BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 SKETCHES 
 
 C. KEGAN PAUL 
 
 LONDON 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH <&* CO. 
 
 MDCCCLXXXIII
 
 P RE FA CE. 
 
 The seven sketches "which form the present volume 
 have been contributed to various Magazines and 
 Reviews during the past twenty years. They are 
 scarcely altered, tJwugh there are opinions and 
 expressions which I might modify were I now 
 writing for the first time on the same subjects. 
 But since I here admit that my views have under- 
 gone a certain development, and since the course 
 and even the process of change will be apparent to 
 those who care to trace them, it has seemed best to 
 leave tJie papers mainly as they were written, with 
 such few variations as were necessary to give 
 unity to the whole. 
 
 Recent publications, which have revived in large 
 measure the interest in Edward Irving formerly 
 
 excited 
 
 j ij**
 
 vi PREFACE. 
 
 excited by Mrs. Oliphanfs Memoir, have but little 
 changed the aspect of the facts as I knew them, and 
 in no degree my opinion of the man; it is enough 
 to say that I have carefully considered all that has 
 been published on the subject. 
 
 I have to thank the Editors and Proprietors of 
 Eraser's, Harper's, and the Century Magazines, 
 and of the Theological and Westminster Reviews 
 for permission to reprint the substance of the 
 
 book. 
 
 C. K. P. 
 
 MARCH 8, 1883.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Edward Irving i 
 
 John Keble 37 
 
 Maria Hare . . . . . . 71 
 
 Rowland Williams 93 
 
 Charles Kingsley 115 
 
 George Eliot 141 
 
 John Henry Newman 171
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 1792-1834. 
 
 "C"OR thirty years after Edward Irving's death, 
 * until Mrs. Oliphant wrote his life in 1862, 
 his name had passed away from most men's lips, 
 and his memory from their hearts. If by accident 
 mention of him was tossed up on the light froth 
 of daily talk, a few persons present might recall to 
 mind that once, years since, they had gone with 
 the crowd to hear the great Scotch preacher ; that, 
 like many others in the crowd, they had wondered 
 for a moment, and gone their way. It had not 
 occurred to them that the fervid eloquence which 
 stirred them was addressed not merely or chiefly 
 to the throngs that come and go ; that themselves 
 were but the outsiders of a united and permanent 
 body which ever gathered a closer and closer 
 unity ; which, when their teacher was cast out of 
 the communion of his baptism and his orders, 
 became a separate and organic Church, second to 
 /' none
 
 2 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 none in claims of authority, firmness of discipline, 
 definiteness of doctrine. They fancied that when 
 this great star of oratory set below their horizon 
 he shone no more, whereas in truth it was then 
 his power grew greatest, and the effects of his 
 teaching became most lasting. 
 
 An interesting Church of educated men and 
 women hold dearer than their lives the faith in 
 which Irving died ; and while the world calls 
 them by Irving's name, they refusing to call any 
 man on earth Master, and declaring that they hold 
 the Catholic faith in its fulness, and exhibit in its 
 entirety the true ecclesiastical organisation claim 
 no lower title than the Catholic Apostolic Church. 
 But Irving's memory is enshrined in their heart 
 of hearts as the man through whom chiefly God 
 prepared them, and by whom he led them, in that 
 new revelation, "that new world which is the 
 old." What manner of man, then, was he who 
 seemed once so remarkable to all who saw or 
 heard him, whose life and teaching were of so 
 vast importance to many ? 
 
 Edward Irving, the son of respectable burgher 
 parents long time established on the shores of the 
 Solway Firth, was born at Annan, August 4th, 
 1792. His childhood and youth seem to have 
 been in no way remarkable, except that the life of 
 a Scotch lad who is cast, as so many are, on his 
 
 own
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 3 
 
 own resources at the age of thirteen into a great 
 city to get himself educated as best he may, is 
 always remarkable compared with the careful 
 fencing round bestowed on English lads of the 
 same age, and long afterwards. His relations 
 both in early life and at Edinburgh with Thomas 
 Carlyle, are now so well known that little need 
 here be said. With proud independence he spent 
 the time between his pupilage and his ministry 
 in teaching, first at Haddington, afterwards at 
 Kirkcaldy. At Haddington he was also private 
 tutor to Miss Welsh, who afterwards became the 
 pupil, then the wife of Thomas Carlyle. It was 
 no doubt the remembrance of his little charge, 
 though in part also the natural chivalry of the 
 man, which made him foster such a spirit of 
 reverence for girlhood among the rough lads of 
 his school, that violent games were suspended 
 as they passed by. 
 
 Among his pupils was the daughter of the 
 minister of Kirkcaldy, that Isabella Martin whom 
 he afterwards married, who as child and wife alike 
 was his trusting pupil, and more than this, his 
 friend and counsellor, a brave, true-hearted woman. 
 She at no time, in spite of allegations to the 
 contrary, " contributed to the clouding of his 
 genius," for the simple reason that it blazed bright 
 and unclouded to the end. A single extract from 
 
 one
 
 4 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 one of her letters tells more of what she was than 
 a volume by any one else. " You know well," 
 writes Mrs. Irving in 1830, "from my feeling and 
 acting in regard to dear Edward, that I am not 
 one who is continually in fear about health, when 
 one is doing the Lord's work." 
 
 Irving was all we might expect a Border Scot 
 to be. Strong in mind as in body ; keen to 
 contrive and swift to do ; fervid in religion, yet 
 always with a certain lawless originality break- 
 ing out, to be repressed under authority, when 
 it had, in fact, gained its end ; a poet in thought 
 and imagination ; outspoken and blunt, yet full 
 of a winning grace and tenderness ; magnificent 
 in stature and bearing ; handsome in face, had it 
 not been for a remarkable and disfiguring cast in 
 one eye, he would always have been a man of 
 mark : to these more outward gifts and graces 
 were joined a singularly high tone of morals, a 
 purity, honour, guilelessness, power of love for and 
 belief in men which few ever have and fewer still 
 preserve. He was, as a matter of course, brought 
 up in strict Presbyterianism, a creed and a ritual 
 which seem chill and lifeless to most of us, as 
 would the Thirty-nine Articles and " Cathedral 
 service " to an Italian, which have yet their own 
 poetry, their own enthusiasm, their " noble army 
 of martyrs." Presbyterianism was not to him 
 
 that
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 5 
 
 that modern thing which we for the most see 
 when we turn our eyes northward, looking like a 
 weak and washed-out copy of some of our own 
 phases of Dissent ; but it was the faith of the 
 Westminster Divines, with their deep and subtle 
 and abstruse theology, their keen reasoning, their 
 conclusions, from which there was no escape if 
 once their premisses were admitted. 
 
 For a clever lad, nurtured as Irving was, and 
 at such a time, but one career was open, and in it 
 he naturally engaged. It would have seemed to 
 him flat blasphemy to say that formulas which 
 had been wide enough for his fathers in the faith 
 could ever prove too narrow for him ; even when 
 in after days the Church of Scotland cast him out, 
 he never doubted but that he was adhering to the 
 old ways ; his humble estimate of himself never 
 rose to the conception that he had grown too big 
 for " the sharp knots of human creeds." He was 
 ever, in theory, as loyal to his church as he was 
 to his country. The way he loved both, glorified 
 both, idolised both, may be seen in a passage from 
 his Discourses on yudgment to Come^ published 
 in London in 1823. He writes : 
 
 Of my beloved native country, whose sufferings for more 
 than a long century do place her in a station of honour 
 second only to the Waldenses in the militant church, and 
 whose martyrs alas, that they should have been to episcopal 
 
 pride
 
 6 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 pride and Protestant intolerance ! will rank on the same 
 file with those of Lyons and Alexandria in the primitive 
 church, of her regeneration by the power of religion, I can 
 hardly trust myself to speak. Before that blessed xra she 
 had no arts but the art of war, no philosophy nor literature 
 save her songs of love and chivalry, and little government of 
 law. She was torn and mangled by intestine feuds, en- 
 slaved to arbitrary or aristocratic power, in vassalage, in 
 turbulence. Her soil niggard, her climate stern, a desert 
 land of misty lakes and hoary mountains. Yet no sooner 
 did the breath of truth from the living Oracles of God breathe 
 over her, than the wilderness and the solitary plain became 
 glad, and the desert rejoiced and blossomed like the rose. 
 The high-tempered soul of the nation the " ingenium per- 
 fervidum Scotorum " which had roused itself heretofore to 
 resist invasions of her sacred soil, and spoil the invader's 
 border, or to rear the front of rebellion, and unloose warfare 
 upon herself, did now arise for the cause of religion and liberty 
 for the rights of God and the rights of man. And oh, what 
 a demonstration of magnanimity we made ! The pastoral 
 vales and upland heaths which of old were made melodious 
 to the shepherd's lute, now rung responsive to the glory of 
 God, attuned from the hearts of his persecuted saints. The 
 blood of martyrs mingled with our running brooks ; their 
 hallowed bones now moulder in peace within their silent 
 tombs, which are dressed by the reverential hands of the 
 pious and patriotic people. And their blood did not cry in 
 vain to heaven for vengeance. Their persecutors were de- 
 spoiled ; the guilty race of kings were made vagabonds upon 
 the earth. The church arose in her purity like a bride decked 
 for the bridegroom ; religious principles chose to reside within 
 the troubled land, and they brought moral virtues in their 
 train, and begot a national character for industry and enter- 
 prise, for every domestic and public virtue, which maketh 
 her children ever an acceptable people in the four quarters 
 of the earth. 
 
 No
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 7 
 
 No doubt the passionate love of country has 
 led the writer into a great exaggeration in the 
 last sentence. All Scotchmen are not like Edward 
 Irving, and Englishmen at least have not always 
 found them an acceptable people ; but we can 
 easily understand how one who wrote and felt 
 thus could, when life opened before him, think no 
 calling higher and more blessed than that of a 
 minister in the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland. 
 
 Yet it was long before employment opened to 
 him, and he thought seriously of becoming a mis- 
 sionary. Dr. Chalmers, however, seeking a curate 
 while Irving was waiting, hoping, and at times 
 desponding, in Edinburgh, heard him preach, and 
 after some deliberation on both sides Irving became 
 his curate at St. John's Church, Glasgow. This was 
 in October 1819, when he was seven-and-twenty. 
 
 He startled and awed the good people of Glas- 
 gow, more, however, by his appearance and man- 
 ner than his sermons. " Mem," said an excited 
 servant girl, " there's a wonderful grand gentleman 
 called, I think he maun be a Highland chief." 
 " That Mr. Irving," said another, " I took him 
 for a cavalry officer." " People," reported a third, 
 "say he's like a brigand chief." He blessed each 
 house as he entered it " Peace be to this house." 
 He laid his hands on the children with the words, 
 "The Lord bless thee and keep thee." But 
 
 though
 
 8 EDWARD TRYING. 
 
 though his labours from house to house were 
 unceasing, though all brought face to face with 
 him loved him, in the pulpit he was unrecog- 
 nised, and he felt it, and accepted it with 
 the touching humility which marked his whole 
 career. "This congregation is almost the first 
 in which our preaching was tolerated ; we know, 
 on the other hand, that our imperfections have 
 not been hid from your eyes." He was not as 
 yet at ease in the pulpit ; his style was laboured 
 and formal. That wonderful force and beauty 
 which marked his musical sentences in after days 
 was not yet present. A few looked on him with 
 exceeding admiration, but neither the congregation 
 nor Chalmers himself gave him cordial acceptance. 
 Once again that missionary scheme rose before 
 him ; he would go as went the Apostles of old, 
 with like fervour, like poverty, to meet, if need 
 be, like martyrdom. The ideal of such a life was 
 ever present with him, was put out in a sermon 
 some two years later which shook the religious 
 world. Had he gone, men might have seen a 
 missionary like St. Francis Xavier, whose work 
 would have been indeed hard to fit into the 
 dreary dulness of "reports of missions." At that 
 time, however, the committee of the Caledonian 
 Church in London offered him the ministry, then 
 vacant, of their congregation. This seemed a call 
 
 from
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 9 
 
 from God, and was obeyed as such. He was not 
 yet a fully ordained minister, and he chose for 
 this ceremony of orders the church of Annan, 
 where he had been baptized. He little thought 
 that in that same church ten years later such 
 orders as he then received should be recalled by 
 the presbytery that conferred them. 
 
 Whoever has heard of Irving has heard what 
 followed his appearance in London. A short 
 period of quiet ministry to his few sheep in that 
 great wilderness, his appreciation by Sir James 
 Mackintosh and Canning, and then the flood of 
 people who thronged the little chapel, and whose 
 carriages blocked the streets around it, are mat- 
 ters known to all. None can wonder at this popu- 
 larity. There are passages in the earliest book 
 he published Orations on the Oracles of Cod, 
 and a Discourse on Judgment to Come which are 
 scarcely surpassed, if indeed they are surpassed, 
 in eloquence even by Jeremy Taylor. They have 
 not, it is true, Taylor's profusion of learning, but 
 the style flows more freely for that very want. 
 Irving's published works are so little known that 
 another passage may well be quoted from this 
 remarkable book, in order to show what was the 
 eloquence which enthralled a vast congregation 
 during the hours while he preached. He speaks 
 of those "who confound the foresight of death 
 
 with
 
 io EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 with a fearfulness of death," and think but little 
 of God and the end : 
 
 And here I would try these flush and flashy spirits with 
 their own weapons, and play a little with them at their own 
 game. They do but prate about their exploits at fighting, 
 drinking, and death despising. I can tell them of those who 
 fought with savage beasts yea, of maidens who durst enter 
 as coolly as a modern bully into the ring, to take their 
 chance with infuriated beasts of prey ; and I can tell them 
 of those who drank the molten lead as cheerfully as they do 
 the juice of the grape, and handled the red fire and played 
 with the bickering flames as gaily as they do with love's 
 dimples and woman's amorous tresses. And what do they 
 talk of war ? Have they forgot Cromwell's iron band who 
 made their chivalry to skip ; or the Scots Cameronians, who 
 seven times, with their Christian chief, received the thanks 
 of Marlborough, that first of English captains ? or Gustavus 
 of the North, whose camp sung psalms in every tent? It is 
 not so long that they should forget Nelson's Methodists, who 
 were the most trusted of that hero's crew. Poor men, they 
 know nothing who do not know out of their country's history 
 who it was that set at nought the wilfulness of Henry VIII. 
 and the sharp rage of the virgin Queen against liberty, and 
 bore the black cruelty of her popish sister, and presented the 
 Petition of Rights and the Bill of Rights and the claim of 
 rights. Was it chivalry? Was it blind bravery? No ; these 
 second-rate qualities may do for a pitched field or a fenced 
 ring ; but when it comes to death or liberty, death or virtue, 
 death or religion, they wax dubious, generally bow their necks 
 under hardship, or turn their backs for a bait of honour or a 
 mess of solid and substantial meat. 
 
 Or again : 
 
 I greatly fear that the modern contraction of the Gospel 
 into the span of one or two ideas, this promulgation of it as
 
 EDWARD IRVING. it 
 
 if it were a drawling monotony of sweetness, a lullaby for a 
 baby spirit, with no music of mighty feeling, nor swells of 
 grandeur, nor declensions of deepest pathos, nor thrilling 
 themes of terror ; as if it were a thing for a shepherd's love- 
 sick lute, or a sentimentalist's yEolian harp, instead of being 
 for the great organ of human thought and feeling, through 
 all the stops and pipes of this various world ; I say, I fear 
 greatly lest this strain of preaching Christ, the most feeble 
 and ineffectual that the Christian world has ever heard, 
 should have lulled many into a quietus of the soul, under 
 which they are resting sweetly from searching inquiry into 
 their personal estate, and will pass composedly through death 
 into the awful judgment. 
 
 Now, what difference is it whether the active spirit of a 
 man is laid asleep by the comfort of the holy wafer and ex- 
 treme unction, to be his viaticum and passport into heaven, 
 or by the constant chnrm of a few words sounded and sounded 
 and eternally sounded about Christ's efficiency to save ? In 
 the holy name of Christ and the three times holy name of 
 God have they declared aught to men, or are they capable 
 of declaring aught to men, which should not work upon men 
 the desire and the power of holiness? Why, then, do I hear 
 the constant babbling about simple reliance and simple 
 dependence upon Christ, instead of most scriptural and 
 sound-minded calls to activity and perseverance after every 
 perfection ? And oh ! they will die mantled in their vain 
 delusion, as the Catholic dies ; and when the soothing voice 
 of their consolatory teacher is passed into inaudible distance, 
 conscience will arise with pensive reflection and pale fear, 
 her two daughters, to take an account of the progress and 
 exact advancement of the mind. 
 
 No wonder that words like these drew crowds 
 to hear him, and at the same time excited strong 
 antagonism; no wonder, also, that unceasing 
 
 daily
 
 12 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 daily work among the members of his flock knit 
 them closely to himself in bonds of love. 
 
 In the second year of his London work, the 
 same in which he published the Orations, he mar- 
 ried Isabella Martin. She was worthy of such a 
 husband. His faithful companion and friend in 
 all sorrows, sharer of his deepest thoughts in the 
 deaths of hopeful children tried again and again, 
 believing to the utmost all, and more than all, that 
 Edward Irving did before he died, she grew to 
 seem to some who knew her but slightly, and that 
 not long before her own death, a beautiful, saintly 
 soul, living a life almost supernatural in the depth 
 of its faith. 
 
 Irving's home affections had always been very 
 strong. " There are no women now," he once 
 wrote, "like my mother." He always observed 
 the death-day of a dear brother as a solemn fast. 
 Stronger than ever ran the current of home love 
 when turned into a yet deeper channel. His 
 letters to his wife are beyond quotation : it seems 
 almost a profanation of such wedded love to have 
 published them at all. Nor is it well to cite his 
 words over his children's early graves ; there are 
 chords too sacred t& strike lightly, and too solemn 
 when stricken aright, to be heard anywhere but 
 in a book of devotion. To this holy home 
 came many in sorrow and suffering, and the hearts 
 
 of
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 13 
 
 of Irving and his wife were ever open to them. 
 There gathered round him also a circle of pious- 
 hearted men, who studied with him and prayed 
 with him ; and among these came Henry Drum- 
 mond, leading and being led by him, ever his 
 faithful friend, one day to become an apostle and 
 leader in the Catholic Apostolic Church. His 
 congregation soon outgrew the little church in 
 Hatton-garden, and in 1827 they entered into 
 possession of a new church in Regent-square, of 
 which one thousand sittings were rented at once ; 
 and with this move Edward Irving rose to the 
 height of his fame. 
 
 The time had now come when, conscious of his 
 own powers, as is every great man, full of a fervid 
 and passionate religion, recognised as teacher by 
 a large and increasing congregation, the common- 
 places of ordinary Scotch theology could not 
 satisfy one who held so high an ideal of his call- 
 ing. The Christian world has at all times been 
 divided between two schools of thought, which, 
 whatever those names once meant, may on the 
 whole be marked by the terms Catholic and Pro- 
 testant. The Catholic holds that on earth there 
 exists a society which is at once divinely inspired, 
 yet only so inspired as to interpret truth once 
 given, and final, which is the same through all 
 the ages, unchanging as God himself, though 
 
 changing
 
 14 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 changing, as he does, the modes of her manifesta- 
 tion. As the living witness of God in the world, 
 the secret things of God are in great measure no 
 secrets to her. His wondrous and unexpected 
 workings which men call miracles, are in a degree 
 in her hands ; the spirits and souls of the 
 righteous, though gone before, are not parted 
 from her body; her fixed and steady gaze, en- 
 lightened by Scripture of which she is the 
 guardian and interpreter by tradition, by revela- 
 tions and visions from the unseen world, is able 
 to penetrate the gloom which hangs over the state 
 after death, to map out the dim future land, and, 
 indeed, by the power of faith, to believe it more 
 real than those things which are seen. She is the 
 dictatrix of conscience, the watchful keeper of the 
 souls of men. The Roman Church has ever been 
 the chief asserter of this Catholic faith, though it 
 is obvious the tone of mind we have described 
 may exist quite independently of many subordinate 
 Roman doctrines. 
 
 The Protestant, on the contrary, can look to no 
 body of men as the exponent of his opinions. To 
 talk of the Protestant Church is to talk nonsense. 
 The Protestant holds that his own private judg- 
 ment is the test of truth, truth at least so far as 
 it can be known by man. He will cultivate his 
 intellect and his judgment so far as he can, but 
 
 none
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 15 
 
 none shall dictate to him what he shall believe. 
 Of the nature of things unseen he knows nothing ; 
 he will bring a calm, patient criticism to bear on 
 all points presented to him ; will sift and examine 
 the Scriptures with more regard to modern science 
 than old tradition, will be quite content to live a 
 sceptic, in the good sense of the word, cheerfully, 
 hopefully, and, in his way, faithfully doing his duty. 
 The consistent religious Protestant can seldom be 
 found, and most men not avowed Roman Catholics, 
 are members of some church which contrives to 
 reconcile some part of the Catholic faith, with 
 some portion of Protestant scepticism, Protestant 
 free inquiry. The Church of England is eminently 
 such a compromise, and had Edward Irving's lot 
 been cast within her pale, no doubt he would have 
 been among the foremost in that great Catholic 
 movement of which the throes were felt when he 
 first became a religious leader. For his was a 
 thoroughly Catholic mind. His reverence for an- 
 tiquity, his respect for authority, his love of power; 
 his hereditary faith in the letter of the Bible, its 
 inspiration, its miracles; his poetic taste, his yearn- 
 ing pursuit of the ideal, all led him to cling to such 
 Catholic doctrines, such shadows of Catholic rites, 
 as the Church of Scotland retained, and to shrink 
 away from her chilly Protestantism without vigour 
 or life, save in its fear of Rome, with which he 
 
 cordially
 
 1 6 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 cordially agreed. So week by week his teaching 
 assumed higher ground, he stood before his people 
 rather a priest than a minister. Week by week, 
 along with doctrines of which we will presently 
 speak, the full Catholic faith on the subject of 
 baptism and the like was put forward more promi- 
 nently, more and more he taught as one having 
 authority, and not as the recognised scribes. Yet, 
 leader as he was, he could not but drink deep of 
 the spirit of his age, and this too, equally with the 
 bent of his own mind, drew him back towards 
 Catholic antiquity. But the current of thought 
 which swept men backward, was after all but one 
 of the many influences then at work. Since the 
 Reformation, nothing has so deeply stirred the 
 world as the French Revolution, and all it brought. 
 Men's faith in the stability of things was rudely 
 shaken when they saw ancient monarchies blotted 
 out, and new men from among the people seated 
 on sacred thrones. An empire like that of Nebu- 
 chadnezzar rose to the terror of the nations ; its 
 ruler fell, and they were scarcely less afraid. For 
 prophetic words in the Scriptures, spoken, indeed, 
 on a like occasion, seemed to such as saw these 
 events to have been meant for no times but theirs. 
 Surely they saw the blood, and the fire, and the 
 vapour of smoke, Lucifer falling from heaven, and 
 the stars darkened in the sky. As they read, they 
 
 grew
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 17 
 
 grew to suspect, and then to make sure that the 
 end of all things was at hand; other signs were 
 wanting, and of course were not long wanting. 
 Earnest men prayed for the gifts of the Spirit, 
 such as had been given at Pentecost ; and straight- 
 way were rumours of strange tongues, of prophecies, 
 and of miracles. There was a time of painful 
 uncertainty in Irving's mind what course could be 
 pursued, so that on the one hand the Spirit's utter- 
 ance should not be checked, and on the other, that 
 solemn worship should not be interrupted. Happily 
 there was a text for the occasion. " The spirits of 
 the prophets are subject to the prophets," and 
 special times and services were set forth, at which 
 these old-new gifts should be manifested without 
 hindrance. It is on this portion of Irving's life that 
 most attacks which affect his character have been 
 directed. His popularity, said and say some, was 
 waning, and unconsciously, few could dare to say 
 consciously, he resorted to expedients like these to 
 win back his estranged flock. But the exact 
 opposite was the truth, now generally recog- 
 nised. His wonderful success as a pulpit orator 
 had never dazzled him. No man whom vanity 
 ensnares pursues the quiet tenor of his way as did 
 Irving. When his name was mentioned in the 
 House of Commons by Canning, when the car- 
 riages of the great and noble blocked up the streets 
 
 round 
 
 B
 
 18 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 round his church, when he might have been a "lion " 
 out of as well as in the pulpit, and have justified to 
 himself the going to seek those great men and deepen 
 the impression he had made ; then his ministrations 
 to his own steady congregation of worthy middle 
 and lower class of people were redoubled, his home 
 life grew still more beautiful, his tastes more simple, 
 his relaxations fewer. To call a class round him 
 in the early dawn of morning, and build them up 
 in the faith, was the most blessed duty ; a stroll 
 through the quieter streets at evening, with one of 
 his babies in his arms and his wife by his side, the 
 chiefest pleasure of him whose head was supposed 
 to be turned by the crowds that came to hear him. 
 The charge of fanaticism is an easy one to bring. 
 It is not easy to refute till one knows the religious 
 condition of those who bring it. We are all apt 
 to think the faith and actions of those who have 
 a higher or even a different standard than ours, 
 highflown and unreal. If Edward Irving had to 
 bear the charge, if his family and the Church he 
 built up have still to hear him called fanatic, and 
 to take a share in the opprobrium, he and they 
 bear it at least in worthy company, for the long 
 list of those whom the world has called so may 
 be traced back to the noble army of martyrs, to 
 the glorious, company of the apostles, to One 
 greater still than these. 
 
 But
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 19 
 
 But to believe in miracles, tongues, prophecy, 
 what can we say to these things ? On miracles 
 there have ever been two extreme opinions, which 
 for convenience sake we may again call Catholic 
 and Protestant. That through all ages holy men 
 have worked wonders by God's power, exerted 
 in that precise way in each only act, that this 
 power culminated in Christ, has been by his 
 Spirit continued in the Church, to be exerted from 
 time to time as God shall please, is no doubt 
 Catholic teaching. That God always works in 
 the same way, orderly and surely, that the same 
 causes always produce the same effects ; that his 
 work is good, and that a miracle would be a sign 
 of previous imperfection ; that therefore all seem- 
 ing miracles can be explained, or will hereafter be 
 explained, by known laws, is the extreme Protest- 
 ant view. Those who shrink from either of these 
 extremes limit miraculous agency to the lives of 
 the Apostles, or at least to those of the men who 
 had known them, to what is generally called the 
 apostolic age. This is, of course, an obvious and 
 a plausible theory, and men may be quite right in 
 holding it, since it solves many an unanswerable 
 difficulty ; but at the same time it is one which 
 has no shadow of proof, and rests upon a pure 
 assumption. It is obvious that the Roman Church 
 with regard to prophecy and tongues adopts the 
 
 same
 
 20 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 same course that most Protestant bodies pursue 
 with miracles, restricts them to a certain time. 
 With tongues there is this further difficulty, that 
 unaided men, knowing so little as we do of the 
 ritual and organisation of the Corinthian Church, 
 have not, nor can have, clear notions of what 
 indeed they were. 
 
 Irving carried out to their true conclusion Ca- 
 tholic premisses with regard to all three. His soul 
 spurned the notion of a compromise in regard to 
 religious truth. We are most of us content with 
 it Our opinions often run on side by side, con- 
 tradicting each other, and we are unconscious of 
 the contradiction. This perhaps is well for us, 
 but we have no right to scorn and charge with 
 folly one who carried out to their logical extreme 
 premisses which we in part, and a vast number of 
 Christians wholly, admit. Another point on which 
 Irving held strong opinions was one where he and 
 his followers by no means stood alone. He looked 
 for the personal and immediate coming of Christ 
 in glory, as that which all Christians ought to ex- 
 pect, for which they should long and pray. Theo- 
 retically the whole Church believes this. Each 
 Advent preachers work themselves up into a sort 
 of half reality, when they say they look for the re- 
 turn of the Lord. They do not choose to contra- 
 dict their habitual assertions about inspiration by 
 
 honestly
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 21 
 
 honestly confessing the Apostles were mistaken, 
 and misunderstood their Master's words. Yet 
 practically they act as men who say, " Where is 
 the promise of his coming ? for since the fathers 
 fell asleep, all things continue as they were." 
 
 But Irving trusted to his Lord's coming with a 
 daily recurring sense of want and disappointment ; 
 he yearned for him with the longing like that with 
 which men watch for the sails of the ship which 
 shall bring " their friends up from the under world." 
 He and the Church were only half themselves with- 
 out that human companionship that Divine per- 
 sonal government. Here, again, his strong, hale, 
 consistent mind held as a living faith what thou- 
 sands more held as a vague and expiring tradi- 
 tion. 
 
 Yet, wholly clear as Irving may be from the 
 charges so recklessly brought against him, it seems 
 equally certain that he was departing widely from the 
 teaching of any known communion. Though the 
 Creeds are the standards of Christian doctrine, un- 
 written symbols, and still more narrowing shibbo- 
 leths limit and must for ever limit for bodies of men 
 the interpretation of these Creeds and the mutual 
 interdependence of their dogmas. It came to pass, 
 therefore, that while all men saw that Irving had 
 in truth ceased to be a true and consistent member 
 and minister of the Presbyterian Church, it was 
 
 hard
 
 32 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 hard to prove that his teaching on any point con- 
 travened her known standards and tests. But that 
 the congregation over which he presided was in a 
 state of ferment, disorganisation, and chaos, was 
 apparent, and the dissatisfaction felt with his 
 teaching passed beyond the bounds of his con- 
 gregation, and beyond the country he had now 
 made his home. 
 
 It is necessary to anticipate events in some 
 degree, in order to show how Irving's vehement 
 words and unusual doctrine stirred the authorities 
 of his Church, acting through the only body which 
 had the requisite authority over him. 
 
 An unmeasured censure passed by him on the 
 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland led 
 to retaliation. That Assembly had rejected what 
 seemed to Irving vital truth, and to it he would 
 hold henceforth " no relationship but that of open 
 and avowed enmity." 
 
 The Presbytery of Annan summoned him before 
 them to answer a charge of heresy on the doctrine 
 of our Lord's humanity, and he obeyed the sum- 
 mons. None could doubt the end ; and in that 
 church of his native town where he had received 
 from man the call to the ministry among men, 
 he was deposed from his office ; and however a 
 priest of God, ceased to be a minister of the Scotch 
 
 Church.
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 23 
 
 Church. For a few days his voice was heard on 
 the hill-sides and the sands, denouncing the 
 Church which had cast him out, and proclaiming 
 the coming of the Lord ; then leaving the excited 
 multitudes who listened, he turned back to his 
 own work and his own church in London. 
 
 There is no need to discuss at length the diffi- 
 cult point of doctrine on which the Presbytery of 
 Annan decided that he was heretical. In this, as 
 in all like cases, the point tried was not that really 
 at issue. Had Irving remained true to the shibbo- 
 leths of the Church of Scotland in more ostensible 
 matters, no doubt he might have said what seemed 
 to him good to say on the question of the Lord's 
 humanity. But though the points which most ir- 
 ritated them were points of discipline, heretical 
 opinions alone could shake Irving's position as one 
 who held orders in the Church of Scotland, and 
 therefore they found him to be heretical, as who 
 would not be found were his every word sifted by 
 careful enemies ? for, as said the late Father 
 Faber the Oratorian, " It is a very easy thing for 
 a man to go wrong in spiritual theology, and to 
 stray into the shadow of condemned propositions." 
 Though we will not discuss the question, it is but 
 fair to let the accused speak for himself: 
 
 The point at issue is simply this whether Christ's flesh 
 had the grace of sinlessness and incorruption from its proper 
 
 nature,
 
 24. EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 nature, or from the indwelling of the Holy Ghost ; I say the 
 latter. I assert that in its proper nature it was as the flesh of 
 His Mother, but by virtue of the Holy Ghost quickening and 
 inhabiting it, it was preserved sinless and incorruptible. This 
 work of the Holy Ghost, I further assert, was done in conse- 
 quence of the Son's humbling Himself to be made flesh. The 
 Sonsaid " I come," the Father said "I prepare thee a body to 
 come in," and the Holy Ghost prepared that body out of the 
 Virgin's substance ; and so by the threefold acting of the 
 Trinity was the Christ constituted, a Divine and a human 
 nature joined in personal union for ever. 
 
 Those who follow here would soon get beyond 
 their depth. If, however, we free the question at 
 issue from wrappages, and get to Irving's " simply 
 this," it would certainly seem that, given the ordin- 
 ary creeds of Christendom, his doctrine is more 
 in accordance with common sense than that of his 
 opponents, though perhaps it may be thought that 
 common sense might be a dangerous power if once 
 admitted into the province of theology. Yet with 
 admiration for Irving, it is possible to be too hard 
 on the orthodox party. It would never do that 
 any man, even any teacher of men, should, while 
 accredited by any congregation or church, be 
 allowed to open up de novo received truths. The 
 allowance of such a step by a church would in 
 most cases be the signing its own death-warrant. 
 Men must take much for granted which has never 
 been granted, as proved which has never been 
 proved, if they will have a definite creed and 
 
 church
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 25 
 
 church at all ; and it requires a severe mental 
 effort and a possible loss of much which is en- 
 twined with one's whole life, to follow the lead of 
 a bold innovator in religion. The blessing of be- 
 ing an accredited teacher is so great, the reformer 
 can trace so well his own developed faith as grow- 
 ing out of that in which he has been nurtured, 
 that he is quite right in clinging to the church 
 which seeks to expel him ; yet in nine cases out 
 of ten he knows he is setting at naught all precious 
 traditions, and he sees as a quite possible end his 
 complete severance from his party. Far too much 
 has been made of this danger of stifling God's 
 truth, since agreement or non-agreement with cer- 
 tain human formulas is after all the only test which 
 man can apply. 
 
 Before, however, the crisis came, the new church 
 had already risen up in spite of, though out of 
 the body of London Presbyterians, which could 
 confer on Irving, as he considered, higher orders 
 than those he forfeited, and holding an authority 
 yet more divine. 
 
 In common with many others brought up in 
 various churches and schools of thought, he had 
 long been searching into the meaning of what was 
 called unfulfilled prophecy. There are those who 
 even now busy themselves with such sacred riddles, 
 but they are not men of mark ; saner and sounder 
 
 views
 
 26 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 views have taken the place of those which de- 
 graded the prophet to the level of the Pythian 
 priestess, and made the man of spiritual insight, 
 who should tell forth eternal laws, into a mere 
 soothsayer gifted with second-sight. Then, how- 
 ever, almost all men believed that modern history 
 was enwrapped in these ancient oracles ; that 
 with the right key, could one only find it, the 
 secret of modern days politically and socially so 
 confused would open to the diligent student of pro- 
 phecy. And since almost all prophets had spoken 
 of a day of God to dawn upon a darkened people, 
 since Christ and his apostles had spoken of his 
 second coming, what could these confusions mean, 
 but that the day of the Lord was at hand, and a 
 return of Christ in glory ? 
 
 With such expectations, earnest students of 
 their Bibles met year after year at Albury, the 
 house of the late Mr. Drummond, and what they 
 saw they found, for in Biblical studies Carlyle's 
 dictum is pre-eminently true, that the eye only sees 
 that which it brings with it the power of seeing. 
 The study of prophecy became the fashion among 
 religious people, the signs of the last days were 
 eagerly expected, and as a matter of course they 
 were not long withheld. 
 
 But this close study of the Bible gave rise to 
 another train of thought. The phenomena which 
 
 now
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 27 
 
 now were recurring had taken place in apostolic 
 days, it would seem as if they belonged to a pure 
 and true condition of the Church, from which she 
 had fallen. Would not God restore the perfect 
 and complete condition of the Church before Christ 
 came again to receive her to himself? Tongues, 
 prophets, apostles, all followed in a natural order, 
 and the word once more was confirmed by signs 
 following. This may seem at first sight absurd, 
 but surely from the orthodox stand-point there 
 should be a very strong case for all these. If pro- 
 phecy is indeed a foretelling, when was the power 
 withdrawn ? If God's laws were once reversed by 
 miracles, when did miracles cease ? The account 
 of the speaking in tongues in the Corinthian Church, 
 leads to the impression that it was an ecstatic, and 
 to the multitude incomprehensible utterance ; the 
 supposition that the apostles were an order of men 
 intended to continue stands on nearly or quite as 
 good grounds as the declaration of the Church of 
 England, that " it is evident unto all men diligently 
 reading the Holy Scripture and ancient authors, 
 that from the apostles' time there have been three 
 orders of ministers in Christ's church ; bishops, 
 priests and deacons." For men's sins these apostles, 
 who alone could fit the church for Christ, had 
 been withdrawn ; now perhaps they would be 
 restored in answer to prayer, before the coming of 
 
 the
 
 28 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 the Lord. And since prayer has a wonderful 
 tendency to beget an answer to itself, restored 
 they were, before men had prayed for them long. 
 
