books. For now had opened a prospect inviting him to the worthy use of those talents which might otherwise have been consumed in sordid occupations, or in some obscure and fruitless efforts to assert his native supe¬ riority to other men. Intelligence had reached his mother that admission might be obtained at Pembroke College, Oxford, for her capricious and thoughtful boy; and the in¬ tuitive wisdom of a mother’s love assured her that through this avenue he might advance to distinction, if not to fortune. A few more oscillations between dissolute tastes and heaven¬ ward desires, and the youth finally gained the mastery over his lower appetites. From his seventeenth year to his dying day he lived amongst imbittered enemies and jealous friends, without a stain on his reputation. In 1731 the gates of Pembroke College had finally closed on the rude figure of one of her illustrious sons, expelled by poverty to seek a precarious subsistence, and to earn a lasting reputation in the obscure alleys of London. In the following year they were opened to a pupil as ill provided with this world’s wealth as Samuel Johnson, but destined to achieve a still more extensive and a more enduring celebrity. The waiter at the Bell Inn had become a ser¬ vitor at Oxford — no great advancement in the social scale ac¬ cording to the habits of that age — yet a change which con¬ ferred the means of elevation on a mind too ardent to leave them unimproved. He became the associate of Charles, and the disciple of John Wesley, who had at that time taken as their spiritual guide the celebrated mystic, William Law. These future chiefs of a religious revolution were 6 02 Stephen’s miscellanies. then “interrogating themselves whether they had been sim¬ ple and recollected; whether they had prayed with fervour Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and on Saturday noon; if they had used a collect at nine, twelve and three o’clock; duly meditated on Sunday from three to four on Thomas a Kempis, or mused on Wednesday and Friday from twelve to one on the Passion.” But Quietism, indigenous in the East, is an exotic in this cold and busy land of ours, bearing at the best but sorry fruit, and hastening to a premature decay. Never was mortal man less fitted for the contem¬ plative state than George Whitfield. It was an attempt as hopeless as that of converting a balloon into an observatory. He dressed the character indeed to admiration, for “ he thought it unbecoming a penitent to have his hair powdered, and wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes.” But the sublime abstractions which should people the cell and haunt the spirit of the hermit he wooed in vain. In the hopeless attempt to do nothing but meditate, “ the power of meditating or even of thinking was,” he says, “ taken from him.” Castanza on the “Spiritual Combat” advised him to talk but little; and “ Satan said he must not talk at all.” The Divine Redeemer had been surrounded in his temptations by deserts and wild beasts, and to approach this example as closely as the localities allowed, Whitfield was accustomed to select Christ Church Meadow as the scene, and a stormy night as the time of his mental con¬ flicts. He prostrated his body on the bare earth, fasted during Lent, and exposed himself to the cold till his hands began to blacken, and “ by abstinence and inward struggles so emaciated his body as to be scarcely able to creep up stairs.” In this deplorable state he received from the Wes¬ leys books and ghastly counsels. His tutor, more wisely, sent him a physician, and for seven weeks he laboured un¬ der a severe illness. It was, in his own language, “ a glo¬ rious visitation.” It gave him time and composure to make a written record and a penitent confession of his youthful sins — to examine the New Testament; to read Bishop Hall’s Contemplations; and to seek by prayer for wisdom and tor peace. The blessings thus invoked were not denied. “ The day-star,” he says, “arose in my heart. The spirit of mourning was taken from me. For some time 1 could not avoid singing Psalms wherever I was, but my joy became gradually more settled. Thus were the days of my mourn- ,ing ended.” THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 63 And thus also was ended his education. — Before the completion of his twenty-first year, Whitfield returned to Gloucester; and such was the fame of his piety and talents, that Dr, Benson, the then Bishop of the Diocess, offered to dispense, in his favour, with the rule which forbade the ordination of Deacons at so unripe an age. The mental agitation which preceded his acceptance of this proposal, is described in these strange but graphic terms in one of his latest sermons. “ I never prayed against any corruption I had in my life, so much as I did against going into holy orders so soon as my friends were for having me go. Bishop Benson was pleased to honour me with peculiar friendship, so as to offer me preferment, or to do any thing for me. My friends wanted me to mount the Church betimes. They wanted me to knock my head against the pulpit too young, but how some young men stand up here and there and preach I do not know. However it be to them, God knows how deep a concern entering into the ministry and preaching was to me. I have prayed a thousand times, till the sweat has dropped from my face like rain, that God of his infinite mercy would not let me enter the church till he called me to and thrust me forth in his work. I remember once in Gloucester, I know the room; I look up to the window when I am there, and walk along the street. I know the window upon which I have laid prostrate. I said, Lord, I cannot go, I shall be puffed up with pride, and fall into the condemnation of the Devil. Lord, do not let me go yet. I pleaded to be at Oxford two or three years more. I in¬ tended to make one hundred and fifty sermons, and thought that I would set up with a good stock in trade. I remem¬ ber praying, wrestling, and striving with God. I said, I am undone. I am unfit to preach in thy great name. Send me not, Lord — send me not yet. I wrote to all my friends in town and country to pray against the Bishop's solicitation, but they insisted 1 should go into orders be¬ fore I was twenty-two. After all their solicitations, these words came into my mind, ‘ Nothing shall pluck you out of my hands;’ they came warm to my heart. Then, and not till then, I said, ‘ Lord, I will go; send me when thou wilt.’ He was ordained accordingly; and ‘ when the Bishop laid his hands upon my head, my heart,’ he says, ‘ was melted down, and I offered up my whole spirit, soul, and body.’ 64 Stephen’s miscellanies. A mail within whose bosom resides an oracle directing his steps in the language and with the authority of inspira¬ tion, had needs be thus self-devoted in 'soul and body to some honest purpose, if he would not mistake the voice of the Pythoness for that which issues from the sanctuary. But the uprightness and inflexible constancy of Whitfield s character rendered even its superstitions comparatively harmless ; and the sortilege was ever in favour of some new effort to accomplish the single object for which he henceforward lived. The next words which “ came to his soul with power” were, “ Speak out, Paul,” and never was injunction more strictly obeyed. “ Immediately,” he says, “ my heart was enlarged, and I preached on the Sunday morning to a very crowded audi¬ ence with as much freedom as if I had been a preacher for some years. As I proceeded I perceived the fire kindled, till at last, though so young, and amidst a crowd of those who knew me in my infant childish days, I trust I was enabled to speak with some degree of gospel authority. Some few mocked, but most for the present seemed struck, and I have heard since that a complaint had been made to the Bishop that I drove fifteen mad by my first sermon. The worthy Prelate, as I am informed, wished that the madness might not be forgotten before next Sunday,” Thus early apprized of the secret of his strength, his pro¬ found aspirations for the growth of Christianity, the delight of exercising his rare powers, and the popular admiration which rewarded them, operating with combined and cease¬ less force on a mind impatient of repose, urged him into ex¬ ertions which, if not attested by irrefragable proofs, might appear incredible and fabulous. It was the statement of one who knew him well, and who was incapable of wilful exaggeration — and it is confirmed by his letters, journals, and a whole cloud of witnesses— that “ in the compass of a single week, and that for years, he spoke in general forty hours, and in very many sixty, and that to thousands; and after his labours, instead of taking any rest, he was en¬ gaged in offering up prayers and intercessions, with hymns and spiritual songs, as his manner was, in every house to which he was invited.” Given, a preacher, who during the passage of the sun through the ecliptic, addresses his audience every seventh dav, in two discourses of the dwarfish size to which ser- THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 65 mons attain in this degenerate age, and multiply his efforts by forty, and you do not reach the standard by which, for thirty-five successive years, Whitfield regulated this single branch of his exertions. Combine this with the fervour with which he habitually spoke, the want of all aids to the voice in the fields and the thoroughfares he frequented, and the toil of becoming distinctly audible to thousands and tens of thousands; and, considered merely as a physical phenomenon, the result is amongst the most curious of all well authenticated marvels. If the time spent in travelling from place to place, and some brief intervals of repose be subtracted, his whole life may be said to have been con¬ sumed in the delivery of one continuous or scarcely unin¬ terrupted sermon. Strange as is such an example of bodily and mental energy, still stranger is the power he possessed of fascinating the attention of hearers of every rank of life and of every variety of understanding. Not only were the loom, the forge, the plough, the collieries, and the work¬ shops, deserted at his approach, but the spell was acknow¬ ledged by Hume and Franklin— by Pulteney, Bolingbroke, and Chesterfield — by maids of honour and lords of the bed¬ chamber. Such indeed was its force, that when the scandal could be concealed behind a well adjusted curtain, “ e’en mitred ‘auditors’ would nod the head.” Neither English reserve, nor the theological discrimination of the Scotch, nor the callous nerves of the Slave-dealers of America, nor the stately self-possession of her aborigines, could resist the enchantment. Never was mortal man gifted with such an incapacity of fatiguing or of being fatigued. No similar praise could be honestly awarded to Whit¬ field’s present biographer. He has followed the steps of the great itinerant from the cradle to the grave, in a volume of nearly six hundred closely printed pages, compiled on the principle that nothing can be superfluous in the narra¬ tive of a man’s life which was of any real importance to the man himself, or to his associates. The chronicle so drawn up, illuminated by no gleams of philosophy, human or divine, and arranged on no intelligible method, is a sore exercise for the memory and the patience of the reader. It records, without selection or forbearance, thirteen succes¬ sive voyages across the Atlantic— pilgrimages incalculable to every part of this island, and of the North American con¬ tinent, from Georgia to Boston — controversies with Wesley 6* 66 Stephen’s miscellanies. on predestination and perfection, and with the Bishops on still deeper mysteries — Chapel buildings and subscriptions — preachings and the excitement which followed them — and characteristic sayings and uncharacteristic letters, meet¬ ings and partings, and every other incident, great and small, which has been preserved by the oral or written traditions of Whitfield’s followers. His life still remains to be writ¬ ten by some one who shall bring to the task other qualifi¬ cations than an honest zeal for his fame, and a cordial adoption of his opinion^. From the conflict with the enemies who had threatened her existence, the church militant turned to resist the un¬ welcome ally who now menaced her repose. Warburton led the van, and behind him many a mitred front scowled on the audacious innovator. Divested of the logomachies which chiefly engaged the attention of the disputants, the controversy between Whitfield and the Bishops lay in a narrow compass. It being mutually conceded that the vir¬ tues of the Christian life can result only from certain divine impulses, and that to lay a claim to this holy inspiration when its legitimate fruits are wanting, is a fatal delusion; he maintained, and they denied, that the person who is the subject of this sacred influence has within his own bosom an independent attestation of its reality. So abstruse a de¬ bate required the zest of some more pungent ingredients; and the polemics with whom Whitfield had to do, were not such sciolists in their calling as to be ignorant of the necessity of rivetting upon him some epithet at once op¬ probrious and vague. While, therefore, milder spirits ar¬ raigned him as an enthusiast, Warburton, with constitutional energy of invective, denounced him as a fanatic. In vain he demanded a definition of these reproachful terms. To have fixed their meaning would have been to blunt their edge. They afforded a solution at once compendious, ob¬ scure, and repulsive, of whatever was remarkable in his character, and have accompanied his name from that time to the present. The currents of life had drifted Warburton on divinity as his profession, but nature designed him for a satirist; and the propensity was too strong to yield even to the study of the Gospel. From them he might have discovered the injustice of his censure; for the real nature of religious fanaticism can be learnt with equal clearness from no other THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD A.ND FROUDE. 67 source. They tell of men who compassed sea and land to make one proselyte, that when made they might train him up as a persecutor and a bigot; of others, who erected se¬ pulchral monuments to the martyrs of a former age, while unsheathing the sword which was to augment their num¬ ber; of some who would have called down fire from heaven to punish the inhospitable city which rejected their master; and of those who exhausted their bodies with fasting, and their minds with study, that they might with deeper em¬ phasis curse the ignorant multitude. They all laboured under a mental disease, which, amongst fanatics of every generation, has assumed the same distinctive type. It con¬ sists in an unhallowed alliance of the morose and vindictive passions with devotion or religious excitement. Averting the mental vision from what is cheerful, affectionate, and animating in piety, the victims of this malady regard op¬ posing sects, not as the children, but as the enemies of God; and while looking inward with melancholy alternations of pride and self-reproach, learn to contemplate Deity itself with but half-suppressed aversion. To connect the name of the kind hearted George Whitfield with such a reproach as this! To call on the indolent of all future generations who should believe in Warburton, to associate the despised itinerant with the Dominies, De Ranees, and Bonners of former ages! Truly the indignant prelate knew not what manner of spirit he was of. If ever philanthropy burned in the human heart with a pure and intense flame, embracing the whole family of man in the spirit of univer¬ sal charity, that praise is pre-eminently due to Whitfield. His predestinarian speculations perplexed his mind, but could not check the expansion of his Catholic feelings. “ He loved the world that hated him.” He had no prefe¬ rences but in favour of the ignorant, the miserable, and the poor. In their cause he shrunk from no privation, and declined neither insult nor hostility. To such wrongs he opposed the weapons of an all-enduring meekness, and a love incapable of repulse. The springs of his benevolence were inexhaustible, and could not choose but flow. As¬ sisted it may have been by natural disposition, and by many an external impulse; but it ultimately reposed on the fixed persuasion that he was engaged in a sacred duty, the faithful discharge of which would be followed by an im¬ perishable recompense. With whatever undigested sub- 68 Stephen’s miscellanies. defies his religious creed was encumbered, they could not hide from him, though they might obscure the truth, that, between the virtues of this life and the rewards of a future state, the connexion is necessary and indissoluble. Refer¬ ring this retributive dispensation exclusively to the divine benevolence, his theology inculcated humility while it in¬ spired hope. It taught him self-distrust, and reliance on a strength superior to his own; and instructed him in the mystery which reconciles the elevation and the purity of disinterested love with those lower motives of action which more immediately respect the future advantage of the agent. Whatever else Whitfield may have been, a fanatic, in the proper sense of that term, he assuredly was not. The charge of enthusiasm was so ambiguous, that it might, with equal propriety, be understood as conveying either commendation or reproach. Hope is the element in which all the great men of the world move and have their being. Engaged in arduous and lofty designs, they must, to a certain extent, live in an imaginary world, and recruit their exhausted strength with ideal prospects of the success which is to repay their labours. But, like every other emotion when long indulged, hope yields but a precarious obedience to the reasoning powers; and reason herself, even when most enlightened, will not seldom make a vo¬ luntary abdication of her sovereignly in favour of her pow¬ erful minister; — surrendering up to the guidance of impulse a mind whose aims are too high to be fulfilled under her own sober counsels. For in “this little state of man” the passions must be the free subjects, not the slaves of the understanding; and while they obey her precepts, should impart to her some of their own spirit, warmth, and ener¬ gy. It is, however, essential to a well constituted nature, that the subordination of the lower to the superior faculties, though occasionally relaxed, should be habitually main¬ tained. Used with due abstinence, hope acts as a health¬ ful tonic; intern perately indulged, as an enervating opiate. The visions of future triumph, which at first animated ex¬ ertion, if dwelt upon too intently, will usurp the place of the stern reality, and noble objects will be contemplated, not for their own inherent worth, but on account of the day-dreams they engender. Thus, imagination makes one man a hero, another a somnambulist, and a third a lunatic: while it renders them all enthusiasts. And thus are classed THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 69 together, under one generic term, characters wide asunder as the poles, and standing at the top and at the bottom of the scale of human intellect; and the same epithet is used to describe Francis Bacon and Emanuel Swedenborg. Religious rnen are, for obvious reasons, more subject than others to enthusiasm, both in its invigorating and in its morbid forms. They are aware that there is about their path and about their bed a real presence, which yet no sense attests. They revere a spiritual inmate of the soul, of whom they have no definite consciousness. They live in communion with one, whose nature is chiefly defined by negatives. They are engaged in duties which can be performed acceptably only at the bidding of the deepest affections. They rest their faith on prophetic and miracu¬ lous suspensions, in times past, of the usual course of nature; and derive their hopes and fears from the dim sha¬ dows cast by things eternal on the troubled mirror of this transient scene. What wonder if, under the incumbent weight of such thoughts as these, the course of active virtue be too often arrested; or if a religious romance sometimes takes the place of contemplative piety, and the fictitious gradually supersedes the real; and a world of dreams, a system of opinions, and a code of morals, which religion disavows, occasionally shed their narcotic influence over a spirit excited and oppressed by the shapeless forms and the fearful powers with which it is conversant? Both in the more and in the less favourable sense of the expression, Whitfield was an enthusiast. The thraldom of the active to the meditative powers was indeed abhorrent from his nature; but he was unable to maintain a just equilibrium between them. His life was one protracted calenture; and the mental fever discoloured and distorted the objects of his pursuits. Without intellectual disci¬ pline or sound learning, he confounded his narrow range of elementary topics with the comprehensive scheme and science of divinity. Leaping over the state of pupillage, he became at once a teacher and a dogmatist. The les¬ sons which he never drew from books, were never taught him by men. He allowed himself no leisure for social in¬ tercourse with his superiors, or with his equals; but under¬ went the debilitating effects of conversing almost exclu¬ sively with those who sat as disciples at his feet. Their homage, and the impetuous tumult of his career, left him 70 Stephen’s miscellanies. but superficially acquainted with himself. Unsuspicious of his own ignorance, and exposed to flattery far more intoxicating than the acclamations of the theatre, he laid the foundations of a new religious system with less of pro¬ found thought, and in a greater penury of theological re¬ search, than had ever fallen to the lot of a reformer or heresiarch before. The want of learning was concealed under the dazzling veil of popular eloquence, and supplied by the assurance of Divine illumination; and the spiritual influence on which he thus relied was little else than a continually recurring miracle. It was not a power like that which acts throughout the material world — the unseen and inaudible source of life, sustaining, cementing, and in¬ vigorating all things, hiding itself from the heedless beneath (he subordinate agency it employs, and disclosed to the thoughtful by his prolific and plastic energies. The access of the Sacred presence, which Whitfield acknowledged, was perceptible by an inward consciousness, and was not merely different, but distinguishable from the movements of that intellectual and sensitive mechanism of his own nature, by means of which it operated. He discerned it not only in the growth of the active and passive virtues, and in progressive strength and wisdom and peace, but in sudden impulses which visited his bosom, and unexpected suggestions which directed his path. A truth of all others the most consolatory and the most awful, was thus de¬ graded almost to a level with superstitions, which, in their naked form, no man wrould have more vehemently dis¬ claimed; and the great mystery which blends together the human and the divine in the Christian dispensation, lost much of its sublime character, and with it much of its sa¬ lutary influence. It was indeed impossible that a mind feeding upon such visions as he invited and cherished should entirely escape their practical mischief. He would have rejected with horror the impious dream that the indwelling Deity would absolve him from any obligation of justice, mercy, or truth. Yet he could persuade himself that he enjoyed a dispensation from the duty of canonical obedience to his ecclesiastical superiors. His revolt against the authority of the Church of which he was a presbyter is at once avowed and de¬ fended by his present biographer. “ If,” he says, “ a bishop did good or allowed good to be done, Whitfield venerated THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 71 him and his office too; but he despised both whenever they were hostile to truth or zeal — I have no objection to say, whenever they were hostile to his own sentiments and measures. What honest man would respect an unjust judge, or an ignorant physician, because of their profes¬ sional titles? It is high time to put an end to this non¬ sense.” Mr. Philip’s boast is not, or at least should not be, that he is well found in the principles of casuistry. He is no Ductor Dubitantium , but a spiritual pugilist, who uses his pen as a cudgel. But, whatever may be the value of hard words, they are not sufficient to adjust such a ques¬ tion as this. Under sanctions of the most awful solemnity, Whitfield had bound himself to submit to the lawful com¬ mands of his bishop. His “measures,” being opposed to the law ecclesiastical, were interdicted by his diocesan; but, his “ sentiments ” telling him that he was right, and the bishop wrong, the vow of obedience was, it seems, can¬ celled. If so, it was but an impious mockery to make or to receive it. If it be really “nonsense” to respect so sacred an engagement, then is there less sense than has usually been supposed in good faith and plain dealing. Even on the hazardous assumption that the allegiance vo¬ luntarily assumed by the clergy of the Anglican church is dissoluble at the pleasure of the inferior party, it is at least evident that, as an honest man, Whitfield was bound to abandon the advantages when he repudiated the duties of the relation in which he stood to his bishop. But, “de¬ spising ” the episcopal office, he still kept his station in the episcopal church; and, if he had no share in her emolu¬ ments, continued at least to enjoy the rank, the worship, and the influence which attend her ministers. In the midst of his revolt he performed her offices, and ministered in her temples, as often as opportunity offered. It was the dishonest proceeding of a good man bewildered by dreams of the special guidance of a Divine Monitor, The apology is the error of an honest man led astray by a sectarian spirit. The sinister influence of Whitfield’s imagination on his opinions, and through them on his conduct, may be illustrated by another example. He not only became the purchaser of slaves, but condemned the restriction which at that time for¬ bade their introduction into Georgia. There is extant, in 72 Stephen’s