OF THE 
 
 PW PIT APT 1 
 
 : '. .
 
 x^ 7 - - / 
 
 /# (/^US^Ji /S^s" 
 
 
 EEY. CHAELES WICKSTEED, B.A.
 
 MEMORIALS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 REV. CHARLES WICKSTEED, B.A. 
 
 EDITED BY HIS SON 
 
 PHILIP HENEY. 
 
 WILLIAMS AND NORGATE, 
 
 14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON; 
 AND 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH. 
 
 1886.
 
 LONDON : 
 
 PRINTED BY C. GREEN AND SOX, 
 178. STRAND.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THIS volume has been prepared in answer to a request 
 urged upon me by many of my father's friends. And it is 
 now published by them ; though the entire responsibility for 
 its form and substance rests with myself. 
 
 In the Biographical Sketch, I have made no attempt to 
 define the place which belongs to my father in the history of 
 the Church for which he laboured during the best years of 
 his life, or the nature and extent of the services he rendered 
 it; and had I felt disposed to do so, I should have been 
 rebuked by a letter of gentle expostulation which he once 
 wrote to a friend who felt hurt and injured by the omission 
 of a loved and honoured name from a record in which it might 
 naturally have been looked for. The world has no time, he 
 urges, to attend very closely to the details both of the past 
 and the present, to keep a minute register of its obligations 
 both to the living and to the dead, to do its own work and 
 keep in memory the exact proportions of the work of others. 
 The past, even our own past if we live long, is obliterated by 
 the very forces that sustain the present and reach out to the 
 future. And it is well that it should be so. 
 
 206G200
 
 Vl PREFACE. 
 
 But amongst those memories of the past that we cannot 
 willingly allow to die, is the influence of every strongly 
 marked human individuality, the strength of every human 
 friendship. And it has been my object in this volume to 
 catch and set down, if I might, the living expression and 
 movement of a man whom many loved and honoured, and 
 would fain look upon and speak with again. How far I have 
 succeeded, it is impossible for me even to guess. I can 
 hardly hope that my father's old friends will be satisfied with 
 a Sketch that has necessarily been drawn from the point of 
 view of a later generation than theirs and his ; but if the 
 many younger lives which have been refreshed by his influ- 
 ence recognize this brief memorial as preserving some touches 
 of his character, the hours of quiet contemplation and com- 
 munion enshrined in it will bear their fruit to others, as I 
 trust they have done to me. 
 
 P. H. W.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface . v 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 I. Childhood. School. College 3 
 
 II. First Liverpool Ministry 25 
 
 III. Leeds Ministry 37 
 
 IV. First Retirement. Second Liverpool Ministry . . 62 
 V. Ministry at Large. Final Retirement . . .80 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 I. From CoUege 97 
 
 II. From the Continent 99 
 
 III. During his Leeds Ministry . . . . .114 
 
 IV. During his first Retirement and second Liverpool 
 
 Ministry ........ 137 
 
 V. During his Ministry at Large and final Retirement . 168 
 
 DISCOURSES, &c. 
 
 I. The Sympathetic Necessities of the Religious Life . 211 
 
 II. Faith and Doubt . . . ' . . . .221 
 
 III. The Two Blessings 233
 
 viii CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGR 
 
 IV. For the Sake of Others 240 
 
 V. The Life Within and the Life Without . . .252 
 VI. " No more Strangers and Foreigners" . . . 26.2 
 
 VII. The Book of Psalms " . .273 
 
 VIII. "Have Pity upon Me" 285 
 
 IX. "Let it Alone this Year also" . 294 
 
 Sin. A Fragment 307 
 
 St. Bartholomew. A Lesson for the Day .... 320 
 On the National Use of Cathedrals and Parish Churches. 
 
 A Paper read in Liverpool 334 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 A List of some of the published Writings of the Kev. Charles 
 
 Wicksteed, B.A 353
 
 BIOGEAPHICAL SKETCH.
 
 I. 
 
 BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 I 
 
 MY father was proud of his descent (on the mother's 
 side) from Philip Henry. 
 
 He used to say that you could never gauge the real 
 force that was in a man till you saw whether he could 
 perpetuate his character in his posterity. Philip Henry 
 had lasted for two hundred years, and his descendants 
 were still like him in feature and in character. Mode- 
 rately gifted, but respectable, conscientious and plodding, 
 they had produced neither a man of genius nor a rascal 
 for two centuries ; and although we must stipulate for a 
 tolerably high standard of definition for at least one of 
 these terms, if the statement is to be strictly accurate, 
 yet, as far as his own immediate branch of the family 
 was concerned, my father lived long enough to satisfy 
 himself that the traditional character would be easily 
 maintained for one and probably two generations more. 
 
 On his father's side he was related to the Cheshire 
 family, of Wickstead Hall ; but, as far as I am aware, 
 
 B2
 
 4 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 he could not trace his own immediate ascendants for 
 more than two generations. His grandfather had a 
 shop in Mardol, the main street of Shrewsbury, where 
 he made and sold gloves, and was, says my father, " a 
 quiet, well-principled little man, from all I can learn, 
 but I should think with a faint heart and poor spirit." 
 He subsequently lived very narrowly on the income 
 derived from small properties of his own and his wife's, 
 and "used to say that if he had but 20 a-year more he 
 should be perfectly happy and free from anxiety." 
 
 His son John was partially adopted by a Mrs. Tylston, 
 of Chester, and was sent by her to the grammar-school 
 in that city, after which he was apprenticed to a draper 
 in Shrewsbury. At the close of his apprenticeship he 
 went to spend some months in London, before setting 
 up business on his own account ; and as he was fortunate 
 enough to have some acquaintance with Hazlitt and the 
 Aikins and Barbaulds, he had opportunities of culti- 
 vating a natural taste for study, and was subsequently 
 marked by " a tone of mind not often met with apart 
 from professional pursuits, and certainly very little usual 
 among either the gentry or the men of business living 
 in the little county town of Shrewsbury."* 
 
 * " From Kendal I proceeded through Skipton to Leeds, where 
 I spent two evenings with my Yorkshire friends. It was at this 
 time that I first saw Wicksteed, the Unitarian minister there a 
 man I at once took a fancy to. He is the son of an early friend 
 of William Hazlitt the only home acquaintance I ever heard 
 Hazlitt warmly praise. Of "Wicksteed I have heard Archdeacon 
 Hare speak in terms of warm praise, calling him a Christian 
 whether or not a Unitarian." -Crabbe Robinsons Diary, Feb. 2nd, 
 1836.
 
 CHILDHOOD. 5 
 
 At the age of about twenty-five, John Wicksteed mar- 
 ried Bithia Swanwick, of Wem, whose pedigree may be 
 traced by the curious in the book of the " Descendants 
 of Philip Henry,"* and who, like John Wicksteed him- 
 self, was in education and tastes far superior to most of 
 those with whom her position enabled her to associate. 
 
 John and Bithia Wicksteed established their home in 
 Shrewsbury, where he was engaged at first in the flannel 
 and afterwards in. the starch trade, and they were blessed 
 with a numerous family. 
 
 My father, Charles Wicksteed, the fifth child who 
 survived infancy, was born on June 10th, 1810, in a 
 house called " The College." 
 
 " The things, persons and events," he says, " which I 
 can remember at 'the College' were, first, a summer- 
 house at the bottom of the garden; second, receiving 
 half an orange on a half-holiday of my elder brothers', 
 and thinking thenceforth that half -oranges and half- 
 holidays were the same thing ; then sitting with my 
 younger sister on the lowest step of the staircase, and 
 imitating with our feet the tramping of horses which 
 were bringing our eldest sister Bithy in the stage-coach 
 from school at Chester ; . . . . then our neighbour, Mr. 
 Phillips, whom I used to be sent in to see, a hypochon- 
 driac, who used to call me his little David charming the 
 evil spirit from Saul ; and an old kitchen fender, with a 
 
 * The Descendants of Philip Henry, M.A., Incumbent of Wor- 
 thenbury, in the County of Flint, who was ejected therefrom by 
 the Act of Uniformity in 1662. By Sarah Lawrence, a Descendant 
 in the Fifth Degree. London, 1844. See pp. 10, 12, 13, 17, 18.
 
 6 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 round centre flat part large enough to hold a plate on, 
 as it was being put into a cart on (I presume therefore) 
 the occasion of our removal from 'the College.'" 
 
 " Charley" was only about four years old at the time 
 of this removal, and he remembered the next period of 
 his childhood with lively pleasure. It was spent in a 
 country-house about two miles out of Shrewsbury; and, 
 short as it was, it perhaps exercised a decisive influence 
 on his future life ; for he himself attributed to the asso- 
 ciations it left behind it, the waking of a passionate love 
 of the country and country life which filled him during 
 all his years of town work with an intense longing to 
 " touch the earth," increasing as his health grew worse, 
 till at last it became irresistible, and moulded almost all 
 his remaining days. 
 
 The next removal was to a detached house on the 
 outskirts of the town, near Mr. Wicksteed's starch-works, 
 where the workshop was a new delight, and the pigs, 
 fed on the refuse of the grain, a new interest, though, to 
 say the truth, neither mechanics nor animals ever very 
 deeply enlisted my father's sympathies. 
 
 Lessons were still in abeyance at the period of which 
 we are now speaking, but the children were realizing the 
 educational ideal of modern science by " observing nature 
 for themselves." For example : Their nursery was so low 
 that in after years, when my father took his wife to see 
 the old place, he found he could just touch the ceiling 
 with his hand. "Here," he says, "we used often to 
 place a table and then stool and chair, and ascending it 
 to the top, look down upon each other at the bottom, to
 
 FIRST SERMON. 7 
 
 see if the distance made any difference in our size and 
 stature ; and I think that on the whole, aided by the 
 individuals at the bottom of the elevation crowding into 
 the smallest possible personal space, we decided it did 
 a little" 
 
 It was here, too, perhaps at the age of six or seven, 
 that my father preached or rather intended to preach 
 his first sermon. He was of a naturally devout disposi- 
 tion, and though the services at the little Presbyterian 
 chapel which has recently acquired a kind of celebrity 
 from the fact that Charles Darwin attended it as a boy 
 made little impression upon him, yet he very early made 
 up his mind that he wished to be a minister. " I recol- 
 lect well," he says, " preaching in the dining-room to the 
 assembled nurses and children, when my elder brother 
 Tom was to be my clerk. He sat below me. But no 
 sooner had I announced my text, which was the hospi- 
 table one of ' Masters, give good coffee to your servants/ 
 than my clerk burst out into a most irreverent laugh ; on 
 which, in mingled grief, mortification and anger at this 
 reception of what was a very genuine and sincere matter 
 with me, I stooped over my pulpit, pulled my clerk's 
 hair, burst into tears, descended, and the congregation 
 was left in great confusion and disorder." 
 
 My father's early childhood was spent amid sufficiently 
 easy circumstances, but before he was eight, a change 
 had begun to come over things. His mother became 
 anxious and careworn, and there was a general appear- 
 ance of contracted and finally suspended operations at 
 the works. In a word, John Wicksteed had failed. The
 
 8 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 consideration shown him by his creditors and the exer- 
 tions made by influential friends, resulting in his ap- 
 pointment to the post of manager of the gas-works, 
 which he held till shortly before his death, testify to 
 the respect and esteem in which he was held by his 
 townspeople. And perhaps his descendants may take 
 more comfort from this fact than from a family tradition, 
 that I have not been able to verify, which attributes 
 the failure to certain fiscal arrangements of Vansittart's, 
 which were supposed to give the London starch manu- 
 facturers an advantage over their country competitors. 
 
 Be this as it may, one of the economies necessitated 
 by this change of circumstances was the withdrawal of 
 "Charley" from a preparatory school, when he had just 
 passed his eighth birthday, and his establishment in the 
 Shrewsbury free grammar-school. 
 
 Charles Wicksteed was a slight, timid, sensitive and 
 far from robust boy. His features were irregular, but 
 his full blue eyes, fair bright complexion and luxu- 
 riant hair, gave him no small share of childish beauty ; 
 and to the credit of the Shrewsbury boys be it said, 
 that the timid little scholar was received in their rough 
 society with a degree of kindliness too seldom exhibited. 
 The brutal ordeals to which new boys were usually 
 subjected were remitted in his case, and some of the 
 elder scholars seem to have taken him under their lordly 
 protection, though of course he had to submit to his 
 full allowance of the coarse and degrading raillery for 
 which the sensitive and simple-hearted little home-bird 
 who had actually been seen on one occasion taking a
 
 DEATH OF HIS MOTHER. 9 
 
 walk with the nurse and babies ! offered so tempting 
 a mark. 
 
 Over the home itself, too that refuge from the storms 
 and cleanser from the stains of school-life a deep shadow 
 soon fell. Before he was nine years old Charles Wick- 
 steed had lost his mother ; and there were only left to 
 him memories of her early care and love, of the tender 
 fraud by which she once imitated her poor weary little 
 boy's round hand and laid by his bed-side the exercise 
 which he had spoilt once and again, and had put aside 
 at her command in despair at night ; memories of the 
 brightness of the first years, of the strain and oppres- 
 sion of those that followed. The last time he spoke 
 to her, she put aside his request in sheer weariness. 
 The last time he saw her, it was through the open door 
 of her sick-room, as she lay thrown feverishly into a 
 strained, unresting attitude. Then came his father's 
 speechless anguish, the helpless sympathy of his elder 
 brothers and sisters, and the weary blank, never to be 
 filled, in the home of which the light had gone out. 
 
 Who shall say what is lost in the loss of that foster- 
 ing tenderness, gradually ripening into a beautiful com- 
 panionship of unconscious guidance, by which a mother 
 may train her son, instructing, interpreting and supple- 
 menting the instinctive chivalry that springs up in 
 every manly heart, and teaching what must else remain 
 unlearned ? To call such a loss irreparable is but feebly 
 to describe its weight. 
 
 For his father who with his doubled charge had lost 
 half his power to meet it and for all his brothers and
 
 10 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 sisters, Charles entertained a sincere and lasting affec- 
 tion ; but it was his brother Joseph Hartley to whom he 
 gave the full measure of his love. 
 
 Joe Wicksteed was his senior by many years, and 
 was just completing his school life when Charles was 
 beginning his; but after a time the two were drawn 
 together by influences which rested upon and yet bridged 
 over this difference in years. Joe Wicksteed was a man 
 of rare intellectual and poetic gifts, a fine scholar and a 
 fascinating companion. To his brother Charles he was 
 almost a deity. They would go long walks together, 
 Joe often reciting poetry, and kindling an admiration 
 and enthusiasm in his brother's heart second only to 
 his own. His favourite poets came to his brother through 
 him ; and while the glow of a strong personal affection, 
 or rather devotion, was thus thrown over them, they in 
 their turn served almost to transfigure the personality 
 through which they came. To my father, his brother 
 Joe was the impersonation of poetry, the presiding deity, 
 as it were, of romance and heroism and aspiration, and 
 yet at the same time a fellow-worshipper with himself 
 at the shrine. And the younger brother, in his turn, 
 once again took the part of a David when the evil spirit 
 was upon his hero ; for the almost morbid sensitiveness, 
 the shrinking and wounded sense of any rebuff or want 
 of feeling, that often characterize the poetic tempera- 
 ment, sometimes left Joe Wicksteed in sore need of the 
 comforting presence of his beloved brother. 
 
 In 1824, when he had studied in Glasgow with no 
 small distinction, Joseph Wicksteed went for a tour in
 
 JOE WICKSTEED. 11 
 
 the Highlands, and was drowned while bathing in Loch 
 Katrine. My father was fourteen years old, and it was 
 as if he had again been orphaned. The joys and sorrows 
 of sixty years failed to obliterate, hardly even overlaid, 
 this deep grief of his soul. For twenty years, I have 
 heard him say, no single day ever passed without his 
 consciously dwelling upon his brother's memory. Night 
 after night he prayed (but always in vain) to be allowed 
 to see him in dream-land ; and in after years when his 
 children grew up around him, they learned to listen 
 with a wondering grief and sympathy to the story of 
 their uncle Joe, which still filled their father's eyes with 
 tears, and to repeat fragments of his poetry, which seemed 
 to link their homespun lives with the distant world of 
 genius and glory.* 
 
 But we must return to Shrewsbury school, where the 
 young scholar worked up his way, patiently and plod- 
 dingly, for ten long years, during the whole of which 
 time Dr. Samuel Butler, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield 
 and Coventry, was Head Master. It was my father's 
 firm belief, in after years, that he had been a slow boy, 
 and I have no doubt that in intellectual rapidity and 
 power he fell far short of the brilliant attainments of 
 his brother Joe ; but the " talent for taking pains," 
 which if not genius is at any rate a good working sub- 
 stitute for it, characterized him now, as it did in all his 
 after-life; and in spite of the short sight, which pre- 
 vented him from understanding (inasmuch as he did 
 * See pp. 107, 135, 136.
 
 12 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 not see) half the corrections in his compositions, and in 
 spite of all the disadvantages which narrow circum- 
 stances brought with them, such as want of good books, 
 and want of the private lessons and assistance which 
 most of the boys secured, Charles Wicksteed managed 
 to hold his own among the three hundred and sixty 
 boys, and ultimately won his way to a place amongst 
 " Butler's Eighteen" the privileged boys who received 
 their instruction solely from the Head Master himself. 
 
 Of the moral atmosphere of the school, the less said 
 the better. In after years, my father believed that no 
 one, however strongly protected by native modesty and 
 refinement, could go through such a society uninjured, 
 and he only wondered that the poison had not sunk 
 deeper into his own nature. It was, perhaps, not worse 
 at Shrewsbury than at other schools ; but when a man 
 dares to give himself or another a true account of his 
 school life, the picture is apt to be an appalling one. 
 
 Of the reckless neglect of sanitary requirements in 
 the boarding-houses, of the coarseness of manners, of 
 the general laxity, or rather absence, of moral discipline, 
 it is needless to speak. Some of these evils have dis- 
 appeared ; others, let us hope, are disappearing ; none are 
 remote enough to possess historical interest ; and if any 
 one cannot adequately fill in the picture from his own 
 experience, let him thank God for " the bettering of the 
 times," or for his own good fortune, and rejoice in his 
 ignorance. 
 
 For the sports which fill so large a part of the life of 
 many school-boys, my father was never specially quali-
 
 SHREWSBURY SCHOOL. 13 
 
 fied. Though sufficiently muscular, he was deficient in 
 quickness and dexterity of hand, and his short sight 
 was fatal to success. Moreover, the determined con- 
 scientiousness with which he grappled with his work, 
 left him little time for amusement ; and the only game 
 I ever heard him speak of with anything like enthusiasm 
 was what we used to call " cobbing," but I forget whether 
 it went by the same name at Shrewsbury. It consists 
 in striking nuts, strung upon thongs or strings, against 
 one another the passive nut for the time being resting 
 on some firm but not too hard surface (often, 1 regret to 
 state, the open pages of a school book) till one or the 
 other is broken. To those who have never experienced 
 the strange fascination of this apparently inane occupa- 
 tion, it would be difficult to realize the excitement it 
 may produce. The fall of an empire could not cause a 
 greater thrill than the collapse of a celebrated champion 
 nut that counts its victories by hundreds, and has per- 
 haps been the hero of several successive seasons. 
 
 Bathing, during the summer months, was a great and 
 unfailing delight. A quick walk to the Severn, a plunge 
 and swim, and a walk back again, was always an effec- 
 tive restorative ; and the recollection of these dips in the 
 river ever remained, fresh and delightful, as a part of 
 my father's permanent possessions and conscious wealth. 
 Long walks the most vividly remembered being those 
 with his brother Joe, and afterwards with his beloved 
 younger sister Bessie, the only one of the family that 
 survives him complete the list of relaxations of which 
 I can recollect hearing him speak, except that his father
 
 14 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 occasionally read Milton or Spenser aloud to him a 
 questionable enjoyment sometimes, for the moments 
 were not always happily chosen and that on rare occa- 
 sions he was taken to the theatre. 
 
 His holidays were often spent with his cousins, the 
 Swan wicks, at Chester, and were enjoyed with a zest 
 which shows that, for all his quiet and studious ways, 
 he was by no means deficient in the high spirits and 
 love of fun of which healthy boyhood can hardly be too 
 full. Mrs. Swanwick, his aunt Joseph, earned his lasting 
 affection, and his cousin Frederick, late of Whittington, 
 became his life-long friend. 
 
 The lessons a boy goes through at school are often 
 but an unimportant part of what he gets and learns in 
 one way or another, but in this particular case the result 
 was very far from insignificant. Of my father's earlier 
 masters <at Shrewsbury, I need only say that he learned 
 to respect and almost to love Sheepshanks, who has 
 recently obtained a momentary celebrity as George 
 Eliot's Greek tutor ; and that on looking back upon the 
 general system of instruction, he seems to have thought 
 it about as stupid and futile as human ingenuity could 
 have made it. 
 
 Of Butler himself he speaks as a man superior to all 
 meanness, but deficient in the finer perceptions, and 
 never coming within sight of any lofty conception of 
 his responsibilities or duties as a master. He had a 
 prodigious memory, but " he did not succeed in breath- 
 ing a soul into his author, notwithstanding all this 
 massive learning. He rarely condescended to quote an
 
 DK. BUTLER. 15 
 
 English or modern author. He rarely examined the 
 thought, or very critically the style. He used to labour 
 away sometimes to realize a picturesque description, but 
 his efforts generally ended, after an enumeration of the 
 objects, with a great deal of humming and hawing and 
 hesitation, and the words, 'quite a quite a quite a 
 picture !' I never felt the beauty or grandeur of the 
 classical literature under him as a literature of thought 
 and taste. I think he could scarcely have had a large 
 critical or appreciatory faculty. Metre-structure, geo- 
 graphy, history, and ' parallel passages/ were his gods." 
 These, however, are no contemptible deities for studious 
 youth, and my father always felt that he owed to Butler 
 a secure foundation in that severe, if somewhat narrow, 
 scholarship which still survives sporadically, and often 
 puts to shame the more ambitious and philosophical 
 attempts of recent systems. 
 
 During the later years of his school life, he had to 
 commit to memory (forty lines a day) the great bulk of 
 the Greek and Latin poets usually read in schools, and 
 although, owing to his defective memory, the task was 
 at first a terribly severe one, he soon learned to find it 
 a not unpleasant part of his day's work. No doubt this 
 poetry, for the most part, merely passed through his 
 memory; but fragments at least remained, and there 
 can be no question that the practice contributed much 
 towards that security and firmness which I imagine 
 characterized the old style of scholarship generally, 
 and was certainly conspicuous in my father. 
 
 The great bane of his school existence, however, was
 
 16 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 verse -writing. Greek and Latin composition in any 
 form he found hard, but verse-making he hated. Twice 
 a week he was forced to write a copy of verses, perhaps 
 thirty or forty hexameters, on a given theme ; and as he 
 tried to draw comfort from the distant prospect of relief 
 which the years must bring at last, he would say to 
 himself that if ever he had sons he would help them 
 in everything except verse-writing. But this vow, like 
 other such, was made to be broken ; and in after years 
 his two eldest sons, the only ones who ever had to 
 pass through this particular round of purgatory, often 
 renewed his youthful woes, to the unspeakable alleviation 
 of their own. Nay, such is the force of habit, that he 
 even defied Sydney Smith's assertion that an ordinary 
 school-boy, having composed before he is nineteen more 
 hexameters than Virgil wrote in the ^Eneid, never, unless 
 he is a singularly weak man, writes another in his life ; 
 for now and then, in his capacity of family poet-laureate 
 for instance, he would drop into the old trick and cele- 
 brate some domestic event in a "copy of verses"; and 
 while never pretending to elegance or facility as a Latin 
 versifier, he retained a keen appreciation of the skill in 
 others. There are few minor poems in any language for 
 which I have heard him express greater admiration than 
 for Kennedy's Latin translation of "John Anderson," 
 Savage Landor's patriotic lines on " Bathing," or a beau- 
 tiful Latin version of "Abide with me," by the late 
 Edwin Martin Geldart. 
 
 To the last he found Latin or Greek poetry at least 
 as easy to commit to memory as English.
 
 FROM SCHOOL TO COLLEGE. 17 
 
 At the age of eighteen, my father left Shrewsbury 
 school and went to Glasgow University. 
 
 His resolve to enter the ministry appears never to 
 have wavered, though he had formed an estimate of the 
 sacrifices involved in this choice of a profession which 
 the event showed to be exaggerated. He felt that he 
 was facing the probability, if not the certainty, of a life 
 of poverty or even want, and contemplated the likeli- 
 hood of having to face it alone ; but a devout and earnest 
 heart, a firm belief in the truth and the importance of 
 the theological views he held dear, and the thought of 
 devoting his life to a cause which he regarded as intrin- 
 sically noble on the one hand and as destined to win 
 conspicuous triumphs on the other, filled him with an 
 enthusiasm before which all difficulties and privations 
 seemed but light. 
 
 His first session at college was moulded on the type 
 of what he expected his future life to be, as is manifest 
 enough from the scale of his expenditure. In after years 
 he frequently spoke of "accounts" as constituting the 
 best of diaries. " Under the headings of simple figures, 
 an account-book recalls events and joys and sufferings 
 and friends and the dead and the living, so as to fill 
 up by the aid of the ever-acting law of association a 
 complete biography." His own little slip of an account- 
 book kept at Glasgow furnishes biographical material 
 fully as luminous as the piles of carefully- written note- 
 books of lectures, or even the written or remembered 
 details of his college life. 
 
 During his first session, 1828-29, he held a Scholar- 
 c
 
 18 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 ship, under Dr. Williams's Trust, of 40, and a grant of 
 20 from a special fund connected with the Shrewsbury 
 chapel. From these resources he had to meet all his 
 expenses, including class fees, books, clothes, board and 
 lodging, and the then heavy item of travelling. An 
 intense susceptibility to anything sordid or unrefined 
 in his physical surroundings made it hardly short of a 
 necessity to him to occupy lodgings which, in comparison 
 with the quarters of some of the students, were luxurious, 
 but in all other respects he practised the strictest self- 
 restraint and economy, and at the end of the session he 
 returned to Shrewsbury with a 10 note, which he 
 gravely handed over to his father, saying that he had 
 been as careful as he could and had saved this sum 
 out of his exhibitions. In his dutiful thoughts and 
 desires he had perhaps imagined the circumstances of 
 his home narrower than they really were, and his father, 
 at once touched and amused by his offer, told him with 
 a laugh that this was carrying things a little too far; 
 and it was henceforth understood that if his son met 
 all his own expenses, he need not trouble himself about 
 those of the household at Shrewsbury. 
 
 The next year, moreover, brought, in addition to the 
 renewal of the exhibitions already enjoyed, an additional 
 grant of 20 from a fund connected with the chapel at 
 Chester ; so that my father returned to Glasgow for the 
 session of 1829-30 with ample provision for his require- 
 ments. During his first year he had spent hardly any- 
 thing on books, and at the close of the session a sum of 
 five shillings for the loan of "Donegan's Greek Lexicon"
 
 WAYS AND MEANS. 19 
 
 is entered. What a pathos such an entry lends to that 
 10 note that was taken back to Shrewsbury ! The first 
 entry in the new session is sixteen-and-sixpence for the 
 purchase of "Donegan;" there are occasional visits to 
 the theatre an amusement in which my father found 
 a keen though seldom gratified enjoyment till close upon 
 the end of his life ; there is even evidence of " fencing 
 lessons"; and while all remains quiet and economical, 
 there are no further signs of painful pressure. 
 
 The summer of 1830 was spent in Scotland, partly in 
 Glasgow, partly in a tour in the Highlands with Mr. 
 George Harris (the minister of the St. Vincent Street 
 chapel) and his wife, and partly in a visit to some 
 friends of Joe Wicksteed's. During this tour, my father 
 made his first pilgrimage to the spot on the shingles of 
 Loch Katrine where Joe Wicksteed's clothes had been 
 found, and to the grave at Brig of Turk where his body 
 lay.* 
 
 The next session, 1830-31, closed his college life. 
 
 Intellectually, it need hardly be said, these were years 
 of rapid expansion and of keen enjoyment. Under 
 Sandford, the Professor of Greek, the real meaning and 
 beauty of the classical literatures opened out, and on 
 the basis of Butler's drill my father began to build up 
 the knowledge and love of the classics that remained to 
 him throughout his life the source of unfailing enjoy- 
 ment. At no period did he cease to confirm and extend 
 his acquaintance with the Greek and Eoman authors, 
 but it was at college that his tastes took their permanent 
 * See p. 136. 
 C2
 
 20 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 direction, and lie did not find it easy to admit authors 
 whom he had not placed amongst the Olympians in his 
 youth, to anything like an equality of rank with his 
 acknowledged deities. The modern estimate of Catullus, 
 for example, long appeared to him paradoxical and 
 extravagant, and it was only within a few years of his 
 death that, under stress of personal experiences to which 
 some of the poems of Catullus appealed with startling 
 directness, he came to acknowledge him, at least in some 
 fields, as the revealer of a depth and tenderness that he 
 had never thought of hitherto as Eoman. 
 
 Amongst the authors he specially studied at col- 
 lege, I have often heard him mention Herodotus and 
 Demosthenes ; and his life-long and intense admiration 
 of Homer, which had forced itself to the birth even under 
 Butler, was fostered and established under Sandford. 
 
 His careful notes on Persius show that he shrank 
 from no difficulties ; and like others who have paid the 
 price he felt that to master this obscurest and least 
 known of the great Eoman poets was well worth the toil 
 it demanded. " Horace/' he was fond of saying, quoting 
 from Buchanan, " Horace laughs, Juvenal inveighs, and 
 Persius writes like a grave good man in earnest." Virgil 
 he could never forgive for the sins of his hero ^Eiieas. 
 For Cicero he long felt a romantic admiration and 
 reverence that would hardly brook criticism. Horace 
 he read with that unbounded delight and admiration 
 which many other cultivated Englishmen of his genera- 
 tion have felt, and the manifestations of which by the 
 pilgrims to the site of his villa near Tivoli have made
 
 FAVOURITE AUTHORS AND STUDIES. 21 
 
 the peasantry suppose that Horace was an Englishman 
 himself. "I should like to have known Horace," my 
 father would often say ; and of the many classical authors 
 he had committed to memory, Horace was perhaps the 
 one of whom he retained most. 
 
 Buchanan's classes in logic, moral philosophy and 
 literature, occupied no small part of his attention at 
 college. A pile of closely-tilled note-books, carefully 
 and laboriously written out from rough notes taken in 
 class, testify to his continued talent for taking pains ; 
 and he looked back afterwards to this labour of Hercules 
 as one of the most fruitful of his college occupations. 
 Pure philosophy, however, and especially metaphysics, 
 rather fascinated him than won his steady affections. 
 He admired but never trusted them. He never took 
 them quite seriously. He seemed invincibly indisposed 
 to commit himself to any abstract speculative opinion, 
 and least of all would he act upon or insist on any such. 
 As the different systems came forward, each with the 
 claim " aut Cassar aut nullus" everything or nothing 
 he would respectfully suggest that they should each of 
 them take a province ; a compromise which each one, as 
 a system, must necessarily reject with indignation as 
 worse than nothing. But then my father never believed 
 in systems; aud this was perhaps a source of both strength 
 and weakness to him. It preserved him from extrava- 
 gances and exaggerations. An admirable common-sense 
 presided over his judgments and saved him from pursuing 
 will-o'-the-wisps. But, on the other hand, it exposed
 
 22 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 him at least to the danger of adopting a quasi-mechanical 
 compromise between ideas which were really mutually 
 exclusive. Buchanan once gave as the subject for a 
 philosophical essay, the question, " Whether beauty is in 
 the mind or in the object ?" and my father, with invin- 
 cible common-sense, but by no means to his Professor's 
 satisfaction, maintained that it resided " partly in each." 
 Such at least was his own account of the affair given 
 in later life ; but I find from his college letters, written 
 at the time, that this is a somewhat satirical version of 
 his actual contention, and it suffices to show that he 
 was. himself by no means blind to the weak side of his 
 precautions against riding a theory to death. 
 
 Even in theology, of which he was an earnest and 
 indeed a voracious reader, though ardently advocating 
 what must be classed as speculative truths or opinions, 
 he nevertheless approached them from the practical, 
 the ethical and the emotional side, and regarded them 
 as important chiefly in their reactions upon the heart 
 and conduct. " A scientific theology," in the sense of 
 ultimate religious truths obtainable through and defen- 
 sible by purely or prevailingly intellectual processes, he 
 regarded with the profoundest distrust. 
 
 Of his other studies at Glasgow there is little to 
 say. The "account-book" shows that Hebrew was not 
 neglected ; but whether he studied it under Gibb, the 
 Professor of Oriental literature, or on his own account, I 
 cannot say. What modest amount of mathematics was 
 deemed sufficient at Shrewsbury he had never found
 
 BACHELOPJS DEGREE. 23 
 
 difficult, and he kept up, and probably extended, his 
 knowledge at Glasgow; but in this temple he never 
 worshipped save in the court of the Gentiles. 
 
 He took his Bachelor's degree in April, 1830, with 
 great distinction, obtaining the highest honours, which 
 had not been taken for seven years previously ; but for 
 reasons connected partly with his early settlement in 
 the ministry, and partly with a fancied slight from the 
 authorities, which he afterwards saw existed only in his 
 own imagination, he never presented himself for his 
 Master's degree. 
 
 In his reminiscences of college life there was a 
 marked absence of any sense of strain, oppression or 
 anxiety. Neither his class-work nor his preparation for 
 his degree seems at all to have weighed upon his mind. 
 His ten years of unassisted toil at Shrewsbury had 
 given him a self-reliance and a mastery of the elements 
 of learning which made his years at college a delicious 
 harvest-time. Excessive hours of study, weariness, head- 
 aches, apprehensions and sufferings of every kind, seem 
 to have disappeared. He was master of the situation ; 
 and though his industry was unabated, it was now 
 coupled with an elastic sense of enjoyment and power 
 which probably characterized no other period of his life, 
 unless to some extent the very earliest years of his 
 ministry. 
 
 The hospitalities of the acquaintance he found or 
 formed in Glasgow gave variety and zest to his college 
 life, and he often spoke of these years as a time of 
 refreshment and delight, between the troubles and
 
 24 .BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 oppressions of boyhood and the responsibilities and 
 cares of manhood, which had a charm and even a 
 strength peculiarly its own. 
 
 A sympathetic imagination may reconstruct some of 
 the impressions which he took away with him and left 
 behind him when his college life came to a close, from 
 words which he wrote more than twenty years later, 
 when he had just spent a long morning in Glasgow 
 with my mother, " visiting the dear old college, with its 
 common-hall, library and class-rooms." He says: "I 
 called on my old quarters in Sanchie Hall Eoad, and 
 was admitted with Jane to inspect my former lodgings, 
 whence I emerged for my Bachelor's examination, and 
 from the door of which, to my then great annoyance 
 and subsequent amusement, my landlady flung the old 
 shoe of luck after me. I also found out where my dear 
 old dead landlady's daughter lived, and called on a nice- 
 looking, very respectable and intelligent millinery and 
 lodging-keeping young woman, who was ' Lizzy' and a 
 dirty little girl of seven or eight when I knew her, who 
 saw me, however, once seventeen years ago next month, 
 and at once recognized me. If ever any young lady in 
 the world was complimented by a call from me, Eliza 
 Forbes was that young lady. After ten minutes' con- 
 versation, I took her down-stairs to see Jane, who was 
 in the carriage below, and could not ascend the ' turn- 
 pike' to the 'top flat.'" 
 
 # * * * 
 
 If " Lizzy" is still alive, she is now more than sixty 
 years old. The "dear old college" is a railway station.
 
 FROM CLASS-ROOM TO PULPIT. 25 
 
 And of those whom my father remembered as sitting 
 with him in the class-rooms, Mr. E. Dees, of Newcastle, 
 and the Eev. G. H. Wells, are, I believe, the sole sur- 
 vivors. "One generation passeth away, and another 
 generation cometh."* 
 
 II. 
 
 When he had but just attained his majority, my 
 father was invited to the pulpit of the Ancient Chapel, 
 Toxteth Park, Liverpool, vacant by the appointment of 
 the Eev. J. H. Thorn to the Eenshaw Street pulpit, and 
 with a half intention of returning for a time to Glasgow 
 to take his Master's degree, he accepted the invitation. 
 
 Nominally, he was to be the colleague of old Mr. 
 Anderson, who had long been the minister, but was at 
 this time quite unable to take even occasional duty, and 
 who died in the course of the following year. 
 
 On August 31st, 1831, after a visit to Shrewsbury, 
 my father entered upon his duties as the stated minister 
 of Toxteth Park Chapel, amongst a cultivated, refined 
 and thoughtful people, with, as he afterwards said, " a 
 few of the picturesque and Walter-Scottish adornments 
 and supplements to a well-to-do Christian congregation" 
 the " poor." He lost no time, however, in adding a 
 less picturesque but more genuine element to his charge, 
 by undertaking the management of a district under the 
 " Provident Society," which required him " to visit from 
 twenty-five to seventy-five poor families resident in 
 cellars or in the rooms over the cellars, every week, for 
 * See " Letters and Journals," pp. 97, 98.
 
 26 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 the purpose of collecting their savings, administering 
 relief, helping, advising, consoling and guiding them in 
 any way not directly theological that seemed required." 
 
 Moreover, in those days the general business and 
 management of our chapels often fell upon the ministers 
 to an extent which it is not very easy for us to realize 
 now; and it is indicative of the great change and improve- 
 ment which the last fifty years have brought about in 
 this respect, that though the Toxteth Park congregation 
 was probably second to none in consideration for its 
 minister, yet my father was at one time obliged to 
 arrange for the organ-playing, Sunday by Sunday, by 
 special personal application to some competent and will- 
 ing friend, and he proposed (at the suggestion of a leading 
 member of his flock) himself to receive applications for 
 sittings or pews in the chapel. 
 
 It is instructive and encouraging, too, to note that 
 whereas in February, 1834, the members of the con- 
 gregation presented a memorial to the Houses of Par- 
 liament, setting forth their grievances as "Protestant 
 Dissenters/' every one of the reforms demanded has 
 now been brought about. 
 
 The grievances were : 
 
 First : The want of a legal registration of births, mar- 
 riages and deaths, without submitting to religious rites 
 of which they, the memorialists, disapproved. 
 
 Second : Compulsory conformity to the rites and 
 ceremonies of the Established Church in the celebration 
 of marriage. 
 
 Third : The denial to Dissenters of the right of burial
 
 DISSENTERS' GRIEVANCES. 27 
 
 by their own ministers, according to their own form, in 
 parochial or consecrated cemeteries. 
 
 Fourth : The exclusion of Protestant Dissenters from 
 the privileges of the Universities of Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge. 
 
 Fifth : The liability of Dissenters to the payment of 
 Church-rates and other ecclesiastical demands. 
 
 Such glimpses of the conditions and scope of the 
 young minister's work in his first settlement must 
 suffice. It was now that he really came into contact 
 with practical life for the first time, and the equipment 
 for the encounter with the world which he brought with 
 him from the study consisted in instinctive refinement 
 and delicacy of feeling, scrupulous consideration for 
 others, pleasant manners, remarkable conversational 
 powers, a well-stored mind and a romantic generosity 
 of disposition, coupled with an almost incredible igno- 
 rance of the ways of the world,, in knowledge of which 
 he was young even for his years. 
 
 It was well for him that his lot was thrown amongst 
 men who could not only appreciate, but extend and 
 supplement his intellectual culture, and who could love 
 his frank and ingenuous simplicity of character while 
 insensibly initiating him into a little more of the very 
 needful wisdom of the serpent. Under the happy cir- 
 cumstances of his settlement he won the enthusiastic 
 love and loyalty of his little flock, and himself grew 
 rapidly towards the firmness of judgment and practical 
 wisdom which marked him in later life.
 
 28 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 In theology he was a sound and earnest Protestant 
 and Unitarian ; not troubling himself, after the manner 
 of a later generation, to show the truth in error and 
 the error in truth, but taking things straightforwardly, 
 attacking the error of error and defending the truth of 
 truth. All his life he felt impatient with attempts to 
 show the spiritual meaning and the hidden truth of 
 orthodox opinions. "They are not the confused and 
 imperfect expression of spiritual truths," he would say. 
 "They are the clear, logical and appropriate expres- 
 sion of spiritual falsehoods/' And although he was in 
 fundamental sympathy with every large-hearted attempt 
 to do justice to the position of any man or body of men, 
 yet he would lament in his later years, with a serio- 
 comic pathos, that the simplicity of life had disappeared, 
 and that no one knew exactly whom he was righting. 
 " It used to be very different. It was : ' Here you are. 
 There's your adversary. Knock him down !'" 
 
 The fathers of our Church will recognize in these 
 reminiscences of earlier methods of controversy the 
 influence of such men as Robert Harris, of Glasgow; 
 and it is a fact that my father attributed to the affec- 
 tionate admiration with which that noted controversialist 
 and fine preacher inspired him in early life, a moulding- 
 influence upon his style of pulpit work in the opening 
 years of his ministry. 
 
 But, after all, it was in ethical rather than controver- 
 sial fields that he loved to expatiate. All the world was 
 opening up before him, and he did not care to obtrude 
 the study or its processes upon his hearers. I have
 
 SUBJECTS OF PREACHING AND READING. 29 
 
 heard him speak of the composition of his sermons at 
 this time (alas, at this time only !) as a keen delight ; 
 though the sleepless night which had preceded his first 
 service when a student at Glasgow was a but too faith- 
 ful type of the anxiety, the wear and the strain, which 
 with him remained to the end inseparable from preaching. 
 
 During his settlement at Liverpool he kept up his 
 habits of study, and his reading, though wide and varied, 
 was for the most part fairly systematic, for he delibe- 
 rately set to work to supplement and extend the thorough 
 but one-sided culture of his school and college life ; and 
 indeed for a time a kind of superficial reaction disguised 
 the fundamental loyalty to the classical traditions of his 
 education with which he never really broke. Till now, 
 modern languages had been almost wholly neglected by 
 him, though he had been a diligent student of English 
 literature ever since the days when his brother Joe had 
 fired his boyish imagination with a love of the English 
 poets. On his settlement in Liverpool he began to study 
 French, and though never deeply or extensively read 
 in French literature, he was far from insensible to its 
 peculiar charm ; and had he drawn up a " Select Cabinet 
 Library," he would have given a place in it to more 
 than one French author, and perhaps not always those 
 whom his friends in later life would have first looked 
 for. " Corinne" would certainly have taken an honoured 
 place amongst his favourite books in his youth, and 
 some of Rousseau's writings retained their hold upon 
 him to the end. 
 
 Next came Italian a language to which, as a spoken
 
 30 'BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 tongue, he became so devoted, that he used to say he 
 should like to live in Italy if only that he might always 
 speak and hear Italian ; but, with the one exception of 
 Alfieri, no Italian author made a very deep or perma- 
 nent impression upon him. Of " the four poets," I can 
 only find that he read Tasso, and him with such qua- 
 lified admiration as might be expected. Boccaccio was 
 not enough to his taste to draw him far past the portals 
 of his gardens and palaces, and the other Italians of 
 whom notes or traces remain in his manuscripts are 
 eighteenth and nineteenth century poets, keenly enjoyed 
 at the time, but not permanently remembered. 
 
 In the mental history of these years, however, the 
 first place should be given, not to books, but to men. 
 At school my father had formed no solid friendships ; 
 at college only few, though of those few more than one 
 lasted as long as life. From the moment of his first 
 settlement in the ministry, friendships sprang up around 
 him in unbroken succession, and he never forgot or was 
 forgotten by a friend. 
 
 His fellow-ministers in Liverpool were men who could 
 not fail to exercise a marked influence upon him. His 
 predecessor at the Park Chapel, the Eev. John Hamilton 
 Thorn, soon became, as he ever afterwards remained, his 
 dearest and most honoured friend. Those who knew 
 him best, best knew what this companionship was to 
 him. "Amicus amicorum" my friend of friends he 
 called him in these early days, and would have called 
 him to the last. " Down upon your knees, and thank 
 Heaven fasting for a good man's love," is an exhortation
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 31 
 
 of wider application than Rosalind gives it; and my 
 father, who had always a thankful and grateful heart, 
 was never in danger of forgetting it. 
 
 In 1832, the Eev. James Martineau settled in Liver- 
 pool as co-pastor of the Paradise Street chapel with the 
 Eev. J. Grundy, and the friendship of the trio, " Thorn, 
 Martineau and Wicksteed," was soon firmly knit. 
 
 Towards the end of the same year my father visited 
 Shrewsbury, and I cannot refrain from inserting at 
 length a letter written by his father, at the close of the 
 visit, to a sister residing in Chester. It is easy to read 
 between the lines evidence of the interest, not unmiri- 
 gled with alarm, which the new life and thought, so 
 fully represented in Liverpool, were beginning to stir in 
 many hearts besides that of the writer of this letter. 
 
 " Shrewsbury, Dec. 13, 1832. 
 
 " My dear Martha, I cannot let Charles leave us with- 
 out expressing my thankfulness to Heaven for having 
 blessed rne with so great a treasure. He has been a 
 prodigious comfort to us. I have had. much delightful 
 conversation with him, and find him sound at the core, 
 with a considerable increase of knowledge, and an evident 
 desire to apply it for the benefit of his fellow-creatures. 
 Fixed and firm in the grand essentials of religion and 
 morality, which are the same in all times, and will remain 
 the same for ever, he will probably differ considerably 
 from his father in his holding of particular doctrines in 
 theology and politics. But whatever may be his senti- 
 ments, they will be based on truth and advocated in 
 the spirit of Christ, and will command my unfeigned 
 respect.
 
 32 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 " I am glad to ,perceive from his discourses that his 
 increasing knowledge of human nature gives increased 
 effect to his style of composition, and an energy that 
 will carry them into the hearts of his hearers. He mixes 
 judiciously with society, and seems to me to draw right 
 inferences. His intercourse with Thorn and Martineau 
 will certainly be of great advantage to him, and I expect 
 will also reflect some benefit on them. Their conver- 
 sations are free and animated, and I think Charles has 
 sufficient strength to discern and maintain the right, 
 notwithstanding the doubtful may be supported by elo- 
 quence and talent of no mean order. He will not sur- 
 render but upon conviction, and will not mistake a strong 
 and momentary impression for conviction, but will return 
 again and again to the subject, and be thoroughly satisfied 
 before he yields. Thus I hope he will acquire a set of 
 well-considered truths felt in his inmost soul, and then 
 his preaching cannot fail to be efficacious under the 
 blessing of God. 
 
 " To part from him is very painful. 
 
 " Your affectionate brother, 
 
 " J. WICKSTEED. 
 
 " Thank my beloved Hannah, when you next write to 
 her, for an excellent, affectionate letter of sympathy to 
 Bithie received the other day. Amidst all these troubles, 
 how the heart yearns after and clings to old times, old 
 friends, old affections, which seem to swallow up and 
 annihilate everything of late growth, one's children 
 always excepted!"* 
 
 * John "Wicksteed died on March 13th, 1837, at Old Ford, in 
 the house of his son, Thomas Wicksteed, the civil engineer, with 
 whom he had gone to reside a short time before.
 
 LEAVE OF ABSENCE. 33 
 
 In the midst of such work and such companionships 
 the first years of my father's ministry passed happily 
 and fruitfully by; and before he left Liverpool a rare 
 and priceless opportunity offered itself of enlarging his 
 experience, and storing up impressions which would 
 endure as long as life. 
 
 In the autumn of 1834, Mr. R. V. Yates, a member 
 of the Toxteth Park congregation, left England with 
 Mrs. Yates for a six or eight months' tour on the conti- 
 nent, especially Italy. A young friend was to join them 
 during a part of their travels, and the fourth seat in the 
 carriage remained to be disposed of. My father's Italian 
 studies, and his affectionate intimacy with the Yates 
 family, which had already begun, and was never after- 
 wards broken, suggested that he should be invited to 
 take the vacant place. 
 
 Arrangements were made for leave of absence, and 
 on Sept. 17th, 1834, my father left Liverpool for his first 
 visit to the continent. 
 
 " On that meat," he wrote long afterwards, " I went 
 for twenty years." 
 
 A paper printed in the January and February numbers 
 of the " Christian Reformer" for 1886, records his retro- 
 spective impressions of travel in those days, and the con- 
 trasts brought out by later fashions and methods ; while 
 the impressions he received at the time are recorded in 
 two manuscript volumes of "journal" which lie before 
 me. 
 
 This journal, in its perfect frankness and sincerity, 
 gives a vivid picture of my father's character and 
 
 D
 
 34 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 interests at this period. It was with mingled feelings 
 that he turned over its pages again towards the close of 
 his life. Charles Wicksteed at seventy would not have 
 believed, without ocular demonstration and authentic 
 depositions under his own hand, that Charles Wicksteed 
 at twenty-four was quite so young and a synonym for 
 "young" in my father's mouth, but a synonym in which 
 was no touch of scorn but rather a blended amusement 
 and tenderness quite so foolish as he appeared to him 
 to have been. The journal shows us a young man full of 
 life and enjoyment, not precociously mature perhaps, but 
 instinct with intelligence and interest in men and things; 
 with literary culture and associations preponderatingly, 
 but not exclusively, classical; with artistic tastes on other 
 than literary matters still quite in the embryonic stage ; 
 and with an unqualified contempt for the Catholic religion 
 that makes him all but insensible even to Catholic art, 
 with the sole exception of architecture. He is interested 
 in everything, from the casual sight of a veritable " bush" 
 as the sign of a Belgian wine-shop, or the construction 
 of a bridge of boats across the Ehine, to the continental 
 mode of observing Sunday, or the physical and moral 
 characteristics of the peoples amongst whom he travels. 
 All that concerns the comfort or welfare of the people 
 excites his special attention. He takes careful note, for 
 instance, of the use of chestnuts as food, and observes 
 that the Belgians mix coal-dust with earth for firing, and 
 is interested in connecting the similar practice which Mr. 
 Yates had observed in Pembrokeshire with the Belgian 
 immigration into that county in the twelfth century.
 
 CONTINENTAL TOUR. 35 
 
 Or he notices that the girls in a school have a second 
 chair each for their work, with a ledge for a foot-rest, 
 and notes the sanitary importance of the arrangement. 
 
 Mr. Yates who possessed something of the encyclo- 
 paedic information that is associated with his family 
 name was an admirable guide, philosopher and friend. 
 
 So they journeyed through Belgium, up the Ehine 
 and into Italy, where Como flashed upon the young 
 traveller's soul like a new world and a new life ; where 
 Florence was slower to assert her greater power; and 
 where at last the queenly Rome slowly and surely mas- 
 tered his spirit and for years afterwards ever grew upon 
 him, rising up to borrow a fine image of his own as 
 he withdrew from her, till she stood alone amongst the 
 cities. 
 
 " On the strength of that meat he went twenty years." 
 
 His stay with his beloved and generous people was 
 not to be long protracted after his return, early in 1835. 
 Towards the close of that same year he accepted an 
 invitation to the old Mill Hill chapel, Leeds, and left 
 his little flock, united and prosperous, with the warmest 
 feelings of affection and gratitude on either side. 
 
 He wore for many years a handsome gold watch which 
 was presented to him as a parting gift by his people 
 to be succeeded at last by a like gift from another group 
 of Liverpool friends when he was minister of the Hope 
 Street church. 
 
 There were many reasons which induced him to accept 
 the invitation to Leeds., His powers were now un- 
 doubtedly such as to demand more scope than could well 
 
 D 2
 
 36 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 be given them at the Park Chapel. He had always 
 resolved that the work of the ministry should be, if 
 in any way possible, his sole professional employment. 
 He did not think it a task which he could discharge 
 in conjunction with literary or scholastic work of a re- 
 munerative character, and he therefore felt it natural and 
 legitimate to embrace an opportunity of making himself 
 permanently independent of any subsidiary profession. 
 And, finally, he had private reasons for desiring a change 
 of surroundings that must not be altogether passed over 
 in the conventional silence that falsifies and mutilates 
 biography. 
 
 Even amid all the glories of Italy his thoughts had often 
 wandered back to England, where they had gathered into 
 a hope that on his return he felt he must relinquish. 
 
 Those who knew his robust character in later life, and 
 who have not realized the strength of certain literary 
 influences in earlier decades of the century, will hardly 
 be prepared to hear that a copy of the English transla- 
 tion of the " Sorrows of Werther," worn almost to pieces 
 by incessant reading, testifies to the fact that at this 
 time he sought, and in some sense found, comfort for his. 
 wounded affections in a train of thought and sentiment 
 with which he had little sympathy afterwards. 
 
 He still loved his work ; but for a time life seemed to 
 have little to give or take away that could raise a per- 
 sonal hope or fear in his heart. But this too should 
 
 pass away.* 
 
 * See "Letters and Journals," pp. 99 114.
 
 FROM LIVERPOOL TO LEEDS. 37 
 
 III. 
 
 On December 20th, 1835, my father preached his first 
 sermon as the minister of the Mill Hill chapel. 
 
 The next eighteen years cover the period of his fullest 
 and most sustained professional activity. His Leeds 
 ministry always appeared to him to have been his true 
 life-work, and by it he would have wished to be judged. 
 
 In such a sketch as this, no attempt can be made 
 to fill in a detailed picture of the varied and successful 
 toils of these busy and often anxious years. 
 
 The position taken in the town since the recent repeal 
 of the " Corporation and Test Acts," by members of the 
 Mill Hill congregation, and by my father's predecessor 
 and cousin, Dr. Button, opened up opportunities of 
 public usefulness to him which he soon saw it would 
 require all his strength adequately to utilize. 
 
 Under his new and extended duties he rapidly 
 attained to the full measure of his powers, though in 
 appearance he was still, for some time to come, younger 
 than his years. " God bless thee, joy ! " said an old 
 woman, as she set down her water-pail, on being intro- 
 duced to her new minister. " Nay, but they have sent 
 us a lad this time !" remarked one of his hearers, when 
 first he preached at Mill Hill, thinking he was a student 
 sent to supply; but he soon perceived that, whether 
 man or boy, " he could do a man's work," 
 
 And no doubt there was man's work to be done at 
 Mill Hill, and in Leeds, if any one could do it. The 
 town of Leeds in 1836 was full of life and vigour, but
 
 38 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 it was a very different place from what it has become 
 in 1886. Only just enfranchised (by the Eeform Bill 
 of 1832), without a daily paper, with none of the great 
 public buildings and comparatively few of the public 
 institutions which it now boasts, with such a centre of 
 intellectual life as the Yorkshire College not so much as 
 dreamed of, Leeds in 1836 required a long series of 
 public services and a long growth of public spirit to 
 develop its political, municipal and intellectual resources. 
 In all these directions my father strove to bear his 
 part, for during his Leeds ministry, though at no other 
 time of his life, he took an active part in public affairs. 
 In doing so, he allowed neither conventional reticence 
 nor party allegiance to restrain the freedom of his action 
 or his utterance ; and those who only knew him in later 
 life may well be startled by the vehemence of his advo- 
 cacy of the causes for which he fought in his earlier 
 years. Speaking, for instance, on " those vile and wicked" 
 Corn Laws, at the close of 1845, he declared that "he 
 could not but reflect on the burdens which the poor had 
 to bear in times of dearth and scarcity. He was sick of 
 hearing of the burdens of the rich the burdens on the 
 land in the face of starvation and want for the poor. 
 This land was indeed becoming a burden, and was begin- 
 ning to be like a mill-stone about their necks. The very 
 land which nature intended for their support was, by 
 an artifice in legislation, by a vile and wicked sophism, 
 becoming a limiter of their supplies and an instrument 
 of starvation. He believed that there had been no years 
 in our history more damaging to the character, to the
 
 THE CORN LAWS. EDUCATION. 39 
 
 chivalry, to the reputation and to the humanity of the 
 British aristocracy and landed proprietors, than the few 
 years in which the Corn Laws and their mischievous 
 effects had been exposed. In conclusion, he expressed 
 a hope that God would please to convert the selfish and 
 inactive stewards of the nation's liberty, and he hoped 
 He would convert them by warning, rather than leave 
 them to be compelled to yield by plagues." 
 
 Again, at the General Election of 1847, the official 
 Liberalism of Leeds, led and represented by the " Leeds 
 Mercury," was passionately opposed to what it called 
 "Government education" and the receipt of "Govern- 
 ment money" by the managers of schools. My father, 
 however, supported by the majority of his congregation, 
 threw himself ardently into the national scheme, what- 
 ever its imperfections, and did not shrink from the 
 necessary result of an active alliance with the Church 
 and Tory party. He even enlisted in spite of earnest 
 protests on the part of some respected members the 
 collective and official action of the Mill Hill congrega- 
 tion in the cause, calling a meeting of the members, at 
 which resolutions were passed in favour of the national 
 scheme. 
 
 Yet more noteworthy was the action of the minister 
 and congregation of Mill Hill chapel with reference to 
 the Fugitive Slave Act. This measure roused my father's 
 deepest indignation. Unable to believe in any second- 
 hand evidence of such legislative enormities, he obtained 
 a copy of the Act from America ; and when satisfied of 
 the truth of the worst representations, he threw himself
 
 40 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 with heart and soul into the agitation against it and 
 against the system out of which it had grown. 
 
 Dr. Dewey's notorious advocacy of compliance with 
 the measure had created a profound feeling of distress 
 and shame amongst his friends in England. The congre- 
 gation of the Mill Hill chapel had, many years before, 
 invited Dr. Dewey, in highly complimentary terms, to 
 become their pastor ; and so high had the wave of indig- 
 nation risen, that this very fact threatened to become a 
 stain upon their Christian character unless made the 
 means of asserting and vindicating it. 
 
 On June 22nd, 1851, my father preached a sermon 
 on the Fugitive Slave Law. A meeting of the congre- 
 gation was held at the close of the service, under his 
 presidency, and a resolution passed in which those 
 present declare that "they feel themselves summoned 
 by the cause of humanity and truth to protest against 
 the sacrifice to supposed immediate political and com- 
 mercial expediency, of those great principles of moral 
 right which lie at the basis of all human security, happi- 
 ness and virtue. And they implore the Father of grace 
 and mercy to turn into the paths of mercy those citizens 
 of America, and those professors of the Christian faith, 
 who are at present resisting eternal obligations, and to 
 strengthen the hands and sustain the hearts of all those 
 who are advocating the common cause of human nature 
 and Christian duty." 
 
 Several leading members of the congregation were 
 then deputed to draw up a letter to Dr. Dewey, to be 
 sent to him, together with the resolution, in the name of
 
 THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT. 41 
 
 the congregation. This letter was afterwards submitted 
 to another meeting and approved. " We cannot conceal 
 from you," the writers said, " our bitter grief and disap- 
 pointment at the course which you and [others] have 
 thought it right to pursue. It is with the hope that we 
 may be the means of awakening in your mind a sense 
 of the great injury to the cause of humanity and religion 
 which you appear to us to have inflicted, that we now 
 write to you." 
 
 These facts will suffice to illustrate the active interest 
 taken by my father in public questions, and at the 
 same time to show that the judicial turn of mind, the 
 dislike of extremes, the distrust of a judgment formed 
 at a distance from the phenomena to be judged, the great 
 love of peace, and the tendency to a middle course in 
 practical matters which always characterized him, did 
 not always restrain his enthusiasm or his indignation 
 within the limits which worldly wisdom would have 
 dictated. He, too, had learned and taught that "the 
 foolishness of God is wiser than men." 
 
 On other matters I have been able to find no record 
 of my father's opinions. What was his precise attitude 
 towards the Chartist movement, for instance, or towards 
 the " Ten Hours' Bill," I have not been able to ascertain. 
 
 On the latter point, an old admirer of his still living 
 in Leeds seemed to promise some information. " I 
 think he was in favour of it," he said, in answer to a 
 question. But when pressed for a detailed justification 
 of his belief, he could only say, " Well, you see, he wer' 
 always i' favour of everything good ! " And perhaps,
 
 42 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 after all, the impression left on the honest Yorkshire- 
 man's mind is as good biographical material as we can 
 desire. 
 
 Amongst the public institutions of Leeds in which 
 he took an active interest may be mentioned the 
 " Literary Institution," the " Mechanics' Institute," and 
 the " Philosophical Hall." The two former were united, 
 with beneficial results, in June, 1842, and my father 
 was the first President of the united institutions. For 
 the "Philosophical Hall" he worked during the whole 
 time of his residence in Leeds, and he was President 
 from the session of 1851-52 till the time of his resigna- 
 tion in 1854. 
 
 This work, though often arduous and occasionally 
 discouraging, was on the whole a source of keen interest 
 and enjoyment to him. It brought him into contact 
 with many interesting people, and furnished him with 
 the occasion for extending and formulating his own 
 studies and opinions in matters not immediately con- 
 nected with his professional work, thus furnishing the 
 intellectual stimulus and variety which are almost a 
 necessity of mental and even physical health to men 
 of wide and active sympathies. 
 
 A selection of the subjects on which he prepared 
 careful and often elaborate essays for the institutions I 
 have mentioned may not be without its interest. 
 
 " On ' II Bruto Secondo' of Alfieri, and ' Julius Caesar' 
 of Shakespeare" (1836) ; " On the Metaphysical Identity 
 of the leading Theories (as those of Clarke, Wollaston, 
 Bentham and others) on the Grounds of Moral Distinc-
 
 THE PHILOSOPHICAL HALL. 43 
 
 tions" (1838) ; "A critical Analysis of the Second and 
 Fourth Books of Milton's Paradise Lost" (1844); "On the 
 Characteristics of "Writers on the French Revolution 
 Hazlitt, Scott, Smythe, Carlyle, Thiers" (1846) ; " On 
 some of the leading Facts and Statutes relating to the 
 Woollen Trade, from the Twelfth Century downwards" 
 (1848) ; " On Homeric Contrasts of Character Priam 
 and Nestor, Hector and Paris, Andromache and Helen, 
 &c." (1851) ; " On the Styles of the great Military Com- 
 manders Xenophon, Caesar, Napoleon, Wellington" 
 (1852) ; " On the Poetry of English, Scotch and Irish 
 Domestic Life" (1853). 
 