 It is not necessary to go into the history of the 
 gradual outpouring of the gifts, or of the restora- 
 tion of the apostles, and the organisation of the 
 Church. This only may be said by one who has 
 given much patient thought to the subject for many 
 years and who speaks with intimate knowledge 
 of many early members of the Catholic Apostolic 
 Church, that all notion of imposture or impiety in 
 connection with this movement may be dismissed 
 once for all. But on the opinion we may form of 
 the manifestations, soberly considered, will depend 
 our opinion of apostolic and all miracles, all pro- 
 phecy, all ecstasy, whether of Mary Campbell, or 
 of St. Paul raised in spirit to heaven. 
 
 However these gifts and manifestations fell 
 into their natural places in a new church after 
 apostles were "restored," it is obvious that speak- 
 ing with tongues was strangely incongruous with the 
 decorous dulness of Presbyterian ritual. Hence 
 the scandal had been great when the revival 
 passed into the Regent - square church, after 
 sermons from its pastor on the extraordinary gifts 
 of the Spirit. His own struggle was serious be- 
 tween his belief that these manifestations were of 
 God, and his desire of order in public worship. 
 
 But
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 29 
 
 But it could end only in one way. It was im- 
 possible to "resist God." The tongues and pro- 
 phetic utterances became more and more frequent, 
 the alarm of the Presbytery greater, and the doors 
 of his church were at last for ever closed against 
 him in the first week in May 1832. Though the 
 Presbytery were not with him, he was followed by 
 almost his whole church, consisting of eight 
 hundred communicants, to whom he continued 
 still to minister as a clergyman of the Scotch 
 Church. He had ceased to hold office in Regent- 
 square, but his orders were still intact, nor was it 
 pretended his acts were such as to call for his de- 
 position, however discordant they may have been 
 with time-honoured ritual arrangement 
 
 The congregation, after some wanderings, found 
 refuge in a picture gallery in Newman-street, 
 their home for many years. Here it was that 
 the organisation and ceremonies began to set aside 
 the old Presbyterian forms, and gain somewhat of 
 Catholic magnificence. Here it was that by the 
 voice of prophecy six apostles were called out to 
 rule the church before Mr. Irving's death. Mr. 
 Irving was not called as an apostle, nor was he a 
 prophet, nor did he speak with tongues ; but he 
 remained as he had ever been, the chief pastor of 
 that congregation, the Angel, as the minister in 
 charge of each church began to be called. He 
 was not shelved in any degree, nor slighted, and 
 
 though
 
 30 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 though the details of what took place were ordered 
 by others on prophecy, yet the whole was what he 
 had prayed for and foreseen, as necessary in his 
 estimation to the perfectness of the Church. So 
 in ordering and building up his people under, as 
 it seemed to him, the immediate direction of the 
 Holy Spirit, passed the rest of that year. In the 
 Spring of 1833 he was summoned before the 
 Presbytery of Annan, which had ordained him, 
 on the old charge of heresy, and on that ground 
 he was deposed, as has been already narrated. 
 Irving, though he struggled to the last, was neither 
 surprised nor indeed displeased by the result, and 
 the statement made by Mrs. Oliphant in her Life 
 is inaccurate. 
 
 The account which has been generally received 
 of the circumstances which then took place is as 
 follows : 
 
 Deposed by his mother church, he returned to Newman- 
 street, was received, not with extraordinary honours as a 
 martyr, but with an immediate interdict .... forbidding 
 him to exercise any priestly function, to administer sacra- 
 ments, or to assume anything out of the province of a deacon, 
 the lowest office in the newly formed church. One of his re- 
 lations writes with affectionate indignation that he was not 
 permitted even to preach except in those less sacred assem- 
 blies in which the outer world of unbelievers was admitted 
 to meet the church, but in the church itself sat silent, deprived 
 of his office Such an inconceivable indignity, accord- 
 ing to all human rules, did the spiritual authorities whom 
 his constant and steadfast faith had made masters of the 
 
 flock
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 31 
 
 flock put upon their former leader Accordingly 
 
 those lingering March days glided on through all the 
 oft devotions of the church ; the prophets spoke and the 
 elders ruled, but in the midst of them Irving sat silent, lis- 
 tening wistfully, if perhaps the voice from heaven might 
 come to restore him to that office which was the vocation 
 
 of his life At last, while he sat in the lowest place, 
 
 .... the utterance once more called the forlorn but daunt- 
 less warrior to take up his arms. 
 
 But the dates of the occurrences thus described 
 demand special attention. Edward Irving was 
 deposed by the Presbytery of Annan, on March 
 1 5th, 1833. He returned to his church in 
 Newman-street on Saturday, March 23rd, re- 
 sumed his ministry, and was never removed from 
 it, but a few days after his return, Sunday, March 
 3 ist, when about to receive a child into the Church, 
 he was stayed by one of the newly-called Apostles, 
 and desired to wait till he had been re-ordained. 
 Edward Irving stopped the service, and taking off 
 his gown, threw it behind him, exclaiming, 
 'Thank God, I am free from the trammels of 
 men.' He did not baptize or consecrate the 
 Eucharistic bread and wine till after his admission 
 to the Episcopate, which took place the very next 
 Friday, April 5th, 1833. During the time of 
 pause, however, he continued to teach and preach 
 as usual. There was therefore no period of 
 mournful silence during which he waited to speak, 
 nor was his recognition for a moment doubtful. 
 
 And
 
 32 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 And it will be easily seen that if his people had 
 followed his own teaching about the priesthood, 
 that he whose priesthood had been taken from 
 him by the authority which gave it him, was not 
 justified in assuming priestly functions. It was as 
 natural that he should be stopped, as that he should 
 forget for the moment that, on his own showing, 
 he had no right to baptize. Here is his own 
 account of the transaction, written to a friend a 
 few days after his reordination : 
 
 I sit down to record for your praise and thanksgiving, and 
 that of your church, the doings of the Lord in the midst of 
 us during these days past. On the Lord's day before the 
 last (March 31), when, as usual during the forenoon service, 
 I proceeded to receive into the Church the child of one of the 
 members, who had been baptized at home during sickness, 
 and had desired the father to stand forth, the Lord, by the 
 mouth of His Apostle, arrested my hand, saying that we 
 must tarry for awhile. Though I wist not wherefore this 
 was done I obeyed, and desired the father to postpone it. 
 Then the Lord further signified it was His wish we should 
 know, and the whole Church feel, our destitute condition, and 
 cry unto Him for the ordinances from heaven. Then I dis- 
 cerned that He had indeed acknowledged the act of the 
 fleshly church, taking away the fleshly thing, and that He was 
 minded in His grace to take us under His own heavenly care, 
 and constitute us into a Church directly in the hands of the 
 great Shepherd and Bishop of our souls ; for He commanded 
 us to rejoice, and confirmed our souls with words of pro- 
 phecy, assuring us that He would build the house, saying unto 
 Jerusalem, " Thou shalt be built," and to the Temple, "Thy 
 foundation shall be laid." We did accordingly take heart 
 and sing " When Israel out of Egypt came." 
 
 This
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 33 
 
 This certainly does not read like the words of 
 one who was over grieved for the past, or over 
 doubtful of the future. They show also a frank 
 and full recognition of the rites and ceremonial 
 which were growing up within his church, fostered 
 or even induced in part by his teaching, and in part 
 by causes quite without his own circle of working. 
 Here may be quoted the words of one who, know- 
 ing that of which he speaks, has been good enough 
 to give information on this point. He says : 
 
 Edward Irving fully and joyfully accepted all the measures 
 of development which took place in the doctrine, discipline, 
 and ritual of the congregation over which he was called to 
 preside. 
 
 The doctrine was that contained in the three Creeds of the 
 Catholic Church, and he prominently set forth the true human- 
 ity of our Lord as testified to in the Athanasian Creed. From 
 the fact that our Lord took the nature common to all men, 
 he deduced the doctrine of universal redemption, affirming 
 that all flesh had been redeemed by the Lord, and that the 
 condemnation of the condemned would be that they had 
 loved darkness rather than light, and refused to believe the 
 record of God concerning His Son. Further, the personal 
 coming and kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. Also, that 
 the gift of the Holy Ghost given to Christ by the Father, and 
 communicated by Him to His Apostles on the day of Pente- 
 cost, still remains in the Christian Church, and only needs a 
 repentant, prayerful, and prepared spirit in order to His mani- 
 festation in all holy gifts. 
 
 Further, that God had restored apostles and prophets, had 
 called and ordained angels or bishops, elders or priests, and 
 deacons. And he recognised that many men and women 
 
 were 
 C
 
 34 EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 were speaking in the power of the Holy Ghost in his own 
 and other congregations at that time assembling. 
 
 As to Ritualism, all the worship of the Church was ex- 
 tempore, but the outline of the Eucharist Service, and the 
 daily morning and evening worship, had been given to and 
 received by Edward Irving on the authority of apostles. . . 
 No vestments were worn ; no forms of prayer were used ; 
 no incense was offered ; no symbolic lights were used. 
 
 If it be assumed that God had raised up apostles and pro- 
 phets, and was setting His Church in order, it seems evident 
 that a gradual return to discipline and right service was the 
 only safe and fatherly mode of dealing. Scotch Presbyterians 
 were naturally opposed to Episcopacy, priestly investments, 
 liturgies, and all reverent forms of worship. They sat to sing, 
 they stood to pray, and did not kneel even to receive the 
 bread and wine in the Supper of the Lord. . . . To those 
 engaged in this work it has seemed to be by slow degrees 
 that the present order, discipline, and service have been 
 developed. 
 
 Little need be added to this sketch. It is diffi- 
 cult to see the oak in the acorn ; not less difficult 
 to believe that the present ritual and organisation 
 of the Catholic Apostolic Church has grown from 
 such small beginnings. Yet those who best knew 
 Edward Irving's mind his widow, his son, his 
 daughters all followed, and the survivor follows, 
 every detail of the development which has since 
 taken place. We may at least believe there is in 
 it nothing contrary to his teaching, his wishes, his 
 faith. 
 
 With his deposition at Annan, and his calling 
 to a bishopric, or office of angel, in London, his 
 
 storm-
 
 EDWARD IRVIXG. 35 
 
 storm-tossed life drew near to its close. In the 
 next year, worn out by constant and excessive 
 work, he set out on a tour through Wales, north- 
 ward to Scotland, walking even then in the 
 shadow of the coming death. He wrestled with 
 death, for he could not yet believe he must go to 
 meet his Lord. He yet clung to the hope that to 
 him, to the waiting Church, that Lord would come 
 in glory. But at Liverpool he wrote for his wife, 
 feeling, though he would not say so, that his end 
 was coming fast. Together the husband and wife 
 revisited Glasgow, and there, in the scene of his 
 earliest ministerial work, the strong man, van- 
 quished at last, laid down to rest. " If I die, I 
 die into the Lord. Amen," were the last words 
 that they who watched by him could hear. 
 
 A noble life ended thus, and it ended, as so 
 many others have done, in success or in failure, 
 according to the point from which we view it. 
 Failure, if Mr. Carlyle's estimate be true, "Ever 
 wilder waxed the confusion without and within. 
 The misguided, noble-minded had now nothing 
 left to do but die." Failure, if orthodoxy on the 
 Scotch pattern is the desirable and beautiful thing 
 many Scotchmen deem it. Failure, if to find 
 when death comes, one mistake in belief, while in 
 all other respects, the soul is comforted in the 
 calmness of an absolute trust But if to build up 
 
 a
 
 36 EDWARD IRVING, 
 
 a great congregation in singular devotion of life 
 and purity of morals be good ; if amid temptation 
 to vanity and pride, and lust of power, it be 
 noble to keep a heart simple and leal as that of a 
 little child ; if to have left on men's memories, 
 even of those who differ most widely, an impres- 
 sion of rare personal holiness, is to succeed, then 
 Edward Irving's life was no failure. 
 
 In these stormy times, when much that is old is 
 passing away, and much faith that is new still un- 
 fixed ; when men's hearts look anxiously on those 
 things that are coming on the earth; when'darkness 
 as of old wraps from many the mountain whereon 
 God dwells, it is no light thing to have set before 
 us the life and character of one who, filled with 
 the deepest love to God and man, hoped, endured, 
 and believed even unto the end. 
 
 " Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace 
 
 Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul, 
 While the stars burn, the moons increase, 
 And the great ages onward roll. 1 ' 
 
 1863.
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 1792-1870. 
 
 WERE there no other reason for interest in Mr. 
 Keble's life, the precise space of time it fills 
 would give an importance to that of any pro- 
 minent English clergyman. For the years during 
 which he was known are almost exactly coinci- 
 dent with the Tractarian movement from its rise 
 to its passage into another phase, known by 
 another nickname. The son of a Gloucestershire 
 vicar, he grew up in a school of High-church 
 theology, into which not many of the most earnest 
 men were born, and his views to the end were 
 unchanged, save in the way of a gradual develop- 
 ment When the Evangelical or Puritan vigour 
 had wakened into action the High-churchmanship 
 which had been slumbering, Keble, in the prime 
 of life, was ready to take an eager part in the 
 strife ; he died when Tractarianism had become 
 Ritualism, when the controversies were passing 
 
 into
 
 38 yOHN KEBLE. 
 
 into a stage he had not foreseen, and in which he 
 was not entirely one in heart with the leaders of 
 the new movement. There is, indeed, no reason 
 to doubt that, like his friend, Dr. Pusey, he would, 
 on the whole, have accepted the legitimate issue 
 of the principles for which he had contended ; 
 but we may be thankful that the sweet singer 
 whose poems were specially designed to "exhibit 
 the soothing tendency of the Prayer Book," was 
 not mixed up with questions about its interpreta- 
 tion so infinitely more trivial than those for which 
 he had had to stir angry controversies. 
 
 The events of Mr. Keble's life were so few and 
 take up so small space in the telling, that they 
 may here shortly be repeated, since the narrative 
 will form a string on which to hang the remarks 
 to be made on his character and works. He 
 was born in the spring of 1792, at Fairford, in 
 Gloucestershire, his father being the incumbent 
 of Coin St. Aldwin's, a village three miles distant. 
 From that father he learned all that he knew before 
 he went to Oxford, for he never was at school, 
 ahd was so well taught that he gained a Corpus 
 scholarship, even in those days a considerable 
 distinction, before he was fifteen years old ; from 
 his father he learnt also to be, what he continued 
 to be, a Churchman of a strongly marked type, of 
 the school represented by Hooker, whose works 
 
 he
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 39 
 
 he edited, and Bishop Wilson, of Sodor and Man, 
 whose life he wrote. His godfather was the 
 Rev. Stafford Smith, rector of Fladbury, and a 
 curious link was thus formed with another distin- 
 guished writer. Mr. Stafford Smith's first wife 
 was the widow of Bishop Warburton, the author 
 of The Divine Legation of Moses ; she was a lady 
 of considerable culture, and full of traditions of the 
 society in which her husband had lived. 
 
 Of the undergraduate days at Corpus there is 
 little to say ; it is interesting to think that Copies- 
 ton, Coleridge, Arnold, grew together from boyhood 
 into manhood, but the record of the hours of one 
 studious set is much the same as that of another. 
 To those who know the inexpressible charm of an 
 University life of the better kind, there is no need 
 to say a word ; for those who do not, it would be 
 presumptuous to attempt to draw what has so often 
 been described, and always without success. The 
 sum of Keble's youthful career and its immediate 
 result can best be given in Dr. Newman's words : 
 " Having carried off as a mere boy the highest 
 honours of the University, he had turned from 
 the admiration which haunted his steps, and 
 sought for a better and holier satisfaction in pas- 
 toral work in the country." This work was the 
 serving one and sometimes more curacies near 
 his father's home, where the parishes were some- 
 what
 
 40 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 what neglected and the remuneration was slender. 
 Hence he was able to revisit Oxford without diffi- 
 culty ; and when his College or the University 
 required his services, whether as Tutor or as 
 Examining Master, he did not sever his connec- 
 tion wholly with these parishes, the labours of 
 which his brother shared with him. And he was 
 in this way also enabled to live much with his 
 aged father, for whom he had ever the tenderest 
 care, the deepest veneration. Immediately after tak- 
 ing his degree, he was elected Fellow of Oriel, home 
 of so many brilliant minds, invested to Oxford men 
 of a past generation with a sanctity attaching to 
 perhaps no other spot in these later days. He did 
 then what most clever young Fellows have always 
 done, took pupils during the vacations as well as 
 from time to time in Oxford itself. At Sidmoutb, 
 in his first reading party, he was thrown into very 
 intimate relations with the family of his friend 
 George Cornish, whose father resided there, and 
 from whom Mr. Keble rented the house which 
 was his temporary home. 
 
 It is not generally known that much of the 
 poetry and tender human feeling of Mr. Keble's 
 life took its origin from this stay at Sidmouth. 
 Yet, now that more than sixty years have passed 
 away, it can violate no sanctities to reveal that 
 the depths of his nature were stirred by one whose 
 
 acquaintance
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 41 
 
 acquaintance he then first made ; and though she 
 was at that time very young, his interest in 
 Cornelia Sarah Cornish, the sister of his friend, 
 ripened in after days into a deep and tender, though 
 rejected, love. One who knew well whereof he 
 spoke, and who more than any had a right to 
 speak of those dim, distant days, wrote : " I believe 
 much of the pathos of the whole book " The Chris- 
 tian Year "had its source in his love for her." 
 
 It is, indeed, impossible to read The Christian 
 Year without being sure that the varied stops cf 
 human feeling had all been tuned and exercised 
 before such true harmony of its kind flowed from 
 his soul. It was this early love which called out 
 such tenderness towards a younger Cornelia or 
 " Keenie" Cornish, who became the wife of his 
 nephew ; and the chord once struck still sounded 
 in these words, under date of 1840 : 
 
 On St. Mark's day following his own birthday he had 
 to write again to Cornish upon the death of his youngest 
 sister, an event which for particular reasons moved him very 
 tenderly : in the course of his note he says : ' ' One surely 
 feels more and more the privilege of being allowed to re- 
 member one's departed friends in private prayer and secretly 
 at the altar." 
 
 It is during this period of Mr. Keble's life that his 
 remarkable resignation was first shown, so often 
 and so severely tried. His was a most affectionate 
 nature ; yet so completely did he realise to himself 
 
 his
 
 42 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 his belief in the reunion of friends in another life, 
 that it might almost have seemed to superficial 
 observers that he did not grieve at their departure 
 hence. He was able to return from his father's 
 home immediately after his mother's death, to his 
 duties as examiner in the schools, only returning 
 home to her funeral a week during which many 
 far less loving sons would have needed, and not only 
 taken, rest. How keen, however, his affection was, 
 will appear from the following incident, with which 
 closes the account of his early home and Oxford life. 
 During that week, a candidate for examination in 
 the schools was translating the touching passage in 
 the Alcestis where the child Eumelos kisses his dead 
 mother, and passionately calls on her who is gone : 
 
 Keble, as was then usual, was standing ; he heard the 
 passage out with fixed attention and unchanged counte- 
 nance ; then dropped in his chair, and burying his face in 
 his hands on the table, remained for some time silent, over- 
 come with emotion. 
 
 In 1827, when Mr. Keble was residing with his 
 father at Fairford, The Christian Year was pub- 
 lished. Though he was a man who habitually 
 shrank from notice, a large number of his intimate 
 friends were taken into his counsel, in spite also 
 of the fact that his after estimate of the work he 
 had given to the world was extremely low. Dr. 
 Pusey, in a letter published soon after Mr. 
 Keble's death, related how he ever spoke in a 
 
 disparaging
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 43 
 
 disparaging tone of " that book," and how care- 
 less he was about the correction of what was, in 
 his eyes, a manifest blemish. But before pub- 
 lication, the poems were submitted to critics of 
 most varied tastes and character, and it is curious 
 to find that a man so eminently prosaic as the 
 late Archbishop Whately was among those con- 
 sulted, and one of the earliest of the many friends 
 who urged their wider circulation. The work 
 would seem only gradually to have taken the 
 shape it assumed in the end, a complete series of 
 verses on the Prayer Book ; yet it is now diffi- 
 cult to conceive of it as made up of detached de- 
 votional pieces, so entirely has it a character of 
 unity and completeness. It stands alone in litera- 
 ture; for though George Herbert's Poems and 
 Bishop Heber's Hymns each present some points 
 of resemblance, we should be inclined to rate 
 Herbert far higher as poet, and Heber far lower. 
 Herbert's verse can only be read with pleasure 
 when the mind is attuned to feelings of personal 
 devotion in which none others can share Heber's 
 Hymns can be sung by mixed congregations 
 while The Christian Year fits itself to the closet 
 or the drawing-room, not to singing in church ; can 
 be read aloud, when to read Herbert were pro- 
 fanation ; can be enjoyed for its poetry by those 
 who object to its theology while its theology has 
 
 gained
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 gained an admission for poetic thoughts into the 
 minds of many wooden-headed people. 
 
 Of a book of which in "less than twenty-six 
 years 108,000 copies were issued in forty-three 
 editions," the sale of which never has nagged 
 since, of which in the nine months following the 
 writer's death seven editions were issued of 11,000 
 copies, it may seem absurd to say it is less 
 known than it deserves. Yet this very large sale 
 has mainly been restricted to members of the 
 Church of England, and of one only school in the 
 Church ; so that, comparatively speaking, only a 
 few of the more cultivated among Nonconformists 
 are well acquainted with its beauties ; nor do they 
 at all realise the power that it has had in attach- 
 ing its readers to the form of words and form of 
 faith which it was written to accompany and ex- 
 plain. It has not been hitherto, even within the 
 limits of English speech, a book for all creeds in 
 spite of its adherence to one ; it has not been, as 
 in its degree it deserves to be, to English religious 
 thought, what the De Imitatione Ckristi has been 
 to the religious thought of Europe. 
 
 In one of those double-edged sayings of which 
 he was so consummate a master, Dr. Rowland 
 Williams well expressed one of the charms and 
 one of the weaknesses of Mr. Keble's poetry. 
 He says : 
 
 "In
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 45 
 
 Tn a book whose tender and chastened pathos renders 
 it the worthy companion of our Prayer Book in many lands, 
 hardly any reader has not been touched by the hymn for the 
 Twentieth Sunday after Trinity : 
 
 " Where is thy favour'd haunt, eternal Voice, 
 
 The region of thy choice, 
 Where, undisturb'd by sin and earth, the soul 
 
 Owns thine entire control ? 
 'Tis on the mountain's summit dark and high, 
 
 When storms are hurrying by : 
 Tis ''mid the strong foundations of the earth, 
 
 Where torrents have their birth. " 
 
 The sentiment here implied has the great advantage 
 over some others in the same volume, that the more we 
 reflect upon it, the truer it seems, while there are others 
 which will not bear reflection. When we read, for instance, 
 In one of the autumnal hymns, that the winds and storms 
 suspend their wintry rage, that flowers and leaves have time 
 to die gently, the utter contrast of such a fancy with the unre- 
 lenting course of nature destroying recklessly what she has 
 brought lavishly to life, makes the idea seem a dream for a 
 moment, or turns it into a sense of disappointed sadness. 
 All things untrue are idle when we make them food for the 
 mind. 
 
 Dr. Newman, however, says, with special refer- 
 ence to The Christian Year, that the first of two 
 " main intellectual truths which it brought home " 
 to him " was, what may be called, in a large sense 
 of the word, the Sacramental system, that is, the 
 doctrine that material phenomena are both the 
 types and the instruments of real things unseen;" 
 and he notices also " the connection of this philo- 
 sophy
 
 46 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 sophy of religion with what is sometimes called 
 Berkleyism." 
 
 Bearing this connection in mind, Mr. Keble's 
 answer to Dr. Williams, had he cared to give one, 
 would probably have been in effect, that what seem 
 " laws of nature" are mere phenomena to be altered 
 or set aside at any moment by the Divine will, 
 and that even when they appear to one most unre- 
 lenting, they may, and probably are, intended to 
 convey that very lesson of doctrine which another 
 who looks for it may find in spite of those points 
 which seem to conflict with that teaching. There 
 are many who would deem it flagrant impiety 
 to disbelieve that the material of our bodies 
 which we lay aside in the grave will re-live, be- 
 cause St. Paul seems to see in the sprouting of 
 the seed a proof of the resurrection ; and if to 
 insist on " laws of nature " upsets a Sacramental 
 system altogether, "so much the worse for the 
 facts," will be the cry of those who " Berkleyise." 
 But, in fact, the very moment any man leaves the 
 strict philosophical investigation of nature, and 
 this will either teach him nothing about " things 
 unseen," or else quite other facts than those for 
 which they look who believe in a Sacramental 
 system, he will see in phenomena just what 
 " his eye brings with it the power of seeing," and 
 no more. For instance, Moschos, a Greek poet 
 
 who
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 47 
 
 who does not believe in the resurrection, looks on 
 the fading mallows, and contrasts their revival 
 after seeming decay with the sleep of man that 
 knows no waking. Mr. Keble, who does believe 
 in the resurrection, wishing also to contrast man 
 with natural objects, chooses to cast out of sight 
 what would, no doubt, have been his reading of 
 St. Paul's great analogy, and look at the leaves of 
 the trees, which are only portions of the material 
 frame of the tree, as though one were to consider 
 the hair cut from a man, or the nails he sheds, 
 as separate entities. The two passages are so 
 beautiful, that they may be placed side by side. 
 
 Ah me ! the mallows, dead in the garden drear, 
 Ah ! the green parsley, the thriving tufts of dill. 
 These again shall rise, shall live in the coming year. 
 
 But we men in our pride, we in wisdom and strength, 
 
 We, if once we die, deaf in the womb of earth, 
 
 Sleep the sleep that wakes not, sleep of infinite length. 
 
 Now take Keble on the fall of the leaf : 
 
 How like decaying life they seem to glide ! 
 
 And yet no second spring have they in store, 
 But where they fall forgotten to abide 
 
 Is all their portion, and they ask no more. 
 
 Soon o'er their heads blithe April airs shall sing, 
 A thousand wild-flowers round them shall unfold, 
 
 The green buds glisten in the dews of Spring, 
 And all be vernal rapture as of old. 
 
 Man's
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 Man's portion is to die and rise again 
 Yet he complains, while these unmurmuring' part 
 
 With their sweet lives, as pure from sin and stain, 
 As his when Eden held his virgin heart. 
 
 While, then, to many these poems are full of 
 lessons, nursing fancies which on reflection dis- 
 please those of another school of thought, it 
 cannot be denied that a great charm is thrown 
 over all descriptions of nature by the religious 
 sentiments which pervade them, even if it be 
 not " Der Dichtungs Schleier aus der Hand 
 der Wahrheil." To read our own theology in 
 an imperfect observation of the processes of na- 
 ture, brings into the verses in which those pro- 
 cesses are described a weakness from which the 
 highest poet is free. Yet, making the deduction 
 which has been explained, one great merit of The 
 Christian Year is the power of seeing the subtle 
 beauty which lies in the simpler aspects of nature, 
 invisible to, or at least inexpressible by, those who 
 have not a considerable gift of song. On this 
 ground a place, and no mean one, may be claimed 
 for its author in the company of those who sung 
 
 of 
 
 daffodils 
 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty^ 
 and saw when 
 
 the high lawns appeared 
 Under the opening eyelids of the morn ; 
 
 or
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 49 
 
 or noticed the colour of 
 
 ash-buds in the front of March ; 
 or heard in the garden, 
 
 The wise thrush, he sings his song twice over, 
 Lest you should think he never could re-capture 
 
 That first fine careless rapture. 
 Such a delicate eye and ear did Mr. Keble also 
 bring to his work. 
 For instance : 
 
 Not surer does each tender gem, 
 Set in the fig-tree's polished stem, 
 Foreshow the summer. 
 
 Or: 
 
 See the soft green willow springing 
 
 Where the waters gently pass, 
 Every way her free arms flinging 
 
 O'er the moist and reedy grass. 
 Long ere winter blasts are fled, 
 See her tipp'd with vernal red, 
 And her kindly flower display'd 
 Ere her leaf can cast a shade. 
 
 Or when he speaks of sounds, in a poem already 
 
 quoted : 
 
 the fitful sweep 
 Of winds across the steep 
 Through wither'd bents romantic note and clear, 
 
 Meet for a hermit's ear. 
 The wheeling kite's wild solitary cry. 
 And, once more, when he notices 
 
 The evening's blackbird's full-ton'd lay, 
 When the relenting sun has smil'd 
 
 Bright through a whole December day. 
 
 The 
 D
 
 50 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 The book appeared at a time when the Oxford 
 revival had not fairly begun, Dr. Newman dates 
 the commencement of it six years later, and the 
 poems had taken a hold on many people who 
 would have turned from them if read for the first 
 time in later years. Hence, no doubt, it prepared 
 the way for much which was afterwards to come. 
 Writing in 1845, Mr. Keble specifies three 
 points as not having been understood by him at 
 the time he wrote his former poems : " the doc- 
 trine of Repentance, or that of the Holy Eucharist 
 as held, e.g., by Bishop Ken, nor that of Justifica- 
 tion ; " and he says there are other points which 
 he does not mention. There are certainly no such 
 strong expressions on Confession and Absolution 
 as find place in Dr. Newman's well-known lines 
 in the Lyra AJ>ostolica ; and the alteration of a 
 phrase in reference to the Communion since Mr. 
 Keble's death, of which more presently, shows 
 that definitions were regarded as of less moment 
 forty years ago ; but, on the whole, the teaching 
 is Catholic, and if Anglican in feeling, it is so 
 by its omissions rather than its statements ; 
 additions might be required by Catholics of these 
 days within the English Church, but nothing 
 beyond the one expression noticed would need to 
 be altered or pruned away. To all that is called 
 Liberalism or Free Thought, to all that is non- 
 dogmatic,
 
 yOHN KEBLE. 51 
 
 dogmatic, to views on the Atonement and nature 
 of Christ like those gaining ground daily among 
 even the orthodox churches, Mr. Keble would 
 have offered, did offer when they came in his way, 
 the sincerest opposition, and the nature of his 
 feelings comes out clearly in this volume. When 
 Mr. Tennyson writes : 
 
 I that rather held it better men should perish one by one, 
 Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon 
 in Ajalon, 
 
 we understand that he uses the tale as a poetic 
 illustration, and we do not suppose that he con- 
 siders for a moment its agreement or non-agree- 
 ment with fact and possibility. But when Mr. 
 Keble writes : 
 
 'Tis true, of old th' unchanging sun 
 His daily course refus'd to run, 
 
 The pale moon hurrying to the west 
 Paus'd at a mortal's call, to aid 
 Th' avenging storm of war, that laid 
 Seven guilty realms at once on earth's denied breast. 
 
 But can it be, -one suppliant tear 
 Should stay the ever-moving sphere? 
 
 A sick man's lowly breathed sigh, 
 When from the world he turns away, 
 And hides his weary eyes to pray, 
 Should change your mystic dance, ye wanderers of the sky ? 
 
 we feel at once that he gives his entire adhesion 
 in faith and intellect to two of the most unlikely 
 miracles of the Old Testament. Again, he turns 
 
 with
 
 52 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 with a something like terror from the creed of 
 those who would reject the doctrine of eternal 
 damnation, considering that if it fails, so fails 
 also the trust of the godly. If there be "hope 
 for such as die unblest," 
 
 But where is then the stay of contrite hearts ? 
 
 Of old they lean'd on thy eternal word, 
 But with the sinners' fear their hope departs, 
 
 Fast link'd as thy great Name to Thee, O Lord : 
 
 That Name by which thy faithful oath is past, 
 That we should endless be, for joy or woe : 
 
 And if the treasures of thy wrath could waste, 
 Thy lovers must their promised Heaven forego. 
 
 Nor would it be possible to put in stronger 
 words that view of the Sacrament of the Lord's 
 Supper, held by devout Catholics both within and 
 without the Roman obedience, depending on the 
 extremest view of the Atonement as a substitution 
 of Christ for the sinner, than in the following 
 lines : 
 
 Fresh from th' atoning sacrifice 
 The world's Creator bleeding lies, 
 That man, His foe, by whom He bled, 
 May take Him for his daily bread. 
 
 It might have been sufficient to point to these 
 lines as a proof of what Mr. Keble's belief had 
 been, when, after his death, an unfortunate con- 
 troversy was raised about a verse in the poem on 
 the Service for " Gunpowder Treason," which so 
 
 long
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 53 
 
 long disgraced the English Prayer Book. The 
 verse stood : 
 
 O come to our Communion Feast ; 
 
 There present in the heart, 
 Not in the hands, th' eternal Priest 
 
 Will His true self impart. 
 
 Mr. Keble, when pressed about these words, so 
 unlike the whole tone of his teaching, replied that 
 they would bear the sense of " not only in the 
 hands," and he was not careful to alter what 
 ought to be interpreted by his known opinions. 
 Towards the end of his life, however, finding the 
 words quoted by a Bishop as against his view, he 
 made up his mind to alter the verse, but his sud- 
 den illness and death prevented his carrying the 
 intention into act. Neither Mrs. Keble nor her 
 nephew could properly exercise any discretion in 
 the matter, when they made an alteration which 
 at the time caused much discussion. The result 
 has been that the whole poem has been withdrawn 
 in those editions sanctioned by the family ; the 
 lines were never among the happiest portions 
 of the book, and they helped to perpetuate the 
 memory of a scandalous Form of Prayer. 
 
 The vagueness of expression, of which the 
 lines quoted were so signal an instance, is one 
 of the main defects of the book ; the thought, 
 no doubt, is always definite, but the words in 
 
 which
 
 54 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 which it is couched are often obscure in sense 
 and harsh in metre. And so it chances from time 
 to time that close by passages of almost perfect 
 melody and singular felicity of expression, are 
 others hard to unravel ; unusual, or even ungram- 
 matical expressions ; words distorted for the sake 
 of rime, as "spright" for "spirit," "the rod 
 they take so cal/n" for "calmly; " "rose<z/ cups" 
 for " rose blossoms," " mystic unison " for " mystic 
 harmony." 
 
 Yet read the book as critically as we may, or 
 at however great a distance from its teaching, 
 none will ever learn to know it without being 
 better for the knowledge, without kindly and 
 tender thoughts for the theology it advanced, 
 without growing to love him who loved and strove 
 to interpret God and Nature to himself and his 
 brother-men. And if we are sometimes apt to be 
 angry with a school which has done so much to 
 revive mediaeval and useless asceticism, and has 
 been at least as mischievous as the Evangelical 
 party in setting a great gulf beween the Church 
 and the world, to the confusion of morality and a 
 low estimate of the simple and homelier virtues, 
 let it not be forgotten that the true reviver and 
 minstrel of this school was he who wrote : 
 
 We need not bid, for cloistered cell, 
 Our neighbour and our work farewell, 
 
 Nor
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 55 
 
 Nor strive to wind ourselves too high 
 For sinful man beneath the sky : 
 The trivial round, the common task, 
 Would furnish all we ought to ask : 
 Room to deny ourselves ; a road 
 To bring us, daily, nearer God. 
 
 And: 
 
 There are in this loud stunning tide 
 
 Of human care and crime, 
 With whom the melodies abide 
 
 Of th' everlasting chime ; 
 Who carry music in their heart 
 Through dusky lane and wrangling mart, 
 Plying their daily task with busier feet, 
 Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat. 
 
 It is by The Christian Year that Mr. Keble will 
 be known and remembered. His contributions 
 to the Lyra Apostolica are as nothing by the side 
 of Dr. Newman's ; his own second volume, the 
 Lyra Innocentium, is inferior to The Christian 
 Year from every point of view, except that of those 
 who prize above all things a distinct utterance of 
 dogmatic theology. In this point there is cer- 
 tainly an advance, at least in expression and 
 that is all to be said which has not been said or 
 implied on the poems already examined. 
 