miscellanies. his hand-writing, an inventory of the effects at the Orphan House, in that province, in which these miserable captives take their place between the cattle and the carts. “ Blessed be God,” he exclaimed, “for the increase of the negroes. I entirely approve of reducing the Orphan House as low as possible, and I am determined to take no more than the plantation will maintain till I can buy more negroes.” It is true that it was only as founder of this asylum for des¬ titute children that he made these purchases; and true, that in these wretched bondsmen he recognised immortal be¬ ings for whose eternal welfare he laboured; and it is also true that the morality of his age was lax on the subject. But the American Quakers were already bearing testimony against the guilt of slavery and the slave trade; and even had they been silent, so eminent a teacher of Christianity as Whitfield, could not, without censure, have so far de¬ scended from Scriptural to conventional virtue. To measure such a man as George Whitfield by the standards of refined society might seem a very strange, if not a ludicrous attempt. Yet, as Mr. Philip repeatedly, and with emphasis, ascribes to him the character of a “ gen¬ tleman,” it must be stated that he was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours against the laws of that aristocratic commonwealth in which the assertion of social equality, and the nice observance of the privileges of sex and rank, are so curiously harmonized. Such was his want of animal courage, that in the vigour of his days he could tamely ac¬ quiesce in a severe personal chastisement, and fly to the hold of his vessel for safety at the prospect of an approach¬ ing sea-fight. Such was his failure in self-respect, that a tone of awkward adulation distinguishes his letters to the ladies of high degree who partook and graced his triumph. But his capital offence against the code of manners was the absence of that pudicity which shrinks from exposing to public gaze the deepest emotions of the heart. In Journals originally divulged, and at last published by himself, and throughout his voluminous correspondence, he is “naked and is not ashamed.” Some very coarse elements must have entered into the composition of a man who could thus scatter abroad disclosures of the secret communings of his spirit with his Maker. Akin to this fault is his seeming unconsciousness of the oppressive majesty of the topics with which he was habit- THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 73 ually occupied. The seraph in the prophetic vision was arrayed with wings, of which some were given to urge his flight, and others to cover his face. Vigorous as were the pinions with which Whitfield moved, he appears to have been unprovided with those beneath which his eyes should have shrunk from too familiar a contemplation of the inef¬ fable glory. Where prophets and apostles “stood trem¬ bling,” he is at his ease; where they adored, he declaims. This is, indeed, one of the besetting sins of licentiates in divinity. But few ever moved among the infinitudes and eternities of invisible things with less embarrassment or with less of silent awe. Illustrations might be drawn from every part of his writings, but hardly without committing the irreverence we condemn. To the lighter graces of taste and fancy Whitfield had no pretension. He wandered from shore to shore unob¬ servant of the wonders of art and nature, and the strange varieties of men and manners which solicited his notice. In sermons in which no resource within his reach is neg¬ lected, there is scarcely a trace to be found of such objects having met his eye cr arrested his attention. The poetry of the inspired volume awakens in him no corresponding raptures; and the rhythmical quotations which overspread Iris letters never rise above the cantilena of the tabernacle. In polite literature, in physical and moral science, he never advanced much beyond the standard of the grammar-school of St. Mary de Crypt. Even as a theologian, he has no claims to erudition. He appears to have had no Hebrew and little Greek, and to have studied neither ecclesiastical antiquity nor the great divines of modern times. His read¬ ing seems to have been confined to a few, and those not the most considerable, of the works of the later noncon¬ formists. Neither is it possible to assign him a place among profound or original thinkers. He was, in fact, al¬ most an uneducated man; and the powers of his mind were never applied, and perhaps could not have been bent suc¬ cessfully, either to the acquisition of abstruse knowledge or to the enlargement of its boundaries. “Let the name of George Whitfield perish if God be glorified,” was his own ardent and sincere exclamation. His disciples will hardly acquiesce in their teacher’s self-abasement, but will resent, as injurious to him and to their cause, the imputations o« enthusiasm, of personal timidity, of irreverence and coarse- 7 74 Stephen’s miscellanies. ness of mind, of ignorance and of a mediocrity or absence of the powers of fancy, invention and research. But the apotheosis of saints is no less idolatrous than that of he¬ roes; and they have not imbibed Whitfield’s spirit who cannot brook to be told that he had his share of the faults and infirmities which no man more solemnly ascribed to the whole human race. Such, however, was his energy and self-devotion, that even the defects of his character were rendered subservient to the one end for which he lived. From the days of Paul of Tarsus and Martin Luther to our own, history records the career of no man who, with a less alloy of motives ter¬ minating in self, or of passions breaking loose from the control of reason, concentrated all the faculties of his soul with such intensity and perseverance for the accomplishment of one great design. He belonged to that rare variety of the human species of which it has been said that the liber¬ ties of mankind depend on their inability to combine in erecting a universal monarchy. With nerves incapable of fatigue, and a buoyant confidence in himself, which no au¬ thority, neglect, or opposition could abate, opposing & pachy¬ dermatous front to all the missiles of scorn and contumely, and yet exquisitely sensitive to the affection which cheered, and the applause which rewarded his labours, un¬ embarrassed by the learning which reveals difficulties, or the meditative powers which suggest doubts; with an insa¬ tiable thirst for active occupation, and an unhesitating faith in whatever cause he undertook; he might have been one of the most dangerous enemies of the peace and happiness of the world, if powers so formidable in their possible abuse had not been directed to a beneficent end. Judged by the wisdom which is of the earth, earthy, Whitfield would be pronounced a man whose energy ministered to a vulgar ambition, of which the triumph over his ecclesiastical su¬ periors, and the admiration of unlettered multitudes, were the object and the recompense. Estimated by those whose religions opinions and observances are derived from him by hereditary descent, he is nothing less than an apostle, inspired in the latter ages of the Church to purify her faith and to reform her morals. A more impartial survey of his life and writings may suggest the conclusion, that the ho¬ mage of admiring crowds, and the blandishments of courtly dames, were neither unwelcome nor unsolicited; that a hie- THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 75 rarehy subdued to inaction, if not to silence, gratified his self-esteem: and that, when standing on what he delighted to call his “throne,” the current of devout and holy thoughts was not uncontaminated by the admixture of some human exultation. But ill betide him who delights in the too curious dissection of the motives of others, or even of his own. Such anatomists breathe an impure air, and un¬ consciously contract a sickly mental habit. Whitfield was a great and a holy man; among the foremost of the heroes of philanthropy, and as a preacher without a superior or a rival. If eloquence be justly defined by the emotions it excites, or by the activity it quickens, the greatest orator of our times was he who first announced the victory of Waterloo — if that station be not rather due to the learned President of the College of Physicians, who daily makes the ears to tingle of those who listen to his prognostics. But the con¬ verse of the rule may be more readily admitted, and we may confidently exclude from the list of eloquent speakers him whose audience is impassive w'hilst headdresses them, and inactive afterwards. Every seventh day a great company of preachers raise their voices in the land to detect our sins, to explain our duty, to admonish, to alarm and to con¬ sole. Compare the prodigious extent of this apparatus with its perceptible results, and, inestimable as they are, who will deny that they disappointed the hopes which antece¬ dently to experience, the least sanguine would have in¬ dulged? The preacher has, indeed, no novelties to commu¬ nicate. His path has been trodden hard and dry by constant use; yet he speaks as an ambassador from Heaven, and his hearers are frail, sorrowing, perplexed and dying men. The highest interests of both are at stake. The preacher’s eye rests on his manuscript; the hearer’s turns to the clock; the half hour glass runs out its sand; and the portals close on well-dressed groups of critics, looking for all the world as if just dismissed from a lecture on the tertiary strata. Taking his stand on some rising knoll, his tall and graceful figure dressed with elaborate propriety, and com¬ posed into an easy and commanding attitude, Whitfield’s clear blue eye ranged over thousands, and tens of thou¬ sands, drawm up in close files on the plain below, or clus¬ tering into masses on every adjacent eminence. A “rabble rout” hung on the skirts of the mighty host; and the feel- 76 Stephen’s miscellanies. ings of the devout were disturbed by the scurrile jests of the illiterate, and the cold sarcasms of the more polished spectators of their worship. But the rich and varied tones of a voice of unequalled depth and compass quickly si¬ lenced every ruder sound — as in rapid succession its ever- changing melodies passed from the calm of simple narra¬ tive, to the measured distinctness of argument, to the ve¬ hemence of reproof, and the pathos of heavenly consola¬ tion, “ Sometimes the preacher wept exceedingly, stamped loudly and passionately, and was frequently so overcome that for a few seconds one would suspect he could never reco¬ ver, and, when he did, nature required some little time to compose herself.” In words originally applied to one of the first German Reformers — vividus vultus , vividi oculi, vividce manus , denique omnia vivida. The agitated as¬ sembly caught the passions of the speaker, and exulted, wept, or trembled at his bidding. He stood before them, in popular belief, a persecuted man, spurned and rejected by lordly prelates, yet still a presbyter of the Church, and clothed with her authority; his meek and lowly demeanour chastened and elevated by the conscious grandeur of the apostolic succession. The thoughtful gazed earnestly on the scene of solemn interest, pregnant with some strange and enduring influence on the future condition of mankind. But the wise and the simple alike yielded to the enchant¬ ment; and the thronging multitude gave utterance to their emotions in every form in which nature seeks relief from feeling too strong for mastery. Whitfield had cultivated the histrionic art to a perfection which has rarely been obtained by any who have worn the sock or the buskin. Foote and Garrick were his frequent hearers, and brought away with them the characteristic and very just remark, that “ his oratory was not at its full height until he had repeated a discourse forty times.” The tran¬ sient delirium of Franklin — attested by the surrender on one occasion of all the contents of his purse at a “ charity sermon,” and by the Quaker’s refusal to lend more to a man who had lost his wits — did not prevent his investigating the causes of this unwonted excitement. “ I came,” he says, “by hearing him often, to distinguish between ser¬ mons newly composed and those he had preached often in the course of his travels. His delivery of the latter was so improved by frequent repetition, that every accent, every THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROTJDE. 77 emphasis, every modulation of the voice was so perfectly timed, that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse — a pleasure of much the same kind as that received from an excellent piece of music.” The basis of the singular dominion which was thus ex¬ ercised by Whitfield during a period equal to that assigned by ordinary calculation for the continuance of human life, would repay a more careful investigation than we have space or leisure to attempt. Amongst subordinate influences, the faintest of all is that which may have been occasionally exercised over the more refined and sensitive members of his congregations by the romantic scenery in which they assembled. But the tears shaping “ white gutters down the black faces of the colliers, black as they came out of the coal pits,” were certainly not shed under any over¬ whelming sense of the picturesque. The preacher himself appears to have felt and courted this excitement. “ The open firmament above me, the prospect of the adjacent fields, to which sometimes was added the solemnity of the ap¬ proaching evening, was,” he says, “ almost too much for me.” But a far more effectual resource was found in the art of diverting into a new and unexpected channel, the feelings of a multitude already brought together with ob- jects the most strangely contrasted to his own. Journeying to Wales, he passes over Hampton Common, and finds himself surrounded by twelve thousand people collected to see a man hung in chains, and an extempore pulpit is im¬ mediately provided within sight of this deplorable object. On another similar occasion, the wretched culprit was per¬ mitted to steal an hour from the eternity before him, while listening, or seeming to listen, to a sermon delivered by Whitfield to himself and to the spectators of his approach¬ ing doom. He reaches Basingstroke, when the inhabitants are engaged in all the festivities of a country fair, and thus records the use he made of so tempting an opportunity. “ As I passed on horseback I saw the stage, and as I rode further I met divers coming to the revel, which affected me so much that I had no rest in my spirit, and therefore having asked counsel of God, and perceiving an unusual warmth and power enter into my soul, though I was gone above a mile, I could not bear to see so many dear souls for whom Christ had died ready to perish, and no minister •7* 78 Stephen’s miscellanies. or magistrate to interpose; upon this, I told my dear fellow- travellers that I was resolved to follow the example of Howell Harris in Wales, and bear my testimony against such lying vanities, let the consequences to my own pri¬ vate person be what they would. They immediately as¬ senting, I rode back to the town, got upon the stage erected for the wrestlers, and began to show them the error of their ways.” The often told tale of Whitfield’s controversy with the Merry-Andrew at Moorfields, still more curiously illustrates the skill and intrepidity with which he contrived to divert to his own purposes an excitement running at high tide in the opposite direction. The following is an extract from Ills own narrative of the encounter. “ For many years, from one end of Moorfields to the other, booths of all kinds have been erected for mountebanks, players, puppet-shows, and such like. With a heart bleeding with compassion for so many thousands led captive by the devil at his will, on Whit-Monday, at six o’clock in the morning, attended by a large congregation of praying peo¬ ple, I ventured to lift up a standard amongst them, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Perhaps there were about ten thousand in waiting, not for me, but for Satan’s instruments to amuse them. Glad was I to find that 1 had for once, as it were, got the start of the devil. I mounted my field pul¬ pit; almost all flocked immediately around it; I preached on these words — “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” &c. They gazed, they listened, they wept, and I believe that many felt themselves stung with deep conviction for their past sins. All was hushed and solemn. Being thus encouraged I ventured out again at noon. The whole fields seemed, in a bad sense of the word, all white, ready not for the Redeemer’s but for Beelzebub’s harvest. All his agents were in full motion. Drummers, trumpeters, Merry-Andrews, masters of puppet-shows, exhibitions of wild beasts, players, &c., all busy in entertaining their re¬ spective auditors. I suppose there could not be less than twenty or thirty thousand people. My pulpit was fixed on the opposite side, and immediately, to their great mor¬ tification, they found the number of their attendants sadly lessened. Judging that, like St. Paul, I should now be called, as it were, to fight with beasts at Ephesus, I preached from these words, “ Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 79 You may easily guess that there was some noise among the craftsmen, and that I was honoured with having a few stones, dirt, rotten eggs and pieces of dead cats thrown at me, whilst engaged in calling them from their favourite but lying vanities. My soul was indeed among lions, but far the greatest part of my congregation, which was very large, seemed for awhile turned into lambs. This Satan could not brook. One of his choicest servants was exhibiting, trumpeting on a large stage, but as soon as the people saw me in my black robes and my pulpit, I think all to a man left him and ran to me. For awhile I was enabled to lift my voice like a trumpet, and many heard the joyful sound. God’s people kept praying, and the enemy’s agents made a kind of roaring at some distance from our camp. At length they approached near, and the Merry-Andrew got up on a man’s shoulders, and, advancing near the pulpit, attempted to lash me with a long heavy whip several times, but always with the violence of his motion tumbled down. I think I continued in praying, preaching and singing (for the noise was too great to preach,) for about three hours. We then retired to the Tabernacle, with my pockets full of notes from persons brought under concern, and read them amidst the praises and spiritual acclamations of thou¬ sands. Three hundred and fiftv awakened souls were received in one day, and I believe the number of notes exceeded a thousand.” The propensity to mirth which, in common with all men of robust mental constitution, Whitfield possessed in an unusual degree, was, like every thing else belonging to him, compelled to minister to the interest and success of his preaching; but however much his pleasantries may attest the buoyancy of his mind, it would be difficult to assign them any other praise. Oscillating in spirit as well as in body, between Drury-Lane and the Tabernacle, Shuter, the comedian, attended in Tottenham Court Road during the run of his successful performance of the character of Ramble, and was greeted with the following apostrophe — “ And thou, poor Ramble, who hast so long rambled from Him, come thou also. Oh! end thy ramblings, and come to Jesus.” The preacher in this instance descended not a little below the level of the player. In the eighteenth century the crown of martyrdom was a prize for which Roman Catholics alone were permitted 80 Stephen’s miscellanies. to contend, and Whitfield was unable to gain the influence which he would have derived from the stake, from a prison or a confiscation. Conscious, however, of the importance of such sufferings, he persuaded himself and desired to con¬ vince the world, that he had to endure them. The Bishops were persecutors, because they repelled with some acri¬ mony his attacks on their authority and reputation. The mob were persecutors, because they pelted a man who in¬ sisted on their hearing him preach w'hen they wanted to see a bear dance, or a conjurer eat fire. A magistrate was a persecutor, because he summoned him to appear on an unfounded charge, and then dismissed him on his own re¬ cognisance. He gloried with better reason in the con¬ temptuous language with which he was assailed, even by the more decorous of his opponents, and in the ribaldries of Foot and BickerstafF. He would gladly have partaken of the doom of Rogers and Ridley, if his times had per¬ mitted, and his cause required it; but the fires of Smithfield were put out, and the exasperated Momus of the fair, with his long whip, alone remained to do the honours appro¬ priated to the feast of St. Bartholomew. There are extant seventy-five of the sermons by which Whitfield agitated nations, and the more remote influence of which is still distinctly to be traced, in the popular divinity and the national character of Great Britain and of the United States. They have, however, fallen into neglect; for to win permanent acceptance for a book, into which the prin¬ ciples of life were not infused by its author, is a miracle which not even the zeal of religious proselytes can accom¬ plish. Yet, inferior as w7ere hife inventive to his mimetic powrers, Whitfield is entitled, among theological writers, to a place, which if it cannot challenge admiration, may at least excite and reward curiosity. Many, and those by far the worst, of his discourses, bear the marks of care¬ ful preparation. Take at hazard a sermon of one of the preachers usually distinguished as evangelical, add a little to its length, and subtract a great deal from its point and polish, and you have one of his more elaborate perform¬ ances — common topics discussed in a commonplace way; a respectable mediocrity of thought and style; endless varia¬ tions on one or two cardinal truths — in short, the task of a clerical Saturday evening, executed with piety, good sense and exceeding sedateness. But open one of that series TIIE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 81 of Whitfield’s sermons which bears the stamp of having been conceived and uttered at the same moment, and ima¬ gine it recited to myriads of eager listeners with every charm of voice and gesture, and the secret of his unrivalled fascination is at least partially disclosed. He places him¬ self on terms of intimacy and unreserved confidence with you, and makes it almost as difficult to decline the invitation to his familiar talk as if Montague himself had issued it. The egotism is amusing, affectionate and warm-hearted; with just that slight infusion of self-importance without which it would pass for affectation. In his art of rhetoric, personification holds the first place; and the prosopopxia is so managed as to quicken abstractions into life, and to give them individuality and distinctness without the exhibition of any of those spasmodic and distorted images which obey the incantations of vulgar exorcists. Every trace of study and contrivance is obliterated by the hearty earnestness which pervades each successive period, and by the verna¬ cular and homely idioms in which his meaning is conveyed. The recollection of William Cobbett will obtrude itself on the reader of these discourses, though the presence of the sturdy athlete of the “ Political Register,” with his sophis¬ try and his sarcasm, his drollery and his irascible vigour, sorely disturbs the sacred emotions which it was the one object of the preacher to awaken. And it is in this gran¬ deur and singleness of purpose that the charm of Whitfield’s preaching seems really to have consisted. You feel that you have to do with a man who lived and spoke, and who would gladly have died, to deter his hearers from the path of destruction, and to guide them to holiness and peace. His gossiping stories, and dramatic forms of speech, are never employed to hide the awful realities on which he is intent. Conscience is not permitted to find an intoxicating draught in even spiritual excitement, or an anodyne in glowing imagery. Guilt and its punishment, pardon and spotless purity, death and an eternal existence, stand out in bold relief on every page. From these the eye of the teacher is never withdrawn, and to these the attention of the hearer is riveted. All that is poetic, grotesque, or rap¬ turous, is employed to deepen these impressions, and is dismissed as soon as that purpose is answered. Deficient in learning, meagre in thought and redundant in language as are these discourses, they yet fulfil the one great condi- 82 Stephen’s miscellanies. tion of genuine eloquence. They propagate their own kindly warmth, and leave their stings behind them. The enumeration of the sources of Whitfield’s power is still essentially defective. Neither energy, nor eloquence, nor histrionic talents, nor any artifices of style, nor the most genuine sincerity and self-devotedness, nor all these united, would have enabled him to mould the religious cha¬ racter of millions in his own and future generations. The secret lies deeper, though not very deep. It consisted in the nature of the theology he taught — in its perfect sim¬ plicity and universal application. His thirty or forty thou¬ sand sermons were but so many variations on two key¬ notes. Man is guilty, and may obtain forgiveness; he is immortal, and must ripen here for endless weal or wo hereafter. Expanded into innumerable forms, and diversi¬ fied by infinite varieties of illustration, these two cardinal principles were ever in his heart and on his tongue. Let who would invoke poetry to embellish the Christian sys¬ tem, or philosophy to explore its esoteric depths, from his lips it was delivered as an awful and urgent summons to repent, to believe and to obey. To set to music the orders issued to seamen in a storm, or to address them in the lan¬ guage of Aristotle or Descartes, would have seemed to him not a whit more preposterous than to divert his hearers from their danger and their refuge, their duties and their hopes, to any topics more trivial or more abstruse. In fine, he was thoroughly and continually in earnest, and, therefore, possessed that tension of the soul which admitted neither of lassitude, nor relaxation, few