 In theology, my father was regarded hy some of the 
 older ministers as a dangerous man ; but his perception 
 of the practical aspects of every question, and his sym- 
 pathy with the practical needs of the heart, enabled him 
 generally to present even those conceptions that were 
 most likely to excite opposition, in such a way that they 
 were felt as a development and vindication of some loved 
 and acknowledged principle, or a relief from some felt 
 encumbrance, rather than as an attack upon a cherished 
 belief. On a large number of questions, too, he was 
 content to observe a deliberate silence, not because he 
 believed in reticence with respect to any firm conviction 
 for it was a cardinal maxim with him that the great 
 thing to do with the truth is "to tell it" but because 
 the attitude of his own mind was one of suspense. 
 Throughout his Leeds ministry he was determined never 
 to rest anything upon the miracles, for he could not
 
 44 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 accept them as having any evidential value. But the 
 question of their historical truth he never raised, because 
 he did not feel that he could answer it. 
 
 When he felt the ground firm, however, he could 
 speak decisively enough ; and as early as in 1839 he 
 published in the "Christian Teacher," then under the 
 editorship of his friend the Eev. J. H. Thorn, an article 
 on "Ancient Prophets and Modern Ministers," which 
 he fully expected at the time would put an end to his 
 career as a minister. No such result followed ; but the 
 article caused no little disapproval and even dismay in 
 some quarters, though it did not at all impair the sym- 
 pathy and confidence of the Mill Hill congregation. It 
 is an uncompromising and striking vindication of the 
 historical and organic view of prophecy. 
 
 " In fact, we are not only of opinion (however these 
 views be sympathized in by others) that the prophecies 
 of the Old Testament do not contain a single clear, 
 express and positive prediction of Christianity, but that 
 the whole nature of the prophetic office is mistaken 
 when it is regarded as a foretelling office, instead of a 
 forewarning and a denunciatory one. It would not shake 
 our faith in the prophets it would not lower one degree 
 our veneration and appreciation of them if it should 
 appear, as we are wholly inclined to believe that on full 
 investigation and reflection it will, that their prophecies 
 were only so far predictions, as auguries of coming good, 
 fears and warnings of probable ill, denunciations of the 
 bad effects of bad actions, are likely to prove predictions 
 when the course of causation has brought about results."
 
 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES. 45 
 
 With a view chiefly to his theological studies, my 
 father was now gradually and laboriously adding to his 
 knowledge of French and Italian some acquaintance 
 with German, and though he never acquired any facility 
 in this language, yet he succeeded in working his way 
 through some of the writings of De Wette, Paulus, and 
 others, and undoubtedly gained much from them.* 
 
 But in spite of his earnest study of theology, my 
 father did not regard himself, however he may have been 
 regarded by others, as a leader in this region of thought 
 except in his own immediate circle ; and it was only in 
 response to the warmest personal solicitations that he 
 consented to become, in 1845, one of the editors of the 
 " Prospective Eeview," as a colleague of his old Liver- 
 pool associates, the Eev. J. H. Thorn and the Eev. J. 
 Martineau, and his and their friend, the Eev. J. J. Tayler, 
 of Manchester. As long as the Eeview was published, 
 he was a regular contributor to its pages ; and the quar- 
 terly meetings at which the four friends planned the 
 successive numbers of the Eeview furnished a welcome 
 
 * In 1847, he spent some weeks in Heidelberg, to improve his 
 knowledge of German. He had an introduction to Paulus, and, 
 having carefully primed himself with a few sentences, he entered 
 his study, and was struck by his refined and delicate appearance, 
 and at first by his somewhat distant manner. On his announcing 
 that he had read his " Leben Jesu," however, all coldness disap- 
 peared, and he was soon on easy enough terms with him to ask 
 whether he still adhered to his system of interpretation. Strauss 
 had published his " Lebeii Jesu," and " a good many things had 
 happened" since 1828, the date of Paulus's book, but the old 
 scholar would not admit that anything had been said or done to 
 shake his faith in his own discoveries.
 
 46 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 break and change in the routine of busy lives, fruitful 
 and refreshing at the time, and strangely fascinating in 
 the retrospect. These meetings haunted the memory of 
 all the four editors with a persistent echo of tenderness ; 
 and my father, serious and even anxious as was the 
 prevailing tone of his life at this time, was remembered 
 as the most light-hearted and vivacious of the group ; 
 for on these occasions all his cares vanished, and, while 
 keeping a strict eye to business, he was as ready "desipere 
 in loco" as " ridens, dicere verum" ; and although in the 
 special studies and speculations naturally associated with 
 a theological journal, my father, as already hinted, never 
 regarded himself as in any sense the peer of his three 
 associates, yet they, on their side, felt that what he 
 could contribute to the joint enterprize was not less 
 important than what they could bring ; and, at any rate, 
 he may be joined with them in the gratitude of a later 
 generation whose path these theological pioneers have 
 done so much to smooth. 
 
 The quarterly meetings of the editors occupied a place 
 wholly their own ; but with this exception the most in- 
 tellectually refreshing and stimulating evenings spent 
 by my father at this period were those occupied by the 
 meetings of the Leeds " Conversation Club," of which he 
 was one of the original members. 
 
 All the activities now mentioned, however, were 
 strictly subordinate to the direct work of the ministry, 
 to which my father devoted his life at Leeds. Thinking 
 very modestly of his own powers, he was convinced that
 
 DOMESTIC MISSION. 47 
 
 amid surroundings demanding greater strength or bril- 
 liancy he would have failed ; and while rejoicing to find 
 himself in a position in which he could hope to render 
 some services to a wider public, he never believed that 
 his true work lay anywhere outside his chapel and con- 
 gregation, and a certain "ministry at large" that his 
 position naturally carried with it. 
 
 The growth of this latter branch of work ultimately 
 led to the establishment of the Domestic Mission in 
 Holbeck in 1844,* for which my father had well pre- 
 pared the way, aud in which he never ceased to take a 
 warm personal interest; and likewise to the establish- 
 ment (also in 1884) of the first Leeds Loan Society, as a 
 substitute for private loans, which, in my father's case, 
 produced, as he said, two undesirable results : 1st, that 
 he was constantly and rather seriously out of pocket ; 
 2nd, that he was in danger of being cut by a consider- 
 able proportion of his humbler acquaintance. 
 
 The great event of his ministry at Mill Hill was the 
 building of the new chapel. The old building had been 
 erected in 1672, immediately after the Indulgence, at a 
 cost of 400, and, though frequently altered, it had 
 become wholly inadequate and uusuited to the require- 
 ments of the congregation. An extensive scheme of 
 renovation, when already well advanced, was delayed 
 by the celebrated decision of the House of Lords in the 
 "Lady Hewley Case," in August, 1842, which rendered 
 
 * A room -was engaged at 10 a year in the first instance. A 
 chapel was built in 1852. The present chapel and schools were 
 opened in 1883.
 
 48 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 the tenure of our chapels altogether precarious ; and the 
 money subscribed lay for some years at the bank.* 
 When the "Dissenters' Chapels Act" was passed in 
 1844, the scheme was taken up again, and was anxiously 
 promoted by my father. 
 
 On the whole, great unanimity and spirit were shown 
 in support of the project, though there were of course 
 some "praisers of times past" who thought it was "a 
 shame to pull down the old chapel," in spite of its 
 almost dangerous condition. "There will be no need 
 of that," my father replied. " The old chapel is coming 
 down of itself. The only question is, whether we are to 
 build a new one." 
 
 At last all difficulties were overcome, and on Wednes- 
 day, Dec. 27th, 1848, the new chapel was opened, the 
 chanting of the words, " Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of 
 Sabaoth," being "the first audible act of worship" there. 
 
 The new Mill Hill chapel was one of the first pro- 
 nounced architectural departures from the old meeting- 
 house style of building, and was opened free of debt, 
 having cost a little more than 7300. 
 
 Of the general spirit of my father's ministry at Leeds 
 it is difficult for me to speak. His " talent for taking 
 
 * " I am assured also that a sum of no less than ,4000, which 
 has been subscribed for the purpose of fresh repairs to the meeting- 
 house at Leeds, the place where Priestley himself once taught, is 
 lying idle, because they dare not repair a single pew within the 
 walls of that meeting-house until they know whether this Bill 
 shall pass into a law." Macaulay's Speech in the House of 
 Commons, June 6th, 1844. See " Debates on the Dissenters' 
 Chapels Bill," p. 135. Cf. also ibid. Appendix, p. 443.
 
 NEW CHAPEL. 49 
 
 pains" had not forsaken him ; and there lies before me 
 a mass of evidence in his scrupulously-kept registers 
 and note-books of the system and method which by 
 a constantly sustained effort he introduced into every 
 detail of his work. From the warming and ventilation 
 of the chapel to the composition of his sermons, he 
 allowed nothing to be done badly if thought and care 
 could secure its being done well, and he had too much 
 respect for the substance of his work to be content with 
 anything slipshod or careless in its adjuncts. 
 
 As a pastor he was deeply loved, and the secret of his 
 power is not hard to understand. A member of his old 
 flock, on once hearing of some one paying a " ministerial 
 call," remarked, "Ah! Mr. Wicksteed never called on 
 us. He came to see us." And yet, though always a 
 natural man, incapable of cultivating, and still more 
 incapable of assuming, an austere indifference to the 
 minor pleasures and cares of life, a habitual exemption 
 from commonplace interests, or a saintly seclusion of 
 unbroken spiritual exaltation, he had nevertheless a 
 certain severity of life and manner which truly reflected 
 the sustained earnestness of his aims, and prevented the 
 affectionate admiration with which he inspired his friends 
 from passing into too easy familiarity. Few people ever 
 took liberties with him ; very few did so twice. 
 
 In 1837, Charles Wicksteed married Jane, second 
 daughter of the late Arthur Lupton, Esq., of Leeds ; 
 and in her " his heart safely trusted " till the day 
 of his death. The marriage, which was celebrated in 
 
 E
 
 50 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 the Call Lane (Arian) chapel, was the first that took 
 place in the district under the new Marriage Act. The 
 Eegistrar was almost afraid of a disturbance, and was 
 with my father, in fear and trembling, from six o'clock 
 in the morning. The bridegroom came to the chapel 
 with a copy of the Act in his pocket, the page turned 
 down at the place where the penalties incurred by any 
 who should impede the ceremony were set forth. But 
 the alarms were groundless. Great interest was felt in 
 the marriage, but not of a hostile description. 
 
 If omens go for anything, the first marriage in the 
 district under the new Act was a happy augury for those 
 to come. The novelist strains his powers to make his 
 readers realize the lives of his hero and heroine ; the 
 biographer often exerts his utmost skill to conceal them ; 
 but no efforts could be adequate to the suppression in 
 a sketch of the life of Charles Wicksteed, of the place 
 occupied in it by Jane his wife. He was a lover to the 
 day of his death ; and his life had in it, not only the 
 strength and peace of steady affection, but an abiding ele- 
 ment of that romance which is conventionally supposed 
 to be in its nature transient. " I am amused to see," he 
 once wrote, " how the people take us to be on a wedding 
 tour so attentive a spouse am I after fifteen years' 
 experience, when I have time to pay attention and she 
 time to receive it, a rare (alas !) coincidence ! " And he 
 often spoke of the "twilight existence" he led when for 
 a few days he was alone. 
 
 Wise people had felt and even expressed some surprise 
 that so learned and "clever" a man had not selected a
 
 MARRIED LIFE. 51 
 
 more learned lady for his partner. But my father, while 
 perceiving that Miss Jane Lupton was neither a musician, 
 a linguist, nor a metaphysician, and that she strongly 
 objected to hearing of the sin and shame of the past, 
 even if it was called history, saw at the same time that 
 she knew something at first-hand of American, French 
 and English ideas and society, had a mind stored with 
 picturesque and pleasing details of the past and present, 
 loved poetry and art with assimilating enthusiasm, had 
 cultivated a firm memory and a skilful hand that could 
 do good service in reproducing masterpieces of both alike, 
 had looked straight into men and things with the guile- 
 less eye of unflinching and unsuspecting veracity, and 
 had seized the good and rejected the evil with the quick 
 instincts of truth. 
 
 The companionship of Charles and Jane "Wicksteed, 
 therefore, was one alike of the intellect and the affections. 
 It is true that my mother was in no sense her husband's 
 fellow-student. The problems of speculative theology 
 had no attraction for her, and she did not wish to descend 
 with him into the regions of uneasy questioning which 
 must sometimes agitate the life of every faithful minister; 
 but she never shrank from the result, whether positive or 
 negative ; and in this, as in many other trials, my father 
 found the greatest of all helps and supports in the bright 
 and trusting presence of one who was not in the valley 
 of death -like shade with him, and whose quick and 
 unfailing sympathy in all those higher interests, pur- 
 suits #nd pleasures, which still remained unclouded, 
 served to lift him out of his troubles and perplexities, 
 
 E2
 
 52 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 and keep his heart and thoughts fresh and healthy. 
 Again and again, in times of secret depression or per- 
 plexity, merely to see his wife steadily and cheerfully 
 going on her way, full of life and courage, was to feel the 
 leaden weight lifted from his heart, and to find strength 
 to grapple afresh with the difficulty or trial that was 
 best shared because unknown. 
 
 And even apart from these exceptional experiences, 
 my father was never one of those who require constantly 
 to communicate their ideas as they rise, and who love 
 to have a friendly and sympathetic witness always in 
 their workshop, watching the progress of each piece even 
 of routine work with affectionate and suggestive interest. 
 He liked to work alone, and my mother seldom knew 
 what special subject had occupied his thoughts during 
 the week till the Sunday morning came. 
 
 But, for all that, they were companions in intellect as 
 well as in affection. Her artistic enthusiasms aided the 
 general expansion and growth of his powers, till the im- 
 patience and almost disgust with which he had once 
 regarded the monotony of Catholic art, was converted 
 into a deep and restful appreciation of its deathless mes- 
 sage to humanity. The whole field of modern English 
 poetry was common to them both. My mother's love 
 of biographies, old and new, gave her a command of 
 apposite and illustrative facts on a wide range of sub- 
 jects ; and my father, on his side, though not inviting 
 her into his mental workshop, loved to make her as far 
 as possible the companion of his reading ; and from the 
 far-distant evenings snatched for a number of " Copper-
 
 HOMER. 53 
 
 field," to the half-hours devoted to passages from St. 
 Augustine, none of those "rare coincidences" of leisure 
 on either side was ever lost. 
 
 Even Homer my father could not bear to keep all 
 to himself, and on one memorable holiday, about seven 
 years after their marriage, when they were at the sea- 
 side at Seaton Carew, and he was going through the 
 Iliad, from time to time he would read a short passage 
 in Greek to my mother, adding a word-for-word con- 
 struing, and then going through the Greek again, as the 
 "many- sounding ocean," seen from their window, in- 
 terpreted and blended with the words, till the scenes 
 depicted rose so vividly before her mind and were so 
 intimately associated with the roll of the hexameters, 
 that she could hardly persuade herself that she had not 
 in a kind of way read Homer in the original! She 
 would relate with infinite amusement how on these 
 occasions my father (who never liked the sea, and whom 
 it never suited) would sit or recline with his back to the 
 window I suppose to catch the light enjoying the 
 many-rippling ocean purely through the literary vehicle; 
 while she might have apostrophized the sea as " lending 
 to the poet's rhythm the music of its voice," and as lift- 
 ing her on its heaving bosom to the crest of Homer's 
 hexameters. 
 
 But all this was, of course, mere episode brief and 
 rare enough in busy lives. Their increasing family 
 very fully occupied her, and the increasing demands of 
 his congregational and public work more than fully 
 occupied him.
 
 54 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 It was in the daily unobtrusive, often unspoken, fel- 
 lowship of work, the unseen but unfailing considerate- 
 ness and forbearance on both sides, the loyal observance 
 of the golden rule given them by Mr. Crawford when 
 he married them, " Never both be out of temper at the 
 same time" it was in these things that that hallowed 
 and hallowing love found expression, which made an 
 atmosphere in their home that no one could breathe 
 without having his heart purified and his estimate of 
 human nature raised. It was this that made them so 
 much part of each other's life, that if my mother was 
 away her husband walked as among shadows. 
 
 Every true joy bears with it potential sorrows. Before 
 many years of their married life had passed, Mr. and 
 Mrs. Wicksteed lost their eldest child, a girl of about 
 two years old, stories of whose tenderness for her baby 
 sister, and sacred relics of whose bodily presence for 
 a time on earth, were handed down to the reverent 
 thoughts of the children who had never known their 
 little sister. 
 
 There was something of amazement in my father's 
 grief. There come events in the lives of all men, some- 
 times more and sometimes less engrossing in themselves, 
 which bring them definitely face to face with some fact 
 of God's government of the world hitherto unrealized. 
 In the presence of such experiences we have to make 
 our peace as best we may with the realities of life, and 
 are happy if through our perplexity, and may be our 
 rebelliousness, we can win our way at last to peace and
 
 THE ANGEL OF DEATH. 55 
 
 acquiescence. Questions once faced, and in some sort 
 answered, can never meet us in the same form again. 
 The future may have in store for us harder trials of like 
 kind, but they will no longer be new to us. 
 
 Arid so it chanced to my father with the death of his 
 first-born. In this particular he had made himself a 
 kind of Deuteronomic creed. He sincerely and literally 
 believed in the promise, " blessed shall be the fruit of 
 thy body," conditional on an obedience to divine com- 
 mands, which he had cheerfully and faithfully rendered. 
 Xow it seemed as though the promise were broken ; and 
 he must struggle with sore perplexity and spiritual 
 depression as well as with his sorrow. 
 
 The lesson was learned at last, and had never to be 
 learned again. The little angel hands had led the 
 mourner into a truer knowledge of life and of God, and 
 with a truer knowledge had given a stronger faith and a 
 deeper peace. But the sorrow remained. Forty years 
 afterwards, when in another generation the joys and 
 sorrows of early life were renewed, and the circle was 
 again broken by the loss of a first-born child of like 
 name, the old wound was still aching, and the grand- 
 father could interpret, not from memory, but from still 
 present experience, the thoughts of the bereaved father 
 and mother.* 
 
 The loss of his child was the second great personal 
 sorrow of my father's life. It was to join hands, after the 
 space of many years, with a third and that the last. 
 
 At the time of their little Ellen's death, her parents 
 * See p. 168.
 
 56 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 had but one infant comforter left them ; but in the suc- 
 ceeding years sons and daughters were born to them, 
 and were recognized by them, as by the Hebrew Psalm- 
 ists, as blessings from the Lord. The miracle of the 
 incarnation of a human soul, and the gradual unfolding 
 of its powers, seems commonplace to us only when no 
 personal relation or experience gives us the key to its 
 meaning and opens up the depth of its mystery and 
 wonder ; and what we speak of as the fond delusion of 
 paternity is in truth no delusion at all, but the revela- 
 tion in a special case of the universal reality the sacred 
 marvel, namely, of infancy. And so with my father as 
 with others, the nursery began to teach the study, and 
 the widening experiences of his personal life enriched 
 and multiplied his powers of interpreting and strength- 
 ening the lives of others. 
 
 He was deeply conscious of the importance of first 
 religious impressions, and from days that go back 
 beyond their memory, his children were taught to say 
 hymns to him on Sunday evening, and to repeat at 
 night prayers that he had written for them. My own 
 earliest impressions of my father are for the most part 
 connected with these hymns and prayers. I remember 
 him first as a grave and earnest man, whose presence 
 had a certain solemnity about it. At that time it was 
 chiefly on Sundays that we saw him ; and on Sunday 
 evenings we used all to sing some verses from Pope's 
 " Universal Prayer" together, and each of us repeated a 
 separate hymn. Our evening prayers, which were very 
 beautiful, and which we knew he had written on purpose
 
 CHILDREN'S PRAYERS. 57 
 
 for us, associated him constantly and intimately in our 
 minds with all the moral and spiritual life of which we 
 had as yet any conception ; and though I can well 
 remember going in to see him, and I think sit upon 
 his knee after dinner sometimes, and also a very occa- 
 sional romp with him when the study was turned into 
 a play-room for the nonce, yet the other and more 
 solemn associations almost obliterate these. To me, 
 and no doubt to the rest of us, he was a sort of incarna- 
 tion of the moral and religious life, in its awful but not 
 in its forbidding aspects; for he was never associated 
 with the drudgery, the irksomeness or the unreality 
 which even the simplest religious exercises must some- 
 times present to childhood, but only with their known 
 and unknown power for good in our lives and in the 
 world. 
 
 This is one of the prayers, the only one I can now 
 remember, which he wrote for us : 
 
 " God, my heavenly Father, thou hast blessed me 
 with affectionate parents and relatives and many kind 
 friends ; my daily bread, my needful raiment and my 
 peaceful home, are all the gifts of thy goodness. Make 
 me, therefore, of a contented and cheerful mind. O God, 
 thou seest everything I do, thou knowest everything I 
 think. Help me to make my heart and life pure as in 
 thy sight. Give me strength to keep all the good reso- 
 lutions which I form. When I feel anything to be 
 wrong, may 1 be sure not to do it. May I never be 
 guilty of the great sin of violating the truth. Help me 
 to preserve my temper, to obey my parents with a ready
 
 58 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 mind, to be kind, forbearing and unselfish in my conduct 
 towards all about me. May I remember that thou hast 
 sent Jesus Christ to make us good and happy, and 
 though I have not seen him, yet may I love him, and 
 try to be in all things his true disciple. Amen." 
 
 Towards the close of his Leeds ministry his elder 
 children began to make some claims on his time and 
 attention as a tutor ; and his lessons in grammar, history 
 and literature, and his walks in search of architectural 
 illustrations of his conversations on art, left an abiding 
 impression upon them ; while the care, the joy and the 
 pain of the task to him are illustrated by such entries 
 in a diary as these : " Had my lad crying over his Latin 
 to-day. It was miserable to see his unhappiness. My 
 heart wept too. But it was necessary to make a turned- 
 back lesson thoroughly disagreeable, and I was stern, 
 exacting and severe, from the love I bore him. He was 
 called out to the tailor with his tearful face, and came 
 back in his little new-made ' epicene' dress of merino- 
 like stuff, but the greeting of my heart remained in it 
 silent. But sorrow may endure for an hour, joy cometh 
 at dinner-time, and all trace except, I hope, the fruit of 
 the tears is lost." 
 
 " I have had my dear slow lad and his quick careless 
 sister doing penalty in my study two hours with their 
 neglected Latin lesson of this morning. It challenges 
 my faith to believe in the reality of the infinite, incon- 
 ceivable confusions and puzzles of my poor little fellow's 
 noddle, with his intermixture, at the end of nearly a 
 year's teaching, of verbs and substantives, giving genders
 
 CHILDREN'S LESSONS. 59 
 
 to the first and persons to the second, and throwing 
 personal pronouns and cases indiscriminately among 
 them, till in my exhausted patience I roar into his ear 
 his own incredible mistake. And now he is gone to 
 bed and is fast asleep, with his little trembling voice 
 hushed, and the tear of his lack-lustre eye dried, and 
 his brain at rest. And I have been up to drop a loving 
 kiss upon his unconscious brow, and could weep to 
 have lost my patience with so dear a little fellow, who 
 is sharp, intelligent, observant in actual life, but a slow 
 hand at grammar and books." 
 
 " Got some of Janet's stories and journals last night, 
 being equal to no more serious work. . . . Her powers 
 now require more guidance, I perceive, than they can 
 receive in company with the younger children, and I 
 must endeavour to give more time to her." 
 
 My father had never been strong, and he had always 
 worked up to or beyond his strength. He had suffered 
 severely from rheumatism and afterwards from neuralgia; 
 and the steady and increasing drain upon his powers 
 was beginning to tell. The buoyancy of his manner in 
 company and his keen relish of social life concealed an 
 anxious temperament liable to deep depression ; and as 
 his physical infirmities tightened their grasp on him, he 
 had to struggle against mental as well as bodily lassitude, 
 and the constant fear that he was labouring in vain in 
 the work of his life. The " foolishness of preaching/' 
 the limitations of his own powers, the impossibility of 
 doing, or at least of knowing that he was doing, the
 
 60 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 things which alone he cared to do all these doubts and 
 troubles asserted themselves with growing frequency 
 and emphasis, and told more and more markedly upon 
 his physical health. 
 
 For a number of years, short visits to Ben Rhydding, 
 the hydropathic establishment at Ilkley, then under 
 the management of Dr. Macleod, sufficed to hold these 
 seasons of physical and mental depression, which were 
 usually accompanied with severe neuralgia, at bay. It 
 was difficult for the pleasure-seekers who frequented 
 Ben Rhydding to believe that there was much amiss 
 with him when he was there, for his animated conversa- 
 tion and undisguised enjoyment of his temporary escape 
 from the pressure and responsibility of his work, very 
 often made him the life and soul of the party, even if a 
 few hours before he had been completely prostrated. 
 
 After a time, however, Ben Rhydding and its baths and 
 waters lost their power, and the more serious develop- 
 ments of advancing nervous exhaustion required more 
 systematic treatment. He spent a great part of two 
 successive summers (1850 and 1851) at Barkstone Ash, 
 a village fourteen miles out of Leeds, driving in on 
 Sundays and spending a day or two weekly in Leeds to 
 attend to his pastoral work. 
 
 At last, in the spring of 1853, when a break-down 
 seemed inevitable, he consented to take a long holiday; 
 and realizing a dream he had long dreamed, he took his 
 wife for a tour in Italy. 
 
 They were absent for nearly three months, from May 
 4th to June 28th, travelling through France, along the
 
 FAILING HEALTH. 61 
 
 Eiviera, through Florence and Eome to Naples, then back 
 through Bologna, Venice, Milan and Switzerland, down 
 the Rhine and home. They left Italy, as my mother 
 expressed it, "like well-satisfied guests from an entertain- 
 ment, grateful for the past, but with no wish to linger," 
 turning their faces towards their "happy home" with the 
 conviction so complete as to be rather taken for granted 
 than uttered, that the journey had been as efficacious in 
 restoring my father's health as it had been rich in the 
 renewal and broadening of associations, and the storing- 
 up of memories of beauty drawn alike from nature and 
 art. But almost immediately on his return to work, his 
 old lassitude and the specific ailments that accompanied 
 it returned, and their progress became so rapid and 
 alarming that it was clearly impossible to fight against 
 them any longer. 
 
 " That most gnawing of all companionships," my father 
 afterwards wrote, " constant exhaustion and constant 
 work," made life almost a burden to him. " Sleep forsaking 
 me," he continues, " hope deserting me, vigour departing, 
 and ceasing now to be lured back as heretofore by any 
 contrivance of foreign travel, medical discipline or en- 
 forced leisure, I took the advice of an eminent physician 
 to 'go and live like a cow/ and fled the long rows of 
 brick and stone, and the smoke and whirl, and, harder 
 still, the long row of attached friends and clients, the 
 long list of causes for staying where I was, and rushed 
 to the bosom of boon nature." 
 
 In May, 1854, he wrote to announce his intention of 
 resigning his pulpit at Christmas.
 
 62 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 It seemed as though the congregation at Mill Hill 
 could not accept the situation as real. They suggested 
 that he should take another holiday extending through 
 the summer and autumn, and at last that he would allow 
 them to appoint a colleague, and would take three years 
 of entire rest, in the enjoyment of his full salary. " In 
 his denial they would find no sense. They would not 
 understand him." 
 
 The correspondence in which these proposals were 
 made found my father at Ilkley. Deeply touched, 
 almost overwhelmed by such evidences of attachment, 
 he could only answer them by steadily refusing to in- 
 dulge in or encourage any delusive hopes ; and so start- 
 ling was now the development of his "premature old 
 age," as Erasmus Wilson called it, that he was forced to 
 send in his actual resignation on July 7th, and dared 
 not venture even to deliver a farewell sermon to his 
 beloved and devoted flock. 
 
 Within a few weeks he had taken a house in one of 
 the most beautiful spots in North Wales, and the wreck 
 of his hopes and endeavours had brought about the rea- 
 lization of his dreams, a life in the bosom of nature.* 
 
 IV. 
 
 Upper Eyarth, the house to which my father retired, 
 was situated far up the Vale of Clwyd, between two and 
 three miles past Ruthin. " I write," he says to a friend 
 in the September of 1854, "in face of the everlasting 
 hills of this lovely Clwydian range. Now they are 
 * See " Letters and Journals," pp. 114137.
 
 VALE OF CLWYD. 63 
 
 covered with snow, but up to this moment we have had 
 mild weather, and still the roses, fuchsias, dahlias, bloom 
 before our eyes, or look into our rooms through the sides 
 of the bow-windows. I am already benefiting by the 
 entire mental rest I am now getting, and it is delightful 
 for the first time in my life to spend so many hours in the 
 day with my family. I did not run away from the battle 
 of life till I found I could no longer fight in it. My 
 nerves and heart had got somehow or other so over- 
 charged, that the result was physical pain and illness 
 and prevailing sleeplessness. This had affected me for 
 two or three years more or less, and had been chronic 
 twelve months before I determined to touch my mother 
 earth again, and see if a more external life might not 
 restore me by the long-desired communion with dear 
 and ever-healthy nature." 
 
 This was the beginning of a long period of complete 
 cessation from the work of the ministry. Soon after his 
 settlement at Upper Eyarth, my father received a depu- 
 tation from his beloved flock, bringing a final expression 
 of their grief at the inevitable severance of his connection 
 with them, and requesting his acceptance of a purse of 
 880 and a handsome silver salver.* At the age of 
 
 * This salver is but one of many memorials of the grateful 
 affection of my father's Leeds friends. The still sound and hand- 
 some study table, nearly forty years old, at which I am now 
 writing, is another. The portrait of himself, presented to my 
 mother, now in the Mill Hill Congregational Hall, yet another. 
 And second to none in the significance of its associations is a pair 
 of gold spectacles presented to him, with a touching address, by 
 " some of the less opulent members of his congregation." Indeed,
 
 64 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 forty-four lie had closed, for an indefinite period, his 
 active labours in his profession. 
 
 Indeed, at this time he was, physically speaking, a 
 complete wreck. Unable to walk even a few miles 
 without frequent rests, wearied in mind no less than in 
 body, his whole constitution running down in prematare 
 old age, he had stopped only just in time. 
 
 But these early years of his retirement were never- 
 theless amongst the happiest of his life. Intercourse 
 with his family and intercourse with nature were the 
 two things in the world he loved most, and almost the 
 two things of which, under the unremitting claims of 
 his profession, he had been able to secure least. 
 
 Now he drank in the healing and calming influences 
 of nature at every pore. The two little fields attached to 
 his house, the garden, orchard and nuttery, the pony and 
 the cow, busied without wearying him in country occu- 
 pations ; and his own and his wife's combined resources 
 enabled him to look forward, if not without anxiety, yet 
 at least without immediate apprehension, to the years of 
 rest that might be needful to restore his strength. 
 
 And the children, who had always drawn to them- 
 selves so large a share of his inner thoughts, might now 
 claim their place in his outward life as well, and he 
 became their teacher, guide and companion. In the 
 Leeds days, none of us ever ventured into the. study 
 without a feeling that we might be committing sacrilege. 
 We looked up at him as he sat at his table to see whether 
 
 no opportunity of giving visible expression to feelings of esteem 
 and gratitude was ever allowed to slip.
 
 UPPER EYARTH. 65 
 
 the golden sceptre would be lowered and our request 
 heard, or whether we had broken in at an inopportune 
 moment, and caused some mischief that we could not 
 measure. There was a tradition amongst us that one 
 of us had interrupted him as he was " writing a book," 
 and that in consequence he had had " to do it all again." 
 
 Now a great change came over his life and ours. We 
 were constantly with him in our lessons, our walks and 
 our amusements. Of course it was impossible that his 
 humanity should issue from its shrouded recesses with- 
 out sometimes startling and perplexing us ; but what a 
 new life was opened up to us ! 
 
 Even at Ilkley, when his life was, as it were, trem- 
 bling in the balance, he had begun to find rest and 
 happiness in reading "Ivanhoe" aloud to his children; 
 and for many and many a year to come, Scott, read by 
 my father as few can read him, was to be a part of the 
 life of his household. Milton was soon added, on Sunday 
 evenings, now and then a play of Shakespeare, and (for 
 the benefit of one imaginary knight-errant especially) 
 Spenser, a great favourite of my father's, whose Faery 
 Queen he used to call " the scholar's Pilgrim's Progress." 
 
 For himself, he took down his Greek Lexicon again 
 (that dearly bought Lexicon that superseded the one he 
 had on loan for five shillings !), and read the trilogy of 
 ^Eschylus, while he was endeavouring not by any 
 means an unmixed pleasure this to initiate his elder 
 children into the mysteries of Latin construing. 
 
 One of the advantages of the situation of Upper 
 Eyarth was the neighbourhood of the Euthin grammar- 
 
 F
 
 66 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 school, for which my father began to prepare his elder 
 boys by teaching them the syntax in the Eton Latin 
 Grammar. It was with strange feelings that he directed 
 his attention to that singular product of the human 
 intellect, now that he could form an independent judg- 
 ment on its merits ; and I well remember how his half- 
 suppressed exclamations of contempt as we repeated 
 our Latin rules tempted me to ask with a faint and 
 delusive gleam of hope why, if the rules were so 
 " ridiculous/' we were forced to learn them. " Because 
 you would be ridiculous if you didn't," was his prompt 
 and characteristic reply. He was a reformer, but not a 
 Quixotic one, and he had no notion of sacrificing his 
 children to his own theories of education. 
 
 It was characteristic of my father, too, that when his 
 boys began to attend the grammar-school, it occurred 
 to him as natural that invalid as he was he should 
 call them at, say, a little before six o'clock in the morn- 
 ing and drive them to Euthin, about three miles off, in 
 time for seven o'clock school. But he soon found that 
 this brought back his sleeplessness and lassitude so 
 unmistakably as to convince even him of the necessity 
 of changing his methods, and accordingly he designed a 
 certain " double pad" the greatest engineering achieve- 
 ment of his life, I think on which his two boys rode 
 to and from school on one pony and became independent 
 of a Jehu. 
 
 The school was conducted on strictest Church -of- 
 England principles ; and though my father's scholarly 
 acquirements (admitted by the clerical Head Master as
 
 UNITARIANISM. 67 
 
 a phenomenon wholly inexplicable and abnormal in con- 
 nection with " Dissent," but nevertheless indubitably 
 established by the evidence of the senses) inspired the 
 staff with sufficient respect to enable him to stand out 
 for an extemporized "conscience clause" with respect 
 to the Monday morning "Catechism" lesson, yet mani- 
 fold influences remained in the shape of morning prayers, 
 the daily chapter of the Greek Testament (in the upper 
 school), the books of "Scripture" to be prepared half- 
 yearly for examination, and the general atmosphere of 
 the school, which forced my father to take up a definite 
 line of doctrinal instruction with us. 
 
 Moreover, public worship was to him a veritable 
 necessity ; and though he could never bring himself to 
 endure the morning service of the Church of England, 
 yet he liked to attend the evening service, and therefore 
 took his children to the neighbouring church of Llanfair 
 on Sunday afternoons, as well as conducting a domestic 
 service for his family in the mornings. 
 
 To guard the sturdiness of their Unitarian convictions 
 against all hostile influences, therefore, he took his chil- 
 dren with great care through the Evening Prayer of the 
 Church of England, explaining which portions of it he 
 could not accept or repeat ; and he was ever ready to 
 give us his comments upon passages of the Bible which 
 our masters had directly or indirectly emphasized for 
 our benefit, or which our school-fellows had flung in 
 our teeth. 
 
 So by our sojourn " in partibus infidelium," we were 
 taught to attach great value to our distinctive Unitarian 
 
 F2
 
 68 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 beliefs, and also in some measure to be able to give a 
 reason for the faith that was in us. 
 
 But on such underlying questions as the authority 
 of the Bible and the historical character of many of its 
 narratives, or the authenticity and significance of the 
 miracles, my father observed an almost complete reti- 
 cence, which had the effect of leaving us under impres- 
 sions much more conservative than we might otherwise 
 have gained from him. This course he adopted con- 
 scientiously and deliberately, under the influence of a 
 variety of motives eas"y to understand and to sympa- 
 thize with ; but he came in after years very gravely to 
 question its wisdom, and the more fearless and funda- 
 mental treatment of such subjects which he lived to see 
 attempted in teaching children had his heartiest respect 
 and sympathy. 
 
 Amid such scenes and occupations his health improved 
 rapidly, though any prospect of resuming professional 
 work was still quite remote; and with returning strength 
 came a growing necessity for action. A life of scholarly 
 leisure had always seemed an enviable one to him ; but 
 a "more external life" was still necessary, and it was 
 rather towards farming than towards study that his 
 awakening sense of energy and enterprize directed his 
 thoughts. 
 
 His passion for "contact with the earth" was still 
 unsated, and Nature had treated him in his few acres 
 of land as experienced gamblers treat their victims. 
 She had let him win, or think he won, small stakes, and
 
 FARMING. 69 
 
 had so tempted him on to higher ventures. Even at 
 Eyarth he had begun reclaiming waste land, and before 
 he had been in Wales two years he had taken a farm of 
 180 acres between Denbigh and St. Asaph. 
 
 Mr. Kenrick, as reported in one of our papers, had 
 described him on some occasion as " a farmer," and he 
 laughingly observed to a friend that he considered Mr. 
 Kenrick's reputation for accuracy of such immense im- 
 portance that he must hasten to justify it at any cost 
 by proceeding to be what he had said he was ! 
 
 And so, early in 1856, he entered upon what he then 
 described as " a healthy occupation, which may perhaps 
 help me a little in the support of my large household, 
 or at any rate can scarcely prove worse than an interest- 
 ing, but unremunerative, outward employment." Dis 
 aliter visum. It was otherwise decreed in heaven. 
 
 The farm, Hafod-y-Coed, taken at first for three years, 
 was held (sometimes alone, and sometimes together with 
 others) till 1875. 
 
 The proprietor, Sir John Salisbury, was the adopted 
 son of Piozzi, the Italian violinist who married Mrs. 
 Thrale ; and to so devoted a student of Boswell as my 
 father, Johnson's haunts, including the very house in 
 which he used to visit the Thrales, Bachegraig, which 
 was a mile from Hafod, were classic ground. 
 
 More recent literary associations gathered round other 
 spots, within an easy drive or walk, which had been 
 loved and sung by Mrs. Hemans ; and it was among the 
 privileges of the early years of their residence at Hafod 
 that it brought my parents into relations of affectionate
 
 70 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 intimacy with her surviving sister, Mrs. Hicks Owen, 
 whose music is wedded to many of her best -known 
 songs. She was the wife of the vicar of the little neigh- 
 bouring church of Tremerchion, whither my father and 
 his family repaired on the peaceful Sunday evenings, by 
 a road that commanded a noble view of the plain-like 
 lower vale of Clwyd and the distant sea, often glorified 
 by the setting sun, and where, as long as Mrs. Owen 
 lived, the Welsh service was made to speak in the 
 universal language of humanity by the sweet music 
 rendered by the village choir under her direction and 
 training. 
 
 In point of romantic beauty of situation, Hafod was 
 a great falling off from Upper Eyarth, but by way of 
 compensation it commanded an almost infinite variety 
 of beautiful rides and drives ; and my father though 
 experience taught him to confine himself to the more 
 sedate amongst the ponies on which his children and 
 their friends scampered over the mountains had enough 
 horsemanship to ride on business or pleasure with con- 
 fidence and safety, and so to explore the lovely neigh- 
 bourhood with ever new delight. 
 
 He adopted and often repeated the remark that to 
 live in the country without a horse was like living on 
 an island without a boat ; and indeed it is difficult to 
 see how he could have lived at Hafod at all without the 
 little pony-carriage in which he and my mother made 
 their weekly pilgrimages to Denbigh, at all seasons and 
 in all weathers, laying in the seven-days' stores, and 
 executing all the miscellaneous commissions that had
 
 THE "DENBIGH LIST." 71 
 
 accumulated during the week on the "Denbigh list" 
 he developing a wholly unsuspected and hitherto dor- 
 mant talent for packing, as he fitted the bulky purchases 
 into the small available space of the little carriage till 
 every corner was filled, and the only wonder was how 
 the driver and his companion were to get themselves into 
 the " conjuror's hat," the contents of which were to load 
 the ample hall-table on their return. 
 
 On this weekly drive at least my father and mother 
 were secure of an opportunity of a little conversation ; 
 and it would have been a fine study for any investigator 
 of " animal intelligence" to observe how the sagacious 
 pony felt along the reins, gently alternating between 
 tight and loose, and the mechanically swaying whip, the 
 assurance that her driver's mind was now fully engaged 
 on more important matters, and that she might choose 
 her own time and her own pace, subject only to the risk 
 of his waking up before she did, and visiting his indig- 
 nation upon her for her abuse of his confidence in a 
 chastisement equally sudden and vigorous. 
 
 Walks, drives and rides, were the only characteris- 
 tically country amusements in which my father indulged. 
 He never handled a gun or a fishing-rod ; and even in 
 his evening strolls he generally had an eye to business, 
 waging perpetual war against the thistles, and never 
 forgetting that "the master's eye is better than his 
 two hands." 
 
 It was during the twenty years of his residence at 
 
 *
 
 72 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 Hafod that his family grew up around him. As his boys 
 and girls gradually formed school and college friendships, 
 or became intimate with this or that member or friend 
 of the large family connection, Hafod-y-Coed became 
 more and more of a centre for holiday gatherings or for 
 resting country visits ; and naturally the meetings and 
 partings at "Trefnant Station" were not always without 
 their romantic interest regarded by my father with a 
 tender and silent sympathy that did not re-awaken the 
 poetry of his own life, because it had never slept, but 
 which gave perhaps an added richness to it. 
 
 There must be many lives in which the memory of 
 those Hafod holidays is fresh, and all who remember 
 them at all will remember my father's genial sympathy 
 with the ebullitions of youthful spirits around him, 
 as he stood with my mother at the door, waving an 
 adieu to the pleasure-parties that started on their rides 
 and drives, or welcoming them back on their return, and 
 seeming to keep the homestead warm with hospitality 
 and affection during their absence ; or as he came upon 
 merry groups in the fields or playgrounds, himself some- 
 times filled with a serious and tender peusiveness that 
 seemed unconsciously to mould his very gait and attitude, 
 till the jovial greetings that told him he was "observed" 
 broke into his reverie and awoke his cheery response. 
 
 Nor will they forget how well he sustained the tone 
 of the intellectual life which is so needful for real refresh- 
 ment. He still read Scott aloud in the holidays. It was 
 a pleasure to hear him read anything, but I think he
 
 HOLIDAYS AT HAFOD. 73 
 
 had a specific genius for reading the Bible and Walter 
 Scott.* 
 
 After a time the character of the holidays once more 
 changed. Hafod began to be the happy hunting-ground 
 of the grandchildren ; and from their first appearance 
 on the scene, my father used to say, as he came upon 
 the groups of baby -worshippers, that this perpetual 
 "Adoration of the Magi" in real life impressed the fact 
 yet more deeply upon his mind that we can never under- 
 stand the great works of mediaeval art if we regard them 
 as simply commemorating a few concrete historical 
 events rather than as idealizing whole regions of human 
 life and experience. 
 
 Meanwhile Hafod had been a place of work as well as 
 play. The golden dreams that had accompanied the tak- 
 ing of the farm, obstinately as they asserted themselves, 
 even after the natural hour of dawn, were compelled 
 gradually to recede, if not as yet to fade ; and within 
 half-a-dozen years of my father's first serious farming 
 operations, a happy means of helping to meet the out- 
 goings of his large household spontaneously presented 
 itself. 
 
 A young cousin had come for some months to Hafod, 
 
 * " There are men now holding positions of responsibility and 
 enjoying a deserved reputation for scholarly culture, who remem- 
 ber, not without uneasiness, how they would tremble if they had 
 embarked on a classical quotation in his [Mr. Wicksteed's] presence, 
 and became uncertain as to a 'quantity' as they approached it. 
 They knew that he would not be uncertain about it, and it was 
 an article of his creed that a man who had made a false quantity 
 ' ought to emigrate !'" Inquirer for April 25, 1885.
 
 74 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 and had done his lessons with some of the younger 
 children. An old Leeds friend and neighbour asked 
 whether there was not room for another boy and, in a 
 word, Hafod had become a kind of boys' preparatory 
 school without any one's exactly knowing when. 
 
 After this, many boys, and some few girls, came for a 
 part of their education to Hafod, and were taught by 
 Miss Matilda Lupton, my mother's sister, who had 
 already given herself up with complete devotion to the 
 education of some of her nieces and nephews, and who 
 now enabled two of the girls to stay at home and work 
 with her at school-keeping. 
 
 My father took little direct part in the school work ; 
 but his presence, his guidance, his occasional examina- 
 tions, and above all his "table-talk," constituted no 
 small part of the educational influences of the place. 
 " Without talking, eating is but feeding," he might have 
 said, with the continental proverb, and under his hands 
 the Hafod twelve-o'clock dinner became quite a charac- 
 teristic institution. In the first place, he would generally 
 give an epitome of everything noteworthy in the news- 
 paper he had looked through in the forenoon (two or 
 three days old, as a rule: it was like a "peep into 
 futurity," said one of our party, if we got the day's news 
 on the day at Hafod), not, however, in the monologue 
 style, but by way of a series of starting-points for con- 
 versation, for he was never at ease unless he could make 
 his company talk as well as listen. The country life, 
 too, which to an open mind is so rich in incident, so full 
 of ever fresh and unconventional intercourse with man
 
 SCHOOL AT HAFOD. 75 
 
 and nature and God, furnished hourly topics of interest ; 
 and whenever a question of fact arose that could not be 
 decided without reference to an authority, my father 
 would order one of us (if his name were John he'd call 
 him Peter, till at last in despair he instituted " Eoger" 
 as a universal appellative) to get the " Imperial " or 
 " Conversation," or whatever might be the suitable book 
 to look the matter up. For though he was a stern vin- 
 dicator of the established proprieties, he always allowed 
 an exception to the rule against leaving the table during 
 meals, in favour of the dictionary-bearers ; and of the 
 many images that remain in the minds of Hafod resi- 
 dents and visitors, none is more vivid or characteristic 
 than the picture of him as he sat at the bottom of his 
 table taking the volume from some juvenile Mercury 
 or Iris, pushing his glasses up over his forehead, raising 
 the book to within an inch or two of his reading eye, 
 half-closing the other, and extracting and communicating 
 the information needed. It was one of his favourite 
 sayings that " You ought never to have to go out of the 
 room you are in for a pen and ink or a Bible," and I 
 doubt whether he could with any tolerable comfort have 
 made a place in which there were no dictionaries his 
 dining-room. 
 
 After eight or nine years of country life my father's 
 health was so far restored as to enable him to contem- 
 plate the partial resumption of pulpit duty; and this, too, 
 in spite of heavy drains upon his strength and spirits 
 which recent years had brought. His ardour as an agri-
 
 76 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 culturalist was unabated, and he was sanguine of ultimate 
 success ; but meanwhile his continuous losses began to 
 weigh upon his mind with a growing pressure of anxiety, 
 moral and material. Moreover, for two sad years he had 
 changed parts with my mother and had become her 
 devoted and unwearied nurse. Chronic sleeplessness and 
 depression had made her for the time completely depen- 
 dent upon him, and the light that had so long shone, and 
 was again so long to shine, upon his path from her cheer- 
 ful and unflinching courage was for a season withdrawn. 
 Early in 1863, just as my mother was recovering, he 
 began frequently to take charge of the pulpit of the 
 Hope Street church, Liverpool ; and quite at the close 
 of the year he became one of the stated ministers, with 
 the Rev. Alexander Gordon as his colleague, though he 
 continued to reside at Hafod.* 
 
 * An old Liverpool friend of my father's writes : "Amongst the 
 various recollections which I happily retain of our late friend, two 
 always present themselves to me most vividly, as I doubt not they 
 do to those who have had the same experience. The one occasion 
 is that first Sunday evening in the new church in Hope Street, 
 Liverpool (October, 1849), when the hundreds who were crowded 
 into the building hung on every word that fell from the lips of 
 the earnest, fervent preacher. The sermon was the now well-known 
 one, ' The Church of the First-born,' and was characterized by a 
 discriminating delineative power, a depth of feeling and a breadth 
 of charity, beyond which it is safe to say none of his successors 
 have passed. The other occasion, which also constantly recurs to 
 my memory, is the soiree on New-year's eve, 1863, subsequent to 
 the induction of the Rev. Alexander Gordon as co-pastor of Hope- 
 Street church, Liverpool. With Mr. Wicksteed were associated 
 (amongst others) on that evening two of his oldest and dearest 
 friends, the Revds. James Martineau and John H. Thorn; and 
 never shall I forget the almost ecstatic fervour with which Mr.
 
 HOPE STREET MINISTRY. 77 
 
 The distance of his home, his necessarily divided 
 attention between his farm and his ministry, and his 
 still imperfect health, appeared to him to make an even 
 approximately satisfactory discharge of ministerial duties 
 so impossible that he would have firmly declined to 
 take the sole charge of a congregation, even for a time ; 
 and he never regarded his partial resumption of the 
 ministry as likely to be of more than short duration. 
 
 Nevertheless, he was induced to retain his post till 
 the summer of 1872, though all along he wished only 
 to provide the congregation with a stepping-stone to 
 some more permanent and satisfactory settlement. The 
 address and testimonial presented to him at the close of 
 his ministry testify to the appreciation which his ser- 
 vices met with from the congregation. 
 
 Many warm friendships were formed and many 
 renewed and strengthened during these years of con- 
 stant intercourse with Liverpool, and occasionally my 
 father was able to induce parties of thirty or forty, or 
 on one occasion sixty, Liverpool friends to return his 
 visits by meeting him in his beloved Vale of Clwyd, 
 and spending the day in a Hafod pic-nic. 
 
 He was amused to observe that his sermons were 
 
 Wicksteed expressed his thankfulness that, after the lapse of more 
 than one-and-thirty years, the old trio of ' Thorn, Martineau and 
 Wicksteed/ should meet on the same platform. The sight of 
 those three old friends uniting to welcome a young brother into 
 the ministry was one never to be forgotten by those who were 
 fortunate enough to be present. Long as the duration of this 
 friendship then appeared, it was destined to be still further pro- 
 longed for nearly twenty -two years, the first break being caused 
 by the death of the youngest of the three."
 
 78 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 often found by his flock to be redolent of his present 
 occupation, full of allusions to and illustrations from the 
 soil ; the fact in many cases being that these farming 
 sermons had been written in Leeds, when the longing 
 for country life had found vent in a constant imaginary 
 fellowship with nature, and when the student had been 
 so careful as to his facts as well as so genuine in his 
 sentiments, that the farmer in after years seldom or 
 never found even a detail to correct. 
 
 It is wonderful to think how the unexhausted strength 
 of that passion for it was nothing less for " touching 
 the earth" still made Hafod the most loved spot on earth 
 to my father, still made it an ever- renewed pain of almost 
 prostrating intensity to leave it for a time, and a joy and 
 rest to return to it, even when his early hopes and all 
 his own and his wife's fortunes lay buried deep in its 
 cold relentless clay, with no remotest hope of a resurrec- 
 tion. 
 
 Let this chapter of his life be touched on briefly and 
 tenderly. He himself looked back upon it with sorrow 
 not unmingled with self-reproach. Betrayed by his 
 sanguine temperament, he had lost all and more than 
 all, and only towards the very end of his life could 
 he feel that the generosity of his friends and his own 
 persevering self-denial had in any sense delivered him 
 from the legacy of his great mistake. " The lesson will 
 last one generation," he used to say, with something of 
 the anguish of a Grecian tragic hero struggling against 
 overmastering Destiny, "but in my grandchildren the 
 passion will awake again."
 
 LEAVES HAFOD. 79 
 
 It was not till 1875 that he relinquished Hafod the 
 dream of so many years being broken at last. None of 
 his children were now at home, and during the last 
 months of his tenure of Hafod he lived much at St. 
 Asaph, striving, when his presence on the farm was 
 necessary, to accustom himself to life in a cottage, where 
 he waited on himself or was attended by the wife of one 
 of the labourers. 
 
 It was in the closing years of his connection with 
 Hafod that he began the lecturing tours by which he 
 became so widely known in our churches, and it was 
 during these last, and, as it were, penitential months, 
 that the lecturing scheme took its final shape. 
 
 A few friends, who felt the importance of the work he 
 could still do, combined in 1873 to enable him to carry 
 out an old idea of a " general lectureship and ministry 
 at large ;" and after two experimental years they drew 
 together a number of his friends and admirers who desired 
 to offer him some tribute of their esteem and affection, 
 and at the same time to enable him to devote what 
 strength remained to the work he most loved. These 
 friends purchased an annuity, which was generously cal- 
 culated to enable him to continue his work as long as 
 his strength lasted, and to look forward with no added 
 anxiety to the eventide of his life. It was presented to 
 him on the day before his sixty-fifth birthday. 
 
 It is impossible not to feel that there was a kind of 
 poetical justice in this provision for the old age of one 
 who, alike in years of comparative ease and security,
 
 80 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 and in years of almost crushing anxiety, had been ever 
 busied with thoughts of others and careless in securing 
 advantages for himself. 
 
 Many a worn-out minister or bereaved family had owed 
 the modest provision that staved off absolute penury 
 to his influence and efforts ; he had been amongst the 
 earliest promoters and most vigorous advocates of the 
 " Ministers' Benevolent Fund," the comparative success 
 of which, together with that of kindred efforts, has half 
 blinded a later generation to the urgent need that existed 
 for it ; and while constantly working for others, he was 
 restrained by almost exaggerated scruples from push- 
 ing claims of his own, or availing himself of even the 
 most legitimate opportunities of securing anything to 
 himself.* 
 
 V. 
 
 As originally conceived by my father, his "lecture- 
 ship and ministry at large" had a somewhat wider scope 
 than it actually assumed in practice. His idea was, that 
 " some one or more of our ministers, free from the absorb- 
 ing duties of a local ministry," should be enabled " to 
 offer services to our churches and the public, (1) in aid 
 of benevolent objects and charities ; (2) on occasions of 
 special congregational interest, such as the support or 
 revival of schools, choirs, or other institutions connected 
 with congregational religious life ; (3) communion in 
 the Lord's Supper ; (4) something analogous to the Cou- 
 
 * See " Letters and Journals/' pp. 137168.
 
 "WHY AM I A UNITARIAN?" 81 
 
 firmation Service of the Protestant churches, both in 
 England and on the Continent ; (5) public lectures on 
 week-nights in neutral buildings on theological and eccle- 
 siastical, and even (subordinately) literary and scientific 
 subjects" ; and although he had hardly expected to take 
 up all these lines of activity with equal energy himself, 
 yet it was the force of circumstances rather than choice 
 that confined him principally to the last branch of his 
 suggested work, and which threw such preponderating 
 emphasis upon the single lecture, " Why am I a Unita- 
 rian?" 
 
 This lecture must have been delivered hundreds of 
 times in the course of the nine years during which my 
 lather travelled all over the kingdom on his lecturing 
 tours ; and it was at first with interest, and then with a 
 kind of amused vexation, that, while striving in vain to 
 give greater scope and variety to his work, he was con- 
 stantly driven back, by the pronounced preference of his 
 public, upon "Why am I a Unitarian?" Not that he 
 himself grew weary of the theme or ceased to feel its 
 urgency. On being asked by a friend whether he was 
 not tired of giving the same lecture so often, he replied, 
 " No ; I shall never be tired of delivering it till every 
 one in England has heard it" ; but some of the other 
 lectures which he occasionally delivered, and would have 
 been glad to deliver oftener, were on subjects for which 
 he was almost equally anxious to gain a hearing. Two 
 of them, referring respectively to the Bible and Jesus 
 Christ, manifested his characteristic dislike and distrust 
 of extremes, and his desire to act as a mediator between 
 
 G
 
 82 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 what he regarded as narrow and bigoted superstition on 
 the one hand, and an ill-considered and illogical reaction 
 on the other. 
 
 Again, he was entirely without sympathy with the 
 movement for " Disestablishment." It ran counter to his 
 whole habit of mind and thought, and to all his associa- 
 tions and sympathies. One of his cardinal maxims in 
 life, and one which he believed to be in thorough har- 
 mony with the English character, was that it was better 
 to start from and avail oneself of existing institutions 
 and energies, and proceed by gradual, though not neces- 
 sarily slow, steps of reform, than to defy national tradi- 
 tions and existing powers, and attempt an entirely fresh 
 start. In spite of his sturdy Nonconformity, too, he 
 had a quick eye for the weakness of the voluntary 
 system and the strength of a National Church ; and by 
 his almost constant attendance in later life at the Church 
 Congresses, and the pains he took to inform himself of 
 every considerable movement within the National Church, 
 he gained an insight into the actual conditions of Church 
 life which is far from common in our ministry. He had 
 no complete and ultimate scheme of Church reform. 
 He never put forward or endorsed any formula of " com- 
 prehension." But he regarded the Church property as 
 national, without any limitation or condition. He re- 
 garded himself and all Englishmen as trustees of that 
 property. He believed that the trust was being scanda- 
 lously abused. He could see many reforms in its admin- 
 istration which were immediately needed and instantly 
 practicable, and he desired to see the Dissenters united
 
 MINISTRY AT LARGE. 83 
 
 and urgent in demanding them. When these were 
 granted, the next steps would become clear ; and as the 
 nation made up its mind what it wanted to do with its 
 property, it would be done, until, without revolution and 
 without dissipating the gathered spiritual and material 
 resources of the Church, it might be made de facto, as it 
 was de jure, the Church of the nation. 
 
 It was no small disappointment to him that he could 
 so seldom get a hearing for his views on this subject, 
 and that so few of our people cared to regard it as an 
 open question at all ; but though he rarely had the oppor- 
 tunity of lecturing on Church affairs, the annual meetings 
 of the " Provincial Assembly" of Lancashire and Cheshire 
 generally gave him some opening for calling attention 
 to his favourite subject, and he was never slow to avail 
 himself of the opportunities thus afforded. 
 
 His was a well-known figure at these spirited and 
 interesting meetings, where his age and position endowed 
 him with something of the functions of an " arbiter ele- 
 gantiarum" or " rector morum/' in the exercise of which 
 he did not always escape the half -serious and half- 
 playful resentment of some of his colleagues, but which 
 have left behind them many a pleasant memory of wit 
 and wisdom. 
 
 Several parts of his original scheme, outside the week- 
 evening lecturing, took an actual though subordinate 
 place in his practical work. 
 
 He was not unfrequently requested to preach special 
 sermons for charitable institutions, and whenever he 
 did so he made it a practice as far as possible to visit 
 
 G2
 
 84 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 the institutioiis themselves and study their reports, not 
 so much with a view to any direct references from the 
 pulpit, as because he felt a genuine personal interest in 
 any institution for which he was to preach. 
 
 Occasionally, too, he was able to take part in " Dedi- 
 cation" or " Confirmation" services, which he regarded 
 as of high importance alike to the collective life of our 
 churches and the spiritual welfare of the young people 
 who took part in them. This was in keeping with his 
 constant desire to find in existing institutions the foun- 
 dations for present and future developments; and in 
 the same spirit (first accepting and then heartily en- 
 dorsing and adopting a suggestion of a member of his 
 Liverpool flock) he encouraged his Unitarian friends to 
 retain and regenerate the institution of god-parents, by 
 associating with themselves, in christening services, 
 friends who promised, so far as in them lay, to be ready 
 to take their place, should they be incapacitated by the 
 stroke of death or misfortune from themselves fulfilling 
 their parental duties. 
 
 This happy combination of the best kind of eccle- 
 siasticism with the ingrained traditions and spirit of 
 Nonconformity, enabled my father not unfrequently to 
 obviate that sense of chill and discomfort which often 
 checks at the threshold those who in all essential 
 matters are ready and even eager to join our household 
 of faith ; and he seldom had to lament that young 
 people who had grown up under his influence wandered 
 vaguely from our fold for want of defmiteness of spiritual 
 aim and conviction.
 
 STUDIES. 85 
 
 But however broad and varied his interests at this 
 period of his life, his main practical work, as already 
 hinted, flowed more and more in the channel of week- 
 evening lectures and occasional Sunday services. 
 
 At first it seemed as though his studies would now 
 be resumed and extended. " Here our life proceeds as 
 usual," he writes to a friend in the middle of 1873, 
 " varied by my lecture and preaching tours, which, being 
 really very successful, are a source of some fatigue, yet 
 of greater happiness to me. My studies, too, for some 
 future work of the kind are particularly delightful to 
 me, compelling me to consult numberless and to read 
 many books I have long longed for time and opportunity 
 to hold in my hands. Up to twenty-two I had expected 
 to be a student and a scholar, and then I became a pastor 
 and a preacher ; but after all this interval the old han- 
 kering after life in a University library and a University 
 society comes over me with the strength of a young 
 desire." 
 
 It soon became obvious, however, that but little time 
 and strength for study would be left when the lecturing 
 and preaching engagements that now poured in had 
 been met, and the vision of a student's life again receded 
 into the indefinite future. 
 
 For nine years, as he approached and passed his seven- 
 tieth birthday, my father, who had been more or less of 
 an invalid almost all his life, and who had now become 
 very dependent upon regularity and quietness, endured 
 the constant wear and strain of a life which many a 
 younger and stronger man would have given up as im- 
 possible.
 