 The thirteen years which followed the publica- 
 tion of The Christian Year were full of interest 
 to Mr. Keble, who loved his parish work and his 
 literary labours, but they afford few standing- 
 points
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 points for any who review his life. He set aside 
 with scarce a thought the offer of a colonial arch- 
 deaconry ; he declined to contend for the Provost- 
 ship of his College, for which it would seem some 
 of his friends considered him a likely candidate. 
 He accepted the curacy of Hursley, and refused 
 the incumbency when vacant ; returned to Fair- 
 ford on the death of a sister, and remained in the 
 same quiet work as before till the death of his 
 father in 1835. An edition of Hooker for the 
 Oxford Press, as well as his lectures as Professor 
 of Poetry, for which the growing popularity of 
 The Christian Year had caused his selection, kept 
 up his relations with Oxford, his friendship with 
 Dr. Newman and the band of earnest men who 
 were, with more and more eager determination, 
 bent on a new reformation of the English Church. 
 This took shape and date from an assize sermon 
 of Mr. Keble's in 1833, on National Apostasy. 
 It is a curious proof of how little the authors of 
 the Oxford movement knew the line even their 
 own thought would inevitably take, that the most 
 alarming sign of that which he so designates was 
 the suppression or amalgamation of Irish bishop- 
 rics. Dr. Newman, who has now so many years 
 ceased to feel as an English Churchman, sup- 
 poses, not unnaturally, that he would, were he in 
 the English Church, think as he formerly thought. 
 
 When,
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 57 
 
 When, therefore, in 1865, Dr. Newman once more 
 met his old friend, he expected to find that the 
 present measure for total disestablishment was 
 regarded as evil. Dr. Newman wrote : 
 
 Mr. Gladstone's rejection at Oxford was talked of, and 
 I said that I really thought that, had I been still a member 
 of the University, I must have voted against him, because he 
 was giving up the Irish Establishment. On this Keble gave 
 me one of his remarkable looks, so earnest and so sweet, 
 came close to me, and whispered in my ear I cannot recol- 
 lect the exact words, but I took them to be, " And is not 
 that just ? " It left the impression on my mind that he had no 
 great sympathy with the Establishment in Ireland as an Esta- 
 blishment, and was favourable to the Church of the Irish. 
 
 Immediately after the publication of the ser- 
 mon were begun the Tracts for the Times, and in 
 these also is apparent how little the authors knew 
 what would be their own minds. To revive primi- 
 tive doctrine and practice, or what was supposed 
 to be such, but to keep both carefully within the 
 precise framework then existing, seems to have 
 been the object of the Tracts. Now that the 
 High-church party are dividing services, with 
 good effect, shortening them so far as may be, 
 and keeping them distinct, admitting that a new 
 Lectionary is needed, supplementing the deficien- 
 cies, or supposed deficiencies, in the Prayer Book 
 by expressive ritual and by a lavish use of hymns, 
 it is not uninteresting to turn over those almost 
 
 forgotten
 
 58 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 forgotten volumes, and find careful defences of 
 the long services, pleas for keeping them just as 
 they are. There is one paper of Mr. Keble's on 
 the Sunday Lessons, containing an elaborate theory 
 of their selection, and an earnest justification of 
 the reading of those chapters from which even 
 those of his own party now shrink, for which few 
 now would assert that they were any other than a 
 haphazard selection by men whose sense of delicacy 
 was somewhat coarse, as would naturally be that 
 of the clergy of a coarse age. 
 
 Mr. Keble's own contributions were few, only 
 four in all, the most remarkable being No. 89, on 
 The Mysticism attributed to the Early Fathers 
 of the Church. This is well worth reading even 
 by those who, like ourselves, would utterly repu- 
 diate the whole state of mind which would make 
 such interpretation even possible, who consider 
 that so to read the Bible is simply to turn it into 
 a sort of ingenious puzzle in which words may 
 mean almost anything but what they seem to 
 mean, is to strike at the root of all morality by 
 the mode by which the atrocious crime of Jael 
 and the slaughter of the Canaanites are justified 
 and explained. It is interesting as showing the 
 best that can be said for the patristic method of 
 treating Scripture by a very able man, saturated 
 with a knowledge of the Fathers, with love and 
 
 veneration
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 59 
 
 veneration towards them ; and having read it, we 
 may turn with a clear conscience, once for all, 
 without misgiving or retrogression, to modern 
 interpreters who know at least the meaning of 
 such terms as history, criticism, and the science 
 of language. 
 
 The story of the cessation of the Tracts is now 
 so well known as to need no comment, except 
 to note that Mr. Keble at once with great chivalry 
 made himself responsible, almost equally with 
 Dr. Newman, for Tract 90, and identified him- 
 self with the line of thought therein exemplified. 
 I have never considered the argument in any 
 degree dishonest, or even as going beyond the 
 liberty of interpretation allowed to members of 
 the English Church. Mr. Wilson, one of the 
 four Tutors who protested against the Tract, has 
 since that time found himself in direct collision 
 with popular opinion and the sense ordinarily put 
 on formularies to which he has been able con- 
 scientiously to adhere ; and although there are 
 some who make a distinction between stretching 
 documents in the direction of Rome and their 
 extension towards Free Thought, the cases seem 
 precisely parallel 
 
 The Tractarians did only what all must do who 
 accept inconsistent formularies, the result of an 
 accidental compromise, who hold the dogmatic 
 
 statements
 
 60 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 statements of one age under the pressure of the 
 opinions of another. It is for each man to settle 
 in his particular case how far he can conform to 
 that which all men do not hold in precisely the 
 same sense ; it is not for those to blame who 
 themselves require a like allowance in kind, if 
 not in degree. Mr. Keble and Dr. Newman, 
 with their friends, were surely honest in that they 
 made no scruple of the sense put by them on 
 dogmatic statements having neither the venerable 
 antiquity of creeds, nor a large catholic inclusive- 
 ness, nor a grave precision of language. Few 
 who submit to them can love the Thirty-nine 
 Articles ; to strive to make the bonds less galling 
 is a kindly attempt, from whomsoever it come. 
 
 While the Tracts were in publication, and 
 immediately after the death of his father, a 
 second offer came to Mr. Keble of the vicarage 
 of Hursley, again vacant, and was accepted by 
 him. It came opportunely ; for he was just then 
 engaged to be married, and he had also to pro- 
 vide a home, or partial home, for his sister. The 
 special work of his life was done ; the book was 
 given to the world; the movement was fairly 
 started by which he will be remembered ; and 
 the rest of his life was much like many another 
 spent in the country parishes of England, rather 
 dawdling and trivial, making much of little plea- 
 ,>:: sures,
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 61 
 
 sures, and more of little grievances, of the 
 naughtiness of school-boys and girls, of the ex- 
 citement of a speech in the school-room from a 
 colonial Bishop. In such a life there is seldom 
 much to record, though it is not without a quiet 
 grace and beauty. 
 
 There are, however, some points which will 
 repay special attention in the life of a man so 
 typical among English clergy. Mr. Keble ac- 
 cepted a living at the time when Dr. Newman's 
 faith in the Church of England was receiving 
 constant shocks, and the work of a parish of 
 which he was the incumbent caused himself to 
 feel more and more, that if the Church of England 
 was really in doctrine what he considered it ought 
 to be, it was at any rate a "practical failure." 
 He was powerless to revive in its fulness the 
 habit of confession among those of whom he had 
 the spiritual charge, and without this he felt the 
 Church could not work as he conceived a Church 
 should. The Roman controversy was before him ; 
 and though he says in his letters over and over 
 again that he could not join that Church, so had 
 his friend before him who there after his troubles 
 found rest. In most essential points the High- 
 Anglican and the Roman doctrines are one, 
 and in the Roman Church alone can they be 
 consistently held. But as poetry, or, in other 
 
 words,
 
 62 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 words, feeling, had guided Mr. Keble hitherto, so 
 was it in the great crisis of his life. His fancy 
 and affections were on the side of his staying where 
 he was, and this matter once decided, he wavered 
 no more. While he hesitated, and when Dr. 
 Newman left the Church of England, Mrs. Keble 
 seemed dying, as also another dear relation, and 
 here is Mr. Keble's comment : 
 
 I have written to him Dr. Newman to express as well 
 as I could two feelings, one, continued love and affection to- 
 wards him ; the other, that every day things are happening, 
 especially in our two sick-rooms, which make it impossible 
 for me to do as he has done ; it would seem like impiety to 
 reject such warnings as have been sent to me in that manner ; 
 
 I mean things which dear C said at a moment when she 
 
 thought herself dying. 
 
 Religion surely becomes a most unreal thing if 
 it be not a matter of reason, conviction, and duty, 
 but of sentiment ; a dependence on the thoughts 
 of those we love, when those thoughts are least 
 under control ; a resting the truth of a creed on 
 the holiness of life of those who hold it. And when 
 once such sentiment had swayed his mind, the in- 
 fallibility of his relatives was propounded as a relief 
 to other anxieties than his own. A parishioner 
 of Hursley, after sore struggles, complicated by 
 graver difficulties than assail many, joined the 
 Church of Rome. The difficulties were laid before 
 Mr. Keble not only as a friend, but as the ap- 
 pointed
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 63 
 
 pointed guide and pastor, and the interview was 
 thus described : 
 
 He listened patiently to all I had to say, looking inex- 
 pressibly shocked, and then said, " Suppose we talk to Char- 
 lotte about it ; she will help you much better than I. " When 
 he found that I would not hear of this, he was simply angry. 
 
 And again : 
 
 This I believe was the attitude of his mind against every- 
 thing that seemed to lead beyond the religion of his father 
 and sisters and wife ; for it really came simply to this. He 
 answered a friend of mine who went to him in anxieties and 
 difficulties like my own, by saying, ' ' Look at my sister ; how 
 can the Church of England be wrong, which has nurtured 
 and satisfied a soul like hers ? " And he said the same sort 
 of thing to me. Could it be right for me to have difficulties 
 when she had none ? Must not the fault be my own ? 
 
 And, once more : 
 
 His always seemed to me an unreal life, full of beauty 
 and poetry, but always, to my mind, untrue, for it was a con- 
 tinual contradiction. 
 
 These words are not quoted in any spirit of 
 detraction, but because if any be utterly convinced 
 there is no true standing-point between Rome and 
 Free Thought, it is important to show the futility of 
 fancy taking the place of reason, on which one of 
 the best of Anglicans deemed himself to rest 
 
 To one so loving as Mr. Keble, it must have 
 been doubly painful that his friends should sever 
 themselves from his side and cease to think his 
 thoughts ; for mixed up in curious stratification 
 
 with
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 with his tenderness, was a great severity of judgment 
 on those with whom he could not agree. Thus, 
 when quite a young man, he could not admire 
 Milton's writings, because he disliked his views ; 
 in later days he wrote, that " the opinion there 
 are good men of all parties is a bad doctrine for 
 these days ; " that he would not advise asking a 
 clergyman who had joined the Church of Rome to 
 dine : " I should consider it scandalous in respect 
 of the servants, to say no other ; they know that 
 he is a clergyman who has renounced his Orders, 
 and it cannot be but certain thoughts must enter 
 into their minds, if they think of such things at 
 all" Thus, strangest of all, he declines to enter 
 into the religious difficulties connected with the 
 question of the inspiration of the Scripture, be- 
 cause most of the men who entertained them were 
 "too wicked to be reasoned with." And since 
 he was under the influence of these feelings, it 
 is easy to understand a touching anecdote which 
 belongs to the period of his life in which his 
 doubts were raised and then stifled. A visitor, 
 in the course of a walk, many years afterwards, 
 directed his attention to a broken piece of ground, 
 a chalk-pit as it turned out : 
 
 "Ah," said he, "that is a sad place, that is connected 
 with the most painful event of my life. It was there that I 
 first knew for certain that J. H. N. had left us. We had just 
 made up our minds that such an event was all but inevitable, 
 
 and
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 65 
 
 and one day I received a letter in his handwriting. I felt sure 
 of what it contained, and I carried it about with me all 
 through the day, afraid to open it. At last I got away to 
 that chalk-pit, and then, forcing myself to read the letter, I 
 found that my forebodings had been too true ; it was the 
 announcement that he was gone. 
 
 It is no real matter for surprise that Keble never 
 received dignity in the Church. In those days, 
 indeed, no leaders in the Oxford movement could 
 have expected high preferment. They set them- 
 selves boldly against authority; they opposed 
 the reform of the Irish Church, the Jerusalem 
 Bishopric, and even matters in which the great 
 ones of the land were more concerned than these. 
 It will be remembered by all readers of the Apo- 
 legia pro Vita Sua that Dr. Newman, for himself, 
 solemnly protested against the consecration of 
 Bishop Alexander ; but perhaps few people re- 
 collect a characteristic proceeding of Mr. Keble 
 with regard to a matter of far greater and more 
 national interest. The doctrine which was 
 brought into prominence even more than any 
 other in the early Tracts, was that of " Aposto- 
 lical Succession," by which persons episcopally 
 ordained received a sort of sacred virus trans- 
 missible through the ages, conferring on them, 
 and on them alone, the power of administering 
 the Sacraments. And it was to the holders of 
 such a doctrine matter of grave doubt whether 
 
 any 
 E
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 any beyond the limits of episcopal communions 
 belonged to the Church whether, in fact, they 
 were Christians at all. 
 
 Hence, when the Lutheran King of Prussia 
 was chosen to stand godfather to the Prince of 
 Wales, High-churchmen were sorely exercised in 
 mind. Mr. Keble's feelings on the subject were 
 delivered in a Protest made by himself and several 
 others among his more immediate friends ; and 
 from the position he then took up he probably 
 never would have varied. This singular document 
 is of considerable importance with reference to the 
 non-preferment of those who framed it, till Dr. 
 Moberly was made a Bishop long after the Prince 
 Consort's death. Among the signatories were men 
 who, as the ordinary course of advancement goes, 
 had more reason to expect dignity than Mr. Keble, 
 and who were kept from it on account of their 
 participation in the Protest, some of whom, per- 
 haps, in after years would not again have signed 
 such a document under like circumstances, and it 
 might seem well now to forget it. But it is impor- 
 tant as showing the consistency and honesty of 
 Mr. Keble, whoever was concerned, and also the 
 singular and miserable isolation of the Anglican 
 party in existing Christendom. A man who had 
 joined the Church of Rome was not to be asked 
 to dinner; a Lutheran could not be a witness 
 
 that
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 67 
 
 that a child should be brought up in the faith ; of 
 a Presbyterian church it is said, " I would not be 
 in one of them at service-time on any considera- 
 tion ; " yet all the while the Church in which he 
 ministered was a " practical failure." 
 
 To few men would Goethe's words, " Du bist 
 am Ende was du bist," apply more than to Mr. 
 Keble, and therefore it is needless to pause on 
 the last twenty years of his life. How he would 
 have restored ecclesiastical discipline, had it been 
 in his power, he showed in his Life of Bishop 
 Wilson, who ruled his little diocese with ultra- 
 papal severity - } what he said on the attempt to 
 legalise marriage with the sister of a deceased 
 wife, on Ettcharistical Adoration, on the Colenso 
 case, each reader can now imagine for him- 
 self. On the Ritual question, in quite the last 
 months of his life, his deep reverence for the 
 truths symbolised in the Sacraments led him 
 somewhat away from the line his party was 
 taking, in that he wrote a letter to protest against 
 the necessity of fasting Communions, and the 
 growing custom of merely " assisting at Mass." 
 His later years were shaded by Mrs. Keble's 
 constant ill health ; we can scarce say saddened, 
 because there was between the pair the most 
 complete sympathy, and neither accounted death 
 as an evil or as a real separation. Her delicacy 
 
 of
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 of constitution, and at the last failure of his own 
 vigour, necessitated long residences away from 
 Hursley, and called out from affectionate friends 
 child-like offices towards the childless pair. It 
 was at Hursley, however, and at a time when Mr. 
 Keble was especially anxious about his wife, that 
 a meeting took place which in some measure 
 undid the chill separation of so many years, when 
 once more Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey met 
 under the roof of their friend, so long lost to the 
 greatest of them. Dr. Newman's letter describ- 
 ing this meeting is most touching and beautiful. 
 He arrived unexpectedly ; and the twenty years 
 had so changed those who had parted in the 
 prime of life, that they did not recognise each 
 other. 
 
 Keble was at his door speaking to a friend. He did not 
 know me, and asked my name. What was more wonderful, 
 since I had purposely come to his house, I did not know him, 
 and I feared to ask who it was. 1 gave him my card with- 
 out speaking. When at length we found out each other, he 
 said, with that tender flurry of manner which I recollect so 
 well, that ... he could not receive me as he should have 
 wished to do, nor indeed had he expected me, for " Pusey," 
 he whispered, " is in the house, as you are aware." Then 
 he brought me into his study, and embraced me most affec- 
 tionately, and said he would go and prepare Pusey, and send 
 him to me. . . . 
 
 Just before my time for going, Pusey went to read the 
 Evening Service in church, and I was left in the open air 
 -with Keble by himself. . . , We walked a little way, and 
 
 stood
 
 JOHN KEBLE. 69 
 
 stood looking in silence on the church and churchyard, so 
 beautiful and calm. Then he began to converse with me 
 in more than his old tone of intimacy, as if we had never been 
 parted, and soon I was obliged to go. . . . 
 
 He wrote me many notes about this time ; in one of them 
 he made a reference to the lines in Macbeth 
 " When shall we three meet again? 
 When the hurly-burly's done, 
 When the battle's lost and won." 
 
 This is all I can recollect of a visit of which almost the 
 sole vivid memory which remains with me is the image of 
 Keble himself. 
 
 And this visit was to him also nearly the last 
 of Hursley, which he had loved, and for the poor 
 of which he had lived, making himself and his 
 wife truly the servants of his people. An old 
 friend said of him : 
 
 He was not what is commonly called an eloquent reader 
 or preacher ; his voice was not powerful ; nor his ear perfect 
 for harmony of sound, nor had he in the popular sense great 
 gifts of delivery ; but in spite of all this, you could not but 
 be impressed deeply both by his reading and his preaching. 
 . . . When he preached, it was with an affectionate, almost 
 plaintive, earnestness, which was very moving. His sermons 
 were at all times full of that scriptural knowledge which was 
 a remarkable quality in him as a divine. 
 
 There were, however, those who took a less 
 favourable estimate, one of whom said : 
 
 His sermons were to me, if I may say so without dis- 
 respect, very tiresome, except every now and then when a 
 pretty little poetical thought would come out. But he 
 
 preached
 
 70 JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 preached entirely for the poor, and yet not the least the sort 
 of sermon to arrest or interest them, and I think they used 
 chiefly to sleep. 
 
 There is no need to dwell on his last illness 
 and death, which came while he was awaiting at 
 Bournemouth that of his wife, who, contrary to 
 all expectation, survived him some weeks. The 
 deathbeds of all pious people have a remarkable 
 similarity, in whatever religious communion they 
 may happen to die. Various as has been the 
 labour of the day, the tired toilers say Good-night, 
 and fall asleep with the same actions and almost 
 the same words. 
 
 Most of those who will read what is here writ- 
 ten, are of a far other school of thought than 
 Mr. Keble's. His peculiar party will probably 
 soon be absorbed in the great Roman Church, only 
 true home of all dogmatic sects. And we shall 
 probably wander further even than now into that 
 dim land, of which none can see the horizon ; to 
 us, a land of hope ; to Catholics, the valley of the 
 shadow of eternal death. But at least we need 
 not let the spiritual separation come from us ; we 
 may carry with us loving and tender memories of 
 men from whom we learn much, even while we 
 differ and criticise. 
 
 1869.
 
 MARIA HARE. 
 
 1798-1870. 
 
 IV/T ARIA LEYCESTER, afterwards Mrs. 
 Augustus Hare, was the daughter of a 
 Cheshire clergyman, some time rector of Stoke- 
 upon-Terne, in Shropshire. Her elder sister was 
 the wife of Edward Stanley, who became Bishop 
 of Norwich. Much of her early days was spent 
 with the Stanleys and various county magnates ; 
 but she owed the development of her intellec- 
 tual and spiritual nature to intimacy with 
 Reginald Heber, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, 
 at that time rector of Hodnet, near Stoke. 
 Maria Leycester became attached to his curate, 
 Mr. Stow, though the strong opposition of her 
 family made a definite engagement impossible. 
 Mr. Stow went to India with Bishop Heber as his 
 chaplain, while the matter was still in this unsa- 
 tisfactory state, and died of fever, shortly after 
 his new career had begun. His most intimate 
 
 friend,
 
 72 MARIA HARE. 
 
 friend, whom Miss Leycester had already known 
 well, was Augustus Hare, and the close sympathy 
 into which they were brought by a common grief 
 grew after a time into a warmer feeling. Mr. Hare 
 accepted a small college living in Wiltshire, and, 
 not without much strenuous opposition on the part 
 of the Leycesters, they were married, Maria Hare 
 being thirty-one, and Augustus eight years older. 
 Four happy years of married life were followed by 
 a complete break-down of his health. Marcus Hare, 
 a younger brother of Augustus, had recently mar- 
 ried a Miss Stanley, making thus a double connec- 
 tion with the Stanley family. The two brothers, 
 with their wives, went to Rome together, and there 
 Augustus Hare died in February, 1834. His 
 widow took up her residence at Hurstmonceaux, 
 in Sussex, first with Archdeacon Hare, and then 
 in a house of her own. After a residence of many 
 years, she removed to Holmhurst, fourteen miles 
 from Hurstmonceaux, and there dying in 1870, 
 was buried at Hurstmonceaux. Her Memoirs, 
 and extracts from her papers were afterwards 
 published by her nephew and adopted son, and 
 from this book we know the quiet life somewhat 
 interesting in itself, but far more by reason of its 
 surroundings. It is on the thread of that " quiet 
 life " that the following notes must be strung. 
 The beliefs of childhood are often so rudely 
 
 shaken,
 
 MARIA HARE. 
 
 shaken, that it is pleasant to find the traditional 
 Lady Scott, and the traditional Prince Leopold, 
 the same in the letters of a contemporary as they 
 have come down to us. Miss Leycester paid a 
 visit to Abbotsford, which she found odd and 
 picturesque, was delighted with Mr. Scott, as the 
 great novelist still was in 1819, but she says of 
 the lady of the house : " His family consists of a 
 very insignificant little wife, a French woman, quite 
 inferior to him, and his daughters, who are fine, 
 sensible clever girls." All incidental notices of 
 Bishop Heber, too, are quite what we should ex- 
 pect, a genial, pleasant man, earnest in his piety, 
 accepting his mission as a matter of duty, thougli 
 well aware of its danger, highly cultivated, a good 
 German scholar, rare in those days, by no 
 means averse to rational, and what fanatics 
 would now call unclerical amusements. Witness 
 the following from an account of a week spent at 
 Hodnet : 
 
 We had every kind of amusement in the evenings, in' 
 dancing, singing, and acting. Reginald Heber and Mr. 
 Stow the curate are both excellent actors, and we acted 
 a French proverb one night, and the " Children in the 
 
 Wood " another In the mornings, one of the party 
 
 read Scott's new novel, Ivanhoe, aloud to the others. 
 
 Augustus Hare, whom Miss Leycester met for 
 the first time at Hodnet, was one of a very 
 
 interesting
 
 74 MARIA HARE. 
 
 interesting family. All the Hares were people 
 worth knowing either in life or in print. But 
 by far the most taking character among them 
 was Augustus Hare's mother, daughter of Bishop 
 Shipley, of St. Asaph, wife of Mr. Francis Hare 
 Naylor. This last, who took his mother's name 
 in addition to his own, was the son of a spend- 
 thrift canon of Winchester, himself always in 
 difficulties, clever, odd, and enthusiastic. Bishop 
 Shipley, who had a house near Winchester, did 
 not approve of his daughter's fancy for the hand- 
 some lad with no means and no expectations ; 
 for the family property was impoverished, and all 
 that could be settled away was settled on the 
 children of his father's second marriage. The 
 beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, a 
 cousin of Miss Shipley, did what she could to 
 forward this romantic love affair. The end of it 
 was thus : 
 
 At length, seeing the hopeless state of his daughter's 
 affections, the Bishop was induced to invite Francis Hare 
 Naylor to Twyford. The following day he was arrested for 
 debt while driving in the Episcopal coach with Georgiana 
 and her parents. He was then forbidden the house ; but on 
 his release he contrived to communicate with his beloved by 
 dressingup as a beggar, and appearing at her carriage window, 
 as it ploughed its way through the muddy lanes between 
 Twyford and Winchester. She recognised him, and kissed 
 her hand in the presence of her family. The scene of indig- 
 nation and reproach which followed brought matters to a 
 
 crisis.
 
 MARIA HARE. 75 
 
 crisis. Robert Hare refused to do anything for his son, but 
 the Duchess of Devonshire gave them an annuity of 200, 
 with the promise of a place in Ireland, and on this they mar- 
 ried. The place in Ireland never came ; and soon after the 
 marriage they retired to Carlsruhe, and afterwards to the 
 North of Italy, where their pittance was comparative riches. 
 
 In Italy their four sons were born, and in Italy 
 they resided till, at Robert Hare's death, it was 
 found that he had been unable to leave all his 
 property, as he had intended, to his second family. 
 The Hare-Naylors then returned to England to 
 difficulty and a struggle against poverty, to a life 
 far less congenial to either than had been their 
 Italian wanderings. 
 
 The education of the children was mainly com- 
 mitted to the charge of Father Emmanuele Aponte, 
 a Spanish priest, and his adopted daughter, Clo- 
 tilda Tambroni, a very remarkable woman, whose 
 great classical learning caused her, in spite of the 
 apparent disqualification of her sex, to be appointed 
 Greek Professor in the University of Bologna. 
 Aponte was a Jesuit; the Hares remained Pro- 
 testant ; and in these times of hard insistance on 
 dogmatic theologies, it is pleasant to find that in 
 the later days of the last century and early days of 
 the present there could be and were the most cor- 
 dial relations between persons of different faiths, 
 on the neutral ground of a piety which trans- 
 cended
 
 MARIA HARE. 
 
 cended and underlay all differences, of sympathy 
 in intellectual pursuits, of art and science. 
 
 Long years after these early Italian times, when 
 Francis Hare, Clotilda Tambroni's elder pupil, had 
 died, his widow and daughter were converted to 
 the Catholic faith, and they were then anxious to 
 declare that in his childhood he had been baptized 
 by Cardinal Mezzofanti at Bologna. But if he was 
 so baptized, a thing in itself by no means impro- 
 bable, it is abundantly clear it will only have been 
 because Mr. and Mrs. Hare, while valuing the 
 Christian initiatory rite, had no scruple about the 
 creed of the administrator, or else, which is still 
 more probable, that no minister was at hand save 
 a Roman ecclesiastic. It certainly was " one of 
 the delights of little Francis in his childhood to 
 swing the censer upon the steps of the altar 
 when the future cardinal was celebrating mass." 
 And though Mr. and Mrs. Hare Naylor, in their 
 large-hearted tolerance, may have considered this 
 a mere religious form, which mattered little, so that 
 their child was brought near the central verities of 
 religion, it is probable that a priest would only have 
 allowed this favour to one whom he considered in 
 fact a Catholic child. " Mrs. Hare Naylor sought 
 to interest her son in religion, but on that subject 
 alone he was not to bewilder himself with useless 
 inquiries. . . . She taught her little Francis early 
 
 to
 
 MARIA HARE. 77 
 
 to compose prayers and meditations of his own, 
 and commit them to paper." One remains in the 
 " large round child's hand " of a boy of nine, an 
 admirable child's prayer, whether it be his own or 
 that of his mother : 
 
 I beseech Thee, O my God, to be indulgent to what I 
 have been : to assist me to amend what I am : and of Thy 
 goodness to direct what I shall be, so that the love of virtue 
 and the love of Thee may always be first in my heart. 
 Amen. 
 
 Before Francis was ten he could read fluently 
 with his mother in all the easier Greek and Latin 
 classics, and he was familiar with many of the 
 best authors in French and Italian. At Bologna, 
 his mother was his constant companion, and with 
 her and her dog Smut, and her favourite bird in 
 its cage, he used to pass long days in the woods 
 and olive-gardens near the town. The family 
 group was painted thus by Flaxman, whose 
 friendship was one of Mrs. Hare Naylor's great- 
 est pleasures, and whose advice and assistance 
 added much to the excellence of her own paint- 
 ings. For her he made his drawings from the 
 Iliad and Odyssey. 
 
 When the Hare Naylors returned to England 
 to take possession of what was left them of their 
 ancestral inheritance, they carried Augustus with 
 them, for whom his aunt, Lady Jones, widow of 
 
 the
 
 78 MARIA HARE. 
 
 the well-known Sir William Jones, had undertaken 
 to provide ; Francis was left with Aponte and 
 Clotilda Tambroni ; the younger children with a 
 trusty Italian servant. 
 
 They settled at Hurstmonceaux, Liberals in 
 politics, largely cultured in mind, which facts 
 then even more than now cut them off from much 
 society in such a neighbourhood. With a scanty 
 income and a large house to keep up, they were 
 very different from ordinary English people. The 
 following picture must conclude this notice of a 
 charming character : 
 
 Mrs. Hare Naylor's life at Hurstmonceaux must have 
 astonished her rustic neighbours, and still more her neigh- 
 bours in her own rank of life, of whom there were few with 
 whom she cared to associate, except the ladies at Ashburn- 
 ham Place, where the fine library was a great delight to her. 
 Not only when within the house was she always occupied in 
 the deep study of Greek authors, but during her walks in the 
 park and shrubberies she was always seen dressed in white, 
 and she was always accompanied by a beautiful tame white 
 doe, which used to walk by her side even when she went to 
 church. Her foreign life led her to regard Sunday merely 
 as a f^te-day, and she used frequently to scandalise the 
 church-going population by sitting at a window looking 
 out upon the road working at her tambour-frame, when they 
 were going to church. Her impetuosity in liking and dis- 
 liking often led her to make friends with persons beneath 
 her, or to take them into her service when they were of a 
 character which rendered her notice exceedingly undesirable. 
 The two women she took most notice of in the parish were 
 the last persons who ever did public penance at Hurstmon-
 
 MARIA HARE. 79 
 
 ceaux, having both to stand in a white sheet in the church- 
 yard for their "various offspring," so that people said, "There 
 are Mrs. Hare Naylor's friends doing penance ; " and it was 
 long remembered with amusement that when one of her 
 maids was afterwards found to have misbehaved herself, she 
 said, " Poor thing, she cannot help it; I really believe it must 
 be something in the air t" Yet in her heart she was of a 
 most holy life ; ardent in all her feelings and acts, her whole 
 soul was constantly poured out in prayer. As a Mr. Mit- 
 chell, of whom she saw much at this time, said afterwards 
 to her son Julius, " She did truly embrace Christ with her 
 whole heart. 1 ' 
 
 Augustus Hare was sent by Lady Jones to 
 Winchester, whence he proceeded to New College. 
 Here he led a life of intellectual activity happily 
 more common now than sixty years since. He 
 did much for the political life of Oxford by estab- 
 lishing, together with some like-minded friends, 
 a Debating Society, " the Union " of those days ; 
 scandalized the University by practical jokes, and 
 yet more by trying to reform his College, attempt- 
 ing to extinguish the privileges of founders' kin. 
 Lady Jones had always wished that her nephew 
 should take orders, but his own wishes were de- 
 cidedly against this step till after the death of his 
 friend Martin Stow. But on receiving the news 
 of his death, Hare " thought within himself, If I 
 were to die now, without having been of use ! " 
 and that evening he decided upon taking orders. 
 There had no doubt been a great mental struggle 
 
 before
 
 MARIA HARE. 
 
 before arriving at this decision, but probably 
 rather one connected with distrust of his own fit- 
 ness for an office which he regarded in a some- 
 what exaggerated light, than with doctrinal 
 difficulties. Whatever doubts he had were on 
 details rather than on fundamentals ; the great 
 deeps of thought and the abysses of scepticism 
 had scarcely an existence for him. Augustus 
 Hare's opinions were generous and liberal, but 
 his mind was of a narrower cast than was that of 
 his brother Julius, and perhaps for that very reason 
 he made a better parish minister than the Arch- 
 deacon. 
 
 In these days of sharply-defined theological 
 parties, it is somewhat difficult to fix Augustus 
 Hare's precise position in the Church. He held, 
 it would seem, Church tenets strongly, and though 
 then perhaps considered in some degree high, 
 would now be that rare combination, a learned, 
 zealous, tolerant Evangelical. Here is a curious 
 record of the feeling of those days : 
 
 He united with his brother-clergy in forming a clerical 
 society, one object which he felt to be specially needed being 
 the removal of prejudices and lessening of party feeling in 
 the minds of all towards each other, and the enabling those 
 who were young in their profession to benefit by the experi- 
 ence of their elders. Many difficulties arose from the differ- 
 ence of opinion that prevailed among the members as to the 
 propriety of beginning their meetings with prayer, and as to 
 the nature of that preparatory prayer. The High-Church- 
 men
 
 MARIA HARE. Si 
 
 men were strongly prejudiced against any notice of prayer 
 on such occasions, from a notion of its likeness to Dissenting 
 societies ; the zealous Evangelicals urged the advantages of 
 extempore prayer as fitted for the peculiar circumstances of 
 time and place, and they resolutely refused to agree in the 
 formation of any society for clerical purposes that did not 
 adopt some form of worship at its beginning. 
 
 Not many men who pray at all would now refuse 
 to pray together on these grounds, so that tolera- 
 tion has made some way, even if our lines of de- 
 marcation have become more sharply defined. 
 
 Augustus Hare's work in his parish did not 
 differ in any material respect from that of other 
 earnest men of different views. He was, however, 
 among the first to adopt a familiar mode of ad- 
 dress, to hold evening classes, and to throw him- 
 self into the life of his parishioners as though he 
 were truly one of themselves. But if the religious 
 teaching of any one man has any real effect on 
 the character of a given village, if any change 
 which is brought about is not rather the tendency 
 of opinion " in the air," as Mrs. Hare Naylor 
 would have said, and in the social character of 
 the clergyman with whom the people come in 
 contact, we may well doubt if the teaching of 
 Augustus Hare, long continued, would have really 
 tended to elevate his parishioners. No amount 
 whatever of pietistic teaching can counterbalance 
 such a statement about human nature as this, 
 
 supposing 
 F
 
 82 MARIA HARE. 
 
 supposing it were really accepted by those to 
 whom it was addressed : 
 
 I remember David King telling me . . . that once 
 while working in his garden, his minister whilst talking to 
 him, in order to illustrate the wonderful love of Christ in 
 taking man's fallen nature upon him, asked David how he 
 should like to become a toad, convincing him thereby that 
 however loathsome such a change would be to him, yet it 
 was nothing compared to what the Son of God underwent 
 when He laid aside His glory. 
 
 Surely the mission of Jesus was not intended 
 to give lower views of man than the Psalmist's : 
 " What is man that thou art mindful of him, and 
 the son of man that thau visitest him ? For thou 
 hast made him a little lower than the angels, and 
 hast crowned him with glory and honour." Mr. 
 Hare's comparison dishonours alike God and man. 
 Neither is this epigram from a sermon true : 
 
 How often do we see the sinner perched on the dunghill 
 of his vices, clapping his wings in self-applause, and fancy- 
 ing himself a much grander creature than the poor Christian, 
 who all the while is soaring on high like a lark, and mount- 
 ing on his way to heaven. 
 
 But that there is no reply to teachers in the 
 pulpit, Mr. Hare might have been puzzled had 
 ^Esop's fable of the figure of the man killing the 
 lion, or the parable of the Pharisee and the 
 Publican, been, from a pew, suggested for his 
 consideration. 
 
 But it must have been difficult for one in his 
 
 position
 
 MARIA HARE. 83 
 
 position not to believe himself infallible. He, 
 his wife, the Stanleys, and a few other frequent 
 visitors, were a small mutual admiration society. 
 In their letters about as well as to each other, they 
 are the " darling Mia," the " beloved Augustus," 
 the " dear Master." If Augustus sits down to 
 write a sermon, Miss Stanley must hear what it is 
 about, even if or perhaps because it is little 
 worth recording ; as, e.g. : " At this moment 
 Augustus is writing about God's works having a 
 middle, a point of perfection ; about Jesus Christ 
 being the middle of the world, the tree of life in 
 the midst of the garden." 
 