and familiar as were the topics to which he was confined. His was, therefore, pre¬ cisely that state of mind in which alone eloquence, p>ro- perly so called, can be engendered, and a moral and intel¬ lectual sovereignty won. A still more important topic we pass over silently, not as doubting, or reluctant to acknowledge, the reality of that Divine influence, of which the greatest benefactors of mankind are at most but the voluntary agents; but because, desiring to observe the proprieties of time and place, we abandon such discussions to pages more sacred than our own. The effects of Whitfield’s labours on succeeding times have been thrown into the shade by the more brilliant for¬ tunes of the Ecclesiastical Dynasty of which Wesley was THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 83 at once the founder, the lawgiver and the head. Yet a large proportion of the American Churches, and that great body of the Church of England which, assuming the title of Evangelical, has been refused that of Orthodox, may trace back their spiritual genealogy, by regular descent from him. It appears, indeed, that there are among them some who, for having disavowed this ancestry, have brought themselves within the swing of Mr. Philip’s club. To rescue them, if it were possible, from the bruises which they have provoked, would be to arrest the legitimate march of penal justice. The consanguinity is attested by historical records and by the strongest family resemblance. The quarterings of Whitfield are entitled to a conspicuous place in the Evangelical scutcheon; and they who bear it are not wise in being ashamed of the blazonry. Four conspicuous names connect the great field-preacher with the Evangelical body, as it at present exists in the Church of England. The first of these, Henry Venn, ex¬ hibited in a systematic form the doctrines and precepts of the Evangelical divinity in a treatise, bearing the signifi¬ cant title of the “ New Whole Duty of Man.” He was the founder of that “school of the prophets,” which has, to the present day, continued to flourish with unabated or increasing vigour in the University of Cambridge, and the writer of a series of letters which have lately been edited by one of his lineal descendants. They possess the pecu¬ liar and very powerful charm of giving utterance to the most profound affections in grave, chaste, and simple lan¬ guage, and indicate a rare subjection of the intellectual, and sensitive, to the spiritual nature — of an intellect of no com¬ mon vigour, and a sensibility of exquisite acuteness, to a spirit at once elevated and subdued by devout contempla¬ tions. He was followed by Joseph Milner, who, in a history of the Church of Christ, traced, from the days of the Apostles to the Reformation, the perpetual succession of an interior society by which the tenets of the Calvinislic Methodists had been received and transmitted as a sacred deposit from age to age. A man of more spotless truth and honesty than Milner never yet assumed the historical office. But he was encumbered at once by a theory, and by the care of a grammar-school; the one anticipating his judgments, the other narrowing the range of his investiga- 84 Stephen’s miscellanies. tions. His “ apparatus ” included little more than the New Testament, the Fathers, and the ecclesiastical historians. To explore, to concentrate, and to scrutinize with philoso¬ phical scepticism, the evidences by which they are illus¬ trated and explained, was a task unsuited alike to his powers, his devotion, and his taste. He has bequeathed to the world a book which can never lose its interest, either with those who read to animate their piety, or with those who, in their search for historical truth, are willing not merely to examine the proofs, but to listen to the ad¬ vocates. John Newton, most 'generally known as the friend and spiritual guide of Cowper, has yet better claims to cele¬ brity. For many years the standard bearer of his section of the Anglican Church in London, he was the writer of many works, and especially of an autobiography, which is to be numbered amongst the most singular and impressive delineations of human character. A more rare psycholo¬ gical phenomenon than Newton was never subjected to the examination of the curious. The captain of a slave-ship, given up at one time to all manner of vice and debauchery, gradually emerges into a perfect Oroondates, haunted to the verge of madness by the sentimental Psyche, but is still a slave-trader. He studies the Scriptures and the classics in his cabin, while his captives are writhing in mental and bodily agonies in the hold. With nerves of iron, and sinews of brass, he combines an almost feminine tenderness, and becomes successively the victim of remorse, a peni¬ tent, a clergyman, an eminent preacher, an author of no mean pretensions in verse and prose, beloved and esteemed by the wise and good; and at an extreme old age closes in honour, peace, and humble hope, a life of strange vicissi¬ tudes, and of still stranger contrasts. The position which he has the courage to challenge for himself in the chronicle of his party, is that of an example of the salutary influence of their principles on a man once given up to reckless guilt. His friends and followers, with more discretion, and at least equal truth, assert for him the praise of having consecrated his riper and declining years to the practice of pure and undefiled religion ; and to the inculcation of it with all the vigour of his natural disposition, tempered by a composure and adorned by an elegance, the most remote from his primitive character. THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FR0UDE. 85 The last of the fathers of the Evangelical Church was Thomas Scott, the author of many books, and amongst these of a treatise called the “ Force of Truth,” which re¬ cords his own mental history; and of a Commentary on the Bible, in which the truth he sought and believed himself to have found is discovered in almost every page of the in¬ spired volume. Scott was nothing less than a prodigy of autodidactic knowledge. Bred up in humble life, with little education, regular or irregular, and immersed from youth to age in clerical cares (of which a well-fitted nur¬ sery and an ill-filled purse seem inevitable parts,) he had neither money to multiply books, nor much leisure or in¬ clination to read them. But he studied his congregation, his bible and himself. From those investigations, con¬ ducted with admirable sagacity, good faith and perseve¬ rance, he accumulated a fund of thought indigenous if not original, accurate if not profound, which, considered as the gathering of a solitary mind, is altogether marvellous. In the later editions of his work, indeed, he interspersed such learning as he had derived from subsequent study. But, inverting the established order, he seems to have published his own books first, and to have read those of other men afterwards. Such a process, executed with such zeal and earnestness, if aided by a vivid imagination, would have rendered his speculations instinct with breath and life ; if directed by vanity, it would have ascribed to the sacred oracles some wild novelties of meaning at jar with the sense and spirit of their authors ; if guided by mercenary views, it would have brought them into harmony with the opinions of the orthodox dispensers of ecclesiastical emolu¬ ments and honours. But imagination in the mind of Thomas Scott was not merely wanting, it was a negative quantity; and his chariot-wheels drove heavily. The thirst of praise or of wealth was quenched by a desire as simple and as pure as ever prompted human activity to promote the Divine glory and the good of man. He would have seen the labours of his life perish, and would have pe¬ rished with them, rather than distort the sense of revelation by a hair’s breadth from what he believed to be its genuine meaning. He rendered to his party (if with such a man party can be fitly associated) the inestimable service of showing how their distinguishing tenets, mav be deduced Irom the sacred canon, or reconciled with it; and of placing 8 86 Stephen’s miscellanies. their feet on that which Chillingworth had proclaimed as the rock of the Reformation. Gradually, however, it came to pass in the Evangelical, as in other societies, that the symbol was adopted by many who were strangers to the spirit of the original institution; — by many an indolent, trivial, or luxurious aspirant to its advantages, both temporal and eternal. The terms of membership had never been definite or severe. Whitfield and his followers had required from those who joined their standard neither the adoption of any new ritual, nor the abandonment of any established ceremonies, nor an irksome submission to ecclesiastical authority, nor the renunciation of any reputable path to eminence or to wealth. The distinguishing tenets were few and easily learned; the neces¬ sary observances neither onerous nor unattended with much pleasurable emotion. In the lapse of years the discipline of the society imperceptibly declined, and errors coeval with its existence exhibited themselves in an exaggerated form. When country gentlemen and merchants, lords spiritual and temporal, and even fashionable ladies gave in their adhesion, their dignities uninvaded, their ample ex¬ penditure flowing chiefly in its accustomed channels, and their saloons as crowded if not as brilliant as before, the spirit of Whitfield was to be traced among his followers, not so much in the burning zeal and self-devotion of that extraordinary man, as in his insubordination to episcopal rule and unquenchable thirst for spiritual excitement. Al¬ though the fields and the market-places no longer echoed to the voice of the impassioned preacher and the hallelujahs of enraptured myriads; yet spacious theatres, sacred to such uses, received a countless host to harangue or to ap¬ plaud; to recount or to hear adventures of stirring interest; to propagate the Christian faith to the furthest recesses of the globe; to drop the superfluous guinea, and to retire with feelings strangely balanced between the human and the divine, the glories of heaven and the vanities of earth. The venerable cloisters of Oxford sheltered a new race of students, who listened not without indignation, to the rumours of this religious movement. Invigorated by ha¬ bitual self-denial; of unsullied, perhaps of austere virtue; with intellectual powers of no vulgar cast; and deeply con¬ versant with Christian antiquity, — they acknowledged a Divine command to recall their country to a piety more THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 37 profound and masculine, more meek and contemplative. They spoke in the name and with the authority of the “Catholic Church,” the supreme interpreter of the holy mysteries confided to her care. That sublime abstraction has not indeed, as of yore, a visible throne and a triple crown; nor can she now point to the successors of the fishermen of Galilee collected into a sacred college at the Vatican. Though still existing in a mysterious unity of communion, faith and practice, she is present in every land and among all people, where due honour is paid to the Episcopal office derived by an unbroken succession from the Apostles. Her doctrines are those to which Rome and Constantinople have made some corrupt additions, but which the Ante-Nicene fathers professed and our Anglo- Saxon ancestors adopted. She requires the rigid obser¬ vance of her ancient formularies, and calls on her children to adore rather than to investigate. She announces tenets which the unlearned must submissively receive with a modest self-distrust; inculcates a morality which pervades and sanctifies the most minute, not less than the more con¬ siderable of our actions; and demands a piety which is to be avowed not by the utterance of religious sentiments, nor by a retreat from the ordinary pursuits or pleasures of the world, but by the silent tenour of a devout life. If among the teachers of this new or restored divinity, Ox¬ ford should raise up another Whitfield, the principles for which the martyrs of the Reformation died might be in peril of at least a temporary subversion, in that church which has for the last three centuries numbered Cranmer, Hooper, and Ridley, amongst her most venerated fathers. The extent of the danger will be best estimated by a short survey of the career of the only confessor of Oxford Ca¬ tholicism, who has yet taken his place in ecclesiastical biography. Richard Hurrell Froude was born “on the Feast of the Annunciation” in 1803, and died in 1836. He was an Etonian ; a fellow of Oriel College; a priest in holy orders; the writer of journals, letters, sermons and unsuccessful prize essays; an occasional contributor to the periodical literature of his theological associates; and, during the last four years of his life, a resident alternately in the South of Europe and the West Indies. If the progress of his name to oblivion shall be arrested for some brief interval, it will 88 Stephen’s miscellanies. be owing to the strange discretion with which his surviving friends have disclosed to the world the curious and melan¬ choly portraiture drawn by hi's own hand of the effects of their peculiar system. “The extreme importance of the views to the development of which the whole is meant to be subservient,” and “ the instruction derivable from a full exhibition of his character as a witness to those views,” afford the inadequate apology for inviting the world to read a self-examination as frank and unreserved as the most courageous man could have committed to paper in this un¬ scrupulous and inquisitive generation. Yet, if the editors of Mr. Froude’s papers are the depositories of those which his mother appears to have written, and will publish them also, it will be impossible to refuse them absolution from whatever penalties they may have already incurred. These volumes contain but one letter from that lady; and it con¬ trasts with the productions of her son as the voice of a guardian angel with the turbulent language of a spirit to which it had been appointed to minister. She read his heart with a mother’s sagacity, and thus revealed it to himself with a mother’s tenderness and truth. “From his very birth his temper has been peculiar; pleasing, intelligent and attaching, when his mind was un¬ disturbed and he was in the company of people who treated him reasonably and kindly; but exceedingly impatient under vexatious circumstances; very much disposed to find his own amusement in teasing and vexing others; and al¬ most entirely incorrigible when it was necessary to reprove him. I never could find a successful mode of treating him. Harshness made him obstinate and gloomy; calm and long displeasure made him stupid and sullen; and kind patience had not sufficient power over his feelings to force him to govern himself. After a statement of such great faults, it may seem an inconsistency to say, that he nevertheless still bore about him strong marks of a promising character. In all points of substantial principle his feelings were just and high. He had (for his age) an unusually deep feeling of admiration for every tiling which was good and noble; his relish was lively and his taste good, for all the pleasures of the imagination; and he was also quite conscious of his own faults, and (untempted) had a just dislike to them.” Though the mother and the child are both beyond the reach of all human opinion, it seems almost an impiety to THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD A.ND FROUDE. 89 transcribe her estimate of his early character, and to add, that, when developed and matured in his riper years, it but too distinctly fulfilled her less favourable judgment. Ex¬ ercising a stern and absolute dominion over all the baser passions, with a keen perception of the beautiful in nature and in art, and a deep homage for the sublime in morals; imbued with the spirit of the classical authors, and delight¬ ing in the strenuous exercise of talents which, if they fell short of excellence, rose far above mediocrity, Mr. Froude might have seemed to want no promise of an honourable rank in literature, or of distinction in his sacred office. His career was intercepted by a premature death, but enough is recorded to show that his aspirations, however noble, must have been defeated by the pride and morose¬ ness which his mother’s wisdom detected, and which her love disclosed to him ; united as they were to a constitu¬ tional distrust of his own powers and a weak reliance on other minds for guidance and support. A spirit at once haughty and unsustained by genuine self-confidence; sub¬ dued by the stronger will or intellect of other men, and glorying in that subjection; regarding its opponents with an intolerance exceeding their own; and, in the midst of all, turning with no infrequent indignation on itself — might form the basis of a good dramatic sketch, of which Mr. Froude might not unworthily sustain the burden. But a “dialogue of the dead,” in which George Whitfield and Richard Froude should be the interlocutors, would be a more appropriate channel for illustrating the practical uses of “ the second reformation,” and of the “ Catholic restora¬ tion,” which it is the object of their respective biographies to illustrate. Rhadamanthus having dismissed them from his tribunal, they would compare together their juvenile admiration of the drama, their ascetic discipline at Oxford, their early dependence on stronger or more resolute minds, their propensity to self-observation and to record its results on paper, their opinions of the negro race, and the surprise with which they witnessed the worship of the Church of Rome in lands where it is still triumphant. So far all is peace, and the conconles animse exchange such greetings as pass between disembodied spirits. But when the tidings brought by the new denizen of the Elysian fields to the reformer of the eighteenth century, reach his affrighted shade, the regions of the blessed are disturbed by an un* 8* 90 Stephen’s miscellanies. wonted discord; and the fiery soul of Whitfield blazes with intense desire to resume his wanderings through the earth, # and to lift up his voice against the new apostacy. It was with no unmanly dread of the probe, but from want of skill or leisure to employ it, that the self-scru¬ tiny of Whitfield seldom or never penetrated much be¬ low the surface. Preach he must; and when no audience could be brought together, he seized a pen and exhorted himself. The uppermost feeling, be it what it may, is put down in his journal honestly, vigorously and devoutly, Sa¬ tan is menaced and upbraided. Intimations from Heaven are recorded without one painful doubt of their origin. He prays and exults, anticipates the future with delight, looks back to the past with thankfulness, blames himself simply because he thinks himself to blame, despairs of nothing, fears nothing, and has not a moment’s ill-will to any hu¬ man being. Mr. Froude conducts his written soliloquies in a differ¬ ent spirit. His introverted gaze analyzes with elaborate minuteness the various motives at the confluence of which his active powers receive their impulse, and, with pervert¬ ed sagacity, pursues the self-examination, until, bewildered in the dark labyrinth of his own nature, he escapes to the cheerful light of day by locking up his journal. “ A friend,” (whose real name is as distinctly intimated under its initial letter as if the patronymic were written at length,) “ advises burning confessions. I cannot make up my mind to that,” replies the penitent, “but I think I can see many points in which it will be likely to do me good to be cut off for sometime from these records.” On such a subject the author of “The Christian Year” was entitled to more deference. The great ornament of the College de Propa¬ ganda at Oxford, he also had used the mental microscope to excess. Admonishing men to approach their Creator not as isolated beings, but as members of the Universal Church, and teaching the inmates of her hallowed courts to worship in strains so pure, so reverent and so meek, as to answer not unworthily to the voice of hope and recon¬ ciliation in which she is addressed by her Divine Head, yet had this “sweet singer” so brooded over the evanes¬ cent processes of his own spiritual nature, as not seldom to throw round his meaning a haze which rendered it imper¬ ceptible to his readers and probably to himself. With THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 91 what sound judgment he counselled Mr, Froude to burn his books may be judged from the following entries in them: — “ I have been talking a great deal to B. about religion to-day. He seems to take such straightforward practical views of it that, when I am talking to him, I wonder what I have been bothering myself with all the summer, and al¬ most doubt how far it is right to allow myself to indulge in speculations on a subject where all that is necessary is so plain and obvious.” — “Yesterday when I went out shoot¬ ing, I fancied I did not care whether I hit or not, but when it came to the point I found myself anxious, and, after having killed, was not unwilling to let myself be considered a better shot than I had described myself. I had an im¬ pulse, too, to let it be thought I had only three shots when I really had had four. It wras slight, to be sure, but I felt it.” — “I have read my journal, though I can hardly identify myself with the person it describes. It seems like leaving some one under one’s guardianship who was an intolerable fool, and exposed himself to my contempt every moment for the most ridiculous and trifling motives; and while I was thinking all this, I went into L’s room to seek a pair of shoes, and on hearing him coming got away as silently as possible. Why did I do this? Did I think I was do¬ ing what L. did not like, or was it the relic of a sneaking habit? I will ask myself these questions again.” — “ I have a sort of vanity which aims at my own good opinion, and I look for any thing to prove to myself that I am more anx¬ ious to mind myself than other people. I was very hun¬ gry, but because I thought the charge unreasonable, I tried to shirk the waiter; sneaking!” — “Yesterday I was much put out by an old fellow chewing tobacco and spitting across me; also bad thoughts of various kinds kept present¬ ing themselves to my mind when it was vacant.” — “ I talked sillily to-day as I used to do last term, but took no pleasure in it, so I am not ashamed. Although I don’t re¬ collect any harm of myself, yet I don’t feel that I have made a clean breast of it.” — “ I forgot to mention that I had been looking round my rooms and thinking that they looked comfortable and nice, and that I said in my heart, Ah, ha! I am warm.” — “ It always suggests itself to me that a wise thought is wasted when it is kept to myself, against which, as it is my mostbothering temptation, I will set down some arguments to be called to mind in time of trouble.” — “ Now 92 Stephen’s miscellanies. I am proud of this, and think that the knowledge it shows of myself implies a greatness of mind.” — “ These records are no guide to me to show the state of my mind afterwards; they are so far from being exercises of humility, that they lessen the shame of what I record just as professions and good will to other people reconcile us to our neglect of them.” The precept ‘‘know thyself” came down from heaven; but such self-knowledge as this has no heavenward tenden¬ cy. It is no part of the economy of our nature, or of the will of our Maker, that we should so cunningly unravel the subtle filaments of which our motives are composed. If a man should subject to such a scrutiny the feelings of others to himself, he would soon lose his faith in human virtue and af¬ fection; and the mind which should thus put to the question its own workings in the domestic or social relations of life would ere long become the victim of a still more fatal scepticism. Why dream that this reflex operation, which, if directed towards those feelings of which our fellow-crea¬ tures are the object, would infallibly eject from the heart all love and all respect for man, should strengthen either the love or the fear of God? A well-tutored conscience aims at breadth rather than minuteness of survey; and tasks itself much more to ascertain general results than to find out the solution of riddles. So long as religious men must reveal their “ experiences,” and self-defamation revels in its present impunity, there is no help for it, but in with¬ holding the applause to which even lowliness itself aspires for the candour with which it is combined, and the acute¬ ness by which it is embellished. It is not bv these nice self-observers that the creeds of a/ hoar antiquity, and the habits of centuries are to be shaken; nor is such high emprize reserved for ascetics who can pause to enumerate the slices of bread and butter from which they have abstained. When Whitfield would mor¬ tify his body, he set about it like a man. The paroxysm was short, indeed, but terrible. While it lasted his dis¬ eased imagination brought soul and body into deadly con¬ flict, the fierce spirit spurning, trampling, and well-nigh destroying the peccant carcass. Not so the fastidious and refined “ witness to the views ” of the restorers of the Ca¬ tholic Church. The strife between his spiritual and ani¬ mal nature is recorded in his journal in such terms as THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 93 these — “ Looked with greediness to see if there was goose on the table for dinner.” — Meant to have kept a fast, and did abstain from dinner, but at tea eat buttered toast.” — “ Tasted nothing to*day till tea-time, and then only one cup and dry bread.” — I have kept my fast strictly, having taken nothing till near nine this evening, and then only a cup of tea and a little bread without butter, but it has not been as easy as it was last.” — “ I made rather a more hearty tea than usual, quite giving up the notion of a fast in W’s rooms, and by this weakness have occasioned another slip.” Whatever may be thought of the propriety of disclosing such passages as these, they will provoke a contemptuous smile from no one who knows much of his own heart. But they may relieve the anxiety of the alarmists. Luther and Zuingle, Cranmer, and Latimer, may still rest in their honoured graves. “ Take courage, brother Ridley, we shall light up such a flame in England as shall not soon be put out,” is a prophecy which will not be defeat¬ ed by the successors of those who heard it, so long as their confessors shall be vacant to record, and their doctors to publish, contrite reminiscences of a desire for roasted goose, and of an undue indulgence in buttered toast. Yet the will to subvert the doctrines and discipline of the Reformation is not wanting, and is not concealed. Mr. Froude himself, were he still living, might, indeed, object to be judged by his careless and familiar letters. No such objection can, however, be made by the eminent persons who have deliberately given them to the world on account of “ the truth and extreme importance of the views to which the whole is meant to be subservient,” and in which they record their “own general concurrence.” Of these weighty truths take the following examples:—- “ You will be shocked by my avowal that I am every day becoming a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to be plain, that in all matters which seem to us indifferent, or even doubtful, we should conform our prac¬ tices to those of the Church, which has preserved its tra¬ ditionary practices unbroken. We cannot know about any seemingly indifferent practice of the Church of Rome that is not a development of the apostolic and it is to no purpose to say that we can find no proof of it in the writings z>f the first six centuries — they must find a disproof i fthey 94 Stephen’s miscellanies. would do any thing.” — “ I think people are injudicious who talk against the Roman Catholics for worshipping saints and honouring the Virgin and images, &c. These things may, perhaps, be idolatrous; I cannot make up my mind about it.” — “ P. called us the Papal Protestant Church, in which he proved a double ignorance, as we are Catholics without the Popery, and Church of England men without the Protestantism.” — “ The more 1 think over that view of yours about regarding our present communion service, &c., as a judgment on the Church, and taking it as the crumbs from the apostle’s table, the more I am struck with its fit¬ ness to be dwelt upon as tending to check the intrusion of irreverent thoughts, without in any way interfering with one’s just indignation.”