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 AXISa3AINn IVHINSD
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 IN 
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL BIOGRAPHY 
 
 BY 
 
 THE RIGHT HON. 
 
 SIR I JAMES STEPHEN, K.C.B. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER 
 1868
 
 JOHN CHILDS AND SOS, VKIXTERS.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 I HAD destined iny contributions to the Edinburgh Review to that 
 early forgetfulness which, with a very few remarkable exceptions, 
 attends and bents the whole mass of the periodical literature of our 
 age. But it has seemed good to certain American booksellers to 
 publish, with my name, repeated editions of a series of those con- 
 tributions. I am thus an author in my own despite. 
 
 In these circumstances I have had to make my choice between 
 publishing an enlarged and corrected edition of those papers, or 
 continuing to appear, to such persons in the United States as are 
 readers of such books, the author of a volume replete with defects 
 and errors. Some of those faults are the result of the mere want 
 of learning and ability to do better ; and are therefore incorrigible. 
 But some of them are the result of the haste with which our 
 periodical works are got up by most of the writers of them, and 
 especially by those who, like myself, have been compelled to write 
 in the very scanty leisure of a life of almost ceaseless labour. 
 Such faults are corrigible ; and I trust that, in the following 
 volumes, they are corrected. I am thus an author in my own 
 defence. 
 
 I prefix these few words to these volumes, not to deprecate 
 criticism, which is always a vain and is not always a sincere 
 attempt, but in order to explain that such censures as may justly 
 be due to what I have written, have not been provoked by any 
 inordinate solicitude of mine to appear before the world in my 
 own person as the writer of a book, nor by any wish to assume to 
 myself the character of a teacher on the sacred topics to which so 
 large a part of this book is devoted. 
 
 J. S. 
 
 KICHMOXD-ON-THAMES, 
 May, 1849.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 OF the various criticisms on the original edition of this Book which 
 have reached me, there is one only to which, on repuhlishing it, I 
 think it necessary to refer. This is the commendation which has 
 been bestowed on me of having exhibited extensive research and 
 learning in some of the earlier of these Essays. It is a praise 
 which I am bound and anxious to disclaim. To the utmost of my 
 leisure and opportunities I have, indeed, drawn what I have 
 written from the original authorities. But when leisure and 
 opportunity for the examination of them failed me, I was con- 
 tented to employ the best secondary sources, collated as carefully 
 as was in my power. For I wrote these papers not as an essayist 
 but as a reviewer, seeking only to meet an ephemeral demand and 
 to gain an ephemeral attention. I have already explained how it 
 happened that this original design gave place to what may appear 
 a more ambitious project. But it is totally foreign to that ambition 
 to win for these volumes any applause to which they are not justly 
 entitled. 
 
 J. S. 
 CAMBRIDGE, Oct., 18-50.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE of Sir James Stephen . . Pp. xi xvi 
 
 I. HILDEBRAND ..... 157 
 
 Reprinted from an article in the Edinburgh Review, No. 169, on 
 Gregoire VII., St Frangois d'Assise, St Thomas cCAquin. Par 
 E. J. DEL^CLUSE. 2 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1844. 
 
 II. SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI . . . 5899 
 
 Reprinted from an article in the Edinburgh Review, No. 173, on 
 L'Histoire de St Frangois d 'Assise (1182 1226). Par EMILE 
 CHAVIN DE MALAN. Paris, 1845. 2. St Frangois d'Assise. 
 Par E. J. DELECLUSE. Paris, 1844. 
 
 III. THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM . . . 100188 
 
 Reprinted (with large additions) from an article in the Edinburgh 
 Review, No. 152, on Exerdtia Spiritualia S. P. Ignatii Loyolce, 
 cum Versione literati ex Autographo Hispanico. Prcemittuntur 
 R. P. JOAKNIS ROOTHMEN, Prcepositi Generates Societatis Jesu, 
 Literce Encyclice ad Patres et Fratres ejusdem Societatis, de 
 Spiritualium Exercitiorum. S. P. N. Studio et Usu. Londini, 
 typis C. Richards, 1837. 
 
 IV. MARTIN LUTHER .... 189232 
 
 Reprinted from an article in the Edinburgh Review, No. 138, 
 on The History of the Great Reformation of the Sixteenth Cen- 
 tury, in Germany, Switzerland, &c. By J. H. MERLE D' AUBIGN^ , 
 President of the Theological School of Geneva. 8vo. Vol. I. 
 London, 1838. 
 
 V. THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES . . . 233278 
 
 Reprinted from an article in the Edinburgh Review, No. 179, 
 on Correspondance inedite de Mabillonet de Montfaucon avec 
 L'ltalie. Par M. VALERY. Paris, 1846. 
 
 VI. THE PORT-ROYALISTS .... 279336 
 
 Reprinted from an article in the Edinburgh Review, No. 148, 
 on Reuchlin, Geschichte von Port-Royal. Der Kampf des Re- 
 formirten und des Jesuistischen Katholidsmus. Iter Band : Bis
 
 X CONTENTS. 
 
 zum Tode Angelica Arnauld, (Reuchlin, History of Port- 
 Royal. The Struggle of the Reformed and the Jesuitical 
 Catholicism. 1st vol. : To the death of Angelique Arnauld.) 
 8vo. Leipsic, 1839. 
 
 VII. RICHARD BAXTER . . .Pp. 337378 
 
 Reprinted from an article in the Edinburgh Review, No. 141, on 
 The Practical Works of Richard Baxter, with a Preface, giving 
 some account of the Author, and of this Edition of his Practical 
 Works ; and an Essay on his Genius, Works, and Times. 4 
 vols. 8vo. London, 1838. 
 
 VIII. THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION . . 379468 
 
 Reprinted (with large additions) from an article in the Edinburgh 
 Review, No. 136, on The Life and Times of the Reverend George 
 Whitfteld. By ROBERT PHILIP. 8vo. London, 1838. Remains 
 of the Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, MA. 2 vols. 8vo. 
 London, 1838. 
 
 IX. WILLIAM WILBERFORCE , .' . . 469522 
 
 Reprinted (with many corrections and additions) from an article 
 in the Edinburgh Review, No. 135, on The Life of William 
 Wilberforce. By his Sons, ROBERT ISAAC WILBERFORCE, M. A., 
 Vicar of East Farlough, late Fellow of Oriel College ; and 
 SAMUEL WILBERFORCE, M.A., Rector of Brighstone. 4 vols. 
 8vo. London, 1838. 
 
 X. THE CLAPHAM SECT .... 523584 
 
 " Reprinted (with some additions) from an article in the Edinburgh 
 Review, No. 161, on, 1. The Life of Isaac Milner, D.D., 
 F.R.S., Dean of Carlisle, President of Queen's College, and 
 Professor of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge ; com- 
 prising a Portion of his Correspondence and other Writings, 
 hitherto unpublished. By his Niece MARY MILNER. 8vo. Lon- 
 don. 2. Memoir of the Life and Correspondence of John Lord 
 Teignmouth. By his Son, LORD TEIGNMODTH. 2 vols. 8vo. 
 London, 1843. 
 
 XI. THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM , . 585633 
 
 Reprinted (with numerous corrections and additions) from an 
 article in the Edinburgh Review, No. 143, on A Physical 
 Theory of Another Life. By the Author of " Natural History 
 of Enthusiasm." 8vo. London, 1839. 
 
 XII. THE EPILOGUE . .... 634663 
 
 Now first published.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE 
 
 OF 
 
 SIR JAMES STEPHEN, 
 
 As the connection of the author of these Essays with public affairs 
 though important was not conspicuous, it would be impertinent to assume 
 that any detailed account of him would be interesting to the world at 
 large. This preface has been written solely from an apprehension that 
 in the absence of a very short statement of the principal events of his 
 life, the readers of his works might form a false estimate of them. They 
 cannot he criticised with justice if the circumstances under which they 
 were written are forgotten or unknown. 
 
 Sir James Stephen was the third son of the late James Stephen, Esq., 
 well known in the early part of the present century as one of the most 
 prominent opponents of the slave trade and slavery, and one of the 
 most conspicuous members of the well-known society described in the 
 Essay, contained in the present volume, entitled " The Evangelical 
 Succession." He was born at Lambeth, on the 3rd January, 1789, and 
 completed his education at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he took the 
 degree of LL.B., in the year 1812. Having kept his terms at Lin- 
 coln's Inn during his residence at Cambridge, he was called to the bar 
 in 1813, and was shortly afterwards appointed by Lord Bathurst to be 
 legal adviser to the Colonial Office. This was the origin of his long 
 connection with the public service. 
 
 In the course of the eleven years during which Sir James Stephen 
 pursued his profession, he obtained a considerable share of business at 
 the equity bar, and would probably have risen to high professional dis- 
 tinction if his health and his inclination had been such as to induce him 
 to devote himself exclusively to that object. This, however, was not 
 the case. His taste for his profession was not equal to his success in 
 it, and he was greatly impeded in pursuing it by a very severe illness, 
 and by a weakness of eye-sight, which for many years limited his exer-
 
 Xli BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. 
 
 tions. For these reasons he retired from the bar in the year 1824, 
 accepting the office of Counsel to the Board of Trade, which he held 
 together with that of legal adviser to the Colonial Office In 1834 he 
 was appointed Assistant Under-Secretary to the Colonial Office, and in 
 1836, on the resignation of Mr Hay, he was appointed Under-Secretary 
 of State. He filled this position till the year 1847, when he was forced 
 by illness to resign it. In the summer of 1849 he was appointed Pro- 
 fessor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, and he held 
 this office till his death, which took place at Coblentz, on the 14th Sep- 
 tember, 1859. He was also Professor of Modern History and Political 
 Economy at Haileybury from the beginning of 1855 till the college was 
 finally closed at the end of 1857. 
 
 The Essays contained in this volume were (with the exception of the 
 concluding one) originally contributed to the Edinburgh Review ; and 
 all the rest, except the account of the Benedictines, were written whilst 
 their author was Under-Secretary of State. Considerable additions were 
 made to them when they were first published in a collective form in 
 1849. It would be improper to criticise them here, but it should be 
 remembered by any one who draws inferences from them as to the 
 powers of their author, that their composition was his occasional amuse- 
 ment and relaxation from pursuits of a more engrossing and laborious 
 kind. A few observations on the nature of those pursuits will set this 
 in a clear light. 
 
 The position which Sir James Stephen occupied in the Colonial Office 
 was a very singular one. The British colonies are a collection of many 
 separate states, of every degree of importance, from nations like Canada 
 and New South Wales down to the rock of Heligoland, inhabited by a 
 few Germans. The authority of the Crown over these dependencies 
 differs in its origin, its extent, and its limitations. It has to be applied 
 to very different objects, and to populations differing not merely in race, 
 in religion, in law, and in language ; but in all the other respects by 
 which the Cingalese, the Caffres, the New Zealanders, and the Hotten- 
 tots are distinguished from the English settlers of Canada and Australia, 
 the Dutch Boors at the Cape, the French of the Mauritius, and the mon- 
 grel populations of Malta, Gibraltar, and the Ionian Islands. In some 
 of these communities the Crown exercises, through the Secretary of 
 State for the Colonies, powers of the most extensive kind ; others, as 
 Canada and New South "Wales, are independent in all but name ; and 
 others are, or during Sir James Stephen's tenure of office were, mere 
 infant settlements, dependent, to a great extent, on the central govern- 
 ment for the very simplest elements of civil society. To know exactly 
 what were the powers and what the rights of the English government 
 in respect of each of these communities, to know the history of all the
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. Xlii 
 
 relations between the United Kingdom and each of its dependencies, 
 and to be able to give an account of the state of parties and local poli- 
 tics in every one of them, was one part of what was required of the 
 Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. There was hardly any kind 
 of political question upon which he was not bound to be able to advise 
 the parliamentary head of the department when the occasion arose, for 
 the successive Secretaries of State of necessity laboured under a defi- 
 ciency of special knowledge which it was his duty to be prepared to 
 supply. 
 
 It was also his duty to prepare the drafts of almost all the more im- 
 portant despatches, and of the numerous Acts of Parliament which were 
 required by every colony in turn. Upon subjects which were but little 
 understood by the public at large, and which excited but little general 
 interest, this task was often hardly distinguishable from that of govern- 
 ment and legislation, and it would perhaps be difficult to mention any 
 man of his generation who could claim the title of a legislator with more 
 justice than Sir James Stephen. 
 
 The understanding upon which the permanent offices in the civil 
 service of the Crown are held is, that those who accept them shall give 
 up all claim to personal reputation on the one hand, and shall be shielded 
 from personal responsibility on the other. Though Sir James Stephen 
 was at one time the object of the most bitter personal attacks (often for 
 measures to which he had opposed all the resistance in his power), he 
 never complained of this compact, and his family have no wish to claim 
 for him a reputation which he never had a thought of claiming for him- 
 self . It matters little now what share he individually took in the great 
 questions which during his tenure of office arose between the United 
 Kingdom and the colonies. Praise or blame can neither affect him nor 
 change the opinion which those who knew him best entertained of him ; 
 but without attempting to lift the veil with which official life must of 
 necessity cover those who enter upon it, it may be said that it fell to his 
 lot to assist in two of the most remarkable transactions even of this 
 century. The first was the abolition of slavery, the second was the 
 establishment of responsible government in Canada. With each of 
 these, and indeed with all other public transactions with which he was 
 concerned, he was connected in the same way. He prepared the mea- 
 sures which others advocated, and furnished many of the arguments and 
 much of the information which they employed. He had, in addition to 
 this, the wearisome and laborious task of superintending the detailed 
 application of the principles which the legislature had established. 
 This was generally a very tedious and most unpleasant process. The 
 controversies which arose with the provincial legislatures of the various 
 West Indian Islands in relation to the arrangements required by the
 
 XIV BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. 
 
 abolition of slavery were as bitter as they were obscure ; and the rela- 
 tions between this country and Canada were confused and entangled in 
 every possible way by personal and party questions at home, and by the 
 violent dissensions which existed in Canada itself. The difficulty of the 
 transaction of all this business was aggravated by the fact that though 
 great weight was attached to Sir James Stephen's opinion and advice by 
 his official superiors, and though he held strong opinions of his own upon 
 the subjects which came before him, he had no real authority whatever. 
 The principles which he always advocated ultimately obtained complete 
 recognition and success, but he was constantly obliged to take part in 
 measures which he regretted, and of which he disapproved. 
 
 It will be readily perceived that such occupations as these involved 
 great labour, great anxiety, and occasionally severe mortification. A single 
 instance of the exertions which he was occasionally called upon to make 
 may be mentioned here. The preparation of the bill for the abolition 
 of slavery had, from various causes, been deferred till the last moment. 
 Sir James Stephen received notice on a Saturday morning to prepare 
 the draft of the bill in time to enable the present Lord Derby to lay it 
 before Parliament early in the following week. He immediately went 
 home, and between Saturday afternoon and the middle of the day on 
 Monday completed the task. The act (3 & 4 Will. IV. c. 73) contains 
 sixty-six sections, fills twenty-six pages in the 8vo edition of the 
 Statute Book, and creates a whole scheme of the most intricate and 
 elaborate kind. This exertion seriously affected his health for many 
 months. It was perhaps the most arduous task of the kind that he ever 
 had to discharge, but it was only one of a series.* 
 
 * The author of this sketch, distrusting his own recollection of his father's account 
 of this, and wishing to obtain independent evidence on the subject, applied to his 
 father's valued friend, Mr Halksworth, the present librarian of the Colonial Office, 
 upon the subject, and received from him an answer containing the following pass- 
 age : " I am sorry that it is not in my power to afford you any information touch- 
 ing your father's labours in preparing the Slavery Abolition Bill. The late Mr 
 Joseph was his amanuensis at that time, and it was with his pen, not mine, that 
 the draft was written. I have often heard Joseph speak on the matter of the ori- 
 ginal draft being prepared in the short space of time you mention. He used to tell 
 the story not as an example of your father's mental labours, but of his own physical 
 exertions as his amanuensis. 
 
 " In my time it was no unusual thing for your father to dictate before breakfast 
 as much matter as would fill thirty sides of office folio paper, equal to about ten 
 pages of the Edinburgh Review. With a subject that pleased him I don't think he 
 ever knew what it was to feel tired. The words came from his lips in one continuous 
 stream, checked only by the inability of the writer sometimes to keep pace with 
 him. Whatever the subject might be, one soon became interested in it, and (speak- 
 ing for myself) I can say that at the longest sitting I never discovered that 1 was 
 wearied until I arose from my table, and the task was ended." 
 
 It should perhaps be added, that this was the only instance in which Sir James 
 Stephen ever transacted official business on a Sunday, except once, when he passed 
 the same day of the week in writing despatches about the Caffre War.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. XV 
 
 The composition of the Essays contained in the present Volume was 
 almost the only relaxation which their Author enjoyed for many years. 
 He used to write them early in the morning and late at night, or during 
 the occasional holidays which his official occupations afforded. These 
 holidays were, however, very uncommon. For many years he never 
 left London for a month together, and though this was not the case 
 during the last five years of his official life, he transacted business 
 during the summer in the country with exactly the same regularity as 
 in London. It may, therefore, be fairly said that the Essays must not 
 be supposed to give the full measure of the powers of their Author. 
 They merely show the amount of literary exertion of which he was 
 capable, whilst the powers of his mind were principally directed to 
 other pursuits. 
 
 A similar observation may be made on the Lectures on the History 
 of France, which were delivered at Cambridge in the summer of 1850 
 and '1851. They were written under the greatest disadvantages. Sir 
 James Stephen was appointed Professor of Modern History in the sum- 
 mer of 1849. He was prevented by bad health from beginning his 
 Lectures till the autumn. Most of the Lectures which form the first of 
 the two volumes were written between September, 1849, and April, 
 1850, and they were delivered during the months of April and May. 
 In the summer of 1850 Sir James Stephen had a most severe and dan- 
 gerous illness, which threatened at one time to assume the form of a 
 brain fever. His physician ordered him to pass the winter in travelling 
 abroad, and, above all things, to abstain from mental labour. He 
 accordingly left England with the intention of visiting Italy, but find- 
 ing himself stronger than he expected on his arrival at Paris, he passed 
 the rest of the winter there, and during his stay completed the greater 
 part of the second volume of the Lectures, and delivered them at Cam- 
 bridge in the following summer. The first edition of them was pub- 
 lished in 1852. 
 
 These facts have been mentioned in order to enable those who take 
 an interest in the matter to form an opinion on the evidence which Sir 
 James Stephen's works supply as to his general capacity. Their object 
 would be entirely mistaken if they were supposed to put forward any 
 claim for posthumous fame on the part of a man whose pursuits with- 
 drew him from the public eye, and who wished for nothing more ardently 
 than for the privacy he enjoyed. There are men who do not understand 
 success in life to include of necessity any very brilliant or general 
 reputation either amongst their contemporaries or their successors. To 
 such persons the opportunity of exerting their powers vigorously, and 
 in a worthy direction, is its own reward, and the opinion which may be 
 ibrraed by others of the result of their exertions is only valuable in so
 
 xvi BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. 
 
 far as it proceeds upon adequate information as to their character and 
 extent. Judged by this, which in his case was the true standard, Sir 
 James Stephen was a happy and successful man. His life was passed 
 in pursuits which taxed his powers to the utmost, and the manner in 
 which he discharged the duties assigned to him obtained the approbation, 
 and in many instances the warm and generous recognition, of those who 
 were best entitled to have an opinion on the subject. On his retirement 
 from office he had the honour of being made, without any solicitation 
 on his own part, a member of the Privy Council and a Knight of the 
 Bath, whilst both Lord John Russell and the late Sir Robert Peel bore 
 the strongest testimony in the House of Commons to the importance of 
 his public services. Such evidence proves that he did his duty to the 
 public fully and faithfully, and this is the only fact respecting him of 
 which his family wish to publish the proof. It was not the least of the 
 many instances of his prosperity that the retirement in which the busiest 
 part of his life was passed to a great extent protected him, and will no 
 doubt effectually protect his memory, against unjust censure and ignorant 
 praise. 
 
 Of Sir James Stephen's private life and personal character nothing is 
 said here, as these are matters with which the public has no concern, 
 and on which the evidence of his son would not be impartial. 
 
 JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN. 
 
 5, Fig-Tree Court, Temple, 
 July 16, 1860.
 
 ESSAYS 
 ECCLESIASTICAL BIOGEAPHY, 
 
 &c. 
 
 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 HE had been a shrewd, if not a very reverent, observer of human 
 life, who bowed to the fallen statue of Jupiter, by way of bespeak- 
 ing the favour of the god in the event of his being again lifted on 
 his pedestal. Hildebrand, the very impersonation of Papal arro- 
 gance and of Spiritual Despotism (such had long been his histor- 
 ical character), is once more raised up for the homage of the faith- 
 ful. Dr Arnold vindicates his memory. M. Guizot hails him as 
 the Czar Peter of the Church. Mr Voight, a professor at Halle, 
 celebrates him as the foremost and the most faultless of heroes. 
 Mr Bowden, an Oxford Catholic, reproduces the substance of Mr 
 Voight's eulogy, though without the fire which warms, or the light 
 which irradiates, the pages of his guide. M. Delecluze, and the 
 Bibliotlieque Universelle de Geneve, are elevated by the theme into 
 the region where rhetoric and poetry are conterminous ; while M. 
 1'Abbe Jager absolutely shouts with exultation to witness the sub- 
 sidence, at the voice of Protestants, of those mists which had so 
 long obscured the glory of him by whom the pontifical tiara was 
 exalted far above the crowns of every earthly potentate. Wholly 
 inadequate as are our necessary limits to the completion of such an 
 enquiry, we would fain explore the grounds of this revived worship, 
 and judge IIOAV far it may be reasonable to join in offering incense 
 at the shrine of this reinstated Jupiter ecdcsiasticus. 
 
 Except in the annals of Eastern despotisms, no parallel can be 
 found for the disasters of the Papacy during the century and a , 
 half which followed the extinction of the Carlovingian dynasty. / 
 
 1
 
 2 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 Of the twenty-four popes who, during that period, ascended the 
 apostolic throne, two were murdered, five were driven into exile, 
 four were deposed, and three resigned their hazardous dignity. 
 Some of these Vicars of Christ were raised to that awful pre-emin- 
 ence by arms, and some by money. Two received it from the 
 hands of princely courtesans. One was self-appointed. A well- 
 filled purse purchased one papal abdication ; the promise of a 
 fair bride another. One of those holy fathers pillaged the treasury, 
 fled with the spoil, returned to Eome, ejected his substitute, and 
 mutilated him in a manner too revolting for description. In one 
 page of this dismal history, we read of the disinterred corpse of a 
 former Pope brought before his successor to receive a retrospective 
 sentence of deposition ; and in the next we find the judge himself 
 undergoing the same posthumous condemnation, though without 
 the same filthy ceremonial Of these heirs of St Peter, one 
 entered on his infallibility in his eighteenth year, and one before he 
 had seen his twelfth summer. One, again, took to himself a coad- 
 jutor, that he might command in person such legions as Eome then 
 sent into the field. Another, Judas-like, agreed for certain pieces 
 of silver to recognise the Patriarch of Constantinople as universal 
 bishop. All sacred things had become venal. Crime and de- 
 bauchery held revel in the Vatican ; while the afflicted Church, 
 wedded at once to three husbands (such was the language of the 
 times), witnessed the celebration of as many rival masses in the 
 metropolis of Christendom. It would be heretical to say that the 
 gates of hell had prevailed against the seat and centre of Catholi- 
 cism ; but Baronius himself might be cited to prove that they had 
 rolled back on their infernal hinges, to send forth malignant spirits 
 commissioned to empty on her devoted head the vials of bitterness 
 and wrath. 
 
 How, from this hotbed of corruption, the seeds of a new and 
 prolific life derived their vegetative power, and how, in an age in 
 which the Papacy was surrendered to the scorn and hatred of man- 
 kind, the independence of the Holy See on the Imperial Crown 
 became first a practical truth, and then a hallowed theory, are 
 problems over which we may not now linger. Suffice it to say, that 
 in the middle of the eleventh century, Europe once more looked 
 to Rome as the pillar and the ground of the truth ; while Eome 
 herself looked forth on a long chain of stately monasteries, rising 
 like distant bulwarks of her power in every land which owned her 
 spiritual rule. 
 
 Of these, Clugni was the foremost in numbers, wealth, and piety, 
 and at Clugni, towards the end of the year 1048, Bruno, the
 
 HILDEBRAKD. 3 
 
 Bishop of Toul, arrayed in all the splendour, and attended by the 
 retinue, of a Pontiff elect, demanded at once the hospitality and 
 the homage of the monks. At the nomination of the Emperor 
 Henry the Third, and in a German synod, he had recently been 
 elected to the vacant Papacy, and was now on his way to Eome, to 
 take possession of the Chair of Peter. Hildebrand, the Prior of 
 Clugni, was distinguished above all his brethren by the holiness of 
 his life, the severity of his self-discipline, and by that ardent zeal 
 to obey which indicates the desire and the ability to command. 
 He was then in the prime of manhood, and his countenance (if his 
 extant portraits may be trusted) announced him as one of those 
 who are born to direct and subjugate the wills of ordinary men. 
 Such a conquest he achieved over him on whose brows the triple 
 crown was then impending. An election made beyond the precincts 
 of the Holy City, and at the bidding of a secular power, was re- 
 garded by Hildebrand as a profane title to the seat once occupied 
 by the Prince of the Apostles. At his instance, Bruno laid aside 
 the vestments, the insignia, and the titles of the pontificate ; and 
 pursuing his way in the humble garb of a pilgrim to the tomb of 
 Peter, entered Eome with bare feet, and a lowly aspect, and with 
 no attendant (or none discernible by human sense) except the 
 adviser of this politic self-abasement. To Bruno himself indeed 
 was revealed the presence of an angelic choir, who chanted in 
 celestial harmonies the return of peace to the long-afflicted people 
 of Christ. Acclamations less seraphic, but of less doubtful reality, 
 from the Eoman clergy and populace, rewarded this acknowledg- 
 ment of their electoral privileges, and conferred on Leo the Ninth 
 (as he was thenceforth designated) a new, and, as he judged, a better 
 title to the supreme government of the Church. 
 
 The reward of the service thus rendered by Hildebrand was 
 prompt and munificent. He was raised to the rank of a Cardinal, 
 and received the offices of sub-deacon of Eome, and superintendent 
 of the church and convent of St Paul. 
 
 The Pope and the Cardinal were not less assiduous to soothe, 
 than they had been daring to provoke, the resentment of the 
 Emperor. Bruno became once more a courtier and a pilgrim, 
 while Hildebrand remained in Eome to govern the city and the 
 church. The Pontiff thrice visited the German court, bringing 
 with him papal benedictions to Henry, and papal censures on 
 Henry's rebellious vassals. So grateful and so effective was the aid 
 thus rendered to the monarch, that on- his last return to Italy, Leo 
 was permitted to conduct thither a body o|" Imperial troops, to expel 
 the Norman invaders of the papal territory. At Civitella, however,
 
 4 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 the axes of Humphrey and Kobert, brothers of William of the Iron- 
 hand, prevailed over the sword and the anathemas of Peter. 
 Whether Hildebrand bore a lance in that bloody field, is debated by 
 his biographers. But no one disputes that he more than divided 
 the fruits of it with the conquerors. To them were conceded the 
 three great fiefs of Calabria, Apulia, and Sicily. To the Holy See 
 was assigned the suzerainte over them. Humiliated and broken- 
 hearted by his defeat, Bruno pined away and died. Strong in this 
 new feudal dominion, and in the allegiance of these warlike vassals, 
 Hildebrand directed his prescient gaze to the distant conflicts and the 
 coming glories in which these Norman liegemen were to minister to 
 his vast designs. The auspicious hour was not yet come. His self- 
 command tranquilly abided the approach of it. 
 
 Gebhard, Bishop of Eichstadt, enjoyed the unbounded confidence 
 and affection of Henry. He had ever lent the weight of his personal 
 advice, and the sanction of his episcopal authority, to sustain his 
 friend and master in his opposition to papal encroachments. Yet 
 Gebhard was selected by the discerning Cardinal, as of all men the 
 best qualified to succeed to the vacant Papacy. Hildebrand repre- 
 sented to the Emperor that the choice had been made from an anxious 
 respect for his feelings, and with a loyal desire to promote his interest 
 and his honour. The thoughtful German perceived the net spread 
 for him by the wily Italian. He struggled to avoid it, but in vain. 
 He suggested many other candidates ; but Hildebrand had some con- 
 clusive objection to each of them. He urged that Gebhard had been 
 raised, by the favour of Henry himself, to an eminence unassailable 
 by reproach, and beyond the reach of suspicion, and that no other 
 man could boast an equal or a similar advantage. Importuned and 
 flattered, his affections moved but his understanding unconvinced, 
 the emperor at length yielded. If our own second Henry had studied 
 this passage of history, the darkest page of his own had perhaps 
 never been written. 
 
 Gebhard became Pope, assumed the title of Victor the Second, 
 adopted, even to exaggeration, the anti-imperial principles of Hilde- 
 brand, and rewarded his services by a commission to act as his 
 Legate a latere in the kingdom of France. By Victor, this high 
 employment was probably designed as an honourable exile for a 
 patron to whom he had contracted so oppressive a debt of grati- 
 tude. But the new Legate was not a man on whom any dignity 
 could fall as a mere unfruitful embellishment. He cited before 
 him the bishops and ecclesiastical dignitaries subjected to his 
 legantine power, and preferred against the whole body one com- 
 prehensive charge of simony. Of the accused, one alone stoutly
 
 HILDEBRAND. 5 
 
 maintained his innocence. ' Believest thou,' exclaimed the judge, 
 ' that there are three persons of one substance?' ' I do." 'Then 
 repeat the doxology.' The task was successfully accomplished, until 
 the prelate reached the name of Hun whose gift Simon Magus had 
 desired to purchase. That name he could not utter. The culprit 
 cast himself at the Legate's feet, confessed his guilt, and was deposed. 
 More than eighty of his brethren immediately made the same ac- 
 knowledgment. The rumour spread on every side, that the papal 
 emissary was gifted with a preternatural skill to discern the presence 
 in the human heart of any thoughts of Satanic origin. Popular ap- 
 plause followed the steps of the stern disciplinarian ; and the wonder 
 of the ignorant was soon rivalled by the admiration of the learned 
 and the great. Such was the fame of his wisdom, that the claim of 
 Ferdinand of Castile to bear the title of Emperor of Spain, was re- 
 ferred to his abitrament by the Spanish and the German sovereigns. 
 He decided that the imperial name and dignity belonged to Henry 
 and to his heirs, to the exclusion of every other Potentate. Ill had 
 Henry divined the future ! Rashly had he consented to hold the 
 honours of his crown by the judicial sentence of a man, who, within 
 twenty years, was to pluck that crown, with every mark of infamy, 
 from the brows of his only son and successor ! 
 
 "When that son ascended the throne of his progenitors, and as- 
 sumed the kingly title of Henry the Fourth, he was yet a child. 
 Agnes, his widowed mother, became the regent of his dominions, 
 and Victor the guardian of his person. But the Pope soon followed 
 the deceased Emperor to the grave, and another election placed the 
 vacant tiara on the head of Frederick of Lorraine. 
 
 Frederick was the brother of Godfrey, who, in right of his wife 
 Beatrice, and during the minority of her daughter Matilda, exer- 
 cised the authority and enjoyed the title of Duke of Tuscany. His 
 promotion to the Papacy cemented the alliance between the Holy 
 See and the most powerful of those Italian states by which the 
 northern frontier of the papal territories might be either defended 
 or assailed. The choice was, in appearance, the unpremeditated 
 result of a popular tumult. Frederick seemed to be borne to the 
 apostolic throne by the acclamations of a Roman mob, and to be 
 seated there in a half-reluctant acquiescence in their good pleasure. 
 Some excuse was necessary for so flagrant a disregard of the rights 
 of the infant Emperor, and the turbulent enthusiasm of the people 
 was at least a specious apology. But by what informing spirit the 
 rude mass had been agitated was sufficiently disclosed by the first 
 act of the new Pontiff. He had scarcely assumed the title of 
 Stephen the Ninth before he conferred on Hildebrand the dignities
 
 6 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 of Cardinal-Archdeacon of Eome, and of Legate at the Imperial 
 Court. 
 
 After a reign of eight months, Stephen, conscious of the approach 
 of death, left to the Eomans his last injunction to postpone the 
 choice of his successor until the return from Germany of this great 
 dispenser of ecclesiastical promotions. The command was obeyed. 
 The Cardinal- Archdeacon reappeared, bringing with him the consent 
 of the Empress-Regent to the choice of Gerard, Bishop of Flo- 
 rence, another adherent of the ducal house of Tuscany. Gerard 
 accordingly ascended the chair of St Peter. Like each of his three 
 immediate predecessors, he sat there at the nomination of Hildebrand, 
 and, like each of them, he called or permitted his patron to become 
 the one great minister of his reign and director of his measures. 
 At the instance of Hildebrand, Nicholas the Second (so was he now 
 called) summoned a council at which was first effected, in the year 
 1059, a revolution, the principle of which, at the distance of eight 
 centuries, still nourishes in unimpaired vitality. It, for the first 
 time, conferred on the College of Cardinals the exclusive right of 
 voting at papal elections. It set aside not only the acknowledged 
 rights of the Emperor to confirm, but the still more ancient privilege 
 of the Eoman clergy and people to nominate their bishop. For 
 Hildebrand was now strong enough in his Norman alliance to defy 
 that popular power before which so many churchmen had trembled. 
 At his summons Robert Guiscard broke down the fortresses of the 
 Roman counts and barons, who, with their retainers, had been ac- 
 customed, in the comitia of papal Rome, to rival the exploits of 
 Clodius and his gladiators. Their authority was subverted for 
 ever, and from that period their name ceases to appear in the 
 history of pontifical elections. The title of Duke, and a recogni- 
 tion of his sovereignty over all the conquests which he had made, 
 or should ever make, rewarded the obedience of the Norman free- 
 booter. 
 
 After rendering this service to the cause of sacerdotal independ- 
 ence, Nicholas died. It was a cause which, however much ad- 
 vanced by the profound sagacity and promptitude of Hildebrand, 
 could never finally triumph over its powerful antagonists by any 
 means less hazardous, or less costly, than that of open and pro- 
 tracted war. During the minority of Henry such a conflict could 
 hardly be commenced, still less brought to a decisive issue. The 
 rights of the royal child derived from his very weakness a sanctity 
 in the hearts, and a safeguard in the arms, of his loyal German 
 subjects. The time of mortal struggle was not yet come. The 
 aspiring Cardinal judged that by again resigning to another the
 
 HILDEBKAND. 7 
 
 nominal conduct, lie could best secure to himself the real guidance, 
 of that impending controversy. 
 
 To obtain from the Empress-Eegent an assent to the observance 
 by the Sacred College of the new electoral law, was the first ob- 
 ject of the conclave which assembled after the death of Nicholas, 
 at the command of Hildebrand. At his instance an envoy was 
 despatched to the Imperial Court, with the offer that the choice 
 should fall on any ecclesiastic whom Agnes might nominate, if she 
 would consent that the Cardinals alone should appear and vote at the 
 ceremonial. The compromise was indignantly rejected. A synod 
 of imperialist prelates was convened at Basil, and by them Cado- 
 lous, Bishop of Parma (the titular Honorius the Second), was 
 elevated to the vacant Papacy. To this defiance Hildebrand and 
 his brother Cardinals answered by the choice of Anselm, Bishop of 
 Lucca, afterwards known in history as Alexander, the second of 
 that name. After a brief but sanguinary conflict in the open 
 field, each of the rival Popes, at the mediation of Godfrey, re- 
 tired from Rome to his diocese, there to await the judgment of a 
 future council on their pretensions. But Alexander did not quit 
 the city until he had acknowledged and rewarded the services of 
 the head and leader of his cause. Hildebrand now received the 
 office of Chancellor of the Holy See, the best and the highest re- 
 compense which he could earn by raising others to supreme eccle- 
 siastical dominion. Two successive councils confirmed the election 
 of Alexander, who continued, during twelve years, to rule the 
 Church, with dignity, if not in peace. 
 
 The time had at length arrived when Hildebrand was to receive 
 the high, and hazardous reward which, his unfaltering hopes had so 
 long contemplated, and his self-controlling policy so often declined. 
 Leo, Victor, Stephen, Nicholas, and Alexander, had each been in- 
 debted to his authority for the pontificate, and to his counsels for 
 the policy with, which it had been administered. Successively 
 Cardinal-Deacon, Archdeacon, Legate, and Chancellor of the Apo- 
 stolic See, one height alone was yet to be scaled. In the great 
 church of the Lateran the corpse of Alexander was extended on 
 the bier. A solemn requiem commended to the Supreme Judge the 
 soul of the departed, when the plaintive strain was broken by a 
 shout, which, rising, as it seemed, spontaneously and without con- 
 cert from every part of the crowded edifice, proclaimed that, by 
 the will of the Holy Peter himself, the Cardinal-Chancellor was 
 Pope. From the funeral procession Hildebrand flew to the pulpit. 
 With impassioned gestures, and in a voice inaudible amidst the 
 uproar, he seemed to be imploring silence ; but the tempest was
 
 8 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 not to be allayed until one of the Cardinals announced, in the name 
 of the Sacred College, their unanimous election of him whom the 
 Apostle and the multitude had thus simultaneously chosen. Crowned 
 with the tiara, and arrayed in the gorgeous robes of a Pope-elect, 
 Gregory the Seventh was then presented to the people. Their joy- 
 ous exultation and the pomp of the inaugural ceremonies blended 
 and contrasted strangely with the studied gloom and the melancholy 
 dirge of the funeral rites. 
 
 That this electoral drama was a mere improvisation, may be cre- 
 dited by those before whose faith all the mountains of improbability 
 give way. But thus to reach the summit of sacerdotal dominion as 
 if by constraint ; and thus, without forfeiting the praise of severe 
 sanctity, to obtain the highest of this world's dignities ; and thus to 
 anticipate and defeat the too probable resistance of the Imperial 
 Court ; and thus to afford the Cardinals the opportunity and the 
 excuse for the prompt exercise of their yet precarious electoral pri- 
 vilege was a combination and a coincidence of felicities such as for- 
 tune, unaided by policy, seldom, if ever, bestows even on her choicest 
 favourites. He who had nominated five Popes, was, assuredly, 
 no passive instrument in his own nomination. His letters, written 
 on the occasion, would alone be sufficient to prove, if proof were 
 wanting, that a career thus far guided by the most profound saga- 
 city, was not abandoned at its crisis to the caprice of a dissolute 
 multitude. To several of his correspondents he addressed pathetic 
 descriptions of his alarm and sorrow, but with such a remarkable 
 uniformity of terms as to force on the reader of them the belief that 
 the elegiac strain was repeated as often as necessary by his secret- 
 aries, with such variations as their taste suggested. To the Emperor 
 he breathed nothing but submission and humility. The most un- 
 impeachable decorum presided over the whole of the ceremonial that 
 followed. Envoys passed and repassed. Men of grave aspect in- 
 stituted tedious enquiries. Solemn notaries attested prolix reports ; 
 and in due time the world was informed that, of his grace and cle- 
 mency, Henry, King of Germany and Italy, calling himself Emperor, 
 had ratified the election of his dearly beloved father, Gregory the 
 Seventh the world, meanwhile, well knowing that, despite the 
 Emperor's hostility, the Pope was able and resolved to maintain his 
 own ; and that the Emperor would, if possible, have driven the Pope 
 from Rome, as the most dangerous of rebels and the most subtle of 
 usurpers. 
 
 But Henry was ill prepared for such an effort. During the first 
 six years of his reign the affairs of his vast hereditary empire had 
 been conducted by his widowed mother. She was formed to love,
 
 HILDEBRAND. 9 
 
 to reverence, and to obey. In an age less rude, or in a station less 
 exalted, her much loug-suffering, her self-sustaining dignity, and the 
 tenderness of her gentle spirit, might have enabled her to win the 
 obedience of the heart. But her mind was ductile, her conscience 
 enfeebled by a morbid sensibility, and her character formed by 
 nature and by habit for subservience -to any form of superstitious 
 terror. She was surrounded by rapacious nobles whom no sacrifices 
 could conciliate, and by lordly churchmen, who at once exacted and 
 betrayed her confidence. Though severely virtuous, she was assailed 
 by shameless calumnies. Her female rule was resented by the pride 
 of Teutonic chivalry ; and fraud and violence combined to inflict the 
 deepest wound on her rights as a sovereign and her feelings as a 
 mother. 
 
 At Kaiserworth, on the Rhine, Agnes and her son, then in his 
 thirteenth year, were reposing from the fatigues of an imperial pro- 
 gress. A galley, impelled by long lines of oars, and embellished 
 with every ornament which art and luxury could command, ap- 
 peared on the broad stream before them. Attended by a train of 
 lords and servitors, Anno, the Archbishop of Cologne, descended 
 from the gallant barge, and pressed the royal youth to inspect so 
 superb a specimen of aquatic architecture and episcopal magnifi- 
 cence. Henry gladly complied, and, as the rowers bent to their 
 oars, he enjoyed with boyish delight the rapidity with which one 
 object after another receded from his view, till turning to the com- 
 panions of what had hitherto seemed a mere holiday voyage, he read 
 in the anxious countenances of the commanders, and the vehement 
 efforts of the boatmen, that he was a prisoner, and more than ever 
 an orphan. "With characteristic decision, he at once plunged into 
 the water, and endeavoured to swim to shore ; but the toils were 
 upon him. A confederacy, formed by the Archbishops of Cologne 
 and Mentz, and supported by the Dukes of Bavaria and Tuscany, 
 consigned their young sovereign to a captivity at once sumptuous 
 and debilitating. They usurped the powers, and plundered the 
 treasures, of the crown. They bestowed on themselves and their 
 adherents forests, manors, abbeys, and lordships. But to the future 
 ruler of so many nations they denied the discipline befitting his age, 
 and the instruction due to his high prospects. They encouraged 
 him, and with fatal success, to enervate by ceaseless amusement, and 
 to debase by precocious debauchery, a mind naturally brave and 
 generous. Anno has been canonised by the See of Rome. By the 
 same ghostly tribunal, the monarch whom he kidnapped, betrayed, 
 and corrupted, was excluded from the communion of the Church 
 when living, and from her consecrated soil when dead. Impartial
 
 10 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 history will reverse either sentence,' and will pronounce her ana- 
 themas rather on St Anno, by whom the princely boy was exposed to 
 the furnace of temptation, than on him in whose young mind the 
 seeds of vice, so unsparingly sown, sprung up with such deadly 
 luxuriance. 
 
 The heart of youth was never won by habitual indulgence. As 
 Henry advanced towards manhood, the Archbishops of Cologne and 
 Mentz discovered that they were the objects of his settled antipathy, 
 and that they had to dread the full weight of a resentment at once 
 just, vindictive, and unscrupulous. To avert that danger they trans- 
 ferred the charge of the royal youth to Adalbert, Archbishop of 
 Bremen, rightly judging that his skill in courtly arts (for he had 
 lived on affectionate terms with the deceased emperor) might enable 
 him to win his pupil's regard, but erroneously believing that his 
 ecclesiastical zeal (for it seemed the master passion of his soul) 
 would induce him to employ that advantage in the defence and 
 service of the hierarchy. 
 
 Adalbert, whose life is written in the Church History of Adam 
 of Bremen, was a man whose character was so strangely composite, 
 and whose purposes were so immutably single, that he might have 
 suggested portraits to Scott, epigrams to Young, antitheses to Pope, 
 an analysis to Dryden, or to Shakspeare himself some rich and all- 
 reconciling harmony. According to the aspect in which he was 
 viewed, he might with equal justice be regarded as a saint or a man 
 of pleasure, as a scholar or a courtier, as a politician or a wit. Row 
 washing the feet of beggars, eloquently expounding Christian truth, 
 or indignantly denouncing the sins of the rich and the great, the 
 shifting scene exhibited bim amidst a throng of actors, jugglers, 
 and buffoons, or as the soul and centre of a society where lords and 
 ambassadors, prelates and priests of low degree, met to enjoy his 
 good cheer, to partake of his merriment, and to endure his relent- 
 less sarcasms. At the very moment when, with irresistible address, 
 he was insinuating himself into the favour of some potent count or 
 bishop, the approach of another dignitary would rouse him to bitter 
 and unmeasured invective. From the laughing playfellow of his 
 companions he would pass at once into their fierce assailant, and 
 then atone for the extravagance of his passion by a bounty not less 
 extravagant. But whether he preached or gave alms, whether 
 philosophy, or fun, or satire, was his passing whim, he still enjoyed 
 one luxury which habit had rendered indispensable. Parasites 
 were ever at hand to confirm his own conviction, that Adalbert of 
 Bremen was an universal genius, and that, under his fostering care,
 
 HILDEBRAND. 1 1 
 
 the see of Bremen was destined to become the northern capital of 
 the universal Church. 
 
 Nor was it strange that he believed them. Of the countless 
 victims of self-idolatry, few have had so many seductions to that in- 
 toxicating worship. A military as well as an ecclesiastical prince, 
 he witnessed the extension of his archiepiscopal dominion far along 
 the shores of the Elbe and the Baltic. Kings solicited his personal 
 friendship. Sweden and the Empire accepted him as the mediator 
 of peace. Envoys from every state in Europe, not excepting Con- 
 stantinople, thronged his palace. He was at once the confidential 
 adviser of the Pope and the chief minister of the Emperor, and 
 even boasted (with whatever truth) that he had declined the Papacy 
 itself. But this earlier "Wolsey, like his great antitype, longed 
 for some imperishable monument of his glory. Bremen was the 
 Ipswich of Adalbert ; the site selected, but in vain, for perpetuating 
 to the remotest ages the memory of an ambition less ennobled by 
 the greatness of its aims, than debased by an insatiable vanity. To 
 aggrandise his diocese he builded and fortified, negotiated and in- 
 trigued ; became by turns a suitor and an oppressor ; conciliated 
 attachments and braved enmities ; and lived and died the imaginary 
 patriarch of the imaginary patriarchate of the German and Scandi- 
 navian nations. 
 
 Brightly dawned on the young Henry the day which transferred 
 the charge of his person and of his education from the austere 
 Anno to the princely Adalbert. The Archbishop of Cologne had 
 rebuked the vices he indulged. The stouter conscience of the 
 Archbishop of Bremen stood in need of no such self-soothing com- 
 promise. He fairly threw the reins on the neck of his royal charge, 
 who invoked the aid of young and profligate companions in the use 
 or the abuse of this welcome indulgence. His tutors had sown the 
 wind ; his people were now to reap the whirlwind. Of the domestic 
 life of the young Emperor, the dark tale recorded by the chroniclers 
 of his age would not be endured by the delicacy of our own. His 
 public acts might seem to have been prompted by the determination 
 to exasperate to madness the national pride, the moral sense, and 
 the religious feelings of his subjects. Yet even when they were 
 thus provoked, their resentment slumbered. A popular address, a 
 noble presence, and the indulgence so liberally yielded to the 
 excesses of the great, the prosperous, and the young, gave scope for 
 the full expansion of his crimes and follies. At the Lateran, the 
 influence of his personal qualities was unfelt. Roused to a just 
 indignation by the frequent intelligence of a life so debauched and
 
 1 2 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 of a reign so impious, Alexander cited the Emperor to appear at 
 Home, there to answer in person to the apostolic throne for the 
 simony and the other offences imputed to him. The voice was 
 Alexander's voice, but the hand was the hand of Gregory. 
 
 Between the day on which Hildebrand had conducted Leo the 
 Ninth into Rome as a simple pilgrim, to the time of his own 
 tumultuary election, the quarter of a century had intervened. 
 During the whole of that period he had been the confidential 
 minister and guide of the Papacy. In each of the five pontificates 
 which he nominally served, and really governed, the Holy See had 
 pursued the same aggressive policy, with a steadfastness indicating 
 the guidance of one far-seeing mind, gifted with patience to await, 
 with promptitude to discern, and with courage to seize, the moments 
 of successful advance. When, therefore, the citation of Henry was 
 issued in the name of the dying Pope, none doubted that this 
 audacious act, then without a parallel in history, had been dictated 
 by the same stern and unrelenting councillor. When tidings 
 reached the Imperial Court that the voice of the people and the 
 votes of the cardinals had placed in Gregory's hands the mysterious 
 keys and the sharp sword of Peter, none doubted the near approach 
 of the conflict which was to assign the supreme dominion over the 
 Christian world either to the German sceptre or to the Roman 
 crosier. That, after ages of war and controversy, they should 
 peacefully exercise a concurrent yet divided rule, would have 
 seemed an idle dream to a generation, whose feudal theory of 
 government had for its basis the principle of various gradations of 
 dependency on some one common head, or suzerain. 
 
 With a life stained by no sensual or malignant crime (a praise 
 of which his contemporary and rancorous biographer, Cardinal 
 Benno, is the reluctant and unconscious witness), and degraded by 
 the pursuit of no ends exclusively selfish (for, except as the champion 
 of the Church, he neither obtained nor sought any personal aggran- 
 disement), Pope Hildebrand yielded himself freely to the current 
 of those awful thoughts which have peopled the brain of each in 
 turn of the successors of Peter, the basest and the most impure of 
 them scarcely excepted. A mystery to himself, he had become the 
 supreme vicar of Christ on earth ; the predestined heir of a throne 
 among those saints who should one day judge the world ; the mortal 
 head of an immortal dynasty ; the depositary of a power delegated 
 yet divine ; the viceroy to whom had been entrusted by God himself 
 the care of interests, and the dispensation of blessings and of curses, 
 which, by comparison, reduced to inappreciable vanities all the good 
 and evil of this transitory world. Resolute as he was, he appears
 
 HILDEBRAND. ] 3 
 
 to have trembled at the contrast between the weakness of his human 
 nature and the weight of these majestic responsibilities. With the 
 Abbots of Clugni and of Monte Cassino he maintained a relation 
 as much resembling friendship as was compatible with the austerity 
 of his nature and of his habits ; and to them he depicted the secret 
 tumults of his mind, in terms of which it would be impossible to 
 deny either the sincerity or the eloquence. 
 
 Before his prophetic eye arose a vast theocratic state in which 
 political and religious society were to be harmonised, or rather were 
 to be absorbed into each other. At the head of this all-embracing 
 polity, the Bishop of Rome was to assert his legitimate authority 
 over all the kings and rulers of the earth. In immediate dependence 
 on him was to be ranged the circle of his liege spiritual lords some 
 residing at the seat of empire as electors, councillors, and ministers 
 to the supreme potentate ; others presiding over the fraternities, the 
 provinces, and the sees of which his empire was to be composed. 
 At the capital of this hierarchal state were to be exercised the 
 various powers of government legislative, administrative, and 
 judicial. There also were to be held the occasional meetings of the 
 extraordinary or ecumenical legislature. To the infallible sovereign 
 of this new Jerusalem were to be assigned prerogatives limited only 
 by his own conscience, and restrained by no power but that of God 
 himself. To the Emperor, the Kings, the Dukes, and Counts, his 
 feudatories, was to be entrusted a ministry altogether subordinate 
 and auxiliary to his. They were to maintain order, to command 
 armies, to collect revenues, to dispense justice. But they were to 
 hold their crowns or coronets at the pleasure of the Autocrat, to 
 justify to him the use of their inferior authority, and to employ it 
 in support of his power, which, as it was derived from heaven itself, 
 could acknowledge no superior, equal, or competitor on earth. But 
 woe such woe as vengeance, almighty and unrelenting, could 
 inflict on him who, wielding the pontifical sceptre in the sacred 
 name of Christ, should impiously use it in any spirit, or for any 
 ends, not in accordance with these awful purposes which once made 
 Christ himself a sojourner among men ! Heathen Rome had been 
 raised up to conquer and to civilise. To Christian Eome was 
 appointed a far loftier destiny. It was hers to mediate between 
 hostile nations to reconcile sovereigns and their people to super- 
 intend the policy, restrain the ambition, redress the injustice, and 
 punish the crimes of princes and to render the Apostolic Throne 
 the source and centre of an holy influence, which, diffused through 
 every member of the social body, should inform, and animate, and 
 amalgamate the whole, and realise the inspired delineation of that
 
 14 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 yet unborn age, when the lion and the lamb should lie down 
 together, with a little child their leader. 
 
 Sublime as were the visions which thus thronged on the soul of 
 Gregory the Seventh, and which still shed a glowing light over his 
 three hundred and fifty extant letters, life was never, for a single 
 day, a state of mere visionary existence to him. Before him lay 
 the approaching struggle with Henry, with Honorius, with the 
 ecclesiastics of Lombardy, with the German people, whose loyalty 
 had so long survived the sorest provocation, and even with many of 
 the German prelates, who ascribed to the successor of Charlemagne 
 and of Otho the same rights which these great monarchs had exer- 
 cised over the Pontiifs of an earlier generation. Kor was he uncon- 
 scious that the way for his theocracy must be paved by reforms so 
 painful, as to convert into inexorable antagonists a large number of 
 those on whose attachment to his person and his laws he might 
 otherwise have most implicitly relied!, 
 
 Yet it was with no doubtful prospects of success that he girded 
 himself for the battle. His Gorman feudatories to the south, and 
 his Tuscan alliance to the north, promised security to the papal city. 
 Disaffection was widely spread among the commonality of the Em- 
 pire. The Saxons were on the verge of revolt. The Dukes of 
 Swabia, Carinthia, and Bavaria were brooding over insufferable 
 wrongs. From the young and debauched Emperor, it seemed idle 
 to dread any resolved or formidable hostility. From the other 
 powers of Europe Henry could expect no succour. From every 
 region of Christendom, the Church, in a voice which, though in- 
 articulate, was audible to the Supreme Pontiff, invoked a remedy 
 for the traffic in holy things, and for the fearful pollutions beneath 
 which she was groaning ; and that heavenly Bride assured him that 
 when he should have strangled the monsters of iniquity by whom 
 she was oppressed, he should be recompensed by every honour which 
 man could confer, and by every benediction which God bestows on 
 his most favoured servants. He heard, and he obeyed. 
 
 From the most remote Christian antiquity, the marriage of 
 clergymen had been regarded with the dislike, and their celibacy 
 rewarded by the commendation, of the people. Among the ecclesi- 
 astical heroes of the first four centuries, it is scarcely possible to 
 point to one who was not, in this respect, an imitator of Paul rather 
 than of Peter. Among the ecclesiastical writers of those times, it 
 is scarcely possible to refer to one by whom the superior sanctity 
 of the unmarried to the conjugal state is not either directly incul- 
 cated or tacitly assumed. This prevailing sentiment had ripened 
 into a customary law, and the observance of that custom had been
 
 HILDEBRAND. 15 
 
 enforced by edicts and menaces, by rewards and penalties. But 
 nature had triumphed over tradition, and had proved too strong for 
 Councils and for Popes. 
 
 When Hildebrand ascended the chair first occupied by a married 
 Apostle, his spirit burned within him to see that marriage held in 
 her impure and unhallowed bonds a large proportion of those who 
 ministered at the altar, and who handled there the very substance of 
 the incarnate Deity. It was a profanation well adapted to arouse 
 the jealousy, not less than to wound the conscience, of the Pontiff. 
 Secular cares suited ill with the stern duties of a theocratic ministry. 
 Domestic affections would choke or enervate that corporate passion 
 which might otherwise be directed with unmitigated ardour towards 
 their chief and centre. Clerical celibacy, on the other hand, would 
 exhibit to those who trod the outer courts of the great Christian 
 temple, the impressive image of a transcendental perfection, too pure 
 not only for the coarser delights of sense, but even for the alloy of 
 conjugal or parental love. It would fill the world with adherents of 
 Home, in whom every feeling would be quenched which could rival 
 that sacred allegiance. From every monastery might be summoned 
 a phalanx of allies to overpower the more numerous, but dispersed 
 and feeble, antagonists of such an innovation. In every mitred 
 churchman it would find an active partisan. The people, ever rigid 
 in exacting eminent virtue from their teachers, would be rude but 
 effective zealots of a ghostly discipline from which they were them- 
 selves to be exempt. 
 
 With such anticipations, Gregory, within a few weeks from his 
 accession, convened a council at the Lateran, and proposed a law, 
 not, as formerly, forbidding the marriage of priests, but commanding 
 every priest to put away his wife, and requiring all laymen to absent 
 themselves from any sacred office which any wedded priest might 
 presume to celebrate. Never was legislative foresight so verified by 
 the result. What the great Council of Nicsea had attempted in vain, 
 the Bishops assembled in the presence of Hildebrande accomplished, 
 at his instance, at once, effectually, and for ever. Lamentable in- 
 deed were the complaints, and bitter the reproaches, of the sufferers. 
 ' Were the most sacred ties thus to be torn asunder at the ruthless 
 bidding of an Italian priest "? Were men to become angels, or were 
 angels to be brought down from heaven to minister among men ? ' 
 Eloquence was never more pathetic, more just, or more unavailing. 
 Prelate after prelate silenced these remonstrances by austere rebukes. 
 Legate after legate arrived with papal menaces to the remonstrants. 
 Monks and abbots preached the continency which they at least pro-' 
 fessed. Kings and barons laughed over their cups at many a merry
 
 16 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 tale of compulsory divorce. Mobs pelted, hooted, and besmeared 
 with profane and filthy baptisms the unhappy victims of pontifical 
 rigour. It was a struggle not to be prolonged. Broken hearts pined 
 and died away in silence. Expostulations subsided into murmurs, 
 and murmurs were drowned in the general shout of victory. Eight 
 hundred years have sinced passed away. Amidst the wreck of laws, 
 opinions, and institutions, this decree of Hildebrand's at this day 
 rules the Latin Church, in every land where sacrifices are still offered 
 on her altars. Among us, but not of us, valuing then- rights as 
 citizens, chiefly as instrumental to their powers as churchmen 
 ministers of love, to whom the heart of a husband and a father is an 
 inscrutable mystery teachers of duties, the most sacred of which 
 they may not practise compelled daily to gaze on the most polluted 
 imagery of man's fallen heart, but denied the refuge of nature from 
 a polluted imagination professors of a virtue of which, from the 
 death of the righteous Abel down to the birth of the fervent Peter, 
 no solitary example is recorded in Holy Writ excluded from that 
 posthumous life in remote descendants, in the devout anticipation 
 of which the patriarchs were enabled to walk meekly, but exultingly, 
 with their God the sacerdotal caste yet nourishes in every Christian 
 land, the imperishable and gloomy monument both of that far-sighted 
 genius which thus devised the means of papal despotism, and of that 
 short-sighted wisdom which proposed to itself that despotism as a 
 legitimate and a laudable end. 
 
 With this Spartan rigour towards his adherents, Gregory combined 
 a more than Athenian address and audacity towards his rivals and 
 antagonists. So long as the monarchs of the West might freely be- 
 stow on the objects of their choice the sees and abbeys of their 
 states, papal dominion could be but a passing dream, and papal in- 
 dependency an empty boast. Corrupt motives usually determined 
 their choice ; and the objects of it were but seldom worthy. Ec- 
 clesiastical dignities were often sold to the highest bidder, and then 
 the purchaser indemnified himself by a use no less mercenary of his 
 own patronage : or they were given as a reward to some martial re- 
 tainer, and the new churchman could not forget that he had once 
 been a soldier. The cope and the coat-of-mail were worn alternately. 
 The same hand bore the crucifix in the holy festival, and the sword 
 in the day of battle. Episcopal warriors and abbatial courtiers thus 
 learned to regard themselves rather as feudatories holding of their 
 temporal lord, than as liegemen owing obedience to their spiritual 
 chief. In the hands of the newly consecrated Bishop was placed a 
 staff, and on his finger a ring, which, received as they were from his 
 temporal sovereign, proclaimed that homage and fealty were due to
 
 HILDEBRAXD. 1 7 
 
 him alone. And thus the sacerdotal Proconsuls of Rome became, in 
 sentiment at least, and by the powerful obligation of honour, the 
 vicegerents, not of the Pontifex Maximus, but of the Imperator. 
 
 To dissolve this trinoda necessitas of simoniacal preferments, 
 military service, and feudal vassalage, a feebler spirit "would have 
 exhorted, negotiated, and compromised. To Gregory it belonged first 
 to subdue men by courage, and then to rule them by reverence. 
 Addressing the world in the language of his generation, he proclaimed 
 to every potentate, from the Baltic to the Straits of Calpe, that all 
 human authority being holden of the divine, and God himself having 
 delegated his own sovereignty over men to the Prince of the Sacred 
 College, a divine right to universal obedience was the inalienable 
 attribute of the Roman Pontiffs, of whom, as the supreme earthly 
 suzerain, emperors and kings held their crowns, patriarchs and bi- 
 shops their mitres ; and held them not mediately through each other, 
 but immediately, as tenants in capite, from the one legitimate repre- 
 sentative of the great Apostle. 
 
 In turning over the collection of the epistles of Hildebrand, we are 
 everywhere met by this doctrine asserted in a tone of the calmest 
 dignity and the most serene conviction. Thus he informs the French 
 monarch that every house in his kingdom owed to Peter, as their 
 father and pastor, an annual tribute of a penny, and he commands 
 his legates to collect it in token of the subjection of France to the 
 Holy See. He assures Solomon, the King of Hungary, that his terri- 
 tories are the property of the Holy Roman Church. Solomon being 
 incredulous and refractory, was dethroned by his competitor for the 
 Hungarian crown. His more prudent successor, Ladislaus, acknow- 
 ledged himself the vassal of the Pope, and paid him tribute. To 
 Corsica a legate was sent to govern the demesnes of the Papacy in 
 the island, and to recover the rest of it from the Saracens. To the Sar- 
 dinians an account was despatched of Gregory's title to their obedi- 
 ence, with menaces of a Norman invasion if it should be withheld. 
 On Demetrius, Duke of Dalmatia, we find him conferring the kingly 
 title, reserving a yearly payment of two hundred pieces of silver 
 ' to the holy Pope Gregory and his successors lawfully elected, 
 as supreme lords of the Dalmatian kingdom.' Among the visitors 
 of Rome Avas a youth, described in one of these epistles as son of the 
 King of Russia. The letter informs the sovereign so designated, 
 that, at the request of the young Prince, the Pontiff had adminis- 
 tered to him the oath of fealty to St Peter and his successors, not 
 doubting that ' it would be approved by the king and all the lords 
 of his kingdom, since the Apostle would henceforth regard their 
 country as his own, and defend it accordingly.' From Sweno the 
 
 2
 
 18 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 Dane he exacted a promise of subjection. From the recently con- 
 verted Polanders he demanded and received, as sovereign lord of the 
 country, an annual tribute of a hundred marks in silver. From every 
 part of the European continent Bishops were summoned by these 
 imperial missives to Rome, and there were either condemned and 
 deposed, or absolved and confirmed in their sees. In France, in 
 Spain, and in Germany, we find his legates exercising the same 
 power ; and the correspondence records many a stern rebuke, some- 
 times for their undue remissness, sometimes for their misapplied 
 severity. The rescripts of Trajan scarcely exhibit a firmer assurance 
 both of the right and the power to control every other authority, 
 whether secular or sacerdotal, throughout the civilised world. 
 
 There was, however, in the case of the Normans, a memorable ex- 
 ception. Robert the Norman, conqueror of Sicily, and William the 
 Norman, conqueror of England, steeped in blood and sacrilege, were 
 the most shameless and cruel of usurpers. The groans and curses 
 of the oppressed cried aloud for vengeance against them. But the 
 apostolic indignation, though roused by the active vices of the Em- 
 peror, and by the apathetic depravity of Philip of France, had for 
 these tyrants no menaces of wrath, no exhortations to repentance. 
 Robert was embraced and honoured as the faithful ally of Rome. 
 William was addressed in the blandest accents of esteem and tender- 
 ness. ' You exhibit towards us ' (such is the style) ' the attachment 
 of a dutiful son, yea, of a son whose heart is moved by the love of 
 his mother. Therefore, my beloved son, let your conduct be all that 
 your language has been. Let what you have promised be effectually 
 performed.' The injunction was not disobeyed ; for even of pro- 
 mises the grim conqueror of the North had been sufficiently parsi- 
 monious. As Duke of Normandy, he remitted to the Pope the 
 amount of certain dues. As King of England, he indignantly re- 
 fused the required oath of fealty. ' I hold my kingdom of God and 
 of my sword,' was his stern and decisive answer. Something the 
 papal legate dared to mutter of the worthlessness of gold without 
 obedience ; but the gold was accepted, and the disobedience endured. 
 These were not the days of John, surnamed Lackland ; and for In- 
 nocent the Third was reserved, by his great predecessor, the glory of 
 receiving, from an English sovereign on his bended knee, the crown 
 which, while it rested on the head of William, challenged equal 
 honours with the papal tiara. For concessions more favourable to 
 his hopes of unlimited dominion, the Pontiff turned to a sovereign 
 whose crimes no triumphs had sanctified, and no heroism redeemed. 
 
 Alexander's citation had been despised by Henry, and was not re- 
 vived by Hildebrand. Every post from Germany brought fresh
 
 HILDEBRAND. 19 
 
 proof that, without the use of weapons so hazardous, the Emperor 
 must, ere long, be reduced to solicit the aid of Rome on such terms 
 as Rome might see fit to dictate. Dark as were the middle ages, the 
 German court had light enough (if we may credit the chroniclers) to 
 anticipate our own enlightened Irish policy. The ancient chiefs of 
 Saxony were imprisoned, and their estates confiscated and granted 
 to absent lords and prelates. Tithe proctors hovered like birds of 
 prey over the Saxon fields. A project was formed for driving the 
 ancient inhabitants into a Saxon pale, and for converting the land 
 into a great Swabian Colony. Castles frowned on every height. 
 Their garrisons pillaged and enslaved the helpless people. Alliances 
 were formed with the Bavarian and the Dane to crush a race hated 
 for their former pre-eminence, and despised for their recent suffer- 
 ings. Nothing was wanting to complete the parallel but discord and 
 dejection amongst the intended victims. 
 
 Groaning under the oppressions, and penetrating the designs of 
 their sovereign, the Saxons solicited for their leaders an audience at 
 Goslar. The appointed day arrived. The deputies presented them- 
 selves at the palace. Henry was engaged at a game of hazard, and 
 bade them wait till he had played it out. A stern and indignant 
 demand for justice repelled the insult. A second time, in all the in- 
 solence of youth, Henry returned a contemptuous answer. In a few 
 hours he found himself blockaded at his castle of Hartzburg by a 
 vast assemblage of armed men, under the command of Otho of 
 Nordheim, the Tell or Hofer of his native land. 
 
 Escaping with difficulty, the Emperor traversed Western Ger- 
 many to collect forces for crushing the Saxon insurgents. But the 
 spell of his Imperial name, and of his noble presence, was broken. 
 The crimes of a defeated fugitive were unpardonable. His allies 
 made common cause with the Saxons, whom they had so lately 
 leagued to destroy. Long repressed resentment burst out in the 
 grossest indignities against the recreant sovereign. Unworthy to 
 wear his spurs or his crown (so ran the popular arraignment), he 
 descended at a step from the summit of human greatness to the 
 condition of an outcast from human society. A diet had been sum- 
 moned for his deposition. His sceptre had been offered to Rudolf 
 of Swabia. A few days more, and his crown, if not his life, would 
 have been forfeited, when an opportune illness, and a rumour of his 
 death, awakened among his subjects the dormant feelings of attach- 
 ment and compassion. Haggard from disease, abject in appearance, 
 destitute, deserted, and unhappy, he presented himself to the citizens 
 of Worms. The ebbing tide of loyalty rushed violently back into 
 its wonted channels. Shouts of welcome ran along the walls. Every 
 
 2 *
 
 20 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 house-top rang with acclamations. Women wept over his wrongs. 
 Men-at-arms devoted their lives, and rich hurghers their purses, to 
 his cause. The diet was dissolved, Rudolf fled, and it remained for 
 Henry to practise, on his recovered throne, the lessons he had 
 learned in the school of adversity. 
 
 Those lessons had been unfolded and enforced by the parental 
 admonitions of Gregory. The royal penitent answered by promises of 
 amendment, 'full' (as the Pope declared) 'of sweetness and of 
 duty.' Nor was this a mere lip homage. To prove his sincerity, he 
 abandoned to the Pope the government of the great see and city of 
 Milan, the strongest hold of the Imperialists in Italy. A single de- 
 sire engrossed the heart of Henry. No sacrifice seemed too costly 
 which might enable him to inflict an overwhelming vengeance on 
 the Saxon people ; no price excessive by which he could purchase 
 the aid, or at least the neutrality, of Hildebrand in the impending 
 struggle. The concessions were accepted by the Pope, the motive 
 understood, and the equivalent rendered. "With gracious words to 
 the Emperor and to Rudolf, with pacific counsels and vague pro- 
 mises to the Saxons, Hildebrand retired from all further intervention 
 in a strife of which it remained for him to watch the issue, and to 
 reap the advantage. 
 
 It was in the depth of a severe winter that Henry, hoping to sur- 
 prise the insurgents, marched from Worms at the head of forces furn- 
 ished by the wealth and zeal of that faithful city. Drifts of snow 
 obstructed his advance. The frozen streams could no longer turn the 
 mills on which he depended for subsistence. Meteors blazed in the 
 skies, and the dispirited soldiers trembled at such accumulated 
 omens of disaster. In that anxious host, one bosom alone was heed- 
 less of danger, and unconscious of suffering. He, who had hitherto 
 been known as a profligate and luxurious youth, now urged on his 
 followers through cold, disease, and famine, to the Saxon frontier. 
 But there Otho awaited him at the head of a large and well-dis- 
 ciplined army. The Imperialists declined the unequal encounter. 
 Again Henry was reduced to capitulate. Humbled a second time be- 
 fore his subjects, he bound himself to dismantle his fortresses, to 
 withdraw his garrisons, to restore the confiscated fiefs, to confirm 
 their ancient Saxon privileges, and to grant an amnesty unlimited 
 and universal. 
 
 The treaty of Gerstungen (so it was called) was dictated by 
 animosity and distrust, and was carried into execution by the con- 
 querors in the spirit of vindictive triumph. They expelled from his 
 residence at Goslar their dejected king and his household, and 
 destroyed the town of Hartzburg with his royal sepulchre, where
 
 HILDEBRAND. 21 
 
 lay the bones of his infant son, and of others of his nearest kin- 
 dred. The graves were broken open, and their ghastly contents 
 exposed to shameful and inhuman contumelies a wild revenge, 
 and a too plausible pretext for a fearful and not distant retribution.-* 
 
 Henry returned to his lihenish provinces to meditate vengeance. 
 Eeckless of any remoter danger in which the indulgence of that 
 fierce passion might involve him, he invoked the arbitrament of 
 the Pope, and called on him to excommunicate the sacrilegious 
 race who had burned the church, and desecrated the sepulchres, 
 of his forefathers. Gregory watched the gathering tempest of 
 civil war, received the appeals of the contending parties, and 
 answered both by renewed injunctions of obedience to himself. To 
 the Saxons he sent homilies ; to the Emperor an embassy, graced 
 by the name and the presence of his mother, Agnes. She bore a 
 papal mandate to her son to enforce the celibacy of the clergy, 
 and to restore to its lawful channels the patronage of the Church. 
 Henry promised obedience. The legates then convoked a national 
 synod, to be held in Germany under their own presidency. To this 
 encroachment also, Henry submitted. A remonstrance against it 
 from the Archbishop of Bremen was answered by a legantine 
 sentence suspending him from his see. Still the Emperor was 
 passive. Another sentence of the papal ambassadors exiled from 
 the court and presence of Henry five of his councillors whom 
 Alexander had excommunicated. No signal of resistance was given 
 by their insulted sovereign. Edicts for the government of the 
 Teutonic Church were promulgated without the usual courtesy of 
 asking his concurrence. They provoked from him no show of re- 
 sentment. Their work accomplished, the legates returned to Rome, 
 the messengers of successes over the authority of the Ceesar, more 
 important than any former Pope had ventured to anticipate. Ap- 
 plause, honours, and preferments rewarded the associates of Agnes ; 
 while to herself were given assurances of celestial joy, and of a dis- 
 tinguished place among the choristers of heaven. 
 
 Her less aspiring son fed his mind with hopes of vengeance, ren- 
 dered as he thought more sure by all his concessions to the Roman 
 Pontiff. Twice, indeed, he had recoiled ignominiously from the 
 Saxon frontier. But from defeat itself he might draw the means of 
 victory. By the great feudatories of the Empire, the spectacle of 
 armed peasants and wealthy burghers imposing terms of peace on 
 the successor of Charlemagne, had been regarded with proud scorn 
 and indignation. They resented the rising fame and influence of 
 Otho. He and his followers might become strong enough to re- 
 sume by arms the estates they had lost by confiscation. Rumours
 
 22 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 were already rife of such designs. To fan these flames and deepen 
 these alarms, and thus to excite among restless chiefs and predatory 
 bands the appetite for war and plunder, became the easy and suc- 
 eessful labour of the impatient Emperor. At Henry's summons, 
 the whole strength of Germany was collected on the Elbe to crush, 
 in his quarrel, the power they had so lately aided to depose him. 
 There were to be seen the crucifix of the Abbot of Fulda, and there 
 the sacred banner of the Archbishop of Mentz. There Guelph, the 
 Bavarian, raised his ducal standard to reconquer the broad lands re- 
 stored to their former owners by the treaty of Gerstungen. There, 
 surrounded by the chivalry of Lorraine, and restored by the Em- 
 peror to that forfeited principality, Godfrey repaid the boon by the 
 desertion of the alliance, conjugal as well as political, which bound 
 him to the House of Tuscany. There appeared the king of Hungary, 
 lured by the hope of new provinces to be assigned to him on the 
 dismemberment of Saxony. And there, in the centre of countless 
 pennons, came Eudolf, to prove his loyalty to the prince whose 
 throne he had so recently endeavoured to usurp. 
 
 The tide of war rolled on towards the devoted land. It had been 
 saved, if penitence, humility, and prayer were of the same poAver 
 in the courts of earth as in those of heaven. It had been saved, 
 if courage gathered from despair, and guided by patriotism, could 
 have availed against such a confederacy of numbers and of dis- 
 cipline. But prayer was vain, and patriotism impotent. A long 
 summer's day had reached its close, when, under the command of 
 their great leader Otho, the Saxon lines approached the Unstrut. 
 On the opposite banks of that stream the Imperialists had already 
 encamped. Neither army was aware of the vicinity of the other, 
 and Henry had retired to rest, when Eudolf roused bim with the 
 intelligence that the insurgent forces were at hand, unarmed, and 
 heedless of their danger, the ready prey of a sudden and immediate 
 attack. The Emperor threw himself in a transport of gratitude at 
 the feet of his adviser, and, leaping on his horse, led forward his 
 forces to the promised victory. 
 
 In this strange world of ours, tragedies, of which the dire plot and 
 dark catastrophe might seem to be borrowed from hell, are not seldom 
 depicted by historical dramatists in colours clear and brilliant as 
 those which may be imagined to repose over Paradise. One of the 
 mitred combatants has sung, and Lambert, the chronicler of Aschaf- 
 naburg, has narrated the battle of the Unstrut. The Bishop's 
 hexameters have all the charm which usually belongs to episcopal 
 charges. But Lambert is among the most graphic and animated of 
 historians. His picture of the field glows with his own military
 
 HILDEBRAND. 23 
 
 ardour, and is thronged with incidents and with figures which might 
 well he transferred to the real canvas. Among them we distinguish 
 the ill-arranged Saxon lines hroken, flying, and again forming at the 
 voice of Otho as it rises above the tumult, and then rushing after 
 him with naked swords, and naked bosoms, on the main hattle of 
 the triumphant invaders. And still the eye follows Otho wherever 
 there are fainting hearts to rally, or a fierce onslaught to repel ; 
 and we seem almost to hear the shrill war-cry of the Swahians from 
 the van of the Imperial host, where, by a proud hereditary right, 
 they had claimed to stand ; and Rudolf their leader, the very 
 minister of death, is ever in the midst of the carnage, himself, as if 
 in covenant with the grave, unharmed ; and in the agony and 
 crisis of the strife, Henry, the idol to whom this bloody sacrifice is 
 offered, is seen in Lambert's battle-piece leaping at the head of his 
 reserve on his exhausted enemies, sweeping whole ranks into con- 
 fused masses, and amid shrieks, and groans, and fruitless prayers, 
 and fruitless curses, immolating them to his insatiable revenge. 
 
 The sun went down on that Aceldama amidst the exultations of 
 the victorious allies. It rose on them the following morning agitated 
 by grief, by discord, and by disaffection. Many nobles who had 
 fought the day before under the Imperial banner, were stretched on 
 the field of battle. The enthusiasm of the Saxons had proved at 
 how fearful a price, if at all, the selfish ends of the confederacy 
 must be attained. They mourned the extinction of one of the eyes 
 of Germany. Silently but rapidly the armament dissolved. God- 
 frey alone remained to prosecute the war. With his aid it was 
 brought by Henry to a successful issue. A capitulation placed Otho 
 and the other leaders in the Emperor's power. With their persons 
 secured, their estates forfeited, and their resources destroyed, he re- 
 turned to join with the loyal citizens of Worms in chanting the 
 ' Te Deum laudamus.' The same sacred strain had but a few days 
 before celebrated at Rome a still more important and enduring 
 victory. 
 
 Gregory had rightly judged, that while the rival princes were im- 
 mersed in civil war, he might securely convene the princes of the 
 Church to give effect to designs of far deeper significance. The long 
 aisles of the Lateran were crowded with grave Canonists and mitred 
 Abbots, with Bishops and Cardinals, with the high functionaries, 
 and the humble apparitors, of the Papal State. Proudly eminent 
 above them all, sat the Vicar and Vicegerent of the King of kings. 
 Masses were sung, and homilies were delivered, and rites were per- 
 formed, of which the origin might be traced back to the worship of 
 the Capitoline Jove ; and then was enacted, by the ecclesiastical
 
 24 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 Senate, a law, not unlike the most arrogant of those which eleven 
 centuries before had been promulgated in the Capitol. It forbade 
 the kings and rulers of the earth to exercise their ancient right of 
 investiture of any spiritual dignitary, and transferred to the Pope 
 alone a patronage and an influence more than sufficient to balance, 
 within their own dominions, all the powers of all the monarchs of 
 Christendom. In the darkest hours of Imperial despotism, the suc- 
 cessors of Julius had never enjoyed, or demanded, an authority so 
 wide or so absolute. Even the daring spirit by which the decree had 
 been dictated drew back from the immediate publication of it. The 
 Pope intimated to the German court and prelates the other acts of 
 the councils, but passed over in silence the great edict for which 
 they had been assembled, and by which they were to be immor- 
 talized. It reposed in the Papal Chancery as an authority to be in- 
 voked at a more convenient season, and, in the mean time, as a text 
 for the rulers of the earth to ponder, and for the learned to inter- 
 pret. To Hildebrand it belonged neither to expound nor to threaten, 
 but to act. 
 
 The Bishop of Lucca was dead : the Pope nominated his successor. 
 The Bishop of Bamberg was accused of simony : the Pope sus- 
 pended him. The Archbishop of Bremen still denied the right of 
 Papal legates to preside in a German synod : the Pope deprived 
 him of his see, and of the holy sacraments. The Bishops of Pavia, 
 Turin, and Placentia adhered to Honorius : the Pope deposed them. 
 Henry's five exiled councillors gave no signs of repentance : the 
 Pope again excommunicated them. The Normans invaded the Ro- 
 man territory : the Pope assailed them by a solemn anathema. 
 Philip of France continued to indulge himself, and to pillage every 
 one else : the Pope upbraided and menaced him. Thus with male- 
 dictions, sometimes as deadly as the Pontine miasma, sometimes as 
 innocuous as the Mediterranean breeze, he waged war with his an- 
 tagonists, and exercised, in reality, the powers which he yet hesi- 
 tated to assert in words. 
 
 To the conqueror of Saxony these encroachments and anathemas 
 of the Pontiff appeared more offensive than formidable. He retaliated 
 rather by scorn than by active hostility. He heaped favours on his 
 own excommunicated councillors sent one of his chaplains to ascend 
 the vacant episcopal throne of Lucca nominated an obscure and 
 scandalous member of his own household for the princely mitre 
 of Cologne and forbade his Saxon subjects to appeal to Rome, 
 even in cases exclusively ecclesiastical. To Henry, the Pontiff 
 seemed an angry, arrogant, vituperative old man, best to be en- 
 countered by contempt. To Gregory, the Emperor appeared as the
 
 HILDEBRAND. 25 
 
 feeble and unconscious agent in a providential scheme for subject- 
 ing the secular to the spiritual dynasty. To such as could read the 
 signs of the times, it was evident that, on either side, this contempt 
 was misplaced ; and that a long and sanguinary conflict drew near, 
 by which the future destinies of the world would be determined. 
 
 Events hurried rapidly onward to that crisis. Complaints were 
 preferred to the Holy See of crimes committed by Henry against the 
 Saxon Church which cried for vengeance, and of vices practised by 
 him in private, which rendered him unfit for communion with his 
 fellow-Christians. Gregory cited the Emperor to appear before him 
 to answer these charges. The Emperor, if we may believe the papal 
 historians, answered by an attempt to assassinate the author of so 
 presumptuous a citation. 
 
 On Christmas eve, in the year 1075, the city of Rome was visited 
 by a dreadful tempest. Not even the full moon of Italy could pene- 
 trate the dense mass of superincumbent clouds. Darkness brooded 
 over the land, and the trembling spectators believed that the day of 
 final judgment was about to dawn. In this war of the elements, 
 however, two processions were seen advancing to the Church of 
 Santa Maria Maggiore. At the head of one was the aged Hilde- 
 brand, conducting a few priests to worship at the shrine of the 
 Virgo Deipara. The other was preceded by Cencius, a Roman 
 noble. His followers were armed as for some desperate enterprise. 
 At each pause in the roar of the tempest might be heard the hallelu- 
 jahs of the worshippers, or the voice of the Pontiff pouring out 
 benedictions on the little flock which knelt before him when the 
 arm of Cencius grasped his person, and the sword of some yet more 
 daring ruffian inflicted a wound on his forehead. Bound with 
 cords, stripped of his sacred vestments, beaten, and subjected to 
 the basest indignities, the venerable minister of Christ was carried 
 to a fortified mansion within the walls of the city, again to be 
 removed, at daybreak, to exile, or to death. "Women were there with 
 women's sympathy and kindly offices, but they were rudely put 
 aside ; and a drawn sword was already aimed at the Pontiffs 
 bosom, when the cries of a fierce multitude, threatening to burn or 
 batter down the house, arrested the arm of the assassin. An arrow, 
 discharged from below, reached and slew him. The walls rocked 
 beneath the strokes of the maddened populace, and Cencius, falling 
 at his prisoner's feet, became himself a suppliant for pardon, and for 
 life. 
 
 In profound silence, and undisturbed serenity, Hildebrand had 
 thus far submitted to these atrocious indignities. The occasional 
 raising of his eyes towards heaven alone indicated his consciousness
 
 26 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 of them. But to the supplication of his prostrate enemy he re- 
 turned an instant and a calm assurance of forgiveness. He rescued 
 Cencius from the exasperated besiegers, dismissed him in safety and 
 in peace, and returned, amidst the acclamations of the whole Koman 
 people, to complete the interrupted solemnities of Santa Maria 
 Maggiore. 
 
 That Henry instigated this crime, is an accusation of which no 
 proof is extant, and to which all probabilities are opposed. But 
 such a belief was current at the time ; and the contest thencefor- 
 ward assumed all the bitterness of personal animosity. To the 
 charges of sacrilege, impurity, and assassinations, preferred against 
 the Emperor, his partisans answered by denouncing the Pope him- 
 self, at a Synod convened at Worms, as baseborn, and as guilty of 
 murder, simony, necromancy, and devil worship, of habitual, though 
 concealed, profligacy, and of an impious profanation of the Euchar- 
 ist. Fortunately for the fame of Gregory, his enemies have written 
 a book. Cardinal Benno, one of the most inveterate of them, has 
 bequeathed to us a compendium of all those synodal invectives. 
 The guilt of a base birth is established ; for Hildebrand's father 
 was a carpenter in the little Tuscan town of Saone. The other 
 imputations are refuted by the evident malignity of the writer, and 
 by the utter failure, or the wild extravagance, of his proofs. 
 
 Such, however, was not the judgment of the Synod of "Worms. 
 A debate, of two days' continuance, closed with an unanimous vote 
 that Gregory the Seventh should be abjured and deposed. Henry 
 first affixed his signature to the act of abjuration. Then each Arch- 
 bishop, Bishop, and Abbot, rising in his turn, subscribed the same 
 fatal scroll. Scarcely was the assembly dissolved before Imperial 
 messengers were on their way to secure the concurrence of other 
 Churches,. and the support of the temporal princes. On every side, 
 but especially in Northern Italy, a fierce and sudden flame attested 
 the long smouldering resentment of the priests whom the Pope had 
 divorced from their wives ; of the lords whose simoniacal traffic he 
 had arrested ; of the princes whose Norman invaders he had cherished ; 
 of the ecclesiastics whom his haughty demeanour had incensed ; of 
 the licentious whom his discipline had revolted ; and of the patriotic 
 whom his ambition had alarmed. The abjuration of "Worms was 
 adopted with enthusiasm by another Synod at Placenza. Oaths of 
 awful significance cemented the confederacy. Acts of desperate 
 hostility bore witness to the determination of the confederates to 
 urge the quarrel to extremities. Not a day was to be lost in inti- 
 mating to Gregory that the apostolic sceptre had fallen from his hands, 
 and that the Christian Church was once more free.
 
 HILDEBRAND. 27 
 
 It was now the second week in Lent, in the year 1076. From his 
 throne, beneath the sculptured roof of the Vatican, Gregory, arrayed 
 in the rich mantle, the pall, and the other mystic vestments of pon- 
 tifical dominion, looked down the far-receding vista of the sacred 
 edifice on the long array of ecclesiastical Lords and Princes, before 
 whom ' Henry King of Germany and Italy, calling himself Emperor,' 
 had been summoned to appear, not as their sovereign to receive their 
 homage, but as a culprit to await their sentence. As he gazed on 
 that new senate, asserting a jurisdiction so majestic and listened to 
 harmonies which might not unfitly have accompanied the worship of 
 Eden and joined in anthems which in far distant ages had been 
 sung by blessed saints in their dark crypts, and by triumphant 
 martyrs in their dying agonies and inhaled the incense symbolical 
 of the prayers offered by the Catholic Church to her eternal Head 
 what wonder if, under the intoxicating influence of such a scene and 
 of such an hour, the old man believed that he was himself the apo- 
 stolic Rock on which her foundations were laid, and that his cause 
 and person were sacred as the will, and invincible as the power, of 
 heaven itself ! The ' Veni Creator ' was on the lips of the papal 
 choir, when Roland, an envoy from the Synods of Worms and Pla- 
 cenza, presented himself before the assembled hierarchy of Rome. 
 His demeanour was fierce, and his speech abrupt. ' The King and 
 the united Bishops, both of Germany and Italy ' (such was his apo- 
 strophe to the Pope), ' transmit to thee this command : Descend 
 without delay from the throne of St Peter. Abandon the usurped 
 government of the Roman Church. To such honours none must 
 aspire without the general choice, and the sanction of the Emperor.' 
 Then addressing the conclave ' To you, brethren,' he said, ' it is 
 commanded, that at the feast of Pentecost ye present yourselves be- 
 fore the King my master, to receive a pope and father from his hands. 
 This pretended pastor is a ravenous wolf.' A brief pause of mute 
 astonishment gave way to shouts of fury. Swords were drawn, and 
 the audacious herald was about to expiate his temerity with his 
 blood. But Gregory descended from his throne, received from the 
 hands of Roland the letters of the Synods, and, resuming his seat, 
 read them, in a clear and deliberate voice, to the indignant council. 
 Again the sacred edifice rang with a tempest of passionate invective. 
 Again swords were drawn on Roland, and again the storm was com- 
 posed by the voice of the Pontiff. He spake of prophecies fulfilled 
 in the contumacy of the King, and in the troubles of the faithful. 
 He assured them, that victory would reward their zeal, or divine 
 consolations soothe their defeat ; but whether victory or defeat 
 should be their doom, the time, he said, had come when the aveng-
 
 28 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 ing sword must be drawn to smite the enemy of God, and of His 
 Church. 
 
 The speaker ceased and turned for approbation, or at least for 
 acquiescence, not to the enthusiastic throng of mitred or of armed 
 adherents, but to one who, even in that eventful moment, divided 
 with himself the gaze and the sympathy of that illustrious assem- 
 blage. For by his side, though in an inferior station, sat Agnes, the 
 Empress-mother, brought there to witness and to ratify the judgment 
 to be pronounced on her only child, whom she had borne amidst the 
 proudest hopes, and trained for empire beneath the griefs and anxie- 
 ties of widowhood. She bore, or strove to bear, herself as a daughter 
 of the Church, but could not forget that she was the mother of Henry, 
 when, in all the impersonated majesty of that holy fellowship, Hilde- 
 brand, raising his eyes to heaven, with a voice echoing, amidst the 
 breathless silence of the Synod, through the remotest arches of the 
 lofty pile, invoked the holy Peter, prince of the apostles, to hear, 
 and ' Mary the mother of God,' and the blessed Paul, and all the 
 saints, to bear witness, while for the honour and defence of Christ's 
 Church, in the name of the sacred Trinity, and by the power and 
 authority of Peter, he interdicted to King Henry, son of Henry the 
 Emperor, the government of the whole realm of Germany and Italy, 
 absolved all Christians from their oaths and allegiance to him, and 
 bound him with the bond of anathema, ' that the nations may know 
 and acknowledge that thou art Peter, and that, upon thy rock, the 
 Son of the living God hath built His church, and that the gates of 
 hell shall not prevail against it.' 
 
 When intelligence of the deposition of Henry first astounded the 
 nations of Europe, the glories of Papal Rome seemed to the multi- 
 tude to have been madly staked on one most precarious issue. Men 
 foretold that the Emperor would promptly and signally punish a 
 treason so audacious, and that the Holy See would, ere long, descend 
 to the level of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Nor did the 
 wisest deem such anticipations unreasonable. They reflected that 
 Henry was still in the very prime of life that he possessed a force 
 of will which habitual luxury had not impaired, and a throne, in the 
 hearts of his people, which the wildest excess of vice and folly had 
 not subverted that he reigned over the fairest and the wealthiest 
 portion of the Continent that he commanded numerous vassals, and 
 could bring into the field powerful armies that he had crushed re- 
 bellion among his subjects, and had no rival to dread among his 
 neighbours and that the Papacy had flourished under the shelter of 
 the Imperial crown, the authority of which had been so arrogantly 
 defied, and the fierce resentment of which was now inevitably to be
 
 HILDEBRAND. 29 
 
 encountered. But in the seeming strength of the Imperial resources, 
 there was an inherent weakness ; and in the seeming weakness of 
 the Papal cause, a latent but invincible strength. Even Teutonic 
 loyalty had been undermined by the cruelties, the faithlessness, and 
 the tyranny of the monarch, and the doom of the oppressor was upon 
 him. The cause of Gregory was, on the other hand, in popular esti- 
 mation, the cause of sanctity and of truth, of primaeval discipline and 
 traditionary reverence, and the Pope himself a martyr, who, in all 
 the majesty of superhuman power, was resolved either to repel the 
 spoiler from the Christian fold, or to lay down his life for the sheep. 
 That these high and lofty purposes really animated the soul, or 
 kindled the imagination, of him to whom they were thus ascribed, it 
 would be presumptuous to deny. But whatever may have been his 
 reliance on the promises of heaven, he certainly combined with it a 
 penetrating insight into the policy of earth. He summoned to his 
 aid his Gorman feudatories, and invoked the succour of his Tuscan 
 allies. She who now reigned in Tuscany might be supposed to have 
 been called into being for the single purpose of sustaining, like an- 
 other Deborah or Judith, the fainting hopes of another Israel. 
 
 On the death of Boniface, Duke and Marquis of Tuscany, in 1054, 
 his states descended to his only surviving child, who, under the title 
 of 'The Great Countess,' ruled there until her own death hi 1116, 
 first in tutelage, then in conjunction with her mother, Beatrice, and 
 during the last thirty-nine years of that long period, in her own 
 plenary and undivided right. Though she married Godfrey of Lor- 
 raine in her youth, and Guelph of Bavaria in her more mature age, 
 neither the wit and military genius of her first husband, nor the 
 wisdom and dignity of his successor, could win the heart of Matilda. 
 Her biographer has entered into an elaborate inquiry to establish the 
 fact, that, notwithstanding her nuptial vows with two of the most 
 accomplished princes of that age, she lived and died as in a state of 
 celibacy. Even they who cannot concur with him in pronouncing 
 the sacrifice sublime, will admit that it was at least opportune. 
 While persuading the clergy to put away their wives, she herself 
 repudiated both her husbands. The story, indeed is not very tract- 
 able. Schools for scandal preceded, as they have survived, all the 
 other schools of modern Italy ; and whoever has read Goldasti's 
 ' Eeplication for the Sacred Caesarean and Royal Majesty of the 
 Franks,' is aware that if Florence had then possessed a comic stage 
 and an Aristophanes, he would have exhibited no less a personage 
 than the great Hildebrand in the chains of no meaner an Aspasia 
 than the great Countess of Tuscany. But large as is the space 
 occupied by this charge, and by the refutation of it, in the annals of
 
 30 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 those times, it may safely be rejected as altogether incredible and 
 absurd. At that period, the anatomists of the human heart seemed 
 not to have described, if indeed they had detected, that hieropathic 
 affection so familiarly known among ourselves, of which the female 
 spirit is the seat, and the ministers of religion the objects a flame 
 usually as pure as it is intense, and which burned as brightly in the 
 soul of Matilda eight centuries ago, as in the most ardent of the fair 
 bosoms which it warms and animates now. She was in truth in love, 
 but in love with the Papacy. Six aged Popes successively acknoAv- 
 ledged and rejoiced over her, as at once the most zealous adherent of 
 their cause, and the most devoted worshipper of their persons. And 
 well might those holy fathers exult in such a conquest. Poets, in 
 their dreams, have scarcely imaged, heroes, in the hour of their 
 triumph, have rarely attained, so illustrious a trophy of their genius 
 or of their valour. 
 
 The Me of Matilda is told by Donnizone, a member of her house- 
 hold, in three books of lamentable hexameters ; and by Fiorentini, 
 an antiquary and genealogist of Lucca in the seventeenth century, in 
 three other books scarcely less wearisome ; though his learning, his 
 love of truth, and his zeal for the glory of his heroine, secure for him 
 the respect and the sympathy of his readers. That she should have 
 inspired no nobler eulogies than theirs, may be ascribed partly to her 
 having lived in the times when the Boethian had subsided into the 
 Boeotian age of Italian literature, and partly to the uninviting nature 
 of the ecclesiastical feuds and alliances in which her days were con- 
 sumed. Otherwise, neither Zenobia, nor Isabella, nor Elizabeth, had 
 a fairer claim to inspire, and to live in immortal verse. Not even 
 her somnolent chaplain, as he beat out his Latin doggerel, could 
 avoid giving utterance to the delight with which her delicate features, 
 beaming with habitual gaiety, had inspired him. Not even her severe 
 confessor, Saint Anselm of Lucca, could record without astonishment, 
 how her feeble frame sustained all the burdens of civil government, 
 and all the fatigues of actual war ; burdens indeed, which, but for a 
 series of miraculous cures wrought for her at his own intercession, 
 she could not (he assures us) have sustained at all. 
 
 Supported either by miracle, or by her own indomitable spirit, 
 Matilda wielded the sword of justice with masculine energy both in 
 the field, against the enemies of the Holy See, and in the tribunal, 
 against such as presumed to violate her laws. He who knew her 
 best, regarded these stern exercises of her authority but as the 
 promptings of a heart which loved too wisely and too well to love 
 with fondness. In the camp, such was the serenity of her demean- 
 our, and the. graceful flow of her discourse, that she appeared to him
 
 HILDEBRAND. 31 
 
 a messenger of mercy, in the garb of a Penthesilea. On the judg- 
 ment-seat he saAV in her not the stern avenger of crime, but rather 
 the compassionate mother of the feeble and the oppressed. 
 
 Nor did she allow to herself any of the weak indulgence she 
 denied to others. In a voluptuous age she lived austerely, sub- 
 duing her appetites, and torturing her natural affections with the 
 perverse ingenuity which her ghostly counsellors inculcated and 
 extolled. In a superstitious age she subdued her desire for the 
 devotional abstractions of the cloister ; and with greater wisdom, 
 and more real piety, consecrated herself to the active duties of her 
 princely office. In an illiterate age, her habits of study were such 
 that she could make herself intelligible to all the troops among whom 
 she lived, though levied from almost every part of Europe, and ' 
 especially to her Italian, French, and German soldiers, whose tongues 
 she used with equal facility. Donnizone assures us, that, though 
 he was ever at hand as her Latin secretary, she wrote with her own 
 pen all her letters in that language to the Pontiffs and Sovereigns 
 of her times a proof, as his readers will think, of her discernment 
 no less than of her learning. On his testimony, also, may be claimed 
 for her the praise of loving, collecting, and preserving books ; for 
 thus he sings : 
 
 ' Copia librorum non deficit huic, ve bonorum ; 
 Libros ex cunctis habet artibus atque figuris." 
 
 How well she understood the right use of them, may be inferred 
 from her employment of "Werner, a jurist, to revise the ' Corpus 
 Juris Civilis ; ' and of Anselm, her confessor, to compile a collection 
 of the Canon Law, and to write a commentary on the Psalms of 
 David. Such, indeed, was her proficiency in scriptural knowledge, 
 that her versifying chaplain maintains her equality in such studies 
 with the most, learned of the Bishops, her contemporaries. 
 
 Warrior, ascetic, and scholar as she was, the spirit of Matilda was 
 too generous to be imprisoned within the limits of the camp, the 
 cell, or the library. It was her noble ambition to be the refuge of 
 the oppressed, the benefactor of the miserable, and the champion of 
 what she deemed the truth. Mortifying the love of this world's 
 glory, she laboured, with a happy inconsistency, to render it still 
 more glorious. At her bidding, castles and palaces, convents and ca- 
 thedrals, statues and public monuments, arose throughout Tuscany. 
 Yet, so well was her munificence sustained by a wise economy, that 
 to the close of her long reign, she was still able to maintain her 
 hereditary title to the appellation of ' the rich,' by which her father, 
 Boniface, had been also distinguished. She might, with no less pro-
 
 32 HILDEBBAND. 
 
 priety, have been designated as ' the powerful ;' since, either by 
 direct authority, or by irresistible influence, she ruled nearly the 
 whole of Northern Italy, from Lombardy to the Papal States, and 
 received from the other monarchs of the West, both the outward 
 homage, and the real deference, reserved for sovereign potentates. 
 
 Matilda attained to the plenary dominion over her hereditary 
 states at the very crisis of the great controversy of her age, when 
 Henry had procured, and promulgated, the sentence of the Synod of 
 Worms for the deposition of Gregory. Heedless, or rather uncon- 
 scious, of the resources of that formidable adversary, he had made 
 no preparation for the inevitable contest ; but as though smitten by 
 a judicial blindness, selected that critical moment for a new outrage 
 on the most sacred feelings of his own subjects. He marched iiito 
 Saxony ; and there, as if in scorn of the free German spirit, erected 
 a stern military despotism, confiscated the estates of the people, 
 exiled their nobles, imprisoned their bishops, sold the peasants as 
 slaves, or compelled them to labour in erecting fortresses, from 
 which his mercenary troops might curb and ravage the surrounding 
 country. The cry of the oppressed rose on every side from the un- 
 happy land. It entered into the ears of the Avenger. 
 
 As Henry returned from this disastrous triumph to Utrecht, the 
 Imperial banner floated over a vast assemblage of courtiers, church- 
 men, vassals, ministers of justice, men-at-arms, and sutlers, Avho lay 
 encamped like some nomad tribe round their chief; when the in- 
 dignant bearing of some of his followers, and the alarmed and half- 
 averted gaze of others, disclosed to him the awful fact that a ponti- 
 fical anathema had cast him down from his Imperial state, and 
 exiled him from the society of all Christian people. His heart 
 fainted within him at these dismal tidings as at the sound of his 
 own passing bell. But that heart was kingly still, and resolute 
 either to dare or to endure, in defence of his hereditary crown. 
 Shame and sorrow might track him to the grave, but he would hold 
 no counsel with despair. The world had rejected him the Church 
 had cast him out his very mother had deserted him. In popular 
 belief, perhaps in his own, God Himself had abandoned him. Yet 
 all was not lost. He retained, at least, the hope of vengeance. On 
 his hated adversary he might yet retaliate blow for blow, and male- 
 diction for malediction. 
 
 On Easter-day, in the year 1076, surrounded by a small and 
 anxious circle of prelates, William the Archbishop of Utrecht as- 
 cended his archiepiscopal throne, and recited the sacred narrative 
 which commemorates the rising of the Eedeemer from the grave. 
 But no strain of exulting gratitude followed. A fierce invective
 
 HILDEBRAKD. 33 
 
 depicted, in the darkest colours, the character and the career of 
 Hildebrand, and with bitter scorn the Preacher denied the right of 
 such a Pope to censure the Emperor of the "West, to govern the 
 Church, or to live in her communion. In the name of the assembled 
 Synod, he then pronounced him excommunicate. 
 
 At that moment the summons of death reached the author of this 
 daring defiance. While the last fatal struggle convulsed his body, 
 a yet sorer agony affected his soul. He died self-abhorred, rejecting 
 the sympathy, the prayers, and the sacraments with which the 
 terrified bystanders would have soothed his departing spirit. The 
 voice of heaven itself seemed to rise in wild concert with the cry of 
 his tortured conscience. Thunderbolts struck down both the church 
 in which he had abjured the Vicar of Christ, and the adjacent 
 palace in which the Emperor was residing. Three other of the anti- 
 papal prelates quickly followed William to the grave by strange and 
 violent deaths. Godfrey of Lorraine fell by the hand of an assassin. 
 These facts, though recorded by the contemporary chroniclers, will 
 of course be received in our own times with the judicious scepticism 
 which has been so deeply impressed on all modern readers of his- 
 torical marvels. But there can be no doubt that the belief in these 
 accumulated portents was everywhere diffused, and awakened uni- 
 versal horror. Each day announced to Henry some new succession. 
 His guards deserted his standard ; his personal attendants avoided 
 his presence. The members of the Synod of Worms fled to Rome, 
 to make their peace with the justly irritated Pontiff. The nobles set 
 free the Saxon prisoners who had been confided to their custody. 
 Otho appeared once more in arms to lead a new insurrection of his 
 fellow-countrymen. The great Princes of Germany convened a coun- 
 cil to deliberate on the deposition of their Sovereign. To every eye 
 but his own, all seemed to be lost. Even to him it was but too evi- 
 dent that the loyalty of his subjects had been undermined, and that 
 his throne was tottering beneath him. A single resource remained. 
 He might yet assemble the faithful, or the desperate, adherents of 
 his cause inspire dread into those whose allegiance he had for- 
 feited make one last strenuous effort in defence of his crown and 
 descend to the tomb, if so it must be, the anointed chief of the 
 Carlovingian Empire. 
 
 With a mind wrought up to such resolves, he traversed the north 
 of Germany to encounter the Saxon insurgents published to the 
 world the sentence of Utrecht and called on the Lombard Bishops 
 to concur in the excommunication it denounced. He reaped the 
 usual reward of audacity. Though repelled by Otho, and com- 
 pelled to retrace his march to the Rhine, he found every city, vil 
 
 3
 
 34 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 lage, and convent, "by which he passed, distracted with the contro- 
 versy between the Diadem and the Tiara. Religion and awakening 
 loyalty divided the Empire. Though not yet combining into any 
 definite form, the elements of a new confederacy were evidently at 
 work in favour of a Monarch who thus knew how to draw courage 
 and energy from despair. 
 
 Yet the moral sentiment of the German people was as yet un- 
 equivocally against their Sovereign. The Imperialists mournfully 
 acknowledged that their chief was justly condemned. The Papalists 
 indignantly denied the truth of the reproaches cast on their leader. 
 In support of that denial, Gregory defended himself in epistles 
 addressed to all the greater Teutonic prelates. Among them is a 
 letter to Herman, Bishop of Mentz, which vividly exhibits both the 
 strength of the writer's character and the weakness of his cause. 
 Although (he says) such as, from their exceeding folly, deny the pa- 
 pal right of excommunicating kings, hardly deserve an answer (the 
 right to depose kings was the real point in debate), yet, in conde- 
 scension to their weakness, he will dispel their doubts. Peter him- 
 self had taught this doctrine, as appeared by a letter from St Cle- 
 ment (in the authenticity of which no one believes). When Pepin 
 coveted the crown of Childeric, Pope Zachary was invited, by the 
 Mayor of the Palace, to give judgment between them. On his am- 
 biguous award the usurper had founded the title of his dynasty. 
 Saint Gregory the Great had threatened to depose any monarch who 
 should resist his decrees. The story of Ambrose and Theodosius, 
 rightly interpreted, gave proof that the Emperor held his crown at 
 the will of the Apostle. Every king was one of the " sheep " whom 
 Peter had been commanded to feed, and one of the " things " which 
 Peter had been empowered to bind. Who could presume to place 
 the Sceptre on a level with the Crosier, the one the conquest of 
 human pride, the other the gift of divine mercy : the one conduct- 
 ing to the vain glories of earth, the other pointing the way to 
 Heaven? As gold surpasses lead, so does the Episcopal transcend 
 the Imperial dignity. Could Henry justly refuse to the universal 
 Bishop that precedence which Constantino had yielded to the mean- 
 est Prelate at Mcaea 1 Must not he be supreme above all terrestrial 
 thrones, to whom all ecclesiastical dominations are subordinate ? 
 
 To employ good arguments, one must be in the right. To make 
 the best possible use of such as are to be had is the privilege of 
 genius, even when in the wrong. Nothing could be more convincing 
 to the spiritual lords of Germany, nothing more welcome to her 
 secular chiefs, than this array of great names and sonorous authori- 
 ties against their falling Sovereign. To overcome the obstinate
 
 HILDEBRAND. 35 
 
 loyalty of the burghers and peasantry to their young and gallant 
 King, religious terrors were indispensable; and continual reinforce- 
 ments of pontifical denunciations were therefore solicited and ob- 
 tained. At length, in the autumn of 1076, appeared from Eome a 
 rescript which, in the event (no longer doubtful) of Henry's con- 
 tinued resistance to the sentence of the last papal council, required 
 the German princes and prelates, counts and barous, to elect a new 
 Emperor, and assured them of the Apostolical confirmation of 
 any choice which should be worthily made. These were no idle 
 words. The death-struggle could no longer be postponed. Legates 
 arrived from Eome to guide the proceedings of the Diet to be con- 
 vened for this momentous deliberation. It met during the autumn 
 at Tribur. 
 
 The annals of mankind scarcely record so solemn, or so dispassion- 
 ate, an act of national justice. Some princely banner waved over 
 every adjacent height, and groups of unarmed soldiers might be traced 
 along the furthest windings of the neighbouring Ehine, joining in 
 the pleasant toils, and swelling the gay carols, of the mature vintage. 
 In the centre, and under the defence, of that vast encampment, rose 
 a pavilion, within which were collected all whose dignity entitled 
 them to a voice in that high debate. From the only extant record 
 of what occurred, and of what was spoken there, it may be inferred 
 that Henry's offences against the Church were regarded lightly in 
 comparison with the criminality of his civil government. Stationed 
 on the opposite bank of the river, he received quick intelligence of 
 the progress and tendency of the discussion. The prospect darkened 
 hourly. Soldiers had already been despatched to secure him ; and 
 his person was in danger of unknightly indignities ; which might 
 for ever have estranged the reverence borne to him by the ruder 
 multitude, when he attempted to avert the impending sentence of 
 deposition by an offer to abdicate all the powers of government 
 to his greater feudatories, stipulating for himself only that he 
 should retain his Imperial title as the nominal head of the Teutonic 
 Empire. 
 
 Palpable as was the snare to the subtle Italian legates, the simple- 
 minded Germans appear to have nearly fallen into it. For seven 
 successive days speech answered speech on this proposal, and when 
 men could neither speak nor listen more, the project of a nominal 
 reign, shorn of all substantial authority, was adopted by the Diet ; 
 but (in modern phrase) with amendments obviously imposed by the 
 representatives of the sacerdotal power. The Pope was to be invited 
 to hold a Diet at Augsburg in the ensuing spring. He was mean- 
 while to decide whether Henry should be restored to the bosom of
 
 36 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 the Church. If so restored, he was at once to resume all his im- 
 perial rights. But if the sun should go down on him, still an ex- 
 communicate person, on the 23rd of February, 1077, his crown was 
 to be transferred to another. Till then he was to dwell at Spires, 
 with the title of Emperor, but without a court, an army, or a place 
 of public worship. 
 
 The theocratic theory, hitherto regarded as a mere Utopian extrava- 
 gance, had thus passed into a practical and sacred reality. The 
 fisherman of Galilee had triumphed over the conqueror of Pharsalia. 
 The vassal of Otho had reduced Otho's successor to vassalage. The 
 universal monarchy which Heathen Rome had wrung from a bleed- 
 ing world, had been extorted by Christian Rome from the supersti- 
 tion or the reverence of mankind. The relation of the Papacy and 
 the Empire had been inverted ; and Churchmen foretold with un- 
 hesitating confidence the exaltation of their order above all earthly 
 potentates, and the resort to their capital of countless worshippers, 
 there to do homage to an oracle more profound than that of Delphi, 
 to mysteries more pure than those of Eleusis, and to a pontificate 
 more august than that of Jerusalem. Strains of unbounded joy re- 
 sounded through the papal city. Solitude and shame and peniten- 
 tial exercises attested the past crimes, and the abject fortunes, of the 
 exile of Spires. 
 
 But against this regimen of sackcloth and fasting, the body and 
 the soul of Henry revolted. At the close of the Diet of Tribur, he 
 had scarcely completed his twenty-sixth year. Degraded, if not 
 finally deposed, hated and reviled, abandoned by man, and compelled 
 by conscience to anticipate his abandonment by God, he yet, in the 
 depths of his misery, retained the remembrance and the hope of 
 dominion. The future was still bright with the anticipations of 
 youth. He might yet retrieve his reputation, resume the blessings 
 he had squandered, and take a signal vengeance on his great antagon- 
 ist. And amidst the otherwise universal desertion, there remained 
 one faithful bosom on which to repose his own aching heart. Bertha, 
 his wife, who had retained her purity unsullied amidst the license of 
 his court, now retained her fidelity unshaken amidst the falsehood 
 of his adherents. Her wrongs had been such as to render a deep 
 resentment nothing less than a duty. Her happiness and her honour 
 had been basely assailed by the selfish profligate to whom the most 
 solemn vows had in vain united her. But to her, those vows were 
 a bond stronger than death, and indissoluble by all the confederate 
 powers of earth and heli To suffer was the condition tb pardon 
 and to love, the necessity of her existence. Vice and folly could 
 not have altogether depraved him who was the object of such
 
 HILDEBRAND. 37 
 
 inalienable tenderness, and who at length learnt to return it with a 
 devotion almost equal to her own, after a bitter experience had 
 taught him the real value of the homage and caresses of the world. 
 
 In her society, though an exile from every other, Henry wore 
 away two months at Spires in a fruitless solicitation to the Pope to 
 .receive him in Italy as a penitent suitor for reconcilement with the 
 Church. December had now arrived ; and in less than ten weeks 
 would be fulfilled the term, when, if still excommunicate, he must, 
 according to the sentence of Tribur, finally resign, not the pre- 
 rogatives alone, but with them the title and rank of Head of the 
 Empire. No sacrifices seemed too great to avert this danger ; and 
 history tells of none more singular than those to which the heir of 
 the Franconian dynasty was constrained to submit. In the garb of 
 a pilgrim, and in a season so severe as, during more than four months, 
 to have converted the Rhine into a solid mass of ice, Henry and his 
 faithful Bertha, carrying in her arms their infant child, undertook to 
 cross the Alps, with no escort but such menial servants as it was yet 
 in his power to hire for that desperate enterprise. Among the 
 courtiers who had so lately thronged his palace, not one would be- 
 come the companion of his toil and dangers. Among the neighbour- 
 ing princes who had so lately solicited his alliance, not one would 
 grant him the poor boon of a safe-conduct and a free passage through 
 their states. Even his wife's mother exacted from him large terri- 
 torial cessions as the price of allowing him, and her own daughter, 
 to scale one of the Alpine passes, apparently that of the Great St 
 Bernard. Day by day, peasants cut out an upward path through 
 the long windings of the mountain. In the descent from the highest 
 summit, when thus at length gained, Henry had to encounter 
 fatigues and dangers from which the chamois-hunter would have 
 turned aside. Vast trackless wastes of snow were traversed, some- 
 tunes by mere crawling, at other times by the aid of rope-ladders 
 or still ruder contrivances, and not seldom by a sheer plunge along 
 the inclined steep ; the Empress and her child being enveloped, on 
 those occasions, in the raw skins of beasts slaughtered on the march. 
 
 The transition from these dangers to security, from the pine forests, 
 glaciers, and precipices of the Alps, to the sunny plains of Italy, was 
 not so grateful to the wearied travellers as the change from the gloom 
 of Spires to the rapturous greetings which hailed their advance along 
 the course of the Po. A splendid court, a numerous army, and an 
 exulting populace, once more attested the majesty of the Emperor ; 
 nor was the welcome of his Italian subjects destitute of a deeper 
 significance than usually belongs to the pseans of the worshippers of 
 kings. They dreamed of the haughty Pontiff humbled, of the see
 
 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 of Ambrose exalted to civil and ecclesiastical supremacy, and of the 
 German yoke lifted from their necks. Doomed as were these soar- 
 ing hopes to an early disappointment, the enthusiasm of Henry's 
 partisans justified those more sober expectations which had prompted 
 his perilous journey across the Alps. He could now prosecute his 
 suit to the Pope with the countenance and in the vicinity of those 
 zealous adherents, and at a secure distance from the enemies towards 
 whom Hildebrand was already advancing to hold the contemplated 
 Diet of Augsburg. In the personal command of a military escort, 
 Matilda attended the Papal progress ; and was even pointing out 
 to her guards their line of march through the snowy peaks which 
 closed in her northern horizon, when tidings of the rapid approach 
 of the Emperor at the head of a formidable force induced her to 
 retreat to the fortress of Canossa. There, in the bosom of the 
 Apennines, her sacred charge would be secure from any sudden 
 assault ; nor had she anything to dread from the regular leaguer of 
 such powers as could, in that age, have been brought to the siege 
 of it. 
 
 Canossa was the cradle and the original seat of her ancient race. 
 It was also the favourite residence of the Great Countess ; and when 
 Gregory found shelter within her walls, they were crowded with 
 guests of the highest eminence in social and in literary rank. So 
 imposing was the scene, and so superb the assemblage, that the 
 drowsy muse of her versifying chaplain awakened for once to an 
 hyperbole, and declared Canossa to be nothing less than a new 
 Home, the rival of that of Romulus. Thither, as if to verify the 
 boast, came a long line of mitred penitents from Germany, whom the 
 severe Hildebrand consigned on their arrival to solitary cells with 
 bread and water for their fare ; and there also appeared the German 
 Emperor himself, not the leader of the rumoured host of Lombard 
 invaders, but surrounded by a small and unarmed retinue mean in 
 his apparel, and contrite in outward aspect, a humble suppliant for 
 pardon and acceptance to the communion of the faithful. Long 
 centuries had passed away since the sceptre of the "West had been 
 won by Italian armies in Italian fields, and Henry declined to put 
 the issue of this great contest on the swords of his Milanese vassals. 
 He well knew that, to break the alliance of patriotism, cupidity, and 
 superstition, which had degraded him at Tribur, it was necessary to 
 rescue himself from the anathema which he had but too justly in- 
 curred, and that his crown must be redeemed, not by force, but by 
 submission to his formidable antagonist. And Hildebrand ! fathom- 
 less as are the depths of the human heart, who can doubt that, 
 amidst the conflict of emotions which now agitated him, the most
 
 
 HILDEBRAND. 39 
 
 dominant was the exulting sense of victory over the earth's greatest 
 monarch. His rival at his feet, his calumniator self-condemned, the 
 lips which had rudely summoned him to abdicate the Apostolic crown 
 now suing to him for the recovery of the Imperial diadem, the ex- 
 altation in his person of decrepit age over fiery youth, of mental 
 over physical power, of the long-enthralled Church over the long- 
 tyrannizing world, all combined to form a triumph too intoxicating 
 even for that capacious intellect. 
 
 The veriest sycophant of the Papal Court, even in that super- 
 stitious age, would scarcely have ventured to describe, as a serious 
 act of sacramental devotion, the religious masquerade which followed 
 between the high priest and the imperial penitent"; or to extol as 
 politic and wise, the base indignities to which the Pontiff subjected 
 his prostrate enemy, and of which his own pastoral letters contained 
 the otherwise incredible record. Had it been his object to compel 
 Henry to drain to its bitterest dregs the cup of unprofitable humilia- 
 tion to exasperate to madness the Emperor himself, and all who 
 would resent as a personal wrong an insult to the sovereign and to 
 transmit to the latest age a monument and a hatred alike imperish- 
 able, of the extravagances of spiritual despotism, he could have 
 devised no fitter course. 
 
 Environed by many of the greatest Princes of Italy who owed 
 fealty and allegiance to the Emperor, Gregory affected to turn a deaf 
 ear to his solicitations. His humblest offers were spurned ; his most 
 unbounded acknowledgments of the sacerdotal authority over the 
 kings and kingdoms of the world were rejected. For the distress of 
 her royal kinsman, Matilda felt as women and as monarchs feel ; 
 but even her entreaties seemed to be fruitless. Day by day, the 
 same cold stern appeal to the future decisions of the Diet to be con- 
 vened at Augsburg, repelled the suit even of that powerful inter- 
 cessor. The critical point, at which prayers for reconcilement 
 would give way to indignation and defiance, had been almost 
 reached. Then, and not till then, the Pope condescended to 
 offer his ghostly pardon, on the condition that Henry would sur- 
 render into his hands the custody of the crown, the sceptre, 
 and the other ensigns of royalty, and acknowledge himself un- 
 worthy to bear the royal title. This, however, was a scandal 
 on which not even the proud spirit of the now triumphant priest 
 dared to insist, and to which not even the now abject heart of 
 the Emperor could be induced to submit. But the shame which 
 was spared to the Sovereign, was inflicted with relentless severity 
 on the Man. 
 
 It was towards the end of January. The earth was covered with
 
 40 HILDEBBAND. 
 
 snow, and the mountain-streams were arrested by the keen frost of 
 the Apennines, when, clad in a thin penitential garment of white 
 linen, and bare of foot, Henry, the descendant of so many kings, and 
 the ruler of so many nations, ascended slowly and alone the rocky 
 path which led to the outer gate of the fortress of Canossa. With 
 strange emotions of pity, of wonder, and of scorn, the assembled 
 crowd gazed on his majestic form and noble features, as, passing 
 through the first and the second gateway, he stood in the posture of 
 humiliation before the third, which remained inexorably closed 
 against his further progress. The rising sun found him there fast- 
 ing ; and there the setting sun left him stiff with cold, faint with 
 hunger, and devoured by shame and ill-suppressed resentment. A 
 second day dawned, and wore tardily away, and closed, in a con- 
 tinuance of the same indignities, poured out on Europe at large in 
 the person of her chief, by the Vicar of the meek, the lowly, and the 
 compassionate Redeemer. A third day came, and, still irreverently 
 trampling on the hereditary lord of the fairer half of the civilized 
 world, Hildebrand once more compelled him to prolong till nightfall 
 this profane and hollow parody on the real workings of the broken 
 and contrite heart. 
 
 ]STor was he unwarned of the activity and the strength of the in- 
 dignation aroused by this protracted outrage on every natural senti- 
 ment, and every honest prejudice, of mankind. Lamentations and 
 reproaches rang through the castle of Canossa. Murmurs from 
 Henry's inveterate enemies, and his own zealous adherents, upbraided 
 Gregory as exhibiting rather the cruelty of a tyrant than the rigour 
 of an apostle. But the endurance of the sufferer was the only mea- 
 sure of the inflexibility of the tormentor ; nor was it till the unhappy 
 monarch had burst away from the scene of his mental and bodily 
 anguish, and sought shelter in a neighbouring convent, that the 
 Pope, yielding at length to the instances of Matilda, would admit 
 the degraded suppliant into his presence. It was the fourth day on 
 which he had borne the humiliating garb of an affected penitent, 
 and, in that sordid raiment he drew near on his bare feet to the more 
 than imperial Majesty of the Church, and prostrated himself, in more 
 than servile deference, before the diminutive and emaciated old man, 
 " from the terrible glance of whose countenance," we are told, " the 
 eye of every beholder recoiled as from the lightning." Hunger, 
 cold, nakedness, and shame had, for the moment, crushed the 
 gallant spirit of the sufferer. He wept and cried for mercy, again 
 and again renewing his entreaties, until he had reached the lowest 
 level of abasement to which his own enfeebled heart, or the 
 haughtiness of his great antagonist, could depress him. Then, and
 
 HILDEBRAND. 41 
 
 not till then, did the Pope condescend to revoke the anathema of the 
 Vatican. 
 
 Cruel, however, were the tender mercies of the now exulting 
 Pontiff. He restored his fallen enemy at once to the communion, 
 and to the contempt, of his Christian brethren. The price of pardon 
 was a promise to submit himself to the future judgment of the Apo- 
 stolic See ; to resign his crown if that judgment should be unfavour- 
 able to him ; to abstain meanwhile from the enjoyment of any of 
 his royal prerogatives or revenues ; to acknowledge that his subjects 
 had been lawfully released from their allegiance ; to banish his 
 former friends and advisers ; to govern his states, should he regain 
 them, in obedience to the papal counsels ; to enforce all papal de- 
 crees ; and never to revenge his present humiliation. To the observ- 
 ance of the terms thus dictated by the conqueror, the oaths of 
 Henry himself, and of several Prelates and Princes as his sponsors, 
 were pledged ; and then, in the name of Him who had declared that 
 His kingdom was not of this world, and as the successor of Him who 
 had forbidden to all Bishops any lordship over the heritage of Christ, 
 the solemn words of pontifical absolution rescued the degraded Em- 
 peror from the forfeit to which he had been conditionally sentenced 
 by the confederates at Tribur. 
 
 Another expiation was yet to be made to the injured majesty of 
 the Tiara. He in whom the dynasties of Csesar, of Charlemagne, 
 and of Otho had their representative, might still be compelled to en- 
 dure one last and galling contumely. Holding in his hand the 
 seeming bread, which (as he believed) words of far more than mira- 
 culous power had just transmuted into the very body which died 
 and was entombed at Calvary " Behold ! " exclaimed the Pontiff, 
 fixing his keen and flashing eye on the jaded countenance of the un- 
 happy Monarch, " behold the body of the Lord ! Be it this day the 
 witness of my innocence. May the Almighty God now free me 
 from the suspicion of the guilt of which I have been accused by thee 
 and thine, if I be really innocent ! May He this very day smite me 
 with a sudden death, if I be really guilty ! " Amidst the acclama- 
 tions of the bystanders, he then looked up to heaven, and broke and 
 ate the consecrated element. " And now," he exclaimed, turning 
 once more on the awe-stricken Henry that eye which neither age 
 could dim nor pity soften ; " if thou art conscious of thine innocence, 
 and assured that the charges brought against thee by thine own 
 opponents are false and calumnious, free the Church of God from 
 scandal, and thyself from suspicion, and take as an appeal to heaven 
 this body of the Lord." 
 
 That, in open contradiction to his own recent prayers and penances,
 
 42 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 the penitent should have accepted this insulting challenge, was ob- 
 viously impossible. He trembled, and evaded it. At length, when 
 his wounded spirit, and half-lifeless frame, could endure no more, a 
 banquet was served, where, suppressing the agonies of shame and 
 rage with which his bosom was to heave from that moment to his 
 last, he closed this scene of wretchedness, by accepting the hospital- 
 ities, sharing in the familiar discourse, and submitting to the bene- 
 dictions, of the man who had in his person given proofs, till then 
 unimagined, of the depths of ignominy to which the Temporal chief 
 of Christendom might be depressed by an audacious use of the powers 
 of her Ecclesiastical head. 
 
 The Lombard lords who had hailed the arrival of their Sovereign 
 in Italy, had gradually overtaken his rapid' advance to Canossa. 
 There, marshalled in the adjacent valleys, they anxiously awaited, 
 from day to day, intelligence of what might be passing within the 
 fortress, when at length the gates were thrown open, and, attended 
 only by the usual episcopal retinue, a bishop was seen to descend 
 from the steep path which led to their encampment. He announced 
 that Henry had submitted himself to the present discipline and to 
 the future guidance of the Pope, and had received his ghostly abso- 
 lution ; and that on the same terms his Holiness was ready to bestow 
 the same grace on his less guilty followers. As the tidings of this 
 papal victory flew from rank to rank, the mountains echoed with one 
 protracted shout of indignation and defiance. The Lombards spurned 
 the pardon of Hildebrand an usurper of the Apostolic throne, him- 
 self excommunicated by the decrees of German and Italian Synods. 
 They denied the authority of the Emperor, debased as he now was 
 by concessions unworthy of a king, and by indignities disgraceful to 
 a soldier. They vowed to take the crown from his dishonoured head, 
 to place it on the brows of his son, the yet infant, Conrad ; to march 
 immediately to Rome, and there to depose the proud Churchman who 
 had thus dared to humble to the dust the majesty of the Franconian 
 line, and of the Lombard name. 
 
 In the midst of this military tumult, the gates of Canossa were 
 again thrown open, and Henry himself was seen descending to the 
 camp, his noble figure bowed down, and his lordly countenance over- 
 cast with unwonted emotions. As he passed along the Lombard 
 lines, every eye expressed contempt, and derision was on every tongue. 
 But the Italian was not the German spirit. They could at once de- 
 spise and obey. Following the standard of their degraded monarch, 
 they conducted him to Reggio, where, in a conclave of ecclesiastics, 
 he instantly proceeded to concert schemes for their deliverance, and 
 for his own revenge.
 
 HILDEBRAND. 43 
 
 Within a single week from the absolution of Canossa, Gregory was 
 on his way to Mantua to hold a council, to which the Emperor had 
 invited him, with the treacherous design (if the papal historians may 
 be credited) of seizing and imprisoning him there. The vigilance of 
 Matilda rescued her Holy Father from the real or imaginary danger. 
 From the banks of the To she conducted him back, under the escort 
 of her troops, to the shelter of her native mountain-fastness. His 
 faith in his own infallibility must have undergone a severe trial. The 
 Imperial sinner he had pardoned was giving daily proof that the 
 heart of man is not to be penetrated even by Papal eyes. Henry 
 was exercising, with ostentation, the prerogatives he had so lately 
 vowed to forego. He had cast off the abject tone of the confes- 
 sional. All his royal instincts were in full activity. He breathed 
 defiance against the Pontiff seized and imprisoned his legates re- 
 called to his presence his excommunicated councillors became once 
 more strenuous for his rights and was recompensed by one simul- 
 taneous burst of sympathy, enthusiasm, and devotedness, from his 
 Italian subjects. 
 
 To balance the ominous power thus rising against him, Gregory 
 now received an accession of dignity and of influence on which his 
 eulogists are unwilling to dwelL The discipline of the Church, and 
 the fate of the Empire, were not the only subjects of his solicitude 
 while sheltered in the castle and city of the Tuscan heroine. The 
 world was startled and scandalised by the intelligence, that his 
 princely hostess had granted all her hereditary states to her Apostolic 
 guest, and to his successors for ever, in full allodial dominion. By 
 some sage of the law, who drew up the act of cession, it is ascribed 
 to her dread of the Emperor's hostility. A nobler impulse is ascribed 
 to the mistress of Liguria and Tuscany, in the hobbling verses of her 
 more honest chaplain. Peter, he says, bore the keys of heaven, and 
 Matilda had resolved to bear the Etrurian keys of Peter's patrimony, 
 in no other character than that of doorkeeper to Peter. With 
 what benignity the splendid inheritance was accepted, may also be 
 learned from the worthy versifier. At this hour Pope Gregory the 
 Sixteenth holds some parts of his territorial do-minion in virtue of 
 this grant. Hildebrand is one of the saints of the Church, and one 
 of the heroes of the world. He, therefore, escapes the reproach of 
 so grave an abuse of the hospitality of the Great Countess, and of 
 the confidence she reposed in her spiritual guide. The coarser re- 
 proach in which it has involved them both will be adopted by no 
 one who has ever watched the weaving of the mystic bonds which 
 knit together the female and the sacerdotal hearts. It was the age 
 of feudalism, not of chivalry. Yet when chivalry came, and St
 
 44 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 Louis himself adorned it, would he, if so tried, have resisted the 
 temptation under which St Gregory fell ] It is, probably, well for 
 the fame of that illustrious prince that his virtue was never subjected 
 to so severe a test. 
 
 Canossa, the scene of this memorable cession, was, at the same 
 tune, the prison of him to whom it was made. All the passes were 
 beset with Henry's troops. All the Lombard and Tuscan cities 
 were in Henry's possession. His reviving courage had kindled the 
 zeal of his adherents. He was no longer an outcast to be trampled 
 down with impunity ; but the leader of a formidable host, with 
 whom even the Vicar of Christ must condescend to temporise. 
 
 In the wild defiles of the Alps, swift messengers from the Princes 
 to the Pope hurried past solemn legates from the Pope to the 
 Princes they urging his instant appearance at Augsburg he 
 exhorting them to avoid any decision in his absence. Mitred 
 emissaries also passed from Gregory to the Emperor, summoning 
 him to attend the Diet within a time by which no one unwafted 
 by wings or steam could have reached the place, and requesting 
 from him a suicidal safe-conduct for his pontifical judge. The Pope 
 was now confined to the weapons with which men of the gown con- 
 tend with men of the sword. His prescience foreboded a civil war. 
 His policy was to assume the guidance of the German league just far 
 enough to maintain his lofty claims, not far enough to be irrevocably 
 committed to the leaguers. A plausible apology for his absence was 
 necessary. It was afforded by Henry's rejection of demands which 
 were made only that they might be rejected. 
 
 To Otho and to the aspiring Rudolf such subtleties were alike 
 unfamiliar and unsuspected. Those stout soldiers and simple Germans 
 knew that the Pope had deposed their King, and had absolved them 
 from their allegiance. They doubted not, therefore, that he was 
 bound heart and soul to their cause. Or if, in the assembly which 
 they held at Forcheim, a doubt was whispered of Italian honour or 
 of Pontifical faith, it was silenced by the presence there of Papal 
 legates, who sedulously swelled the tide of invective against Henry. 
 At first, indeed, they dissuaded the immediate choice of a rival 
 sovereign. But to the demand of the Princes for prompt and de- 
 cisive measures, they gave their ready assent. They advised them, 
 it is true, to confer no hereditary title on the object of then? choice. 
 Yet when, in defiance of that advice, the choice was made, they 
 solemnly confirmed it in the name, and by the authority, of Gregory. 
 They did not, certainly, vote for the election of Rudolf ; but, when 
 the shouts of the multitude announced his accession to the Teutonic 
 throne, they placed the crown on his head. That Hildebrand did
 
 HILDEBRAND. 45 
 
 not disavow these acts of his representatives, but availed himself of 
 the alliances and aids to be derived from them, appeared to these 
 downright captains abundantly sufficient to bind him in conscience 
 and in honour. That the Pope had not the slightest intention of 
 being so bound, unless it should chance to suit his own convenience, 
 is, however, past dispute. Even in the nineteenth century he has 
 found, in M. 1'Abbe Jager, an apologist who absolves him from all 
 responsibility for the acts of his legates at the Diet of Forcheim, 
 because they were adopted without awaiting his own personal arrival. 
 The Diet might just as reasonably have awaited the arrival of the 
 Millennium. 
 
 The decretals of Rome, of Tribur, of Canossa, and of Foreheim, 
 were now to bear their proper fruits fruits of bitter taste, and of 
 evil augury. At the moment when the cathedral of Mentz was 
 pouring forth the crowds who had just listened to the coronation 
 oath of Rudolf, the clash of arms, the cries of combatants, and the 
 shrieks of the dying, mingled, strangely and mournfully, with the 
 sacred anthems and the songs of revellers. An idle frolic of some 
 Swabian soldiers had kindled into rage the sullen spirit with which 
 the partisans of Henry had gazed on that unwelcome pageant ; and 
 the first rude and exasperated voice was echoed by thousands who 
 learned, from those acclamations, the secret of their numbers and 
 their strength. The discovery and the agitation spread from city to 
 city, and roused the whole German people from the Rhine to the 
 Oder. Men's hearts yearned over their exiled king. They remem- 
 bered that, but twelve short years before, he had been basely stolen 
 from his mother by churchmen, who had yet more basely corrupted 
 him. They commemorated his courage, his courtesy, and his muni- 
 ficence. They pardoned his faults as the excesses of youth, and re- 
 sented, as insults to themselves, the indignities of Canossa, and the 
 treason of Forcheim. In this reflux of public opinion, the loyal and 
 the brave, all who cherished the honours of the crown, and all who 
 desired the independence of the state, were supported by the multi- 
 tudes to whom the papal edicts against simony and clerical marriages 
 were fraught with disaster, and by that still more numerous body 
 who, at all times, lend their voices and their arms to swell the 
 triumph of every rising cause. To this confederacy Rudolf had to 
 oppose the alliance of the princes, secular and ecclesiastical, the de- 
 voted zeal of the Saxon people, and the secret support, rather than 
 the frank and open countenance, of the Pope. The shock of these 
 hostile powers was near and inevitable. 
 
 In the spring of 1077, tidings were spread throughout Germany 
 of the Emperor's arrival to the northward of the Alps. From Fran-
 
 46 HILDEBKAND. 
 
 conia, the seat of his house, from the fruitful province of Burgundy, 
 and from the Bohemian mountains, he was greeted with an enthu- 
 siastic welcome. Many even of the Bavarians and Swabians revolted 
 in his favour. His standard once more floated over all the greater 
 citadels of the Ehine. He who, six months before, had fled from 
 Spires a solitary wanderer, was now at the head of a powerful army, 
 controlling the whole of Southern Germany, laying waste the terri- 
 tories of his rivals, and threatening them with a signal retribution. 
 
 Amidst the rising tempest the voice of Gregory was heard ; but 
 it was no longer trumpet-tongued and battling with the storm. The 
 supreme earthly judge, .the dread avenger, had subsided into the 
 pacific mediator. In the name of Peter he enjoined either king to 
 send him a safe-conduct, that he might, in person, arbitrate between 
 them and stop the effusion of Christian blood. A safe but an im- 
 practicable offer; an indirect but significant avowal of neutrality 
 between the sovereign he had so lately deposed and the sovereign 
 whom, by his legates, he had so lately crowned ! Thus ignobly 
 withdrawing from the contest he had kindled, Hildebrand returned 
 from Canossa to the papal city. The Great Countess, as usual, 
 attended as the commander of his guard. Rome received in triumph 
 her new Germanicus, and decreed an ovation to hia ever-faithful 
 Agrippina. 
 
 While the glories of Canossa were thus celebrated by rejoicings 
 in the Christian capital, they were expiated by blood in the plains 
 of Saxony. Confiding in the solemn acts of the Pope and his 
 legates, the Saxons had thronged to the defence of the crown of 
 Rudolf, and they had sustained it undauntedly. But the bravest 
 quailed at the intelligence that Gregory had disowned the cause of 
 the Church and of their native land ; and that, even in the palace 
 of the Lateran, the ambassadors of Henry were received with 
 honours, and with a deference denied to the humbler envoys of his 
 rival. Sagacity far inferior to that of Hildebrand could, at that 
 time, have divined that the sword alone could decide such a quarrel 
 that the sword of Henry was the keener of the two and that, by 
 the cordial adoption of the cause of either, the Pope might draw on 
 himself the vengeance of the conqueror. To pause, to -vacillate, and 
 to soothe, had therefore become the policy of the sovereign of the 
 papal states ; but to be silent or inactive in such a strife would have 
 been to abdicate one of the highest prerogatives of the Papacy. 
 Pontifical legates traversed Europe. Pontifical epistles demanded 
 the submission of the combatants. Pontifical warning denounced 
 woes on the disobedient. But no pontifical voice explained who 
 was to be obeyed or who opposed, what was to be done or what for-
 
 HILDEBRAND. 47 
 
 borne. Discerning readers of these mandates understood them as 
 an intimation that, on the victorious side (whichever that side might 
 be) the pontifical power would ultimately be found. 
 
 The appeal from these dark oracles to the unambiguous sword 
 was first made by the rival kings in the autumn of 1078. They 
 met on the banks of the Stren, on the plains of Melrichstadt. Each 
 was driven from the field with enormous loss ; Henry by his in- 
 veterate antagonist Otho ; Eudolf by Count Herbard, the lieutenant 
 of Henry. Each claimed the victory. An issue so undecisive could 
 draw from the circumspect Pontiff nothing more definite than re- 
 newed exhortations to rely on the Holy Peter ; and could urge him 
 to no measure more hazardous than that of convening a new Council 
 at the Lateran. There appeared the Imperial envoys with hollow 
 vows of obedience, and Saxon messengers invoking some intelligible 
 intimation of the judgment and purposes of the Apostolic See. 
 Again the Pope listened, spoke, exhorted, threatened ; and left the 
 bleeding world to interpret as it might the mystic sense of the 
 Infallible. 
 
 ; To that brave and truth-loving people from whom, at the distance 
 of 'four centuries, Luther was to rise for the deliverance of mankind, 
 these subterfuges appeared in their real light. The Saxon annalist 
 has preserved three letters sent by his countrymen on this occasion 
 to Gregory, which he must have read with admiration and with 
 shame. " You know, and the letters of your Holiness attest (such is 
 their indignant remonstrance), that it was by no advice nor for any 
 interest of ours, but for wrongs done to the Holy See, that you de- 
 posed our king, and forbade us, under fearful menaces, to acknow- 
 ledge him. We have obeyed you at great danger, and at the expense 
 of horrible sufferings. Many of us have lost their property and their 
 lives, and have bequeathed hopeless poverty to their children. We 
 who survive are without the means of subsistence, delivered over to 
 the utmost agonies of distress. The reward of our sacrifices is, that 
 he who was compelled to cast himself at your feet has been absolved 
 without punishment, and has been permitted to crush us to the very 
 abyss of misery. After our king had been solemnly deposed in a 
 Synod, and another chosen in virtue of the Apostolic authority, the 
 very matter thus decided is again brought into question. What 
 especially perplexes us simple folk is, that the legates of Henry, 
 though excommunicated by your legates, are well received at Rome. 
 Holy Father, your piety assures us that you are guided by honour- 
 able, not by subtle views ; but we are too gross to understand them. 
 We can only explain to you that this management of two parties has 
 produced civil war, murder, pillage, conflagration. If we, helpless
 
 48 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 sheep ! had failed in any point of duty, the vengeance of the Holy 
 See would have otertaken us. Why exhibit so much forbearance 
 when you have to do with wolves who have ravaged the Lord's fold ? 
 We conjure you to look into your own heart, to remember your own 
 honour, to fear the wrath of God, and for your own sake, if not for 
 love of us, rescue yourself from responsibility for the torrents of 
 blood poured out in our land." 
 
 To these pathetic appeals Gregory answered slowly and reluctantly, 
 by disavowing the acts of his legates at Forcheim ; by extolling his 
 own justice, courage, and disinterestedness ; by invoking the sup- 
 port of all orders of men in Germany; and by assuring them, in 
 scriptural language, of the salvation of such " as should persevere 
 to the end." But the hour for blandishments had passed away. The 
 day of wrath, and the power of the sword, had come. 
 
 The snow covered the earth, and the frost had chained the rivers, 
 when, in the winter of 1079-80, the armies of Henry and Rudolf 
 were drawn up, in hostile lines, at the village of Fladenheim, near 
 Mulhausen. Henry was the assailant, but Rudolf, though driven 
 with great loss from the field, was the conqueror ; for in that field 
 the dreaded Otho again commanded, and by his skill and courage a 
 rout was turned into a victory. 
 
 The intelligence arrived at Rome at the moment when Gregory 
 was presiding there in the most numerous of the many councils he 
 had convened at the Lateran. Long-suppressed shame for his ignoble 
 indecision, the murmurs of the assembled prelates, a voice from 
 Heaven audible, as we are told, to his sense alone, and above all the 
 triumphant field of Fladenheim, combined to overcome his long- 
 cherished but timid policy. Rising from his throne with the majesty 
 of his earlier days, the Pope, in the names of Peter and of Paul, " of 
 God, and of his holy mother Mary," excommunicated Henry, took 
 from him the government of his states, deprived him of his royal 
 rank, forbade all Christian people to receive him as their king, 
 " gave, granted, and conceded " that Rudolf might rule the German 
 and Italian Empire ; and with blessings on Rudolf's adherents, and 
 curses on his foes, dissolved the assembly. Then, moved, as he 
 believed, by a divine impulse, he proceeded to the altar, and uttered 
 a prediction that ere the Church should celebrate the festival of the 
 Prince of the Apostles, Henry, her rebellious outcast, should neither 
 reign, nor live, to molest her. 
 
 A perilous prophecy ! Henry was no longer the exile of Tribur, 
 nor the penitent of Canossa. Yet his own rage, on hearing of this 
 new papal sentence, did not burn so., fiercely as the wrath of his 
 adherents.
 
 HILDEBRAND. 49 
 
 "With the sanction of thirty bishops, a new Anti-Pope, Guibert of 
 Ravenna, was elected at Brixen ; and at every court in Europe Im- 
 perial embassies demanded support for the common cause of all 
 temporal sovereigns. In every part of Germany troops were levied, 
 and Henry marched at the head to crush the one German power in 
 alliance with Rome. But that power was still animated by the 
 Saxon spirit, and was still sustained by the claims of Rudolf, and 
 by the genius of Otho. 
 
 On the bright dawn of an autumnal day his forces, drawn up on 
 the smiling banks of the Elster, raised the sacred song of the He- 
 brews, " God standeth in the congregation of princes ; he is a judge 
 among Gods ; " and flung themselves on the far-extended lines of 
 Henry's army ; who, with emulous devotion, met them with the 
 hardly less sublime canticle, " Te Deum laudamus." Cries more 
 welcome to the demons of war soon stilled these sacred strains ; cries 
 of despair, of anguish, and of terror. They first rose from one of 
 Henry's squadrons, which, alarmed by the fall of their captain, re- 
 ceded ; and, in their retreat, spread through the rest a panic, a pause, 
 and a momentary confusion. That moment was enough for the eagle 
 glance of Otho. He rushed on the wavering Imperialists ; and, ere 
 that bright sun had reached the meridian, thousands had fallen by 
 the Saxon sword, or had perished in the blood-stained river. The 
 victory was complete, the exultation rapturous. Shouts of glory to 
 the God of battles, thanksgivings for the deliverance of Saxony, 
 pa?ans of immortal honour to Otho, the noblest of her sons, soothed 
 or exasperated the agonies of the dying ; when the triumph was 
 turned into sudden and irremediable mourning. On the field which 
 had, apparently, secured his crown, Rudolf himself had fallen. He 
 fell by an illustrious arm. Godfrey of Bouillon, the hero of the 
 Jemsalem Delivered, struck the fatal blow. Another sword severed 
 the right hand from the arm of Rudolf. " It is the hand," he cried, 
 as his glazing eye rested on it, " with which I confirmed my fealty 
 to Henry my lord." At once elevated by so signal a victory, and 
 depressed by these penitent misgivings, his spirit passed away, leaving 
 his adherents to the mercy of his rival 
 
 The same sun which witnessed the ruin of Henry's army on the 
 Elster, looked down on a conflict, in which, on that eventful morn- 
 ing, the forces of Matilda, in the Mantuan territory, fled before his 
 own. He now, once more, descended into Italy. He came, not, 
 as formerly, a pilgrim and an exile ; but at the head of an army de- 
 voted to his person, and defying all carnal enemies, and all spiritual 
 censures. He came to encounter Hildebrand, destitute of all Trans- 
 alpine alliances, and supported, even in Italy, by no power but that 
 
 4
 
 50 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 of Matilda ; for the Gorman Duke of Apulia was far away, attempt- 
 ing the conquest of the Eastern capital and Empire. Lut Henry 
 left in his rear the invincible Saxons, and the hero who commanded 
 them. To prevent a diversion in that quarter the Emperor proposed 
 to abdicate his dominion in Saxony in favoirr of Conrad, his son. 
 But Otho (a merry talker, as his annalist informs us) rejected the 
 project with the remark, that " the calf of a vicious bull usually 
 proved vicious." Leaving, therefore, this implacable enemy to his 
 machinations, the Emperor pressed forward ; and before the summer 
 of 1 080, the citizens of Rome saw, from their walls, the German 
 standards in hostile array in the Campagna. 
 
 In the presence of such danger the gallant spirit of the aged Pope 
 once more rose and exulted. He convened a Synod to attest his last 
 defiance of his formidable enemy. He exhorted the German princes 
 to elect a successor to Rudolf. In letters of impassioned eloquence, 
 he again maintained his supremacy over all the kings and rulers of 
 mankind. He welcomed persecution as the badge of his holy calling ; 
 and, while the besiegers were at the gates, he disposed (at least in 
 words) of royal crowns, and distant provinces. Matilda supplied 
 him with money, which, for a while, tranquillised the Roman popu- 
 lace. He himself, as we are assured, wrought miracles to extinguish 
 conflagrations kindled by their treachery. In language such as 
 martyrs use, he consoled the partners of his sufferings. In language 
 such as heroes breathe, he animated the defenders of the city. The 
 siege, or blockade, continued for three years uninterruptedly, except 
 when Henry's troops were driven, by the deadly heats of autumn, 
 to the neighbouring hills. Distress, and, it is alleged, bribery, at 
 length subdued the courage of the garrison. On every side clamours 
 were heard for peace ; for Henry demanded, as the terms of peace, 
 nothing more than the recognition of his Imperial title, and his 
 coronation by the hands of Gregory. The conscience, perhaps the 
 pride, of Gregory revolted against the proposal. His invincible will 
 opposed and silenced the outcries of the famished multitudes ; nor 
 could their entreaties, or their threats, extort from him more than a 
 promise that, in the approaching winter, he would propose the ques- 
 tion to a Pontifical Synod. It met, by the permission of Henry, on 
 the 30th of November, 1083. It was the latest council of Gregory's 
 pontificate. A few bishops, faithful to their chief and to his cause, 
 now occupied the seats so often thronged by mitred churchmen. 
 Every pallid cheek and anxious eye was turned to him who occupied 
 the loftier throne in the centre of that agitated assembly. He rose, 
 and the half-uttered suggestions of fear and human policy were 
 hushed into deep stillness as he spoke. He spoke of the glorious
 
 HILDEBEAND. 51 
 
 example, of the light affliction, and of the eternal reward, of martyrs 
 for the faith. He spoke, as dying fathers speak to their children, of 
 peace, and hope, and of consolation. But he spoke also, as inspired 
 prophets spake of yore to the Kings of Israel, denouncing the swift 
 vengeance of Heaven against his oppressor. The enraptured audience 
 exclaimed that they had heard the voice of an angel, not of a man. 
 Gregory dismissed the assembly, and calmly prepared for whatever 
 extremity of distress might await him. 
 
 It did not linger. In the spring of 1084 the garrison was over- 
 powered, the gates were thrown open to the besiegers, and Gregory 
 sought a precarious refuge in the Castle of St Angelo. He left the 
 great Church of the Lateran as a theatre for the triumph of his an- 
 tagonist and his rival. Seated on the Apostolic throne, Guibert, the 
 Anti-Pope of Brixen, was consecrated there by the title of Clement 
 the Third ; and then, as the successor of Peter, he placed the crown 
 of Germany and of Italy on the brows of Henry, and of Bertha, as 
 they knelt before him. 
 
 And now Henry had, or seemed to have, in his grasp the author 
 of the shame of Canossa, of the anathemas of the Lateran, and of 
 the civil wars and rebellions of the Empire. The base populace of 
 Rome were already anticipating, with sanguinary joy, the humilia- 
 tion, perhaps the death, of the noblest spirit who had reigned there 
 since the slaughter of Julius. The approaching catastrophe, what- 
 ever might be its form, Gregory was prepared to meet, with a serene 
 confidence in God, and a haughty defiance of man. A few hours 
 more, and the Castle of St Angelo must have yielded to famine or to 
 assault ; when the aged Pope, in the very agony of his fate, gathered 
 the reward of the policy with which he had cemented the alliance 
 between the Papacy and the Norman conquerors of the South of 
 Italy. Robert Guiscard, returning from Constantinople, flew to the 
 rescue of his Suzerain. Scouts announced to Henry the approach of 
 a mighty host, in which the Norman battle-axe, and the cross, were 
 strangely united with the Saracenic cimeter, and the crescent. A pre- 
 cipitate retreat scarcely rescued his enfeebled troops from the impend- 
 ing danger. He abandoned his prey in a fever of disappointment. 
 Unable to slake his thirst for vengeance, he might perhaps allay it by 
 surprising the Great Countess, and overwhelming her forces, still in 
 arms in the Modenese. But he was himself surprised in the attempt by 
 her superior skill and vigilance. Shouts for St Peter and Matilda 
 roused the retreating Imperialists by night, near the Castle of Sorbaria. 
 They retired across the Alps, with such a loss of men, of officers, 
 and of treasure, as disabled them from any further enterprises. 
 
 The Emperor returned into Germany to reign undisturbed by civil 
 
 4 *
 
 52 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 war ; for the great Otho was dead, and Herman of Luxemlmrg, who 
 had assumed the Imperial title, was permitted to abdicate it with 
 contemptuous impunity. Henry returned, however, to prepare for 
 new conflicts with the Papacy to drain the cup of toil, of danger, 
 and of distress and to die, at length, with a heart broken by the 
 parricidal cruelty of his son. No prayers were said, and no requiem 
 sung, over the unhallowed grave which received the bones of the 
 excommunicated Monarch. Yet they were committed to the earth 
 with the best and the kindest obsequies. The pity of his enemies, 
 the lamentation of his subjects, and the unbidden tears of the poor, 
 the widows, and the orphans, who crowded round the bier of their 
 benefactor, rendered his tomb not less sacred than if it had been 
 blessed by the united prayers of the whole Christian Episcopacy. 
 Those unbribed mourners wept over a Prince to whom God had 
 given a large heart and a capacious mind ; but who had derived, 
 from canonised Bishops, a corrupting education, and from a too early 
 and too unchequered prosperity, the development of every base and 
 cruel appetite ; but to whom calamity had imparted a self -dominion, 
 from which none could withhold his respect, and an active sympathy 
 with sorrow, to which none could refuse his love. 
 
 With happier fortunes, as, indeed, with loftier virtues, Matilda 
 continued, for twenty-five years, to wage war in defence of the Apo- 
 stolic See. After a life which might seem to belong to the province 
 of romance rather than of history, she died at the age of seventy-five, 
 bequeathing to the world a name second, in the annals of her age, 
 to none but that of Hildebrand himself. 
 
 To him the Norman rescue of the Papal city brought only a mo- 
 mentary relief. He returned in triumph to the Lateran. But, 
 within a few hours, he looked from the walls of that ancient palace 
 on a scene of woe such as, till then, had never passed before him. 
 A sanguinary contest was raging between the forces of Eobert and 
 the citizens attached to Henry. Every street was barricaded ; every 
 house had become a fortress. The pealing of bells, the clash of 
 arms, cries of fury, and shrieks of despair, assailed his ears in dismal 
 concert. When the sun set behind the Tuscan hills on this scene of 
 desolation, another light, and a still more fearful struggle, succeeded. 
 Flames ascended at once from every quarter. They leaped from 
 house to house, enveloping and destroying whatever was most splen- 
 did or most sacred, in the edifices of mediaeval Eome. Amidst the 
 roar of the conflagration they had kindled, and by its portentous 
 light, the fierce Saracens, and the ruthless Northmen, revelled in 
 plunder, lust, and carnage, like demons by the glare of their native 
 pandemonium. Gregory gazed with agony on the real and present
 
 HILDEBRAND. 53 
 
 aspect of civil war. Perhaps he thought with penitence on the wars 
 he had kindled beyond the Alps. Two-thirds of the city perished. 
 Every convent was violated, every altar profaned, and multitudes 
 driven away into perpetual and hopeless slavery. 
 
 Himself a voluntary exile, Gregory sought, in the Castle of 
 Salerno, and under the protection of the Normans, the security he 
 could no longer find among his own exasperated subjects. Age 
 and anxiety weighed heavily upon him. An unwonted lassitude 
 depressed a frame till now incapable of fatigue. He recognized the 
 summons of death, and his soul rose with unconquerable power to 
 entertain that awful visitant. He summoned round his bed the 
 Bishops and Cardinals who had attended his flight from Eome. He 
 passed before them, in firm and rapid retrospect, the incidents of 
 his eventful life. He maintained the truth of the great principles 
 by which it had been governed from the commencement to the 
 close. He named his three immediate successors in the Papacy. 
 He assured his weeping friends of his intercession for them in 
 heaven. He forgave, and blessed, and absolved his enemies, though 
 with the resolute exceptions of the Emperor and the Anti-Pope. 
 He then composed himself to die. His faltering lips had closed on 
 the transubstantiated elements. The final unction had given 
 assurance that the body, so soon to be committed to the dust, would 
 rise again, in honour and incorruption. Anxious to catch the last 
 accents of that once oracular voice, the mourners were bending over 
 him, when, struggling in the very grasp of death, he collected, for 
 one last effort, his failing powers, and breathed out his spirit with 
 the indignant exclamation "I have loved righteousness, and 
 hated iniquity : and therefore I die in exile ! " 
 
 It was not permitted, even to the genius of Hildebrand, to 
 condense, into a single sentence, an epitome of such a life as his. 
 It was a life scarcely intelligible to his own generation, or to him- 
 self, nor indeed to our age, except by the light of that ecclesiastical 
 history in which it forms so important an era. 
 
 It had ill beseemed the inspired wisdom of the tent-maker of 
 Tarsus, and of the Galilean fishermen, to have founded on any other 
 than a popular basis, a society destined to encounter the enmity of 
 the dominant few, by the zeal of the devoted many. Erom the 
 extant monuments of their lives and writings, it accordingly appears 
 that they conceded to the lay multitude an ample share in the 
 finance, the discipline, and the legislation of the collective body. 
 The deacons were the tribunes of the Christian people. This was 
 the age of Proselytism.
 
 54 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 In the sad and solemn times which followed, ecclesiastical author- 
 ity became austere and arbitrary, and submission to it enthusiastic. 
 Martyrs, in the contemplation of mortal agonies, and of an opening 
 paradise, had no thoughts for the adjustment and balancing of 
 sacerdotal powers. They who braved the wild beasts of the amphi- 
 theatre, or the ascetic rigours of the wilderness, were the heroes of 
 the Church. The rest sank into a degraded caste. But all laid bare 
 their souls at the confessional. All acknowledged a dominion 
 which, discountenanced by the state, sustained itself by extreme 
 and recondite maxims of government. In virtue of such maxims, 
 the Episcopal order encroached on every other. The vicarious 
 attributes of Deity were ascribed to those who ministered at the 
 altar. There, and at the font, gifts of inestimable price were placed, 
 in popular belief, at the disposal of the priest ; whose miracles, 
 though unattested by sense or consciousness, threw into the shade 
 the mightiest works of Moses and of Christ. This was the age of 
 Persecution. 
 
 Heretics arose. To refute them from the sacred text Avas some- 
 times difficult, always hazardous. It was easier to silence them by 
 a living authority. The Bishops came forth as the elect depositaries 
 of an unwritten code. Tradition became the rule of the Christian 
 world. It might crush the errors of Arms, but it might sustain the 
 usurpations of Ambrose. This was the age of Controversy. 
 
 Constantine saw the miraculous cross, and worshipped. He 
 confirmed to the Christian hierarchy all their original, and all their 
 acquired, powers. This was the age of the Church and State 
 alliance. 
 
 The seat of empire was transferred from the Tiber to the Bos- 
 phorus. The Roman bishop and clergy seized on the vacant in- 
 heritance of abdicated authority. The Pope became the virtual 
 sovereign of the Roman city. The Greeks and Latins became 
 ecclesiastical rivals. Then was first heard the Eoman watchword, 
 and rallying cry, of the Visible Unity of the Church. This was 
 the age of Papal Independence. 
 
 Goths, Vandals, Huns, Bulgarians, Franks, and Lombards, con- 
 quered the dominions of Caesar. But they became the converts and 
 tributaries of Peter. , The repulse of the Saracens by Charles Martel 
 gave to Europe a new empire, to the Church a second Constantine. 
 This was the age of Barbaric Invasion. 
 
 Europe became one vast assemblage of military states. The lands 
 were everywhere partitioned by the conquerors among their liege- 
 men, who, having bound themselves to use their swords in their 
 lords' defence, imposed a similar obligation on their own tenants,
 
 HILDEBRAND. 55 
 
 who, in turn, exacted it from their subordinate vassals. This was 
 the age of Feudalism and of Hildebrand. 
 
 He ascended the Apostolic throne, therefore, armed with pre- 
 scriptions in favour of the loftiest claims of the hierarchy, thus 
 reaching back almost to the apostolic times. But he found in the 
 Papal armoury other weapons scarcely less keen, though of a more 
 recent fabric. Of these the most effective were the intimate 
 alliance of the Roman See with the monastic orders, and the re- 
 appearance, in theological debate, of that mystic word which, seven 
 centuries before, had wrought such prodigies at Mcsea. He who first 
 taught men to speak of an Hypostatic change beneath unchanging 
 forms, may have taught them to use words without meaning. But 
 though he added little or nothing to the received doctrines of the 
 Church, he made an incalculable addition to the sacerdotal power. 
 
 To grasp, to multiply, and to employ these resources in such a 
 manner as to render the Roman Pontiff the suzerain of the civilised 
 world, was the end for which Hildebrand lived an unworthy end, 
 if contrasted with the high and holy purposes of the Gospel an end 
 even hateful, if contrasted with the free and generous spirit in which 
 the primitive founders of the Church had established and inculcated 
 her liberties yet an end which might well allure a noble spirit in 
 the eleventh century, and the attainment of which (so far as it was 
 attained) may be now acknowledged to have been conducive, perhaps 
 essential, to the progress of Christianity and civilisation. 
 
 To the spiritual despotism of Rome in the middle ages may, indeed, 
 be traced a long series of errors and crimes, of wars and persecutions. 
 Yet the Papal dynasty was the triumphant antagonist of another 
 despotism the most galling, the most debasing, and otherwise the 
 most irremediable, under which Europe had ever groaned. The 
 centralisation of ecclesiastical power more than balanced the isolating 
 spirit of the feudal oligarchies. The vassal of Western, and the 
 serf of Eastern Europe, might otherwise, at this day, have been in 
 the same social state, and military autocracies might now be occupy- 
 ing the place of our constitutional or paternal governments. Hilde- 
 brand's despotism, with whatever inconsistency, sought to guide 
 mankind, by moral impulses, to a more than human sanctity. The 
 feudal despotism with which he waged war, sought, with a stern 
 consistency, to degrade them into beasts of prey, or beasts of burden. 
 It was the conflict of mental with physical power, of literature with 
 ignorance, of religion with injustice and debauchery. To the Popes 
 of the middle ages was assigned a province, the abandonment of 
 which would have plunged the Church and the "World into the same 
 hopeless slavery. To Pope Gregory the Seventh were first given the
 
 56 HILDEBRAND. 
 
 genius and the courage to raise himself and his successors to the level 
 of that high vocation. 
 
 Yet Hildebrand was the founder of a tyranny only less odious 
 than that which he arrested, and was apparently actuated hy an 
 ambition neither less proud, selfish, nor reckless, than that of his 
 secular antagonists. In the great economy of Providence, human 
 agency is ever alloyed by some base motives ; and the noblest success 
 recorded by history must still be purchased at the piice of some great 
 ultimate disaster. 
 
 To the title of the Czar Peter of the Church, conferred on him by 
 M. Guizot, Hildebrand's only claim is, that by the energy of his will, 
 he moulded her institutions, and her habits of thought, to his own 
 purposes. But the Czar wrought in the spirit of an architect who 
 invents, arranges, and executes his own plan : Hildebrand in the 
 spirit of a builder, erecting by divine command a temple of which 
 the divine hand had drawn the design, and provided the materials. 
 His faith in what he judged to be the purposes and the will of 
 Heaven, was not merely sublime, but astounding. He is everywhere 
 depicted, in his own letters, the habitual denizen of that bright 
 region which the damps of fear never penetrate, and the shadows of 
 doubt never overcast. 
 
 To extol him as one of those Christian stoics whom the wreck of 
 worlds could not divert from the straight paths of integrity and 
 truth, is a mere extravagance. His policy was Imperial ; his re- 
 sources and his arts Sacerdotal. Anathemas and flatteries, stern 
 defiances and subtle insinuations, invectives such as might have been 
 thundered by Genseric, and apologies such as might have been whis- 
 pered by Augustulus, succeed each other in his story, with no visible 
 trace of hesitation or of shame. Even his professed orthodoxy is 
 rendered questionable by his conduct and language towards Beren- 
 garius, the great opponent of transubstantiation. With William of 
 England, Philip of France, and Eobert of Apulia, and even with 
 Henry of Germany, he temporised at the expense of his own princi- 
 ples as often as the sacrifice seemed advantageous. " Nature gave 
 horns to Bulls." To aspiring and belligerent Churchmen she gave 
 Dissimulation and Artifice. 
 
 Our exhausted space forbids the attempt to analyse or delineate 
 the personal character of the great founder of the spiritual despotism 
 of Borne. His acts must stand in place of such a portraiture. He 
 found the Papacy dependent on the Empire : he sustained her by 
 alliances almost commensurate with the Italian Peninsula. He 
 found the Papacy electoral by the Eoman people and clergy : he 
 left it electoral by a college of Papal nomination. He found the
 
 HILDEBRAND. 57 
 
 Emperor the virtual patron of the Holy See : he wrested that 
 power from his hands. He found the secular clergy the allies and 
 dependants of the secular power : he converted them into the 
 inalienable auxiliaries of his own. He found the higher ecclesiastics 
 in servitude to the temporal sovereigns : he delivered them from 
 that yoke to subjugate them to the Roman Tiara. He found the 
 patronage of the Church the mere desecrated spoil and merchandise 
 of princes : he reduced it within the dominion of the Supreme 
 Pontiff. He is celebrated as the reformer of the impure and profane 
 abuses of his age : he is more justly entitled to the praise of having 
 left the impress of his own gigantic character on the history of all 
 the axes which have succeeded him.
 
 58 
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 IT was a noble design which died with Eobert Southey. His 
 History of the Monastic Orders would not perhaps have poured a 
 large tribute of philosophy, divine or human, into the ocean of 
 knowledge ; but how graceful would have been the flow of that 
 transparent narrative, and how would it have reflected and enhanced 
 the beauty of every rich champaign, and of every towering pro- 
 montory, along which it would have swept ! Peremptory and dog- 
 matical as he was, he addressed himself to the task of instructing 
 his own and future generations, with a just sense of the dignity, and of 
 the responsibilities, of that high office. He was too brave a man, 
 and too sound a Protestant, to shrink from any aspect of truth ; 
 nor would he ever have supposed that he could promote a legitimate 
 object of ecclesiastical history, by impairing the well-earned fame of 
 any of the worthies of the Church, because they had been entangled 
 in the sophistries, or the superstitions, of the ages in which they 
 flourished. 
 
 M. Chavin de Malan has adopted the project of our fellow- 
 countryman, and is publishing a Monastic History in a series of 
 fragments, among which is a volume on the founder and the pro- 
 gress of the Franciscan Order. Though among the most passionate 
 and uncompromising devotees of the Church of Rome, M. Chavin 
 de Malan is also in one sense a Protestant. He protests against any 
 exercise of human reason in examining any dogma which that 
 Church inculcates, or any fact which she alleges. The most merci- 
 less of her cruelties affect him with no indignation, the silliest of her 
 prodigies with no shame, the basest of her superstitions with no 
 contempt. Her veriest dotage is venerable in his eyes. Even the 
 atrocities of Innocent the Third seem, to this all-extolling eulogist, 
 but to augment the triumph and the glories of his reign. If the 
 soul of the confessor of Simon de Montfort, retaining all the 
 passions and all the prejudices of that sera, should transmigrate into 
 a Doctor of the Sorbonne, conversant with the arts and literature of
 
 SAIXT FRANCIS OF ASSIST. 59 
 
 our own times, the result might be the production of such an 
 Ecclesiastical History as that of which M. de Malan has given us a 
 specimen elaborate in research, glowing in style, vivid in portrait- 
 ure ; utterly reckless and indiscriminate in belief ; extravagant, up 
 to the very verge of idolatry, in applause ; and familiar, far beyond 
 the verge of indecorum, with the most awful topics and objects of 
 the Christian faith. 
 
 The episode of which M. Chavin de Malan disposes in his Life of 
 Francis of Assisi, is among the most curious and important in the 
 annals of the Church ; and the materials for such a biography are 
 more than usually copious and authentic. First in order are the ex- 
 tant writings, consisting chiefly of letters, colloquies, poems, and 
 predictions, of the Saint himself. His earliest biographer, Thomas 
 of Celano, was his follower and his personal friend. Three of the 
 intimate associates of the Saint (one of them his confessor) compiled 
 a joint narrative of his miracles and his labours. Bonaventura, him- 
 self a General of the Franciscan Order, wrote a celebrated Life of the 
 Founder, whom in his infancy he had seen. And lastly, there is a 
 chroncile called Fioretti di San Francisco, which, though not written 
 till half a century after his death; has always been held in much 
 esteem by the hagiographers. Within the last thirty years a new 
 edition of it has been published at Verona. On these five authorities 
 all the more recent narratives are founded. Yet the works of Thomas 
 de Celano, and of the " Tres Socii," with the writings of Francis 
 himself, are the only sources of contemporary intelligence strictly so 
 called ; although Bonaventura and the chronicler of the Fioretti had 
 large opportunities of ascertaining the reality of the facts they have 
 related. How far they availed themselves of that advantage, may 
 be partly inferred from the following brief epitome of those 
 occurrences. 
 
 The city of Assisi, in TJmbria, was a mart of some importance in 
 the latter half of the twelfth century. At that period it could boast 
 no merchant more adventurous or successful than Pietro Bernadone 
 di Mericoni. Happy in a thriving trade, and happier still in an 
 affectionate wife, he was above all happy in the prospect of the 
 future eminence of his son Francisco. The foremost in every feat 
 of arms, and the gayest in every festival, the youth was at the same 
 time assiduous in the counting-house ; and though his expenditure 
 was profuse, it still flowed in such channels as to attest the princely 
 munificence of his spirit. The brightest eyes in Assisi, dazzled by 
 so many graces, and the most reverend brows there, acknowledging 
 such early wisdom, were alike bent with complacency towards him ; 
 and all conspired to sustain his father's belief, that, in his person,
 
 60 8AIXT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 the name of Bernadone would rival the proudest of those whom 
 neither Transalpine conquerors, nor the Majesty of the Tiara, dis- 
 dained to propitiate in the guilds of Venice or of Pisa. 
 
 Uniform, alas ! is the dirge of all the generations of mankind, 
 over hopes blossoming but to die. In a combat with the citizens of 
 Perugia, Francis was taken prisoner ; and, after a captivity of twelve 
 months, was released only to encounter a disease, which, at the 
 dawn of manhood, brought him within view of the gates of death. 
 Long, earnest, and inquisitive was his gaze into the inscrutable 
 abyss on which they open ; and when at length he returned to the 
 duties of life, it was in the awe-stricken spirit of one to whom those 
 dread realities had been unveiled. The world one complicated im- 
 posture, all sensible delights so many polluting vanities, human 
 praise and censure but the tinkling of the cymbals, what remained 
 but to spurn these empty shadows, that so he might grasp the one 
 imperishable object of man's sublunary existence ? His alms 
 became lavish. His days and nights were consumed in devout 
 exercises. Prostrate in the crowded church, or in the recesses of 
 the forest, his agitated frame attested the conflict of his mind. He 
 exchanged dresses with a tattered mendicant, and pressed to his 
 bosom a wretch rendered loathsome by leprosy. But as he gra- 
 dually gathered strength from these self-conquests, or as return- 
 ing health restored the tone and vigour of his nerves, his thoughts, 
 reverting to the lower world, wandered in search of victories of 
 another order. 
 
 Walter of Brienne was in arms in the Neapolitan States against 
 the Emperor ; the weak opposed to the powerful ; the Italian to the 
 German ; the Guelph to the Ghibelline ; and Francis laid him down 
 to sleep, resolved that, with the return of day, he would join the 
 " Gentle Count," as he was usually called, in resisting the oppressor 
 to the death. In his slumbers a vast armoury seemed to open to his 
 view ; and a voice commanded him to select from the burnished 
 weapons with which it was hung, such as he could most effectually 
 wield against the impious enemy of the Church. The dreamer 
 awoke ; and in prompt submission to the celestial mandate, laid 
 aside the serge gown and modest bonnet of his craft, and exhibited 
 himself to his admiring fellow-citizens armed cap-a-pie, and urging 
 on his war-horse towards the encampment of his destined leader. 
 At Spoleto fatigue arrested his course. Again he slept, and again 
 the voice was heard. It announced to him that the martial imple- 
 ments of his former vision were not, as he had supposed, such as are 
 borne beneath a knightly banner against a carnal adversary, but arms 
 of spiritual temper, to be directed, in his native city, against the
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 61 
 
 invisible powers of darkness. He listened and obeyed ; and Assisi 
 re-opened her gates to her returning warrior, resolute to break a lance 
 with a more fearful foe than was ever sent by the Emperor into 
 the field. 
 
 To superficial judges it probably appeared as if that dread an- 
 tagonist had won an easy triumph over his young assailant. For 
 Francis was seen once more the graceful leader of the civic revels, 
 bearing in his hand the sceptre of the king of frolic, and followed 
 by a joyous band, who made the old streets echo with their songs. 
 As that strain arose, however, a dark shadow gathered over the 
 countenance of the leader, and amid the general chorus his voice 
 was unheard. " Why so grave, Francis 1 Art thou going to be 
 married ? " exclaimed one of the carollers. " I am," answered Francis, 
 " and to a lady of such rank, wealth, and beauty, that the world 
 cannot produce her like." He burst from the jocund throng in 
 search of her, and was ere long in her embrace. He vowed to take 
 her " for his wedded wife, for better for worse, to love and to cherish 
 till death should them part." The lady was Poverty. The greatest 
 poet of Italy and the greatest orator of France have celebrated their 
 nuptials. But neither Dante nor Bossuet was the inventor of the 
 parable. It was ever on the lips of Francis himself, that Poverty 
 was his bride, that he was her devoted husband, and the whole 
 Franciscan order their offspring. 
 
 His fidelity to his betrothed lady was inviolate, but was not un- 
 assailed by temptation. Pleasure, wealth, ambition, were the syrens 
 who, with witching looks and songs, attempted to divert him from 
 his Penelope ; and when he could no longer combat, he at least could 
 fly, the fascination. Wandering in the Umbrian hills, he wept and 
 fasted, and communed with the works of God ; till raised to com- 
 munion with their Maker, he knelt in a rustic church which the 
 piety of ancient times had consecrated there to the memory of St 
 Damiano. 
 
 The voice which directed his path in life was heard again. " Seest 
 thou not," it cried, " that my temple is falling into ruins ? Eestore 
 it." Again the spirit of interpretation failed him. Instead of ad- 
 dressing himself to renovate the spiritual, he undertook the repairs 
 of the material fabric an arduous task for the future spouse of 
 Poverty ! But obedience was indispensable. Rising from his knees, 
 he hastened to his father's warehouse ; laded a stout palfrey with 
 silks and embroideries ; sold both horse and goods at the neighbour- 
 ing town of Foligno ; and laid down the money at the feet of the 
 officiating priest of St Damiano. The more cautious churchman re- 
 jected the gold. Francis indignantly cast it into the mire; and
 
 62 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 vowed that the building so solemnly committed to his care should 
 become his dwelling-place and his home, till the Divine behest had 
 been fulfilled. 
 
 During all this time hallucinations of his own, though of a far 
 different kind, had haunted the brain of the respectable Pietro 
 Bernadone. Grouping into forms ever new and brilliant, like span- 
 gles shaken in a kaleidoscope, the ideas of bales and bills of lading, 
 of sea risks and of supercargoes, had combined with those of loans 
 to reckless crusaders and of the supply of hostile camps, to form one 
 gorgeous El Dorado, when intelligence of the loss of his draperies, 
 his pack-horse, and his son, restored him to the waking world and to 
 himself. The goods and the quadruped were gone irrevocably. But 
 as the exasperated father paced the streets of Assisi, a figure emaciated 
 with fasts and vigils, squalid with dirt, and assailed by the filthy 
 missiles of a hooting rabble, approached him, and as it moved on- 
 wards with a measured tread, an uplifted eye, and a serene aspect, 
 it revealed to the old merchant, in this very sorry spectacle of dignified 
 suffering, the long-cherished object of his ambitious hopes. "\Vhat 
 biographer even now can tell the sequel without a blush ! Francis 
 was hurried away from his persecutors and his admirers, in the grasp 
 of the elder Bernadone, and, from his vigorous arm, received that kind 
 of chastisement under which heroism itself ceases to be sublime. 
 The incensed judge then passed a chain round the body of the youth, 
 and left him in a kind of domestic prison, there to satiate his love 
 for penances until his own return from a journey to which the in- 
 exorable demands of his commerce had summoned him. 
 
 Wiser far and more gentle was the custody to which Francis was 
 transferred, and a voice was heard in his penitentiary full of a more 
 genuine inspiration than any of those by which his steps had been 
 hitherto guided. It was the voice of his mother, soothing her half- 
 distracted child in accents as calm and as holy as those which first 
 broke the silence of Eden. It spoke to him of maternal love, of 
 reconciliation, and of peace. But it addressed him in vain. He 
 was bound to leave father and mother, and to cleave to his betrothed 
 wife, and to the duties of that indissoluble alliance. Convinced at 
 length of the vanity, perhaps trembling at the impiety, of any further 
 resistance, his mother threw open his prison doors, and permitted 
 him to escape to his sanctuary at St Damiano. 
 
 In those hallowed precincts Francis found courage to oppose, and 
 constancy to disarm, the rage with which he was pursued by his 
 father. Gradually, but surely, the mind of the old man embraced 
 the discovery, that, though dwelling on the same planet, he and 
 his son were inhabitants of different worlds. From that conviction
 
 SAINT FRAXCIS OF ASSIST. 63 
 
 he advanced with incomparable steadiness to the practical results 
 involved in it. Why, he inquired, should a churchman, to whom 
 all earthly interests were as the fine dust in the balance, retain the 
 price of the pack-horse and of his pack 1 The priest of St Damiano 
 immediately restored the scattered gold, which he had providently 
 gathered up. Why should a youth, who despised all treasures but 
 those laid up in heaven, retain his prospective right to a sublunary 
 inheritance 1 A renunciation of it was at once drawn up, signed, 
 and placed in his hands. Why should a candidate for cowl and 
 scapulary retain the goodly apparel in which he had reached his 
 place of refuge? In a few moments the young probationer stood 
 before him in his shirt. Carefully packing up the clothes, the 
 parchment, and the gold, the merchant returned to accumulate more 
 gold at Assisi. And here history takes her leave of him ; without 
 regret and without applause, but not without a sullen acknowledg- 
 ment that, after all, it was from the mortal Pietro that the immortal 
 Francis derived one inheritance which he could not renounce the 
 inheritance of that inflexible decision of purpose which elevated the 
 father to distinction among the worshippers of Mammon, and the 
 son to eminence among the saints of Christendom. 
 
 It was indeed " an obstinate hill to climb." An orphan with 
 living parents, a beggar entitled to a splendid patrimony, he traversed 
 the mountains with the freedom of soul known only to those for 
 whom the smiles of fortune have no charm, and her frowns no terror. 
 Chanting divine canticles as he went, his voice attracted the banditti 
 who lurked in those fastnesses. They tossed the worthless prize 
 contemptuously into a snow drift. Half frozen, he crawled to a 
 neighbouring monastery, and was employed by the monks as a 
 scullion. He returned to the scene of his former revels ; and ob- 
 tained the cloak, the leathern girdle, and the staff, of a pilgrim, as 
 an alms from one who, in those brilliant days, had confessed his 
 superiority in every graceful art and in every feat of chivalry. With 
 the dress, he assumed the spirit, of a pilgrim ; and devoted himself 
 to the relief of the sorrows of those Avho like himself, though for a 
 very different reason, were estranged from a cold and a fastidious 
 world. 
 
 The Crusaders had at this period introduced the Leprosy of the 
 East into all the countries embracing the Mediterranean Sea. A 
 ritual was compiled for the purpose of celebrating with impressive 
 solemnity the removal of the victims of that fearful malady from 
 all intercourse with their fellow-Christians. It was a pathetic and 
 melancholy service, in which the sternest interdict was softened by 
 words of consolation and of pity. Nor were they words of empty
 
 64 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSIST. 
 
 ceremonial. A sentiment of reverence towards those miserable 
 sufferers Avas widely diffused throughout the whole of Europe. The 
 obscurity which hung over the origin, the nature, and the cure of 
 the disease, and the mysterious connexion in which it stood to the 
 warfare for the Holy Sepulchre, had induced that wonder-loving age 
 to invest it with a kind of sacred character. The churchmen of the 
 times availed themselves skilfully and kindly of this popular feeling. 
 They taught that Christ himself had regarded the leprous with 
 peculiar tenderness ; and not content to enforce this lesson from 
 those parts of the evangelic narrative which really confirm it, they 
 advanced, by the aid of the Vulgate, further still ; and quoted from 
 the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, a prophecy in which, as they main- 
 tained, the Messiah himself was foretold under the image of a leper. 
 " Nos putavimus eum quasi Leprosum, percussum a Deo, et humili- 
 atum." Kings and princes visited, countesses ministered to them, 
 saints (as it was believed) wrought miracles for their cure, and 
 almost every considerable city erected hospitals for their reception 
 and relief. 
 
 Some time before his betrothment to Poverty, Francis, crossing 
 on horseback the plain which surrounds Assisi, unexpectedly drew 
 near to a leper. Controlling his involuntary disgust, the rider dis- 
 mounted and advanced to greet and to succour him ; but the leper 
 instantaneously disappeared. St Bonaventura is sponsor for the 
 sequel of the tale. He who assumed this deplorable semblance 
 was, in reality, no other than the awful Being whom the typical 
 language of Isaiah had adumbrated. Little wonder, then, that after 
 his vows had been plighted to his austere bride, Francis had faith to 
 see, and charity to love, even in the leprous, the imperishable traces 
 of the Divine image in which man was created, and the brethren of 
 the Divine sufferer by whom man was redeemed. 
 
 Yet, despite this triumph of the spiritual discernment over the 
 carnal sense, neither faith nor charity could subdue his natural 
 terror in the prospect of a continued and familiar intercourse with 
 such associates. Some distinct disclosure of the Divine will was 
 still requisite to such a self-immolation ; and such disclosures were 
 never long denied to him. The now familiar voice was heard anew. 
 " Hate what thou hast hitherto loved," it cried ; " Love what thou 
 hast hitherto hated." He listened, and became an inmate of the 
 Leprous Hospital at Assisi. With his own hands he washed the 
 feet and dressed the sores of the lepers ; and once at least reverently 
 applied his lips to such a wound. The man (so says St Bonaven- 
 tura) instantly became whole. " Whether shall we most admire," 
 he exclaims, " the miraculous power, or the courageous humility of
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OP ASSIST. 65 
 
 that kiss 1 " A question to be asked of those who believe in both. 
 But even they who reject the miracle, will revere the lovingkind- 
 ness of such a sojourn among such unhappy outcasts. 
 
 In later days Francis became the father and the apostle of the 
 leprous ; and when weightier cares withdrew him in person from that 
 charge, his heart still turned towards them with a father's yearnings. 
 Among his numerous followers, were some who, though destitute of 
 the higher gifts of intellect, were largely endowed with the heroism 
 of self-denying love. James, surnamed the Simple, was amongst 
 the most conspicuous of them ; and. in those abodes of woe he 
 earned the glorious title of steward and physician of the leprous. It 
 happened that, in his simplicity, James brought one of his patients 
 to worship at a much-frequented church, and there received from 
 Francis the rebuke so well merited for his indiscretion. The heart 
 of the sick man was oppressed as he listened to the censure pro- 
 nounced on his benefactor ; and the heart of Francis was moved 
 within him to perceive that he had thus inadvertently added to 
 the burden of the heavy-laden. He fell at the leper's feet, im- 
 plored his forgiveness, sat down with him. to eat out of the same 
 dish, embraced and dismissed him ! Had he grasped every subtle 
 distinction of the Summa Theologise itself, or had he even built up 
 that stupendous monument of the learning of his age, it would have 
 been a lower title to the honours of canonisation. 
 
 The church of St Damiano still lay in ruins. The command to 
 rebuild it was still unrevoked. Ill success had followed the at- 
 tempt to extract the requisite funds from the hoards of the old mer- 
 chant. Plutus, his inexorable father, had been invoked in vain. 
 Poverty, his affianced wife, might be more propitious. He wooed 
 her in the form she loves best. In the dress and character of a 
 beggar, he traversed the city through which he had been wont to 
 pass as at once the gayest of her troubadours, the bravest of her 
 captains, and the most sumptuous of her merchants. Assisi had 
 her witty men who jeered, her wise men who looked grave, and her 
 respectable men who were scandalised, as this strange apparition in- 
 voked their alms in the names of the Virgin and of St Damiano. 
 Solemn heads were shaken at the sight, in allusion to the supposed 
 state of the brain of the mendicant. But the sarcasms of the 
 facetious, and the conclusive objections of the sensible, fell on 
 Francis like arrows rebounding from the scales of Behemoth. His 
 energy silenced and repelled them all. Insuperable difficulties gave 
 way before him. The squalid lazar became the inspiring genius of 
 the architect, the paymaster of the builders, the menial drudge of 
 the workman. Sometimes he came with money in his hand, some- 
 
 5
 
 66 SAINT FRANCIS OR ASSISI. 
 
 times "with stones and mortar on his back. At his bidding, nave, 
 chancel, arches, roof, and towers, rose from their foundations. The 
 sacred edifice appeared in renovated splendour. The heavenly pre- 
 cept was obeyed. 
 
 Prompt and decisive was the reaction of popular feeling. Instead 
 of debating whether this strange mortal was rogue or maniac, it was 
 now argued that he must be either a necromancer or a saint. The 
 wise and more charitable opinion prevailed. Near to the city was 
 a ruined church sacred to the prince of the apostles. Confident in 
 his late success, Francis rather demanded than implored contribu- 
 tions for rebuilding it. Purses were emptied into his hands, and 
 speedily the dome of St Peter looked down in all its pristine dignity 
 on the marts and battlements of Assisi. 
 
 There were no church-building commissioners in those days. In 
 their stead, a half-starved youth in the rags of a bedesman moved 
 along the streets of his native city, appealing to every passer-by, in 
 quiet tones and earnest words, and with looks still more persuasive, 
 to aid him in reconstructing the chapel of La Porzioncula ; a shrine 
 of Our Lady of Angels, of which the remains may yet be seen, at 
 once hallowing and adorning the quiet meadow by which Assisi is 
 surrounded. " He wept to think upon her stones, it grieved him to 
 see her in the dust." Vows were uttered, processions formed, 
 jewels, plate, and gold were laid at the feet of the gentls enthusiast : 
 and Mary with her attendant angels rejoiced (so at least it was de- 
 voutly believed) over the number and the zeal of the worshippers 
 who once more thronged the courts erected in honour of her 
 name. 
 