 86 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 Hardly sleeping in the same bed two nights running, 
 lecturing or preaching five evenings out of six, or even 
 (on at least one occasion) on seven consecutive evenings, 
 fighting often against positive illness, almost always 
 against weariness and exhaustion, he sometimes returned 
 from his tours completely prostrated, only to recover 
 strength in some degree in time for his next departure. 
 
 And yet on the whole the life suited him. His letters 
 of this period, forming an almost unbroken diary of his 
 tours, as compared with his reflections of an earlier date, 
 show far more satisfaction with his work and confidence 
 in its usefulness and relative success than he had ever 
 felt before ; and however wretchedly ill he was before 
 he got upon the platform or into the pulpit, when once 
 there he almost invariably seemed to revive and to get 
 through his work in a way that showed small trace of 
 any weakness. 
 
 Intercourse with his fellow -creatures under almost 
 any circumstances and upon almost any terms was a 
 pleasure to him. On his railway journeys it was impos- 
 sible to shut him up with companions out of whom he 
 could not extract interesting conversation, till it became 
 a saying amongst us that "he always met interesting 
 people" ; and when his railway journey ended and he 
 reached the home of some one or other of the many 
 friends who received him with such unvarying hospi- 
 tality, a new and unfailing source of pleasure and interest 
 was opened. Generally speaking, he had a slow and 
 treacherous memory (the "constructiveness" of which, 
 however, as it has been happily styled, added consider-
 
 LECTURING TOURS. 87 
 
 ably, we used to suspect, to the interest of those railway- 
 train and other conversations he reported so well), but 
 he had a truly "royal memory" for names and faces. 
 Any one whom he had ever seen or even heard of he 
 apparently knew all about ; and his letters are full of 
 details which show how deep and genuine was the 
 personal interest he took in all those with whom he 
 came into contact. As he was now becoming a kind 
 of Nestor, the added interest of family history and 
 connections going back one, two or three generations, 
 often enriched the associations which he gathered as he 
 passed from home to home. 
 
 His general impressions alike of the progress of our 
 own churches and of the progress of the world, based on 
 the rather extensive observations made in his journeys, 
 were uniformly favourable, however severely he might 
 at times criticise specific men or things. 
 
 Such observations as the following are altogether 
 characteristic of his general feeling : " It is astonishing 
 to me, comparing the present and forty years ago, to 
 observe the increase of attention, of intelligent faces and 
 intelligent apprehensions in the children, the result no 
 doubt of a generation of week-day education/' Or this, 
 written at a hotel : " I had a cup of tea, and three young 
 men 'joined,' not in the cup of tea, but in the military 
 sense. I was struckwith the improvement in their appear- 
 ance, manners and countenances, over the old bloated, 
 vulgar, yet would-be genteel and courteous men that used 
 in my younger days, before railways and fast business 
 life were invented, to fill these commercial rooms."
 
 88 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 I do not think there was a single particular in which 
 the contrasts he drew between past and present were 
 in favour of the past. 
 
 Though generally a speaker, he was not unfrequently a 
 hearer on Sundays during his lecturing tours. And here, 
 again, his impressions were on the whole very favour- 
 able. In his private letters he speaks, of course, with the 
 utmost frankness of both men and things ; but this only 
 makes his words of appreciation and respect on almost 
 every occasion when he attended a service at one of our 
 chapels the more striking. It is to be noted, too, that 
 this feeling lived and grew in spite of a pronounced dis- 
 like on his part for many of the characteristic results of 
 modern criticism. For example, there were few facts 
 of literary history of which he felt more deeply assured 
 than the historical authenticity of the Gospel of John. 
 Again and again I have heard him declare his conviction 
 that the state of critical opinion on the subject would 
 veer round within a few -years, and that the internal 
 evidence of reality which he saw stamped upon every 
 line, especially, of the conversations at the close of the 
 Gospel, would ultimately be recognized as conclusive. 
 It was never without annoyance, and even impatience, 
 that he heard any expressed doubt or reservation on the 
 subject from the pulpit.* And there were other points 
 of Biblical criticism on which he was equally out of 
 sympathy with the current of recent speculations and 
 inquiries. Yet, taking it all for all, he regarded the free- 
 dom with which scriptural questions are now handled 
 * See, however, p. 197.
 
 LECTURING. 89 
 
 as a great gain from every point of view, and he 
 frequently expressed his sense of the privilege which 
 younger men enjoyed in being able to reclaim, as it 
 were, what to him had been Biblical waste lands, inas- 
 much as they felt at liberty to criticise or dissent, and 
 to explain the meaning of a passage without committing 
 themselves to its truth. 
 
 The main work of his tours the delivery of his lec- 
 tures, and especially the lecture, " Why am I a Unita- 
 rian ?" enabled him to gauge the state of public opinion 
 and feeling in different parts of England with some 
 accuracy ; and his strong impression was that the mere 
 existence of a Unitarian congregation in a place, however 
 apparently feeble and decadent it might be, exercised a 
 marked educational influence, and insensibly enlarged 
 the views and leavened the ideas of the neighbourhood. 
 
 His lectures were always received with attention, 
 generally with great sympathy ; and it often happened 
 that members, sometimes clergymen, of various Churches 
 moved or seconded votes of thanks to him. He disliked 
 and discouraged the practice of inviting questions after 
 the lecture. The balance and caution of his mind, and 
 his rooted belief in the many-sidedness of truth, made it 
 singularly distasteful to him to be asked such questions 
 as, " Do you believe in inspiration ?" or, " Do you believe 
 in the miracles ?" and to be expected to answer them 
 off-hand in half-a-dozen words, but he was always 
 pleased when his lectures gave rise to correspondence 
 in the local papers, which was often the case. 
 
 The centre from which all these expeditions were
 
 90 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 organized was at first the Vale of Clwyd. Hafod was given 
 up in 1875, but the furniture and miscellaneous accumu- 
 lations of some twenty years still lay in the house till 
 the autumn of 1877, while my parents lived at St. Asaph. 
 
 My father still loved the Vale of Clwyd with a whole 
 heart, but he wished for his own, and still more for my 
 mother's sake, to be nearer to some of their children, 
 and determined at last to leave St. Asaph and settle in 
 Croydon. 
 
 In thinking of the last evening he spent in the Vale 
 of Clwyd as his home, I am forcibly reminded of his 
 own description of his father, and can write after him, 
 omitting a few words, but adding none, "I have him 
 before my mind's eye now, with his short but rather 
 stout person, his spectacles and his stick, and his grave 
 features . . . walking along with one or other of his chil- 
 dren, and pausing at the first stile or gate to point out 
 the beauties of the prospect !" 
 
 "Then came still evening on," he would constantly 
 say towards the close of his life, and would wonder 
 whether there was anything in the words to account 
 for or justify the deep feeling which they stirred in 
 him ; and on that last evening I went out with him in 
 the pensive quiet of the closing day, and he told me 
 how, during the more than twenty years through which 
 he had known and loved the Vale he had never ceased, 
 as he walked or rode or drove, to find new beauties 
 in it, and now that he gazed upon it, perhaps for the 
 last time, he saw an aspect of its face that had never 
 revealed itself to him before.
 
 FROM WALES TO CROYDON. 91 
 
 " Ah ! Wales is the ruin of us (in many ways)," he 
 once wrote after passing through Shropshire, " for it has 
 made the average scenery of my fair native county 
 appear flat and simply rural the abode of shepherds 
 and shepherdesses, not of gods and goddesses." 
 
 Four years of active public work still lay before my 
 father at Croydon years of growing infirmity, through 
 which he struggled on towards the completion of a ten- 
 years' exercise of his Ministry at Large, after which he 
 meant to furl his sails. 
 
 He had hoped to continue his Leeds ministry for 
 twenty years, and had had to be content with eighteen. 
 He had fixed on ten years as the term of his Ministry 
 at Large, but he was only able to carry it on for nine. 
 
 In August, 1881, his youngest son, John Hamilton, 
 who had just completed the Water-works at Port Eliza- 
 beth, in South Africa, died. So strong was the instinct 
 of work upon my father, that at first he thought of 
 carrying out at least his current engagements, which 
 included a service at Mr. Voysey's Theistic church;* 
 
 * The sermon which was to have been preached on this occasion 
 was already finished. It was the last sermon my father ever wrote. 
 It consists mainly of a conciliatory and sympathetic statement 
 of the causes which have led to, and which so largely justify, 
 a wide -spread "alienation from a profession of the Christian 
 religion," though not concealing the writer's personal sense of 
 the danger and loss which that alienation may involve. " For 
 myself," he says in conclusion, " I believe that looking not merely 
 at a few years of a Palestinian ministry, but also at eighteen suc- 
 ceeding centuries, not merely at the little volume which contains 
 without exhausting the spirit of that ministry, but also at the
 
 92 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 but he soon saw how entirely impossible this was, and 
 yielded to the necessity of an indefinite break in his 
 public work. 
 
 There is little more to tell. From the blow of his 
 son's death he never really recovered. Nearly four 
 years more of life remained to him, but he was very 
 weary. When the first shock had in some sense passed, 
 and he attempted quietly to resume a portion of his 
 labours, it was only to find that old age had at last 
 mastered him. He could no longer control his voice or 
 his feelings. He had done his work, and he accepted his 
 retirement as final and decisive. 
 
 His strength now failed rapidly, and but few hours of 
 the day were available for any, even moderate, mental 
 exertion. 
 
 In his days of comparative vigour he had never spared 
 any effort, however painful, by which he could hope to 
 bring comfort or light into sorrowing or darkened homes; 
 and he never forgot the invalided or age-stricken, or 
 suffered them to feel neglected. And even now his last 
 expenditures of ebbing strength were made upon visits, 
 letters, and finally messages, of sympathy to those who 
 seemed in need of them. 
 
 With a relaxing hold of life, he still retained the 
 buoyancy of his faith in the age, and repeatedly declared 
 that he had never known so much earnestness in public 
 
 institutions and the lives and the literatures and the principles 
 which have historically and spiritually issued from it, we shall 
 see at length upon the canvas no Lay Figure or Idol-God, but a 
 real, loving, noble, holy, pulsing and breathing Man, our Brother 
 and our Guide."
 
 FAILING STRENGTH. 93 
 
 and private life, so quick an eye for searching out evils, 
 and so brave a determination to grapple with them, as 
 he witnessed now. 
 
 But with this happy faith, little personal joy or cheer- 
 fulness could now be blended. He was weary. When 
 he read, he seemed to have heard it all before. He felt 
 that he could learn little and do less. But at least he 
 was determined not to be a hindrance to others. I once 
 asked him what he thought of a project of which I 
 expected him to disapprove. We were walking together, 
 and he stopped short, and, resting on his stick, said 
 solemnly, " I can do nothing ; I'm not going to stop 
 anything." And on being asked on another occasion 
 whether he could sanction some step that one of his 
 children was taking, he answered, " I thank God that 
 my children are grown up !" He often said that he 
 felt the blessing of being responsible for nothing. And 
 thus, as he looked calmly and trustingly upon the world, 
 in which he hardly felt that he was any longer living, 
 his evening drew to its close. 
 
 On several occasions he was persuaded by his friend, 
 Mr. Joshua Fielden, to conduct a private service in his 
 house, and in the spring of 1883 he was even inspirited 
 to spend a few weeks with him at Cannes. He under- 
 took the long, and to him rather formidable journey, in 
 company with Mrs. Fielden and some others of the house- 
 hold, whose affectionate solicitude so anticipated every 
 want and consulted every taste and habit, as to reduce 
 the fatigue and anxiety of travelling and of absence
 
 94 LAST MONTHS. 
 
 from home to an absolute minimum, and to make the 
 visit a true relief and happiness to him. 
 
 He still read the classics, and turned to Cicero's " De 
 Senectute" and other old-age literature with pleasure. 
 Seeley's " Expansion of England," and Drummond's 
 "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," were amongst 
 the few recent books which he read with pleasure. 
 
 In the late summer of 1884, his life-long friend, the 
 Eev. J. H. Thorn, paid a visit to Croydon, and was able 
 to spend many hours with him. On Oct. 23rd of the 
 same year, he was seized with a slight stroke of paralysis, 
 from which he never fully recovered. After a time, he 
 was able to walk from room to room with assistance, 
 and occasionally brightened up at the visit of a friend 
 so as to converse with something of his old vivacity. One 
 of the last of such visits which he received was from the 
 third member of the old Liverpool trio, Dr. Martineau. 
 
 Early on the morning of April 19th, 1885, he had a 
 second seizure. After this he never recovered conscious- 
 ness. He died in the evening, with his wife and three 
 of his sons round him. He was buried in the Lower 
 Norwood Cemetery, and at his own repeatedly-expressed 
 desire the inscription was placed on his tomb : 
 
 Vixit et obiit felix pietate natorum.
 
 IT. 
 
 EXTEACTS FEOM LETTEES AND JOUBNALS.
 
 IL 
 
 EXTEACTS FKOM LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 I. 
 
 [Written from College, see pp. 17 24} 
 
 To HIS FATHER. 
 
 Glasgow, Jan. 25th, 1829. 
 
 IT is with great pleasure that I sit down to write to 
 my dear father, after having passed a week of remark- 
 ably hard syllogisms and frost. As to the syllogisms, I 
 feel very comfortable at the thoughts of the hardest part 
 of logic being over I believe now the light has dawned 
 upon my benighted soul, and I think that I comprehend 
 as much as is necessary of this difficult and dreary part 
 of the course, the former part of which was so interesting 
 that I thought that Buchanan's simile of logic opening 
 to us, as Italy did to the soldiers of Hannibal, after they 
 had scaled the Alps, was reversed, and that we had come 
 by mistake through Italy first ; but I suppose we must 
 take the march from Saguntum to the Alps as represent- 
 ing the introductory part. 
 
 H
 
 98 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 To HIS SISTER BITHIA. 
 
 Glasgow, Feb. 7th, 1829. 
 
 The bursars, I find, do not generally meet with any 
 incivility, but I imprudently applied at the Factor's office 
 with my red rags on my back, at the very sight of which 
 a spirit of hostility towards the wearer is excited in the 
 breast of ignorant townsmen ; for a vulgar notion prevails 
 here that the doctors murder, kidnap, resurrectionize, or 
 do anything to get a body, which creates an invincible 
 hatred towards the medical students ; but as they have 
 no badge to distinguish them as members of the Uni- 
 versity, the odium undeservedly falls upon the gowned 
 students, who, as long as they have their "lugs" upon 
 their backs, are liable to any insult. ... At the present 
 time especially, " the public mind is in such agitation" 
 about Burke, that the students are almost abhorred by 
 the vulgar. Portraits, memoirs, confessions, &c., of Burke 
 and Co., are published daily; a whole side of a newspaper 
 is devoted to particulars on these subjects. People have 
 been taken up in Glasgow and almost murdered by the 
 enraged mob under suspicion of being Hare or Helen 
 
 McDougal. . . . Do you ever hear anything of and 
 
 ? Although I call them about my oldest and best 
 
 unrelated friends, yet they were so far from my abstract 
 idea of a true friend, that I thought I might perhaps pass 
 the whole of my life without finding such an one. How- 
 ever, I have found one whose tastes and pursuits very 
 nearly correspond with my own I mean Dees. He . . . 
 is in almost everything a kindred soul with myself.
 
 . CONTINENTAL TOUR. 99 
 
 II. 
 
 [Written from the Continent, see pp. 33 35]. 
 
 To HIS FATHER AND SISTER. 
 
 Bonne, Sept. 28th, 1834. 
 
 We have generally been up between five and six in 
 the morning, and not arrived at the place of our destiny 
 and finished tea until nine or ten. . . . Mr. Yates has his 
 own carriage with him . . . but if you saw the tout 
 ensemble of the thing, how it would lower your idea of 
 a gentleman's carriage with three horses ! I never shall 
 forget my feelings at Calais on seeing them fastening 
 the horses to the carriage the feeling of impossibility 
 of their being intended for us. Not that the horses are 
 in themselves bad, but they are so miserably kept as to 
 look like horses taken from the plough ; and the harness 
 is so exquisitely vile, consisting of bits of rope, leather 
 that never was new, more old and dry and brown than 
 the worst cart-horse harness I ever saw in England, 
 that no human being would dare to show his face in a 
 vehicle drawn by so miserable an apparatus. But find- 
 ing everybody in the same predicament, we are quite 
 impudent. 
 
 To HIS FATHER. 
 
 Firenze, Oct. 27th, 1834. 
 
 We are to stay here for about a month to work at 
 Italian like Trojans, in order to profit the more by the 
 remainder of our sojourn. . . . Speaking I know will always 
 in any language be a slow and painful thing to one whom 
 
 H2
 
 100 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 nature hath not blessed with a copia verborum ; but I 
 hope to obtain such a substantial elementary knowledge 
 of the language as shall open to me hereafter the bright, 
 fascinating riches of Italian literature, amend my ear 
 and taste, and not, I hope, materially injure my heart. . . . 
 I am so sick of the mystic mummeries of the [Catholic 
 churches], that I yesterday went to the English Esta- 
 blished Church, the first that we have met with since 
 our travels on the continent commenced. It was to me 
 in a Catholic country what a Unitarian chapel would 
 have been in a Church-of-England country, and I found 
 most refreshing rest for the soul of my spirit. The clergy- 
 man who read prayers was (I was surprised to see) an 
 Irishman, with wretched, positively sinful, emphasis 
 and indifferent pronunciation ; but he read with feeling, 
 and as if in earnest, and though at all those awful parts 
 against which my spirit rebels I felt as though a needle 
 were run into me, and started bolt upright, as if shocked 
 at finding myself in an act of idolatry, yet by means 
 of the Lessous, which were good, and the parts of the 
 Prayers which were not bad, aided by a good, sensible, 
 appropriate sermon, preached well and forcibly, ... I 
 do assure you I felt a comfort, a delight so exquisite, as 
 I think nothing in our journey has surpassed. It moves 
 me so much to be receiving good influences, instead of 
 being for ever taxed to pour them out upon others ; and 
 I think, when the effect of the scenery, the conscious- 
 ness of benefit and enjoyment received, and the sense of 
 gratitude consequent upon these feelings, which have 
 never for a moment left me on our journey, have the
 
 FIRST VIEW OF ROME. 101 
 
 pathos of a religious appeal added to them, it is quite 
 overwhelming, and I never felt more deeply the power 
 of the beautiful and the good upon my mind than I 
 have done ever since leaving those duties, the effect of 
 the performance of which I feared it would require much 
 struggling to prevent being destroyed by the effects of 
 being liberated from them. 
 
 MY FIRST VIEW OF BOMB. 
 
 [Two letters written from Eorae, one to his father and one 
 to his cousin Edward Boult, give Mr. Wicksteed's first im- 
 pressions of the city. These letters, especially the former, 
 were subsequently worked up into an article for the " Christian 
 Teacher" for 1836, which was probably the first writing of 
 Mr. Wicksteed's that appeared in print. It is here reproduced, 
 exactly as published.] 
 
 I never shall forget that day. We had slept, I think, 
 at Viterbo the night before, and though enjoying, for the 
 most part, the valuable though unromantic privilege of 
 sound slumber, on that night Morpheus was unpropitious, 
 and my rest was disturbed and broken. Another might 
 have said that a man of any taste and feeling might 
 naturally enough be somewhat excited by the mere fact 
 of being within a day's journey of Eome. But I did 
 not think it was at all so with me. I did not care about 
 Eome I wanted to go to sleep. We were at that time 
 just fresh from Florence, where recollections of all the 
 struggles and glories of more modern Italian republics 
 engaged all our interest. Lorenzo the Magnificent, and 
 his bright circle of intellectual satellites Michael Angelo 
 and his triple crown of architectural, sculptural, pictorial
 
 102 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 glory Dante, Galileo, Alfieri, Boccaccio, with all the 
 reminiscences of them so indissolubly connected with 
 Florence these were the subjects that, for a month 
 before, had been passing through my mind, and I had 
 not given a thought or a feeling to Eome. 
 
 I must confess besides, that a certain rough crust of 
 utilitarianism had been gathering round my heart for 
 some two or three years before this my approach to the 
 world's ancient capital, and I had begun to throw upon the 
 old lady regards of rather a grim and ungracious charac- 
 ter ; respecting her indeed, but with the same kind of 
 feeling, with which, in England, partly from habit, partly 
 from good nature, and partly from a slight doubting 
 whether, after all, our opinions may be perfectly correct, 
 we are accustomed to say that we respect what we call 
 'vested rights.' I remembered, indeed, one rich, full, 
 happy flow of classical association that burst over my 
 soul as we crossed the Athesis, but it was the only very 
 deep or very lively one that I had experienced in Italy. 
 A thousand various influences had long been weaning 
 me from my classics ; and certain it is that on this night, 
 as well as for some time previously, I believed myself 
 to be a regular, hard, dry, insensate Benthamite. I 
 thought it was the cold that prevented me from sleep- 
 ing, but the addition of a warm travelling-cloak to my 
 apparatus lecticus made no difference. Sleep refused to 
 visit me. I now know, notwithstanding the absence all 
 acknowledgment of it to myself at the time, that my 
 restlessness was caused by nothing else than the attempt 
 that poor, dear, old Home was making to regain her
 
 . FIRST VIEW OF ROME. 103 
 
 ancient influence over me. I suppose most persons have 
 observed that when there is some subject of peculiar 
 interest upon the mind, not perhaps of pressing anxiety 
 or needing immediate provision, it not unfrequently 
 happens that a certain watchfulness and excitement are 
 created, totally independent of all physical causes, yet 
 actually without the mind's consciousness being so 
 directly or intensely fixed upon the subject, as to be 
 distinctly aware of the real cause of the excitation. 
 
 But let that pass. The day of Rome at length dawned ! 
 What a happy party we were, when, more for the joy of 
 uttering the word than for the 'necessity of informing the 
 postilions, we cried out almost simultaneously, "Roma!" 
 and the whips cracked to the sound ; and the horses, as 
 though proud of their destination, whirled us onward at 
 a speed most delightfully accordant with the excited 
 state of our feelings at the time.* Whatever I had been 
 during the night, I was at no loss now to account for 
 the positively indomitable rioting of my spirits. We all 
 know what it is, at least a few times in our lives, to feel 
 etherealized unencumbered by a sense of time or place 
 or matter to have our whole relations of physical being 
 lost in one unmixed absorbing state of pure immaterial 
 
 * They can drive fast in Italy ; and as you approach Home, 
 whether it is from the impression that travellers must be in so 
 admirable a humour that they will bear anything, or in such haste 
 to reach their journey's end that any means of increasing the 
 expeditiousness of travelling will be hailed by them with delight, 
 I do not know but certain it is that they begin to attach a most 
 unreasonable number of horses to your carriage as you arrive 
 within a day's journey of his Holiness's capital.
 
 104 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 imagination. It is in such phases of the mind that we 
 realize to ourselves the kind of feeling that immortality 
 must be a joyous wakefulness a conscious intellectu- 
 ality a spiritualization of our whole frame, mental and 
 corporeal an unweariable roaming, in which you never 
 fear to be made aware that you are in a miserable cage 
 by being dashed unexpectedly against its sides, but go 
 sailing along through boundless, unimpeding aether, wher- 
 ever the impulse of intellect or fancy sends you the 
 utter absence, not of the want merely, but of the idea of 
 the possibility of wanting, repose, nutrition, or any other 
 of those creature-comforts, by which, however, this clay 
 in due time will sink the spark immortal. 
 
 Whether it was any of these provoking causes that 
 sunk my divince particulam aurce or not, or how long 
 this excited state of mind continued, I cannot now 
 remember. I only know that for a long time before we 
 arrived at the first full view of Eome, I had undergone 
 many alternations of feeling now melancholy, now 
 elated but upon the whole, either mopish or irritable, 
 and indignant beyond measure if any one dared to insult, 
 as a youthful fellow-traveller sometimes wickedly did, 
 though but by a good-natured breath of ridicule, the 
 sacred facts and records of classic lore. It was, I think, 
 on the hill above Baccano, twelve or fifteen miles from 
 Eome, that our postilions stopped, and uttered that cry 
 that no traveller who has ever heard will ever forget 
 'Ecco I'eterna citta!' How strange it was! so different 
 were my feelings a day before, that I would have deemed 
 it an affectation to have anticipated the kind of spell
 
 FIRST VIEW OF ROME. 105 
 
 that took possession of me as I heard those words, 'Ecco 
 I'eterna cittd!' We were indeed looking upon Eome. 
 I was gazing on that place in which I might have been 
 almost said to have passed one-half of my mental exist- 
 ence. A thousand memories crowded upon me the 
 great, the good, the brave, I ran over the names of all. 
 Their mighty struggles, the struggles of humanity; those 
 which, though ever varying in form and place, are still 
 the same throughout the world the eternal struggles 
 between the oppressors and the oppressed, the self-con- 
 stituted guardians, and the rightful heirs of liberty. I 
 knew that I was on holy ground, on the soil over which 
 the Gracchi, Cincinnatus, Cato, Germanicus, all had 
 passed. These noble Eomans! I felt their presence 
 with a reality never known before. I met them in their 
 familiar walks of life. I went with them to their villas. 
 I drank a glass of Sabine with Horace at his farm, and 
 sat under the broad portico of the Tusculan ; and Atticus 
 and Quintus were there, with the Master-spirit. I hur- 
 ried from these scenes to the Forum I watched the 
 face of Catiline as he encountered the eloquence of the 
 Pater Patriee I heard Virgil sue for his little patrimony 
 Brutus raise the cry of liberty Eegulus demand his 
 own destruction and his country's honour. And with 
 all this, and more, that passed through my mind with 
 the rapidity of lightning, strangely mingled thoughts of 
 myself, my own spirit, the effect of this lore upon it. I 
 felt it a solemn thing, to look, as it were, upon the centre, 
 the turning-point of ten or twelve years of my life, and 
 ask what had collected round it ? If the effect of such
 
 106 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 studies as I had followed in my boyhood and early 
 youth is really good, it is at the same time so impal- 
 pable, so impossible to trace and define, as to leave the 
 mind to the last, distressingly in doubt whether years 
 that never can be redeemed have not been spent almost 
 in vain. If the improving character of a system of 
 mental discipline is to be judged of by the amount of 
 fact incorporated into the intellect, in what a land of 
 shadowy, useless dreams had I long time been dwelling ! 
 If information, in the common sense of the word, is to 
 be regarded as the exclusive object of youthful attain- 
 ment, how lamentably must my midnight oil have been 
 wasted, during those racking hours and they were many 
 when my sole ambition was to write love-ditties like 
 an Ovid, or alcaics that would show that I had caught 
 a tone from the lyre of Horace ! 
 
 But if and my sinking spirit rose at the idea any- 
 thing that has tasked and stimulated the powers of 
 thought, or of expression, that has strengthened the 
 memory, imparted habits of application, given a fillip 
 to the imagination, bestowed culture on the taste, ren- 
 dered capable of attainment, rather perhaps than really 
 given it, must advance and benefit the whole framework 
 of the mind then why might not the discipline it was 
 arduous enough which I had undergone have dis- 
 charged in some degree its office towards me ? I rallied 
 from the gloom and despondence into which I had 
 fallen. The times and seasons of that discipline returned 
 upon my memory, and with them a confused heap of 
 school and college recollections, hope, fear, excitement
 
 FIRST VIEW OF ROME. 107 
 
 of all kinds, terminating in joy or sorrow honour or 
 disgrace defeat or victory. There were home and its 
 love companions and their friendship. And, above all, 
 there was one on bright July mornings I would stand 
 by his side, translating, in school-boy guise, those beau- 
 tiful episodes in the Georgics, or the fiery speeches of 
 the ^Eneid, and he with his arm round my neck, induc- 
 ing as it were on my words, in his own deep mellow 
 voice, the rich, fervid, feeling version of genius ; and 
 then we would wander forth into the groves of that 
 finely-wooded county, in which it was our fortune to 
 dwell, or on the banks of its own fair winding river 
 and whether the bard was in his hand or in his mind, 
 it was alike poetry and happiness to me. How dearly I 
 loved him ! Alas ! it is but a dream now a thing of 
 mingled memory and imagination. The waters rolled 
 over him, and it is many years ago, but I think the 
 wound will never close. 
 
 The thought of one in whom my boyhood was as it 
 were wrapped up, so naturally associated with the scenes 
 on which I was gazing, seemed to crown the growing 
 tumult of my feelings. Thank Heaven! I was unob- 
 served ; and I could weep freely, and without fear. I 
 do not know how it was I had no idea that I should 
 feel it so, but this hour seemed like a crisis in my life 
 everything revived, fresh as yesterday heart, memory, 
 intellect Eome was wound about them all. I never 
 felt the Classics so near my heart. I never knew before 
 how great a part of myself and my spirit were the dreams 
 of antiquity. But the troubled flow of my thought soon
 
 108 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 subsided, or rather took a different turn. We were now 
 within a very short distance of Borne. I became mise- 
 rably impatient. The horses, I thought, crawled we 
 stopped for a minute to look at the tomb of Nero a 
 minute was too long. I cared not a straw for Nero or 
 his tomb. Eome ! Rome ! ! Rome ! ! ! For pity's sake 
 get on ! But time and space do not yield to the most 
 earnest wishes. In due season we arrived soon after 
 four. I was not ten minutes in Rome, before, like a 
 shot, I was off to the Capitol and the Colosseum. I 
 passed rapidly by the Fontagna della, vergine this 
 church and that and as St. Peter's struck five, I stood 
 on the site of the Altar of Romulus. The heavy panting 
 of my poor guide, whom, if I had had a whip, I fear, I 
 should have flogged on before me all the way, called me 
 to a sense of his situation. He mopped his perspiring 
 physiognomy, poor fellow, as he tried to tell me about 
 the two bambinis that were sucked by a wolf. I looked 
 upon him with infinite compassion, especially in his 
 well-meant mythological efforts, and stopped till he had 
 recovered breath enough to talk more freely ; and this 
 importuning me, I made him start off before me, at a 
 good round pace, to the Colosseum. But just as you 
 turn down the right-hand egress out of the Capitol, 
 (which, by the way, I must afflict the reader by observ- 
 ing, is wholly mournfully modern,) the first ruin, three 
 exquisite pillars of the Temple of Jupiter Tonans, caught 
 my eye. The moon just then came out to show me 
 them. Indeed they were beautiful. They gave me my 
 first impression of the exquisite nature of ancient archi-
 
 FIRST VIEW OF ROME. 109 
 
 tecture : I know not but that those three columns left 
 with me the deepest. The Colosseum, that is the mag- 
 nificent amphitheatre of Flavius, is not far off you 
 cross the poor deserted Forum Eomanum, and you are 
 at it 
 
 ' Arches on arches ! as it were that Rome 
 Collecting the chief trophies of her line 
 Would build up all her triumphs in one dome, 
 The Colosseum stands : the moonbeams shine 
 As 'twere its natural torches, for divine 
 Should be the light which streams here, to illume 
 That long explored, but still exhaustless, mine 
 Of contemplation ; and the azure gloom 
 Of an Italian night, whose skies assume 
 Hues that have words and speak to ye of Heaven, 
 Float o'er this vast and wondrous monument, 
 And shadow forth its glory.' 
 
 How delicious it is to have the help of some great 
 mind at hand, on occasions of interesting associations, 
 to give you the proper feelings, if you have them not, 
 and clothe them in adequate language, if you have. I 
 thank the Gods, I saw the Colosseum first lit by its own 
 'torches.' It is impossible that it should produce an 
 equal effect by daylight. But I must confess that the 
 first gaze at it made no impression upon me. I saw it 
 merely from the outside. I looked simply at a portion 
 of the shell, if I may so speak of the building, and the 
 lad who was with me called it the Theatre of Apollo. 
 I did not know it was the Colosseum. It was true that 
 I had read descriptions of it, as of the other ruins of 
 Rome ; but whether it was from an early defect of sight, 
 and a consequent mental inability to retain or realize
 
 110 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 descriptions of form and locality, or from the exagge- 
 rated and misleading accounts of the picturesque, which 
 I had seen in so many books of travels, or from both 
 causes together, I had formed the most strangely erro- 
 neous impressions of the extent, the nature, and the 
 character of ancient Eome, that any poor human being 
 was ever condemned to the dire necessity of correcting. 
 My impressions of it had been glorious, but exaggerated; 
 full, but misty. I am sure that nothing but disappoint- 
 ment can be the effect of such a book as that of Eustace, 
 for example, which, though most valuable for its classical 
 references, is, beyond expression, deficient in justness of 
 description. The fact is, that "Messieurs les Voyageurs" 
 for the most part, in recounting the various objects 
 which they have seen, or which they have not seen (a 
 difference of less consequence than might be supposed 
 to guide -writers and book-makers), and which, they 
 think, it is ten to one their readers may never see, think 
 only of rouging (as though for the gallery, in the dis- 
 tance) their descriptions, and making round the ends of 
 their periods. From sundry books of this character, I 
 had expected to find, in approaching the Colosseum, a 
 large plain, covered with ruins of temples, arches, pillars, 
 porticoes. Ah ! but I pity the first moment of mingled 
 shame, and grief, and anger, which that man undergoes 
 who has been foolish enough to expect a city of ruins at 
 Eome. When I found that the round, isolated building, 
 on the outside alone of which I was looking, was the 
 Colosseum that the Forum was no more that the 
 Capitol had passed away (though this latter I remem-
 
 FIRST VIEW OF ROME. Ill 
 
 bered well from Corinne) that a single pillar was a 
 treasure, and that the great ruins of the city of four 
 million souls, and a circumference of fifty miles,* ex- 
 ceeded not in number a score, I bit my lip in as great a 
 confusion of feelings as I ever experienced. 
 
 What was I to think ? Was it possible that an hour's 
 gaze upon Home was enough to quench the first fire of 
 my longings ? Was it possible and 1 felt a kind of 
 abominable, sacrilegious thought creeping over me 
 Was it possible could it be that I was disappointed ? 
 I was ashamed to confess it. I grieved that it was true. 
 By this time I was two or three hundred yards from 
 the Colosseum. I stopped for awhile and leaned my 
 back against a tree, I must say feeling most miserable. 
 I asked for the rest? and echo answered, "the rest!" 
 The Colosseum ? it was there. The Capitol ? it was 
 there. The Eoman Forum ? I was standing on it. I 
 never shall forget the bitter agony of that struggle 
 between shame and disappointment. At last, a feeling 
 of remorse came over me. I felt as though I had been 
 offending something that was mighty and holy. I felt 
 as though I had insulted and spurned something that 
 should have commanded my fear, my reverence. I ran 
 back to the Colosseum, and, doubt not, this time I 
 entered it. I prayed its fair, spherical form, its winding 
 galleries, its leafy and moon-lit arches, to forgive me. 
 It now became beautiful, magnificent, glorious it filled 
 my every want. I turned again to the triumphal arches, 
 in their admirable preservation, of Constantine, Titus 
 * Credat, quicunque vult.
 
 112 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 and Severus. I begged the Temple of Concord to for- 
 give me, for I was at peace with her, and vowed eternal 
 admiration to the three pillars of the Thunderer to 
 deprecate his wrath. 
 
 It had been long since I had undergone such excite- 
 ment as on this day, and I went exhausted to bed at an 
 unreasonably early hour. That day, with its impressions, 
 can never be enjoyed or suffered again ; but I would 
 preserve the memory of it as of one of the dearest and 
 most deeply engraven pages in my book of life. There 
 is a plant, I think I have heard described, that flowers 
 or bears fruit but once and there is a freshness of 
 feeling in the mind, which, on whatever subject known, 
 is known that once and never known again. Pluck 
 the flower ! you are right ; but you pluck it once and 
 for ever. Seize on the fruit ! you may ; but your first 
 and last taste of it are the same. 
 
 JOURNAL. 
 
 Kome, Dec. 29th, 1834. 
 
 I have had a delightful day in the Vatican. The portion 
 I visited to-day was the new arm of the Museum Chiara 
 Monti. There were many very fine statues. Those 
 that pleased and struck me most were a Demosthenes, 
 a Minerva Medica, a Fortune, two Amazons, a Ganymede, 
 a Commodus, and a Diana. The Nile, which is generally 
 so much admired, was wholly lost upon me a large 
 recumbent river-god with a number of little chaps crawl- 
 ing all about him, up, down and round him, to represent 
 all his tributary streams. There is one feature that
 
 STATUES OF GODS. NAPLES. 113 
 
 begins to strike me as peculiar in the statues of the gods 
 and goddesses which takes off a little from their effect : 
 they have no scope in their gaze ; they are all looking 
 either down or horizontally. There is nothing of passion 
 in their faces. [They are] serious and solemn. No up- 
 ward [or] eager, forward gaze. In this respect the statues 
 of warriors, philosophers, orators, &c., have their peculiar 
 character or vocation marked not only in their bearing, 
 but in the position of the head and direction of the look. 
 But the deities have no varieties or advantages of this 
 kind. . . . They are, ... for the most part, represented as 
 looking down upon their worshippers, a grave, candid, 
 attentive expression on their countenance, dignified and 
 unimpassioned, as becomes gods. 
 
 To HIS BROTHER THOMAS. 
 
 Napoli, Jan. 30th, 1835. 
 
 I am perfectly bewitched with this fascinating place. 
 It is one of the few things, places or persons, of whom 
 or of which one has heard great eulogies, that when 
 confessing the honest truth perfectly come up to one's 
 anticipations. We arrived here on the 27th inst. I 
 do not know how to describe to you my first feelings. 
 Imagine going to bed in January and waking in 
 July ; conceive being boxed up in a well-fired room in 
 rather rainy weather at Eome on Tuesday, and sitting 
 on the Wednesday following with windows wide open, 
 keeping out of the sun's heat, looking up to Vesuvius on 
 your left, and over the wide sparkling Bay of Naples 
 before you. Stroll through a lively population, exceed- 
 
 i
 
 114 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 ingly busy with nothing to do ; exceedingly happy with 
 nothing perhaps in the world for to-morrow; laughing, 
 gesticulating, singing, smiling and basking in the sun ; 
 their very beggars begging in fun ; their signs and 
 expressions of suffering and hunger exaggerated into 
 burlesque. Clothe yourself with that nameless sort of 
 genial, happy, sunny feeling with which one first rises, 
 and continues throughout the day to glory in, at the 
 year's first decisive leap into summer. Look from the 
 hill of St. Elmo upon the white and shining city of the 
 beautiful Naples at its foot, and then throw yourself into 
 a " wee boatie," get a mile or two into the bay, and look 
 back upon its village-crowned shore. This will give you 
 a notion of the kind of fascination one experiences in 
 first coming into this sunny South and very Greek people. 
 Its early colonists called it " Virgin-faced," and exqui- 
 sitely named a part of its vicinity " Cessation from care," 
 and the toughest and most prosaic spirit will not quarrel 
 with such epithets, but will acknowledge the appropriate- 
 ness of the terms Parthenope and Pausilype. 
 
 III. 
 
 [Written during the Leeds ministry. See pp. 37 62.] 
 
 To Miss . 
 
 Jan. 20th, 1846. 
 
 . . . The scheme of Mr. Dawson's broadcast tracts is 
 excellent, and to judge from the first specimen most 
 satisfactory in accomplishment. I have long been of 
 opinion that the Unitarians were like the Jews of old,
 
 GEORGE DAW SON. 115 
 
 holding up the light in a dark place, a farthing candle 
 in the world's wide wilderness, till Shiloh should come, 
 turn the feeble light into a torch, and pass it rapidly 
 from hand to hand, like the war-signal among the Scottish 
 clans, till the earth should be filled with the knowledge 
 of the Lord, till he should be one, and his name one. 
 I have been prepared, then, to expect that we should 
 decrease, while of this new movement, when it should 
 arrive, that it should increase; and the same principle 
 obliges me to rejoice in it, if our poverty should prove 
 the riches of the world. Whenever, therefore, a distinct 
 movement arises, under a new name, more popular forms, 
 a more catholic spirit, and less stringent historical and 
 denominational associations, then I should be prepared 
 to welcome a most valuable accessory to the cause of 
 truth. There is only one danger. Undutiful children 
 are apt to despise their parents when they are grown 
 old and feeble, and themselves have become strong and 
 hearty, forgetful of who it is that has given them their 
 thews and sinews, watched over their infancy, endured 
 the heat of the day, and prepared the way, like the Baptist, 
 for the Messianic kingdom which they are now entering. 
 I fear lest the Unitarians should too readily forget all 
 that has been done, and too sanguinely rely upon what 
 shall now be done, of greater and better. Their oak has 
 borne the battle and the breeze; there may be great 
 beauty and hope in the sapling of a new cause, but time 
 alone can test its fabric. Under these circumstances, I 
 would rather see Unitarians holding to their own post, 
 and giving a helping hand and kindly word to the move- 
 
 12
 
 116 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 ment among others, than rushing pell-mell into it them- 
 selves, and perhaps in the end attaching to it too much 
 of their own traditional character, and checking its spon- 
 taneous formation and growth. Men that have fixed 
 views will always mould those that have not. And as 
 the majority of the new hearers have yet their views to 
 form, the decided sentiments of the Unitarians may tend 
 to precipitate and to cramp them. 
 
 To HIS WIPE. 
 
 Kettlewell, Wharfedale, July 28th, 1846. 
 I kept close to the smooth-flowing, narrow Aire, as 
 a lover. I realized the ancient reverence, and felt it 
 human. It was manifestly of woman's type of loveli- 
 ness. ... It was a river-nymph, who not poured it out of 
 her urn, but was it her very self. I felt great sympathy 
 with that . . . song of Schiller's in which he bewails the 
 lost Olympus, and makes this world appear so desolate 
 and sorrowful under its monotheism. Though a little 
 frightened at first at my venture of a three miles' walk 
 in a darkening sky by an unknown path, yet I deter- 
 mined to keep close by my nymph. And well did she 
 requite my trust. Ere long, sweet Malham all quietly 
 peered, with her white cottages, from her sweet seclusion. 
 I was sorry I was at the end of my walk, and unwilling 
 to go in. After a time I overcame this scruple, entered 
 the clean symbol of hospitality, and at nearly ten o'clock 
 made a monstrous tea. How soundly I slept in that 
 white-curtained chamber ! how fresh and happy I woke 
 to-day ! . . . My companions [two young men he met at
 
 WHARFEDALE. LEASOWES. 117 
 
 the inn] and I started for Gordale Scar. I was fain to 
 look at the interesting little Gordale, with its mossy 
 protrusions, especially because near it was a place, rather 
 difficult of access, called Janet's Cave. Tell her [their 
 daughter Janet] that they say it was called after a fairy 
 of that name, who was supposed to live in it with all 
 her court Mr. " Bacon" Montague, in his guide, makes 
 a fable of it, and, oddly enough, he makes Janet the 
 daughter of her mother, around whom he concentrates 
 the chief interest. But Gordale ! It is worth coming 
 to see. My idea is that you have visited this part of 
 the country, but as we have no time to talk over such 
 things at home, I do not know. . . . 
 
 To THE SAME. 
 
 Stourbridge, Tuesday Morning [Aug. 4th } 1846]. 
 Yesterday it was my intention to have written to 
 you before dinner and after a morning's ramble in the 
 Leasowes, and if I had done this you would have had a 
 letter full of those delightful feelings to which you know 
 I am very susceptible in visiting on the traces of the 
 great, or at least the interesting dead. . . . Poor Shen- 
 stone's place, the toil and pleasure and glory of his life, 
 that on whose walks and urns and trees and arbours he 
 spent the whole of his little property. Attwood's sister 
 has it. The family entered upon it as mortgagees, and 
 have suffered it to run to waste. The walks are all 
 obliterated, the grottoes, seats, &c., overthrown, the in- 
 scriptions erased, and yet the original choice of trees, 
 the outline of the arrangements, and the natural advan-
 
 118 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 tages of the spot, are so indelibly beautiful, that the 
 place is lovely and infinitely attractive still. I went by 
 coach at nine in the morning, got there about ten, sallied 
 at once into the grounds with a volume of the poor bard 
 in my hands, and after a couple of hours' ramble regained 
 the turnpike -road. ... It was one of those favoured 
 moments in these excursions which impress me with a 
 pleasure so lively as to rub out the desagre'ments of my 
 other duties. . . . And you . . . are always with me on 
 such occasions in the light of imagination and love, and 
 I feel that if I was not to be a poet myself, nature 
 intended me to be a companion of poets and a frequenter 
 of their haunts. 
 
 To Miss . 
 
 September 28th, 1847. 
 
 .... I came home on Sunday, from doing duty at 
 Huddersfield, at a quarter past eleven. Wife, children 
 and servants, all in the arms of Morpheus, when I saw 
 Mr. Dawson's sermon on the table. Wearied as I 
 was, this briskened me up a little, and at half -past 
 twelve I found myself ascending to my room all the 
 richer man for the way in which I had spent the pre- 
 ceding hour. The sermon is an exceedingly clever one, 
 and touches upon many much-needed points, and con- 
 tains a great deal of valuable and necessary truth. In 
 the author's views of the changing vesture of religion I 
 quite agree, but I should have liked to have had on such 
 an occasion some statement of what his view of the un- 
 clwtnginy truth was. . . . The question is, among all the 
 shapes, what is the best material, where is it to be had,
 
 UNITY AMID DIVERSITY. 119 
 
 what does it consist of ? ... Is it silk, or wool, or linen, 
 or calico ? l3ecide me this question, or help me to decide 
 it, and then you shall have a Quaker's coat or a shooting- 
 jacket, for all I care, just as you like. . . . The struggle 
 of all and each of the sects is a struggle for freedom ; 
 and the world is a great congeries of churches, each 
 claiming, and more or less obtaining, freedom for itself, 
 and thus, on the whole, for the world. The question is, 
 whether you can make each division or congregation an 
 epitome of that world. I believe you cannot ; that if 
 there be freedom or earnestness of individual thought, it 
 must prove a Babel ; and harmony can only be restored 
 by each language having its own country, but all agreeing 
 to live as citizens of a common world. 
 
 To HIS WIFE. 
 
 Edinburgh, July 31st, 1848. 
 
 I would gladly go into it [Holyrood Palace], But a 
 strange feeling keeps me from many visits and excur- 
 sions of this kind, which perhaps you will understand. 
 I have a sense of incompleteness, and feel as if I ought 
 not to go to see these places in halves, but that I ought 
 to go altogether. And so ... when we sit together on 
 the stirrup of Arthur's Saddle . . . looking upon Holy- 
 rood, we will then descend and enter the chamber of 
 Mary, around whose name, weakness and misery, gather 
 the compassions of the heart. So it is with Melrose, 
 Dryburgh : it costs me even an effort, put off from day 
 to day, to throw up my book and say, that as Eoslyn is 
 within a cheap ride and walk of seven miles, I will go
 
 120 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 there : they all seem put off to a more convenient season, 
 and the convenience lies in bringing an integer to the 
 visit, my heart as well as my head. . . . 
 
 I long for them [the children] all to be a little older. 
 I fancy one could bring out their minds so much more 
 than while in the ABC and infantine stage. I have 
 been reading Rob Roy, and thinking how they will enjoy 
 it when some winter holidays we gather round the fire 
 and read it aloud in nightly sequence, if a week of such 
 unreproved leisure be ever mine. . . . 
 
 To Miss . 
 
 [In answer to a question about the treatment in Sunday- 
 school of such narratives as that of the angel Gabriel in 
 Luke ii.] 
 
 Feb. 28th, 1849. 
 
 . . . The " angel Gabriel" is but a type of a class ; a 
 great many such messengers of doubt and difficulty 
 present themselves to the inquirer as he passes on with 
 open eye from page to page of the Bible, and you will 
 not wonder when I say that I, as a theologian, have no 
 " cough mixture," no " Old Parr's Pills," in my depart- 
 ment for the cure and remedy of these things. ... In 
 the abstract, I have no difficulty about angels. The 
 narrowest of narrow things is to limit the existences of 
 the universe and the operations of God to the creatures 
 we ourselves know of, and the modes of communication 
 with which we are familiar. I believe, therefore, in 
 races of beings superior to man. I believe that they 
 are employed (as man is, in an inferior degree) to execute 
 the commands of the Almighty. Whether this involves
 
 TEE ANGEL GABRIEL. 121 
 
 a locomotion among the planets, and a message-bearing 
 from world to world, is a different matter, and one on 
 which, judging from the analogy of the direct spiritual 
 way in which God works on human wills and human 
 affairs, I should be greatly doubtful. Still, I say it is 
 narrow and presumptuous to say it is not so and cannot 
 be so. And therefore I should make it merely a matter 
 of evidence. The evidence of direct angelic interference 
 with the affairs of man is to me too weak to prove its 
 existence. . . . You [imply that] it is easy to tell the 
 class where Jesus was born, &c., [though] you say that 
 they could not answer the question. But here is an 
 illustration of the whole character of your difficulty, 
 which is no greater in the case of Gabriel than here ; 
 for can you answer where Jesus was born ? I can't. If 
 I follow the letter of the account bound up as part of 
 the Gospels, I say without hesitation, " Bethlehem." If 
 I follow my evidence, the universal implied voice of the 
 whole of the rest of Jesus' history, I reply, " Nazareth." 
 Now it seems to me here must your decision be made. 
 If you say " Bethlehem," take all the rest in the same 
 way, angels and all. Accept the narrative in all its 
 wonder, and fill the minds of your young people with 
 pious reverence. It is possible to receive the account 
 as it stands. Millions do. But if you say " Nazareth," 
 then you take the liberty of examining and sifting the 
 account on your own responsibility, and have adopted 
 for yourself and your class the utmost principle of free 
 inquiry. In the first case, you must stop inquiry (if it 
 arise) with the reverence due to an authentic, inspired
 
 122 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 account. In the second, you encourage it, and must 
 found your reverence henceforth in the spirit, and not 
 in the letter, and keep the difference continually in 
 view. . . . 
 
 To HIS SISTER-IN-LAW MATILDA LUPTOX. 
 
 Leeds, June 30th, 1849. 
 
 . . . And this note, dear child, will come into your 
 hands on the glorious Sabbath-morn, time's symbol of 
 eternity's peace, when I trust the sun may be shining 
 on the quiet hills, and the stillness of nature bear witness 
 with the tranquil sanctity of the hour to the unbroken 
 rest of the all-happy hereafter. And yet at Ilkley the 
 active lifey (if one may coin such a word) movement of 
 the 104th Psalm is my unfailing study and delight. I 
 think I have found the Sundays spent at Ilkley and 
 Ben Ehydding the holiest in my life spent from home. 
 The plaintive tones of the soul, if one is in suffering, 
 find there a response in nature's mirror, or its glad 
 gratitude, if in the consciousness of returning health 
 and vigour, in the echo of the hills. . . . 
 
 To HIS WIFE. 
 
 Paris, Sept. 4th, 1849. 
 
 On Saturday afternoon, about the time I was expecting 
 the return of my unfriendly visitor the tic, and was 
 beginning to attribute the failure of his visit to one 
 cause or other, the air changed and a thunderstorm 
 came on and took away my evil genius on its wings. I 
 was out when the storm actually rose. It was curious
 
 A STORM IN PARIS. 123 
 
 to feel the air come on in a rush in the streets ; then the 
 dust from mending roads and repairing houses came 
 like a blinding tornado. The shopkeepers all began to 
 close their windows and shutters, the libraires to take 
 in their stalls, the picture-dealers to hurry down their 
 engravings. All the people were scudding through the 
 streets, often knocking against each other in their desire 
 to get home and under shelter. Presently some scaf- 
 folding fell down with a great crash very near me, 
 thickening the already almost blinding torrent of dust. 
 The lightning gave a friendly flash to show me the 
 way about every half-minute, and at length the slow 
 heavy drops began to fall, and down came the storm. 
 By this time I was very near home, and hastened in to 
 close my windows. The next morning I took my bath 
 in the cooled river, went at ten o'clock to the Eue 
 Grenelle de St. Germain over the Pont Eoyal, now 
 National, and heard Coquerel preach. One feels so much 
 at home with the French Protestant service that it was 
 almost like being in England. Although very grateful 
 and happy, yet when I thought that about eleven o'clock 
 you were all assembling at Mill Hill, I could not help 
 feeling the touching beauty mingled with the truth of 
 some of the lines we were singing from the 84th Psalm : 
 
 " Et moi, dans mes ennuis mortels, 
 Je languis loin de tes autels." 
 
 FROM A PRIVATE DIARY. 
 
 Nov. 20th, 1850. I remember often now the weari- 
 ness of life and of the world, and the failure of energy,
 
 124 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 under which my poor father used to suffer. I understand 
 these feelings better now than then. I have long par- 
 ticipated in them in some degree, but do so now more 
 and more. Thank God that children grow up from a 
 fresh fountain, and begin not life with the moss and 
 green that almost choke up the old springs. I have 
 prayed to God, and am more placid but not more cheer- 
 ful, more acquiescent but not more contented. 
 
 April 12th, 1851 (at Barkstone). We have been here 
 ten days. It is the same simple, primitive place as 
 before. One takes part so completely with nature in it, 
 that no weather seems to be amiss. One rains with the 
 rain, and is warm with the sun. . . . The frequent going 
 in and out makes us feel no chilliness from the early 
 spring, which indeed is late in coming this year. The 
 blossoms of the plum-tree venture out slowly and timidly. 
 I have finished my sermon for Manchester, which I have 
 had in hand all week, and taking up Augustine's Con- 
 fessions am again struck with his account of verse- 
 making at school. It is so like Shrewsbury. No doubt 
 the education in our public schools is traditional, and 
 derived from the heathen curriculum, with a sprinkling 
 of Christianity. 
 
 May 14:tk (Barkstone). To-day, as I sat in the garden, 
 free from pain, with the warm sun upon my back, and 
 looking up into the deep tranquil azure of the sky above 
 me, I could not help feeling that for such a day, so 
 enjoyed, it would be worth living a twelvemonth of 
 ordinary weather : the memory of such a day through 
 one-half the year, and its prospect through the other
 
 "WEATHER." 125 
 
 half, would sustain one through the whole ; it would be 
 the one great wonder, beauty, fete of the world, and of 
 our annual existence. Now there are numbers of such 
 days, but because so many are unlike it we exclaim, 
 "What a climate this is to live in!". . . We shut our- 
 selves up in towns, walk through dirty streets, keep 
 within doors twenty-three hours out of every twenty- 
 four, throw ourselves thus out of harmony and intimacy 
 with nature, are sensitive to instead of sensitive with 
 her changes, and then damn the weather instead of the 
 ungenial state of our own blood. 
 
 To MATILDA LUPTON. 
 
 Feb. 25th, 1851. 
 
 . . . On Thursday I found myself very happy among the 
 lower, nay the lowest classes, on "the moss" at Trafford 
 Park, the property of Sir Thomas Trafford. He has let 
 forty-two acres of unproducing moss to the Guardians 
 of the Poor of Chorlton-on-Medlock, on a lease of four- 
 teen years, at 10s. an acre. It now, after eleven years, 
 is producing abundant crops of potatoes, as well as some 
 wheat, oats, turnips, &c. An average of fifteen able- 
 bodied paupers are always on the farm ; sometimes as 
 many as fifty come. They walk from Manchester (three 
 miles) every morning and return in the afternoon, an 
 hour being allowed before leaving and an hour after 
 returning to Manchester to look out for employment. 
 It is found to act excellently as a test, many coming 
 and becoming accustomed to work for a few months, 
 and then getting better employment in Manchester, and
 
 126 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 never returning. Thus habits of industry are cherished 
 by this genial labour, instead of being discouraged as 
 they are by the stone-heap. They receive their relief 
 each day, Is. 3d. if there be a family. On Saturday I 
 visited the similar establishment in Hollow Meadows, 
 seven miles from Sheffield. There the paupers only 
 return on Saturdays. The farm is fifty acres, on a fine 
 hill-side, originally all moor, rented at 4s. and 6s. an 
 acre from the Duke of Norfolk. With this also I was 
 greatly pleased. You know it is my ideal philanthropy. 
 . . . Yesterday [at the "Conversation Club"] . . . Church 
 told us that when he had written a favourable article 
 on Arnold in the " Intelligencer," Dr. Hook wrote a letter 
 of remonstrance, telling him that Arnold, though himself 
 an amiable and conscientious man, was the father of 
 infidels, and that / had furnished him, he was sure, with 
 all the illustrative matter of his argument ! But it is 
 trifling to write these things. . . . 
 
 PRIVATE DIARY. 
 
 June Wth, 1851 (Barkstone). This is my birthday 
 and my little Clara's. To-day I am forty-one. We had 
 purposed spending it in the woods, where all the family 
 were to have gone on a pic-nic. But little Clara was 
 not quite well, and the day has been very wet. Whether 
 it be this, or other things, or the solemn thought of one's 
 having completed the first year of the fifth of the seven 
 decades of life, I do not know, but I feel as I sit down 
 in the evening, when all the noise is hushed and most 
 of the little voices are silent in sleep, a great depression
 
 THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 127 
 
 weigh down my mind. My external lot in all things 
 has been happier than I deserve. I have been singularly 
 blessed in the most excellent, beloved and affectionate 
 of wives, a happy, healthy, energetic and intelligent set 
 of children, in faithful and attached friends, in a position 
 of usefulness and honour, and in an ample competence 
 of worldly means. I am not ambitious ; I am not con- 
 scious of ever having been so. But I am, and have 
 always since I was a boy been, exceedingly anxious to 
 succeed in what I undertake. I have not undertaken 
 things because they would bring me worldly fame or 
 profit, but generally things which I conceived it was my 
 duty, religious or social, to undertake. I am disappointed. 
 It is two years and a half since my new chapel was 
 opened. I have given up almost all other duties in the 
 town and working in all other societies; I have kept 
 at my post month after month, ten or eleven together, 
 with scarcely a single exchange, and almost no relief. 
 I have endeavoured to keep all my strength and interest 
 for my pastoral and pulpit duties. I cannot say that I 
 see any result in increased interest or attention on the 
 part of my people generally to the chapel services. At 
 the end of this year, perhaps I may give up the experi- 
 ment, and endeavour to make myself useful once more 
 in the town and in preaching in other places. I some- 
 times ask myself whether a change would not benefit 
 my people. I know there may be much more done, and 
 there is much more that ought to be done than I do. 
 But my Sunday services exhaust me that day. Family 
 engagements also take up more of my time. But I am
 
 128 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 profoundly attached to Leeds, to my friends and to my 
 congregation. I cannot bear the thought of going else- 
 where, or else perhaps for several years a more encourag- 
 ing career might lie before me. I wish I could distinguish 
 between real bodily weakness and indolence. I should 
 like to know more certainly than I do the cause of the 
 lassitude and difficulty of exertion against which I am 
 so often called to struggle. 
 
 July llth (BarTcstone). The first week of my summer 
 freedom. The weight of the responsibility of preparation 
 for Sunday is off my mind. The ground is lying under 
 the gentle influences of God's rain and sunshine, un- 
 cropped and fallow ; not forced into a strained produc- 
 tiveness, but awaiting the renewal of its powers. Harvest 
 should not come too often. Manuring and atmosphering 
 and sowing and growing should be allowed more time. 
 After reading some Marmion for the children this evening, 
 I was called up to see a tableau vivant. It was from 
 Mrs. Cowden Clarke's Desdemona. I guessed it to be 
 Desdemona over the death-bed of her mother, which was 
 wrong, and the nursemaid, Elizabeth, who was among 
 the spectators behind me, gently said in the silence, 
 " her maid." She was right. 
 
 Aug. 4:th. My dear wife would have me go to London 
 to see the Great Exhibition of the world's industry. So 
 we went there and back first class for 30s. a-piece, a price 
 which, though so reasonable, has been since reduced to 
 half. The old things in London are what please me best, 
 however. I went with a gallery order to the House of 
 Commons, and though half-an-hour before the debate,
 
 LONDON IN 1851. 129 
 
 found the gallery full. It was the question of the 
 admission of Mr. Salomons, Lord John Kussell main- 
 taining that he must not be admitted to the House until 
 he had taken the oaths prescribed by law he having 
 sworn on the Old Testament and not on the New, having 
 omitted the words, " On the faith of a Christian," and 
 having thereupon taken his seat, voted and spoken in 
 the House. . . . Went one day to hear Tom [his brother] 
 undergo a severe cross-examination on the Water-works' 
 Bill, before a Committee of the House. ... I like Parlia- 
 mentary proceedings. They, the talk of literary men, 
 a good library, and the sight of good pictures and sculp- 
 ture, would fill up the measure of all chief secular delights 
 with me. Tagart received us very kindly during our 
 stay on a three -days' visit to his beautiful house at 
 Hampstead. Spent an hour or two with Mr. James 
 Yates at Lauderdale House ; missed seeing Mr. A. Aikin 
 and Mr. Crabbe Eobinson. My brother ministers Boucher 
 and Sadler, both of whom I wished to hear, were absent 
 from town. Saw several times that Christian man Henry 
 Enfield, but he was too desponding. I should be sorry 
 to live in London. The place is too overwhelming : one 
 ceases to be a relative or significant part of the whole. 
 One is buried and lost in the mass of humanity. Went 
 to Hampton Court and spent the whole of our short time 
 before the Cartoons. The picture which in the prints 
 always strikes me least here struck me most, the Mira- 
 culous Draught. The light shines behind and through 
 the sides of the figures in so remarkable a manner as 
 to make them stand out of the picture like so many 
 
 K
 
 130 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 bas-reliefs or real persons. But the whole set were 
 wonderful. I wished I had never seen an engraving of 
 them, so that the whole conception as well as execution 
 of the beautiful ideas might have come upon one freshly 
 and unpreparedly at once. . . . The whirl of London 
 astonished me. . . . We were told that six hundred new 
 omnibuses had been put on for the additional work con- 
 sequent on the Exhibition, in which there was nothing 
 to my mind so fine, so interesting and so beautiful, as 
 the two large trees enclosed from the Park beneath the 
 roof of the transepts. Two or three of my mornings were 
 spent as a delegate at the Peace Congress in Exeter Hall, 
 where there must have been between three and four 
 thousand persons, and over which Sir David Brewster 
 presided. We spent a fortnight in town, and how glad 
 we were to get back to Barkstone and our dear little 
 savages ! 
 