— “ Your trumpery principle about Scripture being the sole rule of faith in fundamentals (I nauseate the word,) is but a mutilated edition, without the breadth and axiomatic character, of the original.” — “ Re¬ ally I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and more, and have almost made up my mind that the rational¬ ist spirit they set afloat is the of the Revela¬ tion.” Why do you praise Ridley? Do you know suffi¬ cient good about him to counterbalance the fact, that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, and Bucer?” - — 1 “ I wish you could get to know something of S. and W. (Southey and Wordsworth,) and un-protestantize and un- Miltonize them.” — “ How is it we are so much in advance of our generation ?” Spirit of George Whitfield! how would thy voice, rolled from “ the secret place of thunders,” have overwhelmed these puny protests against the truths which it proclaimed from the rising to the setting sun! In what does the mo¬ dern creed of Oxford differ from the ancient faith of Rome? Hurried along by the abhorred current of advancing know¬ ledge and social improvement, they have indeed renounced papal dominion, and denied papal infallibility, and rejected the grosser superstitions which Rome herself at once de¬ spises and promotes. But a prostrate submission to human authority (though veiled under words of vague and myste¬ rious import) — the repose of the wearied or indolent mind on external observances — an escape from the arduous exer¬ cise of man’s highest faculties in the worship of his Maker — the usurped dominion of the imaginative and sensitive over the intellectual powers — these are the common cha¬ racteristics of both systems. THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FR0UDE. 95 The Reformation restored to the Christian world its only authentic canon, and its one Supreme Head. It pro¬ claimed the Scriptures as the rule of life; and the Divine Redeemer as the supreme and central object to whom every eye must turn, and on whom every hope must rest. It cast down not only the idols erected for the adoration of the vul¬ gar, but the idolatrous abstractions to which the worship of more cultivated minds was rendered. Penetrating the de¬ sign, and seizing the spirit of the gospels, the reformers inculcated the faith in which the sentient and the spiritual in man’s compound nature had each its appropriate office; the one directed to the Redeemer in his palpable form, the other to the Divine Paraclete in his hidden agency; while, united with these, they exhibited to a sinful but penitent race the parental character of the Omnipresent Deity. Such is not the teaching of the restored theology. The most eminent of its professors have thrown open the doors of Mr. Fronde’s oratory, and have invited all passers-by to notice in Ids prayers and meditations “ the absence of any distinct mention of our Lord and Saviour.” They are ex¬ horted not to doubt that there was a real though silent “ allusion to Christ” under the titles in which the Supreme Being is addressed ; and are told that “ this circumstance may be a comfort to those who cannot bring themselves to assume the tone of many popular writers of this day, who yet are discouraged by the peremptoriness with which it is exacted of them. The truth is, that a mind alive to its own real state often shrinks to utter what it most dwells upon; and is too full of awe and fear to do more than silently hope what it most wishes.” It would indeed be presump¬ tuous to pass a censure, or to hazard an opinion, on the private devotions of any man; but there is no such risk in rejecting the apology which the publishers of those secret exercises have advanced for Mr. Froude’s departure from the habits of his fellow Christians. Feeble, indeed, and emasculate must be the system, which, in its delicate dis¬ taste for the “popular writers of the day,” would bury in silence the name in which every tongue and language has been summoned to worship and to rejoice. Well may “ awe and fear ” become all who assume and all who invoke it. But an “ awe ” which “ shrinks to utter” the name of Him who was born at Bethlehem, and yet does not fear to use the name which is ineffable; — a “fear” which can make 90 Stephen’s miscellanies. mention of the Father, but may not speak of the Brother, of all — is a feeling which fairly baffles comprehension. There is a much more simple, though a less imposing theory. Mr. Froude permitted himself, and was encouraged by his correspondents, to indulge in the language of an¬ tipathy and scorn towards a large body of his fellow Chris¬ tians. It tinges his letters, his journals, and is not without its influence even on his devotions. Those despised men too often celebrated the events of their Redeemer’s life, and the benefits of his passion, in language of offensive fami¬ liarity, and invoked him with fond and feeble epithets. Therefore, a good Oxford Catholic must envelop in mystic terms all allusion to Him round whom as its centre the whole Christian system revolves. The line of demarcation between themselves and these coarse sentimentalists must be broad and deep, even though it should exclude those by whom it is run, from all the peculiar and distinctive ground on which the standard of the protestant churches has been erected. There is nothing to dread from such hostility and such enemies. A fine lady visits the United States, and, in loathing against the tobaceonised republic, becomes an absolutist. A “double first-class” theologian overhears the Evangelical psalmody, and straightway turns catholic. But Congress will not dissolve at the bidding of the fair; nor will Exeter hall be closed to propitiate the fastidious. The martyrs of disgust and the heroes of revolutions are composed of opposite materials, and are cast in very dif¬ ferent moulds. Nothing truly great or formidable was ever yet accomplished, in thought- or action, by men whose love for truth was not strong enough to triumph over their dis¬ like of the offensive objects with which it may be asso¬ ciated. Mr. Froude was the victim of these associations. No¬ thing escapes his abhorrence which has been regarded with favour by his political or religious antagonists. The Bill for the Abolition of Slavery was recommended to Parlia¬ ment by an administration more than suspected of Liberal¬ ism. The “ Witness to Catholic Views,” “ in whose sen¬ timents as a whole,” his editors concur, visits the Wrest Indies, and they are not afraid to publish the following report of his leelings: — “I have felt it a kind of duty to maintain in my mind an habitual hostility to the niggers, and to chuckle over the failures of the new system, as if THE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 07 these poor wretches concentrated in themselves all the Whiggery, dissent, cant, and abomination that have been ranged on their side.” Lest this should pass for a pleasant extravagance, the editors enjoin the reader not to “ confound the author’s view of the negro cause and of the abstract negro with his feelings towards any he should actually meet;” and Professor Tholuck is summoned from Germany to explain how the “ originators of error” may lawfully be the objects of a good man’s hate, and how it may innocently overflow upon all their clients, kindred and connexions. Mr. Fronde’s feelings towards the “ abstract negro ” would have satisfied the learned Professor in his most indignant mood. “ 1 am ashamed,” he says, “ 1 cannot get over my prejudices against the niggers.” — “ Every one 1 meet seems to me like an incarnation of the whole Anti-Slavery Society, and Fowell Buxton at their head.” — “ The thing that strikes me as most remarkable in the cut of these niggers is exces¬ sive immodesty, a forward stupid familiarity intended for civility, which prejudices me against them worse even than Buxton’s cant did. It is getting to be the fashion with every body, even the planters, to praise the emancipation and Mr. Stanley.” Mr. Froude, or rather his editors, ap¬ pear to have fallen into the error of supposing that his pro¬ fession gave him not merely the right to admonish, but the privilege to scold. Lord Stanley and Mr. Buxton have, however, the consolation of being railed at in good com¬ pany. Hampden is “ hated ” with much zeal, though, it is admitted, with imperfect knowledge. Louis Philippe, and his associates of the Three Days, receive the following humane benediction — “ I sincerely hope the march of mind in France may yet prove a bloody one .” “ The election of the wretched B. for - , and that base fellow H. for - , in spite of the exposure,” &e. Again, the editors protest against our supposing that this is a playful exercise in the art of exaggeration. “ It should be observed,” they say, “ as in other parts of this volume, that the author used these words on principle, not as abuse, but as expressing matters of fact, as a way of bringing before his own mind things as they are.” Milton, however, is the especial object of Mr. Froude’s virtuous abhorrence. He is “ a detestable author.” Mr. Froude rejoices to learn something of the Puritans, because, as he says, “ It gives me a better right to hate Milton, and 9 08 STEPHENS MISCELLANIES. accounts for many of the things which most disgusted me in his (not in my sense of the word,) poetry.” — “ A lady told me yesterday that you wrote the article of Sacred Poetry, &c. I thought it did not come up to what I thought your standard of aversion to Milton.” Mr. Froude and his editors must be delivered over to the secular arm under the writ De Heretico Comburando for their wilful obstinacy in rejecting the infallible sentence of the fathers and oecume¬ nical counsels of the church poetical, on this article of faith. There is no room for mercy. They did not belong to the audience, meet but few, to whom the immortal addressed himself — to that little company to which alone it is re¬ served to estimate the powers of such a mind, and reve¬ rently to notice its defects. They were of that multitude who have to make their choice between repeating the established creed and holding their peace. Why are free¬ thinkers in literature to be endured more than in religion? The guilt of Liberalism has clearly been contracted by this rash judgment; and Professor Tholuck being the witness, it exposes the criminals and the whole society of Oriel, nay, the entire University itself, to the diffusive indignation of all who cling to the Catholic faith in poetry. There are much better things in Mr. Fronde’s book than the preceding quotations might appear to promise. If given as specimens of his power, they would do gross injustice to a good and able man, a ripe scholar, and a devout Chris¬ tian. But as illustrations of the temper and opinions of those who now sit in Wycliffe’s seat, they are neither unfair nor unimportant. And they may also convince all whom it concerns, that hitherto, at least, Oxford has not given birth to a new race of giants, by whom the Evangelical founders and missionaries of the Church of England will be ex¬ pelled from their ancient dominion, or the Protestant world excluded from the light of day and the free breath of heaven. Whenever the time shall be ripe for writing the ecclesi¬ astical history of the last and the present age, a curious chapter may be devoted to the rise and progress of the Evangelical body in England from the days of Whitfield to our own. It will convey many important lessons. It will manifest the irresistible power of the doctrines of the Reformation when proclaimed with honesty and zeal, even though its teachers be unskilled in those studies which are TIIE LIVES OF WHITFIELD AND FROUDE. 99 essential to a complete and comprehensive theology. It will show that infirmities which, not without some reason, offend the more cultivated, and disgust the more fastidious members of the Catholic Church amongst us, are but as the small dust in the balance, when weighed against the mighty energy of those cardinal truths in the defence of which Wycliffe and Luther, Knox and Calvin, Ridley and Latimer, lived and laboured, and died. It may also prove that re¬ condite learning, deep piety and the purest virtue may be all combined in bosoms which are yet contracted by narrow and unsuspected prejudices. But, above all, it may teach mutual charity; admonishing men to listen with kindness and self-distrust even to each other’s extravagant claims to an exclusive knowledge of the Divine will, and the exclu¬ sive possession of the Divine favour. D’AUBIGNE’S HISTORY OF THE GREAT REFORMATION.* (Edinburgh Review, 1839.) English literature is singularly defective in whatever relates\to the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, and to the lives of the great men by whom it was accom¬ plished, A native of this island who would know any thing to the purpose, of Reuchlin or Hutten, or Luther or Melancthon, of Zuingle, Bucer or CEcolampadius, of Cal¬ vin or Farel, must betake himself to other languages than his own. To fill this void in our libraries, is an enterprise which might stimulate the zeal, and establish the reputa¬ tion, of the ripest student of Ecclesiastical History amongst us. In no other field could he discover more ample re¬ sources for narratives of dramatic interest; for the delinea¬ tion of characters contrasted in every thing except their common design; for exploring the influence of philosophy, arts, and manners, on the fortunes of mankind; and for reverently tracing the footsteps of Divine Providence, moving among the ways and works of men, imparting dig¬ nity to events otherwise unimportant, and a deep signifi¬ cance to occurrences in any other view as trivial as a border raid, or the palaver of an African village. Take, for example, the life of Ulric de Hutten, a noble, a warrior, and a rake; a theologian withal, and a reformer; and at the same time the author, or one of the authors, of a satire to be classed amongst the most effective which the world has ever seen. Had the recreative powers of Walter Scott been exercised on Iiutten’s story, how familiar would all Christendom have been with the stern Baron of Fran- * History of the Great Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, in Germany* Switzerland, &c. By J. H. Merle D’Aubigne, Presi¬ dent of the Theological School of Geneva. 8vo. Vol. I. London, 1838. LUTHER AND TIIE REFORMATION. 101 conia, and Ulric, his petulant boy; with the fat Abbot of Foulde driving the fiery youth by penances and homilies to range a literary vagabond on the face of the earth; with the burgomaster of Frankfort, avenging by a still more for¬ midable punishment the pasquinade which had insulted his civic dignity. How vivid would be the image of Hutten at the siege of Pavia, soothing despair itself by writing his own epitaph; giving combat to five Frenchmen for the glory of Maximilian; and receiving from the delighted Em¬ peror the frugal reward of a poetic crown. Then would have succeeded the court and princely patronage of “ the Pope of Mentz,” and the camp and castle of the Lord of Sickengen, until the chequered scene closed with Ulric’s death-bed employment of producing a satire on his stupid physician. All things were welcome to Hutten; arms and love, theology and debauchery, a disputation with the Tho- mists, a controversy with Erasmus, or a war to the knife with the dunces of his age. His claim to have written the Epistolx Obscurorum Virorum, has, indeed, been dis¬ puted, though with little apparent reason. It is at least clear that he asserted his own title, and that no other can¬ didate for that equivocal honour united in himself the wit and learning, the audacity and licentiousness, which suc¬ cessively adorn and disfigure that extraordinary collection. Neither is it quite just to exclude the satirist from the list of those who lent a material aid to the Reformation. It is not, certainly, by the heartiest or the most contemptuous laugh that dynasties, w’hether civil or religious, are sub¬ verted; but it would be unfair to deny altogether to Hutten the praise of having contributed by his merciless banter to the successes of wiser and better men than himself. To set on edge the teeth of the Ciceronians by the Latinity of the correspondents of the profound Ortuinus, was but a pleasant jest; but it was something more to confer an im¬ mortality of ridicule on the erudite doctors who seriously apprehended, from the study of Greek and Hebrew, the revival at once of the worship of Minerva, and of the rite of circumcision. It was in strict satirical justice, that cha¬ racters were assigned to these sages in a farce as broad as was ever drawn by Aristophanes or Moliere; and which was destitute neither of their riotous mirth, nor even of some of that deep wisdom which it was their pleasure to exhibit beneath that mask. 9* 102 Stephen’s miscellanies. Mach as .Luther, himself, asper , incolumi gravitate jocum tentavit, he received with little relish these sallies of his facetious ally; whom he not only censured for employing the language of reproach and insult, but, harder still, de¬ scribed as a buffoon. It is, perhaps, well for the dignity of the stern Reformer that the taunt was unknown to the object of it; for, great as he was, Hutten would not have spared him; and as the quiver of few satirists has been stored with keener or more envenomed shafts, so, few illus¬ trious men have exposed to such an assailant a greater number of vulnerable points. But of these, or of his other private habits, little is generally recorded. History having claimed Luther for her own, Biography has yielded to the pretensions of her more stately sister; and the domestic and interior life of the antagonist of Leo and of Charles yet remains to be written. The materials are abundant, and of the highest interest; — a collection of letters scarcely less voluminous than those of Voltaire; the C olio quia Men- salici, in some parts of more doubtful authenticity, yet, on the whole, a genuine record of his conversation; his theo¬ logical writings, a mine of egotisms of the richest ore; and the works of Melancthon, Seckendorf, Cochlceus, Erasmus, and many others, who flourished in an age when, amongst learned men, to write and to live were almost convertible terms. The volume whose title-page we have transcribed, is, in fact, an unfinished life of Luther, closing with his ap¬ peal from the Pope to a general Council. We have select¬ ed it as the most elaborate, from a long catalogue of works on the Reformation, recently published on the continent, by the present inheritors of the principles and passions which first agitated Europe in the beginning of the sixteenth cen¬ tury, By far the most amusing of the series is the collec¬ tion of Lutheriana by M. Michelet, which we are bound to notice with especial gratitude, as affording a greater number of valuable references than all other books of the same kind put together. It was drawn up as a relaxation from those severer studies on which M. Michelet’s histori¬ cal fame depends. But the pastime of some men is worth far more than the labours of the rest; and this compilation lias every merit but that of an appropriate title; for an auto¬ biography it assuredly is not, in any of the senses, accurate or popular, of that much abused word. Insulated in our habits and pursuits, not less than in our geographical posi- LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 103 tion, it is but tardily that, within the intrenchment of our four seas, we sympathize with the intellectual movements of the nations which dwell beyond them. Many, how¬ ever, are the motives, of at least equal force in these islands as in the old and new continents of the Christian world, for diverting the eye from the present to the past, from those who would now reform, to those who first reformed, the churches of Europe. Or, if graver reasons could not be found, it is beyond all dispute that the professors of Wittemburg, three hundred years ago, formed a group as much more entertaining than those of Oxford at present, as the contest with Dr. Eck exceeded in interest the squabble with Dr. Hampden. The old Adam in Martin Luther (a favourite subject of his discourse,) was a very formidable personage; lodged in a bodily frame of surpassing vigour, solicited by vehement appetites, and alive to all the passions by which man is armed for offensive or defensive warfare with his fellows. In accordance with a general law, that temperament was sustained by nerves which shrunk neither from the endu¬ rance nor the infliction of necessary pain; and by a courage which rose at the approach of difficulty, and exulted in the presence of danger. A rarer prodigality of nature combined with these endowments an inflexible reliance on the con¬ clusions of his own understanding, and on the energy of his own will. He came forth on the theatre of life another Samson Agonistes “ with plain heroic magnitude of mind, and celestial vigour armed;” ready to wage an unequal com¬ bat writh the haughtiest of the giants of Gath; or to shake down, though it were on his own head, the columns of the proudest of her temples. Viewed in his belligerent aspect, he might have seemed a being cut off from the common brotherhood of mankind, and bearing from on high a com¬ mission to bring to pass the remote ends of Divine bene¬ volence, by means appalling to human guilt and to human weakness. But he was reclaimed into the bosom of the great family of man, by bonds fashioned in strength and number proportioned to the vigour of the propensities they were intended to control. There brooded over him a con¬ stitutional melancholy, sometimes engendering sadness, but more often giving birth to dreams so wild, that, if vivified by the imagination of Dante, they might have passed into visions as awful and majestic as those of the Inferno . 