 From that devout company he was not often absent, by whose 
 pious zeal the work had been accomplished. As he knelt before 
 the altar, the oracular voice, so often heard before, again broke in 
 upon the silence of his soul. It cried, "Take nothing for your 
 journey, neither staves nor scrip, neither bread nor money, neither 
 have two coats a-piece." A caviller, in the plight to which Francis 
 was reduced already, might have evaded such an injunction. But 
 Francis was no caviller. The poor fragment left to him of this 
 world's goods, his shoes, his staff, his leathern girdle, and his empty 
 purse, were abandoned ; and in his coarse cloak of serge, draAvn 
 round him with a common cord, he might defy men and devils to 
 plunge him more deeply in the lack of this world's wealth, or to re- 
 kindle in his heart the passion for it. 
 
 And now were consummated his nuptials with his betrothed 
 spouse. Dante has composed the Epithalamium in the eleventh 
 Canto of the Paradiso :
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OP ASSISI. 67 
 
 "Not long the period from his glorious birth, 
 
 When, with extraordinary virtue blest, 
 
 This wondrous Son began to comfort earth ; 
 Bearing, while yet a child, his father's ire, 
 
 For sake of her whom all as death detest, 
 
 And banish from the gate of their desire. 
 Before the spiritual court, before 
 
 His father, too, he took her for his own : 
 
 From day to day then loved her more and more. 
 * * " * * 
 
 But lest my language be not clearly seen, 
 
 Know, that in speaking of these lovers twain, 
 
 Francis and Poverty henceforth I mean. 
 Their joyful looks, with pleasant concord fraught, 
 
 Where love and sweetness might be seen to reign, 
 
 Were unto others cause of holy thought." * 
 
 did Bossuet himself disdain to emulate this part of the 
 " divine comedy." In the panegyric bestowed on the saint by the 
 great orator, Francis is introduced as thus addressing his bride : 
 
 " Ma chere Pauvrete, si basse que soit ton extraction selon le 
 jugenient des hommes, je t'estime depuis que mon maitre t'a epousee. 
 Et certes," proceeds the preacher, " il avait raison, Chretiens ! Si 
 un roi epouse une fille de basse extraction, elle devient reine ; on 
 en murmure quelque temps, mais enfin on la reconnait : elle est 
 ennoblie par le mariage du prince." " Oh pauvres ! que vous etes 
 heureux ! parce qu'a vous appartient le royaume de Dieu. Heureux 
 done mille et mille fois, le pauvre Franois ; le plus ardent, le plus 
 transporte, et, si j'ose parler de la sorte, le plus desespere amateur 
 de la pauvrete qui ait peut-etre ete dans 1'eglise." 
 
 Art contributed her aid to commemorate this solemn union. In 
 one of the churches of Assisi may yet be seen a fresco, by Giotto, 
 of Francis and his bride ; he placing the nuptial ring on her finger, 
 and she crowned with light and roses, but clothed in sordid apparel, 
 and her feet torn by the sharp stones and briars over which she is 
 passing. 
 
 As often as the rising sun had in former days lighted up the spires 
 of Assisi, it had summoned the hard-handed many to earn their 
 bread by the sweat of their brows ; and the prosperous few to drive 
 bargains, or to give them legal form ; to chant masses, or to assist 
 at them ; to confess, or to lay up matter for confession ; to arrange 
 their toilettes, or to sit in judgment on the dresses and characters of 
 others ; to sleep through the sultry noon, and to while away the long 
 soft summer nights with dice, music, scandal, or lovers' vows ; till 
 after some few circuits through the Zodiac, the same sun looked down 
 
 * Wright's Dante. 
 5
 
 68 SAINT FRANCIS OP ASSIST. 
 
 on their children's children sauntering at the same listless pace, 
 along the same flowery road, to the same inevitable bourne. But 
 no sooner had these prolific nuptials been celebrated, than the inert 
 mass of human existence at Assisi began to heave with unwonted 
 agitation. In her streets and public walks and churches, might be 
 daily encountered the presence of one, most merciless to himself, 
 most merciful to others. His few, simple, and affectionate words, 
 penetrated those cold and frivolous minds ; for they were uttered in 
 the soul-subduing power of a seer, whose wide horizon embraces the 
 sublime objects visible to the eye of faith, though hidden from the 
 grosser eye of sense. 
 
 Of the union of Francis and Poverty, Bernard de Quintavalle was 
 the first fruits. He was a man of wealth and distinction, and had 
 cherished some distrust of the real sanctity of his fellow-townsman. 
 .Bernard therefore brought him to his house, laid himself down to 
 rest in the same chamber, and pretended to sleep while he watched 
 the proceedings of his guest. He saw him rise and kneel, extend 
 his arms, weep tears of rapture, and gaze towards heaven, exclaim- 
 ing repeatedly, " My God, and my all ! " At this sight all doubts 
 were dissipated, " Tell me," said Bernard to his friend, when they 
 met shortly afterwards, " if a slave should receive from his master a 
 treasure which he finds to be useless to him, what ought he to do 
 with it?" "Let him restore it," said Francis, "to his master." 
 "Lo then," replied Bernard, "I render back to God the earthly 
 goods with which He has enriched me." " We will go together to 
 church," rejoined the spouse of Poverty, " and, after hearing mass, 
 \ve will ascertain His will." In their way thither they were joined 
 by Peter of Catania, who, though a canon of the cathedral church 
 of Assisi, was another aspirant after the same sublime self-sacrifice. 
 
 The three knelt together before the altar ; and when the mass had 
 been sung, the officiating priest, at their request, made the sign of 
 the cross over the missal, and then devoutly opened it. Once on 
 behalf of each of them were these sortes sanctorum tried. "We are 
 the humble transcribers, not the sponsors of the marvels which 
 followed. To the first inquiry, the response of the oracle was, " If 
 ye will be perfect, go and sell all that ye have." To the second it 
 answered, " Take nothing for your journey." To the third and last 
 was returned the admonition, " He that would come after me, let 
 him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me." " Ye have 
 heard, my brethren," exclaimed Francis, "what must be our rule of 
 life, and the rule of all who shall join us. Let us obey the Divine 
 command." It was obeyed implicitly. Bernard and Peter sold 
 all they had, and gave it to the poor ; and, having stripped them-
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 69 
 
 selves of all temporal wealth as absolutely as their leader, they as- 
 sumed his austere dress, and avowed themselves his disciples. 
 
 A great event had happened in an unconscious world. Though 
 but three had thus met together, yet the order of Minorites or 
 Franciscan brethren was constituted. Six centuries have since 
 passed away ; and it still flourishes, one of the elements of life, if 
 not of progress, in the great Christian commonwealth. 
 
 The grain of mustard-seed soon began to germinate. Francis, 
 Bernard, and Peter, retired together to a hut in the centre of the 
 plain of Eivo Torto ; so called from a serpentine stream which 
 wanders through it. With what authority the founder ruled even 
 these, his first followers, may be inferred from the fact (attested by 
 the usual evidence), that after the death of Peter, such prodigies of 
 healing were wrought at his tomb, as much disturbed the devout 
 retirement of his surviving friends. " Brother Peter, you always 
 obeyed me implicitly when you were alive," at length exclaimed the 
 much-perplexed Francis " I expect from you a similar submission 
 now. The visitors to your tomb annoy us sadly. In the name of 
 holy obedience I command you to work no more miracles." Peter 
 at once dutifully desisted from his posthumous works of mercy. 
 " So obedient," observes M. Chavin de Malan, writing in. this nine- 
 teenth century, " were the family of Francis even after death." 
 
 At Rivo Torto, Egidius, another rich citizen of Assisi, sought out 
 and joined the new society. Famous for many graces, and for not 
 a few miracles, he is especially celebrated for having received at 
 Perugia a visit from St Louis in disguise, when the two saints long 
 knelt together in silence, embracing each other, in such a manner as 
 to bring their hearts into the closest possible contiguity. On the 
 departure of the King, Egidius was rebuked by his brethren for his 
 rudeness, in not having uttered a word to so great a sovereign. 
 " Marvel not," he answered, " that we did not speak. A divine 
 light laid bare to each of us the heart of the other. No words 
 could have intelligibly expressed that language of the soul, or have 
 imparted the same sacred consolation. So impotent is the tongue 
 of man to utter divine mysteries." 
 
 Sabbatini, of whom we read only that he was vir bonus et rectus 
 Morico, a crusader who had been miraculously cured by the 
 prayers of Francis John de Capella, "who, like another Judas, 
 hanged himself at last " Sylvester, who, in a dream, had seen the 
 arms of Francis extended to either end of the world, while a golden 
 cross reached from his lips to heaven with four other worthies, of 
 whom history has preserved only the names, followed the steps of 
 the mystic Egidius. In the dilapidated hut of Eivo Torto, twelve
 
 70 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSIST. 
 
 poor men had now asembled. To a common observer they might 
 have passed for the beggar king and his tattered crew. To the 
 leader himself they appeared, more justly, an image of the brother- 
 hood of which the patriarchal family had been the type, and the 
 apostolic college the antitype. 
 
 The morning had dawned over the hills from which the river 
 Torto flows, and long had been the prayer of Francis, when, rising 
 from his knees, he called his brethren round him, and thus 
 addressed them : " Take courage, and shelter yourselves in God. 
 Be not depressed to think how few we are. Be not alarmed either 
 at your own weakness, or at mine. God has revealed to me that 
 He will diffuse through the earth this our little family, of which He 
 is himself the Father. I would have concealed what I have seen, 
 but love constrains me to impart it to you. I have seen a great 
 multitude coming to us, to wear our dress, to live as we do. I 
 have seen all the roads crowded with men travelling in eager haste 
 towards us. The French are coming. The Spaniards are hasten- 
 ing. The English and the Germans are running. All nations are 
 mingling together. I hear the tread of the numbers who go and 
 come to execute the commands of holy obedience." " We seem 
 contemptible and insane. But fear not. Believe that our Saviour, 
 who has overcome the world, will speak effectually in us. If gold 
 should lie in our way, let us value it as the dust beneath our feet. 
 We will not, however, condemn or despise the rich who live softly, 
 and are arrayed sumptuously. God, who is our master, is theirs 
 also. But go and preach repentance for the remission of sins. 
 Faithful men, gentle, and full of charity, will receive you and your 
 words with joy. Proud and impious men will condemn and oppose 
 you. Settle it in your hearts to endure all things with meekness 
 and patience. The wise and the noble will soon join themselves to 
 you, and, with you, will preach to kings, to princes, and to nations. 
 Be patient in tribulation, fervent in prayer, fearless in labour, and the 
 kingdom of God, which endures for ever, shall be your reward." 
 
 Such, we are assured by his "Three Companions," was the 
 inaugural discourse of Francis to his first disciples. Then drawing 
 on the earth on which he stood a figure of the cross, each limb of 
 which was turned to one of the four cardinal points of the compass, 
 and arranging his brethren in the four corresponding lines, he dis- 
 missed each of them with the solemn benediction "Cast thy 
 burden xipon the Lord, and He shall nourish thee." The new 
 missionaries departed to their work of mercy, and Francis himself 
 retired to the solitude of the hut of Eivo Torto.
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OP ASSISI. 71 
 
 In that retirement an arduous duty awaited him. He drew up 
 there, in twenty-three chapters, the rule of his new monastic order, 
 the " Magna Charta of Poverty." It did not essentially differ from 
 the similar institutes of the Benedictines. To the vows of chastity 
 and obedience, was however to be added a vow of Poverty yet more 
 stringent than theirs. His brethren were to labour with their 
 hands, and were to be maintained by alms. But they were to 
 solicit alms, not as suitors for a gratuitous favour, but as asserters 
 of a positive right, which Christ himself had bestowed on the poor. 
 A code of higher authority than any human laws, had imposed on 
 the rich the office, and the obligations, of stewards for such as had 
 need of sustenance. The indigent were the real proprietors of all 
 earthly treasures. The food on which Dives fared sumptuously, 
 belonged of right to Lazarus ; and Dives could acquire an equal 
 title to be fed, only by lying, in his turn, a beggar at the gate. 
 
 A doctrine always so welcome to the great body of mankind, 
 could never have been announced with a surer prospect of a wide 
 and cordial acceptance, by the people at large, than in the com- 
 mencement of the thirteenth century. But the establishment in 
 the church of a polity thus democratic, seemed no easy enterprise. 
 He who wore the Triple Crown, could, it seemed, be scarcely 
 expected to permit the creation of a new monastic institute on prin- 
 ciples so menacing to all sovereigns, whether secular or spiritual. 
 Yet without that permission, the founder might become an 
 heresiarch as guilty as Peter Waldo, and his followers obnoxious to 
 punishments as terrible as those of the Albigenses. It was in the 
 summer of the year 1210 that Francis, accompanied by two or three 
 of his disciples, made a pilgrimage to Rome, to obtain, if possible, 
 from the formidable potentate, who then bore the keys and the 
 sword of Peter, a sanction for these startling novelties. 
 
 The splendid palace of the Lateran reflected the rays of the even- 
 ing sun as the wayworn travellers approached it. A group of 
 churchmen in sumptuous apparel were traversing with slow and 
 measured steps its lofty terrace, then called " the Mirror," as if 
 afraid to overtake him who preceded them, in a dress studiously 
 simple, and with a countenance wrapt in earnest meditation. 
 Unruffled by passion, and yet elate with conscious power, that eagle 
 eye, and those capacious brows, announced him the lord of a 
 dominion which might have satisfied at once the pride of Diogenes, 
 and the ambition of Alexander. Since the Tugurium was built on 
 the Capitoliiie, no greater monarch had ever called the seven hills 
 his own. But, in his Pontificate, no sera had occurred more
 
 72 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 arduous than that in which Innocent the Third saw the mendicants 
 of Assisi prostrate themselves at his feet. 
 
 Twelve years had elapsed since his elevation to the Pontitical 
 throne. In that period he had converted into realities the most 
 audacious visions of Hildehrand. He had exacted the oath of 
 fealty to himself from all the Imperial officers of the city. He had 
 seized on the marches of Ancona and Umbria. He had annulled the 
 election of Frederick, the infant son of the deceased Emperor ; and, 
 as Vicar of Christ on earth, had substituted for him the young 
 Otho of Brunswick ; whom he afterwards excommunicated. He 
 had laid France under an interdict to punish the divorce of Philip 
 Augustus. He had given away the crowns of Bohemia and Bul- 
 garia. He had received homage from John for the crown of Eng- 
 land ; and, availing himself of Count Baldwin's capture of Constan- 
 tinople, he had become the arbiter of the fortunes of the Eastern 
 Empire. So far all had been triumphant. But dark clouds had 
 now arisen, which may well be supposed to have shaped and 
 coloured the evening reverie of this great conqueror; when it was 
 interrupted by the sudden appearance of Francis and his com- 
 panions. 
 
 The interruption was as unwelcome as it was abrupt. As he 
 gazed at the squalid dress and faces of his strange suitors, and 
 observed their bare and unwashed feet, his lip curled with disdain, 
 and, sternly commanding them to withdraw, he seemed again to 
 retire from the outer world into some of the deep recesses of that 
 capacious mind. Francis and his companions betook themselves 
 to prayer ; Innocent to his couch. There (says the legend) he 
 dreamed that a palm tree sprouted up from the ground between his 
 feet, and, swiftly shooting up into the heavens, cast her boughs on 
 every side, a shelter from the heat, and a refreshment to the weary. 
 The vision of the night (so proceeds the tale) dictated the policy of 
 the morning, and assured Innocent that, under his fostering care, 
 the Franciscan palm would strike deep her roots, and expand her 
 foliage on every side, in the vineyard of the Church. 
 
 Never, however, was there a time when the councils of Rome 
 were less really under the influence of narcotics of any kind. It 
 must have been in the vigils, not in the slumbers, of the night, that 
 the Pontiff revolved the incidents of the preceding evening, and 
 perceived their full significance. Yet why deliberate at all when it 
 is impossible to err ? Infallibility should advance to truth by one 
 free intuitive bound, not hobbling on the crutches of inquiry and 
 inference. It is among the mysteries which we are bound to revere- 
 in silence, that, whether in solitude or in synods, the inspired
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 73 
 
 wisdom of Rome has always groped its way by the aid of human 
 reasonings. ISTo record remains of those which now governed the 
 resolves of Innocent ; but an obvious conjecture may supply them. 
 
 The great traditional maxim of the Papal dynasty has ever been, 
 to direct the tendencies of each succeeding age, by grasping and 
 controlling those springs of action from which the spirit of each 
 successively derives its mould, and form, and fashion. From every 
 province of his spiritual empire, tidings had recently reached the 
 Pontiff of the appearance and rapid diffusion of a spirit, full of 
 menace to all thrones, and urgently demanding subjugation. It 
 might be called the fraternising spirit. It manifested itself in the 
 creation of brotherhoods as barriers against despotism, both feudal 
 and ecclesiastical. In all the chief cities of Europe, the merchants, 
 citizens, and workmen, were forming themselves into guilds, and 
 electing their own syndics and magistrates. Already might be dis- 
 cerned the active germs of the great commercial commonwealths of 
 Florence, Pisa, and Genoa ; of Frankfort, Ghent, and Bruges ; of 
 Hamburgh, Lubeck, and Bremen ; and those of the no less great 
 commercial corporations of London, Bristol, and Norwich. Still 
 more numerous were the religious associations which, in one vast, 
 though incoherent, alliance, opposed the pride and luxury of their 
 spiritual lords. From the Guadalquiver to the Elbe from the 
 Thames to the Tiber swarms of such socialists practised, or seemed 
 to practise, extreme austerities, and inculcated doctrines abhorred of 
 the orthodox and the faithful. Obscurely distinguished from each 
 other as Patarins, Cathari, Bons-Hommes, Poor men of Lyons, 
 Josephins, Flagellants, Publicani, and Waldenses, or grouped to- 
 gether under the general term of Albigenses, they rejected the 
 sacraments of marriage and penance, and disbelieved the magical in- 
 fluence of baptism and the eucharist. They denied the lawfulness 
 of oaths and of capital punishments. They maintained that no 
 Divine ordinance was valid if administered by a priest in mortal 
 sin. They taught that the successors of the Apostles were bound 
 to succeed to the apostolic poverty ; and, since none so well fulfilled 
 that hereditary obligation as themselves, they thought that none 
 were equally well entitled to discharge the apostolic office. 
 
 To refute these errors, Eome had employed her most irrefragable 
 arguments : the bitter curses of Lucius ; the cruelties, beyond con- 
 ception horrible, of Innocent. The brand, the scourge, and the 
 sword, had fallen from the wearied hands of the ministers of his 
 vengeance. Hundreds were cast alive into the furnace, and not a 
 few plunged into the flames with exulting declarations of the faith 
 for which they perished. The Vicar of Christ bathed the banner
 
 74 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 of the cross in a carnage, from which the wolves of Eomulus, and 
 the eagles of Csesar, would have turned away with loathing. But 
 the will of the sufferers was indomitable ; and this new scourge of 
 God was constrained to feel, that, from conquests which left the 
 immortal spirit unsubdued, he could derive no effectual security, 
 and no enduring triumph. 
 
 Such was the menacing aspect which Christendom presented to 
 her sacerdotal head at the moment, when, after having first re- 
 pulsed, he again summoned to his presence, the mendicants of 
 Assisi. The other monastic orders formed so many ramparts 
 round his throne. But neither the Benedictines with their splendid 
 endowments, nor the Carthusians with their self-immolations, nor 
 the Cistercians in their studious solitudes, nor the Templars and 
 Hospitallers with their sharp swords, nor the Beguines and Maturins 
 with their half-secular pursuits, could oppose any effective weapons 
 to the migratory gospellers, who in every land toiled, and preached, 
 and died ; at once the martyrs, and the devoted antagonists, of his 
 power. It was, then, in no dreaming phantasy, but in open vision, 
 that the palm-tree sprung up between his feet, as a new and a 
 welcome shelter. The fervid speech, the resolved aspect, the lowly 
 demeanour, the very dirt and wretchedness of those squalid 
 vagrants, gave to that penetrating eye assurance of a devotedness 
 which might rival and eclipse (and, perhaps, persuade) those whom 
 Simon de Montfort had in vain attempted to exterminate. And as, 
 in later days, Aristotelian innovations were neutralised by scholastic 
 subtleties ; the all-emancipating press by the soul-subduing miracles 
 of art ; the impassioned revolt of Luther by the ardent allegiance of 
 Loyola : so now, the ill-organised confederacy of the reformers of 
 "Western Europe might be counteracted by a zeal as impetuous as 
 their own, but directed by the unerring sagacity of the Roman con- 
 clave, to far more systematic and effective exertions. The popular 
 watchwords of Poverty, Continence, Lowliness, and Self-Denial, 
 would no longer be used as so many reproaches on the Roman 
 hierarchy, but as the war-cry of the self-mortified adherents of 
 Rome. Her enthusiastic missionaries, commanding the sympathy 
 of the multitude, would cause it to flow in holy indignation against 
 the vices of the mitre and the coronet, but in pious loyalty towards 
 the Triple Crown which had rested for a thousand years on the 
 brows of the successors of Peter. 
 
 With such prescience, Innocent recalled into his presence the 
 mendicant whose first overtures he had so contemptuously rejected. 
 He now accepted them, cordially indeed, yet with characteristic 
 caution. The laws of the proposed order of Minorites were ex-
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSIST. 75 
 
 aniined, discussed, and approved. Heedless of the sinister predic- 
 tions of the Sacred College, the Pope was willing to recognise, in 
 the severity of their discipline, the perfection which Christ himself 
 requires ; and Francis, having plighted solemn vows of obedience, 
 and having received in turn a no less solemn apostolic blessing, 
 departed from the Lateran with an unwritten approbation of his 
 rule. 
 
 Inflamed with holy ardour for the conversion of men, and for the 
 defence of the fortress and centre of the Catholic faith, he returned 
 to his native city. His toilsome march was a genuine ovation. 
 His steps were followed by admiring crowds ; church bells rang out 
 their peels at his approach ; processions chanting solemn litanies 
 advanced to meet him ; enraptured devotees kissed his clothes, his 
 hands, and his feet ; proselytes of either sex, and of every rank and 
 age, repeated the vows of poverty, continence, obedience, and 
 labour ; and, as the words passed from mouth to mouth, other vows 
 strangely mingled with them, devoting lands, convents, and mon- 
 asteries to the use of those whose abandonment of all worldly 
 wealth was thus enthusiastically celebrated. Superb inconsistency ! 
 ~No homage, however extravagant, is refused by mankind to a will 
 at once inflexible and triumphant ; so great is the reverence uncon- 
 sciously rendered, even by the least reflecting, to the great mystery 
 of our nature ; the existence in man of volitions and of resolves, 
 not absorbed in the Supreme Will, but, in some enigmatic sense, 
 distinct from it. The simple-hearted Francis had a readier solu- 
 tion. "They honour God," he exclaimed, "in the vilest of His 
 creatures." Whatever may have been the motive of the donors, 
 the fact is certain, that, on his return from Rome, the spouse of 
 Poverty received, for the use of his spiritual offering, a formal grant 
 of the church of St Mary of Angels, or the Porzioncula, which his 
 pious zeal had reinstated. 
 
 Among the saints of the Roman calendar few enjoy a more 
 exalted renown than St Clare, a scion of the noble house of 
 Ortolana. " Clara," so runs the bull of her canonisation, " claris 
 pneclara mentis, magnee in coelo claritate glorias, ac in terra miracu- 
 lorum sublimium, clare claret." Even before her birth a voice irom 
 heaven had announced that her course of life was to be a brilliant 
 one ; and, at the instance of her mother, to whom the promise had 
 been addressed, she therefore received at the baptismal font the 
 significant name on which, after her death, Pope Alexander the 
 Fourth was to play this jingle. From her childhood she had 
 justified the appellation. Beneath her costly robes, and the jewels 
 which adorned them, she wore the penitential girdle ; and vain
 
 76 SAINT FRANCIS OP ASSISI. 
 
 were the efforts of countless suitors to win a heart already devoted 
 to the Heavenly Bridegroom. The fame of her piety reached the 
 ears, and touched the heart, of Francis. She admired the lustre of 
 his sanctity. The mutual attraction was felt and acknowledged. 
 They met, conferred, and met again. By his advice an elopement 
 frcm the house of her parents was arranged, and by his assistance 
 it was effected. They fled to the Porzioncula. Monks, chanting 
 their matins by torch-light, received and welcomed her there ; and 
 then, attended by her spiritual guide, she took sanctuary in the 
 neighbouring church of St Paul, until arrangements could be made 
 for her reception in a convent. The heroine of the romance was in 
 her nineteenth, the hero in his thirtieth, year. Yet she was not an 
 Eloisa, but only one of those young ladies (all good angels guard 
 them !) by whom the ether of sacerdotal eloquence cannot be safely 
 inhaled in private. He was not an Abelard, but only one of those 
 ghostly counsellors (all good angels avert them !) who would con- 
 duct souls to heaven, by the breach of the earliest and most sacred 
 of the duties which He who reigns there has laid upon us. Such, 
 indeed, was the superiority of Francis to any prejudice in favour of 
 filial obedience and parental authority, that, despite the agony and 
 the rage of her father, and the effort of his armed retainers, he in- 
 duced her two sisters, Agnes and Beatrice, to follow her flight, and 
 to partake of her seclusion. The shears which severed the cluster- 
 ing locks of Agnes, were held, we are assured, by his own conse- 
 crated hands. 
 
 So bewitching an example was, of course, fatal to many other 
 flowing tresses, and to the serenity of the heads they covered. The 
 church of St Damiano, which the zeal of Francis had reconstructed, 
 became the convent of the order of poor sisters. Monks cannot 
 cease to be men ; and, in their silent cells, the hearts of the Minor 
 brethren throbbed to learn that their cravings for woman's sympathy 
 were thus, at least, partially satisfied. Under the guidance of the 
 ladies of the house of Ortolana, and the legislation of their common 
 founder, colonies of this devout sisterhood were rapidly settled in 
 all the chief cities of Europe ; and Clara, the disobedient and the 
 devout, being elected the first abbess of the order, performed, as we 
 are assured, miracles of self-conquest in her lifetime, and miracles 
 of mercy in her tomb. 
 
 At the summit of his hopes, Francis surveyed the path which yet 
 lay before him ; but his spirit fainted at the prospect. Renown, 
 influence, supremacy, had gathered round him; but his soul was 
 oppressed with the responsibilities of trusts so weighty, and for the 
 use of which he was wholly unprepared by any literary or theolo-
 
 SAINT FKANCIS OF ASSIST. 77 
 
 gical education. In words which he ascribes to Francis himself, St 
 Bonaventura depicts the conflict of his mind on the grave question, 
 whether, by a life of solitary devotion, or by a life of apostolic 
 labours, he should best fulfil the Divine counsels. If the quotation 
 of his language be accurate, it is evident that he inclined to the 
 more active choice, but dreaded to oppose to the wisdom of his age, 
 the foolishness of such preaching as his untaught mind, and un- 
 practised tongue, could utter. If the difficulty itself is character- 
 istic of him, the escape from it is still more so. 
 
 Sylvester, one of his associates at the Bivo Torto, still remained 
 in the adjacent mountains, a hermit absorbed in devotion. To him, 
 and to Clara, Francis despatched injunctions to ascertain what was 
 the pleasure of the great Head of the Church on this momentous 
 question. The answers of the hermit and of the abbess were the 
 same. To each it had been revealed that the founder of their order 
 should go forth and preach the Gospel. God, they assured him, 
 would put words into his mouth. To receive their joint message he 
 knelt on the earth ; his head bare and bowed down, his hands crossed 
 over his breast. On hearing it he vaulted from the ground, crying, 
 " Let us go forth in the name of the Lord ! " At his first appear- 
 ance as a preacher, we are told that burning eloquence burst from 
 his lips, diseases fled at his touch, sinners abandoned their vices, and 
 crowds flocked into his order. Every day witnessed the increase of 
 the numbers and zeal of his proselytes ; until, on the 30th of May, 
 1216, a goodly company, constituting the first chapter of the order 
 of the Minor brethren, had assembled at the Porzioncula. 
 
 This convention was rendered memorable in their annals by the 
 apportionment which was then made of the Christian world into so 
 many Franciscan missions. For himself the founder reserved the 
 kingdom of France, as the noblest and most arduous province. 
 Tuscany, Lombardy, Provence, Spain, and Germany were assigned 
 to five of his principal followers. Such were now their numbers 
 that thirty-four departed for Provence, and no less than sixty found 
 their way to the Empire. The land of the Ghibellines, the future 
 birth-place of Luther, formed, however, even in the thirteenth 
 century, an exception to the welcome with which, in other parts of 
 Europe, these new emissaries of Eome were enthusiastically re- 
 ceived. Of the itinerants along the banks of the "Rhine and the 
 Danube, not one could make himself intelligible in the German 
 tongue. Destitute of the ever ready resource of miracle (it is diffi- 
 cult to conjecture why), they could not convince a people with 
 whom they could not communicate ; and were driven away with 
 ridicule and outrage.
 
 78 SAINT FRANCIS OP ASSISI. 
 
 The French mission received a yet more unexpected check. To 
 place this great undertaking under the special care of St Peter and 
 St Paul, Francis had commenced his missionary journey by visiting 
 their sepulchres. Eome had, at that time, received another, and 
 not less memorable, guest, since known in the calendar of the saints 
 by the name of Dominick. He was a Spaniard, the member of a 
 noble house, a man of letters, and a priest. Amid the horrors of 
 the crusade against the Albigenses, and while himself deeply stained 
 with that blood-guiltiness, he had preached repentance, and incul- 
 cated orthodoxy. And now, a sojourner in the metropolis of Christen- 
 dom, he saw in a vision Christ himself possessed with wrath against 
 mankind (so well agreed his sleeping and his waking thoughts), and 
 then appeared to him the Virgin mother, appeasing her son by pre- 
 senting to him two men, in one of whom the dreamer saw his own 
 image. The other was a stranger to him. "When, with the return 
 of light, he repaired to a neighbouring church to worship, that 
 stranger appeared there in the garb of a mendicant. " My brother, 
 my companion," exclaimed the Spaniard, " let us unite our powers, 
 and nothing shall prevail against us ; " and forthwith the founders 
 of the Dominican and Franciscan orders were in each other's arms. 
 They met again at the palace of the Cardinal Ugolino. He pro- 
 posed to them the elevation of some of their followers to the epis- 
 copacy, and even to the Sacred College. The offer was declined by 
 both. Another ineffectual proposal was made by Dominick himself 
 for the union of their separate institutes ; and then, with earnest 
 professions of mutual regard, and assurances of mutual support, they 
 parted to divide the world between them. 
 
 To secure his share of that empire, Francis, however, found it 
 necessary to abandon his contemplated mission to France. The 
 sagacity of Ugolino had detected the intrigues and secret machina- 
 tions of the enemies of this new spiritual power ; and his authority 
 induced the founder of it to remain at Eome, to counteract them. 
 Subtlety, the tutelary genius of his country, and his natural ally on 
 such an occasion, abandoned Francis on this, as on so many other 
 exigencies, to the charge of the gentler power, Somnus ; who, throw- 
 ing open the ivory gates, exhibited to him, first a hen, attempting 
 in vain to gather her chickens under her wings, and then a majestic 
 bird, gently alighting to spread her far-extended plumage over the 
 unprotected brood. The interpretation was obvious. The Pope 
 must be persuaded to appoint Ugolino to the office of protector of 
 the unfledged nestlings of the Franciscan eyrie. 
 
 But Innocent was now dead ; and the third Honorius, a stranger 
 to Francis, and studiously prepossessed against him, filled the papal
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 79 
 
 throne. The cardinal proposed that the suitor for this new favour 
 should win it by preaching in the sacred consistory ; persuaded 
 that the eloquence for which he was renowned must triumph over 
 all opposing prejudices. Great were the throes of preparation. A 
 sermon, composed with the utmost skill of the preacher, was en- 
 graven, with his utmost diligence, on his memory. But at the sight 
 of that august audience, every trace of it departed from his mind ; 
 leaving him in utter confusion, and, as it seemed, in hopeless 
 silence. A pause, a mental prayer, and one vehement self-conflict 
 followed ; and then, abandoning himself to the natural current of 
 his own ardent emotions, he poured forth his soul, in an address so 
 full of warmth and energy, as to extort from the Pope, and the 
 whole college, the exclamation that it was not he that spake, but 
 the Divinity which spoke within him. From such lips no request 
 could be preferred in vain ; and Ugolino was nominated by Ho- 
 norius to the high and confidential post of Protector of the Minorite 
 brethren. 
 
 In the month of May, 1219 (the tenth year of the Franciscan, 
 sera), the inhabitants of Assisi looked from their walls on a vast 
 encampment surrounding the Porzioncula as a centre, and spreading 
 over the wide plain on which the city stands. Five thousand men- 
 dicants had there met together to celebrate the second general chap- 
 ter of their order. Huts of straw and mud afforded them shelter. 
 The piety of the neighbouring towns and villages supplied them with 
 food. Each group, or company, of sixty or a hundred, formed a dis- 
 tinct congregation, offering up prayers in common, or listening to 
 discourses of which the future conquest of the world was the theme. 
 Then, at the word, and under the guidance, of their chief, the se- 
 parate bands, forming themselves into one long procession, advanced 
 with solemn chants, or in still more solemn silence, to the city of 
 Perugia. There Ugolino met them, and, casting off his purple 
 mantle, his hat, and his shoes, was conducted by his exulting clients, 
 in the dress of a Minor brother, to the place of their great assembly. 
 " Behold," exclaimed the astonished patron, to the founder of the 
 order, " behold the camp of God ! How goodly are thy tents, 
 Israel, and thy dwellings, Jacob ! " 
 
 The words fell mournfully on the ear of Francis. As his eyes 
 scanned the triumphs of that auspicious hour, sadness brooded over 
 his soul. He felt, like other conquerors, that the laurel wreath is 
 too surely entwined with cypress ; and drew dark forebodings of 
 decay even from the unexpected rapidity of his success. Brief, 
 therefore, and melancholy, was his answer to the Cardinal's con- 
 gratulations. " "We have made," he said, " large promises ; we have
 
 80 SAINT FRANCIS OP ASSIST. 
 
 received yet larger. Let us accomplish the one ; and aspire after 
 the fulfilment of the other. These pleasures are brief. There are 
 pains which are eternal Our sufferings are light ; but there is a 
 far more exceeding weight of glory. Many are called, few are 
 chosen. To each man there shall be a recompense according to his 
 works. Above all things, my brethren, love the holy Church, and 
 pray for her exaltation. But cling to poverty. Is it not written, 
 Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall nourish thee 1 " 
 
 Again the heart of Ugolino throbbed as he surveyed the multitude 
 devoted to works of mercy and of self-denial ; and he commended, 
 while he blessed, them. Again was raised the sterner voice of their 
 spiritual father, rebuking the soft weakness with which they had 
 welcomed and enjoyed such unmerited praise. Pained and mortified, 
 the Cardinal asked the motive of this ill-timed severity. " My lord, 
 I have reproved them," was the answer, "that they may not lose 
 the lowliness you have been extolling ; and that humility may strike 
 her roots the more deeply into their hearts." 
 
 Unfamiliar as he was with the subtleties, scholastic or politic, of 
 his age, Francis was a keen observer of the characters and the ways 
 of men. He discovered that the zealous protector of his order was 
 a still more zealous member of the Roman conclave ; and that, to 
 attach the foremost of the Minor brethren to the cause and service 
 of the Papacy, he had dazzled their eyes with prospects of mitres, 
 and even of the purple. He also discovered that they had conferred 
 with the Cardinal on their own exclusion from the government of 
 the society, on the want both of health and of learning in their 
 head, and on the excessive rigour and singularity of his rule. He 
 saw in these Dathans and Abirams of his camp the rising spirit of 
 revolt, and he proceeded at once to subdue it with his accustomed 
 energy. The chapter of the order was in session ; when, conduct- 
 ing Ugolino thither, Francis addressed to them, and to him, these 
 stern and menacing words ; " My brethren, God has commanded 
 me, in foolishness and humility, to copy the foolishness of the 
 cross. Let me hear of no other rule than that which He has thus 
 established. Dread the Divine vengeance, all ye who abandon it, 
 all ye who seduce others to backslide." The silence which followed 
 on this apostrophe, and on the departure of the speaker, Avas at 
 length broken by the Cardinal He exhorted the congregation to 
 obey implicitly their apostolic founder, on whom, he declared, the 
 Divine influence was evidently resting. Evident, at least, it had 
 become, that the day of secular greatness could not dawn on the 
 children of Poverty till her spouse should have ceased to govern 
 them.
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OP ASSISI. 81 
 
 To divert their minds from such disloyal thoughts, Francis oc- 
 cupied them with the promulgation of rules respecting the worship 
 of the Virgin, of Peter and of Paul, and the structure of their eccle- 
 siastical edifices. To elicit their loyal affections, he laid before 
 them a project for the spiritual conquest of the whole habitable 
 globe. For himself he reserved the seat of the war between the 
 crusaders and the Saracens. To each of his foremost disciples he 
 assigned a separate mission ; and he dismissed them with letters 
 from the Pope, commending them to the care of all ecclesiastical 
 dignitaries, and with a circular epistle from himself, bearing this 
 superscription : "To all Potentates, Governors, Consuls, Judges, 
 and Magistrates on the earth, and to all others to whom these pre- 
 sents shall come, brother Francis, your unworthy servant in the 
 Lord, sendeth greeting and peace." Armed with these credentials 
 the propagandists of Assisi dispersed ; some to found monasteries 
 in Spain, some to preach the Gospel in the Empire, some to rival 
 the socialists of France, some to become professors at Oxford, and 
 some to provoke martyrdom in Morocco ; but never again to be 
 convened by their "General Minister" to consult together in a 
 deliberative chapter. It was an experiment too hazardous for re- 
 petition ; a risk to be dreaded far more than any which awaited 
 him among the warriors of the crescent, or the champions of the cross. 
 
 These were now drawn in hostile array under the walls of Dami- 
 etta, and there he joined them. The confusion of the camp of Agra- 
 mante was but a feeble image of that which he found in the host of 
 the titular King of Jerusalem, John de Brienne ; cavaliers and 
 footmen, all emulous of fame, all impatient of obedience, all insist- 
 ing on being led into action, all interchanging bitter contumelies, 
 and all willing to cut each other's throats, if no better employment 
 could be found for their swords. Like another Micaiah, Francis 
 foretold the disastrous results of a combat about to be waged, under 
 the shelter of holy names, but in the wanton insolence of human 
 passion. Like him he saw all Israel scattered like sheep upon the 
 mountains ; and like him he prophesied in vain. The mutinous 
 troops hurried their leader into the field ; and the loss of six 
 thousand of the Christians attested the foresight of their unwarlike 
 monitor. 
 
 In the midst of feats of arms and agonies of toils and suffer- 
 ing, admonition was, however, an office too humble to satisfy the 
 desires of a soul cast in a mould so heroic as his. He was a strate- 
 gist as well as a saint ; and, in this day of sorrow and rebuke, 
 found a meet occasion to exhibit the whole strength of his belli- 
 gerent resources. During many successive hours, he knelt and was 
 
 6
 
 82 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 absorbed in prayer. Then rising with a countenance radiant with 
 joy and courage, he advanced towards the infidel camp ; chanting 
 as he marched, " Though I walk through the valley of the shadow 
 of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me." A gold besant 
 was the price of the head of a Christian. But what were such 
 terrors to an evangelist about to close the war by the conversion of 
 the Soldan himself] From every incident he drew fresh confidence. 
 When he saw the flocks collected for the consumption of the Sara- 
 cens, "Behold," he cried, "I send you forth as sheep among 
 wolves." When seized by the Saracens themselves, and asked by 
 whom, and why, he had been sent to " their lines," he answered, 
 " I am not sent of man, but of God, to show you the way of 
 salvation." When carried before their chief, and courteously 
 invited to remain in his tent, " Yes," he exclaimed, " I will remain, 
 if you and your people will become converts for the love of Jesus 
 Christ. If you hesitate, kindle a furnace, and I and your priests will 
 enter it together ; and the result shall show you whether truth is on 
 my side or on theirs." The most venerable of the Imauns shuddered 
 and withdrew ; and the smiling commander of the Faithful avowed 
 his doubt whether he could find a priest to encounter the ordeal. 
 " Only promise to become a Christian," replied Francis, " and I will 
 enter the furnace alone ; but if I should be burnt, conclude, not 
 that my message is false, but only that it has reached you by one 
 who, bearing it unworthily, is justly punished for his sins." Still 
 obdurate, but still courteous, the infidel chief offered rich presents 
 to his stout-hearted visitor ; and then, with a guard of honour, and 
 a safe-conduct, dismissed him to the Christian camp. 
 
 That the head of the missionary was neither bartered for a gold 
 besant by the soldiers, nor amputated by the scimitar of their 
 leader, may be explained either by the oriental reverence for sup- 
 posed insanity, or by the universal reverence for self-denying 
 courage, or by the motives which induced the lion to lie quietly 
 down, and turn his tail on the drawn sword, and eloquent taunts, 
 of the Knight of La Mancha. To the Eagle of Meaux, however, 
 this adventure presents itself in a more brilliant light. " Francois," 
 he exclaims, " indigne de se voir ainsi respecte par les ennemis 
 de son maitre, recommence ses invectives centre leur religion inon- 
 strueuse ; mais, etrange et merveilleuse insensibilite ! ils ne lui te- 
 moignent pas moins de deference ; et le braA'e athlete de Jesus- 
 Christ, voyant qu'il ne pouvait meriter qu'ils lui donnassent la mort : 
 ' Sortons d'ici, mon frere,' disait-il a son compagnon, ' fuyons, fuyons 
 bien loin de ces barbares, trop humains pour nous, puisque nous 
 ne les pouvons obliger, ni a adorer notre rnaitre, ni a nous perso-
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 83 
 
 cuter ; nous qui somrues ses serviteurs. Oh Dieu ! quand meriterons- 
 nous le triomplie de rnartyre si nous ne trouvons que des lionneurs, 
 meme parmi les peuples les plus infideles ] Puisque Dieu ne nous 
 juge pas dignes de la grace du martyre, ni de participer a ses glorieux 
 opprobes, allons-nous-en, mon frere ; aliens achever notre vie dans 
 le martyre de la penitence, ou cherchons quelque endroit de la terre 
 ou nous puissons Loire a longs traits 1'ignominie de la croix.'" 
 
 Such places were readily found. In Spain, in Provence, and in 
 Northern Italy, Francis everywhere preached to crowds hanging on 
 his lips ; and though the ignominy of the cross may have been his 
 theme, it must be confessed that the admiration of mankind was 
 his habitual reward. But amidst the applauses of the world, his 
 heart yearned after his native Umbria, where his Order had first 
 struggled into sight, and where it was now to receive its final 
 development. 
 
 In his missions through Europe he had discovered that his insti- 
 tutes of Minor brethren, and of poor sisters, bound to celibacy, to 
 poverty, and to obedience, were erected on a basis far too narrow for 
 the universal empire at which he aimed. Marriage was inconsistent 
 with the first of these vows, worldly callings with the second, and 
 secular dignities with the last. But though wives, and trades, and 
 lordships were incompatible with " perfection," they might be recon- 
 ciled with admission into a lower or third estate of his Order, where, 
 as in the court of the Gentiles, those might worship to whom a nearer 
 approach to the sanctuary was interdicted. With the design of thus 
 throwing open the vestibule of the temple to the uninitiated, a sup- 
 plemental code was promulgated, in the year 1221, for what was to 
 be called " The Order of Penitence." 
 
 The members of it were to take no vows whatever. Engaging to 
 submit themselves to certain rules of life, it was agreed that the 
 breach of those rules should not involve the guilt of mortal sin. 
 They required the restitution of all unjust gains, a reconcilement with 
 all enemies, and obedience to the commands of God and of the Church. 
 The members of the Order were to wear a mean and uniform dress. 
 Their houses and furniture were to be plain and frugal, though not 
 without consulting the proprieties of their social rank. All luxurious- 
 ness in animal delights, and all the lusts of the eye, were to be 
 mortified ; all theatres, feasts, and worldly amusements eschewed. 
 Their disputes were to be settled, with all possible promptitude, by 
 compromises or by arbitrament. Every member of the Order was to 
 make his will. They were never to take a nonjudicial oath, nor to 
 bear amis, except in defence of the Church, the Catholic faith, vr their 
 native land. 
 
 6
 
 84 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSIST. 
 
 The founder of such a confederacy must have had some of the 
 higher moral instincts of a legislator. It would be difficult even 
 now, with all the aid of history and philosophy, to devise a scheme 
 better adapted to restrain the licentiousness, to soften the manners, 
 and to mitigate all the oppressions of an iron age. Secular men 
 and women were combined with ardent devotees, in one great 
 society, under a code flexible as it addressed the one, and inexor- 
 able as it applied to the other, of those classes ; and yet a code, 
 which imposed on all the same general obligations, the same undi- 
 vided allegiance, the same ultimate ends, and many of the same ex- 
 ternal badges. Christianity itself, when first promulgated, must to 
 heathen eyes have had an aspect not wholly unlike that which 
 originally distinguished the third estate of the Franciscan Orders ; 
 and rapid as may have been the corruption and decline of that estate, 
 it would be mere prejudice or ignorance to deny that it sustained 
 an important office in the general advancement of civilisation and 
 of truth. 
 
 In the times of Francis himself and of his immediate successors, 
 the Franciscan cord (the emblem of the restraint in which the soul 
 of man is to hold the Beast to which it is wedded) was to be seen 
 on countless multitudes ; in the market-place, in the universities, in 
 the tribunals, and even on the throne. In the camp it was still 
 more frequent ; for there was much latent significance in the excep- 
 tional terms by which the general prohibition of military service 
 had been qualified for the members of the Order of Penitence. In 
 the early part of the thirteenth century " the defence of the Church, 
 of the Catholic faith, and of their native land," was, to Italian ears, 
 an intelligible periphrasis for serving either under the standard of 
 the cross against the Albigenses, or under the standard of the Guelphs 
 against the Ghibellines ; and the third estate of the Minorites 
 formed an enthusiastic, patriotic, and religious chivalry, which the 
 Pope could direct at pleasure against either his theological or his 
 political antagonists. 
 
 And now it remained that Francis should receive the appropriate 
 rewards of the services which he had rendered to Eome, to the world, 
 and to the Church to Eome, in surrounding her with new and 
 energetic allies ; to the world, in creating a mighty corporation for- 
 midable to baronial and to mitred tyrants ; to the Church, in supply- 
 ing her with a noble army of evangelists, who braved every danger, 
 and endured every privation, to diffuse throughout Christendom 
 such light as they themselves possessed. The debt was acknowledged 
 and paid by each. 
 
 In the bitterness of his heart Francis was weeping over the sins
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 85 
 
 of mankind, in the shrine of St Mary of Angels, when a revelation 
 was made to him, which, though described with ease and familiarity 
 by a host of Catholic writers, the weaker faith, or the greater re- 
 verence, of Protestantism cannot venture to paint with the same 
 minuteness. All that can be decorously stated is, that the Virgin 
 mother, her attendant angels, her Divine Son, and Francis their 
 devout worshipper, are exhibited by the narrative as interlocutors in 
 a sort of melodramatic action ; which terminates in a promise from 
 the Eedeemer, that all who should visit that church, and confess 
 themselves to a priest there, should receive a plenary remission from 
 the guilt and punishment of all their sins; "provided" (such is 
 the singular qualification of the promise) " that this general in- 
 dulgence be ratified by him whom I have authorised to bind and to 
 loose on earth." 
 
 On the following day, Francis was on his knees before the Pope 
 at Perugia. " Holy Father," he began, " some years ago I recon- 
 structed a little church on your domain. Grant, I implore you, to 
 all pilgrims resorting thither, a plenary indulgence, and exempt the 
 building from the imposts usually consequent on the grant of such 
 privileges." "For how many years," said the Pontiff, "do you de- 
 sire the indulgence to be given 1 ?" "Give me not years," replied 
 the suitor, " but souls (da mini non annos, sed animos), and let all 
 who enter the church of Saint Mary of Angels in contrition, and 
 who are there absolved by a priest, receive a full remission of their 
 sins in this life, and in the life to come." "A vast gift, and con- 
 trary to all custom," observed the parsimonious dispenser of salva- 
 tion. " But, Holy Father, I make the request not in my own name, 
 but in the name of Christ, who has sent me to you." " Then be it 
 so," exclaimed the Pope; "but I limit to one day in each year the 
 enjoyment of this advantage." The grateful Francis rose, bowed 
 low his head, and was retiring, when the voice of the Pope was 
 again heard. " Simpleton, whither are you going ? What evidence 
 do you carry with you of the grant which you have been soliciting ? " 
 " Your word," replied the single-hearted suitor. " If this indulgence 
 be of God, let the blessed Virgin be the charter, Christ the notary, 
 and the Angels the witnesses. I desire no other." 
 
 The traveller who in our own day visits Assisi, finds himself sur- 
 rounded by a population of about three thousand souls ; and amidst 
 the thirty churches and monasteries which attract his eye, he distin- 
 guishes, as pre-eminent above them all, the Sagro Convento, where 
 repose the ashes of Saint Francis. It is a building of the sixteenth 
 century, extending over the summit of a gentle eminence at the base 
 of the Apennines. A double row of gigantic arches, resembling two
 
 86 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 vast aqueducts, the lower of which forms the "basis of the higher, 
 sustains a sumptuous terrace, which stands out against the evening 
 sky, like the battlements of some impregnable fortress. The luxu- 
 riant gardens, and the rich meadows below, watered by a stream 
 which gushes out from the adjacent mountains, encircle the now 
 splendid church of St Mary of Angels ; where may still be traced 
 the Porzioncula in which Francis worshipped, and the crypt in 
 which his emaciated body was committed to the dust. And there 
 also, on each returning year, may be seen the hardy mountaineers of 
 Umbria, and the graceful peasants of Tuscany, and the solemn pro- 
 cessions of the Franciscan orders, and the long array of civil and 
 ecclesiastical dignitaries, waiting till the chimes of the ancient clocks 
 of the holy convent shall announce the advent of the day in which 
 their sins are to be loosed on earth, and their pardon sealed in 
 heaven. 
 
 Why demand the reasons of this, or of any other part of a reli- 
 gious system which presupposes the renunciation of all reason 1 The 
 promise given to Francis by the Saviour, and ratified by His Vicar, 
 was precise and definite. It insured a plenary remission of sin to 
 all who should visit the hallowed Porzioncula with contrite hearts, 
 and there receive priestly absolution. The promise, as interpreted 
 by the eloquent Bourdaloue, seems equally absolute. From his 
 sermon, " Sur la fete de notre Dame des Anges," we learn that in- 
 dulgences granted by the Pope may, after all, turn out to be worth- 
 less ; since the cause of the gift may be insufficient, or some other 
 essential condition may have been neglected. But in this case, the 
 indulgence, having been granted directly by Christ himself, must 
 (says the great preacher) be infallible ; for He must have known 
 the extent of his own power, and must have been guided by eternal 
 wisdom, and must be superior to all law in the free dispensation of 
 His gifts. 
 
 Pause, nevertheless, all ye who meditate a pilgrimage to Assisi, 
 in quest of this divine panacea ! Put not your trust in Bourdaloue, 
 but listen to the more subtle doctor of our own days, M. Chavin de 
 Malan. From him you will learn that to all these large and free 
 promises is attached yet another tacit condition ; and that unless 
 you renounce all sin, venial as well as mortal, unless the very desire 
 to transgress have perished in your souls, unless your hearts be free 
 from the slightest wish, the most transient voluntary attachment, 
 towards any forbidden thing, you may be members of all religious 
 orders, and join in all their pilgrimages and devotions, but the 
 plenary indulgence shall never be yours. Pilgrims to Assisi ! if 
 such be not your happy state, it boots not to go thither. If such be
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OP ASSISI. 87 
 
 your condition, why roam over this barren earth to find the heaven 
 which is yours already ? 
 
 Equivocal as the benefit of the papal reward may have been, the 
 recompense which the world rendered, by the hands of Orlando, 
 Lord of Chiusi de Casentino, was at least substantial. At a solemn 
 festival, at which the knight had made his profession of arms, 
 Francis had pronounced the usual benediction on the symbols of 
 his chivalry. Much discourse ensued on the spiritual state and 
 prospects of this militant member of the Church, when the grateful, 
 and not improvident, Orlando, for the good of his soul, bestowed 
 on the founder and the companions of the order of Minor brethren, 
 Monte del Alvernia, a tract of land amidst the highest summits of 
 the Tuscan Apennines, now called Lavernia. It was a wild and 
 sequestered region, covered with heath and rocks, and the primaeval 
 forest, and eminently adapted for a life of penitence. It became 
 the favourite, retreat of its new owners, and especially of their chief. 
 Yet even in these solitudes he was not exempt from some grave 
 incommodities. By night, malignant demons afflicted him, drag- 
 ging his defenceless body along the ground, and bruising him with 
 cruel blows. When the sun burnt fiercely over his head, Orlando 
 appeared with food, and with offers to erect cells and dormitories 
 for the hermits, and to supply all their temporal wants, that they 
 might surrender themselves wholly to prayer and meditation. But 
 neither the enmity of the demons, nor the allurements of their 
 unconscious ally, could seduce Francis from his fidelity to his 
 wedded wife. In her society he wandered through the woods and 
 caverns of Alvernia ; relying for support on Him alone by whom 
 the ravens are fed, and awakening the echoes of the mountains by 
 his devout songs and fervent ejaculations. 
 
 It remained only that the Church, in the person of her eternal 
 Head, should requite the services of her great reformer. The too 
 familiar legend must be briefly told ; for every one who would 
 cherish in himself, or in others, the reverence due to the Holy and 
 the Awful, must shrink from the approach to such a topic, and be 
 unAvilling to Linger on it. 
 
 On the annual festival of Saint Michael the archangel, for the 
 year 1 224, Francis and Leoni, a member of his order, went together 
 to worship at a church which had then been erected on Mount 
 Alvernia. The sortes sanctorum were again consulted, by thrice 
 opening the Gospels, which lay upon the altar. On each occasion 
 the volume presented to their eyes the history of the passion ; and 
 the coincidence was accepted by Francis as ominous of some great 
 event which Avas about to happen to himself.
 
 88 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 The hour arrived of the " holy sacrifice ;" when, as though to 
 symbolize his disgust for earth, and his aspirations to heaven, the 
 body of the saint slowly ascended heavenwards. When it had 
 reached lie ordinary height of a man, the feet were embraced and 
 bathed with tears by Leoni, who stood beneath. Gradually it 
 mounted beyond the range of human vision ; but even then his 
 voice was heard in discourse with the Invisible, and a bright 
 radiance attested the presence of the Redeemer. He was made 
 manifest to the eye of his enraptured worshipper, in the form of 
 a seraph moving on rapid wings, though fastened to a cross ; and 
 when the whole scene passed away, it was found that, by radiations 
 from this celestial figure, the body of Francis, like wax beneath the 
 pressure of a seal, had acquired the sacred stigmata- that is, on 
 either hand, and on either foot, marks exactly corresponding with the 
 two opposite extremities of a rude iron nail ; and on the side, a 
 wound such as might have been inflicted by a spear. 
 
 This stupendous event happened on the 17th September, a day 
 still consecrated by the Church to the perpetual commemoration of 
 it. No Christian, therefore, may doubt it ; for St Thomas, and all 
 other theologians, assure us, that to doubt a " canonical fact " is rash, 
 scandalous, and open to the just suspicion of heresy. Yet scepticism 
 on the subject appears to have been of very early growth. Within 
 thirteen years from the date of the occurrence, a Dominican preacher 
 at Oppaw in Moravia, and the Bishop of Olmutz, had both pub- 
 lished their utter disbelief of the whole story, and had condemned 
 the propagation of it as sinful For this audacious presumption, 
 however, Ugolino, who then filled the papal throne under the title 
 of Gregory the Ninth, addressed to both of them reproachful letters, 
 which sufficiently attest his own faith in the prodigy. In the dense 
 cloud of corroborative witnesses may be distinguished his successor, 
 Pope Alexander the Fourth ; who, in a still extant bull, denounces 
 the severest penalties on all gainsayers. Indeed, if Saint Bona- 
 ventura may be believed, Alexander went further still, and was used 
 to declare that he had with his own eyes seen and admired the 
 stigmata. And M. Chavin de Malan is ready to abandon his 
 reliance on all human testimony, if any one can convince him of the 
 insufficiency of that on which his faith in this miracle reposes. 
 
 When the fishermen of Jordan shall have learnt how to stay her 
 swellings with their nets, it will be time to encounter the soaring 
 enthusiasm of M. Chavin de Malan by the cobwebs of human logic. 
 When geometricians shall have ascertained the colour of the circle, 
 we may hope to arrive at an understanding with him as to the 
 meaning of the terms in which he disputes. When critics shall have
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 89 
 
 demonstrated, from the odes of Pindar, the polarization of Light, 
 he and we may be of one mind as to the laws by which our belief 
 should be governed. Meanwhile, his rebukes for the hardness of 
 our hearts shall not be repelled by any imputations touching the 
 softness of his head. He and his fellow-worshippers regard it as 
 eminently probable, that He by whom this universal frame of things 
 has been created and sustained, should descend to this earth, to act 
 so strange a part as they assign to Him in so grotesque a drama as 
 that of Mount Alvernia. If we could adopt the same opinion, we 
 might, with them, give some heed even to the scanty, and most 
 suspicious, evidence on which these marvels rest. One prodigy, 
 indeed, connected with this tale, we receive with implicit conviction 
 and profound astonishment. It is, that in the city in which Louis 
 Philippe was then reigning, in which Guizot and Thierry were 
 writing, and in which Cousin was delivering his lectures, there arose 
 two learned historians, who, with impassioned eloquence, and 
 unhesitating faith, reproduced a legend Avhich would have been 
 rejected as extravagant by the novelists to whom we owe the 
 " Arabian Nights," and as profane by the authors with whom Don 
 Quixote Avas familiar. 
 
 Francis did not long survive the revelation of Mount Alvernia. 
 Exhausted by vigils, by fastings, and by fatigue, he retired to Assisi. 
 Leoni accompanied him. As they approached the city, the increas- 
 ing weakness of the saint compelled him to seek the unwonted relief 
 of riding. But as his companion followed behind, Francis divined 
 his thoughts. In early life they had often journeyed together over 
 the same road ; the one ever conscious of his noble birth, the other 
 never allowed to forget that his father was but a merchant. The 
 contrast of the past and the present was too powerful to both of the 
 travellers. Faint as he was, Francis dismounted from the ass which 
 bore him : declaring that he could not retain the saddle while one so 
 much his superior in rank was on foot. 
 
 He reached at length a hut near the convent of St Damiano, 
 where, under the care of Clara and her poor sisters, he found a tem- 
 porary repose. Twelve months of utter incapacity for exertion 
 followed. They were passed in the monastery of St Mary of Angels. 
 The autumn brought with it some brief intermission of his sufferings ; 
 and again his voice was heard throughout Umbria, preaching, as his 
 custom was, in words few, simple, and pathetic ; and when unable 
 to teach by words, he presented himself, and gazed with earnest 
 tenderness on the crowds who thronged to receive his benediction 
 and to touch his garments. 
 
 In this his last mission, a woman of Bagnarea brought to him. her
 
 90 SAINT FRAXCIS OF ASSIST. 
 
 infant to be healed. Francis laid his hands on the child, who re- 
 covered ; and who afterwards, tinder the name of Bonaventura, 
 became his biographer, the general minister of his Order, a cardinal, 
 a theologian, and a saint. 
 
 At the approach of death, Francis felt and acknowledged the 
 horror common to all men, and especially to men of irritable nerves 
 and delicate organization. But such feelings promptly yielded to 
 his habitual affiance in the Divine love, and to his no less habitual 
 affection for all in whom he recognized the regenerate image of the 
 Divine nature. Among these was the Lady Jacoba di Settesoli ; and 
 to her he dictated a letter, requesting her immediate presence with a 
 winding-sheet for his body, and tapers for his funeral, and with the 
 cakes she had been used to give him during his illness at Eome. 
 Then pausing, he bade his amanuensis tear the letter, expressing his 
 conviction that Jacoba was at hand. She appeared ; and so deep 
 was her emotion as to have suggested to the bystanders (to whom 
 apparently her existence had till then been unknown) the vague and 
 oppressive sense of some awful mystery. It may, however, be 
 reasonably supposed that the anguish of Jacoba was nothing else 
 than the natural expression of that intense and perfect sympathy to 
 which the difference of sex is essential, to which none but the pure 
 in heart can ever attain, and which, with no failure of respect to so 
 great a man, may therefore be supposed to have glowed in his bosom 
 as warmly as in hers. 
 
 Her cakes were again eaten by the sick man ; but without any 
 abatement of his malady. Elia, who, during his illness, had acted 
 as general minister of his Order, and Bernard de Quintavalle, his 
 first proselyte, were kneeling before him. To each of them he gave 
 a part of one of the cakes of Jacoba ; and then crossing his arms 
 so as to bring his right hand over the head of Bernard (whose hu- 
 mility had chosen the left or inferior position), he solemnly blessed 
 them both, and bequeathed to Bernard the government of the whole 
 Franciscan society. He then dictated his last will, in which the 
 rules he had already promulgated were explained and enforced, and 
 his followers were solemnly commended to the guidance and the 
 blessing of the Most High. 
 
 His last labour done, he was laid, in obedience to his own com- 
 mand, on the bare ground. The evening, we are told, was calm, 
 balmy, and peaceful ; the western sky glowing with the mild and 
 transparent radiance which follows the setting of an autumnal sun 
 behind the lofty hills of central Italy. At that moment the requiem 
 for the dying ceased, as the faltering voice of Francis was beard, in 
 the language of David, exclaiming, " Voce mea ad Dominum cla-
 
 SAINT FRAXCIS OF ASSISI. 91 
 
 mavi ! " His attendants tent over him as he pursued the divine 
 song, and caught his last breath as he uttered, "Bring my soul out 
 of prison, that I may give thanks unto Thy name." 
 
 Some there are, total strangers to man's interior life, who find 
 for themselves in the objects of concupiscence a living tomb ; these 
 are the sensual and the worldly. Some, for whom the world within 
 is detached from the world without them by hard, sharp, clear lines 
 of demarcation ; these are the men of practical ability. Some, who, 
 from every idol of the theatre, fashion to themselves some idol of 
 the cavern ; these are the votaries of poetry or art. Some, to whom 
 all substantial things are permanently eclipsed by the imagery of 
 the brain ; these are the insane. And some, to whom every cherished 
 idea of their minds gives assurance of a corresponding objective 
 reality ; these are the mystics and enthusiasts men of an am- 
 phibious existence inhabitants alternately of the world of shadows, 
 and of the world of solidities their dreams passing into action, their 
 activity subsiding into dreams a by-word to the sensual and the 
 worldly, an enigma to the practical, a study to the poet, and not 
 rarely ending as fellow-prisoners with the insane. 
 
 To this small section of the human family belonged Francis of 
 Assisi; a mere self-contradiction to those who beheld him incuriously; 
 in one aspect a playful child, in the next a gloomy Anchorite; an 
 arch smile of drollery stealing at times across features habitually 
 sacred to sorrow and devotion ; passing from dark forebodings into 
 more than human ecstasies ; a passionate lover of nature, yet living 
 by choice in crowds and cities ; at once an erotic worshipper, and a 
 proficient in the practical business of the religious state ; outstrip- 
 ping in his transcendental raptures the pursuit of criticism and con- 
 jecture, and yet drawing up codes and canons with all the precision 
 of a notary. 
 
 The reconcilement of all this was not, however, hard to find. 
 Francis was an absolute prodigy of faith ; and especially of faith in 
 himself. Whatever he saw in the camera lucida of his own mind, 
 he received implicitly as the genuine reflection of some external 
 reality. Every metaphor with which he dallied, became to him an 
 actual personage, to be loved or to be hated. It was scarcely as a 
 fiction that he wooed Poverty as his wife. Each living thing was a 
 brother or a sister to him, in a sense which almost ceased to be 
 figurative. To all inanimate beings he ascribed a personality and 
 a sentient nature, in something more than a sport of fancy. At 
 every step of his progress, celestial visitants hovered round him ; an- 
 nouncing their presence sometimes in visible forms, sometimes inaudible
 
 92 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 voices. The Virgin mother was the lady of his heart ; her attendant 
 angels but so many knights companions in his spiritual chivalry ; 
 the Church a bride in glorious apparel ; and her celestial Spouse the 
 object of a passion which acknowledged no restraint either in the 
 vehemence of spirit with which it was cherished, or in the fondness 
 of the language in which it was expressed. It was inevitable that 
 the inhabitant of such a world as this, should have manifested him- 
 self to the vulgar denizens of earth in ceaseless contrasts and seeming 
 incongruities ; so essential were the differences between the ever- 
 varying impulses on which he soared, and the unvarying motives in 
 the strength of which they plodded. 
 
 Though Bona ventura was but a child at the death of Francis, he 
 possessed and diligently used the means of studying his character, 
 and has laboured in the following passage, with more earnestness 
 than perspicuity, to depict his interior life : 
 
 " Who can form a conception of the fervour and the love of 
 Francis, the friend of Christ? you would have said that he was 
 burnt up by divine love, like charcoal in the flames. As often as 
 his thoughts were directed to that subject, he was excited as if the 
 chords of his soul had been touched by the plectrum of an inward 
 voice. But as all lower affections elevated him to this love of the 
 supreme, he yielded himself to the admiration of every creature 
 which God has formed ; and from the summit of this observatory 
 of delights he watched the causes of all things, as they unfolded 
 themselves to him under living forms. Among the beautiful objects 
 of nature, he selected the most lovely ; and, in the forms of created 
 things, he sought out, with ardour, whatever appeared especially 
 captivating ; rising from one beauty to another as by a ladder, with 
 which he scaled to the highest and the most glorious." 
 
 Birds, insects, plants, and fishes, are variously regarded, according 
 to the temper of the observer, in a culinary, a scientific, a picturesque, 
 or a poetical point of view. To Francis of Assisi they were friends, 
 kinsmen, and even congregations. Doves were his especial favour- 
 ites. He gathered them into his convents, laid them in his bosom, 
 taught them to eat out of his hand, and pleased himself with talking 
 of them as so many chaste and faithful brethren of the Order. In 
 the lark which sprung up before his feet, he saw a Minorite sister, 
 clad in the Franciscan colour ; who, like a true Franciscan, despised 
 the earth, and soared towards heaven with thanksgivings for her 
 simple diet. When a nest of those birds fought for the food he 
 brought them, he not only rebuked their inhumanity, but prophesied 
 their punishment. His own voice rose with that of the nightingale 
 in rural vespers ; and at the close of their joint thanksgivings, he
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSIST. 93 
 
 praised, and fed, and "blessed his fellow-worshipper. "My dear 
 sisters," he exclaimed to some starlings who chattered round him as 
 he preached, " you have talked long enough, it is my turn now ; 
 listen to the word of your Creator, and be quiet." The very sermon 
 addressed by the saint to such an audience, yet lives in the pages of 
 his great biographer. " My little brothers," it began, " you should 
 love and praise the Author of your being, who has clothed you with 
 plumage, and given you wings with which to fly where you will. 
 You were the first created of all animals. He preserved your race 
 in the ark. He has given the pure atmosphere for your dwelling- 
 place. You sow not, neither do you reap. Without any care of 
 your own, He gives you lofty trees to build your nests in, and 
 watches over your young. Therefore give praise to your bountiful 
 Creator." 
 
 The well-known instinct by which irrational animals discover 
 and attach themselves to their rational friends, was exhibited when- 
 ever Francis came abroad. The wild falcon wheeled and fluttered 
 round him. The leveret sought rather to attract than to escape his 
 notice. The half-frozen bees crawled to him in winter time to be 
 fed. A lamb followed him even into the city of Rome ; and was 
 playfully cherished there by Jacoba di Settesoli under the name of 
 a Minor brother. 
 
 These natural incidents became, in the hands of his monkish 
 biographers, so many miracles fit only for the nursery. Let us, 
 not, however, upbraid them. Without apology, as without doubt, 
 M. Chavin de Malan, in the year 1845, and from the city of Paris, 
 informs us, that when Francis addressed his feathered congregation 
 they stretched out their necks to imbibe his precepts ; that, at his 
 bidding, the starlings ceased to chatter while he preached that in 
 fulfilment of his predictions, the naughty larks died miserably ; 
 that a falcon announced to him in the mountains the hour of prayer, 
 though with gentler voice and a tardier summons, when the saint 
 was sick ; that Jacoba was aroused to her devotions by her lamb 
 with severe punctuality ; that an ovicidal wolf, being rebuked by 
 this ecclesiastical Orpheus for his carnivorous deeds, placed his 
 paw in the hand of his monitor in pledge of his future good be- 
 haviour, and, like a wolf of honour, never more indulged himself in 
 mutton. Yet M. Chavin de Malan is writing a learned and an elo- 
 quent history of the monastic orders. Such be thy gods, Ox- 
 ford ! 
 
 In common with all the gveat Thaumaturgists of the Church of 
 Rome, Francis had abstained from recording his own prodigies. 
 He was too honest and too lowly. No man could less be, to him-
 
 94 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 self, the centre of his own thoughts. One central object occupied 
 them all. He was a Pan-Christian. He saw the outer world not 
 merely thronged with emblems, but instinct with the presence, of 
 the Redeemer. The lamb he fondled was the Paschal sacrifice. 
 The worm he guarded from injury was, "the worm, and no man, 
 the outcast of the people." The very stones (on which he never 
 trod irreverently) were " the chief corner-stone " of the prophet. 
 The flowers were the " blossoms of the stem of Jesse, the perfume 
 of which gladdens the whole earth." The ox and the ass were his 
 guests at a Christmas festival, which he gave in the forest not long 
 before his death ; and while they steadily ate the corn provided for 
 them, processions of Minor brethren, and crowds of admiring spec- 
 tators, listened to his discourses on the manger and the babe of 
 Bethlehem, or joined with him in sacred carols on the nativity. 
 
 Among the Opuscula Sancti Francisci are four poems, in which 
 the same mystic spirit expands itself gloriously. It must not, in- 
 deed, be concealed that the authenticity of these canticles has been 
 enveloped by the critics in a chilling cloud of scepticism. The 
 controversy is not without its interest, but could be made intelli- 
 gible within no narrow limits. Suffice it then to say, that both 
 Tiraboschi and Ginguene acknowledge, without hesitation, the 
 poetical claims of the saint ; and that M. Delecluse, after review- 
 ing all the evidence with judicial impartiality and acumen, con- 
 cludes that the general sense, and many of the particular expres- 
 sions, are his, though, in the lapse of so many ages, the style must 
 have drifted far away from the original structure, into a form at once 
 more modern and more ornate. In this qualified sense the follow- 
 ing " Canticum Solis " may be safely read as the work of the 
 founder of the Franciscan order : 
 
 " Altissimo omnipotente bon' Signore, tue son le laude, la gloria, lo honors, e 
 ogni benedictione. A te solo se confanno, e nullo bomo e degno de nominarti. 
 
 " Laudato sia Dio mio Signore con tutte le creature, specialmente messer lo 
 Fratre Sole, il quale giorna e illumina noi per lui. E ello e bello e radiente con 
 grande splendore ; de te, Signore, porta significazione. 
 
 I' Laudato sia mio Signore, per Suora Luna e per le stelle ; il quale in cielo le 
 hai formate chiare e belle. 
 
 "Laudato sia mio Signore per Fratre Vento e per 1' Aire e Nuvole e sereno e 
 ogni tempo, per le quale dai a tutte creature sustentamento. 
 
 "Laudato sia mio Signore per Suora Acqua, la quale e molto utile, e bumile, e 
 pretiosa, e casta. 
 
 " Laudato sia mio Signore per Fratre Fuocbo, per lo quale tu allumini la notte ; 
 e ello e bello, e jocondo, e robustissimo, e forte. 
 
 " Laudato sia mio Signore per nostra Madre Terra, la quale ne sostenta, govorna 
 e produce diversi frutti, e coloriti fiori, e herbe . 
 
 " Laudato sia mio Signore per quelli che perdonano per lo tue amore, e soste-
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 95 
 
 ncno infirmitade e tribulatione. Beati quclli che sostcgneranno in pace, che de te 
 Altissimo, seranno incoronati. " 
 
 Another stanza was added in his last illness, giving thanks for 
 " our sister, the Death of the hody," the last of this strange cata- 
 logue of his kindred. Protestant reserve and English gravity alike 
 forbid any quotations of the canticles which follow. They belong 
 to that kind of anacreontic psalmody, in which Cupid prompts the 
 worship of Psyche. Such a combination of the language of Paphos 
 with the chaste fervours of the sanctuary, can never be rendered 
 tolerable to those who have been familiar from their childhood with 
 the majestic composure of the Anglican liturgy, or with the solemn 
 effusions of our Scottish church, even though it be recommended to 
 them by the pathos of Thomas a Kempis, or by the tenderness of 
 Fenelon. 
 
 Whoever shall undertake a collection of the facetiae of Francis, 
 may console himself under the inevitable result, by remembering 
 that he has failed only where Cicero and Bacon had failed before 
 him. In the tragi-comedy of life, the saint, in common with all 
 other great men, occasionally assumed the buskin ; though not so 
 much to join in the dialogue as to keep up the by-play. His jocu- 
 larities were of the kind usually distinguished as practical ; and, if 
 not eminently ludicrous, were, at least, very pregnant jests. Behold 
 him, to the unutterable amazement of his unwashed and half-naked 
 fraternity, strutting before them, on his return from Damietta, in a 
 tunic of the finest texture, with a hood behind fashionably reaching 
 to his middle, and a broad and rich frill in front usurping the func- 
 tion of clerical bands : his head tossed up towards the sky his 
 voice loud and imperious and his gait like that of a dancing-master. 
 "What this strange pantomime might mean could be conjectured by 
 none but brother Elia, whose unsubdued passion for dress had been 
 indulged during the absence of the " general minister," and who now 
 saw himself thus villanously caricatured by the aid of his own finery. 
 With his serge cloak, his sandals, and his cord, Francis resumed his 
 wonted gravity ; and the unlucky Exquisite was degraded on the 
 spot from his charge as vicar-general. On the refusal, by another 
 brother, of the obedience due to his chief, a grave was dug, the 
 offender seated upright in it, and mould cast over him till it had 
 covered his shoulders. " Art thou dead 1 " exclaimed Francis to the 
 head, which alone remained above ground. " Completely," replied 
 the terrified monk. " Arise, then," rejoined the saint, " go thy 
 ways, and remember that the dead never resist any one. Let me 
 have dead, not living followers." 
 
 These gambols, however, were as infrequent as they were uncouth.
 
 96 SAINT FRANCIS OP ASSISI. 
 
 They were but gleams of mirth, passing rapidly across a mind far 
 more often overcast by constitutional sadness. For though Faith 
 had reversed the natural springs of action in his mind, and revealed 
 to him the cheat of life, and peopled his imagination with many 
 bright and many awful forms, yet she was not attended by her usual 
 handmaids, Peace and Hope. With a heart dead to selfish delights, 
 and absorbed in holy and benevolent affections, he possessed neither 
 present serenity nor anticipated joy. Cheerless and unalluring is 
 the image of Francis of Assisi : his figure gaunt and wasted, his 
 countenance furrowed with care, his soul hurried from one excite- 
 ment to another, incapable of study, incapable of repose, forming 
 attachments but to learn their fragility, conquering difficulties but to 
 prove the vanity of conquest, living but to consolidate his Order of 
 Minor brethren, and yet haunted by constant forebodings of their 
 rapid degeneracy. Under the pressure of such solicitudes and of 
 premature disease, he indulged his natural melancholy (his only 
 self-indulgence), and gave way to tears till his eyesight had almost 
 wholly failed him. 
 
 To his wondering disciples, these natural results of low diet, 
 scanty dress, and ceaseless fatigue operating on a temperament so 
 susceptible as his, appeared as so many prodigies of grace. But the 
 admiration was not reciprocal. He saw, and vehemently reproved 
 their faults. Which of them should be the greatest was debated 
 among the Minor brethren, as once among a more illustrious fra- 
 ternity ; and, in imitation of Him who washed the feet of the aspir- 
 ing fishermen of Galilee, Francis abdicated the government of the 
 Order, and for awhile became himself nothing more than a Minor 
 brother. Which of them should gather in the greatest number of 
 female proselytes, and superintend their convents was another 
 competition which he watched with yet severer anxiety. He had 
 learnt to regard his own abduction of Clara from her father's house 
 as a sublime departure from rules which other zealots would do well 
 to observe. " Alas !" he exclaimed, " at the moment when God for- 
 bade us wives, Satan has, I fear, given us sisters." Which of them 
 should build the most splendid monasteries was yet another rivalry 
 in which he foresaw their approaching decline. " JS^ow," he said, 
 " it is who shall erect the finest religious edifices. The time is 
 coming, when others of us shall build mansions fit for the great and 
 noble of the earth. Rich and beautiful will be the dress of those 
 architects ! Well ! if our brethren may but escape mortal sin, let 
 us be satisfied." Which of them should first win the favour of 
 ecclesiastical patrons was an inquiry which their protector, Ugo- 
 lino, had suggested; but their rising ambition was energetically
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OR ASSIST. 97 
 
 denounced, by their prophet Francis, in fervent and prophetic warn- 
 ings, which may be read among his yet extant predictions. 
 
 Saints and Satirists, of a day but little remote from his own, 
 emulate each othar in recording the accomplishment of these dark 
 forebodings. At the distance of only thirty years from the death of 
 the founder, we find Bonaventura, the greatest of his successors in 
 the government of the Order, thus addressing his provincial minis- 
 ters : " The indolence of our brethren is laying open the path to 
 every vice. They are immersed in carnal repose. They roam up 
 and down everywhere, burthening every place to which they come. 
 So importunate are their demands, and such their rapacity, that it 
 has become no less terrible to fall in with them than with so many 
 robbers. So sumptuous is the structure of their magnificent build- 
 ings as to bring us all into discredit. So frequently are they involved 
 in those culpable intimacies which our rule prohibits, that suspicion, 
 scandal, and reproach have been excited against us." Listen again 
 to the ardent admirer of Francis in the 22nd book of the Paradiso : 
 
 So soft is flesh of mortals, that on earth 
 A good beginning doth no longer last 
 Than while an oak may hring its fruit to birth. 
 
 Peter began his convent without gold 
 
 Or silver, I built mine by prayer and fast ; 
 Humility for Francis won a fold. 
 
 If thou reflect how each began, then view 
 
 To what an end doth such beginning lead, 
 Thou'lt see the white assume the darkest hue. 
 
 Jordan driven backward, and the sea, that fled 
 At God's command, were miracles indeed 
 Greater than those here needful. Wrighfs Dante. 
 
 The Franciscan Order has, however, not only survived the de- 
 nunciations of Bonaventura and of Dante the banter of Erasmus 
 the broader scoffs of " The Letters of some Obscure Men " the 
 invectives of Wicliff and Luther the taunts of Milton the con- 
 temptuous equity of Bayle and the eloquence, the wit, the scorn, 
 and the resentment of half the pens of Europe ; but has outlived 
 the egregious crimes and follies of its own degenerate sons ; and 
 after six centuries still lives and flourishes ; a boast of the Papal 
 and a problem for the Protestant world. What is the principle of 
 this protracted vitality ? Whence the buoyancy, which, amidst so 
 many storms and wrecks, has so long sustained the institute of the 
 unlearned, half-crazy fugitive from the counting-house at Assisi? 
 
 Not even the idolaters of his name ascribe to him any profound 
 foresight, or intuitive genius, or bold originality of thought. The 
 eloquence for which he was renowned was no ignited logic, but a 
 
 7
 
 98 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. 
 
 burst of contagious emotion, guided by no art, fed by no stores of 
 knowledge, and directed by no intellectual prowess. It was the 
 voice of a herald still repeating the same impressive tidings, not the 
 address of an orator subjugating at once the rational and the sensi- 
 tive faculties of his audience. He was rather the compiler than the 
 inventor of the Franciscan code ; and, as a legislator, is famous for 
 only two novelties the vow of absolute poverty, which was made 
 but to be broken ; and the reconcilement of the religious with the 
 secular state in his Order of Penitence, which died away with the 
 feudal oppressions and the social exigencies which, at first, sustained 
 and nourished it. 
 
 If considered only as a part of the general system of Monasticism, 
 the success of the Franciscan rule is, however, readily explicable. 
 Men become monks and women nuns, sometimes from vulgar mo- 
 tives ; such as fashion, the desire of mutual support, the want of a 
 maintenance, inaptitude for more active duties, satiety of the pleasures 
 of life, or disgust at its disappointments, parental authority, family 
 convenience, or the like ; sometimes from superstitious fancies : 
 such as the supposed sanctity of certain relics, or the expiatory 
 value of some particular ceremonial; sometimes' from nobler im- 
 pulses ; such as the conviction that such solitude is essential to the 
 purity of the soul of the recluse, or to the usefulness of his life ; 
 but always, in some degree, from other causes of still deeper root 
 and far wider expansion. Such are, the servile spirit, which desires 
 to abdicate the burden of free will and the responsibilities of free 
 agency ; and the feeble spirit, which can stand erect, and make 
 progress, only when sustained by the pressure and the impulse of a 
 crowd ; and the wavering spirit, which takes refuge from the pains 
 of doubt in the contagion of monastic unanimity. 
 
 Neither is the success of the Franciscan institute, if viewed as 
 distinct from all other conventual orders, involved in any real ob- 
 curity. So reiterated, indeed, and so just have been the assaults 
 on the Mendicant Friars, that we usually forget that, till the days 
 of Martin Luther, the Church had never seen so great and effectual 
 a reform as theirs. During nearly two centuries, Francis and his 
 spiritual descendants, chiefly, if not exclusively, directed the two 
 great engines of the Christian warfare the Mission and the Pulpit. 
 Kothing in the histories of Wesley or of Whitfield can be compared 
 with the enthusiasm which everywhere welcomed them, or with 
 the immediate and visible results of their labours. In an age of 
 oligarchical tyranny they were the protectors of the weak ; in an age 
 of ignorance the instructors of mankind ; and in an age of profligacy 
 the stern vindicators of the holiness of the sacerdotal character, and
 
 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSIST. 93 
 
 the virtues of domestic life. "While other religious societies with- 
 drew from the world, they entered, studied, and traversed it. They 
 were followed by the wretched, the illiterate, and the obscure, 
 through, whom, from the first, the Church has been chiefly re- 
 plenished ; but not by them only. In every part of Europe, the 
 rich, the pOAverful, and the learned were found among their pro- 
 selytes. In our own land Duns Scotus, Alexander Hales, Robert 
 Grostete, and Roger Bacon, lent to this new Christian confederacy 
 the lustre and the authority of their names. And even when, by 
 the natural descent of corruption, it had fallen into well-deserved 
 contumely, still the Mission and the Pulpit, and the tradition of 
 the great men by whom it was originally organised and nurtured, 
 were sufficient to arrest the progress of decay, and to redeem for the 
 Franciscan Order a permanent and' a conspicuous station among the 
 "Princedoms, Dominations, Powers," which hold their appointed 
 rank, and perform their appropriate offices, in the great spiritual 
 dynasty of Rome. 
 
 The tragedy of Hamlet, leaving out the character of the Prince of 
 Denmark, the biography of Turenne, with the exception of his 
 wars, may, perhaps, be but inadequate images of a life of St Francis, 
 omitting all notice of the doctrines he taught, and excluding any 
 account of the influence of his theology on himself or his contem- 
 poraries, and on the generations which have succeeded him. This, 
 however, is not a biography, but a rapid sketch put forth by secular 
 men to secular readers. It would be indecorous to suppose that our 
 profound divines, Scottish or English, would waste the midnight oil 
 over so slight an attempt to revive the memory of a once famous 
 Father of the Church, now fallen into unmerited neglect and indis- 
 criminate opprobrium among us. Yet if, indeed, any student of 
 Jewell or of Knox should so far descend from his Bodleian emin- 
 ences as to cast a hasty glance over these lines, let him, if he will, 
 first heartily censure, and then supply, their too palpable omissions. 
 Let him write the complete story of St Francis, and estimate im- 
 partially his acts, his opinions, his character, and his labours ; and 
 he will have written one important chapter of a History of the 
 Monastic Orders, and will have contributed to supply one great 
 deficiency in the ecclesiastical literature of the Protestant world.
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 ON the dawn of the day on which, in the year 1534, the Church of 
 Rome celebrated the feast of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, 
 a little company of men emerged in solemn procession from the deep 
 shadows cast by the towers of ISTotre Dame over the silent city below 
 them. In a silence not less profound, except when broken by the 
 chant of the matins appropriate to that sacred season, they climbed 
 the Hill of Martyrs, and descended into the Crypt which then ascer- 
 tained the spot where the Apostle of France had won the crown of 
 martyrdom. With a stately though halting gait, as one accustomed 
 to military command, marched at their head a man of swarthy com- 
 plexion, bald-headed, and of middle stature, who had passed the 
 meridian of life ; his deep-set eyes glowing, as with a perennial fire, 
 from beneath brows which, had phrenology then been born, she 
 might have portrayed in her loftiest style, but which, even without 
 her aid, announced to every observer a commission from on high to 
 subjugate and to rule mankind. So majestic, indeed, was the as- 
 pect of Ignatius Loyola, that, during the sixteenth century, few, if 
 any, of the books of his Order appeared without the impress of that 
 imperial countenance. Beside him, in the chapel of St Denys, 
 knelt another worshipper ; whose manly bearing, buoyant step, clear 
 blue eye, and finely chiselled features, contrasted strangely with the 
 solemnities in which he was engaged. Then in early manhood, 
 Francis Xavier united in his person the dignity befitting his birth 
 as a grandee of Spain, and the grace which should adorn a page of 
 the Queen of Castile and Arragon. Not less incongruous with the 
 scene in which they bore their parts, were the slight forms of the 
 boy Alphonso Salmeron, and of his bosom friend lago Laynez, the 
 destined successor of Ignatius in his spiritual dynasty. With them 
 Nicholas Alphonso Bobadilla, and Simon Rodriguez the first a 
 teacher, the second a student, of philosophy prostrated themselves 
 before the altar, where ministered Peter Faber, once a shepherd in 
 the mountains of Savoy, but now a priest in holy orders. By his
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 101 
 
 hands was distributed to his associates the seeming bread, over which 
 he had uttered words of more than miraculous efficacy ; and then 
 \vere lifted up their united voices, uttering in low but distinct arti- 
 culation, an oath, at the deep significance of which the nations might 
 have trembled or rejoiced. Never did human lips pronounce a vow 
 more religiously observed, or pregnant with results more momentous. 
 
 Ignatius Loyola was born in the year 1491, at Guipuscoa, in 
 the province of Biscay. His mother, who had already borne to her 
 husband ten children, resolved to bring forth this her youngest son 
 in a stable, in memory of the birth-place of the Redeemer at Bethle- 
 hem. A few years later his father, a wealthy Hidalgo, introduced 
 the boy as a page into the service of Ferdinand the Catholic, by 
 whose command he was trained up in the graces of the court, the 
 exercises of chivalry, the discipline of the camp, and the observances 
 of religion. The traditions of his youth represent him as one in 
 whom seeming contradictions met and were reconciled : as, at the 
 same time, a voluptuary revelling in sensual delights, and a knight 
 of surpassing hardihood ; as a profligate in his habits, and yet 
 edifying his companions by his modest speech and decorous 
 manners ; as quickly roused to fierce anger, and as quickly sub- 
 dued to gentleness and peace ; as at once destitute of learning, 
 and an ardent cultivator of poetry ; as a captive in the chains of 
 vice, while aspiring after the highest franchises of virtue ; as 
 habitually distracted by conflicting aims, though living under the 
 constant dominion of one master passion the passion for control- 
 ling the wills and directing the conduct of other men. 
 
 At the siege of Pampeluna, by the forces of Francis the First, in 
 the year 1521, Ignatius, in scorn of the alarm which had induced 
 the garrison to capitulate, retired with a single follower into the 
 citadel ; and, while defending a breach in the walls, was struck 
 down by a cannon-ball, which broke and splintered one of his legs. 
 His gallant enemies, raising him on their arms, bore him to the 
 tent of their general, Andre de Foix ; who, filled with admiration 
 of his undaunted valour, placed him under the care of a French 
 surgeon, and then sent him home to the adjacent castle of Loyola, 
 with all the honours of war, and with the fracture apparently 
 reduced. The operation had, however, been ill-performed, and the 
 cure was imperfect ; and, to repair the error, it was thought 
 necessary that the bone should be broken anew. The fever which 
 followed nearly brought to a premature grave the future restorer of 
 the Papacy. 
 
 Thus far we have trodden on ground over which 110 prodigy 
 hangs ; bat our path now lies through the land of miracles. While
 
 102 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 the patient slept, the Prince of the Apostles laid his venerable hand 
 on the limb, and at once the fever ceased, the pains pa?sed away, 
 and the fractured bones resumed their natural position. Yet the 
 therapeutic skill of St Peter was less perfect than might have been 
 expected from so exalted a chirurgeon. A splinter still protruded 
 through the skin, and the wounded leg was shortened, shrunken, 
 and disfigured. To regain his fair proportions, Ignatius submitted 
 to tortures from which a martyr might have shrunk. The fragment 
 of his bone was violently wrenched away, and his limb placed in a 
 rack which, during several days, was strained to draw back the 
 nerves, sinews, and dislocated parts into their proper places. This 
 frightful sacrifice at the shrine of Comeliness was, however, offered 
 in vaiii. Her votary was long confined to his couch, oppressed by 
 the sad conviction that, whether the lute should breathe a summons 
 to the gaillard, or the trumpet ring out an alarm to the battle, the 
 sound would henceforth be bat as a mockery to him. Nor (if the 
 tale be true) was he unhaunted by the still sorer misgiving that the 
 bright eyes of his Angelica (for our Orlando was of course also 
 Innamorato) might henceforward be turned with greater favour on 
 some Medoro of unimpeachable symmetry of form, than on himself, 
 halting at every step on a leg misshapen, mutilated, and contracted. 
 
 Books of knight errantry soothed these anxieties, and relieved the 
 lassitude of sickness ; and, when these tales were exhausted, the 
 disabled soldier betook himself to a series of still more marvellous 
 romances. In the legends of the saints he discovered a new field 
 of emulation and of glory. When contrasted with their self-con- 
 quests and their high rewards, the achievements and the renown of 
 Roland and of Amadis waxed dim. When compared with those 
 peerless damsels, for whose smiles Paladins had fought and died, 
 the awful image of feminine loveliness and angelic purity which 
 had irradiated the hermit's cell and the path of the way-worn 
 pilgrim, presented itself to his mental vision in a glory transcendent 
 and unapproachable. Far as the heavens are above the earth would 
 rise the plighted fealty of the knight of the Virgin Mother over the 
 noblest devotion of mere human chivalry. He would cast his 
 shield over the Church which ascribed to her more than celestial 
 dignities, and Avould bathe in the blood of her enemies the sword 
 once desecrated to the mean ends of earthly ambition. 
 
 These ardent vows were not unheeded by her to whom they 
 were addressed. Environed in light, and clasping her infant to her 
 bosom, she revealed herself to the adoring gaze of her champion. 
 At that heavenly vision, all fantasies of worldly and sensual de- 
 light, like exorcised demons, fled from his soul into an eternal
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 103 
 
 exile. Arising from these erotic dreams, he suspended at her shrine 
 his secular weapons, performed his nocturnal vigils, and, -with 
 returning days, retired from the chapel, to consecrate his future life 
 to the glory of the Virgo Deipara. 
 
 Restored to health, the knight once more vaulted into his saddle, 
 and, guiding his war-horse toward the altar of Our Lady of Mont- 
 serrat, caricoled in advance of the throng of ignobler pilgrims, who, 
 like himself, had made a solemn vow to worship there. A Moor 
 from Granada encountered and accosted him ; but from courteous 
 greetings the two cavaliers soon passed to fierce and thorny contro- 
 versy. If they had graduated at Salamanca, they could not have 
 fallen upon a logomachy setting more triumphantly at defiance 
 every imaginable attempt to resolve it. The infidel affirmed, and 
 the Christian denied, that Mary had ceased to be a virgin when she 
 became a mother ; and the clashing of sword and scimitar seemed 
 about to succeed to the war of words, when, at the point of inter- 
 section of several roads, the Mahometan (so runs the story) gave 
 spurs to his horse and fled. The champion of the Madonna fol- 
 lowed ; but, throwing the rein on the neck of his steed, he left it 
 to the animal's discretion either to follow or to decline the road 
 which the fugitive had taken. To the observance of this law or 
 custom of chivalry, the Paynim was indebted that day for an un- 
 cloven skull an advantage which his most Catholic Sovereign did 
 not probably allow him long to enjoy. ' 
 
 At Montserrat, Ignatius performed such acts of devotion as might 
 best beseem so illustrious a sanctuary and so zealous a worshipper ; 
 and then betook himself to the adjacent town of Manreza, as a 
 place admirably suited to the austerities with which he proposed to 
 celebrate his self-dedication to Our Lady of the Serried Mount. 
 Seven hours were daily given to prayer, during which he remained 
 silent and motionless as a statue. His week-day diet was bread and 
 water, to which on Sundays he added a condiment of herbs and 
 ground ashes boiled together. Next to his skin he wore alternately 
 an iron chain, a horse-hair cloth, and a sash of prickly briars. 
 Three times each day he laid the scourge resolutely on his naked 
 back. The bare earth was his bed. He became one of the fratern- 
 ity of beggars who frequented the hospital of Manreza, exaggerated 
 in his own person whatever was most revolting in their habits and 
 appearance, revelled in filth, and rendered to the sick, and especially 
 to such as were afflicted with ulcers, services of which it is impos- 
 sible to read the account without a strong disposition to sickness. 
 
 It has long been known how fluently "the devil can quote 
 Scripture for his purpose " but to Ignatius belongs the discovery,
 
 104 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 that Satan can present his temptations to mankind in the form of 
 excellent sense and sound reasoning. The Evil Spirit Avas, we are 
 told, afflicted by his excessive humility, and consequent happiness ; 
 and therefore assailed him with the following catechetical seduc- 
 tion : " Is it not possible to be holy without being filthy ? Is it 
 essential to the purity of your soul that vermin should crawl over 
 your person ? Does it become a knight, of a lineage so noble as 
 yours, to appear among men as a Lazar 1 Would not your virtues 
 yield a brighter and more effective example in the court or in the 
 camp, than in this mean hospital 1 " 
 
 To escape these diabolical suggestions, Ignatius quitted Manreza 
 for a neighbouring cavern. It was in the centre of a wilderness, 
 and could not be approached except by forcing the body through 
 thorns and briars. At the extremity it was dark as the grave ; 
 though a fortunate crevice or loophole near the entrance enabled 
 the hermit to gaze at the distant church of Our Lady of Montserrat. 
 In this dismal cell, he delivered over his mind and body to pains 
 which entirely eclipsed those of his hospital at Manreza. Five 
 times each day he bruised and tore his flesh with a blunt iron 
 scourge, beating his bosom at intervals with sharp flint stones, 
 and, with diseased ingenuity, perverting every act of adoration into 
 a penance and a torture. At one time he would commune with the 
 Virgin Mother; at another he would wrestle with the Spirit of 
 Evil ; and so abrupt were his vicissitudes of rapture and despair, 
 that in the storm of turbid passions his reason had nearly given 
 way. Friendly hands dragged him from his hiding-place, and other 
 hands, in intention, at least, not less friendly, recorded his feverish 
 ravings. At one time, he conversed with voices audible to no ear 
 but his. At another, he sought to propitiate Him before whom he 
 trembled, by expiations that would have been more fitly oifered to 
 Moloch. Spiritual doctors ministered to his relief, but they pre- 
 scribed in vain. The simple truth was too simple for them. They 
 could not perceive that in revealing Himself to mankind in the 
 character of a Father, that awful Being has claimed, as peculiarly 
 His own, the gentlest, the kindest, and the most confiding affections 
 of our nature. 
 
 At the verge of madness Ignatius paused. That noble intellect 
 was not to be whelmed beneath the tempests in which so many 
 have sunk ; but neither was he to be rescued by any vulgar methods. 
 Standing on the steps of a Dominican church, he was reciting the 
 office of Our Lady, when (as all his biographers assure us) Heaven 
 itself was laid open to the eye of the worshipper. That ineffable
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 105 
 
 mystery which the author of the Athanasian Creed has laboured to 
 enunciate in words, was laid bare to him as an object, not of faith, 
 but of actual sight. The past ages of the world were rolled back in 
 his presence ; and he beheld the material fabric of things rising into 
 being, and discerned the motives which had prompted this exercise of 
 the creative energy. To his spiritualised sense was disclosed the 
 mysterious process by which the Host is transubstantiated : and 
 those other Christian verities, which it is permitted to common 
 men to receive only as exercises of belief, now became known to 
 him by immediate inspection and direct consciousness. During 
 eight successive days his body reposed in an unbroken trance, while 
 his spirit thus imbibed disclosures for which the tongues of men 
 have no appropriate language. He attempted, indeed, to impart 
 them in a volume of fourscore leaves ; but, dark with excess of 
 light, his words held the learned and the ignorant alike in speech- 
 less wonder. 
 
 Ignatius returned to this sublunary scene with a mission not 
 unmeet for an envoy from the empyrean world of which he had thus 
 become a temporary denizen. He returned to establish on earth a 
 theocracy of which he should himself be the first administrator, and 
 to which multitudes of every tribe and kindred of men should be 
 the subjects. He returned, no longer a 'sordid, half-distracted 
 anchorite, but a kind of Swedenborg-Franklin ; distinguished alike 
 by designs of gigantic magnitude and of superhuman audacity ; and 
 by the clear good sense, the profound sagacity, the calm perseverance, 
 and the flexible address with which he was to pursue them. He re- 
 turned to show how the delirious enthusiasm of the cloister may be 
 combined and reconciled, in the heroic nature, with the shrewdness of 
 the exchange. 
 
 Neither in the hospital and cavern of Manreza, nor in his parox- 
 ysms of disease, nor in the ecstasies of his recovery, had the mind 
 of Ignatius been really drifting without aim or anchorage. Among 
 the saintly prodigies which had first amused his sick bed, and had 
 then entranced the student of them, he had seized with peculiar 
 fervour on the marvellous acts of Benedict, of Francis, and of 
 Dominick ; and the idea of founding a new monastic dynasty became 
 at first a plaything of the imagination ; then a settled desire of the 
 heart ; and then a vast project revolved in his understanding from 
 day to day, until it had at length become a probable, a consistent, 
 and a comprehensive whole. He once more took his place in human 
 society in the garb and with the exterior aspect of other men ; but 
 labouring with a purpose which had already placed in his visionary
 
 106 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 grasp the sceptre with which, in yet distant years, he was destined 
 to rule his spiritual family, and through them, to agitate the nations 
 of the earth, from the Ganges to La Plata. 
 
 The first fruits of the labours of Ignatius in the execution of 
 this stupendous design was the Book of Spiritual Exercises. It 
 was originally written in Spanish ; and, by the command of the Pope, 
 Paul the Third, was rendered into two Latin versions the first 
 severely literal, the other exhibiting the sense, not only with greater 
 elegance, but with more substantial accuracy. Paul then published 
 a bull, dated the 31st July, 1548, in which he commended the 
 latter of those translations to the study of the faithful. A new 
 version of the Spiritual Exercises from an original Spanish MS., 
 corrected in the handwriting of Ignatius himself, was published at 
 Eome, in 1834, by the Eev. Eather John Roothaan, the present 
 General of the Order of Jesus. On collating that MS. with the 
 text of 1548, M. Roothaan discovered that the former translators 
 had, in many passages, not only misrepresented, but impaired the 
 sense of the great author ; and his supposition is, that the humility 
 of Ignatius had constrained him altogether to abandon his own 
 literary composition to the disposal and to the mercy of others. 
 Whatever may be the truth of this strange hypothesis, it is at least 
 clear, that, till the year 1834, the world had never possessed a 
 trustworthy edition of the single literary work of the great founder 
 of Jesuitism. 
 
 The Spiritual Exercises form a manual of what may be termed 
 " The Art of Conversion." It proposes a scheme of self-discipline by 
 which, in the course of four weeks, passed in entire seclusion from 
 the world, that mighty work is to be accomplished. In the first, 
 the penitent is conducted through a series of dark retrospects to 
 abase, and of gloomy prospects to alarm him. Those ends attained, 
 he is, during the next seven days, to enrol himself in the army of 
 the faithful, studying the biography of the Divine Captain of that 
 elect host, and choosing with extreme circumspection that plan of 
 life, religious or secular, in which he may best be able to tread in 
 His steps, and to bear His standard, emblematical at once of suffer- 
 ing and of conquest. To sustain the soldier of the cross in this 
 protracted warfare, his spiritual eye is to be directed, during the 
 third of his solitary weeks, towards that unfathomable abyss of woe 
 into which the Redeemer descended to rescue the race of Adam from 
 the power of Satan and of death : and then seven suns are to rise 
 and set while the disenthralled spirit is to chant triumphant hal- 
 lelujahs, elevating her desires heavenwards, contemplating glories 
 till then unimaginable, and mysteries never before revealed : when,
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 107 
 
 at length, the spiritual exercises close by an absolute surrender of 
 all the delights and interests of his sublunary state, as an holocaust, 
 to be consumed by the undying flame of Divine love on the altar of 
 the regenerate heart. 
 
 This book is at once a momentous chapter in the autobiography 
 of Ignatius, and the earliest of his canons for the government of 
 his future society. It discloses his own spiritual state during the 
 penances and ecstasies of Manreza ; and explains what is the con- 
 dition of mind into which he desired to bring his expected associates 
 in the anticipated labours then lying in dim and shadowy prospect 
 before him. The book would be full of interest, if regarded merely 
 as the one extant devotional production of a man of such command- 
 ing genius. It is yet more so, when considered as the one insight 
 we possess into the early religious character of him whom the Papacy 
 honours as the greatest of her champions, and the Reformation 
 dreads as the most formidable of her antagonists. 
 
 As if to disappoint the expectations raised both by the subject 
 and the object of the book, it is neither pathetic, nor impassioned, 
 nor profound, nor learned ; but, from one end to the other, inva- 
 riably dry and didactic, even when it delineates and enjoins the 
 highest raptures of devotion. It lays down rules for the conduct 
 of what Bunyan calls the " siege of Mansoul," in the precise and 
 peremptory style in which Vauban might have prescribed the plan 
 of an attack on Mentz or Courtray. A series of operations is given 
 for each, in order, of the twenty-eight days of devotional retirement. 
 Each day has its preparatory prayer, and each one prelude, or more, 
 a prelude being an effort of the imagination, by which the recluse 
 is to call up before his mental sight the persons or the places with 
 which his thoughts are about to be engaged ; or, if he is preparing 
 to meditate on things not sensuous (as, for example, his own sinful- 
 ness), he is to conceive of such things in parable. Thus, he may 
 represent to himself his body as a prison, and his soul as a prisoner 
 or the world as a desolate valley thronged with wild beasts, among 
 whom he is condemned to wander as an exile. 
 
 After offering the prayer, and portraying to himself the "pre- 
 lude " of the day, the penitent is required to traverse a prescribed 
 line of contemplation, in which a certain number of indispensable 
 points are marked for his guidance. The diurnal course has usually 
 seven such stations. Take as a specimen the second day of the 
 first week. On that day the exercitant is first to make a general 
 survey of his past sins ; secondly, to ponder over the malignity of 
 each class of offences ; thirdly, to compare his own baseness \vith 
 the sanctity of the superior orders of intelligences ; fourthly, to con-
 
 108 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 trast them with the moral attributes of Deity ; fifthly, to consider 
 (not without articulate exclamations) how his sins are aggravated 
 by the providential bounties and the longsuffering of God ; sixthly, 
 to offer, in a divine colloquy, vows of amendment ; seventhly, to 
 repeat the Lord's Prayer. 
 
 In the same manner the neophyte has to perform, throughout the 
 month, a daily series of penitential or eucharistic evolutions; not 
 as his own heart or as a higher influence may dictate, but at the 
 word of command of his General. For even in the cavern of 
 Manreza, Ignatius was still internally gazing on the encampment 
 and siege of Pampeluna. In the lowest depths of his contrition he 
 could never forget that he was a soldier. Although he had finally 
 quitted the service of Ferdinand for that of the Madonna, visions 
 of mortal enemies, of well-disciplined followers, and of glorious 
 victories, still continued to haunt his fancy, and to guide his pen. 
 He crowded his pages with military images long after he had laid 
 aside the carnal weapons of a merely secular warfare. 
 
 Thus, on the fourth day of the second week, the performer of 
 the spiritual exercises is to direct his mind's eye towards two vast 
 champaigns. One is near Jerusalem ; where, in a pleasant valley, 
 the belligerent Redeemer, resplendent in form, and, in aspect, of 
 surpassing loveliness, erects His standard as the chief commander of 
 all the holy and the wise, and from that noble army sends forth 
 detachments of apostles, disciples, and ministers to rescue the in- 
 habitants of every land from ruin, and to improve and bless every 
 condition of human life. The other plain is a battle-field in the 
 province of Babylon ; where, seated on a fiery throne, surrounded 
 by foetid vapours, horrible in shape, and of terrific countenance, 
 stands Lucifer, the generalissimo of a malignant host inveterate 
 adversaries of Christ, and inexorable foes of the race of Adam, who, 
 traversing the world at the bidding of their leader, propagate guilt, 
 and lamentation, and woe in every abode of man, and pollute and 
 sadden every soul which still retains any trace of her divine origin. 
 
 Throughout the book Ignatius prolongs this attempt to subjugate 
 all the other faculties of the mind to the imagination. With that 
 view the penitent is commanded to descend, like Dante, into the 
 infernal regions, and there to look steadfastly on the mighty con- 
 flagration, and on the bodies of living fire in which the souls of the 
 wicked are pent up. He is to listen to their howlings and blas- 
 phemies. He is to smell the smoke, the sulphur, and the putres- 
 cent odours, of the place of torment. He is to taste the bitter 
 tears which are shed there ; and to handle the undying worm ; and 
 to feel the scorching of the inextinguishable flame. At another
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 109 
 
 time lie is to visit the abode to which the Virgin Mother, when 
 wounded in her own soul, retired from Calvary ; and is to examine 
 the plan, the chambers, the cells, and the oratory of her humble 
 dwelling. This ideal vision is to rise higher still. The Deity him- 
 self is to be seen as actually present in all the elements in the 
 vegetation of plants in the sensation of animals in the intel- 
 ligence of man. He is to be actually beheld in every creative and 
 conservative energy, and in every sanctifying influence ; until the 
 Divine omnipresence shall become, not a mere truth abiding in the 
 reason, but an object of direct, though spiritual perception. 
 
 Closely interwoven with these revelations of what is to pass in 
 the hidden chambers of imagery, are precepts of plain sound sense, 
 like so many solid rocks breaking through the dazzling unrealities 
 of the Fata Morgana. Thus Ignatius teaches, that he who would 
 wisely choose his plan of life, must determine with himself what 
 are the great ends of his existence ; so that to those ends all means 
 may be subordinate, instead of rendering the ultimate design sub- 
 ordinate to what is merely instrumental. He directs us to suppose 
 ourselves, not the persons by whom the choice of a calling is to be 
 made, but the advisers of some very dear friend, whose circum- 
 stances exactly resemble our own ; and he bids us to follow the ad- 
 vice which we should give to that imaginary friend. "We are taught 
 to suppose the hour of death actually arrived, and are to choose our 
 calling, as though in the actual presence of that awful antagonist of 
 all self-indulgent sophistry. And to those who are meditating 
 matrimony are prescribed a series of judicious reflections respecting 
 the kind of household and establishment they ought to maintain ; 
 respecting the right methods of governing them ; respecting the 
 means of rendering their conversation and example instructive to 
 their families ; and respecting the appropriation of their income 
 between the several classes of expenditure, personal, domestic, and 
 eleemosynary. 
 
 He must have been deeply read in the nature of man, who should 
 have predicted such first-fruits as these from the restored health of 
 the distracted visionary, who, in the hospital and cavern of Man- 
 reza, and in the long delirium which followed, had alternately 
 sounded the basest strings of humility on earth, and the living 
 chords which vibrate with spontaneous harmonies along the seventh 
 heavens. His plan of transmuting profligates into converts by a 
 mental process, of which, during any one of her evolutions round 
 our planet, the moon is to witness the commencement and the 
 close, may possibly pass for a plagiarism from the academies of 
 Laputa. But Ignatius Loyola had his eyes open, and his attention
 
 110 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 awake, even when most absorbed in dreams. By force of an in- 
 stinct with which such minds as his alone are gifted, he could rival 
 the shrewd, the practical, and the worldly wise, even when aban- 
 doning himself to the current of emotions which they are alike un- 
 able to comprehend or to endure. His mind resembled the body 
 of his great disciple, Francis Xavier ; which, as he preached or bap- 
 tized, rose majestically towards the skies, while his feet (the pious 
 curiosity of his hearers ascertained the fact) retained their firm hold 
 on the earth below. The object of the Spiritual Exercises was at 
 once to excite and to control religious sensibilities. While aiming 
 to exalt the soul above terrestrial objects, he was intent on disen- 
 chanting his followers of the self-deceits which usually wait on that 
 exaltation. Though most remote from the tone of feeling which 
 animates the gay and busy scenes of life, the book everywhere attests 
 the keen scrutiny with which he had observed those scenes, and 
 the profound discernment with which he had studied the actors in 
 them. To his Protestant readers the Evangelical spirit of the writer 
 must have been the occasion of great, and perhaps unwelcome, sur- 
 prise. It would, indeed, be easy to extract from his pages many 
 propositions which the Synod of Westminster would have anathe- 
 matised ; but that grave assembly might have drawn from them 
 much to confirm the chief article of their own confessions and cate- 
 chisms. If he yielded an idolatrous homage to some of the demigods 
 of Rome, his supreme adoration was strictly reserved for Him to 
 whom alone adoration is due. If he ascribed to ritual expiations a 
 false and imaginary value, all his mighty powers were bowed down 
 in a submissive affiance in the Divine nature, as revealed to us under 
 the veil of human infirmity, and of more than human suffering. 
 Philip Doddridge, one of those who have breathed most freely on 
 earth the atmosphere of heaven, produced, at the distance of two 
 centuries, a work which the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola 
 might have suggested, and of many parts of which it might have 
 afforded the model ; so many are still the points of contact between 
 those who, ranging themselves round the great common centre of 
 the faith of Christians, occupy the most opposite positions in that 
 expanded circle. 
 
 The nine years of the life of Ignatius which immediately followed 
 the production of his book were worn away in pilgrimages, in feats 
 of asceticism, in the working (as it was believed) of miracles, and 
 in escapes, all but miraculous, from the dangers which his devout 
 and martial spirit induced him to encounter. It is a steep path by 
 which the heroes of the Church have scaled the sublime heights of 
 " Perfection ; " and his vows constrained him thus to pursue it
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. Ill 
 
 But the same vows obliged him to conduct his fellow-pilgrims from 
 the City of Destruction to the Land of Beulah. In prison and in 
 shipwreck, fainting with hunger or wasted with disease, his inflexible 
 spirit brooded over that bright, though as yet shapeless vision ; until 
 at length it assumed a coherent form as he knelt on the Mount of 
 Olives, and traced there the last and the indelible foot-print of the 
 ascending Redeemer of mankind. At that hallowed spot had ended 
 the weary way of Him who had bowed the heavens, and come down 
 to execute on earth a mission of unutterable love, and of thought- 
 surpassing self-denial. There also was revealed to the prophetic eye 
 of the founder of the Order of Jesus (no Seer like genius kindled by 
 high resolves !) the long line of missionaries who, animated by his 
 example, and guided by his instructions, should proclaim that holy 
 name from the rising to the setting sun. It was indeed a futurity 
 perceptible only to the telescopic eye of faith. At the mature age 
 of thirty, possessing no language but his own, no science but that 
 of the camp, and no literature beyond the biographies of Saints and 
 Paladins, he became the self-destined teacher of the future teachers 
 of the world. Hoping against hope, he returned to Barcelona ; and 
 there, as the class-fellow of little children, commenced the study of 
 the first rudiments of the Latin tongue. 
 
 Among the established facetiee of the stage, is the distraction of 
 some dramatic Eloisa attempting to conjugate the verb Amo, under 
 the guidance of her too attractive Abelard. Few playwrights pro- 
 bably have been aware that the jest had its type, if not its origin, 
 in the scholastic experience of Ignatius Loyola. His advance in 
 the grammar was arrested by a malignant spirit at the same critical 
 point, and in much the same manner. Assuming the garb of an 
 angel of light, the demon succeeded in driving from his memory 
 the inflections of the verb, by suggesting at each some corresponding 
 elevation of his soul heavenwards. To baffle his insidious enemy, 
 the harassed scholar implored the pedagogue to make a liberal use 
 of that discipline, the pain or the efficacy of which, who that has 
 endured it can ever forget ] The exorcism was complete. Amo be- 
 came familiar to his recollection in all her affectionate moods, and 
 in all her changeful tenses. Then began Thomas a Kempis to speak 
 to him intelligibly ; and then Erasmus disclosed to him treasures of 
 wisdom and of wit formerly buried in the impenetrable recesses of 
 an unknown tongue. Energy won her accustomed triumphs ; and 
 in the year 1528 he entered the University of Paris as a student of 
 the Humanities, and of what was then called Philosophy. 
 
 The fourth of the ten decades of human life (those ten golden 
 years in. which other men achieve, or most strenuously labour for,
 
 112 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 distinction), was devoted by Ignatius to the studies preparatory to 
 his great undertaking. At one time he listened to the preelections 
 of grave professors ; at another he traversed England and the Nether- 
 lands as a beggar, soliciting the means of subsistence. But, whether 
 he sat at the feet of the learned, or sued for the alms of the rich, 
 he was still maturing more lofty designs than the most ambitious 
 monarch of the house of Valois, or of Plantagenet, had ever dared 
 to cherish. At Paris he at length found the means of carrying into 
 effect the cherished purposes of so many years. It was the heroic 
 age of Spain ; and there was no field of adventure, secular or spirit- 
 ual, into which the countrymen of Gonsalvo and of Cortes feared to 
 follow any adventurous leader. 
 
 "We have partly seen how Ignatius proposed to convert men into 
 Jesuits by a course of solitary devotional exercises ; and we are not 
 wholly unable to explain the method by which he rendered his own 
 personal intercourse with them conducive to the same end. On 
 the contemplative and the timid, he imposed severe exercises of 
 active virtue. To the gay and ardent, he appealed in a spirit still 
 more buoyant than their own. He presented himself neck deep in 
 a pool of frozen water, to teach an otherwise obdurate debauchee 
 how to subdue the appetites of the flesh. To a hard-hearted priest 
 he made a general confession of his own sins, with such agonies of 
 remorse and shame, as to break up, by force of sympathy, the fount- 
 ains of penitence in the bosom of the confessor. He engaged at 
 billiards with a joyous lover of the game, on condition that which- 
 ever of the two might be defeated should serve his antagonist during 
 the following month in whatever manner the conqueror should pre- 
 scribe ; and the victorious saint consigned his adversary to the per- 
 formance of the four weeks of the Spiritual Exercises. He encour- 
 aged and shared the wildest ascetic extravagances of his disciples. 
 His countenance was as haggard, his self-flagellations as cruel, and 
 his couch and diet as sordid as the rest. When he saw them faint 
 with the extremity of their sufferings, he would assume the pro- 
 phetical character, and promote, by predicting, their recovery. 
 Rodriguez, one of the gentlest and most patient of them, fled for 
 relief to a solitary hermitage ; but found his retreat obstructed by a 
 man whom he described as of terrible aspect and gigantic stature, 
 armed with a naked sword, and breathing menaces. Hosez, another 
 of his followers, happening to die at the moment when Ignatius, 
 prostrate before the altar, was reciting from the Confiteor the words 
 " Et omnibus sanctis," that countless host was (as the Saint assured 
 the survivors) revealed to his eye, and, among them, resplendent in
 
 THE POUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 113 
 
 glory, appeared his deceased friend, to sustain and animate the hopes 
 of his still militant brethren. 
 
 Thus making himself all things to all men, he constrained his com- 
 panions in study to become first his pupils, and then his associates 
 in religion. Many of them, indeed, yielded at once, and without a 
 struggle, to the united influence of his sanctity and his genius ; and, 
 from these more docile converts, he selected no less than eight of 
 the ten original members of his infant order. After performing the 
 initiatory spiritual exercises, they all swore, on the consecrated Host 
 in the crypt of St Denys, to accompany their spiritual father on a 
 mission to Palestine ; or, .if that should be impracticable, to submit 
 themselves to the Vicar of Christ to be disposed of at his pleasure. 
 
 Impetuous as had been the temper of Ignatius in early life, he 
 had now learnt to be patient of the tardy growth of great designs. 
 Leaving his disciples to complete their studies at Paris, under the 
 care of Peter Faber, he returned to Spain to recruit their number, to 
 mature his plans, and perhaps to escape from a too familiar inter- 
 course with his future subjects. In the winter of 1536, they com- 
 menced their pilgrimage to the Eternal City. At Venice they were 
 joined by Ignatius. They who would conquer crowns, whether 
 secular or spiritual, must needs tread in slippery places. As he jour- 
 neyed to Eome, accompanied by Laynez, but in advance of the rest, 
 he saw a vision, the account of which, derived from his own lips, it 
 is painful to transcribe. It exhibited that Being whom no eye hath 
 seen, and whom no tongue may lightly name ; and with Him the 
 Eternal Son, bearing a heavy cross, and uttering the welcome assur- 
 ance, " I will be propitious to you at Eome." 
 
 There can be no doubt that Ignatius made this statement, and that 
 he made it with a conviction of its truth. But they must be in servi- 
 tude to a party, and to a name, who can ascribe a due reverencee for 
 what is most high and most holy, to the mind which could admit 
 such a conviction, and to the tongue which could give it utterance. 
 
 Notwithstanding this supposed divine promise, Ignatius found it 
 no easy task to obtain the requisite papal sanction for the establish- 
 ment of his Order. In that age the regular or monastic clergy had 
 to contend with an almost universal unpopularity. "With the 
 bishops and secular priests they had long been waging a bitter war- 
 fare. They had now to encounter the additional hostility of the wits, 
 the Eeformers, and the Vatican itself. A large share of the disasters 
 under which the Church of Eome was suffering was not unreason- 
 ably attributed to then? laxity of manners and dissoluteness of life. 
 To oppose his formidable antagonists in every part of Europe, the 
 
 8
 
 114 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM! 
 
 Pope had given his confidence and encouragement to the Theatins, 
 and other isolated preachers, who were labouring at once to protect 
 and to purify the fold, hy diffusing among them their own deep and 
 genuine spirit of devotion. At such a moment it seemed an equivo- 
 cal or dangerous policy to call another religious order into existence. 
 Both the new and zealous allies, and the ancient supporters, of the 
 Papacy, might he expected to regard such an institution with extreme 
 jealousy and disfavour. Neither did the morbid foresight of the 
 Vatican fail to perceive, that the chief of a society projected on a 
 plan of such stupendous magnitude, might become a dangerous rival 
 even to the successors of St Peter. 
 
 Ignatius, therefore, consumed three years in unprofitable suits for 
 a bull of incorporation. He endeavoured, by lavish promises ,to pro- 
 pitiate not mere mortal man only, but the Deity himself. He en- 
 gaged to offer three thousand masses, if so his prayer might be 
 granted. Earth and heaven seemed equally deaf to his offers, when 
 at length terror extracted from Paul the Third the concession which 
 no entreaty and no prayers had been able to extort. 
 
 The Eeformation had crossed the Alps, and made an alarming 
 progress in the very bosom of Italy. Ferrara seemed about to fall 
 away from the Church of Rome, as Germany, England, and Switzer- 
 land had fallen. The dearth-struggle between the contending powers 
 could no longer be averted or postponed. The Consistory then 
 became enlightened to see the Divine hand in a scheme which they 
 had, till then, regarded as the suspicious device of an ambitious and 
 formidable man. They could no longer refuse the gratuitous and 
 devoted services of a host, called, as it might seem, into existence, 
 for the express purpose of defeating their hitherto invincible ene- 
 mies a host animated by an enthusiasm as ardent as that of the 
 Reformers themselves, informed by a learning not less profound than 
 theirs, and guided by that singleness of will and fixedness of pur- 
 pose in which Luther and his associates were so eminently defective. 
 
 On the 27th of September, 1540, Paul the Third, therefore, 
 affixed the papal seal to the bull of "Regimini," the Magna 
 Charta of the Order of Jesus. Admirable as was the foresight 
 which dictated this grant, it was made with undisguised reluctance, 
 with painful misgivings, and with an anxiety of which the instru- 
 ment itself affords the clearest evidence. It places in the lips of the 
 new society the following emphatical profession of their future sub- 
 jection to the power from which they were to derive their corporate 
 existence : 
 
 " Quamvis Evangelio doceamur, et fide orthodoxa cognoscamus, 
 ac firmiter profiteamur, omnes Christi fideles Romano Pontifici tan-
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 115 
 
 quam capito, ac Jesu Christ! vicario, subesse ; ad majorem tamen 
 nostrae societatis liumilitatem, ac perfectam unius cuj usque mortifi- 
 cationem, et voluntatum nostrarum abnegationem, summopere 
 conducere judicavimus, singulos nos, ultra illud commune vinculum, 
 special! voto abstringi, ita ut quicquid Eomani Pontifices pro tern- 
 pore existentes jusserint, quantum in nobis fuerit exequi teneamur." 
 
 So wrote the Pope in the person of his new Praetorians. The 
 first care of Ignatius was the election of a General of that formid- 
 able band. For that purpose he summoned the chief members of 
 his company to Rome. They all concurred in choosing himself. He 
 declined the proffered honour, and was a second time unanimously 
 elected. Again he refused to govern, unless his confessor, to 
 whom, as he said, all his bad dispositions were known, should 
 command him, in the name of Christ, to submit to the hard neces- 
 sity. The confessor accordingly pronounced that solemn injunction, 
 and then Ignatius Loyola ascended the throne of which he had been 
 so long laying the foundations. It will be credible that he seriously 
 contemplated the renunciation of that high reward, when it shall 
 be ascertained that Julius became Dictator, Cromwell Protector, 
 and Napoleon First Consul, in their own despite ; but not till then. 
 
 When finally invested with sovereignty, Ignatius wielded the 
 sceptre as best becomes an absolute monarch, magnanimously and 
 with unfaltering decision ; reverenced, but exciting no servile fear ; 
 beloved, but permitting no rude familiarity ; declining no enterprise 
 which high daring might accomplish, attempting none which headlong 
 ambition might suggest ; self-multiplied in the ministers of his will ; 
 yielding to them a large and generous confidence ; trusting no man 
 whom he had not deeply studied ; assigning to none a province be- 
 yond the range of his capacity. 
 
 Though not in books, yet in the school of active, and especially 
 of military life, Ignatius had learnt the great secret of government, 
 at least of his government. That secret is, that the social affections, 
 when concentrated within a well-defined circle, possess an intensity 
 and an endurance unrivalled by those passions of which self is the 
 immediate object. He had the sagacity to perceive that emotions 
 like those with which a Spartan or a Jew had yearned over the land 
 and the institutions of their fathers emotions stronger than appetite, 
 vanity, ambition, avarice, or death itself might be kindled in the 
 members of his Order, if he could grasp those mainsprings of human 
 action of which the Greek and the Hebrew legislators had obtained 
 the mastery. Nor did he make the attempt in vain. 
 
 He legislated at once in the spirit of his early and of his late pro- 
 fession as a soldier and as a spiritual champion of the Church of 
 
 8 *
 
 116 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 
 
 Eome. Obedience, prompt, absolute, blind, and unhesitating the 
 cardinal virtue of both was the basis of his religious institute. 
 Such submission, however arduous in appearance, is in reality the 
 least irksome of all self-sacrifices. The mysterious gift of free will 
 is the heaviest burthen of the vast multitude of mankind. The free 
 subjects, and the heavenly appointed ministers, of the Jewish theo- 
 cracy, took refuge from that service in the despotism of a man whose 
 sole praise it was to be taller by the head and shoulders than any of 
 them. In the same spirit men everywhere desire to walk by sight, 
 not by faith to obey the stern command of a superior, if so they 
 may be absolved from listening for the still small voice of conscience 
 to bear the yoke of spiritual bondage, if so they may escape the 
 fatigue of study, the labour of meditation, the pains of doubt, and 
 the anxieties of mental freedom. Ignatius had well observed this 
 propensity of the human heart, and he framed the Jesuit code with 
 a constant reference to it. 
 
 He ordained that his Order should be an elective absolute mon- 
 archy for life. The Sovereign, or General, was to be chosen by a 
 small senate or aristocracy. He was, of course, to possess every 
 divine grace, and every human virtue. But he was also to possess 
 middle age, good health, good looks ; and, if to these gifts could 
 be added former rank and consideration in the world, so much the 
 better. 
 
 Christendom was to be divided into provinces, over each of which 
 a president or provincial was to rule. To control the powers of the 
 monarch, each of the five chief provincials was to have at Rome a 
 representative, called an assistant ; and the five assistants were to 
 form a council, who should at once advise the general and watch 
 over his conduct. The general, and each of his provincials, was to 
 have attached to him a functionary called a monitor ; whose office 
 may be best described as being that of an external conscience. 
 
 Such securities as these were, however, totally inadequate to 
 restrain the high prerogatives of Ignatius and his successors. Thej 
 were to inspect the secrets of the soul of each member of the 
 society, which, for that purpose, were to be disclosed to the general 
 by the provincial in letters written as frequently as once a week. 
 All employments and dignities of which any Jesuit was capable, 
 were reserved for the patronage of the general, and of him alone. 
 He was to assign to each member his duty and his station. The 
 whole property of the Order was to be at his absolute disposal. 
 He might alter the law, or, in particular cases, dispense with the 
 observance of it. 
 
 To the vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity, common to all
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 117 
 
 the monastic orders, the professed Jesuit was to add an oath to pro- 
 ceed instantly to any part of the world to which the Pope might 
 send him for the advancement of religion ; and every Jesuit was 
 to bind himself to reject all secular or ecclesiastical dignities, 
 except such as the society itself might have to bestow. But it was 
 provided that if the Pope should constrain any member to accept 
 a bishopric, he would, in that capacity, give heed to the advice of 
 his general. 
 
 None might be admitted into the society without some remarkable 
 endowments of intellect and piety, nor without good health, an agree- 
 able person, and attractive manners. The novice was to renounce 
 to the society all his worldly possessions. He must be exempt from 
 all fetters of betrothment, or of any other contract which might bring 
 him within the reach of the civil tribunals. 
 
 The process of what may be called " breaking in " a young 
 Jesuit, was prescribed with great minuteness and severity. The 
 objects of this discipline were to subdue all habits of indolence, to 
 extinguish every sentiment of aristocratic rank, to eradicate the pride 
 of personal independence, to infuse into the soul a spirit of instant, 
 unscrupulous, unhesitating obedience, and to fasten on it the con- 
 viction that from the lips of the Superior were to be gathered the 
 very oracles of God. To accomplish these ends, the appointed 
 system of education was to be pursued with an intensity of purpose 
 never to be relaxed. The Superior was never to shrink from the 
 infliction of any necessary or wholesome pain. The Pupil was never 
 to decline to apply himself to any useful arts, however mean, humili- 
 ating, or offensive. 
 
 In the science of social Dynamics it is written, that he is the king 
 of men, jure divino, who, with the sublimest purposes and the most 
 inflexible will, exacts the most absolute submission and the most 
 painful sacrifices. To him are drawn the feeble-minded by the in- 
 stinct of obedience, the audacious by the force of sympathy, the 
 torpid by the craving for stimulants, the sceptical by the thirst for 
 certainties, and the unoccupied by the desire to employ their in- 
 effectual energies. By this title reigned Lycurgus and Mahomet 
 over nations, Zeno in the schools, Benedict in the cloister, Columbus 
 in exploration, Cortes in the camp, and Ignatius Loyola over the 
 host which, at his summons, gathered round him to extend the 
 dominion of the Church of Eome over the heretical and the heathen 
 nations of the earth. 
 
 It was with a sublime audacity that he demanded their obedience. 
 It was to be rendered, not merely in the outward act, but by the 
 understanding and the will. He spoke to them, not with the
 
 118 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 timidity of a fallible teacher, but as one invested with the delegated 
 prerogatives of the divine Eedeemer himself. " Non intueamini in 
 persona superioris, hominem obnoxium erroribus atque miseriis, sed 
 Christum ipsum." " Superioris vocem ac jussa non secus ac Chrivti 
 vocem accipite." " Ut statuatis vobiscum quicquid superior prsecipit 
 ipsius Dei praeceptum esse ac voluntatem." 
 
 He who wrote thus had not lightly observed how the spirit of man 
 exults in bondage, if permitted to believe that the chain has been 
 spontaneously assumed. 
 
 Neither had he inattentively examined the motives which will 
 sometimes stimulate the most submissive to revolt. He granted to 
 his followers the utmost liberty in outward things, which could 
 be reconciled with their spiritual servitude. The enslaved soul Avas 
 not to be rudely reminded of her slavery. There was to be no pecu- 
 liar dress, no routine of prayers and canticles, no prescribed sys- 
 tem of austerities, no monastic seclusions. 
 
 Ignatius knew well how awful is the might of folly in all sublunary 
 affairs. Therefore no frivolous, fickle, or feeble-minded proselyte 
 was to find a place in his brotherhood. 
 
 He must be served by virgin minds, who could be ruled by pre- 
 judices of his own engrafting. Therefore no one could be admitted 
 who had worn, though but for a single day, the habit of any other 
 religious order. 
 
 Stern initiatory discipline must probe the spirits of the professed ; 
 for both scandal and danger would attend the faintness of any leader 
 in the host. Gentler probations must suffice for coadjutors, whether 
 lay or spiritual ; for no host is complete without a body of irregular 
 partisans. 
 
 The general himself the centre and animating spirit of the whole 
 company he must rule for life, because ambition and cabal will fill 
 up the intervals between frequent elections, and because the reverence 
 due to royalty is impaired by the aspect of dethroned sovereigns. 
 He must be absolute, because human authority can on no other terms 
 exhibit itself as the image of the Divine. He must reign at a dis- 
 tance, and in solitude, because no government is effective in which 
 imagination has not her proper work to do. He must be the ultimate 
 depository of the secrets of the conscience of each of his subjects, 
 because power can be irresistible only when guided by unlimited 
 knowledge. No subject of his might accept any dignity, ecclesias- 
 tical or civil, beyond the precincts of the Order, because the general 
 himself must be supreme in rank as in dominion, and must alone 
 possess the means of gratifying the ambition, and attracting to him- 
 self the homage, of his dependents.
 
 THE FOUNDEKS OF JESUITISM. 119 
 
 And the ultimate object of this scheme of government, it must 
 be vast enough to expand the soul of the proselyte to a full sense of 
 her own dignity ; and practical enough to provide incessant occupa- 
 tion for his time and thoughts ; and difficult enough to bring all his 
 powers into strenuous activity ; and dangerous enough to teach the 
 lessons of mutual dependence. There must also be conflicts for the 
 brave, and intrigues for the subtle, and solitary labours for the 
 studious, and offices of mercy for the compassionate. To all and to 
 each must be offered both a temporal and an eternal recompense, 
 in this life, the reward of a communion and a sympathy intense in 
 proportion to the narrowness of its range, and stimulating in propor- 
 tion to the mysterious secrecy in which it was to be exercised ; in 
 the life to come, felicities of which the anxious heart was not per- 
 mitted to doubt : for the promises of the wise, the fellowship of the 
 holy, and the assurances of men whose claims to the Divine favour 
 it would seem to them impious to question, formed the present 
 earnest of that celestial inheritance. 
 
 If there be in any of our universities a professor of moral philo- 
 sophy initiating his pupils into the science of human nature, let him 
 study the constitutions of Ignatius Loyola. They were the fruit of 
 the solitary meditation of many years. His midnight lamp threw 
 its rays on nothing but his crucifix, his manuscript, his Thomas a 
 Kempis de Imitatione, and the New Testament. Any other pre- 
 sence would have been a profane intrusion ; for the work (so, at 
 least, he believed and taught) was but a transcript of thoughts im- 
 parted to his disembodied spirit, when in early manhood it had been 
 caught up into the seventh heavens. As he wrote, a lambent flame, 
 in shape like a tongue of fire, is said to have hovered about his 
 head ; and, as may be read in his own hand in a still extant paper, 
 the hours of composition were passed in tears of devotion, in holy 
 ardour, in raptures, and amidst celestial apparitions. 
 
 Ignatius was not less admirable as an administrator, than as a 
 giver, of laws. Taking his own immutable station at the seat and 
 centre of spiritual empire, he committed to each of his proconsuls 
 his province, to each of his ministers his function, and to the 
 humblest of his agents his task, according to the natural or acquired 
 aptitude of each for the work assigned him. He was intimately 
 acquainted with the effects on human character of self-knowledge 
 of strenuous activity and of protracted suffering. He therefore 
 required his disciples to scrutinise the recesses of their own hearts 
 until they turned for relief from the wonders and the shame within 
 to the mysteries and the glories of the world of spirits. He exercised 
 them by ceaseless employment, until the transmutation of means
 
 120 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 into ends was complete, and efforts, at first the most irksome, had 
 become spontaneous and even grateful to them. He disciplined 
 them by every form of privation and self-inflicted pain, until forti- 
 tude, ripening into habit, became the source of delights which, how- 
 ever incomprehensible to the self-indulgent, are far more real and 
 enduring than their own. He rendered them stoics, mystics, and 
 enthusiasts ; and then employed them in duties emphatically prac- 
 tical, to the purpose, and to the time. 
 
 Ignatius was not merely a legislator and a statesman, but, to the 
 last breath he drew, a soldier also. He was a general, whose 
 authority none might question, a comrade, on whose cordiality all 
 might rely, a leader, who partook in every danger and hardship of 
 his followers, a strategist of consummate skill and of all-embracing 
 survey. In his religious campaigns his policy was always aggressive. 
 However inadequate might be the force at his command for defensive 
 operations, he never hesitated to weaken it by detachments on a 
 distant service, if he could so strike terror into nearer foes, and 
 animate the courage of irresolute allies. In this spirit he encountered 
 Lutheranism in Europe by addressing himself to the conversion to 
 the faith of Rome of the barbarous or half-civilised nations of the 
 earth. His searching eye long scanned the characters of his lieu- 
 tenants to discover which of them was best qualified for that difficult 
 and hazardous office. Even to him it was not easy to discover such 
 men. They must not be only superior to all the allurements of 
 appetite and the common infirmities of our nature, but superior also 
 to those temptations which beset inquisitive minds, and men of the 
 highest order of ability. His missionaries must be prepared to do 
 and dare, but not much disposed to speculate. They must burn 
 with an inextinguishable zeal, but must be insensible to the impulse 
 for converting a subordinate into an independent command. He 
 long weighed this perplexing choice, and decided it at length with 
 the utmost sagacity and success. It fell on many who well fulfilled 
 these conditions, but on none in whom all the requisites combined 
 so marvellously as in the young Spanish noble who had borne him- 
 self so gallantly in the crypt of St Denys, and had conducted the 
 pilgrimage to Eome of the first little company of the proselytes of 
 Ignatius. 
 
 It was in the year 1505, that Francis Xavier, the youngest child 
 of a numerous family, was born in the castle of his ancestors, in the 
 Pyrenees. Robust and active, of a gay humour and ardent spirit, 
 the young mountaineer listened with a throbbing heart to the 
 military legends of his house, and to the hopes which spoke of days 
 to come when his illustrious lineage should derive new splendour
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 1^1 
 
 from his own achievements. But the hearts of his parents yearned 
 over the son of their old age, and the enthusiasm which would have 
 borne him to the pursuit of glory in the camp, was directed by their 
 counsels to the less hazardous contest for literary eminence at the 
 University of Paris. From the embrace of Aristotle and his com- 
 mentators, he would, however, have been prematurely withdrawn 
 by the failure of his resources (for the lords of Xavier were not 
 wealthy), if a domestic prophetess (his elder sister) had not been 
 inspired to foretell his marvellous career and immortal recompense. 
 His family acknowledged that all pecuniary sacrifices would be 
 wisely made for a child destined to have altars raised to his name 
 throughout the Catholic Church, and masses chanted to his honour 
 till time should be no longer. He was thus enabled to struggle on 
 at the College of St Barbara, until he had become qualified to earn 
 his own maintenance as a public teacher of philosophy. 
 
 The chair of Xavier was crowded by the studious, and his society 
 courted by the gay, the noble, and the rich. It was courted also by 
 one who stood aloof from the admiring multitude among them, but 
 not of them. Sordid in dress, but of lofty bearing ; unimpassioned, 
 though intensely earnest'; abstemious in speech, yet uttering occa- 
 sionally, in deep and most melodious tones, words of strange signifi- 
 cance, Ignatius Loyola was gradually working over the mind of his 
 young companion a spell which no difference of taste, of habits, or 
 of age, was of power to repel. Potent as it was, the charm was long 
 resisted. Hilarity was the native element of Francis Xavier, and 
 his grave monitor afforded him an inexhaustible theme of mirth and 
 raillery. Armed with satire, which was not always playful, the light 
 heart of youth contended as best it might against the solemn impres- 
 sions which he could neither welcome nor avoid. Whether Xavier 
 plunged into the amusements in which he delighted, or engaged in 
 the disquisitions in which he excelled, or traced the windings of the 
 Seine through the forest which then lined its banks, Ignatius was 
 still at hand, ready to discuss with him the charms of society, of 
 learning, or of nature ; but whatever had been the subject of their 
 discourse, it was still closed by the same awful inquiry, " What shall 
 it profit the man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ] " 
 
 The world which Xavier had sought to gain was already exhibit- 
 ing to him its accustomed treachery. It had given him entertain- 
 ment and applause, but it had stolen from him first his self-control, 
 and then his pupils and emoluments. Ignatius was still at hand to 
 repair his losses. He became the eulogist of the genius and the 
 eloquence of his friend. He presented to him the scholars attracted 
 to his chair by these panegyrics. He repeated them in the hearing 

 
 122 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 of the delighted teacher, but then, when the kindling eye of Xavier 
 attested the sense of conscious merit and of well-established renown, 
 he would check the rising exultation by the ever-recurring inquiry, 
 " What shall it profit " 
 
 Improvidence squandered these new resources, but nothing could 
 damp the zeal of Ignatius. There he was again, himself the poorest 
 of the poor, yet ministering to the wants of Xavier from a purse 
 filled by the alms he had solicited ; but there again was also the 
 same unvarying demand urged in the same rich though solemn ca- 
 dence, " What shall it profit 1 " 
 
 In the unrelaxing grasp of the strong man, at once forgiven and 
 assisted, beloved and rebuked by his stern associate, Xavier gradually 
 yielded to the fascination. He became, like his monitor, impassive, 
 at least in appearance, to all sublunary pains and pleasures, per- 
 formed the initiatory rite of the Spiritual Exercises, and joined with 
 his brethren in the vows of Montmartre, surpassed them all in the 
 fervour of his devotion and the austerity of his self-discipline, and, 
 in the winter of 1536, became the leader of their march to the 
 Eternal City. 
 
 Accomplished in all courtly exercises, he prepared for his journey 
 by binding tight cords round his arms and legs, in holy revenge for 
 the pleasure which their graceful agility had once afforded him, and 
 so pursued his way with Spartan constancy, till the corroded flesh 
 closed obstinately over the ligatures. Miracle, the ever prompt 
 handmaid of the energetic children of the Church of Rome, burst 
 the bands which no surgeon could unloose, and her friendly presence 
 was then attested by the toils which his unfettered limbs immediately 
 endured in the menial service of his fellow-travellers. 
 
 At Venice they rejoined Ignatius, and there employed themselves 
 in ministering to the patients in the hospitals. Foremost in every 
 act of intrepid self-mortification, Xavier signalised his zeal by ex- 
 ploits, the mere mention of which the stomachs of our feebler genera- 
 tion could not endure. While thus courting all the physical tor- 
 tures of purgatory, his soul inhaled the anticipated delights of 
 Paradise. These penances and raptures brought him twice to the 
 gates of death ; and then, in what he supposed to be his last ex- 
 tremity, he caused himself to be borne to places of public resort, that 
 his ghastly aspect might teach the awful lessons which his tongue 
 was no longer able to pronounce. 
 
 Such prodigies, whether enacted by the saints of Eome or by the 
 saints of Benares, exhibit a sovereignty of the spiritual over the 
 animal nature, which can hardly be contemplated without some 
 feelings akin to reverence. But, on the whole, the hooked Faqueer,
 
 THE POUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 123 
 
 spinning round his gibbet, is the more respectable suicide of the 
 two. His homage is at least meet for the deity he worships. But 
 that gracious Being, whose name had been assumed by Xavier and 
 his associates, was equally victorious over the stoical illusions and 
 the lower desires of our nature. When He made himself of no 
 reputation, and took on Him the form of a servant, He yet sought 
 repose amongst the domestic charities of life, and condescended to 
 accept those blameless solaces which life has to offer to the weary 
 and heavy laden. No services were ever offered to Him less in 
 harmony with His serene self -reverence, than the vehement emotions, 
 the squalid filth, and the lacerated frames of the first members of 
 the Society of Jesus. 
 
 Whatever might have been the reward of Xavier's self-mortifica- 
 tions in another life, his name would probably have left no trace in 
 this world's records, had it not happened that John III. of Portugal, 
 resolving to plant the Christian faith in the Indian territories which 
 had become subject to the dominion or influence of his crown, 
 petitioned the Pope to select some fit leader of this peaceful crusade. 
 The choice first fell on Bobadilla, who, however, was immediately 
 seized with a fever of such violence as disqualified him for the enter- 
 prise. Then it was, as we are told, that Ignatius was enlightened 
 from on high to perceive in Xavier the vessel of election. The holy 
 father ratified the choice. 
 
 A happier selection could not have been made ; and never was a 
 summons to toil, to suffering, and to death, so joyously received. In 
 the visions of the night, he had often groaned beneath the incum- 
 bent weight of a wild Indian, of ebon hue and gigantic stature, 
 seated on his shoulders. In those dreams he had often traversed 
 tempestuous seas, enduring shipwreck, famine, and persecution, in 
 their most ghastly forms ; and, as each peril was encountered, his 
 panting soul had invoked yet more abundant opportunities of maldng 
 such glorious sacrifices for the conversion of mankind. And now, 
 when the clearer sense and the approaching accomplishment of these 
 dark intimations were disclosed to him, passionate sobs attested the 
 rapture which his tongue was unable to speak. He fell on his knees 
 before Ignatius, kissed the feet of the holy father, repaired his 
 tattered cassock, and, with no other provision than his breviary, left 
 Rome on the 1 5th of March, 1 540, for Lisbon, his destined port of 
 embarkation for the East. 
 
 Light of heart, and joyful in discourse, he travelled from Rome 
 across the Alps and Pyrenees. As he descended the southern slopes 
 of his native mountains, there rose to his sight the venerable towers, 
 beneath which he had enjoyed the sports of childhood, and woven
 
 124 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 the day-dreams of youth ; where still lived the mother, who, during 
 his first eighteen years, had day by day watched over him and 
 blessed him, and the saintly sister, whose inspired voice had foretold 
 his present high vocation. But it was all too high for even a 
 momentary intrusion of the holiest of those feelings which are merely 
 human. He was on his way with tidings of mercy to a perishing 
 world, and had not one hour to waste, nor one parting tear to bestow, 
 on those whom he best loved and most revered, and whom, in this 
 life, he could never hope to meet again. We are not left to con- 
 jecture in what light his conduct was regarded. Martin D'Aypilcueta, 
 surnamed the Doctor of Navarre, a grave and well-beneficed divine 
 (a shrewd, thriving, hospitable, much-respected man, no unlikely 
 candidate for the mitre, and a candidate, too, in his own drowsy way, 
 for amaranthine crowns, and celestial blessedness), was the maternal 
 uncle of Xavier, and very plausibly believed his nephew mad. He 
 favoured his enthusiastic kinsman with much judicious remonstrance 
 against his suicidal project. Half sportive, half indignant, was 
 Xavier' s answer : " I care little, most illustrious Doctor, for the 
 judgment of men, and least of all for their judgment, who decide 
 before they hear and before they understand." Mad or sober, he 
 was at least impelled by a force, at the first shock of which the united 
 judiciousness and respectability of mankind must needs fall to pieces, 
 the force of will, concentrated on one great end, and elevated above 
 the misty regions of doubt to that unclouded atmosphere, where 
 Faith, attended by her sister Graces, Hope and Courage, Joy and 
 Fortitude, converts the future into the present, and casts the brightest 
 hues over objects the most repulsive to sense, and the most painful 
 to our feeble nature. 
 
 As the vessel in which Xavier embarked for India fell down the 
 Tagus, and shook out her reefs to the wind, many an eye was dim 
 with unwonted tears, for she bore a regiment of a thousand men to 
 reinforce the garrison of Goa ; nor could the bravest of that gallant 
 host gaze on the receding land without foreboding that he might 
 never see again those dark chestnut forests and rich orange groves, 
 with the peaceful convents and the long-loved homes reposing in 
 their bosom. The countenance of Xavier alone beamed with delight. 
 He knew that he should never tread his native mountains more ; 
 but he felt that he was not an exile. He was to depend for food 
 and raiment on the bounty of his fellow-passengers ; but no thought 
 for the morrow troubled him. He was going to convert nations of 
 which he knew neither the language nor even the names ; but his 
 soul was oppressed with no misgivings. Worn by incessant sickness, 
 with the refuse food of the lowest seamen for his diet, and the cord-
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 125 
 
 age of the ship for his couch, he rendered to the diseased services too 
 revolting to be described, and lived among the dying and the pro- 
 fligate, the unwearied minister of consolation and of peace. In the 
 midst of that floating throng he knew both how to create for himself 
 a sacred solitude, and how to mix in all their pursuits in the free 
 spirit of a man of the world, a gentleman, and a scholar. With the 
 viceroy and his officers, he talked as pleased them best, of war or 
 trade, of politics or navigation. To restrain the common soldiers 
 from gambling, he invented for their amusement less dangerous pas- 
 times, or even held the stakes for which they played, that, by his 
 presence and his gay discourse, he might at least check the excesses 
 which he could not entirely prevent. 
 
 Five weary months (weary to all but him) brought the ship to 
 Mozambique, where an endemic fever threatened a premature grave 
 to the apostle of the Indies. But his was not a spirit to be 
 quenched or allayed by the fiercest paroxysms of disease. At each 
 remission of his malady he crawled to the beds of his fellow-suf- 
 ferers to soothe their terrors, or assuage their pains. Just thirteen 
 months after his departure from Lisbon, he reached Goa ; the most 
 wretched of mankind to the eye of any casual observer, but, in the 
 esteem of his shipmates, the happiest and the most holy. 
 
 At Goa Xavier was shocked, and, had he been susceptible of fear, 
 would have been dismayed, by the almost universal depravity of 
 the inhabitants. It exhibited itself in those revolting forms which 
 characteries the crimes of civilised men, when settled among a 
 feebler race, and released from the restraints and conventional de- 
 cencies of civilisation. Swinging a huge bell in his hand, Xavier 
 passed along the streets of the city, imploring the astonished crowd 
 to send their children to him to be instructed in the religion which 
 they continued at least to profess. Though he had never been ad- 
 dressed by the soul-stirring name of father, he knew that there is 
 one chord which never can be wholly out of tune in the hardest 
 and the most dissolute heart which has once felt the parental in- 
 stinct. A crowd of little ones were quickly placed under his charge. 
 He lived among them, at once the most laborious of teachers and 
 the gentlest and gayest of friends ; and then returned them to their 
 homes, that, by their example, they might there impart, with the 
 unconscious eloquence of filial love, the lessons of wisdom and of 
 piety which they had been taught. 
 
 No cry of human misery reached him in vain. He took up his 
 abode in the hospitals ; selecting that of the leprous as the object 
 of his peculiar care. Even in the haunts of debauchery, and at 
 the tables of the profligate, he was to be seen an honoured and a
 
 126 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 welcome guest. He delighted that most unmeet audience "with the 
 vivacity of his discourse ; and spared neither pungent jests to ren- 
 der vice ridiculous, nor sportive flatteries to allure the fallen back 
 to the paths of soberness and virtue. These were hazards not to 
 be incurred, even by Francis Xavier, with impunity. Suspicion 
 and reproach followed, and still pursue, these deviations from the 
 highways of Christian instruction ; nor would it perhaps be possible 
 to make a successful defence of all the freedoms into which his 
 ardent zeal occasionally urged him. But strong in purity of pur- 
 pose, and stronger still in one sacred remembrance, he was content 
 to be called "the friend of publicans and sinners." He had long 
 since deserted the standard of Prudence, the offspring of Fore- 
 thought, for the banners of Wisdom, the child of Love, and followed 
 them through perils not to be braved with impunity under any less 
 triumphant leaders. 
 
 Eugged were the ways along which he was thus conducted. In 
 those times, as in our own, there was a pearl fishery on the western 
 shores of the Strait of Manaar, and then, as now, the pearl divers 
 formed a separate and a degraded caste. It was not till after a resi- 
 dence of many months at Goa that Xavier heard of these people. 
 He heard that they were ignorant and miserable, and he inquired 
 no farther. On that burning shore his bell once more rang out an 
 invitation of mercy, and again were gathered around him troops of 
 inquisitive and docile children. He lived long among these abject 
 fishermen ; his only food their rice and water, their huts his only 
 shelter,- and a sleep of three hours during the four and twenty the 
 measure of his repose. He became at once their physician, the 
 arbiter in their disputes, and their advocate with the Governor of 
 Goa for the remission of their annual tribute. 
 
 He became also their teacher in the doctrines and precepts of 
 Christianity. Destitute as he was, at first, of any acquaintance 
 with their language, the undertaking would have daunted any spirit 
 less ardent than his ; and it is. indeed, to this day, disputed, be- 
 tween the members of his Order and their antagonists, whether he 
 acquitted himself of it in anything more than outward semblance 
 and unmeaning form. 
 
 "When the inhabitants of Cape Comorin were delivered by the 
 Portuguese from their Mahomedan invaders, they did homage to 
 their new masters by submitting their persons to the baptismal 
 ablution, though their minds remained as dark as before, and their 
 course of life not less licentious. To these Paravas (so they were 
 called) Xavier proceeded ; taking with him two interpreters, ap- 
 pointed to that service by the Bishop of Goa. In a letter to his
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 127 
 
 brethren of the Society of Jesus, dated in January, 1544, he thus 
 describes his method of introducing these people to the knowledge 
 of the Christian faith : 
 
 Having "carefully selected some of the more intelligent of their 
 mimber, and especially such of them as could converse both in the 
 Spanish and the Malabar tongues, he laboriously accomplished, by 
 their aid, translations of the Catechism, of the Apostles' Creed, of 
 the Ten Commandments, of the Lord's Prayer, and of some of the 
 devotional offices of the Church of Eome. After committing these 
 versions to his own memory, he undertook a circuit through the 
 country ; summoning the natives to gather round him at each town 
 and village by the sound of his bell, which he rang out on his ar- 
 rival there. To. these assemblages he recited his formularies, repeat- 
 ing them again and again, until they had learnt them by heart. The 
 children, as usual, proved the aptest scholars ; and when they were 
 perfect in their tasks he despatched them to teach what they had 
 thus acquired, to their parents and neighbours. 
 
 On every Sunday he preached on the text thus impressed before- 
 hand on the minds of his hearers ; employing, of course, at first, 
 the intervention of his interpreters. These sermons opened with 
 a comment on the Creed ; to each article of which his hearers, and 
 especially the candidates for baptism, gave their audible assent. 
 The Commandments were then repeated and explained each Com- 
 mandment being succeeded by a prayer (in which the whole as- 
 sembly joined) for grace to observe it. The Lord's Prayer followed ; 
 and the series of congregational offices was closed by Xavier's re- 
 citing, in the language of his hearers, an epitome of the Christian 
 faith, and an exhortation to lead a Christian life. Then came the 
 baptism of the catechumens ; after which the assembly was dis- 
 missed. 
 
 In every heathen land which he subsequently visited, Xavier 
 pursued the same method of propagating the faith. A most inef- 
 fectual method, in the judgment of his Protestant censors. They 
 have no respect or forgiveness for his barbarous translations into 
 semi-barbarous tongues, of formularies and symbols which the most 
 profound scholars have but imperfectly succeeded in transfusing 
 into the most polished dialects of modern Europe. They find much 
 occasion for mirth in the grotesque accents in which the missionary's 
 unpractised tongue must have preached in a foreign idiom, and in 
 the darkness in which an impromptu interpretation must have in- 
 volved his sermons. To inject into uncultivated minds thoughts 
 so remote from their antecedent knowledge and conceptions, is pro- 
 nounced a desperate enterprise ; and it is not without a compas-
 
 128 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 sionate smile that these critics refer to the prejudice which has 
 ventured to claim the reverence of mankind for such delirious zeal, 
 and so much impotent benevolence. 
 
 If this judgment he just, it must at least be acknowledged to be 
 a notable and curious occurrence, that such a man as Francis 
 Xavier first abandoned himself to a life of religious extravagance, 
 and then became the unconscious chronicler of his own folly. He 
 who had taught the learning of his times with high applause at 
 Paris, was certainly no prating sciolist. The friend and chosen 
 companion of Ignatius Loyola and of lago Laynez, could not be 
 destitute of that wisdom which is to be gained by converse with 
 the wise. He who had associated with every class of society, from 
 the hospital to the throne, could not be unprovided with the 
 knowledge which the world has to impart. The author of such 
 missionary journals as his could not be wanting in clear good sense ; 
 for in that respect they may well challenge comparison with the 
 best performances of the most sober-minded of those who, in our 
 own days, have described their own labours in the same field. Nor 
 could Xavier have been betrayed, as so many are betrayed, into 
 foolishness by knavery ; for the most jealous eyes have searched his 
 reports and letters in vain for one wilful deviation from truth, or 
 for so much as a solitary proof that he was actuated by any in- 
 direct or sinister designs. Strange then is it, if such a man drew 
 a self-portraiture, full of glaring absurdity, without perceiving it. 
 
 It is not improbable that these or some similar censures may 
 have reached his own ears. The sleek, worldly-wise traders of 
 Goa, can scarcely have failed to anticipate them ; and as in that 
 case the despised herald of the Gospel can hardly have held his 
 peace, we may, with some plausibility, suppose him to have made 
 to the scorners some such answer as the following : 
 
 " However feeble may be the means by which I endeavour to 
 bring the natives of India into the fold of Christ, they are at least 
 the best means at my command ; and woe unto me if I preach not 
 the Gospel ! They are also the only means at present taken by any 
 one who calls himself a Christian, to atone for the wrongs inflicted 
 on them by their Christian rulers. If the contumelies cast on my 
 teaching reached me only, they would be insignificant ; but let it 
 be well considered whether they will not glance aside from me, and 
 strike against ministrations incomparably higher and holier than 
 mine. When in one day Peter called three thousand converts out 
 of the world when Philip admitted the Ethiopian into the Church 
 or when Paul acknowledged the gaoler of Philippi as a brother 
 in Christ neither Peter, nor Philip, nor Paul had imparted to
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 129 
 
 those proselytes any instruction beyond the first and. elementary 
 articles of the faith. When the same great Apostle of the Gentiles 
 wrote his pastoral letters to the Greeks, he employed what to them 
 must have appeared an uncouth and barbarous dialect. When he 
 spoke to the Corinthians, it was not with excellency of speech, but 
 in the foolishness of preaching. When others addressed them in 
 unknown tongues, Paul did not command that the stranger should 
 be silenced, but that his discourse should be interpreted. When 
 He who spoke as never man spake, condescended to appear on our 
 earth, His mightiest eloquence that by which. He moved, sub- 
 dued, and penetrated the heart was the eloquence, not of speech, 
 but of a life of which each painful step was taken at the bidding of 
 love, and under the guidance of wisdom. Be it then the care of 
 myself and of my fellow-labourers to tread, however feebly, and at 
 however great a distance, in the footsteps of our adorable Master. 
 Let us humbly endeavour to evangelise these outcasts of the human 
 family chiefly by our loving-kindness, our self-denial, and our 
 personal sanctity. But with our words also, though spoken with a 
 stammering tongue, and through an imperfect medium, we will 
 endeavour to make known to them the commands delivered by God 
 himself on Sinai, the prayer dictated by Christ himself to His 
 disciples, and the earliest confession of the faith transmitted to us 
 by His Church. The truths we thus speak may indeed appear to 
 the natural man to be foolishness, but by the spiritual man they 
 may be spiritually discerned ; for there are truths which, though 
 man's wisdom teach them not, are yet effectually taught by Him 
 without whose present aid all teaching is vain, and all wisdom is 
 folly." 
 
 It is not a merely gratuitous conjecture that such would have 
 been the substance of Xavier's apology. It is the burthen of his 
 letters, that the living exhibition of the Christian character is the 
 first great instrument of Christian conquests over idolatry ; and that 
 the inculcation of elementary truth is the second. But while he is 
 thus ever mindful of his own responsibility for the souls of the 
 heathen of his own times, he presses with even painful importunity 
 on his correspondents, the importance of providing for a succession 
 to himself of missionaries eminent for holiness and for learning ; 
 and, amidst all his fatigues and anxieties, his eye is ever fixed upon 
 the prospects opened by the college which he had established at 
 Goa, for training up natives of India as the future teachers of their 
 countrymen. 
 
 It is, indeed, true (though the truth be uttered in the contempt- 
 uous tone best calculated to provoke contradiction), that a Chris- 
 
 9
 
 130 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 tianity, nominal, formal, and external, was, after all, the best fruit 
 to be gathered, or to be rationally expected, from the rude efforts 
 of Xavier for the conversion of the Paravas. But where is that 
 country, and what is that time, in which Christianity has been more 
 than this amongst the great multitude of those who have called and 
 professed themselves Christians ? The travellers in the narrow path, 
 who are guided by her vital spirit, have ever been the " chosen 
 few." The travellers along the broad way, wearing her exterior and 
 visible badges, have ever been the " many called." And yet he who 
 should induce any heathen people to adopt the mere ceremonial of 
 the Church, to celebrate her ritual, and to recognise, though but in 
 words, the authority of her Divine Head, would confer on them a 
 blessing exceeding all which mere human philanthropy has ever 
 accomplished or designed. For such is the vivifying influence of 
 the spirit of the Gospel, that it can never long be otherwise than 
 prolific of the highest temporal benefits to all, and of the highest 
 spiritual benefits to some, in every land which acknowledges it as a 
 rule of life and receives it as a system of worship. If Xavier had 
 succeeded so far only as to diffuse through the East that kind and 
 that degree of Christianity which at this day exists amongst the 
 formalists of Europe, such a success would almost justify the papal 
 apotheosis which has assigned to him a throne in heaven and a 
 perennial homage on earth. 
 
 It is not without exultation, or indeed without truth, that we are 
 reminded that even to this extent Xavier did not eventually suc- 
 ceed. The triumph over his failure would be abated if due attention 
 were given to the causes of it. His mantle never fell on any of his 
 successors. His place was taken by men of worldly minds and of 
 worldly policy. They recited his formularies, but did not imitate 
 his holiness, and found (as how could they but find ?) that with the 
 spirit of his apostolate the power of it had departed. Ere long the 
 Portuguese were expelled from India. They had conquered there, 
 but had not colonized ; and in these later ages colonization has been 
 the habitual, perhaps the indispensable, forerunner of the Gospel 
 among barbarous or half-civilized tribes. When Christianity be- 
 comes the religion of the highest caste, as in the transatlantic con- 
 tinents and colonies, in Western and in Southern Africa, and in the 
 great Australian islands, converts from heathenism are to be counted 
 by millions. For idolatry, being not a principle, but a mere habit, 
 has ever fallen, and will ever fall down in the presence of Truth, 
 when Truth presents herself sustained by power and arrayed in 
 dignity. We shall Christianise India in proportion as we Anglicise 
 her. If in Xavier's days England had been sovereign of the East,
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 131 
 
 that renovating process would ere now have been complete ; and by 
 this time Brahma and Veeshnu would have retired in the peninsula 
 into the same position which Odin and Woden are now occupying 
 in Scandinavia. 
 
 Doubtless the superstitions with which the creed of the Church 
 of Eome has disfigured the Gospel, contributed largely to prevent 
 or to impair Xavier's success. Yet if they who followed him had 
 been men of a like spirit with his, as well as of the same creed, and 
 if his nation had retained and colonized her Asiatic dominion, that 
 which has happened in the transatlantic conquests of the great 
 Roman Catholic powers, would also have happened in the Eastern 
 empire of the House of Braganza ; and India would at present be 
 overspread with Christian churches, acknowledging the Pope as 
 their supreme earthly head, and revering Francis Xavier as their 
 great spiritual progenitor. 
 
 Between the eulogists and the censors of Xavier it is still further 
 debated whether the ultimate ill-success of his missions is or is not 
 to be ascribed to his ignorance of the languages of India. His 
 friends maintain that the miraculous gift of tongues fell upon him 
 while residing near Cape Comorin. His opponents deny that he 
 ever acquired the vernacular speech of that country at all. The real 
 difficulty is to determine which of these two opinions is the more 
 extravagant. His imputed ignorance of the native tongue of those 
 amongst whom he so long lived, and for whom he laboured with 
 such fervent zeal, is hardly less incredible than the supposed mira- 
 culous intervention to impart it to him. If, at the end of several 
 years, he had not acquired the power of conversing intelligibly with 
 his followers, the idlest lad from the East India College at Hayley- 
 bury, now stationed in those regions, may boast of an energy and 
 of talents surpassing those of Francis Xavier ; and he who was at 
 once a Spanish Cavalier and a devoted missionary, must have deliber- 
 ately and repeatedly suggested in his letters falsehoods enough to 
 rack the conscience of a Christian with remorse, and to crimson the 
 cheek of a gentleman with self-reproach. The fact seems to be that 
 Xavier was at best but a moderate linguist, and that he never 
 acquired the perfect command of any language except his own. At 
 the commencement of each of his successive missions he acknow- 
 ledges and bewails his inability to make any colloquial use of the 
 tongues spoken by the people amongst whom he had arrived. Yet, 
 from the commencement of each, he recited to wondering crowds 
 such translations as he could obtain of the creeds and formularies 
 of the faith ; aiding the defects of his discourse by tones and gestures 
 which spoke to the imagination and to the hearts of his hearers. 
 
 9*
 
 132 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 Ere long, however, lie seems to have learnt to converse, to argue, 
 and to preach among every new assemblage of his Asiatic disciples 
 at least intelligibly, though perhaps never with elegance or correct- 
 ness. But among such a people, and on such topics, a man of fer- 
 vent spirit, of natural eloquence, and of high rank, need not be 
 either correct or elegant in order to be impressive. 
 
 Whatever may have been the ultimate fate of Xavier's missions, 
 or the cause of their decay, it is nothing more than wanton scepti- 
 cism to doubt that, in his own lifetime, the apparent results were 
 such as to justify the most sanguine of his anticipations. Near Cape 
 Comorin he appointed thirty different teachers, who under himself 
 were to preside over the same number of Christian churches. Many 
 an humble cottage there was surmounted by a crucifix, the mark of 
 its consecration to public worship, and many a rude countenance 
 reflected the sorrows and the hopes which they had been taught to 
 associate with that sacred emblem. 
 
 In reporting these labours to his society, the habitual calmness 
 of Xavier's style is once, at least, .interrupted by passionate exclam- 
 ations. "I have left myself," he says, "nothing to add on this 
 subject, except that so intense and abundant are the delights which 
 God is accustomed to bestow on those who labour diligently in His 
 service in the vineyard in this barbarous land, that if there be, in 
 this life, any true and solid enjoyment, I believe it to be this and 
 this alone. There is one among those who are so employed" (he is 
 obviously referring to himself), " whom I frequently overhear saying, 
 * Overwhelm me not, my God, with such happiness in this Life ! 
 or if, of Thine infinite beneficence and mercy, Thou shalt be pleased 
 still to bestow it upon me, then take me hence to the abode of the 
 blessed ; for he whose inward sense has once tasted of these delights, 
 must needs regard existence as a heavy burden so long as it is passed 
 without the beatific vision of Thyself.' " 
 
 This prayer for some mitigation of his happiness was not un- 
 answered. A hostile invasion from the kingdom of Bisnagore swept 
 before it the poor fishermen of Cape Comorin, destroyed their 
 simple chapels, and drove them for refuge to the barren rocks and 
 sand banks on the western shores of the Strait of Manaar. The 
 tidings brought their good father Xavier, on the wings of love, to 
 share and solace their affliction, to procure for them food and succour 
 from the viceroy at Goa, and to direct their confidence to an infinitely 
 better Father, whose presence they might acknowledge, and whose 
 goodness they might adore, even amidst the wreck of all their 
 earthly possessions. 
 
 To teach the same salutary lesson to those on whom such pos-
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 133 
 
 sessions had been bestowed in far more ample abundance, Xavier 
 crossed the peninsula to Travancore, in the hope of converting the 
 Rajah and his courtiers. His anxious friends earnestly dissuaded a 
 journey so full of peril ; and the language in which he repels these 
 timid counsels might pass for a quotation from one of the indignant 
 letters of Martin Luther. " There are moments," he says, " when I 
 am weary of life, and when I think that it would be better to die 
 in the cause of God than to witness such a contemptuous disregard 
 of his authority as I am at once constrained to observe and unable 
 to prevent. To escape from the sight and the report of such 
 iniquity, how gladly would I migrate into Ethiopia, or into the 
 dominions of Prester John, where, without meeting opposition from 
 any one, I might render so many services to the Most High. For 
 nothing afflicts me so acutely as my want of power to make an 
 effectual resistance to those who are insulting the majesty of Heaven. 
 May God pardon them, abide with you, and accompany me." 
 
 If any reliance may be placed on his own statements, his success 
 at Travancore justified his daring and surpassed his highest expect- 
 ations. He reported in February, 1545, that God had brought 
 many of the inhabitants to the faith, and had, by his means, con- 
 verted more than ten thousand men in a single month. Passing 
 from one village to another, he repeated the same formularies which 
 he had recited among the Paravas, and founded on them the same 
 instructions. He baptized till his hands dropped with weariness and 
 his voice became inaudible ; experiencing, as he says, in his whole 
 soul, a joy which it would be vain to attempt to express either in 
 writing or by speech. 
 
 It is difficult, or rather impossible, to determine what deduction 
 would have been made from Xavier's estimate of the results of his 
 mission to Travancore, if tried by those sober tests which he was 
 himself too deeply agitated to employ. Some part of his success 
 may have been a mere hallucination of his own overwrought feelings. 
 Something may be ascribed to the terror with which the Portuguese 
 arms had at that time affected the native powers of India, and dis- 
 posed them to conciliate their European invaders. The ancient tra- 
 ditions of Christianity which had lingered in that part of the penin- 
 sula from remote days (the traditions of St Thomas's residence there 
 is a modern fable), may have given the appearance of a conquest to 
 what was, at least to some extent, a mere restoration. But when 
 every abatement which these and similar considerations may suggest 
 shall have been made, we must reject testimony the most unam- 
 biguous, and opposed by no conflicting evidence, if we deny the 
 general truth of Xavier's statement. A solitary, poor, and unpro-
 
 134 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 tected stranger, he had burst through the barriers which separate 
 men of different races and of different tongues. His meaning may 
 have been ill understood, but by some mysterious force of sympathy 
 his hearers quickly caught his ardour. Idols and their temples fell 
 beneath the blows of their former worshippers. Christian churches 
 rose at his bidding ; and Travancore was possessed with new ideas, 
 and agitated by unwonted controversies. 
 
 Amongst the triumphs of the Gospel thus wrought by his own 
 agency, Xavier refers, with expressions of intense delight, to the 
 vast multitude of infants whom he had baptized, and whom death 
 had transferred to Paradise, in the untarnished bloom of their bap- 
 tismal innocency ; and he vehemently implores his general and 
 associates to increase the number of the missionaries in the same 
 field, from which, by this simple process, so vast a harvest of these 
 tender plants might be continually gathered into the heavenly 
 garner. Those who believe, with him, in this astounding efficacy 
 of the sacrament of baptism, must needs number him among the 
 greatest benefactors of his species ; for no other man ever brought 
 down, by his ministration, a blessing of such unutterable magnitude 
 on so vast a multitude of babes and sucklings. It is, indeed, a 
 subject of curious inquiry, why the adherents of that doctrine do 
 not rise to the more than human, and yet easy, office of love which 
 invites them? By employing a few active emissaries to baptize 
 infant Hindoos, they would confer, on the race of man, benefits 
 infinitely eclipsing all the results of all the labours of all the phi- 
 lanthropists who have trodden this earth from the days of Adam to 
 our own. Why, then, is this mighty work of benevolence unat- 
 tempted ? It is because they who are driven by a tyrannical logic 
 to these most marvellous consequences, escape the pressure of them 
 by something which is superior to all logic and proof against all 
 argumentation ; even by those indestructible instincts of our nature, 
 and by that free spirit of the Gospel, which will dash to pieces the 
 inference and the belief, that the Almighty Father of us all has really 
 made the eternal weal or woe of our children to depend on the 
 observance or neglect of an ablution to be sprinkled by the hands, 
 and of a benediction to be pronounced by the lips, of mortal man. 
 
 Against these innovations of Xavier, the Brahmins argued as 
 the Church by law established has not seldom argued with fire 
 and sword, and the interdict of earth and water to the enemies of 
 their repose. A foreign invader threw a still heavier sword into the 
 trembling scales. From the southward appeared on the borders of 
 Travancore the same force which had swept away the poor fishermen 
 of Malabar. Some embers of Spanish chivalry still glowed in the
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 135 
 
 'bosom of Xavier. He flew to the scene of the approaching combat, 
 and there, placing himself in the van of the protecting army, poured 
 forth a passionate prayer to the Lord of Hosts, raised on high his 
 crucifix, and, with kindling eyes, and far-resounding voice, delivered 
 the behests of Heaven to the impious invaders. So runs the tale, 
 and ends (it is almost superfluous to add) in the rout of the astounded 
 foe. It is a matter of less animated, and perhaps of more authentic 
 history, that for his services in this war Xavier was rewarded by the 
 unbounded gratitude of the Rajah, was honoured with the title of his 
 Great Father, and rescued from all further Brahminical persecution. 
 
 Power and courtly influence form an intoxicating draught even 
 when raised to the lips of an ascetic and a saint. Holy as he was, 
 the Great Father of the Rajah of Travancore seems not entirely to 
 have escaped this feverish thirst. Eon Alphonso de Souza, a weak 
 though amiable man, was at that time the Viceroy of Portuguese 
 India ; and Xavier (such was now his authority) despatched a mes- 
 senger to Lisbon to demand rather than advise his recall. For 
 within the limits of his high commission (and what subject is 
 wholly foreign to it ?) the ambassador of the King of kings may 
 owe respect but hardly deference to any mere earthly monarch. So 
 argued Francis, so judged King John, and so fell Alphonso de 
 Souza, as many a greater statesman has fallen, and may yet fall, 
 under the weight of sacerdotal displeasure. 
 
 Weakness, however, was not the only recorded fault of De Souza. 
 Towards the northern extremity of Ceylon lies the Island of 
 Manaar, a dependency, in Xavier's day, of the adjacent kingdom 
 of Jaffna, where then reigned a sort of Oriental Philip II. The 
 islanders had become converts to the Christian faith, and expiated 
 their apostasy by their lives. Six hundred men, women, and chil- 
 dren fell in one royal massacre ; and the tragedy was closed by the 
 murder of the eldest son of the King of Jaffna, by his father's 
 orders. Deposition in case of misgovernment, and the transfer to 
 the deposing power of the dominions of the offender, was no inven- 
 tion of Hastings or of Clive. It is one of the most ancient con- 
 stitutional maxims of the European dynasties in India. It may 
 even boast the venerable suffrage of St Francis Xavier. At his in- 
 stance, De Souza equipped an armament to hurl the guilty ruler of 
 Jaffna from his throne, and to subjugate his territories to the most 
 faithful King. In the invading fleet the indignant saint led the 
 way, with promises of triumphs, both temporal and eternal. But 
 the expedition failed. Cowardice or treachery defeated the design. 
 De Souza paid the usual penalties of ill success. Xavier sailed away 
 to discover other fields of spiritual warfare.
 
 136 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 On the Malabar coast, near the city of Meliapor, might be seen 
 in those times an oratory in which St Thomas, the first teacher of 
 Christianity in India, was supposed to have worshipped, and a tomb 
 in which it was believed that his body had been laid. It was in a 
 cool and sequestered grotto that, according to this local tradition, 
 the Apostle had been wont to pray ; and there yet appeared on the 
 living rock, in bold relief, the cross at which he was said to have 
 knelt, with a crystal fountain of medicinal waters gushing from the 
 base of it. In a church on the neighbouring height was a marble 
 altar, on which (according to the same legend) might still be traced, 
 after the lapse of fifteen centuries, indelible blood-stains, ascertain- 
 ing the sacred spot at which the Apostle had won the crown of 
 martyrdom, and where his bones had been committed to the dust. 
 To this venerable shrine Xavier retired to learn the will of Heaven 
 concerning his future progress. If we may believe the oath of one 
 of his fellow-pilgrims, he maintained, on this occasion, for seven 
 successive days, an unbroken fast and silence no unfit preparation 
 for his approaching conflicts. Even round the tomb of the Apostle 
 malignant demons prowl by night ; and, though strong in the 
 guidance of the Virgin, Xavier not only found himself in their ob- 
 scene grasp, but received from them blows, such as no weapons in 
 human hands could have inflicted, and which had nearly brought 
 to a close his labours and his life. Baffled by a superior power, 
 the fiends opposed a still more subtle hindrance to his designs 
 against their kingdom. In the garb and in the outward semblance 
 of a band of choristers, they disturbed his devotions by such soul- 
 subduing strains, that the very harmonies of Heaven might seem to 
 have been awakened to divert the Christian warrior from, his heaven- 
 ward path. All in vain their fury and their guile ! He found the 
 direction he implored; and the first bark which sailed from the 
 Malabar shore to the city of Malacca, bore the obedient missionary 
 to that great emporium of eastern commerce. 
 
 Thirty years before the arrival of Xavier, Malacca had been con- 
 quered by Alphonso Albuquerque. It was a place abandoned to 
 every form of sensual and enervating indulgence. Through her 
 crowded streets a strange and solemn visitor passed along, pealing 
 his accustomed bell, and earnestly imploring the prayers of the 
 faithful for that guilty people. Curiosity and alarm soon gave way 
 to ridicule ; but Xavier' s panoply was complete. The messenger of 
 divine wrath judged this an unfit occasion for courting aversion or 
 contempt. He became the gayest of the gay, and, in address, at 
 least, the very model of an accomplished cavalier. Foiled at their 
 own weapons, his dissolute countrymen acknowledged the irresist-
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 137 
 
 ible authority of a self-devotion so awful, relieved, and embellished, 
 as it was, by every social grace. Thus the work of reformation 
 prospered, or seemed to prosper. Altars rose in the open streets, 
 the confessional Avas thronged by penitents, translations of devout 
 books were multiplied ; and the saint, foremost in every toil, ap- 
 plied himself with all the activity of his spirit to study the structure 
 and the graceful pronunciation of the Malayan tongue. But the 
 plague was not thus to be stayed. A relapse into all their former 
 habits filled up the measure of their crimes. With prophetic voice 
 Xavier announced the impending chastisements of Heaven ; and 
 shaking off from his feet the dust of the obdurate city, pursued his 
 indefatigable way to Amboyna. 
 
 That island, then a part of the vast dominions of Portugal in the 
 east, had scarcely witnessed the commencement of Xavier's exer- 
 tions, when a fleet of Spanish vessels appeared in hostile array on 
 the shores. They were invaders, and even corsairs ; for their 
 expedition had been disavowed by Charles V. Pestilence, how- 
 ever, was raging among them ; and Xavier was equally ready to 
 hazard his life in the cause of Portugal, or in the service of her 
 afflicted enemies. Day and night he lived in the infected ships, 
 soothing every spiritual distress, and exerting all the magical 
 influence of his name to procure for the sick whatever might contri- 
 bute to their recovery or soothe their pains. The coals of fire thus 
 heaped on the heads of the pirates, melted hearts otherwise steeled 
 to pity ; and to Xavier belonged the rare, perhaps the unrivalled, 
 glory of repelling an invasion by no weapons but those of self-denial 
 and of love. 
 
 But glory, the praise of men, or their gratitude, what were these 
 to him ! As the Spaniards retired peacefully from Amboyna, he, 
 too, quitted the half-adoring multitude, whom he had rescued from 
 the horrors of a pirate's war, and, spurning all the timid counsels 
 which would have stayed his course, proceeded, as the herald of 
 good tidings, to the half -barbarous islands of the neighbouring 
 Archipelago. " If those lands," such was his indignant exclama- 
 tion, " had scented woods and mines of gold, Christians would find 
 courage to go there ; nor would all the perils of the world prevent 
 them. They are dastardly and alarmed, because there is nothing to 
 be gained there but the souls of men ; and shall love be less hardy 
 and less generous than avarice ? They will destroy me, you say, by 
 poison. It is an honour to which such a sinner as I am may not 
 aspire ; but this I dare to say, that whatever form of torture or of 
 death awaits me, I am ready to suffer it ten thousand times for the 
 salvation of a single soul." Nor was this the language of a man.
 
 138 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 
 
 insensible to the sorrows of life, or really unaffected by the dangers 
 he had to incur. " Believe me, my beloved brethren " (the quota- 
 tion is made from a letter written by him at this time to the Society 
 at Rome), "it is in general easy to understand the evangelical 
 maxim, that he who will lose his life shall find it. But when the 
 moment of action has come, and when the sacrifice of life for God 
 is to be really made, oh then, clear as at other times the meaning 
 is, it becomes deeply obscure ! so dark, indeed, that he alone can 
 comprehend it, to whom, in His mercy, God himself interprets it. 
 Then it is we know how weak and frail we are." 
 
 Weak and frail he may have been ; but from the days of Paul of 
 Tarsus to our own, the annals of mankind exhibit no other example 
 of a soul borne onward so triumphantly through distress and danger 
 in all their most appalling aspects. He battled with hunger, and 
 thirst, and nakedness, and assassination ; and pursued his mission 
 of love, with even increasing ardour, amidst the wildest war of the 
 contending elements. At the island of Moro (one of the group of 
 the Moluccas) he took his stand at the foot of a volcano ; and as 
 the pillar of fire threw up its wreaths to heaven, and the earth 
 tottered beneath him, and the firmament was rent by falling rocks 
 and peals of unintermitting thunder, he pointed to the fierce light- 
 nings, and the river of molten lava, and called on the agitated 
 crowd which clung to him for safety to repent, and to obey the 
 truth ; but he also taught them that the sounds which racked their 
 ears were the groans of the infernal world, and the sights which 
 blasted their eyes an outbreak from the atmosphere of the place of 
 torment. Repairing for the celebration of mass to an edifice which 
 he had consecrated for the purpose, an earthquake shook the build- 
 ing to its base. The terrified worshippers fled, but Xavier, stand- 
 ing in meek composure before the rocking altar, deliberately 
 completed that mysterious sacrifice, with a faith, at least in this 
 instance enviable, in the real presence ; rejoicing, as he states in his 
 description of the scene, to perceive that the demons of the island 
 thus winged their flight before the archangel's sword, from the 
 place were they had so long exercised their foul dominion. There 
 is no schoolboy of our days who could not teach much, tinsus- 
 pected by Francis Xavier, of the laws which govern the material 
 and the spiritual worlds. But we have not many doctors who 
 know as much as he did of the nature of Him by whom the worlds 
 of matter and of spirit were created ; for he studied in the school of 
 protracted martyrdom and active philanthropy, where are divulged 
 secrets unknown and unimagined by the wisest and the most 
 learned of ordinary men. Imparting everywhere such knowledge
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 139 
 
 as he possessed, he ranged over no small part of the Indian 
 Archipelago ; and at length retraced his steps to Malacca, that he 
 might learn whether his exhortations and his prayers might even 
 yet avert her threatened doom. 
 
 It appeared to be drawing nigh. Alaradin, a Mahomedan chief 
 of Sumatra, had laid siege to the place at the head of a powerful 
 fleet and army. Ill provided for defence by land, the Portuguese 
 garrison was still more unprepared for a naval resistance. Seven 
 shattered barks, unfit for service, formed their whole maritime 
 strength. Universal alarm overspread the city, and the governor 
 himself at once partook and heightened the general panic. Already 
 thoughts of capitulation had become familiar to the besieged ; and 
 European chivalry had bowed in abject silence to the insulting 
 taunts and haughty menaces of the Moslem. At this moment, in 
 his slight and weather-beaten pinnace, the messenger of peace on 
 earth effected an entrance into the beleaguered harbour. But he 
 came with a loud and indignant summons to the war for Xavier 
 was still a Spanish cavalier, and he " thought it foul scorn " that 
 gentlemen, subjects of the most faithful King, should thus be 
 bearded by barbaric enemies, and the worshippers of Christ defied 
 by the disciples of the Arabian impostor. He assumed the 
 direction of the defence. By his advice the seven dismantled ships 
 were promptly equipped for sea. He assigned to each a commander ; 
 and, having animated the crews with promises of both temporal and 
 eternal triumphs, despatched them to meet and conquer the hostile 
 fleet. As they sailed from the harbour, the admiral's vessel ran 
 aground, and instantly became a wreck. Returning hope and 
 exultation as promptly gave way to terror ; and Xavier, the idol of 
 the preceding hour, was now the object of popular fury. He alone 
 retained his serenity. He upbraided the cowardice of the governor, 
 revived the spirits of the troops, and encouraged the multitude with 
 prophecies of success. Again the flotilla sailed, and a sudden 
 tempest drove it to sea. Day after day passed without intelligence 
 of its safety, and once more the hearts of the besieged failed them. 
 Rumours of defeat were rife. The Mahomedans, it was said, had 
 effected a landing within six leagues of the city, and Xavier's name 
 was repeated from mouth to mouth with cries of vengeance. He 
 knelt before the altar, though the menacing people were scarcely 
 restrained by the sanctity of the place from immolating him there 
 as a victim to his own disastrous counsels. On a sudden his bosom 
 was seen to heave as with some deep emotion ; he raised aloft his 
 crucifix, and with a glowing cheek, and in tones like one possessed, 
 breathed a short yet passionate prayer for victory. A solemn
 
 140 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 pause ensued ; the dullest eye could see that within that now 
 fainting, pallid, agitated frame, some power more than human was 
 in communion with the weak spirit of man. What might be the 
 ineffable sense thus conveyed from mind to mind, without the aid 
 of symbols or of words ! One half-hour of deep and agonising 
 silence held the awe-stricken assembly in breathless expectation 
 when, bounding on his feet, his countenance radiant with joy, and 
 his voice clear and ringing, as with the swelling notes of the 
 trumpet, he exclaimed, "Christ has conquered for us! At this 
 very moment his soldiers are charging our defeated enemies ; they 
 have made a great slaughter we have lost only four of our 
 defenders. On Friday next the intelligence will be here, and we 
 shall then see our fleet again." The catastrophe of such a tale 
 need not be told. Malacca followed her deliverer and the troops of 
 the victorious squadron, in solemn procession to the church ; where, 
 amidst the roar of cannon, the pealing of anthems, and hymns of 
 adoring gratitude, his inward sense heard and reverenced that 
 inarticulate voice which still reminded him, that for him the hour 
 of repose and triumph might never come, till he should reach that 
 state where sin would no longer demand his rebuke, nor grief his 
 sympathy. He turned from the half-idolatrous shouts of an admir- 
 ing people, and retraced his toilsome way to the shores of the 
 Indian peninsula. 
 