 A matter of considerable interest was closely 
 connected with the Hares' Wiltshire life. The 
 year 1830 was one of much agricultural distress, 
 and there was great stir among the labourers. 
 Those were days of machine-breaking and rick- 
 burning ; of mobs of labourers, madly drunk, 
 roaming over the country.; of regiments, not 
 only of yeomanry, but of regular troops, arrayed 
 against the undisciplined rustics ; of begging 
 which could hardly be distinguished from rob- 
 bery ; of danger, intimidation, and fear. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Hare both wrote of a riot and of 
 rick-burning, where the rioters were dispersed by 
 the yeomanry, and the ringleaders imprisoned, 
 not without a touch of exaggeration where a 
 
 farmer
 
 84 MARIA HARE. 
 
 farmer who had been beaten, but was able to 
 walk about, is called a " mangled victim." And 
 the following is an extract from a letter of Arch- 
 deacon Hare, a liberal and thoughtful man, 
 well able generally to see more than one side 
 of a question. It shows the alarm of those 
 troubled days ; 
 
 The gentry, the farmers, the clergy, the citizens, the 
 tradesmen of the towns, must assemble and form constitu- 
 tional associations for preserving peace and order. By 
 active energy we can still avoid the danger, which, if we are 
 
 supine, will crush us Surely our nobility and gentry, 
 
 in spite of the pestilential watering-places, and other temples 
 of vanity and frivolity that draw them away from their 
 estates, may still marshal faithful tenants and peasants, if 
 they will but appear among them and at the head of them. 
 Surely the charity which the ladies of England have be- 
 stowed so liberally and almost prodigally, has not altogether 
 fallen on stony ground, but will produce some good fruit 
 even for themselves here We are trying at Cam- 
 bridge to organise a kind of body for the protection of the 
 country round, in the hope that our example may be fol- 
 lowed, though there are many who say there is no need of 
 it yet. Good God ! not yet ! When will the time come to 
 shake off our sleep ? When that sleep is cast off by the 
 pangs of death ! I was rejoiced by your ringing the church 
 bell ; but, alas ! the Dark Ages are past when that sound 
 would have acted as a summons to every living being for 
 miles around. 
 
 In that there is the ring of a distant age. No 
 one now talks of "peasants," a term which, in 
 use, if not etymologically, has come to mean little 
 
 else
 
 MARIA HARE. 
 
 else than slaves. No one now looks to the 
 " charities " of kindly ladies to set right the social 
 machine if it chance to be out of gear. 
 
 Handfuls of coals and rice, 
 And dealing out flannel and sheeting 
 A little below cost price, 
 
 have lost their virtue as a panacea even in the 
 eyes of their kindly ministrants. No one now 
 dreams of appearing in arms at the head of a 
 loyal tenantry ; and let the clergy ring their 
 tocsin never so loudly, it is not they who are the 
 chosen leaders of the people. 
 
 But the times are changed, and the men are 
 changed in them, the agricultural labourers especi- 
 ally. The calm self-respect and respect for others 
 which has been shown by them in late years is 
 worthy of all admiration ; the steady glow of a 
 strong determination to better their condition 
 which exists among the labourers, is equalled 
 only by their desire to wrong no man and to 
 speak fairly of other classes. At closely-packed 
 meetings of working men, no words have elicited 
 such hearty assent as those which disclaimed 
 sympathy with strikes as such, and where not 
 absolutely forced on the men ; none have called 
 out such rounds of applause as those which de- 
 precated charity and asked only for the wage 
 which a man could fairly earn. From first to 
 
 last,
 
 86 MARIA HARE. 
 
 last, the recent movement among the agricultural 
 labourers for a rise of wages has been free from the 
 stigma of drunkenness ; its leaders have been for 
 the most part total-abstainers ; it has been char- 
 acterised by a deep religious earnestness, for its 
 mainspring has been among the Primitive Metho- 
 dists, men who have a real zeal for God. if not 
 always according to knowledge. Those who 
 hope for, those who tremble at, the prospect of an 
 extension of the franchise to the county house- 
 holder, may alike mark with comfort and thank- 
 fulness the way in which the agricultural labourer 
 has learned already to use his vast and increasing 
 power. 
 
 Although Archdeacon Hare lost his head on 
 the occasion of agrarian riots, he usually said what 
 was worth hearing. Indeed, next to his mother, 
 he is the most interesting figure in the whole 
 circle. His letter has been quoted less to show 
 what he was than how great was the panic, how 
 sharp is the contrast between those days and these. 
 Julius Charles Hare was a man whose indirect 
 has been greater than his direct influence. Not 
 many now read his various charges and sermons, 
 though they have great and conspicuous merit ; 
 but the circle of his personal friends and fol- 
 lowers was large, and they were the leaders of 
 the Broad-Church school of thought, of which, at 
 
 least
 
 MARIA HARE. 87 
 
 least in its modern phase, Archdeacon Hare was 
 the true founder. One who personally or intel- 
 lectually attracted to himself, who was for a time 
 to some of them a sort of central sun, such men 
 as Arnold, Bunsen, Maurice, Sterling, Rowland 
 Williams, Stanley ; who was a Cambridge man 
 of the best type and it may well be doubted if 
 there exist anywhere men of wider culture than 
 the best Cambridge men ; whose mind absorbed 
 and assimilated even the enormous mass of Ger- 
 man theology has not passed away without 
 leaving a deep impress on the mind of this age, 
 and even of those who know not whence the 
 influence which moved them has come. Dr. 
 Rowland Williams thus expressed in a private 
 letter his view of Archdeacon Hare in February 
 1868 : 
 
 As to Julius Hare, I always conceive him to have used 
 language in its most natural sense, and to have been simply 
 an orthodox believer, though he always selected the more 
 reasonable form of orthodoxy. 
 
 How far or whether he made in his own mind an un- 
 defined allowance for the possibility of spiritual conceptions 
 having taken from imagination a sensuous shape, is a 
 question to which my only answer would be a guess. If he 
 did so at all as regards the " Incarnation," he still left it as a 
 commanding reality, and as no less distinct a communication 
 of Deity by the indwelling of the Divine Logos, than as it 
 appears in Justin Martyr and in St. John's Gospel. Thus 
 he would drop nothing distinctive in Christianity but the 
 right of damning and calumniating heathens, which happens, 
 
 after
 
 88 MARIA HARE. 
 
 after all, to be not in the least a Christian employment of 
 our time. Nor do I suppose that he would have cared to 
 press against any one else so purely hypothetical a con- 
 struction as that which Milman exemplifies, in decomposing 
 the poetry of the Nativity into pictorial symbolism of idea ; 
 but it would be in harmony with his Platonic and Johannine 
 line of thought if he vaguely entertained it. 
 
 But certainly, if he ever felt himself to have been en- 
 gaged in maintaining the free Christ and the open Scripture, 
 against foul acts of tyranny or fraud, he would on every 
 account have avoided complicating his position with specu- 
 lative possibilities drawn from the schools of despair. 
 
 So, as to the Resurrection, if you had told him that it is 
 neither clear nor important with what physical conditions 
 our Lord ascended from the grave, he might have assented ; 
 but if you had turned round then, and betrayed that you 
 thought it so immensely important, that in fact our difficulty 
 or uncertainty on this point must vitiate our conception of 
 Christianity, or its hold on our minds, he would have been 
 as far from you as the east is from the west. He certainly 
 saw, as St. Paul saw, in the resurrection of our Lord a strong 
 confirmation of the great hope or aspiration of mankind ; 
 though not a reason for holding that, without this event, no 
 such aspiration could be cherished. 
 
 His general view of Miracles I have long held to be the 
 only correct one, that they are historical realities, for they 
 come to us guaranteed by men whose religious trustworthi- 
 ness we can fairly verify ; but that they are not foundations, 
 or " evidences," both on account of their spiritual inappro- 
 priateness, and also of the logical inadequacy of their 
 evidence, if not aided, as it is to us, by associations. They 
 are not unlike family narratives, which one has no desire, nor 
 perhaps power, to disprove, but which one sees the rest of the 
 world would not select as the universal foundation of religion 
 or law. 
 
 Christianity differs from other religions in this : that 
 
 which
 
 MARIA HARE. 89 
 
 which they aspire to, it exemplifies. Those who mock at 
 aspiration will disbelieve the example ; but those who share 
 the aspiration, and only see, or make allowance for other 
 men's seeing, that the evidence is not of such a kind as 
 would prove moral or intellectual enormities, need only be 
 reduced to this dilemma : they teach with more or less of 
 positiveness ; that is, their confidence admits of degrees. 
 However much the sanguine hope may swell into the tone 
 of demonstration, it always was fundamentally hope. 
 
 The special interest of Julius Hare to my own mind has 
 always been, that his doctrine gives with more scholar-like 
 consistency than Maurice, and greater clearness than Cole- 
 ridge, the one line by which, if at all, the theology of our 
 own Church can be most hopefully and reasonably main- 
 tained. Whether, with a fair field and no favour, it will 
 ultimately hold, we cannot absolutely tell, so long as the 
 foul arts of the Titus Oateses stop the way. At all events, 
 it is better than esoteric sceptism, or courtier-like indiffer- 
 ence, or vulpine Jesuitry ; for it is frank, earnest, and, as far 
 as the nature of the phenomena permits, entirely orthodox. 
 .... At a "reading" last night, I lectured on Martin 
 Luther, more in Hare's style than in Ward's. What minced- 
 meat Hare makes of that set ! 
 
 Many of Archdeacon Hare's letters which have 
 been preserved are well worth reading ; this scrap 
 about Goethe's death is especially so : 
 
 The mightiest spirit that this earth has seen since Shake- 
 speare left it, is departed. But he departed just like himself, 
 in the perfect healthful possession of all his faculties, as a man 
 who had fulfilled the duties of the day, and falls into calm 
 sleep after it. ... Dear, glorious old man, would I had 
 seen him before he was taken away ; would I had heard his 
 voice, and beheld the calm majesty of his face ! 
 
 "When there was a prospect of the family living 
 
 of
 
 90 MARIA HARE. 
 
 of Hurstmonceaux becoming vacant, Augustus 
 Hare waived his claim to it in favour of his younger 
 brother Julius, who however remained through 
 life a student, and never really took root in the 
 country. The following passage, in which he goes 
 to books rather than nature for another instance of 
 one of the most ordinary accidents in the country, 
 is characteristic and delightful : 
 
 My cow .... certainly gives very little and poor 
 milk. ... I myself saw Elphick churning away, and no 
 butter would come of it. That this is not a thing totally 
 unheard of, appears from that, delightful passage of Ben 
 Jonson, quoted in the Phil. Mus. ii. 211. 
 
 When this letter was written, Augustus Hare 
 had broken down, and he, with his wife and Mr. 
 and Mrs. Marcus Hare, were leaving England in 
 search of health. He did not find it, and died, 
 as we have said, at Rome, in February 1834. 
 It was, as might be expected, a fair ending to a 
 fair and self-denying life, clouded, though but a 
 little, by that miserable superstition which makes 
 bodily weakness, and the uncertainty as to the 
 nature of the great change, into the attacks of a 
 personal enemy. 
 
 He said, not long before his last attack, he had such a 
 strong persuasion of Satan's agency, and that he felt as if 
 he would make a last attack on his faith ; and he dreaded 
 lest, if any great suffering came, he might dishonour his 
 Christian character. 
 
 Happily
 
 MARIA HARE. gi 
 
 Happily this dread of non-existent agencies had 
 left him before the end came, and all was calm both 
 for him and his affectionate wife. 
 
 Mrs. Augustus Hare, lived for thirty-seven 
 years after her husband's death. But there is 
 little more to tell. She led for the most part 
 an uneventful, peaceful, meditative life, made 
 various tours abroad, gathered kind friends about 
 her, who were all loved, and all deserving love. 
 She wrote copious diaries and letters which are 
 somewhat wearisome to the reader. Eau sucrte 
 becomes after a time a somewhat vapid drink for 
 the body, and pious as are the reflections, they 
 afford to the mind somewhat analogous nourish- 
 ment. It is very beautiful to watch and read of 
 calm resignation and waiting, content with a world 
 in which all is for the best, and hope of a world 
 in which all will be better than the best How 
 far this temper may be carried may be seen by a 
 special instance. Though we may admire the ex- 
 quisite loveliness of many of our old cathedrals and 
 all their surroundings, few who have stood in their 
 nave on some week-day, and marked the scanty 
 worshippers as they disperse, have not felt that, 
 with all their religious apparatus, they have but 
 slender result on English life and thought. The 
 service on such a week-day has seemed to rattle 
 in the edifice like the shrivelled kernel of a nut, 
 
 as
 
 MARIA HARE. 
 
 as Charles Kingsley said in Yeast. But Mrs. 
 Hare found a fitness in services which no one 
 attended, save the hired and perfunctory wor- 
 shippers. She writes of Norwich, as from the 
 palace she hears the music from the adjacent 
 cathedral : 
 
 Had I strength I would attend the service daily, for it 
 seems to lift one quite out of the world. There is something 
 most impressive in hearing, in the dusk of twilight, the beau- 
 tiful music swelling through that lofty and magnificent temple 
 to the glory of God. I feel, too, as if even the absence of 
 any congregation made it more touching and solemn, to 
 think that day by day those most harmonious and beautiful 
 songs of praise are resounding in the ear of God alone. 
 
 Ingenious optimism can scarcely go beyond 
 that. 
 
 Mrs. Hare had not the strength, or depth, or 
 brilliant mental power, which rendered it a duty 
 to give her meditations to the world as if they had 
 been the thoughts of a Maurice or an Eugenie de 
 Gudrin. Yet there are many who will think her 
 own touching account of her intentions a sufficient 
 justification for the large volumes in which her 
 memory was enshrined. 
 
 1873.
 
 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 
 
 1820-1870. 
 
 T F a religious faith which unites the extremest 
 freedom of criticism to a profound sentiment 
 of reverence, the affection for old institutions 
 and forms to an eager welcome for all new truth 
 whencesoever it may come, shall ever grow more 
 common among us than now it seems to be ; if 
 men shall then look back with wonder to days in 
 which to inquire was called disloyal, and a desire 
 for reformation branded as destructiveness, and 
 shall ask who were the honest and brave pioneers 
 of the advancing armies of free thought, no name 
 will claim more honourable mention, no life will 
 more seem to have been taken from the Church of 
 England when most it was needed, than the name 
 and the life of Rowland Williams. 
 
 Yet it may be doubted if more than a very few 
 know what we lost in him ; his influence was 
 rather deep than extended ; it was the misfortune 
 
 of
 
 94 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 
 
 of his career that he was best known in precisely 
 the very modes in which he would least have 
 chosen that in happier times his work should have 
 lain. Hence it is well to endeavour to estimate 
 the place in English thought of one among the 
 most remarkable theologians of our day. 
 
 It must not, however, be supposed that Dr. 
 Williams considered himself as in any sense a 
 worker with the extreme liberal party. It would 
 be in the highest degree unfaithful to a man who 
 was so eminently straightforward and outspoken, 
 were it not made quite plain he was not of, but 
 rather that he was against, it. In September 
 1865, he thus wrote to one who proposed that he 
 should offer a contribution to The Theological 
 Review : 
 
 As to the suggestion of writing therein, it may be very 
 naturally addressed tome, since having been never connected 
 with any Review since Lockhart's death, nor having, except 
 once casually, written an article anywhere, I may be sup- 
 posed to be in want of an organ. I do not, however, feel 
 in myself the redundancy of vigour which makes reviewing 
 a necessity for some men ; and, so far as I am able to write, 
 prefer writing in other ways. 
 
 Besides this, having long stood alone in reality, I prefer 
 doing so in appearance, and do not intend entangling myself 
 with other men again. I need not enter on the ground of 
 denominational doctrine, although it would have for me 
 grave significance. 
 
 There is every reason for supposing that his 
 
 denominational
 
 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 95 
 
 denominational position assumed ever more im- 
 portance in his eyes, of which position he said at 
 a somewhat later date : 
 
 If you bear in mind that I have for twelve years taught 
 pure Anglicanism, explaining and defending the Articles 
 clause by clause, and facilitating signature of them on the 
 principle of believing them, you will partly understand why 
 the only thing left for me is to jog on alone. 
 
 He was indeed alone. He speaks of " the 
 intense mortification and embarrassment" caused 
 by the want of any brother scholar with whom he 
 could sympathise, and at his out-of-the-way parish, 
 among the Wiltshire downs, there was probably 
 no one in any degree able to appreciate the ripe 
 culture, the subtlety of feeling, the polished style, 
 of a man fitted to shine in one of our great centres 
 of intellectual life. 
 
 And, again, he stood alone by consequence of 
 his extreme refinement of thought, under which 
 he showed himself sometimes intolerant of those 
 who could not enter into his nice distinctions, and 
 who did not see in the same light as he did the 
 more involved questions of theology. This was 
 especially the case in reference to those who 
 claimed to follow his teaching to a very large 
 extent, but did not always adopt his conclusions, 
 or pressed them further than he considered there 
 was need to press them. Some few perhaps he 
 
 alienated,
 
 96 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 
 
 alienated, and so made himself still more alone, 
 by his keen epigrammatic style both in writing 
 and in conversation. In this he spared neither 
 friend nor foe ; the sharp and delicate edge of his 
 wit, playing so brightly, sometimes wounded those 
 who, in the main, were on his side. But those 
 who knew him well soon discovered that this 
 trenchant blade was at the service of the intellect 
 alone, that the heart was warm and tender and 
 large ; and they could then admire that brilliant 
 wit even when it flashed towards them, and its 
 light touch no longer gave pain. 
 
 The circumstances of Dr. Williams's life were in 
 curious contrast to the part he played in the angry 
 controversies of our day, and might have seemed 
 to promise him the ordinary unruffled ease of a 
 college don or a country vicar with a fair living. 
 But it is the peculiarity of these times, and per- 
 haps one of the trials they bring, that those who 
 will reform and innovate are not usually called on 
 to act. A Luther, a Cranmer, and in a measure 
 the lesser men who took part in movements of 
 which such are the chiefs, had to fling themselves 
 vehemently into the whirl of the time, and endure 
 sharp personal dangers from Duke Georges and 
 Queen Marys, be ready for the inquisition or the 
 stake. 
 
 But in danger there is ever a sense of keen 
 
 excitement
 
 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 97 
 
 excitement which keeps a man up to his work, 
 and which, so long as it stops short of the crown- 
 ing martyrdom, is even pleasant. Luther, for in- 
 stance, would seem to have enjoyed all the active 
 part of his life, and the calm after storm at the 
 end ; only when secluded from all strife, and 
 simply engaged with his pen, was he most sorely 
 tried, and, as he conceived, tempted of the devil 
 But in these days, when thought speaks more by 
 pen than by deed and tongue, when therefore 
 each man, though his work may be larger and 
 more effective, sees its results less, many an one 
 who leads a quiet life would fain cry with the 
 poet : 
 
 I must mix myself with action lest I wither with despair, 
 yet no action lies open ; while taunts of desiring 
 a martyr's name without a martyr's danger are 
 recklessly flung by those who do not know the 
 suffering which comes of solitude and want of 
 sympathy. Not, however, that Dr. Williams was 
 an unhappy man ; but there were no doubt many 
 hours when solitude and inaction increased the 
 stzva indignatio which made his printed words so 
 scathing, somewhat like the taunts of an Homeric 
 hero to the foe he was unable to meet except with 
 the strife of tongues. 
 
 He was educated at Eton as a King's Scholar, 
 and proceeded in due course to King's College, 
 
 Cambridge, 
 G
 
 98 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 
 
 Cambridge, which then had the unfortunate privi- 
 lege of conferring degrees on its members without 
 their being required to pass the ordeal of the 
 schools. Hence while dunces rejoiced, the really 
 able men had no adequate means of showing what 
 was in them. Dr. Hawtrey, who was Head 
 Master of Eton when Rowland Williams took his 
 degree, offered him an Eton mastership, which he 
 accepted, but only retained during one term. 
 It is a radical fault of the Eton system that a 
 young man, whatever his abilities, is, on going 
 there as a master, placed to teach the lowest 
 forms, and usually has to deal with only such 
 boys as there fall under his hand. Fresh from 
 the very highest subjects which his college reading 
 can supply, and full of the last subtle refinements 
 of progressive scholarship, he is obliged to teach 
 children who need to be drilled to learn and to be 
 kept in order. The work was not congenial to 
 Dr. Williams, nor does a further tutorial employ- 
 ment at Cambridge appear to have been wholly 
 satisfactory. 
 
 But, in accepting the post of Vice-Principal of 
 Lampeter Theological College, he found work into 
 which he could throw all his energy, and for which 
 he was peculiarly fitted. For he was a thorough 
 Welshman, with an enthusiastic love for his land, 
 its tongue, its literature, perhaps only restrained by 
 
 his
 
 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 99 
 
 his severely critical spirit from an exaggerated 
 estimate of all things Kymric not uncommon in 
 his countrymen. 
 
 He was an accomplished Hebraist, a good 
 historian, as well as possessed of deep and 
 varied culture and general literary tastes. And 
 above all, he loved the Church of England with 
 a love which seems, to even some of its members, 
 excessive, which would, as above stated, defend 
 even the Articles " clause by clause." It is 
 true that at no time would his explanation 
 of the doctrines of the Church have squared 
 with the popular theology ; it was always his 
 aim to combine loyalty to formulas and eccle- 
 siastical organisation with a wide and rational 
 liberty of interpretation. Of modern divines, 
 Archdeacon Hare ; of elder, Bishop Jeremy Tay- 
 lor, was most after his own heart. If it had 
 been suggested to him that Bishop Taylor had in 
 liis mind two conflicting lines of thought, which 
 drew him in two very different directions, it is 
 possible that he might not have wholly admitted 
 this, and yet 'have confessed that his sympathies 
 were rather with the author of The Liberty of Pro- 
 phesying than of the Holy Living and Holy 
 Dying. For such a man, the Lampeter College 
 afforded a favourable opening, though it may be 
 doubted whether, save in a few conspicuous in- 
 stances,
 
 ioo ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 
 
 stances, the material on which he had to work 
 was quite worthy of the pains he took with it and 
 the talent he brought to bear upon it. 
 
 At Lampeter he published his work, Rational 
 Godliness, being sermons delivered for the most 
 part in the College chapel, and somewhat expanded 
 for the press. While in this book the most strik- 
 ing feature is the earnest, lofty, yet simple piety 
 of the life and religion he would aid to form in 
 his hearers, the teaching is " rational " in the best 
 sense, that is, he does not admit for a moment 
 that the reason and the faculties of man may not 
 be exercised on things divine as well as on things 
 human ; he believes in the possibility of a strictly 
 scientific theology, and touches on certain ques- 
 tions with a freedom not even now common among 
 religious people, and less so at that time. 
 
 The volume was vehemently assailed, and with 
 extreme want of candour. A local paper, the 
 Carmarthen Journal, inserted some letters which, 
 as it seemed to Dr. Williams, showed " how little 
 their authors understand the book which they 
 attack, or practise the one which they profess to 
 defend." On this Dr. Williams addressed to the 
 editor a pamphlet, in which he threw into the 
 form of propositions the entire theological portion 
 of his work. Although these theses professed to 
 be a summary of the volume in question only, they 
 
 were
 
 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 101 
 
 were in reality that of the teaching of his whole 
 life. No man ever more clearly defined for him- 
 self the lines of his theology, no man was more 
 distressed if he was misrepresented ; yet for others 
 the lines were not equally clear, and it is very im- 
 portant, therefore, that the more striking of these 
 propositions should be given in Dr. Williams's own 
 words. The little pamphlet, which has probably 
 almost ceased to exist, contains in marvellously 
 terse language the very sum and substance of 
 a wholesome pious and Protestant system, not 
 always easy to formularise or render scientifically 
 consistent. 
 
 Propositions extracted from or connected with a book 
 called " Rational Godliness," which certain Pharisees have 
 mishandled. 
 
 Revelation is an unveiling of the true God, especially as 
 Love and as a Spirit to the eyes of our mind. Much of the 
 evidence of revelation consists in its conformity to whatever 
 is best in the moral nature given and kept alive in us by our 
 Maker. Hence to vilify mankind overmuch is not honour- 
 ing Almighty God so much as desecrating His handiwork, 
 and is injurious to religion. 
 
 There was a preparation for the Gospel of Christ, not 
 only amongst Jews, but amongst Gentiles. God left Himself 
 nowhere without witness, but fashioned the hearts of the 
 heathen, and put a scripture in their conscience. 
 
 Holy Scripture ... is a record of revelations to be re- 
 garded with veneration. It is to be universally read, and to 
 be studied with reverence, with candour, and with prayer. 
 But it is by no means our paramount source of secular know- 
 ledge, in which the Hebrews were not our masters, and in 
 
 which
 
 102 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 
 
 which Divine Providence instructs us daily. Hence as re- 
 gards things of earth it contains the thoughts of fallible men. 
 It expresses the Hebrew range of ideas, which is not, and 
 ought not to be, ours. We none of us go to the Bible to 
 learn practically any trade or art, and it only causes confu- 
 sion in our religious theories, with often distress of mind, for 
 inconsiderate divines to speak as if we ought to do so. 
 
 Scripture is the work of men divinely inspired, in the 
 sense in which St. Paul meant inspiration. But the sacred 
 writers did not mean that they had revealed to them super- 
 naturally the facts of daily life and experience. 
 
 If any religious teacher does not see that the Bible con- 
 tains a human element, liable to all the conditions of 
 humanity, he has never studied the book as he ought. If 
 he knows it and denies it, he sins against the religion of truth 
 which he professes. 
 
 As inspiration concerns things of Heaven, so is it prin- 
 cipally and generally a right feeling of the truth of God, and 
 bears but indirectly or by reflection upon things of earth. . . 
 The books of the New Testament were not dictated in words 
 audible from the clouds of heaven, but are an expression by 
 the writers both of historical and personal experience, and 
 also of truths taught them through their feelings by the 
 Holy Spirit of God. Hence Biblical language exhibits all 
 the peculiarities of each writer's country, age and char- 
 acter. 
 
 Inspiration, even in its proper sphere, does not imply 
 omniscience. We may believe a message, though the 
 servant who carries it does not pretend to know all his 
 master's secrets. 
 
 What Bishop Butler conceded hypothetically, that all 
 prophecies of Christ in the Old Testament referred primarily 
 to the Jewish people, kings or prophets, must in the present 
 state of Biblical criticism be frankly accepted as a fact. 
 
 The Holy Ghost was the sacred writers' teacher through 
 the medium of their heart, rather than of their hands. Hence 
 
 there
 
 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 103 
 
 there is nothing in the text of Scripture but what has passed 
 through the mind of the scribe. 
 
 . . . The books of Holy Scripture are written by 
 different authors in different ages, and will be understood 
 better in proportion as their authorship is correctly known. . . 
 If any bad consequences should hence arise [from a dis- 
 covery that certain books or portions of books are not by the 
 authors whose names they bear], it will not be from the 
 facts, but from unwise concealment of them. Jesus Christ 
 came into the world to bear witness to the Truth. All other 
 hindrances to his religion have not together been so great, 
 as those from the inconsistency of persons who defend it by 
 falsehood. 
 
 In considering our Saviour's miracles, we should lay 
 more stress on the moral significance and beneficence, than 
 on the mere element of power. 
 
 In arguing for Christianity with a Hindoo, we might do 
 so more forcibly from the Decalogue, the Sermon on the 
 Mount and the Lord's Prayer, than from the passage of the 
 Red Sea or the earthquake at the Crucifixion. The moral 
 evidence would be in our hands, but the miraculous would 
 be remote. 
 
 The best evidence of Christianity is a Christian life. 
 
 It is even now desirable that such a relaxation of our for- 
 mularies should be granted, as might have enabled men like 
 Baxter to conform to the Church. 
 
 It is a subject for innocent discussion whether, by demo- 
 niac possession, the Jews did not mean a violent disease. 
 
 Personality is a metaphysical term rather than a scrip- 
 tural term, and may convey to some minds a grosser or 
 more material conception, but to others a more delicate one. 
 If good persons think that, by intensifying such an idea in 
 reference to the Spirit of Evil, they are enabled to fight, as 
 it were, more vividly against the hosts of darkness, I say 
 nothing to disturb them. But if any one without authority 
 imposes on me a metaphysical term, he must first define it 
 
 clearly,
 
 104 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 
 
 clearly, and then prove his definition. Some theories on this 
 point have been broached, savouring more of Zoroaster than 
 of Christ 
 
 Those to whom the principles sustained in these 
 propositions have become as familiar as the air 
 they breathe, a very part of themselves ; those 
 who have been encouraged and enabled to speak 
 out boldly on some points where these propo- 
 sitions were advanced only tentatively, may do 
 well to remind themselves that, five and twenty 
 years ago, English theology was in a very differ- 
 ent state ; and many may admit that it was in 
 large measure in consequence of the discussion 
 which this book raised, that their own opinions 
 grew more definitely and willingly liberal. The 
 number of those who digested the theses may have 
 been small ; but each of them was a centre from 
 which the views therein contained have been 
 surely and sensibly spreading. 
 
 While still resident at Cambridge, Dr. Williams 
 had written a prize essay on the Relation of Chris- 
 tianity to the Religions of the East, especially 
 within our Indian Empire. This he expanded at 
 a later period into a book less known than it 
 deserves to be, but by far the most important of 
 his works, Christianity and Hinduism. In this, 
 adopting the old form of the Platonic Dialogue, 
 he passes in review the religious systems of the 
 
 East,
 
 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 105 
 
 East, and endeavours to show that the Theism 
 which Jesus taught, and which we name Chris- 
 tianity, is really the fulfilment and crown of those 
 imperfect religions, as it was of the imperfect reli- 
 gion of the Jews. He here develops the propo- 
 sition stated above, that not only among the Jews, 
 but among the Gentiles also, was a preparation 
 for the Gospel. If Christianity is ever to take 
 hold of the higher intellects of the East, it can 
 only be by means of missionaries who will go in 
 the spirit of this book, of sympathy and even ad- 
 miration for the nobler side of each grand old 
 faith ; who will not hold as simply accursed, reli- 
 gions in which millions of men live and die. But 
 it is not with a view to missionary enterprise that 
 the book is most interesting and useful. Com- 
 petent scholars have declared that it is the best 
 work on the whole subject of those strange reli- 
 gions and religious customs of the East which 
 most of us know so ill. Incidentally there is 
 scarce a difficulty presented by Christianity, or 
 even religion, which is not touched on in this 
 book, and on which, whether readers agree with 
 Dr. Williams or not, light is not thrown and help 
 given by profound thought clothed in forcible 
 and beautiful language. 
 
 The subject which Dr. Williams regarded as 
 peculiarly his own was that of Prophecy. To his 
 
 eyes,
 
 io6 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 
 
 eyes, the idea of it expressed above constantly 
 grew clearer. What is called Messianic inter- 
 pretation had probably vanished from his system 
 long since, though, of course, neither he nor any 
 one else would deny that many words spoken by 
 a prophet " of himself or of some other man " in 
 his own days, proved afterwards to be even more 
 applicable to Jesus, conceived of as the expected 
 Jewish Messiah. Unhappily only one volume of 
 a new Translation of the Prophets, on which 
 he had been engaged for some years, was pub- 
 lished before his death, and another, which was 
 ready for the press, appeared soon after ; but a 
 large part of the work, as he planned it, can never 
 now see the light. In so much of the work as was 
 published, the prefaces and notes gave full proof 
 of that fact which many people feel instinctively, 
 even if they have not made, as he had, the prophetic 
 books the study of a life, that each word pro- 
 nounced by a prophet refers to his own time, and 
 solely to his own time, and that prophecy in the 
 sense of prediction has never existed, save in the 
 way in which all may prophesy who can draw con- 
 clusions from premisses and inferences from facts. 
 To an interesting work on Daniel, by the late 
 Mr. Desprez, Dr. Williams contributed a preface 
 of great value and learning, but it is too contro- 
 versial to allow the hope that it will be a work 
 
 lastingly
 
 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 107 
 
 lastingly read. It is almost entirely devoted to 
 a refutation of Dr. Pusey on the same prophet, 
 and most of those who would read anything on 
 that side of the controversy would consider that 
 it slays the already slain. 
 
 The works just mentioned were published long 
 after Dr. Williams accepted from his college the 
 living of Broad Chalke ; but the subjects of the 
 books named flowed naturally from the quotation 
 of the propositions which they severally expanded. 
 There is no need to dwell longer on his useful 
 life at Lampeter. His teaching, so vehemently 
 assailed, drew him into much and distressing per- 
 sonal controversy with more than one Welsh 
 Bishop, which, as well as similar ones which arose 
 at a future time and called out An earnestly 
 respectful Letter to the Lord Bishop of St. David's, 
 may now be suffered to sleep in peace. Another 
 controversy, of historical and theological import- 
 ance, cannot so be treated. 
 
 Little need be said about the volume itself 
 called Essays and Reviews, It was not originally 
 much, if at all, more remarkable than the various 
 volumes of Oxford and Cambridge Essays which 
 it succeeded ; it was raised into importance by the 
 exceeding folly of that useless and fussy society, 
 Convocation, and by the prosecutions directed 
 against two of the writers, Dr. Williams and the 
 
 Rev.
 
 io8 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 
 
 Rev. H. B. Wilson. In the book were simply 
 stated in a popular form the results at which many 
 competent scholars have arrived on certain points 
 of Biblical criticism. Dr. Williams's Essay was 
 designed to show the influence on modern theo- 
 logical knowledge exercised by the late Baron 
 von Bunsen. The good results of the trial which 
 ensued from the prosecution of Dr. Williams and 
 Mr. Wilson were, that the liberties of the Church 
 of England were thereby asserted, it having been 
 decided by the highest Court that all that they 
 had taught in those Essays was not inconsistent 
 with their legal obligations. The evil result was 
 personal ; the estrangement between two men so 
 excellent and so devoted, living so close the one 
 to the other, as the late Bishop of Salisbury and 
 Dr. Williams ; and the miserable suspicions, heart- 
 burnings and strifes, which it stirred among the 
 clergy who thought themselves called upon to ex- 
 press any opinion in the controversy. Who can 
 wonder that this prosecution threw somewhat of 
 bitterness into Dr. Williams's way of considering 
 the orthodox party, and, if he adopted the some- 
 what exaggerated conclusion, that he alone of 
 living men represented the strictly Anglican ra- 
 tional theology ? This feeling is strikingly exem- 
 plified in a pamphlet, privately printed, called 
 Hints to my Counsel in the Court of Arches. 
 
 From
 
 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 109 
 
 From this may be extracted a few sentences, 
 clearly denning what the writer held to be his own 
 position : 
 
 The defendant accepts the Articles as they are, and claims 
 to teach by them with fidelity and clearness unsurpassed by 
 living man. 
 
 In the death of Christ the Blood is the outward sign 
 either as the most striking feature, or because blood in the 
 Old Testament stands for life, and bloody sacrifices' were 
 sacrifices of life. It does not follow that this sign should, in 
 practical exhortation, be exalted above the patience and 
 self-devotion of the dying Saviour, or that Almighty God 
 should be represented as having a cannibal pleasure in blood, 
 and not rather in the obedience to the Father's will which 
 made the Son spare not His precious life's blood. 
 
 Our soldiers ransomed half -lost Hindostan with their 
 blood ; that is, with their lives. If a mutinous regiment were 
 pardoned because its officers died leading a forlorn hope, 
 those officers would have bought the pardon with their blood ; 
 not that the Supreme Authority would rejoice in their blood- 
 shedding, but in their self-sacrificing virtue. 
 
 The defendant's doctrine under this head so little needs 
 apology, that it is the doctrine of every thoughtful divine, if 
 not of every saint, in every age. 
 
 It must on no account be conceded that the duty of 
 examination ceases at the moment when a clergyman is 
 ordained. More truly it may be argued, that previously to 
 that date few men have the maturity of thought or extent of 
 research which qualify them to arrive at conclusions. 
 
 Baxter ascribes the sharp controversial flavour of his own 
 style to four reasons : (i) the growing sourness of his humour, 
 or wearied familiarity with his subject : (2) a hatred of the 
 flattering humour which now prevaileth so in the world, 
 that few persons are able to bear the truth ; (3) a long cus- 
 tom of studying how to speak and write in the keenest man-
 
 no ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 
 
 ner to the common, ignorant, and ungodly people, without 
 which keenness to them no sermon nor book does much 
 good ; (4) a strong natural inclination to speak of a thing 
 just as it is, and to call a spade a spade, so that the thing 
 spoken of may be fullest known by the words. 
 Such explanation of his own style the defendant pleads. 
 