104 Stephen’s miscellanies. As these mists rolled away, bright gleams of sunshine took their place, and that robust mind yielded itself to social en¬ joyments, with the hearty relish, the broad humour, and the glorious profusion of sense and nonsense, which betoken the relaxations of those who are for the moment abdi¬ cating the mastery, to become the companions of ordinary man. Luther had other and yet more potent spells with which to exorcise the demons who haunted him. He had ascertained and taught that the spirit of darkness abhors sweet sounds not less than light itself; for music, while it chases away the evil suggestions, effectually baffles the wiles of the tempter. His lute, and hand, and voice, accom¬ panying his own solemn melodies, were therefore raised to repel the more vehement aggressions of the enemy of mankind; whose feebler assaults he encountered by study¬ ing the politics of a rookery, by assigning to each beauti¬ ful creation of his flower-beds an appropriate sylph or ge¬ nius, by the company of his Catherine de Bora, and the sports of their saucy John and playful Magdalene. The name of Catherine has long enjoyed a wide but doubtful celebrity. She was a lady of noble birth, and was still young when she renounced the ancient faith, her con¬ vent, and her vows, to become the wife of Martin Luther. From this portentous union of a monk and nun, the “ob¬ scure men” confidently predicted the birth of Antichrist; while the wits and scholars greeted their nuptials with a thick hail-storm of epigrams, hymns, and dithyrambics, the learned Eccius himself chiming into the loud chorus with an elaborate epithalamium. The bridegroom met the tempest, with the spirit of another Benedict, by a coun¬ ter-blast of invective and sarcasms, which, afterwards col¬ lected under the head of “the Lion and the Ass,” perpetu¬ ated the memory of this redoubtable controversy. “My enemies,” he exclaimed, “triumphed. They shouted, Io, Jo! I was resolved to show that, old and feeble as I am, I am not going to sound a retreat. I trust I shall do still more to spoil their merriment.” This indiscreet if not criminal marriage, scarcely ad¬ mitted a more serious defence. Yet Luther was not a man to do any thing which he was not prepared to justify. He had inculcated on others the advantages of the conjugal state, and was bound to enforce his precepts by his example. The war of the peasants had brought re- LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 105 proach on the principles of the Reformation; and it was incumbent on him to sustain the minds of his followers, and to bear his testimony to evangelical truth by deeds as well as words. Therefore, it was fit that he should marry a nun. Such is the logic of inclination, and such the pre¬ sumption of uninterrupted success. “Dr. Ortuinus” him¬ self never lent his venerable sanction to a stranger sophis¬ try, than that which could thus discover in one great scandal an apology for another far more justly offensive. Catherine was a very pretty woman, if Holbein’s por¬ trait may be believed; although even her personal charms have been rudely impugned by her husband’s enemies, in grave disquisitions devoted to that momentous question. Better still, she was a faithful and affectionate wife. But there is a no less famous Catherine to whom she bore a strong family resemblance. She brought from her nun¬ nery an anxious mind, a shrewish temper, and great volu¬ bility of speech. Luther’s arts were not those of Petru- chio. With him reverence for woman was at once a natu¬ ral instinct and a point of doctrine. He observed, that when the first woman was brought to the first man to re¬ ceive her name, he called her not wife, but mother — “Eve, the mother of all living” — a word, he says, “ more eloquent than ever fell from the lips of Demosthenes,” So, like a wise and kind-hearted man, when his Catherine prattled he smiled; when she frowned, he playfully stole away her anger, and chided her anxieties with the gentlest soothing. A happier or a more peaceful home was not to be found in the land of domestic tenderness. Yet, the confession must be made, that, from the first to the last, this love-tale is nothing less than a case of Isesci majestas against the sovereignty of romance. Luther and his bride did not meet on either side with the raptures of a first af¬ fection. He had long before sighed for the fair Ave Shon- felden, and she had not concealed her attachment for a certain Jerome Baungartner. Ave had bestowed herself in marriage on a physician of Prussia: and before Luther’s irrevocable vows were pledged, Jerome received from his great rival an intimation that he still possessed the heart, and, with common activity, might eyen yet secure the hand of Catherine. But honest Jerome was not a man to be hurried. He silently resigned his pretensions to his illustrious competitor, who, even in the moment of success, 106 Stephen’s miscellanies. had the discernment to perceive, and the frankness to avow, that his love was not of a flaming or ungovernable nature. “Nothing on this earth,” said the good Dame Ursula Schweiekard, with whom Luther boarded when at school at Eisenach, “ is of such inestimable value as a woman’s love.” This maxim, recommended more, perhaps, by truth than originality, dwelt long on the mind and on the tongue of the Reformer. To have dismissed this or any other text without a commentary would have been abhor¬ rent from his temper; and in one of his letters to Catherine he thus insists on a kindred doctrine, the converse of the first. “ The greatest favour of God is to have a good and pious husband, to whom you can intrust your all, your person, and even your life; whose children and yours are the same. Catherine, you have a pious husband who loves you. You are an empress; thank God for it.” His conjugal meditations were often in a gayer mood; as, for example,-— “ If I were going to make love again, I would carve an obedient woman out of marble, in despair of find¬ ing one in any other way.” — “ During the first year of our marriage she would sit by my side while I was at my books, and, not having any thing else to say, would ask me whether in Prussia the Margrave and the house steward were not always brothers. — Did you say your Pater, Catherine, before you began that sermon? If you had, I think you would have been forbidden to preach.” He ad¬ dresses her sometimes as my Lord Catherine, or Catherine the Queen, the Empress, the Doctoress; or as Catherine the rich and noble Lady of Zeilsdorf, where they had a cottage and a few roods of ground. But as age advanced, these playful sallies were abandoned for the following graver and more affectionate style. “To the gracious Lady Catherine Luther, my dear wife, who vexes herself overmuch, grace and peace in the Lord! Dear Catherine, you should read St. John, and what is said in the Cate¬ chism of the confidence to be reposed in God. Indeed you torment yourself as though he were not Almighty, and could not produce new Doctors Martin by the score, if the old doctor should drown himself in the Saal.” — “There is one who watches over me more effectually than thou canst, or than all the angels. He sits at the right hand of the Father Almighty. Therefore be calm.” There were six children of this marriage; and it is at LUTIIER AND THE REFORMATION. 107 once touching and amusing to see with what adroitness Luther contrived to gratify at once his tenderness as a fa¬ ther, and his taste as a theologian. When the brightening eye of one of the urchins round his table confessed the al¬ lurements of a downy peach, it was “the image of a soul rejoicing in hope.” Over an infant pressed to his mother’s bosom, thus moralized the severe but affectionate reformer: “That babe and every thing else which belongs to us is hated by the Pope, by Duke George, by their adherents, and by all the devils. Yet, dear little fellow, he troubles himself not a whit for all these powerful enemies, he gaily sucks the breast, looks round him with a loud laugh, and lets them storm as they like.” There were darker sea¬ sons, when even theology and polemics gave way to the more powerful voice of nature; nor, indeed, has the deepest wisdom any thing to add to his lamentation over the bier of his daughter Magdalene. “Such is the power of natu¬ ral affection, that I cannot endure this without tears and groans, or rather an utter deadness of heart. At the bottom of my soul are engraved her looks, her words, her ges¬ tures, as I gazed at her in her life-time and on her death¬ bed. My dutiful, my gentle daughter! Even the death of Christ (and what are all deaths compared to his?) cannot tear me from this thought as it should. She was playful, lovely, and full of love!” Whatever others may think of these nursery tales, we have certain reasons of our own for suspecting that there is not, on either side of the Tweed, a Papa who will not read the following letter, sent by Luther to his eldest boy during the Diet of Augsburg, with more interest than any of all the five “ Confessions ” presented to the Emperor on that memorable occasion. “Grace and peace be writh thee, my dear little boy! I rejoice to find that you are attentive to your lessons and your prayers. Persevere, my child, and when I come home I will bring you some pretty fairing. 1 know of a beautiful garden, full of children in golden dresses, who run about under the trees, eating apples, pears, cherries, nuts, and plums. They jump and sing and are full of glee, and they have pretty little horses with golden bridles and silver saddles. As I went by this garden I asked the owner of it who those children were, and he told me that they were the good children, who loved to say their prayers, 108 Stephen’s miscellanies. and to learn their lessons, and who fear God. Then I said to him, Dear sir, I have a boy, little John Luther; may not he too come to this garden, to eat these beautiful apples and pears, to ride these pretty little horses, and to play with the other children? And the man said, If he is very good, if he says his prayers, and learns his lessons cheerfully he may come, and he may bring with him little Philip and little James. Here they will find fifes and drums and other nice instruments to play upon, and they shall dance and shoot with little crossbows. Then the man showed me in the midst of the garden a beautiful meadow to dance in. But all this happened in the morn¬ ing before the children had dined; so 1 could not stay till the beginning of the dance, but I said to the man, I will go and write to my dear little John, and teach him to be good, to say his prayers, and learn his lessons, that he may come to this garden. But he has an Aunt Magdalene, whom he loves very much, — may he bring her with him? The man said, Yes, tell him that they may come together. Be good, therefore, dear child, and tell Philip and James the same, that you may all come and play in this beautiful garden. 1 commit you to the care of God. Give my love to your Aunt Magdalene, and kiss her for me. From your Papa who loves you, — Martin Luther. If it is not a sufficient apology for the quotation of this fatherly epistle to say, that it is the talk of Martin Luther, a weightier defence may be drawn from the remark that it illustrates one of his most serious opinions. The views commonly received amongst Christians, of the nature of the happiness reserved in another state of being, for the obedient and faithful in this life, he regarded, if not as er¬ roneous, yet as resting on no sufficient foundation, and as ill adapted to “allure to brighter worlds.” lie thought that the enjoyments of heaven had been refined away to such a point of evanescent spirituality as to deprive them of their necessary attraction; and the allegory invented for the delight of little John, was but the adaptation to the thoughts of a child of a doctrine which he was accustomed to inculcate on others, under imagery more elevated than that of drums, crossbows, and golden bridles. There is but one step from the nursery to the servant’s hall; and they who have borne with the parental counsels to little John, may endure the following letter respecting an LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 109 aged namesake of his, who was about to quit Luther's fa¬ mily: — “ We must dismiss old John with honour. We know that he has always served us faithfully and zealously, and as became a Christian servant. What have we not given to vagabonds and thankless students who have made a bad use of our money? So we will not be niggardly to so wor¬ thy a servant, on whom our money will be bestowed in a manner pleasing to God. You need not remind me that we are not rich. I would gladly give him ten florins, if I had them, but do not let it be less than five. He is not able to do much for himself. Pray help him in any other way you can. Think how this money can be raised. There is a silver cup that might be pawned. Sure I am that God will not desert us. Adieu.” Luther’s pleasures were as simple as his domestic affec¬ tions were pure. He wrote metrical versions of the Psalms, well described by Mr. Hallam, as holding a middle place between the doggerel of Sternhold and Hopkins, and the meretricious ornaments of the later versifiers of the Songs of David. He wedded to them music of his own, to which the most obtuse ear cannot listen without emotion. The greatest of the sons of Germany was, in this respect, a true child of that vocal land; for such was his enthusiasm for the art that he assigned to it a place second only to that of theology itself. He was also an ardent lover of painting, and yielded to Albert Durer the homage which he denied to Cajetan and Erasmus. His are amongst the earliest works embellished by the aid of the engraver. With the birds of his native country he had established a strict inti¬ macy, watching, smiling, and thus moralizing over their habits. “ That little fellow,” he said of a bird going to roost, “ has chosen his shelter, and is quietly rocking him¬ self to sleep without a care for to-morrow’s lodging, calmly holding by his little twig, and leaving God to think for him.” The following parable, in a letter to Spalatin, is in a more ambitious strain. “ You are going to Augsburg without having taken the auspices, and ignorant when you will be allowed to begin. I, on the other hand, am in the midst of the Comitia, in the presence of illustrious sovereigns, kings, dukes, gran¬ dees, and nobles, who are solemnly debating affairs of state, and making the air rinw with their deliberations and de- o O 10 no Stephen’s miscellanies. crees. Instead of imprisoning themselves in those royal caverns which you call palaces they hold their assemblies in the sunshine, with the arch of heaven for their tent, sub¬ stituting for costly tapestries the foliage of trees, where they enjoy their liberty. Instead of confining themselves in parks and pleasure grounds, they range over the earth to its utmost limits. They detest the stupid luxuries of silk and embroidery, but all dress in the same colour, and put on very much the same looks. To say the truth, they all wear black, and all sing one tune. It is a song formed of a single note, with no variation but what is produced by the pleasing contrast of young and old voices. I have seen and heard nothing of their emperor. They have a supreme contempt for the quadruped employed by our gen¬ try, having a much better method for setting the heaviest artillery at defiance. As far as I have been able to under¬ stand their resolutions by the aid of an interpreter, they have unanimously determined to wage war through the whole year against the wheat, oats, and barley, and the best corn and fruits of every kind. There is reason to fear, that victory will attend them every where, for they are a skilful and crafty race of warriors, equally expert in qpl- lecting booty by violence and by surprise. It has afforded me great pleasure to attend their assemblies as an idle looker on. The hope I cherish of the triumphs of their valour over wheat and barley, and every other enemy, renders me the sincere and faithful friend of these patres patriae , these saviours of the commonwealth. If I could serve them by a wish, I would implore their deliverance from their pre¬ sent ugly name of Crows. This is nonsense, but there is some seriousness in it. It is a jest which helps me to drive away painful thoughts.” The love of fables, which Luther thus indulged at one of the most eventful eras of his life, was amongst his favour¬ ite amusements. iEsop lay on the same table with the book of Psalms, and the two translations proceeded alter¬ nately, Except the Bible, he declared that he knew no better book; and pronounced it not to be the work of any single author, but the fruit of the labours of the greatest minds in all ages. It supplied him with endless jests and allusions; as for example,— The dog in charge of the butcher’s tray, unable to defend it from the avidity of other curs, said — Well, then, I may as well have my share of LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. Ill the meat, and fell-to accordingly; which is precisely what the Emperor is doing with the property of the church.” Few really great men, indeed, have hazarded a larger number of jokes in the midst of a circle of note-taking as¬ sociates. They have left on record the following amidst many other memorabilia; — “ God made the Priest. The Devil set about an imitation, but he made the tonsure too large, and produced a Monk.” A cup composed of five hoops or rings of glass of different colours circulated at his table. Eisleben, an Antinomian, was of the party. Lu¬ ther pledged him in the following words:— ^ “ Within the second of these rings lie the Ten Commandments; within the next ring the Creed; then comes the Paternoster; the Catechism lies at the bottom.” So saying, he drank it off'. When Eisleben’s turn came, he emptied the cup only down to the beginning of the second ring. “ Ah,” said Luther, “ I knew that he would stick at the Command¬ ments, and therefore would not reach the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, or the Catechism.” It must be confessed, however, that Luther’s pleasantries are less remarkable for wit or delicacy than for the union of strong sense and honest merriment. They wrere the careless, though not inconsiderate sport of a free-spoken man, in a circle where religion and modesty, protected by an inbred reverence, did not seek the doubtful defence of conventional outworks. But pensive thoughts were the more habitual food of his overburdened mind. Neither social enjoyments, nor the .tenderness of domestic life, could ever long repel the melancholy which brooded over him. It breaks out in every part of his correspondence, and tinges all his recorded conversation. “ Because,” he says, “ my manner is sometimes gay and joyous, many think that I am always treading on roses. God knows what is in my heart. There is nothing in this life which gives me pleasure: I am tired of it. May the Lord come quickly and take me henee. Let him come to his final judgment — I await the blow. Let him hurl his thunders, that I may be at rest. Forty years more life! I would not purchase Paradise at such a price.” Yet, with this lassi¬ tude of the world, his contemplations of death were so¬ lemn, even to sadness. “ How gloriously,” said his friend, Dr. Jonas, “does St. Paul speak of his own death. I cannot enter into this.” “ It appears to me,” replied 112 Stephen’s miscellanies. Luther, “ that when meditating on that subject, even St. Paul himself could not have felt all the energy which pos¬ sessed him when he wrote. I preach, write, and talk about dying, with a greater firmness than I really possess, or tha.n others ascribe to me.” In common with all men of this temperament, he was profuse in extolling the opposite dis¬ position. “ The birds,” he says, “ must fly over our heads, but why allow them to roost in our hair?” “ Gaiety and a light heart, in all virtue and decorum, are the best medi¬ cine for the young, or rather for all. I who have passed my life in dejection and gloomy thoughts, nor catch at en¬ joyment, come from what quarter it may, and even seek for it. Criminal pleasure, indeed, comes from Satan, but that which we find in the society of the good and pious men is approved by God. Ride, hunt with your friends, amuse yourself in their company. Solitude and melan¬ choly are poison. They are deadly to all, but, above all, to the young.” The sombre character of Luther’s mind cannot be cor¬ rectly understood by those who are wholly ignorant of the legendary traditions of his native land. This remark is made and illustrated by M. Henry Heine, with that cu¬ rious knowledge of such lore as none but a denizen of Ger¬ many could acquire. In the mines of Mansfeld, at Eise¬ nach and Erfurth, the visible and invisible worlds were al¬ most equally populous; and the training of youth was not merely a discipline for the future offices of life, but an ini¬ tiation into mysteries as impressive, though not quite so sublime, as those of Eleusis. The unearthly inhabitants of every land are near akin to the human cultivators of the soil. The Killkropff of Saxony differed from a fairy or a hamadryad as a Saxon differs from a Frenchman or a Greek; the thin essences by which these spiritual bodies are sustained being distilled according to their various na¬ tional tastes, from the dews of Hymettus, the light wines of Provence, and the strong beer of Germany. At the fire-side around which Luther’s family drew, in his child¬ hood, there gathered a race of imps who may be consi¬ dered as the presiding genii of the turnspit and the stable; witches expert in the right use of the broomstick, but in¬ capable of perverting it into a locomotive engine; homely in gait, coarse in feature, sordid in their habits, with canine appetites, and superhuman powers, and, for the most part, LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 113 eaten up with misanthropy. When, in his twentieth year, Luther for the first time opened the Bible, and read there of spiritual agents, the inveterate enemies of our race, these spectra were projected on a mind over which such legends had already exercised an indestructible influence. Satan and his angels crowded upon his imagination, neither as shapeless presences casting their gloomy shadows on the soul, nor as mysterious impersonations of her foul and cruel desires, nor as warriors engaged with the powers of light and love, and holiness, in the silent motionless war of antagonist energies. Luther’s devils were a set of ath¬ letic, cross-grained, ill-conditioned wretches, with vile shapes and fiendish faces; who, like the monsters of Dame Ursula’s kitchen, gave buffet for buffet, hate for hate, and joke for joke. His Satan was not only something less than archangel ruined, but was quite below the society of that Prince of Darkness, whom Mad Tom in Lear declares to be a gentleman. Possessing a sensitive rather than a creative imagination, Luther transferred the visionary lore, drawn from these humble sources, to the machinery of the great epic of revelation, with but little change or embellish- ment; and thus contrived to reduce to the level of very vulgar prose some of the noblest conceptions of inspired poetry. At the Castle of Wartburg, his Patmos, where he dwelt the willing prisoner of his friendly sovereign, the Reformer chanced to have a plate of nuts at his supper table. How many of them he swallowed, there is, unfortunately, no Boswell to tell; vet, perhaps, not a few — for, as he slept, the nuts, animated as it would seem by the demon of the pantry, executed a sort of waltz, knocking against each other^ and against the slumberer’s bedstead; when, lo! the staircase became possessed by a hundred barrels rolling up and down, under the guidance, probably, of the imp of the spigot. Yet all approach to Luther’s room was barred by chains and by an iron door--vain intrenchments against Satan! He arose, solemnly defied the fiend, repeated the eighth Psalm, and resigned himself to sleep. Another visit from the same fearful adversary at Nuremburg led to the opposite result. The Reformer flew from his bed to seek refuge in society. Once upon a time, Carlostadt, the Sa- cramentarian, being in the pulpit, saw a tall man enter the church, and take his seat by one of the burgesses of the 10* I 114 Stephen’s miscellanies. town. The intruder then retired, betook himself to the preacher’s house, and exhibited frightful symptoms of a disposition to break all the bones of his child. Thinking better of it, however, he left with the boy a message for Carlostadt, that he might be looked for again in three days. It is needless to add that, on the third day, there was an end of the poor preacher, and of his attacks on Luther and Consubstantiation. In the cloisters at Wittemburg, Luther himself heard that peculiar noise which attests the devil’s presence. It came from behind a stove, resembling, for all the world, the sound of throwing a fagot on the fire. This sound, however, is not invariable. An old priest, in the attitude of prayer, heard Satan behind him, grunting like a whole herd of swine. “Ah! ha! master devil,” said the priest, “you have your deserts. There was a time when you were a beautiful angel, and there you are turned into a rascally hog.” The priest’s devotions proceeded without further disturbance; “for,” observed Luther, “there is nothing the devil can bear so little as contempt.” He once saw and even touched a Killkropff or supposititious child. This was at Dessau. The deviling, — for it had no other parent than Satan himself, — was about twelve years old, and looked exactly like any other boy. But the un¬ lucky brat could do nothing but eat. He consumed as much food as four ploughmen. When things went ill in the house, his laugh was to he heard all over it. If mat¬ ters went smoothly, there was no peace for his screaming. Luther sportively asserts that he recommended the elector to have this scapegrace thrown into the Moldau, as it was a mere lump of flesh without a soul. His visions some¬ times assumed a deeper significance, if not a loftier aspect. In the year 1496, a frightful monster was discovered in the Tiber. It had the head of an ass, an emblem of the Pope; for the Church being a spiritual body incapable of a bead, the Pope, who had audaciously assumed that character, was fitly represented under this asinine figure. The right hand resembled an elephant’s foot, typifying the Papal tyranny over the weak and timid. The right foot was like an ox’s hoof, shadowing forth the spiritual oppression ex¬ ercised by doctors, confessors, nuns, monks, and scholastic theologians; while the left foot armed with griffin’s claws, could mean nothing else than the various ministers of the Pope’s civil authority. How far Luther believed in the LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 115 existence of the monster, whose mysterious significations he thus interprets, it -would not be easy to decide. Yet it is difficult to read his exposition, and to suppose it a mere pleasantry. So constantly was he haunted with this mid¬ night crew of devils, as to have raised a serious doubt of his sanity, which even Mr. Ilallam does not entirely dis¬ countenance. Yet the hypothesis is surely gratuitous. In¬ tense study deranging the digestive organs of a man, whose bodily constitution required vigorous exercise, and whose mind had been earlv stored with such dreams as we have mentioned, sufficiently explains the restless importunity of the goblins amongst whom he lived. It is easier for a man to be in advance of his age on any other subject than this. It may be doubted whether the nerves of Seneca or Pliny would have been equal to a solitary evening walk by the Lake Avernus. What wonder, then, if Marlin Luther was convinced that suicides fall not by their own hands, but by those of diabolical emissaries, who really adjust the cord or point the knife — that particular spots, as, for example, the pool near the summit of the Mons Pilatus, were desecrated to Satan — that the wailings of his victims are to be heard in the bowlings of the night wind — or that the throwing a stone into a pond in his own neighbourhood, immediately provoked Such struggles of the evil spirit imprisoned below the water, as shook the neighbouring country like an earth¬ quake? The mental phantasmagoria of so illustrious a man are an exhibition to which no one who reveres his name would needlessly direct an unfriendly, or an idle gaze. But the infirmities of our nature often afford the best