 He returned to Goa a poor and solitary, but no longer an obscure 
 man. From the Indus to the Yellow Sea, had gone forth a vague 
 and marvellous rumour of him. The tale bore that a stranger had 
 appeared in the semblance of a wayworn, abject beggar, who, by 
 some magic influence, and for some inscrutable ends, had bowed 
 the nations to his despotic will, while spurning the wealth, the 
 pleasures, and the homage which they offered to their conqueror. 
 Many were the wonders which travellers had to tell of his progress, 
 and without number were the ingenious theories afloat for the 
 solution of them. He possessed the gift of ubiquity ; he could at 
 the same moment speak in twenty different tongues on as many 
 dissimilar subjects ; he was impassive to heat, cold, hunger, and 
 fatigue ; he held hourly intercourse with invisible beings, the 
 guides or ministers of his designs ; he raised the dead to life, and 
 could float, when so it pleased him, across the boiling ocean on the 
 wings of the typhoon. Among the listeners to these prodigies had 
 been Auger, a native and inhabitant of Japan. His conscience was 
 burdened with the memory of great crimes, and he had sought 
 relief in vain from many an expiatory rite, and from the tumults of 
 dissipation. In search of the peace he could not find at home he
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 141 
 
 sailed to Malacca, there to consult with the mysterious person of 
 whose avatar he had heard. But Xavier was absent ; and the 
 victim of remorse was retracing his melancholy voyage to Japan, 
 when a friendly tempest arrested his retreat, and once more "brought 
 him to Malacca. He was attended by two servants, and with 
 them, by Xavier's directions, he proceeded to Goa. In these three 
 Japanese his prophetic eye had at once seen the future instruments 
 of the conversion of their native land ; and to that end he instructed 
 them to enter on a systematic course of training in the college, 
 which he had established for such purposes, at the seat of Portu- 
 guese empire in the east. At that place Xavier, ere long, rejoined 
 his converts. Such had been their proficiency, that, soon after his 
 arrival, they were admitted not only into the Church by baptism, 
 but into the Society of Jesxis by the performance of the spiritual 
 exercises. 
 
 The history of Xavier now reaches a not unwelcome pause. He 
 pined for solitude and silence. He had been too long in constant 
 intercourse with man, and found that, however high and holy may 
 be the ends for which social life is cultivated, the habit, if unbroken, 
 will impair that inward sense through which alone the soul can 
 gather any true intimations of her nature and her destiny. He re- 
 tired to commune with himself in a seclusion where the works of 
 God alone were to be seen, and where no voices could be heard but 
 those which, in each varying cadence, raise an unconscious hymn of 
 praise and adoration to their Creator. There for a while reposing 
 from labours such as few other of the sons of men have undergone, 
 he consumed days and weeks in meditating prospects beyond the 
 reach of any vision unenlarged by the habitual exercise of bene- 
 ficence and piety. There, too, it may be (for man must still be 
 human), he surrendered himself to dreams as baseless, and to 
 ecstasies as devoid of any real meaning, as those which haunt the 
 cell of the maniac. Peace be to the hallucinations, if such they were, 
 by which the giant refreshed his slumbering powers, and from which 
 he roused himself to a conflict never again to be remitted till his 
 frame, yielding to the ceaseless pressure, should sink into a premature 
 but hallowed grave. 
 
 Scarcely four years had elapsed from the first discovery of Japan 
 by the Portuguese, when Xavier, attended by Auger and his two 
 servants, sailed from Goa to convert the islanders to the Christian 
 faith. Much good advice had been, as usual, wasted on him by his 
 friends. To Loyola alone he confided the secret of his confidence. 
 " I cannot express to you " (such are his words) " the joy with which 
 I undertake this long voyage ; for it is full of extreme perils, and
 
 142 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 we consider a fleet sailing to Japan as eminently prosperous in which 
 one ship out of four is saved. Though the risk far exceeds any which 
 I have hitherto encountered, I shall not decline it ; for our Lord has 
 imparted to me an interior revelation of the rich harvest which will 
 one day be gathered from the cross when once planted there." 
 "Whatever may be thought of these voices from within, it is at least 
 clear, that nothing magnanimous or sublime has ever yet proceeded 
 from those who have listened only to the voices from without. But, 
 as if resolved to show that a man may at once act on motives incom- 
 prehensible to his fellow-mortals, and possess the deepest insight 
 into the motives by which they are habitually governed, Xavier left 
 behind him a code of instructions for his brother missionaries, illu- 
 minated in almost every page by that profound sagacity which results 
 from the union of extensive knowledge with acute observation, mel- 
 lowed by the intuitive wisdom of a compassionate and lowly heart. 
 The science of self-conquest, with a view to conquer the stubborn 
 will of others the art of winning admission for painful truth and 
 the duties of fidelity and reverence in the attempt to heal the diseases 
 of the human spirit were never taught by uninspired man with an 
 eloquence more gentle, or an authority more impressive. 
 
 A long voyage, pursued through every disaster which the male- 
 volence of man and demons could oppose to his progress (for he was 
 constrained to sail in a piratical ship, with idols on her deck and 
 whirlwinds in her path), brought him, in the year 1549, to Japan, 
 there to practise his own lessons, and to give a new example of 
 heroic perseverance. His arrival had been preceded by what he 
 regarded as fortunate auguries. Certain Portuguese merchants, who 
 had been allowed to reside at the principal seaport, inhabited there 
 a house haunted by spectres. Their presence was usually announced 
 by the din of discordant and agonising screams ; but when revealed 
 to the eye, they exhibited forms resembling those which may be seen 
 in pictures of the infernal state. Now the merchants, secular men 
 though they were, had exorcised these fiends by carrying the cross 
 in solemn procession through the house ; and anxious curiosity per- 
 vaded the city for some explanation of the virtue of this new and 
 potent charm. There were also legends current through the country 
 which might be turned to good account. Xaca, the son of Amida, 
 the Virgo Deipara of Japan, had passed a life of extreme austerity 
 to expiate the sins of men, and had inculcated a doctrine in which 
 even Christians must recognise a large admixture of sacred truth. 
 Temples in honour of the mother and child overspread the land, and 
 suicidal sacrifices were daily offered in them. The Father of Lies 
 had further propped up his kingdom in Japan by a profane parody
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 143 
 
 on the institutions of the Catholic Church. Under the name of the 
 Saco, there reigned in sacerdotal supremacy a counterpart of the holy 
 father at Rome, who consecrated the Fundi or Bishops of this 
 Japanese hierarchy, and regulated at his infallible will whatever re- 
 lated to the rites and ceremonies of public worship. Subordinate 
 to the Fundi were the Bonzes, or Priests in holy orders ; who, to 
 complete the resemblance, taught, and at least professed to practise, 
 an ascetic discipline. But here the similitude ceases ; for, adds the 
 Chronicle, they were great knaves and sad hypocrites. 
 
 With these foundations on which to build, the ideas which Xavier 
 had to introduce into the Japanese mind, might not very widely jar 
 with those by which they were preoccupied. Auger, now called 
 Paul of the Holy Faith, was despatched to his former friend and 
 sovereign, with a picture of the Virgin and the infant Jesus ; and 
 the monarch and his courtiers (we are told) admired, kissed, and 
 worshipped the sacred symbols. Xavier himself (to use his own 
 words) "stood by, a mere mute statue;" but there was Promethean 
 fire within, and the marble soon found a voice. Of all his philo- 
 logical achievements this was the most marvellous. He who, in the 
 decline of life, bethinks him of all that he once endured to unlock the 
 sense of ^Eschylus, and is conscious how stammering has been the 
 speech with which, in later days, he has been wont to mutilate the 
 tongues of Pascal and of Tasso, may think it a fable that, in a few 
 brief weeks, Xavier could converse and teach intelligibly in the 
 involved and ever-shifting dialects of Japan. If the sceptic had 
 ever studied to converse with living men under the impulse of some 
 passion which had absorbed every faculty of his soul, he might 
 perhaps relax his incredulity ; but whatever be the solution, the 
 fact is attested on evidence which it would be folly to discredit 
 that within a very short time Xavier began to open to the Japanese, 
 in their own language and to their clear understanding, the commis- 
 sion with which he was charged. Such, indeed, was his facility of 
 speech, that he challenged the Bonzes to controversies on all the 
 mysterious points of their and his conflicting creeds. The arbiters 
 of the dispute listened as men are apt to listen to the war of words ; 
 and many a long-tailed Japanese head was shaken, as if in the hope 
 that the jumbling thoughts within would find their level by the oft- 
 repettted oscillation. It became necessary to resort to other means 
 of winning their assent ; and in exploits of asceticism, Xavier had 
 nothing to fear from the rivalry of Bonzes, of Fundi, or of the great 
 Saco himself. Cangoxima acknowledged, as most other luxurious 
 cities would perhaps acknowledge, that he who had such a mastery 
 over his own appetites and passions, must be animated by some
 
 144 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 power wholly exempt from any such debasing influence. To fortify 
 this salutary though not very sound conclusion, Xavier betook him- 
 self (if we will believe his historian) to the working of miracles. 
 He compelled the fish to fill the nets of the fishermen, and to fre- 
 quent the bay of Cangoxima, though previously indisposed to do so. 
 He cured the leprous, and he raised the dead. Two Bonzes became 
 the first, and indeed the only fruits of his labours there. The hearts 
 of their brethren grew harder as the light of truth glowed with 
 increasing but ineffectual brightness around them. The king also 
 withdrew his favour ; and Xavier, with two companions, carried the 
 rejected messages of mercy to the neighbouring states of the Japanese 
 empire. 
 
 Carrying on his back his only viaticum, the vessels requisite for 
 performing the sacrifice of the mass, he advanced to Firando, at 
 once the seaport and the capital of the kingdom of that name. 
 Some Portuguese ships riding at anchor there, announced his arrival 
 in all the forms of nautical triumph : flags of every hue floating 
 from the masts, seamen clustering on the yards, cannon roaring 
 from beneath, and trumpets braying from above. Firando was 
 agitated with debate and wonder ; all asked, but none could afford, 
 an explanation of the homage rendered by the wealthy traders to 
 the meanest of their countrymen. The solution of the enigma was 
 given by the humble pilgrim himself, surrounded, in the royal pre- 
 sence, by all the pomp which the Europeans could display in his 
 honour. Great was the effect of these auxiliaries to the work of an 
 evangelist; and the modern, like the ancient Apostle, ready to 
 become all things to all men, would no longer decline the abase- 
 ment of assuming, for a moment, this world's grandeur, when he 
 found that such puerile arts might allure the children of the world 
 to listen to the voice of wisdom. At Meaco, then the seat of empire 
 in Japan, so useful a discovery might be reduced to practice with 
 still more important success ; and thitherwards his steps were 
 promptly directed. 
 
 Unfamiliar to the ears of us barbarians of the North- Western 
 Ocean are the very names of the seats of Japanese civilisation through 
 which his journey lay. At Amanguchi, the capital of Nagoto, 
 he found the hearts of men hardened by sensuality ; and his exhort- 
 ations to repentance were repaid by showers of stones and insults. 
 "A pleasant sort of Bonze, indeed, who would allow us but one God 
 and one woman !" was the summary remark with which the luxu- 
 rious Amanguchians disposed of the teacher and his doctrine. They 
 drove him forth half naked, with no provision but a bag of parched
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 145 
 
 rice, and accompanied only by three of his converts men prepared 
 to share his danger and his reproach. 
 
 It was in the depth of winter ; dense forests, steep mountains, 
 half-frozen streams, and wastes of untrodden snow, lay in his path 
 to Meaco. An entire month was consumed in traversing the wilder- 
 ness ; the cruelty and scorn of man not seldom adding bitterness to 
 the rigours of nature. On one occasion the wanderers were over- 
 taken in a thick jungle by a horseman bearing a heavy package. 
 Xavier offered to carry the load, if the rider would requite the 
 service by pointing out his way. The offer was accepted ; but hour 
 after hour the horse was urged on at such a pace, and so rapidly 
 sped the panting missionary after him, that his tortured feet and 
 excoriated body sank in seeming death under the protracted effort. 
 In the extremity of his distress no repining word was ever heard to 
 fall from him. He performed this dreadful pilgrimage in silent 
 communion with Him for whom he rejoiced to suffer the loss of all 
 things ; or spoke only to sustain the hope and courage of his asso- 
 ciates. At length the walls of Meaco were seen, promising a repose 
 not ungrateful even to his adamantine frame and fiery spirit. But 
 repose was no more to visit him. He found the city in all the 
 tumult and horrors of a siege. It was impossible to gain attention 
 to his doctrines amidst the din of arms ; for even the Saco, or Pope 
 of Japan, could give heed to none but military topics. Chanting 
 from the Psalmist ""When Israel went out of Egypt, and the 
 house of Jacob from a strange people," the Saint again plunged into 
 the desert, and retraced his steps to Amanguchi 
 
 Xavier describes the Japanese very much as a Roman might have 
 depicted the Greeks in the age of Augustus ; as at once intellectual 
 and sensual voluptuaries, on the best possible terms with themselves, 
 a good-humoured but faithless race, equally acute and frivolous, 
 talkative and disputatious. "Their inquisitiveness," he says, "is 
 incredible, especially in their intercourse with strangers, for whom 
 they have not the slightest respect, but make incessant sport of 
 them." Surrounded at Amanguchi by a crowd of these babblers, he 
 was plied with innumerable questions about the immortality of the 
 soul, the movement of the planets, eclipses, the rainbow, sin, grace, 
 paradise, and hell. He heard and answered. A single response 
 solved all these problems. Astronomers, meteorologists, meta- 
 physicians, and divines, all heard the same sound ; but to each it 
 came with a different and an appropriate meaning. So wrote from 
 the very spot Father Anthony Quadros, four years after the event ; 
 and so the fact may ]w read in the process of Xavier's canonisation. 
 
 10
 
 146 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 Possessed of so admirable a gift, his progress in the conversion of 
 these once contemptuous people is the less surprising. Their city 
 became the principal seat of learning in Japan, and therefore, of 
 course, the great theatre of controversial debate. Of these polemics 
 there remains a record of no doubtful authenticity, from which 
 disputants of higher name than those of Amanguchi might take 
 some useful lessons in the dialectic art. Thrusts better made, or 
 more skilfully parried, are seldom to be witnessed in the schools of 
 Oxford or of Cambridge. 
 
 In the midst of controversies with men, Xavier again heard that 
 Divine voice to which he never answered but by instant and 
 unhesitating submission. It summoned him to Fucheo, the capital 
 of the kingdom of Bungo. It was a city near the sea, which had 
 for its port a place called Figer, where a rich Portuguese merchant- 
 ship was then lying. At the approach of the Saint (for such he was 
 now universally esteemed) the vessel thundered from all her guns 
 such loud and repeated discharges, that the startled sovereign of 
 Bungo despatched messengers from Fucheo to ascertain the cause of 
 so universal an uproar. Nothing could exceed the astonishment 
 with which they received the explanation. It was impossible to 
 convey to the monarch's ear so extravagant a tale. A royal salute 
 for the most abject of lazars ! for a man (to use their own energetic 
 language) " so abhorred of the earth that the very vermin which 
 crawled over him loathed their wretched fare ! " If mortal man 
 ever rose or sunk so far as to discover, without pain, that his person 
 was the object of disgust to others, then is there one form of self- 
 dominion in which Francis Xavier has been surpassed. Yielding, 
 with no perceptible reluctance, to the arguments of his countrymen, 
 and availing himself of the resources at their command, he advanced 
 to Fucheo, preceded by thirty Portuguese clad in rich stuffs, and 
 embellished with chains of gold and precious stones. " Next came, 
 and next did go," in their gayest apparel, the servants and slaves 
 of the merchants. Then appeared the apostle of the Indies him- 
 self, resplendent in green velvet and golden brocade.- Chinese 
 tapestry, and silken flags of every brilliant colour, covered the 
 pinnace and the boats in which this brilliant procession was rowed 
 up to the city ; and the oars rose and fell to the sound of trumpets, 
 flutes, and hautboys. As they drew near to the royal presence, the 
 commander of the ship marched bareheaded, and carrying a wand as 
 the esquire or major-domo of the Father. Five others of her 
 principal officers, each bearing some costly article, stepped along, as 
 proud to do such service ; while he, in honour of whom it was 
 rendered, moved onwards with the majestic gait of some feudal
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 147 
 
 chieftain marshalling his retainers, with a rich umbrella held over 
 him. He traversed a double file of six hundred men-at-arms drawn 
 up for his reception ; and interchanged complimentary harangues 
 with his royal host, with all the grace and dignity of a man 
 accustomed to shine in courts, and to hold intercourse with princes. 
 His Majesty of Bungo seems to have borne some resemblance to 
 our own Henry the Eighth, and to have been meditating a revolt 
 from the Saco and his whole spiritual dynasty. Much he said at 
 the first interview, to which no orthodox Bonze could listen with 
 composure. It drew down, even on his royal head, the rebuke 
 of the learned Faxiondono. " How," exclaimed that eminent 
 divine, " dare you undertake the decision of any article of faith 
 without having studied at the university of Fianzima, where alone 
 are to be learned the sacred mysteries of the gods ! If you are 
 ignorant, consult the teachers appointed to direct you. Here am 
 I, ready to impart to you all necessary instruction." An university 
 still more renowned than Fianzima has, in our own times, given 
 birth to many a learned doctor who might pass for nothing more 
 than a servile imitator of the pretensions of the sage Faxiondono. 
 But the replies which the great " Tractarian " of Bungo provoked 
 were most unlike those by which his Oxonian successors are usually 
 assailed. Never was King surrounded by a gayer circle than that 
 which then glittered at the court of Fucheo. The more the Bonze 
 lectured on his own sacerdotal authority, the more laughed they. 
 The King himself condescended to aid the general merriment ; and 
 congratulated his monitor on the convincing proof he had given of 
 his heavenly mission, by the display of an infernal temper. To 
 Xavier he addressed himself in a far different spirit. The triple 
 crown might have lighted on his head without allaying the thirst of 
 his soul for the conversion of mankind ; and the European pomp 
 with which he was, for the moment, environed, left him still the 
 same living martyr to the faith which it was the one object of his 
 life to propagate. His rich apparel, and the blandishments of the 
 great, served only to present to him, in a new and still more im- 
 pressive light, the vanity of all sublunary things. He preached, 
 catechised, and disputed with an ardour and a perseverance which 
 threatened his destruction, and alarmed his affectionate followers. 
 " Care not for me," Avas his answer to their expostulation ; " think 
 of me as a man dead to bodily comforts. My food, my rest, my 
 life, are to rescue from the granary of Satan the souls for the sake of 
 whom God has sent me hither from the ends of the earth." To 
 such fervour the Bonzes of Fucheo could offer no effectual resistance. 
 One of the most eminent of their number cast away his idols, and 
 
 10 *
 
 148 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 became a Christian. Five hundred of his disciples immediately 
 followed his example. The King himself, a dissolute unbeliever, 
 so far was moved (and the smallest concessions of the rulers of the 
 earth in such cases must be handsomely acknowledged) as to punish 
 in others the crimes which he persisted in practising himself; and 
 as to confess that the very face of the Saint was as a mirror, reflect- 
 ing by the force of contrast all the hideousness of his own vices. 
 Revolting, indeed, they were ; and faithful were the rebukes of the 
 tongue, no less than of the countenance, of Xavier. The royal of- 
 fender was at length touched and awed. His conversion was about 
 to crown the labours of his monitor ; and the worship of Xaca and 
 Amida in the kingdom of Bungo seemed waning to its close. It 
 Avas an occasion which demanded from their priesthood every sacri- 
 fice ; nor was the demand unanswered. 
 
 For thirty years the mysteries of the faith of the Bonzes had been 
 taught in the most celebrated of their colleges, by a doctor who had 
 fathomed all divine and human lore ; and who, except when he 
 came forth to utter the oracular voice of more than earthly wisdom, 
 withdrew from the sight of men into a sacred retirement, there to 
 hold high converse with the immortals. Fucarondono, for so he 
 was called, announced his purpose to visit the city and palace of 
 Fucheo. As when, in the agony of Agamemnon's camp, the son of 
 Thetis at length grasped his massive spear, and the trembling sea- 
 shores resounded at his steps so advanced to the war of words the 
 great chieftain of Japanese theology, and so rose the cry of antici- 
 pated triumph from the rescued Bonzes. Terror seized the licentious 
 King himself, and all foreboded the overthrow of Xavier and 
 Christianity. " Do you know, or rather, do you remember me *? " 
 was the inquiry with which this momentous debate was opened. 
 " I never saw you till now," answered the Saint. " A man who has 
 dealt with me a thousand times, and who pretends never to have 
 seen me, will be no difficult conquest," rejoined the most profound 
 of the Bonzes. " Have you left any of the goods which I bought 
 of you at the port of Frenajona 1 ?" " I was never a merchant," said 
 the missionary, "nor was I ever at Frenajona." "What a wretched 
 memory ! " was the contemptuous reply ; " It is precisely five hun- 
 dred years to-day since you and I met at that celebrated mart ; 
 when, by the same token, you sold me a hundred pieces of silk, and 
 an excellent bargain I had of it." From the transmigration of the 
 soul the sage proceeded to unfold the other dark secrets of nature 
 such as the eternity of matter ; the spontaneous self-formation of 
 all organised beings ; and the progressive cleansing of the human 
 spirit in the nobler and holier of our race, at each successive change,
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 149 
 
 until they attain to a perfect memory of the past, and are enabled 
 to retrace their wanderings from one body to another through all 
 preceding ages ; looking down, from the pinnacles of accumulated 
 wisdom, on the grovelling multitude, whose recollections are con- 
 fined within the narrow limits of their latest corporeal existence. 
 That Xavier refuted these perplexing arguments we are assured by 
 a Portuguese bystander who witnessed the debate ; though unhappily 
 no record of his arguments has come down to us. " I have," says 
 the historian, " neither science nor presumption enough to detail 
 the subtle and solid reasonings by which the Saint destroyed the 
 vain fancies of the Bonze." 
 
 Yet the victory was incomplete. Having recruited his shattered 
 forces, and accompanied by no less than 3000 Bonzes, Fucarondono 
 returned to the attack. On his side Xavier appeared in the field 
 of controversy attended by the Portuguese officers in their richest 
 apparel. They stood uncovered in his presence, and knelt when 
 they addressed him. Their dispute now turned on many a knotty 
 point ; as, for example, Why did Xavier celebrate masses for the 
 dead, and yet condemn the orthodox Japanese custom of giving 
 to the Bonze bills of exchange payable in favour of the dead ] So 
 subtle and difficult were their inquiries, that Xavier and his com- 
 panion, the reporter of the dispute, w.ere compelled to believe 
 that the spirit of evil had suggested them ; and that they were 
 at last successfully answered, is ascribed to the incessant prayers 
 which, during the whole contest, the Christians offered for their 
 champion. Of this second polemical campaign we have a minute 
 and animated account. It may be sufficient to extract the conclu- 
 sion of the royal Moderator. "For my own part," he said, "as far 
 as I can judge, I think that Father Xavier speaks rationally, and 
 that the rest of you don't know what you are talking about. Men 
 must, have clear heads or less violence than you have to understand 
 these difficult questions. If you are deficient in faith, at least em- 
 ploy your reason, which might teach you not to deny truths so 
 evident ; and do not bark like so many dogs." So saying, the King 
 of Bungo dissolved the assembly. Royal and judicious as his-award 
 appears to have been, our Portuguese chronicler admits that the dis- 
 putants on either side returned with opinions unchanged ; and that, 
 from that day forward, the work of conversion ceased. He applies 
 himself to find a solution of the problem, why men who had been 
 so egregiously refuted should still cling to their errors ; and why 
 any one should obstinately adhere to practices so irrefragably proved 
 to be alike foolish and criminal. The answer, let us hope, is, that 
 the obstinacy of the people of Bungo was a kind of lusus natures,
 
 150 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 a peculiarity exclusively their own ; that other religious teachers 
 are more candid than the Bonzes of Japan ; and that no Professor 
 of Divinity could elsewhere be found so obstinately wedded to his 
 own doctrines as was the learned Fucarondono.* 
 
 In such controversies, and in doing the work of an evangelist in 
 every other form, Xavier saw the third year of his residence at 
 Japan gliding away, when tidings of perplexities at the mother 
 church of Goa recalled him thither, across seas so wide and stormy, 
 that even the sacred lust of gold durst hardly brave them in that 
 infancy of the art of navigation. As his ship drove before the 
 monsoon, dragging after her a smaller bark which she had taken 
 in tow, the connecting ropes were suddenly burst asunder, and in 
 a few minutes the two vessels were no longer in sight. Thrice the 
 sun rose and set on their dark course ; the unchained elements roar- 
 ing as in mad revelry around them, and the ocean seething like a 
 cauldron. Xavier's shipmates wept over the loss of friends and 
 kindred in the foundered bark ; and shuddered at their own ap- 
 proaching doom. He also wept ; but his were grateful tears. As 
 the screaming whirlwind swept over the abyss, the present Deity 
 was revealed to his faithful worshipper, shedding tranquillity, and 
 peace, and joy over the sanctuary of a devout and confiding heart. 
 " Mourn not, my friend," was his gay address to Edward de Gama, 
 as he lamented the loss of his brother in the bark ; " before three 
 days, the daughter will have returned to her mother." They were 
 weary and anxious days ; but as the third drew towards a close a 
 sail appeared in the horizon. Defying the adverse winds, she 
 made straight towards them ; and at last dropped alongside, as 
 calmly as the sea-bird ends her flight, and furls her ruffled plumage 
 on the swelling surge. The cry of miracle burst from every lip ; 
 and well it might. There was the lost bark, and not the bark only, 
 but Xavier himself on board her ! What though he had ridden 
 out the tempest in the larger vessel, the stay of their drooping 
 spirits, he had at the same time been in the smaller ship, perform- 
 
 * It seems necessary to state, that the Portuguese traveller by whom this debate 
 is reported, is Ferdinando Mendez Pinto ; on whom Congreve, in " Love for 
 Love," has conferred an unenviable immortality. " Capricorn in your teeth " 
 (exclaims Foresight to Sir Samson Legend), "thou modern Maudeville ! Fer- 
 dinando Mendez Pinto was but a type of thee, thou liar of the first magnitude." 
 The wits have ever been at war with the travellers ; and Abyssinian Bruce sus- 
 tained, and has survived, still ruder shocks than Pinto the Orientalist suifered at 
 the hands of Congreve. There can be no doubt that he was present with Xavier 
 at Japan ; nor is it easy to discover any reason for distrusting this part of his 
 narrative. The text contains only a brief extract from it. If the story be really 
 fictitious, Pinto must have possessed far greater knowledge and talents (especially 
 dramatic talents) than have hitherto been ascribed to him.
 
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM.' 151 
 
 ing there also the same charitable office ; and yet, when the two 
 hailed and spoke each other, there was but one Francis Xavier, and 
 he composedly standing by the side of Edward de Gama, on the 
 deck of the " Holy Cross." Such was the name of the commodore's 
 vessel. For her services on this occasion, she obtained a sacred 
 charter of immunity from risks of every kind ; and as long as her 
 timbers continued sound, bounded merrily across seas in which no 
 other craft could have lived. 
 
 During this wondrous voyage, her deck had often been paced in 
 deep conference by Xavier and lago de Pereyra, her commander. 
 Though he pursued the calling of a merchant, he had, says the 
 historian, the heart of a prince. Two great objects expanded the 
 thoughts of Perej r ra the one, the conversion of the Chinese empire ; 
 the other, his own appointment as ambassador to the celestial court 
 of Pekin. In our puny days, the dreams of traders in the East are 
 of smuggling opium. But in the sixteenth century no enterprise 
 appeared to them too splendid to contemplate, or too daring to 
 hazard. Before the " Holy* Cross " had reached Goa, Pereyra had 
 pledged his whole fortune, Xavier his influence and his life, to this 
 gigantic adventure. In the spring of the following year, the apostle 
 and the ambassador (for so far the project had in a few months 
 been accomplished) sailed from Goa in the "Holy Cross," for the 
 then unexplored coasts of China. As they passed Malacca, tidings 
 came to Xavier of the tardy, though complete, fulfilment of one of 
 his predictions. Pestilence, the minister of Divine vengeance, was 
 laying waste that stiffnecked and luxurious people ; but the woe 
 which he had foretold he was the foremost to alleviate. Heedless 
 of his own safety, he raised the sick in his arms and bore them to 
 the hospitals. He esteemed no time, or place, or office, too sacred 
 for this work of mercy. Ships, colleges, churches, all at his bid- 
 ding became so many lazarettos. Night and day he lived among 
 the diseased and the dying, or quitted them only to beg food or 
 medicine, from door to door, for their relief. For the moment, even. 
 China was forgotten ; nor would he advance a step, though he were 
 to convert Christianity a third part of the human race, so long as 
 one victim of the plague demanded his sympathy, or could be 
 directed by him to an ever-present and still more compassionate 
 Comforter. For the career of Xavier (though he knew it not) was 
 now drawing to a close ; and with him the time was ripe for prac- 
 tising those deeper lessons of wisdom which he had imbibed from 
 his long and arduous course of discipline. 
 
 With her cables bent lay the " Holy Cross " in the port of 
 Malacca, ready at length to convey the embassage to China, when a
 
 152 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 difficulty arose, -which not even the prophetic spirit of Xavier had 
 foreseen. Don Alvaro d'Alayde, the governor, a grandee of high 
 rank, regarded the envoy and his commission with an evil eye. To 
 represent the crown of Portugal to the greatest of earthly monarchs 
 was, he thought, an honour more meet for a son of the house of 
 Alayde, than for a man who had risen from the very dregs of the 
 people. The expected emoluments also exceeded the decencies of a 
 cupidity less than noble. He became of opinion that it was not for 
 the advantage of the service of King John III. that the expedition 
 should proceed. Pereyra appeared before him in the humble garb 
 of a suitor, with the offer of 30,000 crowns as a bribe. All who 
 sighed for the conversion, or for the commerce of China, lent the 
 aid of their intercessions. Envoys, saints, and merchants united 
 their prayers in vain. Brandishing his cane over their heads, 
 Alvaro swore that, so long as he was governor of Malacca and cap- 
 tain-general of the seas of Portugal, the embassy should move no 
 further. Week after week was thus consumed, and the season was 
 fast wearing away, when Xavier at length resolved on a measure to 
 be justified, even in his eyes, only by extreme necessity. A secret 
 of high significance had been buried in his bosom, since his 
 departure from Europe. The time for the disclosure of it had 
 come. He produced a Papal Brief, investing him with the dignity 
 and the powers of apostolical nuncio in the East. One more hin- 
 drance to the conversion of China, and the Church would clothe 
 her neck with thunders. Alvaro was still unmoved ; and sentence 
 of excommunication was solemnly pronounced against him and his 
 abettors. Alvaro answered by sequestrating the " Holy Cross " her- 
 self. Xavier wrote letters of complaint to the king. Alvaro 
 intercepted them. One appeal was still open to the vicar of the 
 vicar of Christ. Prostrate before the altar, he invoked the aid of 
 Heaven ; and rose with purposes confirmed and hopes reanimated. 
 In the service of Alvaro, though no longer bearing the embassy to 
 China, the " Holy Cross " was to be despatched to Sancian, an 
 island near the mouth of the Canton river, to which the Portuguese 
 were permitted to resort for trade. Xavier resolved to pursue his 
 voyage so far, and thence proceed to Macao to preach the Gospel 
 there. Imprisonment was sure to follow. But he should have 
 Chinese fellow-prisoners. These at least he might convert ; and 
 though his life would pay the forfeit, he should leave behind him, 
 in these first Christians, a band of missionaries who would pro- 
 pagate through their native land the faith which he might only be 
 permitted to plant. 
 
 It was a compromise as welcome to Alvaro as to Xavier himself.
 
 THE POUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 153 
 
 Again trie " Holy Cross " prepared for sea ; and the Apostle of the 
 Indies, followed by a grateful and admiring people, passed through 
 the gates of Malacca to the beach. Falling on his face on the 
 earth, he poured forth a passionate, though silent, prayer. His 
 body heaved and shook with the throes of that agonising hour. 
 What might be the fearful portent none might divine, and none 
 presumed to ask. A contagious terror passed from eye to eye, but 
 every voice was hushed. It was as the calm preceding the first 
 thunder-peal which is to rend the firmament. Xavier arose ; his 
 countenance no longer beaming with its accustomed grace and 
 tenderness, but glowing with a sacred indignation, like that of 
 Isaiah when breathing forth his inspired menaces against the King 
 of Babylon. Standing on a rock amidst the waters, he loosed his 
 shoes from off his feet, smote them against each other with 
 vehement action, and then casting them from him, as still tainted 
 with the dust of that devoted city, he leaped barefooted into the 
 bark, which bore him away for ever from a place from which he 
 had so long and vainly laboured to avert her impending doom. 
 
 She bore him, as he had projected, to the island of Sancian. It 
 was a mere commercial factory ; and the merchants who passed the 
 trading season there vehemently opposed his design of penetrating 
 further into China. True he had ventured into the forest there, 
 against the tigers which infested it, with no other weapon than a 
 vase of holy water ; and the savage beasts, sprinkled with that 
 sacred element, had for ever fled the place ; but the Mandarins 
 were fiercer still than they, and would avenge the preaching of the 
 Saint on the inmates of the factory ; though most guiltless of any 
 design but that of adding to their heap of crowns and moidores. 
 Long years had now passed away since the voice of Loyola had 
 been heard on the banks of the Seine, urging the solemn inquiry > 
 " What shall it profit 1 " But the words still rung on the ear of 
 Xavier, and were still repeated, though in vain, to his worldly 
 associates at Sancian. They sailed away with their cargoes, leaving 
 behind them only the " Holy Cross," in charge of the officers of 
 Alvaro, and depriving Xavier of all means of crossing the channel 
 to Macao. They left him destitute of shelter and of food, but not 
 of hope. He had heard that the King of Siam meditated an 
 embassy to China for the following year ; and to Si.T-m he resolved 
 to return in Alvaro's vessel ; to join himself, if possible, to the 
 Siamese envoys ; and so at length to force his way into the empire. 
 
 But his earthly toils and projects were now to cease for ever. 
 The angel of death appeared with a summons, for which, since death 
 first entered our world, no man was ever more triumphantly prepared.
 
 154 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 It found him on board the vessel on the point of departing for Siam. 
 At his own request he was removed to the shore, that he might meet 
 his end with the greater composure. Stretched on the naked beach, 
 with the cold blasts of a Chinese winter aggravating his pains, he 
 contended alone with the agonies of the fever which wasted his vital 
 power. It was an agony and a solitude for which the happiest of the 
 sons of men might well have exchanged the dearest society and the 
 purest of the joys of life. It was an agony in which his still-uplifted 
 crucifix reminded him of a far more awful woe endured for his de- 
 liverance. It was a solitude thronged by blessed ministers of peace 
 and consolation, visible in all their bright and lovely aspects to the 
 now unclouded eye of faith ; and audible to the dying martyr through 
 the yielding bars of his mortal prison-house, in strains of exulting joy 
 till then unheard and unimagined. Tears burst from his fading eyes, 
 tears of an emotion too big for utterance. In the cold collapse of 
 death his features were for a few brief moments irradiated as with 
 the first beams of approaching glory. He raised himself on his 
 crucifix ; and exclaiming, In te, Domine, speravi non confundar in 
 ceternum ! he bowed his head and died. 
 
 Why consume many words in delineating a character which can 
 be disposed of in three 1 Xavier was a fanatic, a Papist, and a 
 Jesuit. Comprehensive and incontrovertible as the climax is, it 
 yet does not exhaust the censures to which he is obnoxious. His 
 understanding, that is, the mere cogitative faculty, was deficient in 
 originality, in clearness, and in force. It is difficult to imagine a 
 religious dogma which he would not have embraced, at the command 
 of his teachers, with the same infantine credulity with which he re- 
 ceived the legends and the creeds which they actually imposed upon 
 him. His faith was not victorious over doubt ; for doubt never for 
 one passing moment assailed it. Superstition might boast in him 
 one of the most complete as well as one of the most illustrious of her 
 conquests. She led him through a land peopled with visionary 
 forms, and resounding with ideal voices a land of prodigies and 
 portents, of ineffable discourse and unearthly melodies. She bade 
 him look on this fair world as on some dungeon unvisited by the 
 breath of heaven ; and on the glorious face of nature, and the charms 
 of social life, as so many snares and pitfalls for his feet. At her 
 voice he starved and lacerated his body, and rivalled the meanest 
 pauper in filth and wretchedness. Harder still, she sent him forth 
 to establish among half-civilised tribes a worship which to them was 
 but little more than a new idolatry ; and to inculcate a morality in 
 which the more arduous virtues of the Christian life were made to 
 yield precedence to ritual forms and outward ceremonies. And yet,
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 155 
 
 never did the polytheism of ancient or of modern Rome assign a seat 
 among the demi-gods to a hero of nobler mould, or of a more exalted 
 magnanimity, than Francis Xavier. 
 
 He lived among men as if to show how little the grandeur of the 
 human soul depends on mere intellectual power. It was his to de- 
 monstrate with what vivific rays a heart imbued with the love of God 
 and man may warm and kindle the nations, however dense may he 
 the exhalations through which the giant pursues his course from the 
 one end of heaven to the other. Scholars criticised, wits ridiculed, 
 prudent men admonished, and kings opposed him ; but on moved 
 Francis Xavier, borne forward by an impulse which crushed and 
 scattered to the winds all such puny obstacles. In ten short years, 
 as if mercy had lent him wings, and faith an impenetrable armour, 
 he traversed oceans, islands, and continents, through a track equal 
 to more than twice the circumference of our globe ; everywhere 
 preaching, disputing, baptizing, and founding Christian churches. 
 There is at least one well-authenticated miracle in Xavier' s story. 
 It is, that any mortal man should have sustained such toils as he 
 did ; and have sustained them too, not merely with composure, but 
 as if in obedience to some indestructible exigency of his nature. 
 " The Father Master Francis " (the words are those of his associate, 
 Melchior Nunez), " when labouring for the salvation of idolaters, 
 seemed to act, not by any acquired power, but as by some natural 
 instinct ; for he could neither take pleasure nor even exist except in 
 such employments. They were his repose ; and when he was lead- 
 ing men to the knowledge and the love of God, however much he 
 exerted himself, he never appeared to be making any effort." 
 
 Seven hundred thousand converts (for in these matters Xavier's 
 eulogists are not parsimonious) are numbered as the fruits of his 
 mission ; nor is the extravagance so extreme if the word " conver- 
 sion " be understood in the sense in which they used it. Kings, 
 rajahs, and princes were always, when possible, the first objects of 
 his care. Some such conquests he certainly made ; and as the 
 flocks would often follow their shepherds, and as the gate into the 
 Christian fold was not made very strait, it may have been entered 
 by many thousands and tens of thousands. But if Xavier taught 
 the mighty of the earth, it was for the sake of the poor and miser- 
 able, and with them he chiefly dwelt. He dwelt with them on 
 terms ill enough corresponding with the vulgar notions of a saint. 
 "You, my friends," said he to a hand of soldiers who had hidden 
 their cards at his approach, " belong to no religious order, nor can 
 you pass whole days in devotion. Amuse yourselves. To you it is 
 not forbidden, if you neither cheat, quarrel, nor swear when you
 
 156 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 play." Then good-humouredly sitting down in the midst of them, 
 he challenged one of the party to a game at chess ; and was found 
 at the board by Don Diego Noragua, whose curiosity had brought 
 him from far to see so holy a man, and to catch some fragments of 
 that solemn discourse which must ever be flowing from his lips 
 The grandee would have died in the belief that the saint was a 
 hypocrite, unless by good fortune he had afterwards (as we are told) 
 chanced to break in on his retirement, and to find him there sus- 
 pended between earth and heaven, in a rapture of devotion, with a 
 halo of celestial glory encircling his head ! 
 
 No mention will be found in the letters of Xavier of any such 
 miraculous visitations, or of any other of the supernatural perform- 
 ances, ascribed to him by his Church. Such at least is the result of 
 a careful examination of the whole of the five books into which his 
 Epistles are divided. He was too humble a man to think it pro- 
 bable that he should be the depositary of so divine a gift ; and too 
 honest to advance any such claims to the admiration of mankind. 
 Indeed he seems to have been amused with the facility with which 
 his friends assented to these prodigies. Two' of them repeated to 
 him the tale of his having raised a dead child to life, and pressed 
 him to reveal the truth. " What ! " he replied, " I raise the dead ! 
 Can you really believe such a thing of a wretch like me 1 " Then 
 smiling, he added, " They did indeed place before me a child. They 
 said it was dead, which perhaps was not the case. I told him to 
 get up, and he did so. Do you call that a miracle ? " But in this 
 matter Xavier was not allowed to judge for himself. He was a 
 Thaumaturgus in his own despite ; and this very denial is quoted 
 by his admirers as a proof of his profound humility. Could he, by 
 some second sight, have read the Bull of his own canonisation, he 
 would doubtless, in defiance of his senses, have believed (for belief 
 was always at his command) that the Church knew much better 
 than he did, and that he had been reversing the laws of nature 
 without perceiving it ; for at the distance of rather more than half 
 a century from his death, Pope Urban VIII., with the unanimous 
 assent of all the cardinals, patriarchs, archbishops, and bishops, in 
 sacred conclave assembled, pledged his papal infallibility to the 
 miracles already recorded, and to many more. And who will be so 
 sceptical as to doubt their reality, when he is informed that deposi- 
 tions, taken in proof of them, were read before that august assembly ; 
 and that the apotheosis was opposed there by a learned person, who, 
 as usual in such cases, appeared at their bar in the character, and 
 with the title, of " the Devil's advocate " 1 A scoffer might indeed 
 suggest that if the lawyer really laboured to refute falsehood, he
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 157 
 
 must have betrayed the interests of his clients ; and that the Father 
 of Lies probably instructed his counsel to make a sham, fight of it, 
 in order that one lie the more might be established among men in 
 the form of a new idol worship. Without exploring so dark a ques- 
 tion, it may be seriously regretted that such old wives' fables have 
 been permitted to sully the genuine history of so many men of 
 whom the world was not worthy, and of none more than Francis 
 Xavier. They have long obscured his real glory, and degraded him 
 to the low level of a vulgar hero of ecclesiastical romance. Stripped 
 of these puerile embellishments, with no title to the homage due 
 to genius and to learning, and not included in the number of those 
 who have aided the progress of speculative truth, he emerges from 
 those lower regions, clad with the mild brilliancy, and resplendent 
 in the matchless beauty, which belong to the human nature, when 
 ripening fast into a perfect union with the divine. He had attained 
 to that childlike affiance in the Author of his being, which gives an 
 unrestrained play to every blameless impulse, even when that awful 
 presence is the most habitually felt. His was a sanctity which, at 
 fitting seasons, could even disport itself in jests and trifling. No 
 man, however abject his condition, disgusting his maladies, or hate- 
 ful his crimes, ever turned to Xavier without learning that there 
 was at least one human heart on which he might repose with all the 
 confidence of a brother's love. To his eye the meanest and the 
 lowest reflected the image of Him whom he followed and adored ; 
 nor did he suppose that he could ever serve the Saviour of mankind 
 so acceptably as by ministering to their sorrows, and recalling them 
 into the way of peace. It is easy to smile at his visions, to detect 
 his errors, to ridicule the extravagant austerities of his life, and 
 even to show how much his misguided zeal eventually counteracted 
 his own designs. But with our philosophy, our luxuries, and our 
 wider experience, it is not easy for us to estimate or to comprehend 
 the career of such a man. Between his thoughts and our thoughts 
 there is but little in common. Of our wisdom he knew nothing, 
 and would have despised it if he had. Philanthropy was his pas- 
 sion ; reckless daring his delight ; and faith, glowing in meridian 
 splendour, the sunshine in which he walked. He judged or felt 
 (and who shall say that he judged or felt erroneously 1 ?) that the 
 Chiu'ch demanded an illustrious sacrifice, and that he was to be the 
 victim ; that a voice which had been dumb for fifteen centuries 
 must at length be raised again, and that to him that voice had been 
 imparted ; that a new Apostle must go forth to break up the in- 
 crustations of man's long-hardened heart, and that to him that 
 apostolate had been committed. So judging or so feeling, he obeyed
 
 158 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 the summons of him whom he regarded as Christ's vicar on earth, 
 and the echoes from no sublunary region, which the summons 
 seemed to awaken in his bosom. In holding up to reverential ad- 
 miration such self-sacrifices as bis, slight, indeed, is the danger of 
 stimulating an enthusiastic imitation. Enthusiasm ! our pulpits 
 distil their bland rhetoric against it ; but where is it to be found 1 
 Do not our share markets, thronged even by the devout, overlay it 
 and our rich benefices extinguish it and our pentecosts, in the 
 dazzling month of May, dissipate it and our stipendiary missions, 
 and our mitres, decked, even in heathen lands, with jewels and Avith 
 lordly titles do they not, as so many lightning conductors, effect- 
 ually divert it 'I There is indeed the lackadaiscal enthusiasm of de- 
 votional experiences, and the sentimental enthusiasm of religious 
 bazaars, and the oratorical enthusiasm of charitable platforms, and 
 the tractarian enthusiasm of certain well-beneficed ascetics ; but in 
 what, except the name, do they resemble the " God-in-us " enthusiasm 
 of Francis Xavier of Xavier the magnanimous, the holy, and the 
 gay ; the canonised saint, not of Rome only, but of universal Chris- 
 tendom ; who, if at this hour there remained not a solitary Christian 
 to claim and to rejoice in his spiritual ancestry, should yet live in 
 hallowed and everlasting remembrance, as the man who has be- 
 queathed to these later ages, at once the clearest proof and the most 
 illustrious example, that even amidst the enervating arts of our 
 modern civilisation the apostolic energy may still burn with all its 
 primaeval ardour in the human soul, when animated and directed by 
 a power more than human. 
 
 Xavier died in the year 1552, in the forty-seventh year of his age, 
 and in the eleventh year of his absence from Europe. During his 
 residence in the East, he had maintained a frequent correspondence 
 with the General of his Order. Their letters breathe the tenderness 
 which is one of the indispensable elements of the heroic character. 
 But it was a grave though an intense affection, never degenerating 
 into fondness, but chastened by filial reverence on the one side, and 
 by parental authority on the other. 
 
 It was, indeed, as a father, or rather as a patriarch, exercising a 
 supreme command over his family, and making laws for their future 
 government, that Ignatius passed the last twenty years of his life. 
 No longer a wanderer through the world, captivating or overawing 
 the minds of men by marvels addressed to their imagination, he 
 dwelt in the ecclesiastical capital of the West, giving form and sub- 
 stance to the visions which had first fallen upon him at the Mount 
 of Ascension, and which had immovably abided with him through 
 every succeeding pilgrimage.
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 159 
 
 Of the projects of his later days, the most cherished was that of 
 training, at the Central College of the Jesuits at Rome, the pupils 
 who were to propagate his society throughout the world. All lan- 
 guages and all sciences were taught there. The scholars contended 
 with each other in public for literary honours, and exhibited before 
 the learned and the great their skill in dramatic recitation. Such 
 was the solicitude of Ignatius for their improvement, that he invited 
 them to criticise his own colloquial Italian ; for, having acquired 
 that language late in life, he spoke it imperfectly ; and was willing 
 to compromise even his own habitual and well-sustained dignity, if 
 so he might impress on his neophytes the importance of excelling in 
 those vernacular tongues, by the use of which they were destined to 
 encounter and rival their Protestant adversaries. 
 
 He was not, however, permitted to devote his declining years to 
 such peaceful pursuits as these ; but yielded to the law which con- 
 signs to the life-long hostility of mankind every innovator who 
 either breaks up their inveterate habits, or discredits their cherished 
 maxims. 
 
 In Spain, Ignatius was assailed by Melchior Cano, a Dominican 
 monk, by the Archbishop of Toledo, and by the Vicar-General of 
 Saragossa ; all of whom appear to have braved his power, in the 
 secret assurance of support from the Emperor Charles V. Melchior 
 denounced the Jesuits and their General as impostors. Their in- 
 fluence, it is said, consigned him to an honourable banishment as 
 Bishop of the Canaries. But he quickly resigned his mitre, and, 
 resuming his invectives, continued them with impunity till death 
 itself silenced him. The Archbishop launched against the new 
 Order hot thunderbolts of interdicts and excommunications, as 
 usurpers of his archiepiscopal privileges ; and, though Ignatius met 
 the storm with papal briefs and edicts from the royal council, he 
 was compelled to propitiate his powerful antagonist by humiliating 
 submissions. Encouraged perhaps by this success of his neighbour, 
 the Vicar-General of Saragossa brought into the field against the 
 same enemies the same spiritual artillery of mandates and anathe- 
 mas. Alarmed to find themselves thus cut off from all Christian 
 offices, and from all the sacraments of the Church, the citizens first 
 furiously drove away the Jesuits ; and then, with true popular con- 
 sistency, as furiously drove away the Vicar-General and his clergy. 
 The intrusive Order triumphed, and established themselves at Sara- 
 gossa, both as ministers of religion, and as teachers of youth. It 
 was a triumph doomed to a late, but lamentable expiation. 
 
 In France, Ignatius contended long and without success for the 
 reception and settlement of his society. Though the Cardinal of
 
 160 THE FOUNDEKS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 Lorraine was his advocate, and Henry II. issued letters-patent 
 authorising the establishment of a Jesuit house and college in Paris, 
 the Parliament refused to register the grant ; and, -when urged by 
 the royal commands to obedience, opposed to them an angry 
 remonstrance. The University seconded the Parliament. The 
 Sorbonne promulgated a " conclusion " in their support. The Arch- 
 bishop poured down a pitiless storm of declarations, prohibitions, 
 and censures upon the heads of the suspected and unpopular 
 Jesuits. Neither the King, the Cardinal, nor the General could 
 make head against the thick flight of these ecclesiastical missiles. 
 So the churchmen and the professors of Paris retained their mono- 
 poly of preaching and lecturing ; the Jesuits taking refuge at St 
 Germains, where, beyond the reach of the metropolitan jurisdiction, 
 they waited the arrival of more propitious days. 
 
 In Portugal still more formidable disasters exercised the fortitude 
 of Ignatius. Under the genial beams of royal favour, his institu- 
 tion had thriven but too luxuriantly in that kingdom, and was 
 already exhibiting symptoms of corruption and decay. The Jesuit 
 College at Coimbra was crowded with youths of family and fortune, 
 who had rapidly degenerated into the lawless and self-indulgent 
 habits of secular collegians. Eodriguez, the provincial of Portugal, 
 a ruler of a gentle nature and too easy compliance, had been unable 
 to restrain their petulance, or to punish their vices ; and was dis- 
 placed by the indignant General to make way for Miron, a man 
 renowned for austerity, and endowed with an inflexible sternness. 
 But the severities of Miron were followed by an open revolt of the 
 students ; and so formidable was their resistance, that even Ignatius 
 was compelled to temporise. It was not, however, in his nature to 
 make a permanent sacrifice of any part of his authority. He sub- 
 jugated the rebels at length ; but it was by a method which, at any 
 other time, and in any other hands, might pass for the fabulous. 
 
 The rector of the college of Coimbra magnanimously resolved to 
 make a public and painful expiation in his own person for the 
 offences of his pupils. With his back and shoulders bare, and 
 wielding in his hand a scourge, he traversed the city, inflicting on 
 his naked back a succession of well-aimed and formidable stripes, 
 and explaining to the astonished multitude the vicarious nature of 
 this self-inflicted punishment. The example was of course ir- 
 resistible. Other Jesuits quickly followed the rector, lashing them- 
 selves with emulous severity. The fascination spread. The 
 refractory students themselves at length joined the expiatory pro- 
 cession, till they reached the college ; where they arrived soundly 
 whipped, excoriated, bleeding, and exhausted ; and resolved never
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 161 
 
 more to provoke the mysterious power -with which they had to do 
 a power which could thus, by an incomprehensible influence, compel 
 their own wills to pronounce, and their own arms to execute, a 
 sentence of shame and suffering, such as no other judge would have 
 ventured to impose. 
 
 The great enchanter himself was now, however, to submit to the 
 common doom. The spiritual sovereignty of which he was the 
 architect had, in less than a quarter of a century, acquired an ex- 
 tension almost as great, and an establishment almost as firm, as that 
 which the Papacy had gained by the unremitting labours of a 
 thousand years. But, on the 30th of July, 1556, the strong man 
 received the summons to render up his soul to him who gave it. 
 He lingered till the following day and then died ; but, strange to 
 say, "unanointed, unannealed," without the benediction of the 
 Pope, or the sacraments of his Church. It is alleged by his friends 
 that, in the spirit of obedience to his physician, he had postponed 
 till too late the demand of these spiritual aids. His enemies exult 
 over him as having betrayed, by this last act of indifference to the 
 offices of religion, the latent infidelity and the secret falsehood of his 
 life. The more charitable is incomparably the more probable 
 hypothesis. They, however, who have studied Christianity in the 
 life and the discourses of its divine Author, rather than in systems of 
 dogmatic theology, will venture to believe that the acceptance of a 
 dying man by his Maker depends on something infinitely higher 
 and more holy than any priestly absolution or sacerdotal chrism. 
 
 Some unconscious love of power, a mind bewildered by many 
 gross superstitions and many theoretical errors, and perhaps some 
 tinge of insanity, may be justly ascribed to Ignatius Loyola. But 
 no dispassionate student of his life will question his integrity, or 
 deny him the praise of a devotion at once sincere, habitual, and 
 profound. It is not to the glory of the Reformed to depreciate their 
 greatest antagonist ; or to think meanly of him, by whom, more 
 than by any other man, the Reformation was stayed, and the Church 
 of Rome rescued from her impending doom. 
 
 In the language now current amongst us, Ignatius might be de- 
 scribed as the leader of the conservative, against the innovating spirit 
 of his times. It was an age, as indeed is every era of great popular 
 revolutions, when the impulsive or centrifugal forces which tend to 
 isolate man, preponderating over the attractive or centripetal forces 
 which tend to congregate him, had destroyed the balance of the 
 social system. From amidst the controversies which then agitated 
 the world had emerged two great truths, of which, after three hun- 
 dred years' debate, we are yet to find the reconcilement. It was true 
 
 11
 
 162 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 that the Christian Commonwealth ought to be one consentient body, 
 united under one supreme head and bound together by a community 
 of law, of doctrine, and of worship. It was also true that each 
 member of that body was obliged for himself, on his own respon- 
 sibility, and at his own peril, to render that worship, to ascertain 
 that doctrine, to study that law, and to seek the guidance of that 
 Supreme Ruler. Between these corporate duties and these individual 
 obligations, there was a seeming contrariety. And yet the contra- 
 diction must be apparent only, and not real ; for all truths must be 
 consistent with each other. Here was a problem for the learned 
 and the wise, for schools, and presses, and pulpits. But it is not by 
 sages, nor in the spirit of philosophy, that such problems receive 
 their practical solution. Wisdom may be the ultimate arbiter, but 
 is seldom the immediate agent in human affairs. It is by antagonist 
 passions, prejudices, and follies, that the equipoise of this most belli- 
 gerent planet of ours is chiefly preserved in our own days ; and so it 
 was in the sixteenth century. If Papal Rome had her Brennus, 
 she must also have her Camillus. From the camp of the invaders 
 arose the war-cry of absolute mental independence ; from the be- 
 leaguered host, the watchword of absolute spiritual obedience. The 
 German pointed the way to that sacred solitude where, besides the 
 worshipper himself, none may enter ; the Spaniard to that innumer- 
 able company, which, with one accord, still chant the liturgies, and 
 recite the creeds, of remotest generations. Chieftains in the most 
 momentous warfare of which this earth had been the theatre since 
 the subversion of Paganism, each was a rival worthy of the other in 
 capacity, courage, disinterestedness, and the love of truth. And yet 
 how marvellous the contrast ! 
 
 Luther took to wife a nun. For thirty years together, Loyola 
 never once looked on the female countenance. To overthrow the 
 houses of the order to which he belonged, was the triumph of the 
 reformer. To establish a new order on indestructible foundations, 
 the glory of the saint. The career of the one was opened in the cell, 
 and concluded amidst the cares of secular government. The course 
 of life of the other, led him from a youth of camps and palaces to 
 an old age of religious abstraction. Demons haunted both ; but to 
 the northern visionary they appeared as foul or malignant fiends, 
 with whom he was to agonise in spiritual strife ; to the southern 
 dreamer, as angels of light marshalling his way to celestial blessed- 
 ness. As best became his Teutonic honesty and singleness of heart, 
 Luther aimed at no perfection but such as may consist with the 
 everyday cares, and the common duties, and the innocent delights of 
 our social existence; at once the foremost of heroes, and a very
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 163 
 
 man ; now oppressed with melancholy, and defying the powers of 
 darkness, satanic or human ; then " rejoicing in gladness and thank- 
 fulness of heart for all his abundance ;" loving and beloved ; com- 
 muning Avith the wife of his bosom ; prattling with his children ; 
 surrendering his overburdened mind to the charms of music ; awake 
 to every gentle voice, and to each cheerful aspect of nature or of 
 art ; responding alike to every divine impulse and to every human 
 feeling ; no chord unstrung in his spiritual or sensitive frame, but 
 all blending together in harmonies as copious as the bounties of 
 Providence, and as changeful as the vicissitudes of life. How re- 
 mote from the "perfection" which Loyola proposed to himself, and 
 which (unless we presume to distrust the Bulls by which he was 
 beatified and canonised) we must suppose him to have attained ! 
 Drawn by infallible, not less distinctly than by fallible limners, the 
 portrait of the military priest of the Casa Professa possesses the cold 
 dignity and the grace of sculpture ; but is wholly wanting in the 
 mellow tones, the lights and shadows, the rich colouring, and the 
 skilful composition of the sister art. There he stands apart from us 
 mortal men, familiar with visions which he may not communicate, 
 and with joys which he cannot impart. Severe in the midst of 
 raptures, composed in the very agonies of pain ; a silent, austere, 
 and solitary man ; with a heart formed for tenderness, yet mortify- 
 ing even his best affections ; loving mankind as his brethren, and 
 yet rejecting their sympathy : one while, a squalid, care-worn, self- 
 lacerated pauper, tormenting his own senses that so he might rescue 
 others from sensuality ; at another a monarch reigning in secluded 
 majesty, that so he might become the benefactor of his race ; and 
 then a legislator exacting, though with no selfish purposes, an obe- 
 dience as submissive and as prompt as is due to the King of kings. 
 Heart and soul we are for the Protestant. He who will be wiser 
 than his Maker is but seeming wise. He who will deaden one half 
 of his nature to invigorate the other half will become at best a dis- 
 torted prodigy. Dark as are the pages, and indistinct as is the 
 character, in which the truth is inscribed, he who can decipher the 
 roll will there read that self-adoring pride is the head-spring of 
 stoicism, whether in the heathen or in the Christian world. But 
 there is a roll, neither dark nor ambiguous, in which the simplest 
 and most ignorant may learn in what the "perfection" of our hu- 
 manity really consists. Throughout the glorious profusion of didac- 
 tic precepts, of pregnant apothegms, of lyric and choral songs, of in- 
 stitutes ecclesiastical and civil, of historical legends and biographies, 
 of homilies and apologues, of prophetic menaces, of epistolary admo- 
 nitions, and of positive laws, which crowd the inspired Canon, there 
 
 11
 
 164 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 is still one consentient voice proclaiming to man, that the world 
 within and the world without him were created for each other ; that 
 his interior life must be sustained and nourished by intercourse with 
 external things ; and that he then most nearly approaches to the 
 "perfection" of his nature, when being most conversant with the 
 joys and sorrows of life, and most affected by them, he is yet the 
 best prepared to renounce the one or to endure the other, in a cheer- 
 ful acquiescence in the will of Heaven. 
 
 Unalluring, and on the whole unlovely as it is, the image of 
 Loyola must ever command the homage of the world. No other 
 uninspired man, unaided by military or civil power, and making no 
 appeal to the passions of the multitude, has had the genius to con- 
 ceive, the courage to attempt, and the success to establish, a polity 
 teeming with results at once so momentous and so distinctly antici- 
 pated. Amidst his ascetic follies, and his half-crazy visions, and, 
 despite all the coarse daubing with which the miracle-mongers of his 
 Church have defaced it, his character is destitute neither of sub- 
 limity nor of grace. They were men of no common stamp with 
 whom he lived, and they regarded him with an unbounded rever- 
 ence. On the anniversary of his death Baronius and Bellarmine met 
 to worship at his tomb ; and there, with touching and unpremedi- 
 tated eloquence, joined to celebrate his virtues. His successor Lay- 
 nez was so well convinced that Loyola was beloved by the Deity 
 above all other men, as to declare it impossible that any request of 
 his should be refused. Xavier was wont to kneel when he wrote 
 letters to him, to implore the Divine aid through the merits of his 
 "holy Father Ignatius," and to carry about his autograph as a 
 sacred relic. In popular estimation, the very house in which he 
 once dwelt had been so hallowed by his presence, as to shake to 
 the foundation, if thoughts unbecoming its purity found entrance 
 into the mind of any inmate. Of his theopathy, as exhibited in his 
 letters, in his recorded discourse, and in the precepts of his 
 " Spiritual Exercises," it is perhaps difficult for the colder imagina- 
 tions, and the Protestant reserve, of the North to form a correct 
 estimate. Measured by such a standard, it must be pronounced 
 irreverent and erotic; a libation on the altar at once too profuse 
 and too little filtered from the dross of human passion. But to his 
 fellow-men he was not merely benevolent, but compassionate, toler- 
 ant, and candid. However inflexible in exacting from his chosen 
 followers an all-enduring constancy, he was gentle to others, espe- 
 cially to the young and the weak; and would often make an 
 amiable though awkward effort to promote their recreation. He was 
 never heard to mention a fault or a crime, except to suggest an
 
 THE POUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 165 
 
 apology for the offender. "Humbly to conceal humility, and to 
 shun the praise of being humble," was the maxim and the habit of 
 his later life ; and on that principle he maintained the unostentatious 
 decencies of his rank as General of his order at the Casa Professa ; 
 a convent which had been assigned for their residence at Rome. 
 There he dwelt, conducting a correspondence more extensive and im- 
 portant than any which issued from the cabinets of Paris or Madrid. 
 In sixteen years he had established twelve Jesuit Provinces in 
 Europe, India, Africa, and Brazil ; and more than a hundred 
 colleges or houses for the professed and the probationers, already 
 amounting to many thousands. His missionaries had traversed every 
 country, however remote and barbarous, which the enterprise of his 
 age had opened to the merchants of Europe. The devout resorted to 
 him for guidance, the miserable for relief, the wise for instruction, 
 and the rulers of the earth for succour. Men felt that there had 
 appeared among them one of those monarchs who reign in right of 
 their own native supremacy ; and to whom the feebler wills of 
 others must yield either a ready or a reluctant allegiance. It was a 
 conviction recorded by his disciples on his tomb, in these memorable 
 and significant words : " Whoever thou mayest be who has por- 
 trayed to thine own imagination Pompey, or Csesar, or Alexander, 
 open thine eyes to the truth, and let this marble teach thee how 
 much greater a conqueror than they was Ignatius." 
 
 "Whatever may have been the comparative majesty of the Caesarian 
 and the Ignatian conquests, it was true of either that, on the death 
 of the conqueror, the succession to his diadem hung long in anxious 
 suspense. Our tale descends from the sublime and the heroic to the 
 region of ordinary motives and of ordinary men. 
 
 When Ignatius died, two of the most eminent of the original 
 members of his order, Bobadilla and Laynez, were labouring under 
 diseases supposed to be mortal. Laynez roused himself to issue a 
 summons, requiring the attendance of the professed members at 
 Eome, to make choice of a General. But Philip II., then at war 
 witli the papal court, rendered the election impossible, by detaining 
 a majority of the Electoral College in Spain. Laynez, therefore, 
 undertook the government of the society, with the rank and title of 
 Vicar-General. 
 
 There are some bodily disorders for which promotion is a specific. 
 Full of renovated life, the Vicar-General assumed all the powers of 
 his great predecessor, and soon gave proof that they had fallen into 
 no feeble hands. But neither was that a feeble grasp in which the 
 keys of Peter were then held. Hot-headed and imperious as he 
 was, Paul IV. had quailed in the solemn presence of Ignatius ; but
 
 166 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 he believed that the time had now come for arresting the progress of 
 a power which he had learnt rather to dread as the rival, than to 
 respect as the guardian, of his own. To the succour of the Pope 
 came Bobadilla ; who also shook off his illness that he might assume 
 the guidance of a party among the professed Jesuits who were op- 
 posed to the advancement of Laynez to the office of General. 
 
 They commenced hostilities by preferring against him the charge 
 of meditating an escape to Spain, with the view of conducting the 
 election there, and of fixing the future seat and centre of the Jesuit 
 power within the dominions of Philip ; where, exempt from papal 
 control, they might give to the order whatever character and consti- 
 tutions might best promote the greatness, and gratify the ambition, 
 of the General. To defeat this project the Pope issued a mandate 
 forbidding any Jesuit to quit the precincts of the city. Encouraged 
 by this success, Bobadilla, a warm-hearted, impetuous man, who, 
 even during the life of Ignatius, had protested against the severity 
 of his rules and his demand of implicit obedience, now poured forth 
 a series of vehement remonstrances against the supposed machin- 
 ations of the Vicar-General. "With a far more profound policy Lay- 
 nez entrenched himself within an elaborate display of penitence, 
 meekness, and humility. He confessed that it became him and his 
 followers to atone, by self-inflicted penances, for the offence which 
 it had seemed good to the Holy Father to impute to them. He was 
 himself the first to lay publicly on his own shoulders severe and 
 frequent stripes to expiate this fault. His meekness was such that 
 he declined to return any answer to the harsh accusations of his 
 antagonists. The laws of their order, indeed, required that the 
 Vicar-General should impose some punishment on a subordinate who 
 had advanced a complaint against his superior ; but so admirable 
 was his mildness, that he subjected the bitterest of his assailants to 
 no greater burthen than a single recital of the Paternoster and the 
 Ave Maria. 
 
 Bobadilla and his adherents were no match for subtlety like this. 
 They forgot of what inestimable price. such exquisite lowliness must 
 be in papal eyes. They overlooked the disfavour with which any 
 resistance to any spiritual authority must always be regarded at the 
 Vatican. They had the indiscretion to represent to the irritable 
 pontiff that by punishing an appeal to himself by the infliction of 
 any penance whatever, Laynez had violated the majesty of the Papal 
 Crown, and infringed the privileges of all Christian people. " What, 
 then, was the penance ? " inquired the Cardinal Minister. " One 
 Paternoster and one Ave Maria," was the reply. Indignation, con- 
 tempt, and a pious horror at the feebleness of soul which could
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 167 
 
 murmur under such a trifle, repelled the unfortunate remonstrants 
 from the presence of Paul. Laynez enjoyed the pleasure of having 
 made them ridiculous. His gratification was not long afterwards 
 completed by their exile to Assisi, there to perform far less tolerable 
 exercises of penitence. They left the world of Rome for him to 
 bustle in. 
 
 Peace with Spain returned ; and with it came the electors so long 
 and anxiously expected. The entire chapter did not include more 
 than twenty members. It was a lowly chamber in which they 
 were convened, nor did a company less imposing in outward sem- 
 blance meet together on that day within the compass of the seven 
 hills. Yet scarcely had the Comitia, to whose shouts those hills 
 had once re-echoed, ever conferred on consul or on praetor a power 
 more real or more extensive than that which those homely men had 
 now assembled to bestow. But before their choice of a General had 
 been made, the doors of the conclave were thrown open, and Cardi- 
 nal Pacheco appeared among them in the name of the Pope, and 
 armed with his delegated authority. He had come (he said) not to 
 control their proceedings, nor to restrain the free exercise of their 
 electoral powers ; but merely to assert, by his presence, the high 
 prerogative of his Holiness as the sovereign protector of the order. 
 The votes were then collected. Laynez was announced as the new 
 General of the Society ; and homilies, adorations, and thanksgivings 
 celebrated his accession to office. 
 
 In the midst of this devotional harmony the voice of Pacheco 
 was again heard. In the name of Paul he insisted, that, like other 
 religious men, the Jesuits should thenceforward* perform all the 
 daily offices, choral and liturgical, of public worship. Ere the 
 panic of this unwelcome mandate had subsided, the cardinal an- 
 nounced the further pleasure of the sovereign protector, that the 
 tenure of the office of General should cease, not with his life, but at 
 the end of some brief term, not exceeding three years. Each of these 
 decisions was fatal to the great designs of Ignatius and his successor. 
 The first would reduce their Society from their high calling, as 
 champions of the Church, to the low level of any other order of 
 monks. The second, by impairing all the energy of their monarch- 
 ical constitution, would render them the mere vassals of the Pope, 
 and subjugate them effectually to the papal power. To shake off 
 these mandates, Laynez expostulated, reasoned, prayed. He was the 
 most eloquent speaker of his times, but for once he spoke in vain. 
 The immovable pontiff persisted, and actually inscribed on the con- 
 stitutions of Ignatius two decrees for giving effect to these innova- 
 tions. In a few months afterwards Paul IV. died ; when, despite
 
 168 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 these solemn commands and their own still more solemn oaths of 
 obedience, Laynez and his successors remained Generals for life ; and 
 neither chant nor anthem, psalm or liturgy, were ever afterwards 
 permitted to prolong the sacred offices of the Order of Jesus. What 
 are the limits which are, implied in every vow of unlimited sub- 
 mission 1 When our own high churchmen were labouring a century 
 and a half ago for the answer to that knotty question, they were per- 
 haps unconscious that it had already vexed the ingenuity of lago Lay- 
 nez and his associates, without in any degree impeding their freedom. 
 
 The elevation of Laynez to the vacant throne of Ignatius was not 
 accomplished without some sinister arts and some secular policy ; 
 but there is no reason to doubt that, in achieving that ascent, he 
 was also guided by purer and more noble motives. In him, as in 
 other men, antagonist principles not seldom enjoyed a divided 
 triumph, and the testimonies to his virtues are such and so numerous 
 as to command assent to their general truth. Eight of the twenty- 
 four books of the history of Orlandinus are devoted to his 
 administration of the affairs of the Jesuits. The reader of them 
 willingly acknowledges that he possessed extraordinary abilities : 
 and, half reluctantly, admits that he was scarcely less distinguished 
 by genuine piety. 
 
 Laynez would seem to have been born to supply the intellectual 
 deficiencies of Ignatius. He was familiar with the Greek and Latin 
 tongues, with the whole compass of theological literature, and with 
 all the moral sciences which in his age a theologian was required to 
 cultivate. With these stores of knowledge he had made himself 
 necessary to the founder of his order. Loyola consulted, employed, 
 and trusted, but apparently did not bike him. It is stated by 
 Orlandinus that there was no other of his eminent followers whom 
 the great patriarch of the society treated with such habitual rigour, 
 while yet there was none who rendered him such important services. 
 
 The rigour with which Laynez was treated is well illustrated by 
 his appointment to be Provincial of Italy, and to reside at Padua. 
 As often as he had trained up in that city any promising recruit, the 
 General withdrew the novice to Rome. Laynez complained of being 
 thus deprived of the use of the instruments fashioned by himself. 
 Ignatius answered, that it was right to congregate all the most 
 effective sons of the society at Rome, because there was the seat and 
 centre of their operations. Again Laynez remonstrated ; and then 
 Ignatius called on him to state what he thought the penance due to 
 him for such contumacious importunity. The Provincial answered 
 this stern question, as he says, with tears in his eyes. He proposed 
 that he should be withdrawn from all share in the government of
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 169 
 
 the Order; that he should be deprived of all books, except his 
 breviary; that he should beg his way to Rome ; that there he should 
 be employed in the most menial offices of the Casa Professa ; or, if 
 found unfit for them, in teaching grammar to little children ; that, 
 after passing through this penance for two or three years, he should 
 undergo various scourgings, and a fast of four weeks' continuance ; 
 to all which most contrite suggestions, he added a promise that 
 whenever again lie should have occasion to write to his good father, 
 he would abound in circumspection and in prayer. 
 
 This extraordinary course of penitential discipline was obviously 
 recommended by Laynez only as a mode of expressing the profound 
 reverence due to his General, and not with any real expectation that 
 he would accept the proposal. Ignatius substituted for it a much 
 wiser penance, by requiring Laynez to compose a theological work 
 in refutation of the heretics. The General had looked deeply into 
 the soul of his lieutenant. He saw that his too active and restless 
 spirit was the real cause of his discontent at Padua, and judiciously 
 prescribed the sedative of the desk. 
 
 The services rendered by Laynez to his superior are not less 
 remarkable than the severity with which they were thus occasionally 
 requited. " Do you not think," said Ignatius to him, " that the 
 founders of the religious orders were inspired when they framed their 
 constitutions ? " "I do," was the answer, " so far as the general 
 scheme and outline were concerned." Guided by this opinion, 
 Loyola established a remarkable division of labour between himself 
 and his follower. He, in the character of an inspired saint, took for 
 his province the composing the text of the constitutions. To Laynez, 
 as an uninspired scholar, he assigned the preparation of an author- 
 itative comment. For himself, the lawgiver claimed the praise of 
 having erected an edifice of which the plan and the arrangement were 
 divine. To his fellow-labourer, he assigned the merit of having sup- 
 ported it by the solid foundation of a learning which, however ex- 
 cellent, was yet entirely human. An example will best explain the 
 nature of this joint operation. 
 
 " In Theologia legetur vetus et novum Testamentum, et Doctrina 
 Scholastica Divi Thomce " is the text. " Prselegetur etiam Magis- 
 ter Sententiarum, Red si videatur temporis decursu alius autor stu- 
 dentibus utilior futurus, ut si aliqua summa vel liber Theologise scho- 
 lasticae conficeretur qui nostris temporibus accommodatior videretur, 
 praelegi poterit " is the comment. Ignatius was content that the 
 divine Thomas should be installed among the Jesuits as the perma- 
 nent interpreter of the sacred oracles. Laynez, with deeper fore- 
 sight, perceived that the day was coming when they must discover
 
 170 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 a teacher " better suited to our times." It was a prediction which, 
 shortly after his death, was fulfilled in the person of Molina, his 
 own pupil. 
 
 To Laynez belongs the praise or the reproach of having revived, 
 in modern times, the doctrine known in the Catholic Church as 
 Holinist, in the Protestant Churches as Arminian. Our latest pos- 
 terity will debate, as our remotest ancestry have debated, the truth 
 of that doctrine. But that it was " temporibus accommodatior," no 
 one will deny. The times evidently required that the great antagon- 
 ists of the Reformation should inculcate a belief more comprehen- 
 sive and more flexible than that of Augustin or of Thomas. Much 
 of the danger and disrepute to which the society was afterwards ex- 
 posed, may, perhaps, be traced to those opinions. But much of the 
 secret of their vitality and their strength must also be ascribed to 
 the same cause. 
 
 Aided by these theological accomplishments, Laynez rendered to 
 his General at the Council of Trent services still more important 
 than those which he had performed as a commentator on the Ignatian 
 constitutions. He was selected, with Salmeron for his associate, to 
 represent the Papacy at that synod, so far as respected the exposition 
 and defence of the doctrines of the see of Eome. Orlandinus has 
 preserved the instructions addressed to these delegates by Loyola on 
 the eve of their departure. They were to be deliberate in speaking, 
 attentive in listening, and vigilant in seizing on the exact meaning 
 of other speakers. They were admonished to avoid every appearance 
 of dogmatism or prejudice, lest they should offend those whom it 
 was their business to conciliate. In order to maintain their own 
 serenity, they were to keep their seats when they spoke. They were 
 to make frequent and regular visits to the hospitals, but not without 
 alms to the patients ; and in addressing them, they were to converse 
 copiously, and with affection, laying aside the terse and circumspect 
 style befitting their addresses to the council. They were to meet 
 every morning to discuss the business of the day, in the course of 
 which absolute unanimity amongst themselves would be indis- 
 pensable ; and twice on each day they were carefully to examine 
 their own consciences. 
 
 Laynez and Salmeron appear to have conformed exactly to these 
 wise admonitions. In the midst of the gorgeous assembly of princes, 
 prelates, and ambassadors, they at first appeared in ostentatious 
 meanness of appareL They then, however, submitted to wear the 
 better clothing presented to them by a much scandalised cardinal, 
 that they might manifest a no less ostentatious indifference to the 
 use or the neglect of so mean an external advantage. They had
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 171 
 
 joined the synod with, purposes too magnificent and daring to 
 leave their minds vacant for even a passing thought on matters 
 so insignificant as these. For in the bosom of that most orthodox 
 congregation, Laynez dared the reproach of heresy, and proclaimed 
 opinions which, since the days of Augustin, had been branded as 
 Pelagian. 
 
 Since the fall of the Roman Commonwealth the world had pro- 
 duced no such theatre for the exhibition of oratorical powers. 
 Laynez is supposed not to have been constitutionally brave, but in 
 the cathedral of Trent he bore himself with all the hardihood which 
 unrivalled superiority in debate will impart to the least courageous. 
 He asserted the freedom of the human will amidst outcries of indig- 
 nation. He maintained the doctrines which, north of the Alps, are 
 called ultramontane, although they were most unwelcome to the vast 
 majority of his auditors. He vehemently opposed the admission of 
 the laity to the cup, although it was the popular demand of more 
 than half of Europe. He was strong in the consciousness of his 
 dominion over those feelings to which a great speaker in a numerous 
 assembly seldom appeals in vain. The very position from which 
 he spoke proclaimed the pride, which becomes impressive only by 
 assuming the disguise of humility. It was the place the most re- 
 mote from the thrones of the papal legates, and the elevated chairs 
 of the ambassadors of Christendom. But when he spoke those 
 thrones and chairs were abandoned. Cardinals, bishops, counts, 
 and abbots quitted their seats and thronged around him. Generals 
 and doctors obeyed the same impulse ; and, on one occasion, a 
 circle more illustrious for rank and learning than had ever before 
 surrounded the tribune of an orator, continued, during two suc- 
 cessive hours, to reward his efforts by their profound and silent 
 admiration. 
 
 On examining the only two of the speeches of Laynez which have 
 been preserved by Orlandinus, it is difficult to detect the charm 
 which thus seduced the haughtiest prelates into a passing forgetful- 
 ness of their dignity. His eloquence would appear to have been 
 neither impassioned nor imaginative, nor of that intense earnestness 
 which seems to despise the very rules by the observance of which 
 it triumphs. Luminous argumentation, clothed in transparent lan- 
 guage, and delivered with facility and grace, was probably the praise 
 to which he was entitled no vulgar praise indeed, for amidst the 
 triumphs of oratory few are greater or more welcome than that of 
 infusing order without fatigue into the chaotic thoughts of an in- 
 quisitive audience. 
 
 The health of Laynez sank beneath these efforts ; and, if Orlan-
 
 172 THE POUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 dinus may be believed, the deliberations of the fathers of Trent 
 were suspended until he was able to resume his place among them. 
 The fact seems very questionable ; but if Laynez received this high 
 honour he was not long permitted to enjoy it. The march of the 
 Protestants on Trent dispersed the council, and enabled him to ex- 
 hibit his eloquence in a different and scarcely less memorable as- 
 sembly. 
 
 Catherine de Medici had issued, in her son's name, citations to 
 the leaders of the two religions to meet for their celebrated confer- 
 ence at Poissy, and Laynez was despatched to France to protest, in 
 the name of the sovereign pontiff, against this assumption by a tem- 
 poral prince of the right to convene a synod for the adjustment of 
 spiritual questions. Nevertheless, Catherine and her son, and the 
 princes of his blood, appeared on the appointed day at Poissy. 
 Thither also came a long array of cardinals, of bishops, and of doc- 
 tors. Theodore Beza and Peter Martyr were there, with ten other 
 reformed ministers ; and there also appeared Laynez, armed cap-a- 
 pie as a polemic, and clothed with all the dignities of a representative 
 of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic See. 
 
 Among the memorable incidents of the debate which followed, 
 was the bold apostrophe of Laynez to Catherine. He bade her re- 
 member that neither she nor any other secular monarch had any 
 right to enter into compacts or negotiations with the enemies of the 
 Church. "The smith," he exclaimed, "to his smithery. To the 
 priesthood, and to them alone, are reserved all such questions as 
 these." Catherine is said to have wept on receiving this public re- 
 buke. If so, her tears were as unimpressive as those of Mary on the 
 heart of Knox. " Catherine is an old acquaintance of mine," said 
 Laynez afterwards to the Prince de Conde ; " she is an admirable 
 actress, but will not deceive me." 
 
 In Beza he encountered an opponent more worthy of his powers. 
 It had been alleged, in disproof of the real presence, that the image 
 of anything was misplaced when the reality itself was there. Lay- 
 nez answered that the type and anti-type might occasionally meet 
 together ; as, for example, if, on the anniversary of a victory, the 
 conqueror should exhibit the various military evolutions by which 
 he had won the battle. With more smartness than reverence Beza 
 rejoined, that the answer reduced the mass to a comedy, and made a 
 comedian of Him whose presence there was asserted. 
 
 Much else, as little worthy of remembrance, passed between these 
 learned combatants. Had Samuel Taylor Coleridge been present, 
 how would he have deplored their unconsciousness of the great dis- 
 tinction between the reason and the understanding ! How elo-
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 173 
 
 quently Avould he have reminded them, that if men will join in the 
 Avar of words without the same common intuitions, they may dis- 
 charge their dialectics against each other till the day of doom without 
 making any approach to the same common conclusions. 
 
 From Poissy Laynez retired to Trent. He resumed his seat in 
 the council in the double character of Legate of the Pope and 
 General of the Order of Jesus. These dignities seem to have a little 
 impaired his former skill in the management of a popular assembly. 
 Forgetting that the triumphs of pride are best won in the garb of 
 lowliness, he engaged in an ill-timed and unsuccessful contest with 
 the Generals of the monastic orders for precedency. But his defeat 
 was solaced, not only by a high station on the episcopal bench, but 
 by having appropriated to his use an elevated desk or pulpit, from 
 which he might address the synod without danger that any member 
 of it would be deprived of the delight of hearing him. 
 
 Laynez appears to have amply rewarded this homage. He was 
 foremost in every debate, and the historians of the council ascribe to 
 his eloquence two of the most remarkable decrees of the two last 
 sessions. One of those decisions has very lately been invoked in the 
 House of Commons as among the highest extant authorities in favour 
 of the recent enactment, by which marriages not celebrated in facie 
 ecdesice have been rendered as valid as though solemnised by a priest 
 in holy orders. The council indeed determined that for the future 
 the intervention of such a priest should be indispensable ; but they 
 prefaced this enactment by declaring that the former law of the 
 Christian world had been otherwise, and that, until then, no eccle- 
 siastical observances whatever had been necessary to render a matri- 
 monial contract binding on the spouses, and sufficient for the legiti- 
 macy of their offspring. 
 
 To the eloquence of Laynez is to be ascribed this recognition of 
 the general principle. With equal force and intrepidity he main- 
 tained that marriage is a right conferred upon mankind by the im- 
 mediate gift of God himself that no human authority is entitled to 
 derogate from it even to the slightest extent that therefore the 
 Church herself could not lawfully restrain the use of this heaven- 
 born franchise by any burthensome formality and that to render 
 sacerdotal interference indispensable to the exercise of it would be 
 a mere usurpation and a lawless abuse of power. If the speaker 
 had foreseen that at the distance of three centuries an heretical par- 
 liament would build on the foundation he was thus laying, or if that 
 parliament had been aware that the foundations on which they 
 built had been laid by a General of the Jesuits, which of the two 
 would have been the more scandalised?
 
 174 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 In the twenty-fifth and last session Laynez rendered an import- 
 ant service to his society, though with more credit to his address 
 than to his candour. To abate the offence given to the world by 
 the abuse of monastic vows of poverty, the council had decreed that 
 the mendicant orders might hold temporal possessions in their cor- 
 porate capacities. Two of the more zealous of those fraternities 
 sued for and obtained the privilege of exclusion from this invidious 
 franchise. Not to be eclipsed in pious ardour by any religious com- 
 munity, Laynez also solicited and obtained the boon that the Jesuits 
 should continue to be bound by their self-denying renunciation of 
 all worldly wealth But (says Father Paul) with the return of day 
 other thoughts returned ; and, on the morrow, Laynez persuaded 
 the council to reverse their sentence, so as to leave to his society 
 the privilege of holding estates as a body corporate. " To possess 
 the right and yet never to use it, would," he argued, " be praise- 
 worthy in the sight of God. To be deprived of that right on their 
 own petition, would, on the other hand, be praiseworthy in the sight 
 of man. But how much better was it that they should enjoy the 
 honour which cometh of God, than that honour which cometh of 
 man only?" Is it wonderful that the words Jesuitical, and double- 
 minded, so soon became synonymous? 
 
 The council was at length dissolved, Laynez returned to Rome, 
 ruined in health, but possessing the highest esteem and gratitude 
 of Pius IV., who then filled the papal throne. As an eminent ex- 
 pression of his favour, the Pope made a solemn visit to the General 
 and the college of Jesuits, where he was received with discharges of 
 compliments, literary, scientific, and philosophical, with which the 
 reception of Elizabeth and James at our own universities will not 
 bear a moment's comparison. For Laynez excelled most men not 
 only in learning, but in the power of giving an impulse to the 
 studies of the learnad. Under his government the colleges and 
 scholars of the Order had increased fourfold, and her associated 
 members in a still greater proportion. 
 
 Laynez knew how to rule as well as how to teach. By firmness 
 or by craft, he at once and for ever crushed the revolt of Bobadilla 
 and his followers. By his energy he at once animated and con- 
 trolled the operations of all the ministers of his power. He swayed 
 it to the last, unaided by any colleague, and unawed by any rival ; 
 and even on his dying bed refused to name a vicar, or accept a 
 coadjutor. He died in the year 1565, and in the fifty-second year 
 of his age. His death was soothed with all the consolations of the 
 last sacraments of his Church, and of a plenary -indulgence from the 
 Pope and perhaps was not without the solace of remembering that
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 175 
 
 his life had been ceaselessly devoted to the duties prescribed by the 
 laws of his society, and by the law of his own conscience. 
 
 Was that conscience itself a blind guide, perverted by low af- 
 fections, and by unhallowed impulses'? Who shall presume to 
 answer? All hail to Rhadamanthus on his posthumous judgment- 
 seat in the nether regions ! But when Rhadamanthus comes above- 
 ground, holds in his hand the historical pen, and resolves all the 
 enigmas of hearts which ceased to beat long centuries ago, more 
 confidently than most of us would dare to interpret the mysteries of 
 our own, one wishes him back again at the confluence of Styx, 
 Phlegethon, and Cocytus. It is, after all, nothing more than the 
 surface of human character which the retrospective scrutiny of the 
 keenest human eye is able to detect. 
 
 Ambition clothed in rags subtlety under the guise of candour 
 timidity beneath the mask of audacious eloquence these are the 
 offences laid to the charge of lago Laynez. Yet a priest who, in 
 the sixteenth century, refused the purple, must have had aspirations 
 for something higher than worldly nonours. Hypocrisy is the charge 
 which every one must bear who has to do with enemies incredulous 
 of all virtue superior to their own. And cowardice is a reproach 
 never to be escaped by him who, being debarred from the use of 
 all weapons but the tongue, knows how to render that weapon ter- 
 rible to his opponents. The historical portraiture which exhibits 
 Laynez as ambitious, crafty, and timid, may be a correct likeness ; 
 but no one who considers how confused are the lights by which we 
 must now examine it, will peremptorily declare that the resemblance 
 is accurate. 
 
 Gifted with extraordinary talents, flexible address, profound learn- 
 ing, and captivating eloquence, Laynez fell short of that standard at 
 which alone the name of any man may be inscribed on the roll sacred 
 to those who have reigned over their fellow-mortals by a right 
 divine, inherent, and indefeasible. Without the genius to devise 
 or the glowing passion to achieve great things, none may take his 
 place with those kings of the earth on whose brows Nature herself 
 has set the diadem. Far surpassing, in mere intellectual resources, 
 both Ignatius and Xavier, the fiery element native to their souls 
 was uninhabitable by his. But though his hands could not grasp 
 their weapons, he wielded his own with admirable skill and efficacy. 
 To Laynez his society were first indebted for their characteristic 
 theology, for the possession and the fame of learning, for a more 
 intimate alliance with the Papacy, and for the more pronounced hostil- 
 ity of the Reformers. He first established for them that authority in 
 the cabinets of Europe, on which, at no distant time, the edifice of
 
 176 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 their temporal power was to rest. It was his melancholy distinction 
 to number among these royal disciples the infamous Catherine, and 
 her less odious, because feebler son. He was associated with them 
 at the time when they were revolving the greatest crime with which 
 the annals of Christendom have been polluted. His memory is, 
 however, unstained with the guilt of that massacre, except so far as 
 the doctrines he inculcated in the conference at Poissy may have in- 
 duced the sovereigns to think lightly of any bloodshed which should 
 rid the world of a party which he taught them to regard as abhorred 
 of God, and as hateful to the enlightened eye of man. 
 
 It is more easy to discern the intellectual than the moral greatness 
 of Laynez. He was the earliest, if not the most eminent example 
 of the natural results of Loyola's discipline. His character illus- 
 trates the effect of concentrating all the interests of life, and all the 
 affections of the heart, within the narrow circle of one contracted 
 fellowship. It yielded in him, as it has produced in others, a vigor- 
 ous but a stunted development of the moral faculties a kind of 
 social selfishness and sectional virtue a subordination of philan- 
 thropy to the love of caste a spirit irreclaimably servile, because 
 exulting in its own servitude a temper consistent indeed with great 
 actions, and often contributing to them, but destructive (at least in 
 ordinary minds) of that free and cordial sympathy with man as man, 
 of these careless graces and of that majestic repose, which touch 
 and captivate the heart in Him whose name the Order of the 
 Jesuits had .assumed, and to which must in part, at least, be ascribed 
 the sacred fascination exercised over us all by the simple records of 
 his life and language. 
 
 On the 2nd of July, 1565, the Casa Professa, usually the scene 
 of a profound stillness, was agitated by an unwonted excitement. 
 Men of austere demeanour might be seen there clasping each other's 
 hands, and voices habitually mute were interchanging hearty con- 
 gratulations. One alone appeared to take no share in the common 
 joy. As if overpowered by some strange and unwelcome tidings, he 
 seemed by imploring gestures to deprecate a decision against which 
 his paralysed lips in vain attempted to protest. His age might be 
 nearly sixty, his dress mean and sordid, and toil or suffering had 
 ploughed their furrows in his pallid cheek ; but he balanced his tall 
 and still graceful figure with a soldier's freedom, and gazed on his 
 associates with a countenance cast in that mould which ladies love 
 and artists emulate. They called him Father Francis ; and, on the 
 death of Laynez, their almost unanimous suffrage had just hailed 
 him as the third General of the Order of Jesus. The wish for rank 
 and power was never more sincerely disclaimed ; for never had they
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 177 
 
 been forced on any one who had a larger experience of their 
 vanity. 
 
 In the female line Father Francis was the grandson of Ferdinand 
 of Arragon, and therefore the near kinsman of the Emperor Charles 
 V. Among his paternal ancestry he could boast or lament the 
 names of Alexander VI. and of Caesar Borgia. Of that house, 
 eminent alike for their wealth, their honours, and their crimes, he 
 was the lineal representative ; and had, in early manhood, inherited 
 from his father the patrimony and the title of the Dukes of Gandia. 
 
 Don Francis Borgia, as if to rescue the name he bore from the 
 infamy of his progenitors, exhaled, even in his childish days, the 
 odour of sanctity. With each returning month, he cast a lot to 
 determine which he should personate of the saints with whose 
 names it was studded on the calendar. In his tenth year, with a 
 virtue unsung and unconceived by the Muses Etonenses, he played 
 at saints so perfectly as to inflict a vigorous chastisement on his 
 own naked person. It is hard to resist the wish that the scourge 
 had been yet more resolutely wielded by the arm of his tutor. So 
 seems to have thought his maternal uncle, Don John of Arragon, 
 Archbishop of Saragossa. Taking the charge of his nephew, that 
 high-born prelate compelled him to study alternately the lessons of 
 the riding-master and those of the master of the sentences ; and in 
 his nineteenth year sent him to complete his education at the court 
 of his imperial cousin. 
 
 Ardent as were still the aspirations, of the young courtier for the 
 monastic life, no one in that gallant circle bore himself more bravely 
 in the menage, or sheathed his sword with a steadier hand in the 
 throat of the half-maddened bull, or more skilfully disputed with 
 his sovereign the honours of the tournament. As the youthful 
 knight, bowing to the saddle-tree, lowered his spear before the 
 " Queen of Beauty," many a full dark eye beamed with a deeper 
 lustre ; but his triumph was incomplete and worthless unless it won 
 the approving smile of Eleonora de Castro. That smile was not 
 often refused. But the romance of Don Francis begins where other 
 romances terminate. Foremost in the train of Charles and Isabella, 
 the husband of the fair Eleonora still touched his lute with unrival- 
 led skill in the halls of the Escurial, or followed the quarry across 
 the plains of Castile in advance of the most ardent falconer. Yet 
 that music was universally selected from the offices of the Church ; 
 and in the very agony of the chase, just as the wheeling hawk paused 
 for his last deadly plunge, (genius of Nimrod, listen ! ) he would 
 avert his eyes and ride slowly home, the inventor of a matchless 
 effort of penitential self-denial. 
 
 12
 
 178 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 With Charles himself for his fellow-pupil, Don Francis studied 
 the arts of war and fortification under the once celebrated Sainte 
 Croix, and practised in Africa the lessons he had been taught ; 
 earning the double praise, that in the camp he was the most mag- 
 nificent, in the field the most adventurous, of all the leaders in that 
 vaunted expedition. At the head of a troop enlisted and maintained 
 by himself, he attended the Emperor to the Milanese and Provence ; 
 and, in honourable acknowledgment of his services, was selected by 
 Charles to lay a report of the campaign before the Empress in person, 
 at Segovia. Towards her he felt an almost filial regard. She had 
 long been the zealous patron and the cordial friend of himself and of 
 Eleonora ; and at the public festivals, which celebrated at once the 
 victories of Charles and the meeting of the States of Castile at To- 
 ledo, they shone among the most brilliant of the satellites by which 
 her throne was encircled. 
 
 At the moment of triumph the inexorable arm was unbarred which 
 so often, as in mockery of human pomp, confounds together the 
 world's bravest pageants and the humiliations of the grave. Dust 
 to dust and ashes to ashes ! but, when the imperial fall, not without 
 one last poor assertion of their departed dignity. Isabella might not 
 be laid in the sepulchre of the Kings of Spain until, amidst the 
 funeral rites, the soldered coffin had been opened, the cerements 
 removed, and some grandee of the highest rank had been enabled 
 to depose that he had seen within them the very body of the deceased 
 sovereign. Such, in pursuance of an ancient custom, was the duty 
 confided to the zeal of Don Francis Borgia ; nor was any one better 
 fitted for such a trust. The eye, now for ever closed, had never 
 turned to him but with maternal kindness, and every lineament of 
 that serene and once eloquent countenance was indelibly engraven 
 on his memory. Amidst the half-uttered prayers which commended 
 her soul to the Divine mercy, and the low dirge of the organ, he 
 advanced with streaming eyes, and reverently raised the covering 
 which concealed the secrets of the grave ; when but why or how 
 portray the appalling and loathsome spectacle 1 That gentle brow, 
 that eloquent countenance, that form so lately reposing on earth's 
 proudest throne, and extolled with an almost adoring homage ! 
 Don Francis turned from the sight to shudder and to pray. 
 
 It was the great epoch in the life of Borgia. In the eyes of the 
 world, indeed, he may have been unchanged ; but in his eyes the 
 whole aspect of that world was altered. Lord of a princely fortune, 
 the heir of an illustrious house, the favourite kinsman of the Em- 
 peror of the West, renowned in the very flower of his youth as a 
 warrior, a courtier, and a musician, his home hallowed by conjugal
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 179 
 
 love, and gladdened by the sports of his children ; for whom had life 
 a deeper interest, or who could erect on a surer basis a loftier fabric 
 of more brilliant hopes ? Those interests and hopes he deliberately 
 resigned, and, at the age of twenty-nine, bound himself by a solemn 
 vow, that, in the event of his surviving Eleonora, he would end his 
 days as a member of some religious order. He had gazed on the 
 hideous triumph of death and sin over prospects still more splendid 
 than his own. For him the soothing illusions of existence were no 
 more earth and its inhabitants, withering under the curse of their 
 Maker, might put on their empty gauds, and for some transient 
 hour dream and talk of happiness. But the curse was there, and 
 there would it lie, crushing the frivolous spirit the most when felt 
 the least, and consigning alike to that foul debasement the lovely 
 and the brave ; the sylph now floating through the giddy dance, and 
 the warrior now proudly treading the field of victory. 
 
 From such meditations Charles endeavoured to recall his friend to 
 the common duties of life. He required him to assume the vice- 
 royalty of Catalonia, and adorned him with the cross of the order of 
 Saint James of Compostella, then among the noblest and the most 
 highly prized of all chivalric honours. His administration was firm, 
 munificent, and just ; it forms the highest era of his life, and is 
 especially signalised by the same sedulous care for the education of 
 the young which afterwards formed his highest praise as General of 
 the Order of Jesus. 
 
 Ingenious above all men in mortifying his natural affections, Don 
 Francis could not neglect the occasion which his new dignities 
 afforded bim, of incurring much wholesome contumely. Sumptuous 
 banquets must be given in honour of his sovereign ; when he could 
 at once fast and be despised for fasting. To exhibit himself in 
 penitential abasement before the people under his authority, would 
 give to penitence the appropriate accompaniment of general con- 
 tempt. On the festival of " the Invention of the Holy Cross," 
 mysteries, not unlike those of the Bona Dea, were to be celebrated 
 by the ladies of Barcelona ; when, to prevent the profane intrusion 
 of any of the coarser sex, the viceroy himself undertook the office of 
 sentinel. With a naked dagger in his hand, a young nobleman 
 demanded entrance, addressing to the viceroy insults such as every 
 gentleman is bound, under the heaviest penalty of the laws of 
 ehivalry, to expiate by blood. A braver man did not tread the soil 
 of Spain than Don Francis, nor any one to whom the reproach of 
 poltroonery was more hateful. And yet his sword did not leap from 
 his scabbard. With a calm rebuke, and courteous demeanour, he 
 allowed the bravo to enter the sacred precincts preferring the 
 
 12 *
 
 180 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 
 
 imputation of cowardice, though stinging like an adder, to the sin 
 of avenging himself, and, indeed, to the duty of maintaining his 
 lawful authority. History has omitted to tell what were the weapons, 
 or what the incantation, by which the ladies promptly ejected the 
 insolent intruder ; nor has she recorded how they afterwards received 
 their guardian knight of St lago. Her only care has been to excite 
 our admiration for this most illustrious victory, in the bosom of 
 Don Francis, of the meekness of the saint over the human passions 
 of the soldier. 
 
 At the end of four years, Don Francis was relieved by the death 
 of his father from his viceregal office, and assumed his hereditary 
 title of Duke of Gandia. His vassals exulted in the munificence of 
 their new chief. The ancient retainers of his family lived on his 
 bounty cottages, convents, and hospitals, rose on his estates 
 fortresses were built to check the ravages of the Moorish corsairs, 
 and the mansion of his ancestors reappeared in all its ancient 
 splendour. In every work of piety and mercy the wise and gentle 
 Eleonora was the rival of her lord. But it was the only strife which 
 ever agitated the Castle of Gandia. Austerities were practised there, 
 but gloom and lassitude were unknown ; nor did the bright suns of 
 Spain gild any feudal ramparts, within which Love, and Peace, the 
 child of Love, shed their milder light with a more abiding radiance. 
 
 But on that countenance, hitherto so calm and so submissive, 
 might at length be traced the movements of an inward tempest, 
 which, even when prostrate before the altar, the Duke of Gandia 
 strove in vain to tranquillise. Though conversant with every form 
 of self-inflicted suffering, how should he find strength to endure the 
 impending death of Eleonora ! His was a prayer transcending the 
 resources of language and of thought ; it was the mute agony of a 
 breaking heart. But after the whirlwind and the fire was heard the 
 still small voice. It said to him, or seemed to say, " If it be thy 
 deliberate wish, she shall recover ; but it will not be for her real 
 welfare, nor for thine." Adoring gratitude swept away every feebler 
 emotion, and the suppliant's grief at length found utterance. " Thy 
 will be done. Thou knowest what is best for us. Whom have we in 
 heaven but Thee, and whom upon earth should we desire in com- 
 parison of Thee 1 " At the age of thirty-six the Duke of Gandia 
 committed to the tomb the frame at once animated by a spirit from 
 which not death itself could separate him. In the sacred retirement 
 to which, in that event, he had devoted his remaining days, Eleonora 
 would still unite her prayers to his ; and as each of those days 
 should decline into the welcome shadows of evening, one stage the 
 more towards his reunion with her would have been traversed.
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 181 
 
 The Castle of Gandia was still hung with the funeral draperies 
 when a welcome though unexpected guest arrived there. It was 
 Peter Faber, the officiating priest at the Crypt of Montmartre, 
 charged by Ignatius with a mission to promote the cause of Christian 
 education, in Spain. Aided by his counsels, and by the letters of the 
 patriarch, the Duke erected on his estate a church, a college, and a 
 library, and placed them under the care of teachers selected by 
 Ignatius. The sorrows of the Duke were relieved as his wealth 
 flowed still more copiously in this new channel of beneficence ; and 
 the universities of Alcala and Seville were enlarged by his bounty 
 with similar foundations. But, as Faber remarked, a still nobler 
 edifice was yet to be erected on the soul of the founder himself. 
 The first stone of it was laid in the Duke's performance of the 
 Spiritual Exercises. To the completion of this invisible but im- 
 perishable building, the remainder of his life was inflexibly devoted. 
 
 With Ignatius the Duke had long maintained a correspondence, 
 in which the stately courtesies of Spanish noblemen not ungrace- 
 fully temper the severer tones of patriarchal authority and filial 
 reverence. Admission into the Order of Jesus was an honour for 
 which, in this case, the aspirant was humbly content, and was 
 wisely permitted, long to wait and sue. To study the biography, 
 that he might imitate the life, of Him by whose holy name the 
 Society was called ; to preach in his own household, or at the wicket 
 of the nunnery of the ladies of St Clair ; and day by day, to place 
 in humiliating contrast some proof of the Divine goodness and some 
 proof of his own demerit ; were the first probationary steps which 
 the Duke was required to tread in the toilsome path on which he 
 had thus entered. It was a path from which Philip, then governing 
 Spam with the title of Regent, would have willingly seduced him. 
 He consulted him on the most critical affairs ; summoned him to 
 take a high station in the States of Castile ; and pressed on his 
 acceptance the office of grand master of the royal household. 
 It was declined in favour of the Duke of Alva. Had Gandia pre- 
 ferred the duties of his secular rank to his religious aspirations, 
 Spain might have had a saint the less and seven provinces the more. 
 With the elevation of Alva, the butcheries in the Netherlands, the 
 disgrace of Spain, and the independence of Holland, might have 
 been averted. 
 
 Warned by his escape, the Duke implored with renewed earnest- 
 ness his immediate admission into the order ; nor was Ignatius 
 willing that his proselyte should again incur such dangers. At the 
 chapel of his own college he accordingly pronounced the irrevocable 
 vows ; a Papal bull having dispensed, during a term of four years,
 
 182 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 with any public avowal of the change. They were passed in the 
 final adjustment of his secular affairs. He had lived in the splen- 
 dour appropriate to his rank and fortune, and in the exercise of the 
 bounty becoming his eminence in the Christian commonwealth. But 
 now all was to be abandoned, even the means of almsgiving ; for he 
 was himself henceforth to live on the alms of others. He gave his 
 children in marriage to the noblest houses in Spain and Portugal, 
 transferred to his eldest son the enjoyment of the patrimonial 
 estates of Gandia, and then, at the age of forty, meekly betook him- 
 self to the study of scholastic divinity, of the traditions of the 
 Church, and of the canons of the general councils. He even sub- 
 mitted to all the rules, and performed all the public exercises en- 
 forced on the youngest student. Such was his piety, that the 
 thorny fagots of the schoolmen fed instead of smothering the flame ; 
 and on the margin of his Thomas Aquinas might be seen some de- 
 vout aspiration, extracted by his sacred alchemy from each subtle 
 distinction in the text. Never before or since was the degree of 
 Doctor in Divinity, to which he now proceeded, so hardly earned or 
 so well deserved. 
 
 Two of the brothers of the Duke had been members of the sacred 
 college, and his humility had refused for two of his sons the purple 
 offered to them at the instance of the Emperor. But how should the 
 new doctor avert from his own head the ecclesiastical cap of main- 
 tenance with which Charles was now desirous to replace the ducal 
 coronet ] He fled the presence of his imperial patron, made and exe- 
 cuted his own testamentary dispositions, delivered his last parental 
 charge to his eldest son, and bade a final adieu to his weeping 
 family. The gates of the Castle of Gandia closed on their self- 
 banished lord. He went forth, like Francis Xavier, chanting the 
 song of David " "When Israel went out of Egypt, and the House of 
 Jacob from a strange people ; " but adding, from another strain of 
 the royal minstrel, the exulting words, " Our bonds are broken and 
 we are delivered." He lived for more than twenty years from this 
 time, and in his future missions into Spain often passed the gates of 
 the castle, but never more re-entered them. He became a stranger 
 even to his children, never again passing so much as a single day in 
 their society, or even permitting himself to become acquainted with 
 their offspring. 
 
 As the bird set free to her nest, so hastened the emancipated Duke 
 to take his seat at the footstool of Ignatius. Yet, in his route 
 through Ferrara and Florence, his sacred impatience was arrested, 
 and his humility confirmed, by the unwelcome honours yielded to
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 183 
 
 him by his kinsmen, the reigning sovereigns of those duchies. He 
 would have entered Kome by night ; but, in the city of triumphs 
 and ovations, the victorious Loyola could not but desire to exhibit 
 so illustrious a conquest. Attended by the Ambassador of Spain, by 
 a prince of the house of Colonna, and by a long train of cardinals, 
 priests, and nobles, the Duke of Gandia advanced in solemn proces- 
 sion to the Casa Professa. There, in the presence of his General, his 
 wearied spirit found at length the repose which the most profuse 
 liberality of fortune had been unable to bestow. With tears of joy 
 he kissed the feet of the patriarch and of his professed brethren, es- 
 teeming the meanest office in their household "an honour too exalted 
 for so unworthy an associate; and then, in a general confession, 
 poured into the ear of Ignatius every secret of his conscience from 
 the dawn of life to that long-desired hour. 
 
 Such zeal was a treasure too precious to be left without some 
 great and definite object ; and as the Duke was still the steward of 
 some of this world's treasures, which he had devoted to sacred 
 uses, they were employed in building at Rome the church and 
 college afterwards so famous as the College de Propaganda Fide. 
 One only secular care still awaited him. His rank as a grandee of 
 Spain, and the cross of St lago, could not be laid aside without the 
 consent of the Emperor. It was solicited with all the grace of an 
 accomplished courtier, and all the fervour of a saint. But while he 
 awaited at Rome the answer of Charles, a new alarm disturbed the 
 serenity of the Casa Professa. The dreaded purple was again pressed 
 on him with all the weight of Papal admonition. To avoid it, Gandia 
 fled the presence of the Pope and of Ignatius, returned to Spain, 
 performed a pilgrimage to the Castle of Loyola, kissed the hallowed 
 ground, and then burying himself in a Jesuit College at Ognato, 
 once more awaited the decision of the Emperor. 
 
 It soon arrived. He was no longer a duke, a knight of St lago, 
 nor even a Spanish gentleman. Solemnly and in due legal form, 
 he renounced all these titles, and with them all his property and 
 territorial rights. Even his secular dress was laid aside, and his 
 head was prepared by the tonsure for the episcopal touch, emblem- 
 atic of the most awful mystery. The astonished spectators collected 
 and preserved the holy relics. And now, bent in lowly prostration 
 before the altar at Ognato, the Father Francis had no further 
 sacrifice to offer there, but the sacrifice of a heart emptied of all the 
 interests and of all the affections of the world. Long and silent 
 was his prayer, but it was unattended with any trace of disorder. 
 The learshe shed were such as might have bedewed the cheek of
 
 184 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 
 
 the First Man before he had tasted the "bitterness of sin. He rose 
 from his knees, bade a last farewell to his attendants ; and Father 
 Francis was left alone with his Creator. 
 
 It was a solitude not long to be maintained. The fame of his 
 devotion filled the Peninsula. All who needed spiritual counsel, 
 and all who wished to indulge an idle curiosity, resorted to his cell. 
 Kings sought his advice, wondering congregations hung on his lips, 
 and two at least of the grandees of Spain imitated his example. 
 His spiritual triumphs were daily more and more splendid ; and, if 
 he might escape the still threatened promotion into the College of 
 Cardinals, might be as enduring as his life. The authority of Igna- 
 tius, not unaided by some equivocal exercise of his ingenuity, at 
 length placed Father Francis beyond the reach of this last danger. 
 They both went down to the grave without witnessing the debase- 
 ment of their Order by any ecclesiastical dignity. 
 
 But there was yet one tie to the pomp and vanity of this world 
 which could not be entirely broken. During his viceregal adminis- 
 tration, Father Francis had on one occasion traversed the halls of 
 the Castle of Barcelona in deep and secret conference with his im- 
 perial cousin. Each at that interview imparted to the other his 
 design of devoting to religious retirement the interval which should 
 intervene between the business and the close of life. At every 
 season of disappointment Charles reverted to this purpose, and 
 abandoned or postponed it with each return of success. But now, 
 broken with sickness and sorrow, he had fixed his residence in a 
 monastery in Estremadura, and summoned the former viceroy of 
 Catalonia to the presence of his early friend and patron. Falling 
 on his knees, as in times of yore, Father Francis offered to impress 
 the kiss of homage on the hand which had so lately borne the 
 secptre of half the civilised world. But Charles embraced his 
 cousin, and compelled him to sit, and to sit covered, by his side. 
 Long and frequent were their conversations ; but the record of 
 them transmitted to us by the historians of the Order of Jesus, has 
 but little semblance of authenticity. Charles is made to assail, and 
 Borgia to defend the new institute, and the imperial disputant of 
 course yields to the combined force of eloquence and truth. It 
 seems less improbable that the publication of Memoirs of the Life 
 of the Emperor, to be written by himself, was one subject of serious 
 debate at these interviews, and that the good father dissuaded it. 
 If the tale be true, he has certainly one claim the less to the grati- 
 tude of later times. What seems certain is, that he undertook and 
 executed some secret mission from Charles to the court of Portugal, 
 that he acted as one of the executors of his will, and delivered a
 
 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 185 
 
 funeral oration in praise of the deceased emperor before the Spanish 
 court at Valladolid. 
 
 From this point the life of Borgia merges in the general history 
 of the Order to which he had attached himself. It is a passage of 
 history full of the miracles of self-denial, and of miracles in the 
 more accurate acceptation of the word. To advance the cause of 
 education, and to place in the hands of his own Society the control 
 of that mighty engine, was the labour which Father Francis, as 
 their General, chiefly proposed to himself. His success was com- 
 plete, and he lived to see the establishment, in almost every state 
 of Europe, of colleges formed on the model of that which he had 
 himself formed in the town of Gandia. 
 
 Borgia is celebrated by his admirers as the most illustrious of all 
 conquerors of the appetites and passions of our common nature ; and 
 the praise, such as it is, may well be conceded to him. No other 
 saint in the calendar ever renounced or declined so great an amount 
 of worldly grandeur and domestic happiness. No other embraced 
 poverty and pain in forms more squalid, or more revolting to the 
 flesh and blood. So strange and shocking are the stories of his 
 flagellations, of the diseases contracted by them, and of the sicken- 
 ing practices by which he tormented his senses, that even to read 
 them is of itself no light penance. In the same spirit, our applause 
 is demanded for feats of humility, and prodigies of obedience, and 
 raptures of devotion, so extravagant, that his biographers might 
 seem to have assumed the office of penitential executors to the 
 saint ; and to challenge for his memory some of the disgust and 
 contempt which when living he so studiously courted. And yet 
 Borgia was no ordinary man. 
 
 He had great talents with a narrow capacity. Under the control 
 of minds more comprehensive than his own, he could adopt and. 
 execute their wider views with admirable address and vigour. 
 With rare powers both of endurance and of action, he was the prey 
 of a constitutional melancholy, which made him dependent on the 
 more sanguine spirit of his guides for all his aims and for all his 
 hopes ; but once rescued from the agony of selecting his path, he 
 moved along it, not merely with firmness, but with impetuosity. 
 All his impulses came from without ; but when once given, they 
 could not readily be arrested. The very dejection and self-distrust 
 of his nature rendered him more liable than other men to impres- 
 sions at once deep and abiding. Thus he was a saint in his infancy 
 at the bidding of his nurse then a cavalier at the command of his 
 uncle an inamorato because the empress desired it a warrior and 
 a viceroy because such was the pleasure of Charles a devotee from
 
 186 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 
 
 seeing a corpse in a state of decomposition a founder of colleges on 
 the advice of Peter Faber a Jesuit at the will of Ignatius and 
 General of the Order because his colleagues would have it so. Yet 
 each of these characters, when once assumed, was performed, not 
 merely with constancy, but with high and just applause. His mind 
 was like a sycophant plant, feeble when alone, but of admirable 
 vigour and luxuriance Avhen properly sustained. A whole creation 
 of such men would have been unequal to the work of Ignatius 
 Loyola ; but, in his grasp, one such man could perform a splendid 
 though but a secondary service. His life was more eloquent than 
 all the homilies of Chrysostom. Descending from one of the most 
 brilliant heights of human prosperity, he exhibited everywhere, and 
 in an aspect the most intelligible and impressive to his contempor- 
 aries, the awful power of the principles by which he was impelled. 
 Had he lived in the times and in the society of his infamous kins- 
 men, Borgia would not improbably have shared their disastrous re- 
 nown. But his dependent nature, moulded by a far different in- 
 fluence, rendered him a canonised saint ; an honourable, just, and 
 virtuous man ; one of the most eminent ministers of a polity as 
 benevolent in intention as it was gigantic in design ; and the founder 
 of a system of education pregnant with results of almost matchless 
 importance. His miracles may be not disadvantageously compared 
 with those of the Baron Munchausen ; but it would be less easy to 
 find a meet comparison for his genuine virtues. They triumph over 
 all the silly legends and all the real follies which obscure his charac- 
 ter. His whole mature life was but one protracted martyrdom, for 
 the advancement of what he esteemed the perfection of his own 
 nature, and the highest interests of his fellow-men. Though he 
 maintained an intimate personal intercourse with Charles IX. and 
 his mother, and enjoyed their highest favour, there is no reason to 
 suppose that he was entrusted with their atrocious secret. Even 
 in the land of the Inquisition he had firmly refused to lend the in- 
 fluence of his name to that sanguinary tribunal ; for there was 
 nothing morose in his fanaticism, nor mean in bis subservience. 
 Such a man as Francis Borgia could hardly become a persecutor. 
 His own Church raised altars to his name. Other Churches have 
 neglected or despised it. In that all-wise and all-compassionate 
 judgment, which is uninvaded by our narrow prejudices and by our 
 unhallowed feelings, his fervent love of God and of man was doubt- 
 less permitted to cover the multitude of his theoretical errors and 
 real extravagances. Human justice is severe not merely because 
 man is censorious, but because he reasonably distrusts himself, and 
 fears lest his weakness should confound the distinctions of good and
 
 THE FOUNDERS OF JESUITISM. 187 
 
 evil. Divine justice is lenient, "because there alone love can flow in 
 all its unfathomable depths and boundless expansion impeded by 
 no dread of error, and diverted by no misplaced sympathies. 
 
 To Ignatius, the founder of the Order of the Jesuits ; to Xavier, 
 the great leader in their missionary enterprises ; to Laynez, the 
 author of their peculiar system of theology ; and to Borgia, the 
 architect of their system of education, two names are to be added 
 to complete the roll of the great men from whose hands their 
 Institute received the form it retains to the present hour. These 
 are Bellarmine, from whom they learned the arts and resources of 
 controversy ; and Acquaviva, the fifth in number, but in effect the 
 fourth of their Generals who may be described as the Kurna 
 Pompilius of the Order. There is in the early life of Bellarmine a 
 kind of pastoral beauty, and even in his later days a grace, and a 
 simplicity so winning, that it costs some effort to leave such a 
 theme unatternpted. The character of Acquaviva, one of the most 
 memorable rulers and lawgivers of his age, it would be a still greater 
 effort to attempt. 
 
 " Henceforth let no man say" (to mount on the stilts of dear old 
 Samuel Johnson), " Come, I will write a disquisition on the 
 history, the doctrines, and the morality of the Jesuits " at least let 
 no man say so who has not subdued the lust of story-telling. 
 Filled to their utmost limits, lie before us the sheets so recently 
 destined to that ambitious enterprise. Perhaps it may be as well 
 thus to have yielded to the allurement which has marred the ori- 
 ginal design. If in later days the disciples of Ignatius, obeying the 
 laws of all human institutions, have exhibited the sure, though 
 slow, development of the seeds of error and of crime, sown by the 
 authors of their polity, it must at least be admitted that they were 
 men of no common mould. It is something to know that an im- 
 pulse, which, after three centuries, is still unspent, proceeded from 
 hands of gigantic power, and that their power was moral as much 
 as intellectual, or much more so. In our own times much indigna- 
 tion and much alarm are thrown away on innovators of a very 
 different stamp. From the ascetics of the common room, from men 
 whose courage rises high enough only to hint at their unpopular 
 opinions, and whose belligerent passions soar at nothing more 
 daring than to worry some unfortunate professor, it is almost ludi- 
 crous to fear any great movement on the theatre of human affairs. 
 When we see these dainty gentlemen in rags, and hear of them 
 from the snows of the Himalaya, we may begin to tremble. 
 
 The slave of his own appetites, in bondage to conventional laws, 
 his spirit emasculated by the indulgences or corroded by the cares
 
 188 THE FOUNDERS OP JESUITISM. 
 
 of life, hardly daring to act, to speak, or to think for himself, man 
 gregarious and idolatrous man worships the world in which he 
 lives, adopts its maxims, and treads its beaten paths. To rouse him 
 from his lethargy, and to give a new current to his thoughts, heroes 
 appear from time to time on the verge of his horizon, and hero- 
 worship, Pagan or Christian, withdraws him for a while from still 
 baser idolatry. To contemplate the motives and the career of such 
 men, may teach much which well deserves the knowing ; but no- 
 thing more clearly than this that no one can have shrines erected to 
 his memory in the hearts of men of distant generations, unless his 
 own heart was an altar on which daily sacrifices of fervent devotion, 
 and magnanimous self-denial, were ofi'ered to the only true object of 
 human worship.
 
 189 
 
 MAETIN LUTHEK.* 
 
 ENGLISH literature is singularly defective in whatever relates to the 
 Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, and to the lives of the 
 great men by whom it was accomplished. A native of this island 
 who would know anything to the purpose, of Reuchlin or Hutten, 
 of Luther or Melancthon, of Zuingle, Bucer, or (Ecolampadius, of 
 Calvin or Farel, must betake himself to other languages than his 
 own. To fill this void in our libraries, is an enterprise which 
 might stimulate the zeal, and establish the reputation, of tne ripest 
 student of Ecclesiastical History amongst us. In no other field 
 could he discover more ample resources for narratives of dramatic 
 interest ; for the delineation of characters contrasted in every- 
 thing except their common design ; for exploring the influence of 
 philosophy, arts, and manners, on the fortunes of mankind ; and \ 
 for reverently tracing the footsteps of Divine Providence, moving 
 among the ways and works of men, imparting dignity to events 
 otherwise unimportant, and a deep significance to occurrences in 
 any other view as trivial as a border raid, or as the palaver of an 
 African village. 
 
 Take, for example, the life of Ulric de Hutten, a noble, a war- 
 rior, and a rake ; a theologian withal, and a Reformer ; and at the 
 same time the author, or one of the authors, of a satire to be classed 
 amongst the most effective which the world has ever seen. Had the 
 recreative powers of Walter Scott been exercised on Hutten's story, 
 how familiar would all Christendom have been with the stern 
 
 * Any interest which may have attached to this essay, on its first appear- 
 ance, has heen so effectually superseded by Mr Hazlitt's more recent work on 
 Luther, that the republication of it now could hardly be justified, were it not 
 that it forms an essential part of the series to which it belongs, by exhibiting the 
 singular contrast between the characters of the great German Reformer and of 
 the Founders of Jesuitism. Every one, however, who wishes to understand the 
 personal character of Martin Luther, will of course study it in Mr Hazlitt's book, 
 and in the authorities to which he refers.
 
 190 MAKTIN LUTHER. 
 
 i 
 
 Baron of Franconia, and Ulric, his petulant "boy; with the fat 
 Abbot of Fulda driving the fiery youth by penances and homilies 
 to raage a literary vagabond on the face of the earth ; and with the 
 burgomaster of Frankfort, avenging by a still more formidable pun- 
 ishment the pasquinade which had insulted his civic dignity. How 
 vivid would be the image of Hutten at the siege of Pavia, soothing 
 despair itself by writing his own epitaph ; giving combat to five 
 Frenchmen for the glory of Maximilian; and receiving from the 
 delighted Emperor the frugal reward of a poetic crown. Then would 
 have succeeded the court and princely patronage of " the Pope of 
 Mentz," and the camp and castle of the Lord of Sickengen, until the 
 chequered scene closed with Ulric's death-bed employment of pro- 
 ducing a satire ou his stupid physician. 
 
 All things were welcome to Hutten ; arms and love, theology and 
 debauchery, a disputation with the Thomists, a controversy with 
 Erasmus, or a war to the knife with the dunces of his age. His 
 claim to have written the Epistolce Obscurorum Virorum, has, indeed, 
 been disputed, though with little apparent reason. It is at least 
 clear that he asserted his own title, and that no other candidate for 
 that equivocal honour united in himself the wit and learning, the 
 audacity and licentiousness, which successively adorn and disfigure 
 that extraordinary work. Neither is it quite just to exclude the 
 satirist from the list of those who lent a material aid to the Reform- 
 ation. It is not, certainly, by the heartiest or the most contemptuous 
 laugh that dynasties, whether civil or religious, are subverted ; but 
 it would be unfair to deny altogether to Hutten the praise of having 
 contributed by his merciless banter to the successes of wiser and 
 better men than himself. To set on edge the teeth of the Ciceronians 
 by the Latinity of the correspondents of the profound Ortuinus, was 
 but a pleasant jest ; but it was something more to confer an immor- 
 tality of ridicule on the erudite doctors who seriously apprehended, 
 from the study of Greek and Hebrew, the revival at once of the 
 worship of Minerva, and of the rite of circumcision. It was in strict 
 satirical justice, that places were assigned to these sages in a farce 
 as broad as was ever drawn by Aristophanes or Moliere ; a farce 
 which was destitute neither of the riotous mirth, nor even of some 
 of that deep wisdom which it was the pleasure of those great drama- 
 tists to exhibit beneath that grotesque mask. 
 
 Much as Luther himself incolumi gravitate jocum tentavit, he 
 received with little relish these sallies of his facetious ally ; whom 
 he not only censured for employing the language of 'reproach and 
 insult, but, harder still, described as a buffoon. It is, perhaps, well 
 for the dignity of the stern Reformer that the taunt was unknown
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 191 
 
 to the object of it ; for, great as he was, Hutten would not have 
 spared him ; and as the quiver of few satirists had been stored with 
 keener or more envenomed shafts, so, few illustrious men have ex- 
 posed to such an assailant a greater number of vulnerable points. 
 But of these, or of the other private habits of Luther, little is gener- 
 ally recorded. History having claimed him for her own, Biography 
 has yielded to the pretensions of her more stately sister ; and the 
 domestic and interior life of the antagonist of Leo and of Charles 
 yet remains to be written. 
 
 The materials are abundant, and of the highest interest; a 
 collection of letters scarcely less voluminous than those of Voltaire ; 
 the Colloquia Mensalia, in some parts of more doubtful authenticity, 
 yet, on the whole, a genuine record of his conversation ; his theo- 
 logical writings, a mine of egotisms of the richest ore ; and the works 
 of Melancthon, Seckendorf, Cochlosus, Erasmus, and many others, 
 who flourished in an age when, amongst learned men, to write and 
 to live were almost convertible terms. M. Merle D'Aubigne's " His- 
 tory of the Great Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Germany, 
 Switzerland, &c.," is, in fact, an unfinished Life of Luther, closing 
 with his appeal from the Pope to a General Council. It is the most 
 elaborate of a long series of works on the Reformation, recently 
 published on the Continent, by the present inheritors of the prin- 
 ciples and passions which first agitated Europe in the beginning of 
 the sixteenth century. By far the most amusing of the series is the 
 collection of Lutheriana by M. Michelet, which we are bound to 
 notice with especial gratitude, as affording a greater number of 
 valuable references than all other books of the same kind put to- 
 gether. It was drawn up as a relaxation from those severer studies 
 on which M. Michelet's historical fame depends. But the pastime 
 of some men is worth far more than the labours of the rest ; and 
 this compilation has every merit but that of an appropriate title ; 
 for an autobiography it assuredly is not, in any of the senses, accur- 
 ate or popular, of that much abused word. 
 
 Insulated in our habits and pursuits, not less than in our geogra- 
 phical position, it is but tardily that within the intrenchment of 
 our four seas, we sympathise with the intellectual movements of 
 the nations which dwell beyond them. Many, however, are the 
 motives, of at least equal force in these islands as in the old and 
 new continents of the Christian world, for diverting the eye from 
 the present to the past, from those who would now reform, to those 
 who first reformed, the churches of Europe. Or, if graver reasons 
 could not be found, it is beyond all dispute that the professors of 
 "Wittemberg, three hundred years ago, formed a group as much more
 
 192 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 entertaining than those of Oxford at present, as the contest with Dr 
 Eck exceeded in interest the squabble with Dr Hampden. 
 
 The old Adam in Martin Luther (a favourite subject of his dis- 
 course) was a very formidable personage ; lodged in a bodily frame 
 of surpassing vigour, solicited by vehement appetites, and alive to 
 all the passions by which man is armed for offensive or defensive 
 warfare with his fellows. In accordance with a general law, that 
 temperament was sustained by nerves which shrunk neither from the 
 endurance nor the infliction of necessary pain ; and by a courage 
 which rose at the approach of difficulty, and exulted in the presence 
 of danger. A rarer prodigality of nature combined with these en- 
 dowments an inflexible reliance on the conclusions of his own under- 
 standing, and on the energy of his own will He came forth on the 
 theatre of life another Samson Agonistes, " with plain heroic magni- 
 tude of mind, and celestial vigour armed ; " ready to wage an un- 
 equal combat with the haughtiest of the giants of Gath ; or to shake 
 down, though it were on his own head, the columns of the proudest 
 of her temples. 
 
 Viewed in his belligerent aspect, he might have seemed a being 
 cut off from the common brotherhood of mankind, and bearing from 
 on high a commission to bring to pass the remote ends of the Divine 
 benevolence, by means appalling to human guilt and to human 
 weakness. But he was reclaimed into the bosom of the great family 
 of man, by bonds strong and numerous in proportion to the vigour 
 of the propensities they were intended to control. There brooded 
 over him a constitutional melancholy, sometimes engendering sad- 
 ness, but more often giving birth to dreams so wild, that, if vivified 
 by the imagination of Dante, they might have passed into visions 
 as awful and majestic as those of the Inferno. As these mists rolled 
 away bright gleams of sunshine took their place ; and that robust., 
 TTjjjid yielded itself to social enjoyments, with the hearty relisE^the 
 broad humour, and the glorious profusion of sense and nonsense, 
 which betoken the relaxations of those who abdicate an habitual 
 sovereignty over other men to become, for a passing hour, their com- 
 panions. Luther had other and yet more potent spells with which 
 to cast out the demons who haunted him. He had ascertained and 
 taught that the spirit of darkness abhors sweet sounds not less than 
 light itself ; for music (he says), while it chases away the evil sug- 
 gestions, effectually baffles the Aviles of the tempter. His lute, and 
 hand, and voice, accompanying his own solemn melodies, were 
 therefore raised to repel the more vehement aggressions of the enemy 
 of mankind ; whose feebler assaults he encountered by studying the 
 politics of a rookery, by assigning to each beautiful creation of his
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 193 
 
 flower-beds an appropriate sylph or genius, by the company of his 
 Catherine de Bora, and the sports of their saucy John and playful 
 Magdalene. 
 
 The name of Catherine has long enjoyed a wide but doubtful 
 celebrity. She was a lady of noble birth, and was still young when 
 she renounced the ancient faith, her convent, and her vows, to be- 
 come the wife of Martin Luther. From this portentous union of a 
 monk and nun, the " obscure men " confidently predicted the birth 
 of Antichrist; while the wits and scholars greeted their nuptials 
 with a thick hail-storm of epigrams, hymns, and dithyrambics, the 
 learned Eccius himself chiming into the loud chorus with an elabor- 
 ate epithalamium. The bridegroom met the tempest with the 
 spirit of another Benedict, by a counter-blast of invective and sar- 
 casms, which, afterwards collected under the title of " the Lion and 
 the Ass," perpetuated the memory of this redoubtable controversy. 
 " My enemies," he exclaimed, " triumphed. They shouted, lo, lo ! 
 I was resolved to show that, old and feeble as I am, I am not going 
 to sound a retreat. I trust I shall do still more to spoil their 
 merriment." 
 
 This indiscreet, if not criminal marriage, scarcely admitted a more 
 serious defence. Yet Luther was not a man to do anything which 
 he was not prepared to justify. " He had inculcated on others the 
 advantages of the conjugal state, and was bound to enforce his pre- 
 cepts by his example. The war of the peasants had brought reproach 
 on the principles of the Reformation ; and it was incumbent on him 
 to sustain the minds of his followers, and to bear his testimony to 
 evangelical truth by deeds as well as words. Therefore, it was fit 
 that he should marry a nun." Such is the logic of inclination, and 
 such the presumption of uninterrupted success. " Dr Ortuinus " 
 himself never lent his venerable sanction to a stranger sophistry, 
 than that which could thus discover in one great scandal an apology 
 for another far more justly offensive. 
 
 Catherine was a very pretty woman, if Holbein's portrait may be 
 believed ; although even her personal charms have been rudely 
 impugned by her husband's enemies, in grave disquisitions devoted 
 to that momentous question. Better still, she was a faithful and 
 affectionate wife. But there is a no less famous Catherine to whom 
 she bore a strong family resemblance. She brought from her nun- 
 nery an anxious mind, a shrewish temper, and great volubility of 
 speech. Luther's arts were not those of Petruchio. With him 
 reverence for woman was at once a natural instinct and a point of 
 doctrine. He observed, that when the first woman was brought to 
 the first man to receive her name, he called her not wife, but 
 
 13
 
 194 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 mother "Eve, the mother of all living" a word, he says, 
 " more eloquent than ever fell from the lips of Demosthenes." 
 So, like a wise and kind-hearted man, when his Catherine prattled 
 he smiled, when she frowned he playfully stole away her anger, 
 and chided her anxieties with the gentlest soothing. A happier or 
 a more peaceful home was not to be found in that land of domestic 
 tenderness. Yet the confession must be made, that, from first to 
 last, this love tale is nothing less than a case of Icesa majestas 
 against the sovereignty of romance. Luther and his bride did not 
 meet on either side with the raptures of a first affection. He had long 
 before sighed for the fair Ave Schonfelden, and she had not con- 
 cealed her attachment for a certain Jerome Baungartner. Ave had 
 bestowed herself in marriage on a physician of Prussia ; and before 
 Luther's irrevocable vows were pledged, Jerome received from his 
 great rival an intimation that he still possessed the heart, and, with 
 common activity, might even yet secure the hand, of Catherine. 
 But honest Jerome was not a man to be hurried. He silently re- 
 signed his pretensions to his illustrious competitor, who, even in the 
 moment of success, had the discernment to perceive, and the frank- 
 ness to avow, that his love was not of a naming or ungovernable 
 nature. 
 
 " Nothing on this earth," said the good Dame Ursula Schweickard, 
 with whom Luther boarded when at school at Eisenach, " is of such 
 inestimable value as a woman's love." This maxim, recommended 
 more, perhaps, by truth than originality, dwelt long on the mind 
 and on the tongue of the Reformer. To have dismissed this or any 
 other text without a commentary would have been abhorrent from 
 his habits of mind ; and in one of his letters to Catherine he thus 
 insists on a kindred doctrine, the converse of the first. " The 
 greatest favour of God is to have a good and pious husband, to 
 whom you can entrust your all, your person, and even your life : 
 whose children and yours are the same. Catherine, you have a pious 
 husband who loves you. You are an empress ; thank God for it." 
 His conjugal meditations were often in a gayer mood ; as for ex- 
 ample, "If I were going to make love again I would carve an 
 obedient woman out of marble, in despair of finding one in any 
 other way." " During the first year of our marriage she would sit 
 by my side while I was at my books, and, not having anything else 
 to say, would ask me whether, in Prussia, the Margrave and the 
 house steward were not always brothers." " Did you say your 
 Pater, Catherine, before you began the sermon ? If you had, I think 
 you would have been forbidden to preach." He addresses her 
 sometimes as my Lord Catherine, or Catherine the Queen, the
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 195 
 
 Empress, the Doctoress; or as Catherine the rich and noble Lady of 
 Zeilsdorf, where they had a cottage and a few roods of ground. 
 But as age advanced, these playful sallies were abandoned for the 
 following graver and more aifectionate style. " To the gracious 
 Lady Catherine Luther, my dear wife, who vexes herself overmuch, 
 grace and peace in the Lord ! Dear Catherine, you should read St 
 John, and what is said in the Catechism of the confidence to be 
 reposed in God. Indeed you torment yourself as though he were 
 not Almighty, and could not produce new Doctors Martin by the 
 score, if the old doctor should drown himself in the Saal. There 
 is one who watches over me more effectually than thou canst, or 
 than all the angels. He sits at the right hand of the Father 
 Abnighty. Therefore be calm." 
 
 There were six children of this marriage ; and it is at once 
 touching and amusing to see with what adroitness Luther contrived 
 to gratify at once his tenderness as a father and his taste as a theo- 
 logian. When the brightening eye of one of the urchins round his 
 table confessed the allurements of a downy peach, it was " the image 
 of a soul rejoicing in hope." Over an infant pressed to his mother's 
 bosom thus moralised the severe but affectionate Eeformer : " That 
 babe and everything else which belongs to us is hated by the Pope, 
 by Duke George, by their adherents, and by all the devils. 
 Yet, dear little fellow, he troubles himself not a whit for all these 
 powerful enemies ; he gaily sucks the breast, looks round him with 
 a loud laugh, and lets them storm as they like." There were darker 
 seasons, when even theology and polemics give way to the more 
 powerful voice of nature ; nor, indeed, has the deepest wisdom any- 
 thing to add to his lamentation over the bier of his daughter Mag- 
 dalene. " Such is the power of natural affection, that I cannot 
 endure this without tears and groans, or rather an utter deadness of 
 heart. At the bottom of my soul are engraven her looks, her words, 
 her gestures, as I gazed at her in her lifetime and on her deathbed. 
 My dutiful, my gentle daughter ! even the death of Christ (and 
 what are all deaths compared to his?) cannot tear me from this 
 thought as it should. She was playful, lovely, and full of love ! " 
 
 Whatever others may think of these nursery tales, we have certain 
 reasons of our own for suspecting that there is not, on either side of 
 the Tweed, a Papa who will not read the following letter, sent by 
 Luther to his eldest boy during the Diet of Augsburg, with more 
 interest than any or all of the five " Confessions " presented to the 
 Emperor on that memorable occasion. 
 
 " Grace and peace be with thee, my dear little boy ! I rejoice to 
 find that you are attentive to your lessons and your prayers. Per- 
 
 13
 
 196 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 severe, my child, and when I come home I will bring you some 
 pretty fairing. I know of a beautiful garden, full of children in 
 golden dresses, who run about under the trees, eating apples, pears, 
 cherries, nuts, and plums. They jump and sing and are full of glee, 
 and they have pretty little horses with golden bridles and silver 
 saddles. As I went by this garden I asked the owner of it who 
 those children were, and he told me that they were the good chil- 
 dren, who loved to say their prayers, and to learn their lessons, and 
 who fear God. Then I said to him, Dear sir, I have a boy, little 
 John Luther ; may not he too come to this garden, to eat these 
 beautiful apples and pears, to ride these pretty little horses, and to 
 play with the other children ? And the man said, If he is very 
 good, if he says his prayers, and learns his lessons cheerfully, he 
 may come, and he may bring with him little Philip and little 
 James. Here they will find fifes and drums and other nice instru- 
 ments to play upon, and they shall dance and shoot with little cross- 
 bows. Then the man showed me in the midst of the garden a 
 beautiful meadow to dance in. But all this happened in the morn- 
 ing before the children had dined ; so I could not stay till the be- 
 ginning of the dance, but I said to the man, I will go and write to 
 my dear little John, and teach him to be good, to say his prayers, 
 and learn his lessons, that he may come to this garden. But he has 
 an Aunt Magdalene, whom he loves very much may he bring her 
 with him ? The man said, Yes, tell him that they may come to- 
 gether. Be good therefore, dear child, and tell Philip and James 
 the same, that you may all come and play in this beautiful garden. 
 I commit you to the care of God. Give my love to your Aunt Mag- 
 dalene, and kiss her for me. From your Papa who loves you, 
 Martin Luther." 
 
 If it be not a sufficient apology for the quotation of this fatherly 
 'epistle to say, that it is the talk of Martin Luther, a weightier de- 
 fence may be drawn from the remark that it illustrates one of his 
 most serious opinions. The views commonly received amongst 
 Christians, of the nature of the happiness reserved in another state 
 of being, for the obedient and faithful in this life, he regarded, if 
 not as erroneous, yet as resting on no sufficient foundation, and as 
 ill adapted to "allure to brighter worlds." He thought that the 
 enjoyments of Heaven had been refined away to such a point of 
 evanescent spirituality as to deprive them of their necessary attrac- 
 tion ; and the allegory invented for the delight of little John, was 
 but the adaptation to the thoughts of a child of a doctrine which he 
 was accustomed to inculcate on others, under imagery more elevated 
 than that of drums, crossbows, and golden bridles.
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 197 
 
 There is but one step from the nursery to the servants' hall ; and 
 they who have borne with the parental counsels to little John, may 
 endure the following letter respecting an aged namesake of his who 
 was about to quit Luther's family : 
 
 " We must dismiss old John with honour. We know that he 
 Las always served us faithfully and zealously, and as became a 
 Christian servant. What have we not given to vagabonds and 
 thankless students who have made a bad use of our money ? So we 
 will not be niggardly to so worthy a servant, on whom our money 
 will be bestowed in a manner pleasing to God. You need not remind 
 me that we are not rich. I would gladly give him ten florins if I 
 had them, but do not let it be less than five. He is not able to do 
 much for himself. Pray help him in any other way you can. 
 Think how this money can be raised. There is a silver cup which 
 might be pawned. Sure I am that God will not desert us. 
 Adieu." 
 
 Luther's pleasures were as simple as his domestic affections were 
 pure. He wrote metrical versions of the Psalms, so well described 
 by Mr Hallam, as holding a middle place between the doggerel of 
 Sternhold and Hopkins, and the meretricious ornaments of the later 
 versifiers of the Songs of David. He wedded to them music of his 
 own, to which the most obtuse ear cannot listen without emotion. 
 The greatest of the sons of Germany was, in this respect, a true 
 child of that vocal land ; for such was his enthusiasm for the art, 
 that he assigned to it a place second only to that of theology itself. 
 He was also an ardent lover of painting, and yielded to Albert 
 Durer the homage which he denied to Cajetan and Erasmus. His 
 are among the earliest works embellished by the aid of the engraver. 
 With the birds of his native country he had established a strict in- 
 timacy, watching, smiling, and moralising over their habits. " That 
 little fellow," he said of a bird going to roost, " has chosen his 
 shelter, and is quietly rocking himself to sleep without a care for to- 
 morrow's lodging, calmly holding by his little twig, and leaving God 
 to think for him." The following parable, in a letter to Spalatin, 
 is in a more ambitious strain : 
 
 " You are going to Augsburg without having taken the auspices, 
 and ignorant when you will be allowed to begin. I, on the other 
 hand, am in the midst of the Comitia, in the presence of illustrious 
 sovereigns, kings, dukes, grandees, and nobles, who are solemnly 
 debating affairs of state, and making the air ring with their deli- 
 berations and decrees. Instead of imprisoning themselves in those 
 royal caverns which you call palaces, they hold their assemblies in 
 the sunshine, with the arch of Heaven for their tent, substituting
 
 198 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 for costly tapestries the foliage of trees, where they enjoy their 
 liberty. Instead of confining themselves in parks and pleasure- 
 grounds, they range over the earth to its utmost limits. They 
 detest the stupid luxuries of silk and embroidery, but all dress. in 
 the same colour, and put on very much the same looks. To say the 
 truth, they all wear black, and all sing one tune. It is a song 
 formed of a single note, with no variation! but what is produced by 
 the pleasing contrast of young and old voices. I have seen and 
 heard nothing of their emperor. They have a supreme contempt for 
 the quadruped employed by our gentry, having a much better 
 method for setting the heaviest artillery at defiance. As far as I 
 have been able to understand their resolutions by the aid of an in- 
 terpreter, they have unanimously determined to wage war through 
 the whole year against the wheat, oats, and barley, and the best 
 corn and fruits of every kind. There is reason to fear that victory 
 will attend them everywhere ; for they are a skilful and crafty race 
 of warriors, equally expert in collecting booty by violence and by 
 surprise. It has afforded me great pleasure to attend their assem- 
 blies as an idle looker-on. The hope I cherish of the triumphs of 
 their valour over the wheat and barley, and every other enemy, 
 renders me the sincere and faithful friend of these patres patrice 
 these saviours of the commonwealth. If I could serve them by a 
 wish, I would implore their deliverance from their present ugly 
 name of Crows. This is nonsense, but there is some seriousness in 
 it. It is a jest which helps me to drive away painful thoughts." 
 
 The love of fables, which Luther thus indulged at one of the 
 most eventful eras of his life, was amongst his favourite amuse- 
 ments. .^Esop lay on the same table with the book of Psalms, and 
 the two translations proceeded alternately. Except the Bible, he 
 declared that he knew no better book ; and pronounced it not to be 
 the work of any single author, but the fruit of the labours of the 
 greatest minds in all ages. It supplied him with endless jests and 
 allusions ; as, for example, " The dog in charge of the butcher's 
 tray, unable to defend it from the avidity of other curs, said, 
 ' Well, then, I may as well have my share of the meat,' and fell to 
 accordingly ; which is precisely what the Emperor is doing with the 
 property of the Church." 
 
 Eew really great men, indeed, have hazarded a larger number of 
 jokes in the midst of a circle of note-taking associates. They have 
 left on record the following amidst many other memorabilia : 
 " God made the Priest. The Devil set about an imitation, but he 
 made the tonsure too large, and produced a Monk." A cup com- 
 posed of five hoops or rings of glass of different colours circulated
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 199 
 
 at his table. Eisleben, an Antinomian, was of the party. Luther 
 pledged him in the following words : " Within the second of these 
 rings lie the Ten Commandments ; within the next ring the Creed ; 
 then comes the Paternoster ; the Catechism lies .at the bottom." So 
 saying, he drank it off. When Eisleben's turn came, he emptied 
 the cup only down to the beginning of the second ring. "Ah," 
 said Luther, " I knew that he would stick at the Commandments, 
 and therefore would not reach the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, or the 
 Catechism." 
 
 It must be confessed, however, that Luther's pleasantries are less 
 remarkable for wit or delicacy than for the union of strong sense 
 and honest merriment. They were the careless, though not incon- 
 siderate sport of a free-spoken man, in a circle where religion and 
 modesty, protected by an inbred reverence, did not seek the doubt- 
 ful defence of conventional outworks. But pensive thoughts were 
 the more habitual food of his overburdened mind. Neither social 
 enjoyments, nor the tenderness of domestic life, could ever long 
 repel the melancholy which brooded over him. It breaks out in 
 every part of his correspondence, and tinges all his recorded con-' 
 versation. " Because," he says, " my manner is sometimes gay and 
 joyous, many think that I am always treading on roses. God knows 
 what is in my heart." " There is nothing in this life which gives 
 me pleasure ; I am tired of it. May the Lord come quickly and 
 take me hence. Let him come to his final judgment I await the 
 blow. Let him hurl his thunders that I may be at rest." " Forty 
 years more life ! I would not purchase Paradise at such a price." 
 Yet with this lassitude of the world, his contemplations of death 
 were solemn even to sadness. " How gloriously," said his friend, 
 Dr Jonas, " does St Paul speak of his own death. I cannot enter 
 into this." "It appears to me," replied Luther, "that when medi- 
 tating on that subject, even St Paul himself could not have felt all the 
 energy which possessed him when he wrote. I preach, write, and 
 talk about dying, with a greater firmness than I really possess, or 
 than others ascribe to me." In common with all men of this tem- 
 perament, he was profuse in extolling the opposite disposition. 
 " The birds," he says, " must fly over our heads, but why allow 
 them to roost in our hair 1 ?" "Gaiety and a light heart, in all 
 virtue and decorum, are the best medicine for the young, or rather 
 for all. I, who have passed my life in dejection and gloomy 
 thoughts, now catch at enjoyment, come from what quarter it may, 
 and even seek for it. Criminal pleasure, indeed, comes from Satan, 
 but that which we find in the society of good and pious men is ap- 
 proved by God. Ride, hunt with your friends, amuse yourself in
 
 200 MARTIN LDTHER. 
 
 their company. Solitude and melancholy are poison. They are 
 
 \ ^ deadly to all, but, above all, to the young." 
 
 The sombre character of Luther's mind cannot be correctly un- 
 derstood by those who are wholly ignorant of the legendary tra- 
 ditions of his native land. This remark is made and illustrated by 
 M. Henry Heine, with that curious knowledge of such lore as none 
 but a denizen of Germany could acquire. In the mines of Man sf eld, 
 at Eisenach, and at Erfurth, the visible and the invisible worlds 
 were almost equally populous ; and the training of youth was not 
 merely a discipline for the future offices of life, but an initiation 
 into mysteries as impressive, though not quite so sublime, as those 
 of Eleusis. The unearthly inhabitants of every land are near of kin 
 to the human cultivators of the soil. The Killkropff of Saxony 
 differed from a fairy or a hamadryad as a Saxon differs from a 
 Frenchman or a Greek ; the thin essences by which these spiritual 
 bodies are sustained being distilled according to their various 
 national tastes, from the dews of Hymettus, the light wines of Pro- 
 vence, and the strong beer of Germany. At the fireside around 
 which Luther's family drew, in his childhood, there gathered a race 
 of imps who may be considered as the presiding genii of the turnspit 
 and the stable ; witches expert in the right use of the broomstick, 
 but incapable of perverting it into a locomotive engine ; homely in 
 gait, coarse in feature, sordid in their habits, with canine appetites 
 and superhuman powers, and, for the most part, eaten up with mis- 
 anthropy. When, in his twentieth year, Luther for the first time 
 opened the Bible, and read there of spiritual agents, the inveterate 
 enemies of our race, these spectra were projected on a mind over 
 which such legends had already exercised an indestructible influence. 
 Satan and his angels crowded upon his imagination, neither as 
 shapeless presences casting their gloomy shadows on the soul, nor as 
 mysterious impersonations of her foul and cruel desires, nor as war- 
 riors engaged with the powers of light, and love, and holiness, in 
 the silent motionless war of antagonistic energies. Luther's devils 
 were a set of athletic, cross-grained, ill-conditioned wretches, with 
 vile shapes and fiendish faces ; who, like the monsters of Dame 
 Ursula's kitchen, gave buffet for buffet, hate for hate, and joke for 
 joka His Satan was not only something less than archangel 
 ruined, but was quite below the society of that Prince of Darkness, 
 whom Mad Tom in Lear declares to have been a gentleman. Pos- 
 sessing a sensitive rather than a creative imagination, Luther trans- 
 ferred the visionary lore, drawn from these humble sources, to the 
 machinery of the great epic of revelation, with but little change or
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 201 
 
 embellishment ; and thus contrived to reduce to the level of very- 
 vulgar prose some of the noblest conceptions of inspired poetry. 
 
 At the Castle of Wartburg his Patmos, where he dwelt the 
 willing prisoner of his friendly sovereign, the Reformer chanced to 
 have a plate of nuts at his supper table. How many of them he 
 swallowed, there is, unfortunately, no Boswell to tell ; yet, perhaps, 
 not a few for, as he slept, the nuts, animated as it would seem by 
 the demon of the pantry, executed a sort of waltz, knocking against 
 each other, and against the slumberer's bedstead ; when, lo ! the 
 staircase became possessed by a hundred barrels rolling up and 
 down, under the guidance, probably, of the imp of the spigot. Yet 
 all approach to Luther's room was barred by chains and by an iron 
 door vain entrenchments against Satan ! He arose, solemnly 
 defied the fiend, repeated the eighth Psalm, and resigned himself to 
 sleep. Another visit from the same fearful adversary at Nuremburg 
 led to the opposite result. The Reformer flew from his bed to seek 
 refuge in society. 
 
 Once upon a time, Carlostadt, the Sacramentarian, being in the 
 pulpit, saw a tall man enter the church, and take his seat by one of 
 the burgesses of the town. The intruder then retired, betook him- 
 self to the preacher's house, and exhibited frightful symptoms of a 
 disposition to break all the bones of his child. Thinking better of 
 it, however, he left with the boy a message for Carlostadt, that he 
 might be looked for again in three days. It is needless to add that, 
 on the third day, there was an end of the poor preacher, and of his 
 attacks on Luther and Consubstantiation. 
 
 In the cloisters of Wittemberg, Luther himself heard that 
 peculiar noise which attests the devil's presence. It came from 
 behind a stove, resembling, for all the world, the sound of throwing 
 a faggot on the fire. This sound, however, is not invariable. An 
 old priest, in the attitude of prayer, heard Satan behind him, grunt- 
 ing like a whole herd of swine. "Ah ! ah ! master devil," said the 
 priest, "you have your deserts. There was a time when you were a 
 beautiful angel, and there you are turned into a rascally hog ! " 
 The priests devotions proceeded without further disturbance "for," 
 observed Luther, " there is nothing the devil can bear so little as 
 contempt." He once saw and even touched a Killkropff or supposi- 
 titious child. This was at Dessau. The deviling for it had no 
 other parent than Satan himself was about twelve years old, and 
 looked exactly like any other boy. But the unlucky brat could do 
 nothing but eat. He consumed as much food as four ploughmen. 
 When things went ill in the house, his laugh was to be heard all 

 
 202 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 over it. If matters went smoothly, there was no peace for his 
 screaming. Luther declares (of course sportively) that he recom- 
 mended the Elector to have this scapegrace thrown into the Moldau, 
 as it was a mere lump of flesh without a soul. 
 
 His visions sometimes assumed a deeper significance, if not a 
 loftier aspect. In the year 1496, a frightful monster was dis- 
 covered in the Tiber. It had the head of an ass, an emblem 
 of the Pope ; for the Church being a spiritual body incapable 
 of a head, the Pope, who had audaciously assumed that character, 
 was fitly represented under this asinine figure. The right hand 
 resembled an elephant's foot, typifying the Papal tyranny over 
 the weak and timid. The right foot was like an ox's hoof, 
 shadowing , forth the spiritual oppression exercised by . doctors, 
 confessors, nuns, monks, and scholastic theologians ; while the left 
 foot, armed with griffin's claws, could mean nothing else than the 
 various ministers of the Pope's civil authority. How far Luther 
 believed in the existence of the monster whose mysterious signifi- 
 cation he thus interprets, it would not be easy to decide. Yet it is 
 difficult to read his exposition, and to suppose it a mere pleasantry. 
 
 So constantly was he haunted with this midnight crew of devils, 
 as to have raised a serious doubt of his sanity, which even Mr 
 Hallam does not entirely discountenance. Yet the hypothesis is 
 surely gratuitous. Intense study deranging the digestive organs of 
 a man, whose bodily constitution required vigorous exercise, and 
 whose mind had been early stored with such dreams as we have 
 mentioned, sufficiently explains the restless importunity of the 
 goblins amongst whom he lived. It is easier for a man to be in 
 advance of his age on any subject than on this. It may be doubted 
 whether the nerves of Seneca or Pliny would have been equal to a 
 solitary evening walk by the lake Avernus. What wonder, then, 
 if Martin Luther was convinced that suicides fall not by their own 
 hand, but by those of diabolical emissaries, who really adjust the 
 cord or point the knife that particular spots, as, for example, the 
 pool near the summit of the Mons Pilatus, were desecrated to Satan 
 that the wailings of his victims are to be heard in the bowlings of 
 the night wind or that the throwing a stone into a pond in his 
 own neighbourhood, immediately provoked such struggles of the 
 evil spirit imprisoned below the water, as shook the neighbouring 
 country like an earthquake ? 
 
 The mental phantasmagoria of so illustrious a man are an 
 exhibition to which no one who reveres his name would needlessly 
 direct an unfriendly or an idle gaze. But the infirmities of our 
 nature often afford the best measure of its strength. To estimate
 
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 203 
 
 the power by which, temptation is overcome, you must ascertain the 
 force of the propensities to which it is addressed. Amongst the 
 elements of Luther's character was an awe, verging towards idolatry, 
 for all things, whether in the works of God or in the institutions of 
 man, which can be regarded as depositiories of the Divine power, or 
 as delegates of the Divine authority. From pantheism, the disease 
 of imaginations at once devout and unhallowed, he was preserved in 
 youth by his respect for the doctrines of the Church ; and, in later 
 life, by his absolute surrender of his own judgment to the text of 
 the sacred canon. But as far as a pantheistic habit of thought and 
 feeling can consist with the most unqualified belief in the incom- 
 municable Unity of the Divine nature, such thoughts and feelings 
 were habitual to him. 
 
 The same spirit which solemnly acknowledged the existence, 
 whilst it abhorred the use, of the high faculties which, according to 
 the popular faith, the foul fiends of earth, and air, and water, at 
 once enjoy and pervert, contemplated with almost prostrate rever- 
 ence the majesty and the hereditary glories of Rome ; and the 
 apostolical succession of her pontiff, with kings and emperors for 
 his tributaries, the Catholic hierarchy as his vicegerents, and the 
 human mind his universal empire. To brave the vengeance of such 
 a dynasty, wielding the mysterious keys which close the gates of 
 hell and open the portals of heaven, long appeared to Luther an 
 impious audacity, pf which nothing less than woe, eternal and 
 unutterable, would be the sure and appropriate penalty. For a 
 man of his temperament to hush these superstitious terrors, and 
 abjure the golden idol to which the adoring eyes of all nations, 
 kindred, and languages were directed, was a self-conquest, such as 
 none but the most heroic minds can achieve ; and to which even 
 they are unequal, unless sustained by an invisible but omnipotent 
 arm. For no error can be more extravagant than that which would 
 reduce Martin Luther to the rank of a coarse spiritual demagogue. 
 The deep self-distrust which, for ten successive years, postponed his 
 irreconcilable war with Eome, clung to him to the last ; nor was he 
 ever unconscious of the dazzling splendour of the pageantry which 
 his own hand had contributed so largely to overthrow. There is no 
 alloy of affectation in the following avowal, taken from one of his 
 letters to Erasmus : 
 
 " You must, indeed, feel yourself in some measure awed in the 
 presence of a succession of learned men, and by the consent of so 
 many ages, during which flourished scholars so conversant in sacred 
 literature, and martyrs illustrious by so many miracles. To all this 
 must be added the more modern theologians, universities, bishops,
 
 
 204 MARTIN LUTHER 
 
 and popes. On their side are arrayed learning, genius, numbers, 
 dignity, station, power, sanctity, miracles, and what not. On mine 
 Wycliif and Laurentius Valla, and, though you forget to mention 
 him, Augustine also. Then comes Luther, a mean man, born but 
 yesterday, supported only by a few friends, who have neither learn- 
 ing, nor genius, nor greatness, nor sanctity, nor miracles. Put them 
 all together, and they have not wit enough to cure a spavined horse. 
 What are they 1 What the wolf said of the nightingale a voice, and 
 nothing else, I confess it is with reason you pause in such a 
 presence as this. For ten years together I hesitated myself. Could 
 I believe that this Troy, which had triumphed over so many 
 assaults, would fall at last 1 I call God to witness that I should 
 have persisted in my fears, and should have hesitated until now, if 
 truth had not compelled me to speak. You may well believe that 
 my heart is not rock ; and if it were, yet so many are the waves and 
 storms which have beaten upon it, that it must have yielded when 
 the whole weight of this authority came thundering on my head, 
 like a deluge ready to overwhelm me." 
 
 The same feelings were expressed at a later time in the following 
 words : 
 
 " I daily perceive how difficult it is to overcome long-cherished 
 scruples. Oh, what pain has it cost me, though the Scripture is 
 on my side, to defend myself to my own heart for having dared 
 singly to resist the Pope, and to denounce him as Antichrist ! 
 What have been the afflictions of my bosom ! How often, in the 
 bitterness of my soul, have I pressed myself with the Papist's argu- 
 ment, Art thou alone wise ? are all others in error 1 have they been 
 mistaken for so long a time 1 What if you are yourself mistaken, 
 and are dragging with you so many souls into eternal condemna- 
 tion ? Thus did I reason with myself, till Jesus Christ, by his own 
 infallible word, tranquillised my heart, and sustained it against this 
 argument, as a reef of rocks thrown up against the waves laughs at 
 all their fury." 
 
 He who thus acknowledged the influence, while he defied the 
 despotism, of human authority, was self-annihilated in the presence 
 of his Maker. " I have learned," he says, " from the Holy Scrip- 
 tures, that it is a perilous and a fearful thing to speak in the House 
 of God ; to address those who will appear in judgment against us, 
 when at the last day we shall be found in His presence ; when the 
 gaze of the angels shall be directed to us, when every creature shall 
 behold the Divine Word, and shall listen till He speaks. Truly, 
 when I think of this, I have no wish but to be silent, and to cancel
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 205 
 
 all that I have written. It is a fearful thing to be called to render 
 to God an account of every idle word." 
 
 Philip Melancthon occasionally endeavoured, by affectionate ap- 
 plause, to sustain and encourage the mind which was thus bowed 
 down under the sense of unworthiness. But the praise, even of the 
 chosen friend of his bosom, found no echo there. He rejected it, 
 kindly indeed, but with a rebuke so earnest and passionate, as to 
 show that the commendations of him whom he loved and valued 
 most were unwelcome. They served but to deepen the depressing 
 consciousness of ill desert, inseparable from his lofty conceptions of 
 the duties which had been assigned to him. 
 
 In Luther, as in other men, the stern and heroic virtues demanded 
 for their support that profound lowliness which might at first appear 
 the most opposed to their development. The eye which often turns 
 inward with self-complacency, or habitually looks round for admir- 
 ation, is never long or steadfastly fixed on any more elevated object. 
 It is permitted to no man at once to court the applauses of the world^ 
 and to challenge a place amongst the generous and devoted bene- 
 factors of his species. The enervating spell of vanity, so fatal to 
 many a noble intellect, exercised no perceptible control over Martin 
 Luther. Though conscious of the rare endowments he had received 
 from Providence (of which that very consciousness was not the least 
 important), the secret of his strength lay in the heartfelt persuasion, 
 that his superiority to other men gave him no title to their commend- 
 ations, and in his abiding sense o'f the little value of such praises. 
 The growth of his social affections was unimpeded by self-regarding 
 thoughts ; and he could endure the frowns and even the coldness of 
 those whose approving smiles he judged himself unworthy to receive, 
 and did not much care to win. 
 
 His was not that feeble benevolence which leans for support, or 
 depends for existence, on the sympathy of those for whom it labours. 
 Reproofs, sharp, unsparing, and pitiless, were familiar to his tongue 
 and to his pen. Such a censure he had directed to the Archbishop 
 of Mentz, which Spalatin, in the name of their common friend and 
 sovereign, the Elector Frederic, implored him to suppress. " jSTo," 
 replied Luther, " in defence of the fold of Christ, I will oppose to 
 the utmost of my power this ravening wolf, as I have resisted others. 
 I send you my book, which was ready before your letter reached me. 
 It has not induced me to alter a word. The question is decided, I 
 cannot heed your objections." They were such, however, as most 
 men would have thought reasonable enough. Here are some of the 
 words of which neither friend nor sovereign could dissuade the pub-
 
 206 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 lication. " Did you imagine that Luther was dead ? Believe it not. 
 He lives under the protection of that God who has already humbled 
 the Pope, and is ready to hegin with the Archbishop of Mentz a 
 game for which few are prepared." 
 
 To the severe admonition which followed, the princely prelate 
 answered in his own person, in terms of the most humble deference, 
 leaving to Capito, his minister, the ticklish office of remonstrating 
 against the rigour with which the lash had been applied. But neither 
 soothing nor menaces could abate Luther's confidence in his cause and 
 in himself. " Christianity," he replies, " is open and honest. It sees 
 things as they are, and proclaims them as they are. I am for tearing 
 off every mask, for managing nothing, for extenuating nothing, for 
 shutting the eyes to nothing, that truth may be transparent and un- 
 adulterated, and may have a free course. Think you that Luther is 
 a man who is content to shut his eyes if you can but lull him by a 
 few cajoleries ? " " Expect everything from my affection ; but rever- 
 ence, nay, tremble for the faith." 
 
 George, Duke of Saxony, the near kinsman of Frederic, and one 
 of the most determined enemies of the Reformation, not seldom pro- 
 voked and encountered the same resolute defiance. " Should God 
 call me to Wittemberg, I would go there, though it should rain 
 Duke Georges for nine days together, and each new Duke should be 
 nine times more furious than this." "Though exposed daily to 
 death in the midst of my enemies, and without any human resource, 
 I never in my life despised anything so heartily as these stupid 
 threats of Duke George, and his associates in folly. I write in the 
 morning, fasting, with my heart filled with holy confidence. Christ 
 lives and reigns, and I too shall live and reign." 
 
 Here is a more comprehensive denunciation of the futility of the 
 attempts made to arrest his course. 
 
 " To the language of the Fathers, of men, of angels, and of devils, 
 I oppose neither antiquity nor numbers, but the single word of the 
 Eternal Majesty, even that gospel which they are themselves com- 
 pelled to acknowledge. Here is my hold, my stand, my resting- 
 place, my glory, and my triumph. Hence I assault Popes, Thomists, 
 Henrycists, Sophists, and all the gates of hell. I little heed the 
 words of men, whatever may have been their sanctity, nor am I 
 anxious about tradition or doubtful customs. The Word of God is 
 above all If the Divine Majesty be on my side, what care I for 
 the rest, though a thousand Augustines, and a thousand Cyprians, 
 and a thousand such churches as those of Henry, should rise against 
 me 1 ? God can neither err nor deceive. Augustine, Cyprian, and 
 all the saints, can err, and have erred."
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 207 
 
 " At Leipsic, at Augsburg, and at "Worms, my spirit was as free 
 as a flower of the field." " He whom God moves to speak, expresses 
 himself openly and freely, careless whether he is alone or has others 
 on his side. So spake Jeremiah, and I may boast of having dono 
 the same. God has not for the last thousand years bestowed on 
 any bishop such great gifts as on me, and it is right that I should 
 extol his gifts. Truly, I am indignant with myself that I do not 
 heartily rejoice and give thanks. Now and then I raise a faint 
 hymn of thanksgiving, and feebly praise Him. Well ! live or die, 
 Domini sumus. You may take the word either in the genitive or 
 the nominative case. Therefore, Sir Doctor, be firm." 
 
 This buoyant spirit sometimes expressed itself in more pithy phrase. 
 When he first wrote against indulgences, Dr Jerome Schurf said to 
 him., " What are you about 1 they won't allow it." " What if they 
 must allow it 1 ?" was the peremptory answer. 
 
 The preceding passages, while they illustrate his indestructible 
 confidence in himself as the minister, and in his cause as the behest, 
 of Heaven, are redolent of that unseemly violence and asperity 
 which are attested at once by the regrets of his friends, the reproaches 
 of his enemies, and his own acknowledgments. So fierce, indeed, 
 and contumelious and withering is his invective, as to suggest the 
 theory, that, in her successive transmigrations, the same fiery soul 
 which in one age breathed " the Divine Philippics," and in another, 
 the "Letters on a Regicide Peace," was lodged in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury under the cowl of an Augustinian monk ; retaining her indo- 
 mitable energy of abuse, though condemned to a temporary divorce 
 from her inspiring genius. Yet what she lost in eloquence in her 
 transit from the Roman to the Irishman, this upbraiding spirit more 
 than retrieved in generous and philanthropic ardour, while she dwelt 
 in the bosom of the Saxon. Luther's rage, for it is nothing less 
 his scurrilities, for they are no better are at least the genuine lan- 
 guage of passion, excited by a deep abhorrence of imposture, tyranny, 
 and wrong. Through the ebullitions of his wrath may be discovered 
 his lofty self-esteem, but not a single movement of puerile self- 
 applause ; his cordial scorn for fools and their folly, but not one 
 heartless sarcasm ; his burning indignation against oppressors, whether 
 spiritual or secular, unclouded by so much as a passing shade of 
 malignity. The torrent of emotion is headlong, but never turbulent. 
 When we are least able to sympathise with his irascible feelings, it 
 is also least in our power to refuse our admiration to a mind which, 
 when thus torn up to its lowest depths, discloses no trace of envy, 
 selfishness, or revenge, or of any still baser inmate. His mission 
 from on high may be disputed, but hardly his own belief in it. In
 
 208 MARTIN LUTHER, 
 
 that persuasion, his thoughts often reverted to the Prophet of Israel 
 mocking the idolatrous priests of Baal, and menacing their still 
 more guilty King; and if the mantle of Elijah might have been 
 borne with a more imposing majesty, it could not have fallen on one 
 better prepared to pour contempt on the proudest enemies of truth, 
 or to brave their utmost resentment. 
 
 Is it paradoxical to ascribe Luther's boisterous invective to his 
 inherent reverence for all those persons and institutions, in favour 
 of which wisdom, power, and rightful dominion are involuntarily 
 presumed] He lived under the control of an imagination suscep- 
 tible, though not creative of that passive mental sense to which 
 it belongs to embrace, rather than to originate to fix and deepen 
 our more serious impressions, rather than to minister to the under- 
 standing in the search or the embellishment of truth. This pro- 
 pensity, the basis of religion itself in some, of loyalty in others, and 
 of superstition perhaps in all, prepares the feeble for a willing serv- 
 itude ; and furnishes despotism with zealous instruments in men of 
 sronger nerves and stouter hearts. It steeled Dominic and Loyola 
 for their relentless tasks, and might have raised St Martin of AVit- 
 temberg to the honours of canonisation ; if, in designating him for 
 his arduous office, Providence had not controlled the undue sensibility 
 of Luther's mind, by imparting to him a brother's love for all the 
 humbler members of the family of man, and a filial fear of God, 
 stronger even than his reverence for the powers and principalities of 
 this sublunary world. Between his religious affections and his 
 homage for the idols of his imagination, he was agitated by a cease- 
 less conflict. The nice adjustment of such a balance ill suited his 
 impatient and irritable temper ; and he assaulted the objects of his 
 early respect with an impetuosity which betrays his secret dread of 
 those formidable antagonists (so he esteemed them) of God and of 
 mankind. He could not trust himself to be moderate. The re- 
 .straints of education, habit, and natural disposition, could be 
 overborne only by the excitement which he courted and indulged. 
 His long-cherished veneration for those who tread upon the high 
 places of the earth, lent to his warfare with them all the energy of 
 self-denial, quickened by the anxiety of self-distrust. He scourged 
 his lordly adversaries in the spirit of a flagellant taming his own re- 
 bellious flesh. His youthful devotion for " the solemn plausibilities 
 of life," like all other affections obstinately repelled and mortified, 
 reversed its original tendency, and gave redoubled fervour to the 
 zeal with which he denounced their vanity and resisted their 
 usurpation. 
 
 If these indignant contumelies offended the gentle, the learned,
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 209 
 
 and the wise, they sustained the courage and won the confidence of 
 the multitude. The voice which commands in a tempest must battle 
 with the roar of the elements. In his own apprehension at least, 
 Luther's soul was among lions the Princes of Germany and their 
 ministers ; Henry the Eighth and Edward Lee, his chaplain ; the 
 Sacranientarians and Anabaptists ; the Universities of Cologne and 
 Louvain ; Charles and Leo ; Adrian and Clement ; Papists, Jurists, 
 and Aristotelians ; and, above all, the devils whom his creeds assign- 
 ed to each of these formidable opponents as so many inspiring or 
 ministering spirits. However fierce and indefensible may be his 
 occasional style, history presents no more sublime picture than that 
 of the humble monk triumphing over such adversaries, in the invin- 
 cible power of a faith before which the present and the visible dis- 
 appeared, to make way for things unseen, eternal, and remote. One 
 brave spirit encountered and subdued a hostile world. An intellect 
 of no gigantic proportions, seconded by learning of no marvellous 
 compass, and gifted with no rare or exquisite abilities, but invincible 
 in decision and constancy of purpose, advanced to the accomplish- 
 ment of one great design, with a continually increasing momentum, 
 before which all feebler minds retired, and all opposition was dissi- 
 pated. The majesty of the contest, and the splendour of the results, 
 may, perhaps, even in our fastidious and delicate age, be received 
 as an apology for such reproofs as the following to the Royal 
 "Defender of the Faith." 
 
 " There is much royal ignorance in this volume, but there is also 
 much virulence and falsehood, which belongs to Lee the editor. In 
 the cause of Christ I have trampled under-foot the idol of the Ro- 
 man abomination which had usurped the place of God and the 
 dominion of sovereigns and of the world. Who, then, is this 
 Henry, this new Thomist, this disciple of the monster, that I should 
 dread his blasphemies and his fury ? Truly he is the Defender of 
 the Church ! Yes, of that Church of his which he thus extols 
 of that prostitute who is clothed in purple, drunk with her debauch- 
 eries of that mother of fornications. Christ is my leader. I will 
 strike with the same blow that Church and the defender with whom 
 she has formed this strict union. They have challenged me to war. 
 Well, they shall have war. They have scorned the peace I offered 
 them. Well, they shall have no more peace. It shall be seen 
 which will first be weary the Pope or Luther." "The world is 
 gone mad. There are the Hungarians, assuming the character of 
 defenders of God himself. They pray in their litanies, ut nos 
 defensores tuos exaudire dignens why do not some of our princes 
 take on them the protection of Jesus Christ, others that of the Holy 
 
 14
 
 210 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 Spirit ? Then, indeed, the Divine Trinity would be well guarded." 
 
 The Briefs of Pope Adrian are thus disposed of : " It is morti- 
 fying to be obliged to give such good German in answer to this 
 wretched kitchen Latin. But it is the pleasure of God to confound 
 anti-Christ in everything to leave him neither literature nor 
 language. They say that he has gone mad, and fallen into dotage. 
 It is a shame to address us Germans in such Latin as this, and to 
 send to sensible people such a clumsy and absurd interpretation of 
 Scripture." 
 
 The Bulls of Pope Clement fare no better. " The Pope tells us in 
 his answer that he is willing to throw open the golden doors. It 
 is long since we opened all our doors in Germany. But these Italian 
 Scaramouches have never restored a farthing of the gain they have 
 made by their indulgences, dispensations, and other diabolical in- 
 ventions. Good Pope Clement, all your clemency and gentleness 
 won't pass here. We'll buy no more indulgences. Golden doors 
 and bulls, get ye home again. Look to the Italians for payment. 
 They who know ye will buy you no more. Thanks be to God, we 
 know that they who possess and believe the Gospel, enjoy an un- 
 interrupted jubilee. Excellent Pope, what care we for your bulls 1 
 You may save your seals and your parchment. They are in bad 
 odour now-a-days." " Let them accuse me of too much violence. I 
 care not. Hereafter be it my glory that men shall tell how I 
 inveighed and raged against the Papists. For the last ten years have 
 I been humbling myself, and addressing them in none but re- 
 spectful language. What has been the consequence of all this sub- 
 mission 1 ? To make bad worse. These people are but the more 
 furious. Well, since they are incorrigible, as it is vain to hope to 
 shake their infernal purposes by kindness, I will break with them, I 
 will pursue them," &c. " Such is my contempt for these Satans, 
 that were I not confined here, I would go straight to Rome in spite 
 of the devil and all these furies. But," he continues, in a more 
 playful mood, " I must have patience with the Pope, with my 
 boarders, my servants, with Catherine de Bora, and with everybody 
 else. In short, I live a life of patience." 
 
 At the risk of unduly multiplying these quotations, we must add 
 another, which has been quoted triumphantly by his enemies. It is 
 his answer to the charge of mistranslating the Bible. " The ears of 
 the Papists are too long with their hi ! ha ! they are unable to criti- 
 cise a translation from Latin into German. Tell them that Dr Mar- 
 tin Luther chooses that it shall be so; and that a Papist and a 
 jackass are the same." 
 
 We should reprint no small portion of Luther's works before we
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 211 
 
 exhausted the examples which might be drawn from them, of the 
 uproar with which he assailed his antagonists. To the reproaches 
 which this violence drew on him, he rarely condescended to reply. 
 But to his best and most powerful friend, the Elector Frederic, he 
 makes a defence, in which there is some truth and more eloquence. 
 "They say that these books of mine are too keen and cutting. 
 They are right ; I never meant them to be soft and gentle. My 
 only regret is, that they cut no deeper. Think of the violence of 
 my enemies, and you must confess that I have been too forbearing." 
 "All the world exclaims against me, vociferating the most hate- 
 ful calumnies ; and if, in my return, I, poor man, raise my voice, 
 then nobody has been vehement but Luther. In fine, whatever I 
 do or say must be wrong, even should I raise the dead. "Whatever 
 they do must be right, even should they deluge Germany with tears 
 and blood." In his more familiar discourse, he gave another, and 
 perhaps a more accurate, account of the real motives of his im- 
 petuosity. He purposely fanned the flame of an indignation which 
 he thought virtuous, because the origin of it was so. " I never," 
 he said, "write or speak so well as when I am in a passion." He 
 found anger an effectual, and at last a necessary stimulant, and 
 indulged in a liberal or rather in an intemperate use of it. 
 
 The tempestuous phase of Luther's mind was not, however, per- 
 manent. The wane of it may be traced in his later writings ; and 
 the cause may be readily assigned. The liberator of the human 
 mind was soon to discover that the powers he had set free were not 
 subject to his control. The Iconoclasts, Anabaptists, and other 
 innovators, however welcome at first, as useful, though irregular, 
 partisans, brought an early discredit on the victory to which they 
 had contributed. The Reformer's suspicion of these doubtful allies 
 was first awakened by the facility with which they urged their con- 
 quests over the established opinions of the Christian world beyond 
 the limits at which he had himself paused. He looked with dis- 
 trust on their exemption from the pangs and throes with which the 
 birth of his own doctrines had been accompanied in his own bosom. 
 He perceived in them none of the caution, self-distrust, and humil- 
 ity, which he wisely judged inseparable from the honest pursuit of 
 truth. Their claims to an immediate intercourse with heaven 
 appeared to him an impious pretension ; for he judged that it is 
 only as attempered through many a gross intervening medium, that 
 Divine light can be received at all into the human understanding. 
 
 Carlostadt, one of the professors at Wittemberg, was the leader 
 of the llluminati at that university. The influence of Luther pro- 
 cured his expulsion to Jena, where he established a printing-press. 
 
 H *
 
 212 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 But the maxims of toleration are not taught in the school of success- 
 ful polemics ; and the secular arm was invoked to silence an appeal 
 to the world at large against a new papal authority. The debate 
 from which Luther thus excluded others he could not deny to him- 
 self; for he shrunk from no inquiry and dreaded no man's prowess. 
 A controversial passage at arms accordingly took place between the 
 Reformer and his refractory pupil. It is needless to add that they 
 separated, each more firmly convinced of the errors of his opponent. 
 The taunt of fearing an open encounter with truth, Luther repelled 
 with indignation and spirit. He invited Carlostadt to publish 
 freely whatever he thought fit, and the challenge being accepted, he 
 placed in his hands a florin, as a kind of wager of battle. It was 
 received with equal frankness. The combatants grasped each other's 
 hands, drank mutual pledges in a solemn cup, and parted to engage 
 in hostilities more serious than such greetings might have seemed 
 to augur. Luther had the spirit of a martyr, and was not quite 
 exempt from that of a persecutor. Driven from one city to another, 
 Carlostadt at last found refuge at Basle ; and thence assailed his 
 adversary with a rapid succession of pamphlets, and with such 
 pleasing appellatives as "twofold Papist," "ally of Antichrist," 
 and so forth. They were answered with equal fertility, and with 
 no greater moderation. " The devil," says Luther, " held his tongue 
 till I won him over with a florin. It was money well laid out. I 
 do not regret it." 
 
 He now advocated the cause of social order, and exposed the 
 dangers of ignorant innovators, assailing these new enemies with his 
 old weapons. " It will never do to jest with Mr All-the-World 
 (Herr omnes). To keep that formidable person quiet, God had 
 established lawful authority. It is His pleasure that there should 
 be order amongst us here." " They cry out, The Bible ! the Bible ! 
 Bibel! Bubel! Babel!" 
 
 From that sacred source many arguments had been drawn to 
 prove that all good Christians were bound, in imitation of the 
 great Jewish lawgiver, to overthrow and deface the statues with 
 which the Papists had embellished the sacred edifices. Luther 
 strenuously resisted both the opinion and the practice ; maintaining 
 that the Scriptures nowhere prohibit the use of images, except such 
 as were designed as a representation or symbol of Deity. 
 
 But to the war with objects designed (however injudiciously) to 
 aid the imagination, and to enliven the affections, Carlostadt and 
 his partisans united that mysticism which teaches that the mind, 
 thus deprived of all external and sensible supports, should raise it- 
 self to a height of spiritual contemplation and repose, where, all
 
 MARTIN LUTHEK. 213 
 
 other objects "being banished, and all other sounds unheard, and all 
 other thoughts expelled, the Divine Being will directly manifest 
 himself, and disclose His will by a voice silent and inarticulate, and 
 yet distinctly intelligible. Luther handles this sublime nonsense 
 as it well deserved. " The devil/' he says (for this is his universal 
 solvent), " opens his large mouth, and roars out, Spirit ! spirit ! 
 spirit ! destroying the while all roads, bridges, scaling ladders, and 
 paths, by which spirit can enter ; namely, the visible order estab- 
 lished by God in holy baptism, in outward forms, and in His own 
 word. They would have you mount the clouds and ride the winds, 
 telling you neither how, nor when, nor where, nor which. All this 
 they leave you to discover for yourself." 
 
 Carlostadt was an image breaker and a mystic, but he was some- 
 thing more. He had adopted the opinion of Zuingle and (Ecolam- 
 padius on the Holy Communion, receiving as an emblem, and as 
 nothing else, the sacred elements in which the Roman Catholic 
 Church, after the words of consecration, recognises the very body 
 and blood of the Divine Redeemer. He was, therefore, supported 
 by the whole body of Swiss reformers. Luther, " chained down," 
 as he expresses it, " by the sacred text," to the doctrine of the real 
 presence, had ardently desired to be enfranchised from this opinion. 
 " As often as he felt within himself the strivings of the old Adam, 
 he was but too violently drawn to adopt the Swiss interpretation." 
 "But if we take counsel with reason, we shall no longer believe any 
 mystery." He had, however, consulted this dangerous guide too 
 long, thus easily to shake off her company. The text taught him 
 one real presence, his reason assured him of another ; and so he re- 
 quired his disciples to admit and believe both. They obeyed, 
 though at the expense of a schism among the Reformers, of which 
 it is difficult to say whether it occasioned more distress to them- 
 selves, or more exultation to their common enemies. 
 
 This is the first and greatest of those " Variations " of which the 
 history has been written with such inimitable eloquence. Nothing 
 short of the most obtuse prejudice could deny to Bossuet the praise 
 of having brought to religious controversy every quality which can 
 render it either formidable or attractive ; a style of such trans- 
 parent perspicuity as would impart delight to the study of the Year 
 Books, if they could be rewritten in it ; a sagacity which nothing 
 escapes ; and a fervour of thought and feeling so intense, as to 
 breathe and burn not only without the use of vehement or oppro- 
 brious words, but through a diction invariably calm and simple ; 
 and a mass of learning so vast and so perfectly digested as to be 
 visible everywhere without producing the slightest encumbrance or
 
 214 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 embarrassment. To quote from Mr Hallam's History of the Middle 
 Ages : " Nothing, perhaps, in polemical eloquence is so splendid 
 as the chapter on Luther's theological tenets. The Eagle of Meaux 
 is there truly seen, lordly of form, fierce of eye, terrible in his beak 
 and claws," a graphic and not unmerited tribute to the prowess of 
 this formidable adversary. But the triumph which it appears to 
 concede to him may not be so readily acknowledged. 
 
 The argument of the "Variations" rests on the postulate, that a 
 religion of Divine origin must have provided some resource for ex- 
 cluding uncertainty on every debatable point of belief or practice. 
 Now, it must be vain to search for this steadfast light amongst 
 those who were at variance on so many vital questions. The re- 
 quired Ductor Dubitantium could, therefore, be found only in the 
 venerable form of the Catholic Church, whose oracles, everywhere 
 accessible and never silent, had, from age to age, delivered to the 
 faithful the same invariable truths in one continuous strain of per- 
 fect and unbroken harmony. 
 
 Much as the real contrast has been exaggerated by the most 
 subtle disputant of modern times, it would be futile to deny or to 
 ? extenuate the glaring inconsistencies of the Reformers with each 
 other, and with themselves. Protestantism may well endure an 
 avowal which leaves her foundations unimpaired. Bossuet has 
 disproved the existence of a miracle which no one alleges. He has 
 incontrovertibly established that the laws of nature were not sus- 
 pended in favour of Luther and his associates. He has shown, with 
 inimitable address and eloquence, that, within the precincts of moral 
 science, human reason must toil in vain for demonstrative certain- 
 ties ; and that, in such studies, they who would adopt the same 
 general results, and co-operate for one common end, must be content 
 to rest very far short of an absolute identity of opinion. 
 
 But there is a deep and impassable gulf between these premises 
 and the inference deduced from them. The stupendous miracle of 
 a traditional unanimity for fifteen hundred years amongst the mem- 
 bers of the Christian Church, at once unattested by any authentic 
 evidence, and refuted by irresistible proofs, is opposed as much to 
 the whole economy of the moral government of the world, as it is 
 to human experience. It was, indeed, easy to silence dissent by 
 terror ; to disguise real differences beneath conventional symbols ; 
 to divert the attention of the incurious by a gorgeous pageantry ; 
 and to disarm the inquisitive at one time by golden preferments, 
 and at another by specious compromises : and it was easy to 
 allege this timid, or blind, or selfish acquiesence in spiritual despot- 
 ism, as a general consent to the authority, and as a spontaneous
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 215 
 
 adoption of the tenets, of the dominant priesthood. But so soon as 
 men really began to think, it was impossible that they should think 
 alike. When suffrages were demanded, and not acclamations, there 
 was at once an end of unanimity. With mental freedom came 
 doubt, and debate, and sharp dissension. The indispensable con- 
 ditions of human improvement were now to be fulfilled. It was 
 discovered that religious knowledge, like all other knowledge, and 
 religious agreement, like all other agreement, were blessings which, 
 like all other blessings, must be purchased at a price. 
 