 Dr. Williams's ministry at Broad Chalke gave rise 
 to a volume of Sermon-Essays, discourses delivered 
 to a village congregation, and, as was his wont, 
 afterwards worked out elaborately for more culti- 
 vated readers. 
 
 Such, and no more, were his public work and 
 life ; but both were of the kind which continually 
 bears fruit, and the more liberal thought advances, 
 the more will his influence be felt. His books 
 will not die; it was the accident of his career 
 that he was best known by the least important of 
 them ; the rest will take and keep their place 
 among the standard works of a liberal theology. 
 And in future years it will be seen that he once, 
 "in a minority of one," proclaimed a truth be- 
 come the intimate conviction of thousands ; he 
 will be remembered with affectionate admiration, 
 and not forgotten as a mere sentinelle perdue. 
 
 Those whom stern experience has not taugiit 
 how unswerving and indiscriminate are those laws 
 which regulate life and death, may find it strange 
 that the master of some, and the friend of many 
 more, is taken away. For all things seemed to 
 
 promise
 
 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. ill 
 
 promise a long career of happy usefulness. The 
 strifes engendered by Essays and Reviews were 
 dying away, and much acerbity of feeling was 
 buried in the grave of good Bishop Hamilton. A 
 tinge of somewhat more pronounced orthodoxy 
 was stealing over the thoughts and words of the 
 tried liberal, though in all essential matters he 
 was unchanged. This had conciliated neighbours 
 and not estranged old admirers, who saw him, 
 even in the last months of his life, doing battle at 
 Birmingham for the principles of the Education 
 League. He was still within middle life, in full 
 possession of bodily and intellectual vigour. 
 
 Perhaps even Broad Chalke seemed less lonely 
 and out of the world when he had no longer to 
 drive, as it were, through an enemy's country into 
 Salisbury, the very headquarters of opposition and 
 distrust. Old friends went there to find from the 
 vicar and his wife a genial and cordial hospitality, 
 a freshness and wealth of conversation which 
 carried the hearers back in thought to the best 
 Oxford and Cambridge Common and Combination 
 Rooms, where, as it seems to those who are there 
 no longer, human speech is at its very highest, 
 most unconsciously bright and deep. And though 
 Dr. Williams once wrote, " We both enjoy solitude 
 very much, but our enjoyment of it at Chalke is 
 almost too complete," it was, when the sun shone 
 
 and
 
 112 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 
 
 and the chalk-mud was dry, a place with a peculiar 
 charm. The long sweeps of down, with their 
 cliff-like sides, along which you walked looking 
 into a sea of valley below, with the old water- 
 lines so clearly marked that the country sounds 
 rising to the height seemed mixed with murmurs 
 of the ancient sea, the heights fading off into the 
 old woodland and the green glories of fair Cran- 
 bourne Chase ; all these made the surroundings 
 of that home very much that was congenial to one 
 who had an eye for Nature and her works. The 
 inner life of the home was very happy, and full 
 also of the love which flowed in from outside, 
 from the hearts of parishioners who admired and 
 respected their vicar, and found in him an un- 
 wearying, affectionate friend. 
 
 Speculation is idle now ; yet it is impossible 
 not to wonder if this was all that was reserved for 
 so real a scholar, had longer life been his ; if, by 
 the gift of Dr. Williams to his countrymen again, 
 at the hands of a Liberal Ministry, would ever 
 have been answered the request of Welshmen for 
 a Welsh Bishop. Such were the idle thoughts of 
 some who drove sadly, on a bright, cold winter 
 day, January 24th, 1870, to attend the funeral of 
 their friend, taken away after a few days' illness. 
 But all such questions were stilled, in presence of 
 the sad reality, by the one overmastering feeling 
 
 that
 
 ROWLAND WILLIAMS. 113 
 
 that he was in the hands of God and needed no 
 earthly honours. The funeral procession, moving 
 through a close line of parishioners nearly all 
 in black, into a crowded church ; the hesitating 
 notes of the choir, who sung two funeral hymns ; 
 the agitated accents of the tried friend who 
 read the service ; all testified to the strong love 
 felt for the dead by those who knew his warm 
 heart. 
 
 It was a day with a keen and biting wind, but 
 with bright sun-gleams striking up along the valley 
 sides and on the churchyard graves. He was 
 laid near the southern boundary of the church- 
 yard, and his parishioners will pass his resting- 
 place as they draw towards the porch. In their 
 hearts, and in those of his friends, his memory 
 will long be fresh ; and when they are dead who 
 knew him, all angry controversy will have fallen off 
 from his memory, and the teaching of Christianity 
 and Hinduism, Rational Godliness, Sermon Essays, 
 and the Prophetic volumes, will no longer be dim- 
 med by any thought of strife, and will be regarded 
 only as a part of that free, devout and critical 
 literature, which shall foster the growth of a free 
 and devout religious spirit like his own. 
 
 1870.
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 1819-1875. 
 
 /CHARLES KINGSLEY'S life was not event- 
 ^*< ful. But his was so prominent a figure in 
 English society for so many years ; he flung him- 
 self so vehemently, so chivalrously, and sometimes 
 so recklessly into action or controversy which 
 interested him ; he was so many-sided, thereby 
 attracting the sympathy, affection, or hostility 
 of such various classes of people; he has been 
 the subject alike of so extravagant praise and 
 exaggerated blame, that it may be well to sketch 
 the^ man as he looked to one at least among those 
 who knew him best. 
 
 For some twenty years he was the most popular 
 clergyman in England. Others have been equally 
 loved, or reverenced, or notorious, each in his own 
 circle, some in more than one circle, but no man 
 ever appealed to so large numbers, and to so 
 different classes. Dr. Newman, Dr. Martineau, 
 
 Dean
 
 Ii6 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 Dean Stanley, and in their degrees Mr. Haweis 
 or Mr. Stopford Brooke, all represent, or have re- 
 presented, considerable bodies ; Robertson's fame 
 has greatly widened since his death ; but none of 
 these names express at all the sort of influence 
 which Kingsley exerted. He was not a profound 
 or subtle thinker, though he was so eager and so 
 various ; he was not a Protestant Pope to his own 
 co-religionists ; he did not veil his conclusions even 
 from himself in a cloud of graceful words, but 
 always tried to define sharply what at the moment 
 he believed ; he never cast himself on the stream 
 of his eloquence to say haphazard all that passed 
 through his brain, in whatever words came readiest ; 
 he did not become the preacher of culture only, 
 rather than of a gospel to the poor. But he was 
 equally at home in the pulpit of the Queen's 
 Chapel or of the Abbey, and in an obscure church 
 delivering the message of the Church to working 
 men. His large genial nature attracted alike the 
 princes who strove to alleviate the sufferings of 
 his last hours, and the gipsies who strewed, and 
 still strew, flowers on his grave. Now and then 
 in his later years it was said that Kingsley had 
 become a courtier, and forgotten his zeal for re- 
 form and for the poor ; but it was never really 
 believed ; there was no sign that the large trust 
 which had been given him was withdrawn ; men 
 
 of
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 117 
 
 of the people were his correspondents and friends 
 to the last. 
 
 Yet his personal fascination must have been 
 very great ; for it may be admitted there were 
 acts which, till explained by that white light 
 which beats on a dead man's face, seem to mili- 
 tate against his consistency. He ceased to agi- 
 tate and to appear on Radical platforms ; he 
 became a Court Chaplain and a Canon of West- 
 minster ; he re-wrote that portion of Alton Locke 
 which had reflected on the manners of the 
 undergraduates at Cambridge. And although all 
 this may bear a quite satisfactory aspect when 
 rightly understood, there is much also which would 
 have ruined great portions of the popularity of a 
 man less beloved. In the controversy with Dr. 
 Newman he was signally worsted, and all but a 
 few felt he had made a grave mistake, yet he 
 offered no amende to the great man whom he had 
 attacked without any adequate justification. He 
 came forward on a public occasion to justify the 
 deeds of Eyre in Jamaica ; he who had been the 
 fierce assailant of the doctrine of everlasting dam- 
 nation, joined with the rigid Church party in up- 
 holding the Athanasian Creed. Yet it seems that 
 he never lost the love of a friend, or was counted 
 by any who knew him as willingly and consciously 
 unfaithful to the Liberal cause. 
 
 It
 
 Ii8 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 It is more than thirty years since Kingsley's 
 name first rose into notice as that of an author 
 of originality, versatility, and power. The Saint's 
 Tragedy, Yeast, and Twenty-five Village Ser- 
 mons, in whatever order published, were all 
 before the public at much the same time, and 
 either book would have been enough to mark the 
 author as no common man. Taken collectively, 
 they were the notes of a chord which was echoed 
 back from the hearts of many young men who 
 wanted, and thought they had found, a leader. 
 The time was not over in which they looked for a 
 leader in a clergyman ; those who turned from the 
 Tractarian teachers, and who were filled with the 
 dawning liberalism of the day, were glad to ad- 
 here for a time to one who was the typical liberal 
 Churchman, as it then seemed. Kingsley was a 
 pupil and devoted follower of Mr. Maurice, whom 
 many considered as a sort of prophet, none the 
 less because he was often unintelligible. Kingsley 
 appealed to the manly side of their nature, and 
 seemed at the same time to interpret the dark 
 sayings of the sage. 
 
 Those who, in the years of which I speak, were 
 constant guests at Eversley, can never forget that 
 happy home. Kingsley was in the vigour of his 
 manhood and of his intellectual strength, was ad- 
 ministering his parish with enthusiasm, was reading, 
 
 writing,
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. ng 
 
 writing, fishing, walking, preaching, talking with 
 a twenty-parson power, but was at the same time 
 wholly unlike the ordinary conventional parson. 
 
 The picturesque bow-windowed rectory rises to 
 memory as it stood with all its doors and windows 
 open on certain hot summer days, the sloping 
 bank with its great fir-trees, the garden a gravel 
 sweep before the drawing-room and dining-room, 
 a grass plot before the study hedged off from the 
 walk and the tall active figure of the rector 
 tramping up and down one or the other. His 
 energy made him seem everywhere, and to per- 
 vade every part of house and garden. The MS. 
 of the book he was writing lay open on a rough 
 standing desk, which was merely a shelf projecting 
 from the wall ; his pupils, two in number, and 
 treated as his own sons, were working in the 
 dining-room, his guests perhaps lounging on the 
 lawn or working in the study. And he had time 
 for all, going from his writing to lecturing on 
 optics, or to a passage in Vergil, from this to a 
 vehement conversation with a guest, or tender 
 care for his wife, who was far from strong, or a 
 romp with his children. He would work himself 
 into a sort of white heat over his book till, too 
 excited to write more, he would calm himself down 
 by a pipe, pacing his grass plot in thought, with 
 long strides. He was a great smoker, and tobacco
 
 120 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 was for him a needful sedative. He always used 
 a long clean churchwarden, and these pipes used 
 to be bought a barrel-full at a time. They lurked 
 in all sorts of unexpected places. A pipe would 
 suddenly be extracted from a bush in the garden, 
 filled and lighted as by magic, or one has been 
 even drawn from a whin bush on the heath, some 
 half mile from the house. But none was ever 
 smoked which was in any degree foul, and when 
 there was a vast accumulation of old pipes, 
 enough to fill the barrel, they were sent back 
 again to the kiln to be rebaked, and returned 
 fresh and new. This gave him a striking simile, 
 which in Alton Locke he puts into the mouth 
 of James Crossthwaite. " Katie here believes in 
 purgatory, where souls are burnt clean again like 
 'bacca pipes." 
 
 In the afternoons he would visit one or another 
 of his scattered hamlets or single cottages on the 
 heaths. Those who have read My Winter Gar- 
 den in the Miscellanies know how he loved the 
 moor under all its aspects and the great groves of 
 firs. Nothing was ever more real than Kingsley's 
 parish visiting. He believed absolutely in the 
 message he bore to the poor, and the health his 
 ministrations conveyed to their souls ; but he was 
 at the same time a zealous sanitary reformer, and 
 cared for their bodies also. He once visited, it 
 
 was
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 121 
 
 was a typical instance out of many such, a sick 
 man suffering from fever. The atmosphere of the 
 little ground-floor room was horrible, but before 
 Kingsley said a word he ran upstairs, and, to 
 the great astonishment of the inhabitants of the 
 cottage, bored, with a large auger he had brought 
 with him, several holes above the bed's head for 
 ventilation. His reading in the sick-room and 
 his words were wholly free from cant. The 
 Psalms and the Prophets, with judicious omis- 
 sions, seemed to gain new meaning as he read 
 them, and his after words were always cheerful 
 and hopeful. Sickness, in his eyes, seemed 
 always to sanctify and purify. 
 
 On the week-day evenings he often held 
 a " Cottage lecture," or short service for the 
 old and feeble who lived at a distance from 
 church. To this, if the night were wet or cold, 
 he would sally forth in a fisherman's knitted 
 blouse ; then and always his costume was studi- 
 ously non-clerical. 
 
 Old and new friends came and went as he grew 
 famous, and the drawing-room evening conversa- 
 tions and readings, the tobacco parliaments later 
 into the night, included many of the most remark- 
 able persons of the day. Those were perhaps the 
 happiest years of Kingsley's life ; they are those 
 in which some of us best like to think of him. 
 
 His
 
 122 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 His appointment to the Professorship of 
 Modern History at Cambridge was at once cause 
 for satisfaction and regret regret, since it certainly 
 was a post for which he had no special quali- 
 fications ; satisfaction, because the influence he 
 exerted over many young men was largely bene- 
 ficial Due, no doubt, to the personal weight of 
 the Prince Consort, and to his desire that Kingsley 
 should, in a non-official way, be directly attached 
 to the Prince of Wales during his stay at Cam- 
 bridge, this post brought the Professor into contact 
 with those whom in no other way he would have 
 affected, and made him a real power in university 
 life. One who was staying at Cambridge at the 
 time of the Prince Consort's death, remembers how 
 he was moved by it as at the loss of a personal 
 friend. He walked over to Madingley the next 
 day with Kingsley, who wished to hear Windsor 
 news from some of the household, and met on the 
 way some of the specially chosen young associates 
 of the Prince of Wales. The companion can never 
 forget, nor probably will those who were addressed 
 forget, the earnest, solemn, and agitated tones in 
 which he spoke of the Prince Consort's care for 
 his son, and the duty which lay on them, that son's 
 friends, to see that they did all in their power to 
 enforce the wise counsel of him who was dead. 
 
 There is no need to follow Kingsley to his 
 
 Canonries,
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 123 
 
 Canonries, first of Chester then of Westminster, 
 nor inquire too closely whether, when the ladder 
 of place had once been reached, there did not 
 come a tinge of ambition and a desire of further 
 reward which those who loved him best would 
 fain have seen away. Through it all, however, 
 there was a touching love of Eversley, his earliest 
 preferment, the home of his marriage, and the 
 birth-place of his children ; he always said that 
 he would accept nothing which severed his con- 
 nection with it, and there when his health became 
 worse he returned to die. 
 
 Kingsley's literary work is before the public, 
 and it will live or die by a natural law, according 
 as it is worthy to live or die. Yet it may not 
 be unfitting to endeavour to estimate, as far as 
 may be done while awaiting the sure verdict of the 
 future, his place in English literature. 
 
 His work must be studied in a three-fold 
 character, that of a theologian, novelist, and 
 poet. We purposely omit politician, for, so far as 
 he considered the subject of politics at all, he did 
 so only through theology, and he had no care for 
 any large and general questions of statesmanship. 
 For a very considerable period, and that the one 
 in which he was interesting himself most actively in 
 the condition of the working-classes, he took in no 
 daily newspaper, and the " Spectator," then under 
 
 the
 
 124 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 the editorship of Mr. Rintoul, was his only weekly 
 journal. He seems to have had political instincts, 
 but no political principles, and these instincts 
 drew him in two different directions. First, 
 hereditarily, he was sprung on the one side from 
 a good old county family, and, on the other, from 
 West Indian slaveholders ; he had, therefore, 
 much of the feudal lord's feeling combined with 
 the pride of a dominant race. Loyalty ran in his 
 blood, and all the Creole nature sprang to the 
 front when he heard of the rising in Jamaica. 
 The strong bias of Toryism was long counteracted 
 by his intense sympathy with individual suffering. 
 He could and did realise the wants of the poor 
 chill penury, insufficient wages, a large part of 
 which, in town-work, was swallowed up by middle- 
 men he could not realise the larger misery which 
 would result from kingly families having the 
 power to rule, and from the Eyres repressing 
 rebellion, themselves unchecked. Therefore, when 
 he saw sorrow, he fought against it with such 
 weapons as he had at hand ; it was by an acci- 
 dent that they were those used by Radicals, and 
 that his mental protests against wrong-doing 
 expressed themselves in Radical language. In- 
 deed, when the sufferings of humanity are con- 
 cerned, what other tongue is there to use than 
 that in which all reformers have spoken ? But 
 
 the
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 125 
 
 the action he then took, and the words he spoke, 
 were aside from his proper work, which was that 
 of religious teacher ; he was before all things a 
 priest, and, when once the strong excitement was 
 past which drew him away to become a Christian 
 Socialist, his hereditary tendencies inclined him to 
 a certain lofty but always beneficent rule of the 
 lower orders by the higher. These being his 
 political instincts, he satisfied the contradictory 
 feeling of equality, which had been developed in 
 him, by his deep power of sympathy, by his con- 
 ception of the great theological kingdom, in which 
 the equality of men before God by no means upset 
 their inequalities in regard to each other. 
 
 Kingsley's theology was always interesting, 
 if incoherent and illogical, founded on a basis 
 with which reason had little to do, in which 
 tradition and emotion played almost equal parts, 
 but the superstructure was one reared with much 
 common sense. From a creed which logically 
 and severely included them all, he rejected many 
 doctrines which were harsh and cruel. He held, 
 as we have seen, the Athanasian Creed, while 
 rejecting eternal damnation, and used the account 
 of the conquest of Canaan to prove the exceeding 
 love of God. The Canaanitish nations had filled 
 up the measure of their iniquity, and were to be 
 put out of the way ; how far more merciful and 
 
 lovingr
 
 126 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 loving of God to give them into the hands of man 
 than to kill them by the brute forces of nature ; 
 how much better to die by massacre than by, for 
 instance, an earthquake, as of Lisbon ; and to the 
 slaughterers was a great lesson taught, that they 
 were God's agents, and were not to carry out their 
 own lusts and desires. This is no caricature of a 
 series of papers called Bible Politics ; or, God Jus- 
 tified to the People. 
 
 But, however illogical, his preaching and minis- 
 trations were an incalculable comfort to many, 
 who by him were encouraged to live manly, pure, 
 self-restrained lives, sustained by that which still 
 is, to the great majority, the only stay. He 
 fostered that Broad Church theology which, utterly 
 inadequate as a resting-ground, has yet been to so 
 many a passage from bondage into freedom ; and 
 destitute himself of the critical spirit, he treated 
 the Bible in a free yet reverent manner, which 
 prepared others for the conclusions of modern 
 research. Profoundly penetrated with the con- 
 viction that the Bible and science would be found 
 to be at one, with an eager admiration for nature 
 and a love for physical science, he never dis- 
 couraged or flouted research, but, on the contrary, 
 aided it in every way. His favourite studies were 
 geology and botany, rather in detail than in wide 
 sweeps of knowledge. He sat at the feet of and 
 
 encouraged
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 127 
 
 encouraged others to learn from Darwin ; but, 
 intent on the specimens on the lecture table as it 
 were, he did not follow the motions of the teacher's 
 baton pointing far beyond. 
 
 In the controversy with Dr. Newman, there 
 can be no doubt that Kingsley strengthened his 
 adversary's hand ; yet some of his most vigorous 
 letters are on the Roman question ; and, as against 
 that side, from the religious Protestant standpoint, 
 they are very clever. Perhaps their arguments may 
 seem to make against more than Rome alone. 
 
 Far in excess, however, of the numbers who knew, 
 or will know, Charles Kingsley as a theologian, are 
 those who knew him as a writer of fiction. The 
 time comes to most people when all but a very few 
 novels of the highest art pall upon them, and per- 
 haps Kingsley is not re-read with very great delight. 
 Neither do men now talk of his novels as though 
 they were much in the hands of this generation ; 
 but there can be no doubt that for a time he was 
 the most popular novelist in England. Few men 
 since Walter Scott have succeeded in England 
 in making historical novels readable. But King- 
 sley did, and Hypatia and Westward Ho ! are 
 not only excellent in plot, with careful charac- 
 ter-drawing and exquisite writing, but the local 
 colour is admirably caught and kept. In fact, 
 one of the faults which may be found with both 
 
 these
 
 128 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 these works is, that they are too carefully studied, 
 there is a sense of oppression in the laboured 
 minuteness ; we long for a daring Shaksperian 
 anachronism, such as " ordnance shot off" in 
 the days of Hamlet, or an honest violation of 
 geography, such as a sea-coast of Bohemia. In 
 these novels Kingsley proved himself to have one 
 great quality of a poet, he saw by his mind the 
 scenes in which his characters were placed. Those 
 who know the climate and aspect of Alexandria 
 and the Desert, and of the tropics, are amazed 
 at the great accuracy of the word-painting. Not 
 At Last itself is truer to the scenery of South 
 America than is Westward Ho I written while 
 the scenes were only those of vision and of hope. 
 But beyond the word-painting so attractive while 
 fresh, so apt to weary in the re-reading there 
 was another reason for the great popularity of 
 these books, a reason which time weakens. They 
 were all novels with a purpose, and wholly intel- 
 ligible only while their subject was before the 
 minds of the audience. Yeast, the earliest, and 
 in some respects the most vigorous, depicted in a 
 really striking manner the ideas and impulses 
 which were fermenting in the brains of young 
 men more than thirty years since, the yeast 
 works in these days under changed conditions and 
 in different matter. The temptations of Lancelot 
 
 Smith,
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 129 
 
 Smith, though they were the same au fond as 
 those of men now, since the world and the flesh 
 are always at hand, yet took very different forms. 
 Lancelot's cousin, the ascetic young curate about 
 to go to Rome, and the mystical person at the 
 end, of whose appearance the author himself can 
 only say, " Omnia exeunt in mysterium," would 
 have no influence on the Lancelots of our own 
 day. Each man faces for himself the problems 
 of his own time, and the armour of a former gene- 
 ration is valueless to the warriors of the present. 
 So, too, Alton Locke was deeply occupied with 
 the very beginnings of the labour question. 
 Trades' unions, with which Kingsley never sym- 
 pathised, were yet to be ; the then condition of 
 society is past. So, too, is past the religious frame 
 of mind in which doubts were to be assuaged by 
 Bunsen's form of faith, and for Bunsen was in- 
 tended the glib and kindly Dean who rationalises 
 miracle for Alton Locke. And in Westward Ho ! 
 where the motive for the story was the struggle 
 with Rome, though that struggle is still vigorous, 
 the wnole battlefield and one of the combatants 
 have changed. Then Kingsley depicted the con- 
 flict between Rome and Protestantism as a religion; 
 now it is between Rome as the representative of 
 religion, and free thought, science, and unbelief. 
 Protestantism as a religion is dead, and can only 
 
 be 
 I
 
 130 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 be galvanised into a semblance of life. So, too, 
 it will be found, in all the more important works, 
 that whether or not nominally concerned with the 
 past, Kingsley was occupied with a present which 
 has slipped away, and is really more removed 
 from our day than much which in time is far more 
 distant. The result is, that the enduring popula- 
 rity of these books is scarce to be expected. Just 
 because of their passionate earnestness they grow 
 less intelligible to another generation. Without 
 pretending to compare the two men, it may yet 
 be said that one cause of Scott's lasting fame is, 
 that he was not intensely in earnest in regard to 
 the inculcation of direct teaching of any kind, and 
 his characters, in whatever time he placed them, 
 are the ordinary men and women of any period, 
 not those penetrated and singularised by the 
 spirit of the age. Only the upholstery and 
 millinery belongs to any special date. He draws 
 the bustle and pageant of an historic time, but 
 does not touch its depths, nor, under a figure, the 
 passions of his own age. The great court of 
 Elizabeth is only the stage for the sorrows of 
 a neglected wife ; and if plots and conspirators 
 are found in Rob Roy, they are only intended to 
 bring into prominence the charms of Di Vernon, 
 a dark background for a fair maiden,, made to 
 worship. 
 
 There
 
 CHARLES KINGS LEY. 131 
 
 There are charming passages in the novels, but 
 again they are somewhat tedious. Kingsley wanted 
 the power of concentration ; he had a vast com- 
 mand of picturesque and forcible language, but 
 no scene he ever wrote is considered stroke by 
 stroke, so as to leave on us the impression of 
 strength in reserve, or of which the actual phrases 
 remain in the memory. Contrast, for instance, the 
 scene in which Amyas Leigh hangs the Spanish 
 American Bishop, with Scott's murder of Por- 
 teous, or note how the latter has no single need- 
 less word in the wonderful scene between Jeanie 
 Deans and Queen Caroline, and Kingsley's luxu- 
 riant excess, his wash of colour as contrasted with 
 the sharpness of steel-engraving, will be seen at 
 once. 
 
 Kingsley will probably as a poet have left 
 his mark on the literature of our day, and 
 this although he has not written any lar-e quan- 
 tity of verse from which posterity may choose. 
 There are, indeed, many writers whose mark on 
 literature has been made by but a few lines. 
 Wolfe will live by The Burial of Sir John Moore 
 as long as the language lasts in which it is written. 
 So if Charles Kingsley had written nothing but 
 The Three Fishers, The Sands o' Dee, The Bad 
 Squire, and a few more ballads, he would have 
 been known hereafter as one of our most musical 
 
 lyrists.
 
 132 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 lyrists. His occasional blank verse also, which 
 metre he called " the verse of verses," had re- 
 markable merit. The following is one of his 
 less-known poems, as he originally wrote it, 
 without a few subsequent alterations, which were 
 not improvements : 
 
 " Even as an eagle crying all alone 
 Above the vineyards through the summer night, 
 Among the skeletons of robber towers, 
 Because the ancient eyrie of his race 
 Is trenched and walled by busy-handed men, 
 And all his forest chace and woodland wild, 
 Wherefrom he fed his young with hare and roe, 
 Are trim with grapes which swell from hour to hour, 
 And toss their golden tendrils to the sun 
 For joy at their own riches : So in time 
 The great devourers of the earth shall sit, 
 Idle and impotent, they know not why, 
 Down staring from their barren heights of pride 
 On nations grown too wise to slay and slave, 
 The puppets of the few, while peaceful lore 
 And fellow-help make glad the heart of earth 
 With wonders which they fear and hate, as he, 
 The eagle, hates the vineyard slopes below. " 
 
 It is interesting to know that this was written 
 on the Rhine on his first tour abroad, in 1851. 
 " How strange," he writes to his wife, " that my 
 favourite psalm about ' the hills of the robbers ' 
 should have come the very day I went up the 
 Rhine ; " and he speaks again of the Castle of 
 .Sonneck as the very beau iddal of the robber's 
 
 nest
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 133 
 
 nest Here, no doubt, he saw, as others have 
 seen, the eagles flying so close above the Rhine 
 steamer that the very flash of the eye and turn of 
 the neck could be seen. 
 
 The Sainfs Tragedy should take increas- 
 ingly high rank among English dramas, and, 
 in the years to come, place Kingsley on a lofty 
 pedestal. The publication of this work in 1848 
 made little impression on the literary world in 
 England. But what Bunsen said of it to Max 
 Miiller is noteworthy : 
 
 Of Kingsley's dramatic power I do not hesitate to call 
 these two works, The Saint's Tragedy and Hypatia, by far 
 the most important and perfect of this genial writer. In 
 these more particularly I find the justification of a hope 
 which I beg to be allowed to express that Kingsley might 
 continue Shakespeare's historical plays. I have for several 
 years made no secret of it, that Kingsley seems to me the 
 genius of our country called to place by the side of that 
 sublime dramatic series from King John to Henry VIII. 
 another series from Edward VI. to the landing of William 
 of Orange. . . . The tragedy of " Saint Elizabeth " shows 
 that Kingsley can grapple not only with the novel, but with 
 the more severe rules of dramatic art. 
 
 With hearty admiration for Kingsley's genius, 
 the notion of his continuing Shakspere is like Mr. 
 Martin Farquhar Tupper continuing Christabel ; 
 but though The Sainfs Tragedy is not Shak- 
 spere or Shaksperian, it is a very fine play, and 
 
 Kingsley
 
 134 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 Kingsley has here the great advantage of a sub- 
 ject which is not local nor temporary in interest, 
 but broadly and grandly human. The contro- 
 versy between asceticism and the frank accept- 
 ance of man's nature, restrained only by such 
 rules as experience teaches are best for society, 
 and therefore for the individual, is not the narrow 
 issue between Rome and Protestantism, though 
 once in the world's history it had to be fought 
 out as though it were. In many religions, asce- 
 ticism has played its dark part ; in fact, it is the 
 larger and the more real side of them ; the revolt 
 against it is in general a revolt against religion, 
 and in so far as Protestantism retained the dogmas 
 of Catholicism, it retained the root of asceticism ; 
 it rebelled against it just so far as it abandoned 
 the dogmas. One of the objects which Kingsley 
 proposed to himself in writing his drama was to 
 cause each Englishman who read it to ask him- 
 self: 
 
 I, as a Protestant, have been accustomed to assert the 
 purity and dignity of the offices of husband, wife, parent. 
 Have I ever examined the grounds of my own assertion? 
 Do I believe them to be as callings from God, spiritual, 
 sacramental, divine, eternal ? Or am I at heart regarding 
 and using them, like the Papist, merely as Heaven's indul- 
 gence to the infirmities of fallen man ? 
 
 We should not all put our view of human rela- 
 tions into Kingsley's words, but we may all pro- 
 test
 
 CHARLES KIXGSLEY. 135 
 
 test in his spirit against the doctrine contained in 
 the words italicised. 
 
 Baron Bunsen was certainly right in taking a 
 very high estimate of the dramatic power shown, 
 and of the way in which, first element of dramatic 
 success, Kingsley has caught the spirit of the time 
 in which his scene was laid. For this he deserves 
 especial credit, when it is remembered that thirty 
 years ago it was very difficult indeed for young 
 men to see the Middle Ages except through the 
 telescope held to their eyes by the Tractarian party, 
 and that one of the most popular books of the day 
 was Kenelm Digby's almost forgotten The Broad 
 Stone of Honour. It is of this that Kingsley speaks in 
 his preface : " So rough and common-life a picture 
 of the Middle Ages will be far from acceptable to 
 those who take their notions of that period prin- 
 cipally from such exquisite dreams as the fictions 
 of Fouqud and of certain moderns, whose graceful 
 minds, like some enchanted well, 
 
 ' In whose calm depths the pure and beautiful 
 Alone are mirrored,' 
 
 are, on account of their very sweetness and simpli- 
 city, singularly unfitted to convey any true likeness 
 of the coarse and stormy Middle Age." I n those who 
 re-read this tragedy now, after many years, the old 
 feelings are awakened which made Kingsley's name 
 so much to a knot of young University men, none 
 
 of
 
 136 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 of whom, perhaps, thought with him in their later 
 life, although his influence lifted them in those days 
 above self-indulgence and sloth, and was the motive 
 cause which made them take what part they could 
 in the battle of life. But if this should be a mis- 
 take, and if The Saint's Tragedy does not live 
 among the great literary works of the Victorian 
 age, it is much to have moved the feelings of any 
 time as Kingsley moved those of that in which he 
 lived. For, after all, we build unconsciously the 
 growing structure of which the full perfection is 
 yet further in the distance than its beginnings are 
 in the past we build like the insects on a coral 
 reef, and few indeed can be distinguished for more 
 than a few moments among that toiling crowd; 
 the stimulus which is given by hearty work lives 
 on when the work itself is buried, and the indivi- 
 duality obscured in the scene of labour and the 
 multitude of toilers. And Kingsley was altogether 
 a stimulating neighbour, co-worker, and friend. 
 His eagerness led him into many situations in 
 which it could only be asked, " Que diable allait- 
 il faire dans cette galere?" There was scarce a 
 question on which he would not give an answer to 
 persons who wrote to him as if he had been in pos- 
 session of the whole counsel of God, and his great 
 fluency enabled him to put words now and then in 
 the place of thought. But when he was assailed, 
 and had right on his side, he could concentrate his 
 
 forces
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 137 
 
 forces, and hit, as it were, straight from the shoul- 
 der with tremendous effect. For example, The 
 Guardian newspaper reviewed Yeast in a flagrantly 
 unfair and bitter article, leaving out a "not," and 
 making Kingsley say the very thing to which he was 
 giving an indignant denial. Kingsley turned on the 
 reviewer with the answer of Pascal's Father Valerian 
 in the Lettres Provinciates, " Mentiris impudentis- 
 sime, ' and few who looked into the matter could feel 
 the words too strong. The " Sturm and Drang" of 
 the man's whole life, the stormy controversies in 
 which he was engaged are evidence how much he 
 inspired his generation, and whether we agree with 
 him or not, the stimulus he gave to it did incal- 
 culable good. 
 
 Many years ago, a friend on his way from Evers- 
 ley travelled from Reading to London with Miss 
 Mitford, who did not then know Kingsley, though 
 they afterwards became very good friends. She 
 said she had driven by Eversley churchyard a few 
 days before, and had seen Kingsley reading the 
 funeral service ; that he looked like what she would 
 have expected, " a pale student." She had seen 
 his curate, and Kingsley was as unlike a pale student 
 as any man who ever lived. He could be a student, 
 and when, for example, he wrote Hypatia, his 
 study was close, minute, incessant ; he has been 
 known to turn over a whole volume of Synesius 
 to search for a single detail. But his temperament 
 
 was
 
 I 3 8 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 
 
 was artistic and impulsive. He delighted in out- 
 door life, in sport, in nature in all her moods and 
 phases. His physical frame was powerful and 
 wiry, his complexion dark, his eye bright and 
 piercing. Yet he often said he did not expect a 
 long life, and the end sadly confirmed his antici- 
 pations. 
 
 It is sad for those who knew his home in his own 
 joyous days to visit Eversley now. A little time 
 ago I drove past the parsonage and stood by my 
 friend's grave. The picturesque rectory had a 
 changed aspect, the creepers had been stripped 
 from the walls, the lawn looked uncared for, and 
 the garden walks were rough. The church was 
 undergoing restoration, as it is called, all its indi- 
 viduality destroyed, and fitted for a far more ritual 
 worship than was used in it of old. The rectory 
 pew had vanished, scene in old days of a ritual 
 usage strange in those days of careful observ- 
 ances. The then curate of Eversley was a dea- 
 con, and could not give the blessing from the 
 pulpit ; there was no place at the communion 
 table for the clergyman to sit who was not actually 
 officiating. Therefore, if the curate preached, 
 Kingsley took off his surplice after reading prayers, 
 and sat in his pew. Then, when the sermon was 
 over, he rose where he sat, and gave the blessing 
 to the people in his lay-cut black coat. It was 
 thoroughly unconventional, against all ecclesias- 
 tical
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 139 
 
 tical proprieties, yet he rendered it dignified as 
 well as touching. A generation has arisen to which 
 a parson who dressed like a layman, and was im- 
 patient of ceremonial, who liked hunting when he 
 could get it, and fishing always, who held all 
 Church doctrine, yet was tolerant, loving, and ten- 
 der to the most obstinate heretics, is a very singular 
 phenomenon. Such a type of parson will become 
 more and more rare as the strife between the lay 
 and the clerical mind accentuates itself more and 
 more. But it was a good type while it existed, 
 the examples of it did excellent service in the 
 world ; and, though Charles Kingsley was much 
 more than this, he was this also. At Eversley his 
 memory will long be green, and he will live in the 
 hearts of his people and his friends. His biography 
 has taken its place among the records of those who 
 have swayed the forces of their time, and when the 
 men of our days are judged by those who can esti- 
 mate them more calmly than we who are so near, 
 others will be found more deep-thoughted, more 
 logical, more consistent, but none more zealous for 
 what seemed the right, more true-hearted, more 
 loveable, than he who sleeps at Eversley, where on 
 summer afternoons the shadow of the great garden 
 fir-trees lies across his grave. 
 
 1877.
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 1820-1880. 
 