measure of its strength. To estimate the strength by which tempta¬ tion is overcome, you must ascertain the force of the pro¬ pensities to w’hicli it is addressed. Amongst the elements of Luther’s character was an awe verging towards idolatry, for all things, whether in the works of God or in the insti¬ tutions of man, which can be regarded as depositories of the Divine power, or as delegates of the Divine authority. From pantheism, the disease of imaginations at once devout and unhallowed, he was preserved in youth by his respect for the doctrines of the church; and, in later life, by his absolute surrender of his own judgment to the text of the sacred canon. But as far as a pantheistic habit of thought and feeling can consist with the most unqualified belief in 116 Stephen’s miscellanies. the uncommunicable Unity of the Divine nature, such thoughts and feelings were habitual to him. The same spirit which solemnly acknowledged the existence, whilst it abhorred the use, of the high faculties which, according to the popular faith, the foul fiends of earth, and air, and water, at once enjoy and pervert, contemplated with almost prostrate reverence the majesty and the hereditary glories of Rome; and the apostolical succession of her pontiff, with kings and emperors for his tributaries, the Catholic hierar¬ chy as his vicegerents, and the human mind his universal empire. To brave the vengeance of such a dynasty, wield¬ ing the mysterious keys which close the gates of hell and open the portals of heaven, long appeared to Luther an im¬ pious audacity, of which nothing less than wo, eternal and unutterable, would be the sure and appropriate penalty. For a man of his temperament to hush these superstitious terrors, and to abjure the golden idol to which the adoring eyes of all nations, kindred, and languages were directed, was a self-conquest, such as none but the most heroic minds can achieve; and to which even they are unequal, unless sustained by an invisible but omnipotent arm. For no error can be more extravagant that that which would re¬ duce Martin Luther to the rank of a coarse spiritual dema¬ gogue. The deep self-distrust which, for ten ’successive years, postponed his irreconcilable war with Rome, clung to him to the last; nor was he ever unconscious of the daz¬ zling splendour of the pageantry which his own hand had contributed so largely to overthrow. There is no alloy of affectation in the following avowal, taken from one of his letters to Erasmus: — “ You must, indeed, feel yourself in some measure awed in the presence of a succession of learned men, and by the consent of so many ages, during which flourished scholars so conversant in sacred literature, and martyrs illustrious by so many miracles. To all this must be added the more modern theologians, universities, bishops, and popes. On their side are arrayed learning, genius, numbers, dignity, station, power, sanctity, miracles, and what not. On mine, Wycliff and Laurentius Valla, and though you forget to men¬ tion him, Augustine also. Then comes Luther, a mean man, born but yesterday, supported only by a few friends, who have neither learning, nor genius, nor greatness, nor sanctity, nor miracles. Put them altogether, and they have not wit LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 117 enough to cure a spavined horse. What are they? What the wolf said of the nightingale — a voice, and nothing else. I confess it is with reason you pause in such a presence as this. For ten years together I hesitated myself. Could I believe that this Troy, which had triumphed over so many assaults would fall at last? I call God to witness, that I should have persisted in my fears, and should have hesi¬ tated until now, if truth had not compelled me to speak. You may well believe that my heart is not rock; and. if it were, yet so many are the waves and storms which have beaten upon it, that it must have yielded when the whole weight of this authority came thundering on my head, like a deluge ready to overwhelm me.” The same feelings were expressed at a later time in the following words: — “ I daily perceive how difficult it is to overcome long cherished scruples. Oh, what pain it has cost me, though the Scripture is on my side, to defend myself to my own heart for having dared singly to resist the Pope, and to denounce him as Antichrist! What have been the afflic¬ tions of my bosom ! How often, in the bitterness of my soul, have I pressed myself with the Papist’s argument,- — Art thou alone wise? are all others in error? have they been mistaken for so long a time? WThat if you are yourself mistaken, and are dragging with you so many souls into eternal condemnation? Thus did I reason with myself, till Jesus Christ, by his own infallible word, tranquillized my heart, and sustained it against this argument, as a reef of rocks thrown up against the waves laughs at all their fury. lie who thus acknowledged the influence, while he defied the despotism of human authority, was self-annihilated in the presence of his Maker. “ I have learned,” he says, “ from the Holy Scriptures that it is a perilous and a fearful thing to speak in the House of God; to address those who will appear in judgment against us, when at the last day we shall be found in his presence; when the gaze of the angels shall be directed to us, when every creature shall behold the Divine Word, and shall listen till He speaks. Truly, when I think of this, I have no wish but to be silent, and to cancel all that I have written. It is a fearful thing to be called to render to God an account of every idle word.” Philip Melancthon occasionally endeavoured by affectionate 118 Stephen’s miscellanies. applause, to sustain and encourage the mind which was thus bowed down under the sense of unworthiness. But the praise, even of the chosen friend of his bosom, found no echo there. He rejected it, kindly indeed, but with a re¬ buke so earnest and passionate, as to show that the com¬ mendations of him whom he loved and valued most, were unwelcome. They served but to deepen the depressing consciousness of ill desert, inseparable from his lofty con¬ ceptions of the duties which had been assigned to him. In Luther, as in other men, the stern and heroic virtues de¬ manded for their support that profound lowliness which might at first appear the most opposed to their development. The eye which often turns inward with self-complacency, or habitually looks round for admiration, is never long or steadfastly fixed on any more elevated object. It is permitted to no man at once to court the applauses of the world, and to challenge a place amongst the generous and devoted be¬ nefactors of his species. The enervating spell of vanity, so fatal to many a noble intellect, exercised no perceptible control over Martin Luther. Though conscious of the rare endowments he had received from Providence (of which that very consciousness was not the least important,) the secret of his strength lay in the heartfelt persuasion, that his superiority to other men gave him no title to their com¬ mendations, and in his abiding sense of the little value of such praises. The growth of his social affections was un¬ impeded by self-regarding thoughts ; and he could endure the frowns and even the coldness of those whose approving smiles he judged himself unworthy to receive, and did not much care to win. His was not that feeble benevolence which leans for support, or depends for existence, on the sympathy of those for whom it labours. Reproofs, sharp, unsparing, and pitiless, were familiar to his tongue, and to his pen. Such a censure lie had directed to the Archbishop of Mentz, which Spalatin, in the name of their common friend and sovereign, the Elector Frederic, implored him to suppress. “ No,” replied Luther, “in defence of the fold of Christ, I will oppose to the utmost of my power this ravening wolf, as I have resisted others. I send you my book, which was ready before your letter reached me. It has not induced me to alter a word. The question is de¬ cided, I cannot heed your objections.” They were such, however, as most men would have thought reasonable LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 119 enoughs Here are some of the words of which neither friend nor sovereign could dissuade the publication. “ Did you imagine that Luther was dead? Believe it not. He lives under the protection of that God who has already humbled the Pope, and is ready .to begin with the Arch¬ bishop of Mentz a game for which few are prepared.” To the severe admonition which followed, the princely prelate answered in his own person, in terms of the most humble deference, leaving to Capito, his minister* the ticklish office of remonstrating against the rigour with which the lash had been applied. But neither soothing nor menaces could abate Luther’s confidence in his cause, and in himself, “ Christianity,” he replies, “ is open and honest. It sees things as they are, and proclaims them as they are. I am for tearing off every mask, for managing nothing, for ex¬ tenuating nothing, for shutting the eyes to nothing, that truth may be transparent and unadulterated, and may have a free course. Think you that Luther is a man who is content to shut his eyes if you can but lull him by a few cajoleries?” “Expect every thing from my affection; but reverence, nay tremble for the faith.” George, Duke of Saxony, the near kinsman of Frederic, and one of the most determined enemies of the Reformation, not seldom pro¬ voked and encountered the same resolute defiance. “ Should God call me to Wittemburg, I would go there, though it should rain Duke Georges for nine days together, and each new Duke should be nine times more furious than this.” “ Though exposed daily to death in the midst of my ene¬ mies, and without any human resource, I never in my life despised any thing so heartily as these stupid threats of Duke George, and his associates in folly. I write in the morning fasting, with my heart filled with holy confidence. Christ lives and reigns, and I, too, shall live and reign.” Here is a more comprehensive denunciation of the futility of the attempts made to arrest his course. “ To the language of the Fathers, of men, of angels, and of devils, I oppose neither antiquity nor numbers, but the single word of the Eternal Majesty, even that gospel which they are themselves compelled to acknowledge. Here is my hold, my stand, my resting-place, my glory, and my triumph. Hence I assault Popes, Thomists, Henrycists, Sophists, and all the gates of hell. I little heed the words of men, whatever may have been their sanctity, nor am I 120 Stephen’s miscellanies. anxious about tradition or doubtful customs. The Word of God is above all. If the Divine majesty be on my side, what care I for the rest, though a thousand Augustines, and a thousand Cyprians, and a thousand such churches as those of Henry, should rise against me? * God can neither err nor deceive. Augustine, Cyprian, and all the saints, can err, and have erred.” “ At Leipsic, at Augsburg, and at Worms, my spirit was as free as a flower of the field.” “ He whom God moves to speak, expresses himself openly and freely, careless whether he is alone, or has others on his side. So spake Jeremiah, and I may boast of having done the same. God has not for the last thousand years bestowed on any bishop such great gifts as on me, and it is right that I should ex¬ tol his gifts. Truly, I am indignant with myself that I do not heartily rejoice and give thanks. Now and then I raise a faint hymn of thanksgiving, and feebly praise Him. Well! live or die, Domini swims. You may take the word either in the genitive or in the nominative case. Therefore, Sir Doctor, be firm.” This buoyant spirit sometimes expressed itself in a more pithy phrase. When he first wrote against Indulgences, Dr. Jerome Schurf said to him, “ What are you about? they won’t allow it.” “ What if they must allow it?” was the peremptory answer. The preceding passages, while they illustrate his inde¬ structible confidence in himself as the minister, and in his cause as the behest, of Heaven, are redolent of that un¬ seemly violence and asperity which are attested at once by the regrets of his friends, and the reproaches of his enemies, and his own acknowledgments. So fierce, indeed, and contumelious and withering is his invective, as to suggest the theory, that, in her successive transmigrations, the same fiery soul which in one age breathed the “ Divine Philippics.” and in another, the “ Letters on a Regicide Peace,” was lodged in the sixteenth century under the cowl of an Augustinian monk; retaining her indomitable energy of abuse, though condemned to a temporary divorce from her inspiring genius. Yet what she lost in eloquence in her transit from the Roman to the Irishman, this up¬ braiding spirit more than retrieved in generous and philan¬ thropic ardour, while she dwelt in the bosom of the Saxon. Luther’s rage, for it is nothing less — his scurrilities, for they LUTHER AND TIIE REFORMATION. 121 are no better — are at least the genuine language of passion, excited by a deep abhorrence of imposture, tyranny, and wrong. Through the ebullitions of his wrath may be dis¬ covered his lofty self-esteem, but not a single movement of puerile vanity; his cordial scorn for fools and their folly, but not one heartless sarcasm; his burning indignation against oppressors, whether spiritual or secular, unclouded by so much as a passing shade of malignity. The torrent of emotion is headlong, but never turbulent. When we are least able to sympathize with his irascible feelings, it is also least in our power to refuse our admiration to a mind which, when thus torn up to its lowest depths, discloses no trace of envy, selfishness, or revenge, or of any still baser inmate. II is mission from on high may be disputed, but hardly his own belief in it. In that persuasion, his thoughts often reverted to the Prophet of Israel mocking the idola¬ trous priests of Baal, and menacing their still more guilty King; and if the mantle of Elijah might have been borne with a more imposing majesty, it could not have fallen on one better prepared to pour contempt on the proudest ene¬ mies of truth, or to brave their utmost resentment. Is it paradoxical to ascribe Luther’s boisterous invective to his inherent reverence for all those persons and institu¬ tions, in favour of which wisdom, power, and rightful do¬ minion, are involuntarily presumed? He lived under the control of an imagination susceptible though not creative — of that passive mental sense to which it belongs to embrace, rather than to originate — to fix and deepen our more serious impressions, rather than to minister to the understanding in the search or the embellishment of truth. This propensity, the basis of religion itself in some, of loyalty in others, and of superstition perhaps in all, prepares the feeble for a willing servitude; and furnishes despotism with zealous instruments in men of stronger nerves and stouter hearts. It steeled Dominic and Loyola for their relentless tasks, and might have raised St. Martin of Wittemburg to the honours of canonization; if, in designing him for his ardu¬ ous office, Providence had not controlled the undue sensi¬ bility of Luther’s mind, by imparting to him a brother’s love for all the humbler members of the family of man, and a filial fear of God, stronger even than his reverence for the powers and principalities of this sublunary world. Between his religious affections and his homage for the 11 122 Stephen’s miscellanies. idols of his imagination, he was agitated by a ceaseless conflict. The nice adjustment of such a balance ill suited his impatient and irritable temper; and he assaulted the objects of his early respect with an impetuosity which be¬ trays his secret dread of those formidable antagonists (so he esteemed them) of God and of mankind. He could not trust himself to be moderate. The restraints of education, habit, and natural disposition, could be overborne. only by the excitement which he courted and indulged. His long- cherished veneration for those who tread upon the high places of the earth, lent to his warfare with them all the energy of self-denial, quickened by the anxiety of self-dis¬ trust! He scourged his lordly adversaries, in the spirit of a flagellant taming his own rebellious flesh. His youthful devotion for “ the solemn plausibilities of life,” like all other affections obstinately repelled and mortified, reversed its original tendency, and gave redoubled fervour to the zeal with which he denounced their vanity and resisted their usurpation. If these indignant contumelies offended the gentle, the learned, and the wise, they sustained the courage and won the confidence of the multitude. The voice which commands in a tempest must battle rvith the roar of the elements. In his own apprehension at least, Luther’s soul was among lions — the Princes of Germany, and their ministers; Henry the Eighth, and Edward Lee, his chaplain; the Sacramentarians and Anabaptists; the Universities of Cologne and Louvain; Charles and Leo; Adrian and Clement; Papists, Jurists, and Aristotelians; and, above all, the Devils whom his creed assigned to each of these formidable opponents as so many inspiring or ministering spirits. However fierce and indefensible may be his occasional style, history presents no more sublime picture than that of the humble monk triumphing over such adversaries, in the invincible power of a faith before which the present and the visible disappeared, to make way for things unseen, eternal, and remote. One brave spirit en¬ countered and subdued a hostile world. An intellect of no gigantic proportions, seconded by learning of no marvel¬ lous compass, and gifted ivith no rare or exquisite abilities, but invincible in decision and constancy of purpose, ad¬ vanced to the accomplishment of one great design, with a continually increasing momentum, before which all feebler minds retired, and all opposition wras dissipated. The LUTIIER AND THE REFORMATION. 123 majesty of the contest, and the splendour of the results, may, perhaps, even in our fastidious and delicate age, be received as an apology for such reproofs as the following to the Royal “Defender of the Faith.” “There is much royal ignorance in this volume, but there is also much virulence and falsehood, which belongs to Lee the editor. In the cause of Christ I have trampled under foot the idol of the Roman abomination which had usurped the place of God and the dominion of sovereigns and of the world. Who, then, is this Henry, this Tho- mist, this disciple of the monster, that I should dread his blasphemies and his fury? Truly he is the Defender of the Church! Y es, of that Church of his which he thus extols — of that prostitute who is clothed in purple, drunk with her debaucheries — of that mother of fornications. Christ is my leader. I will strike with the same blow that Church and the defender with whom she has formed this strict union. They have challenged me to war. Well, they shall have war. They have scorned the peace I of¬ fered them. Well, they shall have no more peace. It shall be seen which will first be weary — the Pope or Lu¬ ther.” — “The world is gone mad. There are the Hun- garians, assuming the character of the defenders of God himself. They pray in their litanies, ut nos defensores tuos exciudire digneris — why do not some of our princes take on them the protection of Jesus Christ, others that of the Holy Spirit? Then, indeed, the Divine Trinity would be well guarded.” The Briefs of Pope Adrian are thus disposed of: — “It is mortifying to be obliged to give such good German in answer to this wretched Latin. But it is the pleasure of God to confound Antichrist in every thing — to leave him neither literature nor language. They say that he has gone mad and fallen into dotage. It is a shame to address us Germans in such Latin as this, and to send to sensible people such a clumsy and absurd interpretation of Scrip¬ ture.” The Bulls of Pope Clement fare no better. “The Pope tells us in his answer that he is willing to throw open the golden doors. It is long since we opened all doors in Germany. But these Italian Scaramouches have never restored a farthing of the gain they have made by their in¬ dulgences, dispensations, and other diabolical inventions. 124 Stephen’s miscellanies. Good Pope Clement, all your clemency and gentleness won’t pass here. We’ll buy no more indulgences. Golden doors and bulls, get ye home again. Look to the Italians for payment. They who know ye will buy ye no more. Thanks be to God, we know that they who possess and believe the gospel, enjoy an uninterrupted jubilee. Ex¬ cellent Pope, what care we for your bulls? You may save your seals and your parchment. They are in bad odour now-a-days.” — -“Let them accuse me of too much violence. I care not. Hereafter be it my glory that men shall tell how I inveighed and raged against the Papists. For the last ten years have I been humbling myself, and addressing them in none but respectful language. What has been the consequence of all this submission? To make bad worse. These people are but the more furious. Well, since they are incorrigible, as it is vain to hope to shake their infernal purposes by kindness, I will break them, I will pursue them,” &c. — “Such is my contempt for these Satans, that were I not confined here, I would go straight to Rome, in spite of the Devil and all these furies.” “But,” he continues, in a more playful mood, “I must have patience with the Pope, with my boarders, my ser¬ vants, with Catherine de Bord, and with every body else. In short, I live a life of patience.” At the risk of unduly multiplying these quotations, we must add another, which has been quoted triumphantly by his enemies. It is his answer to the charge of mis-trans- lating the Bible. “The ears of the Papists are too long with their hi! ha!— -they are unable to criticise a translation from Latin into German. Tell them that Dr. Martin Lu¬ ther chooses that it shall be so, and that a Papist and a jack¬ ass are the same.” We should reprint no small portion of Luther’s works before we exhausted the examples which might be drawn lrom them, of the uproar with which he assailed his an¬ tagonists. To the reproaches which this violence drew on him, he rarely condescended to reply. But to his best and most powerful friend, the Elector Frederic, he makes a defence, in which there is some truth and more eloquence. “They say that these books of mine are too keen and cutting. They are right: I never meant them to be soft and gentle. My only regret is, that they cut no deeper. Think of the violence of my enemies, and you must con- LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 125 less that I have been forbearing.” — “All the world exclaims against me, vociferating the most hateful calumnies; and if in my turn, I, poor man, raise my voice, then nobody has been vehement but Luther. In fine, whatever I do or say must be wrong, even should I raise the dead. Whatever they do must be right, even should they deluge Germany with tears and blood,” In his more familiar discourse, he gave another, and perhaps a more accurate account of the real motives of his impetuosity. He purposely fanned the flame of an indignation which he thought virtuous, because the origin of it was so. “I never,” he said, “write or speak so well as when I am in a passion.” He found anger an effectual, and at last a necessary stimulant, and indulged in a liberal or rather in an intemperate use of it. The tempestuous phase of. Luther’s mind was not, how¬ ever, permanent. The wane of it may be traced in his later writings; and the cause of it may be readily assigned. The liberator of the human mind was soon to discover that the powers he had set free were not subject to his control. The Iconoclasts, Anabaptists, and other innova¬ tors, however welcome at first as useful, though irregular partisans, brought an early discredit on the victory to which they had contributed. The Reformer’s suspicion of these doubtful allies was first awakened by the facility with which they urged their conquests over the established opinions of the Christian world beyond the limits at which he had himself paused. He distrusted their exemption from the pangs and throes with which the birth of his own doctrines had been accompanied. He perceived in them none of the caution, self-distrust, and humility, which he wisely judged inseparable from the honest pursuit of truth. Their claims to an immediate intercourse with heaven ap¬ peared to him an impious pretension; for he judged that it is only as attempered through many a gross intervening medium, that Divine light can be received into the human understanding. Carlostadt, one of the professors of Wit- temburg, was the leader of the Illuminati at that university. The influence of Luther procured his expulsion to Jena, where he established a printing press. But the maxims of toleration are not taught in the school of successful pole¬ mics ; and the secular arm was invoked to silence an ap¬ peal to the world at large against a new papal authority. The debate from which Luther thus excluded others he II* 12G STEPHENS MISCELLANIES. could not deny to himself; for he shrunk from no inquiry and dreaded no man’s prowess. A controversial passage at arms accordingly took place between the Reformer and his refractory pupil. It is needless to add that they sepa¬ rated, each more firmly convinced of the errors of his op¬ ponent. The taunt of fearing an open encounter with truth, Luther repelled with indignation and spirit. He invited Carlostadt to publish freely whatever he thought fit, and the challenge being accepted, placed in his hands a florin, as a kind of wager of battle. It was received with equal frankness. The combatants grasped each other’s hands, drank mutual pledges in a solemn cup, and parted to engage in hostilities more serious than such greetings might have seemed to augur. Luther had the spirit of a martyr, and was not quite exempt from that of a persecu¬ tor. Driven from one city to another, Carlostadt at last found refuge at Basle; and thence assailed his adversary with a rapid succession of pamphlets, and with such pleasant appellatives as “ twofold papist,” “ ally of Antichrist,” and so forth. They were answered with equal fertility, and with no greater moderation. “ The