 August Wth (Barkstone). A letter from Mr. Eichard 
 Martineau, the treasurer of the Carter Lane congregation 
 in London, mentioning Dr. Hutton's retirement, and 
 asking me if there was any chance of my being induced 
 to accept the charge of the congregation. The letter 
 was couched in the most respectful terms possible. I 
 could not help feeling such a mark of confidence ; at the 
 same time, there are many considerations that put my 
 acceptance of it quite out of the question, and none 
 more decidedly so than the great liberality, kindness 
 and consideration of my congregation at Leeds, to whom 
 I am heartily attached, and whom, as long as my services 
 are useful, I shall delight to serve. One would bring
 
 INVITATION TO CARTER LANE. 131 
 
 both new and old powers, no doubt, to new ground, and 
 there are many points in which a residence in London 
 would be both stimulative and rewarding to exertion. 
 But as long as I am desired here, why should I go to 
 chances of usefulness elsewhere ? 
 
 Sept. 4th. Would that I had leisure and power to 
 write a book that should be called " Christian Institutes" 
 for the 19th century ! There is no thoughtful medium 
 between our two extremes. They are entirely out of 
 harmony with each other, and cannot strike a balance. 
 The negative and destructive school have no feeling for, 
 have almost lost all knowledge of, the state of want and 
 of conviction in the school which they have left, and 
 that school will not, or cannot, enter into the real diffi- 
 culties of the questions between them, but goes on utter- 
 ing inarticulate moanings, like those of dumb animals, 
 neglecting to search and study the whole matter over 
 again, and refusing to be comforted. The mass of our 
 people want a guide. I think I see the weak points and 
 the strong points of both sides. Would that I could 
 firmly lay hold of and wisely expound that intermediate 
 ground on which Truth sits on her throne, but which 
 neither of these parties apprehend! And yet what is 
 Truth ? Nothing more, after all, but my trovrings in my 
 hands. It lives nowhere but with God. 
 
 Jan. 27th, 1852. Yesterday morning spent as usual, 
 for now more than twenty years, in visiting my flock, 
 with the addition, however, of four committee-meetings 
 in succession Chapel, Day-school, Philosophical Hall, 
 Leeds Public Improvement and Charitable Inquiry. 
 
 K2
 
 132 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 These made a hole in my six hours of daylight work. 
 In the evening, again at Mrs. Kemble's reading. Having 
 given up my seat to Mrs. Henry Marshall, I was seated 
 on a chair opposite the audience, and it was interesting 
 to observe the transmutations of countenance that took 
 place in the hearers as the reading went on. I observed 
 that the very young ladies and the married " went" first. 
 The first scene was scarcely completed ere my wife's 
 countenance was lighted up with full expansive rays of 
 kind and genial interest. Then a very well-behaved, 
 plain, proper-looking young girl began to forget herself, 
 her still, frigid and formal countenance giving way before 
 the charm, the head uplifted and bent slightly forward, 
 the lip opened, the eye bright and suffused, the forefinger 
 lifted up towards the bosoin and curved. At length the 
 elderly single ladies, whose faces looked at first as if 
 they had no love in them as if the natural stream, 
 that should have been flowing on in nurture of all love 
 exchanges, had been turned back upon the heart and 
 frozen there began to yield in the fixed and sharp out- 
 line of their countenances. One wooden block of a man, 
 whose head I wished off its tower, and who intercepted 
 me from seeing Matilda's face, was resolute in its fixed- 
 ness for about three acts. At length, I think, the nurse 
 made him laugh for the moment. . . . The beautiful deaf 
 
 and dumb daughter of Mr. was there, and near her 
 
 happened to be placed an intelligent little girl of Mr. 
 Henry Marshall's, who did not know her, but soon per- 
 ceived her malady, and, laying aside her own book, looked 
 over hers, pointed out the omitted passages, dwelt with
 
 MRS. KEMBLE. "TALENTS." 133 
 
 slow, pausing finger upon the accented ones, looked up in 
 her face every now and then with delighted intelligence. 
 
 Feb. 5th. I am convinced of nothing more thoroughly 
 than that nature has given me but a very moderate por- 
 tion of brain, that I am in the full height of any position 
 to which I am equal, that I have had in every way 
 through life a full and ample measure of reward for 
 everything I am, have, or could do. Had it pleased my 
 Maker to give me a few ounces more brain, a greater 
 quickness of apprehension and tenacity of impressions, 
 I might have been something more considerable : as it 
 is, I have no reason to court more light than already 
 shines upon me. I am best where I am. I should 
 be unequal to any exposure where there was a higher 
 average about me. And yet how I long for the gifts of 
 genius ! What would I not give to create the impressions 
 I can now only receive ! I think my chief and only 
 power is the putting to their full use the faculties I 
 have. If it be so, I have reason to be grateful and 
 contented. My two talents are made four: how can I 
 murmur that of five which I never had I cannot make 
 ten? 
 
 Feb. 27th. At preliminary meetings to arrange for 
 James Marshall's re-election. It was announced that 
 the "publicans" were much opposed to Mr. Carbutt's 
 return. He is a teetotaller. Calling on old Mr. Heaps, 
 I heard an anecdote of the Yorkshire election of 1807, 
 when the Whigs first broke the Tory power in this 
 county by the return of Lord Milton, which illustrates 
 the spirit in which the election was then conducted even
 
 134 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 on the Liberal side. Mr. Heaps, an independent-minded 
 young tradesman of Leeds, succeeded in getting seven 
 claims to votes established out of one estate, which had 
 been left by a grandfather among fifteen grandchildren, 
 and of which he was manager and distributor. He was 
 brought into presence of the committee, consisting of 
 Lord Fitzwilliam, Lord Milton, Fawkes, the Wentworths, 
 and other members of leading Whig families, to tell his 
 story, which he did with a racy Yorkshire dialect and 
 zest. Lord Fitzwilliam said to him at the conclusion, 
 " Would you oblige, Mr. Heaps, by taking this note to 
 the cock-pit for me?" "My Lord," he replied, "I do 
 not know where the cock-pit is, and I never saw a cock- 
 fight, and never desire to see one." His Lordship laughed, 
 and said that his servant would go with him and show 
 him the way, but he particularly requested that he 
 would deliver the note himself. Accordingly he sallied 
 forth with his servant, who was grinning " on both sides 
 of his mouth." When at the cock-pit he was desired to 
 give his note at a small opening made by lifting up a 
 window-shutter. He gave it to "a hand." A voice 
 behind the wall said, " Any answer ?" Mr. Heaps said, 
 " Nay, I know not. I was to leave it here." After a 
 pause, the voice said, "Is your name Heaps? Then 
 hold out your hand for the answer," and a sum of twenty 
 guineas was put into it. Mr. Heaps said, " What's this ? 
 This must be some mistake." But the voice said, " We 
 never make mistakes here." The hand was withdrawn 
 and the shutter went down. He hurried back to Mr. 
 Fawkes to remonstrate. Mr. Fawkes said, " Now there's
 
 ELECTIONEERING IN 1807. 135 
 
 nothing more than you and your friends will want for 
 your expenses, Mr. Heaps. You'll have to stay in York 
 all night. You can't get away." "Mr. Fawkes," he 
 said, " we have a carriage-and-six to take us back ; for 
 we came in a carriage-and-four, and a gentleman who 
 came by post is going to yoke his horses to our four 
 and go back with us." "Well, then, you must oblige us 
 by staying and going to Bumble's Moor and fetching 
 back those two of the seven voters whose claim they 
 rejected yesterday, before you established their claim." 
 Accordingly Mr. Heaps submitted, and they divided 
 the money amongst them for expenses. 
 
 June 18th. The principles of Unitarian theology are 
 sound. The principles of Unitarian ecclesiology are 
 unsound. Our main views of God, and Christ, and 
 Duty, and Futurity, are right, though they will bear 
 enriching and intensifying ; but our views of the con- 
 stitution of a church, on the mode of binding men 
 together in religious bodies for mutual and general pro- 
 gress in holiness, mercy and truth, are unphilosophical 
 and foolish. Experience has proved their mistakenness. 
 
 To MATILDA LUPTON. 
 
 The Trossacs, 1852. 
 
 You remember by what dear and precious though pen- 
 sive recollections the place from which I now date is 
 consecrated to me. Twenty-two years ago I visited the 
 scene of the close of poor Joe's life, when the event had 
 only taken place six years, and when a life-long sorrow 
 was young and green. JSTow dear Jane, the blessing and
 
 136 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 comfort of my life, is with me, and shares, and thus 
 alleviates, the sad associations of the place. When I 
 was last here, my tears flowed freely, as I laid hold of 
 one of the willows planted on the spot where the clothes 
 were found and a poor young brother's bereaved heart 
 refused to be comforted ; for in Joe I lost father, mother, 
 brother, friend the director of my studies, the former 
 of my tastes, the companion of my walks, the encourager 
 of all my higher and better desires. I was only thirteen 
 years old when I last saw him. Now I behold the same 
 spot dear Jane bringing with her the associations of 
 home, children, brother and sisters, and all the many 
 blessings of love, affection and companionship which 
 God in these has given me and I behold it with sor- 
 rowing indeed, but resigned and tranquil heart, and no 
 tear falls from my eye. The emptied soul is filled again ; 
 the yearning heart is satisfied. 
 
 To JAMES HOLE, ESQ. 
 
 Ilkley, Sept. 14th, 1853. 
 
 My dear Sir, When a State threatens to be bankrupt, 
 it must make reforms impartial and unsparing. I am a 
 member of a dozen or fifteen committees, and have many 
 other extra-professional engagements. In each of several 
 of these the consumption of time and thought may be 
 small ; the aggregate is more than I can give. In several 
 I receive the same kind intimations as your letter con- 
 tains, and have to write a second statement, as I now 
 do to you, that I have taken my resolution from neces- 
 sity, and necessity compels me to adhere to it. If this
 
 RETIREMENT. 137 
 
 is not done now, I may be, as you say, better and I 
 shall then be worse again. This has happened too often 
 already ; and if it is to happen again, ray congregation 
 and my family shall not have even the colour of a cause 
 in the supposition that I am sacrificing my health and 
 strength to general and unimperative duties. 
 
 Farewell. God give you health ! Good health and 
 good principles are the only things I care to pray for 
 for my children, or for any one for whom I have the 
 regard I have for you. 
 
 Yours truly, CH. WICKSTEED. 
 
 IV. 
 
 [Written during his first retirement and second Liverpool 
 ministry. See pp. 63 80.] 
 
 To MATILDA LUPTON. 
 Upper Eyarth, near Ruthin, Aug. 25th, 1854. 
 The day after mine ancestors among the Nonconfor- 
 mists were ejected from their homes do I date my letter 
 
 from the most charming and peaceful of abodes 
 
 Miss Livesey* and Charlotte are busy arranging the 
 books, John and I in taking up the potatoes, which are 
 mostly diseased. But even this funereal process has not 
 the ill effect upon me which an attempt to arrange my 
 books had last evening, striking the very nerve of me, 
 by association, I presume, of ideas. How shall I describe 
 
 * Afterwards Mrs. John Wellings, at this time engaged in 
 teaching the children, and till her death a beloved friend of the 
 family.
 
 138 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 to you the peace of soul which envelopes and irradiates 
 and gladdens us here ! The dear lads are ceaseless in 
 their love of their companion. No walk together is 
 enjoyed without papa, who wonders at it too, for he is 
 nothing but a cipher, and answers the many appeals 
 made to him for the most part by inappropriate mono- 
 syllables, usually, by precaution, of an affirmative and 
 acquiescent description. As we walked home last night 
 from investigation into the merits of some possible cow- 
 purchases, by the light of the early stars, the inquiry of 
 Philip as to how the sizes as well as distances of the 
 heavenly bodies were measured, produced but a confused 
 and unsatisfactory reply, I fear. Latin is my cheval 
 de battaille. We, i.e. Janet, Clara and Hartley, read 
 Virgil for an hour every morning now, I prelecting for 
 the latter half; and Hartley wishes he knew Latin as 
 well as I, because he would not look at his lesson before 
 he came up. You know I never found any bad weather 
 at Barkstone; still less is there any here. When we 
 hear from Leeds and elsewhere of wishes that the 
 weather would take up, we are in amazement. The 
 showers we have here are the mere batJis of nature, used, 
 as we do bathing for the body, for mere delectation and 
 refreshment only. 
 
 Alas ! however little actual service my conscience has 
 been to me, at least it has given me trouble. I have 
 been troubled with a conscience ; and now that I have 
 no duties but such as are easy and pleasant to discharge, 
 my conscience is at peace, and so am I. ... This is the 
 true paradise, for probably at least thpee months. Aprds,
 
 UPPER EYARTH. 139 
 
 probably, le deluge. However, coine one, come all, this 
 rock shall fly from its firm base as soon as I, with 
 ten tons of furniture and eight children, not to mention 
 my dear wife, . . . who, though busy now, will still, I 
 hope, live through to a season of enjoyment and repose. 
 Will you and Addy come before the apricots, the apples, 
 the pears, the plums, the artichokes, . . . are all gone ? 
 Ah ! for my first winter in the country. 
 
 This moment I have been called off by Hartley, in a 
 tremulous voice, to come to the kite, which had escaped 
 from its half-mile of string, and lodged itself in a tree. 
 Starting with rake in hand, like a medical man quietly 
 walking, and talking about the siege of Bornersund to the 
 agitated Mr. B., who has called him up in the middle 
 of the night in great anxiety because Mrs. B. has a most 
 violent headache, I proceeded along, telling Hartley of the 
 fate of human things when they got to the highest they 
 began to fall, when to the lowest they began to ascend 
 when we got within earshot of Philip, who had been 
 left to keep the wake of the kite, and who was uttering 
 the piercing shrieks of a man in the process of being 
 murdered, for the tail of the kite had broken loose. This 
 was exactly the favourable turn in the case, which, there- 
 fore, on the contrary, greatly relieved Hartley ; and by 
 means of the rake, papa and Hartley, the kite was extri- 
 cated, and followed by half-an-hour's winding of the 
 string.
 
 140 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 \ 
 
 To THE KEY. J. H. THOM [on the Continent]. 
 Upper Eyarth, near Ruthin, N. Wales, July 13th, 1855. 
 
 . . . And first of all, as of first importance, thank your 
 wife for her P.S. Tell her that I have had great expe- 
 rience in the glove line the last twelve months; that 
 first of all I wore out all my old party whites and 
 yellows in gardening ; that then I got a pair of gauntlets, 
 rose-budding gauntlets, for my wife, and wore out those ; 
 then I begged my sisters-in-law to bring all their old 
 kid gloves, and wore out those ; then I got some tanned 
 they seemed untanned leather everlastings from Liver- 
 pool, and wore out those ; and lastly I have fallen upon 
 Berlin gloves at eight shillings the dozen, which wear 
 out too, but answer best of all and all this that my 
 hands, after all the weeding they have undergone, may 
 be ready to shake with your dear wife's when she comes 
 to see us in my Sabine farm this winter, which my 
 wife and I trust she will do. ... The Liverpool meeting 
 is the finest in character and general tone I ever 
 remember to have taken place among us. Your young 
 men, H. A. Bright and Lamport, shone conspicuously. 
 There was also a most seasonable, sensible and pithy 
 short written speech of Mr. Eathbone's, of great value 
 and great truth. Channing was most successful; the 
 report of his speeches alters and fills up my impression 
 of him, which now more corresponds with what you 
 describe as yours. He was genial, joyous, natural, hope- 
 ful and earnest young, too, for a middle-aged man, and 
 sanguine and undimmed for a mature one. . . . When
 
 NONCONFORMIT Y. 141 
 
 he talks of the position we as Unitarians ought to take, 
 not as a sect but as the true church, while there is much 
 truth in what he says, I feel that he does not understand 
 or enter into (especially from his position on the back 
 of so strong a body as the Unitarians in Liverpool) the 
 immense historic and social hold which the Church of 
 England has on our nation, and would have if it taught 
 Islarnism or Heathenism. . . . 
 
 I should be sorry if went to church except occa- 
 sionally with his wife. Why should not she go with him 
 the other times ? The strongest will in these matters 
 rules, and why should not his be the strongest ? She is 
 coming among new associations, and it will not be much 
 at least to try some variation in her religious associa- 
 tions at the same time, if it were only for a few months ; 
 whilst he would have to forego not only convictions as 
 strong of their kind as hers, but the place of worship of 
 his father and mother, brother and sister, and of his own 
 childhood to turn his back, in fact, upon his old religious 
 associates, and alter, and as we think pervert, in this in- 
 stance, the authority, influence and consistency of his 
 name. ... It would be ... a pitiable thing. ... It is such 
 things that put us and keep us back, and I do not know 
 what would not justify conformity, or what would not 
 overthrow nonconformity, if such difficulties would. . . . 
 I cannot forget that we are all, with various degrees of 
 martyrdom and effort, holding up a standard worthy of 
 a hundred times more sacrifice from each of us. ... I 
 know how unreasonable it is to expect that one can 
 transfuse one's own earnest theological convictions into
 
 142 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 the heart of another, differently constituted and with 
 different experiences from oneself, yet the failure to do 
 this is not on that account the less to be deplored. A 
 resolute step now, if he could be induced to take it, 
 would save much uncertainty and discomfort in the 
 future. It is the turning moment in their own and 
 their family's (if they have one) religious profession 
 
 I have been reading, like an old-fashioned man, 
 Easselas to my wife composed in this valley, and 
 treating of the Happy Valley, it is impossible not to 
 suppose that this place suggested the subject 
 
 I did feel tempted to go to Liverpool . . . but the 
 irregularity and excitement would have made me ill. 
 The slightest deviation from my quiet and orderly life 
 leaves a mark upon me. 
 
 To HIS WIFE. 
 
 Upper Eyarth, near Ruthin, Oct. 8th, 1855. 
 My dearest Wife, I received with particular pleasure 
 your welcome and loving letter this morning. Little 
 Hamilton [four-and-a-half years old] was made very 
 happy by his share in your remembrances. Though he 
 had been asking for the reply ever since he sent his 
 letter, the arrival of the reply seemed to him as great 
 a matter of incredulous astonishment and delight as if he 
 had never expected it. Last night, when reading the 
 New Testament stories, Charley brought down, as a not 
 very obvious illustration of Christ in the temple, his 
 little bas-relief of Christ blessing the children, when 
 Hamilton pointed himself out among the children, and
 
 EXPERIMENTS IN AGRICULTURE. 143 
 
 seemed to regard it as a picture of a past occurrence in 
 his own life; and as some of those more anxious for 
 abstract truth than, alas ! I have ever been, were endea- 
 vouring to set him right, he asked with surprise, " Then 
 didn't Jesus Christ once bless me ? I thought he blessed 
 me when I was in heaven." So that Plato, Wordsworth 
 and Matthew Arnold, would have been delighted to have 
 received this confirmation, strong as Holy Writ, of the 
 pre-existence of man. 
 
 We have had, and hope you too have had, a glorious 
 October day. Certainly, October is a noble and manly 
 month. It stands exactly between youth and old age, 
 feminine delicacy and veteran strength. . . . Hay is sell- 
 ing (new and ordinary) at 6. 10s. a ton, and (old) 8. 
 Calling mine new and ordinary (which last it is not), 
 my field has yielded me a good 30, which is cent, per 
 cent, on a rather extravagant outlay of 15. Certainly 
 that is what I should have to pay at least for what it has 
 yielded me. I feel much flattered by your auguries of 
 my future fame. Laudari (you know) a laudato viro 
 that is to say, to be praised for good farming by a good 
 farmer, &c. 
 
 Henry Jones and Jack Williams commence clearing 
 out the " force" on Wednesday. If all goes right, I may 
 get my own nearly back the first year, and the second 
 year (if we have it) be what you like Lady Bardolph, 
 Countess, &c. 
 
 We still hope to see you back on Wednesday, and 
 will order dinner at two. It is the longest week I think 
 I ever spent in my life. But of course if the weather
 
 144 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 should be very unfavourable and little M. unequal to 
 the journey, you must not think of moving. I never 
 thought, however, till you mentioned it, of any uncer- 
 tainty attaching to the return, though I saw how it 
 applied to the departure. I enclose you whatever of 
 interest there is. The French have gained a cavalry 
 attack over the Eussians, who, it is said, are going to 
 defend the Crimea to the utmost. Give our dear love 
 to that little woman near you, and lay an embargo on it 
 as it passes for yourself. 
 
 Ever your amato ed amante, CH. "W. 
 
 To THE EBV. J. H. THOM. 
 
 Upper Eyarth, near Kuthin, Dec. 24th, 1855. 
 
 My dear Friend, You will be prepared by my last 
 letter for the announcement which I am now to make 
 to you, that I have taken, literally, the yoke upon me, 
 and have turned, for some years at least to come, farmer. 
 
 The farm I have taken is at Hafod, . . . situated between 
 Denbigh and St. Asaph in this vale. It consists, you 
 will be suprised to hear, of one hundred and eighty acres, 
 of not very good soil, being a stiff clay, which will require 
 draining, and is susceptible of considerable and interest- 
 ing improvements. There is a house upon it, which, 
 with some alterations and additions, will do for us, 
 though the rooms are small. It has until just now been 
 occupied by the owner, Sir John Salisbury, who has got 
 all the buildings, fences, &c., into excellent order, but 
 says he is too poor to improve the land itself. This place 
 I am to hold for three years, and for longer terms after-
 
 HAFOD- Y-COED. 145 
 
 wards if I wish, at the moderate rent of 200. Although 
 this kind of employment has been the longing of my life, 
 a passionate desire, yet while it appeared manifest that 
 God and duty and qualification seemed to have called 
 me to another mode of life, I never indulged, except 
 as a dream and " vain desire," in the vision of a country 
 life. But when necessity was laid upon me to give this 
 up, when health and happiness came with the accom- 
 plishment of the sigh of my heart " to touch the ground," 
 when not the faintest hope or belief was left in me 
 that I could return to my old calling, with my nervous, 
 anxious and unsatisfied temperament, without falling 
 back in three months or as many weeks into my old 
 weaknesses and illness, I have thankfully accepted this 
 opening for continuing for a further period (making in 
 all four years) a healthy occupation, which may perhaps 
 help me 'a little in the support of my large household, 
 or at any rate can scarcely prove worse than an interest- 
 ing but unremunerative outward employment. We sacri- 
 fice everything in beauty of situation, but do not expect 
 to leave off residing here until our term of two years is 
 up. I must be a good deal at Hafod, where I shall have 
 a bailiff. . . . 
 
 To THE SAME. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Aug. 14th, 1856. 
 
 . . . How Tayler does go on improving himself, growing 
 and acquiring and gathering every year ! . . . I think his 
 example will even make me take up again, some time or 
 other, the laid-down and despaired-of task of cultivating 
 
 L
 
 146 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 my intellect. If I make this clay soil productive, what 
 may I not hope for ? Even my bog at Eyarth promises 
 to become a "good property"; why, then, should I de- 
 spair of the unfertile " indoles" of my mental soil, which 
 never bore the slightest crop without heavy manuring 
 and much tillage ? . . . Last Sunday I preached at Chester. 
 ... I thought, if ever I was to try, there could not be a 
 better opportunity ; so, very much in opposition to the 
 wishes of my wife, I promised to go. This was the 
 pulpit in which I had preached my first sermon in 
 England, twenty-five years ago last May. It was the 
 pulpit of M. Henry, and in the congregation had wor- 
 shipped members of my family for nearly two hundred 
 years. . . . Though not over-tired with the service, I was 
 with the journey. . . . My wife broke the small bone of 
 her wrist on Sunday. . . . The fracture is simple, and I 
 hope is healing, but painfully and slowly, by splinters. 
 She gets up nevertheless every day, and tries to forget 
 her discomforts in reading Macaulay's third volume. . . . 
 
 To THE SAME. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Aug. 19th, 1856. 
 
 I did not in my last thank you for mentioning Dr. 
 Eeynolds's intention of bringing you over some day here. 
 I should like much to see his place and to compare 
 notes with him, though except on farming subjects I 
 am becoming a very shy man. It is with an effort I 
 leave my own land. We have had Sir John Salisbury 
 and his daughter spending three weeks at the Hall. . . . 
 He has lunched with us several times, and we have
 
 RETURNING STRENGTH. 147 
 
 walked and talked over the farm. But his modes of 
 cultivation belong to the order not so much of agri- 
 culture as of hedgiculture. I have fifteen acres of oats 
 cut, and my wheat nearly ready. But this is poor 
 harvest weather, though most of my oats are in sheaf 
 and proof against weather for ten days to come. . . . 
 Have you seen Dickens' Pictures of Italy lately ? There 
 happens to be a copy in the house, and I have been 
 looking again at the description of the posting, couriers, 
 &c. It is odd to seem to go to Italy to look at one's 
 shoe-strings. His eyes never seem to penetrate beyond 
 the surface, but nothing escapes him there. 
 
 To MATILDA LUPTON. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Jan. 1st, 1859. 
 
 A new year to you ... as fresh and sunshiny as this 
 day which commences it ! And let this wish be extended 
 to all the dear circle in whose midst you are so happy 
 now. So great seems this wish, that I feel as if it were 
 daring and presumptuous to fill it up with the usual 
 phrase, " and many of them." Many of them ! Exor- 
 bitant and insatiable desire ! Let us have one first, if 
 we may, and be thankful and satisfied with it. We 
 went forth to meet its approach yesterday evening with 
 our deferred festivity, which seemed, even when shorn 
 of much of its last year's grandeur, to be very keenly 
 enjoyed ; for all bright and happy things were there as 
 usual the green branches of the fir-tree, the shining 
 tapers, the pendant oranges and apples, and the gay 
 almanacks (all painted), and pictures. Five mothers, with 
 
 L2
 
 148 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 the limited allowance of two children each (which each 
 had to bring), and all our own household, filled the inside 
 of the room, and the men circled as usual outside. The 
 blowing out was "very jolly," and when we came to the 
 last at the top, out of reach of every one, I proposed 
 that all should join in a long puff, and a strong puff, 
 and a puff altogether, our united efforts failing in every- 
 thing but the mirth they caused, and at length Anne 
 (the servant) bringing down thunders of applause by 
 jumping in mid-air and blowing it out while at the 
 highest point of her aerial career. Mr. Jones, the curate, 
 came in when all was over, but, as he is fresh caught, 
 Jane kindly lighted it up for him again, which gratified 
 him much, and he petitioned to be considered under 
 thirteen next year. At the close of the proceedings in 
 the drawing-room, as we were wishing them good-bye, 
 I said, " We were glad to see new faces, but more glad 
 still to see old ones," when Edward Davies's wife (one 
 of the new ones) said very prettily, "And the new faces, 
 Mr. and Mrs. Wicksteed, hope to be old faces next year; 
 and all, old and new, wish many happy new years to 
 Mr. and Mrs. Wicksteed." There's a pretty extempore 
 speech for you! What say you now to the rights of 
 woman ? Yesterday I had a visit from Mr. Salisbury,* 
 who, with his lady, has left to-day. . . . He is a friend 
 to agricultural improvement, and could not believe that 
 what he saw in the stack-yard all came off Hafod. He 
 said, " Well, I never saw such a stack-yard here before," 
 and it is indeed about doubled. He would cut clown 
 * Son of Sir John, who had died shortly before.
 
 NEW-YEAR'S EVE. "MARRIAGE." 149 
 
 all the trees in Plas Newydd, except three or four ; and 
 there seems to be a prospect, indeed, of " a feller coming 
 up against" all the trees of our forests. . . . 
 
 To THE KEY. J. J. TAYLER [on the death of his wife]. 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Feb. 23rd, 1862. 
 
 . . . And I suppose, indeed, that that life which had 
 seemed for so many years to be a peaceful and happy 
 gift from God, had come to be in its once grateful pos- 
 sessor a weight and trial, and to those who were around 
 her and loved her a source of anxiety and care. Under 
 such circumstances, I know you would yourself have 
 wished you should be the one to continue to bear the 
 burden that God had been laying on you both, and 
 endure the anguish of separation. When the dreadful 
 hour draws nigh, when two who had lived as one must 
 be separated and disjoined from one another, the only 
 comfort is, that the one who is released from the pains 
 and sorrows of our mortal state, and risen into that 
 second state which is far better, is the one we loved 
 better than ourselves. Well may marriage indeed be 
 called a holy estate, for it is the only relation in which 
 the union of two souls is perfect. Brothers and sisters, 
 parents and children, friend and friend, may diverge into 
 two separate roads, and each have his own cares, tastes, 
 pursuits, happiness, interest, apart and separate. But in 
 a happy marriage the two lives, each retaining all its 
 own elements of thought and happiness and good, fuse 
 into one, higher, richer, and more blessed than any 
 natural relation God has created. The communion and
 
 150 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 sympathy between two beings thus bound together 
 unites the special and peculiar blessings both of self- 
 communion and of social communion. In no other 
 relation of life do you speak so much to another as you 
 would to yourself, or feel, on the other hand, the same 
 security of sympathy. It is next, in the comfort, safety 
 and undisguisedness of its communion, to communion 
 with God ; and the confidence and certainty of love and 
 consideration and forgiveness, are only second to the 
 assurance we feel we have of these in prayer to God. 
 
 To HIS SON CHARLES. 
 
 [Hafod, 1863 ?]. 
 
 It is very kind indeed . . . and I am sure it will not 
 be lost upon you. We can seldom return kindness in 
 kind, or to the same person from whom we have received 
 it. And by this arrangement and fact God intends to 
 teach us, first of all to return it in some other way, by 
 grateful acknowledgment and corresponding behaviour ; 
 and second, to remember, when our turn comes, to exer- 
 cise a similar power, and to be kind to others. Thus 
 God designs that beneficence and love shall not be back- 
 wards and forwards, from this person to that, and that 
 again to this, which would be merely an enlarged form 
 of selfishness, but shall flow from one creature to another 
 in constant and ever-new succession, till, like his own 
 fatherly bounty, it overflows all the face of human life. 
 
 To THE SAME. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Jan. 7th, 1365. 
 Your letter interested me very much. I remember
 
 "HOME, SWEET HOME." 151 
 
 feeling just as you do when I used to come back to my 
 lodgings after a pleasant visit away from them, especially 
 when that visit had been home. But then I came back 
 to utter solitude, and my duties were mainly indoors, 
 so that I had not the advantage always of continued 
 means of distraction of my thoughts. But, however, 
 like you, after a day or two I usually got all right again. 
 I often feel it now, going away, after my quarter of a 
 century of family life, to my lodgings in Liverpool, with 
 less vigour of body and elasticity of mind, and more 
 topics for anxious meditation. But life is made up of 
 day and night, of shade and sunshine. . . . 
 
 It pleased me much to hear that you are beginning 
 to be fond of poetry. . . . After Annie is gone to bed I 
 read Byron to your mother, in order that we may review 
 together in sober maturity the enthusiastic judgment 
 we formed of that poet when we were far nearer your 
 age than our own present one. . . . 
 
 May 17th. 
 
 I feel quite with you what a happiness and benefit home 
 feelings are, and what a sorrow and a loss the absence 
 of such must be to every one. To carry these with us 
 wherever we go in the world, is like the extension of a 
 purifying atmosphere, which sustains us in life and 
 health even at a distance from the centre which it 
 immediately surrounds and to which it belongs. 
 
 To THE EEV. J. H. THOM [on the Continent]. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, June 27th, 1865. 
 ... I knew how many trying calls you had had on
 
 152 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 your pen and on your sympathies from Liverpool, and 
 felt very sorry that your heart-strings should not have 
 some still and perfect rest while away. But it seems 
 as if God, by the very advances of civilization and the 
 very development of the means of communication, were 
 binding us more nearly to life and to each other, and 
 that every fresh facility by which men can be hurried 
 away to great distances was met by some other which, 
 in thought at least, made those distances nothing, and 
 sometimes in a few hours drew them back thousands of 
 miles to what they had left behind. The " ! for a lodge 
 in some vast wilderness, where rumour of oppression 
 and deceit (or sorrow and distress) should never reach 
 us !" seems to be becoming an impossible wish, except 
 to those who undertake to deliver a lot of sheep or 
 cattle up country in Australia, and follow a daily task 
 on foot, for four or five months together, themselves 
 continually getting a-head of all possible sequence, so 
 that the "post equitem sedet atra cura" even in this 
 sense is defied. In fact, all leads to your own motto, 
 " in cselo quies.". . . 
 
 To THE KEY. JAMES MAUTINEAU. 
 
 [On the projects which resulted in the establishment of the 
 " Free Christian Union," and on the proposed resolution of 
 the Eev. Samuel Bache to define the dogmatic basis of the 
 Unitarian Association.] 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Oct. 4th, 1865. 
 
 To enumerate all the positions in your letter with 
 which I agree, would be to transcribe almost the whole
 
 A UNIVERSAL CHURCH. 153 
 
 of it ... I had better at once, therefore, state what my 
 difficulties are.* 
 
 1. "The Church," you say, "is the society of those 
 who seek harmony with God." I make no objection to 
 this definition ; but I presume you mean it to include 
 not only the Christian Calvinistic, Catholic, Unitarian 
 but the Mahometan and the Hindoo. " All who agree 
 in the terms of that harmony, so as to seek it in the same 
 way, belong to the same church." I make no objection 
 to this ; but I suppose you admit that the assertion con- 
 tains within itself the principle on which varied churches 
 arise, on which they are founded, and by which they 
 become necessary. The terms differ to the Parsee and 
 the Christian; to the Catholic, the Calvinist and the 
 Unitarian among Christians. Hence their different 
 churches. 
 
 You grant that certain terms must be agreed upon by 
 or in each church. I understand you to propose such, 
 as essentially "Christian," and to reject certain others 
 as the separable accidents of Christian profession. Now 
 no person regarding "the separable accidents" as essen- 
 tial, can be satisfied with the terms proposed by you. 
 I presume, therefore, that you give up all idea of com- 
 prehending existing churches except one on the con- 
 templated basis. 
 
 2. Your appeal, then, must be to individuals outside 
 
 * It is fair to state that Mr. "Wicksteed's difficulties, urged in this 
 and the following letter, were regarded by his correspondents as 
 liased, in part, upon a misconception and therefore an uninten- 
 tional misrepresentation of their real purpose.
 
 154 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 these churches, or only ostensibly belonging to them, 
 much more in harmony in reality with the broader and 
 sounder terms you propose. This is an intelligible and 
 legitimate position. But I am not sure that it mate- 
 rially differs from that already held by us. If a compre- 
 hensive church is to be founded, the persons intended 
 to be comprehended in it must be consulted. For this 
 reason, therefore, I conclude that your consideration of 
 the possible basis for a broad church is merely prelimi- 
 nary, that you wish to ascertain to what position our 
 own body, or the most intelligent and influential part 
 of it, would assent, and, that settled, would seek to hold 
 conference with free-minded men of other churches and 
 of no church, with a view to some common ground on 
 which all could stand, a ground which might have to be 
 materially though not essentially modified in obedience 
 to the wishes of the other elements of the combination. 
 You can hardly suppose that a little body like ours, 
 feared and suspected too as it is, should effectively offer 
 terms to the rest of the Christian world without some 
 previous consultation with them. But if the step is 
 only preliminary, and subject to the voice and opinion 
 of now unknown parties, it should appear on the face of 
 the plan. 
 
 3. If, however, you do not contemplate the incorpora- 
 tion of existing churches, or any important appeal to or 
 extensive consultation with individuals outside our body, 
 then it becomes simply a denominational movement 
 towards a broader denominational basis. 
 
 This I grant to be an important object. But I am not
 
 DEFINITION AND COMPREHENSION. 155 
 
 sure whether the better way of producing this is not by 
 the gradual action of your own and other kindred minds 
 on our body by the usual agencies, preserving our unity. 
 A part of this action would of course be the resistance 
 of such an attempt at defining our opinions as Mr. Bache 
 proposes, and the expansion of the objects and the sym- 
 pathies of our Association. To attempt exact definition 
 (at a peculiarly inauspicious moment, too, when almost 
 all theological thought is in a more or less fluid state) is 
 no doubt a great mistake of Mr. Bache's. But to make 
 this attempt a cause for founding a new church, to be 
 based after all only on what you yourself declare to be 
 the principles on which our existing church is founded, 
 and before its members have repudiated those principles, 
 seems to me a step of very doubtful policy. The Asso- 
 ciation will not pass the resolution. Let those who are 
 dissatisfied with their not doing so secede, or attempt a 
 new organization. Let us keep the ground we have, and, 
 if we can, enlarge it. ... On the whole, the proposal of 
 a broad church, unless it be by mutual conference and 
 consent, and that you and Eowland Williams and Jowett 
 and Colenso, with a few Independent and Baptist min- 
 isters of standing, with laymen of all sorts, will unite, 
 and devote the remainder of your lives to the establish- 
 ment of it, must of necessity be a failure, and resolve 
 itself into a little troublesome split, with a still more 
 troublesome organization, especially troublesome to and 
 unsuitable for the peculiar character of those engaged in 
 it. I do not think, as I said before, that it will " march." 
 Ever, dear friend, yours affectionately, 
 
 CHARLES WICKSTEED.
 
 156 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 To THE REV. J. J. TAYLER [on the same subject], 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Dec. 21st, 1865. 
 
 ... As regards the extremely unfortunate nature of 
 our honest friend Bache's proposed resolution, I am of 
 course in cordial agreement with you. Such a move- 
 ment would at any time be exceedingly distasteful and 
 unsuitable to a body characterized as ours is. But at 
 present, when opinion is in a fluid state, when evidence 
 is almost every year altering in amount and character, 
 when the points at issue are singularly subtle, and the 
 actual differences existing among us difficult even of 
 accurate statement or mutual communication and under- 
 standing, when, in fact, we are all as firmly united as 
 possible on all great and essential principles, but trem- 
 blingly susceptible, like a barometer, on several ques- 
 tions of strictly theological and critical character, it is 
 wonderful that an open-minded man, in such a morbidly 
 excited, varying and susceptible state of denominational 
 opinion, should think it his duty to rush in and insist 
 on forcing his jury to a verdict, and anticipating, as it 
 were, by external pressure the natural action of inquiry 
 and the continued production and issue of evidence. 
 
 2. But, in the second place, if this is done, in fact, it 
 must be met as yourself and others so well met the 
 threat of it, and the proposal will be defeated. 
 
 3. If it were not defeated, then a question would 
 immediately arise as to what steps must be taken to 
 liberate dissentients from an apparent acquiescence in 
 such a state of things.
 
 SECTARIANISM. 157 
 
 4. And then, but not till then, would arise, as I con- 
 ceive, the necessities that you and Mr. Martineau are 
 anxious to provide for. 
 
 5. Practically to me the whole question of subsequent 
 action drops on the defeat of Bache's motion. 
 
 No doubt, however, it is impossible to let the mind 
 rest here, and the interesting and important questions 
 considered by Mr. Martineau and yourself naturally arise 
 for consideration, if not for action. 
 
 I have such a horror of denominational names, that I 
 often realize the circumstances to my mind in which 
 the designation Christian itself would become sectarian 
 and exclusive; and when I would sink it, as an indi- 
 viduality (an individuality, indeed, of which I was proud 
 and for which I was grateful), in the larger Church of 
 the worshippers of God, and while retaining my special 
 personal Christian convictions with the greatest earnest- 
 ness and thankfulness, would nevertheless join most 
 happily in a worship, by music and symbol (if language 
 were found too logical and distracting for the subject), 
 with all believers in God, 
 
 But looking at life as it is, I see that in a country 
 where thought is active, and the interest in religious 
 questions extended far beyond the power and oppor- 
 tunity of solving or even properly discussing them, the 
 exacting curiosity and love of definition and of a sup- 
 posed knowledge is so great, that men must say what 
 they think and why they separate from others, and say 
 it sharply and quickly by a descriptive name. They
 
 158 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 have but one alternative to do this and give themselves 
 a name, or not to do this and receive a nickname. 
 
 Now, all things considered, if we must define our 
 position by a word, that of Unitarian seems to me among 
 the very most respectable and elevated. Surely it is 
 better than the heathenish term Trinitarian, the Erastian 
 term of the Established Church, the formalist term Bap- 
 tist, the modal term Methodist, or (as far as theology is 
 concerned) the meaningless terms Independent and Con- 
 gregationalist. Had we to choose, perhaps the American 
 " Christian," or the attempted English " Free- Christian," 
 might have been better. But there is a great assumption 
 in both. And we see, in fact, that those adopting them 
 are practically regarded as sectaries as much as if they 
 had taken or retained any other name. No doubt Pres- 
 byterian is a real name, because it is a historic and family 
 name, but it has ceased to be descriptive in any other 
 sense. 
 
 But suppose we thought of throwing off the name. 
 There would be a following, no doubt. But there is no 
 question that the " Unitarians" would have a following 
 too I think, on the whole, the more numerous and the 
 more respectable, and the more reliably earnest and 
 courageous. At any rate, we should have two little 
 sects instead of one, and the division would be a source 
 of weakness. Our broad church would be a narrow 
 sect. . . . 
 
 Practically, such an attempt would be a miserable 
 and a most fatiguing failure. . . .
 
 CHURCH AND HOME. 159 
 
 To HIS SON CHARLES. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Jan. llth, 1866. 
 
 The cattle plague does not seem to make much pro- 
 gress. There has been another farm attacked, Pen Ucha 
 Eoe, next to Glyn Llyn, and also close to Maes Elwy 
 [one of his own farms]. But they both lie low, and 
 I have had a theory for some weeks that low places, 
 and those along the course of rivers, are more liable to 
 the disease than higher localities, and I had my stock 
 removed from the Elwy meadows some little time since. 
 . . . The spread in the vale is so very slow, scarcely per- 
 ceptible, that I am very sanguine that we may escape. 
 But we are in the hands of God. 
 
 To MRS. MADGE. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Sept. 5th, 1866. 
 My dear Mrs. Madge, Your kind congratulations on 
 
 Clara's engagement were most welcome to us I have 
 
 been spending five days in our dear Leeds. It was really 
 an ovation. A crowded church of earnest old friends, 
 and cordial greetings and hospitalities on all sides. Mill 
 Hill is going on well, and all its members apparently 
 prosperous and happy. . . . 
 
 A BIRTHDAY LETTER. 
 
 1866. 
 
 Dearest of Boys, Long life, great prosperity, immortal 
 happiness, and a rest which surpasseth all the activities, 
 
 be with thee ! 
 
 Your father, CH. W.
 
 160 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 To HIS DAUHGTER ANNE. 
 [Assisting and studying in a school in London.] 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Jau. 30th, 1867. 
 
 My dear Nanny, Enclosed is the first half of a 
 " flimsy." Acknowledge it, and you shall have t'other. 
 
 Show this to Miss as a sample of the elegant habits 
 
 of composition prevailing at our "scholastic establish- 
 ment" at Hafod. Twice have I asked, " Does not Annie 
 want some money ?" Twice have I asked, " Shall not I 
 get Annie a Post-office order to-day ?" An equal num- 
 ber of times has the reply been, "No!" But to-day I 
 saw for myself, "P. 0.0. required," and heard the re- 
 mainder of your pathetic representation. I made myself 
 immediately in consequence the happy possessor of a 
 5 Bank-of-England note, the half of which you now 
 possess. On [my] mentioning my achievements, your 
 Aunt M. became nervous, insisted on this being sent 
 from her. I resenting, and saying, " But it is due to her 
 from me;" she retaliating, and saying, "Bills at home 
 no use sending money backwards and forwards." I 
 retreating (backwards), and saying, " It shall be as you 
 like." So thank Aunt M. . . . 
 
 Whenever you want cash away from home, write to 
 me at once. If I have a sovereign above the sod (would 
 that I had all that are below it within reach !) it shall go 
 to you. You are very economical, and so be comfortable, 
 and if 1 extra between "you and I" will smooth your 
 course, follow it, and confide in your affectionate father, 
 
 CH. WICKSTEED.
 
 THE BURDEN OF THE LORD. 161 
 
 To THE REV. J. H. THOM. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, April 28th, 1867. 
 
 ... In one particular I admire more than I (candidly 
 speaking) sympathize with your feelings, those of evident 
 sorrow with which you lay down (for a time only, I 
 trust) your office. I wish I could feel so. It seems to 
 argue a deeper love for the work itself, and a deeper 
 conviction of the importance of one's share in it, and 
 therefore a more intimate sense of communion with 
 God, and having a part in his work, than I fear from 
 the contrast I have, or ever had, or ever shall have. On 
 the contrary, rarely, I think, has a pang (I feel inclined 
 to say, so intense was it) of greater pleasure struck 
 through my heart than when, after writing and almost 
 drenching in tears my farewell letter to my congregation 
 in Leeds, I walked up that hill at Ilkley, and felt my- 
 self, for the first time in my life, a free man, not (in a 
 sense) even the servant of Christ, but simply a child of 
 God. No one was ever more reconciled to silence and 
 obscurity, and no one more reluctant to leave them, 
 than I have been. The weight and responsibility of such 
 an office have always to me crushed out the joy of it. 
 I have only felt that the work must be done by some 
 one, and I have even clutched at the belief or hope, as 
 it has arisen, that some one else would do it, and do it 
 better. In this way, even in my liberty, I soon grew to 
 be not quite happy, until Hincks was appointed my 
 successor, and in the happiness of the conviction that 
 he would do my work, I first felt steady comfort, and 
 began to grow better in health. 
 
 M
 
 162 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 To HIS SON CHARLES [engaged in steam-ploughing in Norfolk]. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, March 24th, 1868. 
 The weather has been sadly against you, as indeed it 
 has been against us slower folk. Your greatest triumph 
 is to come in the harrowing season. I do not know 
 whether you have yourself seen any seed-harrowing by 
 steam. But it is more gratifying and more convincing 
 and converting than any other operation. It filled me 
 with delight when I saw a sown field, instead of being 
 poached and trampled on by horses, exquisitely raked 
 by the steam harrow. You felt how comfortable and 
 grateful the seed itself must be. 
 
 To HIS SON 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Sept. 29th, 1868. 
 
 I do not like the idea of your going out and working 
 on Sundays. There is never any gain to any human 
 being in giving up the God-appointed day of rest. They 
 who think to gain, lose by it lose their health, their 
 brain or their principles. I think I have known men 
 who have lost all of these by it ; certainly one, if not 
 more, is almost sure to be lost. Let me beg of you to 
 give this up. There is no "utilizing" in the business ; 
 it is a pure loss. . . . 
 
 It is a hard and painful struggle to me to give up 
 Maes Elwy, and the fond, vain hopes that have gathered 
 round it. But all my friends assure me, and I " partly 
 believe it," that the greatest of God's blessings to man 
 is the gift of good, grateful and affectionate sons ; and as
 
 CLOUD AND SUNSHINE. 163 
 
 he has blessed me so greatly in this respect, I must 
 bow to the great trials he has sent me in other direc- 
 tions. 
 
 Your loving father, CH. WICKSTEED. 
 
 To HIS NEPHEW, EDWARD ARTHUR LUPTON. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, June 14th, 1869. 
 
 My dear Edward Arthur, Of all the vices, defects, 
 faults and crimes (as we used always to begin our themes 
 each week at Shrewsbury school, whatever might be the 
 sin patronized by the master's selection for our contem- 
 plation and avoidance that particular Monday), that 
 which most degrades, debases, corrupts and vilifies 
 human nature, and injures and ruins society to the 
 greatest degree, is the base sin of ingratitude. Of this 
 sin, my dear nephew, you must have been not unnatu- 
 rally, and yet unjustly, accusing your innocent uncle for 
 some days past ; but, believe me, I should have written 
 to you sooner to acknowledge your prompt attention to 
 my wants and wishes, but that I could not at the time 
 reimburse you for the charges at which you had been 
 on my account, having only stamps enough to provide 
 me with the bare necessaries of life. 
 
 I now have the pleasure of enclosing four stamps, 
 with many thanks. . . . 
 
 We had a remarkable week of hospitality. On Wed- 
 nesday, our former clergyman, now rector of Ilangau, 
 near Corwen, and his lady and little boy, invited them- 
 selves to spend the day with us. The Eev. A S , 
 
 a pet clergyman of Miss Burdett Coutts, near Southamp- 
 
 M 2
 
 164 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 ton, with his little boy and girl, joined us at tea, and, as 
 odd fortune would have it, at the same time turned up 
 Trevor Owen, to whom Sir Watkin Williams Wynne 
 has just given a small living and a large house near 
 Oswestry, accompanied by his sister. Thus we had three 
 clergymen and their families . . . with us on the same 
 day. Is it not an affecting mark of the uniting effect of 
 Christian bread and butter? On Thursday came our 
 friends from Liverpool, thirty strong, to pic-nic, and, 
 with our own household and servants, we dined fifty. 
 On Friday came a smaller . . . party from Liverpool ; 
 and on Saturday evening our curate, Mr. Jones, came to 
 supper. I hope these things will improve me ; indeed, I 
 feel already better. 
 
 To HIS SON PHILIP HENRY. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Dec. 23rd, 1869. 
 
 . . . On Monday week, Tudor Owen made a little drum 
 party for me, and I took a bed at his house. Among 
 other gentlemen he had invited to meet me was the 
 Eev. Dr. Bullerton, late Head Master of Uppingham, 
 and once for a short time, while I was there, head boy 
 at Shrewsbury. On Sunday, Mr. Whishaw (lately a minor 
 canon of Gloucester Cathedral, and now the clergyman 
 at the Church for the Blind in Liverpool) was invited to 
 meet me at dinner in Liverpool ; and on Monday morn- 
 ing came out in the Church paper, the "Daily Courier" 
 of Liverpool, a report of a sermon I had given on Sunday 
 morning on Voysey, which contained this remark : " In 
 fact, the clergy of the Church of England have no theo-
 
 CLERICAL EDUCATION. 165 
 
 logical education. The little bit of cram they call 
 'reading for holy orders' would be regarded as a very 
 moderate apparatus of learning for a student among us 
 in the first year of his theological course. Hence, when 
 they come to study for themselves, they make their 
 discoveries with all the innocence and amazement of 
 neophytes." Fancy my " convives "... reading this 
 report. Tudor met me, shook his fist at me good- 
 naturedly, said he'd a crow to pluck with me, but con- 
 cluded, " I'm afraid there's much truth in it" 
 
 To THE REV. RICHARD A, ARMSTRONG. 
 
 Hafod, St. Asaph, Jan. 8th, 1871. 
 
 ... To take hold of too large a subject at once is the 
 error of our youth, but the effect is often more sprightly 
 than the greater detail and fulness of later years. Being 
 once asked to give a lecture on the Atonement, I gave 
 six, and so had some comfort in the treatment of so wide 
 a subject. I often find what people need is information, 
 or the means of forming an opinion, and the grounds on 
 which they do so. What they like is the result put in 
 a sparkling way, without the labour of getting at it, and 
 yet with the satisfaction of supposing that they have 
 formed and reached it. On this distinction rests the dif- 
 ference between an educated congregation, knowing the 
 reason for the faith that is in them, and a congregation 
 merely got together by the attractions of a preacher. 
 No great number of people like fatigue of any kind, 
 especially mental fatigue, and on a Sunday; and so they 
 go in the greatest numbers where they can be, as they
 
 166 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 think, taught and improved and instructed with the least 
 effort of their own. A laborious series of lectures always 
 breaks down in the number of attendants before it is 
 half finished. And no doubt, as religious worship and 
 instruction is a social matter, and there are two parties 
 to it, the minister and the congregation, it must be the 
 aim of the first to get upon that ground which can be 
 made common to the other as well. Now you are choos- 
 ing the course which is most suitable to yourself and to 
 your love of study, thought and information, and which 
 will (as you say you hope) eventually gather and keep 
 around you a thoughtful, well-grounded set of believers. 
 Spurgeon has a large congregation, but a less influential 
 one, for its numbers, does not exist except among the 
 Wesleyan Methodists. I am more and more convinced 
 that our strength lies in quality more than in quantity, 
 and the uneasy shriek after increased numbers only leads 
 to the loss of the few without the gain of the many. 
 
 To HIS WIFE. 
 
 Nottingham, Oct. 12 [1871]. 
 
 We are really hard worked [at the Church Congress], 
 the work occupying ten good hours a day. 
 
 Yesterday we had a most exciting debate on Church 
 and State, the notes varying from the High-church key 
 of absolute independence of all interference from Crown, 
 Government or people, to a decided preference for lay 
 influence, lay administration and lay courts of appeal, 
 leaving to the clergy simply their religious duties. Also 
 a very exciting debate on parochial councils, in the
 
 CHURCH CONGRESS. 167 
 
 course of which a speaker described an experimental 
 effort on a small tentative scale in his own family, the 
 domestic council consisting of the clergyman himself, 
 his wife, two daughters, the butler, the cook and the 
 housekeeper. Though they started well, the result was 
 
 a failure ! 
 
 To THE SAME. 
 
 Leeds [1872]. 
 
 To-day we have had a most exciting sitting [of the 
 Church Congress], nay fight, which I am sorry to say 
 Mrs. Swaine, who went down with me, much enjoyed. . . . 
 In fact, the Pdtualists are getting each year stronger in 
 this Evangelical meeting, and felt and showed their 
 strength to-day. The burden of the debate was : In 
 which direction is the Church's comprehension to be 
 directed ; towards the " other Churches" of Europe, east 
 and west, or towards the Protestant communities ? I 
 never saw greater excitement ; and I felt how vain it 
 would be in me, from mere books and works, to attempt 
 to be an interpreter of Church feeling, or the possibilities 
 of Church reform, without being from day to day and 
 year to year amongst them. 
 
 To THE SAME. 
 
 London, Nov. 6th, 1872. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Voysey received me with unbounded 
 kindness, and seemed determined to crowd all conceiv- 
 able possibilities of hospitality into the short space I 
 had alone to stay with them. All the children (but 
 Mary, the eldest girl, who was from home) dined with 
 iis ; and after this we went to the dear beautiful Gallery
 
 168 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 [Dulwich], and though twilight was beginning to steal 
 on it, I saw enough to freshen up in my memory those 
 images of beauty that we saw together thirty years 
 
 ago 
 
 Mrs. Shaen will take me to call on Mrs. Warren. . . . 
 They had planned for me to go to the Bethnal Green 
 Exhibition, which I should much have enjoyed, but that 
 I may be able to see again, and perhaps this may not 
 be so certain with my old friends ; and so, as usual, the 
 eternal delights and solaces of old friendships weigh 
 down the temptations of sight and wonder seeing. 
 
 V. 
 
 [Written during the Ministry at Large and final retirement. 
 See pp. 8094.] 
 
 To HIS DAUGHTER CLARA [on the death of her eldest child]. 
 
 London, April 12, 1874. 
 
 My dearest Child, Yesterday, as I was leaving Hafod, 
 your dear mother's letter came to hand, to tell us of the 
 passing on of that sweet little angel spirit to her fitting 
 home above, and of the tender shade of sorrow which 
 was resting on the home she had left below. ... I used 
 to look on her as she lay in her little cot, sometimes 
 (was it not ?) in the drawing-room at Hafod, and as she 
 lay, fair and delicate and frail, I felt assured that she 
 was not long for a rough world. As years passed, I 
 hoped I had been deceived, and that all the thoughtful 
 and tender watchfulness your mother-heart had bestowed 
 upon her had not been lost. But now the pensive pre-
 
 THE LILY OF A DAY. 169 
 
 vision is realized I am thankful for us all that it was 
 so long deferred. We have all added by that little life 
 to the treasure of our knowledge of the world of hearts 
 and souls. She stood by herself, and had a being of her 
 own, no copy but an original. I am so glad we have so 
 many memorials of her thoughts in your letters. Her 
 beautiful little frame, her delicate skin, the refined tinge 
 of her colour, and the special, interesting and subtile 
 light of her eye, always seeming as if it were looking 
 from the depth of a home within, out into a world of 
 which she did not feel that it was quite the same as her 
 own ... all these indicated, my dear child, that your 
 little treasure was only lent you, was only paying her 
 mother a visit upon earth, and that she would have at 
 last to go away to the higher air, in which she could 
 alone breathe freely and with entire happiness. 
 
 How thankful I am that you had the comfort of your 
 own mother's presence with you in these trying days 
 Especially as ... she could add her own parallel expe- 
 rience of the shade you were and are passing through. . . . 
 Ah ! I remember I was preaching the very evening my 
 child was dying, and I went home from my service to 
 count the ever one by one diminishing number of her 
 last little sighs, till as the succession of that series 
 dropped from nine to eight, and from eight to seven, 
 when it came to two, I knew there was but one sigh 
 more and all would be over, and so it was. 
 
 Your ever loving father, CHAS. WICKSTEED.
 
 170 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 To HIS WIFE. 
 
 Newchureh, Rossendale, May 4th, 1874. 
 There was some rain yesterday afternoon, and this 
 morning is cold and wintry, something that looks like 
 hail coming down, under dark and chilly skies. But 
 " souls are ripened in these northern skies." At least I 
 was again impressed yesterday with the immense energy 
 of life around me. . . . The appearance of this people is 
 something quite impressive. A great display of brain 
 in the head, and still, quiet power in the countenance 
 of the men ; very cleanly and elegant dressiness in the 
 wives and children. Music generally joined in. All 
 alive. On these occasions, the wives, who apparently 
 do all the work of their households, manage to get things 
 " sided," and come forth, themselves and children dressed 
 as if they had nothing else to do. The whole thing gives 
 one the impression not only of intelligence, but worth, 
 culture and conscientious industry. Certainly Uni- 
 tarianism is a great power here, securing not only intel- 
 ligence and thoughtfulness, but morality and industry, 
 and independence of mind and conduct. 
 
 To THE SAME. 
 
 York, Jan. 16th, 1875. 
 
 I washed my hands and brushed my hair that I might 
 appear lovely in the eyes of Mrs. Kenrick, and walked 
 the short distance to Monkgate, where I was shown 
 into the dining-room, the dear old gentleman (eighty- 
 seven the 4th of next month) coming down after his nap
 
 JOHN KENRICK. 171 
 
 for his single cup of tea. I had timed my visit for this 
 happy moment, knowing even younger men who rejoice 
 more in the society of their friends after than in the 
 middle of their nap. His hair is quite white, and his 
 skull surmounted by a velvet cap. He has become very 
 deaf, had been out (the first time for six weeks) a little 
 walk in the morning, and, though glad to see me and 
 very affectionate, was, I thought, tired. I left him in 
 half-an-hour, promising to call again this morning. Mrs. 
 Kenrick was wonderfully well and young, being not yet 
 even eighty. Mr. Kenrick had been sending the leading 
 events of his life to Mr. Hunter at Dr. Williams's Library, 
 a thing I had thought it impossible to do ; so he told 
 me exactly what he had sent, explaining away my 
 objection by saying, " Simple facts, you know; of course, 
 nothing encomiastic. My works, but not articles or 
 translations, such as grammars." "Not Matthise?" said 
 I. " No ; that was only a translation." And then he 
 gave me the correct version of that interesting passage 
 in his life. " The Bishop's brother, the Eev. Mr. Bloom- 
 field, was bringing out a second edition of the Grammar, 
 with some additions. Eichard Taylor was the printer. 
 Calling at the office, I saw some of the proofs as they 
 went through the press. There were several mistakes 
 and mistranslations. These I pointed out to Taylor." 
 The Bishop, coming for the same purpose of revision, 
 and hearing of it, requested Mr. Kenrick to draw up a 
 list of these. He did so, and they were adopted in the 
 new edition, and Mr. Kenrick's help acknowledged in 
 the Preface. He afterwards said to Mr. Taylor he hoped
 
 172 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 Mr. Kenrick would not be hurt that he had not spoken 
 of him as the Eev. John Kenrick, for although he (inno- 
 cent man !) would not have objected himself, yet others,, 
 he feared, might have done so. Some years afterwards 
 a third edition was required. It was then in Murray's 
 hands, who applied to Mr. Kenrick to carry it out. He 
 made many additions and alterations from the subse- 
 quent German editions, and it came out under his 
 editorship, two handsome octavo volumes. This is there- 
 fore the authentic version of a history I have often 
 heard, though in less detail. 
 
 To THE SAME. 
 
 Portsmouth, Jan. 30th, 1875. 
 
 I had a pleasant, though hurried, walk through Oxford 
 this morning, after writing to you. I saw again some 
 of the same places which you and I went together to see 
 some thirty (?) years ago. The Bodleian, the Eadcliffe, 
 the Martyrs' Memorial, and many of the colleges. The 
 new features seen by me this morning were the Keble 
 Memorial College and Chapel (handsome brick buildings), 
 the Taylorian and Clarendon Museums, &c. The scien- 
 tific element has come to the surface since we were 
 there. On the table of the Eadcliffe Library, too, I 
 saw, besides the usual secular literary papers (such as 
 "Academy," "Saturday Keview," &c.) and the Church 
 Eeviews, all the Noncon. representative Eeviews, as the 
 " North British " (Scotch Presbyterian), the " British 
 Quarterly" (Independent), the Baptist and Wesleyan
 
 LEAVEN. 173 
 
 Reviews, and the " Theological." Here is a foretaste of 
 the future and sign of a really national University. 
 
 To THE SAME. 
 
 Poole, Feb. 5th, 1875. 
 