 "\ T 7HENEVER the life of George Eliot is fully 
 ^ written, it is plain that the interest will 
 be found to lie chiefly in the records of her mind, 
 as shown by what of her conversation can be 
 preserved, and by her correspondence. For of 
 outward events her life had few. She shunned 
 rather than courted publicity, and there will be 
 nothing to satisfy any of those who look for 
 exciting narratives in biography. The time, how- 
 ever, is not come for such a record. Her loss is 
 obviously too recent to her own family and friends 
 to enable them to sift and winnow with impar- 
 tiality what may be at their disposal. We must be 
 content to wait, and in the meantime merely 
 gather up what may be known of one who has 
 long been so much to so many. Here is an at- 
 tempt to relate, as far as may be, what there is 
 to tell of her life, which may give those who had 
 
 not
 
 I 4 2 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 not the great honour of her personal acquaint- 
 ance some portrait of what she was. 
 
 No doubt it is difficult to judge those who live 
 in our own immediate time. The greatest are 
 sometimes hardly appreciated, the insignificant 
 are given too high a position by those among 
 whom they live. The sure verdict of the years 
 can alone decide whether she whom we mourn 
 was as great as we deem her. Great she surely 
 was, with no ordinary greatness, who has so 
 swayed the thoughts and moved the heart of her 
 own generation. 
 
 Mary Ann Evans not Marian,, though this 
 name was afterward given her by the affection of 
 friends, and was that by which, she frequently 
 signed herself Mary Ann Evans was born at 
 Griff House, near Nuneaton, on the 22d Novem- 
 ber 1820. Her father, Mr. Robert Evans, who 
 had begun life as a master-carpenter, came from 
 Derbyshire, and had become land agent to several 
 important properties in the rich Warwickshire 
 district. The sketches of Mr. Burge in Adam 
 Bede and of Caleb Garth in Middlemarch would 
 give a fair idea of her father's life in these two 
 positions, although it must not be for a moment 
 supposed that either of them was intended for a 
 definite portrait. Her mother died when she was 
 fifteen,, and among the most interesting facts of 
 
 Mary
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 143 
 
 Mary Ann Evans's early life is the deep love she 
 clearly bore her mother. When she speaks of 
 her in the autobiographical sonnets, however 
 slightly, it is with the tenderest touch. There 
 is one passage which speaks volumes : 
 
 Our mother bade us keep the trodden ways, 
 Stroked down my tippet, set my brother's frill, 
 Then with, the benediction of her gaze 
 Clung to us lessening, and pursued us still 
 Across the homestead to the rookery elms 
 
 and there is no doubt that the beautiful ma- 
 ternity of Mrs. Moss, the upright rectitude of 
 Mrs. Garth, the tender spots in the heart of 
 Mrs. Poyser, the mature beauty of Milly Barton, 
 are all recollections of the mother she loved 
 and lost. We do not at all know what was 
 Mrs. Evans's age at her death, but we feel inti- 
 mately persuaded that she was about thirty-five, 
 the age at which Milly Barton died, and at which 
 the still more beautiful and stately Janet repented, 
 and became a noble woman. Shortly after his 
 wife's death her father removed to Foleshill, near 
 Coventry, with which removal her childish life 
 closed. It is not unlikely that the time will come 
 when, with one or other of her books in their 
 hand, people will wander among the scenes of 
 George Eliot's early youth, and trace each allusion, 
 as they are wont to do at Abbotsford or New- 
 stead,
 
 144 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 stead, and they will recognise the photographic 
 minuteness and accuracy with which these scenes, 
 so long unvisited, had stamped themselves on the 
 mind of the observant girl. 
 
 Maggie Tulliver's Childhood is clearly full of 
 the most accurate personal recollections, not, in- 
 deed, of scenery, for St. Oggs is the town of 
 Gainsborough, in Lincolnshire, from which the 
 physical features of the tale were taken. But 
 her inner life as a child is described in it and in 
 the autobiographical sonnets called Brother and 
 Sister. The key-note of these poems is her love 
 for her brother in childhood's days till school 
 parted them. Afterwards came a greater separa- 
 tion, when 
 
 the dire years whose awful name is change, 
 Had grasped our souls still yearning iu divorce, 
 And pitiless grasped them in two forms that range, 
 Two elements which sever their life's course. 
 
 The story of Tom and Maggie is the story of her 
 own childish affection for her brother, and, with 
 differences, the story of their later severance. 
 
 One more passage in her early life, noted in the 
 sonnets, was remembered also in her fiction ; it is 
 that on which she speaks of her own dread of the 
 gipsies who played so large a part in Maggie 
 Tulliver's adventures. The "Red Deeps," the 
 scene of Maggie's spiritual awakening, were near 
 
 her
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 145 
 
 her own home, and had evidently been a favourite 
 haunt of the real Maggie in childhood. So, too, 
 the churches and villages, and the town described 
 in the Scenes of Clerical Life, are all drawn from 
 her own intimate experiences. Cheveril Manor 
 is Arbury Hall, the seat of the Newdegates, Mr. 
 Robert Evans's early patrons; Knebley, described 
 in Mr. Gilfil's Love Story, is Astley Church, 
 hard by; Shepperton, in Amos Barton, is Chilvers 
 Coton, Nuneaton is Milby; and, indeed, it seems 
 pretty certain, that many of the incidents, as well 
 as the scenery, of George Eliot's early stories were 
 hung on facts well known in Warwickshire. At 
 the same time it was but little that she took from 
 outside. The merest hint or sketch of one whom 
 she had seen was worked up, by a creative genius 
 scarcely matched since Shakspere, into a picture 
 which lives, a true memorial. It would be unfair 
 to some of her characters, far too complimentary 
 to others, to believe that they were actual. In 
 the few instances in which identification is pos- 
 sible, the unlikenesses to that which served as the 
 hint are greater than the likenesses. 
 
 Mr. Robert Evans was able to give his daughter 
 an exceptionally good education. There were and 
 are so many bad schools for girls that it was a 
 piece of singular good fortune that Mrs. Walling- 
 ton, at Nuneaton, and afterward Miss Franklin, 
 
 at
 
 146 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 at Coventry, undertook her education. To Mrs. 
 Wallington George Eliot owed some of the beauty 
 of her intonation in reading English poetry. Be- 
 sides the studies at school, she was fortunate in 
 finding a willing instructor in the then head- 
 master of Coventry Grammar School, Mr. Sheep- 
 shanks ; and, motherless as she was, she possibly 
 studied more deeply than a mother's care for a 
 delicate daughter's health would have permitted. 
 However this may be, the years that she spent 
 near Coventry, on her father's removal to Foles- 
 hill, till his death in 1849, were years of excessive 
 work, issuing in a riper culture than that attained 
 by any other prominent Englishwoman of our age, 
 and only approached by that of Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning. 
 
 No man can read George Eliot's books with- 
 out realising the fact that she had gone through 
 deep religious troubles. From her early creed 
 she passed through doubt to another, though 
 very different, phase of belief, and while she was 
 in this transitional stage grave misunderstandings 
 occurred with her own family. The friends who 
 then stood by her and smoothed over the family 
 difficulties, Mr. and Mrs. Bray, of Coventry, 
 brought about incidentally her first introduction 
 to serious literary work. Mrs. Bray's brother, 
 Mr. Charles Hennell, was interested in a trans- 
 lation
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 147 
 
 lation of Strauss's Leben Jesu, which had been 
 intrusted to the lady he was about to marry, and 
 who had before her marriage accomplished about 
 one-fourth of the entire work. During a visit to 
 Tenby with the Brays, Miss Evans became ac- 
 quainted with this lady, and, on her relinquishment 
 of the task in consequence of her marriage, took 
 it up and completed it. This kind of literary work 
 was then, as unfortunately now, sadly underpaid. 
 Twenty pounds was the entire sum received for 
 this translation, an excellent piece of literary work. 
 On Mr. Evans's death, in 1849, his daughter 
 went abroad with the Brays, and stayed behind 
 them at Geneva for purposes of study. Some 
 time after her return to England, she became a 
 boarder in the house of Mr. now Dr. Chapman, 
 who with his wife was in the habit of receiving 
 ladies into their family. She assisted Mr. Chap- 
 man in the editorship of the Westminster Review, 
 and her literary career in London was fairly 
 begun. Her work on the Westminster Review 
 was chiefly editorial. During the years in which 
 she was connected with it she wrote far fewer 
 articles than might have been supposed. The 
 most important of them were the following, written 
 between 1852 and 1859, inclusive: Woman in 
 France Madame De Sable" ; Evangelical Teach- 
 ing, on Dr. Cumming ; The Natural History of 
 
 German
 
 I 4 8 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 German Life ; German Wit, on Heine ; World- 
 liness and Other-ivorldliness, on Young and 
 Cowper. 
 
 Two or three others have been attributed to her, 
 but their authorship is not quite certain, and they 
 are not, at any rate, works by which she would 
 probably desire to be known, or which immediately 
 and clearly prove themselves to be hers by in- 
 ternal evidence. 
 
 Two of the above-named articles especially 
 deserve careful study by those interested in the 
 after-career of George Eliot. It has been noted 
 as a fault by many critics of her later style that 
 she so constantly introduced illustrations from 
 physical science ; and it has been said that these 
 have been brought in somewhat at random be- 
 cause she happened in later life to have her atten- 
 tion specially directed to such studies. Others, 
 however, have not taken this view ; they have 
 believed that the studies were really a part of 
 herself, and as such found expression in all that 
 she wrote. In the article Worldliness and Other- 
 worldliness we find the following sentences : 
 
 Where the fully developed insect is parasitic, we believe 
 the larva is usually parasitic also, and we shall probably not 
 be far wrong in supposing that Young at Oxford, as else- 
 where, spent a good deal of time in hanging about possible 
 and actual patrons. 
 
 And
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 149 
 
 And again : 
 
 He, Dr. Doran, has ascertained that the internal emotions 
 of prebendaries have a sacerdotal quality, and that the very 
 chyme and chyle of a rector are conscious of the gown and 
 band. 
 
 Again, from another article : 
 
 The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the 
 absorption of ideas ; her physical conditions refuse to support 
 the energy required for spontaneous activity ; the voltaic pile 
 is not strong enough to produce crystallisations. 
 
 These are selected at random from many pas- 
 sages with a strong affinity to those to which so 
 much exception has been taken in Middlemarch 
 and Daniel Deronda. On the other hand, there 
 are expressions about virtue or religion as they 
 really existed, and not in the imagination of poets 
 and divines, which are quite in the manner of her 
 later works. She speaks of religion existing 
 
 in the emotions of a man dressed in an ordinary coat, and 
 seated by his fireside of an evening, with his hand resting on 
 the head of his little daughter ; in courageous effort for 
 unselfish ends, in the eternal triumph of justice, in pity for 
 personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation and 
 sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary 
 life. 
 
 It would take too long, however, to point out 
 in detail the resemblances in style between the 
 earlier and the later work. A passage from the 
 
 article
 
 150 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 article on Madame De Sabld has a far deeper and 
 more personal bearing. It is that in which George 
 Eliot speaks of marriage. She is noticing 
 
 the laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the mar- 
 riage-tie. Heaven forbid that we should enter on a defence of 
 French morals, most of all in relation to marriage ! But it 
 is undeniable that unions formed in the maturity of thought 
 and feeling, and grounded only on inherent fitness and 
 mutual attraction, tended to bring women into more intelli- 
 gent sympathy with men, and to heighten and complicate their 
 share in the political drama. The quiescence and security 
 of the conjugal relation are, doubtless, favourable to the 
 manifestation of the highest qualities by persons who have 
 already attained a high standard of culture, but rarely foster 
 a passion sufficient to rouse all the faculties to aid in winning 
 or retaining its beloved object to convert indolence into 
 activity, indifference into ardent partisanship, dulness into 
 perspicuity. 
 
 We have made the above extract because it 
 were pedantry, or worse hypocrisy, to pass over 
 in silence the relation which grew up between 
 George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, whose 
 name she bore for almost the whole remainder of 
 her life. It would be, moreover, to do her gross 
 wrong ; for silence implies that the position 
 maintained in the face of the world, and never 
 concealed, was one for which there was need of 
 excuse. The unusual circumstances may demand 
 a word of explanation, no more. Mr. Lewes was 
 separated from his wife as completely as though 
 
 death
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 151 
 
 death had come between them. There is no need 
 to apportion blame or disinter the buried past, but 
 all his married life was over. Without a thought 
 of self, Mary Ann Evans entered into a relation 
 which neither first nor last was considered by her 
 wrong or blameworthy. Had she been free to do 
 so, she would no doubt have thought it well to 
 follow the usages of society and surround the 
 union with all traditional sanction ; but that was 
 not possible, and to her the union was permanent 
 and sacred. It is clear that her view of marriage 
 was not the conventional one. It is probable that 
 only a series of untoward circumstances made her 
 act upon her convictions but she carried them 
 out openly and fearlessly, considering herself, and 
 considered by her friends, as Mr. Lewes's wife, 
 acting as a tender mother to his boys, who re- 
 paid her care with true filial affection. She 
 sought no acquaintances, but to those who sought 
 her she was accessible, neither flaunting her differ- 
 ence of opinion, nor concealing what was unusual 
 in her position. If any were deceived, they were 
 not deceived by her or by Mr. Lewes. Few 
 would maintain that to every visitor at their house 
 it was their duty to proclaim that the Church had 
 not blessed their marriage. What those who 
 came there saw was a companionship second to 
 none in all "mutual society, help and comfort 
 
 that
 
 152 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 that the one ought to have of the other both in 
 prosperity and in adversity." They saw a versa- 
 tile, high-strung, somewhat wayward nature re- 
 strained, raised, ennobled, and purified by his 
 association with her, so strengthened, so raised, 
 that many who had only thought that they ad- 
 mired the intellectual dexterity and bright adaptive- 
 ness of the man were affected at his death by a 
 thrill of surprise on finding how deeply they had 
 valued and loved him. 
 
 The question has naturally some interest how 
 far two persons of such remarkable intellectual 
 individuality affected each other's work during the 
 many years of their joint lives. Those who have 
 read George Eliot's novels but superficially, and 
 who have been acquainted with the fact that Mr. 
 Lewes's studies lay very greatly in the direction 
 of physiology, have thought that they discovered 
 his influence in the many scientific similes and 
 allusions which abound in her works ; but they 
 are wholly mistaken, as is plain from the passages 
 just quoted. That each largely influenced the 
 other is true, but the influence was the subtle 
 effect of companionship and association, and 
 certainly there was but very little of direct stimula- 
 tion, or even direct criticism. 
 
 Mr. Lewes's character attained a stability and 
 pose in which it had been somewhat lacking, and 
 
 the
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 153 
 
 the quiet of an orderly and beautiful home enabled 
 him to concentrate himself more and more on 
 works demanding sustained intellectual effort, 
 while Mrs. Lewes's intensely feminine nature had 
 found the strong man on whom to lean in the 
 daily business of life, for which she was physically 
 and intellectually unfitted. Her own somewhat 
 sombre cast of thought was cheered, enlivened, 
 and diversified by the vivacity and versatility 
 which characterised Mr. Lewes, and made him 
 seem less like an Englishman than a very agree- 
 able foreigner. Was the character of Ladislaw in 
 any degree drawn from George Henry Lewes, as 
 his wife first remembered him ? The suggestion 
 that she should try her hand at fiction undoubtedly 
 came from Mr. Lewes. Probably no great writers 
 ever know their real vein. But for this outward 
 stimulation, she might have remained through life 
 the accurate translator, the brilliant reviewer, the 
 thoughtful poet, to whom accuracy of poetic form 
 was somewhat wanting, rather than as the writer 
 of fiction who has swayed the hearts of men as no 
 other writer but Walter Scott has done, or even 
 attempted to do. 
 
 In the maturity of her life and intellectual 
 powers she became known as a writer of fiction. 
 There are those who now regard the Scenes of 
 Clerical Life as her best work. Beautiful as they
 
 154 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 are, that is not our opinion, and, at any rate, the 
 Scenes failed to attract much notice at first. The 
 publication of Adam Bede, however, took the world 
 by storm. 
 
 As in the Scenes of Clerical Life the actual 
 surroundings and the mere sketch outlines of 
 many of the characters were drawn from her 
 Warwickshire home, so in Adam Bede she has 
 gone for her scenery to Derbyshire, the cradle of 
 her family. That Dinah Morris was to some 
 extent a real character has long been known. 
 There was, however, but little direct portraiture, 
 and as Shakspere with the stories which formed 
 the basis of his plays, she has infused and irra- 
 diated the simplest and commonest facts with her 
 own light and warmth and eloquence. The like- 
 ness, however, was recognised at once. From a 
 very curious little book, published in 1859 by 
 Tallant & Co., of 21 Paternoster Row, called 
 Seth Bede, the Methody : His Life and Labours, 
 chiefly "written by Himself, we find that Hay- 
 slope is the little village of Roston, four miles 
 from Ashbourne. Adam and Seth were Samuel 
 and William Evans ; but the Dinah of real 
 life cast in her lot, not with Adam, but with 
 Seth. The incident of their father's death is true, 
 and Samuel Evans himself describes the process 
 of his conversion, his instruction by " Mr. Beres- 
 
 ford,
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 155 
 
 ford, a class-leader, and a precious man of God," 
 and his after-career as a Methodist. The account 
 of Dinah is extremely interesting, and, from the 
 Methodist point of view, entirely confirms the 
 description given by her niece. But the little 
 tract quotes with the utmost coolness Dinah's 
 prayer on the village green as " having been 
 preserved," the real fact being that it is quoted 
 bodily out of the novel ; and of this Miss Evans 
 herself says, " How curious it seems to me that 
 people should think Dinah's sermon, prayers, and 
 speeches were copied, when they were written, 
 with hot tears, as they surged up in my own 
 mind ! " Perhaps the greatest compliment, 
 though an equivocal one, that can be paid to a 
 man's own compositions is that others should 
 endeavour to steal them. This was the case with 
 the novel of Adam Bede. Finding that the author 
 desired to remain unknown, a poor creature, whose 
 name should be gibbeted as Joseph Liggins, resid- 
 ing at Nuneaton, being in needy circumstances, 
 claimed the novel, stating that, after the manner 
 of Milton and other great authors, he had received 
 for it a wholly inadequate sum, and, showing to 
 various persons the manuscript which he had taken 
 the trouble to make from the printed book, he 
 asked and received certain moneys to supplement 
 his publishers' niggardliness. His cause was en- 
 thusiastically
 
 156 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 thusiastically espoused by one or two neighbour- 
 ing clergy, and in spite of the real author's denial 
 of Mr. Liggins's claims, a hot controversy raged 
 for a time, the parties being sharply divided, as is 
 the case in this singular country of ours, by their 
 ecclesiastical differences of High and Low Church. 
 In that Coventry neighbourhood it was perhaps 
 only the publication of after-works, which Mr. 
 Liggins did not see fit to copy, that entirely 
 exploded his preposterous claims. 
 
 This novel showed the great range of characters 
 over which the author's observations and fancy 
 extended ; they showed also her deep and wide 
 sympathy. All writers but the greatest a Shak- 
 spere, a Goethe, a Scott, a George Eliot take 
 interest in their own class, their own co-religionists, 
 alone. The others of whom they speak come in as 
 the supernumeraries on a stage, to fill up the back- 
 ground of the picture, but those who bring them 
 seem not to consider whether they are men and 
 women with human hearts, or merely marionettes. 
 But the great writer shows that even the humblest, 
 " if you prick them, will bleed," and discovers the 
 human touch of goodness in the most unpromising 
 characters in the poor frivolous little Hetty, in 
 the sensuous, pleasure-loving Arthur Donnithorne, 
 as well as in Dinah and Mr. Irwine. The sole 
 point, perhaps, in which her early country training 
 
 comes
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 157 
 
 comes out, is the omission, or almost omission, 
 from her canvas of the lowest stratum of country 
 life, the agricultural labourer pure and simple. 
 In English village life, along with perfect freedom 
 of intercourse and direct plainness of speech, caste 
 is even more marked than in the higher ranks of 
 English society. The demarcations are not easily 
 understood, but they are there, when, to the out- 
 ward observer, the differences are not very plain 
 between the sections of village ranks, as an undu- 
 lating country may often seem a dead flat from the 
 mountain height. The miller, the master-carpenter, 
 the small farmer, are each more severed from the 
 mere labourer than are the Mr. Irwines and the 
 Squire Donnithornes, in whose case there is no 
 danger of confusion. It is probable, therefore, 
 that the few labourers whom George Eliot speci- 
 fies are drawn as direct portraits ; and she has 
 made but few advances into the land which Mr. 
 Hardy knows so thoroughly, and which is so pecu- 
 liarly his own. He, and he alone, sees the English 
 peasant as Shakspere saw him, with all his acci- 
 dental limitations, yet with his shrewdness, his 
 pleasantry, and his human heart. 
 
 There is no need to discuss in detail novels 
 which are the possession of all English-speaking 
 people, which most of their readers believe to be 
 of no ephemeral interest, but part of the abiding 
 literature of the language. Enough to say that, 
 
 omitting
 
 158 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 omitting the very highest and the very lowest sec- 
 tions of modern society, these novels present a 
 photographic picture of English life which will 
 give to the future reader the same sort of truthful 
 information of the early Victorian time that Shak- 
 spere's plays do of Elizabeth's England. We say 
 the early Victorian age : we might even put the 
 date a few years further back, because the quiet 
 lady whose life was one of so much outward peace 
 did not willingly describe the more strenuous 
 aspects of our time. We hear but little of the 
 steam-ship, of the railway, of the hurry of our 
 London life, that London which, as a sponge 
 draws water, seems to gather to itself the life-blood 
 of the country. There have been greater story- 
 tellers ; we need only mention Sir Walter Scott. 
 In individual scenes as well as in plot, Sir Walter, 
 at his greatest, is greater. Nothing that George 
 Eliot has ever written approaches the wonderful 
 scene in which Jeanie Deans pleads her sister's 
 cause before Queen Caroline in Richmond Park. 
 But George Eliot has been, is, and will be, no 
 mere writer who can amuse a leisure hour ; nor 
 is she only a literary study or an intellectual de- 
 light, her wish is fulfilled that she might 
 
 be to other souls 
 
 A cup of strength in some great agony, 
 Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love, 
 Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. 
 
 That
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 159 
 
 That the mind of her who penned these novels 
 was profoundly religious, no reader can doubt ; 
 nor is it in any degree inconsistent with the deepest 
 religious feeling that she should have translated 
 Strauss and Feuerbach. To any such soul, in the 
 struggle which attends an inability to believe what 
 has been previously taught, the effort to clear the 
 thoughts by the definite grasp of those completely 
 opposed is oftentimes of great spiritual help. When, 
 however, we attempt to define the religion in which 
 George Eliot rested, our task becomes difficult. 
 We find in her the most marvellous power of 
 putting herself in the position of the holders of all 
 creeds, so deep was her sympathy with every form 
 in which the religious instincts have expressed 
 themselves. The simple faith, half pagan but 
 altogether reverent, of Dolly Winthrop ; the sen- 
 sible, matter-of-fact, and honourable morality of 
 Mr. Ii wine ; the aspirations of a modern St. The- 
 resa ; the passionate fervour of Dinah, supplying 
 by sympathy all that was lacking in external cul- 
 ture ; all these were understood and reverenced 
 by her. Whatever was most human, and, there- 
 fore, most divine, most ennobling, and most help- 
 ful, was assimilated by her. The painful bliss of 
 asceticism, the rapture of Catholic devotion, the 
 satisfaction which comes of self-abnegation, were 
 realised by her as though she had been a fervid 
 
 Catholic.
 
 160 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Catholic. But the ground-tone of her thought 
 was essentially and intensely Protestant. She 
 could not submit herself completely to any exter- 
 nal teacher. Of Auguste Comte, whose system 
 she more and more admired as the old creeds lost 
 their hold upon her soul, she said more than once 
 in the closing months of her life, " I will not sub- 
 mit to him my heart and my intellect." Her 
 views on immortality are expressed in the great 
 poem, great surely despite of some defects of 
 form, which closes the volume, Jubal and Other 
 Poems, so well known by its first line : 
 
 O, may I join the choir invisible ! 
 
 It was an immortality which seemed to her to 
 carry out most fully the great creed of self- 
 renunciation, the giving all for others, hoping 
 for nothing again, either in time or in eternity. 
 
 Not now is the time or here the place for direct 
 criticism on her novels. Let this alone be said, that 
 to me Middlemarch seems the crowning work of 
 her life ; not, however, that Daniel Deronda showed 
 any falling off of power, but that, in her eager 
 desire to do justice to a great race, too cruelly 
 misunderstood, she chose a theme in which the 
 world at large was less specially interested. Her 
 intellectual eye was not dim at the last, neither 
 was her intellectual force abated, and it is pos- 
 sible
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 161 
 
 sible that she might have surpassed herself even 
 as she was in Middlemarch, We shall never 
 have an opportunity of guessing on imperfect data. 
 Most wisely those whom she has left to mourn her 
 loss deemed it best to destroy the small fragment 
 which yet remained of a novel which she had begun, 
 reverencing her own dislike of unfinished work 
 and what they believe would have been her own 
 wishes. 
 
 Perhaps no one filling a large portion of the 
 thoughts of men has ever been so little known to 
 the world at large. Always in delicate health, 
 always living a student life, caring little for what 
 is called general society, though taking a genial 
 delight in that of her chosen friends, she very 
 seldom appeared in public. She went to the 
 houses of but a few, finding it less fatiguing to 
 see her friends at home. Those who knew her 
 by sight beyond her own immediate circle did so 
 from seeing her take her quiet drives in Regent's 
 Park and the northern slopes of London, or from 
 her attendance at those concerts at which the 
 best music of the day was to be heard. There, 
 in a front row, in rapt attention, were always to 
 be seen Mr. and Mrs. Lewes, and none who saw 
 that face ever forgot its power and spiritual beauty. 
 To the casual observer there was but little of what 
 is generally understood to be beauty of form. 
 
 In 
 L
 
 162 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 In more than one striking passage in his novels 
 Mr. Hardy has recognised the fact that the beauty 
 of the future, as the race is more developed in 
 intellect, cannot be the ideal physical beauty of 
 the past ; and in one of the most remarkable he 
 says that " ideal physical beauty is incompatible 
 with mental development and a full recognition of 
 the coil of things. Mental luminousness must be 
 fed with the oil of life, even though there is already 
 a physical need for it." And this was the case 
 with George Eliot. The face was one of a group 
 of four, not all equally like each other, but all of 
 the same spiritual family, and with a curious inter- 
 dependence of likeness. The four are those of 
 Dante, Savonarola, Cardinal Newman, and her- 
 self. There is one such other group, consist- 
 ing of three only. It is that formed of the tra- 
 ditional head of Christ the well-known profile 
 on a coin Shakspere, and St. Ignatius Loyola. 
 In the group of which George Eliot was one there 
 is the same straight wall of brow ; the droop of 
 the powerful nose ; mobile lips, touched with strong 
 passion kept resolutely under control ; a square 
 jaw, which would make the face stern were it not 
 counteracted by the sweet smile of lips and eye. 
 We can hardly hope that posterity will ever know 
 her from likenesses as those who had the honour 
 of her acquaintance knew her in life. Only some 
 
 world's
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 163 
 
 world's artist could have handed her down as she 
 lived, as Bellini has handed down the Doge whom 
 we all know so well on the walls of the National 
 Gallery. The two or three portraits that exist, 
 though valuable, give but a very imperfect pre- 
 sentment. The mere shape of the head would be 
 the despair of any painter. It was so grand and 
 massive that it would scarcely be possible to re- 
 present it without giving the idea of disproportion 
 to the frame, of which no one ever thought for a 
 moment when they saw her, although it was a 
 surprise, when she stood up, to see that, after all, 
 she was but a little fragile woman who bore this 
 weight of brow and brain. 
 
 It is difficult for any one admitted to the great 
 honour of friendship with either Mr. Lewes or 
 George Eliot to speak of their home without seem- 
 ing intrusive, in the same way that he would have 
 been who, unauthorised, introduced visitors, yet 
 something may be said to gratify a curiosity which 
 surely is not impertinent or ignoble. When London 
 was full, the little drawing-room in St. John's 
 Wood was now and then crowded to overflowing 
 with those who were glad to give their best of 
 conversation, of information, and sometimes of 
 music, always to listen with eager attention to 
 whatever their hostess might say, when all that 
 she said was worth hearing. Without a trace of 
 
 pedantry,
 
 164 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 pedantry, she led the conversation to some great 
 and lofty strain. Of herself and her works she 
 never spoke ; of the works and thoughts of others 
 she spoke with reverence, and sometimes even too 
 great tolerance. But those afternoons had the 
 highest pleasure when London was empty or the 
 day wet, and only a few friends were present, so 
 that her conversation assumed a more sustained 
 tone than was possible when the rooms were full 
 of shifting groups. Those who knew her carried 
 away from her presence the remembrance of a 
 charm even greater than any which lay in her 
 writings ; of a low sweet voice vibrating with 
 emotion ; of language in which, without the 
 faintest tinge of pedantry, every sentence was as 
 complete, as fully formed, as though written in 
 her own published works ; of a knowledge and 
 a breadth of thought which, had we not found them 
 in her, the pride of the male intellect would have 
 designated masculine ; of a sympathy which never 
 failed, a toleration almost excessive, and of a 
 nature which, with all this weight of learning and 
 greatness, was feminine and tender. Yet interest- 
 ing as seemed to her, as well as to those admitted 
 to them, her afternoons in London, she was always 
 glad to escape when summer came, either for one 
 of the tours on the Continent in which she so 
 delighted, or lately to the charming home she had 
 
 made
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 163 
 
 made in Surrey. She never tired of the lovely 
 scenery about Witley, and the great expanse of 
 view obtainable from the tops of the many hills. 
 It was on one of her drives in that neighbourhood 
 that a characteristic conversation took place be- 
 tween her and one of the greatest English poets, 
 whom she met as he was taking a walk. Even 
 that short meeting enabled them to get into some- 
 what deep conversation on evolution ; and as the 
 poet afterward related it to a companion on the 
 same spot, he said, " Here was where I said 
 'good-bye' to George Eliot; and as she went 
 down the hill, I said, ' Well, good-bye, you and 
 your molecules/ and she said to me, ' I am quite 
 content with my molecules.' " A trifling anecdote, 
 perhaps, but to those who will read between the 
 lines, not other than characteristic of both speakers. 
 In the May of 1880, Mrs. Lewes, who for some 
 time past after her great bereavement had been 
 again beginning to see her friends and enter a 
 little into society, became the wife of Mr. J. W. 
 Cross. There would be no excuse for attempting 
 to penetrate into the home she recently formed, 
 and in which, from accidental circumstances, a 
 very few friends had seen her. This only may be 
 said, that some of those who had loved her best, 
 and had been a little inclined to doubt whether 
 any second union would now be for their friend's 
 
 welfare,
 
 166 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 welfare, found that all their scruples had been 
 idle and gratuitous, that as the twenty years of 
 her life past had been years of deep and true 
 happiness, so a like period might have been begun, 
 through which she might have passed to an 
 honoured old age, sheltered and protected by the 
 tenderest care and love. But it was not to be. 
 Her health, never robust, had seemed to revive 
 and strengthen in the tour taken to Italy after her 
 marriage, but a return to the English climate 
 chilled and withered her from the first. A winter 
 such as has been scarcely known in England 
 within the memory of man laid upon her, at its 
 beginning, an iron hand, and only one fortnight 
 after her removal to her new home in Chelsea, 
 she sank from the effects of a cold which appeared 
 but little dangerous at first. She was laid to rest 
 by the side of Mr. George Henry Lewes on a day 
 which was indeed calculated to test the love of 
 those who wished to be present at her funeral. 
 Yet the chill rain seemed to have kept away none 
 who desired to be with her to the last, and to 
 comfort by their presence those most dear whom 
 she had left. Besides her husband and her step- 
 son, there came members of her own family from 
 Warwickshire, and it was touching to remember 
 the closing lines of her autobiographical sonnets, 
 in which she says : 
 
 But
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 167 
 
 But were another childhood's world my share, 
 I would be born a little sister there, 
 
 when the brother-companion of those years was 
 seen standing by his sister's grave. There were 
 those, too, who had only known her as an invisible 
 presence while they read her books, to whom 
 she had been the comfort and the help she most 
 wished, who came to strew flowers on her coffin. 
 Had she been laid in the Abbey, where some 
 would fain have placed her, the funeral might 
 have been more stately, but it could not have 
 been more full of respect and affection and 
 sorrow. 
 
 We have already said that we live too near the 
 dead to gauge her place in literature. To many of 
 us her conversation, which was even better than her 
 books, her sympathy and large-heartedness, which 
 were yet more remarkable than her conversation, 
 and our great personal affection, may have in 
 some degree dimmed the keen edge of criticism. 
 I do not, however, think that this is so, or that 
 the judgment of those of her own time will be very 
 greatly reversed. Some mannerisms are obvious 
 mannerisms which perhaps prevent her, when 
 she speaks in her own person, from ever being 
 considered among the great masters of language ; 
 neither was she among the very greatest of story- 
 tellers. When she deals with that which was 
 
 originally
 
 168 GEORGE ELIOT, 
 
 originally unfamiliar to her, as in Romola y the 
 effort of preparation is somewhat too visible, the 
 topographical and antiquarian learning too little 
 spontaneous. In poetry, the thought was over- 
 great for the somewhat unfamiliar element in 
 which it moved, and brought to the reader a 
 certain sense of stiffness or constraint. The 
 canvas on which she worked, as suited to our age, 
 was not the canvas of yEschylus, of Dante, or that 
 on which Shakspere, who worked in all kinds of 
 art, drew the figures of Lear, of Lady Macbeth, 
 and of Othello. But in the description of the 
 tragedy which underlies so much of human life, 
 however quiet-seeming, in the subtle analysis of 
 character, in the light touch which unravels the 
 web of complex human motives, she seems to 
 us absolutely unrivalled in our English tongue, 
 except by him who is unrivalled in all the branches 
 of his art, the mighty master Shakspere. No ; 
 history will not reverse the judgment of our time, 
 and generations to come may find pleasure in 
 tracing the resemblances, with all their unlikeness, 
 between her and the great dramatist, and in re- 
 cognising how thoroughly English were the minds 
 of both. They were cradled in the same county ; 
 they were nursed by the same outward influences ; 
 the same forest of Arden for Shakspere's Arden 
 is in reality the Warwickshire, not the French 
 
 one
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 169 
 
 one the same forest of Arden was round them 
 both, the same forms of gently sloping hills and 
 fields ; and the scenes of George Eliot's youth 
 reproduced in the novels may be joined, and 
 joined easily, with the pilgrimages from afar to 
 Charlecote and to Stratford. That is for the 
 future ; but for those who knew herself, admiration 
 of her genius is secondary in their minds to regret 
 for loss. They think less of the words preserved 
 on the lasting page for many generations to come 
 than of the low sweet voice which so often thrilled 
 them as it uttered words of welcome, and wisdom, 
 and sympathy ; of the bright home, so easily 
 accessible, and so often opened to the young, 
 beginning their London career all the more hope- 
 fully because George Eliot and George Henry 
 Lewes had given them encouragement ; of the 
 new home she had made, to leave it soon so 
 desolate, and of the new friend they had gained, 
 with whom to sympathise when he was so un- 
 timely and unexpectedly left alone. 
 
 Many who knew George Eliot can use no more 
 fitting words in regard to her than those in which 
 one, a gifted woman also, has recorded her own 
 feelings on the death of a great man who was her 
 master and her friend : 
 
 I am not proud for anything of mine, 
 
 Done, dreamed, or suffered, but for this alone : 
 
 That
 
 x;o GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 That the great orb of that great human soul 
 Did once deflect and draw this orb of mine, 
 Until it touched and trembled on the line 
 By which my orbit crossed the plane of his ; 
 And heard the music of that glorious sphere 
 Resound a moment ; and so passed again, 
 Vibrating with it, out on its own way. 
 
 1881.
 
 JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL 
 NEWMAN. 
 
 BORN 1 80 1. 
 
 T) Y a series of events, none of them noisy or 
 -*-^ startling, but which have become historic, or, 
 as some would say, by a singular leading of divine 
 Providence, one by nature retiring and shy holds a 
 position of higher dignity than any other, not here- 
 ditary, in England. A small room in a religious 
 house, only technically differing from a monk's 
 cell, is the home of the one English writer of trans- 
 cendent intellectual and literary merit left by the 
 deaths of Carlyle and George Eliot. 
 