devil,” says Luther, “held his tongue till I won him over with a florin. It was money well laid out. I do not regret it.” He now advo¬ cated the cause of social order, and exposed the dangers of ignorant innovators, assailing these new enemies with his old weapons. “ It will never do to jest with Mr. All the World ( Herr Omnes.) To keep that formidable person quiet, God has established lawful authority. It is his plea¬ sure that there should be order amongst us here.” “ They cry out, the Bible! the Bible! — Bibel ! Bubel ! Babel!” From that sacred source many arguments had been drawn to prove that all good Christians were bound, in imitation of the great Jewish lawgiver, to overthrow and deface the statues with which the Papists had embellished the sacred edifices. Luther strenuously resisted both the opinion and the practice; maintaining that the Scriptures nowhere pro¬ hibit the use of images, except such as were designed as a representation or symbol of Deity. But to the war with objects designed (however injudiciously) to aid the imagi¬ nation, and to enliven the affections, Carlostadt and his partisans united that mysticism which teaches that the mind, thus deprived of all external and sensible supports, should raise itself to a height of spiritual contemplation LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 127 and repose, where, all other objects being banished, and all other sounds unheard, and all other thoughts expelled, the Divine Being will directly manifest himself, and dis¬ close his will by a voice silent and inarticulate, and yet distinctly intelligible. Luther handles this sublime non¬ sense as it well deserved. “The devil,” he says (for this is his universal solvent,) “ opens his large mouth, and roars out, Spirit! spirit! spirit! destroying the while all roads, bridges, scaling-ladders, and paths, by which spirit can enter; namely, the visible order established by God in holy baptism, in outward forms, and in his own word. They would have you mount the clouds and ride the winds, telling you neither how, nor when, nor where, nor which. All this they leave you to discover for yourself.” Carlostadt was an image-breaker and a mystic, but he was something more. He had adopted the opinion of Zuingle and CEcolampadius on the Holy Communion, — re¬ ceiving as an emblem, and as nothing else, the sacred ele¬ ments in which the Roman Catholic Church, after the words of consecration, recognises the very body and blood of the Divine Redeemer. He was, therefore, supported by the whole body of Swiss reformers. Luther, “ chained down,” as he expresses it, “ by the sacred text,” to the doctrine of the real presence, had ardently desired to be enfranchised from this opinion. “ As often as he felt within himself the strivings of the old Adam, he was but too violently drawn to adopt the Swiss interpretation.” “ But if we take counsel with reason we shall no longer believe any mystery.” He had, however, consulted this dangerous guide too long, thus easily to shake off her company. The text taught him one real presence, his reason assured him of another; and so he required his disciples to admit and believe both. They obeyed, though at the expense of a schism among the reformers, of which it is difficult to say whether it occasioned more distress to themselves, or more exultation to their common enemies. This is the first and greatest of those “Variations” of which the history has been written with such inimitable eloquence. Nothing short of the most obtuse prejudice could deny to Bossuet the praise of having brought to reli¬ gious controversy every quality which can render it either formidable or attractive; a style of such transparent perspi¬ cuity as would impart delight to the study of the year-books, 128 Stephen’s miscellanies. if they could be re-written in it; a sagacity which nothing escapes; and a fervour of thought and feeling so intense, as to breathe and burn not onlv without the use of vehement or opprobrious words, but through a diction invariably calm and simple; and a mass of learning so vast and so perfectly digested as to be visible every where without producing the slightest incumbrance or embarrassment. To quote from Mr. Hallam’s History of the Middle Ages: — “ No¬ thing, perhaps, in polemical eloquence is so splendid as the chapter on Luther’s theological tenets. The Eagle of Meaux is there truly seen, lordly of form, fierce of eyes, terrible in his beak and claws” — a graphic and not un¬ merited tribute to the prowess of this formidable adversary. But the triumph which it appears to concede to him may not be so readily acknowledged. The argument of the “ Variations ” rests on the postulate, that a religion of divine origin must have provided some resource for excluding uncertainty on every debateable point of belief or practice. But it must be vain to search for this steadfast light amongst those who were at variance on so many vital questions. The required Ductor Dubi- tantium could, therefore, be found only in the venerable form of the Catholic Church, whose oracles, every where accessible and never silent, had, from age to age, delivered to the faithful the same invariable truths in one continuous strain of perfect and unbroken harmony. Much as the real contrast has been exaggerated by the most subtle disputant of modern times, it would be futile to deny, or to extenuate the glaring inconsistencies of the reformers with each other, and with themselves. Protes¬ tantism may well endure an avowal which leaves her foun¬ dations unimpaired. Bossuet has disproved the existence of a miracle which no man alleges. He has incontrover- tibly established that the laws of nature were not suspended in favour of Luther and his associates. He has shown, with inimitable address and eloquence, that, within the pre¬ cincts of moral science, human reason must toil in vain for demonstrative certainties; and that, in such studies, they who would adopt the same general results, and co-operate for one common end, must be content to rest very far short of an absolute identity of opinion. But there is a deep and impassable gulf between these premises and the inference deduced from them. The stupendous miracle of a tradi- LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 129 tional unanimity for fifteen hundred years amongst the members of the Christian Church, at once unattested by any authentic evidence, and refuted by irresistible proofs, is opposed as much to the whole • economy of the moral government of the world, as it is to human experience. It was, indeed, easy to silence dissent by terror; to disguise real differences beneath conventional symbols; to divert the attention of the incurious by a gorgeous pageantry; and to disarm the inquisitive at one time by golden preferments, and at another by specious compromises: and it was easy to allege this timid, or blind, or selfish acquiescence in spi¬ ritual despotism, as a general consent to the authority, and as a spontaneous adoption of the tenets of the dominant priesthood. But so soon as men really began to think, it was impossible that they should think alike. When suf¬ frages were demanded, and not acclamations, there was at once an end of unanimity. With mental freedom came doubt, and debate, and sharp dissension. The indispensa¬ ble conditions of human improvement were now to be ful¬ filled. It was discovered that religious knowledge, like all other knowledge, and religious agreement, like all other agreement, were blessings which, like all other blessings, must be purchased at a price. Luther dispelled the illusion that man’s noblest science may be attained, his first in¬ terests secured, and his most sacred duties discharged, ex¬ cept in the strenuous exercise of the best faculties of his nature. He was early taught that they who submit them¬ selves to this divine ordinance are cut off from the intellec¬ tual repose which rewards a prostrate submission to human authority; that they must conduct the search of truth through many a bitter disappointment, and many a humiliating re¬ traction, and many a weary strife; and that they must brace their nerves and strain their mental powers to the task, with sleepless diligence, — attended and sustained the while by singleness of purpose, by candour, by hope, by humility, and by devotion. When this severe lesson had been learned, the reformers boldly, nay, passionately, avowed their mu¬ tual differences. The imperfect vision, and unsteady gait, of eyes long excluded from the light, and limbs debarred from exercise, drew on them the taunts and contumelies of those whose bondage they had dared to reject. But the sarcasms even of Erasmus, the eloquence even of Bossuet, were hurled at them in vain. Centuries rolled on their 130 Stephen’s miscellanies. appointed course of controversy, of prejudice, of persecu¬ tion, and of long suffering. Nor was that sharp conflict endured to no good end. Gradually the religion of the gospel resumed much of the benignant and catholic spirit of the primitive ages. The rights of conscience and the principles of toleration, were acknowledged. Some vehe¬ ment disputes were consigned to well-merited neglect. The Church of Rome herself silently adopted much of the spirit, whilst anathematizing the tenets, of the Reformers; and if the dominion of peace and charity be still imperfect and precarious, yet there is a brighter prospect of their univer¬ sal empire than has ever before dawned on the nations of Christendom. The Eagle of Meaux, had he been reserved for the nineteenth century, would have laid aside “ the terrors of his beak, the lightnings of his eye,” and would have winged his lordly flight to regions elevated far above those over which it is his glory to have spread war and consternation. These, however, are conclusions which, in Luther’s age, were beyond the reach of human foresight. It was at that time supposed that all men might at once freely discuss, and unanimously interpret, the meaning of the inspired vo¬ lume. The trial of the experiment brought to light many essential variations, but still more in which the verbal ex¬ ceeded the real difference; and such was, perhaps, the case with the Sacramenlarian controversy. The objection to Luther’s doctrine of Consubstantiation, was not that it was opposed to the reason of man, nor even that it was contra¬ dicted by the evidence of his senses; but that no intelligible meaning could be assigned to any of the combinations of words in which it was expressed. It might be no difficult task to be persuaded that whatever so great a doctor taught, on so high a point of theology, must be a truth; — just as the believers in George Psalmanazer may have been firmly assured of the verity of the statements he addressed to them in the language of Formosa. But the Lutheran doctrine could hardly have been more obscure, if delivered in the Formosan, instead of the Latin or the German tongue. To ail common apprehension, it appeared nothing less than the simultaneous affirmation and denial of the very same thing. In this respect, it closely resembled the kindred doctrine of the Church of Rome. Yet who would dare to avow such presumptuous bigotry as to impute to the long LUTHER AND TIIE REFORMATION. 131 unbroken succession of powerful and astute minds which have adorned the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches, the extravagance of having substituted unmeaning sounds for a definite sense, on so momentous an article of their re¬ spective creeds? The consequence may be avoided by a much more rational supposition. It is, that the learned of both communions used the words in which that article is enounced, in a sense widely remote from that which they usually bear. The proof of this hypothesis would be more easy than attractive: nor would it be a difficult, though an equally uninviting office, to show that Zuingle and his fol¬ lowers indulged themselves in a corresponding freedom with human language. The dispute, however, proceeded too ra¬ pidly to be overtaken or arrested by definitions; which, had they preceded, instead of following the controversy, might have stifled in its birth many a goodly folio. The minds of men are rudely called away from these subtleties. Throughout the west of Germany, the peasants rose in a sudden and desperate revolt against their lords, under the guidance of Goetz of the “Iron Hand.” If nei¬ ther animated by the principles, nor guided by the precepts, of the gospel, the insurgents at least avowed their adhe¬ rence to the party then called Evangelical, and justified their conduct by an appeal to the doctrines of the reformers. Yet this fearful disruption of the bands of society was pro¬ voked neither by speculative opinions, nor by imaginary wrongs. The grievances of the people were galling, pal¬ pable, and severe. They belonged to that class of social evils over which the advancing light of truth and knowledge must always triumph; either by prompting timely conces¬ sions, or by provoking the rebound of the overstrained pa¬ tience of mankind. Domestic slavery, feudal tenures, op¬ pressive taxation, and a systematic denial of justice to the poor, occupied the first place in their catalogue of injuries: the forest laws and the exaction of small tithes the second. The demand of the right to choose their own religious teachers, may not improbably have been added, to give to their cause the semblance of a less sublunary character; and rather in compliment to the spirit of the times, than from any very lively desire for instructed, who, they well knew, would discourage and rebuke their lawless violence. Such a monitor was Luther, He was at once too conspicuous and too ardent to remain a passive spectator of these tu- 132 Stephen’s miscellanies. mults. The nobles arraigned him as the author cf their calamities. The people invoked him as an arbiter in the dispute. He answered their appeal with more than papal dignity. A poor untitled priest asserted over the national mind of Germany a command more absolute than that of her thousand Princes and their Imperial head. He had lit¬ tle of the science of government, nor, in truth, of any other science. But his mind had been expanded by his studies which give wisdom even to the simple. His understanding was invigorated by habitual converse with the inspired writings, and his soul drunk deeply of their spirit. And therefore it was, that from him Europe first heard those great social maxims which, though they now pass for ele¬ mentary truths, were then as strange in theory as they were unknown in practice. He fearlessly maintained that the demands of the insurgents were just. He asserted the all important, though obvious truth, that power is confided to the rulers of mankind not to gratify their caprice or selfish¬ ness, but as a sacred trust to be employed for the common good of society at large; and he denounced their injustice and rapacity with the same stern vehemence which he had formerly directed against the spiritual tyrants of the world. For, in common with all who have caught the genius as well as the creed of Christianity, his readiest sympathies were with the poor, the destitute, and the oppressed; and, in contemplating the unequal distribution of the good things of life, he was not slowly roused to a generous indignation against those to whom the advantages of fortune had taught neither pity nor foibearance. But it was an emotion re¬ strained and directed by far deeper thoughts than visit the minds of sentimental patriots, or selfish demagogues. He depicted, in his own ardent and homely phrase, the guilt, the folly, and the miseries of civil war. He reminded the people of their ignorance and their faults. He bade them not to divert their attention from these, to scan the errors of their superiors. He drew from the evangelical pre¬ cepts of patience, meekness and long-suffering, every mo¬ tive which could calm their agitated passions. He implored them not to dishonour the religion they professed; and showed that subordination in human society was a divine ordinance, designed to promote, in different ways, the mo¬ ral improvement of every rank, and the general happiness of all. LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 133 The authority, the courage, and the pathetic earnestness of the great Reformer were exerted in vain. Oppression, which drives wise men mad, had closed the ears of the German peasantry to the advice even of Martin Luther; and they plunged into a contest more desperate in its charac¬ ter, and more fatal in its results, than any which stains the annals of the empire. He felt, with the utmost keenness, the reproach thus brought unto the Reformation; nor may it be concealed, that at last his voice was raised in terrible indignation against the insurgents by whom his pacific efforts had been defeated and his remonstrances de¬ spised. His old antagonist, Carlostadt, was charged with a guilty participation in the revolt; and in his distress ap¬ pealed to the much-reviled Consubstantialist for protection. It was hardly in human nature, certainly not in Luther’s, to reject such a supplicant. The odium theologicum is, after all, rather a vituperative than a malignant affection, even its worst type; and Luther possessed, more than most polemics, the faculty of exorcising the Demon of Wrath through the channel of the pen. He placed Carlostadt in safety, defended him from the charge of fostering rebel¬ lion, and demanded for him a fair trial and a patient hear¬ ing. His preternatural fate has been already noticed. But a more formidable enemy was at hand. The su¬ premacy of Erasmus in the world of letters was such as no other writer ever lived to enjoy. Literature had then a universal language, and the learned of all nations ac¬ knowledged him as their guide and model. In an age of intense mental activity, no other mind was so impatient of repose; at a period when freedom of thought was asserted with all the enthusiasm of new-born hope, he emulated the most sanguine of the insurgents against the ancient dy¬ nasties. The restorer, almost the inventor, of the popular interpretation of the scriptures, he was excelled by few, if any, in the more ambitious science of biblical criticism. His philosophy (if in deference to custom it must so be called) was but the application to those inquiries in which the present and future welfare of mankind is chiefly in¬ volved, of an admirable good sense — penetrating sophisms under the most specious disguise, and repelling mere verbal subtleties, however imposing their pretensions, or however illustrious their patrons. Alternately a man of the world, and a recluse scholar, he was ever wide 12 134 STEPHEN^ MISCELLANIES. awake to the real business of life; even in those studies which usually conduct the mere prisoners of the cloister into dreamy and transcendental speculations. In his hands, ihe Latin language was bent to uses of which Cicero him¬ self might have thought it incapable; and without any bar¬ barous innovations, became, almost for the first time, the vehicle of playful banter, and of high and mysterious doc¬ trines, treated in a familiar and easy tone. Of the two im¬ perial virtues, industry and self-denial, the literary charac¬ ter of Erasmus was adorned by the first, much more than by the second. Grasping at universal excellence and im¬ mediate renown, he poured out orations, verses, essays, dia¬ logues, aphorisms, biographies, translations, and new edi¬ tions of the classical writers, with a rapidity which at once dazzled the world, and exhausted himself. Deeply as the impress of his mind was fastened on his own generation, those only of his countless works retain their charm in la¬ ter times, which he regarded but as the pastime of a few leisure hours. Every one has read the “ Colloquies,” and admired their gay and graceful exposure of the frauds and credulity of his age. The “ Praise of Folly” should never be separated from Holbein’s etchings, without which the reader may now and then smile, but hardly laugh. The “ Ciceronians ” is one of those elaborate pleasantries which give pleasure only to the laborious. For neither as a wit nor as a theologian, nor perhaps even as a critic, does Erasmus rank among master intellects; and in the other departments of literature no one has ventured to claim for him a very elevated station. His real glory is to have opened at once new channels of popular and of ab¬ struse knowledge — to have guided the few, while he in¬ structed the many — to have lived and written for noble ends — to have been surpassed by none in the compass of his learning, or the collective value of his works — and to have prepared the way for a mighty Revolution, which it required moral qualities far loftier than his to accomplish. For the soul of this great man did not partake of the energy of his intellectual faculties. He repeatedly confesses that he had none of the spirit of a martyr; and the acknowledg¬ ment is made in the tone of sarcasm, rather than in that of regret. He belonged to that class of actors on the scene of life, who have always appeared as the harbingers of great social changes; — men gifted with the power to discern, and LUTHER AND TIIE REFORMATION'. 135 the hardihood to proclaim, truths of which they want the courage to encounter the infallible results; who outrun their generation in thought, but lag behind it in action; players at the sport of reform so long as reform itself appears at an indefinite distance; more ostentatious of their mental supe¬ riority, than anxious for the well-being of mankind; dream¬ ing that the dark page of history may hereafter become a fairy tale, in which enchantment will bring to pass a glo¬ rious catastrophe, unbought by intervening strife, and agony, and suffering; and therefore overwhelmed with alarm when the edifice begins to totter, of which their own hands have sapped the foundation. He was a Reformer until the Re¬ formation became a fearful reality; a jester at the bulwarks of the papacy until they began to give way; a propagator of the Scriptures, until men betook themselves to the study and the application of them; depreciating the mere outward forms of religion, until they had come to be estimated at their real value; in short, a learned, ingenious, benevolent, amiable, timid, irresolute man, who, bearing the responsi¬ bility, resigned to others the glory of rescuing the human mind from the bondage of a thousand years. The distance between his career and that of Luther was, therefore, con¬ tinually enlarging, until they at length moved in opposite directions, and met each other with mutual animosity. The Reformer foresaw and deprecated this collision ; and Bos- suet has condemned as servile the celebrated letter in whicfi Luther endeavoured to avert the impending contest. In common with many of his censures of the great father of the Protestant churches, this is evidently the result of pre¬ judice. It was conceived with tenderness, and expressed with becoming dignity. “I do not,” he says, “reproach you in your estrange¬ ments from us, fearing lest I should hinder the cause which you maintain against our common enemies the Papists. For the same reason, it gives me no displeasure that, in many of your works, you have sought to obtain their favour, or to appease their hostility, by assailing us with undeserved reproaches and sarcasms. It is obvious that God has not given you the energy or the courage requisite for an open and fearless attack on these monsters, nor am I of a tem¬ per to exact from you what is beyond your strength.” — “ I have respected your infirmity, and that measure of the gifts of God which is in you. None can deny that you 136 Stephen’s miscellanies. have promoted the cause of literature, thus opening the way to the right understanding of the Scriptures; or that the endowment which you have thus received from God is magnificent and worthy of all admiration. Here is a just cause for gratitude. 1 have never desired that you should quit your cautious and measured course to enter our camp. Great are the services you render by your genius and elo¬ quence; and as your heart fails you, it is best that you should serve God with such powers as He has given you. My only apprehension is, lest you should permit yourself to be dragged by our enemies to publish an attack upon our doc¬ trines, for then I should be compelled to resist you to the face.” — “ Things have now reached a point at which we should feel no anxiety for our cause, even though Erasmus himself should direct all his abilities against us. It is no wonder that our party should be impatient of your attacks. Human weakness is alarmed and oppressed by the weight of the name of Erasmus, Once to be lashed by Erasmus is a far different thing from being exposed to the assaults of all the Papists put together.” — “ I have written all this in proof of my candour, and because I desire that God may impart to you a spirit worthy of your name. If that spirit be withheld, at least let me implore you to remain a mere spectator of our tragedy. Do not join your forces to our enemies. Abstain from writing against me, and I will write nothing against you.” This lofty tone grated on the fastidious ear of the mo¬ narch of literature. He watched his opportunity, and inflicted a terrible revenge. To have attacked the doc¬ trines of the Reformation would have been to hazard an unanswerable charge of inconsistency. But Luther, in exploring his path, had lost his way in the labyrinth of the question of free will ; and had published opinions which were nothing short of the avowal of absolute fa¬ talism. In a treatise De Libero Arbitrio , Erasmus made a brilliant charge on this exposed part of his adversary’s position: exhausting all the resources of his sagacity, wit, and learning, to lower the theological character of the founder of the Lutheran Church. The Reformer stag¬ gered beneath this blow. For metaphysical debate he was ill prepared — to the learning of his antagonist he had no pretension — and to his wit could oppose nothing but indig¬ nant vehemence. His answer, l)e Servo Arbitrio , has LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION. 137 been confessed by his most ardent admirers, to have been but a feeble defence to his formidable enemy. The tem¬ per in which he conducted the dispute may be judged from the following example: — Erasmus, that king of amphibo¬ logy, reposes calmly on his amphibological throne, cheats us with his ambiguous language, and claps his hands when he finds us entangled amongst his insidious tropes, like beasts of chase fallen into the toils. Then seizing the occasion for his rhetoric, he springs on his captive with loud cries, tearing, scourging, tormenting, and devoting him to the infernals, because, as it pleases him to say, his words have been understood in a calumnious, scandalous and Sa¬ tanic sense, though it was his own design that they should be so taken. See him come on creeping like a viper,” &c. Blessed, we are told, are the peacemakers ; but the bene¬ diction is unaccompanied with the promise of tranquillity. He found, indeed, a patron in “His Highness, Richard Lord Protector,” whose rule he acknowledged as lawful, though he had denied the authority of his father. Ad¬ dressing that wise and amiable man, “I observe,” he says, that the nation generally rejoice in your peaceable entrance upon the government. Many are persuaded that you have been strangely kept from participating in any of our late bloody contentions, that God might make you the healer of our breaches, and employ you in that temple work which David himself might not be honoured with, though it was LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD BAXTER. 