 The lecture [at Ryde] was listened to with awful 
 attention. Half the young men of the Young Men's 
 Christian Association were there. I was told by an 
 observer sitting near the door that they and their older 
 friends came in looking very cheerful, and listened at 
 first with a look of supercilious confidence in their faces, 
 which then became graver, then rather earnest, then 
 rather anxious ; and at last Mrs. Timmins said she could 
 not help feeling sorry for them they looked pale and 
 appalled as blow after blow was dealt their system of 
 mythology 
 
 Last night, at Poole, we had ... a very different 
 audience from the previous one attentive, but far less 
 impressionable. The " magnetic fluid " did not flow 
 much from them to me, or from me to them. 
 
 FROM MRS. WICKSTEED TO HER SON PHILIP HENTIT. 
 
 4, Brownlow Villas, St. Asaph, Nov. 29th, 1875. 
 . . . All is well that ends well, or else I should say 
 we had almost a tragic scene last night in [your father's] 
 study and bed-room (which you know are one), owing 
 to his missing one of his lectures that has been adver- 
 tized for this week. 
 
 I had been rather overdone with the extreme cold, so 
 I had gone to bed early and had a little nap, from which
 
 174 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 I was awakened by sounds as of a sudden removal - 
 boxes dragged about, drawers emptied, and cupboards 
 rummaged. I asked what was the matter, and was told 
 one of the lectures was missing. It was last seen at 
 Nottingham, and was believed to be in a black case. 
 Could it be left at Nottingham? That seemed very 
 unlikely. Could it have been lost in the removal [from 
 Hafod to the St. Asaph lodgings] ? That was impossi- 
 ble, for the things did not come from Nottingham till 
 after the removal here. Could it be left in the portman- 
 teau that came from Nottingham ? No ; every corner 
 and pocket had been looked in, " and" said my poor 
 husband, who had gone about groaning at intervals as 
 if in physical pain, and had looked over (amongst other 
 things) all the sermons in the deep west-stand-cupboard 
 you will remember, and had only groaned more sadly 
 if I suggested any expedient or alleviation " I know I 
 put them all into this drawer." 
 
 This was the turning-point of the tragedy. All, I 
 thought, into that little drawer; then perhaps it was 
 too full, and it has slipped out behind. He pulled out 
 the drawer nothing ! He pulled out the one below 
 nothing ! He pulled out the third drawer nothing ! 
 He pulled out the lowest drawer there it was ! 
 
 "Oh! thank God!" he exclaimed; "thank God! now 
 I can sleep !" 
 
 He got into bed while the last nicker went out of the 
 fire and the clock struck midnight, and, I am glad to 
 say, slept peacefully till morning. This is soon told, but 
 the two hours or more that were passed in this agitation
 
 ALL'S WELL TEAT ENDS WELL. 175 
 
 seemed very long at the time, and I was seriously afraid 
 he would make himself ill, and not be able to give any 
 of his lectures. However, as before said, " All's well that 
 ends well." 
 
 Best love to all from your loving mother, 
 
 JANE WICKSTEED. 
 
 To HIS WIPE. 
 
 1875. 
 
 My dearest Wife, I reached at two o'clock, 
 
 after an almost entirely solitary journey, which grew 
 darker and damper and colder after leaving Chester. . . . 
 Here about five. A car awaited me at the station, which 
 was promising ; but there was no one in it, and in a very 
 short time it stopped at the bottom of a field, and I found 
 I had to make my way up steep steps about a quarter 
 of a mile in the slippery dark to the new house of my 
 host, to which no road is yet made. It reminded me of 
 the Salita at Genoa, and our call on Colonel Kadici. 
 However, luckily two little boys, were at hand (for the 
 man could not leave his horse), and they carried up my 
 rather heavy bag. I do not know what I should have 
 done without this help, as I found it quite enough work 
 to carry my panting and tired self up the hill. When 
 I reached the house I went straight into bed, and at 
 6.30 got a good cup of tea, and started soon after, down 
 
 the same hill, in a car to . By it also I came back 
 
 before ten to supper, and sat up till twelve talking to 
 my host, who is an entirely self-made man, beginning 
 as a working man, getting 50 saved in a few years out
 
 176 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 of his wages, and has beginning business for himself 
 as a drugget -printer bought and paid for a mill 
 (3600) in six years, and is now, by industry, frugality 
 and temperance, worth (he told me in confidence) 50,000, 
 since he began for himself in 1858. It is impossible not 
 to feel the justifiable pride of such a career. It involves 
 many, though far from all, the virtues. And how few 
 careers carry them all ! He has unlocked his own mill 
 every morning at six o'clock for sixteen years, and has 
 done so this morning, the news reaching him as he rose 
 of the death of his late wife's father, an old man of 
 seventy- six, dying at three this morning of bronchitis. 
 He went to see him last night instead of coming with 
 me, and now both of us are glad that he did so. He is, 
 
 however, gone as usual himself to the market, and 
 
 all goes on as if this sigh in the breath of life had not 
 occurred. 
 
 To HIS SON PHILIP HENRY. 
 
 St. Asaph, March 29th, 1876. 
 
 . . . You are indeed busy. As for me, my present life 
 is delightful, except when I have to write. Three large 
 volumes of St. Augustine lie now ready to be returned 
 to the London library, a large part of which I have read, 
 for Latin (at least such Latin) is as easy to read as 
 English, and much pleasanter, because an original always 
 impresses itself more on the mind and memory than a 
 translation. There are two forms that never make any 
 permanent impression on me translations of books and 
 reviews of books. When I touch an original, a thrill
 
 AUGUSTINE. 177 
 
 comes through my fingers. And then the dear Saint, 
 writing in reply to the same or similar questions, and 
 on the same or similar subjects, to different correspon- 
 dents, who are not expected to see each other's letters, 
 repeats himself with a Homeric iteration which enables 
 one to pass over much as Us, terve, yea, decemve repeti- 
 tum. Conceive of his being appointed coadjutor Bishop 
 to old Valerius at Hippo, and their then both discovering 
 that a canon had been passed at Nica3a some sixty or 
 more years before, forbidding such an appointment during 
 the life of the Antistes ! 
 
 To HIS SON THOMAS STRETTON. 
 
 St. Asaph, May 22nd, 1876. . 
 
 My dear Tom, . . . We were very sorry to hear of 
 your illness. I was very ill too on my journey, and got 
 out of bed, after twenty hours, to get into a car to take 
 me four miles to my next lecture (I had one on each of 
 five nights), and all the sustenance I had had for twenty- 
 four hours before giving the lecture was a little lemon- 
 juice and water. I wonder how I got through. . . . 
 
 We must, I suppose, be both thankful to be better ; 
 at least I feel it much more comfortable to be at home 
 and well, and with your dear mother by me, than to be 
 a wanderer in the wilds of North Lancashire. I lec- 
 tured, among other places, on a week -night at Colne to 
 400 men ; there was not one woman present a thing 
 I do not remember ever occurring to me before. 
 
 While in the neighbourhood, I took the opportunity 
 of going over Stoneyhurst, where one of the Fathers 
 
 N
 
 178 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 received me and spent an hour and a half showing me 
 everything. Before leaving, I found that my old neigh- 
 bour, Father Harper, Professor of Theology at St. Beuno's 
 College, was residing there, and sent in my card. He 
 was at the time engaged with the Superior, and also had 
 two or three relays of people waiting to see him, so that 
 my card did not get to his hand till I was gone. I found 
 a most kind and beautifully written letter from him on 
 my return home, reproaching me for going away so 
 abruptly, and urging me to come and spend a night or 
 two at the College with him. This humanity is very 
 touching to me under all the circumstances, showing 
 surely that there is a broader religion somewhere even 
 than our broadest. You know he is a very distinguished 
 preacher and writer, and has replied to and demolished 
 Dr. Pusey. 
 
 To THE SAME. 
 
 St. Asaph, Nov. 6th, 1876. 
 
 ... I went on to Edinburgh and ... lectured at St. 
 Mark's chapel, and at five other places in Scotland on 
 following nights ; preached and administered the Com- 
 munion at Glasgow on the 29th. Saw the new building of 
 
 my old University The library consists of three rooms, 
 
 one over the other, each 130 feet by 70, the largest 
 University library accommodation, I should think, in 
 Europe. On my return I broke the journey at Keswick, 
 and saw Derwentwater . . . and Southey's tomb, monu- 
 ment, house. Stood with uncovered head at the foot of 
 his grave, because he worked hard, brought up his family 
 respectably, and helped his nephews and nieces.
 
 IN CLQVEE. 179 
 
 To MATILDA LUPTON. 
 
 Darlington, Feb. 7th, 1877. 
 
 I have got along very prosperously, had attentive and 
 pleasant audiences, and delightful weather. But the 
 great glory of my tour was a couple of hours spent yes- 
 terday morning in Durham Cathedral. I do not wonder 
 at my dear father's ecstatic admiration of it. And it is 
 more glorious than when he used to see it, because more 
 like itself. The plaster and colouring have been, at 
 infinite cost and labour, scraped off the stone, which now 
 rises in pillar, arch and buttress, in its native and invio- 
 late beauty. The vile wash and plaster was like so much 
 paste and rouge upon a woman's face. I wandered and 
 sat a long time within the ample folds of its beauty by 
 myself, and then got hold of an intelligent verger. . . . 
 Then I saw the library. Most luckily for me, I was on 
 the spot one of the only two hours of the week it is 
 open to the public. Oh, what a glorious place ! Eight 
 thousand selected volumes of the choicest editions of the 
 Fathers, the Classics, works of Art and Science, Politics 
 and History. The liberal modern Theology, if any, must 
 have been relegated to the upper shelves. But as I 
 passed along successive cases, looking at all the tempt- 
 ing titles, I thought how I should like to come and live 
 in Durham a year, with no duty but to read and take 
 notes. There were also not only amusing traditions, but 
 interesting relics of St. Cuthbert ; and to these, and to 
 some altar-robes lately discovered, the attention of the 
 only other party, two ladies and two gentlemen, seemed 
 to be exclusively confined ! 
 
 N 2
 
 180 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 To HIS WIFE. 
 
 Bishop Auckland, Feb. 8th, 1877. 
 
 I observe in my progresses how Unitarianism, educa- 
 tion and teetotallism are banded together and a good 
 band too. Here the Temperance Hall had been secured 
 for the lectures. But the vicar declared he would never 
 attend a meeting in the hall again if it was so " dese- 
 crated." The Unitarians, being teetotallers too, did not 
 like to injure the moral cause by insisting on the theo- 
 logical, especially as some heavy subscriptions were 
 involved, which they could not afford to lose ; and, 
 much to their credit, forbore to insist on their rights, 
 took the Town Hall (a far more important building), 
 and I believe have at once shown their spirit, their 
 determination and their judicious forbearance by this 
 course. It is astonishing how so many people cannot 
 see that no real progress in secure liberalism can be 
 made until this secret bigotry is brought to the light 
 and face to face with the public, by plain challenge of 
 free speech. There is no use talking of a liberalism 
 which means being quiet as long as nobody will say in 
 public a word in derogation of the old traditions. 
 
 To HIS SON JOSEPH HARTLEY. 
 Croydon Grove, West Croydon, Oct. 20th, 1877. 
 My dear Hartley, It is now a fortnight since you 
 descended upon us here, and a fortnight all but a day 
 since you left us. I think, therefore, you will like to 
 hear what we have been about, and how we have been 
 getting on in the interval.
 
 LARES AND PENATES. 181 
 
 In household matters, chiefly by the active exertions 
 of Mary Jean and Hamilton, we have the study, draw- 
 ing-room and our bed-room arranged finally and all 
 comfortably. The study is of itself a study, and by the 
 great ornament of the books, arranged so as to look 
 incredibly such by Philip (for I have not spent a shilling 
 a-year on binding for twenty-six years) and Hamilton's 
 shelves, the School of Athens over the mirror, and the 
 Colosseum opposite, Butler, Priestley and Channing in 
 the recess between two of the shelves, the Transfigura- 
 tion on the other side of the shelves (all opposite the 
 window), Hamer Stansfeld bending forward over the 
 door, Tennyson and Constantine on each side of the 
 window, the old sofa and the old chair, bought by me 
 at Kendell's forty -two years ago, Mill -Hill oak desk 
 (Charlotte's present), on which I am now writing, Mill- 
 Hill oak inkstand (Mr. Kitson's present) on the small 
 table in the window, the pedestals in the recess farthest 
 from door and window, lighted up at night not only by 
 the fire and the gas, but by your dear mother's, Mary 
 Jean's and Hamilton's, and one evening Lucy Wick- 
 steed's presence, with tea on the table, comfort and 
 gratitude filling every vacant space (to finish this long 
 sentence, which began at the bottom of the last page 
 but one), promises to be the scene of many a pure and 
 sacred joy in the future, and of many a little gathering 
 of loving, faithful, merry hearts. 
 
 The drawing-room, too, looks very charming, but we 
 do not seem to have put up our Lar-shrine there yet, 
 or inaugurated our worship of any household god, as
 
 182 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 no fire has been lighted and no salt consumed in it 
 yet. 
 
 We have had calls from the late tenant, . . . who left 
 the house with great regret and would like to come 
 back again, and from Mrs. John Hincks ; . . . from Mr. 
 and Mrs. George Harris, he the son of the late Rev. 
 George Harris, of Newcastle ; but, more gladdening than 
 all, from Dr. and Mrs. Greenhow, who kindly came 
 over from Clapham Park (leaving a fog there and finding 
 sunshine here, by the way) on Thursday, and stayed an 
 hour or two, looking over the house, and talking over 
 many matters of interest, and pronouncing " the step we 
 had taken a very wise one" (alas ! that we ever took 
 any other). They were both looking very well, the Dr. 
 a perfect wonder. On Thursday the llth and following 
 days we had your goose, according to the favourite 
 adverb of our day, "simply" splendid. I attended of 
 course . . . the Church Congress a good deal, and was 
 much pleased with the general tone, aiming at liberality 
 and comprehension. By the way, the old Stansfeld and 
 Brown French-grey damask curtains are up in the room, 
 looking very well a present of forty years ago. On 
 Tuesday I took Mary Jean to hear Handel's Messiah, 
 which I myself had never heard. Four thousand people 
 present. We paid one shilling a-piece, and had a rush 
 and crush for the gallery. . . . Hamilton off to town. I 
 hope to write again in a fortnight ; but if you have time 
 to send a few lines in reply to my missive, write them 
 to your mother, who sends her heart's love to you with 
 
 your affectionate father, 
 
 CH. W.
 
 BECAUSE OF THE ANGELS. 183 
 
 To Miss GERTRUDE SWAINE. 
 
 Dec. 31st, 1878. 
 
 My dear Gertrude, You always write to me on my 
 birthday, and I do not like tliis Christmas-tide to pass 
 "by without a word of affectionate good wishes. . . . 
 
 What have you been doing with yourself lately ? We 
 heard of you in Leeds, and your first Assembly there. 
 But I fear there will not be so many gaieties for young 
 people this winter as usual, from the fearful want that 
 seems to be stalking over the land and oppressing all 
 hearts. In London it is not so. I am happy to say, 
 not only the people, but the lunatics, the paupers and 
 the prisoners are all jolly with their dinners and balls. 
 I see and hear of no distress in this neighbourhood. I 
 have been twice this late autumn not far from you, 
 visiting my friends the Joshua Fieldens at Nutfield 
 Priory. . . . There are four sons and seven daughters, and 
 when I go into the dining-room at breakfast or lunch, 
 and I scarcely know where to sit, I say, "Anywhere ; 
 only don't let me displace an angel ;" for Dr. Hook used 
 to tell us at the parish church in Leeds that some pious 
 people had found comfort in the thought that when they 
 went into church before the congregation was assembled, 
 the vacant places were occupied, ad interim, by angels. 
 He did not say anything of the modesty of the people 
 who displaced them. I am reminded of hearing this by 
 his Life, in two thick volumes. . . . Parts of it would 
 amuse and interest your father.* Have you had Macleod 
 of Dare at Brabceuf yet ? It catches hold of me a 
 hard thing for a novel to do.
 
 184 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 Mr. Voysey was here the other day, and he said he 
 liked my handwriting. Blessings on him ! It was, he 
 said, so black, large and thick. But I cannot expect 
 other persons to do so, and so think it my duty, though 
 with great reluctance, to give now a farewell to my dear 
 Gertrude, from her very affectionate old friend, 
 
 CHAS. WICKSTEED. 
 
 To MATILDA LUPTON. 
 
 Croydon, Feb. 21st, 1880. 
 
 My dearest Matty e, This is your birthday, and if 
 the heavens look as brightly at St. Asaph as they do 
 here, the day will truly reflect the joy of all our hearts, 
 in sending you our loving greetings, and in congratulating 
 ourselves on another annual return of its dear and happy 
 associations. 
 
 The years, indeed, do not seem to get dimmer or 
 sadder to any of us as their number increases. I suppose 
 it is partly because there has always been a fund of 
 power and will in the bosoms of part of us to increase 
 the happiness and to diminish the sorrows of another 
 part of us, by faithful, generous service. Give my dearest 
 love and congratulations to dear Charlotte, ... on the 
 return of your birthday, with a hearty wish indeed, 
 looking at the face of such a cheerful probability, I may 
 say a merry wish for many of them. 
 
 The twilight that steals on your sunshine this birth- 
 day [in the declining health of their sister Harriet] is, 
 as Koscoe said, a holy one. I am glad that it is so 
 tenderly prolonged. I never liked the thought of living
 
 THE HOLY QRAIL. 185 
 
 in a country where the sun set suddenly ; and I increas- 
 ingly feel how beautiful the prolonged twilight of the 
 day of life is, with its stillness and tenderness, and its 
 gradual melting away into the night, which is to be 
 followed so quickly by the brightest of all mornings. 
 
 Don't smile at such an association of ideas but you 
 remember that silver mustard-pot that dear Harriet 
 gave us at our marriage. It has always been a hand- 
 some, solid, steady, useful piece of table furniture, capa- 
 cious, hospitable, easy to fill, easy to empty, and easy 
 to clean. I nave always been an admirer of it ; but 
 now when I see it each day at table, I look at it with 
 the eye of the soul, and take it into my hands with a 
 conscious feeling mixed of tenderness and reverence, as 
 though it were a sacred cup. . . . 
 
 I have turned from the seventy-five Theses of Erastus, 
 in his work, " De Excommunicatione," which I ought to 
 have been studying in preparation for my paper on the 
 Nationalization of Voluntaryism at the ministers' meet- 
 ing on Monday ; and must now turn to them. The 
 Manchester people have resolved on a meeting to cele- 
 brate the centenary of Channing's birth, and have invited 
 me to give the address. It is the crowning honour of 
 my life. 
 
 To HIS WIFE. 
 
 Oakfield, near Bolton, June 17th, 1880. 
 My dearest Wife, Arriving at Willesden Junction, I 
 found that my train, according to the booking-clerk's 
 information, would not reach Boltoii till 7.15, the usual
 
 186 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 Stockport, Manchester and Liverpool train's time not 
 applying to Bolton. This of course I ought to have 
 known, and probably did know and had forgotten. I 
 telegraphed accordingly to my host, who had been 
 expecting me to dinner at six, that I should dine on 
 the road. I got into a carriage with father, mother, and 
 nurse and two babies, with bottles, pots, pans, napkins, 
 wrappers, bread, milk, luncheons of the future, umbrellas, 
 walking-sticks, coats and cloaks, and hats and bonnets. 
 For the first hour we were all smiles, the elder baby, a 
 girl, soon establishing a marked flirtation with me, till, 
 after climbing up and down her mother and bothering 
 her life out, she accepted my offer, and came and sat on 
 my knee, as quiet and happy as if she had already gone 
 to paradise, turning round to me now and then, with 
 little congratulating smiles and laughs, to exchange 
 quiet jokes with me. She was probably two-and-a-half 
 to three years old. But at length the scene changed ; 
 baby began to cry the nurse, who had been much 
 amused, turning serious ; bribes of bottle and bread-and- 
 butter administered in vain ; papa, who wished to make 
 himself useful, breaking a bottle, and effunding the milk 
 on himself and neighbours, and then in his distress 
 kicking over a wonderful institution which was lying 
 under the seat, and which I had not hitherto observed, 
 a saucepan without a lid, and full but subsequently 
 unhappily empty of some pervasive liquid, that fur- 
 nished our feet with a sudden, startling bath. This was 
 too much for the mother, a nice-looking young woman, 
 who then grew grave and miserable. At the next
 
 SECOND CLASS AND FIRST. 187 
 
 station the useful and efficient husband found out 
 another compartment, but it was a smoking-carriage. 
 Into it, however, they all plunged. Porters rushed to 
 and fro, now for a hood, now for a bottle, now to wipe 
 up the floor. 
 
 This was exhilarating after all, but still I found it 
 was a very long hour which had been spent. Three 
 ladies also in the carriage, who had been dull before, 
 became duller, and I soon found myself very melancholy 
 indeed. But little Edith S 's quick eyes had dis- 
 covered me at Willesden ; she, father and mother, hasten- 
 ing to the Withington wedding at Manchester. They filled 
 a three-seated coupe. I had just time to inspect them 
 and shake hands and get into my own second-class 
 carriage. When we stopped at Kugby, a bright idea 
 struck me, that I would get out and employ the five 
 minutes' stay in varying the monotony of life by having 
 some chat with them. Oh ! how comfortable, quiet and 
 dignified they looked seats filled by themselves, ground 
 with various comforting appurtenances, and nice table in 
 front, with still the remains of sundry consolations of 
 travel, in the shape of lunch, books, newspapers ! Win- 
 dows and mirrors made the front and sides of the coupe 
 bright and cheerful. They looked so easy, comfortable, 
 cool, uncrowded ; no waste of life or energy or temper 
 (apparent, at least). Encouraged by this vision, I went 
 
 again, when next we stopped, asked S whether he 
 
 would not get out and stretch his legs. He thought he 
 would. Once out, the inspiration seized him that he 
 would offer me his place and take mine. Mrs. S 's
 
 188 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 eyes, and perhaps Edith's, sparkled with pleasure. So, 
 I dare say, did mine. The cheerful command, "Oh, 
 do !" was as cheerfully obeyed by me, and we had a 
 grand time of it for an hour and a half, to the end of 
 
 their journey at Manchester. I once invited S to 
 
 re-enter the bosom of his family ; but he said, " I'm very 
 happy as I am, Sir," and so I did not think it necessary 
 to repeat my offer. Love to Tom and Alice. Your loving 
 Husband. 
 
 To HIS SON JOSEPH HARTLEY. 
 
 Croydon, Feb. 12th, 1881. 
 
 . . . Yes ! Time, as you say, takes its revenge upon 
 us all, and Christianity is a slow coach, but one that 
 makes the journey, and in one way or other is getting 
 over the ground. Still ... I think it should admit 
 secular truth into partnership with it, and tack Proverbs 
 to St. John. Indeed, I think its Founder meant this ; 
 otherwise whence the caution, " Be ye wise as serpents 
 and harmless as doves." Thus Christianity says, " Faith, 
 Hope, Charity;" the ancients, "Prudence, Temperance 
 (in the sense of moderation and self-command) and 
 Fortitude ;" and you, whether intentionally or not, echo 
 this combination in your words, " It seems almost as if 
 Prudence were more important than Faith, Temperance 
 than Hope, and Fortitude than Charity." I have always 
 felt that in this life weakness is more severely punished 
 than most sin, and ignorance than knowingness. Still, 
 as your dear mother says, granted that the higher 
 Christian states of mind and character are to be aimed 
 at, they must have the foundation virtues of the secular
 
 CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 189 
 
 order, or they fall to the ground, while the secular 
 virtues hold their own and are certainly something as 
 far as they go. 
 
 " Man is born to trouble," but also to happiness. In 
 truth, life is not a unity of state, but a succession of 
 states, high and low, cheerful and anxious, easy and 
 laborious, happy and sad, sunny and cloudy, warm and 
 cold. We have to conform ourselves to this succession, 
 and give up the dream of absolute unity and homo- 
 geneity, only trying that the better, the higher and the 
 happier shall have their due, and, if possible, their pre- 
 dominant space in the succession. 
 
 To MRS. MADGE. 
 
 Croydon, March llth, 1881. 
 
 ... I propose, therefore, to accept your kind hospitality 
 in this form to join you at dinner on Sunday, having 
 attended a morning service either at Kentish Town or 
 Little Portland Street before. 
 
 Then rest and lecture, returning to Highbury after 
 evening service. The next morning I must return 
 home, but on my way I shall hope to call on our dear 
 old friend Mr. Sharpe, and sit at his learned feet for 
 half-an-hour and inhale his latest ideas. 
 
 In the mean time, thank him that I shall not be an 
 unexpected caller, and tell him that I have been at 
 Cardiff, giving two Unitarian lectures in the Assembly 
 Room, which was full, some two hundred to two hundred 
 and fifty people, the largest audiences they have ever 
 had, and full of zeal.
 
 190 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 This week I have been at Bournemouth, lecturing 
 twice in the Town Hall, both week-nights. Here (a 
 very church and worldly place) the attendance was not 
 so good, only about a hundred ; ground had never been 
 broken up there before, but it is time it was ; one person 
 calling out in the midst of my lecture the first night, 
 " It's all lies;" and another going out in the course of the 
 second, saying to a gentleman who reported it to me, " I 
 hope he'll burn in hell for ever." The audience with 
 these exceptions were with me. 
 
 To Miss EVA BOULT. 
 
 Croydon, Aug. 21st, . 
 
 I agree with Mr. in a passionate persuasion 
 
 that a man, or a woman either, should go to the death 
 rather than yield to the compulsion that forces them 
 publicly to assert their firm belief in the truth of what 
 they themselves feel sure is a lie. The whole progress 
 of the world depends on the existence of this spirit 
 But in the sense of Pope's, "For modes of faith let 
 graceless zealots fight," &c., it may be doubted if many 
 enthusiasts have not died for superstitions and trifles. 
 This is the sense you mean it in. ... 
 
 Your Homeric studies have indeed at length landed 
 you in a grave question. . . . Homer is not describing a 
 feast of Lucullus, but the hungry grabbing at their food 
 by a set of half-barbarous soldiers (for I maintain that 
 most of the higher qualities given by Homer to his 
 heroes are Homer's, not theirs). And when Ajax returns, 
 and Agamemnon wants to do him honour, while he has
 
 JEROME TO EUSTOCHimr. 191 
 
 the portions assigned to the guests divided, he gives 
 Ajax a whole lack, analogous to our baron of beef, though 
 probably not exactly the same, as the modes of the 
 Homeric butchers were not quite the same as ours. 
 Whether he took it to his tent and his larder, I do not 
 know, or ate it all up at the feast. If the latter, I hope 
 it was with the aid of his young companions in arms, as 
 did ./Eneas in the parallel passage (^En. viii. 182) : 
 
 Vescitur Aeneas simul et Trojana juventus 
 Perpetui tergo bovis, &c. 
 
 I know how your father would feel at the death of 
 
 Mr. . We old men are now every year nay, 
 
 sometimes in successive months destined to lose our 
 old friends. This is one thing that makes me anxious 
 to keep up my friendships with the young, that I may 
 not some day find myself high and dry (very dry) with- 
 out any. And I am sorry that you are not coming this 
 way this summer. 
 
 To HIS SISTER-IN-LAW CHARLOTTE LUPTON. 
 
 Croydon, April 21st, 1882. 
 
 My dear Charlotte, Yesterday morning I got up at 
 half-past six, went downstairs, lighted the breakfast- 
 room fire (which our efficient Emily had nicely laid the 
 night before), put the kettle on to boil, opened shutters, 
 drew up blinds and curtains, letting in the light of day 
 into our little dwelling, began collecting tea-caddy, tea- 
 pots, sugar, plates, cups, saucers, knives, forks, spoons, 
 butter, bread, &c. &c. ; the several articles requiring
 
 192 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 apparently about two distinct journeys a -piece, the 
 required presence of each in its turn being a fresh 
 surprise to me ; then made tea, furnished dear Jane's 
 breakfast-tray, took it up to her, and was just preparing 
 Emily's cup of tea for her own room, when that dear 
 sprightly spirit herself appeared on the scene, and 
 relieved me of further duties. I got my own breakfast, 
 went up into my own room to shave, dress and prepare 
 for my visit to Windsor Castle. At a quarter before 
 nine I was on my way to the railway-station for London. 
 Arrived there, I drove ... to Dr. Williams's Library, 
 where the deputation of English Presbyterian Ministers 
 of the cities of London and Westminster and the neigh- 
 bourhood were to assemble, previously to starting for 
 Windsor. . . . 
 
 We proceeded by first-class railway to Windsor. I had 
 long wished for an opportunity of joining in an address to 
 the Queen, for my feelings of loyalty and respect for 
 her have not diminished as I have got older (and I shall 
 be seventy -two in a few weeks). The opportunity 
 offered itself, as so many opportunities do, at a most 
 inconvenient time. My dear wife confined to bed by 
 rheumatic gout ; Tom of course in his usual disabled 
 condition; our single servant gone to the hospital in 
 London with scarlet fever ; all our usual charwomen 
 and helps frightened away. . . . But though I have 
 shrunk the last eight months from all public duty, this 
 seemed to me to be an almost religious occasion, in 
 entire harmony with the gravity of my own feelings, in 
 which I could freely indulge in the course of my journey,
 
 WINDSOR CASTLE. 193 
 
 having no responsibility of any kind, either in act or 
 speech, devolving on me. 
 
 We reached Windsor soon after one o'clock, and . . . 
 went, about a ten-minutes' walk, up to the Castle. And 
 here, when my powers of description are most needed, 
 they most fail me. 
 
 It was a lovely day; the quiet, orderly groups of 
 inhabitants and visitors lining the streets, and watching 
 the passing of the various deputations with a pleased, 
 courteous interest. 
 
 The noble Castle itself looked worthy of the English 
 nation .and its Sovereign, in its commanding and lovely 
 position ; taking in all your Tuilleries, Versailles, Qui- 
 rinals and Vaticans the, to me, grandest palace I have 
 ever seen grand in its simplicity, grand in its vastness, 
 grand in its stability, grand in its unarmed security. At 
 the lodges, entrances and everywhere, we were received 
 by various attendants in various costumes, all clearly 
 and quietly indicating the direction we should follow. 
 At length we came into the great gallery, where were 
 already assembled the Common Councillors in their 
 blue robes, the Aldermen in their scarlet and ermine, 
 the Queen's Lieutenants of London in military dress, the 
 Lord Mayor with his sword and mace bearers, the Mayors 
 and deputations of the Edinburgh and Dublin Town 
 Councils. In entering this gallery, we were received 
 and addressed in a pleasant and courtly manner by some 
 official, who concluded his inquiries and remarks by 
 telling us we should be received third in order, but that 
 before we were presented there would be some lunch. 
 

 
 194 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 At each step of our progress so far we had been received 
 by an increase of dignity and quality in our receivers. 
 The scene was a really brilliant one. At first I had 
 seen two or three blue -robed dignitaries among the 
 guests, whom I took for perhaps Armenian priests, till 
 I found the main gallery half-full of them, and learnt 
 that they were the Common Councillors of London. 
 After a time we were summoned to lunch, and stood up 
 to well-supplied tables ; but belonging only to the Order 
 of Modest Merit, I did not secure myself standing-room 
 at the tables, but remained in a kind of second file of 
 aspirant-expectants, listening, however, to the conver- 
 sation of a magnificent -looking man in some court- 
 military costume, saying, " No wine, thank you ; I'm a 
 teetotaller" (subdued murmur of interlocutor). " Oh, a 
 dangerous character, you think, capable of any insanity ; 
 well, it may be a temporary insanity, but in the mean 
 time I feel none the worse, but I think the better for it." 
 Then turning round and seeing me, he politely vacated 
 his place and offered it to me. It did not take me 
 above a minute or two to go through the form of 
 luncheon ; but then, turning round to see if there was 
 any one to whom I could hand on the politeness, I dis- 
 covered Dr. Martineau and Dr. Sadler standing humbly 
 behind me. Said Dr. Martineau in a droll tone of 
 piqued pride (to my address, " Oh ! What, you here !"), 
 " Yes, Wicksteed, we haven't had the Home Secretary, 
 Sir William Vernon Harcourt, to attend to us, and give 
 up his place to us !" 
 
 Lunch over, again we advanced a step, this time to a
 
 QUEEN VICTORIA. 195 
 
 large drawing-room. After long waiting, about half-past 
 three the door was opened to us, and we entered the 
 apartment where the Queen was holding her court. 
 When we got in about three yards, we all stopped and 
 made low bows, the Queen acknowledging our presence 
 by a gracious courtesy. When about half-way up the 
 room, we all stopped and bowed again. By this time I 
 was too much engaged with my own lowly gaze to 
 observe whether this second obeisance was met by a 
 second courtesy or not. Then we walked boldly up to 
 the Queen, handed, through Dr. Martineau, our address 
 of felicitation on her escape from assassination to her, 
 who, receiving it, handed it over to my now intimate 
 friend the Home Secretary, who then handed in return 
 to the Queen her "gracious" reply, she giving it herself 
 to Dr. Martineau. The addresses and replies are not 
 read now, not read since the Prince Consort's death, or 
 perhaps before. Then Dr. Sadler knelt down, and the 
 Queen extended her hand for him to kiss. Dr. Sadler, 
 as Secretary, mentioned Dr. Martineau's name; the Queen 
 extended her hand, and Dr. Martineau knelt and kissed 
 it. It had been arranged at first that I should do the 
 same (only three were to be presented) ; but I was really 
 afraid that I should perhaps not be able easily to get 
 up again, with my sprained wrist and ankle, and general 
 obese unpliancy of limb, with nothing to lay hold of 
 and rest upon. Besides, I had an idea of backing down 
 throne-steps, so I persistently declined. I am never 
 very fond of obtrusion on great people, besides. So I 
 made one man happy as well as myself, perhaps, from 
 
 02
 
 196 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 a sense of relief and Mr. Panton Ham had this honour. 
 The truth was, the Queen stood but slightly elevated 
 above the floor of the room, and there was no walking 
 backwards down steps. So perhaps I might have managed 
 it. She looked exactly as I had expected, except that I 
 was not prepared for so bright, happy and amiable a 
 look and smile, directed at each separate step of this 
 little ceremony, which took less time, as the novels say, 
 to pass than " it has taken us to describe." We then 
 all bowed, backing, or rather siding towards a side door, 
 bowing ourselves out, and then joined the outer world 
 and the common air. As for details, my dear sister, I 
 must refer you to the " Court Journal," in which, I suspect 
 the first time in its life, the name of your brother-in-law, 
 the Eev. G. Wicksteed (at least so says the "Daily 
 News") appears. 
 
 When I thought of writing the description to you, I 
 had no idea it would prove so long, or I should scarcely 
 have liked to inflict it upon you. 
 
 Jane is still keeping her bed, but is better. We have 
 got a good charwoman for two or three days, and Emily 
 is wonderful. 
 
 Love to Matilda, and all. Your affectionate brother, 
 
 CHARLES WICKSTEED. 
 
 To THE SAME. 
 
 Croydon, Nov. llth, 1882. 
 
 My dear Charlotte, Thanks for your short but very 
 interesting letter received this morning. I, too, often 
 wish we could hold friendly conference on matters of
 
 THE GOSPEL OF JOHN. 197 
 
 theological, literary and general interest as they arise. 
 But, as Mrs. Barbauld reminds us in her essay, we can- 
 not, unfortunately, combine inconsistent advantages; 
 and as Jane and I, before the arrival of the post, were 
 enumerating the various advantages which have accrued 
 to ourselves and our children by our fortunate (or as I 
 prefer to call it, in the old-fashioned phrase, though not 
 necessarily perhaps in its old-fashioned meaning, provi- 
 dential) settlement in this place and house, so we often 
 reflect with gratitude and pleasure what a centre you 
 and Matilda, by remaining where you are, make of 
 enjoyment and interest to so large a circle of friends 
 and relations. . . . 
 
 The articles in the " Modern" are not paid for, or at 
 least I know used not to be in Bichard's time, nor the 
 editor's labour either. This I do not think right or 
 just. But certainly, I agree with you, it shows " what 
 admirable writing is to be had gratis" contrary to 
 the humorous dictum of your old friend Blanco White : 
 " Those who write for nothing know the value of their 
 own articles." 
 
 Dr. Abbott, as you say, is " full of learning," and I 
 fear proves his point of the later origin of John's Gospel. 
 Dr. Drummond is fond of evidence proving that Justin 
 knew it. Dear Mr. Tayler, however, adopted the nega- 
 tive position strongly. I used to tell him he only par- 
 tially convinced me, for I felt sure the original recorder 
 of the conversations given towards the end was present 
 at them, and that therefore they at least had a contem- 
 poraneous origin. They are so full of refractions as well
 
 198 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 as reflections so much incidental and allusive matter 
 so much interrupted and re-commenced and abrupt nar- 
 rative so much symbol, sign, silence so genuinely con- 
 versational, in fact that no one could have invented 
 them. . . . 
 
 On my way to Hampstead last week, I spent nearly 
 an hour with Dr. Martineau, who, you may remember, 
 most affectionately invited me to spend a week or ten 
 days with him in Scotland, to meet Mr. Thorn. 
 
 He was looking robust, though he said he had only 
 been able this summer to ascend two out of his usual 
 three mountains. 
 
 To HIS WIFE. 
 
 Beaulieu, Cannes, France, Jan. 22nd, 1883. 
 
 I am here, as you see. Safe, sound, well and entirely 
 untired, at least quite recovered from all the fatigue I 
 brought with me. . . . 
 
 The bed [on the journey from Paris to Cannes] was 
 as comfortable as could be, and quite roomy. I wound 
 up my watch ; for what could I have done without it ? 
 It was my only speaking companion. Well, I was not 
 like Mark Tapley. I did not feel jolly under the cir- 
 cumstances. I simply lay down wondering at the wilful 
 and gratuitous infatuation of humanity. . . . On getting 
 out at Avignon, I went to the door of Mrs. Fielden's 
 saloon carriage to exchange notes. I could not pretend 
 to be otherwise than I was. I should have looked it 
 if I had. For, to add insult to injury, they have little 
 mirrors in the carriages, as if those in the lavatories 
 were not enough. Mrs. Fielden : " A miserable night !
 
 CANNES. 199 
 
 But you know, Mr. Wicksteed, it's over !" I thought, 
 " What a sensible remark ! So it is !" and it and the 
 coffee made me feel comfortable and then happy. Now 
 it was cheerful work, because we could see. . . . Then 
 came Toulon and twenty minutes' stop. Then came the 
 beautiful ride among miles and miles of olive-trees, 
 interspersed with stately young cypress-trees, almond- 
 trees, vineyards, young green corn and anemonies. . . . 
 Then came Le Luc, Frejus (which you remember), the 
 sight of Cannes looking bright and happy, extending 
 itself along the Bay, and reminding me much of Naples 
 and its Bay, and then came Cannes itself, exchange 
 of waving signals as we passed Beaulieu, and exchange 
 of far more affectionate greetings ... at the station. 
 
 . . . Mrs. Fielden wished me to [dine] upstairs, and 
 not get up for a day or two ! But the truth is, she had 
 all the fatigue, and was so prompt and so thoughtful 
 and energetic throughout, that the natural result was, 
 that while we all retired last night at ten, I quite com- 
 fortable, she went to bed with a headache, and is ... 
 keeping her bed to-day. 
 
 Jan. 23rd. This house ... is in the midst of beautiful 
 grounds, not extensive, but well occupied with lovely 
 trees and plants. It is curious, on going to some of the 
 terraces, to find oneself walking up marble steps, a neigh- 
 bouring stone you remember Carrara even is not so 
 very far off. . . . Out of one of my windows I see each 
 sunny morning that I rise, a sweet pampas-grass, on the 
 side of the drive, holding up its white flowery arms in 
 silent beauty, almost reproaching one with the . . . con-
 
 200 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 sciousness that it has been doing so almost unobserved 
 under the moonlight. Each night a lovely moon. Yes- 
 terday afternoon I sat an hour looking at it. ... 
 
 Jan. 24:th. Your welcome letter of the 21st arrived 
 yesterday afternoon about six o'clock. I, too, had felt a 
 little " dim" now and then, amidst all this sunshine, and 
 so was much cheered by the coming in of one more ray, 
 sunnier than all the others. . . . 
 
 Feb. Wth. This morning ... we started to Peggamor, 
 a real French village, about five miles off, through olive- 
 trees, &c., up a beautiful wild gorge, on the summit of 
 which is the rustic residence of Mrs. Hollond. . . . She 
 is a lady of large property. . . . [Here] she grows olives 
 and makes oil, grows vines and makes wine, which last 
 we tasted. . . . She was the lady from whom Ary Scheffer 
 took his St. Monica in the Augustine picture, and who 
 supplied him with the ideal of his female forms. . . . 
 Further, I feel sure she is the lady of whom I have 
 heard Dr. Martineau and Mr. Thorn speak, and who 
 reads their writings. ... It was altogether the pleasantest 
 and most exciting visit I have made here to strangers, 
 that is. 
 
 To CHARLOTTE LUPTON. 
 
 Croydon, March 27th, 1883. 
 
 ... I never thought of Cannes except as French, or 
 Nice either ; but directly I passed there I felt myself in 
 Italy. 
 
 By way of beginning conversation, many of the visitors 
 and callers at Beaulieu used to say, " This is your first 
 visit to Cannes ?" and I to reply, " No ; I was here about
 
 ST. ASAPH AGAIN. 201 
 
 thirty years ago." This remark, I observed, always raised 
 me in their estimation, and gave me a kind of rank above 
 their own. In the familiarity of the domestic circle, I 
 used to say, " Yes ; I always visit Cannes every thirty 
 years," and this, applied to my next visit, used to cause 
 some laughter. 
 
 To THE EEV. J. H. THOM. 
 
 Croydon, July 13th, 1883. 
 
 My dear Friend, I have been spending a week at St. 
 Asaph, in lodgings, to be near my sisters-in-law, who are 
 like myself in requiring their own home for meals and 
 rest. ... I went two or three times every day, sitting an 
 hour or more on each occasion, and enjoying a great deal 
 of pleasant intercourse and conversation. . . . The only 
 alteration I found in the "littel citie" was in the roads 
 and distances, which were decidedly longer and requiring 
 more time to traverse than they were and did six years 
 ago. Everybody, young and old, rich and poor, clerical and 
 laic, recollected me, and gave me, wherever I met them, 
 hearty greeting. ... I took with me your letter of June 
 7th, intending to answer it while there. But I was almost 
 daily occupied, something as you have been, correcting 
 proofs. For at the earnest request of many of his young 
 friends and relatives, we are printing for private circula- 
 tion extracts from Hamilton's letters and journals. Janet, 
 by her own desire, undertook the selection, finding, how- 
 ever, the omissions (a necessary thing) very trying to 
 her, as they were to his mother. Hartley then made 
 more. I wished them, as being of his generation, and
 
 202 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 therefore more in sympathy with the style, to undertake 
 this duty, if it was to be undertaken at all ; for the whole 
 tone was too bright for my dimmed eyes, too merry for 
 my heavy heart, and too jocose for my grave soul. How- 
 ever, I found they looked for safety to me, after all, and 
 so I exercised some further discretion in omissions, and 
 superintended the printing. . . . With my wife's and my 
 own love to you, I remain, my dear friend, ever most 
 affectionately yours, CH. WICKSTEED. 
 
 To CHARLOTTE LUPTON. 
 
 Croydon, Dec. 19th, 1883. 
 
 ... I am seventy-three and a half. ... I now look 
 with somewhat altered feelings on this prolonged age. 
 I am grateful and surprised to find that, as the world 
 moves on and time grows, I look with more gladness, 
 satisfaction and hope on the life of our race. I remember 
 going into the Yale of Clwyd and feeling that the pro- 
 gress of the world had come to a stand. Politics seemed 
 to have reached a stage of finality. Theology was (out- 
 side our own little body) stagnant. But one day there 
 broke over that Clwydian range of hills the "Essays 
 and Eeviews ;" and though some little scintillations of a 
 dawn had reached me before, in preceding and unnoticed 
 volumes of " Essays," these so laid hold of the world as 
 to fill me with bright hopes. 
 
 Now I am delighted at the progress in the right 
 direction of social reforms and social questions. Seeley's 
 lectures on the " Expansion of England," our Arnold's
 
 EESPICE, ASPICE, PROSPICE. 203 
 
 first lecture,* and perhaps the second, and just now the 
 burst of hope and true knowledge on the condition of 
 the London and other poor, all combine to make me 
 wish to live, and to be grateful that one has been allowed 
 to live to see so brightening and hopeful a present. May 
 you and dear Mattye be long spared for the same, and 
 to see some of the effects of your own good influence 
 and lives upon the larger circle of the public, as well as 
 on the nearer and dearer circle of your attached and 
 reverencing nephews and nieces ! Believe me, dear 
 Charlotte, yours and Matilda's loving brother, 
 
 CH. WICKSTEED. 
 
 To HIS SON PHILIP HENRY. 
 
 Croydon, Jan. llth, 1884. 
 
 . . . You know how strongly I feel, and have long felt, 
 that the old tenure of land (the only practical one eight 
 hundred years ago) has become obsolete, and if remain- 
 ing unchanged would become, or is becoming, infamous, 
 and that a great change and reform in accordance with 
 wide principles of justice is needed and will certainly 
 come. The form in which this is to come is the question ; 
 and I have too great confidence in the preponderance 
 in numbers and influence of the wiser element in the 
 English legislative power over the more blind and rash, 
 to fear the issue. In the mean time, " God," I still think, 
 " is over all, blessed for ever;" and society will eventually 
 become better and happier, in spite of the mixture of 
 
 * " Our Inheritance in the Earth," by Arnold Lupton. Leeds, 
 1883.
 
 204 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 wild talk and wild theories with its graver efforts after 
 progress. 
 
 To K. C. HALL, ESQ. 
 
 Croydon, Jan. 21st, 1884. 
 
 My dear Mr. Hall, I have not yet thanked you for 
 your letter of Oct. 15th, nor for your very true and 
 pleasant account of your and Mrs. Hall's impressions of 
 the " Memorials." It was only by degrees that we sent 
 them to our friends. It was only also by degrees that 
 we decided on printing (not "publishing") them. And 
 when we resolved to do so, we at first thought of his 
 friends, relatives and coevals, and Hartley undertook to 
 send them. But we soon found there were many others 
 (my coevals) to whom I wished to send them, and who 
 we knew, if they did not personally know him, would 
 like to become acquainted with him, and would the 
 more sympathize with us in seeing more distinctly what 
 we had lost. At first I sent them in the most impersonal 
 form possible, for I shrank from challenging a fresh 
 expression of a sympathy which in so many cases had 
 already been so fully and kindly made. But in such a 
 result I was mistaken ; for almost more letters reached 
 me than at first, and I would not that it had been other- 
 wise. For in the second case they knew my boy. This 
 has caused me some delay, as in your case, in making 
 the proper acknowledgments, as I have had so many 
 to make, and as each letter I write is a great exertion. . . . 
 There are sorrows that, coming on one in middle life, one 
 must subdue, in order to do the duty of the present, and 
 to those who still survive, but which coming in later
 
 GOD OVER ALL 205 
 
 life, when the necessity and power to resist them are 
 both less, become crushing and disabling. 
 
 To MATILDA LUPTON. 
 
 Croydon, Feb. 20th, 1884. 
 
 My dearest Matty e, In my laborious days, some 
 thirty or forty years ago, I used to sigh for the time 
 when I should be sixty years old, and sit (the work of 
 life done) with my feet on the fender, reading a pile of 
 Spectator newspapers [recording the course of move- 
 ments in which he had taken part or felt special interest] 
 which I was saving up. I am now close on seventy- 
 four ; my feet are rarely on the fender ; and my pile of 
 old newspapers is in a book-closet upstairs, and the 
 reading of them is not yet commenced. 
 
 So " man proposes and God disposes," and " the 
 future (is) all to us unknown." To-morrow you will be 
 sixty. Did you ever look forward to this as your 
 moderate old age ? If you did not, as I suppose you 
 often did not, may you live many years yet, to falsify 
 your own expectations ! ... In spite of your " infirmities 
 often," this life has a great deal of enjoyment in it to 
 you (as / believe to be continued to far more, with fewer 
 drawbacks and troubles), for your letters teem with living 
 and affectionate interest for others, with a love for " boon 
 nature," the plants and flowers . . . the books ... as well 
 as many other features in this wonderful universe of 
 space and souls. . . . 
 
 This time last year, dear Mattye, I was gathering in 
 Mr. Fielden's gardens at Cannes thirty specimens of
 
 206 LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 semi-tropical plants and flowers, blooming out in the 
 open air (their cowvivors, alas ! scarcely their swrvivors, 
 to be cut off very soon by the bitter weather that even 
 in Cannes followed). This year I send you a far more 
 humble, yet in a sense as fair an offering of plant and 
 flower, growing in our own garden here, as no doubt in 
 your own at Minafon and in many gardens snowdrops, 
 primroses, yellow jasmine (the last two in bloom all 
 winter), a bud of currant-tree and remain your and 
 
 Charlotte's affectionate brother, 
 
 CHAS. WICKSTEED. 
 
 To J. H. GENN, Esq., Secretary of the Hope Street Church, 
 Liverpool. 
 
 [On occasion of the settlement of the Eev. K. A. Armstrong]. 
 
 Croydon, April 23rd, 1884. 
 
 . . . Speaking as an old man, and contrasting the pre- 
 sent with the earlier part of this century, I may truly 
 say that I believe there has never been a brighter out- 
 look for us, for our country and our people, than there 
 is now. 
 
 I believe in the world's progress. I believe in the 
 generation succeeding my own. Good men are feeling, 
 and will go on feeling, after Good, if haply they may 
 find it. Certainly they will not find it unless they feel 
 after it. 
 
 In the process, mistakes in suggested modes may be 
 made (I believe there are some absurd ones made now), 
 but there are usually, in this country, and by the slow- 
 ness and patience of our methods, by our free and
 
 BLESSED FOR EVER. 207 
 
 thorough siftings of thought and opinion, by the com- 
 bined help of various experience, knowledge and ages, 
 achieved results, which are not mistakes. 
 
 I believe in God. I believe in Truth. I believe in 
 my Country. I believe in my Countrymen. Go on, 
 then, in the ways of Thought and Good you have partly 
 inherited and partly made for yourselves, in still-con- 
 tinuing Faith and Hope, for without these the battle of 
 life can never be fought. 
 
 I remain your ever remembering, ever grateful and 
 
 ever affectionate old minister, 
 
 CHARLES WICKSTEED.
 
 iir. 
 DISCOUBSES.
 
 [!N THE ANCIENT CHAPEL, TOXTETH PARK, APRIL STH, 1877.] 
 
 Again, O God, the doors of thy house are opened to us. Again 
 the light of day streams out from thy throne upoii us. Again the 
 air in vigorous freshness stirreth round us. 
 
 And we meet in the home of many memories, where the loved 
 and venerated have worshipped, near the tombs which enshrine 
 their ashes, near the haunts that once were dear to them on earth, 
 to pray that while one generation succeedeth to another, the earth, 
 which remaineth for ever, may still be the abode of the ever-living 
 God, and that the God of our fathers may still be the God of their 
 succeeding race. 
 
 Yet lift up now our hearts even from these dear thoughts and 
 memories. Carry us up where those we remember and those we 
 loved are gone ; carry us into the felt presence of our Father and 
 theirs. Enlighten us with the same and even brighter faith. 
 Feed us with the same and even dearer hopes. Comfort us with 
 the same and even holier consolations. Let to us, as to them, the 
 angel-band of thy messengers gird us round, and encompass us 
 with every heavenly thought of righteousness, with growing and 
 strengthening sense of duty, with ever broadening and deepening 
 love and charity, that thus we may make thy earth our heaven, 
 and our heaven our home with thee. Amen.
 
 III. 
 
 DISCOURSES. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE SYMPATHETIC NECESSITIES OF THE 
 KELIGIOUS LIFE. 
 
 ISAIAH xli. 6: 
 
 " They helped every one his neighbour ; and every one said to his 
 brother, Be of good courage." 
 
 ACTS ii. 1 : 
 " They were all with one accord in one place." 
 
 Ix a very celebrated poem of our age, we have brought 
 before us in the opening scenes "a student, a spiritual 
 searcher, one who had placed himself on the boundless 
 sea of human thought, steered his course in many direc- 
 tions, seeking a full acquaintance with the old and 
 known, and stretching out in search of the new and 
 unknown, but finding still no home for his spirit, no 
 resting-place on the broad waters of thought for him. 
 Regardless of the hopes and pursuits in which his fellow- 
 men around him are engaged, buried in his own thoughts, 
 torn by the doubts and desires which rack his own bosoni, 
 unwitting even of the circuit of the year and the progress 
 
 p 2
 
 212 DISCOURSES. 
 
 of the days in the calendar of Christ, he finds himself, 
 in his thoughtful solitude, on the eve of the day of 
 Easter. The night is spent in his usual experiment and 
 meditation ; the instruments of his toil are lying around 
 him ; another is added to the number of the days and 
 nights which lie has dedicated to a rewardless and hope- 
 less search ; the dawn of a new morning rests upon the 
 pale brow of the student, when the chime of sacred 
 bells is heard, the voice of a world's best hopes is raised ; 
 lie is awakened to the consciousness that while he is 
 pursuing a homeless, endless voyage on life's waters, 
 encountering rocks and quicksands, and black skies and 
 moonless nights, his fellow-creatures around him are in 
 a course that is defined, under a Pilot that may be trusted, 
 moving towards a Home that shall give them rest and 
 joy; and that they are going thither in company, cheered 
 by the same hopes, buoyed up by the same assurance, 
 helping each other on the way, and hoping to be happy 
 together in the end. 
 
 For the Easter hymn strikes upon his ear ; and though 
 he had heard it sung on each anniversary since he was 
 born, it now sounds to him as something new and strange, 
 and goes to his soul as the music of heaven rather than 
 the voice of man, telling the pale, sleepless, joyless, hope- 
 less student, 
 
 Christ 1st erstanden 
 
 Freude dem Sterblichen. 
 
 He hurries forth into the open light of the sun, on to 
 the bosom of God's earth, amidst the walk of his fellow- 
 creatures, within the sight of their countenances, the
 
 WITH OXE ACCORD. 213 
 
 hearing of their voices, the influence of their happiness, 
 the sense of their trials desiring to be restored to fel- 
 lowship with the great human family and to be once 
 more one of them seeking to share in the same faith 
 and hope which gladden them, that he may no more 
 be " a jarring and a dissonant thing amidst this general 
 dance and minstrelsy." 
 
 Yes, my friends, God speaks to us, Christ speaks to 
 us, through the voice of our fellow-creatures, through 
 the influence of human sympathies. Yes ; by our very 
 voice or presence we may help and strengthen each 
 other, and each may say to his neighbour, " Be of good 
 courage." When we are cold and weak, others may be 
 warm and strong ; when, in turn, the fire of their power 
 burns down, and the light of their lamp flickers, we may 
 be able to give them of our oil, and fan the smoking flax 
 that doubt and fear were quenching. 
 
 It was in this communion of faith and hope that 
 Christ especially sought to bind us. He seemed to think 
 that the soul in absolute solitude could wing no steady 
 flight. He seemed to think that the light of individual 
 thought might fail, the purpose of individual will turn 
 faint, the strength of individual faith decay ; that men 
 needed each the other to sustain each the one in the full 
 possession and enjoyment of those hopes and duties and 
 beliefs which appertained to their race and were common 
 to them all. 
 
 Thus, mark how, in the very beginning of the God- 
 directed course of the Christian faith, provision
 
 214 DISCOURSES. 
 
 made for this mutual support. Our Lord himself needed 
 an earthly encourager and strengthened and was pro- 
 vided with such a one in the friend of his childhood 
 and his manhood, his announcer and forerunner, the 
 Baptist John. Among the very first deeds of his own 
 special ministry is his selection of companions, associates, 
 witnesses. When he sends forth these again to the world, 
 he sends them forth by two and two. He binds them 
 together by special ties. He binds them together by the 
 tie of love to each other and to himself when he washes 
 their feet, by the tie of a common remembrance of him 
 when he institutes the Lord's Supper. He makes union 
 the subject of one of his concluding prayers to God, pray- 
 ing for it as binding together his disciples, himself, and 
 their Father. He provides for their meeting together 
 after he is gone, saying that when two or three of them 
 are gathered together in his name, there will he be in the 
 midst of them. The proof of Peter's love to him is to 
 be that he feed his lambs, and that (when he is converted) 
 he strengthen the brethren. 
 
 In fact, except in some rare, heroic breasts, a faith 
 which is left solitary and unaided by human sympathies 
 is sure to die away. Very few convictions can bear the 
 absence of all reflection from the hearts of others. When 
 we forsake the assemblings of our fellow-creatures for 
 any purpose, when we cease " all to be found with one 
 accord in one place" and ready to help our neighbour, 
 our interest in those causes, ideas or objects, to which 
 those assemblings are consecrated, becomes almost inva- 
 riably weaker and weaker, till at length it seems to perish 
 altogether.
 
 WITH ONE ACCORD. 215 
 
 We have only to observe the course of our own or 
 other people's lives, to find out that when men, design- 
 edly and consciously, or by simple negligence and almost 
 unconsciously, begin to dispense with this agency, begin 
 t} live as unto themselves, trimming indeed, it may or 
 may not be, their own lamps, but allowing the light 
 therefrom to stand in its own solitude, commingling with 
 no others, and multiplied and brightened by no others, 
 whatever the object in reference to which men cease to 
 meet and think and talk, or work or pray together, the 
 strength of their interest in those ideas or objects begins 
 to grow less, and at length will die out. It may continue 
 as an abstraction, but not as a reality. A man may even 
 suppose it to be there within him still ; but some day 
 when he calls for it, it shall not answer him. It has 
 ceased to be. 
 
 Our Lord, who knew the heart of man, made the 
 whole of his religion gather around this feeling. The 
 prayers he taught were social; the duties he enjoined 
 were largely social ; the hopes he inspired were common 
 and universal. He sought no one alone. When he 
 planted any seed of doctrine in the human heart, he set 
 two or three, or he set multitudes, to watch it and to 
 nurture it. 
 
 I do not mean that the individual soul was not the 
 one object of his spiritual care ; I do not mean to say 
 that the salvation that is by the gospel of Jesus Christ 
 can exist at all, except as the salvation of individual 
 souls. But I mean that human sympathy is the nutri- 
 ment on which God has ordained that religious faith
 
 21G DISCOURSES. 
 
 shall largely depend for continued life, and that it is 
 only by the communion of saints that there can, for the 
 most part, be any saints at all. 
 
 When our Lord speaks of his own death, what is it 
 that gives it to him its importance and its character ? 
 That all men by it shall be drawn unto him. When he 
 speaks of heaven, it is as a Father's home where there 
 are dwellings for many, w r here he himself goes, but, as 
 it were, that he may prepare places for others ; as the 
 kingdom in which they shall come from the east and 
 the west, from the north and the south, and sit down 
 together. His last acts on earth were to celebrate a 
 feast with his disciples, to take a walk and sing a hymn 
 together. He cannot go to heaven alone, but as he gazes 
 on the thief upon the cross, unites, in his infinite tender- 
 ness and humanity, that penitent wrong-doer with him 
 in his passage to the home of spirits. " This day shalt 
 thou be with me in Paradise." And even when it is all 
 over, and he is gone, he comes back again to say, " Go 
 to my brethren and tell them, I ascend unto my Father 
 and your Father, unto my God and your God." 
 
 And how sweetly, and how gradually and growingly, 
 had he been weaving the tender links of an everlasting 
 chain that was to bind them and us all together ! They 
 had been disciples and followers, later on even friends, 
 but at last he calls them brethren ; and so he binds him- 
 self to us all by a relation, not of accident, but of nature 
 an indissoluble relation. He is our brother, and there- 
 fore his brethren are our brethren ; his God, our God ; 
 his home, our home ; his heaven, our heaven.
 
 WITH ONE ACCORD. 217 
 
 Xo doubt each man must build upon his own founda- 
 tion. Xo doubt the dealing with our own souls, and the 
 culture of our own powers, and the nurture of our own 
 dispositions, is the essential and indispensable task of 
 each one of us. Xo doubt we are and shall remain 
 nothing, unless we make ourselves something. 
 
 But it is the characteristic of Christian hopes and 
 Christian graces that, individually received, they are 
 collectively maintained that their existence in one man 
 is meant to fortify and strengthen and extend their 
 existence in another ; that in these spiritual possessions 
 Christians must have all things in common ; and that 
 the rich in spiritual hopes and treasures must contribute 
 of his abundance, and even the poor of his poverty; that 
 that something which belongs to each shall help and 
 augment that something that belongs to others. The 
 individual man is not complete of himself, and never 
 was meant to be. 
 
 He is born, for instance, gifted with the power of 
 speech ; but place him from the first away from all inter- 
 course with his fellows, and he is dumb. He is born 
 gifted with the power of reason, but place him in the 
 solitude of the desert from his infancy, and the very 
 germ of that power will be blighted, and, ten chances to 
 one, he turns out an idiot. He is gifted, in like manner, 
 with religious affections and the hopes of an immortal 
 nature ; but place him out of the reach of that inter- 
 course, and those sympathies, and those supports, by 
 which such hopes and affections are, by mutual confirma- 
 tion and encouragement, strengthened and fostered, and
 
 218 DISCOURSES. 
 
 they in like manner will decay and wither, and become 
 at length extinct. 
 
 God has intended our individual spiritual life to 
 depend very much on our united spiritual life. Religion 
 is not a growth simply of the individual mind, a result 
 of a balance of arguments and considerations for and 
 against. It is a spirit permeating human life ; it is a 
 light whose greatest intensity is produced by the infinite 
 number of its reflections; it is an influence, living by 
 exchange. 
 