 Whatever a man's religious or political opinions, 
 and the majority of my readers have different 
 views to those of my subject, that must be a dull 
 imagination which is untouched by the ecclesi- 
 astical and storied splendour of the office of 
 cardinal. The Pope and the members of the 
 Sacred College alone are they whose dignity and 
 influence go beyond the bounds of kingdoms or 
 
 states ;
 
 172 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 states ; they, whatever their authority, wield it 
 equally in Rome, their centre, and Japan or San 
 Francisco, points of their circumference ; their 
 sway, being over the mind, is far more real than 
 rule over the mere bodies of men. Yet, because 
 of the once temporal dignities of the pontifical 
 court, there still encompasses them, also, a state 
 and a majesty which impresses the eye, and lends 
 the sanction of sense to their intellectual empire. 
 
 In England, this historic grandeur has been 
 strongly felt, even by those who most repudiate 
 the papal claim, and, though somewhat illogi- 
 cally, men rejoiced and felt that Englishmen were 
 honoured when spiritual honour flowed on Dr. 
 Newman from an authority which they do not 
 recognise. It came tardily, but the late Pope had 
 not, perhaps, so fair a chance of discovering intel- 
 lectual worth as his successor, and, more narrowly 
 Italian, did not, it may be, fully understand so 
 thoroughly English a mind as that of Dr. Newman. 
 But if the dignity came late, it came at a good 
 time. After many years of misunderstanding, 
 mists have cleared off as, in the natural course of 
 human life, Dr. Newman's sun draws to its setting, 
 and the honour from abroad coincided opportunely 
 with the full recognition of its recipient as one of 
 our greatest, wisest, and best. Much of the im- 
 proved understanding is due to the publication of 
 
 Apologia
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 173 
 
 Apologia pro Vita Sua, a fragment of autobio- 
 graphy written with rare courage and frankness, 
 a work which has become classical, and is, or 
 ought to be, known to all students of religious 
 life, of psychology, or of pure and vigorous Eng- 
 lish. 
 
 There were some who desired that a critical ana- 
 lysis of such a life and character should be presented 
 by one outside the Catholic Church, and I was 
 consulted in regard to the writer. Certain names 
 of persons, younger, indeed, than the Cardinal, 
 but still workers with him in Oxford days, at once 
 suggested themselves. These were interested in 
 the desire to make their friend better known and 
 understood, but the old days and times were too 
 sacred in their memories, too dear and too painful 
 to allow them, as yet, to treat of them in full. 
 "The Parting of Friends," in the cases of which I 
 speak, has left a wound fresh as though it were of 
 yesterday. They who now know best Dr. New- 
 man's life and mind are not especially qualified to 
 write of the Oxford past, nor can they be free to 
 speak of one, their master and their father, with 
 whom they are in daily companionship. It was 
 equally clear that such a memoir could not be 
 written by any former opponent, then, as now, 
 out of sympathy with the mind with which they 
 would deal, nor, if there were such, by any once 
 
 familiar
 
 174 yOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 familiar friend who had lifted up his heel against 
 him. 
 
 So, by a process of natural elimination, the 
 thoughts of those old friends of whom I have 
 spoken, and my own, suggested that the task 
 should be mine. One word, not for egoism, but 
 for explanation, of what I may know on the matter. 
 My entrance into Oxford life almost coincided 
 with Mr. Newman's secession. The high-church 
 movement of that day had reached its furthest 
 water-mark. It remained at the full for some 
 years before the ebb preceding the new tide which 
 we call ritualism ; all the doctrines of the move- 
 ment had been settled and defined by the Trac- 
 tarians, and in that full, still time, though Newman 
 was gone in person, his was the one influence 
 abiding in the place, his spirit and his name were 
 everywhere. With it Oxford resounded, as Hebrus 
 of old with that of Eurydice : 
 
 Eurydice the woods, 
 Eurydice the floods, 
 Eurydice the rocks and hollow mountains rang. 
 
 Dr. Pusey's was the name which stamped the 
 Oxford movement in the country, but in spite of 
 his long retirement at Littlemore, Newman's was 
 the one potent memory in the university, alike a 
 charm to conjure with and a dangerous force to 
 execrate. The men who had been his friends were 
 
 kind
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 175 
 
 kind to me, a younger man ; the glamour which 
 had attached to him wrapped me round. I well 
 remember a home near Oxford, in which a veiled 
 crucifix seemed to its possessors to have gained a 
 special sanctity because it had been his, and many 
 of us who attended his former church at Littlemore 
 prayed all the more fervently because he had 
 prayed there before us ; it was hard to say if the 
 young zealots of that day loved St. Mary's most 
 for the porch which Laud had built, or for the 
 pulpit whence Newman had preached. 
 
 Having, then, had a clear understanding of these 
 things from the first, from eye-witnesses and fellow- 
 workers, my veneration and my interest have never 
 flagged. But my interest then, as now, was mainly 
 intellectual, not doctrinal. It is true that I now 
 feel, even far more than then, that, granting the 
 premisses, Dr. Newman's church is the only logical 
 outcome of them ; but even then I scarce accepted 
 the premisses with a whole assent. And there is 
 no seeming paradox more certainly true than this, 
 that a man may largely agree with and give full 
 intellectual admiration to those ] with whom he 
 remains irreconcilably at variance. So near but 
 so far is not a contradiction in terms. A liberal of 
 the liberals, one of those, therefore, falling under 
 Dr. Newman's stern disapproval, with the affec- 
 tionate sympathy of a pupil for a master whom he 
 
 cannot
 
 176 JOHN HENRY NE WMAN. 
 
 cannot follow, with genuine admiration for the 
 subtlest intellect, the largest heart, the most un- 
 selfish life I know, I try to give my readers some 
 faint portraiture of John Henry Newman, Cardinal 
 of St. George. 
 
 He was born in London eighty-two years ago, 
 the eldest son of Mr. John Newman, a London 
 banker. His brother, still living, is Mr. Francis 
 Newman, the well-known author of Phases of Faith. 
 One of his sisters, Mrs. Thomas Mozley, now dead, 
 was the writer of several exceedingly clever stories 
 for young people, among which The Fairy Bower 
 and The Lost Brooch are the best known. Some 
 graceful lines in the second of these are understood 
 to be by her brother John. That literary tastes 
 and reading were not exceptional in the family 
 shows, in a measure, the character of the home. 
 The religious tone was what would now be called 
 evangelical, and, indeed, religious earnestness in 
 that day usually took no other form, save in a few 
 nooks of cathedral cities, and in some old-world 
 aristocratic families. But it was not of a narrow 
 or fanatical type. Dr. Newman speaks of his 
 having read " some romance, Mrs. Radcliffe's or 
 Miss Porter's," of having been taken by his father, 
 " who wanted to hear some piece of music," into 
 the Catholic chapel in Warwick Street, and, in 
 other directions than fiction, the boy's own reading 
 
 was
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 177 
 
 was allowed to be discursive. Tom Paine's tracts, 
 Hume's Essay on Miracles, some of Voltaire, all 
 seem to have been studied without parental opposi- 
 tion, and, indeed, a father might well have judged 
 that such a boy would refuse the evil and choose 
 the good. For, from a child, he took delight in 
 sermons and in theological reading "all of the 
 school of Calvin," and the same teaching had deep 
 effect on him after mere boyhood ; he went up to 
 Trinity as a scholar, after education at Ealing 
 School, near London, with the same opinions 
 dominant in his mind. Yet, as Dr. Newman is 
 himself careful to point out, he was, to a certain 
 extent, eclectic in his acceptance of the theology 
 set before him ; he denied and abjured the doctrine 
 of predestination to eternal death, nor had that of 
 final perseverance any tendency to lead him to be 
 careless about pleasing God. It had some influ- 
 ence, he tells us, " in isolating me from the objects 
 which surrounded me, in confirming me in my dis- 
 trust of the reality of material phenomena, and 
 making me rest in the thought of two, and two 
 only, absolute and luminously self-evident beings 
 myself and my Creator." In this we may indeed 
 see the boy of fifteen father of the man, for there is 
 no single strain of teaching which so runs through 
 all Dr. Newman's works as that of the direct rela- 
 tion of the human soul to God, its isolation from 
 
 all 
 
 M
 
 1 78 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 all else, however it may seem involved with others, 
 "the everlasting face to face with God." And, 
 even at that early date, a guiding fact was fixed as 
 well as a guiding dogma. A deep imagination took 
 hold of him that it would be th will of God that he 
 should lead a single life. This expectation, which 
 coalesced by degrees with personal decision, had 
 a great effect in fitting him to be the guide and 
 friend of many men. For the religious adviser in 
 his ideal state must be celibate, free from other 
 absorbing ties. Such an one is also able to con- 
 tract friendships which are personal to himself 
 alone, and not involved in the tastes and needs 
 of others. Dr. Newman's friendships have been 
 singularly firm and strong. The affectionate 
 epithet " carissime " is applied to more than one 
 in his published letters, and the love thus given 
 has been returned in as full measure as has been 
 compatible with other calls on the heart. He was 
 surely in some measure describing himself also, 
 when he spoke of St. Paul, " who had a thousand 
 friends and loved each as his own soul, and seemed 
 to live a thousand lives in them, and died a thousand 
 deaths when he must quit them." But in friend- 
 ship as in love the feeling is perhaps always stronger 
 on one side than the other ; there can be no exact 
 reciprocity. 
 
 Mr. Newman's residence at Oxford introduced 
 
 him
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 179 
 
 him to wholly new ideas. The vigorous mind of 
 Whately, the cautious shrewdness of Dr. Hawkins, 
 the free speculations of Blanco White, whose ten- 
 dency was not then as yet recognised, were among 
 the personal influences which surrounded him, 
 while the study of Butler's Analogy was " an era 
 in his religious opinions." A time of change had 
 begun for the university as well as for its new and 
 distinguished student, who passed from his Trinity 
 scholarship to a fellowship at Oriel. The old high- 
 church tradition had never died out at Oxford ; the 
 daily chapel, so often a formal observance, still 
 had its effect on many minds, and the whole spirit 
 of the English prayer-book was realised with a 
 vividness unknown in the country at large. There 
 were elderly men linked by tradition to the days of 
 Wesley, whose influence at Oxford was all in the 
 direction of Catholic observance men who walked 
 out week by week to Godstowe on each Friday 
 that they might dine off fish, who discontinued 
 their darling indulgence of snuff through Lent, did 
 reverence to the altar on entering church, and 
 turned to the east at the Creeds. The bones had 
 become very dry, but they were the bones of 
 Catholic doctrines and observances, and the wind 
 of change breathed on them the same wind whose 
 influence had already been shown in Scott and 
 Wordsworth in the fields of literature. It is true 
 
 men
 
 i8o JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 men did not know it. The same persons, or those 
 most closely allied to them, were they whom Dr. 
 Newman calls unintellectual and "most fond of 
 port," one of whom, when Dr. Pusey first showed 
 acquaintance with continental literature, wished 
 "that German theology and German philosophy 
 were both at the bottom of the German ocean." 
 Many of them opposed the innovators who fully 
 restored their own imperfect tradition, but they yet 
 made it possible that the new revival should for a 
 time remain, as Wesley had remained, within the 
 boundaries of Oxford and the English Church. 
 
 In 1828, Mr. Newman became vicar of St. Mary's. 
 Though the nave is used as the university church, 
 and in it are preached the majority of sermons 
 delivered to the university as such, St. Mary's is 
 really the church of a very small parish, the area 
 of which is covered by Oriel and St. Mary's Hall, 
 together with a few houses in the High Street and 
 Oriel Lane. To it was attached the then small 
 hamlet of Littlemore, on rising ground about three 
 miles from Oxford a spot which was to become 
 famous, and, when Mr. Newman had left the 
 English Church, almost a place of pilgrimage for 
 enthusiastic young Oxford men who loved his 
 memory. He says himself : " It was at this time 
 that I began to have influence, which steadily in- 
 creased for a course of years." This influence was 
 
 gained,
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 181 
 
 gained, first, by his sermons ; secondly, by the 
 boundless sympathy which he showed to those 
 who, recognising from his pulpit-teaching his great 
 knowledge of the human heart, came to lay bare 
 before him their troubles and ask his advice. As 
 his view of the dignity and power of his office 
 deepened, his ministrations assumed more and 
 more a sacerdotal character. Private confession 
 had perhaps never become wholly extinct in the 
 Church of England, but it had certainly been con- 
 fined to extremely rare occasions. Mr. Newman 
 and his friends were the first, for many years, to 
 make it habitual ; and independent of its theo- 
 logical character, this close intercourse between 
 themselves and younger men became one of the 
 modes of breaking down the fence which had so 
 long divided the don from the undergraduate. 
 That moral, social, and intellectual sympathy which 
 has of late years characterised the relations of tutor 
 and pupil has been manifested in various forms. 
 It passed in its early stages into the relation of 
 priest and penitent, and in some instances the 
 confessional was the way in which it began. 
 
 We have evidence of the power of Newman's 
 preaching, not only in those ten eloquent volumes 
 which all may read for themselves, but from his 
 own description and from the unwilling testimony 
 of his enemies. When, many years later than the 
 
 time
 
 1 82 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 time of which we are now speaking, he preached 
 at Littlemore his sermon on The Parting of 
 Friends^ the speaker and the hearers alike know- 
 ing that it was his farewell to them and to the 
 English Church, he used the following words : 
 
 And, O my brethren, O kind and affectionate hearts, O 
 loving friends, should you know any one whose lot it has 
 been, by writing or by word of mouth, in some degree to 
 help you thus to act ; if he has ever told you what you knew 
 about yourselves, or what you did not know ; has read to you 
 your wants or feelings, and comforted you by the very read- 
 ing ; has made you feel that there was a higher life than this 
 daily one, and a brighter world than that you see ; or en- 
 couraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the in- 
 quiring, or soothed the perplexed ; if what he has said or 
 done has ever made you take interest in him, and feel well 
 inclined towards him ; remember such an one in time to come, 
 though you hear him not, and pray for him, that in all things 
 he may know God's will, and at all times he may be ready 
 to fulfil it. 
 
 Mr. J. A. Froude, a younger brother of one of 
 Newman's dearest friends, himself in a measure 
 and for a time his disciple, wrote in the once widely 
 known romance, now forgotten, The Nemesis of 
 Faith, of "that voice so keen, so preternaturally 
 sweet, whose very whisper used to thrill through 
 crowded churches, when every breath was held to 
 hear ; that calm grey eye ; those features, so stern, 
 and yet so gentle ! " 
 
 Mr. Kingsley, though of the sister university, 
 
 knew
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 183 
 
 knew well the sway that was exercised over men 
 of his own age at Oxford when he, too, charac- 
 terised that wonderful preaching in terms at once 
 of strong condemnation and unwilling admiration ; 
 and neither of the descriptions is in any degree 
 overstrained. The reader may begin by thinking 
 the sermons cold; so, in some cases, did their 
 hearers, for there is little attempt at rhetoric : pro- 
 found thoughts and logical conclusions are stated 
 in the simplest and most direct words. By degrees, 
 only, did the hearer or does the reader find him- 
 self, by accepting simple premisses, implicated in 
 thelweb of a relentless logic, and fused in the fire 
 of the preacher's intense conviction. Now and 
 then, indeed, as if unconsciously, the words rise to 
 a lofty strain almost unequalled in the language, 
 though even then the style is severe and simple, 
 stripped of all those ornaments which men usually 
 regard as eloquence. One such example is the 
 passage on music in the University Sermon on 
 The Theory of Developments in Religious Doc- 
 trines : 
 
 Let us take another instance, of an outward and earthly 
 form, or economy, under which great wonders unknown 
 seem to be typified ; I mean musical sounds, as they are ex- 
 hibited most perfectly in instrumental harmony. There are 
 seven notes in the scale ; make them fourteen ; yet what a 
 slender outfit for so vast an enterprise ! What science brings 
 so much out of so little ? Out of what poor elements does 
 
 some
 
 1 84 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 some great master in it create his new world ! Shall we say 
 that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or 
 trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day without 
 reality, without meaning ? We may do so ; and then, per- 
 haps, we shall also account the science of theology to be a 
 matter of words ; yet, as there is a divinity in the theology of 
 the Church, which those who feel cannot communicate, so is 
 there also in the wonderful creation of sublimity and beauty 
 of which I am speaking. To many men the very names 
 which the science employs are utterly incomprehensible. To 
 speak of an idea or a subject seems to be fanciful or trifling, 
 to speak of the views which it opens upon us to be childish 
 extravagance ; yet is it possible that that inexhaustible evolu- 
 tion and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intri- 
 cate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a 
 mere sound, which is gone and perishes? Can it be that 
 those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and 
 strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful im- 
 pressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in 
 us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins 
 and ends in itself ? It is not so ; it cannot be. No ; they 
 have escaped from some higher sphere ; they are the out- 
 pourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound ; 
 they are echoes from our Home, they are the voice of Angels, 
 or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living laws of Divine 
 Governance, or the Divine Attributes ; something are they 
 besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we can- 
 not utter, though mortal man, and he perhaps not other- 
 wise distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting 
 them. 
 
 It is no part of my intention to tell over again, 
 save in small measure, the story of the Tractarian 
 movement, so well told by Dr. Newman himself in 
 the Apologia. The masterly sketches of Pusey, 
 
 Keble,
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 185 
 
 Keble, Froude, and others in that work leave no- 
 thing to be desired. But though these were the 
 leaders, the party itself was not definitely formed 
 for five years after Mr. Newman became vicar of 
 St. Mary's. The year before this event, the -vates 
 sacer had indeed appeared, The Christian Year 
 having been published in 1827. For six months 
 previous to the definite formation of the party, Mr. 
 Newman was not in Oxford. At the end of 1832 
 he stood in need of rest, after the completion of the 
 History of the Arians, and went abroad with Arch- 
 deacon Froude and Mr. Hurrell Froude, for the 
 health of the latter. His body was weary, his 
 mind full of care ; fortunately for us, he threw 
 many of the thoughts of that period into verse 
 those short poems which afterwards appeared in 
 the Lyra Apostolicaj the most beautiful of them 
 all, the well-known Lead, Kindly Light, was, as he 
 has told us, written at sea in an orange-boat, be- 
 tween Palermo and Marseilles. He returned early 
 in the following July, to find that the Liberalism 
 he so much dreaded, and the reaction against it, 
 had each assumed decided shape ; and on Sunday, 
 July 14th, Mr. Keble preached his celebrated ser- 
 mon on National Apostasy, of which event Mr. 
 Newman says, " I have ever considered and kept 
 the day as the start of the religious movement of 
 1833." The first outward and visible form of the 
 
 party
 
 186 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 party was that of an "Association of Friends of 
 the Church." The leaders, or, at least, the Oxford 
 leaders, determined to put out a series of Tracts 
 for the Times, of which Mr. Newman was editor. 
 They were published at varying intervals from 
 1833 to February 1841, the date of Tract 90. 
 They were of lengths between a mere leaflet and a 
 great theological pamphlet. They were written, 
 some ad clerum, some adpopuhtm. About half a 
 dozen are, perhaps, still unforgotten ; the last only, 
 Tract 90, is of any real historical importance. 
 Before that came to be written, the party, with 
 Mr. Newman in its van, had advanced far on the 
 Homeward road, though he was not always fully 
 aware of it. Three things during that time had 
 tended to weaken his reverence for the exist- 
 ing state of things in the English Church and 
 in his own Oxford, the visible embodiment of so 
 large a portion of that church. These were the 
 suppression of the Irish sees, which proved the 
 church under the iron grasp of the state ; the 
 appointment of Dr. Hampden, an avowed liberal, 
 and, as Mr. Newman and his friends thought, 
 dangerously heretical, to the Regius Professorship 
 of Theology ; and, at the last, the establishment of 
 an English bishopric at Jerusalem. It will be 
 remembered that this last was brought about by 
 the joint action of the Prussian and English 
 
 Governments.
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 187 
 
 Governments. By such action, two important 
 principles were violated. The Anglican Church, 
 by acting with Lutherans, seemed to declare itself 
 Protestant, to consider that Episcopal orders were 
 no note of the church, but merely a convenient 
 form of church government, while the ancient 
 Patriarchate of Jerusalem was unchurched by the 
 intrusion of such a bishop. It need hardly be said 
 that against all these things the party protested, 
 and protested in vain ; yet the more they felt the 
 unsatisfactory state of things around them, the 
 more they desired to reform the English Church. 
 They held almost all Roman doctrine, but they 
 were not prepared as yet to leave that which had 
 been their home for so many happy years. The 
 Articles were, of course, the great difficulty in their 
 way. Though ritualism was not as yet, it was felt 
 that there was nothing in the words of the services, 
 or in the rubrics, necessarily inconsistent with the 
 extremes! developments of doctrine and ceremony ; 
 but the Articles drawn up by Puritan divines were 
 generally held to represent a totally different phase 
 of thought. Was the Prayer-book, then, as it has 
 been termed, only "au Elizabethan compromise"? 
 It has been said that Acts of Parliament are so 
 loosely drawn that it is possible to drive a coach 
 and four through the clauses of any one of them. 
 Mr. Newman was about to try whether he could 
 
 not
 
 188 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 not drive his coach through the clause of an Act of 
 which, on the whole, he disapproved. He tried, 
 therefore, to discover whether within the gram- 
 matical meaning of the Articles it might not be 
 possible to hold all Catholic doctrine ; nor in this 
 was there anything dishonest. In considering any 
 legal document, " the legal obligation is the measure 
 of the moral," to use the words of Mr. H. B. Wilson, 
 at a later period. If the framers of an Act of 
 Parliament decide, contrary to the desire of the 
 promoters of a railway, that it shall not go through 
 a certain valley, and it afterward be found that, 
 through some error in the drafting, the valley is 
 not exempted from its passage, no one can surely 
 complain should the promoters, or their successors 
 on the board, take their line down that valley, 
 however much the inhabitants may regret that the 
 Act was not more carefully framed. Mr. Newman 
 wished to show that, in holding certain opinions, 
 he and his friends were not what Mr. Faber, long 
 years afterward, designated as " straying under the 
 shadow of condemned propositions." He had not 
 only laid down what he thought his party might 
 legitimately hold, but he had cleared his own mind. 
 He had rendered his own position unmistakable, 
 and he had challenged his university and the 
 bench of bishops. The other party was not long 
 in taking up the gage thus flung down. The tract 
 
 appeared
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 189 
 
 appeared on February 27, 1841, and on March 8th 
 was issued a solemn protest of four of the senior 
 tutors in Oxford. The senior tutors of the other 
 colleges either agreed with Mr. Newman, or, at 
 least, did not agree with his assailants. These 
 grounded their interference, on the fact that the 
 Articles were " the text -book for tutors in their 
 theological teaching." They alleged that the tract 
 had " a tendency to mitigate beyond what charity 
 requires . . . the very serious differences which 
 separate the Church of Rome from " that of Eng- 
 land. They admitted " the necessity of allowing 
 liberty in interpreting the formularies of the church," 
 but demurred to the extent to which that liberty 
 had here been carried, and, although the editorship 
 of the whole series and the authorship of this tract 
 was an open secret, it was yet necessary to call 
 upon the editor that " some person, other than the 
 printer and publisher of the tract, should acknow- 
 ledge himself responsible for its contents." The 
 letter was signed by T. T. Churton, tutor of Brase- 
 nose ; H. B. Wilson, tutor of St. John's ; John 
 Griffiths, tutor of Wadham; and A. C. Tait, tutor 
 of Balliol. Of these, only two were afterward found 
 to be men of real weight. Mr. Churton accepted a 
 college living, and died a year or two since. Mr. 
 Griffiths has lately retired, full of years and hon- 
 oured by all, from the wardenship of Wadham, but 
 
 neither
 
 190 yOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 neither of them had at any time a claim to be called 
 a theologian. The same, indeed, may be said of 
 Dr. Tait, an energetic tutor, an excellent head- 
 master, and who, both as Bishop of London and 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, did so much to uphold 
 the dignity, honour, and firmness of the Eng- 
 lish Bench. But we suppose that many, even 
 of those who have the interest of the Church of 
 England at heart, would think it, on the whole, 
 well that her chief representative should be com- 
 monplace. The fourth, Mr. Wilson, was a man of 
 very different stamp, a theologian, and, as a writer 
 of graceful English, inferior to few. His Bampton 
 Lectures, published not long after Mr. Newman's 
 secession, were the nearest approach to a theolo- 
 gical treatise, constructed on other than Catholic 
 lines, that has been known in England for many 
 years. His aim, as laid down in those Lectures, 
 was to build up a Zwinglian school within the 
 church, and a further development of his opinions 
 was put forth in his Article in the Essays and 
 Reviews, the ablest contribution made to that 
 volume. Had his health lasted, he was the one 
 man who could have given a cohesion and a head- 
 ship to the Broad-Church party, which neither the 
 mystical piety of Mr. Maurice nor the poetic enthu- 
 siasm of Dean Stanley was ever able to furnish. 
 That river of thought has almost ceased to run 
 i within
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. igi 
 
 within the church, or dribbles away in the little 
 stream of followers of Mr. Llewellyn Davies and 
 a few writers in the Spectator, while he, who might 
 have been a leader, is stricken down by paralysis 
 and weakness of brain. 
 
 It is uncertain whether Mr. Newman would have 
 recognised that the tutors had any right to call 
 him to account, but on March I5th, a more weighty 
 appeal was made to him by an authority which he 
 was bound to respect. The Hebdomadal Board, con- 
 sisting of the vice-chancellor, the heads of houses, 
 and the proctors, resolved, "that the modes of in- 
 terpretation such as are suggested in the said tract, 
 evading rather than explaining the sense of the 
 Thirty-nine Articles, and reconciling subscription 
 to them with the adoption of errors which they 
 were designed to counteract, defeat the object, and 
 are inconsistent with the due observance of the 
 above-mentioned statutes." On this, Mr. Newman 
 at once informed the vice-chancellor that he was 
 " the author, and had the sole responsibility of the 
 tract ;" and, on an appeal from his bishop, he dis- 
 continued the series. It was the second time that 
 he had entirely submitted himself to the bishop's 
 judgment, but, on the former occasion, the cessa- 
 tion of the tracts had not been required. 
 
 The Lives of the Saints is another publication 
 with which Mr. Newman's name is connected 
 
 about
 
 1 92 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 about the same time. Although the tone of the 
 " Lives " would now be recognised by most persons 
 as Roman, it was undertaken in the same inclu- 
 sive spirit as Tract 90. Mr. Newman started it 
 with the idea that " it would be useful, as employ- 
 ing the minds of men who were in danger of run- 
 ning wild, bringing them from doctrine to history, 
 and from speculation to fact; again, as giving 
 them an interest in the English soil and the Eng- 
 lish Church, and keeping them from seeking sym- 
 pathy in Rome as she is : and further, as tending 
 to promote the spread of right views." 
 
 But no sooner was the Life of Saint Stephen 
 Harding written, than persons of great weight 
 decided that it could not proceed even from an 
 Anglican publisher, and, therefore, after the issue 
 of two numbers, Dr. Newman ceased to be editor. 
 But men still persisted in associating him in their 
 minds with the scheme ; some blamed the series, 
 because they thought of him ; others wrote in it, 
 because the idea had been his, and, if any were 
 disloyal in carrying out the work which had been 
 given them to do, their disloyalty was unfaith to 
 him. Considered as literature, the " Lives " are of 
 singular beauty and grace. It can scarcely have 
 been anticipated, even by their writers, that they 
 could ever be taken as serious history. There is 
 little attempt at original research. Legend and 
 
 admitted
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 193 
 
 admitted facts are mixed inextricably with one 
 another. 
 
 On September 18, 1843, Mr. Newman resigned 
 the living of St. Mary's. He says himself that the 
 ostensible, direct, and sufficient reason for his doing 
 so was the persevering attack of the bishops on 
 Tract 90 ; the immediate cause was the secession 
 to Rome of a young friend under his spiritual care. 
 His parochial work was over, and he withdrew still 
 more completely into his seclusion at Littlemore, 
 where, for some time past, he and a band of reli- 
 gious-minded men had been endeavouring to lead 
 a life more simple and more by rule than was pos- 
 sible in the ordinary social distractions of collegiate 
 life. Here, thrown in on his own thoughts, which 
 had been moving so long in one direction, it soon 
 became visible to himself whither they must bear 
 him ; but he had not attained certainty ; until that 
 certainty came, he felt that he could take no further 
 voluntary step. In 1845, h g began his History 
 of the Development of Doctrine, an expansion of 
 his last university sermon, preached February 2, 
 1843, an d this landed him with certainty in Rome. 
 The book remains a fragment, but it is sufficient 
 to sum up what he had taught, and to show whither 
 all his teaching tended. The argument is flawless. 
 Given the premisses from which he starts, his con- 
 clusions follow by simple rules of logic, unless it 
 
 be 
 
 N
 
 194 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 be held that an absolutely sufficient doctrine and 
 teaching are to be gained from the very letter of 
 the Bible ; and few but unlearned and unhistorical 
 persons would be found to maintain this. If it be 
 admitted that any one body of men has authority 
 to bring out explicitly and infallibly what is im- 
 plicit in simple statements and imperfect observ- 
 ances, the Catholic Church is that body, and the 
 Roman is the true Church Catholic. The only 
 escape from his conclusions is illogical, such as 
 that adopted by one who, when pushed into a cor- 
 ner on a philosophical question, said, " I admit 
 your premisses, I see the conclusion, but I decline 
 to draw it ; " or there is the bolder but more scien- 
 tific method of denying the premisses. But, in such 
 a case, knowledge, certainty, and a great deal of 
 faith are destroyed ; while all that remains is a 
 hazy speculation and a hazardous hope. 
 
 Meantime Oxford was, as we have already said, 
 still full of the spirit of him whose bodily presence 
 was secluded at Littlemore. The tracts had ceased, 
 but Tract 90 was still alive and at work. In 
 1844, Mr. Ward, fellow of Balliol, published his 
 Ideal of a Christian Ch^^rch, and, as men gazed at 
 the stately fabric raised before their imagination, it 
 was plain that the church so described, if it ever 
 had found realisation at all, had found it nowhere 
 but on the Seven Hills. In this work was to be 
 
 read
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 195 
 
 read contravention of the Articles still more 
 alarming than that of Tract 90, because it was 
 the language of an assailant, not of one who would 
 fain find terms of peace. The party so long opposed 
 to the movement endeavoured to procure Mr. 
 Ward's degradation from his degrees, and they 
 joined to the censure intended to be pronounced 
 upon him, a condemnation of Mr. Newman. The 
 number of pamphlets, addresses, memoranda, etc., 
 which this produced was so vast that even a collec- 
 tion of some of the more striking fills many thick 
 volumes, and there is no need to speak of more 
 than two or three. One is remarkable as bearing 
 out all, and more than all, that we have said of the 
 love felt for Mr. Newman by his friends. Mr. 
 Rogers, fellow of Oriel, now Lord Blachford, wrote 
 a short appeal to members of Convocation upon 
 the proposed censure of Tract 90, from which the 
 following passage may be quoted : 
 
 Those who have been ever honoured by Mr. Newman's 
 friendship must feel it dangerous to allow themselves thus to 
 speak. And yet they must speak, for no one else can appre- 
 ciate it as truly as they do. When they see the person whom 
 they have been accustomed to revere as few men are revered 
 whose labours, whose greatness, whose tenderness, whose 
 singleness and holiness of purpose they have been permitted 
 to know intimately not allowed even the poor privilege of 
 satisfying, by silence and retirement, by the relinquishment 
 of preferment, position, and influence, the persevering hos- 
 tility of persons whom they cannot help comparing with 
 
 him
 
 I 9 6 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 him not permitted even to submit in peace to these irregu- 
 lar censures, to which he seems to have been even morbidly 
 alive, but dragged forth to suffer an oblique and tardy con- 
 demnation ; called again to account for matters now long 
 ago accounted for, on which a judgment has been pro- 
 nounced, which, whatever others may think of it, he, at 
 least, has accepted as conclusive ; when they contrast his 
 merits, his submission, his treatment, which they see or know, 
 with the merits, the bearing, and the fortunes of those who 
 are doggedly pursuing him, it does become very difficult to 
 speak without sullying what it is a kind of pleasure to feel is 
 his cause by using hard words, or betraying it by not using 
 them. 
 
 But the most interesting now of all these papers 
 is a little leaflet bearing only the signature " Ne- 
 mesis," and written by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, 
 then fellow of University College. It is as fol- 
 lows : 
 
 OXFORD, February 10, 1845. 
 
 1. In 1836, Dr. Hampden was censured by Convocation 
 on an undefined charge of want of confidence. In 1845, Mr. 
 Newman and Mr. Ward are to be censured by the same 
 body. 
 
 2. In 1836, the country was panic-stricken with a fear of 
 Liberalism. In 1845, the country is panic-stricken with a 
 fear of Popery. 
 
 3. 474 was the majority that condemned Dr. Hampden. 
 474 is the number of requisitionists that induced the censure 
 on Mr. Newman. 
 
 4. The censure on Dr. Hampden was brought forward at 
 ten days' notice. The censure on Mr. Newman was brought 
 forward at ten days' notice. 
 
 5. Two proctors of decided character, and of supposed 
 
 leaning
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 197 
 
 leaning to the side of Dr. Hampden, filled the proctor's 
 office in 1836. Two proctors of decided character, and of 
 supposed leaning to the side of Mr. Newman, filled the proc- 
 tor's office in 1845. 
 
 6. The Standard newspaper headed the attack on Dr. 
 Hampden. The Standard newspaper heads the attack on 
 Mr. Ward and Mr. Newman. 
 
 7. The Globe and Morning Chronicle defended Dr. Hamp- 
 den. The Globe and Morning Chronicle defends Mr. 
 Ward. 
 
 8. The Thirty-nine Articles were elaborately contrasted 
 with the writings of Dr. Hampden as the ground of his con- 
 demnation. The Thirty-nine Articles are made the ground 
 of the condemnation of Mr. Ward and Mr. Newman. 
 
 9. The Bampton Lectures were preached four years before 
 they were censured. The goth Tract for the Times was 
 written four years before it is now proposed to be censured. 
 
 10. Two eminent lawyers pronounced the censure on Dr. 
 Hampden illegal. Two eminent lawyers have pronounced 
 the degradation of Mr. Ward illegal. 
 
 11. The Edinburgh Review denounced the mockery of a 
 judgment by Convocation then. The English Churchman 
 denounces it now. 
 
 12. And if, on the one hand, the degradation of Mr. Ward 
 is more severe than the exemptions of Dr. Hampden, on the 
 other hand, the extracts from Mr. Ward give a truer notion 
 of the Ideal than the extracts from Dr. Hampden of the 
 Bampton Lectures. 
 
 "The wheel, then, is come full circle." The victors of 
 1836 are the victims of 1845. The victims of 1845 are the 
 victims of 1836. The assailants are assailed, the assailed 
 are the assailants. The condemners are condemned, the 
 condemned are the condemners. 
 
 " The wheel is come full circle." Voters of the i3th take 
 
 this
 
 198 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 this in its true spirit not as an idle note of triumph, nor as 
 a merely striking coincidence, but as a solemn warning to 
 all who were concerned then, to all who are concerned now 
 as a sign that there are principles of justice equally appli- 
 cable to opposite cases, and that, sooner or later, their viola- 
 tion recoils on the heads of those who violated them. 
 
 " The wheel is come full circle." How soon may it come 
 round again ? Voters of the I3th deal now to your oppo- 
 nents that justice which, perhaps, you may not expect to 
 receive from them ; remembering that the surest hope of 
 obtaining mercy and justice then is by showing mercy and 
 justice now. Judge, therefore, by 1836, what should be 
 your conduct in 1845 ; and by your conduct in 1845, what 
 should be your opponent's conduct in 1856, when Puseyism 
 may be as triumphant as it is now depressed ; when none can, 
 with any face, cry for toleration then who have refused tole- 
 ration now ; or protest against a mob tribunal then, if they 
 have used it now ; or deprecate the madness of a popular 
 clamour then, if they have kindled or yielded to it now. 
 