 Luther dispelled the illusion that man's noblest science may be 
 attained, his first interests secured, and his most sacred duties dis- 
 charged, except in the strenuous exercise of the best faculties of his 
 nature. He was early taught that they who submit themselves to 
 this Divine ordinance, are cut off from the intellectual repose which 
 rewards a prostrate submission to human authority ; that they must 
 conduct the search of truth through many a bitter disappointment, 
 and many a humiliating retractation, and many a weary strife ; and 
 that they must brace their nerves and strain their mental powers to 
 the task, with sleepless diligence, attended and sustained the 
 while by singleness of purpose, by candour, by hope, by humility, 
 and by devotion. When this severe lesson had been learned, the 
 Reformers, boldly, nay, passionately, avowed their mutual differ- 
 ences. The imperfect vision, and unsteady gait, of eyes long ex- 
 cluded from the light, and of limbs long debarred from exercise, 
 drew on them the taunts and contumelies of those whose bondage 
 they had dared to reject. But the sarcasms even of Erasmus, the 
 eloquence even of Bossuet, were impotent against such antagonists. 
 Centuries rolled on their appointed course of controversy, of pre- 
 judice, of persecution, and of long-suffering. Nor was that sharp 
 conflict endured in vain. Slowly, indeed, but steadfastly, the 
 Catholic and benignant spirit of the Gospel reappeared, and resumed 
 its influence in the Christian world. The rights of conscience, and 
 the principles of toleration, were acknowledged. Some vehement 
 disputes were consigned to well-merited neglect. The Church of 
 Borne herself silently adopted much of the temper, whilst anathe- 
 matising the tenets of the Reformers ; and if the dominion of peace 
 and charity be still imperfect and precarious, yet there is a brighter 
 prospect of their universal empire than has ever before dawned on 
 the nations of Christendom. The Eagle of Meaux, had he been 
 reserved for the nineteenth century, would have laid aside "the 
 terrors of his beak, the lightnings of his eye," and would have 
 winged his lordly flight to regions elevated far above those over 
 which it is his glory to have spread war and consternation.
 
 216 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 These, however, are conclusions which, in Luther's age, were be- 
 yond the reach of human foresight. It was at that time supposed 
 that all men might at once freely discuss, and unanimously inter- 
 pret, the meaning of the inspired volume. The trial of the experi- 
 ment hrought to light many essential variations, hut still more in 
 which the verbal exceeded the real difference ; and such was, 
 perhaps, the case with the Sacramentarian controversy. The ob- 
 jection to Luther's doctrine of Consubstantiation, was not that it was 
 opposed to the reason of man, nor even that it was contradicted by 
 the evidence of his senses ; but that no intelligible meaning could 
 be assigned to any of the combinations of words in which it was 
 expressed. It might be no difficult task to be persuaded that what- 
 ever so great a doctor taught, on so high a point of theology, must 
 be a truth ; just as the believers in George Psalmanazer may have 
 been firmly assured of the verity of the statements he addressed to 
 them in the language of Formosa. But the Lutheran doctrine could 
 hardly have been more obscure, if it had been delivered in the 
 Formosa, instead of the Latin or the German tongue. To all com- 
 mon apprehension, it appeared nothing less than the simultaneous 
 affirmation and denial of the very same thing. In this respect it 
 closely resembled the kindred doctrine of the Church of Borne. 
 Yet who would indulge in so presumptuous a bigotry as to impute 
 to the long unbroken succession of powerful and astute minds which 
 have adorned the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches, the 
 extravagance of having substituted unmeaning sounds for a definite 
 sense, on so momentous an article of their respective creeds 1 The 
 consequence may be avoided by a much more rational supposition. 
 It is, that the learned of both communions used the words in which 
 that article is denounced, in a sense widely remote from that which 
 they usually bear. The proof of this hypothesis would be more 
 easy than attractive ; nor would it be a difficult, though an equally 
 uninviting office, to show that Zuinglo and his followers indulged 
 themselves in a corresponding freedom with human language. The 
 dispute, however, proceeded too rapidly to be overtaken or arrested 
 by definitions ; which, had they preceded, instead of following the 
 controversy, might have stifled in its birth many a goodly folio. 
 
 The minds of men were rudely called away from these subtleties. 
 Throughout the west of Germany, the peasants rose in a sudden and 
 desperate revolt against their lords, under the guidance of Goetz of 
 the " Iron Hand." If neither animated by the principles nor 
 guided by the precepts of the Gospel, the insurgents at least avowed 
 their adherence to the party then called Evangelical, and justified 
 their conduct by an appeal to the doctrines of the Reformers. Yet
 
 MABTIN LUTHER. 217 
 
 this fearful disruption of the bands of society was provoked neither 
 "by speculative opinions, nor by imaginary wrongs. The grievances 
 of the people were galling, palpable, and severe. They belonged to 
 that class of social evils over which the advancing light of truth and 
 knowledge must always triumph, either by prompting timely con- 
 cessions, or by provoking the rebound of the overstrained patience of 
 mankind. Domestic slavery, feudal tenures, oppressive taxation, 
 and a systematic denial of justice to the poor, occupied the first place 
 in their catalogue of injuries ; the forest laws and the exaction of 
 small tithes, the second. The demand of the right to choose their 
 own religious teachers, may not improbably have been added, to 
 give to their cause the semblance of a less sublunary character ; 
 and rather in compliment to the spirit of the times, than from any 
 very lively desire for instructors, who, they well knew, would dis- 
 courage and rebuke their lawless violence. 
 
 Such a monitor was Luther. He was at once too conspicuous and 
 too ardent to remain a passive spectator of these tumults. The 
 nobles arraigned him as the author of their calamities. The people 
 invoked him as an arbiter in the dispute. He answered their appeal 
 with more than papal dignity. A poor untitled priest asserted over 
 the national mind of Germany a command more absolute than that 
 of her thousand Princes and their Imperial head. He had little of 
 the science of government, nor, in truth, of any other science. But 
 his mind had been expanded by studies which give wisdom even to 
 the simple. His understanding was invigorated by habitual converse 
 with the inspired writings, and his soul had drunk deeply of their 
 spirit. And therefore it was that from him Europe first heard those ' 
 great social maxims which, though they now pass for elementary 
 truths, were then as strange in theory as they were unknown in 
 practice. He fearlessly maintained that the demands of the insur- 
 gents were just. He asserted the all-important though obvious truth, 
 that power is confided to the rulers of mankind, not to gratify their 
 caprice or selfishness, but as a sacred trust to be employed for the 
 common good of society at large ; and he denounced their injustice 
 and rapacity with the same stern vehemence which he had formerly 
 directed against the spiritual tyrants of the world. 
 
 For, in common with all who have caught the genius as well as 
 the creed of Christianity, the readiest sympathies of Luther were 
 with the poor, the destitute, and the oppressed ; and, in contem- 
 plating the unequal distribution of the good things of life, he was 
 not slowly roused to a generous indignation against those to whom 
 the advantages of fortune had taught neither pity nor forbearance. 
 But it was an emotion restrained and directed by far deeper thoughts
 
 218 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 than visit the minds of sentimental patriots, or selfish demagogues. 
 He depicted, in his own ardent and homely phrase, the guilt, the 
 folly, and the miseries of civil war. He reminded the people of their 
 ignorance and their faults. He bade them not to divert their at- 
 tention from these, to scan the errors of their superiors. He drew 
 from the evangelical precepts of patience, meekness, and long-suffer- 
 ing, every motive which could calm their agitated passions. He 
 implored them not to dishonour the religion they professed ; and 
 showed that subordination in human society was a Divine ordinance, 
 designed to promote, in different ways, the moral improvement of 
 every rank, and the general happiness of all. 
 
 The authority, the courage, and the pathetic earnestness of the 
 great Reformer were exerted in vain. Oppression which drives wise 
 men mad, had closed the ears of the German peasantry to the advice 
 even of Martin Luther ; and they plunged into a contest more des- 
 perate in its character, and more fatal in its results, than any which 
 stains the annals of the empire. He felt, with the utmost keenness, 
 the reproach thus brought on the Reformation ; nor may it be con- 
 cealed, that at last his voice was raised in terrible indignation against 
 the insurgents, by whom his pacific efforts had been defeated and 
 his remonstrances despised. His old antagonist, Carlostadt, was 
 charged with a guilty participation in the revolt, and in his distress 
 appealed to the much-reviled Consubstantialist for protection. It 
 was hardly in human nature, certainly not in Luther's, to reject such 
 a supplicant. The odium theologicum is, after all, rather a vituper- 
 ative than a malignant affection, even its worst type ; and Luther 
 possessed, more than most polemics, the faculty of expelling from 
 the soul the Demon of Wrath through the channel of the pen. He 
 placed Carlostadt -in safety, defended him from the charge of foster- 
 ing rebellion, and demanded for him a fair trial and a patient hearing. 
 His preternatural fate has been already noticed. 
 
 But a more formidable enemy was at hand. The supremacy of 
 Erasmus in the world of letters was such as no other writer ever 
 lived to enjoy. Literature had then an universal language, and the 
 learned of all nations acknowledged him as their guide and model 
 In an age of intense mental activity, no other mind was so impatient 
 of repose ; at a period when freedom of thought was asserted with 
 all the enthusiasm of new-born hope, he emulated the most sanguine 
 of the insurgents against the ancient dynasties. The restorer, almost 
 the inventor, of the popular interpretation of the Scriptures, he was 
 excelled by few, if any, in the more ambitious science of biblical 
 criticism. His philosophy (if, in deference to custom, it must so be 
 called) was but the application to those inquiries in which the pre-
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 219 
 
 sent and future welfare of mankind is chiefly involved, of an admir- 
 able good sense, which penetrated sophisms under the most specious 
 disguise, and repelled mere verbal subtleties, however imposing 
 their pretensions, or however illustrious their patrons. Alternately 
 a man of the world, and a recluse scholar, he was ever wide awake 
 to the real business of life ; even when engaged in those studies 
 which usually conduct the mere prisoners of the cloister into dreamy 
 and transcendental speculations. In his hands, the Latin language 
 was bent to uses of which Cicero himself might have thought it in- 
 capable ; and, without any barbarous innovations, became, almost 
 for the first time, the vehicle of playful banter, and of high and 
 mysterious doctrines, treated in a familiar and easy tone. 
 
 Of the two imperial virtues, industry and self-denial, the literary 
 character of Erasmus was adorned by the first much more than by 
 the second. Grasping at universal excellence and immediate re- 
 nown, he poured out orations, verses, essays, dialogues, aphorisms, 
 biographies, translations, and new editions of the classical writers, 
 with a rapidity which at once dazzled the world, and exhausted 
 himself. Deeply as the impress of his mind was fastened on his 
 own generation, those only of his countless works retain their charm 
 in later times which he regarded but as the pastime of a few leisure 
 hours. Every one has read the " Colloquies," and admired their gay 
 and graceful exposure of the frauds and credulity of his age. The 
 " Praise of Folly " should never be separated from Holbein's etch- 
 ings, without which the reader may now and then smile, but will 
 hardly laugh. The " Ciceronianus " is one of those elaborate plea- 
 santries which give pleasure only to the laborious. For neither as 
 a wit, nor as a theologian, nor perhaps even as a critic, does Erasmus, 
 rank among master intellects ; and in the other departments of liter- 
 ature no one has ventured to claim for him a very elevated station. 
 His real glory is to have opened at once new channels of popular 
 and of abstruse knowledge to have guided the few, while he in- 
 structed the many to have lived and written for noble ends to 
 have been surpassed by none in the compass of his learning, or the 
 collective value of his works and to have prepared the way for a 
 mighty revolution, which it required moral qualities far loftier than 
 his to accomplish. 
 
 For the soul of this great man did not partake of the energy of 
 his intellectual faculties. He repeatedly confesses that he had none 
 of the spirit of a martyr ; and the acknowledgment is made in the 
 tone of sarcasm, rather than in that of regret. He belonged to that 
 class of actors on the scene of life, who have always appeared as the 
 harbingers of great social changes ; men gifted with the power to 

 
 S20 MAKTIN LUTHER. 
 
 discern, and the hardihood to proclaim, truths of which they want 
 the courage to encounter the infallible results ; who outrun their 
 generation in thought, but lag behind it in action ; players at the 
 sport of reform so long as reform itself appears at an indefinite 
 distance ; more ostentatious of their mental superiority than anxious 
 for the well-being of mankind ; dreaming that the dark page of 
 history may hereafter become a fairy tale, in which enchantment will 
 bring to pass a glorious catastrophe, unbought by intervening strife, 
 and agony, and suffering ; and therefore overwhelmed with alarm 
 when the edifice begins to totter, of which their own hands have 
 sapped the foundation. 
 
 He was a Reformer, until the Reformation became a fearful 
 reality; a jester at the bulwarks of the Papacy, until they began 
 to give way ; a propagator of the Scriptures, until men betook 
 themselves to the study and the application of them ; depreciating 
 the mere outward forms of religion, until they had come to be esti- 
 mated at their real value ; in short, a learned, ingenious, benevo- 
 lent, amiable, timid, irresolute man, who, though compelled to bear 
 the responsiblity, resigned to others the glory, of rescuing the 
 human mind from the bondage of a thousand years. The distance 
 between his career and that of Luther was, therefore, continually 
 enlarging, until they at length moved in opposite directions, and 
 met each other with mutual animosity. The Reformer foresaw and 
 deprecated this collision : and Bossuet has condemned as servile 
 the celebrated letter in which Luther endeavoured to avert the im- 
 pending contest. In common with many of his censures of the 
 great father of the Protestant Churches, this is evidently the result 
 of prejudice. The letter was conceived with tenderness, and ex- 
 pressed with becoming dignity. 
 
 " I do not," he says, " reproach you in your estrangements from us, 
 fearing lest I should hinder the cause which you maintain against 
 our common enemies the Papists. For the same reason, it gives 
 me no displeasure that, in many of your works, you have sought to 
 obtain their favour, or to appease their hostility, by assailing us 
 with undeserved reproaches and sarcasms. It is obvious that God 
 has not given you the energy or the courage requisite for an open 
 and fearless attack on these monsters, nor am I of a temper to exact 
 from you what is beyond your strength." " I have respected your 
 infirmity, and that measure of the gifts of God which is in you. 
 None can deny that you have promoted the cause of literature, thus 
 opening the way to the right understanding of the Scriptures ; or 
 that the endowment which you have thus received from God is 
 magnificent and worthy of all admiration. Here is a just cause for
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 221 
 
 gratitude. I have never desired that you should quit your cautious 
 and measured course to enter our camp. Great are the services you 
 render by your genius and eloquence ; and as your heart fails you, 
 it is best that you should serve God with such powers as He has 
 given you. My only apprehension is, lest you should permit your- 
 self to be dragged by our enemies to publish an attack upon our 
 doctrines, for then I should be compelled to resist you to the face." 
 "Things have now reached a point at which we should feel no 
 anxiety for our cause, even though Erasmus himself should direct all 
 his abilities against us. It is no wonder that our party should be 
 impatient of your attacks. Human weakness is alarmed and op- 
 pressed by the weight of the name of Erasmus. Once to be lashed 
 by Erasmus is a far different thing from being exposed to the assaults 
 of all the Papists put together." " I have written all this in proof 
 of my candour, and because I desire that God may impart to you a 
 spirit worthy of your name. If that spirit be withheld, at least let 
 me implore you to remain a mere spectator of our tragedy. Do not 
 join your forces to our enemies. Abstain from writing against me, 
 and I will write nothing against you." 
 
 This lofty tone grated on the fastidious ear of the monarch of 
 literature. He watched his opportunity, and inflicted a terrible 
 revenge. To have attacked the doctrines of the Reformation would 
 have been to hazard an unanswerable charge of inconsistency. But 
 Luther, in exploring his path, had lost his way in the labyrinth of 
 the question of free-will : and had published opinions which were 
 nothing short of the avowal of absolute fatalism. In a treatise De 
 Libero Arbitrio, Erasmus made a brilliant charge on this exposed 
 part of his adversary's position ; exhausting all the resources of his 
 sagacity, wit, and learning, to lower the theological character of the 
 founder of the Lutheran Church. The Reformer staggered beneath 
 this blow. For metaphysical debate he was ill prepared to the 
 learning of his antagonist he had no pretension and to his wit 
 could oppose nothing but indignant vehemence. His answer, De 
 Servo Arbitrio, has been confessed, by his most ardent admirers, to 
 have been but a feeble defence to his formidable enemy. The temper 
 in which he conducted the dispute may be judged from the follow- 
 ing example : " Erasmus, that king of amphibology, reposes calmly 
 on his amphibological throne, cheats us with his ambiguous language, 
 and claps his hands when he finds us entangled amongst his insidious 
 tropes, like beasts of chase fallen into the toils. Then seizing the 
 occasion for his rhetoric, he springs on his captive with loud cries, 
 tearing, scourging, tormenting, and devoting you to the infernals, 
 because, as it pleases him to say, his words have been understood in
 
 222 
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 a calumnious, scandalous, and Satanic sense, thoiigh it was his own 
 design that they should be so taken. See him come on, creeping 
 like a viper," &c., &c. 
 
 To the last, the sense of this defeat would appear to have clung 
 to Luther. Accustomed to triumph in theological debate, he had 
 been overthrown in the presence of abashed friends and exulting 
 enemies ; and the record of his familiar conversation bears deep 
 traces of his keen remembrance of this humiliation. Many of the 
 contumelious words ascribed to him on this subject, if they really 
 fell from his lips, were probably some of those careless expressions 
 in which most men indulge in the confidence of private life ; and 
 which, when quoted with the most literal exactness, assume in books 
 published for the perusal of the world at large, a new meaning, and 
 an undesigned emphasis. But there is little difficulty in receiving 
 as authentic the words he is said to have pronounced when gazing 
 on the picture of Erasmus that it was, like himself, full of craft 
 and malice ; a comment on the countenance of that illustrious 
 scholar, as depicted by Holbein, from which it is impossible alto- 
 gether to dissent. 
 
 The contest with Erasmus and the Sacramentarians had taken 
 place in that debatable land which religion and philosophy each 
 claim for her own. But Luther was now to oppose a revolt not 
 merely against philosophy and religion, but against decency and 
 common sense. Equally astounding and scandalous were the antics 
 which the minds of men performed when, exempt from the control 
 of their ancient prepossessions, they had not as yet been brought 
 into subjection to any other. Throughout the north of Germany and 
 the Netherlands, there were found many converts to the belief, that 
 a divorce might be effected between the virtues which the Gospel 
 exacts, and those new relations between man and the Author of his 
 being, which it at once creates and reveals ; that, in short, it was 
 possible to be at the same time a Christian and a knave. The con- 
 nection between this sottish delirium and the rejection of infant 
 baptism was an accident, or at most a caprice ; and the name of 
 Anabaptists, afterwards borne by so many wise and good men, is 
 unfortunately, though indelibly, associated with the crazy rabble 
 who first assumed or received it at Munster. 
 
 Herman Shaproeda, and after him Rothmann, were the first who 
 instructed the inhabitants of that city in these ill-omened novelties ; 
 and they quickly gained the authority which any bold and unscru- 
 pulous guide may command, in times when hereditary creeds have 
 been abandoned by those who want the capacity or the knowledge 
 to shape out new opinions for themselves. " He who has not re-
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 223 
 
 ceived adult baptism " (such, was their argument) " is not a Chris- 
 tian ; he who is not a Christian is an enemy of the truth. ; and it is 
 the duty of the faithful to oppose the enemies of truth, by all arms, 
 spiritual or secular, within their reach." 
 
 Strong in this reasoning, and stronger still in numbers and in 
 zeal, the Anabaptists of Munster declared open war against the 
 Bishop, expelled the Catholics and Lutherans from the city, pillaged 
 the churches and convents, and adopted as their watch-word the 
 exhortation to repent, with which the Baptist of old had addressed 
 the multitudes who surrounded him in the wilderness of Judaea. 
 
 If the insurgents did no works meet for repentance, they did 
 many to be bitterly repented of. Their success was accompanied 
 by cruelty, and followed by still fouler crimes. John de Matthei- 
 son, their chief prophet, established a community of goods, and 
 committed to the flames every book except the Bible. John of 
 Leyden, his successor, was a journeyman tailor, and, though at once 
 a rogue and a fanatic, was not without some qualities which might 
 have adorned a better cause. He conducted the defence of the city 
 against the Bishop with as much skill and gallantry as if his accus- 
 tomed seat had been, not the shop-board, but the saddle of a belted 
 knight. 
 
 In the Scriptures, which his predecessor had exempted from the 
 general conflagration, John found a sanction for the plurality of 
 wives, and proofs that the sceptre of David had passed into his own 
 hands. Twelve princes, representing the heads of the tribes of 
 Israel, received from him authority to ascend the thrones of Europe ; 
 and apostles were sent to the great cities of Germany to propagate 
 the new faith, and to attest the miracles of which they had been the 
 witnesses. The doctrine they taught was less abstruse than might 
 have been anticipated. It consisted in these propositions : There ' 
 have been four prophets : the true are King David and King John ; 
 of Leyden ; the false are the Pope and Martin Luther : but Luther ^ 
 is worse than the Pope. 
 
 While this pithy creed was inculcated without the walls, the 
 most frightful debaucheries, and a strange burlesque on royalty, 
 went on within. The king paraded the city, attended by his queen, 
 and followed by a long train of led horses, caparisoned in gold 
 brocade, a drawn sword being borne at his left hand, and a crown 
 and Bible at his right. Seated on a throne in the public square, he 
 received petitions from supplicants prostrate on the earth before him. 
 Then followed impious parodies on the most sacred offices of the 
 Christian worship, and scenes of profligacy which may not be de- 
 scribed. To these, ere long, succeeded horrors which rendered the
 
 
 224 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 New Jerusalem no inapt antitype of the old. The conquered king ex- 
 piated his crimes on the scaffold, enduring protracted and inhuman 
 torments with a firmness which redeems his character from the 
 abhorrence to which it had so many indisputable titles. 
 
 The story, however offensive, is not without interest. The rapidity 
 with which the contagion of such stupid extravagances was propa- 
 gated, and the apparent genuineness of the belief which a man of 
 much fortitude and some acuteness at length yielded to the coinage 
 of his own brain, are still curious, though not un frequent, phenomena 
 in the science of mental nosology. From his answers to the inter- 
 rogatories which were proposed to him on his trial, it may be inferred 
 that he was perfectly sane. His mind had been bewildered, partly 
 by a depraved imagination and ungoverned appetites, and partly by 
 his encounter with questions too large for his capacity, and with de- 
 tached sentences from Holy Writ, of which he perceived neither the 
 obvious sense nor the more sublime intimations. The memory of 
 this guilty, presumptuous, and unhappy man, is rescued from oblivion 
 by the audacity of his enterprise, and still more by the influence it 
 exerted in arresting the progress of the Reformation. 
 
 The reproach, however unmerited, fell heavily on Luther. It is 
 the common fate of all who dare to become leaders in the war against 
 abuses, whether in religious or in political society, to be confounded 
 with the baser sort of innovators, who at once hate their persons, 
 and exaggerate and caricature the principles on which they have 
 acted. For this penalty of rendering eminent services to the world 
 every wise man is prepared ; and every brave man endures it firmly, 
 in the belief that a day is coming when his fame will be no longer 
 oppressed by this unworthy association. Luther's faith in the 
 ultimate deli verance of his good name from the obloquy cast on it by 
 the madness of the Anabaptists, has but imperfectly been justified 
 by the event. Long after his name belonged to the brightest page 
 of human history, it found in Bossuet an antagonist as inveterate as 
 Tetzel, more learned than Cajetan, and surpassing Erasmus himself 
 in eloquence and ingenuity. Later still has arisen, in the person of 
 Mr Hallam, a censor, whose religious opinions, unquestionable in- 
 tegrity, boundless knowledge, and admirable genius, give a fearful 
 weight to his unfavourable judgment of the Father of the Reform- 
 ation. Neither of these great writers, indeed, countenances the 
 vulgar calumny which would identify the principles of Martin 
 Luther with those of John of Leyden, although both of them arraign 
 him in nearly the same terms, as having adopted and taught the 
 Antinomian doctrines of which the Anabaptists exhibited the 
 practical results.
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 225 
 
 The course we are shaping having brought us within reach of the 
 whirlpools of this interminable controversy, roaring in endless circles 
 over a dark and bottomless abyss, we cannot altogether yield to that 
 natural impulse which would pass them by in cautious silence and 
 with averted eyes. The Labarum of Luther was a banner inscribed 
 with the legend " Justification by Faith " the compendium, the 
 essence, the Alpha and the Omega, of his distinctive creed. Of the 
 many received or possible interpretations of this enigmatical symbol, 
 that which Bossuet and Mr Hallam regard as most accordant with 
 the views of the great standard-bearer himself, may be stated in the 
 following terms : If a man be firmly assured that his sins have been 
 remitted by God, in the exercise of a mercy gratuitous and unmerited 
 as it respects the offender himself, but accorded as the merited re- 
 ward of the great propitiation, that man stands within the line which, 
 even in this life, separates the objects of the Divine favour from the 
 objects of the Divine displeasure. We believe this epitome of the 
 Lutheran doctrine to be inaccurate, and, but for the greatness of the 
 names by which it is sanctioned, we should have ventured to add 
 superficial. In hazarding a different translation of Luther's meaning 
 into the language of the world we live in, we do but oppose one 
 assertion to another, leaving the whole weight of authority on the 
 unfavourable side. The appeal ultimately lies to those whose studies 
 have rendered them familiar with the Reformer's writings, and 
 especially with his " Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians," 
 which he was wont affectionately to call his Catherine de Bora. It 
 must be conceded that they abound in expressions which, detached 
 from the mass, would more than justify the censure of the historian 
 of the " Literature of the Middle Ages." But no writer would be 
 less fairly judged than Luther by isolated passages. Too impetuous 
 to pause for exact discrimination, too long entangled in scholastic 
 learning to have ever entirely recovered the natural relish for plain 
 common sense, and compelled habitually to move in that turbid 
 polemical region which pure and unrefracted light never visits, 
 Luther, it must be confessed, is intelligible only to the impartial 
 and laborious, and might almost be supposed to have courted 
 those reproaches which he least deserves. Stripped of the techni- 
 calities of divinity and of the schools, his Articulus stantis aut 
 cadentis ecclesice may, perhaps, with no material error, be thus 
 explained. 
 
 Define the word " conviction" as a deliberate assent to the truth A/ 
 of any statement, and the word "persuasion" as the habitual 
 reference to any such truth (real or supposed), as a rule of conduct ; 
 and it follows, that we are " persuaded " of many things of which 
 
 15 
 

 
 226 
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 
 we are not " convinced :" which is credulity or superstition. Thus, 
 Cicero was " persuaded " of the sanctity of the mysteries which he 
 celebrated as one of the College of Augurs. But the author of the 
 Treatise De Naturd Deorum had certainly no corresponding " con- 
 victions." We are " convinced " of much of which we are not 
 "persuaded;" which, in theological language, is a "dead faith." 
 The Marquis of Worcester deliberately assented to the truth, that 
 the expansive force of steam could be applied to propel a vessel 
 through the water ; but wanting the necessary " persuasion," he left 
 to others the praise of the discovery. Again, there are many pro- 
 positions of which we are at once " convinced " and " persuaded," 
 and this in the Lutheran style is a " living or saving faith." In 
 this sense Columbus believed the true configuration of the earth, 
 and launched his caravels to make known the two hemispheres to 
 each other. It is b~y~tEe Haid of successful experiment engendering 
 confidence ; of habit producing facility; and of earnest thoughts 
 quickening the imagination and kindling desire, that our opinions 
 thus ripen into motives, and our theoretical " convictions " into 
 active " persuasions." It is, therefore, nothing else than a contra- 
 diction in terms to speak of Christian faith as separable from moral 
 virtue. The practical results of that, as of any other, motive, will 
 vary directly as the intensity of the impulse, and inversely as the 
 number and force of the impediments ; but a motive which produces 
 no motion, is the same thing as an attraction which does not draw, 
 or as a propensity which does not incline. Far different as was the 
 style in which Luther enounced his doctrine, the careful study of 
 his writings will, we think, convince any dispassionate man that 
 such was his real meaning. The faith of which he wrote was not 
 a mere opinion, or a mere emotion. It was a mental energy, of 
 slow but stately growth, of which an intellectual assent was the 
 basis ; high and holy tendencies the lofty superstructure ; and a 
 virtuous life the inevitable use and destination. In his own 
 emphatic words : " We do not say the sun ought to shine, a good 
 tree ought to produce good fruit, seven and three ought to make 
 ten. The sun shines by its own proper nature, without being 
 bidden to do so ; in the same manner the good tree yields its good 
 fruit ; seven and three have made ten from everlasting it is need- 
 less to require them to do so hereafter." 
 
 If any credit be due to his great antagonist, Luther's doctrine of 
 " Justification," when thus understood, is not entitled to the praise 
 or the censure of novelty. Bossuet resents this claim as injurious 
 to the Church of Rome, and as founded on an extravagant misre- 
 presentation of her real doctrines. To ascribe to the great and wise
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 227 
 
 men of whom she justly boasts, or, indeed, to attribute to any one 
 of sound mind the dogma or the dream which would deliberately 
 transfer the ideas of the market to the relations between man and 
 his Creator, is nothing better than an ignorant and uncharitable 
 bigotry. To maintain that, till Luther dispelled the illusion, the 
 Christian world regarded the good actions of this life as investing 
 even him who performs them best with a right to demand from his 
 Maker an eternity of uninterrupted and perfect bliss, is just as 
 rational as to claim for him the detection of the universal error 
 which has assigned to the animal man a place among the quadru- 
 peds. There is in every human mind a certain portion of inde- 
 structible common sense. Small as this may be in most of us, it is 
 yet enough to rescue us all, at least when sane and sober, from the 
 stupidity of thinking, not only that the relations of creditor and 
 debtor can really subsist between ourselves and Him who made us, 
 but that a return of such inestimable value can be due from Him 
 for such ephemeral and imperfect services as ours. People may talk 
 foolishly on these matters ; but no one seriously believes this. 
 Luther slew no such monster, for there were none such to be slain. 
 The error which he refuted was far more subtle and refined than 
 this, and is copiously explained by Hooker, to whose splendid ser- 
 mon on the subject it is a "good work" to refer any to whom it is 
 unknown. 
 
 The celebrated thesis of " Justification by Faith," was peculiar to 
 Luther and to his followers only in so far as he extricated it from a 
 mass of superstitions by which it had been obscured, and assigned 
 to it the prominence in his system to which it was justly entitled. 
 But if his indignation was roused against those who had darkened 
 this great truth, they by whom it was made an apology for lewdness 
 and rapine were the objects of his scorn and abhorrence. His 
 attack on the Anabaptists is conceived in terms so vigorous and so 
 whimsical, that it is difficult to resist the temptation to exhibit some 
 extracts. But who would needlessly disturb the mould beneath 
 which lies interred and forgotten a mass of disgusting folly, which 
 in a remote age exhaled a moral pestilence ? Resolving all the 
 sinister phenomena of life, by assuming the direct interference of 
 the devil and his angels in the affairs of men, Luther thought that 
 this influence had been most unskilfully employed at Munster. It 
 was a coup manque on the part of the great enemy of mankind. It 
 showed that Satan was but a bungler at his art. The Evil One had 
 been betrayed into this gross mistake, that the world might be on 
 their guard against the more astute artifices to which he was about 
 to resort : 
 
 15*
 
 228 
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 " These new theologians did not," he said, " explain themselves very 
 clearly." " Having hot soup in his mouth, the devil was obliged to 
 content himself with mumbling out mum mum, wishing doubtless 
 to say something worse." " The spirit which would deceive the 
 world must not begin by yielding to the fascinations of woman, by 
 grasping the emblems and honours of royalty, still less by cutting 
 people's throats. This is too broad ; rapacity and oppression can 
 deceive no one. The real deceit will be practised by him who shall 
 dress himself in mean apparel, assume a lamentable countenance, 
 hang down his head, refuse money, abstain from meat, fly from 
 woman as so much poison, disclaim all temporal authority, and 
 reject all honours as damnable ; and who then, creeping softly to- 
 wards the throne, the sceptre, and the keys, shall pick them up and 
 possess himself of them by stealth. Such is the man who would 
 succeed, who would deceive the angels and the very elect. This 
 would indeed be a splendid devil, with a plumage more gorgeous 
 than the peacock or the pheasant. But thus impudently to seize 
 the crown, to take not merely one wife, but as many as caprice or 
 appetite suggests oh! it is the conduct of a mere schoolboy 
 devil, of a devil at his A B C ; or rather, it is the true Satan 
 Satan, the learned and the crafty, but fettered by the hands of God 
 with chains so heavy that he cannot move. It is to warn us, it is 
 to teach us to fear his chastisements, before the field is thrown open 
 to a more subtle devil, who will assail us no longer with ABC, 
 but with the real, the difficult text. If this mere deviling at his 
 letters can do such things, what will he not do when he comes to 
 act as a reasonable, knowing, skilful, lawyer-like, theological devil 1 " 
 These various contests produced in the mind of Luther the effects 
 which painful experience invariably yields, when the search for 
 truth, prompted by the love of truth, has been long and earnestly 
 % , . maintained. Advancing years brought with them an increase of 
 ", candour, moderation, and charity. He had lived to see his princi- 
 ples strike their roots deeply through a large part of the Christian 
 world, and he anticipated, with perhaps too sanguine hopes, their 
 universal triumph. His unshaken reliance in them was attested 
 by his dying breath. But he had also lived to witness the defection 
 of some of his allies, and the guilt and folly of others. Prolonged 
 inquiry had disclosed to him many difficulties which had been over- 
 looked in the first ardour of the dispute, and he had become pain- 
 fully convinced that the establishment of truth is an enterprise 
 incomparably more arduous than the overthrow of error. His con- 
 stitutional melancholy deepened into a more habitual sadness his 
 impetuosity gave way to a more serene and pensive temper and as
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 229 
 
 the tide of life ebbed with, still increasing swiftness, he was chiefly 
 engaged in meditating on those cardinal and undisputed truths, on 
 which the weary mind may securely repose, and the troubled heart 
 be still. 
 
 The maturer thoughts of age could not, however, quell the rude 
 vigour and fearless confidence which had borne him through his 
 early contests. With little remaining fondness or patience for ab- 
 struse speculations, he was challenged to debate one of the more 
 subtle points of theology. His answer cannot be too deeply pon- 
 dered by polemics at large. " Should we not," he said, " get on better 
 in this discussion with the assistance of a jug or two of beer ? " The 
 offended disputant retired, "the devil," observed Luther, "being a 
 haughty spirit, who can bear anything better than being laughed at." 
 
 This growing contempt for unprofitable questions was indicated 
 by a corresponding decline in Luther's original estimate of the im- 
 portance of some of the minor topics in debate with the Church of 
 Rome. He was willing to consign to silence the question of the 
 veneration due to the Saints. He suspended his judgment respect- 
 ing prayers for the dead. He was ready to acquiesce in the practice 
 of auricular confession, for the solace of those who regarded it as an 
 essential religious observance. He advised Spalatin to do whatever 
 he thought best respecting the elevation of the Host, deprecating 
 only any positive rule on the subject. He held the established 
 ceremonies to be. useful, from the impression they left on gross and 
 uncultivated minds. He was tolerant of images in the churches, 
 and censured the whole race of image-breakers with his accustomed 
 vehemence. Even the use of the vernacular tongue in public wor- 
 ship he considered as a convenient custom, not an indispensable 
 rule. Carlostadt had insisted upon it as essential. " Oh, this is an 
 incorrigible spirit," replied the more tolerant Reformer ; " for ever 
 and for ever positive obligations and sins ! " 
 
 But while his catholic spirit thus raised him above the exagger-' 
 ated estimate of those external things which chiefly attracted the 
 hostility of narrower minds, his sense of the value of those great 
 truths in which he judged the essence of religion to consist, was 
 acquiring increased intensity and depth. In common with Mon- 
 taigne and Richard Baxter (names hardly to be associated on any 
 other ground), he considered the Lord's Prayer as suspassing every 
 other devotional exercise. " It is my prayer," said Luther; "there 
 is nothing like it." In the same spirit, he preferred the Gospel of 
 St John to all the other sacred books, as containing more of the lan- 
 guage of Christ himself. As he felt, so he taught. He practised 
 the most simple and elementary style of preaching. " If," he said,
 
 H.B-! 
 
 230 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 " in my sermons I thought of Melancthon and other doctors, I should 
 do no good ; but I speak with perfect plainness for the ignorant, 
 and that satisfies everybody. Such Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as I 
 have, I reserve for the learned." " Nothing is more agreeable or 
 useful for a common audience than to preach on the duties and ex- 
 amples of Scripture. Sermons on grace and justification fall coldly 
 on their ears." He taught that good and true theology consisted in 
 the practice, the habit, and the life of the Christian graces Christ 
 being the foundation. " Such, however," he says, " is not our theo- 
 logy now-a-days. We have substituted for it a rational and specu- 
 lative theology. This was not the case with David. He acknow- 
 * ledged his sins, and said, Miserere mei Domine ! " 
 
 Luther's power of composition is, indeed, held very cheap by a 
 judge so competent as Mr Hallam : nor is it easy to commend his 
 more elaborate style. It was compared by himself to the earth- 
 quake and the wind which preceded the still small voice addressed 
 to the prophet in the wilderness ; and is so turbulent, copious, and 
 dogmatical, as to suggest the supposition that it was not written by 
 his own hand, but dictated to an amanuensis, or perhaps to a class 
 of submissive pupils, under the influence of extreme excitement. 
 Obscure, redundant, and tautologous as these writings appear, they 
 are still redeemed from neglect, not only by the mighty name 
 ; of their author, but by that all-pervading vitality and downright 
 { earnestness which atone for the neglect of all the mere artifices of 
 I style ; and by that profound familiarity with the sacred oracles, 
 which far more than compensates for the absence of that speculative 
 wisdom which is drawn from lower sources. 
 
 But the Reformer's lighter and more occasional works not unfre- 
 quently breathe the very soul of eloquence. His language in these, 
 ranges between colloquial homeliness and the highest dignity, now 
 condensed into vivid figures, and then diffused into copious ampli- 
 
 Sfication, exhibiting the successive phases of his ardent, melancholy, 
 playful, and heroic character in such rapid succession, and with 
 such perfect harmony, as to resemble the harp of Dryden's Timo- 
 theus, alternately touched and swept by the hand of the master a 
 performance so bold and so varied, as to scare the critic from the 
 discharge of his office. The address, for example, to the Swabian 
 insurgents and nobles, if not executed with the skill, is at least con- 
 ceived in the spirit of a great orator. The universal testimony of 
 all the most competent judges, attests the excellence of his transla- 
 tion of the Bible, and assigns to him in the literature of his country, 
 a station corresponding to that of the great men to whom James 
 committed the corresponding office in our own.
 
 MARTIN LUTHER. 231 
 
 Bayle has left to the friends of Luther no duty to perform in the 
 defence of his moral character, but that of appealing to the unan- 
 swerable reply which his Dictionary contains to the charges pre- 
 ferred against the Eeformer by his enemies. One unhappy ex- 
 ception is indeed to be made. It is impossible to read without 
 pain the names of Luther, Melancthon, and Bucer, amongst the \ 
 subscribers to the address to the Landgrave of Hesse, on the subject 
 of his intended polygamy. Those great but fallible men remind his 
 Highness of the distinction between universal laws, and such as 
 admit of dispensation in particular cases. They cannot publicly 
 sanction polygamy. But his Highness is of a peculiar constitution, ' 
 and is exhorted seriously to examine all the considerations laid be- 
 fore him ; yet, if he is absolutely resolved to marry a second time, 
 it is their opinion that he should do so as secretly as possible ! Fear- 
 ful is the energy with which the "Eagle of Meaux" pounces on this 
 fatal error, tearing to pieces the flimsy pretexts alleged in defence 
 of such an evasion of the Christian code. The charge admits of no 
 defence. To the inference drawn from it against the Reformer's 
 doctrine, every Protestant has a conclusive answer. Whether in ; 
 faith or in practice, he acknowledges no infallible Head but one. 
 
 But we have wandered far and wide from our proper subject. 
 Where, all this while, is the story of Luther's education, of his visit 
 to Rome, of the sale of Indulgences, of the denunciations of Tetzel, 
 of the controversy with Eccius, the Diets of Worms and Augsburg, 
 the citations before Cajetan and Charles, the papal excommunication, 
 and the appeal to a general council 1 ? These, and many other of the 
 most momentous incidents of the Reformer's life, are recorded in 
 M. D'Aubigne's work, from which our attention has been diverted 
 by matters of less account, but perhaps a little less familiar. 
 
 It would be unpardonable, however, to pass over such a work 
 with a merely ceremonious notice. The absolute merit of M. 
 D'Aubigne's " Life of Martin Luther" is great, but the comparative 
 value far greater. In the English language it has no competitor ; 
 and, though Melancthon himself was the biographer of his friend, 
 we believe that no foreign tongue contains so complete and impres- 
 sive a narrative of these events. 
 
 It is true that M. D'Aubigne neither deserves nor claims a place 
 amongst those historians, usually distinguished as philosophical. 
 He does not aspire to illustrate the principles which determine or 
 peivade the character, the policy, or the institutions of mankind. 
 He arms himself with no dispassionate scepticism, and scarcely 
 affects to be impartial. To tell his tale copiously and clearly, is the 
 one object of his literary ambition. To exhibit the actors on the
 
 232 MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 scene of life, as the free but unconscious agents of the Divine Will, 
 is the higher design with which he writes ; to trace the mysterious 
 intervention of Providence in reforming the errors and abuses of the 
 Christian Church is his immediate end ; and to exalt the name of 
 Luther, his labour of love. 
 
 These purposes, as far as they are attainable, are effectually at- 
 tained. M. D'Aubigne is a Protestant of the original stamp, and 
 a Biographer of the old fashion ; not a calm, candid, discrimin- 
 ating weigher and measurer of a great man's parts, but a warm- 
 hearted champion of his glory, and a resolute apologist even for his 
 errors ; ready to do battle in his cause with all who shall impugn 
 or derogate from his fame. His book is conceived in the spirit, and 
 executed with all the vigour, of Dr M'Crie's " Life of Knox." He 
 has all our lamented countryman's sincerity, all his deep research, 
 more skill in composition, and a greater mastery of subordinate 
 details ; along with the same inestimable faculty of carrying on his 
 story from one stage to another, with an interest which never sub- 
 sides, and a vivacity which knows no intermission. If he displays 
 no familiarity with the moral sciences, he is no mean proficient in 
 that art which reaches to perfection only in the Drama or the Ro- 
 mance. It is the art, not of inventing, but of discerning such 
 incidents as impart life and animation to a narrative. For M. 
 D'Aubigne is a writer of scrupulous veracity. He is at least an 
 honest guide, though his prepossessions may be too strong to ren- 
 der him worthy of implicit confidence. They are such, however, as 
 to make him the uncompromising and devoted advocate of those 
 cardinal tenets on which Luther erected the edifice of the Reforma- 
 tion. To the one great article of the Faith on which the Reformer 
 chiefly insisted in his assault on the Papacy, the eye of the Biogra- 
 pher is directed with scarcely less intentness. To this, every other 
 truth is viewed as subordinate and secondary ; and although, on this 
 favourite point of doctrine, M. D'Aubigne' s meaning is too often 
 obscured by declamation, yet must he be hailed by every genuine 
 friend of the Reformation, as having raised a powerful voice in 
 favour of one of the fundamental truths of the Gospel truths 
 which, so long as they are faithfully taught and diligently observed, 
 will continue to form the great bulwarks of Christendom against 
 the overweening estimate, and the despotic use, of human authority, 
 in opposition to the authority of the Revealed Will of God.
 
 233 
 
 THE FEENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 MIDDLETON and Gibbon rendered a real, however undesigned, serv 
 ice to Christianity, by attempting to prove that the rapid extension 
 of the Primitive Church was merely the natural result of natural 
 causes. For what better proof could be given of the Divine origin 
 of any religion than by showing that it had at once overspread the 
 civilised world, by the expansive power of an inherent aptitude to 
 the nature and to the wants of mankind 1 ? By entering on a still 
 wider range of inquiry, those great but disingenuous writers might 
 have added much to the evidence of the fact they alleged, although 
 at a still greater prejudice to the conclusion at which they aimed. 
 
 It is not predicted in the Old Testament that the progress of the 
 Gospel should, to any great extent, be the result of any agency 
 preternatural and opposed to ordinary experience ; nor is any such 
 fact alleged in any of the apostolical writings as having actually 
 occurred. There is, indeed, no good reason to suppose that such 
 miraculous though transient disturbances of the laws of the material 
 or the moral world, would have long or powerfully controlled either 
 the belief or the affections of mankind. The heavenly husbandman 
 selected the kindliest soil and the most propitious season for sowing 
 the grain of mustard seed ; and so, as time rolled on, the adaptation 
 of our faith to the character and the exigencies of our race was con- 
 tinually made manifest, though under new and ever-varying forms. 
 
 Thus the Church was at first Congregational, that by the agitation 
 of the lowest strata of society, the superincumbent mass of corrup- 
 tion, idolatry, and mental servitude might be broken up then 
 Synodal or Presbyterian, that the tendency of separate societies to 
 heresy and schism might be counteracted then Episcopal, that in 
 ages of extreme difficulty and peril, the whole body might act in 
 concert and with decision then Papal, that it might oppose a 
 visible unity to the armies of the Crescent and the barbarians of the 
 North then Monastic, that learning, art, and piety might be pre- 
 served in impregnable retreats amidst the deluge of ignorance and
 
 234: THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 of feudal oppression then Scholastic, that the human mind might 
 be educated for a return to a sounder knowledge, and to primitive 
 doctrine then Protestant, that the soul might be emancipated from 
 error, superstition, and spiritual despotism then part tally 'Reformed, 
 in the very bosom of the Papacy, lest that emancipation should 
 hurry the whole of Christendom into precipitate change and lawless 
 anarchy and then at length Philosophical, to prove that as there 
 are no depths of sin or misery to which the healing of the Gospel 
 cannot reach, so there are no heights of speculation to which the wis- 
 dom of the Gospel cannot ascend. 
 
 Believing thus in the Perpetuity as well as on the Catholicity of 
 the Church, and judging that she is still the same in spirit through- 
 out all ages, although, in her external developments, flexible to the 
 varying necessities of all, we have ventured on some former occa- 
 sions, and are again about to assert, for "the pure and reformed 
 branches " of it in England and in Scotland, an alliance with the 
 heroes of the faith in remote times, and in less enlightened coun- 
 tries ; esteeming that to be the best Protestantism which, while it 
 frankly condemns the errors of other Christian societies, yet claims 
 fellowship with the piety, the wisdom, and the love, which, in the 
 midst of these errors, have attested the Divine original of them all. 
 
 If, according to the advice which on some of those occasions we 
 have presumed to offer to those who are studious of such subjects, 
 there be among us any scholar meditating a Protestant history of 
 the Monastic Orders, he will find materials for a curious chapter in 
 the correspondence of the French Benedictines of the reign of Louis 
 XIV. which was published in the year 1846 by M. Valery at Paris. 
 In that fraternity light and darkness succeeded each other by a law 
 the reverse of that which obtained in Europe at large. From the 
 promulgation of their rule in the sixth century, their monasteries 
 were comparatively illuminated amidst the general gloom of the 
 dark ages. But when the sun arose on the outer world, its beams 
 scarcely penetrated their cloisters ; nor did they hail the returning 
 dawn of literature and science until the day was glowing all around 
 them in meridian splendour. Then, however, passing at one vault 
 from the haze of twilight to the radiance of noon, they won the 
 wreath of superior learning, even in the times of Tillemont and Du 
 Cange though resigning the palm of genius to Bourdaloue, Bos- 
 suet, and Pascal. Thus the three great epochs of their annals are 
 denoted by the growth, the obscuration, and the revival of their 
 intellectual eminence. M. Valery's volumes illustrate the third and 
 last stage of this progress, which cannot, however, be understood 
 without a rapid glance at each of the two preceding stages.
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 235 
 
 " But why," it may be asked, " direct the eye at all to the moulder- 
 ing records of monastic superstition, self-indulgence, and hypocrisy]" 
 Why, indeed ? From contemplating the mere debasement of any of 
 the great families of man, no images can be gathered to delight the 
 fancy, nor any examples to move or to invigorate the heart. And 
 doubtless he who seeks for such knowledge, may find in the chron- 
 icles of the convent a fearful disclosure of the depths of sin and 
 folly into which multitudes of our brethren have plunged, under the 
 pretence of more than human sanctity. But the same legends will 
 supply some better lessons, to bim who reads books that he may 
 learn to love and to benefit his fellow-men. They will teach him 
 that as, in Judaea, the temple, so, in Christendom, the monastery, 
 was the ark, freighted during the deluge, with the destinies of the 
 Church and of the world, that there our own spiritual and intel- 
 lectual ancestry found shelter amidst the tempest, that there were 
 matured those powers of mind which gradually infused harmony and 
 order into the warring elements of the European Commonwealth, 
 and that there many of the noblest ornaments of our common Chris- 
 tianity were trained to instruct, to govern, and to bless the nations 
 of the West. 
 
 Guided by the maxim " that whatever any one saint records of 
 any other saint must be true," we glide easily over the enchanted 
 land along wbich Domnus Johannes Mabillon conducts the readers 
 of the earlier parts of his wondrous compilations; receiving sub- 
 missively the assurance that St Benedict sang eucharistic hymns in 
 his mother's womb raised a dead child to life caused his pupil 
 Maurus to tread the water dry-shod untied by a word the knotted 
 cords with which an Arian Goth (Zalla by name) had bound an 
 honest rustic cast out of one monk a demon who had assumed the 
 disguise of a farrier rendered visible to another a concealed dragon, 
 who was secretly tempting him to desert his monastery and, by 
 laying a consecrated wafer on the bosom of a third, enabled him to 
 repose in a grave which till then had continually cast bim out ; 
 for all these facts the great annalist relates of his patriarch St Bene- 
 dict, on the authority of the pontiif (first of that name) St Gregory. 
 If, however, the record had contained no better things than these, 
 the memorial of Benedict would long since have perished with him. 
 
 His authentic biography is comprised in a very few words. He 
 was born towards the end of the fifth century, at ]STursia, in the 
 duchy of Spoleto. His mother died in giving him birth. He was 
 sent to Rome for his education by his father, a member of the 
 Anician family, which Claudian has celebrated ; but was driven from 
 the city by the invasions of Odoacer and Theodoric to the Mons
 
 236 THE FRENCH BENEDICTIXES. 
 
 Subiacus, where, while yet a beardless youth, he took up his abode 
 as a hermit. Like Jerome, he was haunted in his solitude by the 
 too vivid remembrance of a Roman lady ; and subdued his volup- 
 tuous imagination by rolling his naked body among the thorns. The 
 fame of such premature sanctity recommended him to the monks of 
 the neighbouring monastery as their abbot ; but scarcely had he as- 
 sumed the office when, disgusted by the rigours of his discipline, the 
 electors attempted to get rid of him by poison. Returning to his 
 hermitage, he soon found himself in the centre of several rude huts, 
 erected in his .vicinity by other fugitives from the world, who ac- 
 knowledged him as the superior of this monastic village. But their 
 misconduct compelled him again to seek a new retirement ; which he 
 found at Monte Casino, on the frontiers of the Abbruzzi. There, at- 
 tended by some of his pupils and former associates, he passed the re- 
 mainder of his life composing his rule, and establishing the Order 
 which, at the distance of thirteen centuries, still retains his name and 
 acknowledges his authority. He died in the year 543, in the sixty- 
 fourth year of his age. 
 
 To the intercourse of Benedict with the refractory monks of 
 Subiaco, may perhaps be traced the basis of his system. It probably 
 revealed to him the fact that Indolence, Self-will, and Selfishness are 
 the three archdaemons of the cloister ; and suggested the inference 
 that Industry, Obedience, and Community of goods are the antagon- 
 ist powers which ought to govern there. But the comprehensive- 
 ness of thought with which he so exhausted the science of monastic 
 polity, that all subsequent rules have been nothing more than 
 modifications of his own, the prescience with which he recon- 
 ciled conventual franchises with abbatial dominion, the skill 
 with which he at once concentrated and diffused power among the 
 different members of his Order, according as the objects in view 
 were general or local, and the deep insight into the human heart 
 by which he rendered myriads of men and women, during more 
 than thirty successive generations, the spontaneous instruments of 
 his purposes, these all unite to prove that profound genius, 
 extensive knowledge, and earnest meditation, had raised him to the 
 very first rank of uninspired legislators. His disciples, indeed, find 
 in his legislative wisdom a conclusive proof that he wrote and acted 
 under a divine impulse. Even to those who reject this solution 
 it is still a phenomenon affording ample exercise for a liberal 
 curiosity. 
 
 That the Benedictine statutes remain to this day a living code, 
 written in the hearts of multitudes in every province of the Chris- 
 tian world, is chiefly perhaps to be ascribed to the inflexible rigour
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 237 
 
 with which they annihilated the cares and responsibilities of freedom. 
 To the baser sort no yoke is so galling as that of self-control ; no de- 
 liverance so welcome as that of being handsomely rid of free agency. 
 With such men mental slavery readily becomes a habit, a fashion, 
 and a pride. To the abject many, the abdication of self-government 
 is a willing sacrifice. It is reserved for the nobler few to rise to the 
 arduous virtues of using wisely the gifts which God bestows, and 
 walking courageously, though circumspectly and humbly, in the 
 light which God vouchsafes. 
 
 And by the abject many, though often under the guidance of the 
 nobler few, were peopled the cells of Monte Casino and her affiliated 
 convents. Their gates Avere thrown open to men of every rank, in 
 whom the abbot or prior of the house could discover the marks of a 
 genuine vocation. To exclude any such candidate, though a pauper 
 or a slave, would have been condemned by Benedict, in the words 
 and spirit of Augustine, as grave delictum. In those sacred en- 
 closures, therefore, many poor and illiterate brethren found a refuge. 
 But they were distinguished from the rest as conversi, that is, as 
 persons destined neither for the priesthood nor the tonsure, but 
 bound to labour for the society as husbandmen, shepherds, artisans, 
 or domestic servants. 
 
 In the whirl and uproar of the handicrafts of our own day, it is 
 difficult to imagine the noiseless spectacle which in those ages so 
 often caught the eye, as it gazed on the secluded abbey and the ad- 
 jacent grange. In black tunics, the mementos of death, and in 
 leathern girdles, the emblems of chastity, might then be seen carters 
 silently yoking their bullocks to the team, and driving them in 
 silence to the field, or shepherds interchanging some inevitable 
 whispers while they watched their flocks, or vine-dressers pruning 
 the fruit of which they might neither taste nor speak, or wheel- 
 wrights, carpenters, and masons plying their trades like the inmates 
 of some deaf and dumb asylum, and all pausing from their 
 labours as the convent bell, sounding the hours of primes, or nones, 
 or vespers, summoned them to join in spirit, even when they could 
 not repair in person, to those sacred offices. Around the monastic 
 workshop might be observed the belt of cultivated land, continually 
 encroaching on the adjacent forest ; and the passer-by might trace 
 to the toils of these mute workmen the opening of roads, the 
 draining of marshes, the herds grazing, and the harvests waving, 
 in security, under the shelter of ecclesiastical privileges which even 
 the Vandal and the Ostrogoth regarded with respect. Our own an- 
 nual agricultural meetings, with their implements and their prizes, 
 their short horns and their long speeches, must carry back their
 
 238 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 economic genealogy to those husbandmen who, with dismal aspect, 
 brawny arms, and compressed lips, first taught the conquerors of 
 Rome the science in which Columella and Virgil had instructed the 
 ancient Romans. 
 
 A similar pedigree must be assigned to our academies of painting, 
 sculpture, architecture, and music. The fine arts are merely imita- 
 tive in their infancy ; though as they become mature, they also 
 become symbolical. And this maturity is first attained by the 
 architect, because he ministers to a want more urgent than the rest, 
 because, in the order of time, the edifice must precede the works 
 designed for its embellishment, and because finding in nature no 
 models except for the details of his performance, he must, from the 
 first, be inventive in the composition of it. Thus the children of 
 Benedict, when contemplating their lofty avenues, sacred to medita- 
 tion and the mellowed lights streaming through the foliage and 
 the flowers clustering in the conventual garden and the pendulous 
 stalactites of the neighbouring grottoes, conceived of a Christian 
 temple in which objects resembling these, though hewn out of im- 
 perishable stone, and carved into enduring forms, might be combined 
 and grouped together into one glorious whole. "With a ritual ad- 
 dressed to the eye rather than to the ear a sacred pantomime, of 
 which the sacrifice of the mass was the action, the priests the actors, 
 and the high altar the stage, nothing more was requisite to the 
 solemn exhibition but the cathedral, as its appropriate theatre. It 
 arose, therefore, not the servile representation of any one natural 
 object, but the majestic combination of the forms of many ; and full 
 of mystic significance, in the cruciform plan, the lofty arch, the 
 oriel windows, the lateral chapels, and the central elevation. Kot 
 a groining, a mullion, or a tracery was there, in which the initiated 
 eye did not read some masonic enigma, some ghostly counsel, or 
 some inarticulate summons to confession, to penitence, or to prayer. 
 
 Every niche without, and every shrine within, these sanctuaries, 
 was adorned with images of their tutelary saints ; and especially of 
 Her who is supreme among the demigods of this celestial hierarchy. 
 But, instead of rising to the impersonation of holiness, beauty, or 
 power, in these human forms, the monkish sculptors were content 
 to copy the indifferent models of humanity within their reach ; and 
 the statues, busts, and reliefs which, in subsequent times, fell beneath 
 the blows of Protestant Iconoclasts, had little if any value but that 
 which belonged to their peculiar locality and their accidental asso- 
 ciations. In painting also, whether encaustic, in fresco, or on wood, 
 the performances of the early Benedictine artists were equally 
 humble. In order to give out their visible poetry, the chisel and
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 239 
 
 the pencil must be guided by minds conversant with the cares and 
 the enjoyments of life ; for it is by such minds only that the living 
 soul which animates mute nature can ever be perceived ; or can be 
 expressed in the delineation of realities, whether animated or inani- 
 mate. In ecclesiastical and conventual architecture, and in that art 
 alone, the monks exhausted their creative imagination ; covering 
 Europe with monuments of their science in statics and dynamics, and 
 with monuments of that plastic genius, which, from an infinity of 
 elaborate, incongruous, and often worthless details, knew how to 
 evoke one sublime and harmonious whole. In those august shrines, 
 if anywhere on earth, the spirit of criticism is silenced by the belief 
 that the adorations of men are mingled in blest accord with the 
 hallelujahs of heaven. 
 
 To animate that belief, the Benedictine musicians produced those 
 chants which, when long afterwards combined by Palestrina into 
 the Mass of Pope Marcellus, were hailed with rapture by the Roman 
 Conclave and the Fathers of Trent, as the golden links which bind 
 together in an indissoluble union the supplications of the Militant 
 Church and the thanksgivings of the Church Triumphant. 
 
 " Lusts of the imagination ! " exclaimed, and may yet exclaim, the 
 indignant pulpits of Scotland and Geneva " lusts as hostile to the 
 purity of the Christian Faith as the grosser lusts of the flesh or the 
 emptiest vanities of life." Hard words these for our restorers of 
 church architecture in medieval splendour ! Let the Camden 
 Society, the Lord of Wilton, and the benchers of the Temple look 
 to it ; while we, all innocent of any such sumptuous designs her 
 Majesty's Church Building Commissioners themselves not more so 
 refer to these Benedictine prodigies only as illustrating a memor- 
 able passage in Benedictine History. 
 
 But art was regarded by the fathers of that Order rather as the 
 delight than as the serious occupation of their brotherhood. "With 
 a self-reliance as just as that of the great philosopher, if not as sub- 
 lime, they took to themselves all knowledge as their proper province. 
 Their rule assigned an eminent rank among monastic virtues to the 
 guardianship and multiplication of valuable manuscripts. It taught 
 the copyist of a holy book to think of himself as at once a pupil and 
 a teacher as a missionary while seated at his desk using each 
 finger as a tongue inflicting on the Spirit of Evil a deadly wound 
 at each successive line and as baffling, with the pen, the dread 
 enemy who smiles at the impotent hostility of every other weapon 
 grasped by the hand of mortal man. In each Benedictine monastery a 
 chamber was set apart for the discharge of this sacred office. In this 
 Scriptorium some of the monks plied their pens assiduously, and in
 
 240 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 profound silence, to produce faultless transcripts of the best originals. 
 To others was committed the care of revising the text of such works 
 as were then held in the highest esteem. Charlemagne himself as- 
 signed to the Benedictine Alcuin the high office of preparing, from 
 the various sources within his reach, a perfect Codex of the Holy 
 Scriptures. For what remains to us of Pliny, Sallust, and Macro- 
 bius, and for the orations against Verres, we are indebted to their 
 literary zeal. A tribute of writing materials at the commencement 
 of each novitiate, and another of books at its close, with an annual 
 impost of manuscripts on the inferior houses, were continually 
 augmenting the libraries of their greater convents. How extensive 
 and how valuable such collections became, may be inferred from the 
 directions given by the Benedictine Cassiodorus for the guidance of 
 his brethren in their studies. He had collected, and he enjoins 
 them to read, the Greek and Latin Fathers, the Church historians, 
 the geographers and grammarians whose Avorks were then extant and 
 in repute, with various medical books, for the assistance of those 
 monks to whom the care of the infirmary was confided. Whoever 
 will consult the " Historia Eei Literarise Ordinis Sancti Benedicti," 
 by their historiographer Magnoaldus Zeigelbauer, may rapidly ac- 
 cumulate the most conclusive proofs, that by their Order were either 
 laid or preserved the foundations of all the eminent schools of 
 learning of Modern Europe. 
 
 The greatness of the Benedictines did not, however, consist either 
 in their agricultural skill, their prodigies of architecture, or their 
 priceless libraries; but in their parentage of countless men and 
 women, illustrious for active piety for wisdom in the govern- 
 ment of mankind for profound learning and for that contem- 
 plative spirit, which discovers within the soul itself things beyond 
 the limits of the perceptible creation. Such, indeed, is the number 
 of these worthies, that, if every page at our disposal were a volume, 
 and every such volume as ponderous as our old acquaintance, 
 Scapula, space would fail us to render justice to the achievements of 
 the half of them. We cannot, however, pass by this goodly fellow- 
 ship without a transient glance at one normal type, at the least, of 
 each of these various forms of Benedictine heroism. For that purpose 
 we need scarcely wander from the annals of our own land. 
 
 In the Benedictine abbey of Nutsall, near Winchester, Poetry, 
 History, Rhetoric, and the Holy Scriptures were taught, in the 
 beginning of the eighth century, by a monk whom his fellow-country- 
 man called Winfred, but whom the Church honours under the name 
 of Boniface. He was born at Crediton, in Devonshire, of noble and 
 wealthy parents, who had reluctantly yielded to his wish to embrace
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 241 
 
 the monastic state. Hardly, however, had he reached middle life, 
 when his associates at Outsail discovered that he was dissatisfied 
 with the pursuits by which their own thoughts were engrossed. As, 
 in his evening meditations, he paced the long conventual avenue 
 of lime trees, or as, in. the night-watches, he knelt before the crucifix 
 suspended in his cell, he was still conscious of a voice, audible 
 though inarticulate, which repeated to him the Divine injunction, 
 to "go and preach the Gospel to all nations." Then, in mental 
 vision, was seen stretching out before him the land of his German 
 ancestry ; where, beneath the veil of the customs described by 
 Tacitus, was concealed an idolatry of which the historian had neither 
 depicted, nor probably conjectured, the abominations. To encounter 
 Satan in this stronghold, became successively the day-dream, the 
 passion, and the fixed resolve of Boniface ; until at length abandon- 
 ing, for this holy war, the studious repose for which he had already 
 abandoned the world, he appeared, in his thirty-sixth year, a solitary 
 and unbefriended missionary, traversing the marshy sands and the 
 primeval forests of Friesland. But Charles Martel was already 
 there, the leader in a far different contest ; nor, while the 
 Christian Mayor of the Palace was striking down the Pagans with 
 his battle-axe, could the pathetic entreaties of the Benedictine Monk 
 induce them to bow down to the banner of the Cross. He therefore 
 returned to Outsail, not with diminished zeal, but with increased 
 knowledge. He had now learnt that his success must depend on 
 the conduct of the secular and spiritual rulers of mankind, and on 
 his own connection with them. 
 
 The chapter of his monastery chose him as their abbot ; but, at 
 his own request, the Bishop of "Winchester annulled the election. 
 Then, quitting for ever his native England, Boniface pursued his 
 way to Rome, to solicit the aid of Pope Gregory II., in his efforts 
 for the conversion of the German people. 
 
 Armed with a papal commission, a papal blessing, and a good 
 store of relics, Boniface again appeared in Friesland, where Charles 
 Martel was now the undisputed master. Victory had rendered him 
 devout; and he gladly countenanced the labours of the monk, to 
 bring his new subjects within the fold of the Christian Church. 
 So ardent, indeed, was his zeal for this great work, that the destined 
 author of it was soon compelled to migrate into Saxony, as the only 
 means of escaping the unwelcome command of the conqueror to fix 
 his residence in Friesland, and there to assume the coadjutorship 
 and succession to the Bishop of Utrecht. 
 
 The missionary labours of Boniface, interrupted only by three 
 short visits to Rome, were prolonged over a period of more than 
 
 16
 
 242 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 thirty-six years ; and were extended over all the territories between 
 the Elbe, the Rhine, and the Ocean. At Rome he sought and 
 found all the support which papal authority, zeal, and wisdom 
 could afford him. Gregory II. consecrated him a bishop, though 
 without a diocese. Gregory III. raised him to be the Archbishop 
 and Primate of all Germany ; with power to establish bishoprics 
 there at his discretion. The same pontiff afterwards nominated 
 him Legate of the Holy See, in Germany and France. To these 
 distinctions Pope Zachary added the Archbishopric of Mentz, then 
 first constituted the metropolis of the German churches. Last of all 
 was bestowed on him the singular privilege of appointing his own 
 successor in his primacy. 
 
 There have been churchmen to whom such a memento of the 
 vanity of even the highest ecclesiastical dignities would have afforded 
 but an equivocal satisfaction. To Boniface the remembrance of the 
 shortness of life was not only familiar, but welcome. The treatise 
 of Ambrose on the advantages of death was his constant companion. 
 It had taught him to regard his successive promotions but as the 
 means of preparing his mind for the joyful resignation of them all. 
 His seventy-fourth year was now completed. For the spiritual care 
 of his converts he had established seven new bishoprics ; and had 
 built and endowed many monasteries for the advancement of piety 
 and learning among them. At last, abdicating his own mitre in 
 favour of Lullus, a monk of Malmesbury, he solemnly devoted his 
 remaining days to that office of a missionary, which he justly es- 
 teemed as far nobler than any symbolised by the crosier, the purple, 
 or the tiara. Girding round him his black Benedictine habit, and 
 depositing his Ambrose, " De Bono Mortis," in the folds of it, he 
 once more travelled to Friesland ; and, pitching his tent on the 
 banks of a small rivulet, awaited there the arrival of a body of 
 neophytes, whom he had summoned to receive at his hands the rite 
 of confirmation. 
 
 Ere long a multitude appeared in the distance, advancing towards 
 the tent ; not, however, with the lowly demeanour of Christian 
 converts drawing near to their bishop, but carrying deadly weapons, 
 and announcing by their cries and gestures that they were Pagans, 
 sworn to avenge their injured deities against the arch-enemy of their 
 worship. The servants of Boniface drew their swords in his defence ; 
 but calmly, and even cheerfully, awaiting the approach of his ene- 
 mies, and forbidding all resistance, he fell beneath their blows a 
 martyr to the faith which he had so long lived, and so bravely died, 
 to propagate. His copy of Ambrose, " De Bono Mortis," covered 
 with his blood, was exhibited during many succeeding centuries, at
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 243 
 
 Fulda as a relic. It was contemplated there by many who regarded 
 as superstitious and heretical some of the tenets of Boniface. But 
 no Christian, whatever might be his own peculiar creed, ever looked 
 upon that blood-stained memorial of him without the profoundest 
 veneration. 
 
 For, since the Apostolic Age, no greater benefactor of our race 
 has arisen among men than the Monk of Outsail, unless it be that 
 other Monk of Wittemberg who, at the distance of seven centuries, 
 appeared to reform and reconstruct the churches founded by the 
 holy Benedictine. To Boniface the north and west of Germany, 
 and Holland, still look back as their spiritual progenitor ; nor did 
 any uninspired man ever add to the permanent dominion of the 
 Gospel provinces of such extent and value. 
 
 If, in accomplishing that great work, Boniface relied more on 
 human authority than is consistent with the practice, or, rather, 
 with the theory of our Protestant churches, his still extant letters 
 will show that he rebuked, with indignant energy, the vices of the 
 great on whom he was dependent. In placing the crown of Chil- 
 deric on the head of Pepin, he may have been guilty of some worldly 
 compliance with the usurper. Yet it is not to be forgotten that the 
 Pope himself had favoured the cause of the Mayor of the Palace, by 
 his Delphic response, " Melius esse ilium vocari regem apud quern 
 summa potestas consisteret." 
 
 The guides of our own missionary enterprises will, probably, accuse 
 Boniface of undue promptitude in admitting within the pale any one 
 who chose to submit himself to the mere outward form of baptism. 
 His facility is indisputable ; but what Protestant will venture to 
 condemn the measures which brought within the precincts of the 
 Christian Church the native lands of Luther, of Grotius, and of Me- 
 lancthon ? 
 
 On a single occasion we find him wearing a garb at least resem- 
 bling that of an inquisitor. "Within his spiritual jurisdiction came a 
 Frenchman, working miracles, and selling as relics the cuttings of 
 his own hair and the parings of his own nails. This worthy had an 
 associate in one Vincent, a Scotchman, a sort of premature Knox 
 a teacher, it is said, of heresies, but certainly a stout opponent of all 
 the laws and canons of . the Church. Moved by Boniface, the 
 secular arm lodged them both in close prison ; and, all things con- 
 sidered, one must doubt their claim to any better lodgings. 
 
 Peace be, however, to the faults of Boniface, whatever they may 
 have been ! Among the heroes of active piety, the world has few 
 greater to revere ; as the disciples of Benedict have assuredly none 
 greater to boast. 
 
 16 *
 
 244 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 They boast, however, in Lanfranc, another primate, to whose far- 
 seeing wisdom in the government of mankind may not obscurely be 
 traced much of the vital spirit of those venerable institutions which 
 are still the glory of the Anglo-Saxon race in our own islands and 
 in the North American continent. In his romance of " Harold," 
 Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, solving with equal erudition and 
 creative fancy, the great problem of his art (the problem how to 
 produce the greatest amount of dramatic effect at the least expense 
 of historical truth), has produced a living portrait of Lanfranc, the 
 subtle Italian, who, armed with homilies for the devout, jests for 
 the facetious, austerities for the superstitious, learning for the 
 inquisitive, and obsequiousness for the great, renders the weakness 
 and the strength of each in turn tributary to his own ambition ; and 
 ascends the throne of Canterbury, not merely by the aid of the, meek 
 old Abbot Herduin, but on the shoulders of the imperious William 
 and the imperial Hildebrand. Our great master of historico- 
 romantic portraiture would have destroyed the picturesque unity of 
 his beautiful sketch, if, by advancing further, he had taught us 
 (and who could have taught us so powerfully ?) how vast is the debt 
 of gratitude which England owes to her great primates, Lanfranc, 
 Anselm, Langton, and Becket, or rather to that benign Providence 
 which raised them lip in that barbarous age. Whatever may have 
 been their personal motives, and whatever their demerits, they, and 
 they alone, wrestled successfully with the despotism of the Con- 
 queror and his descendants to the fourth generation ; maintaining 
 among us, even in those evil days, the balanced power, the control 
 of public opinion, and the influence of moral over physical, a force 
 which from their times passed as a birthright to the parliaments of 
 Henry III. and his successors ; and which at this day remains the 
 inheritance of England, and of all the free communities with 
 which she has covered, and is still peopling, the globe. The 
 thunders and reproaches of Rome are sufficiently encountered by 
 such reverberated thunders and reproaches as they provoke. To 
 those who deplore alike the necessity and the rancour of the con- 
 flict, it may yet be permitted to render a due and therefore a 
 reverent homage to the ancient prelates of the Roman Church. 
 XTnchecked by the keen wisdom, the ecclesiastical policy, and the 
 Roman sympathies of the Benedictine Lanfranc, the fierce Conqueror 
 would have acquired and transmitted to his posterity on the English 
 throne, a power absolute and arbitrary, beneath the withering 
 influence of which every germ of the future liberties and greatness 
 of England must have prematurely perished. 
 
 When, in the mind of William Rufus, the fear of death had pre-
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 245 
 
 vailed over the thirst for the revenues of Canterbury, he placed the 
 mitre of Lanfranc on the head of the Benedictine Anselm ; antici- 
 pating, probably, a less effective assertion of the rights of the 
 Church by the retired and gentle student, than had been made by 
 his insinuating and worldly-wise predecessor. In the great con- 
 troversy of investitures, however, Anselm showed that nothing is so 
 inflexible as meekness, sustained and animated by the firm con- 
 viction of right. Yet at the very moment of success he turned 
 aside from these agitations to revolve the mysterious enigmas which 
 it was at once the purpose and the delight, of his existence to 
 unravel. Those boundless realms of thought over which, in the 
 solitude of his library, he enjoyed a princely, but unenvied dominion, 
 were in his eyes of incomparably higher value than either his 
 primacy of the Church of England, or his triumph in maintaining 
 the prerogatives of the Church of Rome. In our days, indeed, his 
 speculations are forgotten ; and the very subjects of them have 
 fallen into disesteem. Yet, except, perhaps, the writings of Eri- 
 gena, those of Anselm on the " Will of God," on " Truth," on " Free- 
 will," and on the " Divine Prescience," are not only, in point of time, 
 the earliest examples, but, in the order of invention, the earliest 
 models, of those scholastic works, which exhibit, in such intimate 
 and curious union, the prostration and the aspirings of the mind of 
 man prostrating itself to the most absurd of human dogmas 
 aspiring to penetrate the loftiest and the most obscure of the Divine 
 attributes. 
 
 Truth may have concealed herself from most of these inquirers ; 
 but their researches formed no unimportant part of the education 
 which was gradually preparing the intellect of Europe for admis- 
 sion into her sanctuary. Among the followers of Anselm are 
 to be reckoned not merely the Doctors Venerable, Invincible, 
 Irrefragable, Angelical, amd Seraphic, but a far greater than 
 they, even Des Cartes himself who, as may be learnt from 
 Brucker, borrowed from the Benedictine philosopher his proof of 
 the Being of a God. Anselm taught that the abstract idea of 
 Deity was the fontal principle of all knowledge that as God 
 himself is the primaeval source of all existence in the outer world, 
 so the Idea of God precedes, and conducts us to, all other ideas 
 in the world within us and that, until we have risen to that 
 remotest spring of all our thoughts, we cannot conceive rightly of 
 the correspondence of our own perceptions with the realities amidst 
 which we exist. 
 
 If these speculations are not very intelligible, they are at least 
 curious. They show that the metaphysicians who lived when
 
 246 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 Westminster Hall was rising from its foundations, and those who 
 lived when the first stone of our Edinburgh University was laid, 
 beat themselves very much in the same manner against the bars of 
 their mental prison-house. 
 
 Philosophy may thrive in other places than conventual cells. 
 But there is a literature which scarcely flourishes elsewhere. The 
 peculiar and spontaneous product of the monastery is mystic devo- 
 tion. If the Benedictines had been cursed with barrenness in yield- 
 ing this fruit, they would have resembled a Dutch garden in which 
 it was impossible to cultivate the tulip. But no such reproach clings 
 to the sons and daughters of Benedict. It must, however, be ad- 
 mitted that our own land has been singularly destitute of fertility 
 in this the most delicate of all the plants cultivated in monastic se- 
 clusion. We produced schoolmen to satiety. Erigena, Hales, Duns 
 Scotus, and Occam were our own. But we must pass over to Spain 
 and Germany to find a type of Benedictine greatness, in that im- 
 palpable though gorgeous world, which in later times was inhabited 
 by Molinos and by Fenelon. 
 
 In those more fortunate regions, many are the half-inspired rhap- 
 sodists whom we encounter chiefly ladies and, what is worthy of 
 notice, ladies who from their childhood had scarcely ever strayed 
 beyond the convent garden. Nevertheless, the indestructible pecu- 
 liarity of our national character (whether it be shyness or dryness, 
 high aims or low aims, the fear of irreverence for what is holy, or 
 the fear of being laughed at for what is absurd), that character 
 which forbade the public utterance in these islands of the impas- 
 sioned communings of the soul with its Maker and with itself, for- 
 bids us to make any report to our fellow-countrymen of the sublime 
 "Canticles" of St Gertrude or of St Theresa. Lest, however, our 
 hasty sketch of Benedictine intellectual greatness should be defective, 
 without some specimen of their super-terrestrial poetry, we venture 
 to remind our readers of one passage of which M. de Malan (one of 
 Mabillon's biographers) has reminded us, in which the author of the 
 " De Imitatione Christi " (himself a Benedictine, if Mabillon may be 
 trusted) has sung to his JEolian harp a more than earthly strain. It 
 is, indeed, an excellent example of a style of which we have no 
 model in our own language, except perhaps in occasional passages 
 of Archbishop Leighton. 
 
 " My son, let not the sayings of men move thee, however beautiful 
 or ingenious they may be : for the kingdom of God consisteth not 
 in words but in power. 
 
 " Weigh well my words, for they kindle the heart, illuminate the
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 247. 
 
 mind, quicken compunction, and supply abundant springs of con- 
 solation. 
 
 " Read not the Word of God in order that thou mayest appear 
 more learned or more wise. 
 
 " When thou shalt have read and known many things, then return 
 to the one beginning and principle of all things. 
 
 " I am he that teacheth man knowledge, and to little children I 
 impart an understanding more clear than man can teach. 
 
 " He to whom I speak shall quickly be wise, and in spirit shall 
 profit largely. 
 
 " Woe be to them that search out many curious things, and take 
 little thought how they may serve me. 
 
 " I am he who, in one instant, raise up the humble in mind to 
 understand eternal truth better than if he had studied many years 
 in the schools. 
 
 " I teach without noise of words, without confusion of opinions, 
 without ambition of honour, without the shock of arguments. 
 
 " To some men I speak common things, to others things rare ; to 
 some I appear sweetly by signs ; to some, with much light, I dis- 
 cover mysteries. 
 
 " The voice of books is, indeed, one ; but it is a voice which in- 
 structs not all alike. I am he who teaches the truth concealed 
 within the voice. I am the searcher of the heart, the discoverer of 
 the thoughts, promoting holy actions, distributing to each one as I 
 will." 
 
 If, as the Benedictines maintained, this sacred chant was really 
 sung by a poet of their own fraternity about the beginning of the 
 fourteenth century, it may be looked upon as a kind of threnody, 
 designed to intimate the approaching obscuration of their Order. 
 For already might be observed, in a state of morbid activity among 
 them, those principles of decay which were pointed out so indig- 
 nantly by Benedict himself to Dante, when, under the guidance 
 of Beatrice, the poet had ascended to his presence in the seventh 
 heaven : 
 
 " * * My rule 
 
 Is left a profitless stain upon the leaves ; 
 The walls, for abbeys reared, turned into dens ; 
 The cowls, to sacks choked up with musty meal. 
 Foul usury doth not more lift itffelf 
 Against God's pleasure, than that fruit which makes 
 The hearts of monks so wanton." 
 
 Carey's Dante, canto xxii. " II Paradiso." 
 
 In the lapse of more than seven centuries, the state of society had
 
 248 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 undergone vast changes ; tut the institutes of Benedict had not 
 been changed to meet them. The new exigencies of life demanded 
 reformations in the religious state which Francis, Dominic, and 
 Loyola successively established. They combined a more mature 
 policy with a younger enthusiasm. Exhibiting ascetic self-mortifica- 
 tions, till then unknown among any of the monastic communities of 
 the West, they also formed relations, equally new, with the laity 
 in all their offices domestic, political, military, and commercial. 
 Having, at the same tune, obtained possession of nearly all the pul- 
 pits of the Latin Church, the imagination, the interests, and the 
 consciences of mankind fell so much under the control of these new 
 fraternities, that their influence was felt throughout all the ramifica- 
 tions of society. 
 
 While the spiritual dominion of the earlier monasticism was con- 
 tinually narrowed by this formidable competition, the Benedictines 
 were no less constantly becoming more and more entangled in the 
 cares and enjoyments of the world. They established an ill-omened 
 alliance with the Templars, with the Knights of Calatrava and Al- 
 cantara, and with five other orders of chivalry an unhallowed 
 companionship, which, by familiarising the monks with the military 
 and dissolute manners of these new brethren, gradually contaminated 
 their own. 
 
 Wealth and temporal prosperity were no less prolific of evil in 
 the Order of St Benedict than in other societies in which their 
 enervating influence has been felt. But on the monks they inflicted 
 a peculiar disaster. For their riches tempted the chief sovereigns 
 of Europe to usurp the patronage of the religious houses ; and to 
 transfer the government of them from abbots elected by the chap- 
 ters, to abbots appointed by the king. 
 
 The grant of these conventual benefices in commendam, was one 
 of those abuses in the Church, which yielded to no reform until the 
 Church herself and her abuses were swept away together, by the 
 torrent of the French Revolution. It was, however, a practice in 
 favour of which the most venerable antiquity might be alleged. 
 From the earliest times churches had been placed under a kind of 
 tutelage between the death of the incumbent and the appointment 
 of his successor. But it not rarely happened that when the period 
 of this spiritual guardianship was over, the tutor had become too 
 much enamoured of his ward, and possessed too much influence with 
 the great, to acquiesce in a separation from her. In such cases, the 
 commendatory, aided by some ill-fed stipendiary curate, assumed all 
 the privileges and immunities of a sinecurist. 
 
 Yet it was not necessary to rely on any vulgar names in defence
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 249 
 
 or in extenuation of this usage. The great Athanasius himself held 
 a bishopric in commendam, in addition to his see of Alexandria. 
 Neither were they vulgar names by whom it was condemned. Hilde- 
 brand, Innocent III., and the Fathers of Trent, rivalled each other 
 in denunciations of the abuse ; and were cordially seconded by 
 Philippe Auguste, by St Louis, and even by Francis I. Papal, 
 synodal, and royal decrees proved, however, too feeble to check an 
 abuse so tempting to royal and sacerdotal cupidity. The French 
 kings converted the splendid monastery of Fontevrault into an ap- 
 panage for a long succession of royal or noble ladies. The abbey of 
 St Germain-des-Pres also was given in commendam by Louis the 
 Debonnaire, to a bishop of Poictiers ; by Eudes to his brother 
 Robert, a layman ; and at length, by Louis XIII., to a widow of the 
 Duke of Lorraine which is much as though the mastership of 
 Trinity College, Cambridge, had been given to the widow of the 
 Elector Palatine. 
 
 During the progress of this decay, there was no lack of reformers, 
 or of reforms of the Benedictine Order. But the corrupting proved 
 too strong for the renovating power; and their decline proceeded 
 without any real check until, in the year 1614, Don Nicholas Benard 
 became a member of the congregation of St Maur. 
 
 Benard was one of those reformers to whom it is given to inno- 
 vate, at once in the spirit of the institution which they desire to 
 improve, and in the spirit of the age in which the improvement is 
 to be made. His object was to bring back his Order to the dutiful- 
 ness, the industry, and the self-renunciation enjoined by Benedict. 
 His remedial process consisted in conducting them, by exhortation 
 and by his own example, to the culture of those studies which were 
 held in highest esteem in France in the reigns of the thirteenth and 
 of the fourteenth Louis. In those times no seeds of science or litera- 
 ture could be sown in that favoured land without yielding an abund- 
 ant increase. The reason of this redundant fertility at that particular 
 era, no historian can explain and no psychologist can conjecture. 
 But, like the other promoters of learning in his age, Benard soon 
 found himself followed and surrounded by a band of scholars, who 
 joined with him in the successful culture of all historical, antiquarian, 
 and critical knowledge. With their aid he restored one of the chief 
 households of the great Benedictine race to even more than their 
 pristine glory. 
 
 During the seventeenth century one hundred and five writers in 
 the congregation of St Maur (then established at St German-des- 
 Pres) divided among them this harvest of literary renown. A com- 
 plete collection of their works would form a large and very valuable
 
 250 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 library ; as may indeed "be inferred from a bare enumeration of the 
 books of the earlier and later Fathers, which they republished. Among 
 them are the best editions which the world has seen of the writings 
 of St Gregory the Great, of Lanfranc, Basil, Bernard, Anselm, 
 Augustine, Cassiodorus, Ambrose, Hilary, Jerome, Athanasius, 
 Gregory of Tours, Irenaeus, Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Ter- 
 tullian, Justin, and Origen ; to which must be added their edition 
 of Josephus. 
 
 But it would be as easy to form an image of the Grecian camp 
 from the catalogue of the ships, as to conceive aright of the Bene- 
 dictines of St Maur from an enumeration of their publications and 
 of the names of the authors of them. To exhibit some slight sketch 
 of that great seminary as it existed in its days of splendour, it is ne- 
 cessary to confine our attention to the Achilles of their host to him 
 whom all the rest revered as their great example, and acknowledged 
 by acclamation as their head. 
 
 The Life of Mabillon has been written by Ruinart, his affectionate 
 pupil ; by Dom Filipe le Cerf, the historiographer of the congrega- 
 tion ; and more recently by M. Chavin de Malan. To the last of 
 these biographers we are largely indebted for much valuable inform- 
 ation. But a companion at once more instructive and provoking, or 
 a guide less worthy of confidence, never offered himself at the outset 
 of any literary journey. It is the pleasure of M. de Malan to qualify 
 the speculative propensities of our own age by the blindest credulity 
 of the middle ages. He is at the same moment a rhetorician and an 
 antiquarian (as a dervish dances while he prays), and is never satis- 
 fied with investigating truth, unless he can also embellish and adorn 
 it. Happily, however, we are not dependent on his guidance. All 
 that is most interesting respecting Mabillon may be gathered from 
 his own letters and his works. For to write was the very law of his 
 existence ; and from youth to old age his pen unceasingly plied 
 those happy tasks, of which the interest never fails, and the tran- 
 quillity can never be disturbed. 
 
 Jean Mabillon was born at the village of St Pierre Mont, in 
 Champagne, on the 23rd of November, 1632. His mother did not 
 long survive his birth ; but Euinart congratulates himself on having 
 seen Etienne, the father of Jean, at the age of 1 05, in the full en- 
 joyment of all his mental and bodily powers. Jean himself was 
 sent by his paternal uncle, the cure of a parish near Eheims, to a 
 college in that city, which, on his return homewards from the Coun- 
 cil of Trent, the celebrated Cardinal of Lorraine had founded there 
 for the education of clergymen. The habits of the place well became 
 its origin. Except while addressing their teachers, the pupils passed
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 251 
 
 in profound silence every hour of the day save that of noon ; when 
 they amused themselves in a garden, where, as we read, it was their 
 custom, many hundred times a day, to salute a conspicuous image of 
 the Virgin, with assurances of their veneration and their love. 
 
 Whatever may have been the effects of this discipline on the 
 characters of his fellow-students, it moulded the meek and quiet 
 nature of Mabillon into the exact form which the authors of it re- 
 garded as the most perfect. He surrendered up his will to theirs ; 
 and, yielding his whole soul to the divine offices of his college 
 chapel, became so familiar with them, that when, after an absence 
 of more than fifty years, Euinart knelt beside him there, he heard 
 the then aged man repeat, from memory, with unerring exactness, 
 every prayer, every ceremonial, and every sacred melody in which 
 he had been accustomed to offer up the devotions of his youth. 
 
 In the year 1653, and (to use the chronology of the cloister and 
 of Oxford) on the feast of the Decollation of St John the Baptist, 
 Mabillon was received as a Postulant at the Benedictine monastery 
 then attached to the cathedral church of St Eemy. In that sublime 
 edifice his imagination had long before been entranced by the anti- 
 cipated delights of a life of devotional retirement. It had been his 
 single indulgence, while at college, to wander thither that he might 
 listen to the choral strains as they rose, and floated, and died away 
 through the recesses of those long-drawn aisles ; and there had he 
 often proposed to himself the question, whether this world had any- 
 thing to offer so peaceful and so pure as an habitual ministration at 
 those hallowed altars, and an unbroken ascent of the heart heaven- 
 wards, on the wings of those unearthly psalmodies ? 
 
 To this inquiry his judgment, or his feelings, still returned the 
 same answer ; and, at the end of his novitiate, he gladly pronounced 
 those irrevocable vows which were to exclude him for ever from all 
 delights less elevated than those of a devotional life. He had not, 
 however, long to await the proof that the exclusive use of this 
 ethereal dietary is unfriendly to the health both of these gross bodies 
 of ours, and of the sluggish minds by which they are informed. The 
 flesh revolted ; and, to subdue the rebellion, ascetic rigours were 
 required. Then (alas for the bathos !) that base and unfortunate 
 viscus, the stomach, racked his head with insufferable pains. Com- 
 pelled at length to fly for relief to a Benedictine convent at Nogent, 
 he there soothed his aching brows by traversing, and mourning over, 
 the ruins which the impious ravages of the Huguenots had brought 
 upon the monastic buildings. Then passing, for relief, to another 
 monastery at Corbie, he recovered his health ; through the inter- 
 cession of St Adelhard, the patron saint of the place, as he piously
 
 252 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 believed ; though a less perfect faith might have been tempted to 
 ascribe the cure to the active employments in the open air in which 
 the abbot of Corbie compelled him to engage. 
 
 With restored health, Mabillon was next transferred, by the 
 commands of his superior, to the royal abbey of St Denys ; there 
 to act as curator of the treasures which the profaneness of a later 
 age has scattered to the winds. This was no light trust. Amidst 
 countless monuments of the illustrious dead, and^ of the greatness 
 of the French monarchy, the collection contained one of the arms 
 in which the aged Simeon had raised the infant Jesus in the 
 Temple ; and the very hand which the sceptical Thomas httd 
 stretched out to touch the wounded side of his risen Lord ! 
 
 It was just one year before the birth of Mabillon, that the con- 
 gregation of St Maur had taken possession of the monastery of St 
 Germain-des-Pres at Paris. At the time of his arrival at St Denys, 
 Dom Luc d'Achery, a Benedictine monk, was engaged at St Ger- 
 main's, in one of those gigantic undertakings to which Benard had 
 invited his fraternity. It was a compilation from the libraries of 
 France of the more rare and valuable letters, poems, charters, and 
 chronicles relating to ecclesiastical affairs, which had been deposited 
 in them either in later or remoter ages. These gleanings (for they 
 were published under the name of Spicilegium) extended over 
 thirteen quarto volumes. Such, however, were the bodily in- 
 firmities of the compiler, that during forty-five years he had never 
 been able to quit the infirmary. There he soothed his occasional 
 intermissions of pain and study, by weaving chaplets of flowers for 
 the embellishment of the altars of the church of St Germain's. 
 
 For the relief of this venerable scholar, Mabillon, then in his 
 thirty-fifth year, was withdrawn from his charge of St Denys to St 
 Germain's, where he passed the whole of his remaining life in the 
 execution of that series of works which have placed his name at 
 the head of the competitors for the palm of erudition in the most 
 erudite nation of the world, at the period of her greatest eminence 
 in learning. The commencement of his fame was laid in a de- 
 meanour still more admirable for self-denial, humility, and loving- 
 kindness. To mitigate the sufferings of D'Achery, and to advance 
 his honour, had become the devoted purpose of his affectionate 
 assistant. Taking his seat at the feet of the old man, Mabillon 
 humoured his weakness, stole away his lassitude, and became at 
 once his servant, his secretary, bis friend, and bis confessor. From 
 the resources of his far deeper knowledge, guided by his much 
 larger capacity, he enabled D'Achery to complete his Spicilegium,
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 253 
 
 generously leaving him in possession of the undivided honour of 
 that contribution to the literary wealth of France. 
 
 ]N"or was this the greatest of the self-sacrifices which he made to 
 gratify the feelings of the aged antiquarian. Benard and the other 
 brethren of the congregation had, from their first settlement at St 
 Germain's, meditated a complete history of their Order. During 
 forty successive years they had accumulated for the purpose a body 
 of materials of such variety and magnitude as to extinguish the 
 hopes and baffle the exertions of all ordinary men. Having found 
 at length in Mabillon one fitted to " grapple with whole libraries," 
 they committed to him the Titanic labour of hewing out of those 
 rude masses an enduring monument to the glory of Benedict and 
 of his spiritual progeny. He undertook the task in the spirit of 
 obedience and of love. In the printed circular letters with which 
 he solicited the aid of the learned, he joined the name of D'Achery 
 to his own ; and kept alive the same friendly fiction by uniting 
 their names in the title-page of every volume of the Acta Sanctorum 
 Ordinis Sancti Benedict! which appeared in D'Achery's lifetime. 
 
 The literary annals of France, although abounding in prodigies, 
 record nothing more marvellous than the composition of that book 
 by a single man, in the midst of other labours of almost equal mag- 
 nitude. From the title alone it might be inferred that it was a 
 mere collection of religious biographies ; and, if such had been the 
 fact, they who are the deepest read in Roman Catholic hagiology 
 would probably prefer the perusal of the writers of ordinary ro- 
 mance ; since, with less irreverence for sacred things, they are 
 usually more entertaining, and not less authentic. For, in record- 
 ing the lives of those whom it is the pleasure of the Church to 
 honour, her zealous children regard every incident redounding to 
 their glory, as resting on so firm and broad a basis of antecedent 
 probability, as to supersede the necessity for any positive evidence 
 at all ; nay, as to render impious the questioning of any such 
 testimonies as may happen to be cited, even when they are the 
 most suspicious and equivocal. This argument from probability is 
 especially insisted on, when any such occurrences are alleged as 
 miraculous that is, as improbable for, if probable, they cease to 
 be miracles. Of these probable .improbabilities, few writers are 
 better persuaded, or more profuse, than Mabillon. 
 
 But apart from the extravagancies of his monkish legends, and 
 in despite of them all, Mabillon's book will live in perpetul honour 
 and remembrance as the great and inexhaustible reservoir of know- 
 ledge respecting the ecclesiastical, religious, and monastic history
 
 254 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 of the middle ages ; and, therefore, though incidentally, respecting 
 the secular condition and intellectual character of mankind during 
 that period. In those nine folios lie, in orderly method and chronolo- 
 gical arrangement, vast accumulations of authentic facts, of curious 
 documents, and of learned disquisitions ; like some rich geological 
 deposit, from which the Genius of history may hereafter raise up 
 and irradiate the materials of a philosophical survey of the institu- 
 tions, habits, and opinions which have been transmitted from those 
 remote generations to our own. Thence also may be readily disin- 
 terred picturesque narratives without end; and inexhaustible dis- 
 closures both of the strength and of the weakness of the human 
 heart. 
 
 Nor will this knowledge be found in the state of rude and un- 
 organised matter. Mabillon was not a mere compiler ; but was also 
 a learned theologian, and a critic and scholar of the first order. 
 When emancipated from the shackles of human authority, he knew 
 how to take a wide survey of the affairs of men, and could sketch 
 their progress from age to age with a free and powerful hand. To 
 each volume which he lived to complete, he attached a prefatory 
 survey of the epoch to which it referred ; and those Prolegomena, 
 if republished in a detached form, would constitute such a review 
 of the ecclesiastical history of that perplexing period, as no other 
 writer has yet given to the world. It would, indeed, be based 
 throughout upon assumptions which the Protestant Churches with 
 one voice contradict. But if, for the immediate purpose, those as- 
 sumptions were conceded, the reader of such a work would find 
 himself in possession of all the great controversies which agitated 
 the Christian world during several centuries ; and of the best solu- 
 tions of which they are apparently susceptible. Nor is it an insigni- 
 ficant addition to their other merits, that the Latin in which these 
 ponderous Tomes are written, if often such as Cicero would have 
 rejected, is yet better adapted than the purest Ciceronian style, for 
 the easy and unambiguous communication of thought in modern 
 times the phraseology and the grammar, those of the Court of 
 Augustus ; the idioms and structure of the sentences, not seldom 
 those of the Court of Louis Quatorze. 
 
 In the reign of that most orthodox Prince, to have given assent 
 to any fact on which the Church had not set the seal of her infalli- 
 bility was hazardous ; much more so to dissent from any fact which 
 her authority had sanctioned. Yet even this heavy charge was pre- 
 ferred against Mabillon by some of his Benedictine brethren, before 
 a general chapter of the Order. Among the saints of whom the 
 fraternity boasted, there were some whose relation to the Order he had
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 255 
 
 disputed ; some whose claims to having lived and died in the odour 
 of sanctity he had rejected ; some whose very existence he had 
 denied. So at least we understand the accusation. His antagonists 
 maintained that it was culpable, thus to sacrifice the edification of 
 the faithful to a fastidious regard for historical evidence ; and in- 
 jurious, thus to abandon a part of the glories of their society, 
 which, by mere silence, might have been maintained inviolate. 
 Among those who invoked the censure of their superiors on the 
 reckless audacity of Mabillon's critical inquiries, the foremost was 
 Dom Phillippe Bastide ; and to him Mabillon addressed a defence, 
 in every line of which his meekness and his love of truth beauti- 
 fully balance and sustain each other. 
 
 " I have ever been persuaded," he says, " that in claiming for their 
 Order honours not justly due to it, monastic men offend against the 
 modesty of the Gospel as grievously as any person who arrogates to 
 himself individually a merit to which he is not really entitled. To 
 pretend that this is allowable because the praise is desired, not for 
 the monk himself, but for his Order, seems to me no better than a 
 specious pretext for the disguise of vanity. 'Though disposed to 
 many faults, I must declare that I have ever had an insuperable 
 aversion to this ; and that therefore I have been scrupulous in in- 
 quiring who are the saints really belonging to my own Order. It is 
 certain that some have been erroneously attributed to it, either from 
 the almost universal desire of extolling, without bounds, the 
 brotherhood of which we are members, or on account of some ob- 
 scurity in the relations which have been already published. The 
 most upright of our writers have made this acknowledgment ; nor 
 have the Fathers Yebez and Menard hesitated to reduce the num- 
 ber of our saints by omitting those whom they thought inadmis- 
 sible. 1 thought myself also entitled to make a reasonable use of 
 this freedom ; though with all the caution which could be reconciled 
 with reverence for truth. I commit the defence of my work to the 
 Divine Providence. It was not of my own will that I engaged on 
 it. My brethren did me the honour to assign the task to me ; and 
 if they think it right, I shall cheerfully resign the completion of it 
 to any one whose zeal may be at once more ardent and more en- 
 lightened than my own." 
 
 In the Benedictine conclave the cause of historical fidelity 
 triumphed, though not without a long and painful discussion. In 
 proof of the touching candour which Mabillon exhibited as a con- 
 troversialist, we are told that he spontaneously published one of 
 the many dissertations against his book, to manifest his esteem and 
 affection for the author of it. But before subscribing to this
 
 256 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 eulogiurA, one -would wish to examine the arrow which he thus 
 winged for a flight against his own bosom. Recluse as he was, he 
 was a Frenchman still ; and may have quietly enjoyed a little 
 pleasantry even at the expense of a friend for he was a man of a 
 social spirit, and not altogether unskilled in those arts by which 
 society is amused and animated. 
 
 The sick chamber of D'Achery was, however, the only salon in 
 which he could exert these talents. There, for the gratification of 
 his aged friend, and, doubtless, for his own, he was accustomed on 
 certain evenings to entertain a circle of scholars devoted, like them- 
 selves, to antiquarian researches. The hotels of Paris in his days 
 were thronged with more brilliant assemblies, even as, in our own 
 times, reunions of greater aristocratic dignity have adorned that 
 Faubourg of St Germain in which these gatherings of the learned 
 took place. But neither the Bourbon Lilies nor the Imperial 
 Eagles ever protected a society more distinguished by the extent and 
 depth of the knowledge they were able to interchange. In that 
 ill-furnished dormitory of the decrepit monk, might be seen Du 
 Cange, reposing for a moment from his scrutiny into all the languages 
 and histories of mankind ; and Baluze, rich in inexhaustible stores of 
 feudal and ecclesiastical learning ; and D'Herbelot, unrivalled in 
 oriental literature ; and Fleury, in whom the Church of Rome re- 
 veres the most perfect of her annalists ; and Adrian de Valois, whose 
 superlative skill in deciphering the remains of the first dynasties of 
 France was so amusingly combined with almost equal skill in find- 
 ing fault with his own generation, as to provoke an occasional smile 
 even in the most thoughtful of those grave countenances ; and, more 
 eminent than all these, Fenelon, then basking in the noon of royal 
 favour, and Bossuet, in the meridian of Ms genius, both of whom, if 
 hot habitual guests at the monastery, lived in an affectionate con- 
 fidence with Mabillon, which they were unable to maintain with 
 each other. 
 
 Nor were these the only relations which he had formed with the 
 world beyond his convent walls. The Jesuits, the Bollandists of 
 Antwerp, and the chroniclers of the Carthusian and Cistercian 
 fraternities, solicited his aid in their various literary pursuits. 
 Leibnitz applied to him for intelligence regarding the House of 
 Brunswick ; and even Madame de la Valliere sued for his interest 
 to procure for one of her kindred advancement in that world from 
 which she had herself retired to penitential solitude. Like other 
 luminaries in the same literary firmament, he was now followed by 
 his attendant satellites ; nor was his orbit seldom disturbed by the too 
 close vicinity of the bodies amidst which he was constrained to pass.
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 257 
 
 The theological, or rather the conventual, world was at that time 
 agitated by a controversy, in which the great eulogist of the Bene- 
 dictine Saints could not have declined to interfere without some loss 
 of honour, and some abandonment of the cause of which he had be- 
 come the illustrious advocate. It related to the authorship of the 
 treatise " De Imitatione Christi," of all uninspired writings incom- 
 parably the most popular, if the popularity of books may be inferred 
 from the continuance and extent of their circulation. That it was 
 written either in the fourteenth, or at the commencement of the 
 fifteenth, century, was a well- ascertained fact ; and that the author 
 was a monk might be confidently inferred from internal evidence. 
 But was he Thomas a Kempis, one of the regular canons of Mont 
 St Agnes, near Zwol 1 or was he the Benedictine Jean Gersen 1 
 This was the point at issue ; and with what learning, zeal, and 
 perseverance it was debated, is well known to all the curious in 
 such matters ; and may be learned by others from the notice 
 prefixed by Thuilliers to his edition of the posthumous works of 
 Mabillon. It is only so far as his pen was diverted from its 
 Cyclopean toils by this protracted warfare, that we are concerned 
 with it at present. 
 
 Towards the end of the sixteenth century, a Flemish printer, then 
 living at Paris (Joducus Badius Ascentius was his Latinised name), 
 published two editions of the " De Imitatione," in which Thomas, of 
 the village of Kemp, in the diocese of Cologne, was, for the first time, 
 announced as the author. Francis de Tol, or Tob, a German, in two 
 other editions, followed this example ; and was himself followed by 
 Sommatius, a Jesuit, in reliance, as he said, on certain manuscripts 
 of the work in the handwriting of Thomas a Kempis, then to be seen 
 at Antwerp and Louvain. 
 
 But in the year 1616, Constantino Cajitano, a Benedictine monk, 
 published at Rome another edition, in the title-page of which Gersen 
 was declared to be the author ; partly on the authority of a manu- 
 script at the Jesuits' College at Arona, and partly in deference to the 
 judgment of Cardinal Bellarmine. 
 
 Bound Cajitano rallied all the champions of the Gersenian cause. 
 The partisans of Thomas a Kempis found an equally zealous leader 
 in the person of Eosweid, a Jesuit. Bellarmine, himself a member 
 of the same company, was, as the Kempists maintained, induced by 
 Eosweid to abandon the Gersenian standard. The Benedictines, on 
 the contrary, assert that the Cardinal never deserted it at all, nor 
 ever gave in his adhesion to their adversaries except by pronouncing 
 the words, " As you will," in order to silence the importunities with 
 which the anxious Kempists were disturbing his dying bed. 
 
 17
 
 258 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 Whatever the fact may be regarding Bellarmine's latest opinion, 
 the next chieftain who appears on this battle-field is Francis 
 "VValdegrave j who, with true English pertinacity and party spirit, 
 traversed the Continent, to bring up to Cajitano a vast reinforce- 
 ment of manuscripts, pictures, and other proofs collected from all 
 the German, Swiss, and Italian abbeys. Missiles from either side 
 darkened the air; when, between the combatants, appeared the 
 majestic form of Richelieu himself, who, having employed the 
 royal press at the Louvre to print off a new edition of the " De 
 Imitatione," enjoyed at once ^ the honour of being solicited by the 
 disputants on either side for his authoritative suffrage, and the 
 pleasure of disappointing both, by maintaining to the last a digni- 
 fied neutrality. 
 
 On the death of Eosweid, the commander of the Kempists, his 
 baton passed to Fronteau, a regular canon, who signalised his acces- 
 sion to the command by a work called "Thomas Vindicatus." This, 
 for the first time, drew into the field the congregation of St Maur, 
 who, by their champion Dom Quatremaire, threw down the gauntlet 
 in the form of a pamphlet entitled " Gersen Assertus." It was taken 
 up by the Jesuit, George Heser, the author of what he called 
 " Dioptra Kempensis." That blow was parried by Quatremaire, in a 
 publication to which he gave the title of " Gersen iterum Assertus." 
 And then the literary combatants were both surprised and alarmed 
 to learn that the Prevot of Paris considered their feud as dangerous 
 to the peace of that most excitable of cities ; and that they could 
 no longer be permitted to shed ink with impunity in the cause of 
 either claimant. 
 
 Thus the controversy was transferred to the safe arbitrament of 
 Harlay, the archbishop of that see ; who, having no other qualifi- 
 cation for the task than the dignity he derived from his mitre, con- 
 vened at his palace a solemn council of the learned, which, under 
 his own presidency, was to investigate the pretensions of Thomas 
 and of Gersen. Of this conclave Mabillon was a member ; and, 
 after much deliberation, they pronounced a sentence which affirmed 
 the title of Gersen to the honour of having written this ever- 
 memorable treatise. 
 
 An ultimate appeal to public opinion lies against all adjudications, 
 let who will be the author of them ; and in due season the Father 
 Testelette made that appeal against the decision of the archiepiscopal 
 palace, in the form of a book entitled " Vindicise Kempenses," which 
 drew from Mabillon his " Animadversiones " on the argument of 
 Testelette. A truce of ten years followed; after which another 
 council was held, under the presidency of Du Cange ; and although
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 259 
 
 they pronounced no formal sentence, yet the general inclination and 
 tendency of their opinions appears to have been hostile to the claims 
 of Gersen, which have ever since been regarded by the best judges 
 with suspicion, if not with disfavour. 
 
 Agitated by this vehement dispute, and mourning the silence of 
 her infallible head, the Roman Catholic Church was at length re- 
 joiced to repose in the oracular dictum of St Francis de Sales, who 
 declared that the authorship was to be ascribed neither to Thomas 
 a Kempis nor to Gersen, but to him by whose inspiration the Scrip- 
 tures themselves had been written ! 
 
 It is probably on account of the darkness of the regions through 
 which they pass, that antiquarians, philologists, and theologians are 
 so much addicted to use their pens as belligerent weapons. Though 
 the most peaceful of mankind, Mabillon, while waging war with the 
 Kempists on one flank, was engaged in a contest not less arduous 
 with the Bollandists on the other. Papebroch, one of the most 
 learned of that learned body, had published a book on the art of 
 verifying the charters and other ancient public acts deposited in the 
 various archives of Europe. In 1681 Mabillon answered him in a 
 treatise " De Re Diplomatica." After laying down rules for distin- 
 guishing the false instruments from the true, rules derived from 
 the form of the character, the colour of the ink, the nature of the 
 penmanship, the style and orthography of the instrument, the dates, 
 seals, and subscriptions, he proceeded to show, by more than 200 
 examples, how his laws might be applied as a test ; and how, by the 
 application of that test, the manuscripts on which Papebroch chiefly 
 relied might be shown to be valueless. "Whatever may be thought 
 of the interest of this dispute (which, however, involves questions 
 of the very highest practical importance), no one probably will 
 read with indiiference the answer of Papebroch to his formidable 
 antagonist : 
 
 " I assure you," he says, " that the only satisfaction which I retain 
 in having written at all on this subject is, that it has induced you 
 to write so consummate a work. I confess that I felt some pain 
 when I first read it, at finding myself refuted in a manner so con- 
 clusive. But the utility and the beauty of your treatise have at 
 length got the better of my weakness ; and in the joy of contem- 
 plating the truth exhibited in a light so transparent, I called on my 
 fellow-student here to partake of my own admiration. You need 
 have no difficulty, therefore, in stating publicly, whenever it may fall 
 in your way, that I entirely adopt and concur in your opinions." 
 
 While Papebroch, thus gracefully lowering his lance, retired from 
 the lists, they were entered by Father Germon, another Jesuit ; who, 
 
 17*
 
 2GO THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 armed with two duodecimo volumes, undertook to subvert the new 
 Benedictine science. His main assault was aimed at the assumption 
 pervading Mabillon's book, that the authenticity and the authority 
 of an ancient charter were the same. He suggested that forgery was 
 a very wide-spread art, and had probably flourished with peculiar 
 vigour in remote and ignorant ages. Mabillon was content to reply 
 that throughout his extensive researches, he had never found a proof 
 of any such imposture. His disciples assailed the sceptical German 
 by far more elaborate hostilities. In one form or another the dispute 
 has descended to our own times. At the commencement of it, in 
 the seventeenth century, in France, it yielded (as what French dis- 
 pute will not yield 1) some choice entertainment. The Jesuit, Har- 
 douin, anticipating our contemporary, Strauss, resolved all these 
 ancient instruments, and with them a large part of the remains of 
 antiquity, into so many monkish and mythical inventions. Thus, 
 he declared that the odes of Horace were written in some Benedictine 
 monastery ; and that Lalage herself was nothing more than a monk- 
 ish poetical symbol of the Christian faith. "Whither such theories 
 tended Hardouin clearly enough perceived ; but he sheltered him- 
 self by offering up his thanks to God that he had been denied all 
 human faith, in order (as he said) that the total want of it might 
 improve and strengthen his divine faith. Boileau's remark on the 
 occasion was still better : "I have no great fancy for monks," he 
 said, " yet I should be glad to have known Brother Horace and Dom 
 VirgiL" 
 
 Father Anacreon might have been recognised by the great satirist 
 in the person of the reverend Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Ranee, 
 who, having been appointed, at the age of ten, to a canonry at Kotre 
 Dame, became, in less than three years afterwards, the author of a 
 new edition of the Anacreontic Odes, a work of undoubted merit 
 in its way ; though it must not be concealed that the young canon 
 was happy in the possession of a learned tutor, as well as of power- 
 ful patrons ; for Eichelieu was his godfather and kinsman, Bossuet 
 his friend, Marie de Medicis his protector, Francis de Harlay (after- 
 wards archbishop of Paris) the associate of bis youthful revels, and 
 De Eetz his instructor in intrigue and politics. Eminent alike in 
 the field and at the Sorbonne, De Ranee" would occasionally throw 
 aside his hunting frock for his cassock, saying to Harlay, " Je vais 
 ce matin precher comme un ange, ce soir chasser comme un diable." 
 The pupil of the coadjutor was, of course, however, an eyesore and 
 an offence to Mazarin ; and being banished by him to Verret, this 
 venerable archdeacon and doctor in divinity (such were then his 
 dignities) converted his chateau there into so luxurious a retreat,
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 261 
 
 that the cardinal himself might have looked with envy on the 
 exile. 
 
 The spirit of this extraordinary churchman was, however, destined 
 to undergo a change, immediate, final, and complete. De la Eoque 
 relates that having hurried to an interview with a lady of whom he 
 was enamoured, he found her stretched in her shroud a disfigured 
 corpse. Marsollier's story is that his life was saved by the rebound 
 of a musket-ball from a pouch attached to his shooting belt. It is 
 agreed on all sides that, under the deep emotion excited by some 
 such startling occurrence, he retired from the world, and became first 
 the founder, and then the Abbe of the monastery of La Trappe, of 
 the Cistercian Order, where he remained till his death. During the 
 forty intervening years he was engaged in solving the problem 
 what are the Maxima of self-inflicted mortifications which, in the 
 transit through this world to the next, it is possible to combine with 
 the Minima of innocent self-gratifications ? 
 
 While occupied in this rueful inquiry, it happened that De Eance 
 lighted on a treatise which Mabillon had recently published under 
 the title of " Traite des Etudes monastiques." To M. de la Trappe, 
 it appeared that the book was designed as an indirect attack on 
 himself and his community ; and he made his appeal to the world 
 he had abandoned, in a publication, entitled " Beponse au Traite 
 des Etudes monastiques." In reluctant obedience to the commands 
 of his spiritual superiors, Mabillon published " Reflexions sur la 
 Eeponse de M. 1'Abbe de la Trappe," which drew from De Eance 
 another volume, entitled " Eclaircissements sur la Eeponse," &c. ; 
 and there the controversy ended. 
 
 When one of two disputants plants his foot on the terra firma of 
 intelligible utility, and the other is upborne by the shifting, dark, 
 and shapeless clouds of mysticism, it is impossible for any witness 
 of the conflict to trace distinctly either the progress or the result of 
 it. It may, however, be in general reported of this debate that, ac- 
 cording to the Benedictine arguments, he best employs the leisure of 
 a religious state who most successfully devotes it to the diffusion 
 among mankind of divine and human knowledge : while, according 
 to the Trappist, such labours are at best but the fulfilment of the 
 written, positive, and categorical commands of Scripture or of the 
 Church, an obedience of incomparably less excellency than that 
 which is due from those communities, or from those individuals, 
 who are called to the state of sinless perfection ; for to them it is 
 given, not merely or chiefly to conform to absolute rules of duty, but 
 to listen to those inarticulate suggestions which, from the sanctuary 
 of the Divine presence, descend into the sanctuary of the human
 
 262 THE FRENCH BEXEDICTINES. 
 
 heart, and to dwell amidst those elevations of soul to which such 
 heaven-born impulses are designed to conduct them. 
 
 They who thus contended could never come within the reach of 
 each other's weapons. But Mabillon and De Ranee could never get 
 beyond the reach of each other's love. After the close of the debate 
 they met at La Trappe ; and separated not without much unre- 
 served and affectionate intercourse, each in possession of his own 
 opinion, and of his antagonist's esteem. The sentences of Innocent 
 XII. and Clement XI. awarded the victory to the author of " Les 
 Etudes monastiques ; " and, without the gift of infallibility, the 
 same result might, with safety, have been predicted from the differ- 
 ent tempers in which the controversialists had encountered each 
 other. Mabillon descended to the contest in the panoply of a hum- 
 ble, truth-loving spirit. De Ranee (if we may rely on those who 
 knew him well) was not emancipated, even in his retreat, from that 
 enervating thirst for human sympathy which had distinguished him 
 in the world. His disputations and his self-tormentings are both 
 supposed to have been deeply tinged by his constitutional vanity ; 
 and it was believed that he would have been far less assiduous in 
 digging his grave and macerating his flesh, if the pilgrimage to La 
 Trappe had not become a rage at Paris ; and if the salons of that 
 most inquisitive capital had not been so curious for descriptions of 
 that living sepulchre, that the very votaries of pleasure were some- 
 times irretrievably drawn, by a kind of suicidal fascination, within 
 those gates impervious to all sublunary delights, and scarcely visited 
 by the light of day. 
 
 From the depths of his humility Mabillon gathered not only 
 truth, but courage. In his days the altars of the Church were 
 everywhere hallowed by the relics of saints and martyrs ; of which 
 the catacombs at Rome afforded an inexhaustible supply. To watch 
 over this precious deposit, and to discriminate the spurious article 
 from the true, was the peculiar office of a congregation selected for 
 that purpose from the sacred college. But though the skill and the 
 integrity of cardinals were remote from all suspicion, who could 
 answer for the good faith of their subordinate agents, and what was 
 the security that the Dulia appropriate to the bones of the blessed 
 might not be actually rendered to the skeletons of the ungodly ? 
 
 When teaching the art of discriminating between the osseous re- 
 mains of different mammalia, Cuvier never displayed a more edifying 
 seriousness than was exhibited by Mabillon in laying down the laws 
 which determine whether any given bone belonged of yore to a 
 sinner or a saint. The miracle-working criterion, though apparently 
 the. best of all, being rejected silently, and not without very good
 
 THE "FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 263 
 
 reasons, Eusebius Romanus (such was his incognito on this occasion) 
 addressed to Theophiius Gallus a letter " De Cultu Sanctorum igno- 
 torum ; " in which he discussed the sufficiency of three other tests. 
 First, he inquired, are we sure of the sanctity of a bone extracted 
 from a sepulchre on which an anagram of the name of Christ is 
 sculptured in the midst of palms and laurels? The answer is dis- 
 couraging : because it is a well-ascertained fact that the body of one 
 Flavia Jovina was found in this precise predicament, and yet she 
 was a simple neophyte. Then, secondly, are we safe if a vase stained 
 with blood be also found in the tomb 1 ? Nothing more secure if 
 only we could be quite certain that the stain was sanguineous, and 
 was not produced by the perfumes which the ancients were accus- 
 tomed to heap up in such vessels. But, thirdly, what if the word 
 "Martyr" be engraven on the stone? In that case all doubt would 
 be at an end, were it not for a sophistical doctrine of equivalents 
 which the relic dealers have propagated. Thus, for example, at the 
 abbey of St Martin, at Pontoise, the devout had long been honour- 
 ing the corpse of one Ursinus, in the quiet belief that the words of 
 his sepulchral inscription were equivalent to a declaration of martyr- 
 dom, whereas, on inquiry, it turned out that they were really as 
 follows : " Here lies Ursinus, who died on the first of June, after 
 living with his wife Leontia 20 years and 6 months, and in the 
 world 49 years, 4 months, and 3 days." Thus his only recorded 
 martyrdom was the endurance of Leontia's conjugal society for twenty 
 years and upwards. 
 
 Abandoning then all these guides, whither are we to look for 
 assurance as to the title of a relic to the veneration of the faithful ? 
 To this grave inquiry the learned Benedictine gravely answers as 
 follows : Be sure that the alleged saint has been authentically proved 
 to have been a saint. Be sure that his sanctity was established, not 
 merely by baptism, but by some illustrious deeds, attested either by 
 tradition or by certain proofs. Above all, be sure that the apostolic 
 see has ordained that homage be rendered to his remains. Admirable 
 canons, doubtless. Yet to an unenlightened Protestant it would 
 seem that they afford no solution of the problem Did this very 
 jawbone before which we are kneeling, sustain, while yet in life and 
 action, the teeth of a martyr, or the teeth of one of those by whom 
 martyrs were slain, or the teeth of any one else 1 
 
 To assert that any such question was debatable at all before the 
 tribunal of human reason, was, however, an overt act of liberalism ; 
 which Mabillon was of course required to expiate. Long and 
 anxious were the debates in the congregation of the Index, whether 
 the book should not be condemned, and the temerity of the author
 
 264 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 rebuked ; nor would that censure have been averted but for the 
 interference of the Pope in person ; who made himself sponsor for 
 the willingness of Eusebius to explain in a new edition whatever 
 might be thought objectionable in the first. The pledge was re- 
 deemed accordingly ; and then the letter " De Cultu Sanctorum 
 ignotorum " was not only acquitted of reproach by that sacred Col- 
 lege, but even honoured with their emphatic approbation. 
 
 Mabillon gave a yet more decisive proof that he was not blinded 
 to truth by any extravagant scepticism. In his days, as in our own, 
 there was living a M. Thiers, a man of singular talents, and of no 
 less remarkable courage ; who had accused the Benedictine fathers 
 of Vendome of an egregious imposture, in exhibiting at their con- 
 vent one of those tears which fell from the eyes of Jesus when he 
 wept at the grave of Lazarus. An angel (such was the legend) had 
 treasured it up, and given it to Mary, the sister of the deceased. It 
 passed some centuries afterwards to the treasury of relics at Constan- 
 tinople ; and was bestowed by some Greek emperor upon some 
 German mercenaries in reward for some services to his crown. They 
 placed it in the abbey of Frisingen, whence it was conveyed by the 
 Emperor Henry III., who transferred it to his mother-in-law, Agnes 
 of Anjou, the foundress of the monastery of Vendome, where she 
 deposited it. Mabillon threw the shield of his boundless learning 
 round this tradition ; maintaining that the genuineness of the relic 
 might at least be reasonably presumed from the admitted facts of the 
 case ; that it had a prescriptive claim to the honours it received ; 
 and that his brethren ought to be left in peaceable enjoyment of the 
 advantages they derived from the exhibition in their church at Ven- 
 dome of the Holy Tear of Bethany. 
 
 Passing from fables too puerile for the nursery, to inquiries which 
 have hitherto perplexed the senate, Mabillon undertook to explain 
 the right principles of Prison Discipline, in a work entitled " Re- 
 flexions sur les Prisons des Ordres Religieux. " He insisted, that by 
 a judicious alternation and mixture of solitude, labour, silence, and 
 devotion, it was practicable to render the gaol a school for the im- 
 provement of its unhappy inmates in social arts and in moral cha- 
 racter. After discussing to what extent solitary confinement would 
 be consistent with the mental and bodily health of the sufferers, and 
 how far the rigour of punishment ought to be mitigated by exercise 
 and active employments, he concludes as follows : 
 
 " To return to the prison of St Jean Climaque. A similar place 
 might be established for the reception of penitents. There should 
 be in such a place several cells like those of the Chartreux, with a 
 workshop, in which the prisoners might be employed at some useful
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 265 
 
 work. To each cell also might be attached a little garden, to be 
 thrown open to the prisoner at certain hours, for the benefit of 
 labour, and exercise in the open air. They should attend public 
 worship, at first in a separate lodge or compartment, and afterwards 
 in the choir with the congregation at large, so soon as they should 
 have passed the earlier stages of penal discipline, and given proofs 
 of penitence. Their diet should be coarse and poor, and their fasts 
 frequent. They should receive frequent exhortation, and the master 
 of the gaol, either in person or by deputy, should from time to time 
 see them in private, at once to console and to strengthen them. 
 Strangers should not be permitted to enter the place, from which all 
 external society should be strictly excluded. Once establish this, 
 and so far from such a retirement appearing horrible and insupport- 
 able, I am convinced that the greater number of the prisoners would 
 scarcely regret their confinement, even if it were for life. I am 
 aware that all this will be considered as a vision of some new At- 
 lantis : but let the world say or think what it may, it would be easy 
 to render prisons more tolerable and more useful, if men were but 
 disposed to make the attempt." 
 
 So wrote a Benedictine monk in the age and kingdom of Louis 
 XIV. The honour which one of his biographers, M. de Malan," 
 challenges for him, of being the very earliest of those who have 
 addressed themselves to this difficult subject in the spirit of philan- 
 thropy and wisdom, is strictly his due. To the enlightened re- 
 former of prisons may be cheerfully forgiven his sacred osteology, 
 and even his defence of the Holy Tear of Yendome. Though in 
 bondage to the prejudices of his own age, he was able to break 
 through the bonds which have shackled so many powerful minds in 
 later and more enlightened times. 
 
 In the midst of these and similar employments, Mabillon had 
 reached his sixty-second year, but the great project of his life was 
 still unfinished and unattempted. In the belief that the end of his 
 days was drawing near, he desired to consecrate them to a devout 
 preparation for death. But being roused to the task by the instances 
 of Renaudot and Baluze, and his affectionate pupil Ruinart, he 
 engaged, with all the ardour of youth, in collecting materials for his 
 long-meditated history of the Benedictine Order. In studying and 
 methodising the vast collections at his disposal, the aged scholar 
 displayed, though without a shade of scepticism, an acuteness which 
 the subtlest sceptic might have envied, and, without a tinge of 
 philosophy, a luminousness of mind worthy of the most illustrious 
 philosopher. 
 
 At that period the more ardent sons of the Church regarded her
 
 266 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 as no less infallible when she asserted historical facts, than when 
 she proclaimed dogmatic truths. On the other hand, the Centuria- 
 tors of Magdeburgh, Du Pin, Eichard Simon, and even the great 
 Arnauld, had presumed to interrogate ecclesiastical traditions, and 
 to controvert the authority of popes and synods, fathers and saints, 
 whenever it touched on topics beyond the articles of the Christian 
 faith. This audacious freedom was rebuked by the contemptuous 
 and withering eloquence of Bossuet ; and Mabillon presented him- 
 self as the great living model of an historian, employing the most 
 profound and varied knowledge, under the revere restraints of this 
 intellectual docility. By day and by night he laboured, during the 
 last fourteen years of his life, on the annals of his Order ; without 
 so much as a solitary departure from the implicit submission which 
 he yielded to the Church, as to all matters of fact attested either 
 by her own authoritative voice, or by the decision of her accredited 
 doctors. The result was, that, instead of a history of what had 
 actually occurred, he produced a chronicle, from which it may be 
 learnt what are the occurrences, the belief of which the Church jias 
 sanctioned, or has silently left to the investigation of her obedient 
 annalists. 
 
 It is, however, a book which irresistible evidence establishes, and 
 which, without such evidence, could not be believed to be the work 
 of a single man between his sixty-second and seventy-sixth years. 
 It comprises a biography of the Benedictine saints in a form more 
 compendious than that of his Acta Sanctorum. It contains an ac- 
 count of every other illustrious member of the Order. It includes a 
 careful review of every book written by any eminent Benedictine 
 author. All the grants and charters under which the property and 
 privileges of their monasteries were held, are recapitulated and 
 abridged in it. Finally, it embraces a description of all their sepul- 
 chral and other ancient monuments. 
 
 Five folio volumes of this vast compilation were finished, and the 
 last was about to appear, when the life and labours of Mabillon were 
 brought to a painful and a sudden, though not an immature termin- 
 ation. Ruinart meditated, though in vain, the completion of the 
 work. He lifted (perhaps unwisely) the veil which would otherwise 
 have concealed the last fearful agonies of its great author. He has, 
 however, shown, with the most artless and genuine pathos, how the 
 tortures of the body were soothed and dignified by the faith, the 
 hope, and the serenity of soul of the sufferer. "With no domestic 
 ties, and no worldly ambition to bind him to earth, and with no 
 anxious forebodings to overcast the prospect before him, he entertained 
 the last enemy as a messenger of good tidings, and a herald of ap-
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 267 
 
 preaching joy and freedom ; and then breathed out his spirit in an 
 unhesitating affiance on Him, whom, beneath the shade of many 
 superstitions, and the burden of many errors, he had loved, and 
 trusted, and obeyed from childhood to the grave. 
 
 Mabillon was a perfect model of monastic perfection ; and how- 
 ever much inferior the produce of the conservatory may be to those 
 hardier plants which germinate amidst the frosts and the scorchings 
 of the unsheltered day, yet they have a value and a delicacy peculiarly 
 their own. He had quitted the world without a sigh, and probably 
 never breathed a sigh to return to it. If compelled to revisit and to 
 tread the highways of mankind, he would have resembled the life- 
 long prisoner of an aviary, driven out to the bleak uplands for 
 shelter. Meekly bowing his head to " Holy Obedience," he yielded 
 himself without reluctance, to be moulded into whatever form that 
 Genius of the place might prescribe. Nor was this a painful 
 sacrifice. The graces of the cloister docility, devotion, and self- 
 discipline were his by an antenatal predestination. Mabillon lived 
 and died in an uninterrupted subjection to positive laws and forms 
 of man's devising. Even in his interior life, rule and habit exercised 
 an inflexible dominion over him. He worshipped indeed with fer- 
 vent piety ; but with such a mechanical exactness of ceremonial, of 
 time, and of place, as might seem, to a careless self-observer, fatal 
 to the life of spiritual exercises. To his daily routine of divine 
 offices were added other forms of private worship, scarcely less 
 immutable ; of which some were appropriate to his entrance on any 
 Literary work, some to the arrival of the first proof-sheet from the 
 press, and some to the commencement of the studies of each suc- 
 ceeding day. 
 
 To this constitutional and acquired acquiescence in the will of his 
 superiors and the rules of his convent, was added the most profound 
 lowliness of spirit. " Permit me, Sire," said Le Tellier, the arch- 
 bishop of Eheims, to Louis XIV., " to present to your Majesty Dom 
 Mabillon, the most learned man in your Majesty's dominions." 
 " Sire," rejoined Bossuet, who stood by, " the archbishop might 
 also have said the most humble man in France." It is supposed 
 that the plumage of the eagle of Meaux was not a little ruffled by 
 the superlative adjective which derogated from his own claims to 
 the first place among men of learning. But the applauses both of 
 the archbishop and of the bishop, in whatever temper given, were 
 perfectly just. The proofs of Mabillon' s learning are, at this moment, 
 amongst the noblest monuments of the age of Louis XIV. The 
 proofs which his eulogists adduce of his humility have not been very 
 judiciously selected.
 
 \ 
 
 268 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 A humble man is one who, thinking of himself neither more 
 highly nor more lowly than he ought to think, passes a true judg- 
 ment on his own character. But the great Benedictine neither 
 entertained nor suggested a truth; when among titled men, and 
 learned men, and superficial pretenders to knowledge, he bore him- 
 self as if he had been undeserving of their notice, and unworthy to 
 communicate with them on equal terms. There is no genuine self- 
 abasement apart from a lofty conception of our own destiny, powers, 
 and responsibilities ; and one of the most excellent of human virtues 
 is but poorly expressed by an abject carriage. Torpid passions, a 
 languid temperament, and a feeble nature, may easily produce that 
 false imitation of humility; which, however, in its genuine state, 
 will ever impart elevation to the soul and dignity to the demeanour. 
 This part of Mabillon's portrait has been ill drawn ; because the 
 artists drew rather from a false image in their own minds, than from 
 the great original. 
 
 In the conventual merit of bodily self-discipline, so far as it could 
 be reconciled with his studious habits, Mabillon was emulous of the 
 Trappists. His food, sleep, clothing, warmth, social intercourse, and 
 other personal gratifications, were measured by the indispensable 
 exigencies of nature ; and his admirers describe his austere mortv 
 fications of the flesh with the fond delight of a Hindoo recounting 
 his sacred legends of the spontaneous endurance of more than human 
 sufferings. " Holy Obedience " dictated to her favourite child 
 abasements and self-denials, which it is difficult to reconcile with 
 decorum or with sincerity. If she had been wise, she would have 
 summoned him to the nobler office of asserting that intellectual 
 rank, and those claims to the reverence of mankind, which, like all 
 the other good gifts of Providence, are designed for noble uses by 
 the wise and gracious Author of them aLL 
 
 Although the virtues of the convent, even in the person of 
 Mabillon, excite but a reluctant admiration, and a still colder 
 sympathy, yet his simple tastes, his devout spirit, and his affectionate 
 nature, would, under a more genial discipline, have rendered his 
 character as lovely as his diligence, his critical sagacity, and the 
 extent of his knowledge were wonderful. For, soaring, in these 
 respects, immeasurably above vulgar ascetics, he obeyed to the letter 
 the command of his great patriarch Benedict, and devoted every 
 moment of his life to some useful and energetic occupation. 
 
 In these pursuits Mabillon was not merely an indefatigable 
 student, but a laborious traveller. In his time the treasures of 
 which he was insatiably covetous were not accumulated in the Royal 
 Library of Paris, but dispersed in the conventual, episcopal, and
 
 THE FREXCH BENEDICTINES. 269 
 
 other public archives of France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy. 
 The journeys necessary for examining them had all the terrors of 
 an exploration of the Xile to one whom (all Frenchman as he was) 
 not even the enchanted gardens and terraces of Versailles had, 
 during a period of twenty years, been able to seduce, for a single 
 morning, from his seclusion at St Germain-des-Pres. But what 
 antiquarian worthy of the name would be arrested by the Loire, the 
 Meuse, the Rhine, or the Alps, when beyond these distant barriers 
 a whole harem of virgin manuscripts wooed his embrace, glowing, 
 like so many houris, with immortal youth, and rich in charms which 
 increased with each revolving century ? Sometimes alone, but more 
 commonly attended by a Benedictine brother, he accomplished 
 several Capitulary or Diplomatic tours through Flanders, Burgundy, 
 Switzerland, the south of Germany, and the whole of the Italian 
 peninsula. The earlier of those expeditions were made on foot, at 
 the cost of his Order ; the latter with the equipages becoming an 
 agent of the Grand Monarque, employed by Colbert to collect or to 
 transcribe manuscripts for his royal master. The results of these 
 expeditions were various learned itineraries (such as his " Iter 
 Burgundicum " and his "Museum Italicum"), and a prodigious 
 accession to the wealth of the royal library. His services were 
 rewarded by Louis with a seat in the Academy of Belles Lettres and 
 Inscriptions. But the whole republic of letters united to confer on 
 the learned traveller honours far exceeding any at the disposal of 
 the greatest of the kings of the earth. 
 
 His journeys, especially his Italian journey, resembled royal 
 progresses rather than the unostentatious movements of a humble 
 monk. Monasteries contended for the honour of entertaining him 
 as their guest. Fetes celebrated his arrival in the greater cities of 
 Italy. His society and correspondence were courted by the learned, 
 the great, and the fair. The Pope, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, 
 the Cardinals, and the Queen Christina vied in rendering courtesies 
 to their illustrious visitor. At the Catacombs, at Loretto, at Clair- 
 vaux, and, above all, at Monte Casino, the devout assembled to 
 witness and to partake of his devotions. All libraries flew open at 
 his approach ; nor did the revolutionary spavans of France traverse 
 the same regions or examine the same repositories with an authority 
 comparable to that of the poor Benedictine, as he moved from one 
 Italian state to another, powerless except in the lustre of his 
 reputation, the singleness of heart with which he pursued his object, 
 and the love with which he was regarded by all his associates. 
 
 In M. Valery's three volumes will be found an ample and curious 
 'diary of MabiUon's Italian expedition. He commenced it on the
 
 270 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 1st of April, 1685, having selected as his companion Dom Michel 
 Germain, another member of the congregation of St Maur. Ger- 
 main had himself written some essays on monastic history ; but his 
 chief title to literary honours was derived from his having minis- 
 tered to the production of the " Acta Sanctorum Ordinis Sancti 
 Benedicti," and of the treatise " De Ee Diplomatica." 
 
 The travellers had engaged to maintain a correspondence with 
 three of their monastic associates. One of these was the faithful and 
 affectionate Euinart, of whom we already know something. Placide 
 Porcheron, the next, seems to have been a member of the Dryasdust 
 family, so celebrated by Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle ; his two 
 great performances being a commentary on an obscure geographical 
 book of the seventh century, and notes on a treatise on Education 
 written by Basil the Macedonian, who, two hundred years later, had 
 been Emperor of the Greeks. Claude Bretagne, the third of the 
 Committee of Correspondence at Paris, was the author of some de- 
 votional works, but was more eminent as the intimate friend of 
 Nicole, and as a companion of infinite grace and wit, and of the 
 most captivating discourse. It was arranged that letters should be 
 addressed to Charles Bulteau also, who was not a monk, but " Doyen 
 des Secretaires du Eoi," and was famous for having, in that capacity, 
 vindicated, with great learning, the supremacy of the King of Prance 
 over the sovereigns of the Spanish monarchies. 
 
 When devout men, profound scholars, or still more profound 
 antiquaries, engage in a prolonged epistolary intercourse, the reader 
 is not without preconceptions of the mental aliment awaiting him. 
 He has probably gone through some volumes in which Protestant 
 divines interchange their religious experiences. The style in which 
 Salmasius, Budseus, and Scaliger entertained their friends is not 
 wholly unknown to him ; and how the Spelmans of old, and the 
 Whitakers of recent times, wrote their letters, may. be learnt at the 
 expense of a transient fatigue. But let no one address himself to 
 M. Valery's volumes with the hope or the fear of being involved in 
 any topics more sacred, more crabbed, or more antiquated than befits 
 an easy chair, a winter's evening, and a fireside. Eeading more 
 pleasant, or of easier digestion, is hardly to be met with in the 
 Parisian epistles of Grimm, Diderot, or La Harpe. 
 
 Our pilgrims first take up the pen at Venice. They had ran- 
 sacked the Ambrosian Library, examined the Temple of Venus at 
 Brescia, admired the amphitheatre at Verona, and visited the mon- 
 astery of their Order at Vicenza ; though, observes Germain, " M 
 la ni ailleurs, nos moines ne nous ont pas fait gouter de leur vin." 
 Some gentlemen of the city having conducted them over it, " On ne
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 271 
 
 saurait," adds he, " faire attention sur le merite et les manieres hon- 
 netes de ces messieurs, sans reflechir sur nos moines et admirer leur 
 insensibilite. Aussi n'etudient ils pas ; ils disent matins avant 
 super ; ils mangent gras ; portent du linge, pour- ne rien dire du 
 peculium, et de leur sortie seuls." In short, there is already peep- 
 ing out, from behind our good Germain's cowl, one of those Parisian 
 countenances on the quick movable lines of which flashes of subacid 
 merriment are continually playing. 
 
 On reaching Florence the migratory antiquarians form a new 
 acquaintance, alike singular and useful, in the person of Maglia- 
 bechi, the librarian of the Grand Duke. Another man at once so 
 book-learned, so dirty, and so ill-favoured, could not have been found 
 in the whole of Christendom. The Medicaean Library was his 
 study, his refectory, and his dormitory; though, except in the 
 depth of winter, he saved the time of dressing and undressing, by 
 sleeping in his clothes and on his chair ; his bed serving the while 
 as an auxiliary book-stand. Fruit and salads were his fare ; and 
 when sometimes an anchovy was served up with them, the worthy 
 librarian, in an absent mood, would not unfrequently mistake and 
 use it for sealing-wax. Partly from want of time, and partly from 
 the consciousness that an accurate likeness of him would be a cari- 
 cature on humanity at large, he would never allow his portrait to be 
 taken ; though what the pencil was not permitted to do, the pens of 
 his acquaintance have so attempted, that he would have judged 
 better in allowing the painter to do his worst. Michel Germain 
 describes him as " Varillas multiplied by three." Now Menage 
 tells us that happening once to say that every man was hit off by 
 some passage or other in Martial, and having been challenged to 
 prove it with respect to Varillas, the most slovenly scholar of his 
 acquaintance, he immediately quoted "Dimidiasque nates Gallica 
 palla tegit." Short indeed, then, must have been the skirts of 
 Magliabechi, according to Germain's arithmetic. 
 
 His bibliographical appetite and digestion formed, however, a 
 psychological phenomenon absolutely prodigious. Mabillon called 
 him "Museum inambulans, et viva quaedam bibliotheca." Father 
 Finardi, with greater felicity, said of him, "Is unus bibliotheca 
 magna," that being the anagram of his Latinised name, Antonius 
 Magliabechius. 
 
 Having established a correspondence with this most learned 
 savage, the Benedictines proceeded to Eome, where they were 
 welcomed by Claude Estiennot, the procurator of their Order at the 
 Papal court. He also devoted his pen to their entertainment. 
 Light labour for such a pen ! within eleven years he had collected
 
 272 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 and transcribed forty-five bulky folios, at the various libraries of 
 his society in the several dioceses of France, adding to them, says 
 Doin Le Cerf, " reflexions tres sensees et judicieuses ;" a praise which 
 probably no other mortal was ever able to gainsay or to affirm. 
 
 Germain found Eome agitated with the affair of the Quietists. 
 His account of the dispute is rather facetious than theological. 
 Just then a Spaniard had been sent to the galleys, and a priest to 
 the gallows; the first for talking, and the second for writing 
 scandals, while the great Quietist Molinos was in the custody of the 
 Inquisition. Marforio, says Germain, is asked by Pasquin why are 
 you leaving Eome, and answers, " Chi parla e mandato in galera ; 
 chi scrive e impiccato ; chi sta quieto va al sant' officio." Marforio 
 had good cause for his hurry ; for the scandal which (as Germain 
 pleasantly has it) " broke the priest's neck " was merely his having 
 said that "the mare had knocked the snail out of its shell ;" in 
 allusion to the fact of the Pope's having been forced out of his 
 darling seclusion and repose, to be present at a certain festival, at 
 which a mare or palfrey was also an indispensable attendant. " The 
 rogues continue to repeat the jest notwithstanding," observes the 
 reverend looker-on. 
 
 He gathered other pleasant stories, at the expense of his Holiness 
 and these heretical aspirants after a devotional repose of the soul. 
 Some of them are not quite manageable in our most fastidious times, 
 without the aid of a thicker veil than he chose to employ. For 
 example, he tells of a Quietist bishop who, to escape an imaginary 
 pursuit of the police, scaled the roof of his mansion in his night- 
 dress, and so, running along the tops of the adjacent houses, un- 
 luckily made his descent through one of them, into which he could 
 not have entered, even in full canonicals and in broad day, without 
 a grievous damage to his reputation. Then follows a fine buffo 
 catastrophe, and when (says Germain) " the whole reaches the ears 
 of Nostro Signore, the holy man has a good laugh, and orders the 
 bishop to quit Eome without delay." Yet Germain himself breaks 
 out into hot resentment against "the wretched and abandoned 
 Molinos," and proposes to Magliabechi (in seeming seriousness) to 
 arrest the progress of the evil, by publishing a manuscript dis- 
 covered in their Italian tour, from which it would appear that the 
 bones of a wicked Bohemian lady, of the name of Guillemine, who, 
 three centuries before, had propagated nearly the same enormities, 
 were at length taken, with public execration, out of her grave, and 
 scattered to the winds. 
 
 Molinos, however, was strong in the protection of Christina, who 
 then dwelt at Eome. Her abandonment of the faith of her illustrious
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 273 
 
 father, was accepted there, not only as a cover for a multitude of 
 sins, but as an apology for the assumption of an independent authority 
 beneath the very shadow of the Vatican. Mabillon, accompanied 
 by Germain, presented to her his book " De Liturgia Gallicana," in 
 which, to her exceeding discontent, she found herself described as 
 " Serenissima." " My name," she exclaimed, " is Christina. That is 
 eulogy enough. Never again call me, and admonish your Parisians 
 never to call me, Serenissima." Germain left her with the fullest 
 conviction that the epithet was altogether out of place ; but " after 
 all," he says, " she gave us free access to her library, the best thing 
 she could do for us." So great were her privileges, or such the 
 weakness of the lazy Innocent XI., that, as we learn from these 
 letters, an oifender on his way to prison, having laid hold on the 
 bars of one of her windows as a sanctuary, was violently rescued by 
 her servants, whereupon they were tried and sentenced to be hanged. 
 Christina wrote to the judge to inform him, that if her servants died 
 any other than a natural death, they should not die alone ! The 
 judge complained to the Pope ; but his Holiness laughed at the 
 affair, and terminated it by sending her Majesty a peace-offering, 
 which she contemptuously handed over to the complainant. 
 
 Germain looked upon the religious observances of Rome with the 
 eye of a French encyclopediste. He declares that the Romans burn 
 before the Madonna, and in their churches, more oil than the 
 Parisians both burn and swallow. " Long live St Anthony ! " he 
 exclaims, as he describes the horses, asses, and mules all going, on the 
 saint's festival, to be sprinkled with holy water, and to receive the 
 benediction of a reverend father. " All would go to ruin, say the 
 Romans, if this act of piety were omitted. So nobody escapes pay- 
 ing toll on this occasion, not Nostro Signore himself." Then follows 
 an account of a procession to St Peter's, on the repetition of certain 
 new converts, which is compressed into a single paragraph purposely 
 long, intricate, and obscure ; " a sentence," says Germain, " which 
 I have drawn out to this length to imitate the ceremony itself." 
 Soon after we meet him at the cemetery of Pontianus, " where," he 
 observes with all the mock gravity of Bayle, "there lie 50,263 mar- 
 tyrs, without counting the women and children. Each of us was 
 allowed to carry off one of these holy bodies. That which fell to my 
 share had been too big for the hole in which it was found. I had 
 infinite trouble in disinterring it, for it was quite wet, and the holy 
 bones were all squeezed and jammed together. I am still knocked 
 up with the labour." 
 
 The Pope himself fares no better than the ceremonies and relics 
 of his church. " If I should attempt," he says, " to give you an exact 
 
 18
 
 274 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 account of the health of his Holiness, I must begin with Ovid, ' In 
 nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas.' At ten he is sick, at fif- 
 teen well again, at eighteen eating as much as four men, at twenty- 
 four dropsical. They say he has vowed never to leave his room. If 
 so, M. Struse declares that he can never get a dispensation, not even 
 from himself, as his confinement will be de jure divino. The un- 
 pleasant part of the affair is, that they say he has given up all thoughts 
 of creating new cardinals, forgetting in his restored health the scruples 
 he felt when sick ; like other great sinners." 
 
 Indolent and hypochondriacal as he was, Innocent XL had signal- 
 ised himself, not only by the virtues which Burnet ascribes to him 
 in his travels, but by two remarkable edicts. One of them, which 
 could not be decorously quoted, regulated the appearance on the 
 stage of certain classes of singers ; the other (under the penalties of 
 six days' excommunication, and of incapacity for absolution, even in 
 the article of death, save from the Pope himself), commanded all 
 ladies to wear up to their chins, and down to their wrists, draperies 
 not transparent. " The Queen of Spain," says our facetious Bene- 
 dictine, "immediately had a new dress made, and sent it to her 
 nuncio at Home, to ascertain whether it tallied exactly with the 
 ordinance : for," he continues (the inference is not very clear), " one 
 must allow that Spanish ladies have not as much delicacy as our own." 
 
 He has another story for the exhilaration of St Germain-des-Pres, 
 at the expense of both pope and cardinals. A party of the sacred 
 college were astounded, after dinner, by the appearance of an austere 
 Capuchin, who, as an unexpected addition to their dessert, rebuked 
 their indolence and luxury, and their talkativeness even during 
 High Mass. Then, passing onwards to an inner chamber, the 
 preacher addressed his Holiness himself, on the sin of an inordinate 
 solicitude about health no inappropriate theme ; for he was lying 
 in the centre of four fires, and beneath the load of seven coverlets, 
 having recently sustained a surgical operation ; on which Germain 
 remarks, that if it had taken place in summer, " it would have been 
 all up with the holy man." 
 
 The Jesuits of course take their turn. At the table of the 
 Cardinal Estrees, Mabillon and Germain meet the Father Couplet, 
 who had passed thirty years in China. " I do not know," says 
 Germain, "whether he was mandarin and mathematical apostle at 
 the same time; but he told us that one of his brethren was so 
 eminent an astrologer as to have been created a mandarin of the 
 third class. He said that another of them was raiding himself Ly 
 contemplation to the third heaven, before actually going there. I 
 have my doubts about his success. However, Father Couplet told
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 275 
 
 us that he had a very numerous Chretiente. ' My ChretienteJ he 
 frequently said, ' consists of more than 30,000 souls.' Do you 
 believe his story, that there are forty millions of inhabitants in 
 Pekin, and from two to three hundred millions in China at large 1 I 
 do not." 
 
 This keen observer is not silent on the cold reception at Rome of 
 the revocation of the Edict at Nantes. The arrogant claims of Louis 
 XIV. on behalf of the Galilean Church and Crown had abated much 
 of the enthusiasm with which the measure would otherwise have 
 been hailed. " Well," observes Germain (one can see the rising of 
 his shoulders as he writes), " a hundred years ago they took a very 
 different tone about the Huguenots. They not only offered public 
 thanksgiving on their massacre by Charles IX., but hung the walls 
 of the royal hall in the Vatican with pictures of the murder of 
 Coligny and of the butcheries of St Bartholomew. They still form 
 its chief ornaments." 
 
 Even when accompanying Mabillon on a pilgrimage to the cradle 
 of their Order at Monte Casino, Germain looks about him with the 
 same esprit fort. " At the foot of the mountain," he says, "we found 
 an inn, where we learned to fast, as we got nothing but some 
 cabbages which I could not eat, some nuts, and one apple for our 
 supper. Then we paid thirty francs for a wretched bed, which we 
 divided between us, in the midst of bugs and fleas." On the next 
 day they luckily fell in with the vicar-general of the Barnabites, a 
 Frenchman, from whom (he says) " we got some cheese and pre- 
 serves, and, finally, a glass of Lachryma ; as he told us, to strengthen 
 the stomach. Reaching at length the mansion of the abbe of 
 Monte Casino, he made a fete for us, and bore witness to our 
 excellent appetites." 
 
 Mabillon's devotion at the tomb of his patriarch is described as 
 deep, fervent, and protracted. Germain sends to their friend Por- 
 cheron a picturesque account of the dress and aspect of the monks, 
 an enthusiastic description of the library, a very pretty sketch of the 
 adjacent country, Avith a graphic representation of the church and 
 the ceremonial observed in it ; and promises his correspondent " to 
 say a mass for him at the foot of Benedict's tomb." "With the ex- 
 ception of that assurance (whether grave or gay it is not easy to de- 
 termine), the whole letter might have been written by Miss 
 Martineau, and would have done no discredit even to her powers of 
 converting her readers into her fellow-travellers. 
 
 Such of the letters comprised in this collection as are written by 
 Mabillon himself, relate exclusively to the duties of his mission ; 
 and are grave and simple, though perhaps too elaborately courteous. 
 
 18 *
 
 "276 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 In the last volume are some contributions from Quesnel, whose 
 singular fate it is to have been censured by the Pope, Clement XI., 
 and eulogised by De Ranee the Trappist, by La Chaise the Jesuit, 
 by Voltaire the "Wit, and by Cousin the Philosopher. The plea- 
 santries of Michel Germain and the freedoms of Estiennot are far 
 from being the best things in M. Valery's book. We have selected 
 them rather as being the most apposite to our immediate purpose. 
 
 In this correspondence three of the most eminent of the congre- 
 gation of St Maur transmit from Italy such intelligence and remarks 
 as appear to them best adapted to interest other three of the most 
 eminent of their brotherhood at Paris. If the table-talk of the 
 refectory at St Germain-des-Pres was of the same general character, 
 the monks there had no better title to the praise of an ascetic social 
 intercourse, than the students or the barristers in the halls of Christ 
 Church, or of Lincoln's Tnn. It would be difficult to suppose an 
 appetite for gossip more keen, or more luxuriously gratified. 
 
 The writers and the receivers of these letters were all men devoted 
 by the most sacred vows to the duties of the Christian priesthood ; 
 yet in a confidential epistolary intercourse, extending through 
 eighteen successive months, no one of them utters a sentiment, or 
 discusses a question, from which it could be gathered that he sus- 
 tained any religious office, or seriously entertained any religious be- 
 lief whatever. It may be that our Protestant divines occasionally 
 transgress the limits within which modesty should confine the dis- 
 closure, even to the most intimate friends, of the interior movements 
 of a devout spirit. But all reverence to the memory of our Dod- 
 dridges and Howes, our Venns and Newtons ! whose familiar letters, 
 if sometimes chargeable with a failure in that graceful reserve, yet 
 always glow with a holy unction, and can at least never be charged 
 with the frigid indifference which these learned Benedictines exhibit 
 on the subjects to which they had all most solemnly devoted their 
 talents and their lives. 
 
 Visiting, for the first time, the places which they regard as the 
 centre of Christian unity, as the seat of apostolic dominion, as the 
 temple towards which all the churches of the earth should worship, 
 as the ever salient fountain of truth, and as the abode of him who 
 impersonates to his brother men the Divine Eedeemer of mankind, 
 not a solitary word of awe or of tenderness falls from their pens 
 not a fold of those dark tunics is heaved by any throb of grateful 
 remembrance or of exulting hope. They could not have traversed 
 Moscow or Amsterdam with a more imperturbable phlegm; nor 
 have sauntered along the banks of the Seine or the courts of the 
 Louvre in a temper more perfectly debonnaire. '
 
 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 277 
 
 Protestant zeal may be sometimes rude, bitter, and contumelious 
 in denouncing Roman Catholic superstitions. It is a fault to be 
 sternly rebuked. But how adequately censure these reverend mem- 
 bers of that communion, who, without one passing sigh, or one in- 
 dignant phrase, depict the shameful abuses of the holiest offices of 
 their Church, with cold sarcasms and heartless unconcern ! 
 
 Rome combated her Protestant antagonists by the aid of the 
 Jesuits in the world, and of the Benedictines in the closet. Yet to 
 those alliances she owes much of the silent revolt against her 
 authority which has characterised the last hundred years ; and of 
 which the progress is daily becoming more apparent. The Jesuits 
 involved her in their own too well merited disesteem. The Bene- 
 dictines have armed the philosophy both of France and Germany 
 with some of the keenest weapons by which she has been assailed. 
 It was an ill day for the Papacy, when the congregation of St 
 Maur, at the instance of Benard, called the attention of their fellow- 
 countrymen to the mediaeval history of the Church, and invited the 
 most enlightened generation of men whom Europe had ever seen, 
 to study and believe a mass of fables of which the most audacious 
 Grecian mythologist would have been ashamed, and at which the 
 credulity of a whole college of augurs would have staggered. 
 
 It was but a too prolific soil on which this seed was scattered. 
 At the moment when, in the integrity of his heart, Mabillon was 
 propagating these legends, the walls of his monastery were often 
 passed by a youth, whose falcon eye illuminated with ceaseless 
 change one of the most expressive countenances in which the human 
 soul had ever found a mirror. If the venerable old man had fore- 
 seen how that eye would one day traverse his Benedictine annals, 
 in a too successful search for the materials of the most overwhelming 
 ridicule of all which he held holy, he would cheerfully have con- 
 signed his unfinished volumes, and with ihem his own honoured 
 name, to oblivion. Not so would Michel Germain, Claude Estien- 
 not, and the brethren for whose amusement they wrote, have con- 
 templated, if they could have foreknown, the approaching career of 
 the young Arouet. Though they clung to the Church of Rome 
 with all the ardour of partisans, and though their attachment to 
 her was probably sincere, their convictions must have been faint, 
 unripe, and wavering. The mists of doubt, though insufficient to 
 deprive them of their faith in Christianity, had struck a damp and 
 abiding chill into their hearts. If they had lived long enough to 
 know the patriarch of Ferney, they would have been conscious of 
 the close affinity between his spirit and their own. 
 
 How could it have* been otherwise 1 From disinterring legends
 
 278 THE FRENCH BENEDICTINES. 
 
 and traditions revolting to their hearts and understandings, they 
 passed to Eome, there to disinter foul masses of holy bones, to con- 
 template sacred processions of mules and asses, to find a corpulent, 
 self-indulgent valetudinarian sustaining the character of the vicar of 
 Christ, and to discover that the basest motives of worldly interest 
 dictated to the Papal court the decisions for which they dared to 
 claim a divine impulse and a divine infallibility. From such follies 
 and such pretensions these learned persons turned away with im- 
 measurable contempt. The freedom of thought which unveiled to 
 them these frauds left them disgusted with error, but did not carry 
 them forward to the pursuit of truth. Without the imbecility to 
 respect such extravagances, they were also Avithout the courage to 
 denounce and repudiate them. Their superior light taught them to 
 expose and ridicule religious error ; it did not teach them to em- 
 brace unwelcome truth. In that book which is " the religion of 
 Protestants," they might have read that " the light is the life of 
 men," that is, of men who obey and follow its guidance. There 
 also they might have learned that " the light which is in us may be 
 darkness," that is, may at once illuminate the inquisitive intellect, 
 and darken the insensible heart. The letters which they have be- 
 queathed to us, interesting as they are in other respects, afford 
 melancholy proof how deeply the younger Benedictines of the con- 
 gregation of St Maur were already imbued with the spirit of that 
 disastrous philosophy, which was destined, before the lapse of 
 another century, to subvert the ancient institutions of their native 
 land, and with them, the venerable fabric of their own illustrious 
 Order.
 
 279 
 
 THE PORT-KOYALISTS. 
 
 ALL religions, and all ages, have their saints ; their men of un- 
 earthly mould ; self-conquerors ; suhlime even in their errors ; not 
 altogether hateful in their very crimes. If a man would understand 
 the dormant powers of his own nature, let him read the Ada sanc- 
 torum. Or, if " too high this price of knowledge," let him at least 
 acquaint himself with the legends of the later heroes of the Gallican 
 Church. Of all ascetics they were the least repulsive. They waged 
 war on dulness with the ardour of Dangeau and St Simon, and with 
 still better success. While macerating their bodies in the cloisters 
 of Port-Royal, they did not cease to be French men and French 
 women of the Augustan age. While practising the monastic virtue 
 of silence, their social spirit escaped this unwelcome restraint, in a 
 body of Memoirs as copious as those which record the splendour and 
 the miseries of Versailles. A rapid sketch of the substance of those 
 monastic chronicles may not be without its use in directing the 
 attention of our readers to one of the most remarkable episodes in 
 ecclesiastical history. 
 
 He whose journey lies from Versailles to Chevreuse, will soon 
 find himself at the brow of a steep cleft or hollow, intersecting the 
 monotonous plain across which he has been passing. The brook 
 which winds through the verdant meadows beneath him, stagnates 
 into a large pool, reflecting the mutilated Gothic arch, the water- 
 mill, and the dovecot, which rise from its banks ; with the farm- 
 house, the decayed towers, the forest trees, and innumerable shrubs 
 and creepers which clothe the slopes of the valley. France has 
 many a lovelier prospect, though this is not without its beauty ; 
 and many a field of more heart-stirring interest, though this, too, 
 has been ennobled by heroic daring ; but through the length and 
 breadth of that land of chivalry and of song, the traveller will in 
 vain seek a spot so sacred to genius, to piety, and to virtue. That 
 arch is all which remains of the once crowded monastery of Port- 
 Eoyal. In those woods Racine first learned the language the
 
 280 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 universal language of poetry. Under the roof of that humble 
 farmhouse, Pascal, Arnauld, Nicole, De Saci, and Tillemont, medi- 
 tated those works, which, as long as civilisation and Christianity 
 survive, will retain their hold on the gratitude and reverence of 
 mankind. There were given innumerable proofs of the graceful 
 good humour of Henry IV. To this seclusion retired the heroine 
 of the Fronde, Ann Genevieve, Duchess of Longueville, to seek the 
 peace which the world could not give. Madame de Sevigne dis- 
 covered here a place " tout propre a. inspirer le desir de faire son 
 salut." From the Petit Trianon and Marly, there came hither to 
 worship God, many a courtier and many a beauty, heart-broken or 
 jaded with the very vanity of vanities the idolatry of their fellow- 
 mortals. Survey French society in the seventeenth century from 
 what aspect you will, it matters not, at Port-Koyal will be found 
 the most illustrious examples of whatever imparted to that motley 
 assemblage any real dignity or permanent regard. Even to the 
 mere antiquarian, it was not Avithout a lively interest. 
 
 At the eve of his departure to the conquest of the Holy Sepul- 
 chre, the good knight, Matthieu de Marli, cast a wistful gaze over 
 the broad lands of his ancestors, and entrusted to his spouse, 
 Mathilde de Garlaade, the care of executing some work of piety by 
 which to propitiate the Divine favour, and to insure his safe return. 
 A Benedictine monastery, for the reception of twelve ladies of the 
 Cistercian Order, was accordingly erected, in imitation of the 
 Cathedral at Amiens, and by the same architect. Four centuries 
 witnessed the gradual increase of the wealth and splendour of the 
 foundation. Prelates of the houses of Sully and Nemours enlarged 
 its privileges. Pope Honorius III. authorised the celebration of 
 the sacred office within its walls, even though the whole country 
 should be lying under a papal interdict ; and of the host consecrated 
 on the profession of a nun, seven fragments might be solemnly con- 
 fided to her own keeping, that, for as many successive days, she 
 might administer to herself the holy sacrament. Yet how arrest 
 by spiritual immunities the earthward tendency of all sublunary 
 things 1 At the close of the reign of Henry IV., the religious ladies 
 of Port-Royal had learned to adjust their " robes a grandes manches " 
 to the best advantage. Promenades by the margin of the lake 
 relieved the tedium of monastic life. Gayer strains of music than 
 those of the choir might be heard from the adjacent woods ; and if 
 a cavalier from Paris or Chevreuse had chanced to pursue his game 
 that way, the fair musicians were not absolutely concealed nor in- 
 exorably silent. So lightly sat the burden of their vows on those
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 281 
 
 amiable recluses, that the gayest courtier might well covet for his 
 portionless daughter the rank of their lady abbess. 
 
 Such at least was the judgment of M. Marion. He was advocate- 
 general to Henry IV., and maternal grandfather of Jaqueline Marie 
 Angelique, and of Agnes Arnauld. Jobbing is not one of the arts 
 to the invention of which the moderns may lay claim. M. Marion 
 obtained from "the father of his people" the coadjuterie of the 
 Abbey of Port-Eoyal for the high-spirited Jaqueline, then in her 
 eighth year ; and that of St Cyr for the more gentle Agnes, over 
 whom not more than five summers had passed. The young ladies 
 renounced at once the nursery and the world. A single step con- 
 ducted them from the leading strings to the veil. Before the com- 
 pletion of her first decade, Angelique, on the death of her immediate 
 predecessor, found herself, in plenary right, the abbess and ruler of 
 her monastery; and, in attestation of her spiritual espousals, as- 
 sumed the title and the name of the Mere Angelique, by which she 
 has since been celebrated in the annals of the Church. 
 
 To the Church, however, must not be imputed this breach of 
 ecclesiastical discipline. In the ardour of his parental affections, 
 the learned advocate-general was hurried into acts for which he 
 would have consigned a criminal of lower degree to the galleys. 
 He obtained the requisite bulls from Rome by forged certificates of 
 his granddaughter's age ; and to this treason against the Holy See, 
 Henry himself was at least an accessory after the fact. Hunting in 
 the valley of Port-Royal, the gay monarch trespassed on the pre- 
 cincts of the sacred enclosure. To repel the royal intruder, a child, 
 bearing in her hand the crosier which bespoke her high conventual 
 rank, issued from the gates of the abbey at the head of a solemn 
 procession of nuns, and rebuked her sovereign with all the majesty 
 of an infant Ambrose. Henry laughed and obeyed. Marion's 
 detected fraud would seem to have passed for a good practical joke, 
 and for nothing more. In the result, however, no occurrence ever 
 contributed less to the comedy of life, or formed the commencement 
 of a series of events more grave or touching. It would be difficult 
 or impossible to discover, in the history of the Church, the name of 
 any woman who has left so deep an impress of her character on the 
 thoughts and the conduct of the Christian commonwealth. 
 
 The family of Arnauld held a conspicuous station among the 
 noblesse of Provence, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 
 a later age a member of that house enjoyed the singular honour of 
 at once serving Catharine de Medicis as her procureur-general, and 
 of defeating, sword in hand, at the head of his servants, the force
 
 282 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 sent to assassinate him on the day of St Bartholomew. Returning 
 to the bosom of the church, -which had thus roughly wooed him, he 
 transmitted his fortune and his office to his son, Antoine Arnauld, 
 the husband of Catharine Marion. They were the happy parents 
 of no less then twenty children. Of these the youngest was the 
 great writer, who has imparted to the name of Arnauld an imperish- 
 able lustre. Five of the daughters of the same house assumed the 
 veil in the abbey of Port-RoyaL Their mother, Catharine Marion, 
 was admitted in her widowhood into that society. Pomponne, the 
 minister of Louis XIV., Le Maitre, unrivalled among the masters 
 of forensic eloquence in France, and De Saci, the author of the best 
 version of the Holy Scriptures into the French language, were three 
 of her grandsons. Before her death the venerable matron had seen 
 herself surrounded, in the monastery and the adjoining hermitages, 
 by eighteen of her descendants in the first and second generations ; 
 nor until the final dispersion of the sisterhood, in the beginning 
 of the seventeenth century, had the posterity of Antoine and 
 Catharine Arnauld ceased to rule in the house of which the Mere 
 Angelique had, seventy years before, been the renowned reformer. 
 
 To those who believe that the psychological distinction of the 
 sexes may be traced to physical causes ; and that, where they neither 
 marry nor are given in marriage, those distinctions will for ever 
 disappear, the character of Angelique is less perplexing than to the 
 advocates of the opposite theory. Her understanding, her spirit, 
 and her resolves, were all essentially masculine. She was endued 
 with the various faculties by which man either extorts or wins do- 
 minion over his fellow-men ; with address, courage, fortitude, self- 
 reliance, and an unfaltering gaze fixed on objects at once too vast to 
 be measured, and too remote to be discerned, but by the all-search- 
 ing eye of faith. Among the Israelites of old, she would have as- 
 sumed the office of Judge ; or would have given out oracles in the 
 forests of ancient Germany. Born in the reign, and educated near 
 the court, of a Bourbon, the lighter and more gentle elements of her 
 nature found exercise even under the paralysing influences of an 
 ascetic life ; for Angelique was gay and light of heart, and St 
 Benedict himself might have forgiven or applauded the playful 
 sallies of his votary. In scaling the heights of devotion, she could 
 call to her own aid, and that of others, all the resources of the most 
 plaintive or impassioned music. To flowers, and the glad face of 
 nature, she gave back their own smiles with a true woman's sym- 
 pathy. With such literature as might be cultivated within the 
 walls of her convent, she was intimately conversant; and would
 
 THE PORT-EOTALISTS. 283 
 
 have eclipsed Madame de Sevigne's epistolary fame, had it been 
 permitted to her to escape from theological into popular topics. 
 Concentrated within a domestic circle, and bestowed on a husband 
 or a child, the affections which she poured out on every human 
 being who claimed her pity, would have burned with a flame as 
 pure and as intense as was ever hymned in poetry, or dreamt of in 
 romance. A traveller on the highways of the world, she must have 
 incurred every peril except that of treading an obscure and inglo- 
 rious path. Immured by supersition in a cloister, she opened the way 
 at once to sublunary fame and to an immortal recompense ; and has 
 left an example as dangerous as it may be seductive to feebler 
 minds who, in a desperate imitation of such a model, should hazard 
 a similar self-devotion. 
 
 Angelique, indeed, might be fitted for a nunnery ; for such was 
 the strength, and such the sacred harmony, of her spirit, that whilst 
 still a sojourner on earth, she seemed already a denizen of heaven. 
 When a child, she understood as a child ; enjoying the sports, the 
 rambles, and the social delights which the habits of Port-Royal had 
 not then forbidden. With advancing years came deeper and more 
 melancholy thoughts. She felt, indeed, (how could she but feel?) 
 the yearnings of a young heart for a world where love and homage 
 awaited her. But those mysteries of our being of which the most 
 frivolous are not altogether unconscious, pressed with unwonted 
 weight on her. A spouse of Christ a spiritual mother of those 
 who sustained the same awful character -her orisons, her matins, 
 and her vesper chants, accompanied by unearthly music and by 
 forms of solemn significance the Gothic pile beneath which she 
 sat enthroned and the altar where, as she was taught, the visible 
 presence of her Redeemer was daily manifested all spoke to 
 her of a high destiny, a fearful responsibility, and of objects for 
 which all sublunary ties might well be severed, and a sacrifice 
 wisely made of every selfish feeling. NOT need a Protestant fear 
 to acknowledge, that on a heart thus consecrated to the service of 
 her Maker, rested the holy influence, familiar to all who meekly 
 adore the great source of wisdom, and reverently acquiesce in his 
 will. As a science, religion consists in the knowledge of the re- 
 lations between God and man ; as a living principle, in the exercise 
 of the corresponding affections ; as a rule of duty, in the perform- 
 ance of the actions which those affections prescribe. The principle 
 may thrive in healthful life and energy, though the science be ill 
 understood, and the rule imperfectly apprehended. For, after all, 
 the great command is Love; and He from whom that command
 
 284 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 proceeded, is himself Love ; and amidst all the absurdities (for such 
 they were) of her monastic life, Angelique was still conscious of 
 the presence of a Father, and found the guidance of a friend. 
 
 When, at the age of eleven years, Angelique became the abbess 
 of Port-Royal, few things were less thought of by the French 
 ladies of the Cistercian Order than the rule of their austere founder. 
 During the wars of the League, religion, by becoming a watchword, 
 had almost ceased to be a reality. Civil war, the apology for every 
 crime, had debased the national character; and the profligacy of 
 manners which the last generation expiated by their sufferings, 
 may be distinctly paid back to the age of which Davila has written 
 the political, and Bassompierre the social history. Society will 
 still exert a powerful influence even over those by whom it has been 
 abandoned. When Gabrielle d'Etrees reigned at the Louvre, beads 
 were told and masses sung in neighbouring cloisters, by vestals 
 who, in heathen Rome, would have been consigned to a living 
 sepulchre. In a monastery, the spiritual thermometer ranges from 
 the boiling to the freezing point, with but few intermediate 
 pauses. From the ecstacies of devotion there is but one step to 
 disgust, and thence to sensuality, for most of those who dare to 
 forego the aids to piety and virtue which Divine wisdom has pro- 
 vided in the duties and the affections of domestic life. 
 
 While this downward progress was advancing at Port-Royal, it 
 happened that a Capuchin friar sought and obtained permission to 
 preach there. Of the man himself, the chroniclers of the house 
 have left a scandalous report ; but they gratefully acknowledge the 
 efficacy of his sermon. Angelique listened, and was converted. 
 Such, at least, is her own statement : and unstirred be all the theo- 
 logical questions connected with it. How deep was the impression 
 on her mind, may be gathered from her own words : " Often," she 
 exclaims, " did I wish to fly a hundred leagues from the spot, and 
 never more to see my father, mother, or kindred, dearly as I love 
 them. My desire was to live apart from every one but God, un- 
 known to any human being, concealed and humble, with no witness 
 but himself, with no desire but to please him." Her dignity as 
 abbess she now regarded as a burden. Even her projected reforms 
 had lost their interest. To live where her holy aspirations would 
 be thwarted, and where examples of holiness would not be found, 
 was to soar to a more arduous, and therefore a more attractive sphere 
 of self-denial That such fascinations should dazzle a young lady 
 in her seventeenth year, is, it must be confessed, no very memorable 
 prodigy ; but to cherish no ineffectual emotions was one of the cha- 
 racteristics of the Mere Angelique ; as it is, indeed, of all powerful
 
 THE PORT-EOYALISTS. 285 
 
 minds. To abdicate her ecclesiastical rank, and, by breathing a 
 tainted moral atmosphere, to nourish, by the force of contrast, the 
 loftier Christian graces, were purposes ultimately executed, though 
 for a while postponed. She paused only till the sisterhood of Port- 
 Royal should have acquired, from her example or teaching, that 
 sanctity of manners in which her creed informed her that the per- 
 fection of our nature consists. To the elder ladies, the prospect had 
 few charms. But the will of their young abbess prevailed. They 
 laid at her feet their separate possessions, abandoned every secular 
 amusement, and, closing the gates of their monastery against all 
 strangers, retired to that uninterrupted discharge of their spiritual 
 exercises to which their vows had consigned them. Much may be 
 read, in the conventual annals, of the contest with her family to 
 which the Mere Angelique was exposed by the last of these resolu- 
 tions. On a day, subsequently held in high esteem as the 
 " Journee du Guichet," her parents and M. D'Andilly, her eldest 
 brother, were publicly excluded, by her mandate, from the hallowed 
 precincts, despite their reproaches and their prayers, and the filial 
 agonies of her own heart. That great sacrifice accomplished, the 
 rest was easy. Poverty resumed his stern dominion. Linen gave 
 place to the coarsest woollens. Fasting and vigils subdued the 
 lower appetites ; and Port-Royal was once more a temple whence 
 the sacrifices of devotion rose with an unextinguished flame to 
 heaven, thence, as it was piously believed, to draw down an un- 
 broken stream of blessings upon earth. 
 
 Far different were the strains that arose from the neighbouring 
 abbey of Maubisson, under the rule of Mde d'Etrees. That splen- 
 did mansion, with its dependent baronies and forests, resembled far 
 more the palace and gardens of Armida, than a retreat sacred to 
 penitence and prayer. She was the sister of the too famous Ga- 
 brielle, to whose influence with Henry she was indebted for this 
 rich preferment. Indulging without restraint, not merely in the 
 luxuries but in the debaucheries of the neighbouring capital, she 
 had provoked the anger of the king, and the alarm of the General 
 of the Order. A visitation of the house was directed. Madame 
 d'Etrees imprisoned the visitors, and well-nigh starved them. A 
 second body of delegates presented themselves. Penances, at least 
 when compulsory, were not disused at Maubisson. The new com- 
 missioneis were locked up in a dungeon, regaled with bread and 
 water, and soundly whipped every morning. Supported by a 
 guard, the General himself then hazarded an encounter with the 
 formidable termagant. He returned with a whole skin, but boast- 
 ing no other advantage. Next appeared at the abbey gates a .band
 
 286 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 of archers. After two days of fruitless expostulation, they broke 
 into the enclosure. Madame now changed her tactics. She took 
 up a defensive position, till then unheard of in the science of 
 strategy. In plain terms she went to bed. A more embarrassing 
 manoeuvre was never executed by Turenne or Conde. The siege 
 was turned into a blockade. Hour after hour elapsed ; night suc- 
 ceeded to day, and day to night ; but still the abbess was recumbent 
 unapparelled, unapproachable. Driven thus to choose between 
 a ludicrous defeat and a sore scandal, what Frenchman could longer 
 hesitate 1 Bed, blankets, abbess and all, were raised on the profane 
 shoulders of the archers, lifted into a carriage, and most appropri- 
 ately turned over to the keeping of the Filles Penitentes at Paris. 
 
 And now was to be gratified the lofty wish of Angelique to 
 tread in paths where, unsustained by any human sympathy, she 
 might cast herself with an undivided reliance on the Arm which 
 she knew could never fail her. From the solemn repose of Port- 
 Royal, she was called, by the General of the Order, to assume the 
 government of the ladies of Maubisson. Thetis passing from the 
 oceau caves to the Grecian camp, did not make a more abrupt 
 transition. At Maubisson, the compromise between religious duties 
 and earthly pleasures was placed on the most singular footing. 
 Monks and nuns sauntered together through the gardens of the 
 monastery, or angled in the lakes which watered them. Fetes 
 were celebrated in the arbours with every pledge except that of 
 temperance. Benedictine cowls and draperies were blended in the 
 dance with the military uniform and the stiff brocades of their secu- 
 lar guests ; and the evening closed with cards and dice and amateur 
 theatricals, until the curtain fell on scenes than which none could 
 more require that friendly shelter. Toil and care might seem to 
 have fled the place, or rather to have been reserved exclusively for 
 the confessor. Even for him relief was provided. Considerately 
 weighing the extent of the labours which they habitually imposed 
 on him, his fair penitents drew up for their common use certain 
 written forms of self-arraignment, to which he, with equal tender- 
 ness, responded by other established forms of conditional absolution. 
 But the Lady entered, and Comus and his crew fled the hallowed 
 ground which they had thus been permitted to defile. She entered 
 with all the majesty of faith, tempered by a meek compassion for 
 the guilt she abhorred, and strong in that virgin purity of heart, 
 which can endure unharmed the contact even of pollution. " Our 
 health and our lives may be sacrificed," she said to her associates in 
 this work of mercy ; " but the work is the work of God : " and in 
 the strength of God she performed it. Seclusion from the world
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 287 
 
 was again established within the refectory and the domain of Maubis- 
 son. Novices possessing a " genuine vocation" were admitted. 
 Angelique directed at once the secular and the spiritual affairs of 
 the convent. All the details of a feudal principality, the education 
 of the young, the care of the sick, the soothing of the penitents, the 
 management of the perverse, the conduct of the sacred offices, 
 alternately engaged her time ; and in each she exhibited a gentle- 
 ness, a gaiety, and a firmness of mind, before which all resistance 
 gave way. The associates of Madame d'Etrees retained their love 
 of good cheer, and Angelique caused their table to be elegantly 
 served. They sang deplorably out of tune, and the young abbess 
 silently endured the discord which racked her ear. To their mur- 
 murs she answered in her kindest accents. Their indolence she 
 rebuked only by performing the most menial offices in their service ; 
 and she inculcated self-denial by assigning to herself a dormitory 
 which, to say the truth, would have much better suited the house- 
 dog. The record of the strange and even sordid self-humiliations 
 to which she thought it right to bow, can hardly be read without 
 a smile ; but, whatever may have been the errors of her creed, a more 
 touching picture has never been drawn of the triumphs of love and 
 of wisdom, than in the record left by Madame Suireau des Anges 
 of this passage of the life of Angelique Arnauld. 
 
 But Madame d'Etrees was not yet at the end of her resources. 
 A company of young men, under the guidance of her brother-in- 
 law, the Count de Sauze, were observed one evening to loiter near 
 the house of the Filles Penitentes. By the next morning she was, 
 under their escort, at the gates of Maubisson. Burst open by main 
 force, they again admitted the ejected abbess. The servant who 
 opposed her entrance was chastised on the spot. Patients who now 
 occupied as an hospital the once sumptuous chambers of the 
 Abbatial lodge, instantly found themselves in much more humble 
 lodgings. Cooks resumed their long-neglected art, and Madame 
 d'Etrees provided a dinner worthy of her former hospitality and her 
 recent privations. But in the presence of Angelique, the virago 
 was abashed. To intimidate or to provoke her rival proved alike 
 impossible : it might be more easy to overpower hei. De Sauze and 
 his confederates made the attempt. They discharged their pistols 
 and flourished their drawn swords over her head, with unmanly 
 menaces. She remained unmoved and silent. The screams which 
 the occasion demanded, were accordingly supplied by the intrusive 
 abbess. Clamour and outrage were alike ineffectual. At length 
 Madame d'Etrees and her respectable confessor, aided by De Sauze, 
 laid their hands on Angelique, and thrust her from the precincts of
 
 288 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 the monastery. Thirty of the nuns followed her in solemn proces- 
 sion. Their veils let down, their eyes cast on the earth, and their 
 hands clasped in prayer, they slowly moved to a place of refuge in 
 the neighbouring town of Pontoise. 
 
 But, alas, for the vanity of human triumphs! waving banners 
 and burnished arms glittered through the advancing column of dust 
 on the road from Paris to Maubisson. Scouts announced the ap- 
 proach of two hundred and fifty well-appointed archers. Madame 
 d'Etrees and her cavaliers escaped by the postern. A desperate leap 
 saved the worthless life of her confessor. Her partisan, the Mere 
 de la Sure, "a nun by profession, but otherwise resembling a 
 trooper," mounted through a trap-door to a hiding-place in the ceil- 
 ing, thence to be shamefully dragged by an archer, whom she still 
 more shamefully abused. Then might be seen through the gloom 
 of night, a train of priests and nuns drawing near with measured 
 steps to the venerable abbey ; on either side a double file of cavalry, 
 and in each horseman's hand a torch, illuminating the path of the 
 returning exiles. Angelique resumed her benignant reign ; but 
 not in peace. Brigands led by De Sauze, and encouraged by her 
 rival, haunted the neighbouring forests ; and, though protected 
 by the archers, the monastery remained in a state of siege. Shots 
 were fired through the windows, and the life of Angelique was en- 
 dangered. Strong in the assurance of Divine protection, she de- 
 manded and obtained the removal of the guard. Her confidence 
 was justified by the event. Madame d'Etrees was discovered, was 
 restored to her old quarters at the Filles Penitentes, and in due 
 time transferred not without good cause to the Chatelet ; there 
 to close in squalid misery, in quarrels, and intemperance, a career 
 which might, with almost equal propriety, form the subject of a 
 drama, a homily, or a satire. 
 
 For five successive years Angelique laboured to bring back the 
 ladies of Maubisson to the exact observance of their sacred vows. 
 Aided by her sister Agnes, the abbess of St Cyr, she established a 
 similar reform in a large proportion of the other Cistercian nunneries 
 of France. All obstacles yielded to their love, their prudence, and 
 their self-devotion. A moral plague was stayed, and excesses which 
 even the sensual and the worldly condemned, were banished from 
 the sanctuaries of religion. That in some, the change was but from 
 shameless riot to hypocritical conformity ; that in others, intemper- 
 ance merely gave way to mental lethargy ; and that even the most 
 exalted virtues of the cloister hold but a subordinate and an 
 equivocal place in the scale of Christian graces, is indeed but too 
 true : yet assuredly it was in no such critical spirit as this, that the
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 289 
 
 labours of Angelique were judged and accepted by Him, in the lowly 
 imitation of whom she had thus gone about doing good. " She has 
 done what she could," was the apology with which He rescued from 
 a like cold censure the love which had expressed itself in a costly 
 and painful sacrifice ; nor was the gracious benediction which re- 
 warded the woman of Bethany withheld from the abbess of Port- 
 Royal. To that tranquil home she bent her steps, there to en- 
 counter far heavier trials than any to which the resentment of 
 Madame d'Etrees had exposed her. 
 
 Accompanied by a large number of the nuns of Maubisson, 
 Angelique returned to the valley of Chevreuse. They brought with 
 them neither silver nor gold, though rich in treasures of a far higher 
 price in the account of their devout protectress. Poverty, disease, 
 and death, were however in their train. Rising from the marshes 
 below, a humid fog hung continually on the slopes of the adjacent 
 hills, and the now crowded monastery was soon converted into one 
 great hospital. But for a timely transfer of the whole establish- 
 ment to a hotel purchased for them by the mother of Angelique in 
 the Faubourg St Jacques at Paris, their remaining history might 
 all have been compressed into a chapter on the influence of 
 malaria. 
 
 The restoration of the community to health was not, however, 
 the most momentous consequence of the change. It introduced the 
 abbess to the society and the influence of Hauranne de Verger, the 
 abbot of St Cyran, one of the most memorable names in the eccle- 
 siastical annals of that age. When Richelieu was yet a simple 
 bishop, he distinguished among the crowd of his companions one 
 whose graceful bearing, open countenance, learning, gaiety, and wit, 
 revealed to his penetrating glance the germs of future eminence. 
 But to an eye dazzled by such prospects as were already dawning 
 on the ambitious statesman, those which had arrested the upward 
 gaze of his young associate were altogether inscrutable. With what 
 possible motive De Verger should for whole days bury himself in 
 solitude, and chain down that buoyant spirit to the study of the 
 Greek and Latin fathers, was one of the few problems which ever 
 engaged and baffled the sagacity of M. de Lu9on. They parted ; 
 the prelate to his craft, the student to his books ; the one to extort 
 the reluctant admiration of the world, the other to toil and to suffer 
 in the cause of piety and truth. They met again ; the cardinal to 
 persecute, and the abbot to be his victim. Death called them both 
 to their account ; leaving to them in the world they had agitated 
 or improved, nothing but historical names, as forcibly contrasted as 
 they had been strangely associated. 
 
 19
 
 290 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 Great men (and to few could that title "be more justly given than 
 to Richelieu) differ from other men chiefly in the power of self- 
 multiplication ; in knowing how to make other men adopt their 
 views and execute their purposes. Thus to subjugate the genius of 
 St Cyran, the great minister had spared neither caresses nor bribes. 
 The place of first almoner to Henrietta of England, the bishoprics 
 of Clermont and Bayonne, a choice among numerous abbacies, were 
 successively offered and refused. " Gentlemen, I introduce to you 
 the most learned man in Europe," was the courteous phrase by 
 which the Cardinal made .known the friend of his youth to the 
 courtiers who thronged his levee. But human applause had lost 
 its charm for the ear of St Cyran. The retired and studious habits 
 of his early days had not appeared more inexplicable to the worldly- 
 minded statesman than his present indifference. Self-knowledge 
 had made Richelieu uncharitable. Incredulous of virtues of which 
 he detected no type in the dark recesses of his own bosom, he saw 
 in his former companion a treacherous enemy, if not a rival. There 
 were secrets of his early life of which he seems to have expected 
 and feared the disclosure. St Cyran was at least the silent, and 
 might become the open, enemy of the declaration by which the 
 parliament and clergy of Paris had annulled the marriage of Gaston, 
 Duke of Orleans, in order to pave the way for his union with the 
 niece of the Cardinal. To his long-cherished scheme of erecting the 
 kingdom of France into a Patriarchate in his own favour, there 
 could arise no more probable or more dangerous opponent. To 
 these imaginary or anticipated wrongs, was added another, which 
 seems to have excited still more implacable resentment. An 
 aspirant after every form of glory, Richelieu had convinced himself, 
 and required others to believe, that his literary and theological were 
 on a level with his political powers. He was the author of a 
 Catechism where might be read the dogma, that contrition alone, 
 uncombined in the heart of the penitent with any emotions of love 
 towards the Deity, was sufficient to justify an absolution at the 
 Confessional. One Seguenot, a priest of the Oratory, maintained and 
 published the opposite opinion. Rumour denied to Seguenot the 
 real parentage of the book which bore his name, and ascribed it to 
 St Cyran. From speculations on the love of God to feelings of 
 hatred to man, what polemic will not readily pass, whether his cap 
 be red or black ? Seguenot's errors were denounced by the Sor- 
 bonne, and the poor man himself was sent to the Bastille, there, 
 during the rest of his great opponent's life, to obtain clearer views 
 on the subject of contrition. Impartial injustice required that the 
 real, or imputed, should fare no better than the nominal author;
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 291 
 
 and St Cyran was conducted to Vincennes, to breathe no more 
 the free air of heaven till Eichelieu himself should be laid in the 
 grave. 
 