 Tell me not that you can, in the isolation of your own 
 heart and the solitude of your own thoughts, drive down 
 the sense of religion, the conscious belief in God, and 
 the hope of an immortal life, into something that is so 
 poor and tame and lifeless as to be nearly indistinguish- 
 able from extinction. Alas ! I know it. I know that 
 we can do these as well as many other perverse and 
 unhappy things for ourselves. I know that we can, if 
 we will, turn on one side all the blessings, of whatever 
 sort, God, with kind and lavish hand, would otherwise, 
 and if we came with open arms to receive them, shower 
 upon us. I know that we may live so long near the 
 North Pole, that thirty degrees of frost shall be warm to 
 us, and a Greenland city-home so close and suffocating 
 to us, that we prefer for comfort to lie out all night 
 under the open sky in the street. We may live so much 
 alone that at length the very sight of man becomes 
 almost hateful to us. We may neglect the use of our 
 limbs till we cannot stir them ; of our intellect, till we 
 are incapable of any effort of thought or acquirement;
 
 WITH ONE ACCORD. 219 
 
 and we may separate ourselves from the exercise, and 
 the expression, and the exchange of the higher hopes 
 and desires of our religious nature, till at length they 
 too lie torpid and almost dead within us. 
 
 It is of the greatest possible importance, then, to us 
 never to forget that, in addition to those considerations 
 of reason, of analogy, of history, and of the inner feelings, 
 on which we are wont to found our individual faith, and 
 very properly and very frequently to dwell, that faith 
 must receive its God-designed support from the reflected 
 faith and emotion of our fellow- worshippers and fellow- 
 believers, before it can know its own full power or behold 
 its completed work. 
 
 When we want to promote commerce, we meet on the 
 exchange ; when we want to promote production, we meet 
 in the mill or on the farm ; when we want to promote 
 music, we meet in the hall or the church ; when we 
 want to heal human suffering, we gather to the hospital ; 
 when we want to promote some great political improve- 
 ment, we go to our town's meeting ; when we want to 
 strike off manacles of servitude from the slave, the shades 
 of darkness from the ignorant, the misery of their sin 
 from the intemperate, the selfish and the vicious, we meet 
 together to cheer each other, and thus cheer ourselves 
 on in the good course we seek to run. Therefore, when 
 the purposes to be served are, not the w r ants of a special 
 class of men, but of the whole human race ; not a charity 
 in this direction or a charity in that, a grace, a pleasure, 
 a pursuit, an amusement, but the nurture of those uni- 
 versal sympathies and that all-uniting love and charity
 
 220 DISCOURSES. 
 
 which lie at the basis of all these, and out of whose 
 vitality all these spring, as rivulets from the same foun- 
 tain ; when the object is not a provision for the wants 
 of the body or the order of our present social life, but 
 a provision for wants that are imperishable and for a 
 society that is eternal ; when the sins to be driven away 
 are so sad, the sorrows to be soothed so tender and 
 so deep, the errors to be corrected so misleading and 
 weakening, and the laws to be observed and the habits 
 to be formed of so infinite a moment, we should be more 
 than ever anxious to seek and to give the support of 
 human sympathy, to be " all found with one accord toge- 
 ther," never allowing an absence that can be avoided to 
 maim the integrity of the body, or a single human heart 
 to languish in any great work or object for want of hear- 
 ing the words, " Be of good courage, my brother." 
 
 The lessons of Scripture, the words of prayer, the up- 
 rising sounds of holy song, receive a new meaning and 
 a new power when "all are found with one accord in 
 one place ;" and the needs of society and our duty to 
 great truths appeal with fresh force to our consciences, 
 when we see how earnestly our fellow-creatures are 
 working for them. For the sympathetic power is one 
 of the very greatest powers in human life ; and he knows 
 nothing of his own power to help and aid, or of the 
 highest possibilities of his spiritual nature, who does not 
 know of the hand to hand, and the eye to eye, and the 
 foot to foot, and the voice to voice, and the heart to 
 heart, which God, who made us, has ordained to be the 
 multiplying power of all our other powers, and the re- 
 of all our life.
 
 IT. 
 FAITH AND DOUBT. 
 
 MARK ix. 24: 
 " Lord, I believe ; help thou mine unbelief." 
 
 THESE words were really spoken. The seemingly irre- 
 concilable and contradictory nature of the two statements 
 they contain could not have been imagined ; nothing but 
 the real action and the positive experience of the human 
 heart could have created such a sentence as this. 
 
 These words were really spoken. They are too true 
 in spirit to be false in fact, have their origin too deeply 
 down in the heart to have merely fallen from the pen. 
 They cannot have been invented. They are too clearly 
 the result of actual feelings under life's actual experi- 
 ences. They form one of that long and as yet unex- 
 hausted array of coincidences with the probable, or 
 coincidences with human nature, or coincidences with 
 circumstances, or coincidences with themselves, (if I may 
 so describe consistency,) which have been rightly desig- 
 nated " undesigned." 
 
 It is the glory of the Gospel history, and the chiefest
 
 222 DISCOURSES. 
 
 evidence of its ethical fidelity, that it has a perpetual 
 evidence in our own breasts. So many of its thoughts 
 and statements are brought home to our hearts and 
 instantaneously claimed by them as their own. The 
 narratives, events, external circumstances, in the midst 
 of which they appear, are of course the subjects of ex- 
 ternal evidence, and are to be received or rejected accord- 
 ing to its laws. But the law of evidence which regulates 
 our reception or rejection of these thoughts and utter- 
 ances, these moral facts, is very near us and easily 
 discerned. 
 
 The heart recognizes them as her own, as parents are 
 said to recognize their offspring, not so much by the 
 array of register and evidence, as by the indelible tokens 
 and the irresistible feelings of consanguinity. 
 
 We look upon these truths and love them. We look 
 upon them and know them. We look upon them and 
 know that they are ours. Our nature speaks in, and 
 our nature rises up to meet, the words of our text this 
 day ; and compared with this fact, the fact of a father 
 in Galilee having uttered them sinks into comparative 
 insignificance, because we know that a thousand fathers 
 and a thousand mothers, and tens of thousands of human 
 souls, have felt and uttered them a thousand times in 
 all the ages and all the climes in which a belief in God 
 and his holy providence has prevailed. 
 
 "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief." The 
 interest of the Transfiguration scene itself almost pales 
 before the deep colours and passions of this contempo- 
 raneous human scene ; and in the memorial of his genius,
 
 FAITH AXD DOUBT. 223 
 
 called the Transfiguration, which the great painter of 
 Italy has left us, it has always seemed to ine that he 
 felt it so, and threw the greatest energy of his force and 
 sympathy into the scene below. Or else it was from 
 the pressure of a modesty, or a consciousness of inade- 
 quacy, which shrank from the delineation of the mystic 
 scene upon the Mount, that he flung his iutenser power 
 and his most discerning skill into the portrayal of that 
 scene below, that human scene, that scene of earth's 
 sorrows, earth's helplessness, earth's cares and doubts, 
 its fears and hopes. 
 
 The poor maniac boy, with his body braced to the 
 utmost tension of rigidity, his firm, outstretched arms, 
 with every muscle in full and frightful expansion, while 
 his eyes seem prompt to start from their very sockets ; 
 that mother's anxious countenance, bending in tears over 
 her child's distorted form, and gazing anxiously at the 
 stare of his glazed eye ; the younger figure of sisterly 
 affection, striving, but in vain, to soothe this frightful 
 malady and charm the evil spirit from the playmate that 
 she loved ; the father restraining with firm grasp the 
 vehemence of the possessed, though at the same time 
 raising the look and voice of earnest supplication to 
 those who were supposed to have the power to heal ; 
 and the apostles, challenged, urged, implored to the 
 exercise of this power, longing, doubting, timorous, per- 
 plexed ; all form a scene which thrillingly prepares us 
 for the descent of Jesus from the Mount, and for the 
 prayer of the father, " If thou canst do anything, have 
 compassion on us and help us." Jesus said unto him,
 
 224 DISCOURSES. 
 
 " If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that 
 believeth." And straightway the father of the child 
 cried out and said with tears, " Lord, I believe ; help 
 thou mine unbelief." 
 
 Does not the feeling of our own hearts in many of 
 our own moments of suspense and care, burst out, my 
 brethren, with that poor father's in these very words ? 
 
 Which of the many proofs that this is so shall I 
 select ? 
 
 This exclamation is the truthful expression of our 
 mental and spiritual condition in many questions of 
 opinion and of judgment, on many occasions of strong 
 hope and desire, in many seasons of grief and trial, in 
 many seasons of anxiety and earnest social action. 
 
 In the first place, then, in the more serious debates of 
 our judgment and the conscientious formation of our 
 opinions. 
 
 You know how hardly and how roughly the world 
 handles the subject of religious belief. You know that 
 while it allows time and deliberation, and even the fluc- 
 tuation of conviction or of bias, on almost every other 
 topic of thought, on that of Eeligion the most delicate, 
 the most difficult, the most important of all subjects of 
 thought it is inflexible in its demand for prompt and 
 decisive faith. A matter of feeling it will leave to the 
 fitful gusts of circumstance ; to the wayward fancies of 
 caprice ; to the strange and complicated and almost 
 opposing currents of emotion that career without clue 
 or guidance through the labyrinthine passages of the
 
 FAITH AND DOUBT. 225 
 
 human heart ; to the events of time or the accidents of 
 place ; to the thousand influences that will not be com- 
 manded and cannot be foreseen. A matter of taste it 
 will in like manner leave to the gradual or the quick 
 promptings of discernment, according to the moulding 
 of the soul. Sorrow it attempts not to measure in dura- 
 tion or to calculate in weight. Joy, it feels, it were vain 
 to leave to other than its own impulses, and meddles 
 not with the ebbing or flowing of its tides. A matter of 
 historical evidence it leaves to the result of historical 
 inquiry, and would no more ask for the definite decision 
 of a definite time, than it would prescribe the number 
 of volumes that the inquirer should peruse. A question 
 of scientific fact it leaves, without limit of time and 
 place, to be decided by the continuance of scientific 
 observation. But in affairs of religion it reverses its 
 whole style of feeling, of judgment and of action. You 
 must be in haste, lest you perish ; you must decide now, 
 lest the destined hour do pass ; you must rush in, lest 
 the door be closed ; you must be certain, if you would 
 be saved ; you must not doubt, lest perchance in the 
 interim you are damned. 
 
 Wherefore this change ? Wherefore this necessity for 
 instantaneous and positive decision, when the soul itself 
 is not in any way prepared for it ? 
 
 Does human nature, with its feelings and powers of 
 thought does human nature, with its laws of reasoning 
 and liability to error, with its doubts and difficulties and 
 uncertainties and delays, all change when it touches on 
 religion ? 
 
 Q
 
 226 , DISCOURSES. 
 
 If this be not the case, it will arise, in questions of 
 religious belief and sentiment, that we may not be pre- 
 pared to pronounce positively at a given time ; it may 
 arise that, when we think we have learnt to believe, a 
 doubt crosses our mind, and we have to raise the prayer, 
 " Lord, help thou mine unbelief" ; it may arise that there 
 is within ourselves a want of determinedness and reso- 
 lution in searching for, so as to find, the hidden jewel 
 of the truth, which we may lament, but cannot at the 
 moment control, and which is a fact at least of the time. 
 
 But from whatever cause the uncertainty arise, whether 
 from the defect of our own purpose and effort, or from 
 the insufficient character of the evidence before us, the 
 state of partial belief and partial doubt, the state of in- 
 certitude and unfixedness, however undesirable, however 
 painful, is for the time being the real, honest, true state 
 of our souls ; and to compel us to profession of certainty 
 while in that state, is to compel us to untruth. 
 
 Doubt is the appropriate state of our souls in such 
 circumstances. Doubt is our faith. The state of uncer- 
 tainty is our moral truth, and a correct representation 
 of the fact. 
 
 While the lambent lights of faith, and the fitful shades 
 of doubt while the scale of evidence, preponderating at 
 one time on one side, and then rising again perhaps to 
 equilibrium, are ours the truthful language of our souls 
 is found in these everlasting words, " Lord, I believe ; 
 help thou mine unbelief." 
 
 " Lord, I believe ; help thou mine unbelief." This is
 
 FAITH AND DOUBT. 227 
 
 often and often the language of our souls in strong desire 
 and hope. 
 
 Light and darkness alternate in our human as in our 
 earthly life. Fear succeeds to hope, and doubt to cer- 
 tainty, as we walk our course of discipline, eyeing the 
 future, and full of plans and hopes and wishes. 
 
 Sometimes the good we long or labour for is so great, 
 so essential, as we think, to our happiness, so completing 
 in its perfection, did we attain it, that we can scarcely 
 believe it is to be ours. In the very midst of satisfactory 
 progress, in the very midst of promises of attainment, 
 in the very midst of the sunshine and the light, which 
 force us to say, " Lord, I believe," there will often when 
 we consider the value of what we aim at, the greatness 
 of the good whereto we struggle to attain, how happy 
 we should be were the dear life spared us, were bright 
 health restored, were the wanderer back again, were the 
 success achieved, were the truth attained and doubt no 
 more darkened over us trespass a prevailing or a 
 succeeding feeling of terror and of insecurity, and our 
 language is, " Help thou mine unbelief." 
 
 The two states of mind will follow each other almost 
 as rapidly as their several enunciations, so as nearly to 
 blend and mingle together, and form a kind of compo- 
 site order of feeling. But who, I ask, but the careful 
 analyzer of the bosom's subtlest emotions could detect 
 this quick, light, passage of feeling, who but the truth- 
 ful, and the fearless in his truth could have ventured 
 on declaring it ? 
 
 The anxious father did believe in Jesus' power to aid 
 Q2
 
 228 DISCOURSES. 
 
 him, and he prayed the Lord to help his unbelief. He 
 desired intensely and ardently the blessing he petitioned ; 
 he looked on his suffering boy, and his very soul yearned 
 to witness his relief ; it was misery to see that form, 
 from which but now had shone the ruddy glow of child- 
 hood's happiness, torn and lacerated, rigid and deformed. 
 He believed all things ; he would trust in Jesus' power 
 to do for him exceeding abundantly ; but the very 
 intenseness of his anxiety brought along with it an 
 undefmable chill of sickening doubt. He believed but 
 he prayed the Lord to help his unbelief; he was certain 
 but he hoped he should be forgiven for doubting. 
 
 He looked at Jesus, with his mild, commanding brow, 
 the very throne of power, the very sanctuary to which 
 doubting souls would have recourse and drink in cer- 
 tainty, and he believed ; but he looked on his child, he 
 pictured him restored to a sound mind and a sound 
 body, and so overpowering a change was inconceivable 
 to him ; he felt the chilly touch of incredulity. 
 
 " Lord, I believe ; help thou mine unbelief." These 
 words are the truthful expression of our mental and 
 spiritual condition in many seasons of disappointment 
 and trial. 
 
 Brethren, we receive that great doctrine that a wise 
 Providence superintendeth all things. Whatever an 
 event appeareth, we know what it is ; it is well. Though 
 no chastening seemeth for the present joyous, but rather 
 grievous, nevertheless we know that it shall afterwards 
 yield the fruits of righteousness to them, that are exer-
 
 FAITH AND DOUBT. 229 
 
 cised thereby. Though we appear to be grieved for 
 God's arbitrary delight, we know that it is not so, but 
 that it is for our good. The doctrine of an all-good, all- 
 wise, all-powerful superintending Providence changes 
 the aspect of all sublunary things, and gives a stability 
 and a hope to life. Into the depth of darkness it flings 
 the penetrating beam of light ; into the fiercest wounds 
 of anguish it pours the soothing balm of comfort. It 
 stands at the opening of the tomb, and bids angels roll 
 the rock away. It turns all the history that the world 
 calls profane into sacred, and shows that the kingdoms 
 of this earth are the kingdoms of God. The very undu- 
 lations of progress it makes accelerators of speed ; and 
 the fiery furnace of a nation's punishment, the purifier 
 of its life. The tortuous path of the politician it makes 
 tortuous only to himself and his wily coadjutors ; its 
 sinuosities are lost when they are blended into the long 
 course of the Divine order. The harvest springs up 
 rich and luxuriant under the blood-stained steps of 
 conquerors, and the mighty sway of the universal Spirit 
 moulds all elements, however incongruous, all charac- 
 ters, however diversified, all events, however untoward, 
 all circumstances, however strange, into one bright har- 
 mony of result, its own high will. 
 
 Yes, we believe ; we have no choice but to believe. 
 By the constant declarations of the sacred page, by the 
 clear conclusions of our reason, by the stern necessity of 
 fact, we are driven into the faith that God is over all, 
 blessed for ever. 
 
 But I ask you, my brethren, when this belief is to be
 
 230 DISCOURSES. 
 
 exercised on the individual events of our life ; when faith 
 is to credit the good that cannot be discerned by sight ; 
 when light is to be believed in, though darkness alone 
 is to be seen : when smiles are gleaming in the distance, 
 though nought but tears are falling near us ; when re- 
 union is to be our trust, though bereavement is our lot ; 
 when the soul is to rise to health, though the restoring 
 waters are so bitter ; I ask, do we then entirely feel 
 and know that all is well ; and when we wring out the 
 words, " Lord, I believe," can we dispense, to be truthful 
 to ourselves, with the added, " help thou mine unbelief"? 
 No ; I am sure we cannot. Wearied with its sorrow, 
 the spirit sinks at night into its troubled rest and thinks 
 itself resigned; but at the early light of morning it 
 wakes, and it wakes to the consciousness of woe. At 
 early dawn it wakes, and familiarity with its trouble has 
 to be re-formed, and it has to become re-acquainted with 
 its grief, so as to understand only too well those sub- 
 duing words of that fine English poet, 
 
 " Wherefore, mourner, sleep not." 
 
 The sense of sorrow comes fresh upon us ; we wish we 
 had not parted with it; we almost wish we had not had 
 the respite ; we almost wish that the gnawing had not 
 ceased, that it might not have to begin all again. 
 
 The ruined had faced his own altered fortunes and the 
 world's altered looks ; he had resigned the splendour and 
 the grace of life, and in imagination walked contentedly 
 in its humbler path. The rebellious blood of his pride 
 no longer mantled on his brow; it flowed subdued within ;
 
 FAITH AND DOUBT. 231 
 
 he had taken up his cross and resolved to bear his 
 Maker's will, to trust for happier days, and to put forth 
 greater and wiser efforts to secure them ; he had learnt 
 to say, " I believe ;" but vanquished foes return in former 
 strength. Man's frown looks more terrific in the light 
 of day than it had done in the silent watches of the 
 night ; misfortune is more appalling in its many-visaged 
 sad reality than in the thought of its hypothetic presence ; 
 the soul bursts forth in the grief of its unreconciled 
 weakness, and the prayer comes murmuring forth, " Help 
 thou mine unbelief." 
 
 The bereaved had by the mingled indulgence of his 
 grief and prayer worn down the roughness of his anguish 
 and sweetened the bitterness of his lot ; and looking on 
 the brighter side of his afflictions, and discerning good 
 to the lost at least, if not to the left, said, " I believe." 
 But the temporary oblivion gave fresh vigour to the 
 reviving sorrow, and the flood-gates of feeling opened 
 again with the doors of memory ; he called back his 
 woe, and it was there to answer him ; it had been out 
 of sight, but now it had returned. 
 
 The dying had made a home in heaven and friends 
 above, and looked to the future world and its mansions 
 of love and blessedness, its tearlessness, its painlessness, 
 its untroubled peace, and said, " I believe." But daylight 
 brought again to each of these the homes of earth, and 
 the friends below, and the locking of human hearts, and 
 the clasped hand of affection, and they could not repeat 
 the prayer. Yes ; they repeated it perhaps ; but each 
 added, "Help thou mine unbelief."
 
 232 . DISCOURSES. 
 
 In all the waywardness of our soul, then, in all the 
 fluctuations of our fortunes, in all the mind's uncertain- 
 ties and perplexities, let us thank God that we have 
 one (who knows and reflects them all) to guide and 
 comfort us and rectify the balance of the soul ; thank 
 God that we have one, the elder Brother of our souls, 
 who himself prayed, " Let this cup pass from me ;" thank 
 God that we have one W 7 ho was so much one of us that 
 he reflects our weaknesses to turn them into his own 
 strength, reflects our doubts to turn them into his own 
 blessed assurance, reflects our death to turn it into life, 
 and who, even as we say to him, " Lord, I believe," looks 
 into our eyes and into our hearts, and at the very same 
 moment helps our unbelief. Amen.
 
 III. 
 
 THE TWO BLESSINGS, 
 
 GEN. xxvii. 38: 
 
 " Hast thou biit one blessing, my father ? Bless me, even me also. 
 my father !" 
 
 WERE the Scriptures simply an ancient literature, a 
 collection of ancient historical traditions, incidents of 
 early patriarchal life, and narratives of a nation's for- 
 tunes, instead of placing them on our table to be con- 
 sulted every day, we should place them on our shelves 
 with other venerable works of antiquity, to be referred 
 to from time to time for intellectual invigoration and 
 refreshment. 
 
 But they hold a far higher place and a far higher 
 value. The tone ringing from their pages is one of un- 
 paralleled solemnity and depth ; their lessons are of 
 world-wide moment ; their instructions of daily, hourly 
 application ; and their wisdom undying and eternal. 
 
 Thus in those deep, suggestive, throbbing words of our 
 text to-day. Were they uttered, think you, and pre- 
 served and handed down to us, merely as once spoken
 
 234 DISCOURSES. 
 
 in an emir's tent in Palestine ? Are they not echoed in 
 every land, in every home, in every heart, upon this 
 earth ? And do they not convey a world-wide, soul- 
 touching lesson, the suggestion of a great helpful truth, 
 to all the ages and to our whole humanity ? 
 
 " Hast thou but one blessing, my father ? Bless me, 
 even me, my father!" Thus lifted up his voice the 
 unblessed son. The father had given the only blessing 
 he supposed he had, the only blessing estimated by the 
 family as a blessing at all. The son wept ; the old man 
 thought ; at length he sees that all is not gone ; there is 
 something left, after all, for this poor lad. He had said 
 to the one, " God give thee of the dew of heaven, and 
 the fatness of earth, and plenty of corn and wine ; let 
 peoples serve thee, and nations bow down to thee, and be 
 lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother's sons bow 
 down to thee." What had he more to give ? He laid 
 his hand on his poor boy's head and slowly said, " Lo, 
 thy dwelling shall indeed be without the fatness of the 
 earth, and without the dew of heaven from above ; and 
 by thy sword thou shalt live, and shalt serve thy brother. 
 But a time shall come when thou shalt have dominion, 
 and break his yoke from off thy neck." 
 
 And so it is, all through, with us. A man is deprived 
 of or denied what is to him, or appears to him at the 
 moment, the one blessing of this earth, the one wish of 
 his heart, the object around which gather his hope, his 
 pride, his honour, his affections, his happiness. He 
 hears the fatal words, " It is gone ; before thou easiest, 
 it was given away." He cries with a great and exceeding
 
 THE TWO BLESSINGS. 235 
 
 bitter cry, and implores that it be not so, that it may 
 yet be given him. 
 
 But it is vain. The voice says, "Thy blessing has 
 been taken away." The sorrowing one remonstrates, 
 " Hast thou not it yet reserved for me ?" " No ; I have 
 given it away, and it is given away ; and what is left 
 me now to do to thee ?" 
 
 At length the prostrate spirit rises again, and says, 
 "Hast thou but one blessing?" The one valued one, 
 the one only one (as it appeared), is gone ; but perhaps 
 in that deep heart of a father's love there is another. 
 " Hast thou but one blessing, my father ? Bless me, 
 even me, my father!" 
 
 The father had given away the blessing, but he had 
 not given away all his love, and now he gives a love 
 that is greater than his blessing. He has given the corn 
 and wine of his providence, fertile fields and fruitful 
 vineyards and shining skies. He has given power and 
 command and title away ; but he has not given the 
 earth away, he has not given industry away, he has not 
 given the power of achieving independence away. Posi- 
 tion, headship, the already cultured land, the already 
 garnered wealth, he may indeed have given absolutely 
 away. But he has yet a blessing left. He says to his 
 sorrowing and despondent son, " Take the sword of 
 industry and go forth in hope ; and the dew of heaven, 
 now for the present denied thee, shall descend on thee, 
 at last, as on thy brother ; and the soil, from its native 
 barrenness, shall spring forth beneath the foot of toil 
 and reward thee with its fatness; the mountain-wood
 
 230 DISCOURSES. 
 
 shall be thine, and the spoils of the chase, and thou 
 shalt at length break the yoke of inferiority and servi- 
 tude, and rise, by thine own strong arm and will, to the 
 independence of a man." 
 
 And is not all this so throughout our lives also ? Has 
 the All-bountiful but one blessing for his children ? Has 
 he no gracious and tender answer even to the very Esaus 
 of his providence ? How often does it happen that the 
 particular kind of success we desired is denied us the 
 particular kind of toil or of life we loved, not allotted to 
 us, or is discontinued to us ! How often the particular 
 kind of happiness we desired for ourselves is not given 
 us the plans we most wished to succeed, failing, and 
 the hopes on whose fulfilment we had so long been 
 building, blighted ! And how often does it happen that 
 if we go to our Father, and ask him if he has only this 
 one blessing, he tells us of another not the one we 
 wanted, but the one. that perhaps is better for us, better 
 for mankind, better for our own ultimate and best happi- 
 ness, better for our character and soul 1 
 
 We have nothing to say against Jacob's blessing. If 
 well and wisely used, it is a great one. But we know 
 very well that it is not God's only one. 
 
 For see how it is with us. Here God seems to have 
 given away all his gift of wealth to your neighbour, 
 and reserved none for you ; he has sent all the food to 
 another man's house, and all the mouths to yours. You 
 are full of cares and anxieties and efforts, struggling 
 through the long early years to feed and clothe and 
 house and educate your children, and finding, when all
 
 THE TWO BLESSINGS. 237 
 
 tliis is done, it is nothing compared with the difficulty, 
 involving many a sleepless night, of maintaining and 
 preparing them for a calling in life or settling them in it. 
 God had a blessing of wealth and competence, and he 
 has given it away. But afterwards you find he had 
 another blessing, and he had kept that in store for you. 
 
 Your children grow up hardy, self-denying, indus- 
 trious, a blessing and a comfort to you, a usefulness and 
 helpfulness to the world, and perhaps bring you up to 
 the Egypt of their abundance, to spend your old age in 
 peace and honour with them ; and you find that God 
 had one blessing more, the blessing of good children. 
 
 For, behold ! another man comes before you who has 
 none of these cares, for he has no children. And yet 
 for long years perhaps his cry to God was for this one 
 blessing, and God has denied it to him. At length he 
 says, " Hast thou no other blessing, my Father ?" 
 And in many sorrows and losses saved him ; in bitter 
 bereavements and bitterer disappointments spared him ; 
 in competence and freedom from worldly cares secured 
 him ; in a heart at leisure from itself to soothe and sym- 
 pathize, and thus to become the light of other homes, 
 and to carry help and comfort and instruction into 
 regions needing them, regions both blessed and tried in 
 a different way from his ; in opportunities for benefiting 
 the world, of enjoying the friendship of coevals, and the 
 society of the wise and good, how surely shall he find 
 at last, if he will listen to the voice of God in his 
 destiny, that God has in truth reserved another blessing 
 for him, and blessed even him also I
 
 238 DISCOURSES. 
 
 " Hast thou but one blessing, my Father ?" And 
 the child of sickness looks on the joyous possessor of 
 health, looks upon activity from a couch of perhaps 
 nearly life-long confinement ; and God presently shows 
 him that he has a blessing also reserved for him. For 
 while health and energy are doing God's will, sickness 
 and patience are bearing it. While health and energy 
 go forth among God's works in Nature, sickness and 
 patience hear God's words in the chamber; and that 
 sick chamber perhaps becomes the centre of an outflow- 
 ing influence so refined, so gracious, so encouraging, so 
 instructive, so promotive of good feelings to all around, 
 and of a peace within that passeth understanding, that 
 at length the sufferers themselves, and all their world 
 about them, say with conviction and surprise that God 
 had had another blessing, of which they and we before- 
 hand knew not, reserved even for these, and hath blessed 
 them, even them also, his children. 
 
 And so, brethren, throughout this human life and all 
 its strange, mysterious inequalities and apparent unjust- 
 nesses of lot the poor looking in the face of the rich, 
 the sick in the face of the sound, the ill-favoured in the 
 face of the comely, the slow in the face of the clever, 
 the weak in the face of the strong, the tried and the 
 deprived in the face of the prosperous and abounding, 
 and men everywhere forced against their wills into some 
 unwelcome toil, or self-denial, or unattractive path of 
 duty the Almighty Father is watching over us ; and if 
 he withholds from each of us (as from each of us, at 
 one time or other, he most surely does) the blessing on
 
 THE TWO BLESSINGS, 239 
 
 which we had set our hearts, the blessing for which we 
 had supplicated, the blessing the taking away or with- 
 holding of which we had bewailed with a great and 
 exceeding bitter cry, yet for each one of us, if we will 
 look around us, we shall most surely find there is reserved 
 by this kind Hand that other blessing with which he 
 will bless us, even us also. 
 
 And at the last there are those eternal beatitudes 
 which nothing can take away from any one of us at any 
 time comfort for the mourner, satisfying for them who 
 hunger and thirst after righteousness, mercy for the 
 merciful, peace for the peace-makers, the sight of God 
 for the pure in heart. Amen.
 
 IV. 
 
 FOE THE SAKE OF OTHEES. 
 
 JOHN xvii. 19 : 
 
 " And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be 
 sanctified through the truth." 
 
 THERE is a doctrine of the Eeal Presence against which 
 the Protestant would not protest, and it is this : that 
 when his friends and followers gather around the table 
 of him who said, " Do this in remembrance of me," he is 
 really present with them in spirit and in truth. 
 
 There is a doctrine of Incarnation which the Eational- 
 ist himself would not be eager to gainsay, and it is this : 
 that the great Creator may and does dwell among his 
 creatures ; that the power of the Most High may and 
 does overshadow the sons and the daughters of men ; 
 and the very Spirit of God, the good and the tender, may 
 and does reside in human breasts and in human life. 
 
 Finally, there is a doctrine of Sacrifice which is no 
 stumbling-block even to the Unitarian, and it is this : 
 that Jesus Christ subjected his spirit to the martyrdoms 
 of earth, spent his days in the anxieties of spiritual toil 
 and teaching, and laid down his dear life in silent death,
 
 FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS. 241 
 
 that he might be a saving help and guide to man, and a 
 quiet comforter to all who are in trouble. 
 
 " For your sakes." I do not want, and I cannot and I 
 never did receive, that dreader and yet poorer, that more 
 startling but less true, that more popular yet less divine 
 meaning, which the technical and the professional inter- 
 preters of Christianity, to whom the mind and soul of 
 man have been under a too long subjection, have attached 
 to these noble words. For they say the first of our race 
 transgressed a divine commandment, and for this the 
 whole of our race will suffer for eternity, until and unless 
 the Son come, take their sins and their penalties upon 
 his own shoulders, suffer the punishment supposed to be 
 due for the original misdemeanour, and die in our stead, 
 the just suffering, not for, but instead of, the unjust, 
 and the innocent suffering, not for, but instead of, the 
 guilty. In the prosecution of this mistaken interpreta- 
 tion, Calvin, with that stern logical consistency which 
 characterizes the man, but which was after all insufficient 
 for the emergency, maintained that Christ did really 
 descend into hell and suffer the pains of the damned. 
 
 But when we ask how the sufferings of thirty-six 
 hours, or even of a short life, can in any sense be the 
 suffering of eternity, we see that the idea arises, as the 
 whole of this singular conception does, from a supposed 
 theological necessity, from an imaginary case and prece- 
 dent, so to speak, in the heavenly courts, and not from 
 any eternal necessity of truth or of God. 
 
 No, brethren; believe me I say it seriously and I 
 
 R
 
 242 DISCOURSES. 
 
 say it sadly this is mythology, not Christianity ; the 
 mercy, the justice, the logic, of divines, not of the 
 Divine. 
 
 This artificial and transmitted sin, this artificial and 
 transferred punishment, this parody on the judicature 
 even of earthly courts, so far from penetrating, does not 
 even approach to comprehending, the deep, the serious, 
 the tender, the heart-stirring and life-moving meaning 
 of the words of the holy and the beautiful One, " For 
 your sakes." 
 
 His weary march through the world's unysmpathizing 
 hardness his conflict with the ignorance that could not 
 understand him, and with the infidelity that sought only 
 to entrap him. his mental isolation and his spiritual 
 solitude a refined and sensitive frame and nature, 
 buffeted by vulgarity, spit upon by coarseness, scourged 
 and dragged and nailed and insulted and crucified by 
 brutality gentle, patient, firm, forgiving, throughout it 
 all teaching wise lessons for our daily life, lifting up 
 our souls to the lofty and the good, comforting those of 
 us who were in sorrow, healing those of us who were 
 sick, and converting those who were in sin bearing his 
 Father's will for us, that we might learn obedience 
 dying for us, that we might know with what weakness 
 as well as with what strength we might meet our own 
 final hour the immortal having death, and the dying 
 yet alive, that we might know that death is not the 
 end-all of us here turning upon us still an eye of 
 pensive affection, and showing by the mysterious and 
 impalpable influences of spiritual intercourse that he is
 
 FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS. 243 
 
 in communion with us still, when we consider that he 
 was all this, and did all this, for no isolated being and 
 no solitary age and no single country that he was all 
 this and did all this, in order that every fainting spirit 
 in every far-off age, in every far-off laud, in every variety 
 of lot, in every variety of duty, might look up to him 
 and take fresh courage in his work by that sight, might, 
 weary and heavy-laden, go to him for rest, when we 
 consider how, as a matter of fact, this aim has been 
 accomplished, and how many million souls have, as a 
 fact, gone through their walk of life, sitting at his feet 
 for daily counsel, reading his words for daily strength, 
 and looking to his example for holy guidance, when 
 we reflect how many million souls have remembered his 
 agony in the garden, and taken comfort from the words 
 of weakness, "Father, let this cup pass from me," and 
 from the words of returning strength, "Nevertheless, 
 not as I will, but as thou wilt ;" how many million 
 souls have met the otherwise dark approach of death, 
 saying in the confidence of a like faith, " Father, into 
 Thy hands I commend my spirit ;" how many million 
 souls have risen to their futurity, happily and triumph- 
 antly, because of the words, " In my Father's house 
 are many mansions," we can surely understand what 
 a motive, stretching almost into infinity, and what an 
 object, embracing the highest welfare of the universal 
 race, must have filled and animated the soul of Jesus as 
 he said in his prayer to God, looking upon his disciples, 
 and through them on all coming generations and all 
 coming time, " For their sakes I sanctify myself." 
 
 R2
 
 244 DISCOURSES. 
 
 And do we suppose for an instant that Jesus stood, 
 or was intended to stand, alone in the world, a some- 
 thing to be simply gazed at and admired ? He shared 
 our nature, and we share his. He shared our strengths 
 and weaknesses, our joys and griefs, our falls and 
 triumphs, our hopes and fears, our death and iminor- 
 talit}', and we share his. 
 
 Did this great motive and this great object, to act 
 and live for the sake of others, first live with him or 
 then die with him ? Have they not lived, in more or 
 less strength, in the former ages, and do they not now 
 live among ourselves, and ought they not to do so ? In 
 every human breast the same great passion may glow, 
 and in every breast of man the same enthusiasm of 
 humanity. And every good man now, in his life and 
 in his love, is a branch of that fruitful Vine, and forms 
 part of the evidences of Christianity. 
 
 It is not that the life of Christ is to be or can be lived 
 over again by any other. God does not repeat himself. 
 England is different from Galilee; the nineteenth century 
 differs from the first; manners, customs, duties, social 
 conditions and social requirements, all differ. We our- 
 selves differ in a thousand ways (though sharing the same 
 general nature with him) from Jesus Christ; and the 
 office and duties we have to fulfil, as well as the powers 
 and gifts with which we have to fulfil them, are different 
 ah ! how different I It is the spirit of the gospel, not 
 the letter, that is to animate us ; it is the soul and heart 
 and ready hand of sympathy in Jesus Christ that are to 
 quicken us by the touch of their cordial influence. He
 
 FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS. 245 
 
 thus, as it were, gathers to and incorporates in himself 
 the beautiful spirit of the past and the glorious hopes of 
 the future. 
 
 " For the sake of others." Time will never allow to 
 die the memory of that beautiful tale of the two young 
 Pythagorean co-religionists, which relates how the one, 
 Pythias, offered his life that his friend might be allowed 
 to go free for a brief while, and the other, Damon, 
 returned at the appointed moment to give back in 
 honour the offering made by generosity ; and the tyrant 
 himself, smitten by their fidelity, asked, instead of the 
 lives, for the friendship of those two men. The Greek 
 tragedian drew the warm tears of tenderest admiration 
 from his Athenian audience when he showed them a 
 woman bravely descending into the tomb, that her not too- 
 deserving husband might still be permitted to continue 
 in life. The whole cultivated mind of antiquity collected 
 round the base of that rock on which lay chained the 
 Prometheus who had snatched from heaven the gift of 
 light and knowledge for man, and listened to the groans 
 of his suffering soul with an almost religious veneration. 
 
 In turning from the world of Heathenism, but still of 
 human nature, to the world of Scripture, which is also 
 that of human nature, though of human nature surveyed 
 by the light of a diviner wisdom and disciplined by 
 the processes of a holier faith, we see the young Moses 
 turning from the pomp and luxury of the court, from 
 the learning and refinement of the temple, choosing 
 rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, and
 
 246 DISCOURSES. 
 
 esteeming the reproach of the anointed greater riches 
 than the treasures of Egypt. There, too, we see that 
 Euth who will not go back, but will face the uncertain 
 path of an uncertain future, rather than leave the 
 widowed mother desolate ; and young Jonathan, for the 
 sake of David, his friend, braving even to the risk of 
 life the wrath of the jealous and half-maddened monarch. 
 
 These things stand out in the world's history, to be 
 gazed at with ever new admiration. Generation rises 
 up after generation and bows before the same images. 
 Children, turning over the same pages which their 
 fathers turned over, pick out the same points and single 
 out the same narratives. And this happens because 
 these things are symbols of what is in the inner man, 
 because they give expression to the ever-recurring reali- 
 ties of our nature, and are to the soul the mirror of its 
 own tenderest affections and purest respects ; and from 
 the beginning of time the world has ever stood up in 
 love and jubilee around the image of him who has done 
 the great deed or undergone the great sorrow for the 
 world's or for another's sake. 
 
 In truth, the motives that spring from the will of 
 solitary selfishness are not only confessedly poor and 
 low, but are very commonly found also to be feeble and 
 inadequate. His own wants and his own wishes furnish 
 a man with a comparatively weak armoury of resolves, 
 and a still more meagre catalogue of performances. 
 
 You will often find that he grows indifferent to them ; 
 and as supplying motives to action, they cease to operate 
 upon him with any energy and force. o He would rather,
 
 FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS. 247 
 
 it appears at length, submit to the annoyance, than 
 make the exertion necessary to remove it continue in 
 the unbefitting indulgence, rather than gird himself up 
 to say, "This is my infirmity" suffer indignity and 
 want, rather than earnestly betake himself to the course 
 that should put an end to them and yield to the vice 
 that is destroying him, rather than put himself to the 
 extreme trouble of resisting it. But the thought of 
 others will often alter all this, and send forth a breath 
 of reviving air to the feeble flame that, without it, was 
 dying in the embers. 
 
 " For the sake of others." When this idea has entered 
 into a human soul, that soul is invested with a new 
 power, an altered life. Things around seem to have 
 changed their nature. The piece of self-denial, in itself 
 so unalluring the effort of action, in itself so irksome 
 come at last to have something actually joyous and wel- 
 come in them, when sanctified by the thought accom- 
 panying them that they are done, that they are borne, 
 for others. 
 
 Watch that man ; look at his glazed and leaden eye ; 
 look at his dispirited and downcast countenance the 
 knit brow, the lines on the anxious cheek, the drooping 
 hands, the feeble and paralyzed frame. Why, one short 
 hour after, do I see all this changed ? Why do I see a 
 light in the languid eye, a ray of manly hope on the 
 contracted forehead, a right foot moved firmly forward, 
 and the hands grasping in a determined hold the task 
 of the day, the work that shall be done ? It is because 
 the thought of another has shot through his bosom.
 
 248 DISCOURSES. 
 
 The absent boy has thought of the mother that is at 
 home, and for her sake, though not at the moment for 
 his own, in compassion for her tears, in answer to her 
 prayeis, (that, as St. Augustine so beautifully records 
 concerning himself and his mother, " the child of so 
 many tears and prayers may not be lost,") he seizes the 
 clinging serpent of the temptation to sloth or to vice 
 that was assailing him, strangles the power that, uri- 
 grappled with, would have destroyed him, and moves 
 on, in the newly-discovered power of a young Hercules, 
 to the glorious labours that await him. 
 
 The husband has bethought him of his wife, the 
 father of his little ones, the brother of his brother. 
 This man begins to think of some suffering fellow-crea- 
 ture, and turns out at length the Philanthropist; and 
 that looks at the struggles of the free-inquirer and the 
 oppressions of the lover, of truth, and becomes the Con- 
 fessor. 
 
 Each one, but an hour before, looking at the course 
 of painful duty that lay outstretched before him, had 
 whispered to his fainting heart, "There is a lion in. 
 the path ;" but stood up, in fresh and strengthened 
 courage, when his better soul replied, " For the sake of 
 others." 
 
 If I go not now, that poor man, whom no one in the 
 whole world, out of his own street, knows but I, will be 
 waiting for me in cheerlessness and giving up hope. 
 
 If I do not this, that child that runs about the courts 
 and streets, picking up, it is almost a compliment to say, 
 the knowledge of good and evil, (for it is nearly exclu-
 
 FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS. 249 
 
 sively evil that lie is learning,) will grow up a pest to 
 our society, and a poison to the atmosphere of earth. 
 
 If I do not this, that great evil that is under the sun, 
 by the destroying car of which men are perishing by 
 thousands, will go on unchecked, and one hand less will 
 be engaged in its removal. 
 
 If I do not, bear not, this, the battle of Truth will be 
 prolonged, its martyrs multiplied, its victory deferred. 
 
 If I do not, bear not, this, some heart that beats with 
 mine must be distressed, some lives that lean on mine 
 be soiled or troubled. 
 
 And this thought, " For the sake of others," I say, not 
 only causes that the effort shall be made, the trial borne, 
 the sacrifice rendered ; but the consciousness for whom 
 and for what for those we love on earth, for those we 
 love in heaven, for brethren and family and friends, for 
 Jesus and good men, for God and the whole world the 
 thing is to be done, changes it from a dull and laborious 
 task into a holy and joyous duty; and the lights of 
 affection, of piety, of the noble consciousness of a victory 
 over oneself, and a prospect of some good to be done to 
 man and to the world, gather around and sanctify and 
 bless it. 
 
 The general, who leaps from his horse to march at 
 the head of his dispirited troops, and share with them 
 in all the fatigues and deprivations of the road, while he 
 warms his own blood, puts fresh life into the bosoms 
 of his men. And Alexander the Great, when he poured 
 out upon the ground before his thirsting army the goblet 
 of precious water that was brought for his own re-
 
 250 DISCOURSES. 
 
 freshment, struck, as it were, water from the rock of 
 those disastrous circumstances, and visited every faint- 
 ing soul with the dew of a fresh courage. 
 
 Yes; and, thank God! this spirit of heroism has not 
 died out of the world yet. As God, who spake in the 
 olden time, has not ceased to speak yet, so speaks still 
 the human heart that once said, "For your sakes." 
 
 I have been told that some years since, on occasion of 
 a rapid and destructive fire in London, one at least of 
 the firemen perished in his gallant efforts to check the 
 flames. The Prince of Wales, who at that time, with a 
 young nobleman belonging to a family distinguished for 
 its goodness as well as its rank, was often out with the 
 fire-brigade, and was out with it then, made inquiries 
 about the widow and children, with a view to a provi- 
 sion for the one and the education of the others, and he 
 asked what the boys would like to be brought up to. 
 The answer of the lads, with their father's scorched 
 corpse before them, was, " Firemen." 
 
 But I need not go so far back. This very April [1877] 
 the heart of all Britain thrilled for the heroes that toiled 
 night and day in the Ty-newydd mine at Pont-y-pridd, 
 to rescue their brothers from the jaws of a hideous death. 
 
 Oh ! could I but unwrap to you too, in far more 
 common life than all of these, the disguises under which 
 many a man that walks along our streets unnoticed, 
 holds within his bosom the spirit of a hero, how well 
 should I be able to persuade you of the fertile power of 
 the thought, " For the sake of others" ! With what con- 
 scious joy he goes on practising the little or the great
 
 FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS. 251 
 
 efforts and self-denials, of which the world around him 
 is all unconscious, (and which would appear trifling and 
 unimportant to that world, perhaps, if it were conscious 
 of them,) but which spread within the man's own heart 
 a sense of happiness sweeter than he never knew before ! 
 So that at length you can penetrate into the beautiful 
 mystery, the strange meaning of his smile, as he looks 
 into the countenances of those for whom, in his own 
 family or the families of others, he is bearing or doing 
 or suffering, and his heart whispers to him one of the 
 great interpreting motives of his life, in the words, " For 
 your sakes." 
 
 Yes ; we have all around us, and always around us, 
 those who will take courage from our example if we do 
 right, and sorrow and perhaps ruin from our example if 
 we fall. We have all around us, and always around us, 
 those who in some way or other either cannot or will 
 not help themselves, and from whose very souls comes 
 up the appealing cry, " For our sakes." 
 
 Our private life, our public life, our neglected popu- 
 lations, our sick, our insane, our crippled, our ignorant, 
 our wicked, our fallen and our falling ones, the children 
 in our streets, the children in our schools, all unite in 
 a cry that will reach the ears of Heaven if it reach not 
 the heart of man, " For our sakes."
 
 V. 
 THE LIFE WITHIN AND THE LIFE WITHOUT. 
 
 DANIEL v. 10: 
 
 " Let not thy thoughts trouble thee, nor let thy countenance be 
 changed." 
 
 WE walk up and down this earth, we erect dwellings, 
 feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, expend stores for the 
 day and lay up stores for the morrow, and yet we do 
 not live in these things. Our life is not in any or in all 
 of them. 
 
 We lay the hand of labour on the dark soil ; we carry 
 its produce from the field and garner it. Our brows 
 throw out the heavy drops of sweat as we toil at the 
 anvil or the forge. We follow with nice hand the run- 
 ning shuttle, and apply the exact eye to the fabric when 
 completed. We drag and build and sell and buy ; and 
 all these things are material, and yet our life is not 
 material. 
 
 Every moment that we consciously exist, we are call- 
 ing into exercise some sense. We are moving, seeing, 
 tasting, touching or hearing ; and yet our life is not a 
 thing of limb or motion, of sound or taste or sight. It
 
 THE LIFE WITHIN AND THE LIFE WITHOUT. 253 
 
 is, in spite of all these surroundings, to all of us a 
 spiritual thing, and we cannot make it other. For our 
 life is in our thoughts ; and whatever may be outside 
 us, we do not live except by what is within us. 
 
 Overcome with weariness, you shall fall asleep at the 
 seat of your daily toil. The tools and instruments of 
 your calling are all about you; the materials of your 
 fabric, half-executed orders and articles, finished or un- 
 finished, are piled up close around you. Or if the seat 
 of your toil shall be a table or a desk, your plains and 
 schemes, your speculations and reasonings, your persua- 
 sive arguments and your moral forces, your books, your 
 opened letters, or your unfinished manuscripts, pictures, 
 work, are all around you as before. But you are not 
 there. Your outward life is the same, but you are not 
 the same. In fact, you are not you at all. The senses 
 convey no more impressions ; the intellect is not acting ; 
 you might be anywhere or nowhere it would be the 
 same as far as your consciousness is concerned. For the 
 clock of your thoughts has stopped. You are alive, but 
 you are not living, because you can only live in your 
 thoughts, and now you have none. 
 
 You shall arrive a few hours after dark in a gorgeous 
 scene of Nature. The Alp shall rear itself above you ; 
 the torrent shall dash by your feet ; the air shall be 
 clear and cool around you, and the breathing machine 
 of the body shall preserve its ordinary functions ; but 
 none of these things exist to you ; you are lying in the 
 midst of them, but not living among them ; for our life is 
 in our thoughts, and your thoughts are drugged in sleep.
 
 254 DISCOURSES. 
 
 Thus also in our waking world. Things may be around 
 us that are fair and lovely, and yet they may impart to 
 us no consciousness of beauty ; things may be around 
 us that are harsh and painful in their own nature, and 
 yet touch us with no sense of pain ; and things may be 
 around us that are in themselves desirable and good, and 
 yet give us no happiness or delight. For the outward 
 thing is nothing in itself, except in so far as it becomes 
 an inward thing. There is no joy or pain, no feeling in 
 the things themselves ; the joy or the pain is in us. 
 
 Notwithstanding all our environment, then, notwith- 
 standing all our panting and struggling for the things 
 that can be seen and felt, our life is, after all, in our 
 thoughts ; and even our sorrows and happinesses, even 
 our wealth and want, even our health and sickness, are 
 all, wholly or in great part, of the heart within. 
 
 It was well said to the perplexed and frightened king, 
 " Let not thy thoughts trouble thee." For though there 
 was an outward writing on the wall, it was not that that 
 troubled him ; it was the inward writing in his heart 
 that was the scroll of fear and caused his countenance 
 to be changed. 
 
 In a drunken revel he sent for the sacred vessels, and 
 would have them touched by every profane and sensual 
 lip around him. The sacrilege gave piquancy to the 
 feast. These cups had been used in the worship of the 
 High God, and mortal hand was not to touch them for 
 any earthly purpose. The frantic monarch, then, snatched 
 a fearful joy ; and when the joy vanished, the fear 
 remained. The writing on the wall was not compre-
 
 THE LIFE WITH IX AND THE LIFE WITHOUT. 255 
 
 hencled by him. To the good man, therefore, there was 
 no reason why it should not be a token of joy, a har- 
 binger of peace. Why was it not to the monarch ? Why 
 were the joints of his loins loosed, and why smote his 
 knees one against another ? Not because the hand 
 wrote upon the wall, but because another hand had 
 written something also in his heart ; because he could 
 alone live the life of his thoughts, and his thoughts 
 troubled him. 
 
 And so with ns. There is doubtless an outward life 
 to all of us not without its influence upon us, a hand- 
 writing on the wall of our material chamber not without 
 its awakening, its alarming or its cheering interpretation 
 and effect. I am not here to say with the stoic, "The 
 thing that is outside us matters not ; I am king, what- 
 ever happens." I am not here to say that penury and 
 competence, disease and health, weariness and rest, cap- 
 tivity and liberty, are the same thing ; but more with 
 the apostle, " If thou mayst be free (and so with other 
 advantages), choose it rather." 
 
 For I think it one of the worst of the hypocrisies men 
 practise, to make it a rule to say on a given day and in 
 a given place, " Earth is nothing ; this life is worthless ; 
 gold is dross ; pleasure and ease and comfort and com- 
 petence are not entitled to a moment's thought, or worthy 
 of even a passing wish ;" and then all the rest of our time 
 to seek after every one of these things with a diligence 
 as great and a perseverance as anxious as if they were 
 the very kingdom of heaven. 
 
 These things are realities, as much as this earth and
 
 256 DISCOURSES. . 
 
 this world, this body and this sense, are realities, and 
 universal human nature has proclaimed them so from 
 the beginning of time; and in spite of the denunciation of 
 preacher and prophet, men go away and seek after these 
 very things until they find them. They prefer health to 
 sickness; they prefer abundance to want; they prefer 
 honour to dishonour ; and the outward lot of course, 
 whether as cause or as effect, or partly both, has an 
 influence, and a great influence, on the character of the 
 inward life. 
 
 In the truth which I am now endeavouring to bring 
 home, then, I do not mean to deny or question these 
 facts of our nature and of Providence. What I mean 
 to say is, that there are sources of joy and peace quite 
 apart from and independent of these sources of discom- 
 fort, not arising from their absence sources of delight 
 not arising from their presence ; that there is not only a 
 modifying and mingling, but a transmuting power within 
 us, that can so differentiate and infuse itself into the 
 waters of life, that the bitterness in them shall be less 
 and less present to the taste ay, alas ! or the sweetness 
 in them either. And hence actually (more than from 
 without) comes the life we lead. 
 
 All our mental and all our moral and all our spiritual 
 and religious culture are directed to the creation and 
 the strengthening of this power. This day, this hour, 
 this institution of worship and of the higher growth, are 
 devoted to procure the victory of this power, and the 
 erection of its shining throne within our hearts. 
 
 We are not here now to promote the external blessings
 
 THE LIFE WITHIN AND THE LIFE WITHOUT. 257 
 
 and ornaments of life ; we are not here to promote what 
 are called the arts of life. We acknowledge the reality 
 and influence of these things. But we already give 
 much time to them. We have perhaps been busy about 
 them the week through. Many who are not among us 
 are busy about them now ; and some perhaps who are 
 among us are busy with them still in their secret 
 thoughts. 
 
 We are not, however, come together for this. We are 
 come, not indeed to supplant or suppress, but to supple- 
 ment them ; to hallow, uplift, enrich our every-day life 
 by a breath from the higher world of the higher and 
 purer thought. 
 
 For, I say, our life is in our thoughts, and our life is 
 as our thoughts. And be we where we may, or be we, 
 externally, what we may, every man has the power 
 within him to build as he likes, and furnish as he likes, 
 a palace for his soul to dwell in, and that crystal dwell- 
 ing is his home, and there he lives. 
 
 We never know how much that is in outward contact 
 with a man is in inward contact with him ; we never 
 know how much actually reaches the seat of his feel- 
 ings and his soul. We do not know how much or how 
 little the wealth and splendour which decorate one man 
 really move him, or the absence of these things in 
 another affect him with any, even the slightest, pain. 
 We all of us probably know persons surrounded by 
 every external means of happiness who are not happy. 
 One day they encounter some one else who has some- 
 thing which they have not, or, if they have it, have it 
 
 s
 
 258 DISCOURSES. 
 
 better or finer than they. Another day they have been 
 crossed in some self-glorifying purpose. On other days 
 they suffer from some slight, or their hearts have been 
 laden with some ill-will. Are they happy in the midst 
 of what are generally believed to be, and sometimes are, 
 and always ought to be, happiness-producing advantages ? 
 They are not, because they, as all of us must do, live in 
 their thoughts, and their thoughts are their misery. 
 
 But a man once came and stayed with me in Yorkshire 
 who came from a quiet home and garden in America, 
 from a very simple outward life. He was surrounded 
 with nothing. He was altogether in very little compass. 
 He had nothing, to all appearance, but himself, and what 
 he almost carried in his hands. And yet his coun- 
 tenance was serene, affectionate and noble. It was 
 Emerson. 
 
 There was not much about him, I say. He seemed, 
 as it were, to work his passage. But within his bosom 
 was the wealth of a great humanity, lifting him up 
 to the stature of noble spiritual independence ; high 
 thoughts filled his soul, and sometimes burst out in 
 words. He was living with the best thoughts of the 
 best men of all ages, and with the kindest thoughts of 
 the kindest men to the men that were around him 
 seeking to enrich himself with the wisdom of the wise, 
 to refine himself with the purity of the pure, and bless 
 himself and others with the benevolence of the good. 
 He lived in his thoughts. 
 
 And so do we all ; and, what is more, wherever God 
 may place our bodies, or whatever be our outward lot,
 
 THE LIFE WITHIN AND THE LIFE WITHOUT. 259 
 
 (not always within our own power of choosing,) we can 
 choose our inner lot, we can choose what kind of life we 
 will live in our thoughts. 
 
 You know, my friends, these are not mere words ; you 
 know and feel a power within you telling you they are 
 true. You know we can choose whether we will spend 
 our hearts on little silly cares that weaken and degrade 
 us, or fill them with the cares of a loftier cheer that 
 strengthen us and raise us. You know we can choose 
 whether we will fill our breasts with little flashes of 
 anger, with hot coals of jealousy, with mean feelings of 
 ill-will and paltry triumph, or whether we will walk the 
 common road of life with a ray of sunlight round our 
 brow, cherishing the kind and generous thought towards 
 our companions in it, and enjoying the radiant presence 
 of that greatest heart's-ease, good-will to others. We can 
 choose whether we will spend each day some minutes 
 or some hours in the great society of the thinkers, or 
 tread the beaten level of our daily life without a thought 
 to lift us. We can choose whether we will have no 
 better life and faith than the animals that crawl or the 
 devils that tremble, or whether we will uplift the silent 
 thought to God, the Infinite and the All-pure, think of 
 his majesty in the distant star, his brightness in the 
 face of Christ, his goodness in the green earth around, 
 and call him " Abba, Father I" 
 
 You know that we feel a sudden growth of nature 
 when we have resolutely expelled some unworthy feel- 
 ing, some poor care, some doubt, some fear, some thought 
 of unrighteousness, from our bosom, and introduced the 
 
 S2
 
 260 DISCOURSES. 
 
 lifting and gladdening power of some right and benevo- 
 lent ambition, some dignified and worthy study, some 
 purpose of kindness or thought of love. 
 
 Especially those who have their habits yet to form 
 should remember that man's life is in his thoughts ; that 
 these thoughts are the things, and these alone, which 
 make us mean or noble, happy or miserable, kind or 
 malignant, impious or devout; and if they do not take 
 possession of their thoughts, their thoughts will one day 
 take possession of them. 
 
 Let us, then, watch carefully over the temple of our 
 own souls. Let us beware what things gain admission 
 there. If, in its emptiness, demons have got an entrance, 
 let us cast them out, and let the place be filled with the 
 schekinah of a Divine Presence. 
 
 How many an unworthy thought, how many little 
 murky clouds of misunderstanding and ill-will, how 
 many paltry crossings and obstructions of design, how 
 many small anxieties or impure troublings, the good 
 man avoids nay, how many weights of real trouble and 
 affliction does he make lighter by merely walking each 
 day up to the Mount of God, and breathing there, if only 
 for a few minutes, the transfiguring air of that pure 
 height ! 
 
 May that journey to the Mount be daily ours, and it 
 will be ours if we are wise ! 
 
 No handwriting on the wall will then distress us, 
 for w r e shall have no conscious and unworthy fear. No 
 impious grasping at the vessels of gold and silver for bad 
 and selfish objects, sacred to a higher consecration, will
 
 THE LIFE WITHIN AND THE LIFE WITHOUT. 261 
 
 then be ours, or cause the joints of our loins to be loosed; 
 and our outward blessings shall not be all blurred and 
 spoiled by the trouble of the inner thought. Serene and 
 self-possessed, envious of none, of none afraid, we shall 
 walk the path of life as the outward necessities of the 
 road compel us ; but knowing all that time that there 
 is a life beyond that life, a walk beside that walk, an 
 empire in our thoughts, where we may reign triumphant; 
 and that to every one of his followers struggling with 
 the burdens of this earthly life, the Lord Jesus Christ 
 hath said with encouraging assurance, " Fear not ; for if 
 ye fight the good fight of faith, it is your Father's good 
 pleasure to give you the kingdom." Amen.
 
 VI. 
 "NO MOBE STRANGERS AND FOREIGNERS." 
 
 EPHESIANS ii. 19: 
 
 " Now, therefore, ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but 
 fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God." 
 
 THERE is a natural craving in men's minds, even when 
 called unsocial and misanthropical, to be united by bonds 
 and ties of a common interest and sympathy to their 
 fellow-creatures. We all like to belong to some place, 
 some nation, some community, some family. Even if 
 there be a charm at certain periods of life in freedom 
 and a species of vagrancy, the desire in most minds at 
 length arises and it is seldom a happy thing for the 
 individual if it does not arise to draw closer around 
 us the ties of friendship, of kindred, of home, of city, of 
 country. We desire to have and to know our place, and 
 for our place to know us. We are wearied of belonging 
 to nobody and to nowhere. We wish to know and to 
 be known, to serve and to be served, to love and to be 
 loved. We desire to have duties and obligations and 
 regards. We wish for others to be bound by such to us, 
 and for ourselves to be bound by such to them.
 
 "NO MORE STRANGERS AND FOREIGNERS." 263 
 
 The foreigner moves from country to country, a spec- 
 tator, but not a participator, of the affairs of their inha- 
 bitants. He looks at them all with a curious interest, 
 rather than with a tender or anxious care. He gazes on 
 their attire, he marks their motions, he observes their 
 daily life, he witnesses their meetings and partings, 
 their feuds and reconciliations, their arts and inventions ; 
 but he pulls not a single string himself, he affects not 
 a single movement. He has less to do with the whole 
 scene than the least of themselves. The sun arises, but 
 it calls him to no duties and reveals to him no respon- 
 sibilities. Xothing depends upon him. With the evil 
 and the good, with the peace and the tumult, the wealth 
 and the want, the laws or the disorders he witnesses 
 around him, he has no power of interference, no personal 
 concern, perhaps scarcely a personal understanding of 
 them, and he passes on to another exhibition and 
 another land, to experience the same feelings of interest, 
 of amusement or of sorrow, and to find out his own 
 nothingness and unrelation to the whole. So even if he 
 at length pitch his tent and sink his well on one of those 
 strange lands himself, if he be a foreigner he has no 
 sense of home or country still. Though among the 
 people, he is not of them. His principles and his pre- 
 judices are not theirs. He witnesses good, and has little 
 power to promote it evil, and has little power to check 
 it. If he attempt it, in the majority of cases he only 
 shows his own inadequate knowledge of the conditions 
 and his own incompetence for the task. 
 