 Making full allowance for the fact that the points 
 in dispute concern controversy in an insular church, 
 and that civilisation and culture have softened 
 manners, there was much to remind us of the Coun- 
 cils of Sardis and Soissons in the existing state of 
 Oxford when this question came before Convoca- 
 tion. The proceedings were brought to a summary 
 and dramatic close by the proctors, Mr. Guillemard, 
 fellow of Trinity, and Mr. Church, of Oriel, the pre- 
 sent Dean of St. Paul's, who exercised the power 
 they possessed of interposing their own veto on the 
 condemnation which would have been passed. It 
 
 required
 
 yOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 199 
 
 required no little courage to make this stand against 
 an angry and excited majority, and thus to save 
 the university from an unjust and dishonourable 
 action unjust, because a charge which had been 
 virtually condoned was revived ; dishonourable, 
 because the blow was aimed at Mr. Newman 
 through a second work, with which he had nothing 
 whatever to do. How little, indeed, he considered 
 Mr. Ward as the exponent of his own views is seen 
 in the curious fact that, in the Apologia pro Vita 
 Sua, Mr. Ward's name is not even mentioned. 
 When the late Dean of Westminster used to speak 
 of these times, in which he, too, began to play a 
 not inconspicuous part, he was wont to attribute 
 the collapse of the Oxford movement to Mr. Ward's 
 marriage, and to say, " solvuntur risu tabula" 
 There was, however, no real inconsistency in the 
 fact that Mr. Ward, vehemently as he upheld the 
 necessity of clerical celibacy, should have married 
 so soon as he had convinced himself that Anglican 
 orders were naught, and when about to join a church 
 in which he would be no priest ; but the event 
 had its comic side, and might, perhaps, be styled 
 the collapse, for the time, of Ward, though not the 
 collapse of the Oxford movement. This really 
 came from the secession of Mr. Newman. In that 
 was gathered up and brought to an end the strife 
 of many anxious years. It, and nothing else, made 
 
 men
 
 200 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 men who had followed him so long almost unques- 
 tioningly, ask themselves, " Am I prepared also to 
 go ?" and in the " No " of many there was not only 
 the unavoidable pause, but a resistance to further 
 advance. Those so long carried forward by the 
 current were stranded and became fixed. The tide 
 ebbed away and left them there. It gathered 
 strength again and came on in its new phase of 
 ritualism, but, opposed by them in some instances, 
 has passed it, but not changed or moved themi 
 Their convictions were fixed when Newman left ; 
 they have felt no further duty, as certainly they 
 have had no inclination, to ask themselves again 
 the questions of that time. It is not, however, 
 unnatural that Dean Stanley should have taken 
 the view he did. He was always a little inclined 
 to minimise the Oxford movement. Great as was 
 his tolerance when he looked at anything from the 
 side of the affections, he was yet intellectually some- 
 what intolerant ; with all his courteous allowance 
 there was ever mingled a something of scorn for 
 that which he did not wholly understand. 
 
 And so the end had come. The foremost man 
 in the English Church was content to send for the 
 humble Italian monk, Father Dominic, the Pas- 
 sionist, and, falling at his feet, to ask reception into 
 the Roman Church. At the call of conscience he 
 had already resigned preferment and leadership ; 
 
 he
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 20! 
 
 he now abandoned home and nearly all his friends ; 
 for ease he accepted comparative poverty ; for rule 
 over others he took on him obedience ; " et cxiit 
 nescient quo irei" 
 
 II. 
 
 For a while after his reception, Mr. Newman 
 proposed to devote himself to some secular calling, 
 but Cardinal Wiseman, in whose hands he had 
 placed himself, decided otherwise ; and, indeed, it 
 must have been obvious to all the leading mem- 
 bers of the church which now had gained him, 
 that so great gifts of preaching, such deep theolo- 
 gical learning, so keen a power of analysing the 
 workings of the human heart, should be available 
 for the service of the priesthood. In the intervals 
 of the close study at Rome which the change of 
 belief required, he relaxed his mind by writing the 
 extremely interesting story, Loss and Gain. A 
 friend, also a convert, related not long since how, 
 in the winter of 1847, he was a very constant visitor 
 to Dr. Newman, and was puzzled at finding him so 
 frequently laughing to himself over the manuscript 
 on which he was then engaged, till he said : " You 
 do not know what I have been doing. Poor Burns," 
 the late high church publisher, "a convert like our- 
 selves, has got into difficulties owing to his change 
 of faith, and I am going to give him this manu- 
 script
 
 202 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 script to see if it may not help him a little out of 
 them." 
 
 Of course, Dr. Newman is to be believed im- 
 plicity when he tells us that none of the characters 
 in this little romance of Oxford life are drawn from 
 nature ; real persons were, he says, far from his 
 thoughts. Free use was made, however, of sayings 
 and doings which were characteristic of the time 
 and place in which the scene was laid, and he 
 admits that " it is impossible that, when a general 
 truth or fact is exhibited in individual specimens 
 of it, an ideal representation should not more or 
 less coincide, in spite of the author's endeavour, 
 or even without his recognition, with its existing 
 instances or champions." And so it came to pass 
 that, whether intended or not, the book was a pre- 
 sentation, on the somewhat lighter side, of not 
 only the conflicting opinions, but of the men who 
 had held them, in Oxford during the late years. 
 It exhibits the author's good-humoured and more 
 playful sarcasm. We shall see presently what he 
 could do in this strain when he thought the time 
 was fitting for its still more vigorous use. 
 
 The history of his religious opinions, we are told, 
 ended with his conversion ; and though this is 
 strictly true, since he who accepts the Roman 
 system accepts it in faith and as an unchangeable 
 whole, yet that development which Dr. Newman 
 
 claimed
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 203 
 
 claimed for doctrine in the church takes place 
 also in the life of the individual. Each dogma 
 which he held implicitly, some, perhaps, uncon- 
 sciously, had to be brought out and formularised 
 in his Roman retirement. Each that at first was 
 only a faith had to be grasped afterward by the 
 reason, and put into its proper relation with other 
 tenets. Again, since his reception into the Roman 
 Church, certain great doctrines, hitherto undefined, 
 have been dogmatically fixed, and until they were 
 so, he, with other divines, was free to take either 
 side of the controversy concerning them. Before 
 the definition of any dogma, it is in the very nature 
 of things that the matter shall be weighed, dis- 
 cussed, arguments for and against heard. Hence 
 it is quite possible that in regard to these Cardinal 
 Newman's attitude of mind may not be precisely 
 that which it was in the early days of his conver- 
 sion ; but this is not to say that there has been any 
 change in his religious opinions. What he ac- 
 cepted, he accepted once for all. His mind has 
 been at rest. He has possibly not always seen 
 the same aspect of divine truth ; the doctrines have 
 developed in his mind as the whole system of 
 Catholic doctrine has developed in the church at 
 large. But all his mental progress must have 
 seemed to him like stepping from firm to ever 
 firmer ground, or, at least, to the increasing assur- 
 ance
 
 204 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 ance that under his feet was solid rock. For the 
 Church of England, in so far as it had been pos- 
 sible to hold in it Catholic truth, and in so far as 
 its offices had fostered devotion, he has been full 
 of affectionate memories. In so far as it has been 
 regarded by him as a Protestant establishment, he 
 has had nothing but scorn. Two short passages 
 will give his attitude of mind as he regarded his 
 past from those two stand-points : 
 
 Why should I deny to your memory what is so pleasant in 
 mine? Cannot I, too, look back on many years past and 
 many events in which I myself experienced what is now your 
 confidence ? Can I forget the happy life I have led all my 
 days, with no cares, no anxieties worth remembering with- 
 out desolateness, or fever of thought, or gloom of mind, or 
 doubt of God's love to me, and Providence over me? Can 
 I forget I never can forget the day when, in my youth, I 
 first bound myself to the ministry of God in that old church 
 of St. Frideswide, the patroness of Oxford ? nor how I wept 
 most abundant and most sweet tears when I thought what I 
 then had become, though I looked on ordination as no 
 sacramental rite, nor even to baptism ascribed any super- 
 natural virtue ? Can I wipe out from my memory, or wish 
 to wipe out, those happy Sunday mornings, light or dark, 
 year after year, when I celebrated your communion rite in 
 my own church of St. Mary's, and, in the pleasantness and 
 joy of it, heard nothing of the strife of tongues which sur- 
 rounded its walls? When, too, shall I not feel the soothing 
 recollection of those dear years which I spent in retirement, 
 in preparation for my deliverance from Egypt, asking for 
 light, and by degrees gaining it, with less of temptation in 
 my heart and sin on my conscience than ever before ? 
 
 But,
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 205 
 
 But, on the other hand, he says : 
 
 We see in the English Church, I will not merely say no 
 descent from the first ages, and no relationship to the Church 
 in other lands, but we see no body politic of any kind ; we 
 see nothing more or less than an establishment, a depart- 
 ment of Government, or a function or operation of the state, 
 without a substance, a mere collection of officials, de- 
 pending on and living in the supreme civil power. Its unity 
 and personality are gone, and with them its power of exciting 
 feelings of any kind. It is easier to love or hate an abstrac- 
 tion than so commonplace a framework or mechanism. We 
 regard it neither with anger, nor with aversion, nor with 
 contempt, any more than with respect or interest. It is but 
 one aspect of the state, or mode of civil governance ; it is 
 responsible for nothing ; it can appropriate neither praise nor 
 blame ; but whatever feeling it raises is to be referred on, by 
 the nature of the case, to the Supreme Power whom it repre- 
 sents, and whose will is its breath. And hence it has no real 
 identity of existence in distinct periods, unless the present 
 Legislature or the present Court can affect to be the off- 
 spring and disciple of its predecessor. Nor can it in con- 
 sequence be said to have any antecedents, or any future ; or 
 to live, except in the passing moment. As a thing without 
 a soul, it does not contemplate itself, define its intrinsic 
 constitution, or ascertain its position. It has no traditions ; 
 it cannot be said to think ; it does not know what it holds, 
 and what it does not ; it is not even conscious of its own ex- 
 istence. It has no love for its members, or what are some- 
 times called its children, nor any instinct whatever, unless 
 attachment to its master, or love of its place, may be so 
 called. Its fruits, as far as they are good, are to be made 
 much of, as long as they last, for they are transient, and 
 without succession ; its former champions of orthodoxy are 
 no earnest of orthodoxy now ; they died, and there was no 
 reason why they should be reproduced. Bishop is not like 
 
 bishop,
 
 206 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 bishop, more than king is like king, or ministry like ministry, 
 its Prayer-book is an Act of Parliament of two centuries ago, 
 and its cathedrals and its chapter-houses are the spoils of 
 Catholicism. 
 
 While it was still uncertain in what special post 
 Dr. Newman's great powers could be used in 
 England, he was attracted by the elasticity, beauty, 
 and usefulness of the Oratorian congregation in 
 Rome, and, with the full consent of the Pope, he 
 was the first to introduce the Oratorians into 
 England. The congregation of the Oratory had 
 gradually grown up around St. Philip Neri toward 
 the middle of the sixteenth century, and was for- 
 mally approved in 1575. The Oratorians "are 
 secular priests without vows, bound together by 
 the simple tie of charity. Their aim is the conver- 
 sion and sanctification of souls by means of prayer, 
 daily preaching, and frequentation of sacraments." 
 St. Philip made few rules, but would have these 
 perfectly kept. The character of the Oratorians at 
 this present day is as at their foundation ; each 
 congregation is independent of the others ; each 
 priest is free to go when he will ; but the simple 
 life that they live together is very beautiful, and 
 the various works of preaching, education, and the 
 like most efficiently and admirably performed. It 
 is an interesting fact that Dr. Newman himself 
 gives, as the remote cause of his attraction to the 
 
 Oratory,
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 207 
 
 Oratory, Ranke's Sketch of St. Philip, History 
 of the Popes, Bk. IV., Sec. 10, "On the Roman 
 Curia." It had struck him while still in the Angli- 
 can Church. This was a curious passage in which 
 to find the germ of a vocation. 
 
 While he was working at Birmingham, in 1851, 
 occurred the first event which brought Dr. New- 
 man again prominently before the world, from 
 which he had to so large an extent retired. He 
 gave a course of lectures on The Position of 
 Catholics in England, addressed to the brethren 
 of the Oratory, exposing in a lively manner some 
 of the vast number of misconceptions which have 
 attached themselves to Catholics in England. In 
 words at once indignant and pathetic, he explained 
 how a number of gentlemen who had devoted 
 themselves to live a religious life, and who would 
 build a house for their own accommodation, were 
 exposed to the most malignant insinuations from 
 persons " who peeped into the underground brick- 
 work and were curious about the drains," to dis- 
 cover colls of imprisonment, or even places of 
 murder, which must, they thought, necessarily 
 exist in every Catholic establishment ; and he was 
 not unnaturally indignant that the religious world 
 of Birmingham should consider that these malignant 
 insinuations gained some colour from the words of 
 those who, profligate in life, and false in tongue, 
 
 had
 
 208 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 had left the Roman Church, not because they were 
 no longer able to agree with its dogmas intellectu- 
 ally, but because moral rules were disagreeable 
 to them, and because denouncing an unpopular 
 religion was easier than leading a virtuous and 
 cleanly life. Foremost among these persons was 
 a certain Father Achilli, an Italian, an ex-Domini- 
 can monk, who had been lecturing at the Birming- 
 ham town hall against the church he had left, and 
 to which he had been a disgrace. " It is, indeed, 
 our great confusion," said Dr. Newman, "that our 
 Holy Mother could have had a priest like him." 
 What more he said need not be quoted ; though 
 necessary at the time, it is not now edifying to lay 
 bare the scandals of an evil life, exposed as they 
 were by a master of indignant eloquence. Every 
 word of his burning accusation was true, and even 
 less than the truth, but it was actionable according 
 to our singular English law of libel. Dr. Newman 
 was prosecuted, and by the Court of Queen's Bench 
 condemned to pay a fine of one hundred pounds ; 
 but Father Achilli was disposed of once for all. The 
 price was a cheap one to pay for having finally 
 routed such a rascal, while with his exposure fell a 
 large part of the hinted accusations against the 
 Birmingham Oratorians. It is recognised by all 
 fair-minded men and women that, in England at 
 least, Catholics are much like other people, and 
 
 that
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 209 
 
 that they do not, because they happen to hold 
 certain opinions about the jurisdiction of the 
 Bishop of Rome, and about the supernatural in 
 this world and the next, necessarily secrete horns 
 and grow a tail. 
 
 In the same lectures Dr. Newman incidentally 
 refuted one very common statement, which had 
 been made in regard to his position as a Catholic 
 in England. It was the fashion to say that a man 
 of his intellect must have accepted the Roman 
 faith with reservations ; that it was impossible he 
 could believe all the Church taught y that he was 
 a Protestant among Catholics, holding only what 
 his reason could accept, and leaving all the rest on 
 one side ; but the fact was far otherwise. Here 
 are his own words in contradiction : 
 
 The Catholic Church, from east to west, from north to 
 south, is, according to our conceptions, hung with miracles. 
 The store of relics is inexhaustible ; they are multiplied through 
 all lands, and each particle of each has in it at least a dor- 
 mant, perhaps an energetic, virtue of supernatural operation. 
 At Rome there is the true cross, the crib of Bethlehem, and 
 the chair of St. Peter ; portions of the crown of thorns are 
 kept at Paris ; the holy coat is shown at Treves ; the winding- 
 sheet at Turin ; at Monza, the iron crown is formed out of a 
 Nail of the Cross ; and another Nail is claimed for the 
 Duomo of Milan ; and pieces of our Lady's habit are to be 
 seen in the Escurial. The Agnus Dei, blessed medals, the 
 scapular, the cord of St. Francis, all are the medium of 
 Divine manifestations and graces. Crucifixes have bowed 
 the head to the suppliant, and Madonnas have bent their 
 
 eyes
 
 210 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 eyes upon assembled crowds. St. Januarius's blood liquefies 
 periodically at Naples, and St. Winifred's well is the scene 
 of wonders even in our unbelieving country. Women are 
 marked with the sacred stigmata ; blood has flowed on 
 Fridays from their five wounds, and their heads are crowned 
 with a circle of lacerations. Relics are ever touching the 
 sick, the diseased, the wounded ; sometimes with no result 
 at all, at other times with marked and undeniable efficacy. 
 Who has not heard of the abundant favours gained by the 
 intercession of the Blessed Virgin, and of the marvellous 
 consequences which have attended the invocation of St. 
 Antony of Padua? These phenomena are sometimes re- 
 ported of Saints in their life-time, as well as after death, 
 especially if they were evangelists or martyrs. The wild 
 beasts crouched before their victims in the Roman amphi- 
 theatre ; the axe-man was unable to sever St. Cecilia's head 
 from her body, and St. Peter elicited a spring of water for 
 his jailor's baptism in the Mamertine. St. Francis Xavier 
 turned salt water into fresh for five hundred travellers ; St. 
 Raymond was transported over the sea on his cloak ; St. 
 Andrew shone brightly in the dark ; St. Scholastica gained 
 by her prayers a pouring rain ; St. Paul was fed by ravens ; 
 and St. Frances saw her guardian Angel. I need not con- 
 tinue the catalogue ; here, what one party urges, the other 
 admits ; they join issue over a fact ; that fact is the claim of 
 miracles on the part of the Catholic Church ; it is the Pro- 
 testants' charge, and it is our glory. 
 
 I must give one specimen, also, of how in these 
 most telling lectures his pathos passes into sarcasm, 
 his sarcasm into impassioned argument, when he 
 endeavours to explain the manner in which the 
 Church of Rome uses images ; and in a passage 
 of great humour he shows that the Protestant 
 
 practice
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 211 
 
 practice is not so different as it is the fashion to 
 represent it : 
 
 A Protestant blames Catholics for showing honour to 
 images ; yet he does it himself. And first, he sees no diffi- 
 culty in a mode of treating them quite as repugnant to his 
 own ideas of what is rational as the practice he abominates ; 
 and that is, the offering insult and mockery to them. Where 
 is the good sense of showing dishonour, if it be stupid and 
 brutish to show honour? Approbation and criticism, praise 
 and blame go together. I do not mean, of course, that you 
 dishonour what you honour ; but that the two ideas of honour 
 and dishonour so go together, that where you fan apply, 
 rightly or wrongly, but still where it impossible to apply to 
 one, it is possible to apply the other. Tell me, then, what 
 is meant by burning bishops, or cardinals, or popes, in 
 effigy? has it no meaning? is it not plainly intended for an 
 insult ? Would any one who was burned in effigy feel it no 
 insult? Well, then, how is it not absurd to feel pain at 
 being dishonoured in effigy, yet absurd to feel pleasure at 
 being honoured in effigy ? How is it childish to honour an 
 image, if it is not childish to dishonour it ? This only can a 
 Protestant say in defence of the act which he allows and 
 practises, that he is used to it, whereas to the other he is not 
 used. Honour is a new idea it comes strange to him; and, 
 wonderful to say, he does not see that he has admitted it in 
 principle already, in admitting dishonour ; and after preach- 
 ing against the Catholic who crowns an image of the 
 Madonna, he complacently goes his way, and sets light to a 
 straw effigy of Guy Fawkes. 
 
 But this is not all ; Protestants actually set up images to 
 represent their heroes, and they show them honour without 
 any misgiving. The very flower and cream of Protestantism 
 used to glory in the statue of King William on College 
 Green, Dublin ; and, though I cannot make any reference 
 
 in
 
 212 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 in print, I recollect well what a shriek they raised, some 
 years ago, when the figure was unhorsed. Some profane 
 person one night applied gunpowder, and blew the king 
 right out of his saddle ; and he was found by those who took 
 interest in him, like Dagon, on the ground. You might have 
 thought the poor, senseless block had life, to see the way 
 people took on about it, and how they spoke of his face, his 
 arms, and his legs ; yet those same Protestants, I say, would 
 at the same time be horrified had I used " he " and "him " 
 of a crucifix, and would call me one of the monsters described 
 in the Apocalypse did I but honour my living Lord as they 
 their dead king. 
 
 In 1852 Dr. Newman, who had, both in Oxford 
 and at Birmingham, shown the deep interest he 
 took in education, and his ability as a teacher, was 
 called from his post at Birmingham to be rector for 
 a time of the Catholic University in Dublin. We 
 need not deal with this episode in his life further 
 than to say that his residence in Dublin drew from 
 him one of his most interesting books his nine 
 lectures on The Idea of a University Defined and 
 Illustrated, in which his recollections of what Ox- 
 ford was at its best, and his former dreams of what 
 it might become, were happily blended with a larger 
 vision of some greater Oxford in a once more 
 Catholic land. But after this short episode was 
 over he returned again to his quiet work at Bir- 
 mingham, content to be obscure and unknown, 
 except to his spiritual children. Once more, how- 
 ever, by no means through his own seeking, he 
 
 came
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 213 
 
 came forward in controversy, and was able to put 
 before his countrymen a statement and an expla- 
 nation of his life and his religious opinions. It 
 seemed good to Mr. Kingsley, an eager contro- 
 versialist, when anxious to maintain that truth for 
 its own sake was not esteemed a virtue by Roman 
 ecclesiastics, to put Dr. Newman's name forward 
 as an example of what he was saying. It is prob- 
 able that he at first used Dr. Newman's name only 
 as a concrete way of expressing the Roman priest- 
 hood. It was the mightiest English name, but he 
 could not have lighted on a more unlucky instance. 
 The Apologia pro Vita Sua was the answer to what 
 its author says " was the impression of large classes 
 of men, the impression twenty years ago, and the 
 impression now." 
 
 There has been a general feeling that I was for years 
 where I had no right to be; that I was a "Romanist" in 
 Protestant livery and service ; that I was doing the work of 
 a hostile Church in the bosom of the English Establishment, 
 and knew it, or ought to have known it. There was no need 
 of arguing about particular passages in my writings when the 
 fact was so patent, as men thought it to be. 
 
 But the English mind, if suspicious, is not on 
 the whole unfair, and it is quick to recognise the 
 ring of truth. When, therefore, Dr. Newman at 
 last spoke out, men saw directly that here was very 
 fact. A life was laid before them bare to its inmost 
 cell. Although the writer had for years felt "secre- 
 
 tum
 
 214 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 turn meum mihi" he at last spoke out all that he 
 had to say, and his countrymen believed him. 
 However they may differ, however some of them 
 may abhor the opinions which he holds, however 
 dangerous to the well-being of society at large and 
 to many individuals they may think them, they 
 have recognised that here at least is one who holds 
 the opinions he does, because he honestly believes 
 they are the best guides and safeguards to wander- 
 ing men, because they tend to produce holy, happy, 
 and consistent lives. There are few more touching 
 dedications to any man or company of men than 
 that in which Dr. Newman inscribes his History of 
 My Religious Opinions to his brethren of the 
 Oratory. I must quote the closing words : 
 
 In you that is, in those to whom he dedicates his 
 book I gather up and bear in memory those familiar, 
 affectionate companions and counsellors who in Oxford were 
 given to me, one after another, to be my daily solace and 
 relief ; and all those others, of great name and high example, 
 who were my thorough friends, and showed me true attach- 
 ment in times long past ; and also those many younger men, 
 whether I knew them or not, who have never been disloyal 
 to me by word or deed ; and of all these thus various in 
 their relations to me, those more especially who have since 
 joined the Catholic Church. 
 
 And I earnestly pray for this whole company, with a hope 
 against hope, that all of us, who were once so united, and 
 so happy in our union, may even now be brought at length, 
 by the Power of the Divine Will, into One Fold and under 
 One Shepherd. 
 
 And
 
 HENRY NEWMAN. 215 
 
 And so, having nobly vindicated himself, he was 
 again silent, publishing only from time to time collec- 
 tions of his former works, and as a new contribu- 
 tion to literature The Grammar of Assent, in which 
 he put forward arguments satisfactory to his own 
 mind for Theism, for Christianity, and for the 
 Catholic religion. Every intelligent Catholic would 
 be ready to admit that, though in the Church faith 
 is one, the schools of thought and shades of feeling 
 are more than one ; that the late Pope did not 
 perhaps belong to the same school as the present, 
 certainly had not always the same feeling and tone ; 
 and that it was unlikely that one called to the highest 
 eminence in the church under the present Pontiff 
 should have been selected by Pio Nono. It is said, 
 however, by one likely to be well informed on this 
 subject, that had the late Pope known, or been 
 allowed to know, about Dr. Newman all that his 
 successor knew, he would have probably bestowed 
 the same honour. In his residence at Gaeta, in 
 1849, Pio Nono spoke of Dr. Newman in terms of 
 high, even enthusiastic, admiration. But another 
 school of thought was preponderant in his councils, 
 and the Pope in Italy may not always have been 
 conversant with English thought. None can fairly 
 blame a dominant party for promoting its own 
 men, but the party was narrow and provincial. 
 As Dr. Newman has himself said : "The rock of 
 
 St.
 
 216 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 St. Peter enjoys at its summit a pure and serene 
 atmosphere, but there is " was then especially " a 
 great deal of Roman malaria at the foot of it." By 
 the present Pope, Dr. Newman's long services have 
 been rewarded by the highest dignity in his power 
 to bestow. And he added to his gift by dispensing 
 the Cardinal from all those duties and services 
 which might have been burdensome to him at his 
 great age, and to one who for so long had lived 
 apart from the stir of the world in his peaceful 
 home at Edgbaston. 
 
 It will not be to trespass unduly on his privacy 
 to give those who have not seen it some glimpse 
 of what that home is, and what is the life within it. 
 Above the dingy streets of Birmingham, and within 
 short distance of the open, still wild and beautiful 
 country, spread the broad roads of Edgbaston, with 
 their wide gardens and villas, their shrubberies 
 which sift the smoke, and in spring, at least, are 
 bright with lilac and laburnum. The Oratory 
 fronting one of these roads, within sight of thickets 
 and sound of singing birds, is an imposing brick 
 building, with spacious corridors and well-propor- 
 tioned rooms within. Each father has his own com- 
 fortable room, library and bedroom in one, the bed 
 within a screen, the crucifix above, and the prized 
 personal little fittings on the walls. The library is 
 full of valuable books, many of them once the 
 
 private
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 217 
 
 private property of Dr. Newman, now forming the 
 nucleus of a stately collection for the use of the 
 community. The quiet men who share this home 
 come and go about their several businesses the 
 care of the school, whose buildings join but are 
 separate from the Oratory proper, the work in the 
 church, in hearing confessions, saying masses, and 
 preaching. In the house the long soutane and 
 biretta are worn ; to go abroad they wear the usual 
 dress of the clergy in England. Perhaps it is the 
 dinner hour, and the silent figures pass along the 
 galleries to the refectory, a lofty room with many 
 small tables, and a pulpit at one end opposite the 
 tables. At one of these sits the superior alone, clad 
 like the rest, save the red lines of his biretla which 
 mark his cardinal's rank. But among his children, 
 and in his home, he is still more the superior and 
 the father than a prince of the church. At a table 
 near him may, perhaps, be a guest, and at others, 
 the members of the community, two and two. The 
 meal is served by two of the fathers who take this 
 office in turn, and it is only of late that Dr. New- 
 man has himself ceased to take his part in this 
 brotherly service, owing to his advanced years. 
 During the meal a novice reads from the pulpit a 
 chapter of the Bible, then a short passage from the 
 life of St. Philip Neri, and then from some book, 
 religious or secular, of general interest. The silence 
 
 is
 
 218 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 is otherwise unbroken save for the words needful 
 in serving the meal. Toward the end, one of the 
 fathers proposes two questions for discussion, or 
 rather, for utterance of opinion. On one day there 
 was a point of Biblical criticism proposed, and one 
 of ecclesiastical etiquette, if the word may be 
 allowed, whether, if a priest called in haste to 
 administer Extreme Unction, did so inadvertently 
 with the sacred oil set apart for another purpose, 
 instead of that for Unction, the act were gravely 
 irregular. Each gave his opinion on one or other 
 of these questions, the Cardinal on the first, gravely, 
 and in well-chosen words. Yet it seemed to the 
 observer, that, while he, no doubt, recognised that 
 such a point must be decided and might have its 
 importance, there was a certain impatience in the 
 manner in which he passed by the ritual question 
 and fastened on that proposed from Scripture. 
 After this short religious exercise, the company 
 passed into another room for a frugal dessert and 
 glass of wine, since the day chanced to be a feast, 
 and there was much to remind an Oxford man of 
 an Oxford common room, the excellent talk some- 
 times to be heard there, and the dignified unbend- 
 ing for a while from serious thought. 
 
 As might be inferred from the passage on music 
 quoted above, which none but a musician could 
 have written, Dr. Newman once took great delight 
 
 in
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 219 
 
 in the violin, which he played with considerable 
 skill. Even now the fathers hear occasionally the 
 tones awakened by the old man's hand ring down 
 the long gallery near his room, and know that he 
 has not lost the art he loved, while he calms a 
 mind excited from without, or rests from strenuous 
 labour, in the creation of sweet sound. He is still 
 a very early riser, punctual as the sun, still preaches 
 often with what may be best described in words he 
 has applied to St. Philip, " thy deep simplicity." 
 
 The Cardinal has of late been engaged on a 
 careful revision, in the light of modern researches, 
 of his translation of St. Athanasius, with notes of 
 some treatises of St. Athanasius against the Arians. 
 He regards this as the end of his life's work a life 
 which is now appreciated and honoured not only 
 by his spiritual sons, but by all fair-minded men of 
 English speech. 
 
 May he long remain in the possession of bodily 
 ease and intellectual vigour ! Long may it be be- 
 fore any life of him has to be written! Till that 
 day comes, when his loving friends shall gather 
 such private letters and memoranda as he may 
 have desired should be given to the world, he who 
 would speak of Cardinal Newman is bound, what- 
 ever his sources of information, to trench but little 
 on any but published matter. One such paper, 
 however, may be given. The following memor- 
 andum
 
 220 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 andum was written in answer to an inquirer, who 
 wished to know the Catholic view on certain sub- 
 jects, not in themselves the most important, but 
 which were at the time of interest to him, and each 
 of which answered incidentally several other ques- 
 tions of the same sort. With these few words of 
 explanation the following paper explains itself : 
 
 Very little has been formally determined by the church on 
 the subject of the authority of Scripture further than this, 
 that it is one of the two channels given to us by which the 
 salutaris veritas and the morum disciplina, in the words of 
 the Council of Trent, which our Lord and his apostles 
 taught, are carried down from age to age to the end of the 
 world. In this sense Scripture is the " word of God," i.e., 
 the written word. 
 
 There has been no formal definition on the part of the 
 church that Scripture is inspired. 
 
 It is defined that Almighty God is auctor utrivsque Testa- 
 menti. I do not know of any definition that he is auctor 
 omnium librorum which belong to each Testament. 
 
 But it is not to be supposed that, because there is no 
 definition on the part of the church that Scripture is inspired 
 therefore we are at liberty at once to deny it. 
 
 1. First, St. Paul's words cannot be passed over omnis 
 scriptura divinitus inspirata, 
 
 2. Next, the very strong opinion on the subject of the 
 early fathers must be taken into account. 
 
 3. Thirdly, the universal feeling, or <}>p6rri/w, of the Church 
 in every age down to the present time. 
 
 4. The consent of all divines, which, whatever their dif- 
 ferences on the subject in detail, is clear so far as this, viz., 
 that Scripture is true. This, when analysed, I consider to 
 signify this, viz., " Truth in the sense in which the inspired 
 
 writer,
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 221 
 
 writer, or, at least, the Holy Ghost, meant it, and means to 
 convey it to us." 
 
 Thus, though it be not proposed to us by the church de 
 fide that we should accept the doctrine of the inspiration of 
 Scripture, only that we must accept all the church teaches us 
 to be in Scripture and teaches us out of Scripture, yet it is 
 a matter of duty, for the first reasons I have given, not to 
 encourage, to spread, or to defend doubts about its inspira- 
 tion. 
 
 As to the extent of its inspiration, I do not see that the 
 Council of Trent speaks of it as the authoritative channel of 
 doctrine in other matters than faith and morals ; but here, 
 besides the four considerations above set down, I would 
 observe that it is often a most hazardous process to attempt 
 to enunciate faith and morals out of the sacred text which 
 contains them. It is not a work for individuals. At last it 
 has been felt and understood that faith and morals are not 
 involved in a doctrine which Scripture seems to teach, that 
 the earth is fixed and the sun moves over it. The time was 
 necessary to ascertain the fact, viz. , that the earth does move, 
 and therefore that the divine Spirit did not dictate these ex- 
 pressions of Scripture which imply that it does not, rather 
 that He did not mean to convey that notion by these ex- 
 pressions. 
 
 As to the questions you put to me, I do not see anything 
 in the text of Scripture which obliges us, or even leads us, 
 to consider the six days of Genesis i. to be literal days. 
 
 The literal accuracy of the history of Jonah, or that of 
 Elisha, rests upon a different principle, viz., whether miracles 
 are possible, and to be expected. I see no difficulty in be- 
 lieving that iron, on a particular occasion, had the lightness 
 of wood, if it is the will of God in any case to work miracles, 
 i.e. t to do something contrary to general experience. And, 
 while I say the same of Jonah and the whale, I feel the addi- 
 tional grave and awful hazard how to attempt to eny the 
 
 history
 
 222 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 history without irreverence toward the express teaching of 
 the incarnate God. 
 
 It would ill become me to dare to pronounce a 
 critical judgment on Dr. Newman, except so far as 
 such judgment is involved in any account of the 
 man and his works. The scales of comparison at 
 the disposal of the writer are too small to weigh 
 and judge so great an intellect, such deep learning, 
 such subtle literary skill, as is possessed by Car- 
 dinal Newman. I can only say that, during the 
 last few months, I have re-read a very large part 
 of what he has written, always with fresh admira- 
 tion and even wonder. 
 
 One word, however, may be permitted of Cardinal 
 Newman, considered as a poet, in addition to what 
 comes out incidentally in the foregoing sketch. If 
 I have said little hitherto of his poetry, it is not 
 that I am unmindful of it. Who can forget that 
 the lyric Lead, Kindly Light has found its way 
 into almost every hymnal? Who can ignore the 
 wonderful Dream of Gerontius^ in which the 
 peaceful and beautiful side of the doctrine of 
 purgatory is presented to all who can receive it ? 
 His poetry, however, is to be found chiefly in the 
 beautiful thoughts scattered through his prose 
 rather than in the form of verses. These have 
 been the lighter flowers of his literature, and, grace- 
 ful
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 223 
 
 ful as they are, are not those by which he is to be 
 judged. 
 
 Few, however, who know the gravity and great- 
 ness of such a mind would have been prepared for 
 the flower of religious fancy which broke forth in 
 his Valentine to a Little Ctrl : 
 
 Little maiden, dost thou pine 
 For a faithful Valentine ? 
 Art thou scanning timidly 
 Every face that meets thine eye? 
 Art thou fancying there may be 
 Fairer face than thou dost see ? 
 Little maiden, scholar mine, 
 Wouldst thou have a Valentine ? 
 
 Go and ask, my little child, 
 Ask the Mother undefiled : 
 Ask, for she will draw thee near, 
 And will whisper in thine ear : 
 "Valentine ! the name is good ; 
 
 For it comes of lineage high, 
 
 And a famous family : 
 And it tells of gentle blood, 
 Noble blood, and nobler still, 
 
 For its owner freely poured 
 Every drop there was to spill 
 
 In the quarrel of his Lord. 
 Valentine ! I know the name ; 
 Many martyrs bear the same, 
 And they stand in glittering ring 
 Round their warrior God and King, 
 
 Who before and for them bled, 
 
 With their robes of ruby red ; 
 And their swords with cherub flame."
 
 224 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. 
 
 Yes ! there is plenty there, 
 Knights without reproach or fear, 
 Such St. Denys, such St. George, 
 Martin, Maurice, Theodore, 
 And a hundred thousand more, 
 Guerdon gained and warfare o'er 
 By that sea without a surge. 
 
 And beneath the eternal sky, 
 And the beatific Sun 
 
 In Jerusalem above, 
 Valentine is every one ; 
 Choose from out that company 
 Whom to serve, and whom to love. 
 
 But it is time to draw these words to an end. 
 My readers will have had enough of the interpreter, 
 who trusts that he has not said so much as to 
 weary them, but that he may have succeeded in 
 imparting something of his own reverence and 
 affection to some who knew only as a name this 
 man, so old with the weight of honoured years, 
 but, in ecclesiastical dignity, the youngest English 
 cardinal. 
 
 1882.
 
 Printed by BALLANTYNT*. HANSON' & CO. 
 a nit London
 
 A 000 088 756 2 

 
 I