 Never had that gloomy fortress received within its walls a man 
 better fitted to endure with composure the utmost reverses of for- 
 tune. To him, as their patriarch or founder, the whole body of the 
 Port-Royalists, with one voice, attribute not merely a pre-eminence 
 above all their other teachers, but such a combination of intellectual 
 powers and Christian graces, as would entitle him not so much to a 
 place in the calendar, as to a place apart from, and above, the other 
 luminaries in that spiritual galaxy. Make every deduction from 
 their eulogies which a rational scepticism, may suggest, and it will yet 
 be impossible to evade the accumulated proofs on which they claim 
 for St Cyran the reverence of mankind. Towards the close of the 
 first of the four volumes which he has dedicated to the attempt, 
 Claude Lancelot confesses and laments the difficulty of conveying to 
 others by words any definite image of the sublime and simple reality 
 which he daily contemplated with more than filial reverence. He 
 describes a man moving through the whole circle of the virtues 
 which the Gospel inculcates, with a step so firm as to indicate the 
 constant aid of a more than human power, and with a demeanour so 
 lowly as to bespeak an habitual consciousness of that Divine presenca 
 He depicts a moral hero, by whom every appetite had been subdued, 
 and every passion tranquillised, though still exquisitely alive to the 
 pains and the enjoyments of life, and responding with almost 
 feminine tenderness to every affectionate and kindly feeling a 
 master of all erudition, but never so happy as when imparting to 
 little children the elementary truths on which his own heart reposed 
 grave, nay, solemn in discourse, but with tones so gentle, a 
 wisdom so profound, and words of such strange authority to animate 
 and to soothe the listener, that, in comparison with his, all other 
 colloquial eloquence was wearisome and vapid rebuking vice far 
 less by stern reproof than by the contrast of his own serene aspect, 
 at once the result and the reflection of the perfect peace in which 
 his mind continually dwelt, exhibiting a transcript, however rudely 
 and imperfectly, yet faithfully drawn, of the great example to which 
 his eye was ever turned, and where, averting his regard from all 
 inferior models, it was his wont to study, to imitate, and to adore. 
 In short, the St Cyran of Lancelot's protraiture is one of those rare 
 mortals whose mental health is absolute and unimpaired whose 
 character consists not so much in the excellence of particular quali- 
 ties, as in the symmetry, the balance, and the well-adjusted harmo- 
 nies of all who concentrate their energies in one mighty objec.t, 
 
 19 *
 
 202 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 because they live under the habitual influence of one supreme 
 mo tive who are ceaselessly animated by a love embracing every 
 rational being, from Him who is the common parent of the rest, to 
 the meanest and the vilest of those who were originally created in 
 His image and likeness. 
 
 Nor was Lancelot a man inapt to discriminate. He was the 
 author of the Port-Royal Grammars, Greek, Latin, and Italian, 
 now fallen into disuse, but so well known to such of us as ploughed 
 those rugged soils during the first ten years of the present century. 
 His biographical labours are not without a tinge of his style as a 
 grammarian ; a little tedious perhaps, and not a little prolix and 
 over-methodical, but replete in almost every page with such touches 
 of genuine dignity in the master, and cordial reverence in the disci- 
 ple with a sympathy so earnest for the virtues he celebrates, and 
 so simple-hearted a consciousness of his own inferiority that, in the 
 picture he undesignedly draws of himself, he succeeds more than in 
 any other way in raising a lofty conception of the man by whom he 
 was held in such willing and grateful subjugation. And he had 
 many fellow-subjects. Richelieu himself had felt his daring spirit 
 awed by the union, in the friend of his youth, of a majestic repose 
 and unwearied activity, which compelled the great minister to admit 
 that the heart of man might envelope mysteries beyond his divina- 
 tion. Pascal, Nicole, Arnauld, and many others, eminent in that 
 age for genius and piety, submitted themselves to his guidance in 
 their studies as well as in their lives, with the implicit deference of 
 children awaiting the commands of a revered and affectionate father. 
 He was a most voluminous writer ; but of his published works, one 
 only attained a transient celebrity, and of that book his authorship 
 was more than doubtful. If be did not disown, he never claimed it. 
 Of the innumerable incidents recorded of him during his imprison- 
 ment at Vincennes, few are more characteristic than the sale of a 
 considerable part of a scanty collection of books he had brought 
 there, to purchase clothes for two of his fellow-prisoners, the Baron 
 and Baroness de Beau SoleiL " I entreat you," he says to the lady 
 to whom he gave this commission, " that the cloth may be fine and 
 good, and befitting their station in society. I do not know what is 
 becoming ; but, if I remember, some one has told me that gentlemen 
 and ladies of their condition ought not to be seen in company with- 
 out gold kce for the men, and black lace for the women. If I am 
 right about this, pray purchase the best, and let everything be done 
 modestly, yet handsomely, that when they see each other, they may, 
 for a few minutes at least, forget that they are captives." It is in 
 the moral, rather than in the intellectual, qualities of St Cyran, that
 
 THE POUT-ROYALISTS. 293 
 
 his claim to the veneration of posterity must now be rested. He 
 occupies a place in ecclesiastical history as the founder of Jansenism 
 in France. 
 
 Of that system of religious belief and practice, the origin is to be 
 traced to the joint labours of St Cyran and Cornelius Jansen, 
 during the six years which they passed in social study at Bayonne. 
 Returning to his native country, Jansen became first a Professor of 
 Divinity at Louvain, and afterwards Bishop of Ypres. There he 
 surrendered himself to a life of unremitting labour. Ten times he 
 read over every word of the works of Augustine ; thirty times he 
 studied all those passages of them which relate to the Pelagian 
 controversy. All the Fathers of the Church were elaborately collated 
 for passages illustrative of the opinions of the Bishop of Hippo. At 
 length, after an uninterrupted study of twenty years, was finished 
 the celebrated Augustinus Cornelii Jansenii. With St Austin as 
 his text and guide, the good Bishop proceeded to establish, on the 
 authority of that illustrious Father, those doctrines which, in our 
 times and country, have been usually distinguished by the terms 
 Calvinistic or Evangelical. Heirs of guilt and corruption he con- 
 sidered the human race, and each successive member of it, as lying 
 in a state of condemnation, and as advancing towards a state of 
 punishment ; until an internal impulse from on high awakens one 
 and another to a sense of this awful truth, and infuses into them a 
 will to fly from impending vengeance. But this impulse is imparted 
 only to the few ; and on them it is bestowed in pursuance of a decree 
 existing in the Divine intelligence before the creation of our species. 
 Of the motives of their preference not even a conjecture can be 
 formed. So far as human knowledge extends, it is referable simply 
 to the Divine volition; and is not dependent on any inherent 
 moral difference between the objects of it, and those from whom such 
 mercy is withheld. This impulse is not, however, irresistible. 
 Within the limits of his powers, original or imparted, man is a free 
 agent ; free to admit and free to reject the proffered aid. If re- 
 jected, it enhances his responsibility if admitted, it leads him by 
 continual accessions of the same supernatural assistance to an acqui- 
 escence in those opinions, to the exercise of those affections, and to 
 the practice of those virtues, which collectively form the substance of 
 the Christian system. 
 
 Such is the general result of the labours of Jansen. On the day 
 which witnessed the completion of them, he was removed by the 
 plague to a state of being where he probably learned at once to 
 rejoice in the fidelity, and to smile at the simplicity, of those sublun- 
 ary toils. Within an hour of his death he made a will, submitting
 
 294 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 his work to the judgment of the Church of Eome, in the communion 
 of which he had lived, and was about to die. He addressed to Pope 
 Urban VIII. a letter, laying the fruits of his studies at the feet of 
 his Holiness, "approving, condemning, advancing, or retracting, as 
 should be prescribed by the thunder of the apostolic see." Both 
 the will and the letter were suppressed by his executors. Two 
 years from the death of its author had not elapsed before the 
 August irnis appeared in print. It was the signal of a contest which 
 for nearly seventy years agitated the Sorbonne and Versailles, fired 
 the enthusiasm of the ladies and the divines of France, and gave to 
 her historians and her wits a theme, used with fatal success, to swell 
 the tide of hatred and of ridicule, which has for ever swept away 
 the temporal greatness, and which for a while silenced the spiritual 
 ministrations, of the Gallican Church. 
 
 Having aided largely in the composition of this memorable trea- 
 tise, St Cyran exerted himself with still. .greater effect in building up 
 a society for the maintenance and promulgation of the principles it 
 established. Angelique Arnauld and the sisterhood of Port-Royal 
 were now settled at Paris, but they were still the proprietors of the 
 deserted monastery ; and there were gradually assembled a college 
 of learned men, bound by no monastic vows, and living according 
 to no positive rule, Benedictine or Franciscan. They were chiefly 
 disciples of St Cyran, and under his guidance had retired from the 
 world to consecrate their lives to penitence, to their own spiritual 
 improvement, and to the instruction of mankind. 
 
 Of this number was Antoine Le Maitre. At the age of twenty- 
 seven, he had been advanced to the rank of Councillor of State, and 
 enjoyed at the bar an unrivalled reputation for learning and 
 for eloquence. When he was to speak, even the churches were 
 abandoned. Quitting their pulpits, the preachers assisted to throng 
 the hall of the palace of justice ; and some of the most celebrated 
 among them actually obtained from their superiors a permanent 
 dispensation from their ecclesiastical duties at such seasons, that they 
 might improve in the art of public speaking by listening to the great 
 advocate. When he spoke, the delight of the audience broke out 
 into bursts of applause, which the judges were unable or unwilling 
 to repress. " I would rather be the object of those plaudits than 
 enjoy all the glory of my Lord the Cardinal," was the somewhat 
 hazardous exclamation of one of his friends, as he joined, heart and 
 hand, in the universal tumult. 
 
 Far different was the estimate which his devout mother had 
 formed of the prospects of her son. She was one of the sisters of 
 Angelique Arnauld ; and, amidst the cares of conjugal life, cherished
 
 THE POET-ROYALISTS. 295 
 
 a piety at least as pure and as ardent as ever burned in the bosom 
 of a Carthusian. In the wealth and glory which rewarded his for- 
 ensic eminence she could see only allurements to which (so she 
 judged) his peace on earth, and his meetness for a holier state of 
 being beyond the grave, must be sacrificed. She mourned over his 
 fame, and prayed that her child might be abased, that so in due 
 season he might be exalted. It happened that his aunt, Madame 
 D'Andilly, in the last awful scene of life, was attended by her kin- 
 dred, and amongst the rest by Le Maitre. Her fading eye was fixed 
 on the crucifix borne in the hand of St Cyran, as she listened to his 
 voice, now subdued to its gentlest accents, and breathing hope, and 
 peace, and consolation. It was as though some good angel had 
 overpassed the confines of the earthly and the heavenly worlds, to 
 give utterance, in human language, to emotions sacred as his own 
 high abode, and to thoughts as lofty as his own celestial nature. 
 The great orator listened, and wondered, and wept. An eloquence 
 such as even his fervent imagination had never before conceived, 
 enthralled and subdued his inmost soul. It was but a soft whisper 
 in the chamber of death ; but in those gentle tones, and to that 
 weeping company, were spoken words, compared with which his 
 own eloquence appeared to him trivial, harsh, and dissonant as the 
 howlings of the forest. And when his dying relative's last sigh was 
 heard, accompanied by the solemn benediction, " Depart, Christian 
 soul ! "from this world, in the name of the Almighty God who 
 created you," Le Maitre felt that the bonds which attached him to 
 that world were for ever broken. He yielded himself to the spiritual 
 guidance of St Cyran ; resigned his office and his calling ; and 
 plunged into a retreat, where in solitude, silence, and continued 
 penances, he passed the remaining twenty-one years of his life. By 
 the advice of his confessor, the execution of this design was post- 
 poned till the close of the annual session of the courts. In the 
 interval he resumed his ordinary employments ; but the spirit which 
 till then had animated his efforts was gone. He became languid 
 and unimpressive ; and one of the judges was heard to mutter, that, 
 after all, the real power of Le Maitre was that of persuading to 
 sleep. This was too much, even for a penitent. Fixing his eye on 
 the critic, he once more summoned his dormant strength, and pour- 
 ing forth all the energies of his soul in one last and most triumphant 
 speech, he for ever quitted the scene of his forensic glories. 
 
 At Port-Eoyal he appropriately charged himself with the care of 
 the proprietary interests of the house. A village judge in the 
 neighbourhood was once attended by the illustrious advocate, on 
 a question of the purchase of some bullocks. Astounded by his 

 
 296 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 eloquence (so runs the story), the judge fell on his knees before 
 the pleader, professing his un worthiness to preside in his presence, 
 and imploring that they might exchange places. A more likely 
 tale records that the booksellers had got up, during Le Maitre's 
 retreat, an edition of his speeches full of interpolations and errors. 
 At " the request of friends," though not with the consent of his 
 confessors, the orator undertook a corrected edition. His spiritual 
 guides interfered. They prescribed, as a new species of penance, 
 that he should silently acquiesce in this inroad on his fame as a 
 speaker. The penitent submitted, but not so the booksellers. They 
 (worldly men !) talked loudly of violated promises, and of sheets 
 rendered useless. He listened to discourses on the duty of mortify- 
 ing these last movements of vain-glory. Under the excitement of 
 the dispute, his health, already enfeebled by his mode of life, gave 
 way. A fever decided the question against the publishers ; and Le 
 Maitre was doomed at length to die the victim of the brilliant career 
 he had so long and resolutely abandoned. 
 
 His brother, Mons. de Sericourt, was another of the converts of 
 St Cyran. De Sericourt had served with distinction under Conde. 
 He was taken prisoner at the siege of Philipsburg, and effected his 
 escape by leaping from the walls of the fortress at the imminent hazard 
 of his life. Under the deep impression, which this incident left on 
 his mind, of the protecting care of Providence, he returned to Paris, 
 where his first object was to visit his brother, the report of whose 
 retreat from the bar had filled him with astonishment. He found 
 him (the words are Fontaine's) in a kind of tomb, where he was 
 buried alive ; his manner bespeaking all the gloom of penitence. 
 De Sericourt was shocked, and in vain endeavoured to recognise Le 
 Maitre in the person who stood before him. Immediately changing 
 his demeanour, Le Maitre embraced his brother with looks full of 
 gaiety and spirit, exclaiming, " Behold the Le Maitre of former days ! 
 He is dead to the world, and now desires only to die to himself. I 
 have spoken enough to men. Henceforth I wish to converse only 
 with God. I have exerted myself in vain to plead the cause of 
 others. Now I am to plead my own. Do you intend to pay me 
 the same compliment which I receive from the world at large, who 
 believe and publish that I have gone mad 1 " Nothing could be 
 more remote from the judgment of the soldier. Instead of regarding 
 his brother as mad, he aspired to share his solitude, and succeeded. 
 Under the direction of St Cyran, he joined in the silence and auster- 
 ities of the advocate. During the war of the princes he once more 
 took up arms for the defence of Port-Eoyal ; but his monastic life 
 was soon brought to a close. Philipsburg had in reality been at-
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 297 
 
 tended with, less danger. At the age of thirty-nine, he died, a pre- 
 mature victim to fastings, vigils, confinement, and probably to ennui. 
 Recruits for Port-Royal were but seldom drawn from the armies of 
 the Most Christian King, and could hardly have been draughted from 
 a less promising quarter. 
 
 In this memorable brotherhood there was yet a third, Louis Isaac 
 Le Maitre de Saci. At the early age of fourteen he was placed by 
 his aunt, the Mere Angelique, 'under the guidance of St Cyran. 
 From that prophetic eye the future eminence of his pupil was not 
 hidden. " God will restore him to you, for his death would probably 
 be the greatest loss which the Church could sustain " was the pre- 
 diction with which St Cyran at once disclosed his own hopes and 
 allayed the fears of De Saci's mother, as he watched over the 
 sick-bed of her child. To ensure the fulfilment of those hopes, the 
 mind of the boy was sedulously trained. Absolute, unhesitating 
 submission to human authority, as representing the Divine, was the 
 cardinal principle of his education. Though himself one of the most 
 conspicuous teachers of his age as a guide to others, he, on no single 
 question, presumed to guide himself. If no other director could 
 have been had, he would have placed himself under the direction of 
 his Valet, was the praise with which his friends expressed their ad- 
 miration of his illustrious docility. By the advice or commands of 
 St Cyran, he accordingly, like his brothers, became one of the re- 
 cluses of Port-Royal ; and, like them, transferred to the support of 
 the monastery all his worldly wealth. With them also he surrendered 
 himself up to penitence, to solitude, and to silence ; and in their 
 company supplied his emaciated frame with food which rather mocked 
 than satisfied its wants. Le Maitre thus describes one of the petits 
 soupers of Port-Royal : " It is, you know, but a slight repast which 
 they serve up for us in the evening ; but it engages my brother De 
 Saci as completely as the most sumptuous meaL For my own part, 
 such is the warmth of my temperament, the end of my good cheer 
 follows so hard on its beginning, that I can hardly tell which is 
 which. When all is over with me, and I have nothing left to do 
 but to wash my hands, I see my brother De Saci, as composed and 
 as serious as ever, take up his quarter of an apple, peel it deliber- 
 ately, cut it up with precision, and swallow it at leisure. Before he 
 begins, I have more than half done. When his little all is over, he 
 rises from table as light as when he sat down, leaving untouched the 
 greater part of what was set before him, and walks off as seriously 
 as a man who had been doing great things, and who never fasted 
 except on fast-days." 
 
 Poor Le Maitre ! the gay spirit which had animated the palace
 
 298 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 of justice had its transient flashes even in his "living tomb;" 
 though the smile was in this case lighted up at an absurdity which 
 had well nigh conducted his brother to that tomb where all life is 
 extinct. Under these solemn parodies on what usually goes on at 
 the dinner-table, De Saci pined away ; and was rescued, not without 
 extreme hazard, from the effects of his suicidal abstemiousness. 
 He returned from the gates of death with a spirit unsubdued and 
 undaunted ; for it was animated by hopes and sustained by convic- 
 tions which gave to that last enemy the aspect and the welcome of 
 a friend. Admitted, in reluctant obedience to his confessor, to 
 ordination as a priest, he assumed the office of director to the 
 recluses of either sex at Port-EoyaL Nature struggled in the bosom 
 of Le Maitre against laying bare all the secrets of his soul to the 
 inspection of his younger brother. But authority prevailed. Their 
 mother led the way, by placing herself under the direction of her 
 son. Blaise Pascal himself meekly took the law of his conscience from 
 the same revered lips. Days of persecution followed, and De Saci 
 was driven from his retreat, and confined for more than two years 
 in the Bastille. There was fulfilled the prediction of St Cyran. 
 Fontaine, the bosom friend of De Saci, was the associate of his 
 prison hours. They were hours of suffering and of pain ; but hap- 
 pier by far than the brightest and the most joyous passed by the 
 revellers in the gay city beneath them. 
 
 In those hours, De Saci executed, and his friend transcribed, that 
 translation of the Holy Scriptures which to this moment is regarded 
 in France as the most perfect version in their own or in any other 
 modern tongue. While yet under the charge of St Cyran, the 
 study of the divine oracles was the ceaseless task of De Saci. In 
 mature life, it had been his continual delight; in the absence of 
 every other solace, it possessed his mind with all the energy of a 
 master passion. Of the ten thousand chords which there blend 
 together in sacred harmony, there was not one which did not 
 awaken a responsive note in the heart of the aged prisoner. In a 
 critical knowledge of the sacred text, he may have had many 
 superiors, but none in that exquisite sensibility to the grandeur, the 
 pathos, the superhuman wisdom, and the awful purity of the divine 
 original, without which none can truly apprehend, or accurately 
 render into another idiom, the sense of the inspired writers. Even 
 the habitual prostration of his judgment to a human authority, be- 
 lieved to be divine, aided him as a translator : it forbade, indeed, the 
 correction of errors, but it imparted freedom and confidence to the 
 expression of all that he acknowledged as truth. Protestants may 
 with justice except to many a passage of De Saci's translation ; but
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 299 
 
 they will, we fear, search their own libraries in vain for any, where 
 the author's unhesitating assurance of the real sense of controverted 
 words permitted his style to flow with a similar absence of constraint, 
 and an equal warmth and glow of diction. 
 
 Fontaine, the humble companion of his biblical labours, had also 
 been one of the penitents of De Saci. He was a man of learning, 
 and his "Memoires sur MM. de Port-Royal," bespeak a nature 
 gentle, affectionate, and devout. But to saturate his memory with 
 the discourse of minds more exalted than his own, and to minister 
 to them in collating or transcribing the books on which they were 
 employed, limited his humble desires. He was successively the 
 amanuensis of De Saci, and the secretary of the " great " Arnauld. 
 A name so truly great, excepting that of Pascal, does not appear 
 among the disciples of St Cyran, or the inmates of Port-Royal. 
 
 Antoine Arnauld was the youngest child of the parents of the Mere 
 Angelique : he was consequently the uncle of Le Maitre, De Seri- 
 court, and De Saci. From his earliest years the reputation of his 
 genius and learning had rendered him the object of universal notice 
 and expectation. Richelieu himself is recorded to have stolen 
 silently into his chamber, to enjoy the unpremeditated conversation 
 of the young student. The Cardinal had no apparent reason to 
 dread that in this case his advances would be repulsed ; for Arnauld 
 possessed several rich benefices, dressed in fashion, and even kept a 
 carriage. But repulsed they were, and by the influence of the man 
 to whom similar allurements had been presented in vain. In his 
 dungeon at Vincennes, St Cyran received a visit from the young 
 abbe. That almost magical influence was again exerted with irre- 
 sistible power. Arnauld renounced his preferments, assumed the 
 garb of penitence, and became the companion of his nephews, Le 
 Maitre and Sericourt, in their austere retirement. This abandon- 
 ment of the world was not, however, so absolute, but that he still 
 sought the rank of a socius or fellow of the Sorbonne. By the 
 authority of Richelieu, his claims were rejected. But not even the 
 Cardinal could obstruct the advancement of so eminent a scholar and 
 divine to the dignity of a doctor in divinity. " To defend the truth, 
 if neccessary, to the death," was in those days one of the vows of 
 such a graduate vows, it is to be feared, as light as air with most 
 men, but, in this instance, engraven as with a pen of iron on the 
 soul of the new professor of theology. 
 
 A year had scarcely elapsed since he had received from the lips of 
 his dying mother an adjuration to be faithful in the defence of truth 
 at the expense, were it possible, of a thousand lives. Touched with 
 the coincidence of his academical oath and of this maternal precept,
 
 300 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 he thenceforward existed hut to combat for what he at least 
 esteemed the truth ; and endured poverty, exile, and reproach, as he 
 would have cheerfully submitted to death, in that sacred warfare. 
 In controversy he found his vocation, his triumph, and perhaps his 
 delight. The author of more than a hundred volumes, he was 
 engaged in almost as many contests. His great work, La fre'quente 
 Communion, is essentially controversial. He warred with the 
 Jesuits as a body ; and with several of their most eminent writers, 
 as Sirmond, Nouet, and De Bonis, he carried on separate debates. 
 Apologies for St Cyran, Jansenius, and for the ladies of Port-Eoyal 
 flowed copiously from his ever-ready pen. He assailed the meta- 
 physical meditations of Des Cartes, and Malebranche's theory of 
 miracles. He contended even with his friend and associate, Nicole, 
 on an attempt to apply certain geometrical principles to the solution 
 of some problems in divinity. Claude, Maimbourg, and Annat 
 were among his adversaries. The mere list of his works occupies 
 twenty-six closely-printed octavo pages. A rapid analysis of them 
 fills a large volume. If that compilation may be trusted (he would 
 be a bold man who should undertake to verify it), the vast collection 
 of books which bear the name of Antoine Arnauld scarcely contain 
 a tract, except those on mathematics, in which he is not engaged in 
 theological or scientific strife with some antagonist. 
 
 In the catalogue, of course, appears the celebrated treatise De la 
 Perpetuite de la Foi sur V Eucharistie, a work rewarded with higher 
 applause than any other of his avowed writings. Twenty-seven 
 Bishops and twenty Doctors prefaced it with eulogies on the learn- 
 ing, piety, talents, and orthodoxy of the illustrious author. He 
 dedicated it to Clement IX., and was repaid with the most glowing 
 compliments. Perhaps a still more gratifying tribute to his success 
 was the conversion to the Roman Catholic faith of Turenne, of 
 which this book was the occasion ; and yet nothing is more certain 
 than that the real author was not Arnauld, but Nicole. In the 
 title-page of a book, designed to refute the formidable Claude, the 
 two friends judged the name of a Doctor of the Church would avail 
 more than that of a simple tonsure on the side of Arnauld a 
 literary and pious fraud, which it is impossible to excuse ; and, on 
 the side of Nicole, an example of zeal for a man's cause triumphing 
 over his love of fame, to which it would not be easy to find a 
 parallel. Such, however, was the height of Arnauld's reputation, 
 and such the affluence of his mind, that it is scarcely reasonable to 
 attribute this disingenuous proceeding to selfish motives. Few men 
 have been more enamoured of the employments, or less covetous of 
 the rewards, of a literary life. For nearly threescore years he lived
 
 THE POUT-ROT ALISTS. 301 
 
 pen in hand, except when engaged in devotion, or in celebrating 
 the offices of the church of Port-Royal on occasions of peculiar 
 dignity. His was one of those rare natures to which intellectual 
 exertion brings relief rather than lassitude ; thus giving to feebler 
 understandings the assurance that the living spirit which is in man, 
 if disunited from, the burdens of mortality, would be capable of 
 efforts commensurate with an immortal existence. 
 
 His book, De la frequente Communion, was the commencement 
 of the seventy years' religious war which ended in the destruction 
 of Port-Royal. To restore the severe maxims of Christian antiquity 
 respecting the spiritual qualification of communicants, and thus to 
 raise a standard of Church membership, incomparably more exalted 
 than that Avhich prevailed in his own generation, was the avowed 
 object of Arnauld. His scarcely concealed purpose was to chastise 
 the lax morality to which the Jesuits had lent their sanction ; and 
 to repel their attacks on the more rigid system of St Cyran. Re- 
 vised in his prison by that father of the faithful, and sheltered by 
 the commendation of divines of every rank and order, the book 
 forbearing in style, lofty in sentiment, replete with various learning, 
 and breathing an eloquence at once animated by unhesitating faith, 
 and chastened by the most profound humility broke like a peal of 
 thunder over the heads of his startled antagonists. Such was the 
 fury of their resentment, that the Marshal de Vihe sagaciously ob- 
 served, " There must be some secret in all this. The Jesuits are 
 never so excited when nothing but the glory of God is at stake." 
 Though at first struck down by the censures of a conclave of Bishops, 
 with Mazarin at their head, Nouet, the great advocate of the 
 society, returned again and again to the assault. Pulpits fulmin- 
 ated, presses groaned. On the one side, the Sorbonne invoked the 
 aid of the civil power, then in feeble hands ; on the other, the 
 Jesuits appealed to the Papal See, then rising in new vigour from 
 the disasters of the preceding century. Arnauld was cited by the 
 Pope, and required by the Cardinal Minister of France to appear in 
 his own defence at Rome. Against this infringement of the Gallican 
 liberties, the University, the Sorbonne, and the Parliament of Paris 
 remonstrated ; but Mazarin was inflexible. 
 
 The Holy See took cognisance of the cause, though the person of 
 the accused was beyond their reach. In his absence, that infallible 
 tribunal decided not to let the world know whether, of the thirty 
 erroneous opinions imputed to Arnauld as heresies, twenty and nine 
 were heretical or not. Arnauld himself, however, was unable to 
 stand his ground. For twenty-five years together, he was compelled 
 to live in a voluntary concealment, which his enemies had not the
 
 302 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 power nor perhaps the wish, to violate. His retirement was passed 
 in the monastery of Port-Royal, or in one of the adjacent hermit- 
 ages. 
 
 That ancient seat of their Order had now "been long deserted by 
 his sister Angelique and her associates. Their residence at Paris 
 had not been unfruitful of events. They had exchanged the juris- 
 diction of the General of their Order for that of the Archbishop of 
 Paris. On the voluntary resignation of Angelique, and by her 
 desire, the abbatial dignity had been made elective in their house. 
 An ineffectual scheme of devoting themselves to the perpetual 
 adoration of the Holy Eucharist, had deeply exercised their thoughts. 
 Occasional miracles had awakened or rewarded their piety. An 
 inspired litany (so it was believed) had fallen insensibly from the 
 pen of sister Agnes, which eight Doctors censured, St Cyran vindi- 
 cated, and the Pope suppressed. From his prison at Vincennes, 
 their great apologist directed their consciences, and guided them to 
 the office of educating children of their own sex a wise and happy 
 project, which brought back into the sphere of ordinary duties, 
 minds soaring with indefinite aims into the regions of mysticism, 
 and wasting, in efforts for an ideal perfection, talents eminently 
 fitted to bless and to improve mankind. 
 
 To restore the sisterhood to the quiet valley where their prede- 
 cessors had worshipped, was the next care of St Cyran. True, it 
 threatened their lives ; but " is it not," he asked, " as well to serve 
 God in an hospital as in a church, if such be his pleasure ? " " Are 
 any prayers more acceptable than those of the afflicted ] " Ange- 
 lique's heart had a ready answer to such questions from such an 
 inquirer. In that sequestered church where angels, and a still more 
 awful presence, had once dwelt, they could not but still abide (such 
 was his assurance), and she returned to seek them there. She came 
 attended by a large proportion of the ladies of Port-Koyal, hailed by 
 the poor and aged, whom in former times she had cherished, and 
 welcomed by her kinsmen and by the companions of their religious 
 solitude. It was their first and only meeting. Les Granges (a 
 farm-house on the hill-side) became the residence of the recluses, 
 the gates of the monastery closing on the nuns. 
 
 Bound by no monastic vows, the men addressed themselves to 
 such employments as each was supposed best qualified to fill. 
 Schools for the instruction of youth in every branch of literature 
 and science were kept by Lancelot, Nicole, Fontaine, and De Saci. 
 Some laboured at translations of the Fathers, and other works of 
 piety. Arnauld plied his ceaseless toils in logic, geometry, meta-
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 303 
 
 physics, and theological debate. Physicians of high celebrity exer- 
 cised their art in all the neighbouring villages. Le Maitre and 
 other eminent lawyers addressed themselves to the work of arbi- 
 trating in all the dissensions of the vicinage. There were to be -seen 
 gentlemen working assiduously as vine-dressers, officers making 
 shoes, noblemen sawing timber and repairing windows ; a society 
 held together by no vows, governed by no corporate laws, subject 
 to no common superior, pursuing no joint designs, yet all living 
 in unbroken harmony ; all following their respective callings silent, 
 grave, abstracted, self-afflicted by fastings, watchings, and humilia- 
 tions a body of penitents on their painful progress through a 
 world which they had resolved at once to serve and to avoid. 
 From year to year, till death or persecution removed them from the 
 valley of Port-Royal, the members of this singular association ad- 
 hered pertinaciously to their design ; nor among their annals will be 
 found more, we think, than a single name on which rests the imput- 
 ation or infidelity of fickleness of purpose. 
 
 To the nuns, indeed, no such change was possible. Like the 
 inhabitants of Les Granges, they employed themselves in educating 
 the children of the rich and the poor, in almsgiving, and in other 
 works of mercy. Their renunciation of secular cares was combined 
 (no common alliance) with an entire superiority to all secular inter- 
 ests. Angelique, now the elected abbess, and in that character the 
 ruler of the temporalities of the convent, exhibited a princely spirit 
 of munificence nourished and sustained by the most severe and 
 self-denying economy. She and her sisterhood reserved for them- 
 selves little more than a place in their own list of paupers. So firm 
 was her reliance on the Divine bounty, and so abstemious her use 
 of it, that she hazarded a long course of heroic improvidence, justi- 
 fied by the event and ennobled by the motive ; but at once fitted 
 and designed rather to excite the enthusiasm of ordinary mortals, 
 than to afford a model for their imitation. Buildings were erected 
 both at Port-Royal de Paris, and Port-Eoyal des Champs ; in the 
 serene majesty of which the worshipper might discern an appropriate 
 vestibule to the temple made without hands, towards which his 
 adoration was directed. Wealth was never permitted to introduce, 
 nor poverty to exclude, any candidate for admission as- a novice or 
 a pupil. On one occasion twenty thousand francs were given as a 
 relief to a distressed community ; on another, four times that sum 
 were restored to a benefactress, whose heart repented a bounty 
 which she had no longer the right to reclaim. Their regular expen- 
 diture exceeded by more than sevenfold their certain income ; nor
 
 304 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 were they ever disappointed in their assurance, that the annual 
 deficiency of more than forty thousand francs would be supplied by 
 the benevolence of their fellow-Christians. 
 
 What was the constraining force of charity, Angelique had learned 
 from the study of her own heart, and she relied with a well-founded 
 confidence in the same generous impulse in the hearts of others. 
 The grace, the gaiety, and tenderness of her nature, which might 
 have embellished courts and palaces, were drawn into continual 
 exercise to mitigate the anguish of disease, to soothe the wretched, 
 and to instruct the young. Her hands ministered, by day and by 
 night, to the relief of those whose maladies were the most loath- 
 some or contagious, and her voice, in its most kindly tones, allayed 
 their terrors. With playful ingenuity she would teach her associates 
 how to employ the vestments, the furniture, and, when other 
 resources failed, even the sacred plate, of the monastery, in provid- 
 ing clothes for the naked, though it left themselves in want, and 
 in feeding the hungry, though it deprived themselves of all present 
 resources. While thus distributing bounties, not merely to the 
 necessities of the indigent, but to the relief of persons of her own 
 rank in life, there was in the bosom of Angelique a feeling which 
 revolted, not against dependence on alms, for her vows of poverty 
 required it, but against soliciting aid even from her nearest kindred ; 
 a feeling condemned as human, perhaps, in her stern self-judg- 
 ment, but assuredly one of those emotions which the best of our 
 race are the last to relinquish. And if it be true, as true it surely 
 is, that to the culture and exercise of the benevolent affections as an 
 ultimate end, all other ends of human life knowledge, practical 
 skill, meditative power, self-control, and the rest are but subser- 
 vient means, who shall deny to such a course of life as that of the 
 nuns of Port-Eoyal, the praise of wisdom, however ill he may judge 
 of the wisdom which established and maintained conventual insti- 
 tutions? Some affections, indeed, they could not cultivate. Two 
 of the deepest and the richest mines of their nature, maternal and 
 conjugal love, lay unwrought and unexplored. Yet they lived, as 
 wisdom we are told ought to live, with children round their knees ; 
 training them for every office in life, if not with a mother's yearn- 
 ings, with perhaps something more than a mother's prudence. 
 
 Over this singular theocracy, male and female, presided St Cyran, 
 exercising from his dungeon a supreme authority ; and under him 
 ruled Antoine Singlin, the general confessor both of the recluses 
 and the nuns. In the conduct of souls (such is the appropriate 
 style) Singlin was supposed to excel all the professors of that most 
 critical science. Pascal, De Saci, and Arnauld sat at his feet with
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 305 
 
 childlike docility. Ministers of state, advocates, and bishops, crowded 
 reverently round his pulpit ; yet by the confession, or rather the 
 boast, of his disciples, he was distinguished neither by learning, 
 talents, nor eloquence. The mystery of his absolute dominion over 
 intellects so incomparably superior to his own, is partly, at least, 
 dispelled by what remains of his writings. They indicate a mind 
 at once discriminating and devout, conversant alike with human 
 nature and with the Divine, exerting all its powers to penetrate the 
 labyrinth of man's heart, and sustaining these powers by habitual 
 communion with the source of wisdom. 
 
 Guided by such pastors, the Port-Royalists were following out a 
 progress more tranquil than that of John Bunyan's Pilgrim, when 
 the wars of the Fronde rudely scattered the shepherd and the flock. 
 Most of the nuns fled for refuge to Paris, but the recluses (they 
 were Frenchmen still) appeared three hundred strong, in defence 
 of their sequestered valley. Above their hair-shirts glittered coats 
 of mail. As the last notes of the anthem died away, the trumpet 
 summoned the worshippers to military exercises. Spears and hel- 
 mets flashed through the woods plumes waved over many a 
 furrowed brow intrenchments, the course of which may still be 
 traced, were thrown up ; and the evening-gun, the watch-word, and 
 the heavy tread of cavalry, broke a silence till then undisturbed, 
 except by the monastic choir, or the half-uttered prayer of some 
 lonely penitent. De Sericourt felt once again his pulse beat high 
 as he drew out the martial column, and raised the long-forgotten 
 words of peremptory command. But ere long a voice more subdued, 
 though not less peremptory, was heard to silence his. De Saci's 
 heart mourned over this reliance on an arm of flesh. Watching 
 the first pause in the new enthusiasm of his associates, he implored 
 them to lay aside their weapons ; and in long-suffering to submit 
 themselves and their cause to the Supreme Disposer of events. At 
 an instant the whole aspect of Port-Royal was changed. Students 
 returned to their books, penitents to their cells, and handycraftsmen 
 to their ordinary labours. It was a change as sudden and as com- 
 plete as when, at the bidding of the Genius, the crowded bridge and 
 the rushing river disappeared from the eyes of Mirza, leaving before 
 him nothing but the long hollow Valley of Bagdad, with oxen, 
 sheep, and camels grazing on the sides of it. 
 
 To one inmate of Port-Royal the terrors of an impending war 
 had brought no disquietude. Angelique remained there, the 
 guardian angel of the place. Hundreds of ruined peasants were 
 daily fed by her bounty. "Perhaps I shall not be able" (the 
 quotation is from one of her letters written at the time) " to send 
 
 20
 
 306 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 you a letter to-morrow, for all our horses and asses are dead with 
 hunger. Oh ! how little do princes know the detailed horrors of 
 war. All the provender of the beasts we have been obliged to 
 divide between ourselves and the starving poor. We have con- 
 cealed as many of the peasants and of their cattle as we could, in 
 our monastery, to save them from being murdered and losing all 
 their substance. Our dormitory and the chapter-house are full of 
 horses ; we are almost stifled by being pent up with these beasts, 
 but we could not resist the piercing lamentations of the starving 
 and the heart-broken poor. In the cellar we have concealed forty 
 cows. Our court-yards and out-houses are stuffed full of fowls, 
 turkeys, ducks, geese, and asses. The church is piled up to the 
 ceiling with corn, oats, beans, and peas, and with caldrons, kettles, 
 and other things belonging to the cottagers. Our laundry is filled 
 by the aged, the blind, the maimed, the halt, and infants. The 
 infirmary is full of sick and wounded. "We have torn up all our 
 rags and linen clothing to dress their sores ; we have -no more, and 
 are now at our wits' end, "We dare not go into the fields for any 
 more, as they are full of marauding parties. "We hear that the abbey 
 of St Cyran has been burned and pillaged. Our own is threatened 
 with an attack every day. The cold weather alone preserves us 
 from pestilence. We are so closely crowded that death happens 
 continually. God, however, is with us, and we are at peace." 
 
 That inward peace which Angelique was thus enabled to main- 
 tain during the horrors of civil war, was soon to be exposed to a 
 more arduous trial To the baffled antagonists of Arnauld, Port- 
 Koyal was an abomination. There dwelt in safety their intended 
 victim, plying his dreaded pen, surrounded by his kindred, his 
 scholars, and his allies ; and all engaged in the same contest with 
 the casuistry, the theology, and the morals of the society of Jesus. 
 Against these devoted enemies one Brisacier, a Jesuit, led the assault. 
 His articles of impeachment bore that they despised the Eucharist, 
 that they had neither holy water nor images in their churches, and 
 that they prayed neither to the Virgin nor the saints. Vain was 
 the clearest refutation of calumnies so shocking to Catholic ears, and 
 vain the archiepiscopal thunders which rebuked the slanderer. 
 Father Megnier, of the same holy company, denounced to the 
 astonished world a secret conspiracy against the religion of Christ, 
 the leaders of which were the Abbot of St Cyran and Antoine 
 Arnauld the Voltaire and the Diderot of their age ! But human 
 credulity has its limits, and Megnier had overstepped them. For a 
 moment the assailants paused ; but at last, the womb of time, fertile 
 in prodigies, gave birth to the far-famed "five propositions" of
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 307 
 
 Father Comet a " palpable obscure," lying in the dim regions of 
 psychological divinity, and doomed for successive generations to 
 perplex, to exasperate, and to overwhelm with persecution, or with 
 ridicule, no inconsiderable part of the Christian world. 
 
 That these five dogmas on the mystery of the Divine grace were 
 to be found within the Augustinm of Jansenius, was not the original 
 charge. They were at first denounced by Coruet as opinions which 
 had been derived from the work of the Bishop of Ypres, by Arnauld 
 and other Doctors of the Galilean Church, and by them inculcated 
 on their own disciples. Innocent X. condemned the propositions as 
 heretical ; and to the authority of the Holy See Arnauld and his 
 friends implicitly bowed. In a woodcut prefixed to this Papal 
 constitution by the triumphant Jesuits, Jansenius appeared in his 
 episcopal dress, but accoutred with the aspect, the wings, and the 
 other well-known appendages of the evil spirit, around whom were 
 playing the lightnings of the Vatican. 
 
 The man and the heresy thus happily disposed of, a single question 
 remained Were the peccant propositions really to be found in the 
 Augustinus or not ? Arnauld declared that he had studied the book 
 from end to end, and could not find them there. That there they 
 were nevertheless to be found, the Jesuits as strongly asserted. To 
 have quoted by chapter and page the offensive passages, would have 
 spoiled the most promising quarrel which had arisen in the Church 
 since the close of the Tridentine Council. Still-born must then have 
 perished the ever-memorable distinction of the droit and the fait 
 the droit being the justice of the Papal censure of the propositions, 
 which all Catholics admitted the fait being the existence, in the 
 Augustinus, of the propositions so censured, which all Jansenists 
 denied. 
 
 The vulgar mode of trial by quotation being discarded, nothing 
 remained but trial by authority. Annat, the King's Confessor, a 
 Jesuit in religion, and Mazarin, the King's Minister, a Jesuit in 
 politics, each, from different motives, found his account in humili- 
 ating the Port-Royalists. A conclave of Parisian Doctors, selected 
 by them, decreed that the five propositions were in the book, and 
 should be in the book. A papal bull affirmed their sentence, and 
 then a second conclave required all the ecclesiastics, and all the 
 religious communities of France, to subscribe their assent to the 
 order which had thus affiliated these foundling opinions on poor 
 Jansenius. That such a defender of the faith as Antoine Arnauld 
 would receive such a mandate in silence, the authors of it neither 
 expected nor desired. In words exactly transcribed, though not avow- 
 edly quoted, from Chrysostom and Augustine, he drew up his own 
 
 20 *
 
 308 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 creed on the questions of grace and free-will ; and in good 
 round terms acquitted the Bishop of Ypres of having written more 
 or less. A third conclave censured the apologist, unconscious ap- 
 parently that their fulminations would reach the holy fathers of 
 Constantinople and Hippo. They at least reached the object at 
 which they in reality aimed. " Could the most Christian King," 
 they exclaimed, " permit that penitent recluses and young children 
 should any longer assemble for instruction under the influence of a 
 man who had been convicted of heresy on the subject of efficacious 
 grace, and who was either unable or unwilling to find in the Augus- 
 tinus what the Pope himself had said might be found there 1 " Anne 
 of Austria listened, Mazarin whispered, and she obeyed. Armed 
 with her authority, her lieutenants appeared at Port-Royal with orders 
 to restore Les Granges and the forests around it to their ancient soli- 
 tude ; and then had for ever fallen the glories of that sacred valley, 
 but for an incident so strange and opportune as to force back the 
 memory to the precipitate descent from Mount Ida of the Homeric 
 Deities, to rescue, in the agony of his fate, some panting hero on the 
 field of Troy. 
 
 Mademoiselle Perrier was the niece of Blaise Pascal She was a 
 child in her eleventh year, and a scholar residing in the monastery of 
 Port-Royal. For three years and a half she had been afflicted with 
 a fistula lacrymalis. The adjacent bones had become carious, and 
 the most loathsome ulcers disfigured her countenance. All remedies 
 had been tried in vain ; the medical faculty had exhausted their 
 resources. One desperate experiment remained it was that of the 
 actual cautery. For this the day was appointed, and her father had 
 set out on a journey to be present at the operation. Now it came 
 to pass that M. de la Potherie, who was at once a Parisian ecclesi- 
 astic, a great-uncle of Angelique and of Arnauld, and an assiduous 
 collector of relics, had possessed himself of one of the thorns com- 
 posing the crown of which we read in the Evangelists. Great had 
 been the curiosity of the various convents to see it, and the ladies 
 of Port-Royal had earnestly solicited that privilege. Accordingly, 
 on the 24th of March, in the year 1656, the day of the week being 
 Friday, and the week the third in Lent, a solemn procession of 
 nuns, novices, and scholars, moved along the choir of the monastic 
 church, chanting appropriate hymns, and each one, in her turn, 
 kissing the holy relic. When the turn of Mademoiselle Perrier 
 arrived, she, by the advice of the schoolmistress, touched her diseased 
 eye with the thorn, not doubting that it would effect a cure. She 
 regained her room, and the malady was gone ! The cure was instan- 
 taneous and complete. So strict, however, was the silence of the
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 309 
 
 abbey, especially in Lent, that, except to the companion who shared 
 her chamber, Mademoiselle Perrier did not at first divulge the 
 miracle. On the following day the surgeon appeared with his in- 
 struments. The afflicted father was present ; exhortations to patience 
 were delivered ; every preparation was complete, when the astonished 
 operator for the first time perceived that every symptom of the 
 disease had disappeared. All Paris rang with the story. It reached 
 the ear of the queen-mother. By her command, M. Felix, the prin- 
 cipal surgeon to the king, investigated and confirmed the narrative. 
 The royal conscience was touched. Who but must be moved with 
 such an attestation from on high, of the innocence of a monastery 
 divinely selected as the theatre of so great a miracle 1 Anne of 
 Austria recalled her lieutenant. Again the recluses returned to their 
 hermitages ; the busy hum of school-boys was heard once more at 
 Port-Eoyal ; and in his ancient retreat Arnauld was permitted to re- 
 sume his unremitting labours. 
 
 Time must be at some discount with any man who should employ 
 it in adjusting the " balance of improbabilities " in such a case as 
 this. But there is one indisputable marvel connected with it. The 
 greatest genius, the most profound scholar, and the most eminent 
 advocate of that age, all possessing the most ample means of know- 
 ledge, all carefully investigated, all admitted, and all defended with 
 their pens, the miracle of the Holy Thorn. Europe at that time 
 produced no three men more profoundly conversant with the laws of 
 the material world, with the laws of the human mind, and with the 
 municipal law, than Pascal, Arnauld, and Le Maitre ; and they were 
 all sincere and earnest believers. Yet our Protestant incredulity 
 utterly rejects both the tale itself and the inferences drawn from it, 
 and but for such mighty names, might yield to the temptation of 
 regarding it as too contemptible for serious notice. Why is this 1 
 It is a question which volumes might be well employed to answer. 
 In this place, a passing notice is all that can be given to it. 
 
 Antecedently to their investigation of the evidence, Pascal, Arnauld, 
 and Le Maitre may be supposed to have reduced their reasonings on 
 the subject to the following syllogism : The true Church is dis- 
 tinguished from all others by the perennial possession of miraculous 
 gifts. But the Church of Home is the true Church. Therefore, when 
 a miracle is alleged to have happened within her fold, the presump- 
 tion is not against, but in favour of the truth of the statement ; and 
 therefore, aided by that presumption, credit is due in such a case to 
 testimony which would be insufficient to substiantiate the fact under 
 any other circumstances. Negamus majorem. It is not in the spirit 
 of paradox, far less in that of irreverence or levity, that we would
 
 310 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 maintain the reverse namely, that a Church really distinguished by 
 the permanent exercise of miraculous powers, would presumably be 
 not a true Church, but a false. 
 
 Probability is the expectation of the recurrence of usual se- 
 quences. Certainty is the expectation of the recurrence of sequences 
 believed to be invariable. The disappointment of such an expecta- 
 tion may be the disclosure of some uniform sequence hitherto un- 
 known ; that is, one of the laws of nature ; or it may be a mistake ; 
 that is, the disturbance of those laws by some power capable of con- 
 trolling them. He who alleges a miracle alleges the existence of 
 natural laws ; for there can be no exception where there is no rule. 
 Now, to ascribe the laws of nature to any power but that of God, 
 would be atheism. But to ascribe an habitual infringement of these 
 laws to powers subordinate, yet opposed, to the divine, is not atheistic, 
 but is, on the contrary, consistent alike with piety and with reason. 
 
 That analogies of natural and revealed religion not only permit, 
 but require, us thus to judge. For example, the moral law of God 
 is love. That law is habitually infringed by human selfishness. 
 Submission to the legitimate exercise of legitimate authority, is a 
 law from Heaven. That law is habitually infringed by human self- 
 will. That within, the range of his powers of action man should be 
 a free agent, is the divine law. That law, as we learn from the Go- 
 spels, was habitually infringed in the case of demoniacs. 
 
 That the blood of the dead should corrupt and not liquefy ; that 
 houses should be built and not fly ; that diseases should be cured 
 by therapeutics, or not at all, are all physical laws of nature that 
 is, of God. Those physical laws, we are told, are habitually infringed 
 within the fold of the Eoman Catholic Church. Be it so. But if so, 
 what is the inference *? That the Eoman Catholic Church is the de- 
 positary of divine truth, and the special object of divine favour 1 
 We wot not. Where such truth resides, and such favour rests, there 
 will be harmony, not elsewhere to be found, with the general laws 
 of the divine economy, and the general principles of the divine 
 government. The law is higher than the anomaly. The rule is 
 more worthy than the exception. That conformity to the eternal 
 ordinances of Heaven, whether psychological or physical, should 
 indicate the possession of truth and holiness in a Church, is 
 intelligible. That a systematic counteraction of any such ordi- 
 nances should indicate the same, is not intelligible. If in any 
 society any law of the divine government, whether moral or 
 physical, is habitually reversed, the inference would seem to be, 
 that such a society is subject to the control of some power opposed 
 to the divine.
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 311 
 
 it be answered that every disturbance of the laws of God 
 must proceed from the Author of those laws, and attest his agency 
 and approbation ? Why so ] His moral laws are violated every 
 instant by rebel man : why not his physical laws by rebel angels 1 
 Moses and Paul, and that divine teacher to whom Pascal, Arnauld, 
 and Le Maitre bowed their hearts, and desired to bow their under- 
 standings, all assure us that this is no impossible supposition. Or 
 will it be answered that such reasonings impugn the miracles of 
 Christ himself ? If so, we abandon them as fallacious ; for, sooner 
 should our right hand forget its cunning, than be employed to write 
 one word having that tendency. But the cases are utterly dissimilar. 
 Assume the reality both of the series of miracles recorded in the 
 Gospels, and of the series of miracles recorded in the Roman Catho- 
 lic legends, and without any inconsistency we may regard the one 
 as stamped with the seal of truth, and the other as bearing the im- 
 press of error. Our Redeemer's miracles blend in perfect harmony, 
 though not in absolute unison, with those laws, physical and moral, 
 which he established in the creation, and fulfilled in the redemp- 
 tion, of the world. In their occasion in their object in their 
 fulfilment of prophecy in their attendant doctrine and in their 
 exceptional character, they are essentially distinguished from the 
 perennial miracles of Rome. These are at absolute discord with 
 the laws which the miracles of Christ fulfil. If compelled to be- 
 lieve them true, we should not be compelled to refer them to a 
 divine original. But that the truth of such stories as that of the 
 Holy Thorn should ever have commanded the assent of such 
 men as Pascal, Arnauld, and Le Maitre, is, after all, a standing 
 wonder, and can be accounted for only by remembering that they 
 assumed as inevitable, and hailed as invaluable, an inference which, 
 as it seems to us, is not to be drawn from the premises, even if 
 established. 
 
 Judge as we may of the miraculous attestation to the innocence of 
 Port-Royal, which thus obtained the advocacy of Pascal, sentence is 
 irreversibly passed by mankind on the prodigies wrought, at the same 
 time and in the same cause, by the pen of that wonder-working con- 
 troversalist. In the whole compass of literature, ancient and modern, 
 there is probably nothing in the same style which could bear a com- 
 parison with the " Provincial Letters." Their peculiar excellence 
 can be illustrated only by the force of contrast ; and, in that sense, 
 the " Letters of Junius " may afford the illustration. 
 
 To either series of anonymous satires must be ascribed the praise 
 of exquisite address, and of irresistible vigour. Each attained an 
 immediate and a lasting popularity ; and each has exercised a power-
 
 312 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 ful influence on the literature of succeeding times. But here all 
 resemblance ends. No writer ever earned so much fame as Junius 
 with so little claim to the respect or gratitude of his readers. He 
 embraced no large principles; he awakened no generous feelings; 
 he scarcely advocated any great social interest. He gives equally 
 little proof of the love of man, and of the love of books. He con- 
 tributed nothing to the increase of knowledge, and but seldom 
 ministered to blameless delight. His topics and his thoughts were 
 all of the passing day. His invective is merciless and extravagant ; 
 and the veil of public spirit is barely thrown over his personal anti- 
 pathies and inordinate self-esteem. Xo man was ever so greatly 
 indebted to mere style ; yet, with all its recommendations, his is a 
 style eminently vicious. It is laboured, pompous, antithetical 
 never self-forgetful, never flowing freely, never in repose. The 
 admiration he extorts is yielded grudgingly ; nor is there any book 
 so universally read which might become extinct with so little loss 
 to the world as " The Letters of Junius." 
 
 Reverse all this, and you have the characteristics of the " Pro- 
 vincial Letters." Their language is but the transparent, elastic, 
 unobtrusive medium of thought. It moves with such quiet grace- 
 fulness as entirely to escape attention, until the matchless perspi- 
 cacity of discussions, so incomprehensible under any management 
 but his, forces on the mind an inquiry into the causes of so welcome 
 a phenomenon. Pascal's wit, even when most formidable, is so 
 tempered by kindness, as to show that the infliction of pain, however 
 salutary, was a reluctant tribute to his supreme love of truth. His 
 playfulness is the buoyancy of a heart which has no burden to 
 throw off, and is gay without an effort. His indignation is never 
 morose, vindictive, or supercilious : it is but philanthropy kindling 
 into righteous anger and generous resentment, and imparting to 
 them a tone of awful majesty. The unostentatious master of all 
 learning, he finds recreation in toils which would paralyse an 
 ordinary understanding ; yet so sublimated is that learning with the 
 spirit of philosophy, as to make him heedless of whatever is trivial, 
 transient, and minute, except as it suggests or leads to what is com- 
 prehensive and eternal. 
 
 But the canons of mere literary criticism were never designed to 
 measure that which constitutes the peculiar greatness of the author 
 of the " Provincial Letters." His own claim was to be tried by his 
 peers by those who, in common with him, possess a mental vision 
 purified by contemplating that light in which is no darkness at 
 all, and affections enlarged by a benevolence which, having its 
 springs in heaven, has no limits to its diffusion on earth. Among
 
 THE PORT-BO YALISTS. 313 
 
 his ascetic brethren in the valley of Port-Royal, he himself recog- 
 nised the meet, if not the impartial, judges of his labours. They 
 hailed with transport an ally who, to their own sanctity of manners 
 and to more than their own genius, added popular arts to which 
 they could make no pretensions. We infer indeed, though doubt- 
 fully, that they were taught by the excellent M. Singlin to regard and 
 censure such exultation as merely human. That great spiritual ana- 
 tomist probably rebuked and punished the glee which could not but 
 agitate the innermost folds of Arnauld's heart, as he read his 
 apologist's exquisite analysis of the Pouvoir Prochain and of the 
 Graces Suffisantes qui ne sont pas efficaces. For history records the 
 misgivings of Mademoiselle Pascal on the question, whether M. 
 Singlin would put up with the indomitable gaiety which would still 
 chequer with some gleams of mirth her brother's cell at Les Granges, 
 even after his preternatural ingenuity had been exhausted in render- 
 ing it the most desolate and cheerless of human abodes. 
 
 Whatever may have been his treatment of his illustrious peni- 
 tents, the good man was not permitted to guide them through their 
 weary pilgrimage. The respite obtained for Port-Royal by the Holy 
 Thorn and the "Provincial Letters," expired with the death of 
 Mazarin, and with the authority of the Queen-mother. Louis began, 
 as he believed, to act for himself- a vain attempt for a man who 
 could never think for himself. The genius, such as it was, of the 
 dead minister, had still the mastery over the inferior mind of the 
 surviving monarch. Louis had been taught by the Cardinal to fear 
 and to hate De Retz, Jansenism, and Port- Royal. Poor Singlin was 
 therefore driven away, and in due time consigned to the Bastille. 
 At the bidding of the King, a synod of the clergy of France drew 
 up an anti-Jansenist test, to be taken by all ecclesiastics, and by all 
 religious communities, male and female ; fortified, of course, by 
 effective penalties. They were all required to subscribe their names 
 to a declaration that the " five propositions," in their heretical sense, 
 were to be found in the Augustinus; nor was there any exception in 
 favour of those who had never seen the book, or of those who could 
 not read Latin. This was no ineffectual menace. Blow after blow 
 fell on those who refused, and even on those who were expected to 
 refuse, thus to condemn the Bishop of Ypres. Port-Royal was 
 foremost among such obdurate recusants. Their schools, male and 
 female, were dispersed. Arnauld and the other recluses were 
 banished from the valley. The admission of novices and postulantes 
 was interdicted to the abbess ; and her ancient monastery was 
 threatened with suppression as contumacious and heretical. 
 
 Angelique Arnauld was now sinking under the pressure of in-
 
 314 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 firmity and of old age. Half a century had elapsed since the com- 
 mencement of her reforms, and her tale of threescore years and ten 
 had been fully told ; but, ere she yielded her soul to Him who gave 
 it, she rose from her dying-bed to make one more effort for the pre- 
 servation of the house so long devoted, under her guidance, to -works 
 of mercy and to exercises of penitence and prayer. Surrounded by 
 a throng of weeping children, and by her elder associates maintain- 
 ing their wonted composure, she, for the last time, quitted Port- 
 Eoyal des Champs, giving and receiving benedictions, and went to 
 die at the convent of Port-Eoyal de Paris. 
 
 She found the gates guarded, and the court-yards filled by a 
 troop of archers, the executioners of the royal mandate for expel- 
 ling the scholars, novices, postulantes, and other unprofessed in- 
 mates of the house. During eight successive days one after another 
 of these helpless women was torn from the place around which 
 their affections had twined ; and from the arms of the dying mother, 
 whom they loved with the tenderness of children, and regarded 
 with more than filial reverence. Seventy-five persons were thus 
 successively separated from her, as from hour to hour she descended 
 to the tomb, under bodily and mental sufferings, described with 
 fearful minuteness in the obituaries of Port-Eoyal. " At length our 
 good Lord has seen fit to deprive us of all. Fathers, sisters, dis- 
 ciples, children all are gone. Blessed be the name of the Lord." 
 Such was her announcement to Madame de Sevigne of the emptying 
 of this first vial of kingly wrath. To the Queen-mother she ad- 
 dressed herself in a loftier, though not in a less gentle tone. At 
 each momentary remission of her agonies, she dictated to Anne of 
 Austria a letter, long and justly celebrated as a model of epistolary 
 eloquence. It has no trace of debility, still less of resentment. 
 Her defence is as clear and as collected as though, in the fulness of 
 health, she had been conducting the cause of another. Without a 
 reproach or a murmur, she exposes the wrongs of her sisterhood, and 
 the error of her persecutors. For herself she asks no sympathy ; 
 but, from the verge of the world she had so long renounced, and 
 was now about to quit for ever, she invokes from the depositaries of 
 worldly power the justice they owed to man, and the submission 
 due to the ordinances of Heaven. " Now, my earthly business is 
 done ! " was her grateful exclamation as this letter was closed ; and 
 then commenced a mental and bodily strife, recorded, perhaps, but 
 too faithfully by her biographers. These pages, at least, are no fit 
 place for the delineation of a scene over which the sternest spectator 
 must have wept, and the most hardened must have prayed fervently 
 for the sufferer and for himself. From the dark close of a life so
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 315 
 
 holy and so blameless, and from the hope, and peace, and joy, which 
 at length cast over her departing spirit some radiance from that 
 better state on the confines of which she stood, lessons may he 
 drawn which we have no commission to teach, and which are per- 
 haps best learned without the intervention of any human teacher. 
 Yet, even in Port-Royal itself, there were not wanting some to 
 whom this admonition of the vanity of human things was addressed 
 in vain. 
 
 Among that venerable society, the Soeur Flavie Passart was un- 
 rivalled in the severity of her self-discipline, and the splendour of 
 her superhuman gifts. As often as illness confined her to her bed, 
 so often did a miracle restore her. The dead returned to her with 
 messages from the other world. No saint in the calendar withheld 
 his powerful influence in the court of heaven when she invoked it. 
 Like many wiser folks, Soeur Flavie discovered at last, and doubt- 
 less to her own surprise, that she had become (there are none but 
 masculine terms to express it) a liar and a knave. The same dis- 
 covery was opportunely made by her associates, and arrested her 
 progress to the elective dignities of the abbey. A penitent confes- 
 sion of her Jansenist errors, a denunciation of the more eminent 
 ladies of Port-Royal as her seducers, and a retractation of her hereti- 
 cal belief in the innocence of Jansenius, might, however, still pave 
 her way to the abbatial throne. So judged the Soeur Flavie, and so 
 decided M. Perifixe, the then Archbishop of Paris. She merely 
 asked the imprisonment of twenty-six of her rivals. He cheerfully 
 accorded so reasonable a boon. Repairing in pontifical state to the 
 Parisian monastery, he again tendered the anti-Jansenist test. An- 
 gelique was gone ; but her spirit and her constancy survived. The 
 simple-hearted nuns thought that it would be a mere falsehood to 
 attest the existence of " five propositions " in a book which they had 
 never seen, and could not read ; and truth, they knew, was the com- 
 mand of God, let Pope, Cardinal, or Archbishop say what they 
 would to the contrary. Perifixe interdicted their admission to the 
 holy sacrament. " Well, my lord," they replied, " there is in heaven 
 a Judge who reads the heart, and to him we commend our cause." 
 "Ay, ay," rejoined the exemplary prelate, "when we get to heaven 
 it will be time enough to consider that, and see how things go 
 there." 
 
 Eight days elapsed ; and still no change of purpose, no subscrip- 
 tion to the test. Preceded by his crosier, the mitre on his brows, 
 his train borne by ecclesiastics, and followed by a long line of 
 archers, the Archbishop reappeared. Much he discoursed respect- 
 ing his own mildness, and much of the obduracy of the nuns. .In
 
 316 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 proof of both, twenty-three of their number were conveyed to 
 separate places of confinement. But the fruits of her treachery were 
 not reaped by the Sceur Flavie. By the influence of the Archbi- 
 shop, the Soeur Dorothee Perdreau was elected abbess. That lady 
 established her residence at Paris. She effected a final separation 
 of the two monasteries ; and gave entertainments at the Parisian 
 convent which might vie Avith the most brilliant of any which 
 formed the boast of the neighbouring hotels. For ten months her 
 exiled sisters remained in prison. Perifixe then ordered their re- 
 turn to Port f Royal des Champs, there to be excluded from the 
 sacraments of the Church, and to die without her benedictions. 
 The recluses of the valley were to be seen there no more. They 
 lived in hiding-places, or pined away in dungeons. Singlin died of 
 extremity of suffering in the Bastille. It must be admitted, there- 
 fore, that if the existence of the "five propositions" in the Auyus- 
 iinus was not verified by the attestation of a score or two of old 
 ladies, Louis and his clergy have not to bear the responsibility of so 
 great a misfortune to the Church. 
 
 Twelve years before, the miracle of the Holy Thorn and the genius 
 of Pascal had rescued Port-Royal from impending destruction. A 
 person scarcely less unlike the common herd of mortals than the 
 author of the " Provincial Letters," and whose elevation had been 
 owing to events which some may think more miraculous than the 
 cure of Pascal's niece, now interposed in their behalf, and with not 
 inferior success. 
 
 Anne Genevieve de Bourbon was born in the year 1619, in the 
 castle of Vincennes, where her father, Henry, Prince of Orleans, 
 was then confined. The misfortunes of her family, and especially 
 the execution of the Constable Montmorency, her maternal uncle, 
 had predisposed, in early youth, to serious thought, a mind dis- 
 tinguished to the last by an insatiable craving for strong emotions. 
 To renounce the world, and to take the veil among the sisterhood 
 of Carmelites of the Faubourg St Jacques, were the earliest of the 
 projects she had formed to baffle the foul fiend ennui. A counter- 
 project, devised by her mother, was, that the young princess should 
 present herself at a court ball. Maternal authority, perhaps inclin- 
 ation, on the one side, and conscientious scruples on the other, 
 balanced and distressed the spirit of the high-born maiden. She 
 betook herself for guidance to the Faubourg St Jacques. A council 
 on the arduous question was held with all the forms, conventual 
 and theatrical, which the statutes of the Order and the fancy of the 
 nuns required or suggested. As presidents, sat two of their number, 
 one impersonating the grace of Penitence, the other the virtue of
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 317 
 
 Discretion. From the judgment-seat so occupied, went forth the 
 sentence that Anne Genevieve de Boiirbon should attend the ball, 
 and should surrender herself " de bonne foi " to all the dress and 
 ornaments prepared for her ; but that in immediate contact with 
 her person she should be armed with the penitential robe of hair- 
 cloth commonly called a cilice. Above the talisman which thus 
 encircled that young and lovely form, glowed the bright panoply of 
 the marchande de modes. Beneath it throbbed a heart responsive 
 in every pulse to the new intoxication. Penitence and Discretion 
 took their flight, no more to return till, after the lapse of many a 
 chequered year, the cilice was again drawn over a heart, then, alas ! 
 aching with remorse, and towed down with the contrite retrospect 
 of many a crime and many a folly. 
 
 At the Hotel de Eambouillet, she was initiated, with her brother, 
 afterwards " the great Conde," into the Parisian mystery of throw- 
 ing over the cold hard lineaments of downright selfishness the fine 
 woven draperies of polite literature, of sentimentality, and of taste. 
 She had scarcely read any books ; but she could discourse eloquently 
 on all. Mistress of the histrionic art, all words fell bewitchiagly 
 from a voice with which every look, and gesture, and attitude com- 
 bined in graceful harmony. De Retz notices the exquisite effect of 
 the sudden bursts of gaiety which would at times dispel her 
 habitual, but not inexpressive, languor. Sarazin and Voiture were 
 proud to receive their laurels from her hand, or to beg them at her 
 feet. Statesmen and generals sought, or seemed to seek, her coun- 
 sels. Even her mitred correspondents infused into their pastoral 
 admonitions a delicacy and a glow of language, which reveal alike 
 her skill to fascinate, and their desire to please. Vows of celibacy 
 no longer promised an escape from lassitude. At the age of twenty- 
 three she gave her hand to Henri d'Orleans, Due de Longueville, 
 who had already numbered forty-seven years. The Duke repaired 
 as plenipotentiary to the conferences at Munster. The Duchess 
 remained at Paris, the idol of the court. Unexplored, at least by 
 us, be the scandalous chronicle of a scandalous age. She rejoined 
 him in time to shelter, if not entirely to save, her reputation. 
 
 As she floated down the Meuse in a royal progress (for it was 
 nothing less), the sister of Conde was received with more than royal 
 honours. Troops lined the banks; fortresses poured forth their 
 garrisons to welcome her approach ; the keys of Namur, then held 
 by Spain, were laid at her feet ; complimentary harangues hailed her 
 arrival at Liege, Maestricht, and Euremonde ; and amidst the roar 
 of cannon, and the acclamations of ten thousand voices, the triumph- 
 ant beauty was restored to the arms of her husband. At Munster
 
 318 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 she exhibited the state and splendour of a crowned head. But her 
 heart was depressed by ennui, if not agitated by more guilty emo- 
 tions. Tours were undertaken, palaces built, wars of etiquette 
 successfully waged with rival princesses, diplomatic intrigues twisted 
 and untwisted : but gloom still settled on the spirit of her to whose 
 diversion all other minds were ministering. 
 
 She returned to Paris. Conde had exalted the glories of her 
 house. Mazarin got up an Italian opera for her amusement. Ben- 
 serade and Voiture referred to her award the question, then agitating 
 the whole Parisian world, of the comparative excellence of their 
 rival sonnets. She became a mother. On every side the tedium of 
 existence was assailed by new excitements ; but melancholy still 
 brooded over her. Relief" was however at hand. The dissensions, 
 the wars, the intrigues of the Fronde, filled the void which nothing 
 else could fill. Her share in that mad revel is known to all the 
 readers of De Retz, La Rochefoucault, De Montpensier, and De 
 Motteville. Her younger brother, the Prince de Conti, was but a 
 puppet in her hands. With Conde she quarrelled one day, and 
 made it up the next. De Retz was alternately her ruler and her 
 dupe. Marsaillac alone acquired a lasting influence over her mind. 
 He flattered, amused, animated, and governed her, to whose govern- 
 ment alone the factious and the frivolous were alike willing to bow. 
 With her infant in her arms, she appeared on the balconj r , at the 
 Hotel de Ville, "beautiful," says De Retz, "with her dress ap- 
 parently, but not really, neglected ; while at the Greve, from the 
 pavement to the tiles, was a countless multitude of men shouting 
 with transport, and women shedding tears of tenderness." Kever 
 did mob-idolatry assume a more bewitching aspect. Hushed into 
 affectionate silence were the harsh voices of the many-headed 
 monster, as the peerless dame gave birth to " Charles Paris," her 
 second son. Crowded even was that sick-chamber with black-robed 
 councillors, and plumed officers, soliciting her commands for the 
 defence of the blockaded capital 
 
 Peace came, and she met almost on equal terms the haughty 
 widow and mother of the kings of France. For her brother and 
 her husband, she demanded and obtained the government of pro- 
 vinces ; for herself, a state ball at the Hotel de Ville, with the 
 presence of the queen-mother to grace her triumph ; for Marsaillac, 
 the entree at the Louvre in his carriage ; for his wife, a tabouret. 
 
 There are limits to human endurance. Against the entree and 
 the tabouret the whole nobility of France awoke in generous 
 resentment. Astrsea once more took her flight. Conde, Conti, and 
 poor De Longueville himself, were conducted to Vincennes ; our
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 319 
 
 heroine fled to Normandy. Besieged in the Castle of Dieppe, she 
 escaped on foot, and, after a march of some leagues along the coast, 
 reached a fishing-boat, which lay at anchor there awaiting her 
 arrival. A storm was raging ; but, in defiance of all remonstrances, 
 she resolved to embark. In an instant she was struggling for life 
 in the water. Rescued with difficulty, but nothing daunted, she 
 mounted behind a horseman, and for fifteen days evaded the pursuit 
 of her enemies, in mean and desolate hiding-places. At length, reach- 
 ing Havre, an English vessel conveyed her to Rotterdam. From that 
 disastrous eclipse she emerged with undiminished splendour. From 
 Stenay, Turenne advanced to meet her at the head of all his forces. 
 She became a party with him to the convention by which the King 
 of Spain bound himself to maintain the war with France till the 
 liberation of the three captive princes ; and sixty thousand crowns 
 were promised for the support of the table and equipages of 
 Turenne and the Princesse de Longueville. That more tender 
 bonds than those of war and treason did not unite them, is ascribed 
 by her biographers to her preference for one La Moussaye, the com- 
 mandant of Stenay. There she braved the denunciations of her 
 sovereign, opposing one manifesto to another, and adding to her 
 other glories the praise of diplomatic eloquence. 
 
 Again the centre of all intrigue, the delirium, whether ambitious 
 or voluptuous, of her heart, yielded for a while (and where beats 
 the heart which is not enigmatical 1 ?) to remembrances, at once 
 bitter and soothing, of the Carmelites of St Jacques, with whom in 
 days of youth and innocency she had joined in far different aspira- 
 tions. But in the phantasmagoria at Paris the scenes are again 
 shifted. The parliaments remonstrate, the Princes are enlarged, the 
 Cardinal exiled, and a royal declaration attests the innocence of 
 Madame de Longueville. " Vous n'etes plus criminelle, si ce n'est 
 de lese-amours," was the greeting on this occasion of her favourite 
 Sarazin. She rewarded the poet with an embassy to the Spanish 
 government ; for the Duchesse had now undertaken a negotiation 
 for peace between the two crowns. Her second triumph, however, 
 was still incomplete. She returned in all the pomp of a conqueror 
 to Paris, and once more met on equal terms the majesty of France. 
 
 It may reasonably be doubted whether there exists at this day 
 one human being who has found leisure and inclinatioin to study 
 with exact attention, in all its tedious details, the history of the wars 
 of the " Fronde." But that they disturbed the peace and postponed 
 the rising greatness of a mighty nation, they would have as little to 
 commend them to serious regard as the cabals one may suppose to 
 distract the fair council presiding over the internal economy of
 
 320 THE POET-ROYALISTS. 
 
 Almack's. To assert, during the weakness of a long minority, some 
 popular rights not otherwise to be maintained, and to restore the 
 greater nobility to the powers of which Eichelieu had dispossessed 
 them, were indeed motives which gave some show of dignity to the 
 first movement of the Frondeurs ; but meaner passions, more 
 frivolous questions, interests more nakedly selfish, or in themselves 
 more contemptible, never before or since roused a people to war, or 
 formed a pretext for rebellion. Cardinals, Judges, Monarchs, 
 Princesses, Courtiers, and Generals whirl before the eye in that 
 giddy maze intriguing, lying, jesting, imprisoning, and killing, as 
 though Bacchus, Momus, and Moloch had for a while usurped a 
 joint and absolute dominion over the distracted land. 
 
 Among the figurantes in this dance of death, none is more con- 
 spicuous than the Duchesse de Longueville. In the third and last 
 of those preposterous wars, the royal authority triumphed, and her 
 star declined ; but it now set to rise again in a new and far purer 
 radiance. Like the wisest of the sons of men, she had applied her 
 heart to see if there was any good thing under the sun ; and, like 
 him, she returned with a spirit oppressed by the hopeless pursuit, 
 and proclaiming that all is vanity. " I have no wish so ardent " 
 (such is her confession to the Prioress of the Carmelites) "as to see 
 this war at an end, that, for the rest of my days, I may dwell with 
 you, and apart from all the world besides. Till peace is concluded, 
 I may not do so. My life seems to have been given me but to 
 prove how bitter and how oppressive are the sorrows of this mortal 
 existence. My attachments to it are broken, or rather crushed. Write 
 to me often, and confirm the loathing I feel for this sublunary state." 
 
 It was a weary way which the returning penitent had to retrace. 
 !N"ow rising towards the heaven to which she aspired, her fainting 
 spirit would again sink down to the earth she had too much loved. 
 Long and arduous was the struggle tardy, and to the last pre- 
 carious, the conquest. But the conquest was achieved. Gainsay 
 it who will, the spirit of man is the not unfrequent, though the 
 hidden, scene of revolutions as real as that which, from the seed 
 corrupting in the soil beneath us, draws forth the petals, diifusing 
 on every side their fragrance, and reflecting in every varied hue the 
 light of heaven. He who, with disappointed hopes, and the satiety 
 of all the pleasures which earth has to offer, seeks refuge in that 
 sanctuary which in the heat and confidence of youth he had de- 
 spised, may well expect that human judges will note the change 
 with incredulity or derision : nor, perhaps, has he much right to 
 complain. There ever must be some ground for others to doubt 
 whether the seeming love of long-neglected virtues be more than
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 321 
 
 a real distaste for long-practised vices. That the rouee should 
 pass into the ennuyee, and the ennuyee into the devote, may appear 
 as natural as that the worm should become a chrysalis, and the 
 chrysalis a butterfly. To the wits be their jests, and to the mockers 
 their gibes. To those who can feel for some of the deepest agonies 
 of our common nature, such jests will be at least less welcome than 
 the belief that, Avhen innocence is gone, all is not lost ; and the 
 conviction, that over the soul blighted and depraved by criminal in- 
 dulgence, may still be effectually brooding an influence more gentle 
 than a mother's love, and mightier than all the confederate powers 
 of darkness and of guilt. 
 
 Few readers of the later correspondence of the Duchesse de 
 Longueville will doubt that the change in her character was the re- 
 sult of such a renovating energy. At the age of thirty-four she finally 
 retired from the cabals in which she had borne so conspicuous a part. 
 Conde had now taken up arms against her native country, and Tu- 
 renne commanded her armies. The Duchesse mourned alike the suc- 
 cess and the reverses of her brother. De Longueville, a kind-hearted 
 man, hailed with unabated tenderness her return to the paths of 
 wisdom and peace. She watched with true conjugal care over his 
 declining years, and even extended her kindness to one of his 
 illegitimate daughters. 
 
 Touched by her altered conduct, the King and the Queen-mother 
 admitted her not merely to their favour, but to a high place in their 
 regard ; nor are there many incidents in the life of Louis so amiable, 
 as the affectionate gentleness of his demeanour to this once danger- 
 ous but now self-humbled enemy. On the death of her husband, she 
 expended immense sums in the attempt to repair, in some degree, 
 the calamities which the war of the Princes had inflicted on the 
 peasantry. In a single year she restored to freedom, at her own 
 expense, nine hundred persons imprisoned for debt ; and had a list 
 of no less than four thousand pensioners subsisting altogether on 
 her bounty. The austere penances, which, at least, attested her 
 sincerity, were combined, on all becoming occasions, with the 
 princely magnificence due to her exalted station. Her eldest son, the 
 Comte Du Dunois, a feeble-minded youth, turned Jesuit, took 
 orders, escaped to Eome, and was placed under permanent restraint. 
 The Comte St Paul, her only other child, was a wild profligate. He 
 enjoyed ecclesiastical benefices of the annual value of 50,000 crowns, 
 which she compelled him to resign unconditionally to the disposal 
 of the King. 
 
 Louis revered and applauded such unwonted disinterestedness, 
 and exerted all the magic of his flattery to win her back again to the 
 
 21
 
 322 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 court and to the -world. But she had learnt a salutary lesson of self- 
 distrust. In the valley of Port-Koyal she built a modest residence, 
 where she found repose, if not serenity ; and soothed with humble 
 hopes a spirit too deeply contrite to be visited by more buoyant 
 feelings. Her own hand has traced the history of her declining 
 years ; nor have the most pathetic preachers of that age of pulpit 
 eloquence bequeathed to us a more impressive admonition. "Whoever 
 would learn what are the woes of ministering, by reckless self-in- 
 dulgence, to the morbid cravings of the heart for excitement ; or 
 how revolting is the late return to more tranquil pursuits ; or how 
 gloomy is the shadow which criminal passions, even when exorcised, 
 will yet cast over the soul they have long possessed ; or how, through 
 that gloom, a light pure as its divine original, may dawn over the 
 benighted mind with still expanding warmth and brightness 
 should study the Letters and the Confessions of Anne Genevieve, 
 Duchesse de Longueville. 
 
 Such, and so conversant with the ways of the world, was the 
 diplomatist who at length appeared for the rescue of the ladies of 
 Port-Royal. No less skilful hand could have unravelled the folds 
 in which the subject had been wrapped by intrigue and bigotry. 
 
 To explain what was the task she undertook, we must return a 
 little on our former steps. 
 
 The original anti-Jansenist test had been promulgated by a synod 
 of the clergy of France, adopted by the Sorbonne, and enforced by 
 Louis. To the remonstrances of the nuns against being required to 
 attest by their signatures a matter of fact of which they had, and 
 could have, no knowledge, the King had answered only by reiterating 
 the demand for a " pure and simple " subscription. " His Majesty," 
 observed the Princesse de Guimene, " is supreme. He can make 
 princes of the blood, bishops, and archbishops. Why not martyrs 
 also 1 " It was a branch of the royal prerogative which he was 
 nothing loth to exercise. De Retz abdicated the see of Paris, and 
 was succeeded by De Marca, the author of the Formulary. Avail- 
 ing themselves of so happy an occasion, the Jesuits at Clermont 
 drew up a thesis, in which was propounded for the acceptance of 
 the faithful, the naked dogma of Papal infallibility, not only on 
 points of doctrine, but as to mere matters of fact. Arnauld and his 
 friends protested. Their protest was refuted by the hand and the 
 torch of one of the great polemics of that age the public executioner. 
 De Marca did not live long ; and his death brought with it a truce 
 in this holy war. His successor in the see of Paris, M. de Perifixe, 
 resumed it, but with greater subtlety. He taught that it was enough 
 if a matter of fact, asserted by the Pope, were believed not d'unefoi
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 323 
 
 divine, but cfune foi liumaine. Whether, in the Yirgilian elysium, 
 the recompense awarded to the inventors of useful arts awaits the 
 authors of useful distinctions, has not been revealed to us ; but if so, 
 De Perifixe may there have found his recompense. On earth it was 
 his hard fate to be refuted by Nicole, to be laughed at by the Paris- 
 ians, and to be opposed by the ladies of Port-Eoyal. They had no 
 faith, divine or human, and they would profess none, as to the con- 
 tents of a large folio written in a language of which they were en- 
 tirely ignorant. " Pure as angels," said the incensed Archbishop ; 
 " they are proud as devils ! " How he punished their pride has 
 already been recorded. 
 
 When a great dignitary has lost his temper there is nothing which 
 he should more studiously avoid than the being hooked into the sort 
 of contemporary record which the French call a proces verbal. In 
 the midst of the nuns of Port-Eoyal, De Perifixe had stormed and 
 scolded more in the style of a poissarde than of an Archbishop of 
 Paris ; and when the chronicle of all his sayings and doings on the 
 occasion stole into light, with all the forms of notarial certificates, 
 he found himself, to his unutterable dismay, the hero of as broad a 
 farce as had ever delighted that laughter-loving city. It was the 
 single joke of which the nuns had ever been either the willing or 
 the unintentional authors ; and they soon found to their cost that it 
 was no light matter to have directed the current of ridicule against 
 an archiepiscopal, and, through him, against a royal censor. 
 
 The invincible opposition of the Port-Eoyalists to the test, had 
 awakened a more extended resistance. Men had begun to deny the 
 right of assemblies of the clergy, or of the King himself, to impose 
 such subscriptions. To retreat was, however, no longer possible. 
 Louis, therefore, by the advice of the Jesuits, desired the Pope him- 
 self first to draw up a Formula, which should declare his own 
 infallible knowledge of matters of fact ; and then to require the uni- 
 versal acceptance of it. Alexander VII. exultingly complied. Sub- 
 scription to De Marca's test was now exacted by papal authority, 
 with the addition that the subscribers should call on the Deity him- 
 self to attest their sincerity. To this demand the great body of the 
 clergy of France submitted ; but still the resistance of the nuns of 
 Port-Eoyal was unsubdued. Four years of persecution of mean, 
 unmanly, worrying persecution followed. The history of it fills 
 many volumes of the Conventual Annals, exciting in the mind of 
 him who reads them, feelings of amazement and disgust, of respect 
 and pity, strong enough to carry him through what it must be con- 
 fessed is but a wearisome task. From the poor remnant of earthly 
 comforts which these aged women had retained, the mean-spirited 
 
 21 *
 
 324 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 king, his bigoted confessors, and his absurd archbishop, daily stole 
 whatever could be so pilfered. From their means of preparing for 
 the world where the wicked cease from troubling, every deduction 
 was made which sacerdotal tyranny could enforce. But no tyranny 
 could induce them to call on the God of Truth to attest a lie. One 
 after another went down, with no priestly absolution, to graves which 
 no priest would bless ; strong even amidst the weakness and the 
 mortal agonies of nature, in the assurance, that the path to heaven 
 could not be found in disobedience to the immutable laws which 
 Heaven itself had established. 
 
 Among the bishops of France, four had been faithful enough 
 to insist on the distinction between the droit and the fait. In 
 publishing the papal bull, they attached to it an express statement 
 of their dissent from this new pretension of Rome. Of these 
 prelates, one was a brother of the great Arnauld, and bore the same 
 name. Alexander VII. was now on his death-bed ; he had even re- 
 ceived extreme unction. But at that awful hour he retained enough 
 of human or of papal feeling to launch against the four prelates a 
 brief full of menaces, which it devolved on his successor, Eospigliosi, 
 to execute. 
 
 But Clement IX. was a man of a far greater, and more Christian 
 spirit. He had mourned over the distractions of the Church, and 
 had made it his appropriate glory to mediate between the contend- 
 ing crowns of Spain and Portugal To him the Duchesse de 
 Longueville addressed herself on behalf of Port-Royal, in a letter of 
 the most insinuating and impressive eloquence. His nuncio at Paris 
 was made to feel all the powers of that fascinating influence which 
 she still knew how to employ. At her hotel, and in her presence, a 
 select committee met daily for the management of this affair. It was 
 composed of three bishops, aided by Arnauld and Nicole. Conde 
 himself was induced by his sister to lend the weight of his authority 
 to her projects. Even Le Tellier was circumvented by the toils 
 spread for him by this great mistress of intrigue. For nearly 
 eighteen months she laboured to overcome the obstacles which the 
 pride of Rome and of Louis, and the ill-will of the Father Annat, 
 his confessor, opposed to her. All difficulties at length yielded to 
 her perseverance and her diplomatic skill. The four bishops were 
 content to denounce the "five propositions" as heretical, and to 
 promise " a submission of respect and discipline," as to the fact, de- 
 claring that " they would not contest the papal decision, but wotild 
 maintain an absolute silence on the subject." One of them 
 insisted on adding an express statement of the fallibility of the 
 Church respecting such matters of fact as the contents of a book.
 
 THE POET-ROYALISTS, 325 
 
 Clement IX. was, however, satisfied. Peace was restored to the 
 Galilean Church. Medals were struck, speeches made, and solemn 
 audiences accorded by Louis to Arnauld and his associates. De 
 Saci and his fellow-prisoners were set at liberty. Port-Royal was 
 once more permitted to recruit her monastery, to open her schools, 
 and to give shelter to her dispersed recluses. Among the events 
 which signalized .the pacification of Clement IX., one demands 
 especial notice. Malebranche had signed the Formulary. He now 
 frankly avowed that he had condemned Jansenius without reading 
 his book, and implored the pardon of God and of man for his guilty 
 compliance. 
 
 It may perhaps be consolatory to some, in our own times, to be 
 informed, that in censuring as heretical the book of a professor of 
 divinity, of which they knew nothing but the title-page, they might 
 have pleaded the example of so great a man a comfort, however, 
 to which they will not be entitled, unless they imitate also the ex- 
 ample of his repentance. 
 
 Ten years elapsed from this pacification before the close of the 
 extraordinary career of the Duchesse de Longueville ; and they were 
 years distinguished in the chronicle of Port-Eoyal by little else 
 than the peaceful lives and the tranquil deaths of many of the 
 inhabitants of the valley. In their annals are to be found more 
 than a century of names, to which their admirers have promised 
 not only an eternal reward, but such immortality as the world has to 
 bestow. 
 
 Overburdened as we are by the ever-increasing debt of admiration 
 to the illustrious dead, these promises will hardly be fulfilled, at 
 least by our busy age : nor is it easy even for one who has carefully 
 travelled through the whole of these biographies, to select from 
 among the female candidates for posthumous renown, those to whom 
 such homage is especially due. Their portraitures have a strong re- 
 semblance to each other. To each, in her turn, is awarded the praise 
 of passive virtue, of fervent piety, and of austerities from which 
 nature shrinks. If a sense of the ludicrous will occasionally provoke 
 a passing smile, or if a sigh must now and then be given to the 
 melancholy superstitions of which they were the blameless victims, 
 it is at least impossible to contemplate, irreverently or unmoved, the 
 image of purity and peace, of mutual kindness and cheerful acquies- 
 cence in the Divine will, which discloses itself at each successive 
 aspect of that holy sisterhood. 
 
 The sternest Protestant cannot rouse himself at once from the 
 influence of this course of reading ; nor resume, without an effort, 
 his conviction, that it is amidst the charities of domestic life that
 
 Wi THE PORT-BO YALISTS. 
 
 female virtue finds the highest exercise, and female piety the most 
 sublime elevation. He knows, indeed, that exuberant as is the 
 charter of his faith in models of every human virtue, and in pre- 
 cepts of wisdom under every varied form, it contains not so much 
 as a single example, or a solitary admonition, from which the 
 Confessors of Port-Eoyal could have shown that a retreat to such 
 cloisters was in accordance with the revealed will of God. He 
 knows also, that thus to counteract the eternal laws of nature and 
 the manifest designs of Providence, must be folly, however specious 
 the pretext or solemn the guise which such folly may assume. He 
 is assured that filial affection, cheerfully, temperately, bountifully, 
 and thankfully using the gifts of Heaven, is the best tribute which 
 man can render to Him who claims for himself the name and the 
 character of a Father. But with all this knowledge, the disciple 
 of Luther or of Calvin will yet close the vies edifiantes and the 
 necrologies of these holy women, not without a reluctance to doubt, 
 and a wish to believe, that they really occupied the high and awful 
 station to which they aspired ; and stood apart from the world, its 
 pollutions, and its cares, to offer with purer hearts than others, and 
 with more acceptable intercessions, the sacrifice of an uninterrupted 
 worship, replete with blessings to themselves and to mankind. 
 Peace then to their errors, and unquoted be any of the innumerable 
 extravagances which abound in the records of their lives. To the 
 recluses who shared, without ever breaking, their solitude, we rather 
 turn for illustrations of the spirit which animated and characterised 
 the valley of Port-Royal. 
 
 On the pacification of Clement IX., Louis Sebastian le Nam de 
 Tillemont, who had been educated in the schools of Nicole and 
 Lancelot, returned in the maturity of his manhood to a hermitage 
 which he had erected near the court-yard of the abbey. Such had 
 been his attainments as a boy, that the pupil had soon exhausted 
 the resources of those profound teachers, and in his twentieth year 
 had commenced those works on ecclesiastical history, which have 
 placed him in the very foremost rank, if not at the head, of all 
 who have laboured in that fertile though rugged field. To the 
 culture of it his life was unceasingly devoted. Though under the 
 direction of De Saci he had obtained admission to holy orders, he 
 refused all the rich preferments pressed on him by the admirers of 
 his genius. Year after year passed over him, unmarked by any 
 event which even the pen of his affectionate biographer, Fontaine, 
 could record. " He lived," says that amiable writer, " alone, and 
 with no witness but God himself, who was ever present with him, 
 and who was all in all to him." It was only in an habitual and
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 327 
 
 placid communion with that one associate, that he sought relief 
 from his gigantic toils ; and with a spirit recruited by that com- 
 munion, he returned to the society of the Emperors, the Popes, the 
 Fathers, and the Saints, who were to him as companions and as 
 friends. To a man long conversant with the anxieties of a secular 
 calling, the soft lights and the harmonious repose of such a picture 
 may perhaps exhibit a delusive aspect ; yet it can hardly be a delu- 
 sion to believe, that for such colloquy with the minds which yet live 
 in books, and with that Mind which is the source of all life, would 
 be wisely abandoned whatever ambition, society, fame, or fortune, 
 have to confer on their most favoured votaries. 
 
 So at least judged one whom fame and fortune wooed with their 
 most alluring smiles. Racine had been trained at Port-Royal, in 
 the same schools and by the same masters as Tillemont. For the 
 great dramatist, no sympathy could of course be expressed by the 
 austere dwellers in the desert ; and perhaps the friendship of Boileau 
 may have consoled him for the alienation of his old teacher Nicole. 
 But when, in his Visionnaires, that devout and learned man de- 
 nounced the writers of stage-plays as the Empoisonneurs publics des 
 dmes, Racine keenly felt and resented the reproach. Like most 
 controversialists, he lived to repent the asperity of his language : 
 but his repentance yielded fruits, the like of which have rarely been 
 gathered from that bitter stem. The author of Andromaque not 
 only sought the pardon and regained the friendship of Arnauld and 
 Nicole, but actually renounced the drama, exhorted his son to aban- 
 don poetry, became the advocate and the historian of Port-Royal, 
 and secured for his bones a resting-place in that consecrated soil. 
 
 Happily for the world, a method was afterwards discovered of 
 reconciling the exercise of Racine's genius with the severe principles 
 which Nicole had instilled into him when a boy, and had revived 
 with such decisive effect in his riper days. Esther and Atlialie 
 were allowed, even at Port-Royal, to be works not unseemly for a 
 man whose single talent was that of writing verses, and who, if he 
 could do nothing better, was at least acknowledged to do that well. 
 But alas for human consistency ! He who traced those majestic 
 scenes where reliance on the Divine arm triumphs over all human 
 regards and terrors, was doomed himself to pine away and even to 
 die of a hard saying of the hard master it was his ill fate to serve. 
 His guilt was to have drawn up a Memoir on the means of relieving 
 the starving poor at Paris. His punishment, the indignant exclam- 
 ation of the great Louis, " Because he is an all-accomplished 
 versifier, does he presume that he knows everything 1 Because he 
 is a great poet, does he mean to become a minister ] " Well might
 
 328 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 the sensitive spirit which such a feather could crush, wish with 
 Wolsey that he had served his God as faithfully as his King, and 
 repine amidst the pageantries of Versailles for the devout composure 
 of Port-Royal. 
 
 And many were the eminent men who sought and enjoyed that 
 repose. There dwelt the Prince de Conti, one of the heroes of the 
 Fronde, and still more memorahle for ids penitence and restitu- 
 tions ; of whom it is recorded, that his young children were so 
 impressed hy his ahsolute devotedness to the Divine will, as to 
 conceal from him the story of Ahraham, lest the example of the 
 sacrifice of Isaac should be imitated at their own expense. There, 
 too, resided the Due de Laincourt, on whom fortune had exhausted 
 all her bounties, and who, under the loss of them all, rose to the 
 utmost heroism of a meek, unrepining, and cheerful resignation. 
 Pontchateau, a noble, a courtier, an ambassador, and at length the 
 apostolical prothonotary at Eome, brought all the strange vicissi- 
 tudes of his life to an end, by becoming, under the name of Le 
 Mercier, a common labourer in the gardens, and a devout worshipper 
 in the Church of Port-Royal. But this chronicle of worthies, spread- 
 ing out into interminable length, must give place to a very brief ac- 
 count of the events which reduced to a desert the solitudes which 
 they had cultivated and adorned. 
 
 Amidst, the contentions of the Gallican Church, full proof had 
 been given of the keen edge of those weapons which might be 
 borrowed from the papal arsenals. It readily occurred to the suf- 
 ferers, that the resources which the Jesuits had so successfully em- 
 ployed, might be turned against themselves. Pascal had startled 
 the civilised world with the exposure of Molinist errors, hostile not 
 merely to the Catholic creed, but to those principles of virtue which 
 are the very cement of human society. They had imputed to Jan- 
 senius five heresies on the obscure subjects of Divine grace and 
 human freedom ; but who could number the propositions in which 
 Escobar and his associates had spurned the authority of the decalogue 
 itself ] The assiduity of the bishops of Arras and St Pons collected 
 sixty-five of these scandalous dogmas, and these they transmitted to 
 ' Rome in a memorial of which Nicole was believed to be the writer, 
 and known to be the translator. Righteous, unqualified, and de- 
 cisive was the papal condemnation of the morality of the Jesuits ; 
 but fatal to the repose of Port-Royal was. this triumph of one of her 
 brightest ornaments. The Duchesse de Longueville had lately died, 
 and with her had disappeared the motive which had induced Louis 
 to show some forbearance to the objects of her affectionate solici- 
 tude. Harlay now governed the see of Paris. He was a man of
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 329 
 
 disreputable character, and the mere instrument of the King. 
 Louis was in bondage to Madame de Maintenon, and she to the 
 Jesuits. Their vengeance scarcely sought a pretext, and soon found 
 its gratification. 
 
 In the exercise of his archiepiscopal authority, Harlay banished 
 De Saci, Tillemont, and Pontchateau, from the valley of Port-Royal. 
 Nicole and Arnauld sought shelter in the Netherlands from his 
 menaces. The postulantes and scholars were once more expelled, and 
 the admission of novices was again forbidden. 
 
 At this epoch, another lady of the house of Arnauld a cousin and 
 namesake of the Mere AngeHque was invested with the dignity of 
 abbess. Her genius, her virtue, and her learning, are the subject of 
 eulogies too indistinct to be impressive, and too hyperbolical to win 
 implicit credence. Yet, if she was the writer of the memoir in de- 
 fence of her monastery which bears her name, there was no apparent 
 obstacle, but her sex and her profession, to her successful rivalry of 
 the greatest masters of juridicial eloquence in France. Ineffectual, 
 however, would have been all the rhetoric which ever adorned the 
 parliament of Paris, to avert the threatened doom of the stronghold 
 of Jansenism. As he approached the tomb, Harlay's resentment be- 
 came more deep and settled. He left it a fatal inheritance to his 
 successor, the Cardinal De Noailles. A weak and obstinate, but not 
 an unfeeling man, De Noailles owed his promotion to the see of Paris 
 to his fixed hostility to Port-Royal, and his known willingness to 
 hazard the odium of subverting that ancient seat of piety and learning. 
 The apology soon presented itself. 
 
 Several years had elapsed since the dispute about " Le Droit et le 
 Fait de Jansenius " had apparently reached its close. Revolving this 
 passage of bygone history, a priest had improved or amused his 
 leisure, by drawing up, for the decision of the Sorbonne, "a case of 
 conscience," which, it must be owned, was a hard problem for the 
 most expert casuist. Of two* infallible Popes, one had with his 
 dying breath affirmed as a momentous truth, a proposition which the 
 other had abandoned, if not refracted. What was it the duty of the 
 faithful to believe on the subject 1 Forty doctors answered, that it 
 was enough to maintain a respectful silence as to the " fait de Jan- 
 senius." Archiepiscopal mandaments, treatises of the learned, royal 
 orders in council, and parliamentary arrets, flew thick and fast 
 through the troubled air, and obscured the daylight of common sense. 
 Again the eldest son of the Church invoked the authority of her 
 spiritual father. In oracular darkness went forth from the Vatican, 
 the sentence, that " respectful silence is not a sufficient deference for 
 apostolical constitutions." This is what is called in ecclesiastical
 
 330 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 story, the bull "Vineam Domini Sabaoth." Under shelter of an 
 abstract theorem which no Catholic could deny, it ingeniously con- 
 cealed the conflict of opinion of two infallible Pontiffs. Subscription 
 of their unqualified assent to the bull " Vineam " was demanded from 
 the nuns of Port-Eoyal, and from them alone. They cheerfully sub- 
 scribed ; but with the addition, that their signature was not to be 
 understood as derogating from what had been determined on the 
 pacification of Clement IX. This was their final and their fatal act 
 of contumacy. Decree after decree was fulminated by De Noailles. 
 He forbade the admission of any new members of their house. He 
 prohibited the election of an abbess. He despoiled them of a large 
 part of their 'estates. He interdicted to them all the sacraments of 
 the Church. He obtained a papal bull for the suppression of their 
 monastery; and in October, 1709, he carried it into effect by "an 
 armed force, under the Marquis D'Argenson. 
 
 There is in Westminster Hall a tradition that an eminent advocate 
 of our own times addressed to the House of Peers, during sixteen 
 successive days, a speech, in the course of which (such is the calcula- 
 tion) he employed all the words in Johnson's Dictionary, one with 
 another, just thirty-five times over. Neither boasting the copious- 
 ness nor presuming on the patience which were at the command of 
 that great lawyer, we have compressed into a few sentences the history 
 of a contest, which, if not so abridged, would have swollen to the 
 utmost limits of that unparalleled oration. But to those who have 
 leisure for such studies, and who delight in a well-fought forensic 
 field, we can promise that pleasure in the highest degree from a 
 perusal of the contest between the aged ladies of Port-Eoyal, and 
 their royal, mitred, and ermined antagonists. Never was a more 
 gallant struggle against injustice. After exhausting all the resources 
 of legal defence, those helpless and apparently feeble women disputed 
 every inch of ground by protests, remonstrances, and petitions, 
 which, for the moment at least, held their assailants in check, and 
 which yet remain a wondrous monument of their perseverance and 
 capacity, and of the absolute self-control which, amidst the out- 
 pourings of their griefs, and the exposure of their wrongs, restrained 
 every expression of asperity or resentment. Never was the genius 
 of the family of Arnauld exhibited with greater lustre, and never 
 with less effect. 
 
 In a grey autumnal morning, a long file of armed hoi-semen, under 
 the command of D'Argenson, was seen to issue from the woods 
 which overhung the ill-fated monastery. In the name of Louis he 
 demanded and obtained admission into that sacred inclosure. Seated 
 on the abbatial throne, he summoned the nuns into his presence.
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 331 
 
 They appeared before him veiled, silent, and submissive. Their 
 papers, their title-deeds, and their property were then seized, and 
 proclamation made of a royal decree which directed their immediate 
 exile. It was instantly carried into effect. Far and wide along the 
 summits of the neighbouring hills, might be seen a thronging multi- 
 tude of the peasants whom they had instructed, and of the poor 
 Avhom they had relieved. Bitter cries of indignation and of grief, 
 joined with fervent prayers, arose from those helpless people, as, one 
 after another, the nuns entered the carriages drawn up for their 
 reception. Each pursued her solitary journey to the prison destined 
 for her. Of these venerable women, some had passed their eightieth 
 year, and the youngest was far advanced in life. Labouring under 
 paralysis and other infirmities of old age, several of them reached at 
 once their prisons and their graves. Others died under the distress 
 and fatigues of their journey. Some possessed energies which no 
 sufferings could subdue. Madame de Remicourt, for example, was 
 kept for two years in solitary confinement ; in a cell lighted and 
 ventilated only through the chimney ; without fire, society, or books. 
 " You may persecute, but you will never change Madame de Remi- 
 court," said the Archbishop; "for" (such was his profound view of 
 the phenomenon) " she has a square head, and people with square 
 heads are always obstinate." 
 
 Last in the number of exiles appeared, at the gates of the abbey, 
 the prioress, Louise de St Anastasie Mesnil de Courtiaux. She had 
 seen her aged sisters one by one quit for ever the abode, the asso- 
 ciates, and the employments of their lives. To each she had given 
 her parting benediction. She shed no tear, she breathed no mur- 
 mur, nor for a moment betrayed the dignity of her office, nor the 
 constancy of her mind. "Be faithful to the end," were the last 
 words which she addressed to the last companion of her sorrows. 
 And nobly did she fulfil her own counsels. She was conducted to a 
 convent, where, under a close guard, she was compelled to endure 
 the utmost rigours of a jail. Deprived of all those religious com- 
 forts which it is in the power of man to minister, she enjoyed a 
 solace, and found a strength, which it was not in the power of man 
 to take away. In common with the greater part of her fellow- 
 sufferers, she died without any priestly absolution, and was con- 
 signed to an unhallowed grave. They died the martyrs of sincerity ; 
 strong in the faith that a lie must ever be hateful in the sight of 
 God, though infallible popes should exact it, or an infallible Church, 
 as represented by cardinals and confessors, should persuade it. 
 
 Unsatiated by the calamities of the nuns, the vengeance of the 
 enemies of Port-Royal was directed against the buildings where they
 
 332 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 had dwelt, the sacred edifice where they had worshipped, and the 
 tombs in which their dead had been interred. The monastery and 
 the adjacent church were overthrown from their foundations. Work- 
 men, prepared by hard drinking for their task, broke open the graves 
 in which the nuns and recluses of former times had been interred. 
 With obscene ribaldry, and outrages too disgusting to be detailed, 
 they piled up a loathsome heap of bones and corpses, on which the 
 dogs were permitted to feed. What remained was thrown into a 
 pit, prepared for the purpose, near the neighbouring churchyard of 
 St Lambert. A wooden cross, erected by the villagers, marked the 
 spot ; and many a pilgrim resorted to it, to pray for the souls of the 
 departed, and for his own. At length no trace remained of the 
 Fortress of Jansenism to offend the eye of the Jesuits, or to perpe- 
 tuate the memory of the illustrious dead with whom they had so 
 long contended. The mutilated Gothic arch, the water-mill, and the 
 dovecot, rising from the banks of the pool, with the decayed towers 
 and the farm-house on the slopes of the valley, are all that now 
 attest that it was once the crowded abode of the wise, the learned, 
 and the good. In that spot, however, may still be seen the winding 
 brook, the verdant hills, and the quiet meadows, nature's indestruct- 
 ible monuments to the devout men and holy women who nurtured 
 there affections which made them lovely in their lives, and hopes 
 which rendered them triumphant in death. NOT in her long roll of 
 martyrs has history to record the names of any who suffered with 
 greater constancy, or in a nobler cause ; for their conflict was with 
 the very Church which they most profoundly revered, and their 
 cause was that of devotedness to sincerity and abhorrence of false- 
 hood. 
 
 Amongst the interpreters of the counsels of Divine Providence 
 in that age, there were not wanting many who found, in the ca- 
 lamities which overwhelmed the declining years of Louis, the retri- 
 bution of an avenging Deity for the wrongs inflicted on Port-Royal. 
 If it were given to man to decipher the mysterious characters en- 
 graven on the scroll of this world's history, it might not be difficult 
 to find, in the annals of his reign, other and yet more weighty 
 reasons for the awakening of Nemesis in France at the commence- 
 ment of the eighteenth century. But of the mere chronological 
 fact, there is no doubt. The death of the three Dauphins, and the 
 victories of Eugene and Marlborough, followed hard on the dispersion 
 of the nuns. With his dying breath, Louis cast the responsibility 
 of his conduct towards them on the Jesuits who stood round his 
 bed. " If, indeed, you have misled and deceived me " such was 
 his last address to his confessors "you are deeply guilty, for in
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 333 
 
 truth I acted in good faith. I sincerely sought the peace of the 
 Church." 
 
 The humiliation of his spiritual advisers quickly followed. It was 
 preceded hy the retirement and death of Madame de Maintenon, 
 who had both provoked and derided the sufferings of the Port- 
 Eoyalists. The very type of mediocrity out of place, she is to our 
 mind the least attractive of all the ladies of equivocal or desperate 
 reputation, who, in modern times, have stood on the steps of 
 European thrones. Her power was sustained by the feebleness of 
 the mind she had subdued, and by the craftiness of those who had 
 subjugated her own. Her prudery and her religiousness, such as it 
 was, served but to deepen the aversion which her intriguing, selfish, 
 narrow-minded, and bigoted spirit excite and justify ; although, in 
 her own view of the matter, she probably hoped to propitiate the 
 favour of Heaven and the applause of the world, by directing against 
 the unoffending women of Port-Royal the deadly wrath of the worn- 
 out debauchee, whose jaded spirits and unquiet conscience it was 
 her daily task to sustain and flatter. 
 
 De Noailles, the instrument of her cruelty, lived to bewail his 
 guilt with such strange agonies of remorse, as to rescue his memory 
 from hatred, although it is difficult to contemplate, without some 
 contempt, such a paroxysm of emotions, which, however just in 
 themselves, deprived their victim of all powers of self-control, and 
 of every semblance of decorous composure. His bowlings are de- 
 scribed by the witness of them, to have been more like those of a 
 wild beast or a maniac, than of a reasonable man. 
 
 If these slight notices of the heroes and heroines of Port-Royal 
 (slight, indeed, when compared with the materials from which they 
 have been drawn) should be ascribed by any one to a pen plighted 
 to do suit and service to the cause of Rome, no surmise could be 
 wider of the mark. No Protestant can read the writings of the 
 Port-Royalists themselves, without gratitude for his deliverance from 
 the superstitions of a Church which calls herself Catholic, and 
 boasts that she is eternal. That she will flourish as long as the race 
 of man shall endure, is indeed a conclusion which may reasonably 
 be adopted by him who divines the future only from the past. For 
 where is the land, or what the age, in which a conspicuous place has 
 not been held by phenomena essentially the same, however circum- 
 stantially different ? In what sera has man not been a worshipper 
 of the invisible 1 In what country has imagination the sensuous 
 property of the mind failed to triumph over those mental powers 
 which are purely contemplative? Who can discover a period in
 
 334 THE PORT-ROT ALISTS. 
 
 which religion has not more or less assumed the form of a compro- 
 mise between the self-dependence and the self-distrust of her vo- 
 taries between their abasement before a merely human authority 
 and their conviction that no such allegiance is really due between 
 their awe of the Divine, power and their habitual revolt against the 
 Divine will? Of every such compromise, the indications have ever 
 been the same a worship of pomp and ceremonial a spiritual 
 despotism exercised by a sacerdotal caste bodily penances and 
 costly expiations and the constant intervention of man, and of the 
 works of man, between the worshipper and the supreme object of 
 his worship. So long as human nature shall continue what it is, 
 the religion of human nature will be unchanged. The Church of 
 Rome will be eternal, if man, such as he now is, shall himself be 
 eternal 
 
 But for every labour under the sun, says the "Wise Man, there is 
 a time. There is a time for bearing testimony against the errors of 
 Rome : why not also a time for testifying to the sublime virtues 
 with which those errors have been so often associated ? Are we for 
 ever to admit and never to practise the duties of kindness and 
 mutual forbearance ? Does Christianity consist in a vivid perception 
 of the faults, and an obtuse blindness to the merits, of those who 
 differ from us ? Is charity a virtue only when we ourselves are the 
 object of it ? Is there not a Church as pure and more catholic than 
 those of Oxford or Rome a Church comprehending within its limits 
 every human being who, according to the measure of the knowledge 
 placed within his reach, strives habitually to be conformed to the 
 will of the common Father of us all ? To indulge hope beyond the 
 pale of some narrow communion, has, by each Christian society in 
 its turn, been denounced as a daring presumption. Yet Hope has 
 come to all, and with her Faith and Charity, her inseparable com- 
 panions. Amidst the shock of contending creeds, and the uproar of 
 anathemas, good men have listened to gentler and more kindly 
 sounds. They may have debated as polemics, but they have felt as 
 Christians. On the universal mind of Christendom is indelibly 
 engraven one image, towards which the eyes of every true disciple of 
 Christ are more or less earnestly directed. Whoever has himself 
 caught any resemblance, however faint and imperfect, to that divine 
 and benignant Original, has, in his measure, learnt to recognise a 
 brother in every one in whom he can discern the same resemblance.* 
 
 * See on this subject a book entitled " The Catholic Spirit of Christianity," the 
 anonymous work of the Rev. E. M'Vicar, now a minister of the Church of Scot- 
 land, in Ceylon. Why such a book should not have attained an extensive celebrity, 
 or why such a writer should have been permitted to quit his native land, are ques-
 
 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 335 
 
 There is an essential unity in that " Kingdom which is not of this 
 world." But within the provinces of that mighty state there is 
 room for endless varieties of administration, and for local laws and 
 customs widely differing from each other. The unity consists in the 
 one object of worship the one object of affiance the one source of 
 virtue the one cementing principle of mutual love, which pervade 
 and animate the whole. The diversities are, and must be, as 
 numerous and intractable as are the essential distinctions which 
 nature, habit, and circumstances have created among men. Uni- 
 formity of creeds, of discipline, of ritual, and of ceremonies, in such 
 a world as ours ! a world where no two men are not as distinguishable 
 in their mental as in their physical aspect ; where every petty com- 
 munity has its separate system of civil government ; where all that 
 meets the eye, and all that arrests the ear, has a stamp of boundless 
 and infinite variety! What are the harmonies of tone, of colour, 
 and of form, but the result of contrasts of contrasts held in subor- 
 dination to one all-pervading principle; which reconciles without 
 confounding the component elements of the music, the painting, or 
 the structure 1 In the physical works of God, beauty could have no 
 existence without endless diversities. Why assume that in religious 
 society a work not less surely to be ascribed to the supreme 
 Author of all things this law is absolutely reversed? Were it 
 'possible to subdue that innate tendency of the human mind, which 
 compels men to differ in religious opinions and observances, at least 
 as widely as on all other subjects, what would be the results of such 
 a triumph 1 Where then would be the free comparison, and the 
 continual enlargement of thought; where the self-distrusts which are 
 the springs of humility, or the mutual dependencies which are the 
 bonds of love 1 He who made us with this infinite variety in our 
 intellectual and physical constitution, must have foreseen, and fore- 
 seeing must have intended, a corresponding dissimilarity in the 
 opinions of his creatures on all questions submitted to their judg- 
 ment, and proposed for their acceptance. For truth is his law; and 
 if all men will profess to think alike, all men must live in the 
 habitual violation of that law. 
 
 Zeal for uniformity attests the latent distrusts, not the firm con- 
 victions of the zealot. In proportion to the strength of those con- 
 victions on our minds, is our indifference to the multiplication of 
 suffrages in favour of our judgment. Our thoughts are steeped in 
 imagery ; and where the palpable form is not, the impalpable spirit 
 escapes the notice of the unreflecting multitude. In common hands, 
 
 tions to which we fear no satisfactory answer could be given by the dispensers of 
 fame or of Church preferment.
 
 336 THE PORT-ROYALISTS. 
 
 analysis stops at the species or the genus, and cannot rise to the 
 order or the class. To distinguish birds from fishes, beasts from 
 insects, limits the efforts of the vulgar observer of the face of ani- 
 mated nature. But Cuvier could trace the sublime unity, the 
 universal type, the fontal Idea, existing in the creative intelligence, 
 which connects as one the mammoth and the snaiL So, common 
 observers can distinguish from each other the different varieties of 
 religious society, and can rise no higher. Where one assembly 
 worships with harmonies of music, fumes of incense, ancient litur- 
 gies, and a gorgeous ceremonial, and another listens to the unaided 
 voice of a single pastor, they can perceive and record the differences ; 
 but the hidden ties which unite them both escape such observation. 
 All appears as contrast, and all ministers to antipathy and discords. 
 It is our belief that these things may be rightly viewed in a different 
 aspect, and yet with the most severe conformity to the Divine will, 
 whether as intimated by natural religion, or as revealed in Holy 
 Scripture. We believe that, in the judgment of an enlightened 
 charity, many Christian societies, who are accustomed to denounce 
 each other's errors, will at length come to be regarded as members 
 in common of the one great and comprehensive Church, in which 
 diversities of forms are harmonised by an all-pervading unity of 
 spirit. For ourselves, at least, we should deeply regret to conclude 
 that we were aliens from that great Christian Commonwealth of 
 which the Nuns and Eecluses of the valley of Port-Royal were 
 members, and members assuredly of no common excellence.
 
 337 
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 THE recent republication of the whole of the voluminous practical 
 works of Richard Baxter, under the superintendence of the late Mr 
 Orme, may be considered, in legal phrase, as a demand for judgment, 
 in the appeal of the great Nonconformist to the ultimate tribunal of 
 posterity, from the censures of his own age, on himself and his 
 writings. We think that the decision was substantially right, and 
 that, on the whole, it must be affirmed. Eight it was, beyond all 
 doubt, in so far as it assigned to him an elevated rank amongst 
 those, who, taking the spiritual improvement of mankind for their 
 province, have found there at once the motive and the reward for 
 labours beneath which, unless sustained by that holy impulse, the 
 utmost powers of our frail nature must have prematurely fainted. 
 
 About the time when the high-born guests of Whitehall were 
 celebrating the nuptial revels of Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, 
 and the visitors of low degree were defraying the cost by the pur- 
 chase of titles and monopolies, there was living at the pleasant 
 village of Eaton Constantine, between the Wrekin Hill and the 
 Severn, a substantial yeoman, incurious alike about the politics of 
 the empire and the wants of the exchequer. Yet was he not with- 
 out his vexations. On the green before his door, a Maypole, hung 
 with garlands, allured the retiring congregation to dance out the 
 Sunday afternoon to the sound of fife and tabret ; while he, intent 
 on the study of the sacred volume, was greeted with no better 
 names than Puritan, Precisian, and Hypocrite. If he bent his steps 
 to the parish church, venerable as it was, and picturesque, in con- 
 tempt of all styles and orders of architecture, his case was not much 
 mended. There the aged and purblind incumbent executed his 
 weekly task with the aid of strange associates. One of them had 
 laid aside the flail, and another the thimble, to mount the read- 
 ing desk. To these succeeded "the excellentest stage-player in all 
 the country, and a good gamester, and a good fellow." This worthy 
 having received holy orders, forged the like for a neighbour's son, 
 who, on the strength of that title, officiated in the pulpit and at the 
 
 22
 
 338 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 altar. Next in this goodly list came an attorney's clerk, who had 
 " tippled himself into so great poverty," that he had no other way 
 to live hut hy assuming the pastoral care of the flock at Eaton Con- 
 stantino. Time out of mind, the curate, whoever he might chance 
 to he, had heen ex-officio the sole professor of secular, as well as of 
 sacred literature in the parish ; and to each in turn of these learned 
 persons our yeoman was therefore fain to commit the education of 
 his only son and namesake, Richard Baxter. 
 
 Such, from his tenth to his sixteenth year, were the teachers of 
 the most voluminous theological writer in the English language. 
 Of that period of his life, the only incidents which can now he as- 
 certained are, that his love of apples was inordinate, and that, on the 
 subject of rohhing orchards, he held, in practice at least, the doc- 
 trines handed down amongst schoolboys hy an unbroken tradition. 
 
 Almost as harren is the only extant record of the three remaining 
 years of his pupilage. They were spent at the endowed school at 
 Wroxeter, which he quitted at the age of nineteen, destitute of all 
 mathematical and physical science ignorant of Hehrew a mere 
 smatterer in Greek and possessed of as much Latin as enabled him 
 in after-life to use it with reckless facility. Yet, it was not possible 
 that a mind so prolific, and which yielded such early fruits, should 
 have advanced to manhood without much well-directed culture. 
 
 The Bible which lay on his father's table formed the whole of the 
 good man's library, and would have been ill exchanged for all the 
 treasures of the Vatican. He had been no stranger to the cares, nor 
 indeed to the disorders of life ; and, as his strength declined, it was 
 his delight to inculcate on his inquisitive boy the lessons which 
 inspired wisdom teaches most persuasively, when illustrated by dear- 
 bought experience, and enforced by parental love. For the mental 
 infirmities of the son, no better discipline could have been found. 
 A pyrrhonist of nature's making, his threescore years and ten might 
 have been exhausted in a fruitless struggle to adjudicate 'between 
 antagonistic theories, if his mind had not thus been subjugated to 
 the supreme authority of Holy Writ, by an influence coeval with 
 the first dawn of reason, and associated indissolubly with his earliest 
 and most enduring affections. It is neither the wise nor the good 
 by whom the patrimony of opinion is most lightly regarded. Such 
 is the condition of our existence, that, beyond the precincts of ab- 
 stract science, we must take much for granted, if we would make 
 any advance in knowledge, or live to any useful end. Our heredi- 
 tary prepossessions must not only precede our acquired judgments, 
 but must conduct us to them. To begin by questioning everything 
 is to end by answering nothing ; and a premature revolt from human
 
 EICHABD BAXTER. 339 
 
 authority is but an incipient rebellion against conscience, reason, and 
 truth. 
 
 Launched into the ocean of speculative inquiry, without the 
 anchorage of parental instruction and filial reverence, Baxter would 
 have been drawn by his constitutional tendencies into that sceptical 
 philosophy, through the long annals of which no single name is to 
 be found to which the gratitude of mankind has been yielded or is 
 justly due. He had much in common with the most eminent 
 doctors of that school the animal frame, characterised by sluggish 
 appetites, languid passions, and great nervous energy; the intel- 
 lectual nature distinguished by subtlety to seize distinctions more 
 than by wit to detect analogies ; by the power to dive, instead of 
 the faculty to soar; by skill to analyse subjective truths, rather than 
 by ability to combine them with each other and with objective 
 realities into one symmetrical structure. But what was wanting in 
 his sensitive, and deficient in his intellectual nature, was balanced 
 and corrected by the spiritual elevation of his mind. If not 
 enamoured of the beautiful, nor conversant with the ideal, nor 
 accustomed to grasp at the same time the comprehensive and the 
 abstract, he enjoyed that clear mental vision which attends on moral 
 purity the rectitude of judgment which rewards the subjection of 
 the will to the reason the loftiness of thought awakened by 
 habitual communion with the source of light and the earnest 
 stability of purpose inseparable from the predominance of the social 
 above the selfish affections. Scepticism and devotion were the con- 
 flicting elements of his internal life ; but the radiance from above 
 gradually dispersed the vapours from beneath, and through half a 
 century of pain, and strife, and agitation, he enjoyed that settled 
 tranquillity which no efforts merely intellectual can attain, nor any 
 speculative doubts destroy, the peace, of which it is said, that it 
 passes understanding. 
 
 Baxter was born in 1615, and consequently attained his early 
 manhood amidst events ominous of approaching revolutions. Deep 
 and latent as are the ultimate causes of the continued existence of 
 Episcopacy in England, nothing can be less recondite than the 
 human agency employed in working out that result. Nursed by 
 the Tudors, adopted by the Stuarts, and wedded in her youth to a 
 powerful aristocracy, the Anglican Church retains the indelible 
 stamp of these early alliances. To the great, the learned, and the 
 worldly wise, it has for three centuries afforded a resting-place and 
 a refuge. But a long interval had elapsed before the national 
 temples and hierarchy were consecrated to the nobler end of enlight- 
 ening the ignorant, and of administering comfort to the poor. Rich 
 
 22 *
 
 340 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 beyond all Protestant rivalry in sacred literature, the Church of 
 England, from the days of Parker to those of Laud, had scarcely 
 produced any one considerable work of popular instruction. The 
 pastoral care which at a later period Burnet depicted, was till then 
 a vision which, though since nobly fulfilled, no past experience had 
 realised. The alphabet was among the mysteries which the English 
 Church long concealed from her catechumens. There is no parallel 
 in the annals of any other Protestant State, of so wonderful a con- 
 centration, and so imperfect a diffusion of learning and genius, of 
 piety and zeal. The reigns of Whitgift, Bancroft, and Laud, were 
 unmolested by cares so rude as those of evangelising the artisans 
 and peasantry. Jewell and Bull, Hall and Donne, Hooker and 
 Taylor, lived and wrote for their peers, and for future ages, but not 
 for the commonalty of their own. 
 
 Yet was not Christianity bereft in England of her distinctive and 
 glorious privilege. It was still the religion of the poor. Amidst 
 persecution, contempt, and penury, the Puritans had toiled and 
 suffered, and had, not rarely, died in their service. And thus in 
 every city, and almost in every village, they who had eyes to see 
 and ears to hear, might, at the commencement of the seventeenth 
 century, perceive the harbingers of the coming tempest. Thought- 
 ful and resolute men had transferred the allegiance of the heart from 
 their legitimate, to their chosen leaders ; while, unconscious of their 
 danger, the ruling powers were straining the bonds of authority, in 
 exact proportion to the decrease of their number and their strength. 
 It was when the future pastors of New England were training men 
 to a generous contempt of all sublunary interest for conscience sake, 
 that Laud, not content to be terrible to the founders of Connecticut 
 and Massachusetts, braved an enmity far more to be dreaded than 
 theirs. His truth and courage were far less appropriate to the ends 
 to which his life was devoted, than would have been the wily and 
 time-serving genius of Williams. Supported by Heyling, Cosins, 
 Montague, and many others, who adopted or exaggerated his own 
 opinions, he precipitated, by a dull and uncompromising bigotry, 
 the overthrow of a Church, in harmony with the character of the 
 people, strong in their affections, upheld by a long line of illustrious 
 names, connected with the whole aristocracy of the realm, and en- 
 thusiastically defended by the sovereign. 
 
 Baxter's theological studies were commenced during these tumults, 
 and were insensibly biassed by them. The "Ecclesiastical Polity " 
 had reconciled him to episcopal ordination ; but as he read, and 
 listened, and observed further, his attachment to the established 
 ritual and discipline progressively declined. He began by rejecting
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 341 
 
 the practice of indiscriminate communion. He was dissatisfied with 
 the compulsory subscription to articles, and the baptismal cross. 
 " Deeper thoughts on the point of Episcopacy " were suggested to 
 him by the et cetera oath ; and these reflections soon rendered him 
 an irreconcilable adversary to the "English Diocesan frame." He 
 distributed the sacred elements to those who would not kneel to 
 receive them, and religiously abjured the surplice. Thus ripe for 
 spiritual censures, and prepared to endure them, he was rescued from 
 the danger he had braved by the demon of civil strife. The Scots 
 in the north, and the Parliament in the south, summoned Charles 
 and Laud to more serious cares than those of enforcing conformity, 
 and left Baxter free to enlarge and to propagate his discoveries. 
 
 With liberty of speech and action, his mind was visited by a cor- 
 responding audacity of thought. Was there indeed a future life 1 
 Was the soul of man immortal 1 Were the Scriptures true 1 Such 
 were the questions which now assaulted and perplexed him. They 
 came not as vexing and importunate suggestions, but " under pre- 
 tence of sober reason," and all the resources of his understanding 
 were summoned to resist the tempter. Self-deception was abhorrent 
 from his nature. He feared the face of no speculative difficulty. 
 Dark as were the shapes which crossed his path, they must be 
 closely questioned ; and gloomy as was the abyss to which they led, 
 it was to be unhesitatingly explored. The result needs not to be 
 stated. From a long and painful conflict he emerged victorious, 
 but not without bearing to the grave some scars to mark the severity 
 of the struggle. No man was ever blessed with more profound con- 
 victions ; but so vast and elaborate was the basis of argumentation 
 on which they rested, that to re-examine the texture, and ascertain 
 the coherence of the materials of which it was wrought, formed the 
 still recurring labour of his whole future life. 
 
 While the recluses of the world are engulfed in the vortices of 
 metaphysics, the victims of passion are still urged forward in their 
 wild career of guilt and misery. From the transcendental labyrinths 
 through which Baxter was winding his solitary and painful way, the 
 war recalled him to the stern realities of life. In the immediate 
 vicinity of the earlier military operations, Coventry had become a 
 city of refuge to him, and to a large body of his clerical brethren. 
 They believed, in the simplicity of their hearts, that Essex, Waller, 
 and Cromwell, were fighting the battles of Charles, and that their 
 real object was to rescue the King from the thraldom of the malig- 
 nants, and the Church from the tyranny of the prelatists. " We 
 kept," says Baxter, speaking of himself and his associates, " to our 
 old principles, and thought all others had done so too, except a very
 
 342 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 few inconsiderable persons. "We were unfeignedly for King and 
 Parliament. We believed that the war was only to save the Parlia- 
 ment and kingdom from the Papists and delinquents, and to remove 
 the dividers, that the King might again return to his Parliament, 
 and that no changes might be made in religion, but by the laws 
 which had his free consent. "We took the true happiness of King 
 and people, Church and State, to be our end, and so we understood 
 the covenant, engaging both against Papists and schismatics ; and 
 when the Court News-Book told the world of the swarms of Ana- 
 baptists in our armies, we thought it had been a mere lie, because 
 it was not so with us." 
 
 Ontology and scholastic divinity have their charms ; and never 
 did man confess them more than Eichard Baxter. But the pulse 
 must beat languidly indeed, when the superior fascination of the 
 " tented field " is not acknowledged ; nor should it derogate from the 
 reverence which attends his name, to admit that he felt and indulged 
 this universal excitement. Slipping away from Durandus, Brad- 
 wardine, Suarez, and Ariminensis, he visited Edgehill and Naseby 
 while the Parliamentary armies still occupied the ground on which they 
 had fought. He found the conquerors armed cap-a-pie for spiritual, 
 as well as carnal combats ; and to convert the troops from their theo- 
 logical errors, was the duty which, he was assured, had been com- 
 mitted to him by Providence. Becoming accordingly chaplain to 
 Whalley's regiment, he witnessed in that capacity many a skirmish, 
 and was present at the sieges of Bristol, Sherborne, and Worcester. 
 Eupert and Goring proved less stubborn antagonists than the seekers 
 and levellers of the Lieutenant-General's camp ; and Baxter was 
 " still employed in preaching, conferring, and disputing against their 
 confounding errors." The soldiers discoursed as earnestly, and even 
 published pamphlets as copiously as himself. After many an affair 
 of posts, the hostile parties at length engaged in a pitched battle at 
 Amersham in Buckinghamshire. " When the public talking-day 
 came," says Baxter, " I took the reading pew, and Pitchford's cornet 
 and troopers took the gallery. There did the leader of the Chesham 
 men begin, and afterwards Pitchford's soldiers set in ; and I alone 
 disputed against them from morning until almost night." Too old a 
 campaigner to retire from the field in the presence of his enemy, " he 
 staid it out till they first rose and went away." The honours of the 
 day were, however, disputed. In the strange book published by 
 Edwards, under the appropriate title of " Grangraena," the fortunes 
 of the field were chronicled ; and there, as we are informed by Baxtei 
 himself, may be read " the abundance of nonsense uttered on the 
 occasion."
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 343 
 
 Cromwell regarded these polemics with ill-disguised aversion, and 
 probably with secret contempt. He had given Baxter but a cold 
 welcome to the army. " He would not dispute with me at all," is a 
 fact related by the good man with evident surprise ; " but he would 
 in good discourse very fluently pour out himself in the extolling of 
 free grace, which was savoury to those that had right principles, 
 though he had some misunderstanding of free grace himself. He 
 was a man of excellent natural parts for affection and oratory, but 
 not well seen in the principles of his religion ; of a sanguine com- 
 plexion, naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity as another 
 man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much ; but naturally, 
 also, so far from humble thoughts of himself, that it was his ruin." 
 The Protector had surrendered his powerful mind to the religious 
 fashions of his times, and never found the leisure or the inclination 
 for deep inquiry into a subject on which it was enough for his pur- 
 poses to excel in fluent and savoury discourse. Among those pur- 
 poses, to obtain the approbation of his own conscience was not the 
 least sincere. His devotion was ardent, and his piety genuine. But 
 the alliance between habits of criminal self-indulgence, and a certain 
 kind of theopathy, is but too ordinary a phenomenon. That at 
 each step of his progress, Cromwell should have been deceived and 
 sustained by some plausible sophistry, is the less wonderful, since 
 even now, in retracing his course, it is difficult to ascertain the 
 point at which he first quitted the straight path of duty, or to dis- 
 cover what escape was at length open to him from the web in which 
 he had become involved. There have been many worse, and few 
 greater men. Yet to vindicate his name from the condemnation 
 which rests upon it, would be to confound the distinctions of good 
 and evil as he did, without the apology of being tempted as he was. 
 
 Baxter was too profound a moralist to be dazzled by the triumph 
 of bad men, however specious their virtue ; or to affect any com- 
 placency towards a bad cause, though indebted to it for the only 
 period of serenity which it ever was his lot to enjoy. He had 
 ministered to the forces of the Parliamentary general, but abhorred 
 the regicide and usurper. In his zeal for the ancient constitution, 
 he had meditated a scheme for detaching his own regiment, and 
 ultimately all the generals of the army, from their leader. They 
 were first to be undermined by a course of logic, and then blown up 
 by the eloquence of the preacher. This profound device in the 
 science of theological engineering would have been counterworked by 
 the Lieutenant-General, had he detected it, by methods somewhat 
 less subtle, but certainly not less effective. A fortunate illness de- 
 feated the formidable conspiracy, and restored the projector to his
 
 344 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 pastoral duties and to peace. Even then, his voice was publicly- 
 raised against " the treason, rebellion, perfidiousness, and hypocrisy " 
 of Cromwell, who probably never heard, and certainly never heeded, 
 the denunciations of his former chaplain. 
 
 Baxter enjoyed the esteem which he would not repay. He was 
 once invited by the Protector to preach at court. Sermons in those 
 days were very serious things point-blank shots at the bosoms of 
 the auditory ; and Cromwell was not a man to escape or to fear the 
 heaviest pulpit ordnance which could be brought to bear on him. 
 From the many vulnerable points of attack, the preacher selected 
 the crying sin of encouraging sectaries. Not satisfied with the 
 errors of his own days, the great Captain had anticipated those of a 
 later age, and had asserted in their utmost extent the dangerous 
 principles of religious liberty. This latitudinarian doctrine may have 
 been suggested by motives merely selfish ; and Baxter, at least, 
 could acknowledge no deeper wisdom in which such an innovation 
 could have had its birth. St Paul was, therefore, made to testify 
 " against the sin committed by politicians, in maintaining divisions 
 for their own ends, that they might fish in troubled waters." He 
 who now occupied the throne of the Stuarts claimed one prerogative 
 to which even those monarchs had never aspired. It was that of 
 controverting the argumentation of the pulpit. His zeal for the 
 conversion of his monitor appears to have been exceedingly ardent. 
 Having summoned him to his presence, " he began by a long tedious 
 speech to me " (the narrative is Baxter's) " of God's providence in 
 the change of the government, and how God had owned it, and 
 what great things had been done at home and abroad, in the peace 
 with Spain and Holland, &c. When he had wearied us all with 
 speaking thus slowly for about an hour, I told him it was too great 
 a condescension to acquaint me so fully with all these matters which 
 were above me ; but I told him that we took our ancient monarchy 
 to be a blessing, and not an evil, to the land ; and humbly craved 
 his patience that I might ask him how England had ever forfeited 
 that blessing, and unto whom that forfeiture was made. Upon that 
 question he was awakened into some passion, and then told me 
 that it was no forfeiture, but God had changed it as pleased him and 
 then he let fly at the Parliament which thwarted him, and especially 
 by name at four or five of those members who were my chief acquaint- 
 ances, whom I presumed to defend against his passion ; and thus four 
 or five hours were spent." 
 
 During this singular dialogue, Lambert fell asleep, an indecorum 
 which, in the court of an hereditary monarch, would have been fatal 
 to the prospects of the transgressor. But the drowsiness of his old
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 345 
 
 comrade was more tolerable to Cromwell than the pertinacity of his 
 former chaplain, against whom he a second time directed the artillery 
 of his logic. On this occasion almost all the Privy Council were 
 present ; Liberty of conscience being the thesis, Baxter the respond- 
 ent, and Cromwell assuming to himself the double office of oppon- 
 ent and moderator. " After another slow, tedious speech of his, I 
 told him," says the autobiographer, "a little of my judgment, and 
 when two of his company had spun out a great deal more of the 
 time in such like tedious, but more ignorant speeches, I told him, 
 that if he would be at the labour to read it, I could tell him more 
 of my mind in writing two sheets than in that way of speaking 
 many days. He received the paper afterwards, but I scarcely be- 
 lieve that he ever read it. I saw that what he learnt must be from 
 himself, being more disposed to speak many hours than hear one, 
 and little heeding what another said when he had spoken himself." 
 
 Whatever may have been the faults, or whatever the motives, of 
 the Protector, there can be no doubt that under his sway England 
 witnessed a diffusion, till then unknown, of the purest influence of 
 genuine religious principles. The popular historians of that period, 
 from various motives, have disguised or misrepresented the fact ; 
 and they who derive their views on this subject from Clarendon, 
 from Hume, or from Hudibras, mistake a caricature for a genuine 
 portrait. To this result, no single man contributed more largely 
 than Baxter himself, by his writings and his pastoral labours. His 
 residence at Kidderminster during the whole of the Protectorate was 
 the sabbath of his life ; the interval in which his mind enjoyed the 
 only repose of which it was capable, in labours of love, prompted by 
 a willing heart, and unimpeded by a contentious world. 
 
 Good Protestants hold, that the Supreme Head of the Church 
 reserves to himself alone to mediate and to reign, as his incom- 
 municable attributes ; and that to teach and to minister are the 
 only offices he has delegated to the pastors of his flock. Wisdom 
 to scale the heights of contemplation, love to explore the depths of 
 wretchedness a science and a servitude inseparably combined ; 
 the one investigating the relations between man and his Creator, 
 the other busied in the cares of a self-denying philanthropy such, 
 at least in theory, are the endowments of that sacred institution, 
 which, first established by the fishermen of Galilee, has been ever 
 since maintained throughout the Christian commonwealth. A 
 priesthood, of which all the members shall be animated with this 
 spirit, may be expected when angels shall resume their visits to our 
 earth, and not till then. Human agency, even when employed to 
 distribute the best gifts of Providence to man, must still bear the
 
 346 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 impress of human guilt and frailty. But if there be one object in 
 this fallen world, to -which the eye, jaded by its pageantries and its 
 gloom, continually turns with renovated hope, it is to an alliance, 
 such as that which bound together Eichard Baxter and the people 
 among whom he dwelt. He, a poor man, rich in mental resources, 
 consecrating alike his poverty and his wealth to their service ; ever 
 present to guide, to soothe, to encourage, and when necessary, to 
 rebuke ; shrinking from no aspect of misery, however repulsive, nor 
 from the most loathsome forms of guilt which he might hope to 
 reclaim ; the instructor, at once, and the physician, the almoner 
 and the friend, of his congregation. They, repaying his labours of 
 love with untutored reverence ; awed by his reproofs, and rejoicing 
 in his smile; taught by him to discharge the most abject duties, 
 and to endure the most pressing evils of life, as a daily tribute to 
 their Divine benefactor ; incurious of the novelties of their contro- 
 versial age, but meekly thronging the altar from which he dispensed 
 the symbols of their mystical union with each other and their 
 common Head ; and, at the close of their obscure, monotonous, but 
 tranquil course, listening to the same parental voice, then subdued 
 to the gentlest tones of sympathy, and telling of bright hopes and 
 of a glorious reward. 
 
 Little was there in common between Kidderminster and the 
 " sweet smiling " Auburn. Still less alike were the " village 
 preacher," who " ran his godly race," after the fancy of Oliver Gold- 
 smith, and the "painful preacher," whose emaciated form, gaunt 
 visage, and Geneva bands attested the severity of his studies, and 
 testified against prelatic ascendency. Deeper yet the contrast be- 
 tween the delicate hues and fine touches of the portrait drawn from 
 airy imagination, and Baxter's catalogue of his weekly catechisings, 
 fasts, and conferences ; of his Wednesday meetings and Thursday 
 disputations ; and of the thirty helps by which he was enabled to 
 quicken into spiritual life the inert mass of a rude and vicious popu- 
 lation. But, truth against fiction, all the world over, in the rivalry 
 for genuine pathos and real sublimity ! Though ever new and 
 charming, after ten thousand repetitions, the plaintive, playful, 
 melodious poetry of the " Deserted Village " bears to the homely 
 tale of the curate of Kidderminster a resemblance like that of the 
 tapestried lists of a tournament to the well-fought field of Ronces- 
 valles. Too prolix for quotation, and perhaps too sacred for our 
 immediate purpose, it records one of those moral conquests which 
 attest the existence in the human heart of faculties which, even when 
 most oppressed by ignorance, or benumbed by guilt, may yet be roused 
 to their noblest exercise, and disciplined for their ultimate perfection.
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 347 
 
 Eventful tidings disturbed these apostolical labours, and but too 
 soon proved how precarious was the tenure of that religious liberty 
 which Baxter at once enjoyed and condemned. With the Protect- 
 orate it commenced and ended. The death of Oliver, the abdication 
 of Richard, the revival of the Long Parliament, the reappearance of 
 the ejected members, the assembling of a new House of Commons 
 under the auspices of Monk, and the restoration of the Stuarts, pro- 
 gressively endangered, and at length subverted, the edifice of ecclesi- 
 astical freedom, which the same strong hand had founded and 
 sustained. 
 
 Yet the issue for a while seemed doubtful. The sectarians over- 
 rated their own strength, and the Episcopalians exaggerated their 
 own weakness. Infallible and impeccable, the Church of Rome is 
 a Tadmor in the wilderness, miraculously erect and beautiful in the 
 midst of an otherwise universal ruin. The Church of England 
 liable to err, but always judging right ; capable of misconduct, but 
 never acting wrong is a still more stupendous exception to the 
 weakness and depravity which in all other human institutions sig- 
 nalise our common nature. But for this well-established truth, a 
 hardy scepticism might have ventured to arraign her as an habitual 
 alarmist. If she is " in danger " at this moment, she has been so 
 from her cradle. Puritans and Presbyterians, Arminians and Cal- 
 vinists, Independents and Methodists, had for three centuries 
 threatened her existence, when at last the matricidal hands of the 
 metropolitan of all England, and of the prelate of England's metro- 
 polis, were in our own days irreverently laid on her prebendal stalls. 
 One "whose bosom's lord sits lightly on his throne," in the pre- 
 sence of all other forms of peril, has on this last fearful omen lost 
 his accustomed fortitude;* though even the impending overthrow 
 of the Church he adorns, finds his wit as brilliant, and his gaiety as 
 indestructible, as of yore. What wonder, then, if the canons ex- 
 pectant of St Paul's at the Court of Breda, could not survey, even 
 from that Pisgah, the fair land of promise lying before them, without 
 many faint misgivings that the sons of Anak, who occupied the 
 strongholds, would continue to enjoy the milk and honey of their 
 Palestine 1 Thousands of intrusive incumbents on whose heads no 
 episcopal hand had ever been laid, and whose purity no surplice 
 had ever symbolised, possessed the parsonages and the pulpits of 
 either episcopal province. A population had grown up unbaptized 
 with the sign of the cross, and instructed to repeat the longer and 
 shorter catechisms of the Westminster Divines. Thirty thousand 
 armed Covenanters yielded to Monk and his officers a dubious sub- 
 * See the Letters of the Rev. Sydney Smith to Archdeacon Sbgleton.
 
 348 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 mission. Cudworth and Lightfoot at Cambridge, "Wilkins and 
 Wallis at Oxford, occupied and adorned the chairs of the ejected 
 loyalists. The divine right of Episcopacy might yet be controverted 
 by Baxter, Howe, and Owen ; and Smectymnus might awaken from 
 bis repose in the persons of Marshall, Calamy, and Spurstow. 
 Little marvel, then, that their eternal charter inspired a less exult- 
 ing faith than of old in the Bishops who had assembled at Breda ; 
 that Hyde and Southampton temporised ; or that Charles, impatient 
 of the Protestant heresy in all its forms, and of Christianity itself in 
 all its precepts, lent his royal name to an experiment of which 
 deceit was the basis, and persecution the result. 
 
 Liberty of conscience and a concurrence in any Act of Parliament 
 which on mature deliberation should be offered for securing it, 
 were solemnly promised by the King while yet uncertain of the 
 temper of the Commons he was about to meet. Ten Presbyterian 
 ministers were added to the list of royal chaplains ; and, for once a 
 martyr to the public good, Charles submitted himself to the penalty 
 of assisting at four of their sermons. That with which Baxter 
 greeted him, could not have been recited by the most rapid voice in 
 less than two hours. It is a solemn contrast of the sensual and 
 the spiritual life, without one courtly phrase to relieve his censure 
 of the vices of the great. More soothing sounds were daily falling 
 on the royal ear. The surplice and the Book of Common Prayer 
 had reappeared at the worship of the Lords and Commons. Heads 
 and fellows of colleges enjoyed a restoration scarcely less triumphant 
 than that of their sovereign. Long dormant statutes, arising from 
 their slumbers, menaced the Nonconformists ; and the truth was 
 revealed to the delighted hierarchy, that the Church of England 
 was still enthroned in the affections of the English people the 
 very type of their national character the reflection of their calm 
 good sense of their reverence for hoar authority of their fastidious 
 distaste for whatever is scenic, impassioned, and self-assuming of 
 their deliberate preference for solid sense, even when oppressively 
 dull, to mere rhetoric, however animated and for their love to 
 those grave observances and ancient forms which conduct the mind 
 to self-communion, and lay open to the heart its long-accumulated 
 treasure of hidden, though profound, emotions. Happy if the con- 
 fidence in her own strength excited by this discovery, had been 
 blended either with the forgiveness and the love which the gospel 
 teaches ; or with the toleration inculcated by human philosophy ; 
 or with the prudence which should be derived from a long course 
 of suffering ! Twenty-eight disgraceful years had then been blotted
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 349 
 
 from the annals of the Anglican Church, and perhaps from the 
 secular history of England. 
 
 The time was yet unripe for avowed retaliation, but wrongs and 
 indignities such as those which the Episcopalians had suffered, were 
 neither to be pardoned nor unavenged. Invited by the King to 
 prepare a scheme of future church government, Baxter and his 
 friends, taking Usher's "Keduction of Episcopacy" as their basis, 
 presented to Charles and the prelates a scheme of ecclesiastical 
 reform. " As to Archbishop Usher's model of government," replied 
 the bishops, " we decline it as not consistent with his other learned 
 discourses on the original of Episcopacy and of metropolitans, nor 
 with the King's supremacy in causes ecclesiastical." "Had you 
 read Gerson, Bucer, Parker, Baynes, Salmasius, Blondel, &c.," 
 rejoined Baxter, "you would have seen just reason given for our 
 dissent from the ecclesiastical hierarchy as established in England. 
 You would easily grant that dioceses are too great, if you had ever 
 conscionably tried the task which Dr Hammond describeth as the 
 bishop's work, or had ever believed Ignatius' and others' ancient 
 descriptions of a bishop's church." 
 
 To what issue this war of words was tending, no bystander could 
 doubt. To maintain the splendour and the powers of Episcopacy, 
 to yield nothing, and yet to avoid the appearance of a direct breach 
 of the royal word, was so glaringly the object of the Court, that 
 wilful blindness only could fail to penetrate the transparent veil of 
 " The Declaration " framed by Clarendon with all the astuteness of 
 his profession, and accepted by the Presbyterians with the eagerness 
 of expiring hope. Baxter was not so deceived. In common with 
 the other heads of his party, he judged the faith of Charles an 
 inadequate security, and refused the proffered mitre of Hereford as 
 an insidious bribe. 
 
 There were abundant reasons for this distrust. Thanks for his 
 gracious purposes in favour of the Nonconformists had been pre- 
 sented to the Head of the Church by the House of Commons, who 
 immediately afterwards, at the instance of his Majesty's Secretary of 
 State, rejected the very measure which had kindled their gratitude. 
 Three months had scarcely passed since the Declaration had issued, 
 when an Order in Council proclaimed the illegality of all religious 
 meetings held without the walls of the parochial churches. The 
 Book of Common Prayer and the Statute Book were daily cement- 
 ing their alliance ; the one enlarged by a supplication for " grace 
 carefully and studiously to imitate the example of the blessed saint 
 and martyr " who had now attained the honours of canonization ;
 
 350 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 the other requiring the officers of all corporate and port towns " to 
 take the sacrament of the Lord's supper ; " and to swear "that it is 
 not lawful, upon any pretence whatsoever, to take arms against the 
 king," or against " those commissioned by him." 
 
 Amidst these parliamentary thunders were opened the conferences 
 of the Savoy, which were to reduce to a definite meaning the Declara- 
 tions of Breda and of Whitehall. It was the scene of Baxter's triumph 
 and defeat the triumph of his promptitude, subtlety, and bound- 
 less resources the defeat of the last hope he was permitted to 
 indulge, of peace to himself or to the Church of which he was then 
 the brightest ornament. The tactics of popular assemblies form a 
 system of licensed deceit ; and their conventional morality tolerates 
 the avowal of the skill by which the antagonist party has been 
 overreached, and even an open exultation in the success of such 
 contrivances. To embarrass the Presbyterians by the course of the 
 discussion, to invent plausible pretexts for delays, and to guide the 
 controversy to an impotent, if not a ludicrous close, were the scarcely 
 concealed objects of the Episcopalians. Opposed to these by the 
 feebler party were the contrivances by which weakness usually seeks 
 to evade the difficulties it cannot stem, and the captiousness which 
 few can restrain when overborne by the superior force of numbers 
 or of authority. 
 
 Whoever has seen a parliament, may easily imagine a Synod. 
 Baxter was the leader of an unpopular opposition, the Charles 
 Fox of the Savoy, of which Morley was the William Pitt, and Gun- 
 ning the Henry Dundas. To review the Book of Common Prayer, 
 and "to advise and consult upon the same, and the several objec- 
 tions and exceptions which shall be raised against the same," was 
 the task assigned by Charles to twelve bishops, nine doctors of 
 divinity, and twenty- one Presbyterian divines. Exalted by the 
 acclamation of the whole Episcopalian party to the head of all 
 human writings, not without some doubts whether it should not 
 rather class with those of the sacred canon, the Book of Common 
 Prayer was pronounced by the bishops, at the opening of the con- 
 ferences, to be exempt from any errors which they could detect, and 
 incapable of any improvements which they could suggest. They 
 could not therefore advance to the encounter until their antagonists 
 should have unrolled the long catalogue of their hostile criticisms 
 and projected amendments. 
 
 From such a challenge it was not in Baxter's nature to shrink, 
 though warned by his associates of the motives by which it was 
 dictated and of the dangers to which it would lead. "Bishop 
 Sheldon," says Burnet, " saw well enough what the effect would be
 
 EICHAED BAXTER. 351 
 
 of obliging them to make all their demands at once, that the num- 
 ber would raise a mighty outcry against them as a people that could 
 never be satisfied." In fourteen days Baxter had prepared a new 
 liturgy. In a few more he had completed his objections to the 
 former rubric, with an humble petition for peace and indulgence. 
 Fast and thick flew over the field the missiles of theological theses 
 before the closer conflicts of oral debate. This was waged in high 
 dialectic latitudes. Take the following example: "That com- 
 mand" (AVC quote the Episcopalian proponitur) "which enjoins 
 only an act in itself lawful, and no other act whereby an unjust 
 penalty is enjoined, or any circumstance whence directly or per 
 accidens any sin is consequent, which the commander ought to pro- 
 vide against, hath in it all things requisite to the lawfulness of a 
 command, and particularly cannot be charged with enjoining an act 
 per accidens unlawful, nor of commanding an act under an unjust 
 penalty." As an Indian listens to the war-cry of a hostile tribe, 
 Baxter heard the announcement of this heretical doctrine, and 
 plunged headlong into the fight. Pouring forth his boundless 
 stores of metaphysical, moral, and scholastic speculation, he altern- 
 ately plunged and soared beyond the reach of ordinary vision 
 distinguished and qualified, quoted and subtilised, till his voice was 
 drowned " in noise and confusion, and high reflections on his dark 
 and cloudy imagination." Bishop Sanderson, the Moderator, ad- 
 judged the palm of victory to his opponent. " Baxter and Gun- 
 ning" (the words are Burnet's) "spent several days in logical 
 arguing, to the diversion of the town, who looked upon them as a 
 couple of fencers, engaged in a dispute that could not be brought to 
 any end." It had, however, reached the only end which the King 
 and his advisers had ever contemplated. An apology had been made 
 for the breach of the royal promise. Henceforth the Presbyterians 
 might be denounced as men whom reason could not convince, and 
 who were therefore justly given up to the coercion of penal laws. 
 To cast on them a still deeper shade of contumacy, some few trifling 
 changes were made in the Rubric by the Convocation. The Church 
 was required to celebrate the martyrdom of the first Charles, and 
 the restoration of the second, that " most religious and gracious 
 King " (the last an epithet with which in the same sentence the 
 monarch was complimented and the Deity invoked) ; and, as if 
 still more certainly to exclude from her pale those who had sued in 
 vain for entrance, Bel and the Dragon, and other worthies of the 
 Apocrypha, were now called to take their stations in her weekly 
 services. 
 
 Had Charles been permitted to follow the dictates of his own
 
 352 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 easy nature, or of his religious predilections, he would (though for 
 precisely opposite reasons) have emulated the zeal of Cromwell for 
 liberty of conscience. He would gladly have secured that freedom 
 to his Roman Catholic subjects ; and would still more gladly have 
 relieved himself from the trouble of persecuting the Protestant 
 Dissenters. But the time was still unripe for such hazardous ex- 
 periments. At the dictation of Clarendon, he was made to assure 
 his Parliament that he was "as much in love with the Book of 
 Common Prayer as they could wish, and had prejudices enough 
 against those who did not love it." Within two years from his re- 
 turn, the depth and sincerity of this affection were attested by the 
 imprisonment of more than four thousand Quakers, and ty the pro- 
 mulgation of the Act of Uniformity. Among the two thousand 
 clergymen whom this law excluded from the Church, Baxter was 
 on every account the most conspicuous. He had refused the bi- 
 shopric of Hereford, and the united interest of Charles and Claren- 
 don had been exerted in vain (so with most elaborate hypocrisy it 
 was pretended) to recover for him a curacy at Kidderminster. He 
 for ever quitted that scene of his apostolic labours ; and, in the 
 forty-seventh year of his age, bowed down with bodily infirmities, 
 was driven from his home and his weeping congregation, to pass 
 the remainder of his life in loathsome jails or precarious hiding- 
 places ; there to achieve, in penury and almost ceaseless pain, works 
 without a parallel in the history of English theological literature, 
 for their extent, or their prodigality of intellectual wealth. 
 
 Solitude was not amongst the aggravations of his lot. Margaret 
 Charlton was a lady of gentle birth, rich in the gifts of nature and 
 of fortune. She dwelt in her mother's house at Kidderminster, 
 where both parent and child found in Baxter their teacher and 
 spiritual guide. " In her youth, pride and romances, and company 
 suitable thereto, did take her up." But sickness came, and he 
 ministered to her anxieties ; and health returned, and he led the 
 thanksgiving of the congregation ; and there were mental conflicts 
 in which he sustained her, and works of mercy in which he directed 
 her, and notes were made of his sermons, and passages were tran- 
 scribed from his consolatory letters, and gradually but who needs 
 to be told the result ? 
 
 Margaret was no ordinary woman. Her " strangely vivid wit " 
 is celebrated by the admirable John Howe ; and her widowed hus- 
 band, in "The breviate of her life," has drawn a portrait the 
 original of which it would have been criminal not to love. Timid, 
 gentle, and reserved, and nursed amidst all the luxuries of her age, 
 her heart was the abode of aifections so intense, and of fortitude so
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 353 
 
 enduring, that her meek spirit, impatient of one selfish wish, pro- 
 gressively acquired all the heroism of benevolence, and seemed at 
 length incapable of one selfish fear. In prison, in sickness, in evil 
 report, in every form of danger and fatigue, she was still with una- 
 bated cheerfulness at the side of him to whom she had pledged her 
 conjugal faith; prompting him to the discharge of every duty, 
 calming the asperities of his temper, his associate in unnumbered 
 acts of philanthropy, embellishing his humble home by the little 
 arts with which a cultivated mind imparts its own gracefulness to 
 the meanest dwelling-place ; and during the nineteen years of 
 their union joining with him in one unbroken strain of filial 
 affiance to the Divine mercy, and of a grateful adoration for the 
 Divine goodness. Her tastes and habits had been moulded into a 
 perfect conformity to his. He celebrates her catholic charity to 
 the opponents of their religious opinions, and her inflexible ad- 
 herence to her own ; her high esteem of the active and passive 
 virtues of the Christian life, as contrasted with a barren orthodoxy ; 
 her noble disinterestedness, her skill in casuistry, her love of music, 
 and her medicinal arts. 
 
 Peace be to the verses which he poured oat not to extol but to 
 animate her devotion. If Margaret was wcoed in strains over which 
 Sacharissa would have slumbered, Baxter's uncouth rhymes have a 
 charm which Waller's lyrics cannot boast the charm of purity, 
 and reverence, and truth. The Eloise of Abelard and the Eloise of 
 Rousseau, revealing but too accurately one of the dark chambers of 
 the human heart, have poisoned the imagination, and rendered it 
 difficult to conceive of such ties as those which first drew together 
 the souls of the Nonconformist minister and his pupil ; he ap- 
 proaching his fiftieth and she scarcely past her twentieth year ; he 
 stricken with penury, disease, and persecution, and she in the en- 
 joyment of affluence and of the world's alluring smiles. It was not 
 in the reign of Charles II. that wit or will were wanting to ridicule 
 or to upbraid such espousals. Grave men sighed over the weakness 
 of the venerable divine ; and gay men disported themselves with so 
 effective an incident in the tragi-comedy of life. Much had the 
 great moralist written upon the benefits of clerical celibacy, but, 
 "when he said so, he thought that he should die a bachelor." 
 Something he wrote as follows, in defence of his altered opinions : 
 " The unsuitableness of our age, and my former known purposes 
 against marriage and against the conveniency of ministers' marriage, 
 who have no sort of necessity, made our marriage the matter of 
 much talk; "but he most judiciously proceeds, "the true opening 
 of her case and mine, and the many strange occurrences which 
 
 23
 
 354 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 brought it to pass, would take away the wonder of her friends and 
 mine that knew us, and the notice of it would much conduce to the 
 understanding of some other passages of our lives. Yet wise 
 friends, by whom I am advised, think it better to omit such per- 
 sonal particularities at this time. Both in her case and in mine 
 there was much extraordinary, which it doth not much concern the 
 world to be acquainted with." 
 
 Under this apology, is veiled the fact that Margaret herself first 
 felt, or first betrayed the truth, that a sublunary affection had 
 blended itself with their devotional feelings ; and that she encour- 
 aged him to claim that place in her heart which in the holiest of 
 human beings will still remain accessible to a merely human sym- 
 pathy. It was an attachment hallowed on either side by all that 
 can give dignity to the passions to which all are alike subject. To 
 her it afforded the daily delight of supporting in his gigantic 
 labours, and of soothing in his unremitted cares, a husband who 
 repaid her tenderness with unceasing love and gratitude. To him 
 it gave a friend whose presence was tranquillity, who tempered by 
 her milder wisdom, and graced by her superior elegance, and 
 exalted by her more confiding piety, whatever was austere, or rude, 
 or distrustful in his rugged character. After all, it must be con- 
 fessed that the story will not fall handsomely into any niche in the 
 chronicles of romance ; though, even in that light, Crabbe or Mar- 
 montel would have made something of it. Yet, unsupported by 
 any powers of narrative, it is a tale which will never want its 
 interest, so long as delight shall be felt in contemplating the sub- 
 mission of the sternest and most powerful minds to that kindly 
 influence which cements and blesses, and which should ennoble 
 human society. 
 
 Over the declining years of Baxter's life, friendship, as well as 
 conjugal love, threw a glow of consolation which no man ever 
 needed or ever valued more. His affectionate record of his asso- 
 ciates has rescued some of their names from oblivion. Such is the 
 case with " good old Simon Ash, who went seasonably to heaven at 
 the very time he was to be cast out of the church ; who, having a 
 good estate, and a very good wife, inclined to entertainments and 
 liberality, kept a house much frequented by ministers, where, 
 always cheerful, without profuse laughter or levity, and never 
 troubled with doubtings," he imparted to others that gaiety of his 
 own heart, and died as he had lived, "in great consolation and 
 cheerful exercise of faith, molested with no fears or doubts, exceed- 
 ingly glad f the company of his friends, and greatly encouraging 
 all about him." Such also was " good Mr James Walton, commonly
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 355 
 
 called the weeping prophet ; of a most holy, "blameless life, and, 
 though learned, greatly averse to controversy and dispute ; " a man 
 who had struggled successfully against constitutional melancholy, 
 until, " troubled with the sad case of the Church and the multitude 
 of ministers cast out, and at his own unserviceahleness, he con- 
 sumed to death." 
 
 To the Democritus and the Heraclitus of Nonconformity, a 
 far greater name succeeds in the catalogue of Baxter's friends. 
 In the village of Acton, Sir Matthew Hale had found an occasional 
 retreat from the cares of his judicial life ; and devoted his leisure 
 to science and theology, and to social intercourse with the ejected 
 Nonconformist. In an age of civil strife, he had proposed to 
 himself the example of Atticus, and like that accomplished person, 
 endeavoured to avert the enmity of the contending parties by the 
 fearless discharge of his duties to all, without ministering to the 
 selfish ends of any. The frugal simplicity of his habits, his un- 
 affected piety and studious pursuits, enabled him to keep this 
 hazardous path with general esteem, though he was more indebted 
 for safety to his unrivalled eminence as a lawyer and a judge. 
 Though Cromwell and Ludlow revolted against the Papal authority 
 of Westminster Hall, their age lagged far behind them. In the 
 overthrow of all other institutions, the courts in which Fortescue 
 and Coke had explained or invented the immemorial customs 
 of England, were still the objects of universal veneration ; and the 
 supremacy of the law secured to its sages the homage of the 
 people. Never was it rendered more justly than to Hale. With 
 the exception of Roger North we remember no historian of that 
 day who does not bear an unqualified testimony to his uprightness, 
 to the surpassing compass of his professional learning, and the 
 exquisite skill with which it was employed. That agreeable, 
 though most prejudiced writer, refuses him not only this, but the 
 still higher praise of spotless patriotism, and ridicules his preten- 
 sions as a philosopher and divine. Baxter, an incomparably better 
 judge, thought far otherwise. In the learning in which he himself 
 excelled all others, he assigned a high station to Hale ; and has 
 recorded that his "conference, mostly about the immortality of the 
 soul and other philosophical and foundation points, was so edifying, 
 that his very questions and objections did help me to more light 
 than other men's solutions." Differing on those subjects which 
 then agitated society, their minds, enlarged by nobler contempla- 
 tions, rose far above the controversies of their age ; and were 
 united in efforts for their mutual improvement, and for advancing 
 the interests of religion, truth, and virtue. It was a grave and 
 
 23 *
 
 356 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 severe, "but an affectionate friendship; such as can subsist only 
 between men who have lived in the habitual restraint of their 
 lower faculties, and in the strenuous culture of those powers 
 which they believe to be destined hereafter, and to be ripening now, 
 for an indefinite expansion and an immortal existence. 
 
 From such intercourse Baxter was rudely called away. Not 
 satisfied with the rigid uniformity of professed belief and external 
 observances amongst the clergy of the Established Church, Parlia- 
 ment had denounced a scale of penalties graduated from fine to 
 banishment to the plantations, against laics who should attend 
 any other form of religious worship, even in private houses, where 
 more than five strangers should be present. At Acton, a personage 
 of no mean importance watched over the ecclesiastical discipline 
 of the parish. " Dr Eyves, rector of that church and of Hadley, 
 dean of Windsor and of Wolverhampton, and chaplain in ordinary 
 to the King," could not patiently endure the irregularities of his 
 learned neighbour. The Dean indeed officiated by deputy, and 
 his curate was a raw and ignorant youth ; and Baxter (an occasional 
 conformist) was a regular attendant on all the sacred offices. 
 But he refused the Oxford oath, and at his domestic worship 
 there were sometimes found more than the statutable addition 
 to the family circle. Such offences demanded expiation. He Avas 
 committed to Clerkenwell gaol ; and when at length discharged 
 from it, was compelled to seek a new and more hospitable 
 residence. He had his revenge. It was to obtain, through the 
 influence of one of his most zealous disciples, the charter which 
 incorporates the original Society for the Propagation of the 
 Gospel * a return of good for evil for which his name might well 
 displace those of some of the saints in the calendar. 
 
 While the plague was depopulating London, and the silenced 
 clergymen were discharging the unenvied office of watching over 
 the multitude appointed to death, the King and Clarendon, at a 
 secure distance from the contagion, were employed in framing the 
 statute which denounced the most rigid piinishment against any 
 nonconformist minister who should approach within five miles of 
 any town in England, or of any parish in which he had formerly 
 officiated. Totteridge, a hamlet, round which a circle of ten miles 
 diameter could be drawn without including any of the residences 
 
 * The society which now bears that name is an institution of later date, 
 founded on the model of that for the establishment of which Baxter laboured, 
 and designed to supersede it; just as the "National School Society" followed 
 on the " British and Foreign School Society," or King's College, London, on the 
 London University.
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 357 
 
 tlius proscribed to Baxter, became his next abode, but was not per- 
 mitted to be a place of security or rest. His indefatigable pen had 
 produced a paraphrase on the New Testament, where the keen 
 scrutiny of his enemies detected libels, to be refuted only by the 
 logic of the court and prison of the King's Bench. From the 
 records of that court, Mr Orme, the editor of Baxter's works, has 
 extracted the indictment, which sets forth that " Richardus Baxter, 
 persona seditiosa et factiosa, pravae mentis, impiae, inquietae, tur- 
 bulent' disposition' et conversation' ; " " falso, illicite, injuste, 
 nequit', factiose, seditiose, et irreligiose, fecit, composuit, scripsit 
 quendam falsum, seditiosum, libellosum, factiosum, et irreligiosum 
 librum." The classical pleader proceeds in a vein of unconscious 
 humour to justify these hard words by the use of the figure called, 
 we believe, a " scilicet " by those who now inhabit the ancient abode 
 of the Knights Templars. " It is folly," says the paraphrase, " to 
 doubt whether there be devils, while devils incarnate dwell amongst 
 us here " (clericos pred' hujus regni Angl' innuendo). " What else 
 but devils could make ceremonious hypocrites " ^clericos pred' 
 innuendo) 1 " men that preach in Christ's name " (seipsum R. B. 
 et al' seditiosas et factiosaa person' innuendo), "therefore, are not 
 to be silenced if they do more harm than good. Dreadful then is 
 the case of men" (episcopos et ministros justitiae infr' hujus regni 
 Angl' innuendo) "that silence Christ's faithful ministers" (seipsum 
 R. B. et al' seditiosas et factiosas person' innuendo). 
 
 Anstey and George Stevens were dull fellows compared with 
 the great originals from which they drew. L'Estrange himself 
 might have taken a lesson in the art of defamation, from this 
 innuendoing special pleader. But the absurdity was crowned by 
 the conduct of the trial. There were passages in the judicial career 
 of Jeffries in which abhorrence, disgust, indignation, and all other 
 feelings of the sterner kind, gave way to the irresistible sense of the 
 ludicrous ; and, "to be grave exceeds all powers of face," even 
 when reading the narrative of this proceeding, which was drawn up 
 by one of the spectators. The judge entered the court with his face 
 flaming, " he snorted and squeaked, blew his nose and clenched his 
 hands, and lifted up his eyes, mimicking their manner, and running 
 on furiously, as, he said, they used to pray." The ermined buffoon 
 extorted a smile even from the Nonconformists themselves. Pol- 
 lexfen, the leading counsel for the defence, gave in to the humour, 
 and attempted to gain attention for his argument by a jest. " My 
 Lord," he said, " some will think it a hard measure to stop these 
 men's mouths, and not to let them speak through their noses." 
 " Pollexfen," said Jeffries, " I know you well. You are the patron
 
 358 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 of the faction ; this is an old rogue, who has poisoned the world with 
 his Kidderminster doctrine. He encouraged all the women to 
 bring their bodkins and thimbles, to carry on the war against their 
 King, of ever-blessed memory. An old schismatical knave a 
 hypocritical villain!" "My Lord," replied the counsel, "Mr 
 Baxter's loyal and peaceable spirit, King Charles would have 
 rewarded with a bishopric, when he came in, if he would have con- 
 formed." " Aye," said the judge, " we know that ; but what ailed 
 the old blockhead, the unthankful villain, that he would not con- 
 form ? Is he wiser or better than other men ? He hath been, ever 
 since, the spring of the faction. I am sure he hath poisoned the 
 world with his linsey-woolsey doctrine a conceited, stubborn, 
 fanatical dog!" After one counsel, and another, had been over- 
 borne by the fury of Jeffries, Baxter himself took up the argument. 
 " My Lord," he said, " I have been so moderate with respect to the 
 Church of England, that I have incurred the censure of many of the 
 Dissenters on that account." "Baxter for Bishops," exclaimed the 
 judge, " is a merry conceit indeed ! Turn to it, turn to it ! " On 
 this one of the counsel turned to a passage in the libel, which stated, 
 "that great respect is due to those truly called bishops amongst us." 
 "Aye," said Jeffries, "this is your Presbyterian cant, truly called 
 to be bishops ; that is, of himself, and such rascals, called the 
 Bishops of Kidderminster, and other such places. The bishops set 
 apart by such factious, snivelling Presbyterians as himself ; a Kid- 
 derminster bishop he means, when, according to the saying of a late 
 learned author, every parish shall maintain a tithe-pig metropolitan." 
 Baxter offering to speak again, Jeffries exploded in the following 
 apostrophe : " Eichard ! Eichard ! dost thou think here to poison 
 the court ? Eichard, thou art an old fellow an old knave ; thou 
 hast written books enough to load a cart, every one as full of 
 sedition, I might say treason, as an egg is -full of meat. Hadst thou 
 been whipped out of thy writing trade forty years ago, it had been 
 happy. I know thou hast a mighty party, and I see a great many 
 of the brotherhood in corners, waiting to see what will become of 
 their mighty Don, and a doctor of your party at your elbow ; but 
 I will crush you alL Come, what do you say for yourself, you old 
 knave come, speak up, what doth he say ? 1 am not afraid of 
 him, or of all the snivelling calves you have got about you,"- 
 alluding to some persons who were in tears at this scene. "Your 
 Lordship need not," said Baxter, " for I'll not hurt you. But these 
 things will surely be understood one day ; what fools one sort of 
 Protestants are made, to prosecute the other." Then lifting up his 
 eyes to Heaven, he said, " I am not concerned to answer such stuff,
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 359 
 
 but am ready to produce my writings, in confutation of all this ; 
 and my life and conversation are known to many in this nation." 
 
 The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and, but for the resistance 
 of the other judges, Jeffries would have added whipping through 
 the city, to the sentence of imprisonment. It was to continue until 
 the prisoner should have paid five hundred marks. Baxter was at 
 that time in his seventieth year. A childless widower, groaning 
 under agonies of bodily pain, and reduced by former persecutions to 
 sell all that he possessed, he entered the King's Bench prison in 
 utter poverty ; and remained there for nearly two years, hopeless of 
 any other abode on earth. But the hope of a mansion of eternal 
 peace and love raised him beyond the reach of human tyranny. He 
 possessed his soul in patience. Wise and good men resorted to his 
 prison, and brought back from him greetings to his distant friends, 
 and maxims of piety and prudence. Happy in the review of a well- 
 spent life, and still happier in the prospect of its early close, his 
 spirit enjoyed a calm for which his enemies might have joyfully 
 resigned their mitres and their thrones. His pen, the faithful com- 
 panion of his troubles, as of his joys, still plied the Herculean tasks 
 which habit had rendered not merely easy, but delightful to him ; 
 and what mattered the gloomy walls or the obscene riot of a gaol, 
 while he was free to wander from early dawn to nightfall over the 
 sublime heights of devotion, or through the interminable, but, to 
 him, not pathless, wilderness of psychology 1 ? There pain and 
 mortal sickness were unheeded, and even his long-lost wife forgotten, 
 or remembered only that he might rejoice in the nearer approach 
 of their indissoluble re-union. The altered policy of the Court 
 restored him for a while to the questionable advantage of bodily 
 freedom. " At this time," says the younger Calamy, "he talked 
 about another world like one that had been there, and was come as 
 an express from thence to make a report concerning it." But age, 
 sickness, and persecution had done their work. His material frame 
 gave way to the pressure of disease, though, in the language of one 
 of his last associates, " his soul abode rational, strong in faith and 
 hope." That his dying hours were agitated by the doubts which 
 had clouded his earlier days, has been often, but erroneously, as- 
 serted. With manly truth, he rejected, as affectation, the wish for 
 death, to which some pretend. He assumed no stoical indifference 
 to pain, and indulged in no unhallowed familiarity on those awful 
 subjects which occupy the thoughts of him whose eye is closing on 
 sublunary things, and is directed to an instant eternity. In profound 
 lowliness, with a settled reliance on the Divine mercy, repeating at 
 frequent intervals the prayer of the Redeemer on whom his hopes
 
 360 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 reposed, and breathing out "benedictions on those who encircled his 
 dying bed, he passed away from a life of almost unequalled toil and 
 suffering, to a new condition of existence, where he doubted not to 
 enjoy that perfect conformity of the human to the Divine will, to 
 which, during his long and painful pilgrimage, it had been his cease- 
 less labour to attain. 
 
 The record of the solitary, rather than of the social, hours of a 
 man of letters, must form the staple of his biography ; yet he must 
 be a strenuous reader, who should be able, from his own knowledge, 
 to prepare such a record of the fruits of Eichard Baxter's solitude. 
 After a familiarity of many years with his writings, we must avow, 
 that of the one hundred and sixty-eight volumes comprised in the 
 catalogue of his printed works, there are many which we have never 
 opened, and many with which we can boast but a very slight ac- 
 quaintance. These, however, are such as (to borrow a phrase from 
 Mr Hallam) have ceased to belong to men, and have become the pro- 
 perty of moths. From the recesses of the library in Eed Cross Street 
 they lower, in the sullen majority of the folio age, over the pigmies 
 of this duodecimo generation the expressive, though neglected, 
 monuments of occurrences, which can never lose their place, or their 
 interest, in the history of theological literature. 
 
 The English Reformation produced no Luther, Calvin, Zuingle, 
 or Knox no man who imparted to the national mind the impress 
 of his own character, or the heritage of his religious creed. Our 
 Reformers, Cranmer scarcely excepted, were statesmen rather than 
 divines. Neither he, nor those more properly called the martyrs of 
 the Church of England, ever attempted the stirring appeals to man- 
 kind at large, which awakened the echoes of the presses and the pul- 
 pits of Germany, Switzerland, and France. From the papal to the 
 royal supremacy from the legantine to the archiepiscopal power 
 from the Roman missal to the Anglican liturgy, the transition was 
 easy, and, in many respects, not very perceptible. An ambidexter 
 controversialist, the English Church warred at once with the errors 
 of Rome and of Geneva ; until, relenting towards her first antagonist, 
 she turned the whole power of her arms against her domestic and 
 more dreaded enemy. To the resources of piety, genius, and learn- 
 ing, she added less legitimate weapons ; and the Puritans underwent 
 confiscation, imprisonment, exile, compulsory silence, everything, 
 in short, except conviction. When the civil wars set loose their 
 tongues and gave freedom to their pens, the Nonconformists found 
 themselves without any established standard of religious belief; 
 every question debatable; and every teacher conscience-bound to
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 361 
 
 take his share in the debate. Presbyterians, Independents, Ana- 
 baptists, Seekers, Familists, Behmenists, and Quakers, were agreed 
 only in cementing a firm alliance against their common enemies, the 
 Prelatists and Papists. Those foes subdued, they turned against 
 each other, some contending for supremacy, and some for toleration, 
 but all for what they severally regarded, or professed to regard, as 
 truth. Nor were theirs the polemics of the schools or the cloister. 
 The war of religious opinion was accompanied by the roar of Crom- 
 well's artillery, by the fall of ancient dynasties, and by the growth 
 of a military, though a forbearing, despotism. 
 
 It was an age of deep earnestness. Frivolous and luxurious men 
 had for a while retreated to make way for impassioned and high- 
 wrought spirits ; for the interpreters at once of the ancient revela- 
 tions, and of the present judgments, of heaven ; for the monitors of 
 an ungodly world ; and for the comforters of those who bent beneath 
 the weight of national and domestic calamities. Such were that 
 memorable race of authors to whom is given collectively the name 
 of the Puritan divines ; and such, above all the rest, was Richard 
 Baxter. Intellectual efforts of such severity as his, relieved by not 
 so much as one passing smile public services of such extent, in- 
 terrupted by no one recorded relaxation thoughts so sleeplessly 
 intent on those awful subjects, in the presence of which all earthly 
 interests are annihilated might seem a weight too vast for human 
 endurance ; as assuredly it forms an example which few would have 
 the power, and fewer still would find the will, to imitate. His 
 seventy-five years, unbroken by any transient glance at this world's 
 gaieties ; his one hundred and sixty-eight volumes, where the fancy 
 never once disports herself ; a mortal man absorbed in the solemn 
 realities, and absolutely independent of all the illusions, of life, ap- 
 pears like a fiction, and a dull one too. Yet it is an exact, and not 
 an uninviting, truth. 
 
 Never was the alliance of soul and -body formed on terms of 
 greater inequality than in Baxter's person. It was like the compact 
 in the fable, where all the spoils and honours fall to the giant's 
 share, while the poor dwarf puts up with all the danger and the 
 blows. The mournful list of his chronic diseases renders almost 
 miraculous the mental vigour which bore him through exertions re- 
 sembling those of a disembodied spirit. But his ailments were such 
 as, without affecting his mental powers, gave repose to his animal 
 appetites, and quenched the thirst for all the emoluments and honours 
 of this sublunary state. Death, though delaying to strike, stood 
 continually before him, ever quickening his attention to that awful 
 presence, by approaching the victim under some new or varied aspect
 
 3G2 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 of disease. Under this influence he wrote, and spoke, and acted a 
 dying man, conversant with the living in all their pursuits, but taking 
 no share in their transient hopes and fugitive emotions. Every re- 
 turning day was welcomed and improved, as though it were to be his 
 last. Each sermon which he delivered might not improbably be a 
 farewell admonition to his audience. The sheets which lay before 
 him were rapidly filled with the first suggestions of his mind in the 
 first words which offered ; for to-morrow's sun might find him unable 
 to complete the momentous task. All the graces and the negligences 
 of composition were alike unheeded ; for how labour as an artist 
 when the voice of human applause might in a few short hours become 
 inaudible ! 
 
 In Baxter, the characteristics of his age, and of his associates, were 
 thus heightened by the peculiarities of his own physical and mental 
 constitution. Their earnestness passed in him into a profound 
 solemnity ; their diligence into an unrelaxing intensity of employ- 
 ment ; their disinterestedness into a fixed disdain of the objects for 
 which other men contend. Even the episode of his marriage is in 
 harmony with the rest. He renounced the property with which it 
 would have encumbered him, and stipulated for the absolute command 
 of his precarious and inestimable time. Had this singular concen- 
 tration of thought and purpose befallen a man of quick sympathies, 
 it would have overborne his spirits, if it had not impaired his reason. 
 But Baxter was naturally stern. Had it overtaken a man of excitable 
 imagination, it would have engendered a troop of fantastic and ex- 
 travagant day-dreams. But to Baxter's vision all the objects which 
 fascinate ordinary observers, presented themselves with a hard out- 
 line, colourless, and with no surrounding atmosphere. Had it been 
 united to a cold and selfish heart, the result would have been a life 
 of ascetic fanaticism. But Baxter was animated by an enlarged, 
 though a calm, philanthropy. His mind, though never averted from 
 the remembrance of his own and of others' eternal doom, was still 
 her own sovereign ; diligently examining the foundations and de- 
 termining the limits of belief ; methodising her opinions with pain- 
 ful accuracy, and expanding them into all their theoretical or practi- 
 cal results, as patiently as ever analyst explored the depths of the 
 differential calculus. Still everything was practical and to the pur- 
 pose. " I have looked," he says, " over Hutton, Vives, Erasmus, 
 Scaliger, Salmasius, Casaubon, and many other critical grammarians, 
 and all Grater's critical volumes. I have read almost all the physics 
 and metaphysics I could hear of. I have wasted much of my time 
 among loads of historians, chronologers, and antiquaries. I despise 
 none of their learning all truth is useful. Mathematics, which I
 
 EICHARD BAXTER. 363 
 
 have least of, I find a pretty and manlike sport ; but if I had no 
 other kind of knowledge than these, what were my understanding 
 worth 1 What a dreaming dotard should I be ! I have higher 
 thoughts of the schoolmen than Erasmus and our other grammarians 
 had. I much value the method and sobriety of Aquinas, the subtlety 
 of Scotus and Ockam, the plainness of Durandus, the solidity of 
 Ariminensis, the profundity of Bradwardine, the excellent acuteness 
 of many of their followers ; of Aureolus, Capreolus, Bannes, Alvarez, 
 Zumel, &c. ; of Mayro, Lychetus, Trombeta, Faber, Meurisse, Rada, 
 &c. ; of Ruiz, Pennattes, Saurez, Vasques, &c. ; of Hurtado, of 
 Albertinus, of Lud a Dola, and many others. But how loth should 
 I be to take such sauce for my food, and such recreations for my 
 business ! The jingling of too much and false philosophy among them 
 often drowns the noise of Aaron's bells. I feel myself much better 
 in Herbert's ' Temple.' " 
 
 "Within the precincts of that temple, and to the melody of those 
 bells, he accordingly proceeded to erect the vast monument of his 
 theological works. Their basis was laid in a series of " Aphorisms 
 on Justification " an attempt to fix the sense of the sacred volume 
 on those topics which constitute the essential peculiarities of the 
 Christian system. The assaults with which the Aphorisms had been 
 encountered were repelled by his " Apology," a large volume in 
 quarto. The " Apology " was, within a few months, reinforced by 
 another quarto, entitled his " Confession of Faith." Between four 
 and five hundred pages of " Disputations " came to the succour of 
 the " Confession." Then appeared four treatises on the " Doctrine 
 of Perseverance," on " Saving Faith," on " Justifying Righteousness," 
 and on " Universal Redemption." Next in order is a folio of seven 
 hundred pages, entitled " Catholic Theology, plain, pure, peaceable," 
 unfolding and resolving all the controversies of the Schoolmen, the 
 Papists, and the Protestants. This was eclipsed by a still more 
 ponderous folio in Latin, entitled " Methodus Theologies Christianas," 
 composed, to quote his own words, " in my retirement at Totteridge, 
 in a troublesome, smoky, suffocating room, in the midst of daily 
 pains of sciatica, and many worse." After laying down the nature 
 of Deity, and of things in general, he discloses all the relations, 
 eternal and historical, between God and man, with all the abstract 
 truths, and all the moral obligations, deducible from them ; detect- 
 ing the universal presence of a Trinity, not in the Divine Being 
 only, but in all things spiritual and material which flow from the 
 great fountain of life. With another book, entitled " An End of 
 Doctrinal Controversies," a title, he observes, " not intended as a 
 prognostic, but as didactical and corrective," terminated his efforts
 
 364 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 to close up the mighty questions which touch on man's highest h opes 
 and interests. He had thrown upon them such an incredible multi- 
 tude and variety of cross lights, as effectually to dazzle any intellectual 
 vision less aquiline than his own. 
 
 His next enterprise was to win mankind to religious concord. A 
 progeny of twelve books, most of them of considerable volume, attest 
 his zeal in this arduous cause. Blessed, we are told, are the peace- 
 makers ; but the benediction is unaccompanied with the promise 
 of tranquillity. He found, indeed, a patron in " His Highness, 
 Richard, Lord Protector," whose rule he acknowledged as lawful, 
 though he had denied the authority of his father. Addressing 
 that wise and amiable man, " I observe," he says, " that the 
 nation generally rejoice in your peaceable entrance upon the govern- 
 ment. Many are persuaded that you have been strangely kept 
 from participating in any of our late bloody contentions, that God 
 might make you the healer of our breaches, and employ you in that 
 temple work which David himself might not be honoured with, 
 though it was in his mind, because he shed blood abundantly, and 
 made great wars." 
 
 Stronger minds, and less gentle hearts, than that of Richard 
 repelled with natural indignation counsels which rebuked all the 
 contending parties. Amongst these was " one Malpas, an old scan- 
 dalous minister," "and Edward Bagshawe, a young man who had 
 written formerly against monarchy, and afterwards against Bishop 
 Morley, and being of a resolute Roman spirit, was sent first to the 
 Tower, and then lay in a horrid dungeon ; " and who wrote a book 
 " full of untruths, which the furious temerarious man did utter out 
 of the rashness of his mind." In his dungeon, poor Bagshawe died, 
 and Baxter closes the debate with tenderness and pathos. " While 
 we wrangle here in the dark, we are dying, and passing to the world 
 that will decide all our controversies, and the safest passage thither 
 is by peaceable holiness." Dr Owen, one of the foremost in the 
 first rank of the divines of his age, had borne much ; but these ex- 
 hortations to concord he could not bear ; and he taught his monitor, 
 that he who undertakes to reconcile enemies must be prepared for 
 the loss of friends. It was on every account a desperate endeavour. 
 Baxter was opposed to every sect, and belonged to none. He can 
 be properly described only as a Baxterian at once the founder and 
 the single member of an eclectic school, within the portals of which 
 he invited all men, but persuaded none, to take refuge from their 
 mutual animosities. 
 