 But with the citizen all is different. He has planted
 
 264 DISCOURSES. 
 
 his foot upon the soil with a tenacity of pressure, and 
 feels his whole frame drawn and bound to it with a force 
 of gravitation, that the other knows not of. His interests 
 are bound up with its interests, his happiness with its 
 well-being. It is the land of himself, his fathers and 
 his children, and he rejoices in its prosperity and mourns 
 for its calamities, in some measure, as he would do for 
 his own. He is anxious that its laws shall rest upon a 
 good foundation, and desires to give strength to its insti- 
 tutions and authority to its State. He will undergo 
 labour and reproach and loss to strengthen what is feeble 
 in them, redress what is wrong, promote whatever is 
 sound and true. He is part of a whole. He feels a 
 personal responsibility in each one of his public acts. 
 Every day he awakes to duties, and will ponder on the 
 common weal before he will exercise any privilege of 
 public influence which his country grants to him. The 
 sounds of its language are dear to him. He tolerates its 
 very faults. He loves its green fields, or its flat plains, 
 or its lofty mountains, or whatever be its characteristic, 
 though opposing, features. His heart beats high when 
 he hears the stranger speak well of it. He loves and 
 prizes its peace ; but if there must be war or conflict, he 
 cannot help rejoicing when the victory has fallen to the 
 lot of his own country. If new lands are to be colonized, 
 he hails with pleasure the settlement of his own race 
 and stock upon the distant shore. He is glad that its 
 merchantmen should ride the seas, and its merchants 
 be honoured. When men of foreign climes study and 
 admire his native literature, he feels as if a compliment
 
 "XO MORE STRANGERS AND FOREIGNERS." 265 
 
 were paid to himself, and is bound to them by a new 
 tie of sympathy. 
 
 These are the feeliugs and how contrasted are they ! 
 that occupy respectively the bosoms of the foreigner and 
 the citizen ; and notwithstanding many narrownesses 
 and prejudices, it may be, who does not feel how immea- 
 surably preferable are the glowing pride and earnestness 
 and exertion and affection of the one, to the carelessness 
 and indifference, the lack of duty, the lack of love and 
 the lack of service, appertaining to the other ? 
 
 But, happily for us, there has grown up with the 
 centuries another citizenship, which overrides and, as it 
 were, comprehends all these diversities. 
 
 Not that the great basis and attribute of our humanity 
 a love of and perhaps pride in the place and country 
 of our birth is destroyed or even distributed, but that 
 we recognize with sympathy and respect the existence 
 of the same feeling in others; enlarge, as it were, the 
 boundaries of our own country, so as to embrace theirs ; 
 enter into, besides our own beloved and immediate one, 
 a larger citizenship, of which other peoples form a part ; 
 make with each other a virtual alliance, which, without 
 weakening or deserting any one member of it, strengthens 
 and embraces all. 
 
 What I mean is exemplified in a national form by 
 the earnest and sometimes hot and impetuous manner 
 in which we step out of the protected and privileged 
 sanctuary of our own city walls, to vindicate on the 
 great plain of the world the rights of other and perhaps 
 distant peoples, the way in which our voice rises to
 
 266 DISCOURSES. 
 
 say, " In our own State the laws of justice and humanity 
 are honoured, and the happiness and righteousness of 
 our people at least sought after and attempted ; and we 
 are determined to make our own happy citizenship the 
 lever by which to lift all other races to something at 
 least of the same condition, and so to fly west and libe- 
 rate the slave, and east to lift up the down-trodden and 
 oppressed." 
 
 And what I mean is exemplified in a personal form 
 by the life and labours of such a man as the American 
 Ticknor. At a comparatively early period of life, he 
 exiles himself from his country and devotes four years 
 to the study of European literatures, European politics 
 and European morals, longing throughout to be back 
 again in his own country and among his own kindred 
 and friends; and again comes to Europe at sixty-five 
 years of age, a voluntary servant of his native town, 
 self-commissioned to gather together the first really 
 great library of the United States, staying behind in 
 Europe to complete his self-imposed task, though in 
 an agony of anxiety for a sick daughter at home, and 
 separated from a wife who had left him to attend upon 
 her. 
 
 This is what I call a form of thorough citizen-like 
 patriotism, enlarged into that wider citizenship which 
 is spoken of in our text, which is a main characteristic 
 of Christianity, and which embraces and comprehends 
 into one world-wide citizenship all the minor citizen- 
 ships of humanity. And this is the great city of God 
 into which Christ has invited our whole race, and into
 
 "NO MORE STRANGERS AND FOREIGNERS." 267 
 
 which St. Paul, in harmony with the spirit of his Master, 
 told these* Ephesians of our text they were now admitted. 
 
 These lonians of Ephesus had been originally a colony 
 from Greece, then joined a confederacy of neighbouring 
 states for mutual protection, then fell under the sway 
 of Croesus, then were restored to liberty by their mother- 
 country, then joined Xerxes against that country, then 
 were released from the Persian yoke by Alexander, were 
 then subjugated by Sylla and remained tributary to 
 Eome. They might well be called foreigners and 
 strangers, and be described as without a city or a 
 country of their own. And rejoiced many of them no 
 doubt were to be admitted as citizens into a wide and 
 already rapidly-spreading spiritual communion a grand 
 naturalization for them, nay, for any one of us now to 
 be introduced into that enduring company of wise and 
 holy men, who in the midst of all earthly changes were 
 to continue a strengthening and conquering power; the 
 men of the past who have honoured the truth and 
 laboured for us ; the men of the past who have handed 
 down rich legacies of freedom and virtue ; the men of 
 the present who hold fast the moorings of society, who 
 love and obey whatsoever things are just, holy, true and 
 of good report. Yes ; it is a grand naturalization for 
 any one of us to be a fellow -citizen with these honoured 
 citizens of Christ's everlasting and unconquerable king- 
 dom, and heirs with them of the promises. 
 
 Let me, when I see, even in far less high and holy 
 forms of this communion, the Eoman Catholic rejoicing, 
 under whatever skies or whatever government he may
 
 268 DISCOURSES. 
 
 be,' to belong to his wide-spreading Church, when I 
 see similar joy in the English Episcopalian or Metho- 
 dist, I say, let me not be a wanderer or stranger 011 
 this earth of faith, but let me too have a place within 
 those strong walls which surround the city of God, and 
 protect it from the ravages of every foe to my spiritual 
 peace. Let me no longer be a stranger and a wanderer 
 among unknown gods and unknown powers, and guide- 
 less passions and unfixed principles, thinking all faiths 
 and perhaps all practices alike. But let me enter a 
 city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is 
 God. Let me feel my citizenship in the Gospel to be a 
 very precious thing, offering me strength and guidance 
 and support and comfort, telling me clearly of my duties, 
 reminding me joyfully of my privileges, that I may feel 
 myself, wherever I am, a fellow-citizen with that great 
 multitude of strong and mighty ones who have from 
 first to last upheld the unity of virtue, have worshipped 
 in spirit and purity, and have succumbed to no base 
 thing. 
 
 But there is a relation nearer even than this, to which 
 the apostle said were now admitted these homeless 
 lonians, and on which I must say a few words. They 
 were no more strangers ; they were of a household, the 
 household of faith. 
 
 For here, again, how great is the difference between 
 the stranger and the member of a household ! 
 
 The stranger comes to our door and is greeted with 
 distant and uncertain looks. The hand of welcome is 
 kept back and the kindly cares of hospitality withheld
 
 "XO MORE STRANGERS AND FOREIGNERS." 269 
 
 until we know whence he is and wherefore he is come. 
 And even when that stranger has become a guest, though 
 a place is provided for him at our board and kindness 
 is alive to anticipate his every want, yet we are not 
 dependent on him nor he on us. All our inner and 
 nearer affections are complete perhaps without him, and 
 his too find their centre far away from us. He comes 
 to us and takes not his own place, but we make place 
 for him. He rises with the morning, and no duties await 
 performance at his hand, no offices divide for him the 
 allotted hours of the day. He goes away from us, and 
 though perhaps we miss and mourn him for a time, yet 
 the circle of our home is complete without him. He 
 belongs not to us ; he belongs to others who claim him 
 back again, among whom it may be he has a place, a 
 duty, an honour and an affection, that show him to be 
 theirs, not ours. 
 
 Thus comes and stays and passes away the stranger- 
 guest the object of our care, our interest and regard 
 but not fixed in the very centre of our homes, nor loved 
 as the apple of our eye. He is an accident, not a neces- 
 sity; a breeze of the summer, not the all-pervading 
 atmosphere of the continuing year. 
 
 But mark how different it is with even the humblest 
 of our own household. Mark the fearless step and voice 
 of the very child, who looks as if he had as much right 
 to his place and his surroundings there as an emperor 
 to his throne. There are no symptoms of departure or 
 entreaties to stay with him, no hesitations of courtesies 
 and kindnesses. He has his place in that household ;
 
 270 DISCOURSES. 
 
 he has his privileges, his possessions, his duties, secured 
 for him as by an unquestionable law ; and he is going 
 to stay there as long as you are ; he is going to stay 
 there for ever. Even the domestic moves about with an 
 assured and confident step, going direct, without hesi- 
 tancy or questioning, towards an habitual, understood 
 and well-defined object, which hour by hour brings 
 round, and day by day repeats. 
 
 Thus is it throughout. All are parts and have parts 
 to perform in the machine, and the animating .spirit 
 of all is the consciousness of this fact, the knowledge 
 that they are at home. One great design pervades 
 the whole ; the central consciousness of responsibility 
 breathes around all the same atmosphere. Many an 
 incident that occupies the thoughts of the household is 
 concealed from the stranger - guest ; many an exertion 
 is made and many an office fulfilled in which he is 
 invited to take no part, and joys and sorrows in their 
 turn arise with which he cannot intermeddle ; a sacred 
 sense of duty and a love that beareth all things make 
 of all the household, more or less, people of one heart 
 and soul ; and the changed circumstances of calamity, 
 the weary watches of sickness, the solemn shadow of 
 death, alike with the increase of honours and prosperity, 
 the return of health and the joy of new life, convince 
 them, in lesser or greater degrees, that there is a pro- 
 found feeling of sympathy and mutual understanding 
 in every home of man, which reveals to all who belong 
 to it that they are indeed of one household. 
 
 So it is, my brethren, with him that is a guest merely
 
 "NO MORE STRANGERS AND FOREIGNERS." 271 
 
 or a stranger in the world of God, and him that is of his 
 household. The first may be the object of his Maker's 
 welcome and the subject of his favour. The warm sun 
 may shine and the kindly rain may descend upon him. 
 He may see the stars spread out as a canopy over his 
 head, and the flowers may rise up from the green earth 
 beneath his feet. Yea, a seat shall be daily placed for 
 him at the Creator's all-bounteous table, and his cup 
 shall be made to run over. And yet he shall perhaps 
 be a stranger, in the midst of all, to the infinite wisdom, 
 to the benign goodness, to the merciful ends, by and for 
 which all these things are ordained. He shall not re- 
 cognize the Omniscient Hand that daily guideth the 
 affairs of this great household. He shall not understand 
 the sweet and solemn voices with which all these things 
 should come laden to his soul. He shall be as one that 
 cometh into the world, gazeth round upon it, enjoyeth 
 it for some brief while, and then, girding his loins, passeth 
 out of it as though he belonged not to it. Whereas the 
 man who is of the household of God, who hath daily 
 communion with him, who heareth his voice in all events, 
 and saith continually, " Speak, Lord, for thy servant 
 heareth," who loveth all that God loves, who searcheth 
 out his ways and ascertaineth his will to do it, who 
 worketh ever with God for his people, for good, he is 
 one in that great home and household where all kindreds 
 and nations and tongues and peoples are gathered toge- 
 ther, the home and the household of God. 
 
 let me never be the stranger, let me not even be 
 the transient guest that sitteth down at the table which
 
 272 DISCOURSES. ' 
 
 that Almighty bounty hath prepared for me, and then 
 riseth and goeth away ; but let me be of the very house- 
 hold of my Maker, with my own daily duty in it, with 
 my own allotted place in it, with my heart of reverent 
 love, understanding all his ways of mercy and open to 
 all his commands of wisdom ! 
 
 Yes, my friends, to be denizens of the city of God, to 
 be fellow-citizens in it of the good and just, the saints 
 of God, to be consciously admitted into the family, to 
 be of the household of God to have, in fact, what all 
 this means, a Christian heart in a Christian home, a 
 Christian home in a Christian church and land this is 
 the choicest, noblest privilege that God in his mercy 
 hath bestowed on man.
 
 VII. 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 
 
 PSALM cxxxvii. 3: 
 " Sing us one of the songs of Zion." 
 
 WHAT is called "The Book of Psalms" is regarded in 
 the light of modern criticism as a collection of poems 
 by different authors, and by the prevalent tendency of 
 ignorant, it may be, but popular preference, as the work 
 of one wonderful heart. 
 
 I say, the latter is the prevalent tendency. The Babbis 
 and the ancient Fathers believed this, and the simplest 
 signs I can give of the continued popular prevalence of 
 this belief are just these four : 
 
 If you go into a well-trained Sunday-school belonging 
 to church or chapel of the popular order in this country, 
 and ask the children of the highest class who wrote the 
 Book of Psalms, they will probably at once answer, King 
 David. 
 
 In the Church of England, the new version of Tate 
 and Brady, as (I believe) the one it has superseded by 
 Sternhold and Hopkins, is headed, "The Psalms of 
 David." 
 
 T
 
 274 DISCOURSES. 
 
 If you look to the version of the Psalms published by 
 the authority of the General Assembly of the Church of 
 Scotland, you will observe the title to be, " The Psalms 
 of David/' 
 
 If you examine Dr. Watts' version of the Book of 
 Psalms, until the beginning and middle of this century 
 almost exclusively used among Dissenters, you will find 
 it headed, " The Psalms of David." 
 
 But what are the historical facts of the case ? 
 
 From an early period of Jewish history, there was a 
 class of public men and scholars in the nation called 
 Prophets, and so called not only from being persons 
 who, according to the exact meaning of the word, " spoke 
 out" their thoughts, but who uttered them with a certain 
 skill and arrangement, dignity and elegance and mea- 
 sured cadence, singing them to the harp or the lyre. In 
 our own country the bards of the Britons were some- 
 thing of an analogous order. 
 
 These scholars, orators, musicians and poets, gathered 
 themselves into bodies which were called " Colleges" or 
 " Schools" of the Prophets. 
 
 Over one of these Samuel presided, and in his desire 
 that the young king Saul, whom he was obliged to 
 anoint, should add this higher qualification to his royalty, 
 he obliges him to join a school of the prophets. And 
 how, indeed, the spirit of music penetrated the soul of 
 that unhappy young man, all will remember from the 
 touching narrative of his after days, that " an evil spirit 
 from God troubled him ;" and how that the sufferer said, 
 " Provide me now a man that can play well, and bring
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 275 
 
 him to me ;" and how that, when the evil spirit was on 
 Saul, David took a harp and played with his hand ; and 
 so Saul was refreshed and was well, and the evil spirit 
 departed from him. 
 
 And again, in the still later days when the monarch 
 and the young musician were foes, and when Saul sends 
 messengers to Rainah, where, in the buildings in which 
 Samuel had collected his scholars and was teaching 
 them, David had taken refuge, these messengers, when 
 they heard the company of prophets singing their sacred 
 hymns, were themselves seized with an extraordinary 
 influence, and joined in the holy harmony. 
 
 Again and again, sent by the angry and determined 
 monarch, they go ; but again and again, subdued by the 
 holy and peaceful thoughts and the breathing melody 
 of the sacred college, they desist from their wicked 
 purpose, till Saul in his anger goes himself, and with a 
 like result, for the touching and glorious harmony again 
 drives the evil spirit out of him, and he himself joins in 
 the chorus of the song of praise. 
 
 In all nations the early civilization and instruction 
 appear to have been by verse and music. 
 
 Among the wandering tribes of Greece, fixed habita- 
 tions and an improved mode of life arose at the touch of 
 poetry ; and thus Orpheus was said by his music to 
 have drawn the stones into orderly building, and, as 
 Horace says of him, " Sacred expounder of the will of 
 the gods, he drew rude men off from slaughter and a 
 savage life," and gave laws to society. 
 
 On the Hebrew nation, untaught and uncultivated, 
 T2
 
 276 DISCOURSES. 
 
 only a few generations even removed from the condition 
 of slaves, this influence was early brought to bear, and 
 Samuel, if he did not found, at least perpetuated those 
 schools of the prophets, in which were taught to the 
 chosen youth that were to be the future ministers and 
 teachers and prophets of the nation, the arts of life, the 
 knowledge of divine things, and the utterance of the 
 praises of Almighty God. 
 
 Now out of the vast mass of materials which would 
 thus in the course of generations accrue among a people 
 so taught and so practised, (Solomon alone being said, 
 among the wonders of his fertile genius, to have written 
 1005, or, as others read it, 5000 songs,) there have come 
 down to us (and these of mixed and unequal merit and 
 of various date and authorship) only 150 little hymns 
 a small volume indeed, not half the size of many a 
 hymn-book which separate congregations now often 
 appropriate to their own use, and yet so exquisite, so 
 beautiful, so rich, that this little garland, this small 
 string of pearls, the title of which (Sepher Tehillim) 
 some have translated "the Book of Irradiations," has 
 been for more than 2000 years of the past, and will, I 
 believe, be for thousands of years to come, the friend, 
 the solace, the echo of humanity, in all its possible 
 diversities of experience, from that of the French princes 
 who rode to the chase, singing, " As the hart panteth 
 after the water-brook, so thirsteth my soul after thee, O 
 God," to " the mourner in Zion" who sings, " Why art 
 thou cast down, my soul, and why art thou disquieted 
 within me?"
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 277 
 
 " May not indeed," as Professor Jowett has well asked, 
 " almost the whole book be described as a sort of rapture 
 of the love of good and hatred of evil, accompanied by 
 an intense consciousness that, amid all appearances to 
 the contrary, God is ever on the side of right ?" 
 
 In the light of this blaze of glory from the little 
 cabinet of gems, snatched and preserved from the large 
 bulk that must have been produced in such a nation so 
 circumstanced, the question of the individual authorship 
 sinks, in my mind, into insignificance. 
 
 It is no cause of wonder that one-half of this small 
 remaining number should be attributed to David ; for 
 David, it must be remembered, was not only a poet and 
 a musician and a great patron and encourager of the 
 service of song, but was a king; and the flattery of 
 nations is apt to multiply rather than to diminish the 
 claims of royalty, and to heap up rather than to pull 
 down its titles to honour, whether as men after God's 
 own heart or as fine poets and sweet psalmists of Israel ; 
 and it is rather a relief to my mind than otherwise to 
 be able to dispense with the personality of David too 
 exclusively obtruding itself on my thoughts when I 
 dwell on this holy treasury, and to find that evidence 
 bears me out in the belief that we have in the Book of 
 Psalrns the experience, not only of one, but of several 
 personalities, and that in that little collection we have 
 preserved to us the devout thoughts of many a holy 
 man handed down to us through the ages. 
 
 And, indeed, with what wonderful variety of adapta- 
 tion, almost confirming in itself the supposition of
 
 278 DISCOURSES. 
 
 variety of authorship, do these sacred utterances fit 
 themselves to nations in their crises and to individuals 
 in their experiences ! Who can call to mind the struggle 
 of the seventeenth century of our own country, for 
 example, without remembering at the same time the 
 courage and faith breathed into the souls of the Puritans, 
 while they battled for a purer morality and a wider 
 freedom, by many a verse and many a Psalm in this 
 wonderful collection ? "0 God, who hast cast us off 
 and scattered us, and art displeased against us, turn 
 thyself to us again. Deliver us out of the hand of the 
 wicked, out of the hand of unrighteous and cruel men. 
 Let them melt away as waters that run continually, so 
 that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the 
 righteous, there is a God that judgeth in the earth." 
 
 And as I trust we at least are not of the number of 
 those who in great civic strifes judge that all is unmix- 
 edly right and wise upon the one side, and unmix edly 
 wrong and foolish upon the other, let us also rejoice even 
 to find how those who bewailed the devastations of our 
 cathedrals by Cromwell's troopers, and their fanatical 
 hatred of prayers and services endeared by their solemn 
 march and holy spirit to large portions of our nation, 
 found their consolation and support too in this same little 
 roll of sacred song ; and let us feel with what directness 
 of application and suitability of comfort and special 
 emotion the outcast member of the overthrown Church, 
 as he held the forbidden Prayer-book in his hand, and 
 chanted in low strains in the upper chamber of some 
 retired mansion in the country the Psalms of the day,
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS, 279 
 
 would come upon the words, winch in the Service of the 
 fourteenth evening of the month are still said or sung 
 from the 74th Psalm : " God, wherefore are thou absent 
 from us so long? Think upon thy congregation, and 
 the Mount Zion wherein thou hast dwelt. For thine 
 adversaries roar in the midst of them, and set up their 
 banners for tokens. He that hewed timber afore out of 
 the thick trees was known to bring it to an excellent 
 work. But now they break down all the carved work 
 thereof with axes and hammers. Yea, they have said 
 in their hearts, Let us make havoc of them altogether. 
 Thus have they burnt up all the houses of God in the 
 land." 
 
 But it is not only for nations, or for great parties in 
 nations, that is thus provided the voice of sympathy and 
 support for that portion of truth and holiness which they 
 have in their hearts, and for the preservation of which 
 they struggle. God speaks also, through this same mar- 
 vellously varied and adaptative agency, to the souls of 
 the world's great leaders of progress and of truth ; and 
 many and many a one of those whom we call the strong 
 men of humanity have found the source of their strength 
 in the words of this little roll. 
 
 Thus Savonarola, the Luther of Italy, the impassioned 
 preacher, with his crowds about him, the friend and yet 
 the rebuker of Lorenzo de Medici, the bold prophet of 
 reformation in the doctrine and the manners of the 
 Papacy and the Church the persecuted, the excomnm-
 
 280 DISCOURSES. 
 
 nicated, the strangled, and the burnt Savonarola also 
 found a Psalm made for him, a Psalm of petitioning 
 weakness and yet of triumphant hope, and, if I remember 
 right, it was the 35th : " Plead my cause, Lord, with 
 them that strive against me. Take hold of shield and 
 buckler, and stand up for my help. For they have digged 
 a pit for my soul and hid their net in it. False wit- 
 nesses did rise up ; they laid to my charge things I knew 
 not. In my adversity they rejoiced, and with hypocri- 
 tical mockers in feasts they gnashed upon me with their 
 teeth. Let them not say in their hearts, Ah ! so would 
 we have it ; let them not say, We have swallowed him 
 up. Stir thyself up and awake to my judgment, even 
 unto my cause, my God and my Lord. Let them that 
 favour my righteous cause shout for joy and be glad, 
 and say continually, Let the Lord be magnified." 
 
 Luther carried on to victory the cause in which Savo- 
 narola perished. His course, though marked by danger 
 and sorrow, was yet triumphant, and he lived to see the 
 fruit of the travail of his soul. He had his favourite 
 Psalm; it was the 118th: "O give thanks unto the 
 Lord, for his mercy endureth for ever. I called upon the 
 Lord in my distress, and he answered me, and set me in 
 a large place. He is on my side, and I i'ear not what 
 man can do unto me. All nations compass me about, 
 but in the name of the Lord will I destroy them. The 
 stone which the builders refused is become the head- 
 stone of the corner. It is the day the Lord hath made ; 
 we will be glad and rejoice in it." And so on through-
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 281 
 
 out, in a strain of extraordinary adaptation to his for- 
 tunes. It might have been written for him. It was 
 written for him. 
 
 But, again, it is not only for great men labouring in 
 great causes that God provides his consolations and 
 supports. To each humblest subject of his parental 
 discipline on earth the Father of our spirits speaks 
 directly in these Psalms. 
 
 I once knew of a man, firm in his sense of right and 
 stalwart in his integrity, but grieved in his inner heart 
 at every violation of public liberty and every base inflic- 
 tion of personal wrong. He lived in the frightened and 
 the frightening days of Liverpool and Castlereagh ; and 
 as he could go where he listed, he fled from their domi- 
 nion and sought civil and religious liberty in America. 
 But he found an unreasoning and oppressive sovereign 
 there, he thought, the Sovereign People. He came home 
 and went to France, thinking that she had profited by 
 her ordeal (alas ! how many has she had to profit by 
 since I), and was freer from insular prejudices and nar- 
 rownesses than his own land; but found that in the inter- 
 val of his absences that that old land of his own, though 
 slower, was perhaps surer in her progress ; and obtaining 
 no satisfaction for the yearning of his soul on earth, he 
 laid his weary body down at last in the cemetery of 
 Pere la Chaise. He had his favourite Psalm ; it was 
 the 37th : " Fret not thyself because of evil-doers, neither 
 be thou envious against the workers of iniquity, for
 
 282 DISCOURSES. 
 
 they shall soon be cut down like the grass and wither 
 as the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good, for 
 the steps of the good man are ordered by the Lord ; 
 though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down. I 
 have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading 
 himself like a green bay- tree. Yet he passed away and 
 he was not. But mark the perfect man and behold the 
 upright, for the end of that man is peace." Such words 
 were the constant echo and solace to his troubled heart. 
 The Psalm might have been written for him. It was 
 written for him. 
 
 Finally, I knew one who had suffered much from 
 bodily sickness, from mental anxieties and toils, and 
 from his full share of worldly losses. But hope buoyed 
 him up, and religious faith sustained him. He rarely 
 doubted and never despaired. He trusted to be spared 
 to see his work done, his sicknesses healed, his tears 
 dried, his children rising up to call him blessed, and he 
 trusted not in vain. Through all those years when the 
 sky was oftener dark upon his path than bright, he had 
 a favourite Psalm, which more than any other comforted 
 and sustained him ; it was the 34th, and it ran : " I 
 sought the Lord and he heard me, and delivered me out 
 of all my fears. This poor man cried, and the Lord 
 heard, and saved him out of all his troubles. Many are 
 the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth 
 him out of them all. The Lord redeemeth the soul of 
 his servant, and none of them that trust in him shall be 
 desolate. I will bless the Lord at all times, and my soul
 
 THE LOOK OF PSALMS. 283 
 
 shall make her boast of him." The Psalm, he thought, 
 might have been written for him. It was written for 
 him. 
 
 Thus are these Psalms, age after age and century after 
 century, in all the varied circumstances of nations and 
 of individuals, spiritual echoes of the feelings, spiritual 
 bread to the hunger of our hearts, from the man who in 
 his perfect gladness sings, from the 103rd Psalm, "Bless 
 the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits," to 
 the far less happy man who, because of some wrong- 
 doing that presses upon his heart and conscience, cannot 
 echo any strain of gladness or even of trust, but finds 
 no relief in language to his burdened conscience so wel- 
 come as the touching wail of a sinning yet a sorrowing 
 nature, in the 51st: " Have mercy upon me, God, in 
 whose sight I have done this evil. Wash me from mine 
 iniquity ; cleanse me from my sin. Cast me not away 
 from thy presence, and take riot thy holy spirit from 
 me. Create in me a clean heart, God, and renew a 
 right spirit within me. Thus make me to hear joy and 
 gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may 
 rejoice. Thy sacrifices, my God, are a broken spirit ; 
 a broken and a contrite heart thou wilt not despise." 
 
 And I am inclined to think that each man and woman 
 here, that each one of us who has had some special 
 experiences and known the passage of some solemn 
 thoughts, has a Psalm of his own that God has already 
 sent, or which he holds still in his holy keeping, ready 
 for him when he comes to ask it.
 
 284 DISCOURSES. 
 
 Whether we are living under the broad heavens of 
 God in sloth or activity, in selfishness or some thought 
 for others, in sin or in the struggles of holiness, in be- 
 reavement or in company with those we love, in wealth 
 or in want, in sickness or in health, all the time and 
 at every time of these experiences there has been some 
 Psalm or verse of that little volume containing the exact 
 statement of our case, and the exact spiritual prescrip- 
 tion for our needs, that has had for its title, " I have a 
 message of God unto thee."
 
 VIII. 
 "HAVE PITY UPON ME." 
 
 A SERMON FOR A HOSPITAL. 
 
 JOB xix. 21 : 
 
 " Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, ye my friends ; for 
 the hand of God hath touched me." 
 
 THERE may be some here, the lamp of whose worldly 
 lot, though it have varied in its degrees of brightness, 
 has never flickered into the darkness of extinction. 
 There may be some here whose heads have never bowed 
 under that shame which in their presumption and self- 
 assertion they called their misfortune, nor under that 
 misfortune which in the undue depth of their self-re- 
 proach they would not consent to distinguish from their 
 shame. There may be some here, unworn by listlessness 
 or discontent, on the bliss of whose existence no mur- 
 murings from their own, no moroseness from others' 
 spirits, have ever long together trespassed, on whom sin 
 has laid no sad remorse, and injury no grieved remem- 
 brance. There may be some here who have not known of 
 crushed affections or shivered household gods, of hearts 
 grown cold or old-accustomed looks become strange and
 
 286 DISCOURSES. 
 
 unfamiliar, and who number still the friends and circle 
 of their youth among the friends and circle of their age. 
 There may be some here who have not had death for 
 their inmate, or seen their loved one borne from the 
 chamber they once called his, to the long home where 
 they are now to lay him. 
 
 But there are none here to whom sickness is an un- 
 known thing, who have not felt or seen the weakness 
 that required the unwonted aid, or the suffering that 
 asked the removal of its pain. There are none here 
 who have not known of the pallid brow, of the prostrate 
 form, of the " Would to God it were morning !" and the 
 " Would to God it were night !" There are none here 
 whose question has not been at some period of their 
 lives, as the morn returned, of the night-watches o'er 
 the sick, or whose hand has not some time caught with 
 eagerness the letter that told of the absent invalid, and 
 whose eye has not glanced instantaneously on the sure 
 omen of a seal. 
 
 In whatsoever other respects our lots and our lives 
 may have differed, we are all assuredly brethren in this. 
 As sure as death to the individual is sickness to the 
 circle. As sure as that the thread of life shall be broken 
 of all of us, is it that the course of health shall be inter- 
 rupted to some. 
 
 Though mankind have never conceded much credence 
 to Bishop Berkeley's ingenious hypothesis that the mate- 
 rial world around us really is but a collection of impres- 
 sions made upon our own minds that there are no 
 world, no matter, no beings, further than the imagination
 
 "HAVE PITY UPON ME." 287 
 
 on the mind doth frame them yet there is a sense in 
 which this singular theory becomes a solid truth. There 
 scarcely is a world, there scarcely is matter, there scarcely 
 are beings, other than those the mind fashioneth for itself. 
 God himself differs to us as our own conceptions differ 
 in us. He is himself, no doubt, inconceivable, illimit- 
 able, the animating Power of a universe itself too vast 
 and various for us to examine more than the fringe of 
 it, the one great Certainty of all existence, because what- 
 ever else exists, thought certainly does and must. And 
 yet even this God himself, is to us as we are to him. He 
 is the Being of the unutterable Name to one, the subject 
 of a full knowledge and an easy familiarity to another; an 
 Abstraction if we are only metaphysicians, a Demon if 
 we are savages or fools, an infinite and marvellous Power 
 if we have reverence, and a Father if we have affections. 
 
 So is it with the world and things around us and with 
 life. The earth, the bleakest of wildernesses to one, a 
 sun-lit landscape to another. Life, a region scattered 
 with green spots to some, is a desert without oases to 
 others. Man, a creature of imperfection, yet marked to 
 you or to me by many a sweet deed of kindness and 
 starry act of virtue, is to the misanthropist a simple 
 mixture of the animal and the fiend. 
 
 And so it is with a place and a scene on which we 
 are especially to gaze this morning, the chamber of sick- 
 ness. 
 
 In one chamber I look in and see a beam of light 
 (subdued it may be, but holy) striking athwart the dark- 
 ness, a ministering hand, a kindly voice, a patient spirit.
 
 288 DISCOURSES. 
 
 In another I see every ray of light and love carefully 
 barricaded out ; the voices those of blame and murmur, 
 and service demanded peevishly and yielded sullenly. 
 These things ought not so to be. It is the same foun- 
 tain ; it ought not to bring forth sweet water and bitter. 
 
 Disease and pain are evils. Call them by no other 
 name than their own. Disease and pain are evils in 
 the physical world, as sin and sorrow are in the spiritual. 
 / don't want any of them. They are for the most part 
 the result of ignorance and mistake and a wrong bias. 
 They are diminishable and remediable, if not removable. 
 
 And those good and wise men who point out and 
 explain the laws of Nature that we may obey them, and 
 palliate and, as far as they can, remove the circumstances 
 that lead to their violation those good and wise men 
 who point out and make engaging the way of right, and 
 remove, as far as they can, temptation from the patli 
 of life are equalled only by those other benefactors of 
 their race who, when the evils are there in all their crush- 
 ing power, strive to alleviate the suffering and to cor- 
 rect the guilt that spring from them, and lead their 
 fellow-creatures back to something nearer the unviolated 
 type of their original, and restore the integrity of their 
 nature. 
 
 But here to-day we have to do with the evils that 
 exist, with the inheritance of many generations, with 
 sufferings that we might, but quite as likely might not, 
 individually have been able to avoid. Here they are. 
 What are we to do with them ? 
 
 I look, I say, into the chamber of sickness and there
 
 "HAVE PITY UPON ME." 289 
 
 behold forms, that once were buoyant in their health, 
 outstretched in helplessness, perhaps in pain. The hue 
 has faded from the brow and the sunken eye is closed. 
 There is a voice rising from all around upon the stillness, 
 " Have pity on me, ye my friends, have pity on me, 
 for the hand of God hath touched me I" 
 
 Yes ; the hand of God has touched him ; but has it 
 touched none but him ? Has it, while touching his heart, 
 left other hearts unmoved ? Are there no other forms 
 but his to be beheld within that room ? Is there no 
 hand to smooth his pillow, no silent step to curtain off 
 the light or tender the reviving draught ? Is there no 
 anxious eye resting upon him, no low and whispering 
 voice asking after him, no muffled tread of some usually 
 boisterous boy as he passes his sick sister's or sick 
 parent's door? Look within the hearts thus touched, 
 and see if there be no spark of heavenly flame in them. 
 See if there be not a tenderness of pity they had not 
 known existed in themselves before, a spirit of self- 
 sacrifice they could not have foretold, a diligence of 
 attendance that they would have called beforehand an 
 immurement and a death ? And look how they all greet 
 the arrival of the physician ! How their eyes rest upon 
 him and seem to say, " We lean upon you and trust you ; 
 we are yours ; heal his sickness and bind up our hearts"! 
 
 And who that has observed, when the crisis is over 
 and the danger passed, the cheering farewell visits come 
 on, and watched the mild and grateful look of the suf- 
 ferer, the glad faces of his friends, the quiet words of 
 satisfaction and confidence that escape their lips, and 
 
 u
 
 290 DISCOURSES. 
 
 their united readiness to acknowledge the greatness and 
 the benignity of that power to heal, even when possessed 
 in all its human defectiveness and ignorance, who that 
 has seen, as each day remitted more and more of its 
 anguish, and the deadly hue passed off, and the smile 
 came out to pay back the debt of gratitude, and the 
 proffered hand merrily helped to the willing walk, and 
 Nature had new charms to the sufferer, and, as Gray 
 says in his " Ode to Vicissitude," 
 
 " The common sun, the air, the skies, 
 To him are opening Paradise," 
 
 who that has seen all this, has not detected also the new 
 and elevating and purifying and softening and inter- 
 preting sense of the words, "The hand of God had 
 touched him ;" yea, and asked, has it touched no other ? 
 
 Yes, surely, God touches us when he touches others. 
 
 Has the blessing of health struck none more forcibly, 
 and been felt by none more gratefully, after watching 
 over the bed of another's sickness, and witnessing suf- 
 ferings from which we ourselves were exempt ? Has 
 such experience passed over any soul, and not at least 
 for some moments softened and refined it ? The peevish- 
 ness that would have been resented if exhibited by 
 health, how quietly we bear it when the utterer is ill! 
 The changeful wishes and the morbid fancies we might 
 have rebuked or despised in the robust, how ready is 
 our apology for them when they hover with their droop- 
 ing wings over the tired nerves and brain of the invalid! 
 We hear the appeal to have pity on him. For we know 
 the hand of God hath touched him.
 
 "HAVE PITY UPON ME." 291 
 
 But if diseases are God's messengers, there must be a 
 message in them to the sufferer. For though the sick 
 to tend, and the blind to guide, and the sorrowing to 
 console, be occupations' that should amend and touch 
 ourselves, yet these suffering ones cannot be victims to 
 our good, or chastened for our profit only. 
 
 In the world's busy scenes there is often not an hour 
 exempt from its many calls or at liberty for any serious 
 thought. But when sickness lays its hand upon us, the 
 heart will often be driven into itself the inactivity of 
 the present almost force us to think of the nature of the 
 activity of the past, and what should be its nature in 
 the time that may yet be spared us. There will be 
 periods when the bed-side will be without its watcher, 
 the chamber without its guest, when the tired eye 
 shall turn from the printed page, and, though closed, not 
 close itself in sleep. Human life and human conduct 
 are apt to appear differently then from what they would 
 do in the full sweep of their usual and uninterrupted 
 course. And supposing even that there be no great 
 weight upon the conscience, the physical change in our 
 condition creates some corresponding change in our spi- 
 ritual condition, alters our estimates of persons and our 
 judgments of things, throws some different hues upcn 
 the earth, and makes us feel, as the sun sets beyond the 
 horizon, there is something beyond that horizon to us as 
 well as to him ; and though that next stage, now rather 
 nearer us perhaps than we had ever felt it before, may 
 not be so greatly different from this as we had been 
 sometimes told, and though we can scarcely believe that 
 
 u2
 
 292 DISCOURSES. 
 
 any life that shall be the continuance to us of this can 
 be entirely free from the tears and defects and struggles 
 we had become so familiar with here, yet we may w r ell 
 feel that, after all we have gone through, it will scarcely 
 be the same, and we may feel that our sickness has 
 brought us more within sight of a stage of being in 
 which low things shall not have quite so much hold of 
 us, and high things shall be more perceived to be the 
 high things they are, our tears shall be somewhat purer, 
 our sorrows not so mean, and our pains and desires and 
 struggles something richer and nobler. 
 
 There will, moreover, perhaps, among these our more 
 solemn thoughts, mingle (if our dear friends and nurses 
 and companions are gone away from our room for a time) 
 a calling up of kindness and attention paid us, with a 
 desire to repay it better, a desire to check the murmur 
 and repress the rising discontent, more carefully ; and 
 when the hours bring back the cheerers of our solitude 
 and the alleviators of our trial, the time of quiet thought 
 over everything may cause us to greet them with more 
 thankfulness and receive from them with more acknow- 
 ledgment. It is good in such cases to have been alone, 
 good for the sick ones, good for those who watch them. 
 
 But the sicknesses I have now been exclusively con- 
 sidering, manifold as the trials be attending them, are 
 yet those which many a friend is ready to soothe, and 
 which life's comforts gather round in full abundance to 
 relieve, which prompt attention and considerate skill 
 seek by all means conceivable to heal. 
 
 Is there no other kind of sickness ? Is there any
 
 "HAVE PITY UPON ME." 293 
 
 sufferer to whom disease is but one of many miseries ? 
 Are there any whose throbbing temples would be sus- 
 tained, but that the hand that would sustain them must 
 go forth to labour? Are there any whose weakness 
 would be nourished, but that the money that would 
 nourish it must be exchanged for bread ? Is there any 
 chill that would demand some bedding for the sick, but 
 that the means that would procure it must bring cloth- 
 ing for the strong ? Is there any suffering that goes on 
 from day to day increasing, yet hoping that Nature (the 
 poor man's physician) will work a cure, but the cure of 
 which never comes ? Do such things exist ? Have pity 
 on them, ye my friends, have pity on them, for the 
 hand of God hath touched them ! 
 
 There is no one here who feels more strongly than I 
 do how imperative is the duty, how desirable the incul- 
 cation, of such providence and carefulness as shall render 
 each man able to meet out of his own independent means 
 those trials which his lot may bring upon him. But in 
 the mean time there are sufferings not otherwise provided 
 for than by these inestimable blessings of our time, the 
 public hospitals. Those throbs of anguish must be soft- 
 ened, those beings must not perish. 
 
 If there are any here who, should they this day be 
 smitten by the heavy hand of sickness, look with security 
 to a couch of comfort, to kindred that will be near to 
 help, to skill that will in a moment come to their relief, 
 let them remember those for whom none of these things 
 are prepared, who are of themselves destitute of all of 
 them, and have pity on them, ye my friends, for the 
 hand of God hath touched them! Amen.
 
 IX. 
 
 LET IT ALONE THIS YEAE ALSO." 
 A NEW-YEAR'S SEKMON. 
 
 LUKE xiii. 8 : 
 " Lord, let it alone this year also." 
 
 THE work of human life is divided between God 
 and man. There is a part which God does and rnan 
 cannot do. There is a part which man does or ought 
 to do, and which, I would say it with reverence, God 
 will not do. We shall never understand the character 
 of human life and the nature of human duty, until we 
 learn to define the limits and to distinguish the depart- 
 ments, as it were, of this co-operation or working to- 
 gether. 
 
 That we are justified in adopting this phraseology by 
 the exigencies and the deficiencies of language, for the 
 purpose of realizing divine truths, and that there is no 
 irreverence in thus speaking of a conjoint work between 
 God and man, the very words of the Scriptures, sug- 
 gesting the idea to us, distinctly show. For in them 
 we find continually the Almighty God spoken of as
 
 "LET IT ALONE THIS YEAR ALSO." 295 
 
 working. Xay, the great system of things in the midst 
 of which we are placed is pre-eminently spoken of as 
 his work, and its several constituent portions as his 
 works. And St. Paul speaks of himself as a " worker 
 together with God" (2 Cor. vi. 1). 
 
 I say, then, that the work of human life is a joint 
 work, is divided between God and man, and that it is 
 peculiarly necessary for us to know and to distinguish 
 the part that is God's and will be done by him, and 
 the part that is GUI'S and will not be done by him, and 
 which, unless done by ourselves therefore, will not be 
 done at alL 
 
 In this division of labour, it has, in the first place, 
 to be confessed that there are times and directions where 
 the Almighty alone worketh, where there is no place, 
 no call, no possibility of man doing anything, where 
 everything is done and must be done by God, where 
 nothing is done or can be done by man. And there 
 are other directions in which, on the contrary, all that 
 God designs to do is already done, where he will do no 
 more, where the sphere of the work of the future is 
 man's and must be filled by him, wher.e he is waited 
 for by God, and where all stands 'still till he appears 
 with willing hand and ready heart. 
 
 In the preparation of this earth and its several parts 
 for the abode of man, how long does God work by 
 himself ? How long has man no vocation, no place, no 
 duty, no existence even ? 
 
 The good and munificent Creator worketh hitherto in 
 the bowels of the earth, and coal and ore and stone lie
 
 296 DISCOURSES. 
 
 ready but unused, existing but unseen, laden with unap- 
 plied utilities, till the mattock is stuck into the soil, and 
 the shaft sunk, and man advances to do his part. Nay, 
 sometimes the great Creator, while willing to continue 
 his own apparently slow processes and to wait some 
 time longer for man, yet allows, as it were, (benignly 
 contemplating the energy of his earnest action and his 
 free will,) allows, as it were, man to step in before his 
 time, and to undertake to expedite and complete the 
 unfinished processes of nature. 
 
 Thus, putting yourself back into the remote ages, 
 what can you do, for instance, with that little rocky 
 island which rises up into the midst of the Mediterranean 
 Sea, stony, barren, without soil and without verdure, inca- 
 pable of yielding sustenance to man or beast ? What 
 can you do with it in the long ages during which it is 
 forming and rearing itself from the depths ? What can 
 you do with it while its limestone surface is crumbling 
 itself away, by the influence of sun and air and rain, 
 into at length a something of a substitute for a soil ? 
 
 Nature, or the Power that directs nature, is working 
 all this time. Man approaches not, for there is no duty, 
 no place, no existence, and no possibility of existence, 
 for him there. 
 
 At length the thing seems to be possible. With eager 
 energy man steps in, almost before the Creator is ready 
 for him in anticipation, as it were, of his own proper 
 time to take into the hands of his own hearty deter- 
 mination the completion of the Creator's work. He 
 breaks the surface of the soft rock into small fragments,
 
 "LET IT ALONE THIS YEAR ALSO." 297 
 
 cherishes, collects, builds up into terraces this crumbled 
 limestone, actually carrying from the little neighbouring 
 island of Gozzo, and the larger contiguous island of 
 Sicily, the earth and mould which is to mingle with the 
 white natural dust ; and henceforth the island of Malta 
 rises in its beauty, becomes an abode for man, a place 
 of refuge for the shipwrecked apostle, a seat of the Order 
 of the Knights of St. John, the fertile native soil of the 
 cotton-plant, the corn, the fig, the orange, the depot of 
 merchandize and the rendezvous of Eastern and Western 
 commerce. There was a time, indeed, when man could 
 do nothing there ; but it would have remained to this 
 day little more than a place for the insect and the 
 lichen, the subject only of the Creator's everlasting pro- 
 vision of air and rain and sunshine, had not man stepped 
 in, almost in this instance hastily and prematurely, to 
 labour, to carry, to cultivate and to make fertile, to 
 expedite and complete the otherwise unfinished pro- 
 cesses of the Creator. 
 
 But although not so many years ago this ancient 
 primaeval working of the Creator seemed so distant, 
 these far-off periods have become dwarfed and com- 
 paratively almost close upon us, when we discover that 
 there was a time when spreading foliage abounded in 
 what is now an arctic circle, and the green valleys of 
 England were masses of icebergs, and that these things 
 shall even be again, and that our own England has been 
 and shall be again at one time arctic, and at another 
 perhaps almost tropical. 
 
 In these his awful processes the Almighty works
 
 298 DISCOURSES. 
 
 alone, man often not by even to observe. But a time 
 continually comes round when the creature is made to 
 appear to work with the Creator, and then, if he refuses 
 his share in the divine labours, he must be crushed and 
 shattered beneath the rolling wheel of the world. 
 
 But God labours not in matter merely ; he labours in 
 mind and soul. There is a world at least as wonderful 
 here, in which through long time he seems to labour by 
 himself, but in which at length also, as inevitably, he 
 summons us to work with him. 
 
 I think it must certainly be allowed by every one 
 that there is not only in material, but also in spiritual 
 directions, a period of preparation when human efforts 
 can avail little. There is certainly a time when the 
 great preliminary work both of divine creation and 
 divine providence is unfinished, and when we should 
 work in vain. There is, (I think it must be allowed,) as 
 in the material, so in the mental world, such a thing as 
 an unprepared state of the general mind and conscience, 
 unfit for the fine seed of the higher spiritual harvest, and 
 when such seed, if sown, would seem destined simply 
 to rot and disappear. 
 
 Thus, I have sometimes thought, it seemed to be with 
 him who was called " the Morning Star of the Reforma- 
 tion," our fellow-countryman John Wycliffe. His was 
 a light shining in a dark place, and for a long time the 
 darkness comprehended it not. His labours seemed to 
 be without any result proportionate to their earnestness 
 and their value, his truth without any acknowledgment 
 equal to its importance ; and the general preparation of
 
 "LET IT ALONE THIS YEAR ALSO." 299 
 
 mankind and the general work of Providence had to go 
 on the further spread of the newly-awakened spirit of 
 inquiry and love of learning, the invention of printing, 
 the great arousing discoveries of navigation all this work 
 of a general preparation had apparently to go on for two 
 hundred years longer, ere the soil of the European mind 
 was made ready for the seed and prepared to bring forth 
 fruit abundantly. The Eeformer had, as it were, to stand 
 by till the preliminary work of Providence was completed ; 
 the Pope summoned him to his presence at Eome ; the 
 Council of Constance condemned his heresies and ordered 
 his very bones to be dug up and burnt ; his dust was 
 flung into the Swift ; and he himself may have witnessed, 
 from the seat of his empyrean glory, his earthly remains 
 in their rapid transit to the ocean. 
 
 In vain, apparently, he inveighed against luxurious con- 
 vents and idle mendicant friars and the legacy of submis- 
 sion inherited from a craven, Eome-bound monarch. In 
 vain, apparently, he translated the whole Bible, the Old 
 Testament remaining to this day unprinted. The pre- 
 liminary work of Divine Providence in the mind of 
 Europe was not completed, the soil was not yet pre- 
 pared for the seed ; he rushed into an unready world 
 before his toil could be successfully bestowed. 
 
 But even this sublime and lofty haste, as it were, this 
 enthusiastic speed to work with God, it must not be 
 forgotten, though carrying with it its disappointment, 
 is a motive and an argument for trust and patience, 
 and not for inaction. For Wycliffe himself was, after all, 
 an element in that very preparation which we acknow-
 
 300 DISCOURSES. 
 
 ledge must precede success ; and the very rays of light 
 flung by himself on the unprepared soil were indirectly 
 instrumental, with other great independent influences, 
 in mellowing and preparing that soil, and formed one at 
 least of the great succession of attestations which were 
 to liberate mankind and to open the gates of the temple 
 of God. 
 
 And it may be that the first settlements in the new 
 country may wither away and be quoted as failures ; it 
 may be that the extended swamp or the barren rock 
 proclaim that God's work is not yet clone ; it may be 
 that the first efforts in that great cause of freedom, or 
 light, or goodness, may be apparently fruitless, and may 
 be referred to as premature and made in vain, and yet 
 may be, after all, only the early deposits of human labour, 
 as there have been early deposits of divine, so that they 
 are the very basis and support of the culminating and 
 glorious results. 
 
 Yes, my brethren, whatever appearances may be, I 
 believe that when we hear the call within our hearts to 
 go forth and take our share in that great joint work in 
 which our Maker extends to us the privilege and binds 
 upon us the duty of uniting with himself, his share of 
 the joint condition has been fulfilled, and all that remains 
 is for us to fulfil ours. To help and aid us in this great 
 co-operation, the Almighty and the All-good extendeth to 
 us time, summoneth us again and once again, reneweth 
 his voice each morning, giveth us his awful charge again 
 each year. 
 
 Since last this congregation met within these walls,
 
 "LET IT ALOXE THIS YEAR ALSO." 301 
 
 we have entered on another period of those warnings ; 
 another stroke from the bell that numbers the succession 
 of our years has boomed across our world. 
 
 We look up and see God waiting for us. He asks 
 us, and asks us again to-day, at the beginning of another 
 year, whether we have done or are doing our share of 
 the conjoint work. 
 
 The soil is prepared, the sun of opportunity is shining, 
 the rain of nutriment is falling, the air that braces or 
 invites is breathing round us. What are we doing ? Is 
 the spade of industry under our feet are we digging ? 
 Is the knife in our hand are we pruning ? Is the warm 
 manure of encouragement laid around the roots of our 
 purpose are we restoring by toil, or skill, or industry, 
 or temperance, or knowledge, or conduct, to the soil of 
 this life, the elements we are always by the bounty of 
 God taking from it, and preparing for the increment of 
 the future, as well as availing ourselves of the produc- 
 tions of the past ? 
 
 Over the tree of life and opportunity of how many of 
 us may the spirit of a kind and gracious and patient 
 Master be saying to the Father, " Lord, let it alone this 
 year also, that I may dig about and dung it ; if it bear 
 fruit, well ; but if not, after that thou shalt cut it down." 
 It must not ask another year. Why should it further 
 cumber the ground ? 
 
 God hath preserved the lives of all of us here assembled 
 through the past year. Many have fallen around us. 
 Infancy has dropped like the bud ; youth has fallen like 
 the shed lily before the wind ; maturity has laid down
 
 302 DISCOURSES. 
 
 its strength in the grave ; age has sunk into its expected 
 rest ; the good and the gentle have left us alone. And 
 we are here. The plague has come near our shores, but 
 has not stepped upon them. The earthquake and the 
 hurricane have visited other lands, but made no fatal 
 pause with us. We have crossed seas within six inches 
 of destruction, but were preserved. We have travelled 
 almost with the speed of sound, and by the terrible 
 power of the compelling and resistless vapour which 
 has rolled down to death in the fatal crash of a minute 
 hundreds of our fellow-creatures, and we have been put 
 down how often ! at our own doors in safety. 
 
 We are here. " Lord," shall we ask and pray, " let us 
 alone this year also." 
 
 What shall we do and be this year if God grant the 
 prayer ? Shall we do more for our own minds, nurture 
 them in the highest culture we can command, and avail 
 ourselves more diligently of the opportunities of self- 
 improvement God puts within our reach ? Shall we do 
 more for each other ? Shall we be kindlier, juster, more 
 forbearing, more loving ? Shall we feel more for each 
 other's sorrows, trying to lessen their number and their 
 weight ? Shall we rejoice more in each other's joys, 
 trying to increase their multitude and their gladness ? 
 And shall we thus do more for our own immortal souls, 
 making them fitter and fitter for heaven and Christ ? If 
 these be really the purposes with which we enter upon 
 this year, perhaps we may dare to pray, " Lord, let us 
 alone this year also." 
 
 But if we are entering upon it without any strength-
 
 "LET IT ALONE THIS YEAR ALSO." 303 
 
 enecl purpose of good, without any renewed covenant 
 with our Master, without any serious, solemn desire to 
 be better or to do better, and to be more worthy of living 
 if we are permitted to live, we had better not utter the 
 prayer at all. The once-again repeated opportunity is 
 the once-again renewed responsibility. We had better 
 not ask for another year, only to be lost and neglected. 
 It were better we were cut down at once. What good 
 is there in our cumbering the ground ? 
 
 Lord, we believe and hope that now that thou hast 
 once again renewed our being to us, we shall be more 
 worthy of the continued gift. Help thou our unbelief. 
 
 " Lord, let us alone this year also." We shall be one 
 year longer upon earth. May we be one year nearer to 
 heaven ! We shall be one year longer enjoying the 
 means and opportunities of serving, loving, blessing each 
 other, of worshipping, obeying and working with thee, 
 of nurturing, disciplining, cultivating our hearts and 
 lives. 
 
 " Let us alone this year also." We are not ready to 
 go. There are many things undone we should like to do 
 before we go away and are no more seen. There are 
 some things we have done we would fain, by better 
 deeds for the future, as far as is now possible, see undone. 
 
 " Lord, let us alone another year." We will not let it 
 pass fruitless away. "While there is a future for us, there 
 is hope for us. We have much in our own power ; we 
 have much that we may do better than we have clone. 
 We fear, we know, we cumber the ground. Yet for that 
 very reason, good Lord, cut us not down.
 
 304 DISCOURSES. 
 
 " Let us alone this year also." Hallow our penitence 
 and make it real. Sanctify our resolutions and make 
 them strong. Forgive us our trespasses and let them 
 not be repeated. Save us from the evil of hard or 
 thoughtless or wicked lives ; and when the gates are 
 open, and the light of that day streameth forth where 
 there is no setting sun or waning moon or closing years, 
 may we, our work accomplished and our task performed, 
 enter with glad, confiding step into our dear Father's 
 presence, and feel that we are at length at home ! Amen.
 
 "We have been made by thee, God ! We come to our Creator. 
 We have been sustained by thee. We come to our Preserver. We 
 have been blessed by thee. We come to our Benefactor. Thou 
 hast tried us. We come to our Chastener. We have sinned 
 against thee. We come to thee for pardon. O God! we are thy 
 children. We come unto our Father. 
 
 Have we, then, nothing to say to thee ? nothing to ask for from 
 thee ? nothing to pray for from thee ? nothing to praise and bless 
 thee for ? 
 
 Yes ! all-merciful Father. We rejoice with awe once more to 
 be here. We know that thou hast a purpose in permitting us to 
 tread again thy well-known courts, to unite again in hymns and 
 prayers ; for some of us are weak from sorrow, and some of us are 
 weak from sin, and some of us are weak from sickness, and some 
 of us are weak from fear, and some of us are weak from doubt ; 
 and we are all come here, O God, to cast our hearts together at 
 thy footstool, that thou niayest mercifully turn all our weakness 
 into strength, and enable us to leave our burdens at the foot of 
 the cross, and take a song away in our hearts with us from this 
 place. 
 
 Send us forth from the service of thy church this day a strong 
 army of men and women and children, set to do thy will and bear 
 thy will, and thus make us, in the great strife and struggle of this 
 earthly battle, worthy of that great name whereby we are called, 
 and meet inheritors of that blessed life and immortality which 
 thou hast mercifully made known unto us through Jesus Christ 
 our Lord. Amen.
 
 SIN. 
 
 A FRAGMENT. 
 
 SIN is the great sorrow and the great evil of the world. 
 It is not only " the sting of death ;" it is the sting of life. 
 All other sorrows have their alleviation. Friends can share 
 them, medicines can relieve them, a good conscience may 
 lighten them, amusement may disperse them, employ- 
 ment may keep them down. But for remorse there is 
 no remedy. It eats into the soul. It is with you all 
 day; it watches by your bed-side all night. If you 
 suddenly awake, its form is the first you see. From the 
 open wound in the heart of a child who has told an un- 
 truth or taken what was not its own, up to the open 
 wound in the heart of a man who has robbed the father- 
 less and the widow, or blasted the peace and happiness 
 of one that trusted in him, sin inflicts the most acute 
 and perennial of all our anguishes, and is the only wound 
 that refuses to be closed, the only sorrow that cannot 
 be soothed. Because, though you may leave off doing, 
 you never can undo. The past is gone beyond recall. 
 You cannot live it over again and in another manner, 
 so as to erase the traces of the first manner. Life may 
 
 x2
 
 308 SIN. 
 
 indeed be made a palimpsest, and (contrary to th& usual 
 order of palimpsests) you may over-write the original 
 letters with words of a better omen and significance ; 
 but memory refuses to part with one iota of its posses- 
 sions, and its subtle process and chemistry will wash 
 away the later superinduced type, and bring out into its 
 old relief the ineffaceable letters of the first impression. 
 
 For this reason, mankind, in all ages of the world, have 
 sought for some atonement for sin. Each has said, " I 
 can repent of the past, but I cannot undo it. I can re- 
 fashion the future, but I cannot annihilate and then 
 re-create in a better image what is gone. Besides, I 
 shall sin again. Can sin be atoned for and thus oblite- 
 rated obliterated again and again?" 
 
 But, you observe, before you arrive at this stage of 
 feeling and of want, you must have arrived at the con- 
 sciousness of sin, and at the stage not only of occasional 
 consciousness, but of a besetting consciousness. And 
 against this there is in the human soul a great recalci- 
 tration. We all of us by our very nature shrink from 
 sorrow and suffering. And I say that sin is the greatest 
 evil of the world, and the consciousness of it its greatest 
 sorrow ; and we naturally shrink from admitting this 
 consciousness, and resist its approaches to the utmost. If 
 the evil is done and cannot be undone, then we hold off 
 as long as we possibly can the consciousness of it. The 
 stain is there, but we try not to see it. The burden is 
 on the soul, but we try not to feel it. We have not yet 
 begun to long to atone, because we will not yet acknow- 
 ledge that we need atonement.
 
 SIN. 309 
 
 And thus you observe two processes going on in the 
 world and two machineries at work. The sinner strug- 
 gling against the consciousness of his sin, and the devout 
 struggling as earnestly to awaken him to it. The one 
 seeking to pooh-pooh it, to make as little as possible of 
 it, to laugh at it, to forget it, to put it out of mind, by 
 distractions, by amusements, by employment, by society, 
 or by that last and most fatal of all the methods which 
 could be resorted to, and which has been metaphorically, 
 but, alas! too literally, designated, " drowning it" bury- 
 ing it in the stupor of daily debauch. The other seeking, 
 by visions of what ought to have been the life led, by 
 depicting the exceeding misery and the exceeding sin- 
 fulness of sin, by alarming the fears, by harrowing the 
 feelings and agitating the conscience into a distressing 
 activity, by introducing the sinner into that sulphurous 
 atmosphere which lies between the horrors of the past 
 and the greater horrors of the future, to stir up to and 
 induce the very state of mind from which the other is 
 sedulously fleeing, the consciousness of sin. 
 
 It is at this stage, when reached, whether by the natu- 
 ral and God-designed action of the heaven-implanted 
 conscience, by the serious, tearful voice of friendship, or 
 by the active alarmist efforts of the preacher and the 
 divine, it is at this stage that the man, on whose soul 
 sin now lies heavy, cries out, How shall I undo the past 
 and wash out my guilt for ever ? 
 
 And then steps in the Comforter to tell him that an 
 atonement is provided for him if he will only heartily 
 and gratefully accept it. The burden has become too
 
 310 SIN. 
 
 intolerable, the anguish of the wound too piercing/for 
 him to think one moment of rejecting the proffered con- 
 solation. He rushes to the Eock that is higher than 
 he ; he drinks thirstily of the waters that flow from its 
 smitten front; he washes in the blood that has been 
 outpoured for him ; he flings himself at the foot of the 
 Cross and is saved. 
 
 Now am I here to-night to make light of sin ; to say 
 that it requires no atonement ; to take away from the 
 longing, sighing soul of man the only refuge ever truly 
 offered it from the punishment and pangs of guilt ? God 
 forbid ! I should abhor myself if it were so, and you 
 would do right to doubt me and to blame me if it were 
 so. 
 
 But I am not here for so unholy a purpose, and you 
 know that I am not. I am here to assert the reality 
 and misery of sin ; that it is so real that it cannot be 
 transferred, so miserable that its misery can only cease 
 with itself. I believe, nevertheless, there is comfort, 
 because there is God who made us, and therefore knows 
 our frame and remembers we are dust. But many mis- 
 chievous and mistaken teachings about the nature of 
 sin, its punishment and its remedy, fill the air of our 
 religious life ; and from these I am anxious for no 
 false thing can do anything but harm to relieve your 
 minds. 
 
 What, then, are we told about sin, and what are we 
 told about its origin ? 
 