181 in his mind, because he shed blood abundantly, and made great wars.” Stronger minds and less gentle hearts than that of Richard repelled with natural indignation counsels which rebuked all the contending parties. Amongst these was “one Malpas, an old scandalous minister,” “and Ed¬ ward Bagshawe, a young man who had written formerly against monarchy, and afterwards against Bishop Morley, and being of a resolute Roman spirit, was sent first to the Tower, and then lay in a horrid dungeon;” and who wrote a book “full of untruths, which the furious temerarious man did utter out of the rashness of his mind.” In his dungeon, poor Bagshawe died, and Baxter closes the de¬ bate with tenderness and pathos. “While we wrangle here in the dark, we are dying, and passing to the world that will decide all our controversies, and the safest passage thither is by peaceable holiness.” Dr. Owen, one of the foremost in the first rank of divines of his age, had borne much; but these exhortations to concord he could not bear; and he taught his monitor, that he who undertakes to re¬ concile enemies must be prepared for the loss of friends. It was on every account a desperate endeavour. Baxter was opposed to every sect, and belonged to none. He can be properly described only as a Baxterian — at once the founder and the single disciple of an eclectic school, within the portals of which he invited all men, but persuaded none, to take refuge from their mutual animosities. Had Baxter been content merely to establish truth, and to decline the refutation of error, many might have listened to a voice so earnest, and to counsels so profound. But, “ while he spoke to them of peace, he made him ready for battle.” Ten volumes, many of them full-grown quartos, vindicated his secession from the Church of England. Five other batteries, equally well served, were successively opened against the Antinomians, the Quakers, the Baptists, the Millenarians, and the Grotians. The last, of whom Dodwell was the leader, typified, in the reign of Charles, the divines who flourish at Oxford in the reign of Victoria. Long it were, and not very profitable, to record the events of these theological campaigns. They brought into the field Tillotson, Stillingfleet, and Dodwell. The men of learning were aided by the men of wit. Under the nom cle guerre of “ Tilenus Junior,” Womack, the Bishop of St. David’s, had incurred Baxter’s censure for his 16 182 Stephen’s miscellanies. 44 abusive, virulent accusations of the Synod of Dort.” To this attack appeared an answer, entitled, 44 The Examina¬ tion of Tilenus before the Triers, in order to his intended settlement in the office of a public preacher in the com¬ monwealth of Utopia.” Among the jurors empannelled for the trial of Tilenus, are “ Messrs. Absolute,” “ Fata¬ lity,” “ Preterition,” “Narrow Grace, alias Stint Grace,” “Take o’ Trust,” “Know Little,” and “ Dubious,” — the last the established soubriquet for Richard Baxter. But nei¬ ther smile nor sigh could be extorted from the veteran po¬ lemic; nor, in truth, had he much right to be angry. If not with equal pleasantry, he had with at least equal free¬ dom, invented appellations for his opponents; — designating Dodwell, or his system, as “Leviathan, absolute, destruc¬ tive Prelacy, the son of Abaddon, Apollyon, and not of Jesus Christ.” Statesmen joined in the affray. Morice, Charles’s first Secretary of State, contributed a treatise; and Lauderdale, who, with all his faults, was an accomplished scholar, and amidst all his inconsistencies, a stanch Pres¬ byterian, accepted the dedication of one of Baxter’s con¬ troversial pieces, and presented him with twenty guineas. The unvarying kindness to the persecuted nonconformist of one who was himself a relentless persecutor, is less strange than the fact, that the future courtier of Charles read, during his imprisonment at Windsor, the whole of Baxter’s then published works, and, as their grateful author records, remembered them better than himself. While the pens of the wise, the witty, and the great, were thus employed against the universal antagonist, the Quakers assailed him with their tongues. Who could recognise, in the gentle and benevolent people who now bear that name, a trace of their ancestral character, of which Baxter has left the fol¬ lowing singular record? “The Quakers in their shops, when I go along London Streets, say, alas! poor man, thou art yet in darkness. They have oft come to the congrega¬ tion, when I had liberty to preach Christ’s gospel, and cried out against me as a deceiver of the people. They have followed me home, crying out in the streets, 4 the day of the Lord is coming, and thou shalt perish as a de¬ ceiver.’ They have stood in the market-place, and under my window, year after year, crying to the people, ‘take heed of your priests, they deceive your souls;’ and if any one wore a lace or neat clothing, they cried out to me, ‘these are the fruits of your ministry.’ ” LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD BAXTER. 183 Against the divorce of divinity and politics, Baxter ve¬ hemently protested, as the putting asunder of things which a sacred ordinance had joined together. He therefore pub¬ lished a large volume, entitled “The Holy Commonwealth; a Plea for the cause of Monarchy, but as under God the Universal Monarch.” Far better to have roused against himself all the quills which had ever bristled on all the “fretful porcupines ” of theological strife. For, while vin¬ dicating the ancient government of England, he hazarded a distinct avowal of opinions, which, with their patrons, were to be proscribed with the return of the legitimate Sovereign. He taught that the laws of England are above the king; that Parliament was his highest court, where his personal will and word were not sufficient authority. He vindicated the war against Charles, and explained the apos¬ tolical principle of obedience to the higher powers as ex¬ tending to the senate as well as to the emperor. The royal power had been given “for the common good, and no cause could warrant the king to make the common¬ wealth the party which he should exercise hostility against.” All this was published at the moment of the fall of Richard Cromwell. Amidst the multitude of answers which it pro¬ voked may be especially noticed those of Harrington, the author of the “Oceana,” and of Edward Pettit. “The former,” says Baxter, “ seemed in a Bethlehem rage, for, by way of scorn, he printed half a sheet of foolish jests, in such words as idiots or drunkards use, railing at ministers as a pack of fools and knaves, and, by his gibberish deri¬ sion, persuading men that we deserve no other answer than such scorn and nonsense as beseemeth fools. With most insolent pride, he carried it as neither I nor any ministers un¬ derstood at all what policy was; but prated against we knew not what, and had presumed to speak against other men’s art, which he was master of, and his knowledge, to such idiots as we, incomprehensible.” Pettit placed Baxter in hell, where Bradshawe acts as president, and Hobbes and Neville strive in vain for the crown which he awards to the nonconformist for pre-eminence of evil and mischief on earth. “Let him come in,” exclaims the new Rhadaman- thus, “ and be crowned with wreaths of serpents, and chap¬ lets of adders. Let his triumphant chariot be a pulpit drawn on the wheels of cannon by a brace of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Let the ancient fathers of the Church, 184 Stephen’s miscellanies. whom out of ignorance he has vilified; the reverend and learned prelates, whom out of pride and malice he has belied, abused, and persecuted; the most righteous King, whose murder he has justified — let them all be bound in chains to attend his infernal triumph to his 4 Saint’s Ever¬ lasting Rest;’ then make room, scribes and pharisees, hy¬ pocrites, atheists, and politicians, for the greatest rebel on earth, and next to him that fell from heaven.” Nor was this all. The “ Holy Commonwealth ” was amongst the books which the University of Oxford sentenced to the flames which had been less innocently kindled at the same place in a former generation, against the persons of men who had dared to proclaim unwelcome truths. Morley and many others branded it as treason; and the King was taught to regard the author as one of the most inveterate enemies of the royal authority. South joined in the uni¬ versal clamour; and Baxter, in his autobiography, records, that when that great wit and author had been called to preach before the King, and a vast congregation drawn to¬ gether by his high celebrity, he was compelled, after a quarter of an hour, to desist, and to retire from the pulpit exclaiming, “the Lord be merciful to our infirmities!” The sermon, which should have been recited, was after¬ wards published, and it appeared that the passage at which South’s presence of mind had failed him, was an invective against the “ Holy Commonwealth.” After enduring for ten years the storm which his book had provoked, Baxter took the very singular course of publishing a revocation, desiring the world to consider it as non scriptum ; — main¬ taining the while the general principles of his work, and “ protesting against the judgment of posterity, and all others that were not of the same time and place, as to the men¬ tal censure either of the book or revocation, as being igno¬ rant of the true reasons of them both,” We, therefore, who, for the present, constitute the posterity, against whose rash judgment this protest was entered, should be wary in censuring what, it must be confessed, is not very intel¬ ligible, except, indeed, as it is not difficult to perceive, motives enough for retreating from an unprofitable strife, even though the retreat could not be very skilfully accom¬ plished. Two volumes of Ecclesiastical History, the first a quarto of five hundred pages, the second a less voluminous vindi- LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD BAXTER. 185 cation of its predecessor, attest the extent of Baxter’s la¬ bours in this department of theological literature, and the stupendous compass of his reading. The authorities he enumerates, and from a diligent study of which his work is drawn, would form a considerable library. Such labours as those we have mentioned, might seem to have left no vacant space in a life otherwise so actively employed. But these books, and the vast mass of unpub¬ lished manuscripts, are not the most extensive, as they are incomparably the least valuable, of the produce of his soli¬ tary hours. With the exception of Grotius, Baxter is the first of that long series of writers who have undertaken to establish the truth of Christianity, by a systematic exhibition of the evi¬ dence and the arguments in favour of the divine origin of our faith. All homage to their cause, for we devoutly believe it to be the cause of truth ! Be it acknowledged that their labours could not have been declined, without yielding a tem¬ porary and dangerous triumph to sophistry and presumptuous ignorance. Admit (as indeed it is scarcely possible to exag* gerate) their boundless superiority to their antagonists in learning, in good faith, in sagacity, in range and depth of thought, and in whatever else was requisite in this momen¬ tous controversy; — concede, as for ourselves we delight to confess, that they have advanced their proofs to the utmost heights of probability which by such reasonings it is pos¬ sible to scale; — with these concessions may not inconsis* tently be combined some distaste for these inquiries, and some doubt of their real value. The sacred writers have none of the timiditv of their •/ modern apologists. They never sue for an assent to their doctrines, but authoritatively command the acceptance of them. They denounce unbelief as guilt, and insist on faith as a virtue of the highest order. In their Catholic invita¬ tions, the intellectual not less than the social distinctions of mankind are unheeded. Every student of their writings is aware of these facts; but the solution of them is less com¬ monly observed. It is, we apprehend, that the Apostolic authors assume the existence in all men of a spiritual dis¬ cernment, enabling the mind, when unclouded by appetite or passion, to recognise and distinguish the Divine voice, whether uttered from within by the intimations of con¬ science, or speaking from without in the language of in- 16* 186 Stephen’s miscellanies. spired oracles. They presuppose that vigour of under¬ standing may consist with feebleness of reason; and that the power of discriminating between religious truths and error does not chiefly depend on the culture, or on the ex¬ ercise of the mere argumentative faculty. The especial patrimony of the poor and the illiterate — the Gospel — has been the stay of countless millions who never framed a syllogism. Of the great multitudes whom no man can number, who before and since the birth of Grotius have lived in the peace, and died in the consolations of our faith, how incomparably few are they whose convictions have been derived from the study of works like his! Of the numbers who have addicted themselves to such studies, how small is the proportion of those who have brought to the task either learning, or leisure, or industry sufficient to enable them to form an independent judgment on the ques¬ tions in debate! Called to the exercise of a judicial func¬ tion for which he is but ill prepared — addressed by plead¬ ings on an issue where his prepossessions are all but unalterable, bidden to examine evidences which he has most rarely the skill, the learning, or the leisure to verify, and pressed by arguments, sometimes overstrained, and sometimes fallacious— he who lays the foundations of his faith in such “evidences,” will but too commonly end either in yielding a credulous, and therefore an infirm as¬ sent, or by reposing in a self-sufficient and far more hazard¬ ous incredulity. For these reasons, we attach less value to the long series of Baxter’s works in support of the foundations of the Chris¬ tian faith than to the rest of his books which have floated in safety down the tide of time to the present day. Yet it would be difficult to select, from the same class of writings, any more eminently distinguished by the earnest love and the fearless pursuit of truth; or to name an inquirer into these subjects who possessed and exercised to a greater extent the power of suspending his long-cherished opinions, and of closely interrogating every doubt by which they were obstructed. In his solicitude to sustain the conclusions he had so laboriously formed, Baxter unhappily invoked the aid of arguments, which, however impressive in his own days, are answered in ours by a smile, if not by a sneer. The LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD BAXTER. 187 sneer, however, would be at once unmerited and unwise. When Hale was adjudging witches to death, and More preaching against their guilt, and Boyle investigating the sources of their power, it is not surprising that Baxter availed himself of the evidence afforded by witchcraft and apparitions in proof of the existence of a world of spirits; and therefore in support of one of the fundamental tenets of revealed religion. Marvellous, however, it is, in running over his historical discourse on that subject, to find him giving so unhesitating an assent to the long list of extravagances and nursery tales which he has there brought together; unsupported as they almost all are by any proof that such facts occurred at all, or by any decorous pretext for refer¬ ring them to preternatural agency. Simon Jones, a stout¬ hearted and able-bodied soldier, standing sentinel at Wor¬ cester, was driven away from his post by the appearance of something like a headless bear. A drunkard was warned against intemperance by the lifting up of his shoes by an invisible hand. One of the witches condemned by Hale threw a girl into fits. Mr. Emlin, a bystander, “ suddenly felt a force pull one of the hooks from his breeches, and, while he looked with wonder what had become of it, the tormented girl vomited it up out of her mouth.’! At the house of Mr. Beecham, there was a tobacco pipe which had the habit of “ moving itself from a shelf at the one end of the room to a shelf at the other end of the room.” When Mr. Munn, the minister, went to witness the prodigy, the tobacco pipe remained stationary; but a great Bible made a spontaneous leap into his lap, and opened itself at a passage, on the hearing of which the evil spirit who had possessed the pipe was exorcised. “This Mr. Munn himself told me, when in the sickness year, 1665, 1 lived in Stockerson Hall. I have no reason to suspect the veracity of a sober man, a constant preacher, and a good scholar.” Baxter was credulous and incredulous for precisely the same reason. Possessing by long habit a mastery over his thoughts, such as few other men ever acquired, a single effort of the will was sufficient to exclude from his view whatever recollec¬ tions he judged hostile to his immediate purpose. Every prejudice was at once banished when any debateable point was to be scrutinized; and, with equal facility, every rea¬ sonable doubt was exiled when his only object was to en¬ force or illustrate a doctrine of the truth of which he was 188 Stephen’s miscellanies. assured. The perfect submission of the will to the reason may belong to some higher state of being than ours. On mortal man that gift is not bestowed. In the best and the wisest, inclination will often grasp the reins by which she ought to be guided, and misdirect the judgment which she should obey. Happy they, who, like Baxter, have so dis¬ ciplined the affections, as to disarm their temporary usur¬ pation of all its more dangerous tendencies ! Controversies are ephemeral. Ethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy are doomed to an early death, unless when born of genius and nurtured by intense and self- denying industry. Even the theologians of one age must, alas! too often disappear to make way for those of later times. But if there is an exception to the general decree which consigns man and his intellectual offspring to the same dull forgetfulness, it is in favour of such writings as those which fill the four folio volumes bearing the title of 44 Baxter’s Practical Works.” Their appearance in twenty- three smart octavos is nothing short of a profanation. Hew down the Pyramids into a range of streets, divide Niagara into a succession of water privileges, but let not the spirits of the mighty dead be thus evoked from their majestic shrines to animate the dwarfish structures of our bookselling generation. Deposit one of those gray folios on a resting- place equal to that venerable burden, then call up the patient and serious thoughts which its very aspect should inspire, and confess that, among the writings of uninspired men, there are none better fined to awaken, to invigorate, to en¬ large, or to console the mind, which can raise itself to such celestial colloquy. True, they abound in undistinguishable distinctions; the current of emotion, when flowing most freely, is but too often obstructed by metaphysical rocks and shallows, or diverted from its course into some dialectic winding; one while the argument is obscured by fervent expostulation; at another the passion is dried up by the analysis of the ten thousand springs of which it is com¬ pounded; here is a maze of subtleties to be unravelled, and there a crowd of the obscurely learned to be refuted; the unbroken solemnity may shed some gloom on the travel¬ ler’s path, and the length of the way may now and then entice him to slumber. But where else can be found an exhibition, at once so vivid and so chaste, of the diseases of the human heart — a detection so fearfully exact, of the LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD BAXTER. 189 sophistries of which we are first the voluntary and then the unconscious victims — a light thrown with such intensity on the madness and the wo of every departure from the rules of virtue — a development of those rules so compre¬ hensive and so elevated — counsels more shrewd or more persuasive — or a proclamation more consolatory of the re¬ sources provided by Christianity for escaping the dangers by which we are surrounded — of the eternal rewards she promises — or of the temporal blessings she imparts, as an earnest and a foretaste of them? “ Lars' ior hie carnpis sether.” Charles, and Laud, and Cromwell, are forgotten. We have no more to do with anti-psedobaptism or prelacy. L’Estrange and Morley disturb not this higher region; but man and his noblest pursuits — Deity, in the highest con¬ ceptions of his attributes which can be extracted from the poor materials of human thought — the world we inhabit divested of the illusions which insnare us — the world to which we look forward bright with the choicest colours of hope — the glorious witnesses, and the Divine Guide and Supporter of our conflict — throng, animate, and inform every crowded page. In this boundless repository, the intimations of inspired wisdom are pursued into all their bearings on the various conditions and exigencies of life, with a fertility which would inundate and overpower the most retentive mind, had it not been balanced by a method and a discrimination even painfully elaborate. Through the vast accumulation of topics, admonitions, and inquiries, the love of truth is universally conspicuous. To every pre¬ cept is appended the limitations it seems to demand. No difficulty is evaded. Dogmatism is never permitted to usurp the province of argument. Each equivocal term is curiously defined, and each plausible doubt narrowly ex¬ amined. Not content to explain the results he has reached, he exhibits the process by which they were excogitated, and lays open all the secrets of his mental laboratory. And a wondrous spectacle it is. Calling to his aid an extent of theological and scholastic lore sufficient to equip a whole college of divines, and moving beneath the load with unen¬ cumbered freedom, he expatiates and rejoices in all the in¬ tricacies of his way — now plunging into the deepest thickets of casuistic and psychological speculation — and then emer¬ ging from them to resume his chosen task of probing the conscience, by remonstrances from which there is no escape 190 Stephen’s miscellanies. — or of quickening the sluggish feelings by strains of ex¬ alted devotion. That expostulations and arguments of which almost all admit the justice, and the truth of which none can disprove, should fail so ineffectually on the ear, and so seldom reach the heart, is a phenomenon worthy of more than a passing notice, and meriting an inquiry of greater exactness than it usually receives, even from those who profess the art of healing our spiritual maladies. To resolve it “ into the corruption of human nature,” is but to change the formula in which the difficulty is proposed. To affirm that a cor¬ rupt nature always gives an undue preponderance to the present above the future, is untrue in fact; for some of our worst passions — avarice, for example, revenge, ambition, and the like — chiefly manifest their power in the utter dis¬ regard of immediate privations and sufferings, with a view to a supposed remote advantage. To represent the world as generally incredulous as to the reality of a retributive stale, is to contradiet universal experience, which shows how firmly that persuasion is incorporated with the lan¬ guage, habits, and thoughts of mankind; — manifesting itself most distinctly in those great exigencies of life, when dis¬ guise is the least practicable. To refer to an external spiritual agency, determining the will to a wise or a foolish choice, is only to reproduce the original question in another form — -what is that structure or mechanism of the human mind by means of which such influences operate to control or guide our volitions? The best we can throw out as an answer to the problem is, that the constitution of our frames, partly sensitive and partly rational, and corresponding with this the condition of our sublunary existence, pressed by animal as well as by spiritual wants, condemns us to a constant oscillation between the sensual and the divine, between the propensities which we share with the brute creation, and the aspirations which connect us with the author of our being. The rational soul contemplates means only in reference to their ends; whilst the sensuous nature reposes in means alone, and looks no farther. Imagina¬ tion, alternately the ally of each, most readily lends her powerful aid to the ignobler party. Her golden hues are more easily employed to exalt and refine the grossness of appetite, than to impart brilliancy and allurement to ob¬ jects brought within the sphere of human vision by the LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD BAXTER. 192 exercise of faith and hope. Her draperies are adjusted with greater facility, to clothe the nakedness and to con¬ ceal the shame of those things with which she is most con-