 Had Baxter been content merely to establish truth, and to de- 
 cline the refutation of error, many might have listened to a voice
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 365 
 
 so affectionate, and to counsels so profound. But " while he spake 
 to them of peace, he made him ready for hattle." Ten volumes, 
 many of them full-grown quartos, vindicated his secession from the 
 Church of England. Five other batteries, equally well served, were 
 successively opened against the Antinomians, the Quakers, the 
 Baptists, the Millenarians, and the Grotians. The last, of whom 
 Dodwell was the leader, prefigured, in the reign of Charles, the 
 divines who flourish at Oxford in the reign of Victoria. Long it 
 were, and not very profitable, to record the events of these theo- 
 logical campaigns. They brought into the field Tillotson, Stilling- 
 fleet, and Dodwell. The men of learning were aided by the men of 
 wit. Womack, the Bishop of St David's, had incurred Baxter's 
 censure for his " abusive, virulent accusations " of the Synod of 
 Dort, in a book which the Bishop had published under the name of 
 " Tilenus Junior." To this attack appeared an answer, entitled 
 " The Examination of Tilenus before the Triers, in order to his in- 
 tended settlement in the office of a public preacher in the common- 
 wealth of Utopia." Among the jurors empannelled for the trial 
 of Tilenus, are " Messrs Absolute," " Fatality," " Preterition," 
 " Narrow Grace, alias Stint Grace," " Take o' Trust," " Know 
 Little," and " Dubious," the last the established sobriquet for 
 Eichard Baxter. 
 
 But neither smile nor sigh could be extorted from the veteran 
 polemic ; nor, in truth, had he much right to be angry. If not 
 with equal pleasantry, he had, with at least equal freedom, invented 
 appellations for his opponents ; designating Dodwell, or his system, 
 as " Leviathan, absolute destructive Prelacy, the son of Abaddon, 
 Apollyon, and not of Jesus Christ." Statesmen joined in the affray. 
 Morice, Charles's first Secretary of State, contributed a treatise : 
 and Lauderdale, who, with all his faults, was an accomplished 
 scholar, and amidst all his inconsistencies a staunch Presbyterian, 
 accepted the dedication of one of Baxter's controversial pieces, and 
 presented him with twenty guineas. The unvarying kindness to 
 the persecuted Nonconformist of one who was himself a relentless 
 persecutor, is less strange than the fact, that the future courtier of 
 Charles read, during his imprisonment at Windsor, the whole of 
 Baxter's then published works, and, as their grateful author records, 
 remembered them better than himself. While the pens of the wise, 
 the witty, and the great, were thus employed against the universal 
 antagonist, the Quakers assailed him with their tongues. Who 
 could recognise, in the gentle and benevolent people who now bear 
 that name, a trace of their ancestral character, of which Baxter has 
 left the following singular record ] " The Quakers in their shops,
 
 366 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 when I go along London streets, say, ' Alas ! poor man, thou art 
 yet in darkness.' They have oft come to the congregation, when I 
 had liberty to preach Christ's gospel, and cried out against me as a 
 deceiver of the people. They have followed me home, crying out 
 in the streets, ' the day of the Lord is coming, and thou shalt perish 
 as a deceiver.' They have stood in the market-place, and under my 
 window, year after year, crying to the people, ' take heed of your 
 priests, they deceive your souls ;' and if any one wore a lace or neat 
 clothing, they cried out to me, ' these are the fruits of your 
 ministry.' " 
 
 Against the divorce of divinity and politics, Baxter vehemently 
 protested, as the putting asunder of things which a sacred ordinance 
 had joined together. He therefore published a large volume, en- 
 titled "The Holy Commonwealth; a Plea for the Cause of Mon- 
 archy, but as under God, the Universal Monarch." Far better to 
 have roused against "himself all the quills which had ever bristled 
 on all the " fretful porcupines " of theological strife. For while vin- 
 dicating the ancient government of England, he hazarded a distinct 
 avowal of opinions, which, with their patrons, were about to be pro- 
 scribed with the return of the legitimate Sovereign. He taught that 
 the laws of England are above the king ; " that Parliament was his 
 highest court, where his personal will and word were not sufficient 
 authority." He vindicated the war against Charles, and explained 
 the apostolical principle of obedience to the higher powers as ex- 
 tending to the senate as well as to the emperor. The royal power 
 had been given " for the common good, and no cause could warrant 
 the king to make the commonwealth, the party which he should 
 exercise hostility against." 
 
 All this was published at the moment of the fall of Richard 
 Cromwell. Amidst the multitude of answers which it provoked 
 may be especially noticed those of Harrington, the author of the 
 "Oceana," and of Edward Pettit. "The former," says Baxter, 
 " seemed in a Bethlehem rage, for, by way of scorn, he printed half 
 a sheet of foolish jests, in such words as idiots or drunkards use, 
 railing at ministers as a pack of fools and knaves, and, by his 
 gibberish derision, persuading men that we deserve no other answer 
 than such scorn and nonsense as beseemeth fools. With most inso- 
 lent pride, he carried it as neither I nor any minister understood at 
 all what policy was ; but prated against we knew not what, and had 
 presumed to speak against other men's art, which he was master of, 
 and his knowledge, to such, idiots as we, incomprehensible." 
 
 Pettit places Baxter in hell, where Bradshawe acts as President 
 of an infernal tribunal, and Hobbes and Neville strive in vain to
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 367 
 
 obtain from his adjudication the crown for pre-eminence of evil arid 
 mischief on earth ; which he awards to the Nonconformist. " Let 
 him come in," exclaims the new Ehadamanthus, " and he crowned 
 with wreaths of serpents and chaplets of adders. Let his triumphant 
 chariot he a pulpit drawn on the wheels of cannon hy a brace of 
 wolves in sheep's clothing. Let the ancient fathers of the Church, 
 whom out of ignorance he has vilified ; the reverend and learned 
 prelates, whom out of pride and malice he has belied, abused, and 
 persecuted ; the most righteous King, whose murder he has justified 
 let them all be bound in chains to attend his infernal triumph to his 
 ' Saint's Everlasting Eest ;' then make room, scribes and pharisees, 
 hypocrites, atheists, and politicians, for the greatest rebel on earth, 
 and next to him that fell from heaven." 
 
 Nor was this all. The " Holy Commonwealth" was amongst the 
 books which the University of Oxford sentenced to the flames 
 which, in a former generation, had been less innocently kindled at 
 the same place, against the persons of men who had dared to pro- 
 claim unwelcome truths. Morley, and many others, branded it as 
 treason ; and the King was taught to regard the author as one of 
 the most inveterate enemies of the royal authority. South joined in 
 the universal clamour ; and Baxter, in his autobiography, records, 
 that when that great wit and author had been called to preach be- 
 fore the King, and a vast congregation drawn together by his high 
 celebrity, he was compelled, after a quarter of an hour, to desist and 
 to retire from the pulpit, exclaiming, " the Lord be merciful to our 
 infirmities !" The sermon, which should have been recited, was 
 afterwards published, and it appeared that the passage at which 
 South's presence of mind had failed him, was an invective against 
 the "Holy Commonwealth!" 
 
 After enduring for ten years the storm which his book had 
 provoked, Baxter took the very singular course of publishing a re- 
 vocation, desiring the world to consider it as non sc-riptum ; main- 
 taining, nevertheless, the general principles of his work, and " pro- 
 testing against the judgment of Posterity, and all others that were 
 not of the same time and place, as to the mental censure either of 
 the book or revocation, as being ignorant of the true reason of them 
 both." "We of this age, therefore, who, for the present, constitute 
 the Posterity, against whose rash judgment this protest was entered, 
 must be wary in censuring what, it must be confessed, is not very 
 intelligible ; except, indeed, as it is not difficult to perceive, that he 
 had motives enough for retreating from an unprofitable strife, even 
 though the retreat could not be very skilfully accomplished. 
 
 Two volumes of Ecclesiastical History, the first a quarto of five
 
 368 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 hundred pages, the second a less voluminous vindication of its pre- 
 decessor, attest the extent of Baxter's labours in this department of 
 theological literature, and the stupendous compass of his reading. 
 The authorities he enumerates, and from a diligent study of which 
 his work is drawn, would form a considerable library. 
 
 Such labours as those we have mentioned, might seem to have 
 left no vacant space in a life otherwise so actively employed. But 
 these books, and the vast mass of unpublished manuscripts, are not 
 the most extensive, as they are incomparably the least valuable, of 
 the produce of his solitary hours. 
 
 With the exception of Grotius, Baxter is the earliest of that long 
 series of eminent writers who have undertaken to establish the truth 
 of Christianity, by a systematic exhibition of the evidence and the 
 arguments in. favour of the divine origin of our faith. All homage 
 to their cause, for we devoutly believe it to be the cause of truth ! 
 Be acknowledged that their labours could not have been declined, 
 without yielding a temporary and dangerous triumph to sophistry and 
 presumptuous ignorance. Admit (as indeed it is scarcely possible to 
 exaggerate) their boundless superiority to their antagonists in learn- 
 ing, in good faith, in sagacity, in range and in depth of thought, and 
 in whatever else was requisite in this momentous controversy ; 
 concede, as for ourselves we delight to confess, that they have ad- 
 vanced their proofs to the utmost heights of probability which by 
 such reasonings it is possible to scale ; and yet with all these con- 
 cessions may not inconsistently be combined some distaste for these 
 inquiries, and some doubt of their real value. 
 
 The sacred writers have none of the timidity of their modern 
 apologists. They never sue for an assent to their doctrines, but 
 authoritatively command the acceptance of them. They denounce 
 unbelief as guilt, and insist on faith as a virtue of the highest order. 
 In their catholic invitations, the intellectual not less than the social 
 distinctions of mankind are unheeded. Every student of their writ- 
 ings is aware of these facts ; but the solution of them is less com- 
 monly observed. It is, we apprehend, that the Apostolic authors 
 assume the existence in all men of a "Spiritual Discernment," 
 enabling the mind, when unclouded by appetite or passion, to 
 recognise and distinguish the Divine voice, whether Tittered from 
 within by the intimations of conscience, or speaking from without 
 in the language of inspired oracles. They presuppose that vigour of 
 reason may consist with feebleness of understanding.; and that the 
 power of discriminating between religious truth and error does not 
 chiefly depend on the culture or on the exercise of the mere argu- 
 mentative faculty. The especial patrimony of the poor and the illiter-
 
 RICHARD BAXTER, 369 
 
 ate, the Gospel has been tne stay of countless millions who never 
 framed a syllogism. Of the great multitudes whom no man can num- 
 ber, who, before and since the birth of Grotius, have lived in the 
 peace, and died in the consolations, of our faith, how incomparably 
 few are they whose convictions have been derived from the study of 
 works like his ! Of the numbers who have addicted themselves to such 
 studies, how small is the proportion of those who have brought to the 
 task either learning, or leisure, or industry sufficient to enable them 
 to form an independent judgment on the questions in debate ! Called 
 to the exercise of a judicial function for which he is but ill prepared 
 addressed by pleadings on an issue where his prepossessions are all 
 but unalterable, bidden to examine evidences which he has most 
 rarely the skill, the learning, or the leisure to verify, and pressed by 
 arguments, sometimes overstrained, and sometimes fallacious he 
 who lays the foundations of his faith in such "evidences," will but too 
 commonly end either in yielding a credulous, and therefore an in- 
 firm, assent, or by reposing in a self-sufficient, and far more hazard- 
 ous, incredulity. 
 
 For these reasons we attach less value to the long series of 
 Baxter's works in support of the foundations of the Christian faith, 
 than to the rest of his books which have floated in safety down the 
 tide of time to the present day. Yet it would be difficult to select 
 from the same class of writings any more eminently distinguished 
 by the earnest love and the fearless pursuit of truth ; or to name an 
 inquirer into these subjects, who possessed, and exercised to a greater 
 extent, the power of suspending his long-cherished opinions, and of 
 closely interrogating every doubt by which they were obstructed. 
 
 In his solicitude to sustain the conclusions he had so laboriously 
 formed, Baxter xinhappily invoked the aid of arguments, which, 
 however impressive in his own days, are answered in ours by a 
 smile, if not by a sneer. The sneer, however, would be at once 
 unmerited and unwise. When Hale was adjudging witches to 
 death, and More preaching against their guilt, and Boyle investi- 
 gating the sources of their power, it is not surprising that Baxter 
 availed himself of the evidence afforded by witchcraft and appari- 
 tions in proof of the existence of a world of spirits ; and therefore 
 in support of one of the fundamental tenets of revealed religion. 
 Marvellous, however, it is, in running over his historical discourse 
 on that subject, to find him giving so unhesitating an assent to the 
 long list of extravagances and nursery tales which he has there 
 brought together ; unsupported, as they almost all are, by any proof 
 that such facts occurred at all, or by any decorous pretext for 
 referring them to preternatural agency. 
 
 24
 
 370 KICHARD BA.XTEB. 
 
 Simon Jones, a stout-hearted and able-bodied soldier, standing 
 sentinel at Worcester, was driven away from his post by the appear- 
 ance of something like a headless bear. A drunkard was warned 
 against intemperance by the lifting up of his shoes by an invisible 
 hand. One of the witches condemned by Hale threw a girl into fits. 
 Mr Emlin, a bystander, " suddenly felt a force pull one of the hooks 
 from his breeches, and, while he looked with wonder what had 
 become of it, the tormented girl vomited it up out of her mouth." 
 At the house of Mr Beecham, there was a tobacco pipe which had 
 the habit of moving itself from a shelf at one end of the room to a 
 shelf at the other end of the room." When Mr Munn, the minis- 
 ter, went to witness the prodigy, the tobacco pipe remained station- 
 ary ; but a great Bible made a spontaneous leap into his lap, and 
 open itself at a passage, on the hearing of which the evil spirit who 
 had possessed the pipe was exorcised. " This Mr Munn himself 
 told me, when in the sickness year, 1665, I lived in Stockerson 
 Hall. I have no reason to suspect the veracity of a sober man. a 
 constant preacher, and a good scholar." 
 
 Baxter was credulous and incredulous for precisely the same 
 reason. Possessing, by long habit, a mastery over his thoughts, 
 such as few other men ever acquired, a single effort of the will was 
 sufficient to exclude from his view whatever recollections he judged 
 hostile to his immediate purpose. Every prejudice was at once 
 banished when any debatable point was to be scrutinised ; and, 
 with equal facility, every reasonable doubt was exiled when his 
 only object was to enforce or to illustrate a doctrine of the truth of 
 which he was assured. The perfect submission of the will to the 
 reason may belong to some higher state of being than ours. On 
 mortal man that gift is not bestowed. In the best and the wisest, 
 inclination will often grasp the reins by which she ought to be 
 guided, and misdirect the judgment which she should obey. Happy 
 they who, like Baxter, have so disciplined the affections, as to disarm 
 their temporary usurpation of all its more dangerous tendencies ! 
 
 Controversies are ephemeral. Ethics, metaphysics, and political 
 philosophy are doomed to an early death, unless when born of 
 genius and nurtured by intense and self-denying industry. Even 
 the theologians of one age must, alas ! too often disappear to make 
 way for those of later times. But if there is an exception to the 
 general degree which consigns man and his intellectual offspring to 
 the same dull forgetfulness, it is in favour of such writings as those 
 which fill the four folio volumes bearing the title of "Baxter's 
 Practical Works." Their appearance in twenty-three smart octavos 
 is nothing short of a profanation. Hew down the Pyramids into a
 
 KICHARD BAXTER. 371 
 
 range of streets ! divide Niagara into a succession of water privi- 
 leges ! but let not the spirits of the mighty dead be thus evoked 
 from their majestic shrines to animate the dwarfish structures of our 
 bookselling generation. 
 
 Deposit one of those grey folios on a resting-place equal to that 
 venerable burden, then call up the patient and serious thoughts 
 which its very aspect should inspire, and confess that, among the 
 writings of uninspired men, there are none better fitted to awaken, 
 to invigorate, to enlarge, or to console the mind, which can raise it- 
 self to such celestial colloquy. True, they abound in undistin- 
 guishable distinctions ; the current of emotion, when flowing most 
 freely, is but too often obstructed by metaphysical rocks and shal- 
 lows, or diverted from its course into some dialectic winding ; one 
 while the argument is obscured by fervent expostulation ; at another 
 the passion is dried up by the analysis of the ten thousand springs 
 of which it is compounded ; here is a maze of subtleties to be un- 
 ravelled, and there a crowd of the obscurely learned to be refuted ; 
 the unbroken solemnity may now and then shed some gloom on the 
 traveller's path, and the length of the way may occasionally entice 
 him to slumber. But where else can be found an exhibition, at 
 once so vivid and so chaste, of the diseases of the human heart a 
 detection so fearfully exact, of the sophistries of which we are first 
 the voluntary, and then the unconscious victims a light thrown 
 with such intensity on the madness and the woe of every departure 
 from the rules of virtue a development of those rules at once so 
 comprehensive and so elevated counsels more shrewd or more per- 
 suasive or a proclamation more consolatory of the resources pro- 
 vided by Christianity for escaping the dangers by which we are 
 surrounded, of the eternal rewards she promises, or of the temporal 
 blessings she imparts, as an earnest and a foretaste of them ? 
 
 " Largior liic campis cether" Charles, and Laud, and Cromwell 
 are forgotten. We have no more to do with anti-pa3dobaptism or 
 prelacy. L'Estrange and Morley disturb not this higher region ; 
 but man, and his noblest pursuits Deity, in the highest concep- 
 tions of his attributes which can be extracted from the poor 
 materials of human thought the world we inhabit, divested of the 
 illusions which ensnare us the world to which we look forward, 
 bright with the choicest colours of hope the glorious witnesses, and 
 the Divine Example and the Divine Supporter of our conflict 
 throng, and animate, and inform every crowded page. In this 
 boundless repository, the intimations of inspired wisdom are pursued 
 into all their bearings on the various conditions and exigencies of 
 life, with a fertility which would inundate and overpower the most
 
 372 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 retentive mind, had it not been balanced by a method and a dis- 
 crimination even painfully elaborate. Through the vast accumula- 
 tion of topics, admonitions, and inquiries, the love of truth is 
 universally conspicuous. To every precept is appended the limita- 
 tions it seems to demand, No difficulty is evaded. Dogmatism is 
 never permitted to usurp the province of argument. Each equivocal 
 term is curiously defined, and each plausible doubt narrowly ex- 
 amined. Not content to explain the results he has reached, he 
 exhibits the process by which they were excogitated, and lays open 
 all the secrets of his mental laboratory. And a wondrous spectacle 
 it is. Calling to bis aid an extent of theological and scholastic lore 
 sufficient to equip a whole college of divines, and moving beneath 
 the load with unencumbered freedom, he expatiates and rejoices in 
 all the intricacies of his way now plunging into the deepest 
 thickets of casuistic and psychological speculation and then 
 emerging from them to resume his chosen task of probing the con- 
 science, by remonstrances from which there is no escape or of 
 quickening the sluggish feelings, by strains of devotion in which it 
 is impossible not to join. 
 
 That expostulations and arguments of which almost all admit the 
 justice, and the truth of which none can disprove, should fall so 
 ineffectually on the ear, and should so seldom reach the heart, is a 
 phenomenon worthy of more than passing notice, and meriting an 
 inquiry of greater exactness than it usually receives even from those 
 who profess the art of healing our spiritual maladies. To resolve it 
 " into the corruption of human nature," it is but to change the for- 
 mula in which the difficulty is proposed. To affirm that a corrupt 
 nature always gives an undue preponderance to the present above 
 the future, is untrue in fact ; for some of our worst passions avarice, 
 for example, revenge, ambition, and the like chiefly manifest their 
 power in the utter disregard of immediate privations and sufferings, 
 with a view to a supposed remote advantage. To represent the 
 world as generally incredulous as to the reality of a retributive state, 
 is to contradict universal experience, which shows how firmly that 
 persuasion is incorporated with the language, habits, and thoughts 
 of mankind ; manifesting itself most distinctly in those great ex- 
 igencies of life, when disguise is the least practicable. To refer to 
 an external spiritual agency, determining the will to a wise or a 
 foolish choice, is only to reproduce the original question in another 
 form what is that structure or mechanism of the human mind by 
 means of which such influences operate to control or to guide our 
 volitions ? 
 
 The best we can throw out as an answer to the problem is, that
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 373 
 
 the constitution of our frames, partly sensitive and partly rational, 
 and, corresponding with this, the condition of our sublunary ex- 
 istence, pressed by animal as well as by spiritual wants, condemns 
 us to a constant oscillation between the sensual and the divine, 
 between the propensities which we share with the brute creation, and 
 the aspirations which, connect us with, the Author of our being. 
 The rational soul contemplates means only in reference to their 
 ends ; whilst the sensuous nature reposes in means alone, and looks 
 no further. Imagination, alternately the ally of each, most readily 
 lends her powerful aid to the ignobler party. Her golden hues are 
 more easily employed 'to exalt and refine the grossness of appetite, 
 than to impart brilliancy and allurement to the objects brought 
 within the sphere of human vision by the exercise of faith and 
 hope. Her draperies are adjusted with greater facility to clothe the 
 nakedness and to conceal the shame of those things with which she 
 is most conversant, than to embellish the forms and add grace to 
 the proportions of things obscurely disclosed at few and transient 
 intervals. 
 
 It is with this formidable alliance of Sense and Imagination that 
 Religion has to contend. Her aim is to win over to her side that 
 all-powerful mental faculty which, usually takes part with her 
 antagonist, and thus to shed over each of our steps the colours bor- 
 rowed from its ultimate, as contrasted with its immediate, tendency ; 
 to teach us to regard the pleasures and the pains of our mortal state 
 in the light in which we shall view them in our immortal existence ; 
 to make things hateful or lovely now, according as they impede or 
 promote our welfare hereafter. He is a religious, or, in the appro- 
 priate language of theology, a "regenerate" man, who, trained to 
 this discipline, habitually transfers to the means he employs the 
 aversion or the attachment due to the end he contemplates ; who 
 discerns and loathes the poison in the otherwise tempting cup of 
 unhallowed indulgence, and perceives and loves the medicinal balm 
 in the otherwise bitter draught of hardy self-denial. Good Richard 
 Baxter erected his four folio volumes as a dam with which to stay 
 this confluent flood of sense and imagination, and to turn aside the 
 waters into a more peaceful and salutary channel. When the force 
 of the torrent is correctly estimated, it is more reasonable to 
 wonder that he and his fellow-labourers have succeeded so well, than 
 that their success has been no greater. 
 
 On his style as an author, Baxter himself is the best critic. 
 " The commonness and the greatness of men's necessity," he says, 
 " commanded me to do anything that I could for their relief, and to 
 bring forth some water to cast upon this fire, though I had not at
 
 374 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 hand a silver vessel to cany it in, nor thought it the most fit. The 
 plainest words are the most profitable oratory in the weightiest 
 matters. Fineness for ornament, and delicacy for delight ; but they 
 answer not necessity, though sometimes they may modestly attend 
 that which answers it." He wrote to give utterance to a full mind 
 and a teeming spirit. Probably he never consumed forty minutes 
 in as many years in the mere selection and adjustment of words. 
 So to have employed his time, would in his judgment have been a 
 sinful waste of that precious gift. " I thought to have acquainted 
 the world with nothing but what was the work of time and diligence, 
 but my conscience soon told me that there was too much of pride 
 and selfishness in this, and that humility and self-denial required 
 me to lay by the affectation of that style, and spare that industry, 
 which tended but to advance my name with men, when it hindered 
 the main work and crossed my end." Such is his own account ; 
 and, had he consulted QuinctiHan, he could have found no better 
 precept for writing well than that which his conscience gave him 
 for writing usefully. The first of all the requisites for excelling in 
 the art of composition is, as one of the greatest masters of that art 
 in modern times (Sir Walter Scott) informs us, " to have something 
 to say." When there are thoughts that burn, there never will be 
 wanting words that breathe. Baxter's language is plain and per- 
 spicuous when his object is merely to inform ; copious and flowing 
 when he exhorts ; and when he yields to the current of his feelings, 
 it becomes redundant and impassioned, and occasionally picturesque 
 and graphic. There are innumerable passages of the most touching 
 pathos and unconscious eloquence, but not a single sentence written 
 for effect. His chief merit as an artist is, that he is perfectly artless ; 
 and that he employs a style of great compass and flexibility, in such 
 a manner as to demonstrate that he never thought about it, and as 
 to prevent the reader, so long at least as he is reading, from thinking 
 about it either. 
 
 The canons of criticism, which the great Nonconformist drew 
 from his conscience, are, however, sadly inapplicable to verse. Mr 
 James Montgomery has given his high suffrage in favour of Baxter's 
 poetical powers, and justifies his praise by a few passages selected 
 from the rest with equal tenderness and discretion. It is impossible 
 to subscribe to this heresy even in deference to such an authority ; 
 or to resist the suspicion that the piety of the critic has played false 
 with his judgment. Nothing short of an actual and plenary in- 
 spiration will enable any man who composes as rapidly as he writes, 
 to give meet utterance to those ultimate secretions of the deepest 
 thoughts and the purest feelings in which the essence of poetry con-
 
 RICHARD BAXTER, 375 
 
 sists. Most of Baxter's verses, which, however are not very numer- 
 ous, would be decidedly improved by being shorn of their rhyme 
 and rhythm, in which state they would look like very devout and 
 judicious prose ; as they really are. 
 
 Every man must and will have some relief from his more severe 
 pursuits. His faithful pen attended Baxter in his pastime as in his 
 studies ; and produced an autobiography, which appeared after his 
 death in a large folio volume. Calamy desired to throw these 
 posthumous sheets into the editorial crucible, and to reproduce them 
 in the form of a corrected and well-arranged abridgment. Mr Orme 
 laments the obstinacy of the author's literary executor, which for- 
 bade the execution of this design. Few who know the book will 
 agree with him. A strange chaos indeed it is. But Grainger has 
 well said of the writer, that " men of his size are not to be drawn 
 in miniature." Large as life, and finished to the most minute de- 
 tail, his own portrait, from his own hand, exhibits to the curious in 
 such things a delineation, of which they would not willingly spare 
 a single stroke, and which would have lost all its force and freedom 
 if reduced and varnished by any other limner, however practised, or 
 however felicitous. 
 
 There he stands, an intellectual giant as he was, playing with his 
 quill as Hercules with the distaff, his very sport a labour under 
 which any one but himself would have staggered. Towards the 
 close of the first book occurs a passage, which, though often re-pub- 
 lished, and familiar to most students of English literature, must yet 
 be noticed as the most impressive record in our own language, if 
 not in any tongue, of the gradual ripening of a powerful mind under 
 the culture of incessant study, wide experience, and anxious self- 
 observation. Mental anatomy, conducted by a hand at once so 
 delicate and so firm, and comparisons, so exquisitely just, between 
 the impressions and impulses of youth and the tranquil conclusions 
 of old age, bring his career of strife and trouble to a close of unex- 
 pected and welcome serenity. In the full maturity of such know- 
 ledge as is to be acquired on earth of the mysteries of our mortal 
 and of our immortal existence, the old man returns at last for repose 
 to the elementary truths, the simple lessons, and the confiding af- 
 fections of his childhood ; and writes an unintended commentary, 
 of unrivalled force and beauty, on the inspired declaration, that to 
 " become as little children " is the indispensable, though arduous, 
 condition of attaining to true heavenly wisdom. 
 
 To substitute for this self-portraiture any other analysis of Bax- 
 ter's intellectual and moral character would indeed be a vain at-- 
 tempt. If there be any defect or error of which he was unconscious,
 
 376 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 and which he therefore has not avowed, it was the combination in 
 his mind of an undue reliance on his own powers of investigating 
 truth, with an undue distrust in the result of his inquiries. He 
 proposed to himself, and executed, the task of exploring the whole 
 circle of the moral sciences, logic, ethics, divinity, politics, and 
 metaphysics ; and this toil he accomplished amidst public employ- 
 ments of ceaseless importunity, and bodily pains almost uninter- 
 mitted. Intemperance never assumed a more venial form ; but that 
 this insatiate thirst for knowledge was indulged to a faulty excess, 
 no reader of his life, or of his works, can doubt. 
 
 In one of his most remarkable treatises, " On Falsely Pretended 
 Knowledge," the dangerous result of indulging this omnivorous 
 appetite is peculiarly remarkable. Probabilities, the only objects 
 of such studies, will at length become evanescent, or scarcely per- 
 ceptible, when he who holds the scales refuses to adjust the balance, 
 until satisfied that he has laden each with every suggestion and every 
 argument which can be derived from every author who has preceded 
 him in the same inquiries. Yet more hopeless is the search for 
 truth, when this adjustment, after having been once made, is again 
 to be verified as often as any new speculations are discovered ; and 
 when the very faculty of human understanding, and the laws of 
 reasoning, are themselves to be questioned and examined anew as 
 frequently as any doubt can be raised of their adaptation to their 
 appointed ends. Busied with this immense apparatus, and applying 
 it to this boundless field of inquiry, Baxter would have been be- 
 wildered by his own efforts, and lost in the mazes of an universal 
 scepticism, but for the ardent piety which possessed his soul, and 
 the ever-recurring expectation of approaching death, which dissipated 
 his ontological dreams, and roused him to the active duties, and the 
 instant realities, of life. Even as it is, he has left behind him much, 
 which, in direct opposition to his own purposes, might cherish the 
 belief that human existence was some strange chimera, and human 
 knowledge an illusion, did it not fortunately happen that he is 
 tedious in proportion as he is mystical. Had he possessed and 
 employed the wit and gaiety of Bayle, there are some of his writings 
 to which a place must have been assigned in the Index Expurga- 
 torius of Protestantism. 
 
 Amongst his contemporaries, Baxter appears to have been the 
 object of general reverence, and of as general unpopularity. His 
 temper was austere and irritable, his address ungracious and uncouth. 
 "While cordially admitting the merits of each rival sect, he concurred 
 with none, but was the common censor and opponent of all. His 
 own opinions on church government coincided with the later judg-
 
 RICHARD BAXTER. 377 
 
 merit, or, as it should be rather said, with the concessions, of Arch- 
 bishop Usher. They adjusted the whole of that interminable dispute 
 to their mutual satisfaction at a conference which did not last above 
 half an hour ; for each of them was too devoutly intent on the great 
 objects of Christianity to differ with each other very widely as to 
 mere ritual observances. The contentions by which our forefathers 
 were agitated on these subjects, have now happily subsided into a 
 speculative and comparatively uninteresting debate. They produced 
 their best, and perhaps their only desirable result, in diffusing 
 through the Church, and amongst the people of England, an inde- 
 structible conviction of the folly of attempting to coerce the human 
 mind into a servitude to any system or profession of belief; or of 
 endeavouring to produce amongst men any real uniformity of 
 opinion on subjects beyond the cognisance of the bodily senses, and 
 of daily observation. They have taught us all to acknowledge in 
 practice, though some may yet deny in theory, that as long as men 
 are permitted to avow the truth, the inherent diversities of their 
 understandings, and of their circumstances, must impel them to the 
 acknowledgment of corresponding variations of judgment, on all 
 questions which touch the mysteries of the present, or of the future, 
 life. If no man laboured more, or with less success, to induce man- 
 kind to think alike on these topics, no one ever exerted himself 
 more zealously, or more effectually, than did Eichard Baxter, both 
 by his life and his writings, to divert the world from those petty 
 disputes which falsely assume the garb of religious zeal, to those 
 eternal and momentous truths, in the knowledge, the love, and the 
 practice of which, the essence of religion consists. 
 
 One word respecting the edition of his works, to which we referred 
 in the outset. For the reason already mentioned, we have stuck to 
 our long-revered folios, without reading so much as a page of their 
 diminutive representatives, and can therefore report nothing about 
 them. But after diligently and repeatedly reading the two intro- 
 ductory volumes by Mr Orme, we rejoice in the opportunity of 
 bearing testimony to the merits of a learned, modest, and laborious 
 writer, who is now, however, beyond the reach of human praise or 
 censure. He has done everything for Baxter's memory which could 
 be accomplished by a skilful abridgment of his autobiography, and a 
 careful analysis of the theological library of which he was the author ; 
 aided by an acquaintance with the theological literature of the seven- 
 teenth century, such as no man but himself has exhibited, and 
 which it may safely be conjectured no other man possesses. Had 
 Mr Orme been a member of the Established Church, and had he 
 chosen a topic more in harmony with the studies of that learned
 
 378 RICHARD BAXTER. 
 
 body, Ms literary abilities would have been far more correctly esti- 
 mated, and more widely celebrated. They who dissent from her 
 communion, and who are therefore excluded from her universities 
 and her literary circles, are not, however, to expect for their writings 
 the same toleration which is so firmly secured for their persons and 
 their ministry. But let them not be dejected. Let them take for 
 their examples those whom they have selected as their teachers ; 
 and learning from Eichard Baxter to live and to write, they will 
 either achieve his celebrity, or will be content, as he was, to labour 
 without any other recompense than the tranquillity of his own con- 
 science, the love of the people among whom he dwelt, .and the ap- 
 probation of the Master to whom every hour of his life, and every 
 page of his books, were alike devoted.
 
 379 
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 IP the enemies of Christianity in the commencement of the last 
 century failed to accomplish its overthrow, they were at least suc- 
 cessful in producing what at present appears to have been a strange 
 and unreasonable panic. Middleton, Bolingbroke, and Mandeville, 
 have now lost their terrors ; and Chubb, Toland, Collins, and Wool- 
 ston, are remembered, like the heroes of the Dunciad, only on 
 account of the brilliancy of the Auto-da-fe at which they suffered. 
 To these writers, however, belongs the credit of having suggested to 
 Clarke his inquiries into the elementary truth on which all religion 
 depends. By them Warburton was provoked to " demonstrate " the 
 Divine legation of Moses. They excited Bishop Newton to show 
 the fulfilment of Prophecy, and Lardner to accumulate the proofs of 
 the Credibility of the Gospels. A greater than any of these, Joseph 
 Butler, was induced, by the same adversaries, to investigate the 
 analogy of natural and revealed religion ; and Berkeley and Sherlock, 
 with a long catalogue of more obscure writers, crowded to the 
 defence of the menaced citadel of the Faith. But in this anxiety to 
 strengthen their ramparts the garrison not only declined to attempt 
 new conquests, but withdrew from much of their ancient dominion. 
 In this its apologetic age, English Theology was distinguished by an 
 unwonted timidity and coldness. There Avas an end of the alliance 
 which it had maintained from the days of Jewell to those of 
 Leighton, with philosophy and eloquence, with wit and poetry. 
 Taylor and Hall, Donne and Hooker, Baxter and Howe, had spoken 
 as men having authority, and with an unclouded faith in their 
 Divine Mission. In that confidence they had grappled with every 
 difficulty, and had wielded with equal ease and vigour all the 
 resources of genius and of learning. Alternately searching the 
 depths of the heart, and playing over the mere surface of the mind, 
 they relieved the subtleties of logic by a quibble or a pun, and 
 illuminated, by intense flashes of wit, the metaphysical abysses 
 which it was their delight to tread. Even when directing the
 
 380 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 
 
 spiritual affections to their highest exercise, they hazarded any 
 quaint conceit which crossed their path, and gave way to every im- 
 pulse of fancy or of passion. But Divinity was no longer to retain 
 the foremost place in English literature. The Tillotsons and Seekers 
 of a later age were alike distrustful of their readers and of themselves. 
 Tame, cautious, and correct, they rose above the Tatlers and Spec- 
 tators of their times, because on such themes as theirs it was im- 
 possible to be frivolous ; but they can hardly be said to have con- 
 tributed as largely as Steele and Addison to guide the opinions, or to 
 form the character of their generation. 
 
 This depression of theology was aided by the state of political 
 parties under the two first princes of the House of Brunswick. 
 Low and High Church were but other names for Whigs and 
 Tories ; and while Hoadley and Atterbury wrangled about the 
 principles of the Eevolution, the sacred subjects which formed the 
 pretext of their disputes were desecrated in the feelings of the multi- 
 tude, who witnessed and enjoyed the controversy. Secure from 
 further persecution, and deeply attached to the new order of things, 
 the Dissenters were no longer roused to religious zeal by invidious 
 secular distinctions ; and Doddridge and Watts lamented the de- 
 cline of their congregations from the standard of their ancient 
 piety. The former victims of bigotry had become its proselytes, 
 and joined in directing anathemas against the Pope and the 
 Pretender, with still greater acrimony than against the Evil One, 
 with whom good Protestants of all denominations associated them. 
 
 The theology of any age at once ascertains and regulates its 
 moral stature ; and, at the period of which we speak, the austere 
 virtues of the Puritans, and the more meek and social, though not 
 less devout, spirit of the Worthies of the Church of England, if still 
 to be detected in the recesses of private life, were discountenanced 
 by the general habits of society. The departure of the more pure and 
 generous influences of earlier times may be traced nowhere more 
 clearly than in those works of fiction, in which the prevailing profli- 
 gacy of manners was illustrated by Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett ; 
 and proved, though with more honest purposes, by Richardson and 
 Defoe. 
 
 It was at this period that the Alma Mater of Laud and Sache- 
 verel was nourishing in her bosom a little band of pupils destined to 
 accomplish a momentous revolution in the national character. 
 Wesley had already attained the dawn of manhood, when, in 1714, 
 his future rival and coadjutor, George Whitfield, was born at a 
 tavern in Gloucester, of which his father was the host. The death 
 of the elder Whitfield within two years from that time, left the child
 
 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 381 
 
 to the care of his mother, who took upon herself the management of 
 the "Bell Inn;" though, as her son has gratefully recorded, she 
 " prudently kept him, in his tender years, from intermeddling with the 
 tavern business." In such a situation he almost inevitably fell into 
 vices and follies, which have been exaggerated as much by the vehe- 
 mence of his own confessions, as by the malignity of his enemies. They 
 exhibit some curious indications of his future character. He filched 
 his mother's purse, but gave part of the money to the poor. He stole 
 books, but they were books of devotion. Irritated by the unlucky 
 tricks of his playfellows, who, he says, in the language of David, 
 "compassed him about like bees," he converted into a prayer the 
 prophetic imprecation of the Psalmist " In the name of the Lord 
 I will destroy them." The mind in which bad passions and devo- 
 tional feelings were thus strongly knit together, was consigned, in 
 early youth, to the culture of the master of the grammar-school of 
 St Mary de Crypt, in his native city; and there were given the 
 first indications of his future eminence. He studied the English 
 dramatic writers, and represented their female characters with 
 applause ; and when the mayor and aldermen were to be harangued 
 by one of the scholars, the embryo field-preacher was selected to 
 extol the merits, and to gratify the taste, of their worships. His 
 erratic propensities were developed almost as soon as his powers of 
 elocution. "Wearied with the studies of the grammar-school, he ex- 
 torted his mother's reluctant consent to return to the tavern ; and 
 there, he says, " I put on my blue apron and my snuffers, washed 
 mops, cleaned rooms, and, in one word, became professed and 
 common Drawer for nigh a year and a half." The Tapster was, of 
 course, occasionally tipsy, and always in request ; but as even the 
 flow of the tap may not be perennial, he found leisure to compose 
 sermons, and stole from the night some hours for the study of the 
 Bible. 
 
 At the Bell Inn there dwelt a sister-in-law of Whitfield's, with 
 whom it was his fortune or his fault to quarrel ; and to soothe his 
 troubled spirit he "would retire and weep before the Lord, as 
 Hagar when flying from Sarah." From the presence of this Sarah 
 he accordingly fled to Bristol, and betook himself to the study of 
 Thomas a Kempis ; but returning once more to Gloucester, first ex- 
 changed divinity for the drama, and then abandoned the dramatists 
 for his long-neglected school-books. For now had opened a prospect 
 inviting him to the worthy use of those talents which might other- 
 wise have been consumed either in sordid occupations, or in some 
 obscure and fruitless efforts to assert his native superiority to ordin- 
 ary men. Intelligence had reached his mother that admission might
 
 382 THE "EVANGELICAL SUCCESSION. 
 
 be obtained at Pembroke College, Oxford, for her capricious and 
 thoughtful boy ; and the intuitive wisdom of a mother's love assured 
 her that through this avenue he might advance to distinction, if not 
 to fortune. A few more oscillations between dissolute tastes and 
 heavenward desires, and the youth finally gained the mastery over 
 his lower appetites. From his seventeenth year to his dying day he 
 lived amongst embittered enemies and jealous friends, without a 
 stain on his reputation. 
 
 In 1731 the gates of Pembroke College had finally closed on the 
 rude figure of one of her illustrious sons, expelled by poverty to seek 
 a precarious subsistence, and to earn a lasting reputation, in the ob- 
 scure alleys of London. In the following year they were opened to 
 a pupil as ill provided with this world's wealth as Samuel Johnson, 
 but destined to acquire a still more extensive and a more enduring 
 celebrity. The waiter at the Bell Inn had become a servitor at 
 Oxford no great advancement in the social scale, according to the 
 habits of that age yet a change which conferred the means of 
 elevation on a mind too ardent to leave any such advantage unim- 
 proved. He became the associate of Charles, and the disciple of 
 John Wesley, who had at that time taken as their spiritual guide the 
 celebrated mystic William Law. These future chiefs of a religious 
 revolution were then " interrogating themselves whether they had 
 been simple and collected ; whether they had prayed with fervour 
 Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and on Saturday noon ; if they 
 had used a collect at nine, twelve, and three o'clock ; duly meditated 
 on Sunday from three to four on Thomas a Kempis ; or mused on 
 Wednesday and Friday from twelve to one on the Passion." 
 
 But Quietism, indigenous in the East, is an exotic in this cold and 
 busy land of ours, bearing at the best but sorry fruit, and hastening 
 to a premature decay. Never was mortal man less fitted for the 
 contemplative state than George Whitfield. It was an attempt as 
 hopeful as that of converting a balloon into an observatory. He 
 dressed the character indeed to admiration, for " he thought it unbe- 
 coming a penitent to have his hair powdered, and wore woollen 
 gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes." But the sublime ab- 
 stractions which should people the cell and haunt the spirit of the 
 hermit he wooed in vain. In the hopeless attempt to do nothing 
 but meditate, " the power of meditating or even thinking was," he 
 says, " taken from him." Castanza on the " Spiritual Combat " ad- 
 vised him to talk but little ; and " Satan said he must not talk at 
 all" The Divine Redeemer had been surrounded in his temptations 
 by deserts and wild beasts, and to approach this example as closely 
 as the localities allowed, Whitfield was accustomed to select Christ
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 383 
 
 Church Meadow as the scene, and a stormy night as the time, of his 
 mental conflicts. He prostrated his body on the bare earth, fasted 
 during Lent, and exposed himself to the cold till his hands began to 
 blacken, and "by abstinence and inward struggles so emaciated his 
 body as to be scarcely able to creep upstairs." In this deplorable 
 state he received from the Wesleys books and ghostly counsels. His 
 tutor, more wisely, sent him a physician, and for seven weeks he 
 laboured under a severe illness. It was, in his own language, " a 
 glorious visitation." It gave him time and composure to make a 
 written record and a penitent confession of his youthful sins ; to e,x- 
 amine the New Testament ; to read Bishop Hall's Contemplations ; 
 and to seek by prayer for wisdom and for peace. The blessings 
 thus invoked were not denied. " The day-star," he says, " arose in 
 my heart. This spirit of mourning was taken from me. For some 
 time I could not avoid singing Psalms wherever I was, but my joy 
 became gradually more settled. Thus were the days of my mourn- 
 ing ended." 
 
 And thus also was ended his education. Before the completion 
 of his twenty-first year, Whitfield returned to Gloucester ; and 
 such was the fame of his piety and talents, that Dr Benson, the 
 then Bishop of the Diocese, offered to dispense, in his favour, with 
 the rule which forbade the ordination of Deacons at so unripe an 
 age. The mental agitation which preceded his acceptance of this 
 proposal, is described in these strange but graphic terms in one of his 
 latest sermons. 
 
 " I never prayed against any corruption I had in my life, so much 
 as I did against going into holy orders so soon as my friends were 
 for having me go. Bishop Benson was pleased to honour me with 
 peculiar friendship, so as to offer me preferment, or to do anything 
 for me. My friends wanted me to mount the Church betimes. They 
 wanted me to knock my head against the pulpit too young ; but how 
 some young men stand up here and there and preach I do not know. 
 However it be to them, God knows how deep a concern entering 
 into the ministry and preaching was to me. I have prayed a thou- 
 sand times, till the sweat has dropped from my face like rain, that 
 God of his infinite mercy would not let me enter the Church till he 
 called me to and thrust me forth in his work. I remember once in 
 Gloucester, I know the room I look up to the window when I am 
 there, and walk along the street I know the window upon which 
 I have lain prostrate. I said, Lord, I cannot go, I shall be puffed 
 up with pride, and fall into the condemnation of the Devil. Lord, 
 do not let me go yet. I pleaded to be at Oxford two or three years 
 more. I intended to make 150 sermons, and thought that I would
 
 384 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 set up with a good stock in trade. I remember praying, wrestling, 
 and striving with God. I said, I am undone. I am unfit to preach 
 in thy great name. Send me not, Lord, send me not yet. I wrote 
 to all my friends in town and country to pray against the Bishop's 
 solicitation, but they insisted I should go into orders before I was 
 twenty-two. After all their solicitations, these words came into my 
 mind, " Nothing shall pluck you out of my hands ; " they came 
 warm to my heart. Then, and not till then, I said, Lord, I will 
 go ; send me when thou wilt." He was ordained accordingly ; 
 and " when the Bishop laid his hands upon my head, my heart," 
 he says, " was melted down, and I offered up my whole spirit, soul, 
 and body." 
 
 A man within whose bosom resides an oracle directing his steps 
 in the language and with the authority of inspiration, had needs be 
 thus self-devoted, in soul and body, to some honest purpose. If 
 not, he will but two often mistake the voice of the Pythoness for 
 that which issues from the sanctuary. But the uprightness and in- 
 flexible constancy of Whitfield's character rendered even its super- 
 stitions comparatively harmless ; and the sortilege was ever in 
 favour of some new effort to accomplish the single object for which 
 he henceforward lived. 
 
 The next words which " came to his soul with power " were, 
 " Speak out, Paul," and never was injunction more strictly obeyed. 
 " Immediately," he says, " my heart was enlarged, and I preached on 
 the Sunday morning to a very crowded audience with as much 
 freedom as if I had been a preacher for some years. As I proceeded 
 I perceived the fire kindled, till at last, though so young, and 
 amidst a crowd of those who knew me in my infant childish days, 
 I trust I was enabled to speak with some degree of gospel authority. 
 Some few mocked, but most for the present seemed struck, and I 
 have heard since that a complaint had been made to the Bishop that 
 I drove fifteen mad by the first sermon. The worthy Prelate, as I 
 am informed, wished that the madness might not be forgotten 
 before next Sunday." 
 
 Thus early conscious of his own rare powers, delighting in the 
 exercise of them, charmed with the admiration which they excited, 
 and exulting in the belief that he had been commissioned from on high 
 to quicken a torpid generation into life, he was urged into exertions 
 which, if not attested by irrefragable proofs, might appear incredible 
 and fabulous. It was the statement of one who knew him well, 
 and who was incapable of wilful exaggeration and it is confirmed 
 by his letters, his journals, and a whole cloud of witnesses that, 
 " in the compass of a single week, and that for years, he spoke in
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 385 
 
 general forty hours, and very many sixty, and that to thousands ; 
 and after his labours, instead of taking any rest, he was engaged 
 in offering up prayers and intercessions, with hymns and spiritual 
 songs, as his manner was, in every house to which he was invited." 
 
 Given, a preacher, who, during the passage of the sun through the 
 ecliptic, addresses his audience every seventh day in two discourses 
 of the dwarfish size to which sermons attain in this degenerate age, 
 and multiply his efforts by forty, and you do not reach the measure 
 of Whitfield's homiletical labours, during each of his next five and 
 thirty years. Combine this with the fervour with which he habit- 
 ually spoke, the want of all aids to the voice in the fields and the 
 thoroughfares he frequented, and the toil of rendering himself dis- 
 tinctly audible to thousands and tens of thousands, and, considered 
 merely as a physical phenomenon, the result is amongst the most 
 curious of all well-authenticated marvels. If the time spent in 
 travelling from place to place, and some brief intervals of repose and 
 preparation be subtracted, his whole life may be said to have been 
 consumed in the delivery of one continuous or scarcely interrupted 
 sermon. Strange as is such an example of bodily and mental energy, 
 still stranger is the power he possessed of fascinating the attention 
 of hearers of every rank of life and of every variety of understand- 
 ing. Not only were the loom, the forge, the plough, the collieries, 
 and the workshops deserted at his approach, but the spell was ac- 
 knowledged by Hume and Franklin by Pulteney, Bolingbroke, 
 and Chesterfield by maids of honour and lords of the bedchamber. 
 Such indeed was its force, that when the scandal could be concealed 
 behind the well-adjusted curtain, " e'en mitred ' auditors ' would 
 nod the head." Neither English reserve, nor the theological dis- 
 crimination of the Scotch, nor the callous nerves of the slave-dealers 
 of America, nor the stately self-possession of her aborigines, could 
 resist the enchantment. Never was mortal man gifted with such an 
 incapacity of fatiguing or of being fatigued. 
 
 It is impossible to award any similar praise to the Reverend Robert 
 Philip, Whitfield's latest biographer. He has followed the steps of 
 the great itinerant from the cradle to the grave, in a volume of 
 nearly six hundred closely printed pages, compiled on the principle 
 that nothing can be superfluous in the narrative of a great man's 
 life which was of any real importance to the man himself, or to his 
 associates. The chronicle so drawn up, illuminated by no eloquence 
 or philosophy, human or divine, and arranged on no intelligible 
 method, is a sore exercise for the memory and the patience of the 
 reader. It records, without selection or forbearance, thirteen suc- 
 cessive voyages across the Atlantic pilgrimages incalculable in 
 
 25
 
 386 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 every part of the North American continent, from Georgia to 
 Boston controversies with "Wesley on predestination and perfection, 
 and with the Bishops on still deeper mysteries chapel buildings 
 and subscriptions preachings and the excitement which followed 
 them and characteristic sayings and uncharacteristic letters 
 meetings and partings and every other incident, great and small, 
 which has been preserved by the oral or written traditions of 
 Whitfield's followers. His life still remains to be written by some 
 one who shall bring to the task other qualifications than an honest 
 zeal for his fame, and a cordial adoption of his opinions. 
 
 From the conflict with the enemies who had threatened her ex- 
 istence, the Church militant turned to resist the unwelcome ally 
 who menaced her repose. Warburton led the van, and behind him 
 many a mitred front scowled on the audacious innovator. Divested 
 of the logomachies which chiefly engaged the attention of the dis- 
 putants, the controversy between Whitfield and the Bishops lay in 
 a narrow compass. It being mutually conceded that the virtues of 
 the Christian life can result only from certain divine impulses, and 
 that to lay a claim to this holy inspiration when its legitimate fruits 
 are wanting, is a fatal delusion he maintained, and they denied, 
 that the person who is the subject of this sacred influence has within 
 his own bosom an independent attestation of its reality. So abstruse 
 a debate required the zest of some more pungent ingredients ; and 
 the polemics with whom Whitfield had to do, were not such sciolists 
 in their calling as to be ignorant of the necessity of fastening upon 
 him some epithet at once opprobrious and vague. While, therefore, 
 milder spirits arraigned him as an Enthusiast, Warburton, with 
 constitutional energy of invective, denounced him as a Fanatic. In 
 vain he demanded a definition of these reproachful terms. To have 
 fixed their meaning would have been to destroy their point. They 
 afforded a solution at once compendious, obscure, and repulsive, of 
 whatever was remarkable in his character, and have accompanied 
 his name from that time to the present. The currents of life had 
 drifted Warburton on divinity as his profession, but his satirical 
 propensities were too strong to yield even to the study of the 
 Gospels. From them he might have discovered the injustice of his 
 censure; for the real nature of religious fanaticism can be learnt 
 with equal clearness from no other source. They tell of some men 
 who compassed sea and land to make one proselyte, that, when 
 made, they might train him up as a persecutor and a bigot ; of 
 some, who erected sepulchral monuments to the martyrs of a former 
 age, while unsheathing the sword which was to augment their num- 
 ber 3 of some who would have called down fire from heaven to
 
 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 387 
 
 punish, the inhospitable city which rejected their Master ; and of 
 some who exhausted their bodies with fasting, and their minds with 
 study, that they might with deeper emphasis curse the ignorant 
 multitude. These all labourel under a mental disease, which, 
 amongst fanatics of every generation, has assumed the same dis- 
 tinctive type. It consists in an unhallowed alliance of the morose 
 and vindictive passions with devotional or religious excitement. 
 Averting the mental eye from what is cheerful, affectionate, and 
 animating in piety, the victims of this malady regard the sects op- 
 posed to them not as the children, but as the enemies of God ; and 
 while looking inward with melancholy alternations of self-com- 
 placency and self-reproach, learn to contemplate their brethren as 
 their enemies, and Deity itself with but half-suppressed aversion. 
 To connect the name of the kind-hearted George Whitfield with 
 such a reproach as this ! To call on the indolent of all future gen- 
 erations who should believe in Warburton, to associate the despised 
 itinerant of his times with the Dominies and the Bonners of former 
 ages ! Truly the indignant prelate knew not what manner of spirit 
 he was of. If ever philanthropy burned in the human heart with 
 pure and intense flame, embracing the whole family of man in the 
 spirit of universal charity, it was in the heart of George Whitfield. 
 His predestinarian speculations perplexed his mind, but could not 
 check the expansion of his Christian feelings. "He loved the 
 world that hated him." He had no preferences but in favour of the 
 ignorant, the miserable, and the poor. In their cause he shrunk 
 from no privation, and declined neither insult nor hostility. To 
 such wrongs he opposed the weapons of an all-enduring meekness, 
 and a love which would not be repulsed. The springs of his be- 
 nevolence were inexhaustible, and could not choose but flow. As- 
 sisted it may have been by natural disposition, and by many ex- 
 ternal influences ; but it ultimately reposed on the fixed persuasion 
 that he was engaged in a sacred duty, the faithful discharge of which, 
 would be followed by an imperishable recompense. With whatever 
 undigested subtleties his religious creed was encumbered, they could 
 not hide from him, though they might obscure, the truth, that, be- 
 tween the virtues of this life and the rewards of a future state, the 
 connection is necessary and indissoluble. Kef erring the retributive 
 dispensation exclusively to the Divine benevolence, his theology 
 inculcated humility, while it inspired love, and fortitude, and hope. 
 It taught him self-distrust, and reliance on a strength superior to 
 his own ; and instructed him in the mystery which reconciles the 
 elevation and the purity of disinterested love with those lower mo- 
 tives of action which more immediately respect the future advantage 
 
 25 *
 
 388 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 of the agent. "Whatever else "WTiitfield may have heen, a Fanatic, 
 in the proper sense of that term, he assuredly was not. 
 
 The charge of Enthusiasm was so amhiguous, that it might, with 
 equal propriety, he understood as conveying either commendation or 
 reproach. Hope is the element in which all the great men of the 
 world move and have their heing. Engaged in arduous and lofty 
 designs, they must, to a certain extent, live in an imaginary world, 
 and reanimate their exhausted strength with ideal prospects of the 
 success which is to repay their lahours. But, like every other emo- 
 tion, Hope, when long indulged, yields but a precarious obedience 
 to the reasoning powers ; and Eeason herself, even when most en- 
 lightened, will not seldom make a voluntary abdication of her 
 sovereignty in favour of this her so powerful minister surrendering 
 up to the guidance of bright and ardent anticipations, a mind whose 
 lofty aims cannot be realised by obedience to her own sober coun- 
 sels. For in " this little state of man " the passions must be the 
 free subjects, not the slaves of the Reason ; and while they obey 
 her precepts, should impart to her some of their own spirit, warmth, 
 and energy. It is, however, essential to a well-constituted nature, 
 that the subordination of the lower to the superior faculties, though 
 thus occasionally relaxed, should be habitually maintained. Used 
 with due abstinence, Hope acts as a healthful tonic ; intemperately 
 indulged, as an enervating opiate. The visions of future triumph, 
 which at first animate exertion, if dwelt upon too intently, will 
 usurp the place of the stern reality, and noble objects will be con- 
 templated, not for their own inherent worth, but on account of the 
 day-dreams they engender. Thus, Hope aided by Imagination makes 
 one man a hero, another a somnambulist, and a third a lunatic ; 
 while it renders them all Enthusiasts. And thus are classed toge- 
 ther, under one generic term, characters wide asunder as the poles, 
 and standing at the top and at the bottom of the scale of human 
 intellect. The same epithet is applied indifferently to Francis 
 Bacon and to Emanuel Swedenborg. 
 
 Religious men are, for obvious reasons, more subject than others 
 to Enthusiasm, both in its invigorating and in its morbid forms. 
 They are aware that there is about their path and about their bed a 
 real presence, which yet no sense attests. They revere a spiritual 
 inmate of the soul, of whom they have no definite consciousness. 
 They live in communion with one, whose nature is chiefly defined 
 by negatives. They are engaged in duties which can be performed 
 acceptably only at the bidding of the deepest affections. They rest 
 their faith on prophetic and miraculous suspensions, in times past, 
 of the usual course of nature ; and derive their hopes and fears from
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 389 
 
 the dim shadows cast by things eternal on the troubled mirror of 
 this transient scene. What wonder if, nnder the incumbent weight 
 of such thoughts as these, the course of active virtue ' be too often 
 arrested ; or if a religious romance sometimes takes the place of con- 
 templative piety ; or if the fictitious gradually supersedes the real ; 
 or if a world of dreams, a system of opinions, and a code of morals, 
 which religion disavows, occasionally shed their narcotic influence 
 over a spirit excited and oppressed by the shapeless forms and the 
 fearful powers with which it is conversant ? 
 
 Both in the more and in the less favourable sense of the expres- 
 sion Whitfield was an Enthusiast. The thraldom of the active to 
 the meditative powers was indeed abhorrent from his nature ; but 
 he was unable to maintain a just equilibrium between them. His 
 life was one protracted calenture ; and the mental fever discoloured 
 and distorted the objects of his pursuits. Without intellectual dis- 
 cipline or sound learning, he confounded his narrow range of ele- 
 mentary topics with the comprehensive scheme and science of 
 divinity. Leaping over the state of pupilage, he became at once a 
 teacher and a dogmatist. The lessons which he never drew from 
 books were never taught him by living men. He allowed himself 
 no leisure for social intercourse with his superiors, or with his 
 equals, but underwent the debilitating effects of conversing, almost 
 exclusively, with those who sat as disciples at his feet. Their 
 homage, and the impetuous tumult of his career, left him but super- 
 ficially acquainted with himself. Unsuspicious of his own ignor- 
 ance, and exposed to flattery far more intoxicating than the acclama- 
 tions of the theatre, he laid the foundations of a new religious system 
 with less of profound thought, and in a greater penury of theological 
 research, than had ever fallen to the lot of a reformer or heresiarch 
 before. The want of learning was concealed under the dazzling veil 
 of popular eloquence, and supplied by the assurance of Divine 
 illumination ; and the spiritual influence on which he thus relied, 
 would, if real, have been little else than a continually recurring 
 miracle. It was not a power like that which acts throughout the 
 material world the unseen and inaudible source of life, sustaining, 
 cementing, and invigorating all things, hiding itself from the heed- 
 less beneath the subordinate agency it employs, and disclosed to the 
 thoughtful by its prolific and plastic energies. The access of the 
 Sacred presence, which Whitfield acknowledged, was perceptible by 
 an inward consciousness, and was not merely different, but distin- 
 guishable, from the movements of that intellectual and sensitive 
 mechanism of his own nature, by means of which it operated. He 
 discerned it not only in the growth of the active and passive virtues,
 
 390 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 and in progressive strength and wisdom and peace, but in sudden 
 impulses which visited his bosom, and unexpected suggestions 
 which directed his path. A truth of all others the most consolatory 
 and the most awful, was thus degraded almost to a level with super- 
 stitions which, in their naked form, no man would have more vehe- 
 mently disclaimed ; and the great mystery which blends together 
 the human and the Divine in the Christian dispensation, lost much 
 of its sublime character, and with it much of its salutary influence. 
 
 It was indeed impossible that a mind feeding upon such visions 
 as he invited and cherished should entirely escape their practical 
 mischief. He would have rejected with horror the impious dream 
 that the indwelling Deity would absolve him from any obligation 
 of justice, mercy, or truth. Yet he could persuade himself that he 
 enjoyed a dispensation from the duty of canonical obedience to his 
 ecclesiastical superiors. His revolt against the authority of the 
 Church of which he was a presbyter, is at once avowed and de- 
 fended by his latest biographer. "If," he says, "a bishop did good, 
 or allowed good to be done, Whitfield venerated him and his office 
 too ; but he despised both whenever they were hostile to truth or 
 zeal I have no objection to say, whenever they were hostile to his 
 own sentiments and measures. What honest man would respect an 
 unjust judge, or an ignorant physician, because of their professional 
 titles? It is high time to put an end to this nonsense." 
 
 Mr Philip's bonst is not, or at least should not be, that he is well 
 found in the principles of casuistry. He is no Ductor Dubitantium, 
 but a spiritual pugilist, who uses his pen as a cudgel. Whatever 
 may be the value of hard words, they are not sufficient to adjust 
 such a question as this. Under sanctions of the most awful solemn- 
 ity, Whitfield had bound himself to submit to the lawful commands 
 of his bishop. His " measures " being opposed to the law eccle- 
 siastical, were interdicted by his diocesan; but, his "sentiments" 
 telling him that he was right, and the bishop wrong, the vow of 
 obedience was, it seems, cancelled. If so, it was but an impious 
 mockery to make, or to receive, it. If it be really " nonsense " to 
 respect so sacred an engagement, then is there less sound sense than 
 has usually been supposed in good faith and plain dealing. Even 
 on the hazardous assumption that the allegiance voluntarily assumed 
 by the clergy of the Anglican Church is dissoluble at the pleasure of 
 the inferior party, it is at least evident that Whitfield was bound to 
 abandon the advantages, when he repudiated the duties, of the re- 
 lation in which he stood to his bishop. But, "despising" the 
 episcopal office, he still kept his station in the episcopal Church ; 
 and, if he had no share in her emoluments, continued at least to
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. . 391 
 
 enjoy the rank, the worship, the influence, and the privileges which 
 attend her ministers. In the midst of this revolt he performed her 
 offices, and ministered in her temples, as often as opportunity of- 
 fered. It was the dishonest proceeding of a good man bewildered 
 by dreams of the special guidance of a Divine Monitor. The 
 apology of his biographer is the error of a religious man led away 
 by a sectarian spirit. 
 
 The sinister influence of Whitfield's imagination on his opinions, 
 and, through them, on his conduct, may be illustrated by another 
 example. He not only became the purchaser of slaves, but con- 
 demned the restriction which at that time forbade their introduction 
 into Georgia. There is extant, in his handwriting, an inventory of 
 the effects at the Orphan House, in that province, in which these 
 miserable captives take their place between the cattle and the carts. 
 "Blessed be God," he exclaimed, "for the increase of the negroes. 
 I entirely approve of reducing the Orphan House as low as possible, 
 and I am determined to take no more than the plantation will main- 
 tain till I can buy more negroes." It is true that it was only as 
 founder of this asylum for destitute children that he made these 
 purchases ; and true also, that in these wretched bondsmen he re- 
 cognised immortal beings for whose eternal welfare he laboured ; 
 and it is further true that the morality of his age was lax on this 
 subject. But the American Quakers were already bearing testimony 
 against the guilt of slavery and the slave-trade ; and even had they 
 been silent, so eminent a teacher of Christianity as Whitfield could 
 not, without just censure, have so far descended from scriptural to 
 conventional virtue. 
 
 To measure such a man as George Whitfield by the standards of 
 refined society might seem a very strange, if not a ludicrous attempt. 
 Yet, as Mr Philip repeatedly, and with emphasis, ascribes to him 
 the character of a " gentleman," it must be stated that he was guilty 
 of high crimes and misdemeanours against the laws of that aristo- 
 cratic commonwealth in which the assertion of social equality, and 
 the nice observance of the privileges of sex and rank, are so curi- 
 ously harmonised. Such was his want of animal courage, that in 
 the vigour of his days he could tamely acquiesce in a severe personal 
 chastisement ; and fly to the hold of his vessel for safety at the 
 prospect of an approaching sea-fight. Such his failure in self-respect, 
 that a tone of awkward adulation distinguishes nearly all his letters 
 to the ladies of high degree who partook and graced his triumph. 
 But his capital offence against the code of manners was the absence 
 of that pudicity which shrinks from exposing to public gaze the 
 deepest emotions of the heart. In Journals originally divulged, and
 
 392 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 at last published, by himself, and, throughout his -voluminous cor- 
 respondence, he is "naked and is not ashamed." Some very coarse 
 elements must have entered into the composition of a man who 
 could thus scatter abroad disclosures of the sercet communings of 
 his spirit with his Maker. 
 
 Akin to this fault is his seeming unconsciousness of the oppress- 
 ive majesty of the topics with which he was habitually occupied. 
 The seraph in the prophetic vision was arrayed with wings, of which 
 some were given to urge his flight, and others to cover his face. 
 Vigorous as were the pinions with which Whitfield moved, he 
 appears to have been unprovided with those beneath which his eyes 
 should have shrunk from too familiar a contemplation of the inef- 
 fable glory. Where prophets and apostles " stood trembling," he is 
 at his ease ; where they adored, he declaims. This is, indeed, one 
 of the besetting sins of licentiates in divinity. But few ever moved 
 among the infinitudes and eternities of invisible things with less 
 embarrassment or with less of silent awe. Illustrations might be 
 drawn from every part of his writings, but hardly without commit- 
 ting the irreverence we condemn. 
 
 To the lighter graces of taste and fancy Whitfield had no preten- 
 sion. He wandered from shore to shore unobservant of the wonders 
 of art and nature, and of the strange varieties of men and manners 
 which solicited his notice. In sermons in which no resource within 
 his reach is neglected, there is scarcely a trace to be found of such 
 objects having met his eye or arrested his attention. The poetry of 
 the inspired volume awakens in him no corresponding raptures ; and 
 the rhythmical quotations which overspread his letters never rise 
 above the cantilena of the tabernacle. In polite literature, in phy- 
 sical and moral science, he never advanced much beyond the 
 standard of the grammar-school of St Mary de Crypt. Even as a 
 theologian, he has no claims to erudition. He appears to have had 
 no Hebrew and little Greek, and to have studied neither ecclesiastical 
 antiquity nor the great divines of modern times. His reading seems 
 to have been confined to a few, and those not the most considerable, 
 of the works of the later Nonconformists. Neither is it possible to 
 assign him a place among profound or original thinkers. He was, 
 in fact, almost an uneducated man ; and the powers of his mind 
 were never applied, and perhaps could not have been applied suc- 
 cessfully, either to the acquisition of abstruse knowledge, or to the 
 enlargement of its boundaries. 
 
 " Let the name of George Whitfield perish if God be glorified," 
 was his own ardent and sincere exclamation. His disciples will 
 hardly acquiesce in their teacher's self-abasement. They will per-
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL SUCCESSION. 393 
 
 haps resent, as injurious to him and to their cause, these imputations 
 of enthusiasm, of personal timidity, of irreverence and coarseness of 
 mind, of ignorance, and of a mediocrity or a total absence of the 
 powers of fancy, invention, and research. But the apotheosis of 
 saints is no less idolatrous than that of heroes ; and they have not 
 imbibed Whitfield's spirit who cannot brook to be told that he had 
 his share of the faults and infirmities which no man more solemnly 
 ascribed to the whole human race. 
 
 Such, however, was his energy and self-devotion, that even the 
 defects of his character were rendered subservient to the one end for 
 which he lived. From the days of the Apostles to our own, history 
 records the career of no man who, with a less alloy of motives 
 terminating in self, or of passions breaking loose from the control of 
 reason, concentrated all the faculties of his soul, with intensity and 
 perseverance, for the accomplishment of one great design. He 
 belonged to that rare variety of the human species of which it has 
 been said that the liberties of mankind depend on their inability to 
 combine in erecting an universal monarchy. "With nerves incapable 
 of fatigue, and a confidence in himself, which no authority, neglect, 
 or opposition could abate, opposing an impenetrable skin to all the 
 missiles of scorn and contumely, and yet exquisitely sensitive to the 
 affection which cheered and the applause which, rewarded his 
 labours ; unembarrassed either by the learning which, reveals diffi- 
 culties, or by the meditative powers which suggest doubts ; with an 
 insatiable thirst for active occupation, and an unhesitating faith in 
 whatever cause he undertook ; he might have been one of the most 
 dangerous enemies of the peace and happiness of the world, if 
 powers so formidable in their possible abuse had not been directed 
 to a beneficent end. Judged by the wisdom which is of the earth, 
 earthy, WMtfield would be pronounced a man whose energy minis- 
 tered to a vulgar ambition, of which the triumph over his ecclesias- 
 tical superiors, and the admiration of unlettered multitudes, were the 
 object and the recompense. Estimated by those whose religious 
 opinions and observances are derived from him by hereditary de- 
 scent, he is nothing less than an apostle, inspired in the latter ages 
 of the Church to purify her faith, and to reform her morals. A 
 more impartial survey of his life and writings may suggest the con- 
 clusion, that the homage of admiring crowds, and the blandishments 
 of courtly dames, were neither unwelcome nor unsolicited ; that a 
 hierarchy subdued to inaction, if not to silence, gratified his self- 
 esteem ; and that, when standing on what he delighted to call his 
 " throne," the current of devout and holy thoughts was not uncon- 
 taminated by the admixture of some human exultation. But ill
 
 394 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 betide him who delights in the too curious dissection of the motives 
 of others, or even of his own. Such anatomists breathe an impure 
 air, and unconsciously contract a sickly mental habit. "Whitfield 
 was a great and a holy man ; among the foremost of the heroes of 
 philanthropy ; and as a preacher without a superior or a rival. 
 
 If eloquence be justly denned by the emotions it excites, or by 
 the activity it quickens, the greatest orator of our times was he who 
 first announced the victory of Waterloo, if that station be not 
 rather due to the learned President of the College of Physicians, 
 who daily makes the ears to tingle of those who listen to his prog- 
 nostics. But the converse of the rule may be more readily ad- 
 mitted, and we may confidently exclude from the list of eloquent 
 speakers him whose audience is impassive whilst he addresses them, 
 and inactive afterwards. Every seventh day a great company of 
 preachers raise their voices in the land to detect our sins, to explain 
 our duty, to admonish, to alarm, and to console. Compare the pro- 
 digious extent of this apparatus with its perceptible results, and, in- 
 estimable as they are, who will deny that they disappoint the 
 hopes which, antecedently to experience, the least sanguine would 
 have indulged ? The preacher has, indeed, no novelties to communi- 
 cate. His path has been trodden hard and dry by constant use ; 
 yet he speaks as an ambassador from heaven, and his hearers are 
 frail, sorrowing, perplexed, and dying men. The highest interests 
 of both are at stake. The preacher's eye rests on his manuscript ; 
 the hearer's turn to the clock ; the half-hour glass runs out its 
 sand ; and the portals close on well-dressed groups of critics looking 
 for all the world as if just dismissed from a lecture on the tertiary 
 strata. 
 
 Taking his stand on some rising knoll, his tall and graceful 
 figure dressed with elaborate propriety, and composed into an easy 
 and commanding attitude, Whitfield's " clear blue eye " ranged over 
 thousands, and tens of thousands, drawn up in close files on the 
 plain below, or clustering into masses on every adjacent eminence. 
 A " rabble rout " hung on the skirts of the mighty host ; and the 
 feelings of the devout were disturbed by the scurril jests of the 
 illiterate, and the cold sarcasms of the more polished spectators of 
 their worship. But the rich and varied tones of a voice of un- 
 equalled depth and compass quickly silenced every ruder sound, as 
 in rapid succession its ever-changing melodies passed from the calm 
 of simple narrative, to the measured distinctness of argument, to the 
 vehemence of reproof, and the pathos of heavenly consolation. 
 " Sometimes the preacher wept exceedingly, stamped loudly and 
 passionately, and was frequently so overcome that for a few seconds
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 395 
 
 one would suspect lie could never recover, and, when he did, nature 
 required some little time to compose herself." In words originally 
 applied to one of the first German Reformers vividus vultus, vividi 
 oculi, vividce manus, denique omnia vivida. The agitated assembly 
 caught the passions of the speaker, and exulted, wept, or trembled at 
 his bidding. He stood before them, in popular belief, a persecuted 
 man, spurned and rejected by lordly prelates, yet still a presbyter of 
 the Church, and clothed with her authority ; his meek and lowly 
 demeanour chastened and elevated by the conscious grandeur of the 
 apostolic succession. The thoughtful gazed earnestly on a scene of 
 solemn interest, pregnant with some strange and enduring influence 
 on the future condition of mankind. But the wise and the simple 
 alike yielded to the enchantment ; and the thronging multitude gave 
 utterance to their emotions in every form in which nature seeks 
 relief from feelings too strong for mastery. 
 
 Whitfield had cultivated the histrionic art to a perfection which 
 has rarely been obtained, even by the most eminent of those who 
 have trodden the stage in sock or buskin. Foote and Garrick were 
 his frequent hearers, and brought away with them the characteristic 
 and very just remark, that " his oratory was not at its full height 
 until he had repeated a discourse forty times." The transient 
 delirium of Franklin (attested by the surrender on one occasion of 
 all the contents of his purse at a " charity sermon " and by a Quaker's 
 refusal to lend more to a man who had lost his wits) did not pre- 
 vent his investigating the causes of this unwonted excitement. " I 
 came," he says, " by hearing him often, to distinguish between ser- 
 mons newly composed and those he had preached often in the course 
 of his travels. His delivery of the latter was so improved by fre- 
 quent repetition, that every accent, every emphasis, every modulation 
 of the voice was so perfectly timed, that, without being interested in 
 the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse, 
 a pleasure of much the same kind as that received from an excellent 
 piece of music." 
 
 The basis of the singular dominion which was thus exercised by 
 "Whitfield during a period equal to that assigned by ordinary cal- 
 culations for the continuance of human life, would repay a more 
 careful investigation than we have space or leisure to attempt. 
 Amongst subordinate influences, the faintest of all is that which 
 may have been occasionally exercised over the more refined mem- 
 bers of his congregations by the romantic scenery in which they 
 assembled. The tears shaping "white gutters down the black faces 
 of the colliers, black as they came out of the coal-pits," were cer- 
 tainly not shed under any overwhelming sense of the picturesque,
 
 396 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 but the preacher himself felt and courted this excitement. " The 
 open firmament above me, the prospect of the adjacent fields," " to 
 which sometimes was added the solemnity " " of the approaching 
 evening," was, he says, " almost too much for me." But a far more 
 effectual resource was found in the art of diverting into a new and 
 unexpected channel, the excited feelings of a multitude already 
 brought together for purposes the most strangely contrasted to his 
 own. Journeying to Wales, he passes over Hampton Common, and 
 finds himself surrounded by twelve thousand people collected to see 
 a man hung in chains, and an extempore pulpit is immediately pro- 
 vided within sight of this deplorable object. On another similar 
 occasion, the wretched culprit was permitted to steal an hour from 
 the eternity before him, while listening, or seeming to listen, to a 
 sermon delivered by Whitfield to himself, and to the spectators of 
 his approaching doom. He reaches Basingstoke, when the inhabit- 
 ants are engaged in all the festivities of a country fair, and thus re- 
 cords the use he made of so tempting an opportunity. " As I passed 
 on horseback I saw the stage, and as I rode further I met divers 
 coming to the revel, which affected me so much, that I had no rest 
 in my spirit, and therefore having asked counsel of God, and per- 
 ceiving an unusual warmth and power enter my soul, though I was 
 gone above a mile, I could not bear to see so many dear souls for 
 whom Christ had died ready to perish, and no minister or magistrate 
 interpose ; upon this, I told my dear fellow-travellers that I was re- 
 solved to follow the example of Howell Harris in Wales, and bear my 
 testimony against such lying vanities, let the consequences to my 
 own private person be what they would. They immediately assent- 
 ing, I rode back to the town, got upon the stage erected for the 
 wrestlers, and began to show them the error of their ways." 
 
 The often-told tale of Whitfield's controversy with the Merry- 
 Andrew at Moorfields, still more curiously illustrates the skill and 
 intrepidity with which he contrived to divert to his own ends an 
 excitement running at high tide in the opposite direction. The fol- 
 lowing is an extract from his own narrative of the encounter. 
 
 " For many years, from one end of Moorfields to the other, booths 
 of all kinds have been erected for mountebanks, players, puppet- 
 shows, and such like. With a heart bleeding with compassion for 
 so many thousands led captive by the devil at his will, on Whit- 
 Monday, at six o'clock in the morning, attended by a large congre- 
 gation of praying people, I ventured to lift up a standard amongst 
 them, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Perhaps there were about 
 ten thousand in waiting, not for me, but for Satan's instruments to 
 amuse them. Glad was I to find that I had for once, as it were, got
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 397 
 
 the start of the devil. I mounted my field pulpit ; almost all nocked 
 immediately around it ; I preached on these words ' As Moses 
 lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,' &c. They gazed, they 
 listened, they wept, and I believe that many felt themselves stung 
 Avith deep conviction for their past sins. All was hushed and 
 solemn. Being thus encouraged, I ventured out again at noon. 
 The Avhole fields seemed, in a bad sense of the word, all white, ready 
 not for the Redeemer's, but for Beelzebub's harvest. All his agents 
 were in full motion. Drummers, trumpeters, Merry-Andrews, 
 masters of puppet-shows, exhibitions of wild beasts, players, &c. &c., 
 all busy in entertaining their respective auditors. I suppose there 
 could not be less than twenty or thirty thousand people. My pulpit 
 was fixed on the opposite side, and immediately, to their great morti- 
 fication, they found the number of their attendants sadly lessened. 
 Judging that, like St Paul, I should now be called, as it were, to 
 fight with beasts at Ephesus, I preached from these words, ' Great 
 is Diana of the Ephesians.' You may easily guess that there was 
 some noise among the craftsmen, and that I was honoured with 
 having a few stones, dirt, rotten eggs, and pieces of dead cats thrown 
 at me, whilst engaged in calling them from their favourite but lying 
 vanities. My soul was indeed among lions, but far the greatest part 
 of my congregation, which was very large, seemed for a while turned 
 into lambs. This Satan could not brook. One of his choicest serv- 
 ants Avas exhibiting, trumpeting on a large stage, but as soon as the 
 people saw me in my black robes and my pulpit, I think all to a man 
 left him and ran to me. For a while I was enabled to lift up my 
 voice like a trumpet, and many heard the joyful sound. God's people 
 kept praying, and the enemy's agents made a kind of roaring at 
 some distance from our camp. At length they approached near, and 
 the Merry- Andrew got up on a man's shoulder, and, advancing near 
 the pulpit, attempted to slash me with a long heavy whip several 
 times, but always with the violence of his motion tumbled down. 
 I think I continued in praying, preaching, and singing (for the noise 
 was too great to preach) for about three hours. We then retired 
 to the Tabernacle, with my pockets full of notes from persons 
 brought under concern, and read them amidst the praises and spiritual 
 acclamations of thousands. Three hundred and fifty awakened souls 
 were received in one day, and I believe the number of notes exceeded 
 a thousand." 
 
 The propensity to mirth which, in common with all men of robust 
 mental constitution, Whitfield possessed in an unusual degree, was, 
 like everything else belonging to him, compelled to minister to the 
 interest and success of his preaching ; but, however much his pleas-
 
 398 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 autries may attest the alacrity of his mind, it would be difficult to 
 assign them any other praise. Oscillating, in spirit as well as in 
 body, between Drury Lane and the Tabernacle, Shutter, the comedian, 
 attended in Tottenham Court Eoad during the run of his successful 
 performance of the character of Ramble, and was greeted with the 
 following apostrophe, " and thou, poor Eamble, who hast so long 
 rambled from Him, come thou also. Oh ! end thy ramblings, and 
 come to Jesus." The preacher in this instance descended not a little 
 below the level of the player. 
 
 In the eighteenth century the crown of martyrdom was a prize 
 for which Roman Catholics alone were permitted to contend, and 
 Whitfield was unable to gain the influence which he would have 
 derived from the stake, from a prison, or a confiscation. Conscious, 
 however, of the importance of such sufferings, he persuaded himself, 
 and desired to convince the world, that he had to endure them. The 
 Bishops were persecutors, because they repelled with some acrimony 
 his attacks on their authority and reputation. The mob were perse- 
 cutors, because they pelted a man who insisted on their hearing him 
 preach when they wanted to see a bear dance, or a conjurer eat fire. 
 A magistrate was a persecutor, because he summoned him to appear 
 on an unfounded charge, and then dismissed him on his own recog- 
 nizance. He gloried with better reason in the contemptuous lan- 
 guage with which he was assailed, even by the more decorous of his 
 opponents, and in the ribaldries of Foote and Bickerstaff. He would 
 gladly have partaken of the doom of Rogers and Ridley, if his times 
 had permitted, and his cause required it ; but the fires of Smithfield 
 were put out, and the exasperated Momus of the fair, with his long 
 whip, alone remained to do the appropriate honours of the feast of 
 St Bartholomew. 
 
 There are extant seventy-five of the sermons by which "Whitfield 
 agitated nations, and the more remote influence of which is still 
 distinctly to be traced, in the popular divinity and in the national 
 character of Great Britain and of the United States. They have, 
 however, fallen into neglect ; for to win permanent acceptance for 
 a book, into which the principles of life were not infused by its 
 author, is a miracle which not even the zeal of religious proselytes 
 can accomplish. Yet, inferior as were his inventive to his histrionic 
 powers, Whitfield is entitled to a place among theological writers 
 which, if it cannot challenge admiration, may at least excite and 
 reward curiosity. Many, and those by far the worst, of his dis- 
 courses, bear the marks of careful preparation. Take at hazard a 
 sermon of one of the preachers usually distinguished as evangelical, 
 add a little to its length, and subtract a great deal from its point
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 399 
 
 and polish, and you have one of his more elaborate performances ; 
 common-place topics discussed in a common-place way ; a respectable 
 mediocrity of thought and style ; endless variations on one or two 
 cardinal truths ; in short, the task of a clerical Saturday evening, 
 executed Tvith piety, good sense, and exceeding sedateness. But 
 open one of that series of Whitfield's sermons which bears the stamp 
 of having been conceived and uttered at the same moment, and 
 imagine it recited to myriads of eager listeners with every charm of 
 voice and gesture, and the secret of his unrivalled fascination is at 
 least partially disclosed. He places himself on terms of intimacy 
 and unreserved confidence with you, and makes it almost as difficult 
 to decline the invitation to his familiar talk as if Montaigne himself 
 had issued it. The egotism is amusing, affectionate, and warm- 
 hearted; with just that slight infusion of self-importance without 
 which it would pass for affectation. In this art of rhetoric, personi- 
 fication holds the first place ; and the prosopopoeia is so managed as 
 to quicken abstractions into life, and to give them individuality and 
 distinctness, without the use of any of those spasmodic and distorted 
 images which obey the incantations of vulgar rhetoricians. Every 
 trace of study and contrivance is obliterated by the hearty earnest- 
 ness which pervades each successive period, and by the vernacular 
 and homely idioms in which his meaning is conveyed. The recol- 
 lection of William Cobbett will obtrude itself on the reader of these 
 discourses, though the remembrance of the sturdy athlete of the 
 " Political Register," with his sophistry and his sarcasm, his drollery 
 and his irascible vigour, sorely disturbs the sacred emotions which 
 it was the one object of the preacher to awaken. And it is in this 
 grandeur and singleness of purpose that the charm of Whitfield's 
 preaching seems really to have consisted. You feel that you have 
 to do with a man who lived and spoke, and who would gladly have 
 died, to deter his hearers from the path of destruction, and to guide 
 them to holiness and to peace. His gossiping stories and dramatic 
 forms of speech are never employed to dissipate the awful emotions 
 which he proposes to excite. Conscience is not permitted to find 
 an intoxicating draught in spiritual excitement, or a narcotic in 
 glowing imagery. Guilt and its punishment, pardon and spotless 
 purity, death and an eternal existence, stand out in bold relief on 
 every page. From these the eye of the teacher is never withdrawn, 
 and to these the attention of the hearer is riveted. All that is 
 poetic, grotesque, or rapturous is employed to deepen these impres- 
 sions, and is dismissed as soon as that design is answered. Deficient 
 in learning, meagre in thought, and redundant in language as are 
 these discourses, they yet fulfil the one great condition of genuine
 
 400 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 eloquence. They propagate their own kindly warmth, and leave 
 their stings behind them. 
 
 The enumeration of the sources of Whitfield's power is still 
 essentially defective. Neither energy, nor eloquence, nor histrionic 
 talents, nor any artifices of style, nor the most genuine sincerity 
 and self-devotedness, nor all these united, would have enabled him 
 to mould the religious character of millions in his own and future 
 generations. The secret lies deeper, though not very deep. It 
 consisted in the nature of the theology he taught in its perfect 
 simplicity and universal application. His thirty or forty thousand 
 sermons were but so many variations on two key-notes. Man is 
 guilty, and may obtain forgiveness ; he is immortal, and must ripen 
 here for endless weal or woe hereafter. Expanded into innumerable 
 forms, and diversified by infinite varieties of illustrations, these two 
 cardinal principles were ever in his heart and on his tongue. Let 
 who would invoke poetry to embellish the Christian system, or 
 philosophy to penetrate its depths, from his lips it was delivered as 
 an awful and urgent summons to repent, to believe, and to obey. 
 To give orders on ship-board in a tempest in the cadences of Haydn, 
 or in all the categories of Aristotle, would have seemed to him not a 
 whit more preposterous than to divert his hearers from their danger 
 and their refuge, their duties and their hopes, to any topics more 
 trivial or more abstruse. In fine, he was thoroughly and continually 
 in earnest, and, therefore, possessed that tension of the soul which 
 admitted neither of lassitude nor relaxation. Few and familiar as 
 were the topics to which he was confined, his was that state of mind 
 in which alone eloquence, properly so called, can be born, and a 
 moral and intellectual sovereignty acquired. 
 
 The effects of Whitfield's labours on succeeding times have been 
 thrown into the shade by the more brilliant fortunes of the Eccle- 
 siastical Dynasty of which Wesley was at once the founder, the law- 
 giver, and the head. Yet a large proportion of the American 
 Churches, and that great body of the Church of England, which, 
 assuming the title of "Evangelical," has been refused that of 
 " Orthodox," may trace back their spiritual genealogy by regular 
 descent from him. It appears, indeed, that there are among them 
 some who, for having disavowed this ancestry, have brought them- 
 selves within the swing of Mr Philip's club. To rescue them, if it 
 were possible, from the bruises which they have provoked, would be 
 to arrest the legitimate march of penal justice. The consanguinity 
 is attested by historical records, and by the strongest family resem- 
 blance. The quarterings of Whitfield are entitled to a conspicuous
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 401 
 
 place in the "Evangelical" scutcheon; and they who bear it are 
 not wise in being ashamed of the blazonry. 
 
 If the section of the Church of England which usually bears that 
 title be properly so distinguished, there can be no impropriety in 
 designating as her four Evangelists John Newton, Thomas Scott, 
 Joseph Milner, and Henry Venn. Newton held himself forth, and 
 was celebrated by others, as the great living example of the regener- 
 ating efficacy of the principles of his school. Scott was their in- 
 terpreter of Holy Scripture, Milner their ecclesiastical historian, 
 Venn their systematic teacher of the whole Christian institutes. In 
 some respects these men closely resembled each other. A certain 
 sturdiness of character and intrepidity of mind belonged to them 
 all. They all possessed that free, flowing, and inartificial style in 
 which a full man pours out the mature results of his studies and 
 meditations. Each of them was, to a considerable extent, self-edu- 
 cated. As soon as he had made good any position in theology, each 
 of them was accustomed to retain it firmly as a post in advance, or 
 basis for further conquests of the same kind. And, after effecting 
 many such conquests, they all reached and adhered to that system 
 of divinity, which has so long arrested the corruption, and prevent- 
 ed the fall, of our Elizabethan Church economy. But though in 
 contact at these points, they were directly antithetical to each other 
 at many more. 
 
 In the year 1736 John Newton, then a boy in his twelfth year, 
 commenced a seafaring life in a merchant vessel under the command 
 of his father, a master mariner. His mother was then dead. She 
 had given much religious instruction to her son, and had bequeath- 
 ed to him the inheritance of many blessings, and of many prayers. 
 These maternal cares yielded at length an abundant harvest ; but 
 their immediate fruits were harsh and premature. " I took up," he 
 says, " and laid aside a religious profession, three or four times be- 
 fore I was sixteen years old. I spent the greater part of every day 
 in reading the Scriptures, in meditation, and in prayer. I fasted 
 often, I even abstained from animal food for three months. I 
 would hardly answer a question, for fear of speaking an idle word." 
 
 From this state of mind, which he afterwards condemned as 
 "gloomy, stupid, unsociable, and useless," Newton passed by an 
 easy transition to scepticism. The faith of the young ascetic was 
 overthrown by a stray volume of the "Characteristics." By a 
 second and equally natural revolution the " Rhapsodies " of Shaftes- 
 bury made way for other raptures of a more sublunary kind. As 
 he journeyed to join his ship in the Thames, Newton formed an 
 
 26
 
 402 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 acquaintance with Mary Catlett, a Kentish maiden in her fourteenth 
 year, for whose fair sake he abandoned his voyage, and the pros- 
 pects it held out to him of an advantageous settlement in the West 
 Indies. "The world" was once "well lost for love," and at the 
 same shrine the sailor boy sacrificed the management of a plantation 
 in Jamaica. He received, in return, a romance, composed by Hope 
 and embellished by Imagination, of a minority to be passed by him- 
 self and Mary Catlett on the same side of the broad Atlantic. Re- 
 lentless fate destroyed the fiction, and postponed their union until 
 Newton had consumed seven dark and dismal years in frequent and 
 protracted exiles. " During the whole of that time," he assures us, 
 " she was never absent for a single hour from his waking thoughts." 
 When occasionally resident in England, in the brief intervals of 
 these early voyages, he performed sometimes twice, and always 
 once, in each week, a pilgrimage of many miles to Shooter's Hill, 
 there to gaze, not indeed on the house in which she dwelt, for that 
 was still far away, but on the country towards which her eyes 
 might perhaps be directed at the same moment ! 
 
 Before the close of his septennial banishment our nautical Oroon- 
 dates made one visit to the actual abode of the enchantress, when, 
 in obedience to the spell, he again permitted his ship to put to sea 
 without him. The penalty was immediate and severe. On reach- 
 ing the port at which he ought to have embarked, he was pressed 
 into the King's service, and sent on board the " Harwich," a ship of 
 war then under sailing orders for the East Indies. Even this dis- 
 aster soon assumed a comparatively smiling aspect. Struck with 
 Newton's intelligence and address, his captain rated him on the 
 ship's books as a midshipman, and thus laid open to him the path 
 to preferment, and perhaps to martial renown. But his heart was 
 with his idol. In the hope of another interview with her he effected 
 his escape, and on his recapture was reduced to the rank of a common 
 seaman. It was with a fierce resentment that he surrendered him- 
 self up to this degradation. " I was," he says, " as miserable on all 
 hands as could well be imagined. My heart was filled with the 
 most excruciating passions, eager desires, bitter rage, and black 
 despair. Every hour exposed me to some new insult and hardship, 
 with no hope of relief or mitigation. Whether I looked inward or 
 outward I could perceive nothing but darkness and misery. I kept 
 my eyes fixed upon the English shore, till, the ship's distance in- 
 creasing, it insensibly disappeared, and when I could see it no 
 longer I was tempted to throw myself into the sea, which, according 
 to the wicked system I had adopted, would put an end to my sorrows 
 at once."
 
 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 403 
 
 The wholesome discipline of His Majesty's ship " Harwich," how- 
 ever deeply abhorred by Newton, seeras not to have been altogether 
 unprofitable to him. He had acquired a certain respect for his own 
 good name, but his conduct was such that he was readily permitted 
 to exchange into a merchant ship, which they found lying at Ma- 
 deira, on her way to the coast of Africa. "While passing from one 
 ship to the other, one reason why he rejoiced in the change (such is 
 his own statement) was, that he might now be as abandoned as he 
 pleased without any controversy ; and from this time," he says, " I 
 was exceedingly vile indeed, little, if anything, short of that ani- 
 mated description of an almost irrecoverable state, which we have 
 in 2 Peter, ii. 1 4." 
 
 On his arrival on the Gold Coast, Newton became the overseer of 
 one of those depots of slaves which were then, as now, maintained 
 at the mouths of the great African rivers, for the immediate and 
 cheap supply of that article of commerce to the traders resorting 
 thither. But he sank into a bondage only less deplorable than that 
 of his captives. The power of his master and of his master's con- 
 cubine over him was absolute, and their tyranny intolerable. Sick 
 and despised, half naked, and half starved, he dragged out a wretched 
 existence, feeding on fish, which he could not catch without extreme 
 peril, and which, when caught, he was unable to dress, and often 
 exposed without shelter in the rainy season, during forty successive 
 hours, to the inclemency of that fearful climate. As he traversed 
 the shore from one pestilential estuary to another, the unhappy out- 
 cast would have been as destitute of solace from within as from 
 without, had it not happened that a copy of Barrow's Euclid had 
 stuck by him in all his wanderings, and, while he traced the 
 diagrams on the sand, and revolved the demonstration, his sorrows 
 took a temporary flight. 
 
 Better, or, at least, less painful days arrived. Newton was trans- 
 ferred to another master, who admitted him to a share in his slave 
 factory. " And now," he says, " I was decently clothed and lived 
 in plenty, business flourished, and our employer was satisfied, and 
 here I began to be wretch enough to think myself happy. In the 
 language of the country, the white man was growing black," that 
 is, he was learning to contract and to satiate his desires within the 
 narrow range of those sensual gratifications which lay at his com- 
 mand. From such happiness he was opportunely rescued by the 
 appearance off the coast of a ship from Liverpool, the owner of 
 I which, Mr Annesty, a friend of his family, had directed the master 
 to inquire for him among the slave-traders in those parts, and, if 
 possible, to effect his deliverance. Reluctantly, and not without 
 
 26*
 
 .',04 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 the practice by the master of some cajolery, Newton was persuaded 
 to return home, and, after incurring the perils of the sea in their 
 utmost terrors, he reached the North of Ireland in the year 1748. 
 
 This he regards as the epoch of his reformation, and as the com- 
 mencement of the happier portion of his life. In a ship, with the 
 command of which he was entrusted by Mr Annesty, he made four 
 slave-trading voyages to the coast of Africa. After the completion 
 of the first voyage, he married Mary Catlett. After the completion 
 of the fourth, he was compelled by a dangerous illness to exchange 
 his seafaring pursuits for the office of a landing waiter in the cus- 
 toms at Liverpool, for which also he was indebted to the zealous 
 and persevering friendship of Mr Annesty. 
 
 A still more momentous change was at hand. It had been the 
 cherished hope of Newton's pious mother that he might become a 
 faithful minister of the Gospel, and many circumstances concurred 
 to bring about the full, though tardy, accomplishment of her prayer. 
 However dissolute and profane he had been in his passage from 
 youth to manhood, the impressions of her devout cares for him had 
 never been wholly obliterated from his mind ; and he had been for- 
 tunate in his childhood in a schoolmaster of the true Busby breed, 
 from whose lips and vigorous right arm he had received other and 
 more severe lessons, which he never had entirely forgotten. To that 
 inflexible pedagogue he was indebted for his soothing intercourse 
 with Euclid on the sea-shore in Africa, and for the company of 
 Horace, of Livy, of Erasmus, and of Casimir on his subsequent 
 voyages to the same coast. To his mother he owed a taste for the 
 Bible, and for books of devotion, which in due time expelled the 
 pagan poets from his cabin. Old ocean probably never before or 
 since floated such another slave ship. On board of her, indeed, 
 were to be seen all the ordinary phenomena. Packed together like 
 herrings, stifled, sick, and broken-hearted, the negroes in that aquatic 
 Pandemonium died after making futile attempts at insurrection. 
 But, separated by a single plank from his victims, the voice of their 
 gaoler might be heard, day by day, conducting the prayers of his 
 ship's company, singing a devout imitation of his own, of the verses 
 of Propertius (" tu mihi curarum requies," &c.), and, as he assures 
 us, experiencing on his last voyage to Guinea " sweeter and more 
 frequent hours of divine communion " than he had ever elsewhere 
 known. 
 
 From these devotional exercises, Newton passed into much religious 
 society in the "West Indies, and in what was then British North 
 America. There he became acquainted with George "Whitfield, 
 "whose ministry," he says, " was exceedingly useful to him." Still
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 405 
 
 more useful were his leisure, and Ms solitary studies, at Liverpool. 
 In the custom-house, at that town, he made such progress in Hebrew 
 and in Greek, as to be able to read the originals of the Holy Scrip- 
 tures, and, if we can rely on his own assurance, he there became ac- 
 quainted " with the best writers in divinity, in Latin, French, and 
 English." If Hooker was of the number of those " best writers," he 
 found a refractory pupil in John Newton. He became an absolute 
 latitudinarian on all points of ecclesiastical polity. After making 
 " some small attempts " as a Nonconformist, " in a way of preaching 
 and expounding," he was much disposed to join the Protestant Dis- 
 senters altogether. He esteemed it a matter of very little, if of any, 
 importance, with what outward ceremonial he might officiate, or in 
 what Christian society. His one solicitude was to find " a public 
 opportunity to testify the riches of Divine grace, thinking that he 
 was, above most living, a fit person to proclaim that faithful 
 saying, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save the chief of 
 sinners." 
 
 After some delay, he was enabled to gratify this desire by the 
 counsels, and by the united influence, of Richard Cecil, of the Earl 
 of Dartmouth, and of Young, the author of the " Night Thoughts." 
 They not only induced him to seek, but enabled him to find, admis- 
 sion as a pastor in the episcopal fold. In his thirty-ninth year he 
 became at once a deacon of the Church of England, and curate of the 
 parish and town of Olney, in Buckinghamshire. 
 
 At Olney, Newton composed and published many sermons and 
 religious letters, some spiritual exercises in verse, and a brief 
 survey of Ecclesiastical History. There also he formed that friend- 
 ship which the genius of Cowper has immortalised ; became the 
 friend and almoner of John Thornton, the munificent ; and con- 
 tributed largely to form and to mature the theological system of 
 Thomas Scott, the commentator. At Olney, also, he himself 
 laboured to inculcate that system, but Avith no happy issue. After a 
 continuance there of sixteen years, he acknowledged, and deplored, 
 his inability to restrain the " gross licentiousness " of his followers 
 " on particular occasions," and was at length driven away " by the 
 incorrigible spirit prevailing in the parish, which he had so long 
 laboured to reform." 
 
 He was indebted to John Thornton for a place of refuge from Olney, 
 and for a station of far greater prominence. He became the rector 
 of St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street, in the city of London, where 
 he continued till the year 1807, when he died in the eighty-third 
 year of his age, in the twenty-seventh of his incumbency of that 
 church, and in the forty-third of his ministry.
 
 406 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 The animal homo, male or female, is always found in a defective, 
 crude, and distorted state, unless when exhibiting, in his or her 
 character, a certain fusion and reconcilement of the distinctive quali- 
 ties of either sex. A tearless, cheerless, pitiless world this globe of 
 ours would have been, if, according to the wish ascribed to our first 
 progenitor, his race could have been perpetuated without the inter- 
 vention of Eve or of her daughters ! A world in which love, hate, 
 zeal, hope, courage, and every other active passion would have burnt 
 fiercely and blazed brilliantly ; but where sensibility, fear, compas- 
 sion, modesty, sympathy, and all the other passive emotions, would 
 have been wanting to counteract and mitigate the flame ! A world 
 in which the lawless many would have been a band of homicides, 
 and in which the heroical few would have borne a strong resemblance 
 to John Newton, the sailor, the slave-trader, the author, and the rector 
 of St Mary Woolnoth. His strength and his weakness alike consisted 
 in the strange predominance of the male above the female elements 
 of his nature. 
 
 In his own age and country few ministers of the Gospel occupied 
 a more conspicuous station, or exercised a more extensive influence. 
 But he attained that eminence by asserting for himself a distinction 
 which nothing but the most absolute mascularity could have 
 challenged. It was the distinction of having emerged from a depth 
 of moral debasement into which few men had ever fallen, and from 
 which scarcely any man had ever been restored. In the narrative 
 which he published of his own life, he had the courage to describe 
 himself as having been " the willing slave of every evil, possessed 
 with a legion of unclean spirits ; " as not only " having sinned with 
 a high hand himself, but as having made it his study to tempt and 
 seduce others upon every occasion ; very eagerly seeking occasion ; " 
 as " big with mischief, and like one infected with a pestilence, 
 capable of spreading a taint wherever he went ; " as " shunned and 
 despised," even by the savages among whom he lived, " and as an 
 outcast lying in his blood." 
 
 When Newton indited these and many other passages of equally 
 bitter self-condemnation, he certainly neither desired nor expected 
 to be understood by his readers to the letter. Pachydermatous as 
 he was, he could not propose to draw on himself either the abhor- 
 rence, or the indignation, or even the distrust of the world. The 
 wilful and deliberate murder of one's own good name, is a crime 
 unknown in the catalogue of human offences. Such a felo-de-se 
 would be ripe for any other felony. What, then, suggested these 
 confessions, and what was the meaning which the writer of them 
 really designed to convey 1
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 407 
 
 They were certainly not the product of that voracious vanity 
 Avhich finds its account even in self-crimination, and which would 
 rather depict the vices, faults, and follies of the painter, than banish 
 self altogether from the canvas. This canine appetite for human 
 sympathy of any kind, and on any terms, is the disease of men 
 tormented, like Eousseau, by irritable nerves and a delicate organ- 
 isation. But Newton had nerves of brass, and his sinews were 
 iron. 
 
 Neither is it credible that he used these dark colours in his self- 
 portraiture in order to win the praise of humility, candour, and 
 tenderness of the awakened conscience. The veil of penitence has, 
 indeed, been sometimes worn for this purpose ; arid there have not 
 been wanting those who have gratified a morbid ambition by ap- 
 pearing in public in the white sheet falling round them in graceful 
 folds, and arranged as an ornamental drapery. But from the very 
 bottom of his manly heart, Newton would have loathed all such 
 nauseous affectations. He had not a thought or a feeling in common 
 with Lord Byron and his imitators. To his last breath, he was an 
 honest downright sailor, who always employed what seemed to him 
 the most apt, direct, and intelligible words to express what he really 
 thought. 
 
 And such was doubtless his purpose in his penitential autobio- 
 graphy. His mistake was that of transferring to the press the 
 language of the oratory. When he lifted up his voice in the market- 
 place, and when he went into his secret chamber, and shut to the 
 door, his style was still the same. He poured out the language of 
 self-crimination without changing a word, whether he addressed the 
 sacred presence invoked in his prayers, or the coarse, bad world 
 without. Insensible to the proprieties of places and of times, he 
 could not perceive that Truth herself ceases to be true, unless she 
 shapes her discourse to the apprehension of her audience. Bightly 
 judging that, in the retrospect of the sins of his youth, he could 
 not abase himself too much when bowing down before the Holiest, 
 he erroneously inferred that it was impossible to exaggerate his 
 guilt when addressing his fellow-sinners on the same melancholy 
 theme. Yet no danger could be greater or more evident. 
 
 When divested of all colouring, and stated in plain words, the 
 fact appears to be that, in his seafaring life, from his seventeenth to 
 his twenty-second year, Newton was irreligious and profane, and 
 was accustomed to violate the Seventh Commandment as recklessly 
 as the third ; but that, even in those evil days, he was habitually 
 sober and scrupulously honest. At a later period, taking the Scrip- 
 tures for his law, and the evangelical commentators on them for his
 
 408 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 counsellors, lie might well look back on his early career with pro- 
 found shame and with the deepest consciousness of ill desert. But, 
 when he confided those self-upbraidings to mankind at large in 
 language so contrite, so emphatic, and so vague, what could he 
 reasonably expect but that (deeming it altogether inappropriate to 
 the occasion, if referring merely to the impieties and debaucheries of 
 a very young sailor when surrounded by every form of temptation) 
 the world would adopt one of two theories either that it referred 
 to guilt, of which any more precise mention would have been in- 
 sufferable, or that it stood on the same level, in point of sincerity, 
 with the penitential emblazonments of William Huntington, " Sin- 
 ner Saved," and of his worshipful fraternity 1 By what method were 
 Newton's contemporaries to discover that the voice which reached 
 them from the vicarage of Olney, was the exact echo of his solitary 
 devotions there, and that he who invited them to so strange a con- 
 fidence, was neither an enormous transgressor, nor an actor wearing 
 the mask of contrition, but a straightforward sailor, who, with a skin 
 as thick as the copper sheathing of his ship, laid bare the recesses 
 of his conscience with as little squeamishness as he would have 
 thrown open her hold and overhauled her cargo. 
 
 The perfect good faith with which the penitent confessed himself 
 to his readers, is sufficiently proved by the disappointment which he 
 prepared for them at the very same moment. There is a natural 
 history of religious conversions. It commences with melancholy, 
 advances through contrition to faith, is then conducted to tran- 
 quillity, and after a while, to rapture, and subsides at length into an 
 abiding consolation and peace. No epoch in this mental progress 
 can be passed over by the narrator of any such change without 
 raising some suspicion of its genuineness in those who have studied 
 the human heart, rather as it is described in pious books, than as it 
 works in pious men. 'But, braving all such suspicions and strong in 
 conscious sincerity, Newton acknowledged, without the least reserve, 
 that he had overleapt all of these stages. His heart of oak had 
 been rent by no poignant sorrow, nor had it been agitated by any 
 tumultuous joy, from the beginning to the end of his spiritual 
 course. With no vehement internal conflict whatever, he shed the 
 skin of a dissolute seaman, and sheltered himself in that of a devout 
 clergyman. He gave up bad habits of life for an infinitely better 
 course, with abundant good sense, seriousness, and deliberation, but 
 with very little passion or excitement. Ill as such an anomaly 
 squared with the prepossessions of those for whom he wrote, he 
 would not deviate by a hair's breadth from the simple truth, nor 
 affect any feeling which he had not really experienced, either to pro-
 
 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 409 
 
 pitiate the good will of liis teachers or disciples, or to do homage to 
 their religious theories. 
 
 With similar hardihood Newton threw the broad glare of day into 
 the Arcana of his most sacred human affections. He had loved Mary 
 Catlett with all the fervent energy of truth. He depicted that love 
 to the world at large, with all the unscrupulous minuteness of 
 fiction. The ardour of his attachment had triumphed over absence, 
 profligacy, and despair. His letters to her throbbing with every pulse 
 of that emotion, were, during his own lifetime, on sale at the book- 
 stalls ! She was to him a second existence, dearer and holier than 
 his own. But, on the arrival of her mortal agony, " I took," he says, 
 " my post by her bed-side, and watched her nearly three hours, with 
 a candle in my hand, till I saw her breathe her last." " I was afraid 
 of sitting at home, and indulging myself by poring over my loss, 
 and therefore I was seen in the street, and visited some of my 
 serious friends, the very next day. I likewise preached three times 
 while she lay dead in the house, and after she was deposited in the 
 vault, I preached her funeral sermon with little more sensible 
 emotion than if it had been for another person." "I preached 
 from a text which I had reserved from my first entrance on the 
 ministry for this particular service, if I should survive her, and be 
 able to speak." 
 
 Newton was a copious writer of letters. They were pious, wise, 
 and affectionate, and flowed freely out from the depths, which 
 much self-knowledge, and much study, had opened in his mind. 
 They were admirably adapted to feed the flame of devotion in the 
 bosoms of the writer and of his correspondents, and to one collec- 
 tion of them, he accordingly gave the appropriate title of Cardi- 
 phonia. But the language of Newton's heart became, in his own 
 lifetime, one of the embellishments of the windows of Paternoster 
 Eow ! Romance and poetry have beautifully said, and fondly sung, 
 much of friendship the balm of life. It is, however, a balm which 
 loses much of its virtue if rubbed in with a rough hand. However 
 unquestionable a blessing in itself, it may, by such management, 
 be rendered a no less unequivocal discipline. Such, probably, 
 was the judgment of Newton's correspondents, when they found 
 his letters to them advertised in the newspapers. Such also was 
 apparently the judgment of the most illustrious of his friends, 
 William Cowper. 
 
 No two human beings ever experienced more fully the attractive 
 force of contrarieties of tastes arid tempers, than the pastor and the 
 poet of Olney. The sensitive man of genius partook in the labours, 
 revered the character, loved the person, and writhed in the grasp, of
 
 410 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 his robust and hard-favoured neighbour ; and when he sang the fate 
 of the rose, broken in a rude attempt to shake off the moisture 
 which depressed it, he probably aimed a gentle rebuke at the un- 
 gentle touch which was occasionally put forth at the vicarage, to 
 dry up his own tears. The cohesion between the two was obviously 
 never complete. There was, indeed, one repulsive force, which must 
 always have prevented it. Newton had been the manager of a slave 
 factory, and the master of a slave ship. Cowper abhorred the slave- 
 trade with his whole soul, and denounced it with passionate energy. 
 Horrors which had been invisible to the mariner, though placed 
 immediately before his bodily eyes, had presented themselves to the 
 imagination of the poet in all their frightful details. The one had 
 publicly commemorated his pursuit of this traffic, without one word 
 of apology or self-reproach on that account. The other was calling 
 on God and man to arrest it as a crime, in which all the varieties of 
 human wickedness met, and associated, in deadly union. Between 
 the writer of such an autobiography, and the writer of such verse, 
 there yawned a gulf which nothing could ever entirely fill up. 
 
 The prolonged slave-trading of John Newton, and still more his 
 cold and phlegmatic avowal of it, has ever been the great blot on 
 his "evangelical" scutcheon. Before the tribunal in which Pos- 
 terity sits in judgment on the men of former times, he appears not 
 in his sailor's blue jacket, but in full canonicals. Being arraigned, 
 as a remorseless slave-trader, his defence is, that he was eminent as 
 a penitent, still more eminent as a saint, and eminent above all as 
 a zealous and effective preacher of righteousness. The judges are 
 accordingly required to pronounce a decree, consigning his memory 
 either to the lowest degradation, or to the highest posthumous 
 glory. A singular and a perplexing dilemma for the bench ! 
 
 One point seems clear enough. Newton could not be, at one and 
 the same time, a slave-trader and a saint. To this extent he may 
 safely be judged out of his own mouth. " I would not give a 
 straw" (such is his impartial and honest declaration) "for that 
 assurance which sin will not damp. If David had come from his 
 adultery, and had talked of his assurance at that time, I should 
 have despised his speech." When Newton himself came from his 
 man-stealing, and his homicides, and talked of his " sweet hours oi 
 divine communion on his last voyage to Guinea," and of no em- 
 ployment "affording greater advantages to an awakened mind, for 
 promoting the life of God in the soul, especially to a person who 
 has the command of a ship," " and still more so in African voy- 
 ages," we are compelled to take up his own parable against him, 
 and, in his own words, to say that his speech is to be despised.
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 411 
 
 There can be no fellowship between light and darkness ; and woe 
 to us if reverence for any name, however worthy, zeal for any doc- 
 trines, however orthodox, or attachment to any party, however 
 estimable, shall induce us to disregard the eternal land-marks be- 
 tween good and evil, or to believe that the service of Moloch can 
 be reconciled with the service of God. Let Him be true, and every 
 man a liar. 
 
 Does it then follow that the venerable John Newton was either 
 an impostor, or the unresisting victim of self-love and of self-deceit 1 
 A thousand times no ! All that can be inferred is that his priest- 
 hood at the altar of Mammon, with its blood-stained rites, could 
 not be synchronous with his priesthood at that other shrine, at 
 which human love presumes to offer, and divine love condescends 
 to accept, the heart of the worshipper as the one appropriate sacri- 
 fice. At that shrine Newton ministered during forty-three suc- 
 cessive years, the very counterpart of our old friend Mr Greatheart, 
 beneath whose shield Mr Feeblemind and Mrs Much-afraid found 
 shelter, and before whose arm the walls of Doubting Castle and 
 the might of Giant Despair were overthrown. The charge that, 
 during some preceding years, he was a ruthless slave-trader, and 
 that to the last he was little sensible of the heinousness of that 
 guilt, cannot be admitted to countervail such services, or to obscure 
 the lustre of a life in which the brightness of his Christian course 
 was unsullied by a single stain during more than half a century. 
 
 For in the court of Posterity it is a well-settled point of law, that 
 in mitigation, if not in bar, of any penal sentence, the defendant 
 may plead, that the generation to which he belonged did not regard 
 as culpable, or as scandalous, the conduct imputed to him as a 
 crime by men of a later age ; but that, on the contrary, it was 
 sanctioned by the prevalent opinions, and countenanced by the 
 general practice, of his contemporaries. This apology may be justly 
 alleged on behalf of Newton. In his early days the current of 
 public sentiment in favour of the slave-trade ran too strongly to be 
 stemmed, except by the most powerful understanding, guided by 
 the most healthful conscience. There can be no reason to distrust 
 the accuracy of the following statement, in which he adverts to his 
 own participation in it : 
 
 "During the time I was engaged in the slave-trade, I never had 
 the least scruple as to its lawfulness. I was, upon the whole, 
 satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for 
 me." "However, I considered myself as a sort of jailer or turnkey, 
 and I was sometimes shocked with an employment that was per- 
 petually conversant with chains, bolts, and shackles. In this view
 
 412 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 I had often petitioned in my prayers that the Lord in his own time 
 would be pleased to fix me in a more humane calling." Such is 
 the dominion of the social over the individual conscience ! Such 
 the control which the immoral maxims of his associates may ob- 
 tain, even over a devout student of Holy Scripture ! So hopeless 
 is it to shape a right course, even by the aid of that heavenly com- 
 pass, unless the navigator shall make allowance for the disturbing 
 influence of the magnetic currents through which he is passing ! 
 Richard Cecil himself, who completed and republished Newton's 
 Biography, seems to have been blind to the wide deviation of the 
 needle, by which his friend and brother evangelist was misled. He 
 gave to their common disciples a new edition of that work, with- 
 out so much as one passing remark on the incongruity with which 
 the warp of homicidal recollections is there interwoven with the 
 wool of devotional exercises. Alas for the inconsistency of the 
 wisest and the best among us ! But alas also for the severity with 
 which the untempted censure even the penitent victims of tempta- 
 tion ! Such censures are not seldom founded rather on human dog- 
 mas, than on any divine revelations. If he who forsakes the error 
 of his ways, has been assured by the Supreme Judge that the gates 
 of mercy shall be thrown open to him, who shall presume to close 
 them on such a transgressor, because he has failed to exhibit all the 
 compunctious mourning prescribed by some favourite theory of re- 
 pentance ? Though Newton did not smite upon his breast, nor put 
 sackcloth and ashes under him on the remembrance of his slave- 
 trading, he yet abandoned the practice itself, and gravely, though 
 composedly, condemned it. When summoned to the bar of the 
 House of Lords as a witness, he censured, without reserve, in his 
 old age, the pursuits of his youth, and contributed, by his evidence, 
 to prevent the crimes to which he had given too much countenance 
 by his confessions as well as by his example. He thus entitled 
 himself, if not to applause or sympathy, at least to absolution. 
 
 To the hard texture of Newton's mind must be ascribed much of 
 the force, as well as most of the faults, of his character, and much 
 of the success of his apostolate. It was his province to work at the 
 foundations of a great and necessary reform in the spirit of the 
 Established Church of England. His weapon, therefore, was the 
 pickaxe of the builder rather than the chisel of the sculptor ; or, in 
 the dialect of his original calling, he had need, not for the delicate 
 touch which regulates the time-keeper, but for the brawny arm 
 which turns the windlass. The bark of Peter was at that time 
 deeply imbedded in the mud banks of a somnolent orthodoxy ; but 
 when she was well afloat, under the pilotage of Newton and his
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 413 
 
 brethren, he shaped a steady course, and without shifting a sail, 
 pursued his way to his destined harbour. Or, to drop these nauti- 
 cal figures, when Newton had gathered from the Bible that creed, 
 for which the instructions of Whitfield had prepared him, he 
 chmg to it till his last breath with unabated hardihood, sincerity, 
 and courage. Never molested by any speculative doubts, never 
 depressed by any melancholy misgivings, never embarrassed by the 
 refinements of the outer world, he took his stand with firmness, 
 and then advanced with decision, at the command of his own 
 understanding, at the bidding of his own conscience, and at the 
 impulse of his own heart. For, having consecrated these and all 
 his faculties to the service of God, he lived in the joyful conviction 
 of the continual presence of that infallible guide. A century of 
 learned investigation would have availed him infinitely less than 
 this resolute fidelity to his own nature. Prayer, obedience, practical 
 wisdom, contemplative wisdom, and again prayer, each producing 
 and reproducing the other, became the unbroken routine of his 
 life, a circle ever revolving with a still wider range and a more 
 brilliant radiance. Looking upward, and moving onward, he passed 
 by the critics and philosophers, the worldly great, and the worldly 
 wise, as so many busy idlers, who might impede, but who could 
 not advance, the one great object of his renovated existence. To 
 raise aloft the banner of the cross, that men might look to it and 
 be saved, to exhibit Christ as the alpha and omega of his minis- 
 trations, to inculcate this " foolishness " as the one true wisdom, 
 to trample on all wisdom at variance with this, as but so much 
 gaudy foolishness, to derive all motives to holiness, all consola- 
 tion, fortitude, energy, and peace from that one central source of 
 light and love, to unfold the mystery of a living union with that 
 living head, to irradiate with the bright beams of the Sun of 
 Righteousness, all the dark questions which perplex the intellect of 
 fallen man, and all the still darker inquiries which press with so 
 heavy a burden on his heart, to be, in short, in all the comprehen- 
 sive fulness of the words, a preacher of the Gospel such was the 
 purpose which, without pause or faltering, occupied, during more 
 than half a century, the soul of John Newton. 
 
 To this arduous task he brought no exquisite or remarkable 
 abilities. His writings are characterised by a rich unction of 
 Christian kindness, by plain sound sense, by a perspicuous and 
 easy style, and by the natural bloom which always adorns the genuine 
 fruits of the personal experience, and the unborrowed reflection, of 
 any shrewd observer of human affairs. Cecil, a friendly and most 
 competent critic, says of his preaching, that " he appeared perhaps
 
 414 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 to least advantage in the pulpit, as he did not generally aim at ac- 
 curacy in the composition of his sermons, nor to any address in the 
 delivery of them. His utterance was far from clear, and his 
 attitudes ungraceful." To these faults he frequently added the 
 intolerable error of preaching without premeditation. What, then, 
 is the ground on which a place can he assigned to John Newton, 
 amongst those whose memory ought to outlive the age to which 
 they belonged? 
 
 His title to a niche in the temple of fame rests on the great effects 
 which many of the best and most observant of his contemporaries 
 ascribed to the energy, the decision, and the singleness of heart, 
 with which he laboured among them. The promise to the Father 
 of the Faithful, that the doomed city should be spared if ten 
 righteous men could be found in it, was an intimation to him and 
 to his descendants, that the united efforts of even so small a number 
 of such men would have rendered impossible the widespread de- 
 pravity of which the cry had ascended up to Heaven. For, how- 
 ever deadly may be the contagion propagated by those who go hand 
 in hand to work wickedness, the sympathetic influence of the 
 smallest band, inflexibly devoted to any wise and holy enterprise, is 
 more active still. The greater frequency of associations for evil than 
 for good, and their more extensive results, attest the superior 
 strength of the inducements to foirn them, not their superior 
 strength when actually formed. Who can assign a limit to the 
 dominion over the selfish, inert, and sensual mass, even of a solitary 
 mind, when wrought up to a great and immutable resolve, although 
 it be armed with no other authority than that which God himself, 
 by evident tokens, commits to all his appointed missionaries ? The 
 history of all the great moral renovations of any large bodies of 
 mankind is indeed nothing else than a series of the biographies of 
 men bearing a general resemblance to John Newton. Among con- 
 gregations which adhered to the Church and to the ritual of their 
 forefathers, he assumed the office, which had been discharged with 
 far higher powers, and much more conspicuous success, by Whit- 
 field, among the enraptured crowds which hung upon his lips. 
 Newton lived to see his pulpit surrounded by the adult grand- 
 children of his first hearers, and the tradition of his doctrine, his 
 piety, and his undeviating perseverance, is a part of the inheritance 
 of many who at this day stand at the distance of several descents 
 from them. In the genealogy which connects the spiritual ancestry 
 of his age with their spiritual progeny in our own, he holds an 
 eminent place. Himself the child of Whitfield, he was one of the 
 progenitors of Claudius Buchanan, to whom the Church in India
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 415 
 
 owes so large a debt of gratitude of "William "Wilberforce, to whom 
 the Church Universal is still more largely indebted of Joseph 
 Milner, whom he induced to write the "History of the Church" 
 of ancient times and of Thomas Scott, who has bequeathed to the 
 Church, in ages yet to come, writings of imperishable value, and the 
 memory of a life passed in no unsuccessful emulation of those of 
 whom this unhallowed world was the least worthy. 
 
 Thomas, the tenth child of John Scott, a grazier in Lincolnshire, 
 was born in February, 1747. After passing five years to little profit 
 at a grammar-school at Scorton, in that county, he was apprenticed 
 to a medical practitioner. From that service he was dismissed for 
 some unexplained, but "gross" misconduct. At the age of sixteen 
 he returned home and passed the nine following years in "the most 
 laborious and dirty parts of the grazier's business." The hope that 
 he should one day inherit the farm on which he worked, sustained 
 him under these toils, until he accidentally discovered that his father 
 had made a will, disposing of it in favour of another of his sons. 
 To escape the necessity of passing his life in menial employments as 
 a shepherd or herdsman, Thomas Scott forthwith applied himself 
 Avith vigour to regain and to enlarge such knowledge of Greek and 
 Latin as he had acquired at school. Undeterred by the difficulties 
 which so often seem to forbid, while they really promote, the success 
 of a poor, unaided, solitary student, he mastered many classical, and 
 some theological books. Among the last was a Socinian Com- 
 mentary on the Bible. This "poison he drank greedily," and 
 became " nearly a Socinian and Pelagian, and wholly an Arminian." 
 
 With this amount of preparation, and in this state of religious 
 belief, Mr Scott became a deacon of the Church of England in 
 March, 1773, by the "laying on of the hands" of the then bishop 
 of Lincoln. The story of his life from that epoch, occupies nearly 500 
 pages of a volume, written by his son, with such filial piety, such 
 guileless simplicity of heart, and so much deep and unostentatious 
 wisdom, as to give it a place among those books which suspend the 
 critical spirit of the reader during his progress, and leave his thirst 
 for intercourse with the writer unsatiated to the end. Yet seldom 
 has a less eventful tale been told. The external incidents of it 
 may all be comprised in one brief paragraph. 
 
 Mr Scott became curate of Stoke Goldingham, in Buckingham- 
 shire, where he married Mrs Jane Kell, who bore him a numerous 
 offspring. From Stoke Goldingham, he removed to Eavenstone, 
 from Ravenstone to Weston, and from Weston to Olney, all adja- 
 cent parishes in the same county, in each of which successively he 
 held the office of curate. After passing more than thirteen years
 
 416 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 in these services, lie was appointed to preach at a chapel, attached 
 to a hospital, then standing in Grosveuor Place, where he laboured 
 during the next seventeen years. In that interval death deprived 
 him of his wife, but the benignity of Providence directed him to 
 another wise and happy marriage. He was presented, in 1803, to 
 the rectory of Ashton Sandford, in Buckinghamshire, and died there 
 in April, 1821. 
 
 He died unknown, even by name, to all, or nearly to all, of the 
 statesmen and warriors, to whose glory the annals of the reign of 
 George III. are dedicated, although no one of that illustrious baud 
 had really hewn out for himself a monument so sublime and im- 
 perishable. He died unknown or unheeded by the poets, the philoso- 
 phers, the historians, and the artists, who during the same momentous 
 era, had established an intellectual sovereignty in his native land, 
 although he had laid the basis of a wider and more enduring do- 
 minion than had been acquired by the most triumphant of their 
 number. He died neglected, if not despised, by the hierarchy of 
 the Church of England, although in him she lost a teacher, weighed 
 against whom those most reverend, right reverend, very reverend 
 and venerable personages, if all thrown together into the opposing 
 scale, would at once have kicked the beam. But he died amidst the 
 regrets, and yet lives in the grateful remembrance, of numbers 
 without number, who, on either side of the Atlantic (in continental, 
 as well as in insular Britain), had found in his writings such a mass 
 of diversified instruction, such stores of intellectual and of spiritual 
 nutriment, such completeness and maturity of divine knowledge, 
 so steady and so pure a light to lighten the dark places of Holy 
 Scripture, so absolute a devotedness to truth, and so indefatigable 
 a pursuit of truth, as they had not found in any or in all of the 
 theologians who wrote or spake in his own times, and in his own 
 mother tongue. 
 
 Panting to emerge from the mean pursuits to which he had been 
 born and bred, and deluded by sophistries then generally prevalent, 
 Mr Scott had, with the most solemn vows, declared his unconditional 
 assent and consent to the creeds, the articles, and the liturgy of the 
 Anglican Church, although he had rejected more than one of the 
 doctrines which those formulas represent as fundamental ; doubtless 
 a great offence, which no true disciple of his would ever excuse or 
 palliate, and which it is impossible to reprobate more strongly than 
 in the terms of his own public self-condemnation. The dominion of 
 Pelagius, Socinus, and Arminius over him, was however but short- 
 lived. They abdicated it in favour of their rivals, Augustin, Athan- 
 asius, and Calvin ; and, under the title of " The Force of Truth,"
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL SUCCESSION. 417 
 
 Scott published a narrative of this interior revolution, which is ex- 
 tolled by Dr Wilson, the present Bishop of Calcutta, as only second, 
 and as scarcely inferior, in value, to the confessions of the great 
 Bishop of Hippo. A venturous eulogium ; hut it may he safely said 
 that the hook is a luminous and dispassionate portraiture of a series 
 of mental phenomena of rare occurrence, of deep interest, and of such 
 a character, that no man could have heen the subject of them, without 
 the severest integrity, nor the delineator of them, without singular 
 perspicacity and force of mind. 
 
 In this remarkable volume, Scott sketches himself at his original 
 curacy in no very attractive colours as a needy, proud, morose, and 
 ambitious churchman, negligent even of the forms of private devotion, 
 and wrapt up in those learned inquiries, from which he hoped at 
 some future time to gather literary fame and professional advance- 
 ment. It happened that the mortal illness of two of his parishioners 
 had failed to draw this eager student from his books ; but Newton 
 had found his way from his parsonage at Olney to their bed-sides, 
 with ghostly advice and consolation. Scott listened meekly to the 
 rebukes which this contrast drew upon him from his own conscience. 
 He sought the society of his more zealous neighbour, and even be- 
 came an occasional attendant at his church. But he attended it in 
 vain. On one of those occasions Newton had selected, as the subject 
 of his discourse, St Paul's denunciation of the sorcerer Elymas, and 
 Scott was moved to irresistible merriment, by the belief that the 
 preacher was aiming his uncharitable and pointless shafts at himself, 
 as the " child of the devil, full of all subtlety and mischief." Yet 
 revering the honesty of his supposed censor, and assured of his own. 
 superiority as a controversialist and a scholar, Scott challenged him 
 to a written debate on their religious differences. The proposal was 
 wisely declined. Newton estimated theological debate at its true 
 value, and perhaps had the discretion to perceive his own compara- 
 tive poverty in the weapons of that warfare, and his unskilfulness in 
 the use of them. He therefore encountered the argumentative letters 
 of his antagonist by courteous and affectionate answers. He wisely 
 judged that in the field of Polemics, that rude and haughty spirit 
 would have been exasperated into error ; but he perceived that it was 
 united to an uprightness and a courage which, in the quiet ways of 
 secluded meditation, might guide him peacefully to the knowledge 
 and to the love of truth. 
 
 This friendly anticipation was soon verified. Scott received an 
 offer of preferment. He had thirsted and laboured for it, but nothing 
 could tempt him to set his hand again to a confession from which 
 his heart dissented. He chose to remain a necessitous curate, rather 
 
 27
 
 4] 8 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 than to become a rich but hypocritical incumbent. He has not er- 
 plained, and it is vain to conjecture, how he so nearly approached, 
 without reaching the inference, that the same principle demanded 
 the abandonment of his poor curacy also, and of his clerical rank 
 and office. But blessings on him who gives us an example of 
 genuine integrity, even though it be not absolutely self-consistent. 
 In his own time, and by his own connections, his refusal of prefer- 
 ment was condemned, not as an incomplete sacrifice, but as a feeble 
 scrupulosity. From the sting of that censure he knew how to extract 
 a salutary truth. In his self-communings on the subject, he inquired 
 why he should receive any human authority as the foundation 
 of any part of his religious creed, when, upon a point of moral 
 obligation so incomparably more simple, they who loved him best, 
 and whom he best loved, could fall into an error so obvious and so 
 profound. He turned away from his well-meaning, but ill-judging 
 advisers, with a solemn resolution that he would " search the word 
 of God with the single intention to discover whether the articles of 
 the Church of England in general were or were not agreeable to the 
 Scriptures." 
 
 The history of that search occupies the larger part of " The Force 
 of Truth." It was pursued during three successive years in retire- 
 ment, and almost in solitude. The Bible lay continually open on 
 his table. Day by day, and hour by hour,, he implored the Divine 
 Author of it to become also the infallible interpreter. From page 
 to page, and from sentence to sentence, he searched, weighed, and 
 collated every word with unremitting diligence and inextinguish- 
 able ardour. He does not seem to have armed himself with any 
 critical apparatus, or to have sought the assistance of any human 
 commentators. He had rejected the authority of all men over his 
 faith, and therefore of these men. Yet he was not wholly unaided 
 by theological advisers. He summoned to his succour a series of 
 writers, of whose works it seems strange that he should till then 
 have been ignorant. They are among the most trite and popular 
 in our language. 
 
 First came Locke, with his " Essay on the Reasonableness of 
 Christianity," which only supplied Scott with arguments in favour 
 of his Socinian, or, in more modern phrase, his rationalistic errors. 
 Then Burnet's " Pastoral Care " sent him back to the study of the 
 Scriptures, not without an awful rebuke for his past negligence as 
 a minister of the Gospel. Tillotson and Jortin next presented 
 themselves, to teach (as we are told) neither law nor gospel, but a 
 compromise of both, and tempted him, too successfully, to the indo- 
 lent practice of transcribing their sermons for his own pulpit.
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 419 
 
 Soame Jenyns, with his " Internal Evidences," broke up in his soul 
 a hitherto undiscovered depth of religious feeling, which Dr 
 Samuel Clarke contributed again to close up, by his " Scriptural 
 Doctrine of the Trinity." For although Clarke refuted the dogmas 
 of Socinus, he substituted for them the errors of Arius, from which 
 Scott afterwards perceived there was a straight, and only not inevit- 
 able, descent to Atheism. The mystic Law, in his " Serious Call," 
 taught our inquirer the need of a more earnest diligence and a more 
 profound devotion than he had hitherto practised, and drew from 
 him a vow, which, to his latest hour, he preserved inviolate, " never 
 more to engage in any pursuit not evidently subservient to his 
 ministerial usefulness, or to the propagation of Christianity." 
 
 But, last of all, there appeared in Scott's secret chamber one before 
 whose majestic presence Locke and Burnet, Tillotson and Jortin, 
 Jenyns, Clarke, and Law, retreated into obscurity and silence, like 
 the interlocutors in the Platonic dialogue, when the voice of Socrates 
 is heard. With his " Sermon on Justification," the great and 
 judicious Hooker put to flight, at once and for ever, the more op- 
 pressive doubts which had overshadowed the mind of the student, 
 and enabled him to plant his foot immovably on Luther's rock, 
 stantis aid cadentis ecdesice. He was at once astonished and 
 delighted to find that the great adversary of the Puritans, the illus- 
 trious champion of the polity of the Church of England, had an- 
 nounced that doctrine with as full an emphasis, and with as fearless 
 an unreserve, as the German Eeformer, and as the founders of 
 Methodism. 
 
 Up to this period, Scott had never seen the Homilies of that 
 Church, which her Thirty-fifth Article declares to contain " a godly 
 and wholesome doctrine." He read them with eagerness and with 
 surprise, for they completely echoed the voices of Luther, of Hooker, 
 and of Whitfield. Convinced, yet shrinking from the public avowal 
 of his convictions, he opportunely met witb one of the works of 
 Henry Venn, who taught him (what no man had a better title, or 
 more ability, to teach) the contempt of every motive which would, 
 for one hour, delay the amplest acknowledgment of any part of any 
 of the truths which his Saviour had lived to proclaim, and had died 
 to establish. 
 
 And now the Socinian had adopted the Creed of Nicaea, the Pe- 
 lagian had admitted that, unaided by divine grace, every thought 
 and desire of the heart was immersed in an utter and hopeless cor- 
 ruption, and the Formalist was convinced that the justification of 
 sinful man is produced by faith alone, without the works either 
 of the ceremonial or of the moral law. Thus the entire system, 
 
 27
 
 420 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 then and since distinguished as " Evangelical," had gained posses- 
 sion of his mind. But he drew back from the belief that, notwith- 
 standing the stupendous and unutterable mercy of the Incarnation 
 of Deity itself, a comparatively small number only of the race whose 
 nature was thus assumed by their Creator, had, by his irreversible 
 decree, been elected, to the exclusion of all the rest, and predestined, 
 not only to eternal happiness, but to an incapacity of forfeiting that 
 inestimable privilege. He attained, however, to this belief also, 
 by the devout study of the sacred oracles ; although, in this inquiry, 
 he accepted the aid of two writers, each of whom must have 
 regarded the other as a kind of hopeless riddle, if they could have 
 read each other's books. These were Lipsius, the grave expositor of 
 the "Economy of the Covenants," and Harvey, the efflorescent 
 author of " Theron and Aspasia." 
 
 The whole cycle of doctrine was now complete, and, ever faithful 
 to the light which he possessed, Scott enforced his new tenets from 
 his own pulpit, and sat as a child, to receive a more perfect exposi- 
 tion of them from the lips of Newton. Nearly half a century of 
 apostolic labour lay before him. During that period he continued 
 to search and to ponder the Scriptures with an intensity of appli- 
 cation, and a perseverance of prayer, of which the records of our 
 own age and country afford no counterpart. The result was but 
 to add to the stability of the convictions he had derived from his 
 early studies. As the world receded from his view, he clung to 
 them with increased tenacity, and his dying breath attested his 
 indestructible affiance in them. 
 
 Such are the facts. They are important, chiefly as forming the 
 foundation of an argument, which has been very widely diffused, 
 and cordially accepted, in favour of Mr Scott's peculiar theological 
 opinions. He observes that the system which he thus embraced, 
 was in direct contradiction to his long-cherished views that his 
 spirit and temper indisposed him to such a departure from any 
 position which he had once deliberately taken up that the change 
 was hostile to his secular interests and that it exposed him to 
 contumelies and contempt, from which no man could shrink with 
 a more acute sensitiveness. He remarks that this change in his 
 opinions took place very gradually that it was not preceded or ac- 
 companied by any instruction from those to whose sentiments he 
 acceded that the only uninspired books which he consulted were 
 those of writers of high reputation in the Church of England that 
 he was indebted for his opinions to the study of the Scriptures, in- 
 comparably more than to all other studies and that he read them 
 with fervent and unceasing prayer for the right understanding of
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 421 
 
 them. He very solemnly denies that his narrative is clouded by 
 any enthusiastic dreams or illusions, or that it is more or less than a 
 plain record of so many real occurrences. Hence he infers that the 
 conclusions to which he attained must necessarily be just and true ; 
 an inference irresistibly following ( as he conceives ) from the 
 enormous impieties with which the denial of it is pregnant. 
 
 For, if a man devoted to the pursuit of truth, sacrificing his 
 fondest prejudices, his interest, and his reputation, for the love of 
 truth labouring intensely during three successive years, by night 
 and by day, for the discovery of truth taking the word of God as 
 his only authoritative expositor of truth, and studying that word 
 with earnest and habitual prayer for the attainment of truth ; if 
 such a man shall be at last left under any grave and dangerous 
 error, how escape the revolting consequence, that we may ask and 
 not receive seek and not find knock without having the door 
 opened sue for bread and receive a stone be disappointed in the 
 confidence we are taught to repose in our Heavenly Father and 
 find even the Divine promises an insecure foundation of our hopes 1 
 " Can any man," exclaims Mr Scott, " suppose that after such 
 repeated and continual pleadings of the express promises of the Lord 
 to this effect, in earnest prayer, according to his appointment, I 
 should be delivered up to the teaching of the father of lies ? Can 
 any one make this conclusion without an evident insinuation that 
 God hath broken his promises ? " 
 
 Taunt a Roman Catholic with this doctrine of infallibility, and he 
 answers that his creed confines that awful prerogative to the Chris- 
 tian Church, as represented either by an oecumenical Synod, or by 
 her supreme earthly Head ; but that such Protestants as Mr Scott 
 acknowledge that the number of devout persons and of infallible 
 persons is the same, and believe that, although such persons are 
 collectively unable to agree, they are individually unable to err. 
 Such a disputant leaps over the dilemma of "the force of truth," at 
 a single bound. He denies that Holy Scripture contains any 
 promise of illumination, excepting of such as shall be conveyed 
 through the appointed channels, and means of grace, in the Church. 
 He thinks it no contradiction to the divine word, and certainly no 
 marvel, that a man should consume a long life in isolated biblical 
 studies, however energetic, and in solitary meditation and prayer, 
 however fervent, without discovering the narrow way which leads to 
 truth and life, or escaping the broad way which leads to error and 
 to perdition ; for such a man has rejected what his Roman Catholic 
 antagonist maintains to be the one source of light, laid open by 
 Heaven itself for the g;iidance of man.
 
 422 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 Neither are Protestants really hedged up "between the adoption of 
 Mr Scott's religious system, and the abandonment of their reliance 
 on the Divine promises. For they insist that all such promises are 
 conditional, and that every promise of Divine guidance is qualified 
 by the condition, express or implied, that the search for it be made 
 in pure love of truth, and without the bias of any secular motive. 
 But it is irrational to say, that Mr Scott conducted his inquiries 
 with this entire impartiality. He had the strongest possible induce- 
 ment to get rid of his original tenets. They were utterly inconsistent 
 with his preferment, and even with his continuance in his sacred 
 office. He tells us that he had " perceived his Socinian principles 
 to be very disreputable," and that he had been compelled " to con- 
 ceal them in a great measure." He might have stated this much 
 more strongly. It would not merely have been disreputable, but 
 base and criminal, to have adhered at once to his opinions and to 
 his profession. 
 
 Further, that search for truth, which the Divine veracity is 
 pledged to assist, is a search conducted in the use of those means 
 which the Divine beneficence has seen fit to supply. Of these not 
 the least considerable is conference with the wise, either in their 
 persons, or in their writings. But, during the three years of his 
 biblical investigations, Mr Scott seems to have withdrawn not only 
 from all intellectual society, but from all theological reading. His 
 whole catalogue of auxiliary books would hardly aiford serious 
 occupation for one month to a student of ordinary diligence ; and, 
 although he afterwards extended his book knowledge more widely, 
 he seems never to have possessed more than a very slight acquaint- 
 ance with the works of any divines, ancient or modern. But he 
 who revolves the text of Holy Scripture without informing himself 
 how it has been interpreted by any of the great teachers of the 
 Church, has no right to expect immunity from those errors to which 
 we are all liable, in all our studies, and on all subjects, when we 
 wilfully cut ourselves off from the resources of our social nature, and 
 from a free intercourse with the minds of other men. 
 
 Mr Scott's alternative, " think with me, or cease to believe that 
 he who seeks shall find," implies, or rather affirms, that none ever 
 sought as he sought, excepting only those who concluded their 
 search by thinking as he thought. He disposes of all experiments 
 attended with an opposite result, by denying that they were con- 
 ducted with the same good faith, simplicity of purpose, earnestness, 
 and devotion, as his own. Such inquirers as found at length any 
 resting-place rejected by him, were, as he assures us, either persons 
 leaning to their own understanding or persons held in bondage by
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL SUCCESSION. 423 
 
 human authority or persons incredulous of their own liability to 
 error or persons blinded by prejudice, or heated by controversy 
 or persons whose dissent from his own conclusions touches only 
 points of minor importance, that is, does not encroach on any part 
 of his system, excepting that which relates to the predestination and 
 final perseverance of the chosen few. Now, it is a matter of fact, 
 clear and indisputable, that a vast company of those who have been 
 honoured in the Christian Churches, as worthies of the highest 
 name, lived and died in a faith far more remote than this from the 
 faith of Thomas Scott. But it is a mere matter of conjecture, ad- 
 mitting of no proof whatever, that all of these persons were justly 
 liable to some one or more of the imputations thus cast upon them. 
 And it is a most improbable conjecture. Can any one be named, 
 who held and taught all Mr Scott's doctrines, among the throng of 
 saints, and martyrs, and confessors, who flourished between the days 
 of Clement of Rome and those of Augustin 1 Can we ascribe the be- 
 lief of them to any of those who have been most illustrious for piety 
 in the Roman Catholic communion, as, for example, to St Bernard, 
 to Savonarola, to St Charles Borromeo, to St Francis De Sales, to 
 Pascal, to De Saci, or to Feuelon 1 Must we conclude that, in their 
 biblical inquiries, all these illustrious men were either indevout, or 
 presumptuous, or hasty, or bigoted, or arrogant, or prejudiced, or 
 contentious ? Are we to refuse assent to the overwhelming and un- 
 disputed evidence on which we have hitherto assigned to each of 
 them a place amongst the most learned, devoted, and reverential 
 lovers and worshippers of divine truth ] Had Mr Scott any such ac- 
 quaintance with the lives or the writings of the primitive Fathers, or 
 of the modern Catholics, as entitled him to pronounce this indis- 
 criminate censure on them all 1 Is it not rather the fact, that when 
 he wrote that censure, he was wholly unacquainted with the books of 
 any of them, and with the very names of most of them ? 
 
 "What, then, is the right inference from the incontrovertible facts, 
 that during three successive years Mr Scott laboured devoutly and 
 energetically to deduce from the Bible the genuine articles of the 
 Christian faith, and that those labours rendered him an immutable 
 adherent of the system called Evangelical 1 The right inference, we 
 apprehend, is, that in that system is contained whatever was neces- 
 sary to his peace, to his holiness, and to his eternal welfare. For 
 they who seek shall find. They shall find those practical truths 
 which are essential to their highest good, although they may miss 
 of some abstract truths, which lie within the domain of science 
 rather than of practice. In one sense, indeed, each article of the 
 "Evangelical" creed, and of every other creed, must either be an
 
 424 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 absolute truth, or an absolute untruth. But such articles are con- 
 templated by the several adherents or opponents of them, in so 
 many contrary aspects, with such various prepossessions, with so dif- 
 ferent an use and understanding of words, and with habits of thought 
 so dissimilar, that there is another sense in which such articles may 
 be said to be relatively true, and relatively false true to one man, 
 false to another. Many agree in the use of a common symbol, who 
 have yet no meaning in common. Many between whom there is no 
 external uniformity, are living in a substantial unanimity. Amidst 
 the mists which envelope us in this life, many opposite deductions 
 have been made from Holy Scriptures, by men who in that other 
 life, where such mists are dispersed, have doubtless discovered how 
 much our world is agitated by debates, in which nothing is in fact 
 at issue how much disturbed by controversialists between whom 
 no real difference exists and how much occupied by questions 
 which might be decided either way without affecting any vital prin- 
 ciple of the religion to which they relate. 
 
 But whatever authority Mr Scott's studies and prayers may or 
 may not have imparted to his opinions, they undoubtedly formed 
 the origin of his future pursuits, and the basis of his eminence, 
 as the great Scriptural commentator of his age. If regarded only 
 in a commercial point of view, the story of his biblical labours 
 would form a curious addition to the chronicle of the " calamities of 
 authors." 
 
 There was, it seems, in Scott's early days, a publisher whose 
 name moulders in well-merited oblivion, but whose trading capital 
 consisted in his own unblushing effrontery, and in the command 
 which it gave him over the types, the paper, the ink, and the 
 brains of his credulous neighbours. It occurred to this worthy that 
 a series of weekly annotations on the Bible, from the pen of Mr 
 Scott, in one hundred successive numbers, would yield a handsome 
 profit to himself, and that the annotator would be splendidly re- 
 compensed by the receipt of the same number of guineas. Some 
 well-fed authors of our own times may think that a payment of fifty- 
 two pounds ten shillings in each of two successive years, was but a 
 niggardly recompense for such labours. Mr Scott judged other- 
 wise. It was an addition of fifty per cent, to the annual income 
 which he earned by officiating four times every Sunday in two 
 churches, between which he had fourteen miles to walk, and by 
 ministering on every other day of the week to the patients at a 
 hospital. 
 
 Accordingly, in the year 1788, he sat him down to the composi- 
 tion of his weekly commentaries. The world had cordially welcomed
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 425 
 
 the first fifteen numbers, when the crafty bibliopole announced 
 that the work must be abandoned, unless the author could borrow 
 from his friends, and transfer to him, the sum of 500. These hard 
 terms having been complied with, the book was finished in 174 
 numbers, for which the commentator received 164 guineas. Then 
 the bookseller became bankrupt, leaving poor Scott to repay the 
 money he had borrowed for his use. A second bookseller pur- 
 chased the stock of the insolvent, reprinted a large part of it, but 
 refused to account for a shilling of the profits. Rescued by the 
 Court of Chancery from the grasp of this pirate, Scott next braved 
 the perils of becoming his own bookseller, and, after printing two 
 editions of five quarto volumes, and " scarcely clearing more than 
 the prime cost," surrendered himself to fate and Paternoster Eow, 
 and sold the copyright. At this passage of the tragedy the stage 
 is darkened by the re-appearance of the Lord Chancellor, at one 
 time fulminating injunctions, at another recalling his own thunder- 
 bolts in a manner altogether terrific and inexplicable. At length 
 we reach the catastrophe. It presents to us Thomas Scott, under 
 the accumulated burdens of sixty-seven years, of sickness, and of 
 poverty, investigating his accounts, and ascertaining that 199,900. 
 had been " paid in his lifetime across the counter " for his theological 
 publications that he had himself derived from them an income of 
 a little more than 47 per annum that they had involved him in 
 a debt of about 1200 and that all his worldly wealth consisted 
 of a warehouse full of unsaleable theology. Agitated, alarmed, and 
 distressed, but never desponding, he at length, for the first time, 
 invokes the aid of his friends and fellow-labourers, among whom 
 the large-souled Charles Simeon first answers the appeal with 
 affectionate greetings, with numerous orders for his books, and with 
 a remittance of 560 for his relief. Others rapidly follow this good 
 example, and within two months the warehouse is emptied of its 
 contents, and the great commentator finds himself possessed of more 
 than 2000. With his debts paid, his cares dispersed, his heart 
 warmed to his brethren, and his trust in God justified, the curtain 
 falls on the brave old man applying himself to a new edition of his 
 work, and toiling with all the vigour of youth to compile a new 
 concordance, by which he hopes to emulate and to supersede the 
 vast compilation of Cruden. 
 
 Sore vexations doubtless ! A rebuke not altogether unmerited, 
 of that amiable inconsistency which, while in deference to a " re- 
 morseless logic " it depicted in the darkest colours the utter de- 
 pravity of the whole race of man, could see in each individual of it 
 nothing but truth, honour, and integrity personified ! But what,
 
 426 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 after all, -were such vexations to Thomas Scott? Of what account 
 were swindlers, blunderers, and suits in Chancery to him, or what 
 cared he even for sickness, penury, and distress ? The volume for 
 the elucidation of which he lived had imparted to him that self- 
 sovereignty which the Porch so vainly promised. Animated by 
 one changeless purpose, devoted to one inexhaustible task, never 
 undertaken but to be finished, never finished but to be resumed, 
 governed by a creed to which, in each succeeding year, he clung 
 more firmly, rejoicing in the tranquil assurance, that by a divine 
 decree eternal happiness was his indefeasible inheritance, blest 
 with a resoluteness of understanding which turned aside from no 
 difficulty, and with a mental energy which trampled down the 
 whole brood of doubts, sophisms, and delusions, and sustained by 
 a vigour of body which baffled all fatigue and triumphed over all 
 disease, on he went interpreting the word of his God, and onward 
 he could not but go, though "fractus illabatur orbis," though pub- 
 lishers should cheat and chancellors restrain him, though asthma 
 .should choke, and fever unnerve him, though want should hang 
 on him heavily, and critics censure, and congregations desert him, 
 and though the wife of his bosom should be taken from him. It 
 mattered not. These things could not move him, nor prevent his 
 writing and enlarging, and yet again enlarging, his Commentary. 
 He might safely have challenged the world to produce a more un- 
 fortunate, or a more enviable man. 
 
 Enviable for many reasons, and not least so (it is but a seeming 
 contradiction), because he brought to his task neither the intellectual 
 powers, nor the intellectual wealth, which we are most accustomed 
 to admire. In his mental economy, imagination existed only as a 
 negative quantity, and, therefore, invention, pathos, vehemence, 
 ardour, and all the other forms of eloquence, were foreign alike to 
 his pen and to his lips. No exact knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, or 
 Latin, no familiarity with the literature or the languages of modern 
 Europe, no patristic or mediaeval learning, no skill in geography, 
 chronology, political or natural history, no mastery of any moral or 
 political science, and no penetrating critical acumen, conducted him 
 through the codes or the annals of the Hebrew theocracy, or il- 
 luminated his path amidst the aphorisms, the prophecies, or the 
 mythic intimations of their inspired writers, or unabled him to un- 
 ravel and to complete the elliptical statements, the suggestive 
 reasoning, and the obscure allusions which more or less darken all 
 the Apostolic Scriptures, and especially such of them as have been 
 thrown into the epistolary form. 
 
 But in this poverty he found his wealth, and illustriously vindi-
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL SUCCESSION. 427 
 
 cated, in his own person, the bold paradox, " when I am weak then 
 am I strong." He proposed to himself a canon of biblical criticism 
 more perfect than any which had been followed by Origen, Jerome, 
 Erasmus, or Beza. Believing God to be the common Father of us 
 all, and the Word of God to be the common patrimony of all His 
 children, he was assured that the real meaning of it must have been 
 placed within the reach, not only of the learned few, but also of the 
 unlearned many. But how (he inquired) should that book, which 
 was so often found by the wise to be sealed and inscrutable, be thus 
 intelligible to the simple 1 He returned the answer to his own in 
 quiry. God is truth, and His word is truth, and all truth must 
 be consistent with itself. He, therefore, who shall diligently, 
 humbly, and devoutly collate every passage of the divine oracles 
 with the rest, will possess himself of the key to that inexhaustible 
 treasury, and, in proportion to the constancy with which he shall 
 repeat this process, will the clearer pages of the Bible illuminate for 
 him those which are more obscure, until a reflected and continually 
 expanding light shall have shed its beams over the whole of the in- 
 spired canon. 
 
 Mr Scott's efforts to elucidate the sacred text by the juxtaposition 
 and comparison of the various parts of it with each other, were such 
 that a review of them must affect any ordinary student with shame 
 and admiration. It is scarcely possible to count, and it is vain to 
 conjecture, the number of the illustrations of the sense of scriptural 
 words and phrases with which this method furnished him. The 
 labour expended in collecting, verifying, and arranging them all, 
 must have oppressed any mind of less than herculean vigour. Yet 
 this was but one, and not the most arduous, of the many employ- 
 ments to which he devoted the scanty leisure allowed to him by 
 the daily and severe pressure of his pastoral and domestic duties. 
 That leisure was chiefly dedicated to the exposition of the truths, 
 and to the enforcement of the practical lessons, which he had ex- 
 tracted from the inspired writings by his indefatigable collation of 
 every part of them. 
 
 They who shall judge Mr Scott's Commentary on the Bible as a 
 work of art, or by those rules which literary artists inculcate and 
 observe, will not pronounce a favourable, and hardly a tolerant, de- 
 cision. He often wrote with a haste fatal at once to the maturity 
 and to the methodical arrangement of his thoughts. " I have 
 actually known him " (says his son), " with great difficulty and suf- 
 fering, prepare as much copy as he thought would complete the cur- 
 rent number, then, when he had retired to bed and taken an emetic, 
 called up again to furnish more ; what he had provided being in-
 
 428 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 sufficient for his purpose." It is not permitted to any human being 
 to give birth to any mental offspring after so short a gestation, with- 
 out consigning it to an existence which must long be precarious, 
 even though it be eventually protracted by the vigour of the natural 
 constitution. 
 
 Prom the same biographer we learn that Mr Scott "was com- 
 pelled, in the first instance," " to give the result of his own reflec- 
 tions almost alone, there being little time to consult, much less to 
 transcribe, from other authors." This exclusive reliance on his 
 own resources brought with it the inevitable results of want of 
 method, of tautology, and of a sameness in the staple of thought, at- 
 testing the common origin of all the successive pages. Thus tedious- 
 ness became the besetting sin, not only of the entire work, but of 
 almost every part and member of it. The unbroken monotony of 
 the style, and the lowness of that uniform level, is maintained 
 throughout six quarto volumes, with scarcely one passing attempt 
 to bestow on any single passage any of the warmth, the vivacity, or 
 the other embellishments which habit has rendered so familiar to 
 us all, as to have almost elevated them to the class of necessaries. 
 Dulness is the one unpardonable crime of authorship. Nor can the 
 most zealous of Mr Scott's admirers deny that his pen has much to 
 answer for on that score. Hence it has come to pass that this vast 
 biblical Thesaurus, though the greatest theological performance of 
 our age and country, has never enjoyed, and can never attain, popu- 
 larity, excepting with those who consult and study it in the same 
 grave, devout, and practical spirit in which it was written. In pro- 
 portion as that sacred harmony exists between the commentator and 
 his readers, is the reverence and the attachment with which they 
 follow his guidance ; nor would it be easy to form for any student 
 of the Bible, a better wish, than that he might drink so deeply of 
 Mr Scott's spirit, as to lose the power of perceiving his defects, and 
 the disposition to censure them. 
 
 Any such censure would, indeed, be most unreasonable, if not 
 qualified by a cordial acknowledgment of the merits of that most 
 elaborate commentary. The style if heavy is at least plain, clear, 
 and unambitious. If there is not in those six volumes a solitary 
 sentence which could be quoted as an example of pathetic, fervent, 
 or felicitous composition, it is equally true that they might be 
 searched in vain for a sentence put together for effect, or merely 
 interstitial and unmeaning. They are not only replete with thought, 
 but with a greater amount of solid and indigenous thought than 
 perhaps any other man ever accumulated in the solitary and unaided 
 exercise of his own powers of meditation. There they stand, and
 
 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 429 
 
 shall stand for generations yet to come, those bulky tomes ! a huge 
 Cyclopean mass, defying alike the laws of architecture and the 
 tooth of time ; a vast artificial quarry, from which inferior builders 
 may be supplied with materials already wrought and shaped for 
 their puny edifices ; a capacious tank, irrigating the whole thirsty 
 neighbourhood. True, they are embellished by no delicate work- 
 manship or superfluous ornament, and have nothing to satisfy a 
 refined and elegant taste. But let the reader of them believe, as 
 the writer of them believed, that the words on which he commented 
 were, in the exact and literal sense, the very words of God himself 
 that they form the voice, and the only voice, by which the silence 
 between Heaven and earth has ever been broken that they contain 
 the history which alone discloses the awful origin of our race, and 
 the single prophecy which reveals our still more awful destiny, and 
 the immutable law of our hidden, as well as of our external life, and 
 the great charter of our salvation ; let the reader implore, as his 
 teacher himself implored, the illumination of every chamber of his 
 soul by rays of light, diverging from every page of that holy volume ; 
 let him labour, as his teacher laboured, to penetrate to the deep- 
 est and the richest ores deposited in those inexhaustible mines of 
 wisdom, and then he will perceive and feel that Thomas Scott, 
 the comparatively unlearned, the positively unskilful, and the su- 
 perlatively uuamusing commentator, has descended further into the 
 meaning of the sacred oracles, and has been baptized more copiously 
 into their spirit, than the most animated and ingenious and accom- 
 plished of his competitors. 
 
 This saturation of the comment by the spirit of the text is the 
 true and characteristic merit of Mr Scott's exegesis. Except by 
 having the Bible by heart, or in the heart, it would be impossible 
 for any uninspired man to take a view so wide in its range, and so 
 boundless in its variety, of the position of the people of Christ, as 
 betrayed by a corrupt nature, environed by temptations, beset by 
 dangers, deluded by self-deceits, assailed by the powers of dark- 
 ness, and, in the midst of all the affections and employments, the 
 joys and the sorrows of life, continually summoned to exercises of 
 duty and of self-control. No man, unless so qualified, could have 
 produced so comprehensive a development of the relations between 
 Deity, contemplated in a unity of essence and a trinity of persons, 
 and man, contemplated as the object of His creative, redeeming, 
 and sanctifying energy ; or of the relations subsisting between 
 different men, contemplated as members of one spiritual body ; or 
 of the claims, the obligations, and the privileges resulting from all 
 those relations at once so awful, so mysterious, and so inextricably
 
 430 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 complicated with each other. Without the use of scientific form- 
 ularies, he has thus brought together a complete body of divinity. 
 Without aspiring to logical exactness, he has compiled a complete 
 system of ethics. Without affecting the character of a philosopher, 
 he has solved most of the familiar, and some of the more recondite, 
 problems of moral, social, and political philosophy. His great 
 difficulty was, and wonderful are the efforts with which he en- 
 countered it, to revolve through every part of this mighty orbit with 
 an eye at once steadfastly compassing the whole, keeping in view 
 the connection of the several parts, and surveying each in its due 
 subordination to the rest. 
 
 The biblical spirit of Mr Scott's mind placed him at the distance 
 of the poles from the neologists of a later day. He accepted every 
 word of either Testament with the same prostrate reverence of soul 
 with which the author of the Apocalypse bowed himself down when 
 " he heard the voice saying to him, ' Come up hither, and I will 
 show thee things which must be hereafter.' " The doctors of 
 Germany, and those other doctors by whom Oxford is now replacing 
 her Anglo-Catholic professors of divinity, must of course look down 
 from their cloudy tabernacles with pity, if not with contempt, on 
 Thomas Scott, as he submissively plods his way along the ancient 
 paths with an unhesitating belief in the literal and plenary inspira- 
 tion of every word of each of the sixty-six books, which collectively 
 we call the Bible. His great work will, indeed, be consigned by 
 such critics to the limbo of empty toils, and ponderous vanities. 
 But in bar of that judgment his advocates will plead that the Bible, 
 as expounded by the all-believing Thomas Scott, left on his heart 
 and life a more vivid image of Him who is the alpha and the omega 
 of those sacred writings, than was ever impressed on any half- 
 believing, half-rejecting interpreter, who has pyrrhonised them into 
 a series of myths that the disciples of Scott have borne the same 
 similitude more vividly than any who have sat at the feet of our 
 neologian Gamaliels and that no ordinary presumption arises in 
 favour of the superiority of that spiritual culture which has thus 
 yielded fruits of so much greater excellence. 
 
 Mr Scott did not live to finish his Concordance, though he pub- 
 lished inany other books. They consisted chiefly of sermons or of 
 homiletical essays, designed to guide the conscience and the con- 
 duct, and to regulate the affections, of those who, with or without 
 reason, call and profess themselves Christians. These publications 
 might pass for so many fragments accidentally broken off from the 
 author's great work, for they have the same general character. But 
 in his later years he changed his theological pursuits and style, and
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL SUCCESSION. 431 
 
 presented himself to the world as a controversialist and an eccle- 
 siastical historian. 
 
 His antagonist was Dr Prettyman Tomline, successively tutor, 
 secretary, and biographer of William Pitt, Bishop of Lincoln, and 
 Bishop of Winchester a studious, painstaking man, the spoilt 
 child of fortune, who bestowed on him boundless wealth and 
 dignity ; but less favoured by nature, who refused him the eminence 
 to which he aspired in letters and theology. The mitre of Wyke- 
 ham and of Andrews could not rescue him from a wearisome, 
 lethargic mediocrity. As far as his acceptance at the temple of 
 fame is concerned, arrogance, impertinence, blundering, or heresy, 
 would have been more venial faults. 
 
 After long research, the bishop had convinced himself, and under- 
 took to convince the world, that the doctrines of election, predes- 
 tination, and final perseverance, with other cognate tenets, com- 
 posing, collectively, the Calvinistic system, were novelties of the 
 Church of Geneva, and were not to be found either in Holy Writ, 
 or in the works of any of the Fathers, or Doctors of the Church, 
 before John Calvin. To this episcopal " refutation of Calvinism" 
 Mr Scott opposed two octavo volumes of "Bemarks," in which the 
 speculations and the narrative of the prelate are encountered front 
 to front, as subversive not only of the institutes of the Swiss re- 
 former, but of the foundations of the Christian faith. No final 
 adjustment of this high debate is ever to be expected ; nor is there 
 the reasonable prospect even of an approach to such an adj ustment, 
 until it shall be transferred from the field of divinity to the more 
 appropriate arena of moral philosophy. The inspired writers teach 
 morals, not moral science. They proceed on popular assumptions, 
 and make an unrestrained use of popular language. They keep 
 as far aloof from ontology and psychology as from astronomy 
 and optics. Their object is only to purify and to save the soul. 
 The meaner office of explaining the secrets of nature, material 
 or immaterial, they abandon to the schools. A man may be a 
 perfect textuary, though altogether destitute of physics or meta- 
 physics. 
 
 Heedless, therefore, of the discord of the pulpits, we may with 
 reasonable safety acquiesce in the prevailing opinion of the philoso- 
 phers, that a subordinate intelligence may, within the limit of its 
 powers, exercise a will perfectly free, of which nevertheless every 
 movement may, with infallible accuracy, have been foreseen by 
 another and superior intelligence. When the mother raises her 
 infant to her bosom, or when the guide conducts the caravan to the 
 fountains in the desert, they both, with unerring certainty, foresee
 
 432 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 (that is, predestinate) that the infant, or the pilgrims, will forthwith 
 slake their thirst, the free will of either being in each case the in- 
 strument by which that foresight or predestination is verified. But 
 if we suppose a case in which the disparity of intellect is not finite, 
 but infinite, the prescience of such a superior as to the use which, 
 in any given circumstances, such an inferior will make of his free 
 will, must also be infinite. The reflection of the mother, or of the 
 guide, and the intuitions of the Omniscient, alike accomplish their 
 purposes, and alike fulfil their predestinations, through the agency 
 of the volitions of the objects of their care. In a world where the 
 whole system of life is carried on by means of such foresights, it 
 seems strange that we should be perplexed with the inquiry, 
 whether a similar dominion can be exercised over us by the 
 prescience of our Supreme Ruler, compatibly with our possession of 
 a choice in the dilemmas to which we are continually reduced. The 
 debate regarding predestination, would indeed have assumed far less 
 importance in the minds of the disputants themselves, had it not 
 been for its inevitable connection with the far more arduous debate 
 how to reconcile the Divine perfections with the existence of sin 
 and sorrow within any province of the Divine empire. The com- 
 plete solution of that inquiry is for some better and holier state 
 than ours, in which let us hope that the bishop and his antagonist 
 have long since met to discover and to adore it. 
 
 Mr Scott's historical labours are comprised in a brief account of 
 the acts of the Synod of Dort, in which he undertook to correct the 
 errors into which Bishop Tomline had fallen, by relying on Hey- 
 lin's abridgment of them instead of consulting the originals. To 
 this defence of the Protestant divines of the seventeenth century, he 
 added a confession of his own faith on the much-agitated questions 
 of the terms of religious communion, of religious liberty, and of 
 toleration. He taught that the removal of the disabilities affecting 
 the Roman Catholics, would be not only a great political blunder, 
 but a grievous sin ; and while he attacked Judaism in the writings 
 of a certain Rabbi Crool, he defended Christianity against the far 
 more celebrated Thomas Paine. Like most other voluminous 
 authors, he also dallied with many subjects on which it was not 
 permitted to him to enter ; such, for example, as prophecy, and the 
 Christian ministry. But no man could better afford such disap- 
 pointments. His Commentary survives him, the enduring monu- 
 ment to his name, or rather (for such was his own view of it) a 
 monument which he was graciously permitted to erect, to the edifi- 
 cation of the Church, and to the glory of her great Head, in every 
 region of the world in which the Word of God is now studied by
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 433 
 
 Englishmen or their descendants, or shall hereafter be proclaimed 
 in their mother tongue. 
 
 The inscription on the tomb of Pope Gregory the Great, " Im- 
 plebatque actu quicquid sermone docebat," proves, if it be true, that 
 the great Roman Catholic Saint never taught, for it is certain that 
 he never fulfilled, the most important of all human duties those of 
 parental and of conjugal love. But the virtues of Thomas Scott 
 were exhibited in all the domestic relations, as his teaching extended 
 to them all. He was an illustrious example of the great truth that 
 the sublimest heights of Christian perfection are best scaled by- 
 ascending through the deepest and purest of our earthly affections 
 to the love of God himself ; and that he who turns aside from the 
 lower, will scarcely ever rise to the more elevated, of the two 
 " kindred points of heaven and home." 
 
 Yet Scott did not seem, on a casual acquaintance, well suited for 
 the interchange of the kindly offices of domestic life. His appear- 
 ance was harsh and uninviting, his features coarse, his eye lacking 
 lustre, his gait uncouth, his voice asthmatic and dissonant, and his 
 manner absent and inattentive, like that of a student who had been 
 dragged by violence from his mute associates into a reluctant inter- 
 course with his fellow-men. Nor can it be denied that his natural 
 temper was characterised by asperity and arrogance. In his pulpit 
 he too often seemed to scold, and in society to dogmatise. But 
 beneath this rough surface the seeds of every Christian grace were 
 constantly germinating, and their energy became more and more 
 prolific as the time drew near when they were to be transplanted 
 into the paradise of God, there to bloom in perennial beauty. 
 
 Mr Scott was an unpopular, and, on the whole, an unsuccessful, 
 preacher. He trusted to one hour's peripatetic musing for the 
 preparation of his sermons, and to the impulse of the moment for 
 the composition of them errors so glaring, as to derive no justifi- 
 cation, and scarcely any apology, from any fulness of mind or 
 powers of eloquence. But to eloquence, in any of the senses of the 
 word, he had not the most remote claim. He found in his Bible 
 declarations of the efficacy of preaching, and, in reliance on them, 
 he persevered from youth to old age in delivering seldom less than 
 three, and usually four, discourses on each Sunday, neither deterred 
 by hostile criticism nor disgusted by the frivolity of the fashion- 
 able triflers whose nerves he had offended nor damped by the per- 
 versity of some of his hearers, or by the scandalous disgrace of 
 others nor disheartened by the gradual decline of his congregation 
 nor dispirited by finding himself at last the pastor of one of the 
 most wretched of country villages, inhabited by persons little raised 
 
 28
 
 434 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 
 
 above pauperism, and not exceeding seventy in number. And this 
 heroical confidence was vindicated by the event. His preaching, 
 indeed, had no power over the multitude ; but there was a little 
 company, some of whom always sat reverently at his feet, to gather 
 the rich ore of scriptural wisdom and ponderous sense, to which they 
 afterwards imparted more attractive forms, and so gave it circulation 
 amongst auditors more fastidious than themselves, though less dis- 
 cerning. 
 
 Mr Scott was not naturally a social man. His table-talk was 
 exhilarating neither to himself nor to others, although the vigour of 
 his mind would now and then break out into a proverbial terseness 
 of phrase, and a homely quaintness of illustration, which had some- 
 thing of the character, and of the effect, of humour. His colloquial 
 fame must rest on a very different ground. Those with whom he 
 lived were, in his eyes, the joint-heirs with himself of the same 
 eternal inheritance, and his associates in the same arduous probation. 
 He therefore poured himself out in a discourse which, though 
 thoughtful and profoundly serious, was kind and affectionate, giving 
 assurance of the depth from which it sprang by the height at which 
 it aimed. We have no right to expect a playful, an amusing, or a 
 tender companion in a guardian appointed to minister to us frail 
 mortals in our conflicts with temptation and sorrow. A compassion- 
 ate and watchful kindness satisfies the duties of such a relation, and 
 in such kindness Mr Scott was never wanting. 
 
 He was a poor, and even a necessitous man. His annual income, 
 professional and literary, seldom approached 200, and usually 
 amounted to but half that sum. But the great interpreter of Holy 
 Scripture was rich in his knowledge of the full meaning of the 
 promise which he found there " Seek ye first the kingdom of God 
 and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you ;" 
 and therefore he dared to cast himself and his family on the Divine 
 fidelity, rejecting preferment which his conscience forbade him to 
 accept, and never swerving from any principle in order to propitiate 
 the favour, or to avert the displeasure, of the dispensers of popu- 
 larity and patronage. He lived in severe frugality, in brave inde- 
 pendence, and in a self-denying charity to those who were still 
 poorer than himself. When he had exhausted all other means of 
 assisting them, he stooped (it is difficult to suppose a more painful 
 condescension) to convert his house into a sort of public kitchen, 
 where he and his distressed neighbours could partake together of a 
 cheap diet, purchased at their joint expense, but prepared and served 
 at his own charge, seasoned with his cordial greeting, and animated 
 by his wise and gracious conversation.
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 435 
 
 Around that humble board were gathered three sons and one 
 daughter. From the same Divine promise he had derived the habitual 
 assurance (how often beyond the reach of the most affluent !) that 
 nothing necessary for the real welfare of his children should be with- 
 holden from them. A whole library of treatises on education might 
 be studied to less advantage than his brief and simple account of the 
 method by which lie trained them up to tread in his own footsteps. 
 In his household, punishment, rebuke, and even direct admonition, 
 were almost unknown. His children listened from day to day to 
 prayers offered with seriousness and singleness of heart, and to con- 
 versation which, though not apparently, was yet studiously, directed 
 to raise their minds to the comprehension and the love of whatsoever 
 things are true and honest, just and pure, lovely and of good report. 
 From day to day the tempers and the habits of their parents bore an 
 irresistible testimony to the perfect sincerity with which those 
 prayers were offered, and that language employed. It was a health- 
 ful moral atmosphere in which his children grew up. With the keen 
 instinct of their age they watched the congruity of the discourse and 
 the conduct of their teachers. With the ductility of youth they 
 imitated what they thus perceived to be the genuine character of 
 their parents; and their earliest thoughts of the enjoyments and 
 comforts of life became indestructibly associated with the remembrance 
 of the integrity of those through whose hands those blessings were 
 imparted to them. 
 
 Thus, rich in an imperishable faith in human piety and virtue, Mr 
 Scott's sons all became clergymen, and were all devoted to the 
 diffusion of the doctrines which their father had taught. John 
 Scott, the eldest of them, published a biography of his father. It 
 is a narrative which probably no human being ever read without 
 some salutary compunction. It is no monkish legend of superstitious 
 observances, of cruel self-tormentings, or of romantic miracles. It 
 tells of no prodigies of penitence, nor of any feats of preternatural 
 virtue. It shows how a divine and undying light;, fed by the pure 
 word of God, and nourished by constant prayer and meditation, may 
 shine into the heart, and illuminate the path, and gladden the humble 
 roof and the happy household, of one of those to whom that Word 
 is an abiding guide and comforter. It became the happy duty of his 
 son to commemorate and to give to the world a legend of one saint 
 at least worthy of that awful name, and to show with what force of 
 intellect, what candour of mind, and what indefatigable diligence, he 
 laboured to discover the whole will of God ; with what a burning 
 zeal, and yet with what a tranquil energy, he strove to fulfil it ; 
 how acutely he felt the troubles of life, and how bravely he endured 
 
 28*
 
 436 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 them ; how constantly progressive, and at length how perfect, wa3 
 his victory over the faults and infirmities of his nature ; with what 
 brotherly kindness he laboured to promote the best interests of man- 
 kind ; with what filial affiance he committed himself to the guidance 
 of his heavenly Father ; how he sanctified all *the homely offices, 
 all the dearest relations, and all the arduous duties of domestic life ; 
 how profound, and yet how simple, was the unadorned wisdom 
 which flowed so copiously from his pen and from his lips ; how 
 unaverted and how confiding was the gaze which, during fifty suc- 
 cessive years, he fixed on the holy life, and on the atoning death, 
 of his Saviour ; and how, in the strength of a living union with 
 Him, he fought the good fight of faith, and then passed through 
 the dark waters, agitated but not overwhelmed, cast down but not 
 in despair ; and at last made more than conqueror in the strength 
 of that Divine Master, to whom his Me had been consecrated, and 
 to whom he committed his departing spirit in the sure and certain 
 hope of a further revelation of the Divine Will, transcending, as 
 the eternal Heavens transcend this perishing earth, that present 
 revelation of it, which he had so laboriously studied and so de- 
 voutly loved. 
 
 Scott was not the only eminent theologian whom Newton could 
 claim as his disciple or imitator. The work which occupied the 
 life, and signalised the name, of Joseph Milner, originated in the 
 example, if not in the suggestions, of the same master. Milner was 
 the elder of the three sons of a wool-stapler at Leeds ; but was 
 educated at the University of Cambridge at the expense of a society 
 instituted for the assistance of young students of remarkable in- 
 telligence and piety. Having been admitted into holy orders, he 
 became one of the ministers of the High Church at Hull, and 
 master of the endowed grammar-school at that town. There he 
 won for himself a permanent place in literature, and left a deep im- 
 press of his researches and opinions on the minds of his own, and of 
 later generations. 
 
 In the course of his ministry those opinions underwent a change, 
 which, in a brief memoir prefixed to a volume of his posthumous 
 sermons, his surviving brother, Isaac, represented as radical and 
 entire. It was a change which would be described, in popular lan- 
 guage, as a passing over from the ranks of " the orthodox " to those 
 of "the evangelical" clergy. For these conventional terms his 
 biographer endeavours to substitute a more precise definition ; but 
 the readers of the memoir would seem with one voice to have de- 
 clared their inability to attach any definite meaning to the explana- 
 tion. The attempt was renewed still more elaborately in the second
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 437 
 
 edition, "but with no happier result. The fact was, that the dis- 
 tinction which Isaac Milner so ineffectually laboured to express, was, 
 in theory at least, so subtile and evanescent, as to escape the bondage 
 of any words whatever. Neither Crabbe, the synonymist, nor even 
 Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer, could have discriminated exactly 
 between the senses of two appellations, so equivocal in themselves, 
 so tossed about by party spirit, and so continually shifting in their 
 use. 
 
 The knot would perhaps have been best cut, by defining an 
 orthodox clergyman as one who held, in dull and barren formality, 
 the very same doctrines which the evangelical clergyman held in 
 cordial and prolific vitality ; or by saying, that they differed from 
 each other as solemn triflers differ from the profoundly serious. It 
 was a specific, not a generic distinction. It resulted from no assign- 
 able diversity in the elements of their respective creeds, nor from 
 any dissimilarity in the manner in which, in either class, those 
 elements affected, and united with, each other ; but in the degree in 
 which they were combined in each with that caloric the vital heat 
 of the soul itself which quickens into animating motives the other- 
 wise inert and torpid mass of doctrinal opinions. 
 
 The opinions of Joseph Milner, when thus vivified, gave birth to 
 his " History of the Church of Christ." To the Roman Catholic in- 
 quiry, "Where was your religion before Luther T' no very satis- 
 factory answer had been returned by Protestant divines. Their 
 counter-inquiry, " Where was your face before you washed it this 
 morning ]" was but a bad argument, thrown into the form of a sorry 
 jest. If the hands by which such ablutions be performed be rude 
 and violent, they may so wash the face as to lacerate the epidermis ; 
 just as the hard scouring of some ancient vase may destroy incrust- 
 ations coeval with the work itself. Unskilful and presumptuous 
 hands may tear away an integral part of what they desire to amend, 
 by mistaking it for an accidental and injurious accessary ; and such 
 is the error or the offence which the antagonists of Luther ascribe to 
 him. They maintain that the creeds and observances of which he 
 despoiled the Church, belonged to the remotest ecclesiastical anti- 
 quity. They call upon their opponents to specify the time anterior 
 to Luther, when she appeared among men without them, or when 
 she was invested with those ceremonies, and those opinions, with 
 which his hands arrayed her. They insist that, during a period of 
 fifteen centuries, the Confession of Augsburg and the Eitual of Geneva 
 would have appeared to all Christian people as so many strange in- 
 novations. They declare that at every successive era in that long 
 lapse of ages, the Tridentine decrees would have sounded in Christian
 
 438 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 ears but as so many familiar expositions of established truths. They 
 infer that there is, therefore, an irresistible presumption against the 
 one, and in favour of the other. 
 
 John Newton undertook to refute these assertions, and the argu- 
 ment thus founded on them. In his " Observations on Ecclesiastical 
 History," he attempted to trace the Lutheran, or " Evangelical " 
 system, from the apostolic times, until it faded away before the 
 growth of papal errors, in the sixth and following centuries. It was 
 the deliberate judgment of his friend and critic William Cowper, 
 that he had proved his superiority, in some of the essential qualities 
 of an historian, to the author of the " Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire." The world, however, did not affirm the sentence of the 
 poet. With far greater learning, and much more ability, Joseph 
 Milner devoted all the leisure of his life, and all the resources of his 
 mind, to the accomplishment of Newton's design. He pledged him- 
 self to demonstrate that, from the days of Peter and of Paul, there 
 had been an unbroken succession of Christian teachers and of 
 Christian societies, among whom the eternal fire of gospel truth had 
 burnt pure and undefiled by the errors which were abjured in the 
 sixteenth century by the half of Christendom. 
 
 Milner's qualifications for this enterprise were, a respectable pro- 
 ficiency in classical knowledge ; a far wider acquaintance with the 
 Greek and Latin fathers than was usual at that time and in this 
 country ; an inflexible regard for truth ; an ardent attachment to the 
 memory of those heroes of primitive piety, who were at once the 
 witnesses and the ornaments of his cause ; and the command of a 
 style, natural and perspicuous, and glowing with a devout reverence 
 for whatever indicated the presence in the Church of her Supreme 
 Head, and of her Holy Paraclete. He lived to complete the greater 
 part of his plan, but left his account of the German Reformation to 
 be finished by his brother Isaac, and bequeathed to the most worthy, 
 the privilege of bringing his history to an end. It fell, as we have 
 seen, into the hands of John, the son of Thomas Scott. 
 
 The Church History of Joseph Milner is one of those books 
 which may perish Avith some revolution of the moral and religious 
 character of the English race, but hardly otherwise. For in a tone 
 and manner eminently English, it contains the only extant attempt 
 to deduce theological genealogy of the British churches from those 
 of which the Apostles were the immediate founders. Our national 
 homage for antiquity, and for remote traditions, constrains us all, 
 and some of us with undisguised reluctance, to attach a high value 
 to our ecclesiastical ancestry, and to our inheritance, through them, 
 of our religious opinions. " The Bible, and the Bible only," may
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 439 
 
 be our rallying cry ; but the " quod semper, quod ubique," &c., will 
 never lose its hold on English imaginations, or on English hearts. 
 
 It appears to be the opinion of the most competent judges, that 
 Milner was unable to establish the theory to which he was pledged. 
 Indeed his own honest admissions are scarcely to be reconciled with 
 that theory. If the Epistle of St Paul to the Galatians was really 
 understood by Tertullian, Cyprian, Basil, Chrysostom, Jerome, or 
 by either Gregory, as it was understood by Martin Luther, it will 
 follow that our Church historian was either most unfortunate in 
 examining their writings, or most injudicious in reporting what he 
 discovered in them. Whatever may be the truth, or whatever the 
 antiquity, of the Lutheran doctrine of justification, Milner has not 
 been able to prove that it held, in the theological system of those 
 Fathers of the Church, the all-important work assigned to it by the 
 great Reformer, or by the incomparably greater Apostle. 
 
 That this polar star of our faith underwent a protracted and 
 almost a total eclipse, is one of those strange and obstinate facts 
 which the inquiries of Milner ascertained, and which his integrity 
 has virtually acknowledged. The explanation of that phenomenon 
 we suppose to be, that the vital energy of this doctrine has ever 
 consisted rather in the negation of error, than in the affirmation of 
 any positive truth, that, with the reappearance of the opposite 
 delusion, the Pauline and Lutheran doctrine has ever reasserted its 
 dominion, and that with the disappearance, or supposed disappear- 
 ance, of that heresy, the antagonist doctrine has always fallen into 
 comparative disregard. 
 
 Thus, the Jewish people assumed that the Deity considered them, 
 alone as righteous or justified persons, and that He looked on the 
 rest of the children of men as cursed with an indelible reprobation. 
 In defence of this opinion they urged that Abraham, their great 
 progenitor, had transmitted to them promises, and that Moses, their 
 great legislator, had given to them a law, from the benefits and 
 obligations of which the rest of mankind were excluded. This 
 exclusive privilege was claimed, on the same grounds, by the early 
 Jewish Christians, except that they acknowledged that heathen 
 converts to the Gospel, who should submit to the law of Moses, and 
 conform to the Mosaic ritual, might also find a place among the 
 righteous or "justified." To refute this fatal error, St Paul taught 
 negatively that no man could be justified by the works of the law, 
 and affirmatively that men could be justified only by the all-sancti- 
 fying influence of faith, that is, by living habitually in that state 
 of mind, in which the remote is converted into the present, and the 
 unseen into the visible.
 
 440 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 "With the overthrow of the Jewish economy came the disappear- 
 ance of this Judadcal illusion. The apostolic protests against it 
 having accomplished their purpose, ceased to retain their original 
 significance and value. The doctors of the Church dismissed from 
 their writings and their homilies, what they regarded as an obsolete 
 warning against an exploded error. But when errors kindred to 
 that of the Jewish people sprang up in the Christian Church, the 
 protestation of Paul was also revived to negative and to combat 
 them. His. reasoning with the Galatians was quoted against the 
 corresponding fallacies of their own times, by Augustine, by the 
 early Paulicians, by the "Waldenses, by Grossetete, by Wicliffe, by 
 Huss, and by Luther. For, in the times of each of them, the Deity 
 was again represented by the priesthood, and was again regarded by 
 the laity, as contemplating the whole human family as outcasts from 
 His presence, with the exception of those only who were recipients 
 of sacerdotal chrisms, indulgences, and absolutions, and who were 
 observant of a certain discipline, ritual, and routine of external 
 duties. They, and they only, were, according to this creed, esteemed 
 by their Creator as righteous or " justified " persons. The lie of Lu- 
 ther's day was but the revival, in another form, of the lie of the day 
 of Paul of Tarsus, and Luther's contradiction to it was the distinct 
 echo of the contradiction with which it had been met by the great 
 Apostle. Among the Fathers of the first three centuries, the same 
 echo was raised faintly and indistinctly, and at length died away 
 altogether, because in those centuries the lie was uttered in tones 
 too low and indistinct to wound the ears of the guardians of the 
 faith, amidst the din of persecutions from without, and of other 
 controversies from within. It is true, indeed, that the father of lies 
 and his children will always labour to propagate the falsehood, that 
 the Divine favour is to be won by burthensome rites, and by certain 
 external and visible acts. At every period, the ministers of truth 
 must therefore denounce the fallacy, as Paul and as Luther denounced 
 it. The absence of such denunciations in the theological writings 
 of any age will prove, not that the champions of Truth had deserted 
 her cause, but that the advocates of Error had desisted from as- 
 serting her pretensions not that the doctrine of justification by 
 faith had been abandoned by the holy and the wise, but that the 
 doctrine of justification by works had not been inculcated by the 
 carnal and the foolish. 
 