 We are told that man was created perfect and sinless.
 
 311 
 
 And there can be no doubt that he -was sinless till he 
 sinned. But that he was ever perfect is impossible, from 
 the nature of things and from fact. There is and there 
 can be none perfect but God. Everything short of the 
 Infinite, the All-knowing, the All-powerful and the All- 
 good, must of necessity be just so far removed from 
 perfection. All created beings must, as the very con- 
 dition of their existence, be in this sense imperfect. But 
 if you choose to give up this sense and say, by perfect, 
 you mean sound, whole, good, according to the capacity 
 of his nature, free from vain desires and foolish purposes, 
 obedient to law and desirous pre-eminently of holiness, 
 still it is not the fact that man was perfect, because, 
 according to the very theory on which your assertion 
 rests, he fell before the first temptation, and sinned in his 
 imperfectness on the very first opportunity offered him. 
 
 Then it is said, sin is infinite because committed 
 against an infinite Being. But this is false logic. Infinite 
 things can only proceed from infinite, and finite things 
 alone can come from finite. Nothing infinite can pro- 
 ceed from the finite, because this is a contradiction in 
 terms. Can anything come out of a thing if it never 
 was in it ? The finite cannot be the cause of the infinite, 
 though of course the infinite can produce the finite, since 
 it contains it, and a great deal more than it, within itself. 
 Therefore this assertion that sin is infinite because com- 
 mitted against an infinite Being is a mere ring upon 
 words, and has not only no truth, but no meaning in it. 
 
 Again, we are told that the first sin was not only 
 individual but corporate ; that not only did Adam sin,
 
 312 SIN. 
 
 but all the future generations of men sinned in his loins ; 
 that they sinned before they existed, and were subject 
 to the penalty before they had fallen into the trans- 
 gression. 
 
 How so silly a dream, and of so baseless a fabric, can 
 really have possessed waking men so long, is one of the 
 greatest psychological wonders of the world. There is 
 no foundation for it in real things. No reason can sup- 
 port it for a minute. No candidly interpreted words of 
 Scripture can sanction it. There is no mercy, no justice, 
 no sense in it. We must dismiss it as a figment of theo- 
 logians, as the logic of the schools. 
 
 But, more astounding still, we are told that this lapse 
 of one poor man or woman, ages ago, involved the count- 
 less myriads of human beings, then unborn and still 
 unborn, not only in the transgression, but in the penalty, 
 and that penalty not such as we should inflict for a 
 similar transgression on a recreant boy, but everlasting 
 torture ; that He who sits on the throne of the universe 
 called into being, and still goes on every day cruelly 
 calling into being, creatures whom he invests with an 
 immortal nature apparently only that he may immortally 
 torment them. Is it possible that under the name of 
 Religion mankind should have so long subjected them- 
 selves to this nightmare of an unwholesome theological 
 diet and a diseased condition of the soul ? If we have 
 to dismiss the other statements I have mentioned from 
 our minds as simply foolish and irrational, this we 
 should reject as a blasphemy against God and a huge 
 impiety. No swearing in the streets is equal to it in
 
 SIN. 313 
 
 wickedness ; no doubt of God's goodness, no murmur 
 against his providence, so sins against faith and trust 
 and religion and love, as this unfilial charge against our 
 Maker. 
 
 But having thus, as the theologians tell us, sinned by 
 substitute, and carried the spiritual virus of this substi- 
 tute's sin deep down, for ever inseparable, in our nature, 
 and having inevitably inherited also, what he is said to 
 have incurred, the penalty of eternal life in torture 
 what is this wretched, cruelly-created and cruelly-treated 
 race of ours to do ? Where is it to turn for refuge and 
 repose ? Who shall deliver it from the body of this 
 loathsome and agonizing death ? 
 
 The same theologians answer, "A substitute again." 
 God himself, in the person of his eternal Son, descends 
 from heaven, takes this sin and its penalty on his own 
 shoulders, invests us once again with the righteousness 
 which in truth we never had, but which they say we 
 had in Adam, though even Adam never had it ; the 
 wrath of God, or the justice of God, or the law of God, 
 is satisfied by this substitute, and thus we are saved. 
 
 Now, my friends, a logical system most ingeniously 
 put together, apparently finding foundation in the words 
 of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, handed down 
 to us from Augustine and the Fathers of the fourth 
 century, repeated and re-modelled by Calvin and the 
 Eeformers of the sixteenth century, though utterly base- 
 less in its origin, and false in all its details, still holds 
 enthralled the largest part of the Christian world ; and
 
 314 SIN. 
 
 it is the object and desire of an increasing number of 
 independent thinkers to relieve Christianity not only of 
 this great fiction but of this great disgrace ; to restore 
 and re-assert the actual facts of human nature ; to vin- 
 dicate the character and dealings of a wise Creator ; to 
 make the high moral and spiritual teachings of the Bible 
 shine forth once again in their purity, their truth, their 
 simplicity, their practicableness, their usefulness; and 
 to bring back to the heart of man the divine image of 
 that Master, of that real Saviour, who has been so long 
 hung up before us as a brazen serpent or exalted as a 
 severe last-day judge, but whom we want to see restored 
 to us as our wise instructor, as our tender brother, 
 (touched from his own experience with a sense of our 
 infirmities,) as the sharer of our griefs and our comforter 
 under them, as the best image upon earth of our Father's 
 likeness, and the best guide upon earth to our Father's 
 home. 
 
 That is what we want to see back again ; and when 
 we do see it back again, the lurid fires of a cruel and 
 unjust hell will die away; the monstrous idol at present 
 enthroned on the universe will be taken down; the 
 utterly unreal views which have prevailed of human 
 nature, and the nature and the cause and the cure and 
 the punishment of what we call sin, will be dispersed. 
 And we shall stand once again in the sweet daylight of 
 this universe, in the dear love of God, in the bright hope 
 of unceasing progress in knowledge and happiness and 
 holiness through the countless ages and the successive 
 worlds of an immortal being, stand enfranchised, joyous,
 
 sm 315 
 
 full of unperplexed faith and hope, no priest daring to 
 make us afraid by the false terrors of an unreal future, 
 and no metaphysician any more puzzling us with intri- 
 cate and unreal representations of the nature of our 
 present ; this world and all worlds, this age and all ages, 
 being made to be happy and made to be good, and we 
 ourselves restored to our place as children in the home 
 of our father, and brothers in the brotherhood of Christ. 
 
 The days in which the Church built up this theory of 
 sin and of salvation which I am combatting, were the 
 days, we must remember, of the reign of Aristotle, the 
 Greek philosopher, over the intellectual world of the 
 West. And we know that one of the main features of 
 his logic was not so much the examination of premisses 
 as the careful deduction of conclusions. 
 
 I am not saying a word against Aristotle. He was 
 a great man, a great thinker, a careful investigator, and 
 an anxious searcher after fact and truth, and he him- 
 self never did and never would have acquiesced in any 
 theories such as those unhappily prevalent among us, 
 because his knowledge was so wide and his discernment 
 so acute that he would have seen how opposed they 
 were to reality and truth. But it must, I think, be 
 acknowledged that his system of reasoning, as taught 
 and practised in the times we speak of, and still influ- 
 encing the style of thought prevalent at this day, (in our 
 own Oxford, for example,) was a system which led men 
 to consider more carefully the processes of reasoning 
 and their correctness, than the accuracy of the facts
 
 316 SIN. 
 
 and basis on which those processes rested ; and thus, 
 given certain premisses, granted certain conditions, we 
 were to see that the conclusions from these were cor- 
 rectly drawn. Thus attention was rather drawn off from 
 than fixed upon the foundations that is to say, the 
 question (whatever might be the logical correctness of 
 the argument) whether the facts or the hypotheses on 
 which the argument reposed were correct. And this 
 practice vitiated at once our science and our theology. 
 Instead of a careful collection and induction of the facts, 
 we too often assumed the facts, and were careful only 
 about the consistent results of those supposed facts. Thus 
 Aristotle formulated a system of reasoning which is 
 nearly faultless as a process, but the fact of the correct- 
 ness of the process is no voucher in itself for a single 
 one of the statements on which that process rests and 
 from which it starts. These facts were many of them 
 incorrect. I by no means say all, because Aristotle was 
 a careful and usually a correct and acute observer, and a 
 great student and thinker. But, as one might expect 
 in the earlier ages of observation and experience, many 
 of the supposed facts were incorrect, and the extent of 
 the whole was not great ; so that when we had had some 
 eighteen hundred years of the sway of Aristotle, with 
 his correct process, and his unsound or at least insuffi- 
 cient foundation, Bacon began a new arrangement under 
 great disadvantages. For he had to begin correcting 
 the received facts and augmenting the number of facts on 
 which his process was to rest. The labour of genera- 
 tions was suddenly thrown upon him ; and his " Sylva
 
 sry. 317 
 
 Sylvarum" is of itself a proof of how he was lost in 
 the wood, and perplexed among its often pathless and 
 unexplored thickets. But he at least inaugurated a 
 new practice, a nearly new scientific principle, and 
 taught with irresistible power and lucidity that the 
 correct ascertainment of preliminary facts was a greater 
 for the time, and a more indispensable achievement, 
 than any series of deductions that might be founded on 
 them. These last might wait and be none the worse at 
 last ; but the first were absolutely essential to render 
 the last of any intrinsic value whatever. And there can, 
 I think, be no reasonable doubt that this turning of 
 the direction of thought has been the immediate parent 
 of almost all our modern advancement in knowledge and 
 discoveries of facts. 
 
 Now in like manner to Aristotle in the scientific, 
 Augustine in the theological world formulated the system 
 of the Church, resting it principally upon the reasoning 
 of St. Paul, or rather the received interpretations of his 
 reasoning. But he assumed his facts, and the facts were 
 almost without exception false. The system was wonder- 
 fully built up, with sometimes, indeed, what appears to 
 us an incredible credulity and a puerile fancifulness, but 
 for the most part with (given his premisses) a resistless 
 logic and a most lively ingenuity. 
 
 But the great mistake in Augustine, which involves 
 the overthrow and the ruin of his theological system, is 
 this that all his basal facts on which that system rests 
 are wrong, that is to say are not facts. His acuteness, 
 his earnestness, his piety, his logic, are faultless ; but
 
 318 SIN. 
 
 then they all rest on a series of hypotheses which are 
 mistaken and have no foundation in reality. His whole 
 system rests on this assumption, that man was created 
 perfect. In the " De Civitate Dei," in which his system 
 is most carefully and proportionately worked out, he 
 says, " Bona voluntas opus est Dei, cum e& quippe ab 
 illo factus est homo." He speaks of the " mala voluntas" 
 as "non secundum, sed contra naturarn."* 
 
 Now I do not here quote, but only remind you of the 
 various inquiries that in all time, and not least in our 
 own, have been made as to the origin and nature of man. 
 And I think you will admit that we are not at present 
 in a position to assert very dogmatically what these 
 were. 
 
 But I will give Augustine every advantage, and con- 
 cede to him as possible and admissible that our race 
 began with one pair, the representative Adam and Eve. 
 But I deny that they were created perfect. According 
 to the account itself on which Augustine rests his argu- 
 ment, they fell on the first temptation. The " mala 
 voluntas" must have been in them as well as the "bona 
 voluntas," and appears very soon to have obtained the 
 mastery. Then how does Augustine go on to describe 
 the manner of this temptation ? He says the devil 
 chose the serpent as appropriate to his use because he 
 was " lubricum et tortuosis amfractibus mobilem," and 
 attacked in discourse the weaker part of the couple, 
 
 * The inclination of the will to good is the work of God, for 
 he created man with it. The inclination of the will to evil is 
 not according to nature but against it.
 
 SIN. 319 
 
 " ex parte scilicet inferiors illius humanas copulse inci- 
 piens," thinking the man would not be so credulous, but 
 that he would prove like Aaron when at the wish of the 
 people he made an idol, or like Solomon when at the 
 wish of his wives he founded idolatrous worship, though 
 not himself believing the deception any more than 
 Aaron and Solomon believed in the idols, " sed sociali 
 necessitudini paruisse;" so that the apostle says, "Adam 
 non est seductus, mulier autem seducta est," and (con- 
 tinues Augustine), " ille ab unico noluit consortio dirimi, 
 nee in communione peccati"* a most ingenious and 
 interesting theory, no doubt ; and through a long life I 
 have found that a falsehood cleverly maintained excites 
 greater interest, if not more belief, in the majority of 
 mankind, than a truth dully proclaimed. 
 
 I suppose I am not at liberty to say that I do not 
 believe this statement, that I do not know that there is 
 such a being as the devil, but rather believe there is not, 
 or that the man only sinned because he wished to sym- 
 pathize and to go shares with his wife even in her sins. 
 But certainly, if Augustine is at liberty to assume these 
 statements to be facts, I am at liberty to doubt them, 
 and to refuse to be bound by the logical conclusions 
 drawn from them, as I would by a proposition in mathe- 
 matics, the axioms and postulates on which it rested not 
 being necessarily admitted as true, and to say, at least of 
 these supposed facts of Augustine, " Not proven." * * * 
 
 * Adam yielded to the pressure of affection, not wishing to be 
 severed from his sole companionship even in sin.
 
 BAKTHOLOMEW. 
 
 A LESSON FOR THE DAY, AUG. 24, 1879. 
 
 HE was one of the Twelve whom Jesus sent forth. 
 Their commission was a wide one, though confined in 
 the first place to the lost sheep of the house of Israel ; 
 for it was, " Go forth and proclaim that the kingdom of 
 God draws near ; heal the sick, cast out demons ; freely 
 ye have received, freely give." 
 
 Traditional history says that Bartholomew fulfilled 
 this commission by preaching the religion of his great 
 Master and of humanity in Arabia, Anatolia, Armenia 
 and India. A little island in the Tiber preserved his 
 memory by its church and hospital of St. Bartholomew, 
 where, they said, they preserved his relics. Chatham, 
 in our own country, gave its hospital in the eleventh 
 century the patronage of the same name. The little 
 Carribee island bearing it sends forth among its leading 
 produce medicinal drugs and the lignum vitse ; and we 
 have only to go a short distance from the church in 
 which we are met [Effra Road, Brixton], to find in St. 
 Bartholomew's Hospital another indication of the fact
 
 BARTHOLOMEW. 321 
 
 that lie still, as it were, bears his Master's commission 
 in his spirit, and " heals the sick." 
 
 If, further, we are to believe, what theologians have 
 asserted, and what special collocations of names and cir- 
 cumstances seem to render probable, that Bartholomaeus 
 was his patronymic only, and that this "son of Tolmai" 
 was identical with Nathaniel, of whom the Lord said, 
 " Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile," 
 we have a set of associations with the character and the 
 memory of this apostle of the most humane and pleasing 
 description. 
 
 If you should now turn, too, to the celebration of the 
 saints'-days in our own national Church, it is to be 
 noticed that the Epistle of the day (Acts v. 12 sqq.) tells 
 us how there came a multitude out of the cities round 
 about Jerusalem, bringing sick folk and them which were 
 vexed with unclean spirits ; and the Gospel of the day 
 speaks of the true benefactors being not those who exer- 
 cise lordship over, but those who serve, their fellow- 
 creatures ; and it happens that the Collect of this 24th 
 day of August begins thus : " God, who declarest thy 
 Almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and 
 pity."* 
 
 What an instance it is of the power of man to degrade 
 the lofty, to fall from high estate and holy tradition, to 
 bring into the realms of justice and mercy the reign of 
 
 * Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, this year 24th of August. 
 There is also a special Collect for St. Bartholomew 
 
 Y
 
 322 BARTHOLOMEW. 
 
 his own bad passions and wickedness, that this very day 
 has now to most of us lost all its tender, peaceful, loving 
 associations, and is marked by one of the darkest events 
 that has ever blackened the annals of our race, and was 
 selected again some century after for perpetrating a great 
 act of bigotry and persecution on sainted men in our 
 own country ! 
 
 For on the 24th day of August, St. Bartholomew's- 
 day in 1572, just 307 years ago, this happened. In a 
 still and early hour, just as the Sunday began to dawn 
 on the city of Paris, the bell of St. Germain's rang the 
 summons, not to worship but to wickedness not to 
 the service of God, but to the destruction of man. The 
 covenanted signal was taken up by all the other churches, 
 and the city was in the course of a very few minutes 
 awakened up from absolute and confiding stillness to 
 the peal of bells from every church, the discharge of 
 fire-arms on every side, the shrieks of innocent and 
 defenceless men and women and children, and the 
 shouts of their invaders and pursuers. For that wretched 
 young King, Charles IX., incited by his wicked mother, 
 Catherine de Medici, had sent forth the order by which 
 all those who were Eoman Catholic Christians were to 
 murder without remorse all those who were Huguenot 
 or Protestant Christians ; and for several days in that 
 city, and soon after in many other parts of the kingdom, 
 the work of unpitying slaughter went on. On pretence 
 of a festival, most of the leaders and persons of conse- 
 quence connected with the Huguenots had been collected
 
 BARTHOLOMEW. 323 
 
 together in Paris, in order that Protestantism in France 
 might have, as it were, but one neck, and be more easily 
 and immediately destroyed. 
 
 Although our impression of the horror of any trans- 
 action never attains its full depth and darkness until 
 we have had all the details accompanying it presented 
 to our minds, yet nothing is wanted here and now to 
 give to the sentiment of loathing for this treacherous, 
 tyrannous, impious wickedness, its full intensity. The 
 historian's page still conveys, to those who desire to 
 read it, all the dread and thrilling impressions which 
 that bloody Sabbath left on the memory of spectators, 
 and all the suffering and sorrow it left on the victims 
 and their survivors. The moment, the manner, the 
 sound of the rush into each private house the attitude, 
 words, remonstrances or struggles of the victims the 
 overtaken or the successful flight, the vain resistance, 
 the hair-breadth escapes the ages, persons, characters, 
 of many of the murdered all these things are writ for 
 those who wish to read. Suffice for us that this greatest, 
 coldest, cruellest and basest of all iniquities that were 
 ever perpetrated under the sun, this Massacre of St. 
 Bartholomew, is matter of inerasable historic fact, the 
 theme of amazement and horror to all following time. 
 
 I have, indeed, in my eye the attempts that have been 
 made to argue that this blot upon human history was 
 the result of sudden rage and fear, and not premeditated. 
 I wish to God I could believe this ; but the proved 
 facts of the previous invitation of the Huguenots to 
 Paris, the firing of the King himself from the windows 
 
 Y2
 
 324 BARTHOLOMEW. 
 
 of the Louvre on the heretics, the despatches of the 
 various Italian ambassadors, the letter of Catherine de 
 Medici boasting of it, the Te Deum at Eome, and the 
 medal struck in commemoration and description of it, 
 (now in shame concealed,) remove from us the last shred 
 of an apology. 
 
 It is indeed a question with our conscience, and with 
 the desire to decide on what is best and right, in refer- 
 ence to some events of human history and incidents of 
 human life, whether they had better be remembered or 
 forgotten. In private life we feel that to be a very 
 unpleasant kind of memory which is readiest and most 
 active in recalling unpleasant things ; and on the wider 
 arena of historic life we do not like the tone of mind 
 which seems to have an affinity to all the blots and 
 stains and wickednesses of the generations that are 
 passed, to mark its calendar with black days more 
 willingly than with red, to keep in remembrance the 
 wicked more readily than the good, and to celebrate, as 
 it might be said, the festivals of sinners rather than the 
 feast-days of the saints. 
 
 But then it must be considered that these great crimes 
 of men are not only instructive as facts, as indications 
 of what human nature in some of its aspects and cha- 
 racters can be and do, but they lead us to ascertain 
 what are the causes and incentives to such wicked 
 actions under the pretexts of piety and duty. They are 
 warnings, beacons, leading us to a better knowledge of 
 duty by means of its very violations, with their destruc- 
 tive consequences, and the abhorrent sense of mankind
 
 BARTHOLOMEW. 325 
 
 expressed upon them. And they are, further, often a 
 necessary part of the contrary tale which is to be told, 
 of human courage and steadfastness and honour and 
 truth. They are often only darkness to that light of 
 heroism and virtue which gleams across it and in after 
 ages penetrates and illuminates the whole black cloud 
 of the crime by the brightness of its glory. 
 
 Thus, therefore, it may be worthy of the Christian 
 moralist and the religious man just as he at times will 
 gaze with profit, were it only that he gazes with abhor- 
 rence, on the deeds and sufferings of vice to call to 
 remembrance those gigantic crimes which some portion 
 of his race, in some paroxysm of untamed violence or 
 some onslaught of rash and ignorant blindness, have 
 committed, especially when, side by side with these 
 things which stand for our detestation and lament, there 
 stand also the forms of suffering righteousness, to receive 
 from other ages that meed of honour and gratitude 
 which their own, it may be, had in great measure denied. 
 
 Thus numbers that day were offered, on the one hand, 
 death, the signal of their constancy to truth and con- 
 science ; and, on the other, the white cross, the accept- 
 ance of which would have been a sign of their return to 
 the Roman Catholic form of faith ; and numbers in the 
 midst of those dreadful days and nights had the recti- 
 tude and heroism to say, "Give me the death." The 
 leader of this devoted band lay on a bed of sickness. 
 The murderers penetrated into his house ; and his atten- 
 dant, on being interrogated as to the cause of the dis-
 
 326 .BARTHOLOMEW. 
 
 turbance, announced it in these words, " My lord, God 
 calls us to himself." 
 
 Time passed on; ninety years rolled by; the year 
 1662 arrived. It is now 217 years since. 
 
 The morning of the 24th day of August again dawned. 
 The day of St. Bartholomew, that now about to be the 
 twice-stained festival of the guileless and affectionate 
 apostle, came forth with the unwearied sun ; but it this 
 time shone, or rather darkened, upon England. 
 
 Charles II., contrary to all the promises he had made 
 to the English Presbyterians, who in fact restored him 
 to his throne, required that on the 24th day of August 
 every clergyman in the then English Church should be 
 deprived of his living who would not give unfeigned 
 assent and consent to all and everything contained in 
 the Book of Common Prayer. The Act called the Act of 
 Uniformity, still unrepealecl and still in force, required 
 the use of certain vestments, the turning to the east in 
 certain parts of the service, the using the sign of the 
 cross in baptism, kneeling at the Lord's Supper, which 
 was regarded by many of the clergy as connected with 
 the adoration of the elements, and the doctrine of Tran- 
 substantiation and the Eeal Presence. It demanded of 
 these men to submit to the old canons, to retract the 
 oath they had taken to the Solemn League and Covenant, 
 to renounce the ordination they had received from the 
 hands of presbyters, and to declare their orders false 
 and pretended, and consent to receive them anew at the
 
 BARTHOLOMEW. 327 
 
 'hands of bishops. Some of these things it might be 
 innocent in those who approved of them to do ; but 
 none of these things could it be innocent to exact from 
 those disapproving of them, on pain of expulsion from 
 the Christian ministry of men devoted in all essential 
 faith and works to its duties and its obligations. 
 
 But these impossible terms, imposed because they 
 were known to be impossible, were remorselessly exacted ; 
 and rather than yield to them, two thousand ministers 
 of religion among them was my own direct ancestor 
 Philip Henry some of whom had been offered the 
 thrones of bishops if they would comply, preferred depri- 
 vation and disgrace and penury to such a dereliction of 
 principle and duty, and walked forth into their banish- 
 ment with their homeless wives and families, their hearts 
 laden with sorrow, but their heads erect like the heads of 
 honest men, and their consciences their own. This was 
 a great blow and a great loss to all England ; for it was 
 notorious that it deprived the Church of a vast number 
 of its sincerest, devoutest and most learned servants, 
 and brought about (by the necessity of filling up their 
 places with inferior men) that degraded condition of the 
 clergy which Lord Macaulay has so vividly portrayed 
 in the celebrated third chapter of his History. And, in 
 truth, this same Act of Uniformity is a disturbing element 
 in our national and ecclesiastical life to this day, and 
 there is an increasing feeling among most classes of 
 English thinkers that it will have to be repealed yes, 
 repealed, after 200 years of mischief-doing.
 
 328 BARTHOLOMEW. 
 
 I shall close this review with a notice of the lesson of 
 the day, and of the three kinds of feeling that are or 
 should be excited by it. 
 
 The first, of course, is one of horror of horror not 
 merely that such things as this massacre should be done 
 by man at all, but of especial horror that they should 
 be done in the sacred name of Religion. Dreadful as are 
 those battles and sieges, those traitorous betrayals and 
 midnight slaughters, which have place in the name of 
 war, and arise from the hist of power and possession in 
 man, these strike us not with the same indignation and 
 regret which similar things done in the name of God, 
 and for the supposed sake of religion and truth, excite 
 in us. It is a dangerous thing when man begins to 
 judge who are the enemies of God, and that not on the 
 ground of the known and recognized laws of God, known 
 and recognized by all Christian peoples in all times, but 
 on the ground of a variety of sentiment on the things 
 which we ought to believe concerning that God. Under 
 the pretext of vindicating God's honour, he thus in 
 reality only indulges his own ungodly passions; and 
 under the pretence of serving the highest welfare of his 
 fellow-creatures, exercises only his own love of tyrannous 
 sway, and, with the words of heaven upon his lips, has 
 the passions of hell within his heart. Eeligious bigotry, 
 then, is a frightful thing. When the bad and tyrannical 
 passions of the human heart are manifested at all, let us 
 be able to see them as they are, and detest them as we 
 should ; but let us not blind ourselves, or suffer others 
 to blind themselves, by calling persecution, zeal ; human
 
 BARTHOLOMEW. 329 
 
 vengeance, divine justice ; and ignorance and ill-temper, 
 piety and faith. The wrath of man worketh not the 
 righteousness of God. 
 
 The second lesson these recollections should teach us 
 is that of reverence for those who, instead of inflicting 
 any wrong in God's name for what they considered truth, 
 contrariwise bore it. While all is smooth and fair around 
 men, you never know them. They may be sincere, they 
 may be equal to their professions, but they have no 
 opportunity of showing it, or you of knowing it. Their 
 own declarations, or your suppositions, as to what they 
 would or would not bear for you, for their country, for 
 their religion, may be well-founded or they may not. 
 Neither you nor they can positively tell. The hour of 
 trial has not yet arrived to them. For this reason, 
 worldly and irreligious men are for ever saying of the 
 apparently religious and unworldly, "Doth Job serve God 
 for nought ? " and hinting that if tribulation and persecu- 
 tion should arise because of the word, by and by they 
 would be offended. Now, I say, such events as we are 
 calling to mind to-day give the lie to this supposition as 
 any such clear certainty. They prove that to many, to 
 numbers, it is a fact that the spiritual has a far more 
 real existence to them than anything material ; the smile 
 of God is an actually more prized reward than the favour 
 of man ; the rest in heaven at last, a more entrancing 
 prospect to their souls than the peace and splendour of 
 any abode on earth ; the cause of truth, the liberty of 
 man, the integrity of their own consciences, matters that, 
 it' compelled to make a choice, they actually do and will
 
 330 BARTHOLOMEW. 
 
 prefer to any honours or gains or advantages that life 
 can confer nay, to life itself. We say, this fact is con- 
 tinually coming before us in individual cases, and from 
 time to time, as it were, to startle and lift men up from 
 their grovelling scepticism and unbelief in higher things, 
 in the heroic conduct of large masses of men, stamping 
 itself indelibly on the memory of ages. We say, in the 
 two events we are contemplating to-day, men and women 
 were asked by thousands, in the kingdom of France, 
 would they deny the spiritual truths they had been de- 
 claring were more than life to them, and thus escape an 
 instantaneous and frightful death, and they answered, 
 " No ; give us death." We say that on one day in our own 
 country a body of men were asked whether they would 
 deny the great importance of certain religious principles 
 for which they had been earnestly contending, and accept 
 a somewhat different form of the same faith, and save 
 themselves and their wives and their children from 
 threatened homelessness and ignominy and want, and 
 two thousand of these men declared that they and their 
 families would go forth from their homes and churches, 
 and all their known means both of worldly support and 
 social usefulness, and take God and their integrity with 
 them, rather than stay in those abodes without God and 
 a good conscience. And yet the very day before all 
 this was done, any unbelieving and worldly man was at 
 liberty to say of these actual persons that they never 
 would act as they did, and their whole lives might have 
 passed, under a different state of things, without their 
 being able to show to others, or themselves be certain of,
 
 BARTHOLOMEW. 331 
 
 the heroism that was in their hearts. Therefore, I say, 
 we owe thanks to God, and we owe thanks and reverence 
 to these men, who in the cause at least of conscience, 
 and further, as most of us here will believe, of relative 
 truth, proved that men can and do value spiritual, 
 religious, eternal principles above all other things that 
 are dear to our material life, nay, above life itself. 
 
 Lastly, these recollections, while they excite in us 
 mingled horror and admiration of the past, show us 
 many grounds of grateful joy, and some perhaps of 
 wholesome fear, for the present. Of joy, because we 
 have surely reason to believe that some progress has 
 been made in the Christian world, at any rate from the 
 earlier of these events, towards truer Christian prin- 
 ciples. Surely we may at least believe that in no part 
 of the Christian world, (whatever may still be its back- 
 wardness and bigotry) could the precise horror of the 
 St. Bartholomew of 1572 be enacted over again ; or that 
 if it anywhere were, the whole of the rest of Christen- 
 dom would rise at once to insist upon the extinction of 
 the power that perpetrated it from the number of the 
 governments of earth. Then, if this be the case, we may 
 legitimately rejoice that some progress has been made 
 towards a universal, though a still most practically in- 
 complete, recognition of the truth, that while the civil 
 power has a right to restrain by force and check by 
 punishment all violations of the rights of property or 
 the sacredness of human life, it has no right, by pain or 
 .penalty or restraint, to interfere with the mode in which
 
 332 PAR THOLOME w. 
 
 a man shall worship or not worship his Maker ; that 
 these are things solely of argument and representation, 
 of persuasion and choice. 
 
 Those of us who can carry out these principles cor- 
 dially into actual life may rejoice that we are freed from 
 those narrow views of the Almighty and of Truth which 
 suspend the scales of human opinion between heaven 
 and hell, and make a supposed error in belief, which 
 often is in fact a real truth, the sure entail er of eternal 
 sorrow. We have cause to be grateful that, while 
 possessing ourselves, it may be, an earnest and decided 
 faith and preference, we are privileged to look with hope 
 and charity at least on all who from sincere and serious 
 motives differ from us, not feeling ourselves called upon 
 to interrupt the genial flow of our kindly affections by 
 avoidance, reproach, bitterness of spirit, or any other 
 uncharitableness. In all this we have a great gain. 
 
 But some fear mingles with this our joy ; for a ques- 
 tion rises before us whether with our increased liberality 
 there may not have grown up a decreased earnestness ; 
 whether we, too, value our religious principles above all 
 considerations of time, and could die for them ; whether, 
 on the contrary, we do not sometimes shrink with an 
 unworthy and, in comparison with the examples set 
 before us, an ignoble fear, from the petty difficulties with 
 which our own times and our own country still surround 
 sometimes the honest and open avowal of our convic- 
 tions ; and by the question, too, whether we do not too 
 often allow ourselves to be consumed by little things,
 
 BARTHOLOMEW. 333 
 
 little sorrows and vexations of spirit, and allow all our 
 magnanimity, all our reserve of high thoughts and pre- 
 paration for strong trials, to ooze away. 
 
 Let us remember there is a greatness in great sorrows. 
 They swallow up all little private griefs. The men we 
 have been thinking of to-day had great sorrows, great 
 trials, and great minds to face them with. 
 
 In the remembrance of their noble conflicts, in the 
 hearing of the dropping of their pure tears, in the sight 
 of their bosoms heaving with cares for the cause of 
 God, of truth and the freedom of man, let us hide our 
 own light afflictions which are but for a moment, be 
 lifted out of the memory or at least the acuter conscious- 
 ness of them, and remember that home in heaven which 
 heroic souls have been preparing for us, that after our 
 easier steep of life is climbed, we may at last be not all- 
 unworthy of sitting on that Mount of God which they 
 ascended by the harsher paths of cruel wrong and suf- 
 fering, and, after our day of labour is past, be seated with 
 these just made perfect, where our souls shall be stayed 
 in everlasting peace.
 
 ON THE NATIONAL USE OF CATHEDEALS 
 AND PAEISH CHUKCHES. 
 
 A PAPER BEAD IN LIVERPOOL.* 
 
 EVERY great institution, made visible by buildings, 
 originated in a life, a man or an idea. The emanation 
 from the spirit and the life of Jesus Christ animated 
 the souls of many other sons of God and brothers of 
 man, and assumed a concrete form in a society called 
 his Church. 
 
 Men of heart and nerve, inspired with the desire to 
 carry this great salvation to their fellow-creatures, and 
 redeem their tainted lives from sin and passion, their 
 terrified and clouded minds from base idolatry, to uplift 
 their hearts, heavy with uninterpreted and unintelligible 
 ills and sorrows of earth, and to fill the aching void 
 with hope and faith and love, left their homes and faced 
 on little more than planks the unmitigated horrors of 
 wintry seas, landed on foreign and sometimes barbarous 
 coasts, and scarcely got a shelter for their heads. 
 
 But there they were, a power : a power of knowledge 
 in the midst of ignorance, of love in the midst of hates, 
 * Before the recent reform in the Burial Laws.
 
 NATIONAL USE OF CATHEDRALS. 335' 
 
 and of a faith in a God above and a life to come in the 
 midst of an almost unredeemed materialism and exclu- 
 sive belief in the present hour. 
 
 I am not here, from the advantage of a standpoint in 
 a comparatively enlightened and purified age, on the one 
 hand to justify, or on the other hand too severely to 
 censure, the ways and means some of these men em- 
 ployed to secure a footing for their missions amidst the 
 ignorant and semi-barbarous objects of their interest. 
 Appeals to fears and to superstitions as the existing 
 materials on which almost alone they could rest the 
 fulcrum of their leverage, no doubt mixed to a mortify- 
 ing extent with the nobler means they also employed, 
 and desecrated in so far the pure purpose they had 
 before them. 
 
 But I still look with reverence on these missionaries, 
 by whatever name each was called, whether it were the 
 determined and heroic Augustine in Thanet or in Can- 
 terbury, the venerable Cuthbert at Lindisfarne or (after- 
 wards) Durham, "Willebrod in Friesland, or Aidan in 
 Scotland. 
 
 Around the chair, or cathedra, in which each Christian 
 shepherd sat for counsel or for rule, (the music of the 
 man's soul bringing the stones together,) there grew up 
 the stately buildings hence called cathedrals. And to 
 this day we preserve more familiarly in our own lan- 
 guage the idea of the original " kathedra," or chair, in the 
 accustomed phrases, the see (or sedes) and the " seat" of 
 the Bishopric. And although, with a natural modesty 
 and reverence, they often called these solemn piles after
 
 336 NATIONAL USE OF CATHEDRALS 
 
 some apostle, as after St. Paul in London and St. Peter 
 in Westminster, yet the traces of the fact that it was the 
 man and the "seat" of his influence that caused the 
 buildings to spring into life, are still to be observed in 
 such names as St. Asaph's, St. Patrick's and St. David's. 
 
 Here, however, these lovely, stately buildings are, the 
 growth of the centuries and the product of the reverence 
 of the past. Are they fulfilling their destiny among us, 
 or is there at present a pause, as it were, in their history ? 
 Do they not appear, in a measure, standing still and 
 waiting to be assigned their full uses ? 
 
 Strong in the best joinery and masonry of the age, (or 
 perhaps of any age that has succeeded,) strong in the 
 homage and reverence of the whole people, the cathedral 
 rose, large and stately, sturdy in its resistance to winds 
 and storms and wintry weather, full of comfort and pro- 
 tection, not only the centre of the religious life and asso- 
 ciations of the people and their spiritual home, but a 
 place of refuge and a sanctuary, a place of resort, too, 
 not only for the services of religion, but for the adminis- 
 tration of justice and the security of person and property. 
 
 The ecclesiastical courts and councils, still held in some 
 part of the building or its precincts, the still surviving 
 cathedral libraries, the still surviving cathedral schools 
 and alms and charities, the still surviving cathedral ser- 
 vices and occasional oratorios, the markets and meetings 
 and assizes still held at so many cathedral towns, clearly 
 point out the many important civic and social purposes 
 of which the cathedral formed the nucleus and the 
 attraction.
 
 AND PARISH CHURCHES. 337 
 
 Xow that many of these purposes are served, and 
 better served perhaps, by other buildings and other modes 
 of administration, now that, among us at least, the great 
 procession no longer fills the aisle and nave, or the thou- 
 sand lights make the altar the centre of regard amid 
 surrounding dimness, or the air laden with the heavy 
 incense slowly ascends the roof; is the daily service of 
 common prayer (when, too often and too truly it may be 
 said, two or three are gathered together in the name of 
 religion) to be regarded as a sufficient or satisfactory 
 employment of these great foundations and noble struc- 
 tures ? 
 
 Already an answer is beginning to rise to this question 
 within the Church ; and to ensure a just, equitable and 
 truly national solution of it, a contemporaneous answer 
 ought to be arising from those also who are outside the 
 Church. 
 
 It was, I believe, the [late] Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 when Bishop of London, who, on being told of the im- 
 mense audiences that gathered on Sunday evenings in 
 the tabernacle of Mr. Spurgeon, asked what use, in a 
 similar manner, the Church of the country, the endowed 
 and pledged preacher of the nation, was making of its 
 splendid means of accommodation and attraction ; and 
 the result has been the animated, interested and crowded 
 attendances under the dome of St. Paul's and in the 
 nave of Westminster, at York also, at Norwich and at 
 Chester, and no doubt many other places. 
 
 But such results are felt by all to be a very moderate 
 outcome of such antecedents and such opportunities. 
 
 z
 
 338 NATIONAL USE OF CATHEDRALS 
 
 An influential class of Church reformers maintain that 
 though we may owe a beautiful and sometimes a splen- 
 did worship to the cathedrals, and trace to them and to 
 their services the productions of such composers as Pur- 
 cell and Croft and Tallis and Boyce, and such preachers 
 and divines as Hooker and South and Butler, yet " with 
 such large means at their disposal, with the most splendid 
 edifices in the world, and with such congregations often 
 attached to them, it is felt that the cathedrals should 
 hold a higher place as the great centre of church life, 
 as affording the hest models of church services and 
 preaching, and as the great inspirers of spiritual thought 
 and life in every diocese."* They maintain that the 
 present laws and constitution of the bodies (even though 
 often in advance of the actual practice) need great alter- 
 ation, that " they have a strong tendency to impede 
 motion of any kind, and that many a zealous dean or 
 canon, who before his election was perhaps convinced 
 that nothing would be easier than to reform this point 
 or improve that, finds himself, without exactly knowing 
 how, tied down by a thousand little strings, as tightly 
 as Gulliver was by the Lilliputians."-}- They say that 
 the schools ought to be revived and extended, that train- 
 ing in theological science for those about to enter into 
 the service of the Church ought to be added, that the 
 cathedral should afford some resting-place for students, 
 and become the radiating centre of a large staff of mis- 
 sionary lecturers and preachers. 
 
 * Dean of Durham's (Dr. Lake) paper at the Leeds Conference, 
 1872. See Report, p. 218. 
 t Ibid.
 
 AXD PARISH CHURCHES. 339 
 
 This is what is heard from the inside of the Church. 
 What is heard from the outside ? I regret to say, little 
 but murmurs of contempt and indifference, of hostility 
 and hopelessness. As if England had not yet learnt 
 how much can be done with its institutions by reform 
 and re-construction and re-animation ; as if we had not 
 already done something towards reforming our schools, 
 our Universities and our Parliament ; and as if the only 
 property and the only means of usefulness in the nation 
 we were to leave untouched by the finger of adaptation 
 and reform, were the property and the instrumentalities 
 designed for the very most important of all national 
 objects, the moral and spiritual life of the people. 
 
 In the changed condition of the national life and con- 
 science, there is no reason upon earth, except our own 
 apathy and indifference, why we should not extend the 
 uses and the services of these great foundations beyond 
 those suggested, or why we should leave them under the 
 sole control of a sectional portion of our religion. 
 
 And though the first broaching of such an idea may 
 excite little but amusement outside the Church, and 
 little but a contemptuous and frightened horror inside, 
 the idea itself will bear examination ; and the more 
 familiar it becomes, the more just and rational and 
 sensible it will appear, that as a first step to the nation- 
 alization of these great buildings and to the further and 
 completer utilization of their vast capabilities and re- 
 sources, the other great sections of the religious life of 
 England should enjoy their privileges and opportunities 
 
 z2
 
 340 NATIONAL USE OF CATHEDRALS 
 
 iii common with those now exclusively possessing them, 
 and that, under the due restrictions of order and con- 
 venience, these cathedrals should be open for the higher 
 objects of our humanity to all the leading religious bodies 
 of the country, as our great town-halls are now for poli- 
 tical and social purposes to all the larger divisions of 
 the political and social world ; and (though of course I 
 am prepared for a laugh at the mere enunciation of such 
 a proposition) there is no just or sensible reason what- 
 ever that, if desired by them and proved to be particularly 
 convenient to them, the cathedral of their neighbourhood 
 should not be at the service of the Congregational Union, 
 of the Methodist Conference, of the annual meeting of 
 the Friends or the British and Foreign Unitarian Asso- 
 ciation. With the sense of horror, and the grounds of 
 it, with which our Church friends would greet such a 
 proposition, I shall deal presently, when I have vindi- 
 cated the same principle of common use in the case of 
 the parish churches which I maintain to be defensible 
 in the case of the cathedrals. 
 
 The parish or parochial church is nothing more than 
 the church built for the religious use of the TrapoiKia, or 
 neighbourhood, that is (literally), the people who have 
 their homes or houses near it. It is, of its own meaning, 
 for " dwellers." It takes no more cognizance of varieties 
 of opinion than it does of differences of sex, of age, of 
 condition or circumstances. It does not necessarily ask 
 what a man's private religious convictions are, any more
 
 AND PARISH CHURCHES. 341 
 
 than it asks what his age or condition is. It asks simply 
 if he is a dweller near at hand. And if so, he has a 
 right to the use of his parish church. 
 
 It is in vain to say that if people will conform they 
 will erjoy these advantages. Why should they not enjoy 
 them if they do not conform ? Their non-conformity is 
 an act allowed and sanctioned by the law ; and there is 
 no valid reason that, not violating the law, they should 
 lose their hereditary and civic rights as if they had. 
 The law, having recognized my variety of religious faith 
 and my specialty of religious observance, I have a good 
 ground for saying, " Deprive me not of a right (which I 
 have never resigned or forfeited) in consequence of an 
 act which you permit and protect, and for which you 
 must not now treat me as an outlaw." 
 
 What valid reason is there that the law, which now 
 allows me to build in the parish a church for the observ- 
 ance of religion according to my faith, should not allow 
 me the use of the church already built for the same 
 purpose, the church in which I have, in common with 
 the rest of my fellow-parishioners, a share ? 
 
 This is not in accordance with the large and generous 
 interpretation of the uses of the parish church in the 
 early times of its existence, nor is it in accordance with 
 the changed conditions and the altered demands of later 
 times. For formerly, and before other more convenient 
 arrangements were made, the parish church opened its 
 doors not only for weekly or for daily worship, but also 
 for many other purposes. Not only the consistorial or 
 ecclesiastical tribunals, but the lords of the manors held
 
 342 NATIONAL USE OF CATHEDEALS 
 
 their courts and the justices their sessions in the churches. 
 As the only secure building in the neighbourhood, afford- 
 ing protection at once against damage and pillage, the 
 church was often the place where people, coming for 
 the purposes of exchange and traffic, stored their goods. 
 It was the scene at other times of the miracle-plays and 
 the dramatic representation of the scenes and events of 
 sacred story. The great festivals of the Christian year, 
 and especially the day of the saint to which each parti- 
 cular church was dedicated, bringing large concourses of 
 people together, for whom there was no other place of 
 shelter and rest, a generous latitude of accommodation 
 was allowed in the parish church for the repose and 
 refreshment of the people. Sometimes feasts were held 
 within its sacred precincts, with the object of raising 
 funds for the maintenance of its fabric, and for the more 
 sacred purpose still of effecting the reconciliation of 
 those who had been at enmity. And when you add to 
 all this the fact that the religious services were in accord- 
 ance with the religious convictions and requirements of 
 the whole people, how broad and generous and satisfying 
 and uniting stands out the function of the parish church ! 
 But to what is the parish church of the present day 
 restricted ? To the worship of God and religious in- 
 struction. This, with all our modern facilities for the 
 supply of other social and civic requirements, if not 
 carried out in too narrow a spirit of interpretation, we 
 may consider a becoming and a legitimate restriction. 
 But what follows ? It must be the worship of Almighty 
 God exclusively according to a fixed formulary, sub-
 
 AND PARISH CHURCHES. 343 
 
 stantially arranged three hundred years ago, from which 
 there cannot be legally a deviation in one single word ; 
 and further still, these words must be pronounced, as 
 far as the officiating minister is concerned, by a special 
 class of clergy, specially ordained and set apart for this 
 purpose, and so ordained and set apart by one religious 
 body alone, excluding Eoman Catholics, Presbyterians, 
 Methodists, Baptists, Independents, Jews, Unitarians, 
 and everybody in this land except an episcopally ordained 
 clergyman ; so that Lardner, Priestley, Newman Hall or 
 Channing among divines, and Milton, Sir Isaac Newton, 
 Faraday and Herschel among laymen, should any one 
 of them have attempted to conduct a service of any 
 kind in any one of the parish churches or parish burial- 
 grounds, even if requested by the incumbent to do so, 
 would have been guilty of, and been liable to be prose- 
 cuted for, a misdemeanour. 
 
 Now, considering the breadth and variety of the pur- 
 poses to which the parish church was once devoted, and 
 how the whole existing religious community was pro- 
 vided for in its worship and instruction according to its 
 known wants, the present restrictions, in view of the 
 changed conditions of the national convictions and re- 
 quirements, result in an anomalous, an unjust and into- 
 lerable state of things. 
 
 It is very easy for people in large towns and populous 
 neighbourhoods to say, " We can provide for ourselves. 
 If you will not have us or our ministers in your churches 
 or your burial-grounds, it is no matter to us ; we can 
 provide others for ourselves." But we have in England
 
 34 i NATIONAL USE OF CATHEDRALS 
 
 some ten or eleven thousand parish churches, and I will 
 venture to say that in the larger part of these the greatest 
 practical inconvenience is sustained by, and the greatest 
 practical injustice done to, the parishioners, and a serious 
 violation of their rights and withholding of their privi- 
 leges is perpetrated by these restrictions. Not a service 
 can be held by any one of the denominations in their 
 own parish church. Not a prayer can be offered, not a 
 sermon preached, not a lecture delivered, not a meeting 
 held, not a baptism celebrated, not a marriage solemn- 
 ized, not a word uttered over the dead at their burial. 
 
 Such, then, is the restricted use of the parish church 
 as it is. With a variety of religious denominations 
 existing as legally as the Established Church itself, with 
 a large part of the wealth and energy of the nation, one- 
 half of its people, one-half (I think I may venture to 
 say) of its moral respectability, piety and philanthropy, 
 and if not one-half of its highest learning and culture, 
 yet at least one-half of its sap, vigour and intelligence, are 
 excluded by merely artificial and superstitious arrange- 
 ments from any use whatever, according to their own 
 forms and requirements, of the church and burying- 
 ground which by the general law of the land belong to 
 them as much as to any other inhabitants of the country. 
 
 There is no reason at all that, on application to the 
 appointed officer of the district, the parish church and 
 burial-ground should not be open, under conditions pro- 
 viding for order, cleanliness and non-injury, for the use 
 at suitable times of all the inhabitants of the parish, 
 for their baptisms, their marriages, their burials and their
 
 AND PARISH CHURCHES. 345 
 
 occasional services, on Sundays as well as other days, 
 according to the rites of their respective worships. The 
 friends of a national Church, still more the friends of a 
 united people, are unwise in not encouraging all arrange- 
 ments which would tend to this kind of charity and 
 union. 
 
 I have read several theories of Church comprehen- 
 sion, (I never issued one,) and surrounded as all of 
 them are with numerous difficulties, if not impossi- 
 bilities, I fall back on the old historic English plan, of 
 reform of specific wrongs or abuses as they are discerned. 
 With the rare exception of one or perhaps two Bevolu- 
 tions, all our progress has been, not by the destruction 
 but by the re-construction of our institutions. The sober 
 English mind is not fond of "leaps in the dark"; and 
 even the stable country-gentleman element in our legis- 
 lation is willing to move one step more forward, when 
 it finds by experience that the step already taken has 
 preserved its taker on terra-firma, and has not been pro- 
 ductive of the evils that had been prognosticated from it. 
 
 Thus has all our progress been effected. Step by step 
 we have achieved all our religious and civil liberties, 
 all our social and political reforms. The opening of 
 the English Universities is a signal instance of this safe 
 and gradual and successful progress. And to take one 
 exemplification of the possibilities of future improve- 
 ment in Church affairs, there can, I think, be little 
 reasonable doubt that if those outside the Church would 
 have heartily united with their friends inside, such a 
 step as the opening of the parish burial-grounds would
 
 346 NATIONAL USE OF CATHEDRALS 
 
 by this time have been on the point of becoming part 
 of the reformed law of the land ; and when it was seen 
 that no violation of order or propriety or peace or pro- 
 perty accompanied it, it would itself have instantly 
 become the safe fulcrum for the lever of other desirable 
 and inevitable improvements. All theoretic questions 
 would afterwards be in a better, not a worse condition 
 for solution, by the increase of the practical acquaintance 
 among people with the subject with which they were 
 dealing ; and if any contemplate as hereafter desirable 
 a local administration of these rights and properties 
 instead of an imperial one, the conditions for all such 
 arrangements would only be facilitated by these ante- 
 cedent experiences and approaches. 
 
 There would be no doubt many difficulties in the way 
 of such changes. But if difficulties had stopped our 
 ancestors in the way of reforms, we should have had 
 no reforms at all. The only question is : Is the proposed 
 change in itself just and in itself desirable ? And if so, 
 he is a coward, and not a reformer, who is stopped by 
 difficulties. 
 
 What are these difficulties ? First of all there is the 
 novelty of such plans ; and if they are good ones, the 
 charge of novelty must be effectually dismissed by mak- 
 ing the public mind familiar with them. Then there is 
 prejudice. And this must be dealt with in the same way 
 in which we dealt with the prejudices of the old corpo- 
 rate bodies when we opened the Corporations ; the pre- 
 judices of the magistrates at county sessions when we 
 opened the Bench; the prejudices of landlords and farmers
 
 AND PARISH CHURCHES. 347 
 
 when we repealed the Corn Laws ; the prejudices of the 
 clergy when we passed the Birth, Eegistration, Marriages 
 and Burial Laws ; the prejudices of the Universities when 
 we opened them to the people. 
 
 Then there is the property question. But that was 
 settled in the 16th century when the Crown and Par- 
 liament transferred this very property in the most sweep- 
 ing manner to its present holders and tenants, lay and 
 clerical, and has been settled again in the 19th century 
 by the action again of the Crown and Parliament by 
 means of the Ecclesiastical Commission annually re-dis- 
 tributing that property. In the early part of this cen- 
 tury, public money has been granted and public money 
 withheld for the building of churches in the country at 
 large out of the imperial rates and taxes, and your St. 
 Luke's in Liverpool was built out of your local rates. 
 The question of the property is settled. It belongs to 
 the nation. 
 
 Lastly, there is the objection of desecration. I know 
 there has been and there is still such a thing as church 
 desecration, and it is a very objectionable thing. I think 
 in a sense the churches were desecrated, at least treated 
 in a very unworthy and improper manner, when the 
 soldiers of Cromwell and their followers tore down their 
 carved work and ornament, broke their stained windows 
 and pillaged them, a work in which our ancestors the 
 English Presbyterians took no part ; and I hope their 
 descendants, inheriting their good taste and their com- 
 mon-sense, will take care to keep in good company in 
 the parallel circumstances of the present generation. But
 
 348 NATIONAL USE OF CATHEDRALS 
 
 I think the churches have been still more desecrated by 
 their own holders and members when bishops stripped 
 the lead off them to endow their families, when naves 
 were turned into stables and taverns, and the rope of the 
 acrobat, risking his life and tempting God, was stretched 
 from battlement to battlement. I think churches have 
 been still more desecrated by unbelieving men preaching 
 in them for gain, and priests offering up to God prayers 
 in which they did not believe. And it is not only an 
 impertinence for men to talk of the quiet, orderly use of 
 these buildings by their fellow-citizens and fellow-owners 
 as a desecration, but it is a piece of gross Pharisaism, 
 for them to stand by and call the prayers and exhorta- 
 tions and hymns raised in the worship of Almighty God, 
 and in furtherance of human happiness and goodness, 
 by their fellow-christians according to their best con- 
 science, a profanation of the national temples of religion. 
 And yet if there were, as very likely at first there 
 would be, men (and in their way worthy men too) who 
 would declare that they really could not conduct their 
 own worship at one time in a parish church, where some 
 of their fellow-parishioners conducted theirs at another, 
 then certainly, as long as these feelings lasted, I would 
 leave them to that freedom which we ourselves have 
 enjoyed for some centuries, of erecting their own churches 
 for the exclusive performance of their own worship. But 
 I should feel perfectly sure that, under the influence of 
 good example and the growth of broader and better feel- 
 ings, this fanatical prejudice would die away, and the 
 whole community would feel, amidst our sorrowful sec-
 
 AND PARISH CHURCHES. 349 
 
 tarian divisions, (the making at once and the marring of 
 our national life,) the harmonizing, uniting, softening 
 influence of this peace in division, this equality in differ- 
 ence, helping us to feel truly that we had one law, one 
 country and one God.
 
 APPENDIX.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 A LIST OF SOME OF THE PUBLISHED WRITINGS 
 OF THE REV. CHARLES WICKSTEED, B.A. 
 
 1836. " Talia Per Latia," a series of papers on Italian sub- 
 jects in the Christian Teacher for January, March, 
 May, July and December, 1836. The first of these 
 papers is reprinted in the present volume, pp. 101 
 112. 
 
 1839. Ancient Prophets and Modern Ministers. Christian 
 
 Teacher, New Series, No. I. 
 
 Lucubrations in Travel, i. Christian Teacher, No. II. 
 On the Poetry of Keats and Shelley, i. Christian 
 
 Teacher, No. III. 
 
 Lucubrations in Travel, ii. Christian Teacher, No. IV. 
 On the Poetry of Keats and Shelley, ii. Christian 
 
 Teacher, No. V. 
 
 1840. Heresies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Christian 
 
 Teacher, No. VII. 
 
 1841. A Broad Foundation the only Safe One. A Sermon. 
 
 1842. The Law of Conscience in its Action on Nations and 
 
 Individuals. A Sermon preached at the Seventeenth 
 Anniversary of the British and Foreign Unitarian 
 Association, in Essex Street Chapel. 
 2 A
 
 354 APPENDIX. 
 
 1842. The Death of the Duke of Orleans. A Sermon. 
 
 1843. Article on the Introduction of Christianity into Great 
 
 Britain. Christian Teacher, No. XX. 
 
 1844. Article on Recent Works on the Atonement. Christian 
 
 Teacher, No. XXIII. 
 On the Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Theodore 
 
 Parker. Christian Teacher, No. XXIV. 
 On Madge's " Puseyism." Christian Teacher, No. 
 
 XXV. 
 On Joseph Barker's Tracts. Christian Teacher, No. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 1845. Eeligion in the Age of Great Cities. Prospective 
 
 Eeview, No. I. 
 Article on Emerson's Essays. Prospective Eeview, 
 
 No. II. 
 On Elizabeth Barrett Barrett's Poems. Prospective 
 
 Eeview, No. III. 
 On the New German-Catholic Church. Prospective 
 
 Eeview, No. IV. 
 
 1846. Article on Kenrick's Primaeval History. Prospective 
 
 Eeview, No. VI. 
 Article on Tait's Discourses. Prospective Eeview, 
 
 No. VII. 
 Article on [George Eliot's translation of] Strauss's 
 
 Life of Jesus, and Dr. Beard's Eeply. Prospective 
 
 Eeview, No. VIII. 
 
 1847. Article on Acton's Life and Sermons. Prospective 
 
 Eeview, No. IX. 
 
 On Aspland's Sermons. Prospective Eeview, No. X. 
 On Schmidt's " Geschichte der Denk-und-Glaubens- 
 
 freiheit iin ersten Jahrhundert u. s.w." Prospective 
 
 Eeview, No. XII.
 
 APPENDIX. 355 
 
 1847. Lectures on the Memory of the Just, being a Series of 
 
 Discourses on the Lives and Times of the Ministers 
 of Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds, from its Foundation in 
 1672 to the Commencement of the Nineteenth 
 Century, &c. [Second Edition in 1849.] 
 
 1848. Article on Barling's Review of Trinitarianism. Pro- 
 
 spective Eeview, No. XIII. 
 Ee formation from Within or from Without ? D'Au- 
 
 bigne, Ranke and Cesare Cantu. Prospective Re- 
 view, No. XIV. 
 
 On Eton College. Prospective Review, No. XV. 
 On Milnes's Life of Keats. Prospective Review, 
 
 No. XVI. 
 The Common -weal. A Sermon preached at the 
 
 Annual Meeting of the London Domestic Mission. 
 The Doctrine of Jesus inseparable from the History of 
 
 Jesus. A Sermon preached before the West-Riding 
 
 Unitarian Tract Society in the St. Saviourgate 
 
 Chapel, York. 
 The Four Constituents of the Christian Character. 
 
 A Sermon preached at the Opening of Gee Cross 
 
 Chapel. 
 The Life of Man in the Life of Christ. A Sermon 
 
 preached before the Western Unitarian Christian 
 
 Union at George's Meeting, Exeter. 
 
 1849. Number and Xames of the Apocalyptic Beasts. Pro- 
 
 spective Review, No. XVII. 
 
 Article on H. Solly's " Development of the Religious 
 Life in the Modern Christian Church." Prospective 
 Review, No. XVII. 
 
 Article on Vaughan's " Age of Christianity." Pro- 
 spective Review, No. XIX.
 
 356 APPENDIX. 
 
 1849. On E. L. Carpenter's Discourses. Prospective Eeview, 
 
 No. XX. 
 
 The General Assembly and Church of the First-born. 
 A Dedicatory Sermon, preached on Oct. 21st in 
 Hope Street Church, Liverpool. 
 
 1850. Carlyle's "Latter-Day Pamphlets." Prospective Ee- 
 
 view, No. XXII. 
 Mure's " Grecian Literature." Prospective Eeview, 
 
 No. XXIII. 
 Authority and Obedience, or the Desire of Christian 
 
 Obedience in the midst of extensive Rejection of the 
 
 Authority of Christ. A Sermon preached before 
 
 the Warwickshire Unitarian Tract Society at Kenil- 
 
 worth. 
 The Way to meet and treat the Papal Letters. A 
 
 Lecture. 
 
 1851. Article on Yates's "Vindication of Unitarianism." 
 
 Prospective Eeview, No. XXV. 
 
 Symeon, the first Pillar-Saint in Syria. Prospective 
 Eeview, No. XXVI. 
 
 Article on Eliz. Barrett Browning's "Casa'Guidi 
 Windows." Prospective Eeview, No. XXVII. 
 
 Article on Oakley's " Eitual of the Mass." Prospective 
 Eeview, No. XXVII. 
 
 The American Fugitive Slave Act. Prospective Ee- 
 view, No. XXVIII. 
 
 A Short and Familiar Commentary on the Gospel 
 according to St. Matthew. 
 
 1852. English Liturgies, Ancient and Eeformed. Prospective 
 
 Eeview, No. XXX. 
 The Eclipse of Faith. Prospective Eeview, No. XXXI.
 
 APPENDIX. 357 
 
 1853. On Lord John Russell's Memoirs of Thomas Moore. 
 
 Prospective Review, No. XXXIII. 
 Society in Danger from Children. Prospective Review, 
 
 Xo. XXXIV. 
 The Englishman's Duty to the Free and Enslaved 
 
 American. A Lecture. 
 1862. Puritan Life in the Seventeenth Century : a Sketch 
 
 of Philip Henry. 
 1866. The One God and Father of All. A Sermon preached 
 
 at the Annual Meeting of the British and Foreign 
 
 Unitarian Association. 
 1868. "William Rathbone. An Address delivered in Hope 
 
 Street Church on Feb. 16th. [Published together 
 
 with a Sermon by the Rev. Charles Beard, delivered 
 
 in the Reushaw Street Chapel on Feb. 9th.] 
 1871. The Voysey Judgment. A Lecture delivered in Hope 
 
 Street Church. 
 The Divine Voices in the World. A Sermon preached 
 
 in Hope Street Church on occasion of the Meeting 
 
 of the British Association in Liverpool. 
 1875. Address to the Retiring Students of the Unitarian 
 
 Home Missionary Board, delivered in Cross Street 
 
 Chapel, Manchester. 
 1877. Article on "The Liverpool Controversy." Theological 
 
 Review, Xo. LVI. 
 
 1879. What's the Matter? A Paper read before the British 
 
 and Foreign Unitarian Association at the Annual 
 Conference in Essex Street Chapel. * 
 
 1880. Eloge of Channing, delivered in the Town Hall, Man- 
 
 chester, and printed in u The Channing Centenary " 
 volume.
 
 358 APPENDIX. 
 
 1881. The Future Life. Being Lecture X. in the series, 
 " Positive Aspects of Unitarian Christianity." de- 
 livered in St. George's Hall. 
 
 1886. Reminiscences of Continental Travel Fifty Years ago. 
 
 Christian Reformer, Nos. I. and II. 
 " Why am I a Unitarian 1 " and other Lectures. 
 
 [Shortly. 
 
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