 Although for this reason, as we believe, Milner was unable to 
 discover much to his immediate purpose in the earlier literature of 
 the Church, yet his diligence in turning up that long-neglected 
 soil, was repaid by an abundant harvest. Though he failed to dig-
 
 THE cc EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 441 
 
 cover any frequent republication of the apostolic doctrine respecting 
 the piacular inefficacy of any outward acts, and respecting the saving 
 efficacy of that spiritual state which is designated by the word Faith, 
 he succeeded in tracing the deep workings of that vital energy in 
 the meditations, in the writings, in the lives, and in the deaths of 
 a long and illustrious lineage in which the martyrs, the confessors, 
 and the fathers of antiquity are connected by an unbroken and in- 
 dissoluble chain with the reformers and the missionaries of these 
 later ages. He ascertained that there had been a constant succession 
 of holy men, who, amidst great differences of judgment and still 
 wider diversities of language, had lived and died in the power of 
 the same faith, maintaining the unity of the spirit in the bond of 
 peace. He showed that men might live very wisely while they 
 reasoned very absurdly, that much practical sanctity was consistent 
 with much theoretical error, that the victims of many strange su- 
 perstitions might yet have within them the living fountains of 
 eternal life, and that to a head impervious to a syllogism, might 
 be united a heart penetrated with the love of God and with the 
 love of man. In the Catholic Church he found a place for not a 
 few Roman Catholics. He discerned that faith in Christ had been 
 the ruling principle, and the image of Christ the acquired likeness, 
 of many, whom a sterner or more ignorant judge would have con- 
 demned as benighted idolaters or bewildered formalists. 
 
 A noble enterprise and an invaluable conclusion ! Though Milner 
 has been surpassed by a host of writers in explaining the relations 
 of the Church with the world, and in recording the occurrences 
 which advanced or retarded her progress to worldly domination, 
 and although he is but an infant in the grasp of his great German 
 rivals in the history of religious opinions, and of the influence of 
 the philosophical sects on the Church, and though it is impossible 
 to assign to him any rank at all as a philosophical, luminous, 
 graphic, or animated historian, yet this praise is exclusively his own 
 he gave the true answer to the taunting inquiry, " Where was 
 your religion before Luther ? " He demonstrated that it dwelt, if not 
 formally, yet substantially, in the souls, and that it was manifested, 
 if not without some dross of human infirmity, yet with distinct- 
 ness, in the lives, of a long succession of saints, canonised or un- 
 canonised, reaching backwards from the sixteenth to the first century 
 of the Christian era ; each of whom, could he have seen the days of 
 the monk of "Wittemberg, would have hailed him as a brother, 
 would have joined in his devotions, would have sympathised with 
 his hopes, and would have acknowledged that the foundation of 
 their and of his faith was the same, notwithstanding the seeming
 
 442 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 inconsistency of their creeds, and the wide dissimilarity of their re- 
 spective rituals. 
 
 If that posthumous intercourse between the ancient and the mo- 
 dern worthies of the Church Catholic could have been carried on- 
 ward from Luther himself to his followers in the Anglican Church, 
 the mighty dead would have greeted none of them with more cor- 
 diality than Henry Venn, the last of her four great " Evangelical " 
 fathers. Vast as is the interval, which, in the estimate of the world, 
 must ever separate heroical from other men, yet, to eyes purged and 
 strenghtened like those of such imaginary visitors to discern in the 
 human heart those dormant germs of moral grandeur, which, under 
 the genial influence of meet occasion, would have borne luxuriant 
 fruit, he would have appeared as belonging potentially to that order 
 of mankind, among whom the highest and most conspicuous place 
 belonged actually to Martin Luther. 
 
 All the paternal ancestors of Henry Venn, from the Reformation 
 to his own birth, in the reign of George II., had been in holy 
 orders, and several of them had been eminent for piety, zeal, or 
 learning. His father, Eichard, was remarkable for his successful 
 opposition to the appointment to the see of Gloucester of Dr Run- 
 die, whose theology was so liberal, as at length to have dissolved 
 into a creed, to which any man might assent, who did not dissent 
 from theism. The story is told with great effect in Lord Hervey's 
 memoirs, with the addition that Rundle, after having been rejected 
 by the Church of England, was thrust by Walpole on the Church 
 of Ireland, where, of course, no defender of the faith arose to dis- 
 pute his pretensions to the mitre. Henry, the son of Richard, 
 adopting the hereditary profession of his family, became successively 
 Vicar of Huddersfield, in Yorkshire, and Rector of Yelling, a small 
 village in the county of Huntingdon. Failing health compelled 
 him to abandon the first of these cures, after an incumbency of 
 twelve years, and the second, after twenty years' continuance in it. 
 He died in the year 1797, beneath the roof of his son, John Venn, 
 who having, like himself, observed the law of his house, was then 
 in the possession 'of the rectory, and residing at the parsonage of 
 Clapham, in Surrey. Faithful to the example of his progenitors, 
 and therefore sustaining the same clerical office, Henry, the son of 
 John Venn, has recently published a brief memoir of his grand- 
 father, a collection of his letters, and a new edition of his " Com- 
 plete Duty of Man," the book on which his fame as an author and 
 a theologian principally depends. His celebrity as a minister of 
 the Gospel rests on traditions which are not likely soon to die 
 away ; and was not long since resting on the personal recollections
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL SUCCESSION. 443 
 
 of some few aged men and women in Yorkshire, whose hearts and 
 lips overflowed as often as they could find any one to listen to their 
 accounts of the apostolical teacher, by whom they had been guided 
 in youth into those paths of pleasantness, which, even in decrepitude 
 and decay, they still found to be the ways of peace. 
 
 Those traditions, and the writings of Henry Venn, are calculated 
 to excite thoughts far more befitting the silence of a solitary even- 
 ing's walk than the noise and excitement of the press. His vener- 
 able image seems to look upbraidingly on any attempt to delineate ' 
 himself or his works in a spirit less devout than his own, or less 
 exclusively consecrated to the glory of God and to the well-being of 
 mankind. Yet, it can hardly be at variance with those great objects 
 of his life to record of him, that he was one of the most eminent 
 examples of one of the most uncommon of human excellencies the 
 possession of perfect and uninterrupted mental health. As all the 
 chords of a well-tuned harp, or as all the organs of a well-ordered 
 body, so all the faculties of a well-constituted mind, contribute, 
 each in its due place and measure, to that harmony which is the 
 essence at once of all effective action, and of all salutary repose. In 
 this sense of the words, Henry Yenn was " made whole," first by 
 Nature, or that Divine patrimony with which we enter on our pre- 
 sent state of being ; and then by Providence, or that Divine benefi- 
 cence which directs and blesses our progress through life. The 
 congruity of his intellectual powers was not marred by any discord 
 in his affections, nor did either reason or passion ever abdicate or 
 usurp in his mind the separate provinces over which they were re- 
 spectively commissioned to reign. There prevailed throughout the 
 whole man a certain symphony which enabled him to possess his 
 soul in order, in energy, and in composure. And as, in all great 
 social enterprises, the perfection of the success depends on the com- 
 pleteness of the concert between the various co-operating agents, so 
 in individual life, perfection can result only from the absolute ac- 
 cord, and the mutual support, of the various springs of action which 
 animate the solitary agent. Those qualities which are antagonistic 
 in most men, were consentient in him ; and his talents, though 
 separately of no very exalted order, became, by their habitual con- 
 currence, of very singular efficacy. Thus, his athletic sense was 
 associated with a keen taste for the beautiful, and with a quick 
 perception of the ludicrous. Though dwelling amidst the most 
 sublime devotional elevations, his oral and epistolary discourse on 
 those mysterious topics, was characterised by perfect simplicity and 
 transparent clearness. With a well-stored memory, he was an in- 
 dependent, if not an original, thinker. With deep and even
 
 444 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 vehement attachments, he knew how to maintain on fit occasions, 
 even towards those whom he loved best, a judicial gravity, and 
 even a judicial sternness. He acted with indefatigable energy in 
 the throng of men, and yet, in solitude, could meditate with un- 
 wearied perseverance. He was at once a preacher, at whose voice 
 multitudes wept or trembled, and a companion, to whose privacy 
 the wise resorted for instruction, the wretched for comfort, and all 
 for sympathy. In all the exigencies and in all the relations of 
 life, the firmest reliance might always be placed on his counsels, 
 his support, and his example. Like St Paul, he became all things 
 to all men ; and, for the same reason, that he might by any means 
 save some. For the concentration of all his desires on that one 
 object, bore the double relation of cause and of effect to that con- 
 centration of thought and oneness of mind by which he was dis- 
 tinguished. Keeping that single end continually in view, he made 
 all the resources within his reach at all times tributary to it. 
 
 To Henry Venn, therefore, among the " Evangelical " clergy, be- 
 longed, as by an inherent right, the province which he occupied of 
 giving to the world a perfect and continuous view of their system 
 of Christian ethics. The sacred consonance of all the passages of 
 his own life, and the uniform convergence of them all towards one 
 great design, rendered his conceptions of duty eminently pure, large, 
 and consistent ; gave singular acuteness to his discernment of moral 
 error ; and imparted a rich and cordial unction to his persuasions to 
 obedience. 
 
 The Anglican Church already possessed, in the " Whole Duty of 
 Man," a treatise on what Bentham calls " deontology " remarkable 
 for the idiomatic force of its style, for the extent of its popularity, 
 and for the darkness which envelopes its true authorship. But to 
 Mr Venn, and to his brethren, it appeared so defective, in the pur- 
 suit of morality downwards to its deep and only sure foundation, 
 that he thought it necessary, not only to lay the basis anew, but 
 also to erect again the superstructure, with all the variations and 
 additions consequent on that fundamental change. The " Complete 
 Duty of Man " has ever since rivalled, if it has not surpassed, the 
 fame and the acceptance of the " Whole Duty of Man," and is still 
 one of those few books of which the benefits are never unfelt, of 
 which the love never abates, and of which the republication is never 
 long intermitted. Even in our own age of literary voluptuousness, 
 it retains the undiminished favour of many classes of readers, al- 
 though no sacrifice is made in it to gratify the tastes of any class. 
 It was written from the soul, and therefore to the soul; from a 
 full heart, and therefore with genuine tenderness ; from a profound
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 445 
 
 sense of responsibility, and therefore with the deepest seriousness ; 
 from a full mind, and therefore with no perceptible regard to mere 
 words ; from the most mature experience, and therefore in a tone 
 which never falters, and in a style perfectly artless, unrestrained, 
 and perspicuous. He might have borrowed for this and for all his 
 writings, from his friend, John Newton, the title of Cardiphonia. 
 
 They have passed to their account, these holy men of the eigh- 
 teenth century ; and it is neither without the appearance, nor the 
 consciousness, of presumption, that these attempts are made to dis- 
 criminate between them, and to assign to each his appropriate 
 claims to the gratitude of a later age. All such judgments must be 
 more or less conjectural, resting on those slight and imperfect in- 
 dications of character, which can be discovered in their extant 
 writings, or in the brief notices in which their contemporaries have 
 celebrated them. But after every allowance shall have been made 
 for these sources of error, enough will remain to convince any im- 
 partial inquirer, that the first generation of the clergy designated as 
 "Evangelical," were the second founders of the Church of England 
 that if not entitled to the praise of genius, of eloquence, or of 
 profound learning, they were devout, sincere, and genuine men 
 that the doctrines of the New Testament were to them a reality, and 
 the English liturgy a truth that their public ministrations and 
 their real meaning were in exact coincidence that they rose as 
 much above the Hoadleian formality as above the Marian supersti- 
 tion that they revived amongst us the spirit of Paul and of Peter, 
 of Augustine and Boniface, of Wicliffe and Eidley, of Baxter and 
 Howe that they burned with a loyal and enlightened zeal for the 
 kingdom of Christ, and for those eternal verities on which that 
 kingdom is founded that their personal sanctity rose to the same 
 elevation as their theological opinions and that in all these re- 
 spects they formed a constrast, as cheering in one light as it was 
 melancholy in another, to the spirit which, in that age, characterised 
 their clerical brethren. On the other hand, the coincidence with the 
 spirit and the doctrines of the Methodists, and especially of Whit- 
 field, was such as to forbid the belief that there existed no other re- 
 lations between the two bodies, but that of a simultaneous existence. 
 It has already, indeed, been shown, that Newton was the disciple 
 of Whitfield, that Scott was the disciple of Newton, and that 
 Milner was his imitator ; and it would be easy to show that Venn 
 lived in a long and friendly intercourse with the great Itinerant, 
 and officiated with him in places of public worship which rejected 
 episcopal control. 
 
 But the "Evangelical Fathers," bound as they vere to the
 
 446 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 Church of England by their vows, and deeply attached to her 
 ordinances, had neither the power nor the wish to emulate the 
 " Fathers of Methodism," by establishing a new ecclesiastical polity. 
 The line of demarcation between them and the other Anglican 
 clergy, being therefore indicated by no corresponding difference of 
 government, of confessions, or of ritual, gradually became less and 
 less definite, until at length it had been almost wholly obliterated. 
 K"o one man of commanding genius arose to lay the foundation of a 
 new spiritual dynasty ; and no religious system can ever acquire a 
 corporate perpetuity, or long retain a continuous succession, which 
 does not commence in some such personal unity. No scholars 
 arose among them illustrious for learning, nor any authors to whom 
 the homage of the world at large has been rendered ; and without 
 such an aristocracy, no intellectual commonwealth can long flourish. 
 Their theology, also, revolved so much on a very few central points, 
 as to induce a disastrous facility in catching a superficial acquaint- 
 ance with it, and in reproducing it in a plausible imitation. Popular 
 applause, neither carefully measured, nor always well merited, re- 
 warded any eminent success in the advocacy of their peculiar tenets ; 
 and they were early taught the deep truth of the remark of Tacitus 
 " Pessimum inimicorum genus, laudantes." 
 
 Gradually, also, it came to pass in the Evangelical, as in other 
 societies, that the symbol was adopted by many who were strangers 
 to the spirit of the original institution ; by many an indolent, 
 trivial, or luxurious aspirant to its advantages, both temporal and 
 eternal The terms of membership had never been definite or 
 severe. Whitfield and his followers had required from those who 
 joined their standard neither the practice of any peculiar austeri- 
 ties, nor the adoption of any new ritual, nor the abandonment 
 of any established ceremonies, nor an irksome submission to eccle- 
 siastical authority, nor the renunciation of any reputable path to 
 eminence or to wealth. The distinguishing tenets were few and 
 easily learned ; the necessary observances neither onerous nor unat- 
 tended with much pleasurable emotion. In the lapse of years the 
 discipline of the society imperceptibly declined, and errors coeval with 
 its existence exhibited themselves in an exaggerated form. When 
 country gentlemen and merchants, lords spiritual and temporal, and 
 even fashionable ladies, gave in their adhesion ; their dignities unin- 
 vaded, their ample expenditure flowing chiefly in its accustomed 
 channels, and their saloons as crowded, if not as brilliant, as before, 
 the spirit of Whitfield was to be traced among his followers, not so 
 much in the burning zeal and self-devotion of that extraordinary 
 man, as in his insubordination to episcopal rule, and in his un-
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 447 
 
 quenchable thirst for spiritual excitement. Although the fields 
 and the market-places no longer echoed to the voice of the im- 
 passioned preacher and the hallelujahs of enraptured myriads, yet 
 spacious theatres, sacred to such uses, received a countless host 
 to harangue or to applaud, to recount or to hear adventures of 
 stirring interest, to listen to exhortations for propagating the Chris- 
 tian faith to the furthest recesses of the globe, to drop the super- 
 fluous guinea, and to retire with feelings strangely balanced between 
 the human and the divine, the glories of heaven and the vanities 
 of earth. 
 
 And then, in obedience to the general law of human affairs, arrived 
 the day of reaction. A new race of students had grown up at Ox- 
 ford. They were men of unsullied, and even severe virtue ; animated 
 by a devotion which, if not very fervent, was at least genuine and 
 grave ; conversant with classical literature, and not without pre- 
 tensions, more or less considerable, to an acquaintance with Christian 
 antiquity. As they paced thoughtfully along those tall avenues, to 
 which, a hundred years before, Whitfield and the "Wesleys had been 
 accustomed to retire for meditation, they recoiled, with a mixture of 
 aversion and contempt, from the image of the crowded assemblages, 
 and the dramatic exercises, in which the successors of those great 
 men in the Church of England were performing so conspicuous a 
 part. They revolved, not without indignation, the intellectual 
 barrenness with which that Church had been stricken, from the time 
 when her most popular teachers had not merely been satisfied to 
 tread the narrow circle of the " Evangelical " theology, but had 
 exulted in that bondage as indicating their possession of a purer 
 light than had visited the other ministers of the Gospel. They in- 
 voked, with an occasional sigh, but not without many a bitter smile, 
 the reappearance amongst us of a piety more profound and masculine, 
 more meek and contemplative. They believed that such a change in 
 the religious character of their age and country was a divine com- 
 mand, and that a commission had been given to themselves to carry 
 it into effect. 
 
 It happened that at this period Mr "Wordsworth had, at Oxford, 
 a pupil and an imitator, who would have surpassed his master, if 
 he could have attained to the exquisite felicities of his master's 
 occasional and better style. The author of the " Christian Year," 
 like the author of the " Excursion," inhabited a world in which 
 the humblest objects, and the most familiar incidents, were sym- 
 bolical of whatever is most elevated in things spiritual, and most 
 remote from our experience in things invisible. In the tame 
 suburbs, the dusty roads, and the busy streets of Oxford, Mr Keble
 
 448 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 
 
 lived by imagination, not by sight. On every side they teemed for 
 him with analogies and interpretations of the significance of her 
 liturgical offices, of the mysteries of her priesthood, and of the 
 temples erected by no human hands in the souls of her worshippers. 
 When he transferred to the canvas the rich hues in which the sanc- 
 tuary within the veil of common things was disclosed to his own 
 eyes, he was accustomed to throw over the picture an atmosphere, 
 which, however brilliant, was not seldom so hazy as to be almost 
 impervious. What the Virgin Mother had been to the great 
 painters of Italy, that the Anglican or Elizabethan Church became 
 to him. Immaculate in conception, peerless in beauty, resplendent 
 with every grace, she presented herself to him as a living personality 
 to be loved and wooed, and as a divine impersonation to be adored 
 and hymned. 
 
 No strains could be more grateful than these to the sensitive ears 
 which had been wounded by the coarser sounds wafted from Exeter 
 Hall to the banks of Isis ; and it is one of the caprices of fortune, 
 which, at the expense of the Professor of Poetry, has conferred on 
 the Professor of Hebrew the honour of bestowing his patronymic on 
 the league formed under the auspices of their common Alma Mater, 
 against the " Evangelical succession." For, although the warfare of 
 their holy alliance has chiefly been conducted in the lowlands of 
 Prose, it commenced by an irruption of the invaders from the 
 mountain-tops of Poetry. From first to last, indeed, their assaults 
 have been more or less Parnassian or Pegasaean. The same 
 hands which wrought at the " Tracts for the Times," strung and 
 swept the chords of the "Lyra Apostolica." In everything but 
 rhythm, the tractarian essay was lyrical. In everything but tedious- 
 ness, the apostolic lyre was tractarian. To each belonged the 
 poetical privilege of escaping by a half sense, or by the half sug- 
 gestion of a sense, or by words with no sense at all, from the dilemma 
 of Mr Justice Shallow " If, sir, you come with news from the 
 court, I take it, sir, there is but two ways, either to utter them or to 
 conceal them." 
 
 Mr Xewman was incomparably the most eminent of those trac- 
 tarians, who chiefly used the instrument of prose. His theology 
 differed from that of Mr Keble, as a substance in a solidified form 
 differs from itself when in a gaseous form. The style of each bore 
 the impress of learning, and elevation of sanctity and tenderness, 
 but was chargeable with that cloudiness or ambi-dexterity of mean- 
 ing which David Hume denounced as the vilest of all the abuses of 
 the gift of language. But these eminent writers were still more 
 clearly identified by their unmasculine horror of everything vulgar
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL SUCCESSION. 449 
 
 in belief or in sentiment, and therefore of the "Evangelical" tenets 
 as vulgar beyond all other opinions, and of the " Evangelical " 
 teachers as vulgar beyond all other men. And as from Oxford had 
 come forth Wicliffe, to subvert the spiritual power of Eome, and Whit- 
 field, with a deluge of popular rhetoric, to overwhelm the hierarchy 
 of England, so in the same venerable academy arose Messrs Keble 
 and Newman, to cast down the stronghold of Protestantism.- But 
 they came neither with conflagration nor with storm. The genius 
 of refinement, fastidiousness, exclusion, and delicacy, attended, if it 
 did not guide, their movements. They were therefore speedily 
 encumbered by the throng who will always attach themselves to 
 any leader who exhibits a supercilious contempt for the common 
 herd, and stands haughtily aloof from it. But they were also 
 followed by the crowd of aspirants after sacerdotal domination, and 
 by that still larger crowd, who, not knowing how to distinguish 
 between the right and the duty of private judgment, are rejoiced 
 to repudiate both the one and the other, as burdens beyond their 
 strength. 
 
 It therefore came to pass, in the Oxonian as in other leagues, 
 that the head moved forward by the impulse of the tail. Step by 
 step in their progress, "the Church," whom they worshipped, 
 changed her attitude and her aspect. She soon disclaimed her 
 Elizabethan or statutory origin, and then made vehement efforts 
 to escape from her Elizabethan or statutory ceremonial. She as- 
 sumed the title, and laid claim to the character, of the Primitive 
 Church, or the Church of the Fathers, and at length arrogated to 
 herself the prerogatives of that Catholic or universal Church, which 
 " lifts her mitred front in courts and palaces," whether at Eome, at 
 Moscow, or at Lambeth, but whose presence is never vouchsafed 
 to any who cannot trace back from apostolic hands an episcopal 
 succession. 
 
 At this stage of the history of the Oxonian league, its progress 
 was quickened and animated by the panic which exhibited itself 
 from one end to the other of the hostile camp. The disciples of 
 Whitfield and of Wesley united to those of Newton and Scott, of 
 Milner and of Venn, and, reinforced by the whole strength of the 
 Nonconformists, began to throw up along the whole field of con- 
 troversy entrenchments for their own defence, and batteries for the 
 annoyance of their assailants. Amongst the literary missiles cast by 
 the contending hosts against each other, there are few better worth 
 the study of those who wish to estimate the probable result of the 
 conflict, than the life of Eichard Hurrell Froude. It was launched 
 from a catapult under the immediate direction of Messrs Keble and 
 
 29
 
 450 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 Kewman themselves, and, though it is a book of no great inherent 
 value, it has a considerable interest as the only biography which the 
 world possesses, of a confessor of Oxford Catholicism. It contains 
 a vivid picture of the discipline, the studies, the opinions, and the 
 mental habits of his fraternity, and is published by the two great 
 fathers of that school, with the avowal of their " own general coin- 
 cidence " in the opinions and feelings of their disciple. We have 
 thus a delineation at full length of one of those divines who are to 
 effect the conquest which was attempted in vain by the Bellarmines 
 and the Bossuets of former times. If it teaches us nothing else, 
 this biography will at least teach us what is the real extent and 
 urgency of the danger which has so much disturbed the tranquillity 
 of the guardians of the Protestant faith of England. 
 
 Richard Hurrell Froude was born, as we read, on the " Feast of 
 the Annunciation," in the year 1803, and died in 1836. He was 
 an Etonian, a fellow of Oriel College, a priest in holy orders of the 
 Church of England, the writer of unsuccessful prize essays, and of 
 journals, letters, and sermons ; an occasional contributor to the 
 periodical literature of his theological associates ; and, during the 
 last four years of his life, an invalid in search of health, either in the 
 south of Europe or in the West Indies. 
 
 Such are all the incidents of a life to the commemoration of 
 which two octavo volumes have been dedicated. A more intractable 
 story, if regarded merely as a narrative, was never undertaken. But 
 Mr Froude left behind him a great collection of papers, which affec- 
 tion would have committed to the fire, though party spirit has 
 given them to the press. The most unscrupulous publisher of 
 diaries and private correspondence never offered for sale a self-analy- 
 sis more frank or less prepossessing. But the world is invited to 
 gaze on this suicidal portraiture on account of " the extreme import- 
 ance of the views, to the development of which the whole is meant 
 to be subservient," and in order that they may not lose " the in- 
 struction derivable from a full exhibition of his character as a witness 
 to those views. Heavy as are the penalties which the editors of 
 these volumes have incurred for their disclosure of the infirmities of 
 their friend, the world will probably absolve them, if they will 
 publish more of the letters which he appears to have received from 
 his mother, and to have transmitted to them. One such letter 
 which they have rescued from oblivion, is worth far more than all 
 which they have published of her son's. Though both the parent 
 and the child have long since been withdrawn from the reach of 
 this world's judgment, it yet seems almost an impiety to transcribe 
 her estimate of his early character, and to add that the less favour-
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 451 
 
 able anticipations which she drew from her study of him in youth, 
 were but too distinctly verified in his riper years. She read his 
 heart with a mother's sagacity, and thus revealed it to himself with 
 a mother's tenderness and truth. 
 
 " From his very birth his temper has been peculiar ; pleasing, 
 intelligent, and attaching, when his mind was undisturbed, and he 
 was in the company of people who treated him reasonably and 
 kindly ; but exceedingly impatient under vexatious circumstances ; 
 very much disposed to find his own amusement in teasing and vexing 
 others ; and almost entirely incorrigible when it was necessary to 
 reprove him. I never could find a successful mode of treating him. 
 Harshness made him obstinate and gloomy ; calm and long displea- 
 sure made him stupid and sullen ; and kind patience had not suffi- 
 cient power over his feelings to force him to govern himself. After 
 a statement of such great faults, it may seem an inconsistency to say, 
 that he nevertheless still bore about him strong marks of a promising 
 character. In all points of substantial principle his feelings were 
 just and high. He had (for his age) an unusually deep feeling of 
 admiration for everything which was good and noble ; his relish 
 was lively, and his taste good, for all the pleasures of the imagination ; 
 and he was also quite conscious of his own faults, and (untempted) 
 had a just dislike to them." 
 
 Exercising a stern and absolute dominion over all the baser 
 passions, with a keen perception of the beautiful in nature and in 
 art, and a deep homage for the sublime in morals ; imbued with the 
 spirit of the classical authors, and delighting in the exercise of talents 
 which, though they fell far short of excellence, rose as far above medio- 
 crity, Mr Froude might have seemed to want no promise of an 
 honourable rank in literature, or of distinction in his sacred office. 
 His career was intercepted by a premature death ; but enough is 
 recorded to show that his aspirations, however noble, must have been 
 defeated by the pride and moroseness which his mother's wisdom 
 detected, and which her love disclosed to him ; united as they were 
 to a constitutional distrust of his own powers, and a weak reliance on 
 other minds for guidance and support. A spirit at once haughty and 
 unsustained by genuine self-confidence ; subdued by the stronger will 
 or intellect of other men, and glorying in that subjection ; regarding 
 the opponents of his masters with an intolerance exceeding their 
 own ; and, in the midst of all his animosity towards others, turning 
 with no infrequent indignation on itself, might form the basis of a 
 good dramatic sketch, of which Mr Froude might not unworthily 
 sustain the burden. But a " dialogue of the dead," in which George 
 Whitfield and Eichard Froude should be the interlocutors, would be 
 
 29 *
 
 452 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 
 
 a more appropriate channel for illustrating the practical uses of " the 
 Second Reformation, and of the Catholic Restoration," which it is 
 the object of their respectiA^e biographies to illustrate. Rhadaman- . 
 thus having dismissed them from his tribunal, they would compare 
 together their juvenile admiration of the drama, their ascetic disci- 
 pline at Oxford, their early dependence on stronger or more resolute 
 minds, their propensity to self-observation and to self-portraiture, 
 their contemptuous opinions of the negro race, and the surprise with 
 which they witnessed the worship of the Church of Rome in lands 
 where it is still triumphant. So far all is peace, and the Concordes 
 aniince exchange such greetings as pass between disembodied spirits. 
 But when the tidings brought by the new denizen of the Elysian 
 fields to the reformer of the eighteenth century, reach his affrighted 
 shade, the regions of the blessed are disturbed by an unwonted dis- 
 cord ; and the fiery soul of Whitfield blazes with intense desire to 
 resume his wanderings through the earth, and to lift up his voice 
 against the new apostasy. 
 
 It was with no unmanly dread of the probe, but from want of 
 skill or leisure to employ it, that the self-scrutiny of Whitfield 
 seldom or never penetrated much below the surface. Preach he 
 must ; and when no audience could be brought together, he seized a 
 pen and preached to himself. The uppermost feeling, be it what it 
 may, is put down in his journal honestly, vigorously, and devoutly. 
 Satan is menaced and upbraided. Intimations from heaven are re- 
 corded, without one painful doubt of their origin. He prays and 
 exults, anticipates the future with delight, looks back to the past 
 with thankfulness, blames himself simply because he thinks himself 
 to blame, despairs of nothing, fears nothing, and has not a moment's 
 ill-will to any human being. 
 
 Mr Froude conducts his written soliloquies in a different spirit. 
 His introverted gaze analyses with elaborate minuteness the various 
 motives at the confluence of which his active powers receive their 
 impulse, and, with perverted sagacity, pursues the self-examination, 
 until, bewildered in the dark labyrinth of his own natiire, he escapes 
 to the cheerful light of day by locking up his journal. " A friend " 
 (whose real name is as distinctly intimated under its initial letter, as 
 if it were written at length) " advises burning confessions. I cannot 
 make up my mind to that," observes the penitent ; " but I think I 
 can see many points in which it will be likely to do me good to be 
 cut off for some time from these records." On such a subject the 
 author of " The Christian Year " was entitled to greater deference. 
 That bright ornament of the College de Propaganda at Oxford had 
 a^so gazed on his own heart through the mental microscope, till he
 
 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 453 
 
 had learnt the danger of the excessive use of it. "While admonishin^ 
 men to approach their Creator not as isolated beings, but as members 
 of the Universal Church, and while aiding the inmates of her hal- 
 lowed courts to worship in strains so pure, so reverent, and so meek, 
 as to answer not unworthily to the voice of hope and reconciliation 
 in which she is addressed by her Divine Head, this " sweet singer " 
 had so brooded over the evanescent processes of his own spiritual 
 nature, as not seldom to render his real meaning imperceptible to his 
 readers, and probably to himself. With how sound a judgment he 
 counselled Mr Froude to burn his books, may be judged from the 
 following entries in them : 
 
 " I have been talking a great deal to B. about religion to-day. 
 He seems to take such straightforward practical views of it that, 
 when I am talking to him, I wonder what I have been bothering 
 myself with all the summer, and almost doubt how far it is right to 
 allow myself to indulge in speculations on a subject where all that 
 is necessary is so plain and obvious." -" Yesterday, when I went 
 out shooting, I fancied I did not care whether I hit or not ; but 
 when it came to the point, I found myself anxious, and, after having 
 killed, was not unwilling to let myself be considered a better shot 
 than I described myself. I had an impulse, too, to let it be thought 
 that I had only three shots when I really had had four. It was 
 slight, to be sure, but I felt it." " I have read my journal, though 
 I can hardly identify myself with the person it describes. Jt seems 
 like having some one under one's guardianship who was an intoler- 
 able fool, and exposed himself to my contempt every moment for the 
 most ridiculous and trifling motives ; and while I was thinking all 
 this, I went into L.'s room to seek a pair of shoes, and on hearing 
 him coming, got away as silently as possible. Why did I do this 1 
 Did I think I was doing what L. did not like 1 or was it the relic of 
 a sneaking habit ] I will ask myself these questions again." " I 
 have a sort of vanity which aims at my own good opinion, and I 
 look for anything to prove to myself that I am more anxious to mind 
 myself than other people. I was very hungry, but because I thought 
 the charge unreasonable, I tried to shirk the waiter ; sneaking ! "- 
 " Yesterday I was much put out by an old fellow chewing tobacco 
 and spitting across me ; also bad thoughts of various kinds kept 
 presenting themselves to my mind when it was vacant." " I talked 
 sillily to-day, as I used to do last term, but took no pleasure in it, 
 so I am not ashamed. Although I don't recollect any harm of 
 myself, yet I don't feel that I have made a clean breast of it." " I 
 forgot to mention that I had been looking round my rooms, and 
 thinking that they looked comfortable and nice, and that I said in
 
 454 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 
 
 my heart, Ah, ah ! I am warm." " It always suggests itself to me 
 that a wise thought is wasted when it is kept to myself, against 
 which, as it is my most bothering temptation, I will set down some 
 arguments to he called to mind in time of trouble." "Now, I am 
 proud of this, and think that the knowledge it shows of myself im- 
 plies a greatness of mind." " These records are no guide to me to 
 show the state of my mind afterwards ; they are so far from being 
 exercises of humility, that they lessen the shame of what I record, 
 just as professions and good-will to other people reconcile us to our 
 neglect of them." 
 
 The precept "know thyself" came down from heaven; but such 
 self-knowledge as this has no heavenward tendency. It is no part 
 of the economy of our nature, nor is it the design of our Maker, that 
 we should so cunningly unravel the subtle filaments of which our 
 motives are composed. If a man should subject to such a scrutiny 
 the feeling of others to himself, he would soon lose his faith in 
 human virtue and affection. The mind which should thus put to 
 the question its own workings in the domestic or social relations of 
 life, would ere long become the victim of a still more fatal scep- 
 ticism. Why dream that this reflex operation which, if directed 
 towards those feelings of which our fellow-creatures are the object, 
 would infallibly eject from the heart all love and all respect for man, 
 should strengthen either the love or the fear of God ? A well-tutored 
 conscience aims at breadth rather than minuteness of survey, and 
 tasks itself much more to ascertain general results than to find out 
 the solution of riddles. So long as religious men must reveal their 
 " experiences," and self-defamation revels in its present impunity, 
 there is no help for it, but in withholding the applause to which, 
 even lowliness itself aspires for the candour with which it is com- 
 bined, and the acuteness by which it is embellished. 
 
 As it is not by these nice self-observers that the creeds of hoar 
 antiquity, and the habits of centuries are to be shaken ; so neither 
 is such high emprise reserved for ascetics who can pause, to enu- 
 merate the slices of bread and butter from which they have ab- 
 stained. When Whitfield would mortify his body, he set about it 
 like a man. The paroxysm was short indeed, but terrible. While 
 it lasted his diseased imagination brought soul and body into deadly 
 conflict, the fierce spirit spurning, trampling, and well-nigh destroy- 
 ing the peccant carcase. Not so the fastidious and refined " witness 
 to the views " of the restorers of the Catholic Church. The strife 
 between his spiritual and animal nature is recorded in his journal in 
 such terms as these, " Looked with greediness to see if there was 
 goose on the table for dinner." " Meant to have kept a fast and did
 
 THE " EVANGELICAL " SUCCESSION. 455 
 
 abstain from dinner, but at tea eat buttered toast." " Tasted nothing 
 to-day till tea time, and then only one cup and dry bread." " I 
 have kept my fast strictly, having taken nothing till near nine this 
 evening, and then only a cup of tea and a little bread without 
 butter, but it has not been as easy as it was last." " I made rather 
 a more hearty tea than usual, quite giving up the notion of a fast 
 in W.'s rooms, and by this weakness have occasioned another slip." 
 
 Whatever may be thought of the propriety of disclosing such 
 passages as these, they will provoke a contemptuous smile from no 
 one who knows much of his own heart. But they may relieve the 
 anxiety of the alarmists. Luther and Zuingle, Cranmer and Latimer, 
 may still rest in their honoured graves. " Take courage, brother 
 Ridley, we shall light up such a flame in England as shall not soon 
 be put out," is a prophecy which will not be defeated by the suc- 
 cessors of the Oxonian divines who listened to it, so long as they shall 
 be vacant to record, and to publish, contrite reminiscences of a desire 
 for roasted goose, and of an undue indulgence in buttered toast. 
 
 Yet the will to subvert the doctrines and discipline of the Reform- 
 ation is not wanting, and is not concealed. Mr Froude himself, 
 were he still living, might, indeed, object to be judged by his care- 
 less and familiar letters. No such objection can, however, be made 
 by the eminent persons who have deliberately given them to the 
 world on account " of the truth and extreme importance of the views 
 to which the whole is meant to be subservient," and in which they 
 record their " own general concurrence." Of these weighty truths 
 take the following examples : 
 
 " You will be shocked at my avowal that I am every day becom- 
 ing a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to me 
 plain that in all matters which seem to us indifferent, or even 
 doubtful, we should conform our practices to those of the Church 
 which has preserved its traditionary practices unbroken. We 
 cannot know about any seemingly indifferent practice of the Church 
 of Rome that it is not a development of the apostolic ?}0oc, and it is 
 to no purpose to say that we can find no proof of it in the writings 
 of the first six centuries they must find a disproof if they would do 
 anything." " I think people are injudicious who talk against the 
 Roman Catholics for worshipping saints and honouring the Virgin 
 and images, &c. These things may perhaps be idolatrous ; I can- 
 not make up my mind about it." " P. called us the Papal Protest- 
 ant Church, in which he proved a double ignorance, as we are 
 Catholics without the Popery, and Church of England men without 
 the Protestantism." " The more I think over that view of yours 
 about regarding our present communion service ; &c., as a judgment
 
 456 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 on the Church, and taking it as the crumbs from the apostles' table, 
 the more I am struck with its fitness to be dwelt upon as tending 
 to check the intrusion of irreverent thoughts, without in any way 
 interfering with one's just indignation." " Your trumpery principle 
 about Scripture being the sole rule of faith in fundamentals (I 
 nauseate the word), is but a mutilated edition, without the breadth 
 and axiomatic character, of the original." " Eeally I hate the 
 Reformation and the Reformers more and more, and have almost 
 made up my mind that the rationalist spirit they set afloat is the 
 \|/vSoTpo^>/rjjc of the Revelations." " Why do you praise Ridley ? 
 Do you know sufficient good about him to counterbalance the fact, 
 that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, and Bucer 1 " 
 " I wish you could get to know something of S. and W. " 
 (Southey and Wordsworth), " and un-Protestantise, un-Miltonise 
 them." " How is it WE are so much in advance of our generation '/ " 
 
 Spirit of George Whitfield ! how would thy voice, rolled from 
 " the secret place of thunders," have overwhelmed these puny pro- 
 tests against the truths which it was the one business of thy life to 
 proclaim from the rising to the setting sun ! In what does the 
 modern creed of Oxford differ from the ancient faith of Rome 1 
 Hurried along by the abhorred current of advancing knowledge 
 and social improvement, they have indeed renounced papal domin- 
 ion, and denied papal infallibility, and rejected the grosser super- 
 stitions which Rome herself at once despises and promotes. But a 
 prostrate submission to human authority the repose of the wearied 
 or indolent mind on external observances an escape from the 
 arduous exercise of man's highest faculties in the worship of his 
 Maker and the usurped dominion of the imaginative over the 
 rational nature, these are the common characteristics of both 
 systems. 
 
 The Reformation restored to the Christian world its only au- 
 thentic canon, and its one Supreme Head. It proclaimed the 
 Scriptures as the rule of life ; and the Divine Redeemer as the 
 supreme and central object to whom every eye must turn, and on 
 whom every hope must rest. It cast down not only the idols 
 erected for the adoration of the vulgar, but the idolatrous abstrac- 
 tions to which the worship of more cultivated minds was rendered. 
 Penetrating the design and seizing the spirit of the Gospels, the 
 Reformers inculcated the faith in which the sentient and the spiritual 
 in man's compound nature had each its appropriate office ; the one 
 directed to the Redeemer in his palpable form, the other to the 
 Divine Paraclete in his hidden agency ; while, united with these, 
 they exhibited to a sinful, but penitent, race the parental character
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 457 
 
 of the Omnipresent Deity. Such is not the teaching of the restored 
 theology. The most eminent of its professors have thrown open the 
 doors of Mr Fronde's oratory, and have invited all passers-by to 
 notice in his prayers and meditations " the absence of any distinct 
 mention of our Lord and Saviour." They are exhorted not to doubt 
 that there was a real though silent " allusion to Christ " under the 
 titles in which the Supreme Being is addressed and are told that 
 " this circumstance may be a comfort to those who cannot bring 
 themselves to assume the tone of many popular writers of this day, 
 who yet are discouraged by the peremptoriness with which it is 
 exacted of them. The truth is, that a mind alive to its own real 
 state often shrinks to utter what it most dwells upon ; and is too 
 full of awe and fear to do more than silently hope what it most 
 wishes." 
 
 It would indeed be presumptuous to pass a censure, or to hazard 
 an opinion, on the private devotions of any man ; but there is no 
 such risk in rejecting the apology which the publishers of those 
 secret exercises have advanced for Mr Froude's departure from the 
 habits of his fellow-Christians. Feeble, indeed, and emasculate must 
 be the system, which, in its delicate distaste for the "popular 
 writers of the day," would bury in silence the name in which every 
 tongue and language has been summoned to worship and to rejoice. 
 "Well may " awe and fear " become all who assume and all who in- 
 voke it. But an " awe " which " shrinks to utter " the name of Him 
 who was born at Bethlehem, and yet does not fear to use the name 
 which is ineffable; a "fear" which can make mention of the 
 Father, but may not speak of the Brother, of all, is a feeling 
 which fairly baffles comprehension. There is a much more simple 
 though a less imposing theory. Mr Froude permitted himself, and 
 was encouraged by his correspondents, to indulge in the language of 
 antipathy and scorn towards a large body of his fellow-Christians. 
 It tinges his letters, his journals, and is not without its influence 
 even on his devotions. Those despised men too often celebrated the 
 events of their Redeemer's life, and the benefits of his passion, in 
 language of offensive familiarity, and invoked Him with fond and 
 feeble epithets. Therefore, a good Oxford-Catholic must envelope in 
 mystic terms all allusion to Him round whom as its centre the whole 
 Christian system revolves. The line of demarcation between them- 
 selves and these coarse sentimentalists must be broad and deep, even 
 though it should exclude those by whom it is drawn, from all the 
 peculiar and distinctive ground on which the standard of the reformed 
 Churches has been erected. There is really nothing to dread from 
 such hostility and from such enemies. A fine lady visits the United
 
 458 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 States, and, in loathing against the salivated and tobacconised re- 
 public, becomes an Absolutist. A " double-first class" theologian 
 overhears the Evangelical psalmody, and straightway turns Catholic. 
 But Congress will not dissolve at the bidding of the fair Exclusive ; 
 nor will Exeter Hall be closed to propitiate the fastidious Double- 
 first. The martyrs of disgust and the heroes of revolutions are com- 
 posed of entirely opposite materials, and are cast in quite different 
 moulds. Nothing truly great or formidable was ever yet accom- 
 plished, in thought or action, by men whose love for truth was 
 not strong enough to triumph over their dislike of the offensive 
 objects with which truth may chance to be associated. 
 
 Mr Froude was the helpless victim of such associations. Nothing 
 escapes his abhorrence which has been regarded with favour by his 
 political or religious antagonists. The bill for the Abolition of 
 Slavery was recommended to Parliament by an Administration more 
 than suspected of Liberalism in matters ecclesiastical. The " Witness 
 to Catholic Views," " in whose sentiments as a whole," his editors 
 concur, visits the West Indies, and they are not afraid to publish 
 the following report of his feelings : "I have felt it a kind of duty 
 to maintain in my mind an habitual hostility to the niggers, and to 
 chuckle over the failures of the new system, as if these poor wretches 
 concentrated in themselves all the Whiggery, dissent, cant, and 
 abomination that have been ranged on their side." Lest this should 
 pass for a pleasant extravagance, the editors enjoin the reader not to 
 " confound the author's view of the negro cause and of the abstract 
 negro with his feelings towards any he should actually meet ; " and 
 Professor Tholuck is summoned from Germany to explain how the 
 " originators of error" may lawfully be the objects of a good man's 
 hate, and how it may innocently overflow upon all their clients, 
 kindred, and connections. Mr Froude's feelings towards the "ab- 
 stract negro " would have satisfied the learned Professor in his most 
 malevolent mood. " I am ashamed," he says, " I cannot get over my 
 prejudices against the niggers." "Every one I meet seems to me 
 like an "incarnation of the whole Anti-Slavery Society, and Fowell 
 Buxton at their head." " The thing that strikes me as most remark- 
 able in the cut of these niggers is excessive immodesty, a forward 
 stupid familiarity intended for civility, which prejudices me against 
 them worse even than Buxton's cant did. It is getting to be the 
 fashion with everybody, even the planters, to praise the emancipa- 
 tion and Mr Stanley." 
 
 Mr Froude, or rather his editors, appear to have fallen into the 
 error of supposing that their profession gives them not merely the 
 right to admonish, but the privilege to scold. Lord Stanley and
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 459 
 
 Mr Buxton have, however, the consolation of being railed at in 
 good company. Hampden is "hated" with much zeal, though, it 
 is admitted, with imperfect knowledge. Louis Philippe, and his 
 associates of the Three Days, receive the following humane bene- 
 diction " I sincerely hope the march of mind in France may yet 
 
 proce a bloody one." " The election of the wretched B. for , 
 
 and that base fellow H. for , in spite of the exposure," &c. 
 
 Again, the editors protest against our supposing that this is a play- 
 ful exercise in the art of exaggeration. " It should be observed," 
 they say, " as in other parts of this volume, that the author used 
 these words on principle, not as abuse, but as expressing matters of 
 fact, as a way of bringing before his own mind things as they are." 
 
 Milton, however, is the especial object of Mr Froude's virtuous 
 abhorrence. He is " a detestable author." Mr Froude rejoices to 
 learn something of the Puritans, because, as he says, " It gives me 
 a better right to hate Milton, and accounts for many of the things 
 which most disgusted me in his (not in my sense of the word) 
 %)oetry!" " A lady told me yesterday that you wrote the article of 
 Sacred Poetry, &c. I thought it did not come up to what I thought 
 your standard of aversion to Milton." 
 
 Mr Froude and his editors must absolutely be delivered over to 
 the secular arm and club of Dr Philip, under the writ De Hveretico 
 Castigando, for their wilful obstinacy in rejecting the infallible 
 sentence of the fathers and ecumenical counsels of the Church 
 poetical on this article of faith. There is. no room for mercy. 
 Messrs Froude and Newman are not of the audience, meet but few, 
 to whom the Immortal addressed himself. They have no place in 
 that little company to which alone it is reserved to estimate the 
 powers of such a mind, and reverently to notice its defects. They 
 belong to that multitude who have to make their choice between 
 repeating the established poetical creed, and holding their peace. 
 "Why are freethinkers in literature to be endured more than in 
 religion? The guilt of Liberalism has clearly been contracted 
 by this rash judgment ; and Professor Tholuck being the witness, it 
 exposes the criminals and the whole society of Oriel, nay, the entire 
 University itself, to the " diffusive indignation " of all who cling to 
 the Catholic faith in poetry. 
 
 There are much better things in Mr Froude's book than the pre- 
 ceding quotations might appear to promise. If given as specimens 
 of his powers, they would do injustice to one whom we wilhngly 
 would believe to have been a good and able man, a ripe scholar, and 
 a devout Christian ; though as illustrations of the temper and 
 opinions of those who now sit in Wicliffe's seat, they are neither
 
 4GO THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 unfair nor unimportant. But they may convince all whom it con- 
 cerns, that hitherto at least Oxford has not given birth to a new 
 race of giants, by whom the Evangelical founders and missionaries 
 of the Church of England are about to be expelled from their 
 ancient authority, or the Protestant world excluded from the light 
 of day and the free breath of heaven. 
 
 It was but a heartless folly of the surviving friends of Eichard 
 Hurrell Froude, which thus exhibited him as the foremost in the 
 reaction against the " Evangelical " system. To mark the progress 
 of that reaction, his brother (who announces himself as J. A. Froude, 
 of Exeter College, Oxford) has published a novel called the 
 "Nemesis of Faith." The passage from the flippant shallowness 
 of the posthumous essayist to the puny scepticism of the living 
 novelist has consumed about ten years, although, from first to last, 
 the direction of it has been unaltered. Mr Richard Hurrell Froude 
 had, however, the merit of using his mother-tongue with propriety 
 and ease. It is the taste of Mr J. A. Froude to involve his mean- 
 ing in a style which strives in vain to be Germanic, and to adorn it 
 with those meretricious embellishments which he has successfully 
 borrowed from the modern Parisian romance. This tractarian of 
 the "latest development" is the biographer of an imaginary pupil of 
 Mr Newman, on whom he bestows the name of " Markham Suther- 
 land." Markham writes several letters to a friend who is made 
 known to us by the name of " Arthur," and Arthur attaches to his 
 friend's letters a series of commentaries. But Markham and Arthur 
 are but two names for one person. They have every sentiment and 
 every opinion in common ; if, indeed, their unmanly pulings deserve 
 the name of sentiment, or their chloroform dreams can aspire to the 
 dignity of opinions. 
 
 The mouldering walls of an old abbey delivered a discourse to 
 Markham about "Paganism," "Star Gods," and " Almighty Pan." 
 After secretly avowing to his friend his infidelity, he obtains or- 
 dination and a benefice. Certain " Evangelical " and much abused 
 ladies and gentlemen at a tea-table, wring from him. the avowal of his 
 unbelief. He loses his benefice, and migrates to the Lake of Como ; 
 where he plays extensively on the flute, writes several irreligious 
 papers, seduces a young married lady, and ends his days in a mon- 
 astery. Rousseau himself would have shrunk from making his 
 Savoyard vicar the hero of his Eloise. Mr Froude, without any 
 such embarrassment, prepares his readers for an adulterous catas- 
 trophe, by a series of audacious speculations from a clergyman on 
 matters religious and ecclesiastical. 
 
 To quote almost any page of this book, would be to stain our own.
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL SUCCESSION. 461 
 
 pages, although it would be easy to enliven them by various exhi- 
 bitions of the writer's estimate of himself and of other men. For 
 example, Mr Fronde's hero having, for the first time, performed 
 divine service as a minister of the Church of England, relieves him- 
 self by the "folio wing missive to his correspondent : " I felt so sick, 
 Arthur. So ; I may live to be like Burnet, or Tillotson, or Bishop 
 Newton, or Archdeacon Paley. May I die sooner ! " There would 
 seem a very reasonable probability that this ardent aspiration will 
 not have been breathed by Mr J. A. Froude in vain. But the ludi- 
 crous too rapidly makes way for emotions of a far different kind. The 
 following are no unfair specimens of the general style of this child 
 and pupil of Oxford Catholicism : 
 
 " Considering all the heresies, the enormous crimes, the wicked- 
 nesses, the astounding follies which the Bible has been made to jus- 
 tify, and which its indiscriminate reading has suggested ; consider- 
 ing that it has been indeed the sword which our Lord said that He 
 was sending ; that not the Devil himself could have invented an 
 implement more potent to Jill the hated world with lies, and blood, 
 and fury ; I think certainly that to send hawkers over the world, 
 loaded with copies of this book, scattering it in all places, among 
 all persons not teaching them to understand it not standing, 
 like Moses, between that heavenly light and them, but cram- 
 ming it into their own hands as God's book, which He wrote, and 
 they are to read, each for himself, and learn what they can for 
 themselves is the most culpable folly of which it is possible for 
 man to be guilty." 
 
 " In Christianity, as in everything else which men have thrown out 
 of themselves, there is the strangest mixture of what is most noble 
 with what is most .... I shrink from the only word." 
 " Sin, therefore, as commonly understood, is a chimera." 
 " Our failures are errors, not crimes ; Nature's discipline with 
 which God teaches us, and as little violations of His law, or 
 rendering us guilty in His eyes, as the artist's early blunders, or 
 even ultimate and entire failures, are laying store of guilt on him." 
 "When, when shall we learn that 'minds' are governed by 
 laws as inexorable as physical laws, and that a man can as easily 
 refuse to obey what has power over him, as a steel atom can resist 
 the magnet 1 " 
 
 "And why all this murdering] Sometimes for sins committed 
 five centuries past, while for those five centuries generation was let 
 to go on to follow generation in a darkness out of which no deliver- 
 ance was offered them ; for Israel monopolised God. It is nothing 
 to say these were peculiar exceptive cases. The nation to whom they
 
 462 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 were given never thought them peculiar cases. And what is Revela- 
 tion, if it is but a catalogue of examples, not what we are, but 
 what we are not, to follow 1 No, Arthur, this is not God this is a 
 Fiend!" 
 
 From the shelter of his convent Mr Newman, the former teacher 
 of Mr J. A. Froude, has also sent forth a novel a novel of humour, 
 drollery, and sarcasm, directed chiefly against those who, ten years 
 since, were his own zealous and affectionate disciples. The scourge 
 of his contempt is laid with inexorable severity on all who have 
 been weak enough to be dazzled and misled by the glare of his 
 sophistry. In a book, which Mr Newman once regarded as the rule 
 of his faith, there is an awful woe denounced on those by whom 
 offences shall come. In reading the work of his brother novelist 
 with that denunciation in his remembrance, Mr Newman may per- 
 haps have been awakened to some other and less exulting feeling 
 than that of contempt for his dupes. He has consigned one of 
 them, Richard HurrelL Froude, to lasting ridicule. He has drawn 
 another of them, Mr J. A. Froude, into the awful responsibility 
 of conceiving in his heart, and publishing with full deliberation, 
 the "Nemesis of Faith." Little as is our sympathy with the 
 author of that revolting novel, we have still less fellow-feeling for 
 Mr Newman, in his new character of Mephistopheles, mocking 
 so merrily at the delusions he has himself propagated, and heed- 
 less (as it seems) of their fatal consequences. He is at least en- 
 titled to the praise of fairly preparing for the fate which awaits 
 them, any who shall be simple enough to give heed to his present 
 reasonings, to yield to his present persuasions, or to follow his 
 present example. * 
 
 * In this edition of this book I retain the preceding paragraph, not because I 
 adhere to it, but because I could not otherwise explain in what sense and to what 
 extent I now retract it. It was on the 18th of July, 1853, that I for the first 
 time learnt (and the evidence which then reached me was altogether conclusive 
 and irresistible to show), that I had been mistaken in representing Mr Newman as 
 having aimed the ridicule and the sarcasms of his novel against those who had 
 formerly been his own disciples, and whose imputed errors were the result of his 
 own teaching ; and that those caustic passages had really been designed to chastise 
 the follies of a diiferent class of persons. This discovery imposes on me the obli- 
 gation of thus publicly and unequivocally apologising to Mr Newman for having done 
 him that injustice, and for the asperity of the terms in which, under my miscon- 
 ception of his meaning, I referred to him. I cannot, however, reproach myself 
 with any other fault on this subject than that of dulness. "Wits so nimble as his 
 are always in danger of being misunderstood by slower and more torpid minds ; 
 and to myself at least the mistake into which I fell was inevitable. It was a very 
 serious but a natural blunder. I had wholly misconceived the light in which Mr 
 Newman, and the other clerical seceders from the Church of England to the Church 
 of Rome, must regard themselves. I had anticipated that men who had grown
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 463 
 
 Let us, however, render to the discarded followers of Mr Newman 
 the justice which he himself refuses them. 
 
 Although the reaction at Oxford seems chiefly to have originated 
 in a certain morbid fastidiousness of taste, yet there was some 
 apology for the indulgence of that feeling ; for while the " Evangeli- 
 cal" teaching had grievously degenerated from the standard of 
 Newton and Scott, of Milner and of Venn, all the more eminent 
 opponents of it who had risen up at that university, were men of 
 letters, and some of them men of large capacity ; and they may bo 
 forgiven, if they cannot be approved, for the contemptuous spirit in 
 which they contrasted their own intellectual stature with the dwarfish, 
 sterile, rotatory minds of so many of their more conspicuous anta- 
 gonists. Although this innovation was, in some, but the relapse into 
 the spiritual bondage from which the Reformers had rescued us, yet, 
 in many more, it was a sincere and resolute effort to throw round our 
 Protestant liberties the safeguards of law and order, of reverence, and 
 of hoar antiquity. Although the movement brought into action not 
 a few, who, like Mr Eichard Hurrell Froude, could never advance 
 beyond the impertinent minutiae and the ecclesiastical fopperies which 
 became the badges of their fraternity, yet it called forth a still greater 
 number destined to break up much fallow or neglected ground in the 
 
 grey in the assiduous inculcation of doctrines which, according to their new or 
 adopted creed, were nothing less than deadly poison to the souls of their hearers, 
 would have announced that awful discovery in the spirit of the most profound self- 
 ahasement would have asked pardon of God and man for the terrible and irre- 
 parable evil of which they now believed themselves to have been the deliberate and 
 persevering authors would have been filled with a modest, if not an oppressive, 
 consciousness of the weakness and fallibility of their own judgment, and of their 
 extreme liability to error and would have abounded in compassionate tenderness 
 for those religious prejudices in which they had themselves been so recently im- 
 mersed. But when, to my surprise, I found them a body of self-satisfied, self- 
 confident, and contumelious polemics, I read their facetiee, as well as some of their 
 graver passages, in what I must now conclude to have been a " non-natural" and 
 injurious sense. Under the bias of some such mistake I have in this book re- 
 ferred to Mr Newman in one or two other places in terms which I should not 
 now select, but which it is not now worth while to alter. He is not a man whose 
 literary or personal reputation will be assailed by any one who is discreetly 
 jealous of his own. While utterly dissenting from the doctrines which he has 
 recently adopted, I render a willing homage to his genius and his learning, to his 
 mastery of all the resources of our English tongue, to the integrity with which, 
 for conscience sake, he has abandoned so many brilliant prospects and long- 
 cherished attachments, and to the spirit with which he stands erect and fearless 
 in the presence of antipathies and of calumnies before which many a brave man 
 might have quailed. My solicitude not to be numbered among his enemies and 
 calumniators' is dictated by my regard, not for him, but for myself; for I am well 
 aware that neither his estimation in the world nor his tranquillity of mind is at 
 all dependent on anything which I have ever written or could ever write respect- 
 ing him.
 
 464 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 Gospel field, and thence to raise harvests of thought which had never 
 before been gathered in their own generation. And though many of 
 the husbandmen in that field laboured to exalt, beyond all reason- 
 able limits, the authority of ecclesiastical traditions, yet even that 
 attempt may perhaps have been more dangerous in appearance than 
 in reality. 
 
 For, in the great cycle of religious controversy, the questions at 
 issue remain very much the same from one age to another, though 
 the terms in which they are stated and discussed are continually 
 shifting. Thus, from the remotest historical era of the Jewish and 
 Christian Churches, the strife between the " Biblical " and the 
 " Traditional " parties has been unaltered in substance, though carried 
 on under many different forms of speech. To each of the contending 
 hosts an impartial arbitrament must award a certain measure of truth 
 and justice, and of consequent success. The Biblicists have always 
 maintained that, in every passage of Holy Writ, we are listening to 
 words in which the Deity himself has condescended to afford to us 
 solutions at once complete and unambiguous, of all the problems in 
 which, as responsible moral agents, we have any concern. The 
 Traditionists have, with similar constancy, alleged that since the 
 creation of our race, those sacred truths by which we are bound to 
 mould our ideas, and to regulate our conduct, have been transmitted 
 from one depository of them (patriarchal or sacerdotal) to another ; 
 that, in the Bible, those truths are neither systematically arranged 
 nor logically established, nor even categorically propounded ; that 
 they are announced by the inspired writers in language usually so 
 popular and poetical, often so mythic and abrupt, as must unavoid- 
 ably have induced endless diversities and invincible errors, if there 
 had not been, in the mind of every reader, a preconceived scheme of 
 hereditary doctrine, into the complex harmony of which all scriptural 
 revelations might be first received, and then be adjusted and recon- 
 ciled. They who adhere, with severe consistency, to the last of 
 these opinions, generally take refuge in the Roman Catholic fold, as 
 the one secure place of shelter from fatal error. They who pursue 
 to its consequences the former of these opinions, for the most part 
 find themselves, at length, astray on the bleak mountains of scep- 
 ticism, without a track, a resting-place, or a guide. 
 
 Neither of these disputants is, however, in point of fact, thus in- 
 flexibly self-consistent. Loudly as our " Tractarians " extol the 
 authority of ecclesiastical tradition, they are not really unconscious 
 into what an abyss they would be conducted by following that 
 guidance alone without an habitual appeal, and a constant reference, 
 to the divine law and to the written testimony. Confidently as
 
 THE " EVANGELICAL SUCCESSION. 465 
 
 our " evangelical biblicists " proclaim that the " Bible and the Bible 
 only " is their religion, they still read it inevitably, though often 
 unconsciously, by the light of those very traditions which their theory 
 repudiates. 
 
 In the New Atlantis, as we learn from the great circumnavigator 
 who discovered and described it, Christianity was established by the 
 unassisted teaching of a volume in which were written " all the 
 canonical books of the Old and New Testaments." It had been 
 placed by St Bartholomew " on a great cylindrical pillar of light " 
 on the sea-shore of the island, whence it was devoutly brought for 
 the instruction of the islanders, " by one of the wise men of the 
 society of Solomon's house." Francis Bacon, the witness of " this 
 miraculous evangelism" of the Apostle, has, with characteristic 
 wisdom, abstained from alleging the yet greater miracle, that the 
 Atlantean people had succeeded in extracting from those inestimable 
 leaves any one of the three creeds of the Catholic Church, or any 
 other dogmatic synopsis of the Christian faith. His narrative, on 
 the contrary, implies that, in their theological isolation, neither 
 doctors nor dogmas flourished amongst them ; that cut off, as they 
 were, from all intercourse with the Fathers, the Schoolmen, and the 
 Reformers, they had found their solitary written guide inexorably 
 silent on many of the most arduous of the questions which most 
 deeply affect the actual condition and the prospects of our race ; 
 that it had never even occurred to them to assign to divinity a place 
 among the sciences ; that they were destitute of all tenets whatever 
 on many of the subjects most insisted on among other Christians, 
 such as original sin, baptismal regeneration, the efficacy of the sacra- 
 ments, and the like ; and that, although devout and learned above 
 all other people, these mere biblicists of the New Atlantis had never 
 discovered in their language, nor attempted to invent, any terms in 
 which to define either the mysteries of the divine nature, or those of the 
 human nature of the divine Redeemer, or those of His real presence 
 in the consecrated elements. Such, indeed, seems to have been, and 
 such is probably still, the primitive simplicity of these " Bible Chris- 
 tians," that if they shall hereafter be visited by the most " evangeli- 
 cal " of our missionaries, the " wise men of the society of Solomon's 
 house," though they have by heart the volume deposited on the 
 pillar of light, will infallibly astound their visitors by the assur- 
 ance that they have never perceived in it, nor conjectured that 
 it could contain, either the system of theology which their new 
 teachers will lay before them, or any other theological system 
 whatever. 
 
 If a lawyer, educated in this nineteenth century, should say that 
 
 30
 
 4G6 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 he had gathered the whole scheme of the British Constitution from 
 the statutes at large, he would be quite as reasonable as a contem- 
 porary divine, who should persuade himself that he had deduced his 
 creeds and systematic views of Christian doctrine from the Bible, 
 and the Bible alone. The Doctor, Avhether he has graduated in law 
 or in divinity, has grown up from the cradle in the arms of traditions, 
 and in the lap of prepossessions, which have indelibly impressed 
 their own character on all the knowledge which he has afterwards 
 derived from his books. We have some myriads of clergymen 
 amongst us, who have subscribed their assent to each of the three 
 confessions of faith which are comprised in the Anglican Liturgy. 
 Will any one of those reverend persons seriously assert that, with- 
 out the aid of uninspired teaching, he either did discover in the 
 sacred text, or could have discovered there, the whole of any one of 
 those confessions ? or that, if confined to the study of that text alone, 
 he would have detected a fatal error in the opinion of the " Similarity 
 of Substance 1 " a vital truth in the opinion of the " Identity of 
 Substance ; " or that he would have learnt that between the inver- 
 sion of the words " Begotten not made," and the retaining those 
 words in their present order, there lay all the difference of a deadly 
 heresy and an orthodox belief 1 ? 
 
 Unwelcome as such a conclusion must be to any controversialists, 
 it seems inevitable to conclude that the Traditional party is far more 
 biblical, and the Biblical party very far more traditional, than either 
 of them are willing to suppose, whether of their opponents, or of 
 themselves. Except by those who rush either into the extreme of 
 spiritual bondage, or into the excesses of spiritual anarchy, these 
 conflicting opinions are held on both sides, with such great though 
 unavowed qualifications, as render them far more innoxious, in fact, 
 than might be anticipated, from the incautious language of the dis- 
 putants. To be thus unconsciously at variance with oneself, is a 
 mental weakness, which, in a greater or less degree, is only not uni- 
 versal. Many a man prostrates himself before the shrine of the 
 Virgin, in whose heart the spirit of the Bible neutralises the super- 
 stition which it has not subdued. Many a man worships in all the 
 naked simplicity of Geneva, in whose mind the traditions of the 
 Church control the lawless licence with which he boasts, and be- 
 lieves, that he interprets the Scriptures for himself. 
 
 Yet since, for the hearts of most of us, slavery has more attractions 
 than freedom since it leads to far more fatal evils and since it 
 much more effectually debars us from the highest good so is there 
 far greater cause to deprecate the dangers of the traditional, than 
 those of the biblical, system of belief. For all traditional knowledge
 
 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 467 
 
 is deeply imbued with the infirmities and the corruptions of the 
 human agency through which it reaches us. It ever tends to crys- 
 tallise into brilliant, but cold, hard, and profitless theories. But 
 biblical knowledge, like the manna rained on the wilderness, ever 
 tends to dissolve into a warm, and generous, and healthful nutriment. 
 From ecclesiastical lore we learn how to be subtle in distinctions, 
 exact in the analysis of particular doctrines, and clear-sighted in the 
 synthesis of them all. But from the Bible, and from the Bible 
 alone, we may derive, though with no scientific accuracy, and by no 
 logical process, the one great, prolific, and all-embracing idea even 
 the idea of Him in whom we live, and move, and have our being. 
 There also, and there only, we learn all that is to be known, or rather 
 all that is to be felt and experienced, of our relations to Him how 
 they have been impaired by sin, and how they have been restored by 
 an adorable, though utterly inscrutable, atonement. There also we 
 discover what are the spiritual agencies employed for the restoration 
 of our natiire to its primeval image. There, too, is lifted the veil 
 which interposes between our present and our future state, so far as 
 to disclose to us that this " mortal is to put on immortality." There, 
 in no recondite learning, no abtruse speculation, nor in any abstract 
 creed, but in the very person of Christ himself, is exhibited to us the 
 "Way, the Truth, and the Life. There we may contemplate and 
 listen to Him, who is the " Word," or communicative energy, of 
 God. There is set before us the very image of Deity, so far as it can 
 be projected on the dark and contracted mirror of our feeble human- 
 ity. There we become cognisant of a spiritual relationship a con- 
 sanguinity of the soul of man with Hun who assumed man's nature 
 an alliance which, though human words can but ill express it, the 
 Gospels reveal to us as not less real, and as far more intimate and 
 enduring, than those which bind us to each other in domestic life. 
 
 These, and such as these, are the disclosures which day by day 
 dawn Avith still increasing brightness on him who continually refers 
 to the revealed Word of God for light, and day by day examines by 
 that light every theological opinion which he has gathered from any 
 other source. It is because the fathers of the " Evangelical succes- 
 sion " thus continually resorted to Holy Scripture as at once the 
 ultimate source and the one criterion of all religious truth, that we 
 reverently hail them as the restorers and witnesses of the faith in 
 their own and in succeeding generations. It is in proportion as they 
 who now sit in their seats are in this respect imitating their example, 
 that we assign to them also their measure of the same honour. But 
 we do not judge that the like homage may not be reasonably ren- 
 dered to many, who, taking their departure from what is evidently a 
 
 30
 
 468 THE "EVANGELICAL" SUCCESSION. 
 
 distant, and apparently an opposite, point, are yet conducted, even 
 by their reverence for ecclesiastical traditions, to the feet of the same 
 great Teacher, and who study his recorded life and language with the 
 same childlike affiance and unreserved docility. In the presence of 
 their common enemies, Sin and Ignorance, Superstition and Idolatry, 
 our teachers would, we think, do wisely to abate much of their 
 mutual alienation and distrust. Their disciples can, we trust, not 
 be doing ill, or interposing presumptuously, by any attempt, however 
 humble, to promote such reconcilement.
 
 469 
 
 WILLIAM WILBEEFORCE. 
 
 BIOGRAPHY must be parsimonious of her honours ; yet, even in the 
 age of Burke and Mirabeau, of Napoleon and "Wellington, of Goethe 
 and of "Walter Scott, she could not have justly refused them to one 
 who, by paths till then untrodden, reached a social and political 
 eminence never before attained by any man unaided by place, by 
 party, or by the sword. 
 
 William "Wilberforce was born at Hull, on the 24th of August, 
 1759. His father, a merchant of that town, traced his descent from 
 a family which had for many generations possessed a large estate at 
 "Wilberfoss, in the East Eiding of the county of York. From that 
 place was derived the name which the taste or the caprice of his 
 latter progenitors moulded into the form in which it was borne by 
 their celebrated descendant. His mother was nearly allied to many 
 persons of consideration, among whom may be numbered the present 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of "Winchester, and the 
 members of that great London banking house of which Lord Car- 
 rington was formerly the head. 
 
 In the commencement of the reign of George III., the Grammar 
 School of Hull was kept by Joseph Milner, the Church historian, 
 assisted by his brother Isaac, who afterwards rose to great academical 
 honours and emoluments in the University of Cambridge. To 
 attend their lectures, "William "Wilberforce, then a sickly and di- 
 minutive child, might be daily seen passing along the streets of his 
 native town with his satchel on his shoulder. Even at that early 
 age he was himself appointed to teach. So rich were the tones of 
 his voice, and such the grace and impressiveness with which it was 
 modulated, that the Milners would lift him on the table, that his 
 schoolfellows might admire and imitate such a model in the art of 
 recitation. At a far distant period the same matchless voice was to 
 be employed in courts and parliaments, in defence of the theological 
 system, among the confessors and advocates of which each of his 
 tutors was destined to hold a distinguished station.
 
 4:70 WILLIAM WILBEEFORCE. 
 
 The father of "William Wilberforce died before his son had com- 
 pleted his tenth year, and the ample patrimony which he then 
 inherited was afterwards largely increased on the death of a paternal 
 uncle, to whose guardianship his childhood was commited. By 
 that kinsman he was placed at a school in the immediate neighbour- 
 hood of his own residence, at Wimbledon, in Surrey. The following 
 are the characteristic terms in which, many years afterwards, the 
 pupil recorded his recollections of this second stage of his literary 
 education. "Mr Chalmers the master, himself a Scotchman, had 
 an usher of the same nation, whose red beard, for he scarcely shaved 
 once a month, I shall never forget. They taught French, arithmetic, 
 and Latin. With Greek we did not much meddle. It was fre- 
 quented chiefly by the sons of merchants, and they taught, therefore, 
 everything and nothing. Here I continued some time as a parlour 
 boarder. I was sent at first among the lodgers, and I can remember 
 even now the nauseous food with which we were supplied, and 
 which I could not eat without sickness." 
 
 His early years were not, however, to pass away without some 
 impressions more important and not less abiding than those which 
 had been left on his sensitive nerves by the red beard of one of his 
 Scotch teachers, and by the ill savour of the dinners of the other. 
 His uncle's wife was a disciple of George Whitfield, and, under her 
 pious care, he acquired a familiarity with the sacred writings, and a 
 habit of devotion, the results of which were perceptible throughout 
 the whole of his more mature life. While yet a school-boy, he had 
 written several religious letters, "much in accordance with the 
 opinions which he subsequently adopted," and which, but for his 
 peremptory interdict, the zeal of some indiscreet friend would have 
 given to the world. On looking back, after a long interval, to this 
 part of his youthful training, Mr Wilberforce summed up, in the 
 following pithy sentence, his estimate of its apparent tendency : " If 
 I had staid with my uncle I should probably have been a bigoted, 
 despised Methodist." His mother's earlier sagacity foresaw what 
 her son's later experience discovered, and by her he was withdrawn 
 from. Wimbledon, and initiated into the amusements and luxuries 
 of his native city. 
 
 The escape from Methodism, bigotry, and contempt, was complete. 
 The youth sang, danced, and feasted with the wealthier inhabitants 
 of Hull, endured their card parties, and admired their strolling 
 players ; and, lest these spells should be too weak to cast out the 
 Whitfield spirit from his mind, he was committed by the same 
 maternal prescience to the care of a professional exorcist of such 
 demons. He was a sound and well-beneficed divine, a polished
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 471 
 
 gentleman, an elegant scholar, and the master of the endowed gran: - 
 mar-school of Pocklington. To him his pupil was indebted for some 
 general knowledge of polite literature, and for an intimate acquaint- 
 ance with the best dinner tables in that part of the county of York. 
 From this easy thrall he passed, at the age of seventeen, to St 
 John's College, Cambridge, not without a tincture of learning more 
 than sufficient for the plausibilities of the literary character which 
 he was there to sustain. 
 
 No better choice could have been made, if the object of his resi- 
 dence at the University had been to repress any aspirations towards 
 scholarship of a higher order. His companions were hard-drinking, 
 licentious youths, whose talk was even worse than their lives. .His 
 teachers did their best to make and to keep him idle. The single 
 problem proposed for his solution was, " Why so rich a man should 
 trouble himself with fagging V and no Johnian Archimedes could 
 find the answer. Euclid and Newton were abandoned for whist, 
 and Thucydides for such other pastimes as collegiate dulness loves 
 best. With a great Yorkshire pie crowning his table, and with wit, 
 drollery, and song ever flowing from his lips, the child of fortune 
 passed through his academical course, the centre of that never-failing 
 crowd, whose aim it is to eat without cost, and to be amused without 
 effort. 
 
 " That complete and generous education which fits a man to per- 
 form justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both pub- 
 lic and private, of peace and war," was not to be acquired under such 
 teachers or among such associates. Yet scarcely had Mr Wilberforce 
 shaken off that alliance, than he entered on one of the noblest and 
 most difficult of those offices. Within six weeks from the sumptuous 
 celebration of the day on which he attained his majority, he found 
 himself, by the expenditure among the electors of Hull of more than 
 8000, their representative in the House of Commons. 
 
 To make laws is the single employment of adult life which is 
 supposed to require no preparatory study ; which may be one of 
 the reasons why the studies of half a life are too little for the right 
 interpretation of such laws as our legislators make. The young 
 member for Hull, conscious as he was of his ignorance, may yet 
 have sustained himself with the conviction that he would meet in 
 Parliament with many as ill provided as he was with political 
 science, and scarcely with any one so well qualified by the mere in- 
 stinct of natural sagacity to discuss any question, however un- 
 familiar, or to adorn it by the embellishments of an insinuating 
 address, a playful fancy, a brave self-reliance, and a voice which 
 resembled an Eolian harp controlled by the touch of a St Cecilia.
 
 472 WILLIAM WILBERFOKCE. 
 
 He had, indeed, come up to London (such was his rustic sim- 
 plicity) " stored with arguments to prove the authenticity of Row- 
 ley's poems," unconscious that, among the gay circle awaiting him, 
 the sermons delivered in the pulpit of St Mary Redclifie would have 
 been just as welcome as a debate on the parchments discovered in 
 her tower. Brookes' s, White's, and Boodle's received him with open 
 arms. George Selwyn stood sentinel at the faro-table to keep away 
 any intrusive good advice. With Fox, Fitzpatrick, and Sheridan 
 he chatted, or played at cards or dice, according to the humour of 
 the moment. His suppers were taken at a club of which William 
 Pitt, Lord Grenville, and Windham were assiduous members. At 
 a Shaksperian party at the Boar's Head he admired the surpassing 
 brilliancy of Pitt, " the wittiest man " (such is his record of that 
 evening) " he ever knew ; to whose mind every possible combination 
 of ideas seemed always present, and who could at once produce 
 whatever he desired." At Wimbledon the ghost of his pious aunt 
 might have awakened from the tomb to see Lord Harrowby, her 
 nephew's guest, alight, not long before sunrise, at the gates which 
 once were hers, wearing the triangular hat which had clung by him 
 at the Opera, and, not long after the sun had risen, William Pitt, 
 another of his guests, industriously sowing her once-loved flower- 
 beds with the fragments of it, in order, as he declared, to raise a 
 crop of new ones. At Burlington House Mrs Sheridan sang to him 
 "old English songs angelically." At Devonshire House he was 
 himself required to sing by no mean judge in such matters, George, 
 the too famous Prince of Wales. One while passing an evening 
 with Mrs Siddons, at another exchanging repartees with the " charm- 
 ing Mrs Crewe," and occasionally speaking with applause in St 
 Stephen's Chapel (in those days the best and most fashionable of 
 debating societies), he floated with the gay crowd down the smooth 
 current of early life, until the resignation of the Shelburne ministry 
 restored Mr Pitt to leisure, and enabled the two friends, accompanied 
 by Mr Eliot (dear alike to both of them), to project and execute a 
 summer tour in France. 
 
 This " march of the allies to Paris " was directed through the an- 
 cient city of Eheims. As the school in which the future minister 
 of England and his friends were to study the French language, no 
 place could have been more judiciously chosen ; for, as M. Guizot 
 teaches us, it is the sacred fountain from whence have flowed all 
 the streams of our modern civilisation. Yet in the year 1783 
 Eheims failed to impart to her English visitors the knowledge 
 which they had proposed to gather there. " We spent nine or ten 
 days without making any great progress," says Mr Wilberforce,
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 473 
 
 " wliich," he adds, " could not indeed be expected of us, as we spoke 
 to no human being but each other and our Irish courier." Ten 
 years later such a secret conclave of foreigners in the metropolis of 
 an English province would have excited the jealousy of Mr Pitt 
 himself. Little marvel, then, that in the capital of Champagne it 
 attracted the inquisitive eye of M. Du Chatel, the Royal Intendant 
 of Police. Who might these mysterious strangers be ? "Were they 
 hatching a conspiracy against the great ally of Washington? 
 England had bitter humiliations to avenge. Or were they in alli- 
 ance with Count Cagliostro against the purses of his most Christian 
 Majesty's subjects ? - England, impoverished by war, was the too 
 fertile parent of swindlers seeking after their prey. M. Du Chatel 
 must look to it ! 
 
 There was at Rheims, in those days, an Abbe de Legeard, " a 
 fellow of infinite humour," to whom the Intendant disclosed his sus- 
 picions. The Abbe undertook a domiciliary visit to the intriguants. 
 He found them as full of humour as himself, liked their appearance, 
 their manners, and their talk, and ended at last by a cordial tender 
 to them of his good services. 
 
 The son of Chatham stood then in urgent need of such subsidies 
 as he was destined at a future day to lavish. " Here we are," he ex- 
 claimed to the fascinated Abbe, " in the middle of Champagne, and 
 can't get any tolerable wine ! " The Abbe was moved. In his own 
 cellars was some of the choicest, and it crowned his hospitable board, 
 during five or six successive hours, for the exhilaration of his English 
 guests a symposium doubtless of infinite hilarity, fearful as may 
 have been its length, to the courteous Frenchman. 
 
 Rheims began to assume a brighter aspect. Either the future 
 agitator of Europe, or the future liberator of Africa (history does not 
 say which), had been the bearer of an introduction to M. Coustier, 
 of that city, from the great Peter Thellusson, and to the hotel of M. 
 Coustier, their coachman was directed to drive. " It was with some 
 surprise that we found him " (such is Mr Wilberforce's contemporary 
 narrative) " behind a counter distributing raisins. I had heard that 
 it was very usual for gentlemen on the Continent to practise some 
 handicraft trade or other for their amusement ; and therefore, for 
 my own part, I concluded that his taste was in the fig way, and that 
 he was only playing at grocer for his amusement ; and, viewing the 
 matter in this light, I could not help admiring the excellence of his 
 imitation." A genuine grocer, however, was M. Coustier. But he 
 was un brave homme to boot, and at the request of milords Anglais 
 mounted his wig and sword, and ushered them to the house of one 
 of his best customers among the noblesse. This was no other than
 
 474 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 M. Du Chatel himself. " Relations of peace and amity " were estab- 
 lished between the Intendant and the suspects. He introduced them 
 to the Archbishop, and the Archbishop gave them " two very good 
 and pleasant dinners," with an invitation to spend a week at his 
 palace. The following is the portrait which Mr Wilberforce has be- 
 queathed to posterity of this agreeable prelate. "Archbishops in 
 England are not like archbishops in France, These last are jolly 
 fellows, of about forty years of age, who play at billiards, and live 
 like other people." 
 
 In October, Paris opened her gates to the three members of the 
 British Parliament. Mr Wilberforce's memorabilia of their sojourn 
 there resemble the brief notes so often found in the hands of " hon- 
 ourable gentlemen " when rising to take part in a debate. From 
 these fragments, however, we collect that they associated with Ver- 
 gennes, La Fayette, and Marmontel that they followed the court 
 to Fontainebleau that there Mr Pitt hunted the stag on horseback, 
 while his companions in a chaise hunted the boar that Louis XVI. 
 on that occasion presented himself " in immense boots, a clumsy 
 strange figure, of the hog kind " that at Madame de Polignac's 
 " poor Marie Antoinette chatted easily," and rallied them with in- 
 quiries after their friend M. Coustier, the epicier that they passed 
 an evening with Benjamin Franklin that " all the men and women 
 crowded round Pitt in shoals, who behaved with great spirit, though 
 he was sometimes a little bored when they talked to him about " the 
 Parliamentary Reform " and that he was at length rescued from the 
 crowd of his admirers by Iris, who, in the shape of a king's messenger, 
 suddenly appeared at Paris, charged with despatches from the Jupiter 
 Londonensis. 
 
 The object of this royal summons was to secure the aid of Mr Pitt 
 in opposing the India Bill, and in turning out the authors of it. He 
 obeyed ; and in the struggle in which he was soon afterwards en- 
 gaged with the majority of the House of Commons, he found no more 
 zealous or effective supporter than the partaker of his amusements at 
 Paris and at Rheims. 
 
 The Coalition Ministry was now the one object of popular invective; 
 and, at a public meeting in the Castle Yard at York, in March, 1784, 
 Mr Wilberforce, in a speech, welcomed with the loudest plaudits, 
 contributed his share of invective against the Unholy Alliance. In 
 an account of the scene which he transmitted to Mr Dundas, James 
 Boswell described it in terms equally characteristic of the speaker 
 and of himself. " I saw," he says, " what seemed a mere shrimp 
 mount upon the table ; but, as I listened, he grew and grew until 
 the shrimp became a whale."
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 475 
 
 A still more convincing attestation of his eloquence on this 
 occasion is to be found in the consequences to which it led. Mr 
 Wilberforce had attended this meeting with the avowed purpose 
 of defeating the influence of the great "Whig families of Yorkshire 
 at the approaching general election, and with the unavowed pur- 
 pose of becoming himself a candidate for the county. From 
 " Wilberforce and Liberty," the cry raised by his auditors while he 
 spoke, the transition was obvious and easy to the cry of " Wilber- 
 force for Yorkshire " when he concluded. The current of popular 
 favour flowed strongly in his support, for he appeared as the 
 tribune of the people against the patricians of the North ; he had 
 opposed the India Bill ; he had denounced the Coalition ; and he 
 enjoyed the personal affection of Mr Pitt, then rich in hereditary 
 honours, in personal renown, and in the brightest promise. Large 
 subscriptions defrayed the expense of the contest, and his aristo- 
 cratic opponents, without venturing to the poll, surrendered to him 
 a seat which he continued to occupy without intermission in many 
 successive Parliaments. 
 
 With this memorable triumph, Mr Wilberforce closed his twenty- 
 fifth year. He was now in possession of whatever could exalt the 
 hopes of a candidate for fame on the noblest theatre of civil action 
 which at that period had ever been thrown open to the ambition of 
 private men. But the appointed hour had also struck, from which 
 a new direction was to be given to the thoughts and the pursuits of 
 this favourite of nature and of fortune. 
 
 Accompanied by some of his female relatives, and by Isaac Milner, 
 one of his two earliest tutors, the new member for the county of 
 York, before appearing in the House of Commons in that capacity, 
 undertook a journey to the south of France, and thence through 
 Switzerland to Spa. This expedition (interrupted by a brief return 
 to England in the winter of 1784-5) was extended during some 
 months, and forms a memorable era in his life. The lessons he had 
 learnt in childhood at Wimbledon, had left an indelible impression 
 on his mind. The dissipation of his subsequent days had but re- 
 tarded the growth of those seeds of early piety. The companions of 
 his youth had not been without frequent intimations that their gay 
 associate was silently revolving deeper thoughts than those which 
 formed the staple of their ordinary social intercourse. These were 
 now to take entire possession of his mind, and to become the life and 
 mainsprings of his future existence. The opinions of George Whit- 
 field had found a more impressive expositor than the good lady who 
 had originally inculcated them upon him. 
 
 Isaac Milner was a man of strong native sense, and of no incon- 

 
 476 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 siderable learning, and would probably have attained to celebrity, 
 both in science and in theology, if the too early possession of three 
 rich ecclesiastical and academic sinecures had not enabled him to 
 gratify his constitutional indolence. In a narrow collegiate circle 
 he exercised a colloquial despotism akin to that which Samuel John- 
 son had enjoyed, and to which Samuel Parr had aspired, among the 
 men of letters and statesmen of their age. But Milner's dogmatism 
 was relieved by a tenderness of heart not inferior to that of the great 
 lexicographer, and was informed by a divinity incomparably more 
 profound than that of the grandiloquent grammarian. He was among 
 the dearest of the friends of Mr Wilberforce, and now became Ms 
 spiritual preceptor and guide. 
 
 And now our narrative has reached a point at which the ground 
 over which we have to pass becomes tremulous and unstable. If 
 we adopt the orthodox style of the Episcopalian Churches, we must 
 record that " the baptismal seed, long dormant in the soul of Isaac 
 Milner's pupil, began at length to germinate and to yield its fruit." 
 If we prefer the language of a more popular theology, it must be 
 stated that " the conversion of Mr Wilberforce took place in the 
 twenty-sixth year of his age, and during his journey to Mce." 
 There are, we doubt not, those to whom each of these forms of 
 speech conveys an intelligible meaning. But there are others who 
 can perceive in them nothing more than abtruse metaphors or 
 rhetorical tropes ; and they, in a deep consciousness of their own 
 ignorance, referring all such mysteries both to that revelation of the 
 Divine will which is " written with ink," and to that other revelation 
 of it which is written " on the fleshy tables of the heart," will learn 
 from each of those revelations that thehuman mindis subject to asacred 
 influence, which, like the wind, bloweth where it listeth, although it 
 be given to none to discover whence it cometh or whither it goeth. 
 
 It is a fact, which few, if any, self-observers will deny, that, in 
 the interior life of every man, there are occurrences explicable on 
 no hypothesis but that of the direct intervention of the Supreme 
 Ruler of the Universe for the spiritual improvement of his rational 
 creatures. Such events may be considered either as parts of some 
 great predetermined system, or as immediate interpositions of the 
 Deity in particular cases. Each supposition alike refers to that 
 Divine origin those salutary changes in human character which the 
 least thoughtful so often notice, and which even the most depraved 
 not seldom undergo. 
 
 Such a change, when enduring and complete, is designated in 
 the familiar theological terminology as " a new birth ; " and if it be 
 allowable to assign a definite sense to a phrase so much darkened by
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 477 
 
 the rhetorical use of it, " the new "birth " may be said to consist in 
 the progressive coincidence of inclination and of duty, or in the divorce 
 of obedience from self-denial A slow, a laborious, and an imperfect 
 process indeed with the best of us ! Yet, in very many, an evident 
 reality attested by the most conclusive proofs. The very day-dreams 
 on this subject, which are floating in most minds and in most societies, 
 are themselves a sufficient evidence of the existence of substantial 
 things on which they rest as a basis, and which they indistinctly re- 
 flect and dimly shadow forth to us. 
 
 But when such a phenomenon is alleged by the biographers of 
 any man, they are bound to distinguish, as clearly as may be, be- 
 tween his original and his superinduced character, and to explain, in 
 unambiguous language, in what the new man differed from the old. 
 A hard necessity, if not a desperate attempt ! Yet an attempt to 
 be reverently made, if we would not dismiss, unsolved and unex- 
 amined, the most curious problem which the life of Mr Wilberforce 
 raises or suggests. 
 
 Man, as he is delineated by the great masters of fiction, is made 
 up of elements which are at once incongruous, inharmonious, con- 
 flicting, and yet compatible. Man, as he is drawn by inferior artists, 
 is the impersonation of some one dominant propensity which pos- 
 sesses, guides, and individualises him. Thus Lawrence Sterne has 
 filled up his canvas with four figures, each of whom, like one of 
 Joanna Baillie's heroes, is in bondage to some one tyrannical passion. 
 To Mr Shandy is assigned the love of wisdom, to Uncle Toby the 
 wisdom of love, to Corporal Trim heart-loyalty to his captain, 
 and to Yorick a versatile sympathy, by which the humours of all the 
 rest are caught, and heightened, and reflected. Shakspeare or Cer- 
 vantes would have known how to blend the whole group into one 
 complex man a composite yet not irreconcilable assemblage of dis- 
 similar qualities a veritable unit of the race of Adam. Such an 
 imaginary personage would have borne a vivid resemblance to the 
 aboriginal William Wilberforce. 
 
 By force of a decree preceding his birth, he came into the world 
 predestined to be the centre of admiration and of love for the circle 
 of his associates in it. Nature herself endowed him with that genial 
 warmth and graciousness of temper which, by a constant succession 
 of spontaneous impulses, pours itself into all the channels of social 
 intercourse. Towards all who approached him, those kindnesses 
 which, unless when innate, are unattainable, expanded with such a 
 happy promptitude, that, to borrow a well-known eulogy, he might 
 have passed for the brother of every man, and for the lover of every 
 woman, with whom he conversed.
 
 478 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 This instinct of philanthropy was combined with a mercurial 
 gaiety, and with that exquisite perception of all the proprieties of 
 life, which, in mesmeric language, places cultivated minds in " a 
 relation of mutual consciousness towards each other." Every eye 
 which followed him beamed with the lights, or was darkened by the 
 shadows, which played over his countenance ; and his feelings, 
 whether grave or gay, vibrated through every point of the circle by 
 which he was surrounded. 
 
 The basis of the natural or indigenous character of Mr Wilber- 
 force was laid in this quick fellow-feeling with other men. All the 
 restless vivacity of Voltaire, and a sensibility more profound than 
 that of Rousseau, met in him and mutually controlled each other. 
 His responsiveness to the joys and the sorrows of his companions 
 made the happy and the wretched his captives in their turns. But, 
 though ready to weep with those who wept, he was still more prompt 
 to rejoice with those that rejoiced ; nor could the elastic rebound of 
 his heart to gladness be ever long repressed by any burthen, whether 
 laid on others or on himself. 
 
 Society was not merely his delight or his passion ; it was the ne- 
 cessity of his existence. He mixed freely, and on equal terms, with 
 all the men and women of his age the most eminent in wit, in genius, 
 and in learning ; and drank in, with the keenest relish, every variety 
 of colloquial eloquence. Yet he not merely endured but rejoiced in 
 companions, whose absence would have been a luxury to any one but 
 himself. When Pitt, and Burke, and Sheridan were not to be had, 
 he would take the most cordial pleasure in the talk of the most 
 woollen of his constituents at Leeds. When Madame de Stael and 
 Mrs Crewe were away, some dowager from the Cathedral Whist 
 Club became his inspiring muse, and for the moment, would seem 
 herself to be half inspired. Dulness fled at his approach. The most; 
 somnolent awakened at his presence. The heaviest countenance 
 caught some animation from his eye. " The listless prisoner of an 
 easy-chair" gave out some sparks of intellect when brought into a 
 friendly collision with him. 
 
 Reckless is the liberality which bestows rank, wealth, beauty, and 
 prowess so lavishly on the preux chevalier of romance. He enjoys 
 those exterior advantages at the expense of his essential greatness. 
 But the charm exercised by Mr Wilberforce was the inherent and 
 indefeasible attribute of the soul herself. Informed by her, the body 
 which, with all affection and reverence be it spoken, was but a cari- 
 cature of the human form divine, became the ready minister of all 
 his social purposes, and the eloquent interpreter of all his emotions. 
 Before his fellow-men, that diminutive and shapeless figure bore it-
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 479 
 
 self gallantly, as if elevated and sustained by conscious worth. To- 
 wards the other sex, his attitudes and looks and bearing expressed a 
 respect and a tenderness so heartfelt and so grateful, as to impart to 
 the humblest woman he addressed a sense of self-complacency ; and 
 as to fascinate those who were themselves the most skilful in the 
 arts of fascination. Bayard, accosting a damsel of the House of 
 Longueville, could not have carried himself with a more gentle and 
 generous courtesy. 
 
 There is an association of certain indissoluble ideas which degrades 
 the histrionic art in general esteem, yet the faculty of exhibiting and 
 exciting every human sentiment is a power which, though too often 
 desecrated to the meanest ends, may be devoted to the noblest. Mr 
 Wilberforce was, by the gift of nature, amongst the most consummate 
 actors of his tunes. Imagine David Garrick talking not as a mime, 
 but from the resources of his own mind, and the impulses of his own 
 nature to have personated in some other society the friends with 
 whom he had been dining at the Literary Club, now uttering 
 maxims of wisdom with Johnsonian dignity then haranguing with 
 a rapture like that of Burke telling a good story with the unction 
 of James Boswell chuckling over a ludicrous jest with the child- 
 like glee of Oliver Goldsmith singing a ballad with all the taste of 
 Percy reciting poetry with the classical enthusiasm of Cumberland 
 and, at each successive change in this interlude, exhibiting the 
 amenities of Sir Joshua then brood a while over this supposed 
 monopoly logue, and there will emerge an image of the social William 
 Wilberforce, ever the same, and ever multiform, constraining his 
 companions to laugh, to weep, to admire, to exult, and to meditate 
 at his bidding. 
 
 This rare felicity in running over the whole scale of feeling, and 
 the refinement which rescued him, at each successive passage, from 
 every taint of affectation or of coarseness, gave to his discourse a 
 far deeper interest than would have belonged to the mere words he 
 uttered, if falling from any lips but his own. A certain air of 
 originality embellished the most trite and familiar of his observa- 
 tions. There was still an impress of novelty when he repeated for 
 the twentieth time some favourite maxim, or told over again some 
 well-known story, or resumed the discussion of yesterday from the 
 very beginning. In " The Doctor," Southey has drawn an inverted 
 pyramid, the narrowing lines of which represent the subsiding 
 cadences in which he supposes Mr Wilberforce to repeat the words, 
 " Poor creature ! " when advised by the anonymous author to read 
 his book on a Sunday ; each cadence in its turn being meant to 
 convey a rebuke in which kindness and acidity, liking and dislike,
 
 480 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 acquiescence and dissent, meet together in continually varying pro- 
 portions. Kow this is hardly a burlesque. The words, however 
 simple, which Mr Wilherforce selected as the vehicle of any passion, 
 "became, in his use of them, as replete with significance as those 
 homely phrases with which Mrs Siddons was accustomed to awaken 
 the loudest echoes of the theatre. The expression " Poor creature ! " 
 modulated, and varied, and played with, as he would have managed 
 it, would have formed an exquisite criticism on the favourite work 
 of the Laureate, with all its graceful pathos and unmirthful jocularity. 
 
 In the age of Jekyll, Mackintosh, and Sydney Smith, society had 
 no member more popular or more attractive than William Wilber- 
 force. At one time obeying the impulse of the moment, at another 
 pursuing the train of his solitary musing, he passed and repassed 
 from the merest frolic of fancy to the most mature contemplations, 
 the same simple-hearted natural man, talking, without effort, or 
 preparation, or disguise, from the overflowing of his mind, although 
 his voice and manner, and the whole structure of his dialogue, were 
 in a state of constant vicissitude. Yet scarcely any memorial of his 
 table-talk has survived him, nor is it difficult to explain the reason. 
 
 "Wit may either pervade a man's conversation, or be condensed in 
 particular passages of it, as the electric current may be either equally 
 diffused through the atmosphere, or flash across it. Mr Wilberforce 
 turned on every topic which he touched a sort of galvanic stream of 
 vivacity, humour, and warm-heartedness, which tended rather to 
 volatilise and to disperse, than to consolidate, the substances on 
 which it fell. He did not dispose of a laughable incident by one 
 terse and pregnant jest ; he rather used it as a toy to be tossed about 
 and played with for a while, and then thrown aside. Even his 
 wisdom demanded a certain breadth of space for its development ; 
 for it incorporated every illustration, pleasant or pathetic, which fell 
 in his way, and left behind it an impression more delightful than 
 definite. Being himself amused and interested by everything, 
 whatever he said became amusing or interesting. Sometimes Francis 
 Bacon would supply the text, and sometimes Sir John Sinclair ; but 
 whether he fused the pure gold of the sage, or brayed, as in a mortar, 
 the crotchets of the simpleton, the comment was irresistibly charm- 
 ing, though no memory could retain the glowing, picturesque, or 
 comic language in which it was delivered. When he and Sydney 
 Smith left the same dinner-table, their companions carried away 
 some of the solid bullion of wit from the Canon of St Paul's to be 
 exhibited in other company ; but from the member for the county 
 of York, recollections which, though not transferable to others by
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 481 
 
 any quotation of his words, dwelt with themselves as an exhilarat- 
 ing influence, like that of some joyous carol or pungent aether. 
 
 If it be required that the eulogies on his colloquial powers should 
 be justified more distinctly than by this kind of general description, 
 the demand will perhaps be best satisfied by referring to his let- 
 ters. It must indeed be admitted that his epistolary style is far 
 below that of the great writers in that kind, and below his 
 own reputation ; that his sport is not very graceful, nor his 
 tenderness very touching, nor his gravity very impressive. But sup- 
 pose a man continually pouring forth, in his common talk, language 
 as brilliant as that in which he writes to Hannah More, or as play- 
 ful as that in which he rallies Lord Muncaster, or as full of deep 
 meaning as that in which he unbosoms himself to William Hey, or 
 as affectionate as the style of his letters to his sons ; and suppose 
 that his discourse is continually embellished by the most perfect 
 histrionic ornaments ; and the supposition will render Mr Wilber- 
 force audible and visible to the imaginations of those who never 
 heard or saw him, very much as he was to the bodily organs of 
 those who hived with him in a familiar intimacy. 
 
 His social passion, and his social talents, clung to him even when 
 he quitted the throng of men for the solitude of his library. Although 
 a stranger to all the exact sciences, whether physical or moral, and 
 though neither born nor educated to be himself a great author, he 
 was yet the happy comrade, the docile pupil, and the enthusiastic 
 admirer of the greatest. After having lost the sight of one of his 
 eyes, and while sorely annoyed by the ailments of the other, he ran 
 over with eagerness, and appreciated with curious felicity, a greater 
 body of literature than is usually compassed by those who devote 
 themselves exclusively to letters. 
 
 It was, indeed, an ill-assorted and heterogeneous mass, made up 
 of history, morals, philosophy, poetry, statistics, ephemeral politics, 
 and theology ; yet it was not without a certain unity of design that 
 these were all in turn either lightly skimmed, or diligently studied. 
 He was never abandoned by his human affections, even when his 
 books were his only companions. He searched them to detect the 
 various springs of human action, and their influence on the welfare 
 of the great brotherhood he loved so well. He learned from them 
 to understand, and so to benefit, mankind. Nor, in his intercourse 
 with these mute teachers, was he deserted by the tricksy Ariel, who 
 inspired his carriage and his talk in the haunts of living men. That 
 brilliant fancy broke out into a ceaseless colloquy with the grave 
 masters at whose feet he sat. He would controvert, interrogate, or 
 
 31
 
 482 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 applaud in the form of marginal notes, when he was alone ; or, if an 
 auditor was at hand, in spoken comments, at one moment so arch 
 and humorous, at the next so reverent and affectionate, and then so 
 full of solemn meaning, that the austere folio, or the saucy pamphlet, 
 became so many characters in a sort of tragi-comedy ; in which, 
 however, there was usually a large preponderance of the droll above 
 the serious. 
 
 For so arbitrary were the associations of his ideas, such the revelry 
 of his animal life, and so tumultuous the flow of his thoughts, that 
 if his presence had not been fatal to fatigue, the rapid transitions 
 through which the interlocutor in any dialogue with him was hurried, 
 might have perplexed and wearied the most patient listener. In his 
 most playful moods, reverence for all that he esteemed great and 
 holy would arrest at an instant the riot of his spirits ; and, when 
 elevated to the highest contemplations, some odd conceit would 
 lighten up his face with unexpected smiles, and break forth in a 
 burst of contagious merriment. 
 
 It was difficult or impossible to take a deliberate measure of the 
 intellectual stature of such a companion ; nor was it until time and 
 distance had subdued the power of the charm, and diminished the 
 accuracy of the remembrance of it, that they who lived with him 
 could make any successful attempt to estimate and analyse the powers 
 by which they had been dazzled. The result of that tardy effort was 
 to induce the conviction that the master of the spell had not re- 
 ceived from on high a commission to disclose hidden truth, or to 
 throw over familiar truth the mantle of a creative imagination that 
 he never held, nor could ever nave attained, to a place among philo- 
 sophers or poets and that nature had not formed him for patient 
 inquiry, suspended judgment, or for faith in the glorious unrealities 
 of fiction. But if not permitted to take his stand within the inner- 
 most circle of genius, he derived from nature such rapidity of con- 
 ception such an intuitive insight into the characters of other men 
 such a sense of the ludicrous and of the tender a wit vaulting so 
 lightly across his whole visible horizon and so ardent a love for 
 every form of beauty, as justified the enthusiasm of his admirers, 
 although his name would scarcely have descended to posterity if he 
 had devoted himself to any other than an active life. 
 
 And now, whether it be more fitly called the tardy ripening of 
 baptismal seed, or an early conversion, or by whatever other theolo- 
 gical term the event may be most properly described, it came to pass 
 that he was roused and qualified for that course of life, by the great 
 though gradual change to which we have referred. "To be born 
 again" is to acquire, not new powers, but a new tendency of the
 
 YTILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 483 
 
 powers which we derive from nature. "William Wilberforce the 
 pupil of George Sehvyn, and William Wilberforce the pupil of John 
 Newton, were not two different men, but one and the same man. 
 Yet his two preceptors did not differ more widely from each other 
 than he differed from his former self. Before him had opened a new 
 world, and within him a new creation. From an intoxicating in- 
 tercourse with human society, he had withdrawn to commune with 
 himself. From self-acquaintance he had ascended to communicate 
 with the eternal source of light. Faith had revealed to him the 
 illusions of sight, and motives had sprung up in his mind of an 
 energy in some degree commensurate with the invisible realities 
 which she disclosed to him. His social feelings, which had traversed 
 the earth unsatisfied, now found their resting-place in the Redeemer, 
 who henceforth became the ever-present associate of his hopes and 
 purposes. The new fabric of thoughts and of affections which arose 
 within him rested on a basis more firm than he had ever found 
 before, because cemented and sustained by divine, as well as by 
 human, love. 
 
 It was, indeed, with deep dejection and a protracted self-conflict, 
 that these new habits of mind were formed. Gradually and surely, 
 however, the joyful spirit of the man re-assumed its dominion 
 over him. The frolic of earlier years had subsided, and his gaiety 
 assumed a more cautious and a gentler character. But as his self- 
 government gained strength, and as peace diffused her holy calm 
 over him, he rose to the enjoyment of that perfect freedom in which 
 eren Ms constitutional hilarity could indulge and disport itself. 
 Still sadness flew at his approach ; and, though the most devout 
 of men, his mirth was afe exhilarating as the first laughter of child- 
 hood. 
 
 God was in all his thoughts. His piety was allied not only to 
 his serious pursuits, but to all the daily pleasures, and even to the 
 whims and amusements of life. Inhabiting at once the visible and 
 the invisible worlds, he rejoiced over his bright heritage in each. 
 From the passing shadows of earth to the enduring substances of 
 heaven, from secular cares to devotional exercises, he moved with 
 such unexpected rapidity, that the web of his discourse would some- 
 times appear to be of an incongruous colouring and texture. But 
 this fusion of religious and worldly thoughts enhanced the spirit 
 with which he performed every duty, and the zest with which he 
 welcomed every enjoyment. 
 
 Faintly as any portraiture can represent Mr "Wilberforce in his 
 relations with other men, it is altogether impossible that he should 
 be properly delineated in these dearer and more sacred relations 
 
 31 *
 
 484 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 which he had now formed. If any one shall refer to mere en- 
 thusiasm, the belief that the regenerate heart maintains a real, 
 although it be a hidden, intercourse with a Being who has taken 
 up His abode there, we shall leave the censor in undisturbed pos- 
 session of his incredulity. If he shall deny that any sound mind 
 can entertain such a belief, we shall be content to assure him that 
 there are, in the character of man, mysteries of which he has as 
 yet no knowledge. But if he shall assert that the intercourse be- 
 tween the soul and the in-dwelling Paraclete cannot be recorded 
 by the written confessions, experiences, or revelations of any self- 
 observer whatever, we have no controversy with him, but the 
 reverse. 
 
 It was the habit of Mr "Wilberforce to transcribe in a private 
 journal the results of a most unsparing self-examination, not un- 
 mixed with some passages from those prayers in which he was en- 
 gaged " without ceasing." The extracts from those manuscripts 
 which his biographers have published, bear the impress of the most 
 perfect sincerity. They attest his exquisite tenderness of conscience, 
 his constant sense of present Deity, and his intense solicitude for an 
 entire conformity to the Divine will. Doubtless these were inestim- 
 able aids to himself in his daily retrospect of his own spiritual pro- 
 gress. But, having served that purpose, would they not have been 
 more wisely committed to the flames, than to the press ? 
 
 Such publications too often foster in those who read them, a rank 
 undergrowth of hypocrisy. For one man, who, like Mr Wilber- 
 force, will honestly endeavour to lay bare on paper the course of 
 his life and the state of his heart, one hundred will make the same 
 attempt dishonestly, having the fear or the* hope of the biographer 
 before their eyes. How fluent the acknowledgment of those faults 
 which the reader will certainly regard as venial, while he admires 
 the sagacity which has detected, the humility which has condemned, 
 and the integrity which has acknowledged them ! 
 
 Such disclosures, whether made to the confessor or to the world 
 at large, are at best an illusion. No man has such an insight into 
 his own circumstances, motives, and actions, or such leisure for de- 
 scribing them, or such powers of description, as to be able to afford 
 to others the means of estimating, with any approach to accuracy, 
 the exact merit or demerit of any one of his steps (and countless 
 are the millions of these steps) in his whole moral and religious 
 course. 
 
 Or, if the dissection of any man's soul could be completely effect- 
 ed, what eye but must turn away from the spectacle ? "Wisely has 
 the Church proclaimed the sanctity of the confessional. Who would
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 485 
 
 wish or dare to study this morbid anatomy ? Who would not loathe 
 the knowledge with which the memory of the priesthood, who study 
 it professionally, is soiled and burthened 1 Who has courage enough 
 to tell how far our mutual affection and esteem may depend on our 
 imperfect knowledge of each other? The same creative wisdom 
 which shelters from every human eye the processes of our animal 
 frame, has shrouded from observation the workings of our spiritual 
 structure. The lowly and the contrite heart is a shrine in which He 
 who inhabiteth eternity condescends to dwell, but in which any 
 other presence would be an agony and a profanation. 
 
 We have three judges our Maker, ourselves, and our neighbour. 
 The first, looking on the heart, adjudicates infallibly. The second, 
 from a comparison of acts, and of motives imperfectly understood, 
 determines inferentially. The third, observing only the outward 
 conduct, decides hypothetically. He who knew what was in man, 
 confined us to the use of a single clue in forming any such hypo- 
 thesis " By their fruits ye shall know them." Whether we study 
 Mr Wilberforce, or any other human model, it is safest to follow 
 this clue, and this alone. 
 
 Exceedingly dissimilar in abundance and in flavour, are the fruits 
 to be gathered from the different branches of the vine, which, 
 spreading out to the ends of the earth, and supplied with nutriment 
 from the same prolific stem, are yet all more or less propped on 
 some foreign stay. Some of those boughs hang like creepers from 
 a stiff lattice-work of forms and ceremonies ; and then the fruit is 
 dry and penurious. Others cling for support to the austere aisles of 
 conventual asceticism ; and then the produce is harsh and unpalat- 
 able. Others, again, sink down and sustain themselves on a certain 
 stunted and coarse shrubbery of irreverent, sensuous, and erotic 
 familiarity ; and then the vintage becomes watery and luscious. 
 But some abide in the all-sustaining and animating trunk, with the 
 firmest hold and in the closest union, and then the grapes they 
 yield are ponderous and racy, like the clusters of Eshcol, glowing 
 with the richest bloom, and redolent of the most grateful odours. 
 
 The interpretation of the parable is to be found in every page of 
 the five volumes, in which two of the sons of Mr Wilberforce have 
 recorded the Me and writings of their father. Tried by literary 
 laws alone, they must be condemned as overladen with a mass of 
 superfluous details. But that redundance was indispensable to an 
 effect of a far higher kind than any mere artist ever had in view. 
 
 In these annals, or rather in this annual register of Mr Wilber- 
 force's acts, the unity of design consists in the constant exhibition 
 and prominence of one great truth which it is impossible to express
 
 486 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 aright, except in the words of an inspired Apostle. It is the story 
 of a life "hidden with Christ in God." What that hidden life 
 really was in the person of William Wilherforce, none but himself 
 could know, and few indeed could even plausibly conjecture. But 
 even they who are the least able to solve the enigma, may acknow- 
 ledge and feel that there was some secret spring of action on which 
 his strength was altogether dependent. 
 
 It is indeed needless to allege any mystery (except as all things 
 are mysterious) to account for the more obvious phenomena. It 
 was no marvel that a man of great talents rejoiced to exercise and 
 exhibit them in the House of Commons ; or that a gentleman of 
 large estate maintained his parliamentary independence ; or that a 
 person of extraordinary powers of conversation delighted in a 
 generous hospitality ; or that so fortunate a husband, father, brother, 
 and friend, was perfectly amiable in those relations, and kind and 
 temperate, just and true, in his dealings with the outer world. 
 To the eye ranging over the mere surface of society, the master of 
 almost every well-furnished mansion appears like an undistinguish- 
 able monad in the vast and decorous company of the obliging and 
 the respectable. 
 
 But among the tasks to which frail man is subject, there is none 
 to which his unaided strength is more unequal, than that of passing 
 many years among these legitimate advantages, without ever being 
 held in bondage by their enervating influence. Horse-hair shirts 
 and a scourge for the rebellious flesh, monastic rule for the haughty 
 spirit, poverty for the proud of purse, and for self-idolators silence 
 and seclusion ! But what is the outward discipline for bim who, 
 bidden to travel on the highways of life, can take no step heaven- 
 wards, unbeset or unobstructed by wealth, power, admiration, and 
 popularity 1 ? How shall faith preserve her dominion over him to 
 whom the world is daily offering whatever can most kindle the 
 imagination, engage the understanding, or gratify ambition? 
 
 There is but one such corrective. It is to be found in that un- 
 broken communion with the indwelling God, in which Mr Wilber- 
 force habitually lived. He " endured as seeing Him who is 
 invisible," and as hearing Him who is inaudible. When most im- 
 mersed in political cares, or in social enjoyments, he invoked and 
 obeyed the voice which directed his path, while it tranquillised his 
 mind. That voice was still at hand to soften his most indignant 
 invectives, and to disarm his parliamentary polemics of all their 
 bitterness. It reduced his most impassioned statements to the 
 severe measure of truth. It chained down to many an irksome 
 study a mind disposed to flutter about every topic, and to fasten
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 4fe7 
 
 upon none. It rendered him most tolerant of honest mediocrity 
 and well-meant dulness, though he was one in whom every spark of 
 genius instantly kindled a sympathetic flash. It made the keenest of 
 critics the most charitable of judges. It confined to well-chosen 
 channels the stream of bounty which his large heart was willing to 
 pour profusely into all. It rendered every remotest interest of 
 humanity sacred to him, although he was placed in constant and 
 immediate contact with whatever could most excite his self-love or 
 his domestic affections. It enabled him to concentrate his benevo- 
 lence within the narrow precincts of his own house, or of any adjacent 
 cottage, while he was expanding his vision to the ends of the earth, 
 and to remotest posterities. It at once chastised and animated the 
 happy temperament with which he surveyed the ways and the works 
 of men, and tempered without blunting the edge of the playful wit 
 with which he depicted them. It taught him to rejoice, as a child, 
 in the presence of a Father whom he much loved and altogether 
 trusted, and whose approbation was infinitely more than an equiva- 
 lent for whatever restraint, self-denial, labour, or sacrifice, obedience 
 to His will might render necessary. 
 
 And thus were combined and reconciled the most profound sense 
 of the vanity of human pursuits, and the most lively interest in 
 them all. Obeying the precept which Mr Taylor has given to his 
 " Statesman," he observed a sabbatical day in every week, and a 
 sabbatical hour in every day. Those days and hours gave him back 
 to the world, not merely with recruited strength, but in a spirit the 
 most favourable to the right discharge of his worldly duties. Things 
 in themselves the most trivial, wearisome, or even offensive, had, in his 
 solitude, assumed a solemn interest from their connection with the 
 present or the future happiness of mankind, while the alluring 
 objects of human ambition had been brought into humiliating con- 
 trast with the great ends for which life is given, and with the im- 
 mortal hopes by which it should be sustained. Nothing can be more 
 heartfelt than the delight with which he breathed the pure air of 
 these devotional retirements. Nothing more soothing than the 
 tranquillity which they diffused over a spirit harassed with the con- 
 flicts and the vexations which track the path of all who labour in 
 the service of the commonwealth. 
 
 In such labours Mr Wilberforce was sometimes preceded or fol- 
 lowed, but was always accompanied, by that section of the Church 
 (the word, in our use of it, embraces all Christian people), which 
 has either assumed or acquired the distinctive title of " Evangelical." 
 They claimed him as their champion and leader, and not unjustly. 
 And yet the great change of character which he underwent, would
 
 488 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 be most unfairly represented as a mere passing over to their camp. 
 He was exempt from bondage to that, or to any other religious 
 party. Except in his immutable attachment to the great funda- 
 mental doctrines of the Gospel, he was very much a latitudinarian. 
 Though conforming to the ritual of the Church of England, he 
 occasionally attended the public worship of those who dissent from 
 her communion, and maintained a constant and affectionate fellow- 
 ship with many of them. He travelled the highways of life, and 
 conversed freely with all who thronged them. He knew little of 
 polemical divinity, and seemed to care for it but little. His heart 
 must quickly have overleapt the bounds of any narrow ecclesiastical 
 alliance which he might have contracted. His catholic spirit, sus- 
 tained by a ready and capacious faith, was seldom harassed by con- 
 troversy or overclouded by scepticism. No man ever sought out 
 the meaning of the sacred writers with more conscientious care, and 
 none ever acknowledged their divine authority with a more childlike 
 docility. Einding in his own bosom an echo to every doctrine and 
 every precept of the Gospel, he wisely and reverently received this 
 evidence of their truth, and instead of consuming life in a protracted 
 and still recurring scrutiny into the basis of his belief, he busied 
 himself in erecting on it a superstructure of piety and active benevo- 
 lence. Having solemnly consecrated his days to the culture and im- 
 provement of his own spiritual nature, and to the advancement of 
 human happiness, he left it to men of a less favoured destiny to de- 
 bate the government of the Churches, or to untwist the finer intrica- 
 cies of their creeds. "The reformation of manners, and the abolition 
 of the slave trade," having been deliberately selected as his appro- 
 priate province of public service, he gave up to the faithful discharge 
 of it every energy of his renovated soul, until labour, age, and in- 
 firmity dissolved his mortal prison-house, and set him free to par- 
 take of a purer and more perfect renovation. 
 
 " Seated in the open air, at the root of an old tree, in Holwood, 
 just above the steep descent into the valley of Keston," Mr Wilber- 
 force discussed with Mr Pitt the probabilities of success in a warfare 
 against the slave trade ; and rose from that conference with a settled 
 resolution to take the earliest opportunity which might present itself 
 of announcing that design to the House of Commons. 
 
 This was no sudden impulse. While yet a schoolboy at Pockling- 
 ton, he had contributed to a newspaper then published at York, a 
 letter, protesting against " the odious traffic in human flesh." That 
 early impression, from whatever source derived, had deepened with 
 increasing age. During the first six years of his parliamentary life, 
 he had instituted many inquiries into the real state of our colonial
 
 "WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 489 
 
 slavery, and had conceived and avowed the hope that he should live 
 to redress the wrongs of the African race. He had investigated this 
 gigantic evil, and had debated the arduous remedy with James 
 Ramsay, the first confessor and proto-martyr of this faith, and with 
 Ignatius Latrohe, the first of the missionaries who raised the 
 banner of the Cross against" it, and with Sir Charles and Lady 
 Middleton, who had convened, in their mansion in Kent, the first 
 council ever held in this kingdom for the gathering and conduct of 
 this new crusade. 
 
 In later days, agitation for the accomplishment of great political 
 objects has taken a place among social arts. But sixty years since, 
 it was among the inventions slumbering in the womb of time, taught 
 by no professors, and illustrated by no examples. We have lived 
 to see many of the most ancient and solid edifices, erected by the 
 wisdom of our ancestors, totter at the blast of leagues, associations, 
 speeches, reports, and editorial articles, like the towers of Jericho 
 falling before the rams' horns of Joshua. But when Mr Wilber- 
 force and his friends met to deliberate on their enterprise, the con- 
 trast between the magnitude of their design and the poverty of 
 their resources, demanded a faith scarcely inferior to that which en- 
 couraged the invaders of Palestine to assault with the sound of their 
 trumpets, the towers built up by the children of Anak to the hea- 
 vens. Truth, indeed, and justice were on their side ; and in the 
 flower of his youth, his eloquence, and his fame, Mr Pitt had given 
 the bright augury of his adhesion to their cause. But, after 
 twenty years of ceaseless controversy had rolled away, the most 
 sanguine of them was constrained to " stand in awe of the powers 
 of falsehood" and of commercial cupidity, and to acknowledge, 
 that, in effecting so great a deliverance, God would not employ the 
 rulers nor the mere rhetoricians of the world, but would use, as His 
 instruments, His own devoted servants men able to touch in the 
 bosoms of others the sacred springs of action which were working in 
 their own. 
 
 Among the foremost in this holy war, the names of Granville 
 Sharpe and Thomas Clarkson are ever to be mentioned with peculiar 
 reverence. To the former was committed the presidency of the 
 society, charged with the duty of collecting and diffusing informa- 
 tion respecting the real character of the slave trade. Mr Clarkson 
 became the zealous and indefatigable agent of that body. To Mr 
 Wilberforce was assigned the general superintendence of the cause, 
 both in and out of Parliament. 
 
 In 1 789 he first proposed the abolition of the slave trade to the 
 House of Commons, in a speech which Burke rewarded with one of 

 
 490 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 those imperishable eulogies which he alone had the skill and the 
 authority to pronounce. But a victory over Guinea merchants was 
 not to be numbered amongst the triumphs of eloquence. Unable to 
 withstand the current of popular feeling which the novelty, as 
 much as the nature, of the proposal had stirred, they sagaciously 
 resolved to await the subsidence of this unwonted enthusiasm ; 
 soliciting only a suspension of the measure until Parliament 
 should be in possession of the facts which they undertook to 
 substantiate. 
 
 To this Fabian policy, ever changing in its aspect, but uniform 
 in its design, the slave traders were indebted for the prolongation of 
 their guilty commerce. Nearly two years were worn away in the 
 examination of their witnesses ; and when Mr Wilberforce had, with 
 difficulty, succeeded in transferring the inquiry from the bar of the 
 House of Commons to the less dilatory tribunal of a Select Com- 
 mittee, he had still to struggle laboriously for permission to produce 
 testimony in refutation of the evidence of his antagonists. It was 
 not, therefore, till April, 1791, that the question of the abolition of 
 the trade was directly brought to issue ; when a proof was given of 
 the foresight with which the Guinea merchants had calculated on 
 the gradual subsidence of the public indignation. Ominous were 
 the forebodings with which the friends of Mr Wilberforce looked 
 forward to the approaching debate. By the Master of St John's 
 College, Cambridge, his position was compared to that of "Epis- 
 copius in the infamous synod of Dort ; " while John "Wesley ex- 
 horted him to proceed to the conflict as a new " Athanasius contra 
 mundum." Those divines had well interpreted the temper of the 
 tunes. The slave traders triumphed by an overwhelming majority. 
 In the political tumults of those days the voice of humanity was no 
 longer audible, and common sense had ceased to discharge its office. 
 The bad faith and fickleness of the French Government had in- 
 volved St Domingo in confusion and bloodshed ; and because the 
 elements of society had broken loose in that colony, it was judged 
 dangerous to arrest the accumulation of the materials of similar dis- 
 cord within our own ! Even Mr Pitt avowed his opinion that it was 
 wise to await more tranquil times before the slave trade should be 
 abolished. It was in vain that Mr Wilberforce urged on the 
 House of Commons, in 1792, the true inference from the calamitous 
 state of St Domingo. His proposals were again defeated. Those 
 were days in which every change was branded as a revolution, and 
 when the most sacred rules of moral or political conduct, if adduced 
 in favour of any reform, were denounced and abhorred as " French 
 principles."
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 491 
 
 Eeason, however, having gradually regained her dominion, the 
 procrastinating system of the slave traders assumed a new shape, and 
 obtained, in the person of Mr Dundas, its most formidable advocate. 
 "With perverse ingenuity, he proposed to substitute a gradual for an 
 immediate abolition ; fixing a remote period for the entire cessation 
 of the trade. Yet even in this cautious form the bill found a cold 
 reception in the House of Peers, where, after consuming the session 
 in the examination of two witnesses, their Lordships postponed the 
 measure till the following year. "With the arrival of that period, Mr 
 Wilberforce had to sustain three successive defeats. The House of 
 Commons rejected first the main proposal of an immediate abolition 
 of. the trade ; then, a motion restricting the number of slaves to be 
 annually imported into our own colonies ; and, finally, a plan for 
 prohibiting the employment of British capital in the introduction 
 of slaves into foreign settlements. His perseverance, however, 
 was not fruitless. A deep impression had been made by his 
 past efforts ; and, in 1794, the House of Commons, for the first 
 time, passed a bill of immediate abolition. The defenders of the 
 slave trade were again rescued from the impending blow by the 
 interposition of the Peers ; amongst whom a melancholy pre- 
 eminence was thenceforth to be assigned to a member of the Royal 
 House, who lived to redeem his early error, by assenting, in the 
 decline of life, to the introduction of the law for the abolition of 
 slavery. 
 
 Thus far the difficulties of the contest had chiefly arisen from the 
 influence or the arts of his enemies ; but Mr Wilberforce had now 
 to sustain the more depressing weight of the secession of one of his 
 most effective auxiliaries. Suffering under nervous debility and in- 
 fluenced by other motives, of which an explanation is to be found in 
 his " History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade," Mr Clarkson was 
 reluctantly compelled to retire from the field. With what deep 
 regret he abandoned the contest may be learnt from his own volumes ; 
 and earnest as must have been his aspiration for its success, he was 
 unable, during the eleven years which followed, to resume his place 
 amidst the champions of the cause, though he lived to witness and 
 to share in the triumph. 
 
 Providence had gifted Mr Wilberforce with greater nervous energy ; 
 and though sustaining labours not less severe, and a public respon- 
 sibility incomparably more anxious than that under which the health 
 of his colleague had given way, he returned to the conflict with un- 
 abated resolution. In 1795, and in the following year, he again 
 laboured in vain to induce the House of Commons to resume the 
 ground which they had already taken ; nor could his all-believing
 
 492 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 charity repress the honest indignation with which he records that a 
 body of his supporters, sufficient to have carried the bill, had been 
 enticed from their places in the House, by the new opera of the 
 " Two Hunchbacks," in which a conspicuous part was assigned to 
 the great vocalist of that day, Signor Portugallo. A rivalry more 
 formidable even than that of the Haymarket had now arisen. 
 Parodying his father's celebrated maxim, Mr Pitt was engaged in 
 conquering Europe in the West Indies ; and, with the acquisition of 
 new colonies, the slave trade acquired an increased extent, and its 
 supporters had obtained augmented Parliamentary interest. The 
 result was to subject Mr Wilberforce, in the debate of 1797, to a 
 defeat more signal than any of those which he had hitherto endured. 
 His opponents easily seized this opportunity to render it irreparable. 
 On the motion of Mr .Charles Ellis, an address to the Crown was 
 carried, which transferred to the legislative bodies of the different 
 colonies the task of preparing for the very measure which they had 
 leagued together to frustrate. It was with extreme difficulty, and 
 not without the most strenuous remonstrances, that Mr Wilberforce 
 dissuaded Mr Pitt from lending his support to this extravagant pro- 
 ject. To increase the value of his Transatlantic conquests, he had 
 thrown open the intercourse between our colonies and those of Spain, 
 and had offered, in the newly-acquired islands, fresh lands, on which 
 the slave traders might effect further settlements ; and though, by 
 ceaseless importunity, Mr Wilberforce obtained the revocation of 
 the first of these measures, and the suspension of the second, yet 
 the cupidity of the slave traders, and their influence in the national 
 councils, were largely increased by these new prospects of gain. 
 Their augmented powers were attested by the ill success which 
 attended Mr Wilberforce's annual motions in 1798 and 1799. 
 
 The contest had now endured for twelve years. Ten successive 
 efforts had been fruitlessly made to obtain the concurrence of the 
 Legislature in arresting this gigantic evil. Hopeless of success by 
 perseverance in the same tactics, and yet incapable of retiring from 
 the duty he had assumed, Mr Wilberforce now addressed himself to 
 the project of effecting, by a compromise, the end which seemed 
 unattainable by direct and open hostilities. The year 1800 was 
 accordingly consumed in negotiations with the chief West India 
 proprietors, of which the object was to win their concurrence in 
 limiting the duration of the trade to a period of five or at most 
 seven years. Delusive hopes of success cheered him for a while, 
 but it was ere long apparent that the phalanx of his enemies was 
 too firm to be penetrated. The peace of Amiens had brought to the 
 Court of London a minister from the French Eepublic, who en-
 
 WILLIAM WILBEEFORCE. 493 
 
 couraged the hope that it might be possible to arrange a general con- 
 vention of all the European powers for the abandonment of the 
 traffic. Long and anxious were the endeavours made by Mr \Vil- 
 berforce for maturing this project. It is needless to say that they 
 were unavailing. The season of 1801 was about to close, and the 
 end in view appeared more distant than at any former time. 
 
 Mr Addington seems to have regarded the great expedition to St 
 Domingo as a kind of sedative, which would paralyse the resistance 
 of the oppressed negroes throughout the West Indies ; and feared 
 to check the operation of this anodyne. The charm which these 
 medical analogies exercised over the then occupant of the Treasury 
 bench did not, however, extend its influence to Mr Wilberforce. 
 He announced his purpose to resume the Parliamentary contest in 
 the year 1802, when the attempt was accordingly made, though 
 under the most discouraging circumstances. The wit and eloquence 
 of Mr Canning, remonstrating against the settlement of new lands 
 in Trinidad, had been repelled by the passive resistance of the then 
 Minister, and the time occupied in this discussion had delayed, until 
 the dissolution of Parliament rendered impossible, the further pro- 
 gress of the Abolition Act. The tumult of war in the succeeding 
 year silenced every other sound ; and the advocate of the slaves 
 was condemned to a reluctant silence, whilst every voice was raised 
 in reprobation of Bonaparte, and in resentment of the insult offered 
 to Lord Whitworth. 
 
 At length the auguries of success became distinct and frequent. 
 Mr Pitt had returned to office ; the dread of Jacobinism no longer 
 haunted the public mind, but, above all, the proprietors in the 
 Caribbean Islands had made the discovery, that, by encouraging the 
 slave trade, they were creating in the planters of the conquered 
 colonies the most dangerous rivals in their monopoly of the British 
 market. The union with Ireland had added a new host of friends. 
 Not a single representative from that country withheld his assist- 
 ance. Amidst all these encouragements, Mr "Wilberforce again 
 appealed to the House of Commons, and carried the bill with over- 
 whelming majorities. Cordial were now the congratulations of his 
 friends of every class, from the aged John Newton of St Mary 
 Woolnoth, to Jeremy Bentham, whose celebrity as the most original 
 thinker of his age was then in its early dawn. But the Peers had 
 not yet yielded to the influence of Christian or Moral Philosophy. 
 " The debate," says Mr "Wilberforce's Diary, " was opened by the 
 Chancellor in a very threatening speech, because over-rating property, 
 and full of all moral blunders. He showed himself to labour with 
 feelings as if he was the legitimate guardian of property Lord
 
 494 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 Stanhope's a wild speech Lord Hawkesbury spoke honourably and 
 handsomely Westmoreland like himself, coarse and bullying, but 
 not without talent. Grenville spoke like a man of high and 
 honourable principles, who, like a truly great statesman, regarded 
 right and politic as identical." Blunders and bullying, however, 
 prevailed ; and the question was adjourned to the following session. 
 
 Before its arrival Lord Brougham, then travelling on the Con- 
 tinent as an American, and even " venturing to pass a week in the 
 same house with several French Generals," had offered Mr Wilber- 
 force his assistance in pursuing various collateral inquiries through- 
 out Holland and Germany, and in " the great scenes of bondage (as 
 it is called) Poland, Russia, and Hungary." To this most potent 
 ally many others were added. Mr Stephen and Mr Macaulay were 
 unremitting in the use of the pen and the press. The classical 
 knowledge of Mr Robert Grant was put under contribution, to 
 illustrate the state of slavery in the ancient world ; and even the 
 daughters of Lord Muncaster were enlisted in the service of method- 
 ising the contents of all African travels, ancient and modern. High 
 and sanguine as were the hopes of Mr Wilberforce, he had yet 
 another disappointment to sustain. The House of Commons of 1805, 
 receding from their former resolutions, rejected his bill, and drew 
 from him, in his private journals, language of distress and pain such 
 as no former defeat had been able to extort. 
 
 The death of Mr Pitt approached ; an event which the most calm 
 and impartial judgment must now regard as the necessary precursor 
 of the liberation of Africa. For seventeen years, since the com- 
 mencement of the contest, he had guided the counsels of this country. 
 Successful in almost every other Parliamentary conflict, and triumph- 
 ing over the most formidable antagonist, he had been compelled, by 
 the Dundases, and Jenkinsons, and Roses, who on every other 
 subject quailed under his eye, to go to the grave without obliterating 
 that which he himself had denounced as the deepest stain on our 
 national character, and the most enormous guilt recorded in the 
 history of mankind. During that long period, millions of innocent 
 victims had perished. Had he perilled his political existence on the 
 issue, no rational man can doubt that an amount of guilt, of misery, 
 of disgrace, and of loss, would have been spared to England and to 
 the civilised world, such as no other man ever had it in his power to 
 arrest. 
 
 The political antagonists of Mr Pitt were men of a different 
 temper ; and although in the Cabinet of Mr Fox there were not 
 wanting those who opposed him on this subject, yet it was an 
 opposition which, in the full tide of success, he could afford to
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 495 
 
 disregard and to pardon. Had it endangered for a single session the 
 abolition of the slave trade, these names, eminent as one at least of 
 them was, would infallibly have been erased from the list of his 
 Administration. Mr Fox's Ministry had scarcely taken their places, 
 when Lord Grenville introduced into the House of Lords, and 
 speedily carried, two bills, of which the first abolished the slave trade 
 with all foreign powers, and the second forbade the employment in 
 that traffic of any British shipping which had not already been 
 engaged in it ; whilst the House of Commons resolved that the slave 
 trade was " contrary to the principles of justice, humanity, and 
 sound policy ; and that they would proceed to abolish it with* all 
 practicable expedition." Faithfully was this pledge redeemed. The 
 death of Mr Fox did not even delay its fulfilment. Early in 1807 
 that great statesman, to whom at the distance of twenty-six years it 
 was reserved to propose the abolition of slavery itself, introduced 
 into the House of Commons a bill which placed on the British 
 statute-book the final condemnation of the trade in slaves. Amidst 
 the acclamations of Parliament, the enthusiastic congratulations of 
 his friends, and the applauses of the world, Mr Wilberforce witnessed 
 the success of the great object of his life with emotions, and in a 
 spirit, which could not have found admission into a mind less pure 
 and elevated than his own. The friendly shouts of victory which 
 arose on every side were scarcely observed or heeded in the delight- 
 ful consciousness of having rendered to mankind a service of un- 
 equalled magnitude. He retired to prostrate himself before the 
 Giver of all good things, in profound humility and thankfulness, 
 wondering at the unmerited bounty of God, who had carried him 
 through twenty years of unremitting labour, and bestowed on him 
 a name of imperishable glory. 
 
 There are those who have disputed his title to the station thus 
 assigned to him. Amongst the most recent is to be numbered one 
 whose esteem is of infinitely too high value to be lightly dis- 
 regarded, and whose judgment will carry with it no common author- 
 ity. Mr Serjeant Talfourd, in his " Life of Charles Lamb," refer- 
 ring to an interview which took place between Lamb and Mr 
 Clarkson, uses the following expressions : " There he also met 
 with the true annihilator of the slave trade, Thomas Clarkson, who 
 was then enjoying a necessary respite from his stupendous labours in 
 a cottage on the borders of TJlswater. Lamb had no taste for ora- 
 torical philanthropy, but he felt the grandeur and simplicity of Clark- 
 son's character." 
 
 The contrast which is thus drawn between "the true annihil- 
 ator " of the slave trade, and the oratorical philanthropist who de-
 
 496 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 claimed against it, might provoke and justify a retaliation, from 
 which we judge it wise, because charitable, to abstain. Let it 
 rather be acknowledged that Mr Talfourd's disrelish for oratorical 
 philanthropy is a reasonable and honest aversion. But neither let 
 it be concealed that the " philanthropy of agitation " is not gener- 
 ally entitled to much higher esteem. It is for the common good 
 that the merit of all such services should be brought down from 
 the illuminated pinnacles of hyperbole, to the level of unadorned 
 truth. 
 
 We claim no place for Mr Wilberforce among the heroes of 
 benevolence, on the ground of his parliamentary labours in the 
 cause of Africa. Why not frankly admit, what everybody knows, 
 that the conduct of any great cause in the House of Commons is 
 contended for by the members of it with eager rivalry, and that the 
 celebrity and the influence which wait on the successful competitor, 
 are such as might vanquish any common amount of apathy or of 
 idleness. A gentleman of fortune may give himself up to labour 
 during half his life in that assembly to emancipate a continent, or 
 to repeal a corn law, without making one formidable enemy, or 
 losing a single friend, or missing one night's rest, or foregoing a 
 solitary dinner. 
 
 Neither is the noble army of martyrs recruited from that busy class, 
 who, taking for their point of departure some central committee in 
 London, and for their periphery the circuit of our provincial cities, 
 and for their conveyance our commodious public vehicles, and for 
 their solace much local hospitality, and for their support a reasonable 
 salary, are thus enabled to earn the applauses of crowds, and the 
 eulogies of poets. 
 
 The fact is, and we may all as well avow it, that the moral 
 sublime does not belong to our age and country. The labours 
 which the learned Serjeant admires as "stupendous," were pro- 
 bably far less " stupendous " during each of the eight or nine 
 years of their continuance, than those of his biographer in his cham- 
 bers or on his Oxford circuit. " The true annihilator of the slave 
 trade " had, during the eleven last and most irksome years of the con- 
 test, just as much, and just as little, to do with it as Mr Talfourd 
 himself. 
 
 But woe be to them whose joy is in the invasion of great names, 
 and in the overthrow of great reputations ! William Wilberforce 
 was one of the legitimate heirs of immortality, although his path is in 
 appearance the same with that which has since been trodden by our 
 Daniel O'Connells and our Richard Cobdens. Thomas Clarkson is 
 a name to be for ever loved and honoured, despite the vulgar herd
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 497 
 
 who have imitated and rivalled his course of public service. The 
 just and genuine praise of both is the same. Their exertions for the 
 abolition of the slave trade were but in each as a single strain in 
 concord with that love to God and love to man which, in the heart 
 of each, rose in one unbroken harmony, from early youth to extreme 
 old age. Then: common title to enduring fame is, that in a gracious 
 acknowledgment and reward of those holy offices, God himself as- 
 signed to them, not the most arduous, and certainly not the most 
 self-denying, but the foremost places in that enterprise an enterprise, 
 the memory of which could be preserved to the remotest times only 
 by being impersonated in some illustrious names, and therefore as- 
 sociated with theirs, not by any human caprice or fortuitous acci- 
 dent, but by the selection and appointment of the Master they 
 served. And therefore will William Wilberforce be remembered 
 with affectionate reverence as long as the history and the language of 
 England shall endure, maugre such sarcasm as that which we have 
 quoted; and Thomas Clarksonwill be honoured by our latest posterity, 
 in defiance of the extravagance of his eulogists, and though degraded 
 by the citizens of London in their Guildhall to the level of Beckford, 
 the insolent poltroon who stands beside him there. 
 
 It was not in the nature of Mr Wilberforce to concentrate all his 
 thoughts on this, or on any other single design, however magnificent. 
 He could not be a passive spectator of any undertaking, which had 
 the welfare of mankind for its object. " God has set before me the 
 reformation of my country's manners," was one part of the solemn 
 self-dedication of his twenty-seventh year, and he descended to the 
 grave with the unalterable conviction, that such was the will of God 
 concerning him. 
 
 The forty-seven years which intervened between those epochs, 
 embrace the most momentous era of modern history. Within that 
 period, greater changes occurred in the internal economy of Great 
 Britain, than had been witnessed in any two preceding centuries. 
 Agriculture, commerce, manufactures, revenue, and population ex- 
 panded with an unexampled elasticity. Never before had the 
 material world been made to pay so large a tribute to the material 
 wants of mankind. Under the half-magical power of the steam- 
 engine, works which would have baffled the muscular strength of 
 all the inhabitants of the globe united, were performed in a 
 narrow district of this narrow island, with an ease, a precision, and 
 a rapidity, emulating some of the mighty operations of nature. 
 Wealth, such as avarice had scarcely pictured in her dreams, was 
 accumulated in those centres of mechanical industry, and the higher 
 class of English society, commercial as well as noble, revelled in a 
 
 32
 
 498 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 sumptuousness of living, for which a description or an example 
 could be found nowhere but in the fabulous East. 
 
 Mr Wilberforce was hardly a far-sighted philosopher ; yet behind 
 this brilliant spectacle, his prescience saw the lowering of that storm, 
 the approach of which is now confessed by the forebodings of every 
 thoughtful man in Europe. His meditations and his discourse con- 
 tinually pointed to the still widening gulf between the two extremes 
 of English society. He mourned over the coming conflict between 
 vice, ignorance, poverty, and discontent on the one side, and selfish- 
 ness, sensuality, hardness of heart, and corruption on the other 
 between our loathsome cellars and our luxuriant palaces. But it 
 was not in his nature to abandon himself to that or to any other 
 ineffectual grief. 
 
 To stay the advance of the plague, he addressed himself to the pro- 
 motion of every scheme which ingenuity, his own or others, could 
 devise for the religious, and intellectual, and social improvement, 
 either of the rich or of the poor. While Watt and Arkwright 
 were astounding the world with the miracles which mechanical 
 art can produce by the aid of commercial capital, Mr Wilber- 
 force was aiding Bell and Lancaster, under the conduct of all the 
 churches, conforming or non-conforming, to develope the prodigies 
 of mutual instruction. Factories did not spring up more rapidly in 
 Leeds and Manchester than schemes of benevolence beneath his 
 roof ; and though many years have passed since the throng which 
 daily gathered there has been dispersed, it is still impossible to re- 
 vive the remembrance of those strange assemblages, without a smile 
 which will check for a moment the more serious feelings with which 
 they are associated. 
 
 In the study might be seen the projector of the Bible Society, 
 who, in virtue of his privilege of the entree, was seated near the 
 table, upon and beneath which, stood piles of subscription lists, 
 plans, and reports from countless kindred associations. Eloquent 
 deputies from Hibernian schools were, meanwhile, restlessly ex- 
 pecting their audience in the drawing-room. In the ante-chamber, 
 the advocates for an improved prison discipline were themselves 
 undergoing a sort of temporary imprisonment. But it was in the 
 spacious library that philanthropic speculation rose to its highest 
 tide. There were ladies anxious to explain their plans of visiting 
 the sick, Quakers under a concern for transported convicts, the 
 founders of savings banks, missionaries from Serampore and the 
 Red River, and everywhere conspicuous amidst the crowd, the 
 ever-busy and well-satisfied countenance of his excellent friend 
 " Mendicity Martin," so called from his presiding over the whole
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 499 
 
 department of mendicancy in this great eleemosynary government. 
 And then would emerge from his closet Mr Wilberforce, the prime 
 minister of that disjointed state, passing from one group to another, 
 not without a smile, which revealed to the initiated his involuntary- 
 perception of the comic aspect of the scene, but still more clearly 
 disclosing by his voice, his gestures, and his kindling eye, the 
 generous resentment, the glowing admiration, or the tender sym- 
 pathy with which he listened to one and another tale of injustice, 
 of self-denial, or of woe, until, gradually, the Avhole levy had with- 
 drawn, not merely forgiving their host the waste of the morning, 
 but more devoted than ever to a leader, whose exquisite courtesy 
 would have atoned for anything, even if his mature wisdom, his 
 almost feminine tenderness, and his childlike gaiety, had not swept 
 away every less delightful remembrance. 
 
 There are those who can smile with him at the grotesque appear- 
 ance occasionally assumed by the vast machinery established amongst 
 us for the propagation of Christian knowledge and for the relief of 
 human wretchedness, but who never glow, as he did, with faith in 
 the principle, hope of the success, or love for the agents of that great 
 voluntary system. And yet there is no other direction in which it is 
 easy to regard the future destinies of England with complacency, or 
 even with composure. Amidst the sins and the miseries of our land, 
 it is no light solace to remember, that in every city and village, and 
 in almost every private family in the enjoyment of competency, some 
 steady effort is made to diffuse the light of the gospel, and to in- 
 crease the sum of temporal comforts amongst all over whom the do- 
 minion of Great Britain extends, or to whom her influence reaches. 
 But the aged remember when, as yet, these things were not, and were 
 not anticipated. 
 
 Of the schemes of public benevolence which were matured or pro- 
 jected during the half-century which followed the peace of 1783, 
 there was scarcely one of any magnitude in which Mr Wilberforce 
 was not largely engaged. Whether churches and clergyman were to 
 be multiplied, or the Scriptures circulated, or missions sent to the 
 ends of the earth, or national education established, or the condition 
 of the poor improved, or Ireland civilised, or good discipline estab- 
 lished in gaols, or obscure genius and piety enabled to emerge, or in 
 whatever other form philanthropy and patriotism laboured for the 
 improvement of his country, or of the world, his sanction, his 
 eloquence, and his advice, were still regarded as indispensable to 
 success. Xo one man, however, nor any one hundred men, could 
 have assumed the actual superintendence of all the complicated 
 alluirs in which he was thus immersed. To have conducted, or 
 
 32*
 
 500 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 understood, or even to have remembered them all, would have been 
 to live in the habitual performance of a miracle. His real position 
 was that of a minister of public charity, holding his office by popular 
 acclamation, and delegating the more toilsome details of that laborious 
 administration to the friends and the partisans who rejoiced to co- 
 operate with him. He maintained his authority over them by their 
 affectionate reverence, by his own unfailing bounty, and by the spell 
 which he exercised over every one whom he employed and trusted. 
 No department in the state was ever so zealously served, or so well 
 administered. Yet it is impossible to exhibit in any connected nar- 
 rative the series and succession of these labours, which have no other 
 connection or mutual dependency than that which they derive from 
 the identity of the agent, and from the unity of his general design. 
 The biographers of Mr Wilberforce have had no romantic tale to 
 tell, nor have they been required to exhibit human virtue on any 
 gigantic or inimitable scale. In promoting his schemes of beneficence, 
 Mr Wilberforce moved with the graceful freedom which seemed to 
 exclude every notion of effort or of self-denial. Even in his most 
 irksome works of mercy, the refined ease of a gentleman attended 
 him, for to be turgid or ostentatious was as impossible to him as to 
 be unfeeling. He would render the lowliest offices of personal kind- 
 ness to his domestic servants, or to any neighbouring cottager, with 
 the same flowing courtesy with which he interchanged the amenities 
 of society among his equals. During many years of his life, he de- 
 voted to acts of munificence from a third to a fourth part of his an- 
 nual income, and the money so freely given was ever accompanied 
 by some greeting so kindly or so gay, as to soothe every painful 
 sense of obligation. 
 
 It must be confessed, however, that the joyful promptitude with 
 which he rendered every other service of love, forsook him when 
 the press was to be the instrument of his philanthropy. To build 
 up a literary edifice, in which chapter was to rise upon chapter, in 
 architectural proportion, was a task which suited him as ill as the 
 labours of the collier would agree with the taste of an aeronaut. 
 Yet the year 1797 witnessed the completion of an 8vo volume 
 from his pen, bearing on its front the title of "A Practical View of 
 the prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the 
 Higher and Middle Classes of this Country contrasted with real 
 Christianity." 
 
 Tradition informs us, that this book was written under the roof 
 of two of the dearest and wisest of his friends, who had resort to 
 many affectionate artifices to promote this unusual concentration of 
 his discursive thoughts. Sometimes, when passages of peculiar
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 501 
 
 energy burst, in all their native warmth, from his lips, the lady of 
 the house would seize the happy moment, and become herself his 
 amanuensis. Sometimes she would gather up the scattered leaves 
 with which her guest had enriched her drawing-room, or her con- 
 servatory, and when the hour seemed propitious to composition, 
 would purposely leave him in an undisturbed and welcome solitude. 
 The story (pleasantly exaggerated perhaps) concludes with the state- 
 ment, that when, at length, she saw the volume complete upon her 
 table, she declared herself a convert to the opinion, that a fortuitous 
 concourse of atoms might, by some felicitous chance, combine 
 themselves into the most perfect of forms, a moss-rose, or a bird of 
 paradise. 
 
 Such a treatise, by so conspicuous a member of the House of 
 Commons, could not but excite a lively interest at the time of its 
 appearance. But if there be sincerity in this world, it is in the 
 selection of the books we purchase, and neither rank nor any other 
 accident, in the circumstances of any author, ever yet produced 
 the sale of fifty editions of so large a work within the same num- 
 ber of years. It was little marvellous that ecclesiastics of every 
 rank and section greeted with the loudest applause the advent of 
 an ally at once so powerful and so unexpected. But that can have 
 been no common production, which compelled the author of " The 
 Pursuits of Literature " to throw aside his stilts, and to pour out a 
 heartfelt tribute of praise in his unpolluted mother tongue. Still 
 less is it possible to question the inherent life and energy of an 
 appeal, which drew from Edmund Burke his grateful acknowledg- 
 ments for the solace shed by it over the last two days of his event- 
 ful life. 
 
 Yet they who shall search this book for deep theology, or pro- 
 found investigation, will be disappointed, "Philosophy," says 
 Abraham Tucker, " may be styled the art of marshalling the ideas 
 in the understanding, and religion that of disciplining the imagin- 
 ation." In the first of these arts Mr Wilberforce did not excel ; 
 in the second he has scarcely ever been surpassed. The first three 
 chapters of his work are evidently inferior to the rest. He is 
 there upon a debatable land, contrasting the inspired text with 
 the prevalent opinions of his age on some points of Christian 
 doctrine. The accuracy of his own interpretations, or rather of 
 those which are received by that part of the Church of England 
 usually designated as Evangelical, being assumed throughout these 
 discussions, they will scarcely convince such as read the New Testa- 
 ment in a different sense. But when he emerges from these defiles 
 and enters upon broader ground, comprising the precepts of revela-
 
 502 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 tion with the conventional morality of the world's favoured children, 
 he speaks (for it is throughout a spoken rather than a written lan- 
 guage) with a persuasive energy which "breathes the very spirit of 
 the inspired volume. 
 
 Here all is the mature result of profound meditation ; and his 
 thoughts, if not always methodical and compact, are at least always 
 poured out in words so earnest and affectionate, that philanthropy 
 never yet assumed a more appropriate or a more eloquent style. It 
 is the expostulation of a brother. Unwelcome truth is delivered 
 with scrupulous fidelity, and yet with a tenderness which demon- 
 strates that the monitor feels the pain which he reluctantly inflicts. 
 It is this tone of human sympathy breathing in every page which 
 constitutes the essential charm of this book ; and it is to the 
 honour of our common nature that we are all disposed to love best 
 that teacher, who, with the deepest compassion for our sorrows, has 
 the least indulgence for the errors or the faults by which they have 
 been occasioned. 
 
 Whatever objections may have been raised to Mr Wilberforce's 
 theological opinions, there is but one which can be stated to the 
 exegetical part of his treatise. It is, that he has erected a standard 
 too pure and too sublime for this world's use, and proposes a scheme 
 of Utopian perfection which is calculated, by discouraging hope, to 
 repress exertion. The obvious answer is, that the design of every 
 rule which can be given for the conduct of life is to afford an accur- 
 ate measure of our deflection from the path of duty, and a trust- 
 worthy guide for our return. Any system of religion or ethics which 
 tolerated the slightest compromise with moral evil, would be so far 
 subversive of its own purpose ; although it is from the general 
 prevalence of moral evil that such systems derive their existence and 
 their value. To mark distinctly the departure of the luxurious, 
 busy, care-worn, and ambitious age to which he belonged, from the 
 theory and the practice of Christian morality, was the task which 
 Mr Wilberforce proposed to himself. Never were the sensuality, 
 the gloom, and the selfishness which fester below the polished 
 surface of society, brought into more vivid contrast with the faith, 
 and hope, and charity, which in their combination form the Chris- 
 tian character ; and never was that contrast drawn with a firmer 
 hand, with a more tender spirit, or with a purer aspiration for the 
 happiness of mankind. 
 
 To all these labours for the benefit of the world, were added others, 
 addressed, though less directly, to the same end, and undertaken and 
 pursued in a similar spirit. In his political career, Mr Wilberforce 
 never ceased to act and to speak as one to whom Providence had
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 503 
 
 confided the sacred trust of advancing the moral character and pro- 
 moting the welfare of his age and nation. 
 
 As a public speaker, he enjoyed great and well-merited celebrity: 
 But it was not in the House of Commons that his powers in this 
 kind were exhibited to the greatest advantage. In all the deliber- 
 ations of Parliament may be discerned a tacit reference to the Eoyal 
 citation which has brought together the two Houses "for the de- 
 spatch of divers weighty and urgent affairs." The knights and bur- 
 gesses are emphatically men of business, and have but little indul- 
 gence for anything which tasks the understanding, addresses itself to 
 the heart, or elevates the imagination ; least of all for an ostenta- 
 tious display of the resources of the speaker's mind. He who can 
 contribute a pertinent fact, or a weighty argument, may safely re- 
 pose in the region of the bathos. The aspirant for fame must excel 
 in perspicuity of statement, in promptitude in the exposure or in- 
 vention of sophistry, and in a ready though abstemious use of wit, 
 ridicule, and sarcasm. 
 
 In these requisites for success Mr Wilberforce was deficient. He 
 had not much statistical knowledge, nor was he familiar with any 
 branch of Political Economy. His argumentation was not usually 
 perspicuous, and was seldom energetic. The habit of digression, 
 the parenthetical structure of his periods, and the minute qualifica- 
 tions suggested by his reverence for truth, impeded the flow of his 
 discourse, and frequently obscured its design. His exquisite per- 
 ception of the ridiculous kept him in the exercise of habitual self- 
 denial, and the satire which played upon his countenance was 
 suppressed by his universal charity, before it could form itself 
 into language. With these disadvantages he was still a great 
 Parliamentary speaker ; and there were occasions when, borne by 
 some sudden impulse, or carried by diligent preparation, over the 
 diffuseness which usually encumbered him, he delighted and subdued 
 his hearers. 
 
 His reputation in the House of Commons rested, however, chiefly 
 upon other grounds. In that assembly, any one speaks with im- 
 mense advantage whose character, station, or presumed knowledge is 
 such as to give importance to his opinions. The dogmas of some 
 men are of incomparably more value there than the logic of others ; 
 and no member, except the leaders of the great contending parties, 
 addressed the House with an authority equal to that of Mr Wilber- 
 force. The homage rendered to his personal character, his command 
 over a small but a compact party, his representation of the county of 
 York, the confidence of the great religious bodies in every part of 
 England, and, above all, his independent neutrality, gave to his
 
 504 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 suffrage an almost unexampled value. It was usually delivered with 
 a demeanour of conscious dignity, unalloyed by the slightest tinge of 
 arrogance, and contrasting oddly enough with the insignificance of 
 his slight and shapeless person. Yet the spell he exercised was 
 partly drawn from still another source. Parliamentary eloquence is 
 essentially colloquial ; and, when most embellished or sustained, is 
 rather prolonged discourse than oratory properly so called. It was 
 by a constant, perhaps an unavoidable, observance of this tone, that 
 Mr Wilberforce exercised the charm which none could resist, but 
 which many were unable to explain. His speeches in the House of 
 Commons bore the closest resemblance to his familiar conversation. 
 There was the same earnest sincerity of manner, the same natural 
 and varied cadences, the same animation and ease, and the same tone 
 of polished society ; and while his affectionate, lively, and graceful 
 talk flowed on without the slightest appearance of effort or study, 
 criticism itself scarcely perceived, or at least excused, the redundancy 
 of his language. 
 
 But, as we have said, it was not in Parliament that his powers as 
 a public speaker had their highest exercise. His habitual trains of 
 thought, and the feelings which he most deeply cherished, could 
 rarely find utterance in that scene of strife and turmoil At the 
 hustings, where the occasion justified the use of a more didactic 
 style, there was much simple majesty in the uncompromising avowal 
 of his principles, and in the admonitions suggested by them. He 
 there applied the grave eloquence of the pulpit to secular uses. But 
 it was in the great assemblages held for religious and charitable ob- 
 jects that the current of his eloquence moved with the greatest 
 impetus and volume. In them he at once felt his way to the hearts 
 of his eager and delighted hearers. In the fulness of the charity 
 which believeth all things, giving credit to the multitude for 
 feelings as pure and benevolent as his own, he possessed the power 
 of gracefully and decorously laying aside the reserve which habit- 
 ually shrouded from the irreverent and profane the more secret and 
 cherished feelings of his heart. Nothing was ever more singular, or 
 less framed upon any previous model of eloquence, than were some 
 of those addresses in which the chastened style of the House of 
 Commons (of all assemblies the most fastidious) was employed to 
 give utterance to thoughts which, though best becoming the deepest 
 retirement, retained, even in these crowded scenes, their delicacy not 
 less than their beauty. The most ardent of his expressions bore the 
 impress of indubitable sincerity, and of calm and sober conviction ; 
 and were instantly distinguished by the instinct of his hearers from 
 the less genuine enthusiasm of others who dissolved their meaning
 
 WILLIAM WILBEEFORCE. 505 
 
 in ecstasy, and soared beyond the reach of human comprehension 
 into the third heavens of artificial rapture. It was an example per- 
 haps as full of danger as of interest. Not a few are the offensive 
 imitations Avhich have been attempted of a model which could be 
 followed successfully, or even innocently, by none whose bosoms 
 did not really burn with the same heavenly affections, who did not 
 practise the same severe observance of truth, or whose taste had not 
 been refined to the same degree of sensibility. 
 
 No part of Mr Wilberforce's biography will be read with greater 
 interest than that which describes his political career. Holding for 
 forty-three years a conspicuous place in the House of Commons, the 
 current of public affairs, as it flowed past him, reflected his character 
 in a thousand different forms ; and exhibited, on the most tumult- 
 uous theatre of action, the influence of those sacred principles, with 
 the workings of which we are for the most part conversant only in 
 more quiet and secluded scenes. 
 
 " From any one truth all truth may be inferred," a Baconian 
 text, from which certain commentators of the last century concluded, 
 that he who possessed a Bible might dispense with Grotius and with 
 Locke ; and that all other writings should disappear at the approach 
 of the Scriptures, as they had once vanished at the presence of the 
 Koran. The opinion which precisely reverses this doctrine is 
 recommended by less ingenuity, and by no better logic. Mr Wilber- 
 force was far too wise a man to imagine that any revelation from God 
 could be designed to supersede the duty of patient research into all 
 other sources of knowledge. But neither did he ever reject the 
 vast body of ethical precepts delivered by Divine inspiration, as 
 irrelevant to the political questions with which he was daily con- 
 versant. He invariably brought every conclusion drawn from other 
 studies to the test of their consistency with the sacred oracles. 
 They supplied him with an ordinate by which to measure every 
 curve. They gave him what most public men egregiously want, 
 the firm hold of a body of unchanging opinions. In his case this 
 advantage was peculiarly momentous. His neglected education, his 
 inaptitude for severe and continuous mental labour, the strength of 
 his sympathies, and his strong personal attachment to Mr Pitt, all 
 seemed to give the promise of a ductile, vacillating, uncertain course. 
 Yet in reality no man ever pursued in Parliament a career more 
 entirely guided by fixed principles, or more frequently at variance 
 with his habitual inclinations. His connections, both public and 
 private, not less than his natural temper, disposed him to that line 
 of policy which, in our days, assumes the title of " conservative ; " 
 yet his conduct was almost invariably such as is now distinguished
 
 506 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 by the epithets " liberal and reforming." A Tory by predilection, 
 he was in action a Whig. His heart was with Mr Pitt ; but on all 
 the cardinal questions of the times, his vote was given to Mr Fox. 
 
 This conflict of sentiment with principle did not, however, com- 
 mence in the earlier days of Mr Pitt's administration ; for the mortal 
 foe of Jacobinism entered the House of Commons as a Parliamentary 
 reformer; and Mr Wilberforce executed a rapid journey from Nice 
 to London in the winter of 1784 to support, by his eloquence and 
 his vote, the Eeform Bill which his friend introduced in the session 
 of that year. The following broken sentences from his diary record 
 the result : " At Pitt's all day it goes on well sat up late chat- 
 ting with Pitt his hopes of the country and noble patriotic heart 
 to town Pitt's House Parliamentary reform terribly disap- 
 pointed and beat extremely fatigued spoke extremely ill but com- 
 mended called at Pitt's met poor Wyvil." 
 
 Of this " ill spoken" but "commended speech," the following sen- 
 tence is preserved : " The consequence of this measure," he said, 
 " will be that the freedom of opinion will be restored, and party 
 connections in great measure vanish, for party on one side begets 
 party on the other ; " a prophecy which, rightly understood, is 
 perceptibly advancing towards its fulfilment. 
 
 The ill success of Mr Pitt's proposal did not damp the zeal of Mr 
 Wilberforce. He introduced into the House of Commons, and even 
 succeeded in carrying there, two of the most important enactments 
 of the Eeform Bill, in which, at the distance of nearly half a century, 
 Lord Grey obtained the reluctant concurrence of the Peers. One of 
 these measures provided for a general registration of voters ; the 
 other for holding the poll, at the same time, in several different 
 parts of the same county. 
 
 From the commencement of the war with France is to be dated 
 the dissolution of the political alliance which had, till then, been 
 maintained with little interruption between Mr Wilberforce and Mr 
 Pitt. Though partaking more deeply than most men of the preva- 
 lent abhorrence of the revolutionary doctrines of that day, Mr Wil- 
 berforce's resistance to the war was decided and persevering. A 
 written message from Mr Pitt, delivered on the first debate on that 
 question, " assuring him that his speaking then might do irreparable 
 mischief, and promising that he should have another opportunity 
 before war should be declared," defeated his purpose of protest- 
 ing publicly against the approaching hostilities. Accident prevented 
 the redemption of Mr Pitt's pledge, but Mr Wilberforce's purposes 
 remained unshaken. "Our Government," he says, in a letter on 
 this subject, " had been for some months before the breaking out of
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 507 
 
 the war negotiating with the principal European powers, for the 
 purpose of obtaining a joint representation to France, assuring her 
 that if she would formally engage to keep within her limits, and not 
 molest her neighbours, she should be suffered to settle her own 
 internal government and constitution without interference. I never 
 was so earnest with Mr Pitt on any other occasion as I was in my 
 entreaties, before the war broke out, that he would openly declare in. 
 the House of Commons that he had been, and then was, negotiating 
 this treaty. I urged on him that the declaration might possibly 
 produce an immediate effect in France, where it was manifest there 
 prevailed an opinion that we were meditating some interference with 
 their internal affairs, and the restoration of Louis to his throne. At 
 all events, I hoped that in the first lucid interval, France would see 
 how little reason there was for continuing the war with Great 
 Britain ; and at least, the declaration must silence all but the most 
 determined oppositionist in this country. How far this expectation 
 would have been realised you may estimate by Mr Fox's language 
 when Mr Pitt, at my instance, did make the declaration last winter 
 (1799). 'If,' he said, 'the Eight Honourable Gentleman had 
 made the declaration now delivered, to France, as well as to Eussia, 
 Austria, and Prussia, I should have nothing more to say or to 
 desire.' " 
 
 Experience and reflection confirmed these original impressions. 
 After the war had continued for a year, " Mr Wilberforce was en- 
 gaged in making up his mind cautiously and maturely, and, there- 
 fore, slowly, as to the best conduct to be observed by Great Britain 
 in the present critical emergency." With what a severe self-examina- 
 tion he was accustomed to conduct these inquiries, may be learnt from 
 an entry made at that period in his private journal. " It is a proof 
 to me of my secret ambition, that though I foresee how much I 
 shall suffer in my feelings throughout from differing from Pitt, and 
 how indifferent a figure I shall most likely make, yet that motives 
 of ambition will insinuate themselves. Give me, Lord, a true 
 sense of the comparative value of earthly and of heavenly things ; 
 this will render me sober-minded, and fix my affections on things 
 above." 
 
 Such was the solemn preparation with which he approached this 
 momentous question, and moved in the session of 1794 an amend- 
 ment to the address, recommending a more pacific policy. The 
 failure of that attempt did not shake his purpose; for after the 
 interval of a few days he voted with Mr Grey on a direct motion 
 for the re-establishment of peace. The genuine self-denial with 
 which this submission to a clear sense of duty was attended, Mr
 
 508 WILLIAM -WILBERFORCE. 
 
 Wilberforce has thus touchingly described : " No one who has not 
 seen a good deal of public life, and felt how difficult and painful it 
 is to differ widely from those with whom you wish to agree, can 
 judge at what an expense of feeling such duties are performed. 
 Wednesday, February 4, dined at Lord Camden's. Pepper, and 
 Lady Arden, Steele, &c. I felt queer, and all day out of spirits 
 wrong ! but hurt by the idea of Pitt's alienation. 12th, party of 
 the old firm at the Speaker's; I not there." 
 
 Mr Pitt's alienation was not the only, nor the most severe, penalty 
 which Mr Wilberforce had to pay on this occasion. The sarcasms 
 of Windham, the ironical compliments of Burke, a cold reception 
 from the Bang, and even Fox's congratulation upon his approach- 
 ing alliance with the Opposition, might have been endured. But it 
 was more hard to bear the rebukes, however tenderly conveyed, of 
 his friend and early guide, the Dean of Carlisle ; the reproaches of 
 the whole body of his clerical allies for the countenance which they 
 conceived him to have given to the enemies of religion and of order ; 
 and the earnest remonstrances of many of his most powerful sup- 
 porters in Yorkshire. The temper so accessible to all kindly in- 
 fluences was, however, sustained by the invigorating voice of an ap- 
 proving conscience. He resumed his pacific proposals in the spring 
 of 1795, and though still defeated, it was by a decreasing majority. 
 Before the close of that year, Mr Pitt himself had become a convert 
 to the opinions of his friend. The war had ceased to be popular, 
 and Lord Malmesbury's negotiation followed. The failure of that 
 attempt at length convinced Mr Wilberforce that the war was in- 
 evitable ; and thenceforward his opposition to it ceased. Yet, on 
 the renewal of hostilities in 1803, he joined Mr Fox in opposing 
 the ministry, not merely with his vote, but with a speech, which he 
 subsequently published. 
 
 The impeachment of Lord Melville brought Mr Wilberforce into 
 a direct and painful hostility to those with whom he had lived in 
 youthful intimacy, and who still retained their hold on his heart. 
 Mr Pitt was still his chosen friend; Lord Melville had been his 
 early companion. But though compelled to watch the movements 
 of the "fascinating eye" and "the agitated countenance" turned 
 reproachfully to him from the Treasury Bench, he delivered, on this 
 occasion, one of the most memorable of his Parliamentary speeches, 
 in which the sternest principles of public morality were so touch- 
 ingly combined with compassion for the errors he condemned, that 
 the effect was irresistible ; and the casting vote of the Speaker can 
 scarcely be said with greater truth to have determined the decision 
 of the House. Nothing more truly in the spirit of the pure and
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 509 
 
 lofty principles by which he was guided, is recorded of him, than 
 his defence to the charge of inconsistency for declining to join the 
 deputation which carried up to the King the subsequent address for 
 the removal of Lord Melville from the Eoyal Councils. " I am a 
 little surprised," he said, " that it should be imputed as a fault to 
 any that they did not accompany the procession to St James's. I 
 should have thought that men's own feelings might have suggested 
 to them that it was a case in which the heart might be permitted to 
 give a lesson to the judgment. My country might justly demand 
 that, in my decision on Lord Melville's conduct, I should be governed 
 by the rules of justice, and the principles of the constitution, without 
 suffering party considerations, personal friendship, or any extrinsic 
 motive whatever, to interfere ; that, in all that was substantial, I 
 should deem myself as in the exercise of a judicial office. But when 
 the sentence of the law is past, is not that sufficient ? Am I to join 
 in the execution of it ? Is it to be expected of me that I am to 
 stifle the natural feelings of the heart, and not- even to shed a tear 
 over the very sentence I am pronouncing ? I know not what 
 Spartan virtue or stoical pride might require ; but I know that I 
 am taught a different, ay, and a better, lesson by a greater than 
 either Lycurgus or Zeno. Christianity enforces no such sacrifice. 
 She requires us indeed to do justice, but to love mercy. I learn in 
 her school not to triumph even over a conquered enemy, and must I 
 join the triumph over a fallen friend?" 
 
 Although the Historian of the Reign of George III. will probably 
 notice Mr Wilberforce chiefly or exclusively as the author of two 
 great Parliamentary measures, the Annalist of the same times will 
 assign to him a place in almost every memorable debate of the 
 House of Commons, during the last forty years of that reign, and 
 during the first five years of the reign which followed it. But these 
 occurrences, so numerous and so disconnected, will hardly be 
 manageable as a whole, or capable of exhibition, as so many se- 
 quences, even in the hands of a Biographer, unless he shall treat 
 every incident which he shall glean from the debates and journals 
 of the House, as so many indications of the same unvarying con- 
 victions, or as examples of a lawgiver continually acting in the 
 spirit of a judge seeking no guide but truth refusing implicit 
 obedience to the voice of any commander derided by the whole 
 body of partisans as irresolute, fluctuating, and unstable, and yet 
 "being almost the only member of the Legislature whose conscience 
 was perfectly clear of that reproach. From the commencement to 
 the close of his public service, he, and perhaps he alone, shaped his 
 course with an eye continually fixed on what he believed to be the
 
 510 WILLIAM WILBEBFORCE. 
 
 real welfare of his country, with which no personal and no party 
 interest was ever permitted to interfere. 
 
 Thus, in the tranquillity of the years 1785 and 1786, during the 
 alarms of 1809, and amidst the disaffection of 1822, Mr Wilber- 
 force was alike a Parliamentary Reformer, and always with equal 
 decision. For at all times, and under each new aspect of afi'airs, he 
 acknowledged the duty of wrestling, at whatever hazard, with the 
 great moral evils inseparable from the purchase and sale of seats in 
 the Legislature. 
 
 He was the zealous defender of the Toleration Act, against Mr 
 Pitt and Bishop Prettyman in 1800, and against Lord Sidmouth in 
 1811. For he judged that the real interests of Christianity required 
 that all men should be free to diffuse their genuine religious opinions. 
 But he was the equally zealous antagonist of the Maynooth Grant 
 in 1807 and 1808, because he thought that the same interests for- 
 bade the intervention of the state itself to propagate doctrines con- 
 demned by our ecclesiastical and civil polity as deadly errors, and to 
 maintain practices censured by the same polity as nothing less than 
 idolatrous. 
 
 In the perilous times of 1797 and 1800, and in the times of 
 supposed peril of 1817 and 1819, he defended the bills suspending 
 the Habeas Corpus Act, and in 1806 he opposed the admission into 
 the Cabinet of the Chief Justice of the King's Bench. For he 
 habitually regarded himself as the depository of the sacred trust of 
 transmitting our great national institutions unimpaired to future 
 times, whether they were assailed by democratic violence, or by 
 the personal predilections or the party spirit of the minister of the 
 day. 
 
 His zeal for public morality stimulated him not only to zealous 
 efforts for diminishing the number of oaths, for the abolition of 
 lotteries, and for rescuing the day of rest from profanation, but to 
 an effort, far more opposed to his natural temper, to bring Warren 
 Hastings to the punishment which, under the shelter of the relaxed 
 and conventional morality of his judges, he ultimately escaped. 
 
 Yet Mr Wilberforce was not to be drawn into the support or 
 the rejection of any measure by arguments, however plausible or 
 popular, which he considered to be erroneously deduced from the 
 great laws of public morality ; and therefore, at the expense of 
 appearing to the multitude to abandon the standard under which 
 he had so often rallied them, he refused to condemn the seizure of 
 the Danish fleet at Copenhagen. Yet the same fixed resolve to 
 obey his own conscience at whatever immediate pain, induced him 
 to condemn, even with sternness, the ill-fated expedition to AYal-
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 5]1 
 
 cheren. although it had brought overwhelming ridicule on the 
 second Earl of Chatham, the brother of the most intimate of his 
 early friends. 
 
 And this lofty determination, fearlessly to pursue the right into 
 whatever consequences it might conduct him, supplied him, as it 
 not rarely happens, with much political truth, to which others more 
 tardily and imperfectly attained by a merely intellectual process. 
 This kind of intuitive wisdom made him a free trader in 1787 on the 
 debate of the French and Portuguese commercial treaties a bank 
 restrictionist ten years later the triumphant antagonist, in 1806, of 
 
 a tax on iron, the raw material of one of our great staple trades 
 
 and in 1816, the opponent of the Income Tax, which was prevent- 
 ing those accumulations of capital on which the prosperity of all 
 trades depends. 
 
 Eidicule, though distinctly foreseen and keenly apprehended, could 
 not deter him from supporting an address to King George III. to use 
 his influence for the delivery of Lafayette from his prison at Olmutz. 
 JSTor could his loyal attachment to that sovereign (who lived in his 
 family so wisely, and governed his kingdom so disastrously) induce 
 him to acquiesce in the grants to the Princes of the Eoyal House, or 
 to oppose them silently, though, as we learn, Mr Pitt was " furious " 
 on the occasion. While others were regarding the Australian 
 continent only as a vast receptacle for convicts, his Parliamentary 
 influence was used for laying there the foundations of the Church 
 which now occupies every inhabited district of New South Wales. 
 While others were diverting the whole current of national expendi- 
 ture to the support of the war, he was labouring, in the House of 
 Commons, to obtain for the Church of England that increased assist- 
 ance by which alone, as he believed, an effectual barrier could be 
 raised amongst us against ignorance and vice, disaffection and 
 anarchy. 
 
 It is difficult to reconcile the great contemporary influence, with 
 the small posthumous celebrity, of so many of the eminent actors 
 on the theatre of the world. It is often difficult to detect, or even 
 to conjecture, what was the real secret of an authority long since 
 expended, and which no extant record renders intelligible. In 
 many of such cases it will be found that the power possessed by a 
 man in his own generation depended much more than we willingly 
 believe, on his having possessed, in his bodily organism, a meet in- 
 terpreter for the movements of his soul. He may be great who 
 addresses mankind by the pen, the pencil, or the chisel, if Minerva 
 alone be propitious to him. But half Olympus must favour him 
 who would rise to eminence by arts which bring him into daily
 
 512 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 intercourse with his fellow-men. Every hero of history has been a 
 sort of Roscius in his way ; as Louis XIV. became a kind of hero, 
 merely because he excelled all mankind in the role of the Grand 
 Monarque. Half the Parliamentary reputation of our own times 
 rests on no higher ground. We therefore derogate nothing from 
 Mr "Wilberforce in ascribing much of his influence in the House of 
 Commons to his unrivalled dramatic powers. The student of the 
 history of those times, who shall read some of the discourses which 
 won for him so high a reputation, will scarcely avoid the belief that 
 it was very ill merited. But if he had heard them fall from the 
 lips of the speaker if he had seen him rising with a spirit and 
 self-reliance which Mercutio might have envied, and had listened 
 to those tones so full, liquid, and penetrating, and had watched the 
 eye sparkling as each playful fancy crossed his field of vision, or 
 glcrwing when he spoke of the oppressions done upon the earth 
 the fragile form elevating and expanding itself into heroic dignity 
 and the transitions of his gestures, so rapid and so complete, each 
 successive attitude adapting itself so easily to each new variation of 
 his style he would no more have wondered at the efficacy even of 
 ordinary topics and of common-place remarks from such a speaker, 
 than at the magic of the tamest speech from the lips of Garrick or 
 of Talma. 
 
 And yet it was neither in his Parliamentary life, nor in the mixed 
 intercourse of society, nor in the throng of his almoners, nor amidst 
 the crowds with whom he was accustomed to interchange the sym- 
 pathies of great charitable meetings, that the range and force of his 
 power over the hearts of his associates was most effectually dis- 
 played. The most potent incantations of this great magician were 
 raised within the sacred circle of his home. There his wife, the 
 daughter of Isaac Spooner, a country gentleman in "Warwickshire, 
 and their four sons (destined, afterwards, to become conspicuous 
 members of society), and their two daughters, and his only sister 
 and her husband, formed the interior of the many circles of which 
 he was the common centre. It was incomparably the dearest ; yet 
 he loved much the second group, composed, as it was of his more 
 remote kindred, and of the chosen friends of his youth ; and much 
 he delighted in the third, thronged as it continually was by the 
 associates of his labours for the commonwealth and for the Church ; 
 and much also it rejoiced him to regale, with hospitable cheer, and 
 kind or gay discourse, the remoter multitude who, from Gades to 
 Ganges, sought admittance at his house, some to gratify their 
 curiosity, some to explain every grievance suffered beneath the sun, 
 and some to solicit countenance for schemes of beneficence, more
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 513 
 
 numerous and more varied than ever were conceived in Laputa, or 
 accomplished in the New Atlantis. 
 
 But in proportion to the shortness of the radii was the warmth 
 and brightness at the circumference. "With his wife and children 
 about him, the aged William Wilberforce became once more a child, 
 and seemed for the moment scarcely older than his boys. Their 
 glad voices found in his a no less joyous echo, or, rising spon- 
 taneously to the level of their mirth, his spirits would appear as 
 unbroken as their own. Nor were kind filial artifices wanting to 
 lure the old man to the sheltered walk where he liked best to stroll, 
 and there to guide him to those recollections on, which he dwelt 
 with the fondest delight, and the most abounding affluence of 
 anecdote and of reflection. From such topics the transition was 
 easy, and indeed inevitable, to the thoughts which had settled down 
 into the lowest depths of his soul, but which he never poured out 
 in so full a current, or illustrated with such fertility, as when his 
 sons had gathered round him. Then he would speak as if touching 
 the lyre of David, of all the relations between the Divine nature 
 and the human, and would find in every incident of his past life, 
 in whatever he had observed of the lives of others, in each passage 
 of Holy Writ, and every well-remembered poem, in the whole world, 
 visible or audible, buttresses and ornaments for the two main pillars 
 of his creed the first, that God is love; the second, that God is 
 truth. 
 
 Whoever had wished to find fault with the social habits and 
 demeanour of Mr Wilberforce, would have complained of his too 
 rapid movement and versatility of mind, which left no room for re- 
 pose, and for that deliberate interchange of intelligence and opinion, 
 to which repose is indispensable. But this excitement and hurry of 
 spirit was subdued, in the society of his wife and children, by the 
 jealous tenderness which deprecated the association, in their minds, 
 with the idea of himself, of any other than laudable, and reverent, 
 and affectionate remembrances. Even in their boyhood he listened 
 to his sons with a staid and sober quietness, foreign to his ordinary 
 manners ; and in their manhood invited their information, courted 
 their advice, and deferred to their judgment with the same kindly 
 confidence with which he stayed his feeble steps by leaning on their 
 more vigorous arms. 
 
 Friendship never assumed a more touching form. His paternal 
 tenderness had not, even in their early years, degenerated into fond- 
 ness, or expressed itself by caresses, or by a blind and partial ad- 
 miration. On the contrary, it was with an almost morbid acuteness 
 that he detected the germs of evil, moral or intellectual, in his 
 
 33
 
 514 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 children, and watched the growth, or the decline, of any wayward 
 humour or dangerous propensity in them. When, however, the 
 anxious days of their education were completed, then, if ever, might 
 be traced on his venerable countenance one flush of human pride, as 
 he would exclaim, " I have had three sons at Oxford, and all of them 
 first-class men. Show me the man who can make the same boast ! " 
 As years rolled on, and he saw two of those sons presbyters of 
 the Church of England, and the third self-devoted to the same 
 high office, there was no longer room in his heart for any emotion 
 less profound than that of adoring gratitude, that his habitual 
 prayer for them had been heard. If they had brought home royal 
 patents, placing them among the chief nobles of the realm, he would 
 have regarded them as mean and worthless honours, compared with 
 that which their ordination to that sacred function had conferred 
 upon his house. 
 
 And who that ever witnessed can ever forget the solemn and 
 delighted complacency with which he took his seat among the con- 
 gregation to which either of his sons was to minister the child-like 
 docility with which he listened to the voice of his child how he 
 rejoiced to gather, for his own spiritual nutriment, the ripe harvest 
 of the seeds which, in earlier days, he had himself sown in their 
 minds with what a grave and tender joy he partook of the domestic 
 devotions which they had learnt from himself to offer and in 
 what tones of almost oppressive gratitude to God, he would speak of 
 the delight of accompanying one of them in his pastoral visits, and 
 of joining in the prayers which his young messenger of the Gospel 
 of Peace had there poured forth by the beds of his sick or dying 
 parishioners. 
 
 Many years have since passed over those who at that time gazed 
 upon that aged father, so joyous and so placid, his fading eye 
 and furrowed cheek reflecting the dawn of the eternal day then 
 about to rise upon him, his work on earth accomplished, and his 
 earthly hopes fulfilled, blessing his children, and blessed by them ; 
 and although those years have brought with them such events as to 
 render dim and obscure almost every other retrospect, the imperish- 
 able image of that old man contemplating so serenely, from the 
 narrow isthmus of life, the world he had loved and served so long, 
 and the world for which he had been so long maturing still pos- 
 sesses their memories in unimpaired distinctness ; attesting to them 
 that even the Valley of the Shadow of Death may smile like the 
 green pastures, and be tranquil as the waters of comfort, to one 
 who descends into it, sustained by the staff, and defended by the
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 515 
 
 rod, of the Good Shepherd whose guidance he has followed all Ms 
 journey through. 
 
 The kind Providence which thus conducted him withdrew him 
 from the conflicts of public life before he had lost the strength with- 
 out which retirement can neither be really enjoyed nor fitly improved. 
 In the year 1825 he quitted Parliament to pass the rest of his days 
 in the bosom of his family. There, however, he did not entirely 
 escape those sorrows which usually gather round us as the shadows 
 grow long. He had to weep by the dying beds of each of his two 
 daughters ; and from that want of worldly wisdom which always 
 characterised him, he lost a considerable part of his fortune in a 
 speculation from which he had nothing to gain or to hope but the 
 gratification of parental kindness. 
 
 Never were such misfortunes more effectually baffled by the in- 
 vulnerable peace of a cheerful and self-approving heart. There were 
 not, indeed, wanting external circumstances of a painful character 
 which marked his comparative poverty, but the most close and in- 
 timate observer could never perceive in his countenance or in his 
 demeanour so much as a passing shade of dejection or anxiety on 
 that account. He might, indeed, have been supposed to be uncon- 
 scious that he had lost anything, but for the remarks which 
 occasionally fell from him on the divine goodness which had con- 
 verted the seeming calamity into a blessing to his children and to 
 himself. 
 
 Two of them had by this time become incumbents of parsonages, 
 of which one stood on the pleasant hills, which skirt the Med- 
 way, and the other on the slope which connects the high downs of 
 the Isle of Wight with the adjacent ocean. In his altered fortunes 
 he found a welcome apology for withdrawing from society at large 
 to gladden by his almost constant presence those quiet homes of the 
 sons by whom his biography has since been written. There, sur- 
 rounded by his wife, his children, and his grandchildren, he yielded 
 himself to the current of each successive desire ; for he had now 
 acquired that rare maturity of the moral stature, in which the conflict 
 between inclination and duty is over, and virtue and self-indulgence 
 are the same. 
 
 As his later years wore away, some decline of his intellectual powers 
 was occasionally perceptible to the friends of his earlier and more 
 active days. But in general it was otherwise ; and after an evening 
 saunter with him on the sands which stretch towards the Needles, or 
 beneath the hoUy hedges which skirt the hop-gardens in the northern 
 district of Kent, it was difficult not to recall and (silently at least) 
 
 33
 
 516 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 to apply to him the apostrophe of Cowley to the aged author of the 
 " Leviathan : " 
 
 " Nor can the snows which now cold age hath shed 
 Upon thy reverend head, 
 Quench or allay the noble fires within : 
 For all that thou hast been, and all that youth can be, 
 Thou'rt yet so fully still dost thou 
 Possess the manhood and the bloom of wit. 
 To things immortal time can do no wrong, 
 And that which never is to die, for ever must be young." 
 
 The end of his pilgrimage was now drawing near, and gradual, 
 gentle, and serene was his descent to the dark waters through which 
 all must pass to the unseen and unimaginable regions which lie beyond. 
 The heavenly guide who had thus far conducted him did not desert 
 him now. Looking back with gratitude sometimes eloquent, and 
 sometimes striving in vain for utterance to his long career of use- 
 fulness, of honour, and of enjoyment, he watched, with grave com- 
 posure, the ebb of the current which was fast bearing him to his 
 eternal reward. After a very brief illness, and with no indication of 
 bodily suffering, he died in his seventy-fifth year, in undisturbed 
 tranquillity, breathing out to all who surrounded him in his latest 
 hours, benedictions full of love, and thoughts dictated by heavenly 
 wisdom, not without the irradiation of one, at least, of those bright 
 gleams of gaiety which, in his happy nature, no shadow was ever deep 
 enough entirely to obscure. 
 
 He was laid in the grave in Westminster Abbey, in the presence 
 of a large number of the members of both Houses of Parliament, 
 and with all the solemnities which their zeal could devise to express 
 their sense of the services, the dignity, and the worth of the col- 
 league they deplored. Never had the solemn ritual of the Church 
 been pronounced over the grave of any of her children with more 
 affecting or more appropriate truth. Never were recited on a more 
 fitting occasion the solemn words, " I heard a voice from Heaven 
 saying unto me Write. From henceforth blessed are the dead which 
 die in the Lord. Even so, saith the Spirit ; for they rest from 
 their labours." 
 
 The book* to which (not unaided by other sources of knowledge) 
 we are chiefly indebted for the materials of this rapid survey of 
 the life and character of Mr Wilberforce, contains some incidental 
 notices of the eminent persons with whom he associated. The 
 
 * The Life of "William Wilberforce, by his sons, Robert Isaac Wilberforce, 
 M.A., and Samuel Wilberforce, M.A. In five volumes. London, 1838, 
 Murray.
 
 WILLIAM WILBERKORCE. 517 
 
 contribution thus made to the "biographical history of that time is 
 less extensive than might have been anticipated ; and, indeed, less 
 interesting, except as it throws some light on the private life of 
 Mr Pitt, of whose personal habits the world at large has scarcely 
 any intelligence. In these volumes a glimpse of him is caught at 
 one time as he passes an evening in classical studies or amusements 
 with Mr Canning, and at another as, with the aid of Mr Wilber- 
 force and Lord Grenville, he cuts a walk through his plantations at 
 Holwood. On the whole, however, the William Pitt of this work 
 is the austere Minister with whom we were already so well ac- 
 quainted, not the man himself, in his natural, or in his emancipated 
 state. 
 
 The following extract of a letter from Mr Wilberforce is almost the 
 only passage which gives us an intimation of the careless familiarity 
 in which, for many years, they lived together : 
 
 " And now, after having transacted my business with the Minis- 
 ter, a word or two to the man a character in which, if it is 
 more pleasant to you, it is no less pleasant to me to address you. 
 I wish you may be passing your time half as salubriously and com- 
 fortably as I am at Gisborne's, where I am breathing good air, eating 
 good mutton, keeping good hours, and enjoying the company of 
 good friends. You have only two of the four at command, nor 
 these always in so pure a state as in Needwood Forest ; your town 
 mutton being apt to be woolly, and your town friends to be 
 interested : however, I sincerely believe you are, through the good- 
 ness of Providence, better off in the latter particular than has been 
 the fate of ninety-nine Ministers out of a hundred ; and as for the 
 former, the quantity you lay in may in some degree atone for the 
 quality ; and it is a sign that neither in friends nor mutton you 
 have yet lost your taste. Indeed, I shall reckon it a bad symptom 
 of your moral or corporeal state, as the case may be, when your 
 palate is so vitiated, that you cannot distinguish the true from the 
 false flavour. All this is sad stuff, but you must allow us gentle- 
 men who live in forests to be a little figurative. I will only add, 
 however (that I may not quite exhaust your patience), that I hope 
 you will never cease to relish me, and do me the justice to believe the 
 ingredients are good, though you may not altogether approve of the 
 cooking. Yours ever, 
 
 "W. WILBERFORCE. 
 
 "P.S. Bemernber me to all friends. I hope you have no more 
 gout, &c. If you will at any time give me a line (though it be but
 
 518 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 a mouthful) I shall be glad of it. You will think me be-Burked 
 like yourself." 
 
 On the occasion of Mr Pitt's duel with Mr Tierney, Mr Wil- 
 berforce had designed to bring the subject under the notice of the 
 House of Commons. The intention was defeated by the following 
 kind and characteristic letter : 
 
 " My dear Wilberforce, 
 
 " I am not the person to argue with you on a subject in 
 which I am a good deal concerned. I hope, too, that I am in- 
 capable of doubting your kindness to me (however mistaken I may 
 think it), if you let any sentiment of that sort actuate you on the 
 present occasion. I must suppose that some such feeling has inad- 
 vertently operated upon you, because, whatever may be your general 
 sentiments on subjects of this nature, they can have acquired no new 
 tone or additional argument from anything that has passed in this 
 transaction. You must be supposed to bring this forward in refer- 
 ence to the individual case. 
 
 " In doing so, you will be accessory in loading one of the parties 
 with unfair and unmerited obloquy. With respect to the other 
 party, myself, I feel it a real duty to say to you frankly that your 
 motion is one for my removal. If any step on the subject is pro- 
 posed in Parliament and agreed to, I shall feel from that moment 
 that I can be of more use out of office than in it ; for in it, accord- 
 ing to the feelings I entertain, I could be of none. I state to you, 
 as I think I ought, distinctly and explicitly, what I feeL I hope I 
 need not repeat what I always feel personally to yourself. Yours 
 ever, 
 
 "WILLIAM PITT. 
 
 " Downing Street, "Wednesday, 
 "May 30, 1798, 11 P.M." 
 
 The following passage is worth transcribing as a graphic, though 
 slight, sketch of Mr Pitt, from the pen of one who knew him so 
 well : 
 
 "When a statement had been made to the House of ,the cruel 
 practices, approaching certainly to torture, by which the discovery 
 of concealed arms had been enforced in Ireland, John Claudius 
 Beresford rose to reply, and said with a force and honesty, the im- 
 pression of which I never can forget, ' I fear, and feel deep shame 
 in making the avowal I fear it is too true I defend it not but I
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 519 
 
 trust I may be permitted to refer, as some palliation of these 
 atrocities, to the state of my unhappy country, where rebellion and 
 its attendant horrors had roused on both sides to the highest pitch 
 all the strongest passions of our nature.' I was with Pitt in the 
 House of Lords when Lord Clare replied to a similar charge ' Well, 
 suppose it were so ; but surely,' &c. I shall never forget Pitt's 
 look. He turned round to me with that indignant stare which 
 sometimes marked his countenance, and stalked out of the House." 
 
 It is not generally known that, at the period of Lord Melville's 
 trial, a coolness almost approaching to estrangement had arisen 
 between that Minister and Mr Pitt. The following extract from 
 one of Mr Wilberforce's Diaries on this subject affords an authentic 
 and curious illustration of Mr Pitt's character : 
 
 " I had perceived above a year before that Lord Melville had not 
 the power over Pitt's mind which he once possessed. Pitt was 
 taking me to Lord Camden's, and in our tete-a-tete he gave me an 
 account of the negotiations which had been on foot to induce him to 
 enter Addington's Administration. When they quitted office in 
 1801, Dundas proposed taking as his motto, Jam rude donatiis. 
 Pitt suggested to him that, having always been an active man, he 
 would probably wish again to come into office, and then that his 
 having taken such a motto would be made a ground for ridicule. 
 Dundas assented, and took another motto. Addington had not long 
 been in office, before Pitt's expectation was fulfilled, and Dundas 
 undertook to bring Pitt into the plan ; which was to appoint some 
 third person head, and bring in Pitt and Addington on equal terms 
 under him. Dundas accordingly, confiding in his knowledge of all 
 Pitt's ways and feelings, set out for Walmer Castle ; and after dinner, 
 and port wine, began cautiously to open his proposals. But he saw it 
 would not do, and stopped abruptly. ' Really,' said Pitt, with a sly 
 severity, and it was almost the only sharp thing I ever heard him say 
 of any friend, ' I had not the curiosity to ask what I was to be.' " 
 
 Amongst the letters addressed to Mr Wilberforce, to be found in 
 these volumes, is one written by John Wesley from his death-bed. 
 on the day before he sank into the lethargy from which he was 
 never roused. They are probably the last written words of that 
 extraordinary man : 
 
 " February 24, 1791. 
 " My dear Sir, 
 
 " Unless Divine power has raised you up to be as Athana-
 
 520 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 sius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your 
 glorious enterprise, in opposing that execrable villany which is the 
 scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God 
 has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the 
 opposition of men and devils : but if God be for you, who can be 
 against you ? Are all of them together stronger than God 1 Oh ! 
 be not weary of well doing. Go on in the name of God, and in the 
 power of his might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever 
 saw the sun, shall vanish away before it. That He who has guided 
 you from your youth up, may continue to strengthen you in this and 
 all things, is the prayer of, dear sir, your aifectionate servant, 
 
 "JoHN WESLEY." 
 
 From a very different correspondent, Jeremy Bentham, Mr 
 Wilberforce received two notes, for which, as they are the only ex- 
 amples we have seen in print of his epistolary style, we must find a 
 place : 
 
 " Kind Sir, 
 
 " The next time you happen on Mr Attorney-General, in 
 the House or elsewhere, be pleased to take a spike the longer and 
 sharper the better and apply it to him, by way of memento, that 
 the Penitentiary Contract Bill has, for I know not what length of 
 time, been sticking in his hands ; and you will much oblige your 
 humble servant to command, 
 
 "JEREMY BERTRAM. 
 
 " N.B. A corking-pin was, yesterday, applied by Mr Abbot." 
 
 " I sympathise with your now happily promising exertions in 
 behalf of the race of innocents, whose lot it has hitherto been to be 
 made the subject-matter of depredation, for the purpose of being 
 treated worse than the authors of such crimes are treated for those 
 crimes in other places." 
 
 There are, in this work, some occasional additions to the stock of 
 political anecdotes. Of these we transcribe the following speci- 
 
 " Franklin signed the Peace of Paris in his old spotted velvet 
 coat (it being the time of a court-mourning, which rendered it more 
 particular). 'What,' said my friend the negotiator, 'is the mean- 
 ing of that harlequin coat ? ' ' It is that in which he was abused 
 by Wedderburne.' He showed much rancour and personal enmity
 
 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 521 
 
 to this country would not grant the common passports for trade, 
 which were, however, easily got from Jay or Adams. 
 
 " Dined with Lord Camden ; he very chatty and pleasant. Abused 
 Thurlow for his duplicity and mystery. Said the King had said to 
 him occasionally he had wished Thurlow and Pitt to agree ; for that 
 both were necessary to him one in the Lords, the other in the 
 Commons. Thurlow will never do anything to oblige Lord Cam- 
 den, because he is a friend of Pitt's. Lord Camden himself, though 
 he speaks of Pitt with evident affection, seems rather to complain 
 of his being too much under the influence of any one who is about 
 him ; particularly of Dundas, who prefers his countrymen whenever 
 he can. Lord Camden is sure that Lord Bute got money by the 
 Peace of Paris. He can account for his sinking near 300,000 in 
 land and houses ; and his paternal estate in the island which bears 
 his name, was not above 1500 a year, and he is a life-tenant only 
 of Wortley, which may be 8000 or 10,000. Lord Camden does 
 not believe Lord Bute has any the least connection with the King 
 now, whatever he may have had. Lord Thurlow is giving constant 
 dinners to the Judges, to gain them over to his party. ***** was 
 applied to by ***** , a wretched sort of dependant of the Prince 
 of Wales, to know if he would lend money on the joint bond of the 
 Prince and the Dukes of York and Clarence, to receive double the 
 sum lent whenever the King should die, and either the Prince of 
 Wales, the Dukes of York and Clarence, come into the inheritance. 
 The sum intended to be raised is 200,000. 
 
 " 'Tis only a hollow truce, not a peace, that is made between 
 Thurlow and Pitt. They can have no confidence in each other." 
 
 Boswell, the prince of biographers, has well nigh ruined the art 
 of biography. For like every other art, it has its laws, or rather is 
 bound by those laws to which all composition is subject, whether 
 the pen or the pencil, the chisel or the musical chords, be the in- 
 strument with which we work. Of those canons, the chief is, that 
 the artist must aim at unity of effect, and must therefore bring all 
 the subordinate parts of his design into a tributary dependence on 
 his principal object. Boswell (a man of true genius, however coarse 
 his feelings, and however flagrant his self-conceit) knew how to 
 extract from every incident of his hero's life, and from the meanest 
 alike and the noblest of his hero's associates, a series of ever-varying 
 illustrations and embellishments of his hero's character. The 
 imagination of Cervantes scarcely produced a portrait more single, 
 harmonious, and prominent, in the centre of innumerable sketches, 
 and of groups which fill without crowding the canvas.
 
 522 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 
 
 The imitators of this great master have aspired to the same success 
 by the simple collocation of all facts, all letters, and all sayings, 
 from which the moral, intellectual, or social nature of the main 
 figure on their biographical easel may be inferred. But in order to 
 truth of effect, a narrator must suppress much of the whole truth. 
 Charles V. of Spain, and Charles I. of England, still live in picture, 
 as they lived in the flesh, because Titian and Vandyke knew how to 
 exclude, to conceal, and to diminish, as well as how to copy. 
 Imagination cannot do her work unless she be free in the choice of 
 her materials ; and if the work of imagination be undone, nothing 
 is done which any distant times will hoard as a part of their literary 
 inheritance. 
 
 Air Wilberforce was an admirable subject for the exercise of the 
 dramatic power which converts a whole generation into a mirror, 
 reflecting all the different attitudes, and glowing with all the shift- 
 colours, of some one conspicuous and commanding form. A filial 
 hand could not, without some impropriety, have used, if it had 
 possessed, that power ; and the time is perhaps too recent for any 
 one to hazard such a performance. These volumes must therefore 
 be considered as memoirea pour servir, in the composition of an 
 historical picture of English society, political and religious, as it ex- 
 isted in the most eventful epoch of the history of England, and as 
 it clustered round one of its most admirable members. Whoever 
 shall undertake that task, will find here guides to whom it is im- 
 possible to deny the praise of fidelity and diligence, and unaffected 
 modesty. Studiously withdrawing themselves from the notice of 
 their readers, they have made no display of their own theological, 
 scientific, and literary wealth. Their work has been executed with 
 ability, and with deep affection. If their father does not live in 
 their pages as Madame de Stael described him the most eloquent 
 and the wittiest converser she had met in England nor as tradition 
 commemorates him the ever bright and animating centre of the 
 social system which gravitated round him he is yet luminously 
 exhibited in his still nobler character, as consuming his existence in 
 labours for the Church, for the State, and for mankind, such as no 
 other man in that age, and such as no private man in any age of his 
 country's annals, had at once the genius and the will to render.
 
 523 
 
 THE OLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 IN one of those collections of Essays which have recently been de- 
 tached from the main body of the Edinburgh Review (the writers of 
 that Journal following therein the policy of Constantino and of 
 Charlemagne, when dividing their otherwise too extensive Empires 
 into distinct though associated sovereignties), there occur certain, 
 pleasant allusions, already rendered obscure by the lapse of time, to 
 a religious sect or society, which, as it appears, was nourishing in this 
 realm in the reign of George III. What subtle theories, what 
 clouds of learned dust, might have been raised by future Binghams, 
 and by Du Pins yet unborn, to determine what was The Patent 
 Christianity and what The Clapham Sect of the nineteenth century, 
 had not a fair and a noble anthor appeared to dispel, or at least to 
 mitigate, the darkness ! Something, indeed, had been done afore- 
 time. The antiquities of Clapham, had they not been written in the 
 Britannia of Mr Lysons 1 Her beauties, had they not inspired the 
 muse of Mr Robins ? But it was reserved for Mrs Milner, in her 
 Life of Dean Milner, and for Lord Teignmouth, in his Life of his 
 Father, to throw such light on her social and ecclesiastical state as 
 will render the facetious Journalist * intelligible to future generations. 
 Treading in their steps, and aided by their information, it shall be 
 our endeavour to clear up still more fully, for the benefit of ages yet 
 to come, this passage in the ecclesiastical history of the age which 
 has just passed away. 
 
 Though living amidst the throes of Empires, and the fall of Dynas- 
 ties, men are not merely warriors and politicians. Even in such 
 times they buy and sell, build and plant, marry and are given in 
 marriage. And thus it happened, that during the war with revo- 
 lutionary France, Henry Thornton, the then representative in Parlia- 
 ment of the borough of Southwark, having become a husband, became 
 also the owner of a spacious mansion on the confines of the villa- 
 cinctured common of Clapham. 
 
 The Rev. Sydney Smith.
 
 524 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 It is difficult to consider the suburban retirement of a wealthy 
 banker aesthetically (as the Germans have it) ; but, in this instance, 
 the intervention of William Pitt imparted some dignity to an oc- 
 currence otherwise so unpoetical. He dismissed for a moment his 
 budgets and his subsidies, for the amusement of planning an oval 
 saloon, to be added to this newly purchased residence. It arose at 
 his bidding, and yet remains, perhaps, a solitary monument of the 
 architectural skill of that imperial mind. Lofty and symmetrical, 
 it was curiously wainscoted with books on every side, except where 
 it opened on a far-extended lawn, reposing beneath the giant arms of 
 aged elms and massive tulip-trees. 
 
 Few of the designs of the great Minister were equally successful. 
 Ere many years had elapsed, the chamber he had thus projected be- 
 came the scene of enjoyments which, amidst his proudest triumphs, 
 he might well have envied, and witnessed the growth of projects 
 more majestic than any which ever engaged the deliberations of his 
 Cabinet. For there, at the close of each succeeding day, drew 
 together a group of playful children, and with them a knot of 
 legislators, rehearsing, in sport or earnestly, some approaching de- 
 bate ; or travellers from distant lands ; or circumnavigators of the 
 worlds of literature and science ; or the Pastor of the neighbouring 
 Church, whose look announced him as the channel through which 
 benedictions passed to earth from heaven ; and, not seldom, a youth 
 who listened, while he seemed to read the book spread out before 
 him. There also was still a matronly presence, controlling, ani- 
 mating, and harmonising the elements of this little world, by a 
 kindly spell, of which none can trace the working, though the 
 charm was confessed by all. Dissolved in endless discourse, or 
 rather in audible soliloquy, flowing from springs deep and inex- 
 haustible, the lord of this well-peopled enclosure rejoiced over it 
 with a contagious joy. In a few paces, indeed, he might traverse 
 the whole extent of that patriarchal dominion. But within those 
 narrow precincts were his Porch, his Studio, his Judgment-Seat, 
 his Oratory, and " the Church that was in his house," the reduced, 
 but not imperfect, resemblance of that innumerable Company which 
 his catholic spirit embraced and loved, under all the varying forms 
 which conceal their union from each other and from the world. 
 Discord never agitated that tranquil home ; lassitude never brooded 
 over it. Those demons quailed at the aspect of a man in whose 
 heart peace had found a resting-place, though his intellect was in- 
 capable of repose. 
 
 Henry was the third son of John Thornton, a merchant, re- 
 nowned in his generation for a munificence more than princely,
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 525 
 
 and commended to the reverence of posterity by the letters and 
 the poetry of Cowper. The father was one of those rare men in 
 whom the desire to relieve distress assumes the form of a master 
 passion ; and, if faith be due to tradition, he indulged it with a 
 disdain, alternately ludicrous and sublime, of the good advice 
 which the eccentric have to undergo from the judicious. Conscious 
 of no aims but such as might invite the scrutiny of God and man, 
 he pursued them after his own fearless fashion yielding to every 
 honest impulse, relishing a frolic when it fell in his way, choosing 
 his associates in scorn of mere worldly precepts, and worshipping 
 with any fellow-Christian whose heart beat in unison with his own, 
 however inharmonious might be some of the articles of their re- 
 spective creeds. 
 
 His son was the heir of his benevolence, but not of his peculiar- 
 ities. If Lavater had been summoned to divine the occupation of 
 Henry Thornton, he would probably have assigned to him the highest 
 rank among the Judges of his native land. Brows capacious and 
 serene, a scrutinising eye, and lips slightly separated, as of one who 
 listens and prepares to speak, were the true interpreters of the in- 
 forming mind within. It was a countenance on which were graven 
 the traces of an industry alike quiet and persevering, of a self-posses- 
 sion unassailable by any strong excitement, and of an understanding 
 keen to detect and comprehensive to reconcile distinctions. The 
 judicial, like the poetical nature, is a birthright ; and by that impre- 
 scriptible title he possessed it. Forensic debates were indeed be- 
 yond his province ; but even in Westminster Hall, the noblest of 
 her temples, Themis had no more devoted worshipper. To investi- 
 gate the great controversies of his own and of all former times, was 
 the chosen employment : to pronounce sentence in them, the dear 
 delight of his leisure hours. 
 
 Nothing which fell within the range of his observation escaped 
 this curious inquiry. His own duties, motives, and habits, the 
 characters of those whom he loved best, the intellectual resources 
 and powers of his various friends and companions, the preposses- 
 sions, hereditary or conventional, to which he or they were subject, 
 the maxims of society, the dogmas of the Church, the problems 
 which were engaging the attention of Parliament or of political 
 economists, and those which affected his own commercial enter- 
 prises all passed in review before him, and were all in their turn 
 adjudicated with the grave impartiality which the Keeper of the 
 Great Seal is expected to exhibit. Truth, the foe of falsehood 
 truth, the antagonist of error and truth, the exorcist of ambiguity 
 was the object of his supreme homage ; and so reverential were
 
 526 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 the vows offered by him at her shrine, that he abjured the com- 
 munion of those less devout worshippers, who throw over her the 
 veil of fiction, or place her in epigrammatic attitudes, or disguise her 
 beneath the mask of wit or drollery. To contemplate truth in the 
 purest light, and in her own fair proportions, he was content that 
 she should be unadorned by any beauties but such as belong to her 
 celestial nature, and are inseparable from it. Hence his disquisitions 
 did not always escape the reproach of drought and tediousness, or 
 avoided it only by the cheerful tone and pungent sense with which 
 they were conducted. He had as little pretension to the colloquial 
 eloquence as to the multifarious learning and transcendental revela- 
 tions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Yet the pilgrimages to Clapham 
 and to Highgate were made with rival zeal, and the relics brought 
 back from each were regarded as of almost equal sanctity. If the 
 philosophical poet dismissed his audience under the spell of theories 
 compassing all knowledge, and of imagery peopling all space, the 
 practical philosopher sent his hearers to their homes instructed in a 
 doctrine cheerful, genial, and active a doctrine which taught them 
 to be sociable and busy, to augment to the utmost of their power the 
 joint stock of human happiness, and freely to take and freely to 
 enjoy the share assigned to each by the conditions of that universal 
 partnership. And well did the teacher illustrate his own maxims. 
 The law of social duty, as interpreted in his domestic academy, was 
 never expounded more clearly or more impressively than by his 
 habitual example. 
 
 Having inherited an estate, which, though not splendid, was 
 enough for the support of his commercial credit, he adjudged that it 
 ought never to be increased by accumulation, nor diminished by 
 sumptuousness ; and he lived and died in the rigid practice of this 
 decision. In the division of his income between himself and the 
 poor, the share he originally assigned to them was nearly six- 
 sevenths of the whole ; and, as appeared after his death, from 
 accounts kept with the most minute commercial accuracy, the 
 amount expended by him in one of his earlier years for the relief of 
 distress, considerably exceeded nine thousand pounds. When he 
 had become the head of a family, he reviewed this decree, and 
 thenceforward regarded himself as trustee for the miserable, to the 
 extent only of one-third of his whole expenditure. The same faith- 
 ful record showed that the smallest annual payment ever paid by 
 him on this account amounted to two thousand pounds. As a legis- 
 lator, he had condemned the unequal pressure of the direct taxes on 
 the rich and the poor ; but instead of solacing his defeat with the 
 narcotic of virtuous indignation, combined with discreet parsimony,
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 527 
 
 he silently raised his own contribution to the level of his censure. 
 Tidings of the commercial failure of a near kinsman embarked him 
 at once on an inquiry how far he was obliged to indemnify those 
 who might have given credit to his relative, in a reliance, however 
 unauthorised, on his own resources ; and again the coffers of the 
 banker were unlocked by the astuteness of the casuist. A mercan- 
 tile partnership (many a year has passed since the disclosure could 
 injure or affect any one), which without his knowledge had obtained 
 from his firm large and improvident advances, became so hopelessly 
 embarrassed, that their bankruptcy was pressed on him as the only 
 chance of averting from his own house the most serious disasters. 
 He overruled the proposal, on the ground that they whose rashness 
 had given to their debtors an unmerited credit, had no right to call 
 on others to divide with them the consequent loss. To the last 
 farthing he therefore discharged the liabilities of the insolvents, at a 
 cost of which his own share exceeded twenty thousand pounds. Yet 
 he was then declining in health, and the father of nine young 
 children. Enamoured of truth, the living spirit of justice, he yielded 
 the allegiance of the heart to justice, the outward form of truth. The 
 law engraven on the tablet of his conscience, and executed by the 
 ministry of his affections, was strictly interpreted by his reason as the 
 supreme earthly judge. Whatever might be his topic, or whatever 
 his employment, he never laid aside the ermine. 
 
 And yet, for more than thirty years, he was a member of the 
 unreformed parliament, representing there that people, so few and 
 singular, who dare to think, and speak, and act for themselves. He 
 never gave one party vote, was never claimed as an adherent by 
 any of the contending factions of his times, and, of course, neither 
 won nor sought the favour of any. An impartial arbiter, whose 
 suffrage was the honourable reward of superior reason, he sat apart 
 and aloft, in a position which, though it provoked a splenetic 
 sarcasm from Burke, commanded the respect even of those whom it 
 rebuked. 
 
 To the great Whig doctrines of Peace, Reform, Economy, and 
 Toleration, he lent all the authority of his name, and occasionally 
 the aid of his voice. But he was an infrequent and unimpressive 
 speaker, and sought to influence the measures of his day rather by 
 the use of his pen, than by any participation in his rhetoric. His 
 writings, moral, religious, and political, were voluminous, though 
 destitute of any such mutual dependence as to unite them into one 
 comprehensive system ;' or of any such graces of execution as to ob- 
 tain for them permanent acceptance. But in a domestic liturgy com- 
 posed for the use of his own family, and made public after his death,
 
 528 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 he encountered, with as much success as can attend it, the difficulty 
 of finding thoughts and language meet to be addressed by the ephe- 
 meral dwellers on the earth to Him who inhabiteth eternity. It is 
 simple, grave, weighty, and reverential ; and forms a clear, though a 
 faint and subdued, echo of the voice in which the Deity has revealed 
 his sovereign will to man. That will he habitually studied, adored, 
 and laboured to adopt. Yet his piety was reserved and unobtrus- 
 ive, like the life-blood throbbing in every pulse and visiting every 
 fibre, it was the latent though perennial source of his mental health 
 and energy. 
 
 A peace, perfect and unbroken, seemed to possess him. His 
 tribute of pain and sorrow was paid with a submission so tranquil, as 
 sometimes to assume the appearance of a morbid insensibility. But 
 his affections, unimpaired by lawless indulgence, and constant to 
 their proper objects, were subject to a control to be acquired by no 
 feebler discipline. Ills from without assailed him, not as the gloomy 
 ministers of vengeance, but as the necessary exercise of virtues not 
 otherwise to be called into activity. They came as the salutary les- 
 sons of a father, not as the penal inflictions of a judge. Nor did the 
 Father, to whom he so meekly bowed, see fit to lay on him those 
 griefs, under the pressure of which the bravest stagger. He never 
 witnessed the irruption of death into his domestic paradise, nor the 
 rending asunder by sin, the parent of death, of the bonds of love and 
 reverence which united to each other the inmates of that happy 
 home a home happy in his presence from whose lips no morose, or 
 angry, or impatient word ever fell ; on whose brow no cloud of 
 anxiety or discontent was ever seen to rest. Surrounded to his latest 
 hours by those whom it had been his chief delight to bless and to 
 instruct, he bequeathed to them the recollection of a wise, a good, 
 and a happy man ; that so, if in future life a wider acquaintance 
 with the world should chill the heart with the scepticism so often 
 engendered by such knowledge, they might be reassured in the be- 
 lief that human virtue is no vain illusion ; but that, nurtured by the 
 dews of heaven, it may expand into fertility and beauty, even in 
 those fat places of the earth which romance disowns, and on which 
 no poet's eye will condescend to rest. 
 
 A goodly heritage ! yet to have transmitted it (if that were all) 
 would, it must be confessed, be an insufficient title to a place 
 amongst memorable men. Nor, except for what he accomplished as 
 the associate of others, could that claim be reasonably preferred on 
 behalf of Henry Thornton. Apart, and sustained only by his own 
 resources, he would neither have undertaken, nor conceived, the 
 more noble of those benevolent designs to which his life was devoted.
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 529 
 
 Affectionate, but passionless with a fine and indeed a fastidious 
 taste, but destitute of all creative imagination gifted rather with 
 fortitude to endure calamity, than with courage to exult in the 
 struggle with danger a lover of mankind, but not an enthusiast in 
 the cause of our common humanity his serene and perspicacious 
 spirit was never haunted by the visions, nor borne away by the re- 
 sistless impulses, of which heroic natures, and they alone, are con- 
 scious. Well qualified to impart to the highest energies of others a 
 wise direction, and inflexible perseverance, he had to borrow from 
 them the glowing temperament which hopes against hope, and is 
 wise in despite of prudence. He had not far or long to seek for such 
 an alliance. 
 
 On the bright evening of a day which had run its course some 
 thirty or forty summers ago, the usual group had formed themselves 
 in the library already celebrated. Addressing a nearer circle, might 
 be heard above the unbusy hum the voice of the Prelector, inves- 
 tigating the characteristics of Seneca's morality perhaps ; or, not 
 improbably, the seizure of the Danish fleet ; or, it might be, the 
 various gradations of sanity as exhibited by Robert Hall or Johanna 
 Southcote ; when all pastimes were suspended, and all speculations 
 put to flight, to welcome the approach of what seemed a dramatic 
 procession, emerging from the deep foliage by which the further 
 slopes of the now checkered lawn were overhung. In advance of 
 the rest two noisy urchins were putting to no common test the 
 philanthropy of a tall shaggy dog, their playfellow, and the parental 
 indulgence of the slight figure which followed them. Limbs scarcely 
 stouter than those of Asmodeus, sustaining a torso as unlike as 
 possible to that of Theseus, carried him along with the agility of an 
 antelope, though under the weight of two coat-pockets, protuberant 
 as the bags by which some learned brother of the coif announces 
 and secures his rank as leader of his circuit. Grasping a pocket 
 vohime in one hand, he wielded in the other a spud, caught up in 
 his progress through the garden, but instinct at his touch with more 
 significance than a whole museum of horticultural instruments. At 
 one instant a staff, on which he leant and listened to the projector 
 at his elbow developing his plan for the better coppering of ships' 
 bottoms, at the next it became a wand, pointing out to a portly 
 constituent from the Cloth Hall at Leeds some rich effect of the 
 sunset ; then a truncheon, beating time to the poetical reminiscences 
 of a gentleman of the Wesleyan persuasion, looking painfully con- 
 scious of his best clothes and of his best behaviour ; and ere the 
 sacred cadence had reached its close, a cutlass, raised in mimic mu- 
 tiny against the robust form of William Smith, who, as commodore 
 
 31
 
 530 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 of this ill-assorted squadron, was endeavouring to convoy them to 
 their destined port. But little availed the sonorous word of com- 
 mand, or the heart-stirring laugh of the stout member for Norwich, 
 to shape a straight course for the volatile representative of the 
 county of York, now fairly under the canvas of his own bright and 
 joyous fancies. He moved in obedience to some impulse like that 
 which prompts the wheelings of the swallow, or the dodgings of 
 the barbel. But whether he advanced or paused, or revolved, his 
 steps were still measured by the ever-changeful music of his own 
 rich voice ranging over all the chords expressive of mirth and ten- 
 derness, of curiosity or surprise, of delight or of indignation. Elieu, 
 fugaces ! Those elder forms are all now reposing beneath the clods 
 of the valley ; those playful boys are Right Reverend and Venerable 
 dignitaries of the Church ; and he who then seemed to read while 
 he listened silently, is now in the garrulity of declining years, tell- 
 ing old tales, and perhaps distorting in the attempt to revive them, 
 pictures which have long since been fading from the memory. But 
 for that misgiving, how easy to depict the nearer approach of "Wil- 
 liam Wilberforce, and of the tail by which, like some Gaelic chief 
 or Hibernian demagogue, he was attended ! How easy to portray 
 the joyous fusion of the noisy strollers across the lawn, with the 
 quieter but not less happy assemblage which had watched and en- 
 joyed their pantomime to trace the confluence of the two streams 
 of discourse, imparting grace and rapidity to the one, and depth and 
 volume to the other to paint the brightening aspect of the grave 
 censor, as his own reveries were flashed back on him in picturesque 
 forms and brilliant colours or to delineate the subdued countenance 
 of his mercurial associate, as he listened to profound contemplations 
 on the capacities and the duties of man ! 
 
 Of Mr Wilberforce we have had occasion to write so recently, 
 and so much at large, that though the Agamemnon of the host we 
 celebrate the very sun of the Claphamic system we pause not 
 now to describe him. His fair demesne was conterminous with that 
 of Mr Thornton ; nor lacked there sunny banks, or sheltered shrub- 
 beries, where, in each change of season, they revolved the captivity 
 under which man was groaning, and projected schemes for his de- 
 liverance. And although such conclaves might scarcely be convened 
 except in the presence of these two, yet were they rarely held with- 
 out the aid of others, especially of such as could readily find their 
 way thither from the other quarters of the sacred village. 
 
 Yet to that village would not seldom resort guests from more 
 rural abodes which in that age, ignorant of iron railways, were re- 
 garded as sequestered dwellings in remote districts of our island.
 
 THE CL-LPHAM SECT. 531 
 
 Among them not the least frequent, or welcome, or honoured 
 visitor, was one who descended to the table-land of Clapham Com- 
 mon from that loftier table-land, once covered by the ancient forest 
 of Needwood. It is furrowed by several sloping valleys, each 
 forming the bed of a rapid brook, which chafes and twists itself 
 round the roots of oaks so venerable as to have sheltered the deer 
 beneath their branches in the time of the Heptarchy. In later 
 tunes a keeper's lodge, which takes its name from the adjacent 
 village of Yoxall, was erected for the protection of the game at the 
 confluence of two of these rivulets ; for the bolts of " Guy of good 
 Gisborne " had not rarely stricken down the noblest bucks as they 
 came to slake their thirst at those running waters. In the reign of 
 George II. a family, deriving their name from the same " Gisborne," 
 had added Yoxall Lodge to their large possessions, and pursued the 
 sports of the forest with scarcely less ardour than the bold outlaw 
 himself. But this hereditary passion for the chase did not descend 
 to Thomas Gisborne, the second of the race among the modern 
 proprietors of Yoxall Lodge. Though fortune had given him wealth, 
 and nature had endowed him with a figure as graceful and as elastic 
 as that of the deer which peeped out on his mansion from the. 
 neighbouring hollies, and though his spirit was brave and joyous, 
 yet his stout heart and masculine intellect were wedded to a feminine 
 soul. Though he never feared the face or the understanding of 
 mortal man, he shrank with a kind of virgin sensitiveness from the 
 coarse familiarities of the field and of the world. Though gay, even 
 to uproar, in the morning of life, and in his interior circle, he 
 appeared beyond those narrow precincts, like a man driven by con- 
 stitutional shyness into silence and seclusion. When, therefore, 
 the freeholders of his native county proposed to send him as their 
 representative to the House of Commons, he turned away with aver- 
 sion from such a plunge into the miry waters of parliamentary strife, 
 and from such an exile from the glades and the forest banks over 
 which he rejoiced. He was not a man to be cajoled out of his own 
 happiness by any concert of his neighbours' tongues, and escaped 
 the importunities of the electors of Derbyshire by taking sanctuary 
 in the Church. In early manhood he became one of her ministers, 
 and sheltered himself, for the rest of his days, among the "patrician 
 trees" and the "plebeian underwood" of his forest, from the con- 
 flicts of the aristocracy and commonalty of the Palace of West- 
 minster. 
 
 Though secluded, he was not solitary. A daughter of the ancient 
 family of Babington became the companion of his retirement, 
 during a period of almost sixty years ; staying her steps upon his 
 
 34*
 
 532 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 arm, imbibing wisdom from his lips, gathering hope and courage 
 from his eye, and rendering to him such a homage, or rather such 
 a worship, as to draw from the object of it a raillery so playful, so 
 tender, and so full of meaning, that perhaps it ultimately enhanced 
 the affectionate error which, for the moment, it rebuked. 
 
 Husband, father, and householder as he was, a house was all but 
 a superfluity to Mr Gisborne. From dawn till sunset he never 
 willingly passed an hour away from the tangled brakes or the sunny 
 uplands of Needwood, or the banks of the neighbouring Trent. 
 There it was his joyful and inexhaustible employment to study the 
 ways of nature, to investigate her laws, and to meditate the books 
 by which he maintained his intercourse with the outer world. No 
 plant lay in the large circuit of those daily walks, of which he did 
 not understand the history and the use. No animal crossed his path 
 or rose into the air before him, in which he did not recognize a 
 familiar acquaintance. No picturesque grouping of the oaks and 
 hollies in that ancient chase no play of light or shade through 
 their foliage no glimpse of the remoter landscape caught his eye, 
 without being treasured in his memory and transferred to his sketch- 
 book. And when, as would occasionally happen, " one much pent 
 in cities" was permitted to partake in these forest rambles, Mr 
 Gisborne would throw aside, under the genial influence of the place, 
 the reserve which hung upon him in crowded saloons, and would 
 pour himself out in a stream of discourse, sometimes grave and 
 speculative, but more frequently sparkling with humorous conceits, 
 or eddying into retrospects of the comedy of life, of which he had 
 been a most attentive, though too often a silent spectator. Nothing 
 could exceed the amiable good humour with which, on such occasions, 
 he would amuse himself with the incapacity of his metropolitan 
 companion to decipher, without his aid, a single line of that fair 
 scroll of beauty and of wisdom which he himself could read in every 
 scene through which they passed. Their walks, however, would 
 sometimes conduct them to a spot, the charm of which it required 
 no rural tastes to feel, and no rural knowledge to interpret. 
 
 It was the populous village in which Mr Gisborne ministered as 
 a country clergyman. Among its poor inhabitants he seemed to 
 remember nothing except that they were his flock, and he their 
 pastor. Happy in his books, his pencil, his writings, and his home, 
 he never was so happy as when, sitting by the poor man's hearth, 
 he chatted with him about crops and village politics, or with the 
 goodwife about her children, her chickens, and her bees, and then 
 gently deposited, in hearts softened by his kindness, some prolific 
 seeds of a more than human wisdom.
 
 THE CLAP HAM SECT. 533 
 
 From the lodge in the centre of the forest, to the fold thus 
 settled on the slopes of it, there was happily a distance of three 
 miles, which became to Mr Gisborne a species of enlarged though 
 most secluded Study, where, from day to day, he revolved that 
 series of publications to which he was indebted throughout many 
 years for an extensive influence and celebrity. That fame is now 
 dying away. The thoughts of his times were widely dissimilar from 
 those of the present generation. A more impassioned poetry, a 
 severer philosophy, and a theology far more inquisitive and adven- 
 turous, are consigning to a premature oblivion many of his books, 
 which his contemporaries hailed with delight, and with predictions 
 of enduring renown. Xor were those predictions uttered without 
 much apparent reason. For Mr Gisborne contributed largely to the 
 formation of the national mind on subjects of the highest importance 
 to the national character. He was the expositor of the "Evan- 
 gelical " system to those cultivated or fastidious readers, who were 
 intolerant of the ruder style of his less refined brethren. He ad- 
 dressed them as a poet, as a moralist, as a natural philosopher, and 
 as a divine. But he wrought in a spirit, which, though perfectly 
 free and independent, was yet imitative. Cowper was his model in 
 poetry ; Paley, whom he opposed, was yet the prompter of his moral 
 philosophy ; and Bishop Tomline suggested the most considerable of 
 his theological treatises. His literary fame, if it shall indeed endure 
 the competitions of a later age, must rest on his sermons. They 
 were regarded by his contemporaries as models in a style of com- 
 position in which the English language has scarcely a single speci- 
 men of excellence. Except one or two discourses of South, and as 
 many of Robert Hall, we have absolutely nothing to put in compe- 
 tition with the pulpit oratory of France. "We possess, indeed, many 
 homiletical essays of exuberant power, wealth, and eloquence, but 
 scarcely an attempt attesting even the consciousness of what con- 
 stitutes the perfection of a homily. Mr Gisborne approached more 
 nearly than any Anglican clergyman of his time towards the ideal 
 of that much neglected art. His sermons were perspicuous in the 
 analysis of truth, and energetic in the inculcation of it. He knew 
 how to assign to the principal topic of each discourse its due pre- 
 dominance, and to the collateral topics their just subordination. His 
 sermons were remarkable for that unity of design which is indispens- 
 able to beauty, and that elevated singleness of purpose, without 
 which the most exquisite graces of composition are utterly worthless 
 in the pulpit. They were scriptural, uncompromising, and trans- 
 parently luminous ; and deservedly obtained a cordial acceptance 
 and a wide popularity. If the unction of Mr Gisborne's addresses
 
 534 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 had been equal to their vigour ; if the sentiment had been as pro- 
 found as it was genuine, or as elevated as it was just ; if the style 
 had been as easy as it was correct ; if imagination had done her 
 work as effectually as taste performed her office ; if, in a word, 
 those sermons had been animated by the soul of an orator as fully 
 as they were moulded by the hand of an artist, a scholar, and a 
 divine, they would have been not merely the delight ohis own times, 
 but a part of the literary inheritance of Englishmen in our own 
 and in future ages. 
 
 There have been saints of every possible variety of Christian 
 heroism, martyrs of truth and martyrs of humanity, thaumaturgists 
 and ascetics, mystics and missionaries. But there is a form of 
 sanctity more rare than any of these, and more excellent than most 
 of them. It is that sanctity which " passing through the valley of 
 Baca maketh it a well," which throws over this dark world an atmo- 
 sphere like that of a yet unforfeited paradise. It is the sanctity of 
 happiness. It is the conversion of the life of man into a continued 
 eucharistic service, rendered to a gracious Father by a grateful and 
 confiding child. 
 
 There are yet living some who passed many years in the closest 
 intimacy with Thomas Gisborne which can subsist between men of 
 different generations, who, looking back on that long familiar inter- 
 course, can recollect nothing which detracted from his apparently 
 unsullied innocency : no irreverent forgetfulness of the Divine pre- 
 sence, and no ostentatious recognition of it ; no haughtiness of spirit, 
 no morose or vindictive temper, no morbid desire for human ap- 
 plause, no cold indifference to human affection, no inordinate self- 
 indulgence, no world idolatry. Such self-conquest is the indispens- 
 able basis of whatever else is great in human character. The 
 philanthropists of vice and self-indulgence delineated by Fielding and 
 Sheridan are as absolute chimeras as the centaurs and hippogriffs of 
 romance. Yet no accumulation of mere negative virtues will render 
 any man either great or good. To a conscience void of offence, Mr 
 Gisborne added a kind of passion for all the works of God, animate 
 and inanimate, and a profound and tranquil love of God himself. 
 It was no unseemly or loquacious affection, but a grave and cheerful 
 complacency, resting on the meek assurance that he was himself 
 the object of the unceasing benignity of his Maker. The sun shone 
 with a mild and unclouded lustre on his path, as he pursued it 
 from his youth to the grave, with tranquil energy and undisturbed 
 composure. 
 
 It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of 
 feasting ; but it is better still to go to the house of heaven-descende "
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 535 
 
 peace and heaven-ascending thankfulness. They who once passed 
 many happy days beneath the roof of Thomas Gisborne, have since 
 visited many an abode of sorrow and of joy, bearing with them a 
 recollection which may have allayed both the tumultuous mirth and 
 the depressing sorrows of this transient state. It is the recollection 
 of one to whom everything yielded some innocent delight, and over 
 whom nothing ever cast a cloud of melancholy. Their memories re- 
 call the chamber in which he passed such of his studious hours as 
 were withdrawn from his out-door life a chamber which it might 
 seem no dealer in household furniture had ever been permitted to 
 enter, but where books and manuscripts, plants and pallets, tools and 
 philosophical instruments, birds perched on the shoulder, or nestling 
 in the bosom of the student, or birds curiously stuffed by his hands, 
 usurped the places usually assigned to the works of the upholsterer. 
 They can still revive the remembrance of his library, embellished 
 with his own paintings, and thronged with kindred, friends, and 
 neighbours, among whom he Avould sometimes converse with the 
 mature wisdom of old age, and sometimes disport himself with the 
 unrestrained gaiety of boyhood. Theology, literature, art, natural his- 
 tory, gardening, and rambles through his forest, filled the leisure of a 
 life devoted to pastoral and to domestic duties. Yet they did not de- 
 prive him either of the time or of the inclination to take his share in 
 those pursuits to which his friends at Clapham had consecrated their 
 existence. His heart Avas with them. His pen and his purse were 
 ever at their command. 
 
 During a period of more than fifty years, an intimacy the most 
 confiding and affectionate united Thomas Gisborne to William 
 Wilberforce. The member for Yorkshire made Yoxall Lodge his 
 country residence, and the Staffordshire divine had his suburban 
 sojourn at the house of his friend at Clapham. Among the sectaries 
 of that village he took his share in labour and in deliberation, whether 
 the abolition of the slave trade, the diffusion of Christianity, the 
 war against vice and ignorance, or the advancement of evangelical 
 theology, was the object of the passing day. Yet, when he was en- 
 gaged hi these public duties, they who knew him best would perceive 
 that their publicity was painful, and their seeming ostentation offen- 
 sive to him. When seated at the cabinet held in the library of Henry 
 Thornton, it was obvious that the heart of Thomas Gisborne was 
 still turning to his parish, and that his imagination was far away in 
 the recesses of his forest. It had been the cradle of his childhood ; 
 and there, at the age of eighty-seven, his body was committed to the 
 grave in the fulness of that sure and certain hope which had thrown 
 her bright hues over every passage of his protracted residence on
 
 536 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 earth. It was committed to the grave in the fulness of that sooth- 
 ing and grateful memory, also, which they who stood together round 
 his hier retained of a father and of a friend, from whom they had 
 learned very many lessons ; but above all, the lesson that though 
 the path through earth to heaven be usually pursued through a vale 
 of tears, it may also be sometimes pursued through green pastures, 
 and by waters of comfort, with a light from heaven itself Lightening 
 every step, and shining more and more unto the perfect day. 
 
 It is not permitted to any coterie altogether to escape the spirit of 
 coterie. Clapham Common, of course, thought itself the best of all 
 possible commons. Such, at least, was the opinion of the less 
 eminent of those who were entitled to house-bote and dinner-bote 
 there. If the common was attacked, the whole homage was in a 
 flame. If it was laughed at, there could be no remaining sense of 
 decency amongst men. The commoners admired in each other the 
 reflection of their own looks, and the echo of their own voices. A 
 critical race, they drew many of their canons of criticism from books 
 and talk of their own parentage ; and for those on the outside of 
 the pale, there might be, now and then, some failure of charity. 
 Their festivities were not exhilarating. New faces, new topics, and 
 a less liberal expenditure of wisdom immediately after dinner, would 
 have improved them. Thus, even at Clapham, the discerning might 
 perceive the imperfections of our common nature, and take up the 
 lowly confession of the great Thomas Erskine " After all, gentle- 
 men, I am but a man." 
 
 But if not more than men, they were not less. They had none of 
 the intellectual coxcombry since so prevalent. They did not instil 
 philosophic and political neology into young ladies and officers of 
 the Guards, through the gentle medium of the fashionable novel. 
 They mourned over the ills inseparable from the progress of society, 
 without shrieks or hysterics. They were not epicures for whose 
 languid palates the sweets of the rich man's banquet must be seasoned 
 with the acid of the poor man's discontent. Their philanthropy did 
 not languish without the stimulant of satire ; nor did it degenerate 
 into a mere ballet of tender attitudes and sentimental pirouettes. 
 Their philosophy was something better than an array of hard words. 
 Their religion was something more than a collection of impalpable 
 essences ; too fine for analysis, and too delicate for use. It was a 
 hardy, serviceable, fruitbearing, and patrimonial religion. 
 
 They were the sons, by natural or spiritual birth, of men who, in 
 the earlier days of Methodism, had shaken off the lethargy in which, 
 till then, the Church of England had been entranced of men, by 
 whose agency the great evangelic doctrine of faith, emerging in its
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 537 
 
 primeval splendour, had not only overpowered the contrary heresies, 
 but had perhaps obscured some kindred truths. This earlier gener- 
 ation of the evangelic school had been too ingenuous, and too confi- 
 dent in the divine reality of their cause, to heed much what hostility 
 they might awaken. They had been content to pass for fools, in a 
 world whose boasted wisdom they accounted folly. In their once 
 central and all-pervading idea, they had found an influence hardly 
 less than magical. They had esteemed it impossible to inculcate too 
 emphatically, or too widely, that truth which Paul had proclaimed 
 indifferently to the idolaters of Ephesus, the revellers of Corinth, the 
 sophists of Athens, and the debauched citizens of sanguinary Rome. 
 
 Their sons adopted the same creed with equal sincerity and un- 
 diminished earnestness, but with a far keener sense of the hindrances 
 opposed to the indiscriminate and rude exhibition of it. Absolute 
 as was the faith of Mr Wilberforce and his associates, it was not 
 possible that the system called " Evangelical " should be asserted by 
 them in the blunt and uncompromising tone of their immediate pre- 
 decessors. A more elaborate education, greater familiarity with the 
 world and with human affairs, a deeper insight into science and his- 
 tory, with a far nicer discernment of mere conventional proprieties, 
 had opened to them a range of thought, and had .brought them into 
 relations with society, of which their fathers were comparatively 
 destitute. Positiveness, dogmatism, and an ignorant contempt of 
 difficulties, may accompany the firmest convictions, but not the con- 
 victions of the firmest minds. The freedom with which the vessel 
 swings at anchor, ascertains the soundness of her anchorage. To be 
 conscious of the force of prejudice in ourselves and others, to feel 
 the strength of the argument we resist, to know how to change 
 places internally with our antagonists, to understand why it is that 
 we provoke their scorn, disgust, or ridicule and still to be unshaken, 
 still to adhere with fidelity to the standard we have chosen this is 
 a triumph, to be won by those alone on whom is bestowed not 
 merely the faith which overcomes the world, but the pure and 
 peaceable wisdom which is from above. 
 
 And such were they whom the second generation of the Evangel- 
 ical party acknowledged as their secular chiefs. They fell on days 
 much unlike those which we, their children, have known days less 
 softened by the charities and courtesies, but less enervated by the 
 frivolities of life. Since the fall of the Eoman republic, there had 
 not arisen within the bosom, and armed with the weapons, of civil- 
 isation itself, a power so full of menace to the civilised world as that 
 which then overshadowed Europe. In the deep seriousness of that 
 dark era, they of whom we speak looked back for analogies to that
 
 538 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 remote conflict of the nations, and drew evil auguries from the event 
 of the wars which, from Sylla to Octavius, had dyed the earth with 
 the blood of its inhabitants, to establish at length a military despot- 
 ism ruthless, godless, and abominable. But they also reverted to 
 the advent, even in that age of lust and cruelty, of a power destined 
 to wage successful war, not with any external or earthly potentate, 
 but with the secret and internal spring of all this wretchedness 
 and wrong the power of love, incarnate though divine of love 
 exercised in toils and sufferings, and at length yielding up life itself, 
 that from that sacrifice might germinate the seeds of a new and en- 
 during life the vital principle of man's social existence, of his 
 individual strength, and of his immortal hopes. 
 
 And as, in that first age of Christianity, truth, and with it hea- 
 venly consolation, had been diffused, not alone or chiefly by the life- 
 less text, but by living messengers proclaiming and illustrating the 
 renovating energy of the message intrusted to them ; so to those 
 who, at the commencement of this century, were anxiously watching 
 the convulsions of their own age, it appeared that the sorrows of 
 mankind would be best assuaged, and the march of evil most effect- 
 ually stayed, by a humble imitation of that inspired example. They 
 therefore formed themselves into a confederacy, carefully organised 
 and fearlessly avowed, to send forth into all lands, but above all into 
 their own, the two witnesses of the Church Scripture and Tradi- 
 tion ; Scripture, to be interpreted by its divine Author to the de- 
 vout worshippers Tradition, not of doctrinal tenets, but of that un- 
 extinguishable zeal, which, first kindled in the apostolic times, has 
 never since wanted either altars to receive, or attendant ministers to 
 feed and propagate the flame. Bibles, schools, missionaries, the 
 circulation of evangelical books, and the training of evangelical 
 clergymen, the possession of well-attended pulpits, war through the 
 press, and war in parliament, against every form of injustice which 
 either law or custom sanctioned such were the forces by which 
 they hoped to extend the kingdom of light, and to resist the tyranny 
 with which the earth was threatened. 
 
 Nor was it difficult to distinguish or to grapple with their antagon- 
 ists. The slave trade was then brooding like a pestilence over 
 Africa; that monster iniquity which fairly outstripped all abhor- 
 rence, and baffled all exaggeration converting one quarter of this 
 fair earth into the nearest possible resemblance of what we conceive 
 of hell, reversing every law of Christ, and openly defying the venge- 
 ance of God. The formation of the holy league, of which we are 
 the chroniclers, synchronised with that unhappy illness which, half 
 a century ago, withdrew Thomas Clarkson from the strife to which
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 539 
 
 he was set apart and consecrated ; leaving his associates to pursue 
 it during the twelve concluding years, unaided by his presence, but 
 not without the aid of his example, his sympathy, and his prayers. 
 They have all long since passed away, while he still lives (long may 
 he live ! ) to enjoy honours and benedictions, for which the diadem 
 of Napoleon, even if wreathed with the laurels of Goethe, would be 
 a mean exchange. But, alas ! it is not given to any one, not even 
 to Thomas Clarkson, to enjoy a glory complete and analloyed. Far 
 from us be the attempt to pluck one leaf from the crown which rests 
 on that time-honoured head. But with truth there may be no com- 
 promise, and truth wrings from us the acknowledgment, that Thomas 
 Clarkson never lived at Clapham ! 
 
 ISfot so that comrade in his holy war, whom, of all that served under 
 the same banner, he seems to have loved the best. At the distance 
 of a few bow-shots from the house of Henry Thornton, was the happy 
 home in which dwelt Granville Sharpe ; at once the abiding guest 
 and the bosom friend of his more wealthy brothers. A critic, with 
 the soul of a churchwarden, might indeed fasten on certain metes and 
 bounds, hostile to the parochial claims of the family of Sharpe ; but 
 in the wider ken and more liberal judgment of the historian, the 
 dignity of a true Claphamite is not to be refused to one whose even- 
 ing walk and morning contemplations led him so easily and so often 
 within the hallowed precincts. 
 
 Would that the days of Isaac "Walton could have been prolonged 
 to the time when Granville Sharpe was to be committed to the care 
 of the biographers ! His Likeness from the easel of the good old 
 Angler would have been drawn with an outline as correct and firm, 
 and in colours as soft and as transparent, as the portraits of Hooker 
 or of Herbert, of Donne or of Walton. A narrative, no longer than 
 the liturgy which they all so devoutly loved, would then have super- 
 seded the annals which now embalm his memory beneath that non- 
 conforming prolixity which they all so devoutly hated. 
 
 The grandson of an Archbishop of York, the son of an Archdeacon 
 of Northumberland, the brother of a Prebendary of Durham, Gran- 
 ville Sharpe, descending to the rank from which Isaac Walton rose, 
 was apprenticed to a linen-draper of the name of Halsey, a Quaker, 
 who kept his shop on Tower Hill. When the Quaker died, the in- 
 dentures were transferred to a Presbyterian of the same craft. When 
 the Presbyterian retired, they were made over to an Irish Papist. 
 When the Papist quitted the trade, they passed to a fourth master, 
 whom the apprentice reports to have had no religion at all. At one 
 time a Socinian took up his abode at the draper's, and assaulted the 
 faith of the young apprentice in the mysteries of the Trinity and the
 
 540 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 Atonement. Then a Jew came to lodge there, and contested with 
 him the truth of Christianity itself. But blow from what quarter 
 it might, the storm of controversy did but the more endear to him 
 the shelter of his native nest, built for him by his forefathers, like 
 that of the swallow of the Psalmist, in the courts and by the altar 
 of his God. He studied Greek to wrestle with the Socinian he 
 acquired Hebrew to refute the Israelite he learned to love the 
 Quaker, to be kind to the Presbyterian, to pity the Atheist, and to 
 endure even the Roman Catholic. Charity (so he judged) was 
 nurtured in his bosom by these early polemics, and the affectionate 
 spirit which warmed to the last the current of his maturer thoughts, 
 grew up, as he believed, within him, while alternately measuring 
 crapes and muslins, and defending the faith against infidels and 
 heretics. 
 
 The cares of the mercer's shop engaged no less than seven years of 
 a life destined to be held in grateful remembrance as long as the 
 language or the history of his native land shall be cultivated among 
 men. The next eighteen were consumed in the equally obscure em- 
 ployment of a clerk in the office of Ordnance. Yet it was during 
 this period that Granville Sharpe disclosed to others, and probably to 
 himself, the nature, so singular and so lovely, which distinguished 
 him the most inflexible of human wills, united to the gentlest of 
 human hearts an almost audacious freedom of thought, combined 
 with profound reverence for hoar authority a settled conviction of 
 the wickedness of our race, tempered by an infantine credulity in the 
 virtue of each separate member of it a burning indignation against 
 injustice and wrong, reconciled with pity and long-suffering towards 
 the individual oppressor all the sternness which Adam has be- 
 queathed to his sons, wedded to all the tenderness which Eve has 
 transmitted to her daughters. 
 
 As long as Granville Sharpe survived, it was too soon to proclaim 
 that the age of chivalry was gone. The Ordnance clerk sat at his 
 desk with a soul as distended as that of a Paladin bestriding his war- 
 horse ; and encountered with his pen such giants, hydras, and dis- 
 courteous knights, as infested the world in the eighteenth century. 
 He found the lineal representative of the "Willoughbys de Parham in 
 the person of a retired tradesmen ; and buried himself in pedigrees, 
 feoffments, and sepulchral inscriptions, till he saw his friend enjoy- 
 ing his ancestral privileges among the Peers of Parliament. He 
 combated, on more than equal terms, the great Hebraist, Dr Kenni- 
 cott, in defence of Ezra's catalogue of the sacred vessels, chiefs, and 
 families. He laboured long, and with good success, to defeat an un- 
 just grant made by the Treasury to Sir James Lowther of the Forest
 
 THE CLAP HAM SECT. Oil 
 
 of Inglewood, and the manor and castle of Carlisle. He waged a 
 less fortunate war against the theatrical practice of either sex ap- 
 pearing in the habiliments of the other. He moved all the powers 
 of his age, political and intellectual, to abolish the impressment of 
 seamen, and wound up a dialogue with Johnson on the subject, by 
 opposing the scriptural warning, " Woe to them that call evil good, 
 and good evil," to what he described as the " plausible sophistry and 
 important self-sufficiency " of the Sage. Presenting himself to the 
 then Secretary of State, Lord Dartmouth, he denounced, with pro- 
 phetic solemnity, the guilt of despoiling and exterminating in the 
 Charib war that miserable remnant of the aboriginal race of the 
 Antilles. As a citizen of London, he came to the rescue of Crosby, 
 the Lord Mayor, in his struggle with the House of Commons. As a 
 citizen of the world, he called on earth and heaven to stay the plagues 
 of slavery and the slave-trade, and advocated the independence of 
 America with such ardour as to sacrifice to it his own. Orders had 
 reached his office to ship munitions of war to the revolted colonies. 
 If his hand had entered the account of such a cargo, it would have 
 contracted in his eyes the stain of innocent blood. To avoid that 
 pollution he resigned his place, and his means of subsistence, at a 
 period of life Avhen he could no longer hope to find any other lucra- 
 tive employment. But he had brothers who loved and supported 
 him ; and his release from the fatigues of a subordinate office left him 
 free to obey the impulses of his own brave spirit, as the avenger of 
 the oppressed. 
 
 While yet a chronicler of gunpowder and small arms, a negro, 
 abandoned to disease, had asked of him an alms. Silver and gold 
 he had none, but such as he had he gave him. He procured for the 
 poor sufferer medical aid, and watched over him with affectionate 
 care until his health was restored. The patient, once more become 
 sleek and strong, was an object on which Barbadian eyes could not 
 look without cupidity ; and one Lisle, his former master, brought an 
 action against Granville Sharpe for the illegal detention of his slave. 
 Three of the infallible doctors of the Church of Westminster 
 Yorke, Talbot, and Mansfield favoured the claim ; and Blackstone, 
 the great expositor of her traditions, hastened, at their bidding, to 
 retract a heresy on this article of the faith into which his un- 
 instructed reason had fallen. Not such the reverence paid by the 
 hard-working clerk to the inward light which God had vouchsafed 
 to him. He conned his entries indeed, and transcribed his minutes 
 all day long, just as if nothing had happened ; but throughout two 
 successive years he betook himself to his solitary chamber, there, 
 night by night, to explore the original sources of the Law of Eng-
 
 542 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 land, in the hope that so he might he ahle to correct the authori- 
 tative dogmas of Chancellors and Judges. His inquiries closed with 
 the firm conviction that, on this subject at least, these most learned 
 persons were but shallow pretenders to learning. In three successive 
 cases he struggled against them with various and doubtful success ; 
 when fortune, or, be it rather said, when Providence, threw in his 
 way the negro Somerset. 
 
 For the vindication of the freedom of that man, followed a debate, 
 ever memorable in legal history for the ability with which it was 
 conducted; for the first introduction to Westminster Hall of 
 Francis Hargrave ; for the audacious assertion then made by Dun- 
 ning, of the maxim, that a new brief will absolve an advocate from 
 the disgrace of publicly retracting an avowal, however solemn, of 
 any principle however sacred ; for the reluctant abandonment by 
 Lord Mansfield of a long-cherished judicial error; and for the 
 recognition of a rule of law of such importance, as almost to justify 
 the poets and rhetoricians in their subsequent embellishments of it ; 
 but above all memorable for the magnanimity of the prosecutor, 
 who, though poor and dependent and immersed in the duties of a 
 toilsome calling, supplied the money, the leisure, perseverance, and 
 the learning, required for this great controversy who, wholly for- 
 getting himself in his object, had studiously concealed his connection 
 with it, lest, perchance, a name so lowly should prejudice a cause so 
 momentous who, denying himself even the indulgence of attending 
 the argument he had provoked, had circulated his own researches in 
 the name, and as the work, of a plagiarist who had republished 
 them and who, mean as was his education, and humble as were his 
 pursuits, had proved his superiority as a Jurist, on one main branch 
 of the law of England, to some of the most illustrious Judges by 
 whom that law had been administered. 
 
 Never was abolitionist more scathless than Granville Sharpe by 
 the reproach to which their tribe had been exposed, of insensibility 
 to all human sorrows, unless the hair of the suiferer be thick as 
 wool, and the skin as black as ebony. His African client may 
 indeed have usurped a larger share of his attachment than the others; 
 and of his countless schemes of beneficence, that which he loved the 
 best was the settlement at Sierra Leone of a free colony, to serve as 
 a point-d? appui in the future campaigns against the slave trade. 
 But he may be quoted as an experimental proof of the infinite 
 divisibility of the kindly affections. Much he wrote, and much he 
 laboured, to conciliate Great Britain and America ; much to promote 
 the diffusion of the Holy Scriptures ; much to interpret the pro- 
 phecies contained in them ; much to refute the errors of the Socin-
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 543 
 
 ians; much to sustain the cause of Grattan and the Irish volunteers ; 
 much to recommend reform in Parliament ; and much, it must be 
 added, (for what is a man in his best estate ]) to dissuade the eman- 
 cipation of the Catholics. Many also were the benevolent societies 
 which he formed or fostered ; and his publications, who can number] 
 Their common aim was to advance the highest interests of mankind; 
 but to none of them, with perhaps one exception, could the praise 
 either of learning or of originality be justly given. For he possessed 
 rather a great soul than a great understanding ; and was less admir- 
 able for the extent of his resources, than for the earnest affection 
 and the quiet energy with which he employed them. 
 
 Like all men of that cast of mind, his humour was gay and 
 festive. Among the barges which floated on a summer evening by 
 the villa of Pope, and the chateau of Horace Walpole, none was 
 more constant or more joyous than that in which Granville Sharpe's 
 harp or kettle-drum sustained the flute of one brother, the hautboy 
 of another, and the melodious voices of their sisters. It was a 
 concord of sweet sounds, typical, as it might seem, of the fraternal 
 harmony which blessed their dwelling on the banks of that noble 
 river. Much honest mirth gladdened that affectionate circle, and 
 brother Granville's pencil could produce very passable caricatures 
 when he laid aside his harp, fashioned, as he maintained, in exact 
 imitation of that of the son of Jesse. To complete the resemblance, 
 it was his delight, at the break of day, to sing to it one of the songs 
 of Zion in his chamber raised by many an intervening staircase far 
 above the Temple gardens, where young students of those times 
 would often pause in their morning stroll, to listen to the not un- 
 pleasing cadence, though the voice was broken by age, and the lan- 
 guage was to them an unknown tongue. 
 
 On one of their number he condescended to bestow a regard, the 
 memory of which would still warm the heart, even were it chilled by 
 as many years as had then blanched that venerable head. The one 
 might have passed for the grandson of the other ; but they met with 
 mutual pleasure, and conversed with a confidence not unlike that of 
 equals. And yet, at this period, Granville Sharpe was passing into 
 a state which, in a nature less active and benevolent than his, would 
 have been nothing better than dotage. In him it assumed the form 
 of a delirium, so calm, so busy, and giving birth to whim a so kind- 
 hearted, as often to remind his young associate of Isaac "Walton's 
 saying, that the very dreams of a good man are acceptable to God. 
 To illustrate by examples the state of a mind thus hovering on the 
 confines of wisdom and fatuity, may perhaps suggest the suspicion 
 that the old man's infirmities were contagious ; but even at that risk
 
 544: THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 tliey shall be hazarded ; for few of the incidents of his more vigorous 
 days delineate him so truly. 
 
 William Henry, the last Duke of Gloucester (who possessed 
 many virtues, and even considerable talents, which his feeble talk 
 and manners concealed from his occasional associates), had a great 
 love for Granville Sharpe ; and nothing could be more amiable than 
 the intercourse between them, though the one could never for a moment 
 forget that he was a prince of the blood-royal, and the other never 
 for a moment remembered that he was bred up as a linen-draper's 
 apprentice. Beneath the pompous bearing of the Guelph lay a 
 basis of genuine humility, and the free carriage of the ex-clerk of 
 the Ordnance was but the natural expression of a lowliness un- 
 embarrassed by any desire of praise or dread of failure. A little too 
 gracious, perhaps, yet full of benignity, was the aspect and the attitude 
 of the Duke, when, at one of the many philanthropic assemblages 
 held under his presidency, Granville Sharpe (it was no common 
 occurrence) rose, and requested leave to speak. He had, he said, two 
 schemes, which, if recommended by such advocates, must greatly 
 reduce the sum of human misery. To bring to a close the calamities 
 of Sierra Leone, he had prepared a law for introducing there King 
 Alfred's frank pledge, a sovereign remedy for all such social wounds. 
 At once to diminish the waste of human life in the Peninsula, and 
 to aid the depressed workmen in England, he had devised a project 
 for manufacturing portable woolpacks ; under the shelter of wliich 
 ever-ready intrenchments, our troops might, without the least danger 
 to themselves, mow down the ranks of the oppressors of Spain. 
 
 A politician, as well as a strategist, he sought and obtained an 
 interview with Charles Fox, to whom he had advice of great urgency 
 to give for conducting the affairs of Europe. If the ghost of Burke 
 had appeared to lecture him, Fox could hardly have listened with 
 greater astonishment, as his monitor, by the aid of the Little Horn 
 in Daniel, explained the future policy of Napoleon and of the Czar. 
 " The Little Horn ! Mr Sharpe," at length exclaimed the most 
 amiable of men, " what in the name of wonder do you mean by the 
 Little Horn ] " " See there," said the dejected interpreter of pro- 
 phecy to his companion, as they retired from the Foreign Office 
 " See there the fallacy of reputation ! Why, that man passes for 
 a statesman ; and yet it is evident to me that he never before so 
 much as heard of the Little Horn ! " 
 
 As his end drew nearer, he became less and less capable of seizing 
 the distinction between the prophecies and the newspapers. It 
 rained as heavily on the 18th of February, 1813, as on the afternoon 
 when Isaac Walton met the future Bishop of Worcester at Bunliill
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 545 
 
 Row, and found, in the public-house which gave them shelter, that 
 double blessing of good ale and good discourse which he has so 
 piously commemorated. Not such is the fortune of the young 
 Templar, who, in a storm at least as pitiless, met Granville Sharpe 
 at the latter epoch moving down Long Acre as nimbly as ever, with 
 his calm thoughtful countenance raised gently upwards, as was usual 
 with him as though gazing on some object which it pleased him 
 well to look upon. But his discourse, though delivered in a kind 
 of a shower-bath, to which his reverie made him insensible, was as 
 characteristic, if not as wise, as that of the learned Sanderson. "You 
 have heard," he began, " my young friend, of this scandalous proceed- 
 ing of the Rabbi Ben Mendoli ? JSTo ? Why, then, read this brief 
 account of it which I have been publishing. About a year ago the 
 Rabbi, being then at Damascus, saw a great flame descend, and rest 
 on one of the hills which surround the city. Soon after, he came to 
 Gibraltar. There he discovered how completely that celestial 
 phenomenon verified my interpretation of the words ' Arise, shine, 
 for thy light is come,' &c. ; and now he has the audacity not only 
 to deny that he ever saw such a flame, but to declare that he never 
 pretended to have seen it. Can you imagine a clearer fulfilment of 
 the predicted blindness and obduracy of Israel before their restora- 
 tion ? " 
 
 That great event was to have taken place within a few months, 
 when the still more awful event which happens to all living, removed 
 this aged servant of God and man from the world of shadows to the 
 world of light. To die at the precise moment when the vast pro- 
 phetic drama was just reaching its sublime catastrophe, was a trial 
 not easily borne, even by a faith so immovable as his. But death 
 had no other sting for him. It awakened his pure spirit from the 
 dreams which peopled it during the decay of his fleshy tabernacle ; 
 and if that change revealed to him that he had ill-interpreted 
 many of the hard sentences of old, it gave him the assurance that 
 he had well divined the meaning of one immutable prophecy 
 the prophecy of a gracious welcome and an eternal reward to 
 those, who, discerning the brethren of their Redeemer in the 
 hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the pri- 
 soner, should for His sake feed, and shelter, and clothe, and visit, and 
 comfort them. 
 
 United in the bonds of that Christian charity, though wide as the 
 poles asunder in theological opinions, were Granville Sharpe and 
 William Smith ; that other denizen of Clapham who has already 
 crossed our path. He lived as if to show how much of the coarser 
 duties of this busy world may be undertaken by a man of quick 
 
 35
 
 546 THE CLAPHAM SECT 
 
 sensibility, -without impairing the finer sense of the beautiful in 
 nature and in art ; and as if to prove how much a man of ardent 
 benevolence may enjoy of this world's happiness, Avithout any steel- 
 ing of the heart to the wants and the calamities of others. When 
 he had nearly completed fourscore years, he could still gratefully 
 acknowledge that he had no remembrance of any bodily pain or 
 illness ; and that of the very numerous family of which he was the 
 head, every member still lived to support and to gladden his old 
 age. And yet, if he had gone mourning all his days, he could 
 scarcely have acquired a more tender pity for the miserable, or have 
 laboured more habitually for their relief. It was his ill fortune to 
 provoke the invective of Robert Southey, and the posthumous 
 sneers of Walter Scott the one resenting a too well merited 
 reproach, the other indulging that hate of Whigs and Whiggery 
 which, in that great mind, was sometimes stronger than the love of 
 justice. The enmity even of such men he, however, might well 
 endure, who possessed, not merely the attachment and confidence 
 of Charles Fox and his followers, but the almost brotherly love of 
 William Wilberforce, of Granville Sharpe, and of Thomas Clarkson. 
 Of all their fellow-labourers, there was none more devoted to their 
 cause, or whom they more entirely trusted. They, indeed, were all 
 to a man homo-ousicms, and he a disciple of Belsham. But they 
 judged that many an erroneous opinion respecting the Redeemer's 
 person would not deprive of His gracious approbation, and ought not 
 to exclude from their own affectionate regards, a man in whom they 
 daily saw a transcript, however imperfect, of the Redeemer's mercy 
 and beneficence. 
 
 Thirty-seven years have rolled away since these men met at Clap- 
 ham, in joy and thanksgiving, and mutual gratulation, over the 
 abolition of the African slave trade. It was still either the dwelling- 
 place, or the haunt, of almost every one of the more eminent sup- 
 porters of that measure ; and it may be that they exulted beyond 
 the limits of sober reason in the prospects which that success had 
 opened to them. Time has brought to light more than they knew 
 or believed of the inveteracy of the evil ; and of the impotency of 
 law in a protracted contest with avarice. But time has also ascer- 
 tained, that throughout the period assigned for the birth and death 
 of a whole generation of mankind, there has been no proof, or 
 reasonable suspicion, of so much as a single evasion of this law 
 in any one of the transatlantic British colonies. Time has shoAvn 
 that to that law we may now confidently ascribe the deliverance of 
 our own land from this blood-guiltiness for ever. Time has ascer- 
 tained that the solemn practical assertion then made of the great
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 547 
 
 principles of justice, was to be prolific of consequences, direct and 
 indirect, of boundless magnitude. Time has enlisted on our side 
 all the powers and all the suffrages of the earth ; so that no one 
 any longer attempts to erase the brand of murder from the brow 
 of the slave trader. Above all, time has shown that, in the ex- 
 tinction of the slave trade, was involved, by slow but inevitable 
 steps, the extinction of the slavery which it had created and sus- 
 tained. This, also, was a result of which, as far as human agency 
 is concerned, the mainsprings are to be found among that sect 
 to which, having first given a name, we would now build up a 
 monument. 
 
 It is with a trembling hand that we inscribe on that monument 
 the name of Zachary Macaulay ; for it is not without some mis- 
 giving lest pain should be inflicted on the living, while we pass, 
 however reverently, over the half-extinguished ashes of the dead. 
 The bosom shrines, erected in remembrance of them, may be yet 
 more intolerably profaned by rude eulogy than by unmerited re- 
 proach ; and the clanger of such profanation is the more imminent, 
 when the judgment, though unbiassed by any ties of consanguinity, 
 is not exempt from influences almost as kindly and as powerful. 
 It is, however, an attempt which he who would write the sectarian 
 history of Clapham could not wholly decline, without an error like 
 that of omitting the name of Grotius in a sectarian history of the 
 Arrninians. 
 
 A few paces apart from each other, in the church of "Westminster, 
 are three monuments, to which, in God's appointed time, will be 
 added a fourth, to complete the sepulchral honours of those to whom 
 our remotest posterity will ascribe the deliverance of mankind from 
 the woes of the African slave trade, and of colonial slavery. There 
 is a yet more enduring temple, where, engraven by no human hands, 
 abides a record, to be divulged in its season, of services to that 
 cause, worthy to be commemorated with those of William Wilber- 
 force, of Granville Sharpe, of Zachary Macaulay, and of Thomas 
 Clarkson. But to that goodly fellowship the praise will be em- 
 phatically given. Thomas Clarkson is his own biographer, and pious 
 hands have celebrated the labours of two of his colleagues. Of Mr 
 Macaulay no memorial had been made public, excepting that which 
 has been engraven on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, by some 
 eulogist less skilful than affectionate. It is no remediless omission ; 
 although it would require talents of the highest order, to exhibit a 
 distinct and faithful image of a man whose peculiarity it was to 
 conceal, as far as possible, his interior life, under the veil of his 
 outward appearance. That his understanding was proof against 
 
 35*
 
 548 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 sophistry, and his nerves against fear, were, indeed, conclusions to 
 which a stranger arrived at the first interview with him. But what 
 might he suggesting that expression of countenance, at once so 
 earnest and so monotonous hy what manner of feelings those 
 gestures, so uniformly firm and deliberate, were prompted whence 
 the constant traces of fatigue on those overhanging brows, and on 
 that athletic though ungraceful figure what might be the charm 
 which excited amongst his chosen circle a faith approaching to 
 superstition, and a love rising to enthusiasm, towards a man whose 
 demeanour was so inanimate, if not austere 1 it was a riddle of 
 which neither Gall nor Lavater could have found the key. That 
 much was passing within, which that ineloquent tongue and those 
 taciturn features could not utter ; that nature had compensated her 
 other bounties by refusing him the means of a ready interchange of 
 thought ; and that he had won, without knowing how to court, the 
 attachment of all who approached him closely these were dis- 
 coveries which the most casual acquaintance might make, but which 
 they whom he honoured with his intimacy, and they alone, could 
 explain. 
 
 To them he appeared a man possessed by one idea, and animated 
 by one master passion an idea so comprehensive, as to impart a 
 profound interest to all which indicated its influence over him a 
 passion so benevolent, that the coldest heart could not withhold 
 some sympathy from, him who was the subject of it. Trained in' 
 the hardy habits of Scotland in ancient times, he had received from 
 his father much instruction in theology, with some Latin and a little 
 Greek, when not employed in cultivating his father's glebe at Card- 
 ross, on the northern bank of the Clyde. While yet a boy, he had 
 watched as the iron entered into the soul of the slaves, whose 
 labours he was sent to superintend in Jamaica ; and, abandoning 
 with abhorrence a pursuit which had promised him early wealth and 
 distinction, he pondered the question how shall the earth be de- 
 livered from this curse] Turning to Sierra Leone, he braved for 
 many years the deadly climate, that he might aid in the erection 
 and in the defence of what was then the one city of refuge for the 
 Negro race ; and as he saw the slave trade crushing to the dust the 
 adjacent tribes of Africa, he again pondered the question how shall 
 the earth be delivered from this curse ? 
 
 That God had called him into being to wage war with this 
 gigantic evil, became his immutable conviction. During forty suc- 
 cessive years, he was ever burdened with this thought. It was the 
 subject of his visions by day, and of his dreams by night. To give 
 them reality, he laboured as men labour for the honours of a pro-
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 549 
 
 fession, or for the subsistence of their children. The rising sun ever 
 found him at his task. He went abroad but to advance it. His 
 commerce, his studies, his friendships, his controversies, even his 
 discourses in the bosom of his family, were all bent to the promotion 
 of it. He edited voluminous periodical works ; but whether theo- 
 logy, literature, or politics were the text, the design was still the 
 same to train the public mind to a detestation of the slave trade 
 and of slavery. He attached himself to most of the religious and 
 philanthropic societies of his age, that he might enlist them as 
 associates, more or less declared, in his holy war. To multiply such 
 allies, he called into existence one great association, and contributed 
 largely to the establishment of another. In that service he sacrificed 
 all that men may lawfully sacrifice health, fortune, repose, favour, 
 and celebrity. He died a poor man, though wealth was within his 
 reach. He pursued the contest to the end, though oppressed by 
 such pains of body as strained to their utmost tension the self- 
 sustaining powers of the soul. He devoted himself tc the severest 
 toil, amidst allurements to luxuriate in the delights of domestic and 
 social intercourse such as few indeed can have encountered. He 
 silently permitted some to usurp his hardly-earned honours, that no 
 selfish controversy might desecrate then- common cause. He made 
 no effort to obtain the praises of the world, though he had talents to 
 command and a temper peculiarly disposed to enjoy them. He drew 
 on himself the poisoned shafts of calumny ; and, while feeling their 
 sting as generous spirits alone can feel it, never turned a single step 
 aside from his path to propitiate or to crush the slanderers. 
 
 They have long since fallen, or are soon to fall, into unhonoured 
 graves. His memory will be ever dear to those who hate injustice, 
 and revere the unostentatious consecration of a long life to the 
 deliverance of the oppressed. It will be especially dear to the few 
 who closely observed, and who can yet remember, how that self- 
 devotion became the poetical element of a mind not naturally 
 imaginative ; what deep significance it imparted to an aspect and 
 a demeanour not otherwise impressive ; what energy to a temper, 
 which, if not so excited, might perhaps have been phlegmatic ; what 
 unity of design to a mind constitutionally discursive ; and what 
 dignity even to physical languor and suffering, contracted 'in such 
 a service. They can never forget that the most implacable enemy 
 of the tyrants of the plantation and of the slave ship, was the most 
 indulgent and generous and constant of friends ; that he spurned, 
 as men should spurn, the mere pageantry of life, that he might use, 
 as men should use, the means which life affords of advancing the 
 happiness of mankind ; that his earthward affections, active and
 
 550 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 all-enduring as they were, could yet thrive without the support of 
 human sympathy, because they were sustained hy so abiding a sense 
 of the Divine presence, and so absolute a submission to the Divine 
 will, as raised him habitually to that higher region, where the re- 
 proach of man could not reach, and the praise of man might not pre- 
 sume to follow him. 
 
 Although, to repeat a mournful acknowledgment, the tent of 
 Thomas Clarkson was pitched elsewhere, yet throughout the slave 
 trade abolition war, the other chiefs who hailed him as the earliest, 
 and as among the mightiest of their host, kept their communications 
 open by encamping in immediate vicinity to each other. Even to 
 Lord Brougham the same station may, with poetical truth at least, 
 be assigned by the Homer who shall hereafter sing these battles ; for 
 though, at that period, his London domicile was in the walks of the 
 Inner Temple, yet might he not seldom be encountered in the less 
 inviting walks which led him to the suburban councils of his 
 brethren in command. There he formed or cemented attachments, 
 of which no subsequent elevation of rank, or intoxicating triumph 
 of genius, or agony of political strife, have ever rendered him forget- 
 ful. Of one of those denizens of Clapham he has published a sketch, 
 of which we avail ourselves, not as subscribing altogether to the ac- 
 curacy of it, but as we can thus fill up, from the hand of so great a 
 Master, a part of our canvas which must have otherwise remained 
 blank and colourless. 
 
 " Mr Stephen was a person of great natural talents, which, if 
 accidental circumstances had permitted him fully to cultivate, and 
 early enough to bring into play upon the best scene of political 
 exertion the House of Commons would have placed him high 
 in the first rank of English orators. For he had, in an eminent 
 degree, that strenuous firmness of purpose and glowing ardour of 
 soul, which lies at the root of all eloquence ; he was gifted with 
 great industry, a retentive memory, an ingenuity which was rather 
 apt to err by excess than by defect. His imagination was, besides, 
 lively and powerful ; little, certainly, under the chastening disci- 
 pline of severe taste, but often enabling him to embody his own 
 feelings and recollections with great distinctness of outline and 
 strength of colouring. He enjoyed, moreover, great natural 
 strength of constitution, and had as much courage as falls to the 
 lot of most men. But having passed the most active part of his 
 life in one of the "West Indian colonies, where he followed the 
 profession of a barrister, and having, after his return, addicted 
 himself to the practice of a court which affords no scope at all for
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 551 
 
 oratorical display, it happened to him, as it has to many other 
 men of natural genius for rhetorical pursuits, that he neither 
 gained the correct taste which the habit of frequenting refined 
 society, and above all, addressing a refined auditory, can alone 
 bestow, nor acquired the power of condensation, which is sure to 
 be lost altogether by those who address hearers compelled to listen, 
 like judges and juries, instead of having to retain them by close- 
 ness of reasoning, or felicity of illustration. 
 ******** It 
 
 must have struck all who heard him, when, early in 1808, he en- 
 tered Parliament under the auspices of Mr Perceval, that whatever 
 defects he had, arose entirely from accidental circumstances, and not 
 at all from intrinsic imperfections ; nor could any one doubt that 
 his late entrance upon parliamentary life, and his vehemence of 
 temperament, alone kept him from the front rank of debaters, if not 
 of eloquence itself. With Mr Perceval his friendship had been long 
 and intimate. To this the similarity of their religious character 
 mainly contributed ; for Mr Stephen was a distinguished member of 
 the evangelical party, to which the minister manifestly leant without 
 belonging to it ; and he was one whose pious sentiments and de- 
 votional habits occupied a very marked place in his whole scheme 
 of life. No man has, however, a right to question, be it ever so 
 slightly, his perfect sincerity. To this his blameless life bore the 
 most irrefragable testimony. A warm and steady friend a man of 
 the strictest integrity and nicest sense of both honour and justice 
 in all the relations of private society wholly without a stain though 
 envy might well find whereon to perch, malice itself, in the exas- 
 perating discords of religious and civil controversy, never could descry 
 a spot on which to fasten. Let us add the bright praise, and which 
 sets at nought all lesser defects of mere taste, had he lived to read 
 these latter lines, he would infinitely rather have had this sketch 
 stained with all the darker shades of its critical matter, than been ex- 
 alted, without these latter lines, to the level of Demosthenes or of 
 Chatham, praised as the first of orators, or followed as the most 
 brilliant of statesmen. His opinions upon political questions were clear 
 and decided, taken up with the boldness, felt with the ardour, as- 
 serted with the determination, which marked his zealous and uncom- 
 promising spirit. Of all subjects, that of the slave trade and slavery 
 most engrossed his mind. His experience in the West Indies, his 
 religious feelings, and his near connection with Mr Wilberforce, whose 
 sister he married, all contributed to give this great question a pecu- 
 liarly sacred aspect in his eyes ; nor could he either avoid mixing it
 
 552 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 up with almost all other discussions, or prevent his views of its 
 various relations from influencing his sentiments on other matters of 
 political discussion." * 
 
 The author of the preceding portrait enjoyed the happiness denied 
 to the subject of it, not merely of witnessing, but of largely partici- 
 pating in, the last great act by which the labours borne by them in 
 common, during so many preceding years, were consummated. It 
 was a still more rare bounty of Providence, which reserved the 
 abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire as a triumph for 
 the statesmen who, twenty-seven years before, had introduced into 
 the House of Commons the first great act of tardy reparation to 
 Africa. Crowned with honour and with length of days, to Lord 
 Grey it has further been given, by the same benignant power, to 
 watch, in the calm evening of life, the issues of the works of justice 
 and of mercy which God raised him up to accomplish. With the 
 evil omens, and with the too glowing anticipations, of former times, 
 he has been able to contrast the actual solution of this great practi- 
 cal enigma. He has lived to witness eleven years of unbroken tran- 
 quillity throughout countries where, till then, a single year undis- 
 turbed by insurrection was almost unknown the extinction of feuds 
 apparently irreconcilable positions full of danger in former wars, 
 now converted into bulwarks of our national power an equal ad- 
 ministration of justice in the land of the slave-courts and the cart- 
 whip a loyal and happy peasantry, where the soil was so lately 
 broken by the sullen hands of slaves penury exchanged for abund- 
 ance a population, once cursed by a constant and rapid decay, now 
 progressively increasing Christian knowledge and Christian worship 
 universally diffused among a people so lately debased by Pagan 
 superstitions and the conjugal duties, with all their attendant 
 charities, held in due honour by those to whom laws, written in the 
 English language, and sanctioned by the Kings of England, had for- 
 bidden even the marriage vow. If, with these blessings, have also 
 come diminished harvests of the cane and the coffee plant, even they 
 who think that to export and to import -are the two great ends of 
 the social existence of mankind, have before them a bright and not 
 very distant futurity. But he, under whose auspices the heavy yoke 
 was at length broken, is contemplating, doubtless, with other and 
 far higher thoughts, the interests of the world, from which, at no 
 remote period, the inexorable law of our existence must summon 
 him away. In that prospect, so full of awe to the wisest and the 
 best, he may well rejoice in the remembrance that, in conferring on 
 him the capacity to discern and the heart to obey the supreme and 
 * Speeches of Henry Lord Brougham, vol. i. pp. 402 405.
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 553 
 
 immutable will, God enabled him to grasp tlie only clue by which, 
 the rulers of the world can be safely guided amidst the darkness and 
 the intricacy of human affairs. 
 
 Such at least is the doctrine which, if Clapham could have 
 claimed him for her own, Clapham would have instilled into that 
 great Minister of the British Crown, to whom, more than to any 
 other, she was prompt to offer her allegiance. Politics, however, 
 in that microcosm, were rather cosmopolitan than national. Every 
 human interest had its guardian, every region of the globe its re- 
 presentative. If the African continent and the Caribbean Archi- 
 pelago were assigned to an indefatigable protectorate, New Holland 
 was not forgotten, nor was British India without a patron. It was 
 the special charge of Mr Grant, better known to the present genera- 
 tion by the celebrity of his sons, but regarded at the commencement 
 of this century as the real ruler of the rulers of the East, the Director 
 of the Court of Directors. At Leadenhall Street he was celebrated 
 for an integrity exercised by the severest trials ; for an understand- 
 ing large enough to embrace, without confusion, the entire range 
 and the intricate combinations of their whole civil and military 
 policy ; and for nerves which set fatigue at defiance. At Clapham, 
 his place of abode, he was hailed as a man whose piety, though 
 ever active, was too profound for much speech ; a praise to which, 
 among their other glories, it was permitted to few of his neighbours 
 there to attain or to aspire. With the calm dignity of those 
 spacious brows, and of that stately figure, it seemed impossible to 
 reconcile the movement of any passion less pure than that which 
 continually urged him to requite the tribute of India by a treasure, 
 of which he who possessed it more largely than any other of the 
 sons of men has declared, that " the merchandise of it is better than 
 the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold." No 
 less elevated topic (so judged the inquisitive vicinage) could be the 
 subject of his discourse, as he traversed their gorse-covered common, 
 attended by a youth, who, but for the fire of his eye, and the occa- 
 sional energy of his bearing, might have passed for some studious and 
 sickly competitor for medals and prize poems. If such were the 
 pursuits ascribed by Clapham to her occasional visitant, it is but a 
 proof that even "patent Christianity" is no effectual safeguard 
 against human fallibility. 
 
 Towards the middle of the last century, John Martyn of Truro 
 was working with his hands in the mines near that town. He was 
 a wise man, who, knowing the right use of leisure hours, employed 
 them so as to qualify himself for higher and more lucrative pursuits ; 
 and who, knowing the right use of money, devoted his enlarged
 
 554 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 means to procure for his four children a liberal education. Henry, 
 the younger of his sons, was accordingly entered at the University of 
 Cambridge, where in January, 1801, he obtained the degree of bachelor 
 of arts, with the honorary rank of senior wrangler. There also he 
 became the disciple, and, as he himself would have said, the convert 
 of Charles Simeon. Under the counsels of that eminent teacher, the 
 guidance of Mr Wilberforce, and the active aid of Mr Grant, he en- 
 tered the East India Company's service as a chaplain. After a re- 
 sidence in Hindostan of about five years, he returned homewards 
 through Persia in broken health. Pausing at Shiraz, he laboured 
 there during twelve months with the ardour of a man, who, distinctly 
 perceiving the near approach of death, feared lest it should intercept 
 the great work for which alone he desired to live. That work (the 
 translation of the .New Testament into Persian) at length accom- 
 plished, he resumed his way towards Constantinople, following his 
 Mihmander (one Hassan Aga) at a gallop, nearly the whole distance 
 from Tabriz to Tocat, under the rays of a burning sun and the press- 
 ure of continual fever. On the 6th of October, 1812, in the thirty- 
 second year of his age, he brought the Journal of his life to a pre- 
 mature close, by inscribing in it the following words, while he sought 
 a momentary repose under the shadow of some trees at the foot of 
 the Caramanian Mountains : "I sat in the orchard, and thought 
 with sweet comfort and fear of God in solitude, my company, my 
 friend, and comforter. Oh, when shall time give place to eternity ! 
 When shall appear that new heaven and new earth, wherein dwelleth 
 righteousness and love ! There shall in nowise enter anything that 
 defileth ; none of that wickedness which has made man worse than 
 wild beasts ; none of those corruptions which add still more to the 
 miseries of mortality, shall be seen or heard of any more." Ten days 
 afterwards those aspirations were fulfilled. His body was laid in the 
 grave by the hands of strangers at Tocat, and to his disembodied 
 spirit was revealed that awful vision which it is given to the pure in 
 heart, and to them alone, to contemplate. 
 
 Amidst all the discords which agitate the Church of England, her 
 sons are unanimous in extolling the name of Henry Martyn. And 
 with reason : for it is in fact the one heroic name which adorns her 
 annals from the days of Elizabeth to our own. Her apostolic men, 
 the Wesleys and Elliotts and Brainerds of other times, either quitted, 
 or were cast out of her communion. Her Acta Sanctorum may be 
 read from end to end with a dry eye and an unquickened pulse. 
 Henry Martyn, the learned and the holy, translating the Scriptures 
 in his solitary bungalow at Dinapore, or preaching to a congregation
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 555 
 
 of five hundred beggars, or refuting the Mahommedan doctors at 
 Shiraz, is the bright exception. It is not the less bright, because he 
 was brought within the sphere of those secular influences which so 
 often draw down our Anglican worthies from the Empyrean along 
 which they would soar, to the levels, flat though fertile, on which 
 they must depasture. There is no concealing the fact, that he an- 
 nually received from the East India Company an ugly allowance of 
 twelve hundred pounds ; and though he would be neither just nor 
 prudent who should ascribe to the attractive force of that stipend 
 one hour of Henry Martyn's residence in the East, yet the ideal 
 would be better without it. Oppressively conclusive as may be the 
 arguments in favour of a well-endowed and punctually paid " Estab- 
 lishment," they have, after all, an unpleasant earthly savour. One 
 would not like to discover that Polycarp, or Bernard, or Boniface, 
 was waited on every quarter-day by a plump bag of coin from the 
 public treasury. To receive a thousand rupees monthly from that 
 source, was perhaps the duty, it certainly was not the fault, of Henry 
 Martyn. Yet it was a misfortune, and had been better avoided if 
 possible. 
 
 When Mackenzie was sketching his Man of Feeling, he could 
 have desired no better model than Henry Martyn, the young and 
 successful competitor for academical honours ; a man born to love 
 with ardour and to hate with vehemence ; amorous, irascible, 
 ambitious, and vain ; without one torpid nerve about him ; aiming 
 at universal excellence in science, in literature, in conversation, in 
 horsemanship, and even in dress ; not without some gay fancies, but 
 more prone to austere and melancholy thoughts ; patient of the most 
 toilsome inquiries, though not wooing philosophy for her own sake ; 
 animated by the poetical temperament, though unvisited by any 
 poetical inspiration ; eager for enterprise, though thinking meanly 
 of the rewards to which the adventurous aspire ; uniting in himself, 
 though as yet unable to concentrate or to harmonise them, many keen 
 desires, many high powers, and much constitutional dejection the 
 chaotic materials of a great character, destined to combine, as the 
 future events of life should determine, into no common forms, 
 whether of beauty and delight, or of deformity and terror. 
 
 Among those events, the most momentous was his connection 
 with Charles Simeon, and with such of his disciples as sought 
 learning at Cambridge and learned leisure at Clapham. A mind so 
 beset by sympathies of every other kind could not but be peculiarly 
 susceptible to the contagion of opinion. Erom that circle he adopted, 
 in all its unadorned simplicity, the system called Evangelical that
 
 556 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 system of which (if Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Knox, and the 
 writers of the English Homilies may be credited) Christ himself was 
 the author, and Paul the first and greatest interpreter. 
 
 Through shallow heads and voluble tongues, such a creed (or 
 indeed any creed) filtrates so easily, that of the multitude who 
 maintain it, comparatively few are aware of the conflict of their 
 faith with the natural and unaided reason of mankind. Indeed, he 
 who makes such an avowal will hardly escape the charge of affecta- 
 tion or of impiety. Yet if any truth be clearly revealed, it is, that 
 the apostolic doctrine was foolishness to the sages of this world. If 
 any unrevealed truth be indisputable, it is, that such sages are, at 
 this day, making, as they have ever made, ill-disguised efforts to 
 escape the inferences, with which their own subscriptions or admis- 
 sions teem. Divine philosophy divorced from human science 
 celestial things stripped of the mitigating veils woven by man's wit 
 and fancy to relieve them form an abyss as impassable at Oxford 
 now as it was at Athens eighteen centuries ago. To Henry Martyn 
 the gulf was visible, the self-renunciation painful, the victory com- 
 plete. His understanding embraced, and his heart reposed in, the 
 two comprehensive and ever germinating tenets of the school in 
 which he studied. Regarding his own heart as corrupt, and his mvn 
 reason as delusive, he exercised an unlimited affiance in the holiness 
 and the wisdom of Him, in whose person the Divine nature had 
 been allied to the human, that so, in the persons of his followers, 
 the human might be allied to the Divine. 
 
 Such was his religious theory a theory which doctors may 
 combat, or admit, or qualify, but in which the readers of Henry 
 Martyn's biography, letters, and journals, cannot but acknowledge 
 that he found the resting-place of all the impetuous appetencies of 
 his mind, the spring of all his strange powers of activity and endur- 
 ance. Prostrating his soul before the real, though the hidden, 
 Presence he adored, his doubts were silenced, his anxieties soothed, 
 and every meaner passion hushed into repose. He pursued divine 
 truth (as all who would succeed in that pursuit must pursue it) by 
 the will rather than the understanding ; by sincerely and earnestly 
 searching out the light which had come into the world, by still going 
 after it when perceived, by following its slightest intimations with 
 faith, with resignation, and with constancy ; though the path it dis- 
 closed led bim from the friends and the home of his youth across 
 wide oceans and burning deserts, amidst contumely and contention, 
 with a wasted frame and an overburdened spirit. He rose to the 
 sublime in character, neither by the powers of his intellect, nor by 
 the compass of his learning, nor by the subtlety, or range, or th<3
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 557 
 
 beauty of his conceptions (for in all these he was surpassed by 
 many), but by the copiousness and the force of the living fountains by 
 which his spiritual life was nourished. Estranged from a world once 
 too fondly loved, his well-tutored heart learned to look back with a 
 calm though affectionate melancholy on its most bitter privations. 
 Insatiable in the thirst for freedom, holiness, and peace, he main- 
 tained an ardour of devotion which might have passed for an erotic 
 delirium, when contrasted with the Sadducean frigidity of other 
 worshippers. Regarding all the members of the great human family 
 as his kindred in sorrow and in exile, his zeal for their welfare 
 partook more of the fervour of domestic affection, than of the kind 
 but gentle warmth of a diffusive philanthropy. Elevated in his 
 own esteem by the consciousness of an intimate union with the 
 Eternal Source of all virtue, the meek missionary of the cross ex- 
 hibited no obscure resemblance to the unobtrusive dignity, the un- 
 faltering purpose, and the indestructible composure of Him by whom 
 the cross was borne. The ill-disciplined desires of youth, now 
 confined within one deep channel, flowed quickly onward towards 
 one great consummation ; nor was there any faculty of his soul, or 
 any treasure of his accumulated knowledge, for which appropriate 
 exercise was not found in the high enterprise to which he was de- 
 voted. 
 
 And yet nature, the great leveller, still asserting her rights even 
 against those whose triumph over her might seem the most perfect, 
 would not seldom extort a burst of passionate grief from the bosom 
 of the holy Henry Martyn, when memory recalled the image of 
 her to whom, in earlier days, the homage of his heart had been 
 rendered. The writer of his Life, embarrassed with the task of recon- 
 ciling such an episode to the gravity befitting a hero so majestic, and 
 a biography so solemn, has concealed this passage of his story beneath 
 a veil at once transparent enough to excite, and impervious enough 
 to baffle, curiosity. A form may be dimly distinguished of such 
 witchery as to have subdued at the first interview, if not at the first 
 casual glance, a spirit soaring above all the other attractions of this 
 sublunary sphere. We can faintly trace the pathway, not always 
 solitary, of the pious damsel, as she crossed the bare heaths of Corn- 
 wall on some errand of mercy, and listened, not unmoved, to a 
 tremulous voice, pointing to those heights of devotion from which 
 the speaker had descended to this lower worship. Then the shifting 
 scene presents the figure alas ! so common of a mother, prudent, 
 and inexorable, as if she had been involved in no romance of her 
 own some brief twenty years before ; and then appears the form 
 (deliciously out of place) of the apostolic Charles Simeon, assuming,
 
 558 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 but assuming in vain, the tender intervenient office. In sickness 
 and in sorrow, in watchings and in fastings, in toils and perils, and 
 amidst the decay of all other earthly hopes, this human love blends 
 so touchingly with his diviner enthusiasm, that even from the life 
 of Henry Martyn there can scarcely be drawn a more valuable truth, 
 than that, in minds pure as his, there may dwell together in most 
 harmonious concord, affections which a coarse, low-toned, ascetic 
 morality would describe as distracting the heart between earth and 
 heaven. 
 
 Yet it is a life pregnant with many, other weighty truths. It was 
 passed in an age when men whom genius itself could scarcely rescue 
 from abhorrence, found in their constitutional sadness, real or ficti- 
 tious, not merely an excuse for grovelling in the sty of Epicurus, 
 but even an apology for deifying their sensuality, pride, malignity, 
 and worldly-mindedness, by hymns due only to those sacred influ- 
 ences, by which our better nature is sustained in the warfare with 
 its antagonist corruptions. Not such the gloom which brooded over 
 the heart of Henry Martyn. It solicited no sympathy, was never 
 betrayed into sullenness, and sought no unhallowed consolation. It 
 assumed the form of a depressing consciousness of ill desert ; mixed 
 with fervent compassion for a world which he at once longed to 
 quit, and panted to improve. It was the sadness of an exile gazing 
 wistfully towards his distant home, even while soothing the grief of 
 his brethren in captivity. It was a sadness akin to that which stole 
 over the heart of his Master, while, pausing on the slope of the hills 
 which stand round about Jerusalem, he wept over her crowded marts 
 and cloud-capped pinnacles, hastening to a desolation already visible 
 to that prescient eye, though hidden by the glare and tumult of life 
 from the obdurate multitude below. It was a sadness soon to give 
 place to an abiding serenity in the presence of that compassionate 
 Being who had condescended to shed many bitter tears, that he 
 might wipe away every tear from the eyes of his faithful followers. 
 
 Tidings of the death of Henry Martyn reached England during 
 the Parliamentary debates on the renewal of the East India Com- 
 pany's charter ; and gave new impetus to the zeal with which the 
 friends and patrons of his youth were then contending for the estab- 
 lishment of an Episcopal see at Calcutta, and for the removal of all 
 restraints on the diffusion of Christianity within its limits. In the 
 roll of names most distinguished in that conflict, scarcely one can be 
 found which does not also grace the calendar of Clapham. It was a 
 cause emphatically Claphamic. John Venn, to whom the whole 
 sect looked up as their pastor and spiritual guide, was at that time 
 on his death-bed. He had been the projector, and one of the original
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT, 559 
 
 founders, of the society for sending missionaries of the Anglican 
 communion to Africa and the East a body which, under the name 
 of the " Church Missionary Society," now commands a wider field 
 of action, and a more princely revenue, than any Protestant asso- 
 ciation of the same character. To him who prompted the deeper 
 meditations, partook the counsels, and stimulated the efforts of such 
 disciples, some memorial should have been raised by a Church which 
 to him, more than to any of her sons, is indebted for her most 
 effective instrument for propagating her tenets and enlarging her 
 borders. But, linked though that name was to the kindest and the 
 holiest thoughts of so many of the wise and good, it must be passed 
 over in this place with this transient notice ; lest the reverence due 
 to it should be impaired, as it certainly could not be strengthened, 
 by a tribute on which might not unjustly rest some grave suspicion 
 of partiality. 
 
 The shepherd was taken from his flock immediately after the 
 success of the Parliamentary contest, and while their exultations, 
 and the foreboding of their opponents, predicted the glorious, or the 
 disastrous, results of Episcopacy and of missions in India. At this 
 distance of time, we know that these prophecies, whether of good or 
 of evil, were uninspired. Neither Hindoos nor Mussulmen have re- 
 volted on the discovery that their European sovereigns have a belief 
 and a worship of their own, which they seriously prefer to the faith 
 of Brama or of Mahomet. But neither has Benares yet ceased to 
 number her pilgrims by myriads ; nor is the Eammadan violated 
 from dawn to sunset. These results can hardly have surprised those 
 who derived their anticipations of the future from a careful survey 
 of the past. 
 
 The power before which the temples of pagan Rome fell down 
 (like the mighty agencies of the material creation), is a silent 
 invisible influence, obedient to no laws which human wisdom can 
 explore ; though, at length, manifesting its reality in results which 
 the dullest observation cannot overlook. It works by searching 
 out affinities in the elements of man's moral and social nature ; by 
 separating such as are incongruous, and by combining the rest into 
 organic forms, animated by a common life. It works by the repuls- 
 ive force of mutual antipathies, and by the plastic force of self- 
 denying love ; and exhibits its presence in the Christian system, as 
 in its noblest form, and most complete development. And though 
 the prolific energies of this renovating power may often appear to 
 slumber, and though, even when roused into activity, it operates 
 but slowly and imperfectly, yet is it the one vital principle of this 
 otherwise corrupt and corrupting world ; and is not less the source
 
 560 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 of light and of order now, than when it brooded over the dark primi- 
 tive chaos. 
 
 Thus earth's history is but as some incoherent rhapsody of wild 
 joys and maddening sorrows, if not regarded as the progressive ful- 
 filment of the Supreme Will, effected by the ministry, sometimes 
 spontaneous, at other times reluctant, of other wills subordinate to 
 the Supreme. And that passage of history which is to unfold the 
 religious and intellectual regeneration of Hindostan, will, like the 
 rest, delineate the strife, the reverses, and the long delay, which must 
 precede and allay the final triumph. It will tell of men devoting 
 themselves, in constancy and resignation, to labours of which they 
 must never witness the recompense ; and obeying every intimation 
 of the good pleasure of God, even when He may have appeared to 
 have abandoned to their own weakness the champions of His truth. 
 It will trace the path of the heralds of peace, illuminated amidst the 
 deep surrounding darkness by the inward light of faith, and by the 
 outward light which the inspired records throw on the state, the 
 prospects, and the duties of man. And it will also tell of the re- 
 storation of those records to the supremacy for which their Divine 
 Author destined them, among His instruments for the renewal of the 
 image which He impressed on his moral creation, at the first dawn 
 of its existence. 
 
 To effect that restoration, became the chief design of the devout 
 men whose wiser Anglo-Catholic sons are now calling their fathers 
 fools. Of that fblly the ecumenical seat was in the immediate 
 vicinity of our suburban common, reflecting from her glassy pools 
 the mansions by which she is begirt. From them came forth a 
 majority of the first members of the governing body of the " Bible 
 Society," its earliest ministers or secretaries, and, above all, the 
 first and greatest of its Presidents John Lord Teignmouth ; to 
 the commemoration of whose life are dedicated the volumes from 
 which our devious course commenced, and to which it at length 
 returns. 
 
 As Mr Carlyle has it, he was a noticeable man. While Napoleon 
 had been founding an Empire in Europe, he had been ruling an Em- 
 pire in Asia. The greatest of commercial corporations had made 
 him their viceroy. The greatest of religious societies had made him 
 their head. He was a man of letters too, and a man of hair-breadth 
 escapes and strange adventures. He had been the friend of Sir 
 William Jones, the associate of Warren Hastings, the adviser of 
 Henry Dundas, and the choice of William Pitt when he had a trust 
 to confer, superior in splendour, perhaps in importance, to his own. 
 So, at least, said the chronicles of those times ; but his own appear-
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 561 
 
 ance seemed to say the contrary. If the fasces had really once been 
 borne before the quiet, everyday looking gentleman who was to be 
 seen walking with his children on Clapham Common, or holding 
 petty sessions of the peace for the benefit of his neighbours there, 
 then Clapham Common had totally misconceived what manner of 
 men governors-general are. The idea of the common was as mag- 
 nificent as that of a Lord Mayor in the mind of Martinus Scriblerus. 
 But a glance at our Arungzebe, in the Clapham coach, was enough 
 to dispel the illusion. How a man who had sat on the Musnud of 
 Calcutta, could now sit so patiently between Messrs Smith and 
 Brown of St Mildred's, Cornhill, and listen to them on the Paving 
 Kate Question, with such genuine and good-humoured interest, was 
 a question which long exercised the faith and the tongues of the com- 
 moners, and which has ever since remained one of the dark problems 
 of parochial history. 
 
 Lord Teignmouth was an estimable, accomplished, and religious 
 man, on whom Providence bestowed extraordinary gifts of fortune, 
 without any extraordinary gifts of nature. He was exalted to one 
 of the highest places of the earth, but was not endowed with the 
 genius or the magnanimity for which such places afford their meet 
 exercise and full development. The roll of British viceroys in India 
 includes other names than those of the Immortals. Clive, Hastings, 
 and Wellesley transmitted empire, but could not transmit imperial 
 minds to Amherst, or to Minto, or to Shore. He was not one of those 
 who enlarge our conceptions of the powers occasionally confided to 
 man. He rose to the summit of delegated dominion, without any 
 sublime endurance or heroic daring. He wrote many speculations, 
 political, moral, and religious ; but without rendering more clear our 
 knowledge of the actual condition of mankind ; or our conjectures 
 respecting what awaits them. He also wrote many verses ; but can 
 scarcely ever have awakened an echo in the hearts of others. The 
 eminence of his position suggested comparisons which it would other- 
 wise have been unmeaning to form. There is not room for many 
 great men, in any age or in any dynasty ; and he who, in the age of 
 Napoleon and the dynasty of Clive, ruled with spotless virtue, and 
 aimed only to consolidate the conquests of his predecessors, might 
 justly deprecate the disparaging remark, that he was not cast in their 
 gigantic mould. But the good Vespasian must always be prepared 
 for invidious allusions to the mighty Julius. 
 
 The son of a supercargo, and the grandson of a captain in the 
 marine of the East India Company, John Shore was destined from 
 his youth to the service of the same employers. He was prepared 
 for it at Harrow, where he recited Homer and Juvenal with Na- 
 
 36
 
 562 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 thaniel Halhed on the one hand, and Eichard Brinsley Sheridan on the 
 other ; Samuel Pan- being the common tutor of the three. On the 
 same form were seen, nearly forty years later, three other boys, since 
 known to fame as Lord Byron, Sir Eobert Peel, and Sir George 
 Sinclair. In the first of these triumvirates Halhed, in the second 
 Sinclair, were pointed out by Harrovian divination as the men des- 
 tined to illuminate and command the ages which had given them 
 birth. The spirit of prophecy did not rest on the Hill of Harrow ! 
 Neither indeed was the United Company of Merchants, trading to 
 the East Indies at the first of those eras, precisely a school of the 
 prophets. The one qualification they required of the future ministers 
 and judges of their Empire, was a sound acquaintance with book- 
 keeping. Mr Shore was accordingly removed from Harrow to a com- 
 mercial school at Hackney. Among the students there was one who, 
 at the distance of half a century, he met again ; the stately Marquis 
 of Hastings, who then came to ask a lesson in the art of governing 
 India, from the old school-fellow with whom he had once taken 
 lessons in the art of double entry. 
 
 Enthusiasts are men of one idea. Heroes are men of one design. 
 They who prosper in the world are usually men of one maxim. 
 When Mr Shore was toiling up the steep ascent trodden by writers, 
 " an old gentleman named Burgess " chanced to say to him, " make 
 yourself useful, and you will succeed." Old Mr Burgess never said 
 a better thing in his life. It became the text on which the young 
 civilian preached many a discourse to others, and to himself. With 
 his own hands he compiled several volumes of the records of the 
 secret political department. In a single year, he decided six hundred 
 causes at Moorshedabad. He acquired the Hindostanee, Arabic, and 
 Persian tongues ; and was summoned to employ that knowledge at 
 what was then called the " Provincial Council " at Calcutta. He 
 revised one of the philippics launched by Francis against Warren 
 Hastings, and lent his pen to prepare a memorial against the supreme 
 court and Sir Elijah Impey. So useful, indeed, did he make himself 
 to the opponents of Hastings, that he was appointed by that great 
 man (oriental and occidental politics having much in common) to a 
 seat in his supreme council of four. But, whatever might be his 
 change of party, Mr Shore never changed his maxim. He presided 
 at the Board of Revenue. He acted as revenue commissioner in Dacca 
 and Behar. He drew up plans of judicial reform. Ever busy, and 
 ever useful, he remained in India till Hastings himself quitted it, 
 when they returned in the same ship to England the ever-triumph- 
 ant Hastings to encounter Burke and the House of Commons ; 
 the ever-useful Mr Shore to receive from the Court of Directors a
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 563 
 
 seat in the supreme council of three, established under Mr Pitt's 
 India Bill. 
 
 Again he bent his way to the East, and again enjoyed, under the 
 rule of Lord Cornwallis, abundant opportunities of acting up to the 
 precept of old Mr Burgess. He sustained nearly all the drudgery 
 which, in every such combination, falls to the lot of some single 
 person ; assuming, as his peculiar province, the settlement of the re- 
 venues of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa. The result of his labours was 
 that momentous decision, remaining in force to this day, which has 
 recognized the right of the Zemindars to the land, in the double 
 character of renters and landlords a measure against which there is 
 such an array of authority and argument, as to compel a doubt 
 whether, on this occasion at least, Mr Shore did not render a service 
 useful rather to the sovereigns of India, than to their subjects. 
 
 To himself the result was most important. The time had come 
 when Mr Pitt hoped to witness the introduction into India of the 
 pacific system which, at his instance, Parliament had enjoined. He 
 committed that task to Mr Shore ; wisely judging that the author 
 of the territorial settlement possessed in an eminent degree the 
 habits, the principles, and the temper, which qualify men for an un- 
 ambitious and equitable course of policy. With that charge he 
 sailed a third time for the East, in the character of Governor-General. 
 
 He had been eminently useful, and had succeeded eminently. 
 But now the old maxim began to wear out. He who would climb 
 an oak must, as a great living writer has observed, change the nature 
 of his efforts, and quicken his pace after he has once fairly set foot 
 on the branches. Old Mr Burgess had taught how the highest 
 advancement might be obtained. He had not taught how it might 
 be improved. Sir John Shore (such was now the title of the 
 Governor-General) brought to that commanding station, knowledge, 
 industry, courage, and disinterestedness ; with a philanthropy as 
 pure as ever warmed the bosom of any of the rulers of mankind. 
 But he did not bring to it the wide survey, the prompt decision, 
 and the invincible will, of the great statesmen who, before and after 
 him, wielded that delegated sceptre. The sense of subordination, and 
 the spirit of a subordinate, still clung to him. To be useful to 
 the Board of Control, to be useful to the Court of Directors, to be 
 useful to the Civil Service, to be useful to the Indian Army, limited 
 his ambition as an administrator ; and though the happiness of the 
 nations of India was the object of his highest aspirations, his rule 
 over them was barren, not only of any splendid enterprise, but even 
 of any memorable plan for their benefit. 
 
 The four years of Sir John Shore's government was a period of 
 
 36*
 
 564 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 peace, interrupted only by a single battle with the Eohilla chiefs. 
 But it was a peace pregnant with wars, more costly and dangerous 
 than any in which the British Empire in the East had been involved 
 since the days of Clive and Laurence. The charges advanced against 
 Sir John Shore by the more adventurous spirits who followed him, 
 are all summed up in the one accusation that his policy Avas 
 temporising and timid. He acquiesced as an inert spectator in the 
 successful invasion of the dominions of the Nizam by the Mahrattas. 
 He fostered the power and the audacity of that warlike nation. He 
 unresistingly permitted the growth of a French subsidiary force, in 
 the service of three of the most considerable native powers. He 
 thwarted Lord Hobart's efforts for extending the dominion or in- 
 fluence of Great Britain in Ceylon, in the Carnatic, and in Tanjore. 
 He allowed the growth and the aggressions in Northern India of 
 that power which, under Eunjeet Singh, afterwards became so for- 
 midable. He looked on passively while Tippoo was preparing for 
 the contest into which he plunged, or was driven, to his own ruin, 
 and to our no light peril. 
 
 These, and such as these, are the charges. The answer is drawn 
 from the pacific injunctions of Parliament, and the pacific orders of 
 the Company ; and from the great truth, that ambitious wars are the 
 direst curse, and peace the most invaluable blessing, to mankind. In 
 the course of his correspondence, Lord Teignmouth takes frequent 
 occasions to announce the new or philosophical maxim, which as 
 Governor-General he had substituted for his old or utilitarian maxim 
 as a writer. It was that incontrovertible verity, that " honesty is 
 the best policy." Sound doctrine, doubtless ; but whether it is the 
 best policy to be honest now and then, may admit of more dispute. 
 Millions of men never lived together under a rule more severely 
 just in intention than was that of Sir John Shore. But the Eohillas 
 distrusted his equity. The Mahrattas had no belief in his courage. 
 The Nizam could not be convinced of his good faith. The oppressed 
 Eyots were incredulous of his benevolence. Integrity, which, being 
 only occasional and transient, passes for weakness and caprice, may 
 work out evils even more intolerable than those of a consistent, 
 resolute, and systematic injustice. Under their pacific Governor- 
 General, the people of the East remembered the conquests of his 
 predecessors, and were preparing to counteract, by secret or open 
 hostilities, the further conquests of the pro-consuls who were to suc- 
 ceed him. His individual conscience could justly applaud the retro- 
 spect of his Asiatic dominion ; but the national conscience, of which 
 we have lately heard, had it any cause to exult in a pause of four
 
 THE CLAPHAJI SECT. 565 
 
 years in an otherwise unbroken chain of successful aggressions on 
 the princes and people of Hindostan 1 
 
 When Napoleon wrote bulletins about the star of Austerlitz and 
 the fulfilment of his destiny, we were all equally shocked at his 
 principles and his style. Yet the apologies still ringing in our ears 
 for the wars of Affghanistan, of Scinde, and of Gwalior, though 
 made but yesterday by the highest authorities on either side of the 
 House of Commons, were but a plagiarism from the Emperor of the 
 French, in more correct, though less animated language. Nor could 
 it be otherwise. Empire cannot be built up, either in the "West or in 
 the East, in contempt of the laws of God, and then be maintained ac- 
 cording to the Decalogue. When the vessel must either drive 
 before the gale or founder, the helmsman no longer looks at the 
 chart. When the pedestals of the throne are terror and admiration, 
 he who would sit there securely must consult other rules than those 
 of the Evangelists. Sir John Shore was the St Louis of Governors- 
 General. But if Clive had been likeminded, we should have had no 
 India to govern. If Hastings had aspired to the title of " The Just," 
 we should not have retained our dominion. If Wellesley had ruled 
 in the spirit of his conscientious predecessor, we should infallibly 
 have lost it. With profound respect for the contrary judgment of 
 so good a man, we venture to doubt whether the severe integrity 
 which forbade him to bear the sceptre of the Moguls as others had 
 borne it, should not have also forbidden his bearing it at all. Need- 
 lessly to assume incompatible duties, is permitted to no man. Cato 
 would have ceased to be himself had he consented to act as a lieu- 
 tenant of the Usurper. The British viceroy who shall at once be 
 true to his employers, and strictly equitable to the princes of India 
 and their subjects, need not despair of squaring the circle. 
 
 Returning a third time to his native land, Lord Teignmoiith fell 
 into the routine of common duties, and of common pleasures, with 
 the ease of a man who had taken no delight in the pomp or in the 
 exercise of power ; but whose heart had been with his home and 
 with his books, even while Nabobs and Rajahs were prostrating 
 themselves before him. He became eminent at the Quarter Sessions, 
 took down again the volumes in which Parr had lectured him, thinned 
 out his shrubberies, visited at country-seats and watering-places, 
 watched over his family and his poor neighbours, sent letters of good 
 advice to his sons (to the perusal of which the public are now in- 
 vited with perhaps more of filial than of fraternal piety), and, in 
 short, lived the life so pleasant in reality, so tedious in description, 
 of a well-educated English gentleman, of moderate fortune, moderate
 
 566 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 desires, and refined tastes ; with a fruitful vine on the walls of his 
 house, and many olive branches round about his table. 
 
 If, as all Englishmen believe, this is the happiest condition of 
 human existence, it illustrates the remark that happiness is a serious, 
 not to say a heavy thing. The exhibition of it in these volumes is 
 rather amiable than exhilarating. India-House traditions tell, that 
 Avhen a young aspirant for distinction there, requested one of the 
 Chairs to inform him what was the proper style of writing political 
 despatches, the Chair made answer, "The style we prefer is the 
 humdrum." This preference for the humdrum, enjoined perhaps by 
 the same high authority, clung to Lord Teignmouth even after his 
 return to Europe. He wrote as if to baffle the critics, and lived as 
 if to perplex the biographers. A foreigner amongst us might per- 
 haps have sketched him as a specimen of a class peculiar to England. 
 But the portrait is too familiar for exhibition to English eyes, though 
 none is dearer to English hearts. "Who that has contemplated and 
 loved (as who has not ?) the wise, cheerful, and affectionate head of 
 some large household, filling up without hurry or lassitude the wide 
 circle of domestic, neighbourly, and magisterial duties, and aiming at 
 nothing more let him say whether the second Lord Teignmouth 
 could have rendered animating in description the tranquil years 
 which the first Lord Teignmouth probably found the most grateful 
 of his life in reality. 
 
 They were gliding quietly away, cheered by such retrospects as 
 few have enjoyed, and gilded by hopes which few could so reason- 
 ably indulge, when the Society, then for the first time formed for 
 the circulation of the Bible, placed him at their head ; not as a mere 
 titular chief, but as the President by whom all their deliberations 
 were to be controlled, and as the dignitary by whom the collective 
 body were to be represented. So high a trust could not have fallen 
 into hands more curiously fitted for the discharge of it. There met 
 and blended in him as much of the spirit of the world, and as much 
 of the spirit of that sacred volume, as could combine harmoniously 
 with each other. To the capacious views of a man long conversant 
 with great affairs, he united a submission the most childlike to the 
 supreme authority of those sacred records. To the high bearing of 
 one for whose smile rival princes had sued, he added that unosten- 
 tatious simplicity which is equally beyond the reach of those who 
 solicit, and of those who really despise, human admiration. Con- 
 versant with mankind under all political and social aspects, and in 
 every gradation of rank, it was at once his habit and his delight to 
 withdraw from that indiscriminate intercourse into the interior circle 
 where holy thoughts might be best nourished ; and into the solitude
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 567 
 
 where alone the modesty of his nature would permit the utterance 
 of liis devout affections. An Oriental scholar of no mean celebrity, 
 and not without a cultivated taste for classical learning, he daily 
 passed from such pursuits to the study of the Sacred Oracles as 
 one who, having sojourned in a strange land, returns to the familiar 
 voices, the faithful counsels, and the well-proved loving-kindness of 
 his father's house. To scatter through every tongue and kindred of 
 the earth, the inspired leaves by which his own mind was sustained 
 and comforted, was a labour in which he found full scope and con- 
 stant exercise for virtues, hardly to be hazarded in the government 
 of India. 
 
 Of India, indeed, and of the fame of his Indian administration, 
 he had become strangely regardless witnessing silently, if not 
 with indifference, the overthrow of his policy, and the denial of his 
 claims to the respect and gratitude of mankind. Ordinary men, 
 it is true, are but seldom agitated by the temperament by which 
 men of genius expiate their formidable eminence ; but Lord Teign- 
 mouth seems to have had more than his due share of constitutional 
 phlegm. He governed an empire without ambition, wrote poetry 
 without inspiration, and gave himself up to labours of love and 
 works of mercy without enthusiasm. He was, in fact, rather a 
 fatiguing man of a narcotic influence in general society with a 
 pen which not rarely dropped truisms ; sedate and satisfied under 
 all the vicissitudes of life ; the very antithesis and contradiction of 
 the Hero, whose too tardy advent Mr Carlyle is continually invok- 
 ing. Yet he was one of those whom we may be well content to 
 honour, while we yet await the promised deliverer. He was a witness 
 to the truth, that talents such as multitudes possess, and opportuni- 
 ties such as multitudes enjoy, may, under the homely guidance of 
 perseverance and good sense, command the loftiest ascent to which 
 either ambition or philanthropy can aspire ; if that steep path be 
 trodden with a firm faith in the Divine wisdom, a devout belief in 
 the Divine goodness, and a filial promptitude of conformity to the 
 Divine will. 
 
 To Lord Teignmouth, and to the other founders of the Bible 
 Society, an amount of gratitude is due, which might, perhaps, have 
 been more freely rendered, if it had been a little less grandiloquently 
 claimed by the periodic eloquence of their followers. Her annual 
 outbursts of self-applause are not quite justified by any success 
 which this great Protestant propaganda has hitherto achieved over 
 her antagonists. Rome still maintains and multiplies her hostile 
 positions heathen and Mahomedan temples are as numerous and as 
 crowded as before ignorance and sin continue to scatter the too
 
 568 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 fertile seeds of sorrow through a groaning world and it is no longer 
 doubtful that the aspect of human affairs may remain as dark as ever, 
 though the earth be traversed by countless millions of copies of the 
 Holy Text. The only wonder is, that such a doubt should ever have 
 arisen that reasonable people should have anticipated the renova- 
 tion of man to the higher purposes of his being, by any single agency 
 without an apparatus as complex as his own nature or without 
 influences as vivifying as those which gave him birth. To quicken 
 the inert mass around us, and to render it prolific, it is necessary that 
 the primeval or patriarchal institute of parental training should be 
 combined with an assiduous education ; with the various discipline 
 of life ; with the fellowship of domestic, civil, and ecclesiastical 
 society ; and, above all, with the recreative power from on High de- 
 voutly implored and diligently cherished. The wicked habitations 
 by which our globe is burdened, might, alas ! be wicked still, though 
 each of them were converted into a biblical library. And yet with 
 the belief of the inspiration, whether plenary or partial, of the Scrip- 
 tures, who can reconcile a disbelief of the momentous results with 
 which the mere knowledge of them by mankind at large must be at- 
 tended ] Who will presume to estimate the workings of such an 
 element of thought in such a world ? or to follow out the move- 
 ments resulting from such a voice when raised in every tongue and 
 among all people, in opposition to the rude clamour from without, 
 or the still harsher dissonance from within 1 or who will take on him 
 to measure the consequences of exhibiting amongst all the tribes of 
 men one immutable standard of truth one eternal rule of duty one 
 spotless model for imitation ? 
 
 If this vast confederacy of the Protestant and Greek Churches was 
 regarded by the less initiated with some degree of superstitious awe, 
 and extolled beyond the severe limits of truth, the founders of the 
 society were too well instructed in spiritual dynamics, to be them- 
 selves in bondage to that vulgar error. The more eminent of the 
 Clapham sectarians thought of it but as one wheel in that elaborate 
 mechanism, by which they believed that the world would at length 
 be moved. Bell and Lancaster were both their welcome guests 
 schools, prison discipline, Savings' Banks, tracts, village libraries, 
 district visitings, and church buildings each, for a time, rivalled 
 their cosmopolitan projects. But of their subordinate schemes none 
 were so dear to them as that of prepossessing, in favour of their 
 opinions and of their measures, the young men who were then pre- 
 paring for ordination at Cambridge. Hence they held in special 
 honour Isaac Milner, whose biography lies before us, and Charles 
 Simeon, whose life is shortly to be published both unavoidably
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 569 
 
 residing at the university as their appointed sphere of labour ; but 
 both men of Clapham as frequent visitors, as habitual associates, and 
 as zealous allies. 
 
 The biography of Isaac Milner, as recorded in the dense volume 
 published by his niece, occupies a space nearly equal to that which 
 the extant writers of antiquity have devoted to the celebration of 
 all the worthies of Greece and Eome and Palestine put together. 
 And yet of those who have still to reach the meridian of life, how 
 few are aware, either that such a man was famous in the last gener- 
 ation, or what was the ground of his celebrity ! Oh ! ye candidates 
 for fame, put not your faith in coteries. See here how lavishly ap- 
 plause may be bestowed in one age, and how profound the silence 
 into which it may die away in the next ! See how a man may have 
 been extolled not thirty poor years ago, as a philosopher, historian, 
 divine, and academic, on whom "young England" has not one pass- 
 ing remembrance to bestow ! And although the present effort to re- 
 vive and perpetuate his glory be made by a kinswoman, prepared for 
 that undertaking by knowledge, by ability, and by zeal ; yet how 
 avoid the conviction that the monument itself, like the name to 
 which it is erected, is already becoming a premature ruin, and preach- 
 ing one more unheeded sermon on the text which proclaims the vanity 
 of all things 1 
 
 If the several tendencies of Isaac Milner to moral and intellectual 
 greatness had been permitted to act freely, and if Fortune had not 
 caressed and enervated him by her too benignant smiles, his name 
 might have been now illustrious in the Fasti Cantabrigienses. But 
 she bestowed on him the rewards of eminence, such as wealth, leisure, 
 reputation, and authority, without exacting the appointed price of 
 toil and self-denial. Humble as was his hereditary station, he 
 scarcely ever felt the invigorating influence of depending on his own 
 exertions for subsistence, for comforts, or even for enjoyments. He 
 soon obtained and soon resigned a fellowship at Queen's College, 
 Cambridge, to become the president of that society ; an office to 
 which ere long were added the deanery of Carlisle, and the mathe- 
 matical chair once occupied by Newton. Three such sinecures were 
 a burden, beneath which the most buoyant spirit could scarcely have 
 moved with freedom. A splendid patrimony in the three per cents., 
 or the golden repose of Lords Arden or Ellenborough, might agree 
 well enough with the pursuits of a scholar or a statesman. Not so 
 the laborious idleness of a deanery and a mastership, with their 
 ceaseless round of chapters and elections, and founders' feasts, and 
 enclosure questions ; and questions about new racks for the stables, 
 and new rollers for the garden ; and squabbles with contumacious
 
 570 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 canons and much-digesting fellows. Newton himself could not, at 
 the same time, have given laws to the Butteries and explored the 
 laws of the universe ; and therefore it happened that Newton's suc- 
 cessor was too busy for the duties of his lucrative professorship. 
 Delilah bound the strong man with cords supplied by Mammon for 
 the purpose. 
 
 From such toils he might have broken away, if the wily courtesan 
 had not thrown around him the more seductive bondage of social 
 and colloquial popularity. The keen sarcasm, that " science is his 
 forte omniscience, his foible," though of later date, could never 
 have been aimed at any of the giants of Cambridge with more truth, 
 or with greater effect, than at the former president of Queen's. He 
 had looked into innumerable books, had dipped into most subjects, 
 whether of vulgar or of learned inquiry, and talked with shrewdness, 
 animation, and intrepidity, on them all Whatever the company 
 and whatever the theme, his sonorous voice predominated over all 
 other voices, even as his lofty stature, vast girth, and superincum- 
 bent wig, defied all competition. He was equally at home on a 
 steeple-chase, and on final perseverance ; and explained with the 
 same confidence the economy of an ant-hill and the policy of the 
 Nizam. During the last half of his life the Johnsonilatria was at 
 its height ; and among the aspirants to the vacant conversational 
 throne, none appeared to have a fairer title than himself. Parr, 
 with his pipe and his pedantry, was offensive. Bishop Watson was 
 pompous and tiresome. Lord EUenborough, the first of that name, 
 was but an eminent phrase-manufacturer. But Isaac Milner, how- 
 ever inferior to the sage of Bolt Court in genius, in wit, in practical 
 wisdom, in philology, and in critical discernment, ranged over a wider 
 field of knowledge ; with a memory as ready and retentive, with 
 higher animal spirits, a broader humour, a less artificial style, and 
 an enjoyment so cordial and sociable of his own talk, as compelled 
 every one else to enjoy it. If less contentious than his great proto- 
 type, he was not less authoritative. But his topics were more out 
 of the reach of controversy, his temper more serene, and his audience 
 far more subservient. In the whole of his career, he was probably 
 never once surrounded by such a circle as that which at " The Club " 
 reduced the dominion of Johnson to the form of a limited monarchy. 
 At Carlisle, the Dean was the life of an otherwise lifeless amalgam 
 of country squires and well-endowed prebendaries. At Cambridge, 
 the Master was the soul of dinner and tea parties, otherwise inani- 
 mate. At London, he was the centre of a circle, ever prompt (as 
 are all London circles) to render homage to literary and intellectual 
 rank ; especially when it can condescend to be amusing and natural,
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 571 
 
 and can afford to disclaim all pretensions to the elaborate refinements 
 of metropolitan society. Thus the syren Fortune raised her most 
 alluring strain the flattery which rewards colloquial triumphs 
 that so she might induce the warrior to relax his grasp of the 
 weapons by which he might have achieved an enduring reputation. 
 Lashing himself to the mast, he still might have pursued his 
 voyage to permanent renown, if the Enchantress had not raised up 
 in his course certain fog-banks, to seduce him into the belief that 
 he had already reached the yet far-distant haven. The moder- 
 ators, arbiters of Cantabrigian honours, had not only assigned to 
 him the dignity of senior-wrangler, but with it the title of In- 
 comparabilis ; the comparison having been ineffectually attempted 
 with his competitors of the year 1774. Among the "Transactions 
 of the Royal Society," the curious may discover three or four contri- 
 butions bearing the name of Isaac Milner, which, though little 
 noticed at the time, and wholly forgotten now, were allowed to 
 establish, in favour of one who sat in Newton's seat, a station 
 among men of science ; which, in an age not propitious to such 
 studies, few had the wish, and fewer still the power, to contest. 
 No scientific work or discovery illustrates his name, except the dis- 
 covery, much insisted on by his biographer, and much rejoiced in by 
 himself, that the invisible girl of Leicester Square was not a Fairy 
 enshrined in the brazen ball from which her speaking trumpets 
 issued, but an old woman in the next room squeaking through 
 hidden tubes, the orifices of which were brought into nice contact 
 with corresponding apertures in the lips of those magical trumpets. 
 On the opposite side of the same Square rose an observatory, where, 
 a hundred years earlier, his great predecessor had investigated 
 enigmas of greater significance. In literature, Dr Milner was 
 chiefly known as the Editor of the last two volumes of his brother's 
 Church History, which apparently received great additions and im- 
 provements from his hands. They have been extolled as containing 
 the most comprehensive and authentic account of the Reformation 
 in Germany, and of the character of the great German Eeformer ; 
 a praise to which it is impossible to subscribe, for this, if for no 
 other reason, that neither the Author nor the Editor had ever seen, 
 or would have been able to read, one line of the many volumes 
 written by Luther in his mother tongue, and even yet untranslated 
 into any other. A biographical preface of a few pages, prefixed to 
 a posthumous volume of the same brother's sermons, with two con- 
 troversial pamphlets, complete the catalogue of the literary labours 
 of more than half a century of learned and well-beneficed leisure. 
 Of those pamphlets one was an assault on the ecclesiastical history
 
 572 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 of the late Dr Haweis. The other made havoc of the person and 
 writings of Herbert Marsh, the late Bishop of Peterborough. Marsh 
 had denounced the sin and danger of giving people the Bible to read 
 unyoked to the Prayer-book ; and Milner answered him by an ex- 
 amination much more curious than civil, into the question " Who, 
 and what, is Dr Herbert Marsh I " The indignant liturgist replied 
 by an equally courteous attempt to determine the who, and the what, 
 touching Dr Isaac Milner. With cassocks torn, and reputations not 
 much exalted, the combatants retired from the field, and never again 
 appeared among the aspirants to literary renown. Adulation whis- 
 pered to them both that such glory was already theirs, and in her 
 harlotry and her blandishments betrayed them into the belief of 
 that too welcome assurance. 
 
 But Isaac Milner was no ordinary person. His body (the very 
 image of the informing mind) was athletic and capacious, yet coarse 
 and clumsy withal, and alive, far more than is usual with the giant 
 brood, to every vicissitude of pleasure and of pain. His muscular 
 and his nervous structure seemed to belong to two different men, or 
 rather to be of different sexes. The sense of vast physical power 
 was unattended by animal courage ; and the consciousness of great 
 intellectual strength animated him to no arduous undertakings. 
 Robust as he was and omnivorous, he was haunted by imaginary 
 maladies and ideal dangers ; shuddering at the east wind, and flying 
 to a hiding-place at the sound of thunder. In the pursuit of know- 
 ledge, he was as an elephant forcing his way through saplings, and 
 bending them to his purpose with a proboscis alike firm and flexible ; 
 yet at the next moment obeying the feeblest hand, alarmed by the 
 most transient blaze, and turned out of his way by the first mourn- 
 ful gong or joyous cymbal. He was a kind of Ajax-Andromache, 
 combining such might with such sensibility as made him at once 
 admirable, loveable, and inefficient. Call at the lodge at Queen's in 
 the evening, and you heard him with stentorian lungs tumbling out 
 masses of knowledge, illuminated by remarks so pungent, and em- 
 bellished with stories, illustrations, gestures, and phrases so broad 
 and unceremonious, that you half expected the appearance of the 
 Lady Margaret, to remind the master of the house that she had 
 built that long gallery, and those oriel windows, for meditation and 
 studious silence. Call again in the morning, and you found him 
 broken-hearted over some of the sorrows to which flesh is heir, or 
 agitated by some collegiate controversy, or debating with his apothe- 
 cary how many scruples of senna should enter into his next draught, 
 as though life and death were in the balances. Thus erratic in all 
 his pursuits, and responsive to every outward impression, he failed
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 573 
 
 in that stern perseverance, without which none may "become the 
 teachers, the rulers, or the benefactors of mankind, and with which 
 perhaps but few can be much courted as companions, or much loved 
 as friends. 
 
 But so to be loved and courted, should not be regarded as a mere 
 selfish luxury. A wise and good man (and such was Isaac Milner) 
 will regard popular acceptance as an advantage convertible to many 
 excellent uses ; and so he considered it. His great talents were his 
 social talents. In talk, ever ready, ever animated, and usually preg- 
 nant with profound meaning, he found the law, and fulfilled the end, 
 of his sublunary existence. He talked with children (his chosen 
 associates) inimitably. It was like a theological lecture from Bunyan, 
 or a geographical discourse from De Foe. He talked with the great 
 and the rich, as one who was their equal in wealth, and their supe- 
 rior in worship. He talked with pugilists, musicians, and graziers, 
 at once to learn and to interpret the mysteries of their several crafts. 
 He talked with physicians to convince them that their art was em- 
 pirical. He talked with politicians to rouse them to the dangers of 
 Catholic emancipation. He talked on paper to his correspondents 
 pleasantly and affectionately, though, on the chapter of his own 
 affections, too abundantly. He talked also to his chosen and inti- 
 mate friends, but not in the same fitful strain. To them, from the 
 abundance of the heart, he spoke on the theme which alone gave 
 any unity of design to the otherwise incongruous habits of his life ; 
 and which alone harmonised the passages, droll and melancholy, 
 pompous and affectionate, bustling and energetic, of which it was 
 composed. It was that theme which engages the latest thoughts of 
 all men the retrospect and the prospect ; the mystery within, and 
 the dread presence without ; the struggle, and the triumph, and the 
 fearful vengeance ; and whatever else is involved in the relations 
 which subsist between mortal man and the eternal Source of his ex- 
 istence. To search into those relations, and into the duties and hopes 
 and fears flowing from them, was the end which Isaac Milner still 
 proposed to himself, under all his ever-varying moods. From his 
 brother he had derived the theological tenets, for the dissemination 
 of which the History of the Church had been written. Reposing in 
 them with inflexible constancy, he drew from them hopes which, 
 notwithstanding his constitutional infirmities, imparted dignity to 
 his character, and peace to his closing hours. He was the intellectual 
 chief of his party, and the members of it resorted to him at Cam- 
 bridge, there to dispel doubts, and thence to bring back responses, 
 oracular, authoritative, and profound. Nor could they have made a 
 better choice ; for to his capacity, learning, and colloquial eloquence,
 
 574 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 he added a most absolute sincerity and good faith. He had an in- 
 stinct which could detect at a glance, and a temper which loathed, 
 all manner of cant and false pretension ; and he estimated at their 
 real worth the several kinds of religious theatricals, liveries, and free- 
 masonries. 
 
 Kind-hearted, talkative, wise old man ! from the slumbers of many 
 bygone years how easy is it to raise his image joyful, as when he 
 exulted over his exorcism of the clothes-tearing ghost of Sawston ; or 
 jocund, as when he chuckled over the remembrance of the hearty 
 box he inflicted on the ears of Lord Archibald Hamilton, who, in all 
 the pride of pugilism, had defied the assault of unscientific knuckles ; 
 or grandiloquent, as when he reviewed the glories of his first vice- 
 chancellorship, in which he had expelled from the Senate Lucius 
 Catalina Frend ; or the triumphs of his second consulate, when, 
 having thundered his philippics against Marcus Antonius Brown, he 
 was hailed as Pater Academics. Well ! he is gone, and Alma 
 Mater has still her heads of houses, men of renown ; but if once 
 again the table could be spread in that hospitable old dining-room 
 at Queen's, with the facetious Dean at the head of it, there is not 
 among the incomparable wranglers, and conversing Encyclopaedias 
 of them all, any one who would be fit to sit over against him as 
 Croupier. 
 
 As a member of the Confederation of the Common, the Dean of 
 Carlisle administered the province assigned to him rather by the 
 weight of his authority than by any active exertions. Under the 
 shelter of his name his college nourished as the best cultured and 
 most fruitful nursery of the evangelical neophytes of Cambridge. 
 From a theological school maintained at Elland, in Yorkshire, at the 
 charge of the Clapham exchequer, an unbroken succession of students 
 were annually received there ; destined, at the close of their academi- 
 cal career, to ascend and animate the pulpits of the national church. 
 But if to the President of Queen's belonged the dignity of Prcepositus 
 of the evangelical youth of the University, the far more arduous and 
 responsible office of Archididascalus was occupied by a fellow of the 
 adjacent royal college. 
 
 Long Chamber at Eton has been the dormitory of many memor- 
 able men, and King's has been to many a famous Etonian little 
 better than a permanent dormitory. But about seventy years ago 
 was elected, from the one to the other of those magnificent founda- 
 tions, a youth, destined thenceforward to wage irreconcilable war with 
 the slumbers and slumberers of his age. Let none of those (and they 
 are a great multitude) who have enshrined the memory of Charles 
 Simeon in the inner sanctuary of their hearts, suppose that it is in a
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 575 
 
 trifling or irreverent spirit that the veil is for a moment raised, which 
 might otherwise conceal the infirmities of so good a man. He was 
 indeed one of those on whom the impress of the Divine image was 
 distinct and vivid. But the reflected glory of that image (such was 
 his own teaching) is heightened, not tarnished, by a contrast with 
 the poverty of the material on which it may be wrought, and of the 
 ground from which it emerges. 
 
 They who recollect the late Mr Terry, the friend of Walter Scott, 
 may imagine the countenance and manner of Charles Simeon. To a 
 casual acquaintance he must frequently have appeared like some 
 truant from the green-room, studying in clerical costume for the part 
 of Mercutio, and doing it scandalously ill Such adventurous at- 
 titudes, such a ceaseless play of the facial muscles, so seeming a con- 
 sciousness of the advantages of his figure, with so seeming an uncon- 
 sciousness of the disadvantages of his carriage a seat in the saddle 
 so triumphant, badinage so ponderous, stories so exquisitely unbe- 
 fitting him about the pedigree of his horses or the vintages of his cellar 
 the caricaturists must have been faithless to their calling, and the 
 under-graduates false to their nature, if pencil, pen, and tongue had 
 not made him their prey. Candid friends were compelled (of course, 
 by the force of truth and conscience) to admit that he was not alto- 
 gether clear of the sin of coxcombry ; and the worshippers of Bacchus 
 and of Venus gave thanks that they were jolly fellows, and not like 
 this Pharisee. 
 
 To the reproach of affectation and conceit, his disciples made 
 answer, that their master had shed his original manner as soon and 
 as completely as his original teeth ; and that the new or artificial 
 manner was not only more deeply rooted than the old, but was in 
 fact as natural ; being but the honest though awkward effort of the 
 soul within, to give vent to the most genuine feelings for which it 
 could find no other utterance. To the charge of hypocrisy, they 
 replied, that it was related to truth in that sense only in which oppo- 
 sites and contradictions are related. They maintained that even the 
 superficial weaknesses of their teacher ministered to his real designs ; 
 just as the very offal of the Holocaust feeds the sacred flame by 
 which the offering is consumed. Here, they said, was a man beset 
 by difficulties enough to have baffled the whole school of Athens, as 
 brought together by the imagination of Raphael D'Urbino by in- 
 veterate affectations, by the want of learning, by the want of social 
 talents, by the want of general ability of any kind, by the want of 
 interest in the pursuits of his neighbours, by their want of sympathy 
 in his pursuits, by the want of their good-will, nay, by the want of 
 their decided and hearty animosity. Yet thus unprovided for the
 
 576 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 contest, lie gained a victory which the sternest cynic in that glorious 
 assemblage might have condescended to envy, and the most eloquent 
 of the half-inspired sages there, to extol. Slowly, painfully, but 
 with unfaltering hopes, he toiled through more than fifty successive 
 years, in the same narrow chamber and among the same humble 
 congregation requited by no emoluments, stimulated by no animat- 
 ing occurrences, and unrewarded, until the near approach of old age, 
 by the gratitude or the cordial respect of the society amidst which 
 he lived. Love soaring to the Supreme with the lowliest self- 
 abasement, and stooping to the most abject with the meekest self- 
 forgetfulness, bore him onward, through fog or sunshine, through 
 calm or tempest. His whole life was but one long labour of love 
 a labour often obscure, often misapplied, often uncuccessful, but 
 never intermitted, and at last triumphant. 
 
 At the close of each academical year, a crowd of youths, just 
 entering into the business 'of life, received from Charles Simeon his 
 parting counsels and benediction. They had been his pupils, his 
 associates, and his grateful admirers. "Without money and without 
 price, he had sedulously imparted to them a science, which, to many 
 a simple mind, compensated for the want of any other philosophy ; 
 and which, to the best and ripest scholars, disclosed the fountains 
 whence all the streams of truth are salient, and the boundless ex- 
 panse of knowledge towards which they are all convergent. It was 
 the science of which God himself is the author, and men sent of 
 God the interpreters, the revelation, conscience, and history the 
 records. It was that science which explains the internal connection 
 of this world's history ; in which law and ethics and politics have 
 their common basis ; which alone imparts to poetry and art their 
 loftier character ; without which the knowledge of mind and of 
 mental operations is an empty boast, and even the severer problems 
 of the world's material economy are insoluble. It was that science 
 for the diffusion of which the halls and colleges of that learned 
 university had been almost exclusively founded the only science 
 which Cambridge neglected, and which Charles Simeon taught. 
 And yet the teacher was neither historian, poet, artist, lawyer, poli- 
 tician, nor philosopher. He was simply a devout and believing man 
 who, in the language of Bunyan, " dwelt far from the damp shadows 
 of Doubting Castle," amidst the sunshine of those everlasting hills 
 whence stout Mr Greatheart and brave Mr Hopeful, in days of 
 yore, surveyed the boundless prospect, and inhaled the fresh breezes 
 which welcomed them at the close of their pilgrimage. Thither 
 their modern follower conducted his pilgrims by a way which Mr
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 577 
 
 "Worldly-wisdom could never find, and which Mr Self-confidence 
 despised, when it was pointed out to him. 
 
 In the Church of the Holy Trinity at Cambridge, every Sunday, 
 during more than half a century, witnessed the gathering of a crowd 
 which hung on the lips of the preacher, as men hearken to some 
 unexpected intelligence of a deep but ever-varying interest. Faces 
 pale with study or furrowed by bodily labour, eyes failing with age 
 or yet undimmed by sorrow, were bent towards him with a gaze, of 
 which (with whatever other meaning it might be combined) fixed 
 attention was the predominant character. Towards the close of that 
 long period, the pulpit of St Mary's was, occasionally, the centre of 
 the same attraction, and with a still more impressive result. For 
 there were critics in theology, and critics in style and manner, and 
 critics in gastronomy, thronging and pressing on each other, as once 
 on Mars' Hill, to hear what this babbler might say ; listening with 
 the same curiosity, and adjudicating on what they had heard in 
 very much the same spirit. Yet he to whom this homage was 
 rendered was a man of ungraceful address ; with features which 
 ceased to be grotesque only Avhen they became impassioned ; with a 
 voice weak and unmusical ; and to whom no muse was propitious. 
 His habits, and his very theory of composition, were such as seemed 
 to promise empty pews and listless auditors ; for every discourse was 
 originally constructed (to use his own phrase) as a "skeleton," with 
 all the hard processes and the fine articulations as prominent 
 as his logical anatomy could render them the bony dialectic being 
 then clothed with the fibrous and muscular rhetoric, hi such manner 
 as the meditations of the preceding, or the impulses of the passing, 
 hour might suggest. Such Avas his faith in this new art of oratory, 
 that, in a collection entitled " Horce Homileticca," he gave to the 
 world many hundred of these preparations, to be afterwards arrayed 
 by other preachers in such fleshly integuments as might best cover 
 their ghastliness. Deplorable as the operation must have been in 
 other hands than those of the inventor, he well knew how to make 
 his dry bones live. They restrained the otherwise undisciplined 
 ardour of his feelings, and corrected the tendency of that vital heat 
 to disperse all solidity, and to dissolve all coherence of thought 
 His argumentation might occasionally irritate the understanding, his 
 illustrations wound the taste, and his discourses provoke the smiles 
 of his audience. But when, as was his wont, he insisted on funda- 
 mental truths, or enforced the great duties of life, or detected the 
 treacheries of the heart, or traced the march of retributive justice, or 
 caught and echoed the compassionate accents in which the Father of 
 
 37
 
 578 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 mercies addresses his erring children, it was a voice which penetrated 
 and suhdued the very soul. It was an eloquence which silenced 
 criticism. It was instinct with a contagious intensity of belief. It 
 sounded as the language of one to whom the mysteries and the 
 futurities of which he spoke had been disclosed in actual vision, and 
 so disclosed as to have dissipated every frivolous thought, and calmed 
 every turbid emotion, 
 
 If the Church of England were not in bondage with her children 
 to certain acts of Parliament, she would long ere now have had a re- 
 ligious order of the Simeonites ; and would have turned out of her 
 catalogue some of her saints of equivocal character, and some of 
 doubtful existence, to make room for St Charles of Cambridge. 
 "What have Dunstan, and George of Cappadocia, and Swithin the 
 bishop, and Margaret the virgin, and Crispin the martyr, done for 
 us, that they should elbow out a man who, through a long life, sup- 
 plied from the resources of his own mind, to the youth of one of our 
 universities, the theological education not otherwise to be obtained 
 there ; and who, from the resources of his own hereditary fortune, 
 supplied the means of purchasing, in the most populous cities of 
 England, from forty to fifty advowsons, that so the ecclesiastical 
 patronage of those vital organs of our commonwealth might be ever 
 thenceforward exercised in favour of zealous, devout, and evangelical 
 ministers ? 
 
 In that last ugly epithet lies all the mischief. " He is not a Jan- 
 senist, may it please your Majesty, but merely an atheist," was once 
 accepted as a sufficient excuse of a candidate for royal favour. He 
 is not an evangelical clergyman, but merely a Parson Trulliber, was an 
 equally successful apology with the dispensers of fame and promotion 
 in the last age. Among them was the late Bishop Jebb, who, in his 
 posthumous correspondence, indulges in sneers on the gospeller of 
 Cambridge, as cold and as supercilious as if he had himself belonged 
 to the Trulliber school of divinity ; instead of being, as he was, an 
 elegant inquirer into the curiosities of theological literature, to 
 great a master of parallelisms and contrasts might have perceived 
 how the splendour of his own mitre waned before that nobler epis- 
 copate to which Charles Simeon had been elevated, as in primitive 
 times, by popular acclamation. His diocese embraced almost every 
 city of his native land, and extended to many of the remote depend- 
 encies which then, as now, she held in subjection. In every 
 ecclesiastical section of the Empire he could point to teachers Avho 
 revered him as the guide of their youth, and the counsellor of their 
 later years. In his frequent visitations of the churches of which he 
 was the patron or the founder, love and honour waited on him. His
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 579 
 
 infirmities disappeared, or were forgotten, in the majesty of a character 
 animated from early youth to extreme old age by such pursuits as, 
 we are taught to believe, are most in harmony with the Divine will, 
 and most conducive to the happiness of mankind. He had passed 
 his long life in the midst of censors, who wanted neither the disposi- 
 tion nor the power to inflict signal chastisement upon any offence 
 which could be fastened on him ; but he descended to the grave un- 
 assailed by any more formidable weapons than a thick and constant 
 flight of harmless epigrams. He descended thither amidst the tears 
 and the benedictions of the poor ; and with such testimonies of 
 esteem and attachment from the learned, as Cambridge had never 
 before rendered even to the most illustrious of her sons ; and there 
 he was laid in that sure and certain hope on which he enabled an 
 almost countless multitude to repose, amidst the wreck of this 
 world's promises, and in the grasp of their last and most dreaded 
 enemy. 
 
 What is a party, political or religious, without a Eeview 1 A bell 
 swinging without a clapper. What is any society of men, if not re- 
 cruited from the rising generation 1 A hive of neutral bees. Re- 
 viewless, Clapham had scarcely been known beyond herown Common. 
 Youthless, her memory had never descended to the present age. At 
 once rapt into future times, and thoughtful of her own, she addressed 
 the world on the first day of each successive month through the 
 columns of the " Christian Observer ; " and employed the pen of him 
 on whom her hopes most fondly rested, to confer splendour and 
 celebrity on pages not otherwise very alluring. To Mr Macaulay was 
 assigned the arduous post of Editor. He and his chief contributors 
 enjoyed the advantage, permitted, alas ! to how few of their tribe, of 
 living in the same village, and meeting daily in the same walks or 
 at the same table, and lightening, by the common counsel, the cares 
 of that feudal sovereignty. The most assiduous in doing suit and 
 service to the Suzerain was Henry Thornton. But he whose homage 
 was most highly valued, and whose fealty was attested by the richest 
 offerings, was the young, the much loved, and the much lamented 
 John Bowdler. 
 
 He was the scion of a house singularly happy in the virtues and 
 talents of its members ; and was hailed by the unanimous acclama- 
 tion of the whole of that circle of which Mr Wilberforce was the 
 centre, as a man of genius, piety, and learning, who, in the genera- 
 tion by which they were to be succeeded, would prosecute their own 
 designs with powers far superior to theirs. A zeal too ardent to be 
 entirely indiscreet, which gave to the world two posthumous volumes 
 of his essays in verse and prose, has, unintentionally, refuted such 
 
 37
 
 580 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 traditions as had assigned to him a place among philosophers, or 
 poets, or divines. And yet so rare were the component parts of his 
 character, and so just their combination, that, hut for his prema- 
 ture death, the bright auguries of his early days could hardly have 
 failed of their accomplishment. His course of life was, indeed, un- 
 eventful. A school education, followed by the usual training for the 
 bar ; a brilliant, though brief success, closed by an untimely death, 
 complete a biography which has been that of multitudes. But the 
 interior life of John Bowdler, if it could be faithfully written, would 
 be a record which none could read without reverence, and few with- 
 out self-reproach. 
 
 To those who lived in habitual intercourse with him, it was evident 
 that there dwelt on his mind a sense of self-dedication to some high 
 and remote object ; and that the pursuits, which are as ultimate ends 
 to other men, were but as subservient means to him. So intent was 
 he on this design, as to appear incapable of fatigue, frail as were his 
 bodily powers ; and as to be unassailable by the spirit of levity, 
 though fertile and copious in discourse almost to a fault. It is the 
 testimony of one who for nearly twelve months divided with him 
 the same narrow Study, that during the whole of that period he was 
 never heard to utter an idle word, nor seen to pass an idle minute. 
 He stood aloof from all common familiarities, yielding his affection 
 to a very few, and, to the rest, a courtesy somewhat reserved and 
 stately. His friends were not seldom reminded how awful goodness 
 is, as they watched his severe self-discipline, and listened, not with- 
 out some wandering wishes for a lighter strain, to discourses, didactic 
 rather than conversational, in which he was ever soaring to heights, 
 and wrestling with problems inaccessible to themselves. But they 
 felt and loved the moral sublimity of a devotion so pure and so de- 
 vout, to purposes the most exempt from selfishness. They were 
 exulting in prospects which it appeared irrational to distrust, and 
 were hailing him as the future architect of plans, to be executed or 
 conceived only by minds like his, when, from the darkness which 
 shrouds the counsels of the Omniscient, went forth a decree, designed, 
 as it might seem, at once to rebuke the presumption of mortal man, 
 and to give him a new assurance of his immortality. It rent asunder 
 ties as many and as dear as ever bound to this earth a soul ripe for 
 translation to a higher sphere of duty ; and was obeyed with an 
 acquiescence as meek and cheerful as ever acknowledged the real 
 presence of fatherly love under the severer forms of parental disci- 
 pline. His profound conviction of the magnitude of the trust, and of 
 the endowments confided to him, was really justified even when 
 seemingly defeated by the event ; for it showed that those powers
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 581 
 
 had been destined for an early exercise in some field of service com- 
 mensurate with the holy ardour by which he had been consumed. 
 Of those who met round his grave, such as yet live are now in the 
 wane of life ; nor is it probable that, in their retrospect of many 
 years, any one of them can recall a name more inseparably allied than 
 that of John Bowdler to all that teaches the vanity of the hopes 
 which terminate in this world, and the majesty of the hopes which 
 extend beyond it. 
 
 And thus closes, though it be far from exhausted, our chronicle 
 of the worthies of Clapham, of whom it may be said, as it was said 
 of those of whom the world was not worthy, "These all died in 
 faith." With but very few exceptions, they had all partaken largely 
 of those sorrows which probe the inmost heart, and exercise its for- 
 titude to the utmost. But sweet, and not less wise than sweet, is 
 the song in which George Herbert teaches, that when the Creator 
 had bestowed every other gift on his new creature man, he reserved 
 Rest to himself, that so the wearied heart in search of that last 
 highest blessing, might cheerfully return to Him who made it. 
 They died in the faith that for their descendants, at no remote 
 period, was reserved an epoch glorious, though probably awful, 
 beyond all former example. It was a belief derived from the inti- 
 mations, as they understood them, of the prophets of Israel ; but it 
 was also gathered from sources which to many will seem better 
 entitled to such confidence. 
 
 Eevolving the great dramatic action of which this earth has been 
 the scene, they perceived that it was made up of a protracted con- 
 flict between bight and darkness. They saw that, on the one side, 
 science and religion on the other, war and superstition had 
 been the great agents on this wide theatre. They traced a general 
 movement of events towards the final triumph of good over evil ; 
 but observed that this tendency was the result of an all-controlling 
 Providence, which had almost invariably employed the bad passions 
 of man as the reluctant instruments of the Divine mercy sending 
 forth a long succession of conquerors, barbarous or civilised, as mis- 
 sionaries of woe, to prepare the way for the heralds of peace. They 
 saw, or thought they saw, this economy of things drawing to its 
 close. Civilization and. in name at least, Christianity, had at length 
 possessed the far greater and nobler regions of the globe. Goths 
 and Vandals were now the foremost amongst the nations. Even 
 the Scythians had become members of a vast and potent monarchy. 
 The Arabs had again taken refuge in their deserts. If Genghis or 
 Timour should reappear, their power would be broken against the 
 British empire of Hindostan. The mightiest of warriors had
 
 582 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 triumphed and had fallen; as if to prove how impregrable had 
 become the barriers of the European world against such aggres- 
 sions. On every side the same truth was proclaimed, that military 
 subjugation was no longer to be the purifying chastisement of 
 Christendom. 
 
 But the religion of Christ was conquering and to conquer. 
 Courting and exulting in the light, it had made a strict alliance 
 with philosophy the only faith which could ever endure such an 
 association. Amidst the imbecility and dotage of every other form 
 of belief and worship, it alone nourished in perennial youth and 
 indomitable vigour. If anything in futurity could be certain, it 
 was the ultimate and not very remote dominion, over the whole 
 earth, of the faith professed by every nation which retained either 
 wisdom to investigate, or energy to act, or wealth to negotiate, or 
 power to interpose in the questions which most deeply affect the 
 entire race of man. If any duty was most especially incumbent 
 on those who exercised an influence in the national councils of 
 England, it was that of contributing, as best they might, to speed 
 onwards the approaching catastrophe of human affairs the great 
 consummation whence is to arise that new era with which creation 
 travails and is in birth, which poets have sung and prophets fore- 
 told, and which shall justify to the world, and perhaps to other 
 worlds, all that Christians believe of the sacrifice, surpassing thought 
 and language, made for the deliverance and the exaltation of man- 
 kind. 
 
 When such thoughts as these force themselves on the German 
 mind, it forthwith soars towards the unapproachable, and indites 
 the unutterable. When the practical Englishman is the subject of 
 them, he betakes himself to form societies, to collect subscriptions, 
 to circulate books, to send forth teachers, to build platforms, and 
 to afflict his neighbours by an eloquence of which one is tempted 
 to wish that it were really unutterable. Such was the effect of these 
 bright anticipations on the Clapham mind an effect perceptible in 
 many much better things, but, among the rest, in much equivocal 
 oratory, and in at least one great effort of architecture. 
 
 Midway between the Abbey of Westminster and the Church of 
 the Knights Templars, twin columns, emulating those of Hercules, 
 fling their long shadows across the strait through which the far-re- 
 sounding Strand pours the full current of human existence into the 
 deep recesses of Exeter Hall. Borne on that impetuous tide, the 
 mediterranean waters lift up their voice in a ceaseless swell of exult- 
 ing or pathetic declamation. The changeful strain rises with the 
 civilisation of Africa, or becomes plaintive over the wrongs of
 
 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 583 
 
 chimney-boys, or peals anathemas against the successors of Peter, 
 or in rich diapason calls on the Protestant Churches to wake and 
 evangelise the world. No hard task to discover here the causes 
 corruptce eloquentice ! If the shades of Lucian or of Butler hover 
 near that elevated stage, how readily must they detect the anti- 
 types of Peregrinus or of Kalpho ! Criticise, for there is no lack 
 of extravagance. Laugh, for there is no stint of affectation. Yet 
 refuse not to believe, that, grotesque as her aspect may occasionally 
 be, Exeter Hall has a history, a doctrine, and a prophecy, of no 
 common significance. 
 
 Of that history, the preceding pages may afford some general 
 intimation. The doctrine is that of an all-embracing, all-enduring 
 charity embracing every human interest, enduring much human 
 infirmity. The prophecy is a higher and more arduous theme. 
 
 It is a prophetical age. "We have Nominalists who, from the 
 monosyllable " Church," educe a long line of shadowy forms, here- 
 after to arise and reign on Episcopal or patriarchal thrones and 
 Realists, who foresee the moral regeneration of the land by means of 
 union workhouses, of emigrant ships, or of mechanics' institutes 
 and Mediaevals, who promise the return of Astrsea in the persons of 
 Bede and Barnard redivivi and Mr Carlyle, who offers most elo- 
 quent vows for the reappearance of the heroes who are to set all 
 things right and profound interpreters of the Apocalypse, who dis- 
 cover the woes impending over England in chastisement of the im- 
 piety which moved Lord Melbourne to introduce Mr Owen to the 
 Queen of England.* In the midst of all these predictions, Exeter 
 Hall also prophesies. As to the events which are coming upon us, 
 she adopts the theory of her Claphamic progenitor. In reducing that 
 theory to practice, she is almost as much a Socialist as Mr Owen 
 himself. The moral regeneration which she foretells is to be brought 
 about neither by church, by workhouse, by monk, by hero, nor by 
 the purifying of St James's. She believes in the continually de- 
 creasing power of individual, and the as constantly augmenting power 
 of associated, minds. She looks on the age as characterised by a 
 nearer approach than was ever known before to intellectual equality. 
 But Exeter Hall is no croaker. Her temperament is as sanguine as 
 
 * One of the strange blemishes in a work very lately published by the Rev. E. 
 B. Elliott, under the title of Horce Apocalypticce& book of profound learning, 
 singular ingenuity, and almost bewitching interest. 
 
 * * The years which have elapsed since the preceding note was written, have 
 ascertained that society at large has most cordially acknowledged the charm to 
 which it refers a fact which the Historian of the Clapham Sect must record with 
 some exultation, as Mr Elliott himself was bred up in that fraternity, and is one 
 of the most eminent members of it in the second generation.
 
 584 THE CLAPHAM SECT. 
 
 her eloquence. Enumerate to her the long list of illustrious men 
 who, while scarcely beyond their boyhood, had, at the commence- 
 ment of this century, reached the highest eminence in every path to 
 distinction ; and point out to her the impossibility of selecting now, 
 from those who have yet to complete their fortieth summer, any 
 four names, the loss of which would be deplored by any art, or 
 science, or calling in use amongst us ; and, in despite of Oxford, 
 and Young England, and Mr Carlyle, Exeter Hall makes answer 
 " So much the better. The sense of separate weakness is the secret 
 of collective strength." Ours is the age of societies. For the 
 redress of every oppression that is done under the sun, there is a 
 public meeting. For the cure of every sorrow by which our land 
 or our race can be visited, there are patrons, vice-presidents, and 
 secretaries. For the diffusion of every blessing of which mankind 
 can partake in common, there is a committee. That confederacy which, 
 when pent up within the narrow limits of Clapham, jocose men in- 
 vidiously called a " Sect," is now spreading through the habitable 
 globe. The day is not distant when it will assume the form, and be 
 hailed by the glorious title, of " The Universal Church." 
 
 Happy and animating hopes ! Who would destroy them if he 
 could ? Long may they warm many an honest bosom, and quicken 
 into activity many an otherwise sluggish temper ! The true Clap- 
 hamite will know how to separate the pure ore of truth from the 
 dross of nonsense to which the prophets of his time give utterance. 
 He will find sympathy for most, and indulgence for all, of the schemes 
 of benevolence which surround him. Like the founders of his sect, 
 he will rejoice in the progress and prospects of their cause ; nor will 
 he abandon his creed, however unpopular it may be made by the pre- 
 sumption, or however ridiculous by the follies, of some of the weaker 
 brethren by whom it has been adopted.
 
 585 
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 THE author of the " Natural History of Enthusiasm. " has published 
 many books since the appearance of that from which he takes the 
 title of his literary peerage. All of them have the indelible dye 
 and impress of his own peculiar feelings, tastes, and fancies. No 
 man is less chargeable with self-conceit, yet he can scarcely write 
 a paragraph which does not bear the stamp of his own distinctive 
 personality. In each of his volumes he has drawn his own por- 
 trait. He comes forth from his study in the character of a grave 
 and learned teacher, but immediately becomes a familiar acquaint- 
 ance, a member of any family circle into which he enters. 
 
 If the historian of Enthusiasm be as prudent as he is wise, he 
 will bequeath to the world his own biography. If not, it will be 
 compiled at hazard from the materials of which he has thus given 
 to the world so large a store. Some future Daniel De Foe will put 
 together " Memoirs of a late celebrated Author, written by himself, 
 and lately discovered among his papers." Some Curl or Tonson 
 will be found to vouch for the authenticity of the narrative. The 
 hero of it will by that time have passed out of his present, or planetary 
 abode, into the solar sphere, which his physical theory of a future 
 state assigns as a future dwelling-place to those who have faithfully 
 discharged the duties committed to them on earth. The organs of 
 sight, which he is there to enjoy, will enable him to cast an occa- 
 sional glance over the works and ways of this poor satellite, and to 
 run over the whole literature of one of our terrestrial years as a sub- 
 lunary reader glides through his newspaper. , Even in that exalted 
 state, his equanimity may perhaps fail him, as he deciphers the 
 posthumous and mendacious story of his mundane parentage, educa- 
 tion, pursuits, and employments. 
 
 The fabulist, however, will not be quite without excuse. It is a 
 natural and an honest wish to know something about a writer, in 
 whose company hour after hour has flown away so pleasantly. In 
 the absence of truth, fiction may, however imperfectly, minister to
 
 586 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 this want. It may delineate the author as he appears in his books, 
 if not as he actually appeared among his associates. It will create 
 opportunities for throwing out a judgment on those books with 
 greater ease and freedom than in a more didactic method ; and if 
 the pseudo-biographer shoiild happen to have a heart to love what 
 is amiable, and to revere what is exalted, in his intellectual supe- 
 riors, his romance would enable Mm to give expression to such feel- 
 ings, without the embarrassment which besets a deliberate and 
 formal eulogist. 
 
 Will it then be an unpardonable liberty, if, while our teacher 
 still lives to adorn this lower world, and labours to improve it, we 
 venture to take such a conjectural sxirvey of his life as may be 
 deduced from his writings, and such a survey of his writings as may 
 be suggested by the apparent course and habits of his life ? A 
 temper so frank and kindly as his, will not very sternly rebuke the 
 effrontery of assuming his person, and writing in his character, 
 without the slightest personal acquaintance with himself and his 
 affairs. But even the pain of such a rebuke would be tolerable, 
 if he should be further provoked to substitute a true and genuine 
 for the following imaginary autobiography. 
 
 One of those seemingly motionless rivers which wind their way 
 through the undulating surface of the south of England, sweeps 
 round the outskirts of a long succession of buildings, half town, 
 half village, where the meanness of the wattled cottages is relieved 
 by the usual neighbourhood of structures of greater dignity the 
 moated grange the mansion house, pierced by lines of high narrow 
 windows the square tower of the church struggling through a 
 copse of elm trees the grey parsonage, where the conservative 
 rector meditates his daily newspaper and his weekly discourse the 
 barn-fashioned meeting-house, coeval with the accession of the 
 House of Hanover and near it the decent residence in which, since 
 that auspicious era, have dwelt the successive pastors of that non- 
 conformist flock, fanning a generous spirit of resistance to tyrants, 
 now to be encountered only in imagination, or in the records of 
 times long since passed away. 
 
 In the close of the last century my father, a mild and venerable 
 man, ruled his household in that modest though not unornamented 
 abode ; for there might be seen the solemn portraits of the original 
 confessors of dissent, with many a relic commemorative of their suf-
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 587 
 
 ferings and their worth. "With these were contrasted the lighter and 
 curious embellishments which attest the presence of refined habits, 
 female taste, and domestic concord. There also were drawn up in 
 deep files the works and the biographies of the puritan divines, from 
 Thomas Cartwright, the great antagonist of Whitgift, to Matthew 
 Pool, who, in his Synopsis Criticorum, vindicated the claims of the 
 ejected ministers to profound biblical learning. This veteran bat- 
 talion was flanked by a company of lighter troops, drafted from the 
 polite literature of a more frivolous age. Eich in these treasures, 
 and in the happy family with whom he shared them, the good man 
 would chide or smile away such clouds as chequered his habitual 
 composure, when those little nameless courtesies, so pleasantly ex- 
 changed between equals, were declined by the dignified incumbent, 
 or were accepted with elaborate condescension by the wealthy 
 squire. Nor could the democratic sway of the ruling elders, supreme 
 over the finances and the discipline of the chapel, draw from him 
 an audible sigh, even when his delicate sense was writhing under 
 wounds imperceptible to their coarser vision. He had deliberately 
 made his choice, and was content to pay the accustomed penalties. 
 Though denounced as a sectarian, he was at heart a Catholic, gener- 
 ous enough to feel that the insolence of some of his neighbours, and 
 the vulgarity of others, were rather the accidents of their position 
 than the vices of their character. Such vexations as these were 
 beneath the regard of him, who maintained in the village the sacred 
 cause for which martyrs had sacrificed life with all its enjoyments, 
 and who designed to train up his son to the same honourable 
 service, however ill-requited by the distinctions or by the riches of 
 this transitory world. 
 
 That hope, however, was not to be fulfilled. I had been edu- 
 cated under the eye of my father, and had derived from him all my 
 elementary acquaintance with ancient and modern languages, with 
 theology, and with physical and moral science. I had early learnt 
 to venerate his magnanimity and his devotion, and had derived from 
 him his own thirst for knowledge. But his freedom of thought was 
 an inalienable part of my intellectual patrimony. It was not in my 
 nature to receive my opinions by inheritance. Whether they were 
 right or wrong, they were my own ; acquired, not by descent from 
 any one, but by severe and protracted labours. 
 
 I have studied and drawn the characters of too many men, to 
 have been a careless student of my own. I have invented too many 
 physiological theories, not to have one at hand for the interpretation 
 of whatever is peculiar in myself. My habitual introspection has 
 made me more than half a convert to the doctrine of the duality of
 
 588 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 the human soul the doctrine, that is, that each of the two lobes of 
 the brain is inhabited by a distinct person that what we call a 
 soliloquy, is nothing else than a dialogue between them that the 
 internal conflict between the new Adam and the old, is no meta- 
 phor or allegory, but a dry matter of fact that a good or a Avise 
 man is one, in forming whose volitions the healthy side of the 
 cranium is habitually triumphant a knave or a fool, one in whom 
 such volitions are for the most part formed on the opposite or dis- 
 eased side. 
 
 By the aid of this hypothesis, I am able to explain the absence 
 of all apparent affinity between the elements of which my nature 
 was originally composed. It was as though the sensitive plant had 
 been grafted on the Norwegian pine, or as if a Spartan soldier had 
 been enthralled by the Idylls of Theocritus, or as if an anchorite 
 had devoted himself to the imitation of the cosmetic Earl of 
 Chesterfield. I shrank from the rude familiarities of the world, 
 while impatient for the world's applause. I was a worshipper of 
 hoar antiquity, and yet a libertine in the exercise of my own un- 
 fettered judgment. At one time I braced my nerves for controversy, 
 and at another relaxed them in romantic dreams. I buried myself 
 in solitude to fathom the mysteries of my own nature, and then 
 revealed my discoveries in a style like that of the most fashionable 
 Irish oratory. I grew up to manhood with a philanthropy as 
 fastidious as it was ardent. My passion for books was alternately 
 my delight and my torture. I narrowly escaped, in my youthful 
 days, producing a poem, in which the styles of Juvenal and of 
 Tibullus would have been reconciled with each other, as a kind of 
 compromise between the robust and indignant inmate of one half of 
 my brain, and the delicate and sentimental genius who possessed the 
 other half. 
 
 In the midst of this cerebral war, the necessity which comes to 
 all had come to me, of choosing a profession. The choice, indeed, 
 iseemed made to my hand. I had been a theologian from my 
 boyhood, why not a teacher of Theology ? The ecclesiastical polity 
 of the Protestant dissenters possessed my earliest sympathies. My 
 most mature convictions had embraced their religious system. 
 Why not, then, mount the rostrum of my forefathers, and, like 
 them, sustain the interests and inculcate the doctrines of the least 
 prosperous of the churches of my native land ? So, indeed, re- 
 solved the Self inhabiting one of the phrenological hemispheres 
 within me. But the resolution was ultimately reversed by the 
 superior energy of the Self who reigned over the opposite hemi- 
 sphere.
 
 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 589 
 
 I became an enthusiastic student of Divinity. My ardour grew 
 with my early progress in those researches. " Glorious science ! " I 
 exclaimed ; " the substratum of all sciences ! the perfection of 
 human knowledge ! the theme of the noblest intellects which have 
 appeared among the children of men ! the doctrine which has the 
 happiness of mankind for its object, and which, even in its most 
 abstruse and subtle forms, is still culminating towards universal 
 love, and pointing to the abodes of the blessed ! " Alas ! for the 
 illusions of the library ! Not more weary to the soul of the fainting 
 traveller is the burning desert which the mirage had so lately adorned 
 with verdant fields and limpid waters, than is many a barren waste 
 of learning to the soul of him to whom, when viewed from some 
 Pisgah of the imagination, it had appeared as a land flowing with 
 milk and honey, the glory of all lands. 
 
 In my theological inquiries, I had contemplated Christianity as a 
 system of truths to be harmonised, as a code of obligations to be 
 enforced, and as a succession of events to be developed. I com- 
 menced with an earnest and devout examination of the sacred 
 writings, and could have rejoiced to rest for ever within those green 
 pastures, and beside those waters of comfort. But I soon perceived 
 that he who would derive from that hallowed source lights to guide 
 the feet of others into the paths of life, must borrow the means of 
 illuminating the inspired pages from the intellectual stores of un- 
 inspired men. Nothing more easy than to despise and neglect 
 interpreters. Nothing less possible than to advance a step without 
 interpretation. Divine knowledge presupposes human knowledge. 
 Without logic, criticism, languages, and (in the widest sense of the 
 word) history, the Bible is a sealed book ; unless, indeed, it be 
 opened by the aid of miracle. I was neither so indolent nor so pre- 
 sumptuous as to suppose that, by the mere bounty of nature, I pos- 
 sessed within myself all the necessary aids for the right understanding 
 of Moses and of Isaiah, of Luke and of Paul. From those infallible 
 teachers I passed, though not without many an anxious foreboding, 
 to Eusebius and Fleury, to Augustin and Luther. 
 
 Launched on this troubled sea, how fearful were the disclosures 
 forced upon me ! If the annals of the world are but the records of 
 crime and suffering, the chronicles of the Church have but little 
 more alluring to reveal. How rapid the decline from the apostolic 
 models how early the growth of the meanest superstitions ! how 
 swift the triumphs of spiritual despotism ! how intimate, even in 
 the first ages, the alliance of the perverted Gospel with the logo- 
 machies of Grecian philosophy, and the profane mysteries of heathen 
 worship, and the pollutions of pagan idolatry ! And, as the turbid
 
 590 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 stream descended to lower eras, how sadly was I constrained to 
 recognise a real though deplorable reformation even in the establish- 
 ment of the Papacy, and a merited chastisement of the foul crimes 
 of Christendom by the sword of Mahomnied and his followers, and 
 by the hordes who, under the banners of Alaric and Attila, of 
 Genseric and Odoacer, desolated the Latin Churches. I saw the 
 long night of mediaeval darkness yield at length to the dayspring 
 from on high a day too soon to be overcast by persecutions which 
 the Csesars would have abhorred, and by wars envenomed by the 
 bitterest religious animosities, until the combatants at length laid 
 down their arms the Catholics to subside into a licentious infidelity, 
 the Protestants to yield up the soul to Mammon, under the shelter 
 of a lifeless orthodoxy, or of a merely human philosophy. 
 
 From contemplating the speculative errors and the practical 
 misdeeds of the great multitude who, in former ages, had called and 
 professed themselves Christians, I turned aside to survey the living 
 societies who worship in that sacred name, not doubting that among 
 them I should find the image of that New Jerusalem which it was 
 permitted to the Prophet to see descending out of heaven. With 
 this hope I first applied myself to the perusal of the works of their 
 doctors. I did not, indeed, suppose that, in this modern theological 
 literature, I should meet with any of those prodigies of industry and 
 genius which had been produced by the fathers of the Anglican 
 Church, and by the original Puritans. But I knew that I should 
 discover in them the spirit of my own age; that all-controlling 
 power, the dominion of which none may escape ; and which, in my 
 future calling, it would be inevitable that I should myself obey. To 
 appreciate the theology of my own times, as impressed on the writ- 
 ings, or as breathing in the discourses, of my contemporaries, was 
 therefore to see, by anticipation, the general tendency and workings 
 of my own mind, when I should be subsequently numbered among 
 the ministers of the everlasting Gospel. 
 
 It was no attractive prospect. In vain I looked around for any 
 profound investigations into the interior sense, and into the genuine 
 readings of the sacred text. I could meet with no interpreters of 
 the connection between the recent developments of philosophy and 
 science, and those progressive revelations of truth which have pro- 
 ceeded from God to man. The mines of Church History lay aban- 
 doned and unwrought. Nothing was undertaken, either to sustain 
 the foundations or to delineate the symmetry of the vast fabric 
 of Christian doctrine. Nor was any fresh ground broken up on 
 the wide field of morals, to satisfy the demands of an age prolific 
 in political and social changes, and with every such change giving
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 591 
 
 birth to problems, hitherto unexplained, of national and of 'personal 
 duty. 
 
 But while seeking in vain among my contemporaries for guides 
 or companions in such studies, I was constrained to encounter on 
 every side the ill-favoured demon of religious, or rather of eccle- 
 siastical controversy. When I would have scaled the heights of 
 divine knowledge, I was called away to listen to some acrimonious 
 dispute upon the rights, the symbols, and the government of Chris- 
 tian societies. From the celestial path which I desired to ascend, 
 the din of such debates would continually drag me down, to witness 
 and lament the mean jealousies, the petty passions, and the disin- 
 genuous artifices of earthly disputants. 
 
 Generations long since passed away, had transmitted to the 
 generation to which I myself belonged, the interminable strife 
 between the hierarchy of the Elizabethan and the democracy of the 
 Puritan churches. The reluctant but inevitable attention which I 
 bestowed on this hereditary feud, contributed to my belief in the 
 duality of my own nature. War was declared within me between 
 my judgment and my imagination. To the advocates of dissent I 
 awarded the praise of maintaining the better cause, and of support- 
 ing it with the weightier reasons. To their antagonists I assigned 
 the merit of conducting the war of words with the greater dignity, 
 or, shall I say, with less repulsive querulousness. Sophistry and 
 rancour can assume a not ungraceful veil, and put on many specious 
 disguises, when associated with wealth and rank and other social 
 distinctions. The asperities of my own party could boast of no such 
 embellishments. The episcopal charge and the congregational 
 pamphlet, emulated each other in bitterness and wrong. But in the 
 courteous composure with which he inflicted pain, the advantage 
 was ever on the side of the mitred belligerent. My conscience, 
 indeed, condemned alike either form of malevolence ; but my taste 
 was far more grievously offended by the aspect it bore among the 
 advocates of my own system. The ascendant power could affect to 
 be compassionate and serene. The depressed body could not cease 
 to be sore and acrimonious. A dissenter is seldom disposed, and is 
 still more rarely permitted, to forget that he is a dissenter. The 
 habitual sense of wrong is among the most unamiable and unallur- 
 ing of the tempers with which man is afflicted. 
 
 Quitting the arena in which the polemics of the nineteenth 
 century fought, I turned to the temples in which they assembled. 
 Even there, alas ! raged the conflict within me, or rather between 
 the inmate of the one lobe of my brain, who judicially approved, 
 and the inhabitant of the other lobe, who fastidiously disliked,
 
 592 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 the services in which. I joined. In the assemblies of those among 
 whom I proposed, at some future time, to minister, my thoughts 
 would wander from the parsimonious simplicity of their sacred 
 edifices, from the obtrusive prominence of the leaders of their 
 worship, and from their isolation in the great Christian common- 
 wealth, to those august communions where the priesthoods of earth 
 symbolise the hierarchies of heaven ; where the successors, in 
 unbroken lineage from the apostles, yet minister at their altars ; 
 where the creeds and the collects of the first confessors of the faith 
 still rise as incense at those venerable shrines, and where alone can 
 thrive those severe but unobtrusive graces which have an exact 
 subordination of ranks for their indispensable basis. From the 
 long-drawn prayer, offered, in no blest cadence, beneath a roof 
 raised as in utter scorn of architecture, fancy would allure me away 
 to listen to the chant of some ancient liturgy, floating down the 
 fretted aisles of some cruciform cathedral ; and truth would extort 
 from me the acknowledgment that the ascent of the human soul to 
 the fountain of being, demanded other aids than are to be found 
 among those who measure their approach to perfection by their dis- 
 tance from the models which, during fifteen centuries, had been re- 
 verenced throughout the universal church. 
 
 But as in the Primitive, so in the Protestant churches, the Pulpit 
 was the stronghold and chief buttress of the faith ; and to the pulpit 
 I resolved to address my most assiduous attention, convinced that it 
 would yet be found to maintain its primeval supremacy in detecting 
 error, in enlarging the powers and the range of thought, in applying 
 the divine oracles to all the purposes of human life, and in quicken- 
 ing every holy, and kind, and generous emotion. I had, indeed, 
 neither the expectation nor the wish to hear that honeyed discourse 
 which steeps the soul in self-forgetfulness. I remembered that 
 Christianity was for the daily use of homely people. I knew that 
 truth, when appearing among men in her severe and native majesty, 
 would reject the trivial succour of rhetorical arts and of elaborated 
 periods. " From her chosen throne, and from the lips of her con- 
 secrated ministers, she will discourse " (I said) " of the highest 
 interests of time and of the glories of eternity, with an eloquence of 
 which the mere words will be unheeded alike by the speaker and 
 by the hearer. Her weapons of heavenly temper and resistless 
 edge must still be triumphant in their native energy, however 
 feeble may be the arm which wields them. What, then, will not 
 be their power, in hands diligently trained to their use, and instinct 
 with that spiritual life in which alone we truly live 1 " 
 
 With such hopes I listened, and on the basis of such auticipa-
 
 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 593 
 
 tions I judged. Honeyed discourse ! elaborate periods ! artificial 
 eloquence ! No, verily. The severest censor can prefer no such 
 charge against the pulpits of the nineteenth century. Malignity 
 itself cannot accuse them of beguiling us by the witchcraft of genius. 
 They stand altogether clear of the guilt of torpifying the disordered 
 heart by the anodynes of wit or fancy. Abstruse and profound 
 sophistries are not in the number of their offences. It is a mere 
 calumny to accuse them of lulling the conscience to repose by any 
 siren songs of imagination. If the bolts of divine truth are diverted 
 from their aim, it is no longer by enticing words of man's wisdom. 
 Divinity fills up her weekly hour by the grave and gentle excite- 
 ment of an orthodox discourse, or by toiling through her narrow 
 round of systematic dogmas, or by creeping along some low level of 
 schoolboy morality, or by addressing the initiated in some mythic 
 phraseology ; but she has ceased to employ such tongues as those of 
 Chrysostom and Bourdaloue. The sanctity of sacred things is lost 
 in the familiar routine of sacred words. Religion has acquired a set 
 of technical terms and conventional formulas ; somnolent and sleep- 
 compelling. Her pulpits bear the stamp and impress of an age, in 
 which the art of writing has proved fatal to the power of thinking ; 
 when the desire to appropriate gracefully has superseded the 
 ambition to originate profoundly ; when the commercial spirit 
 envelopes and strangles genius in its folds ; when demigods and 
 heroes have abandoned the field, and the holiest affections of the 
 heart die away in silence, and the ripest fruits of the teeming mind 
 drop ungathered into the reaper's bosom ; an age of literary demo- 
 cracy and intellectual socialism, in which no bequests are made to 
 remote posterities, and no structures are rising to command and 
 break the universal mediocrity. 
 
 Such was the view of ancient and of modern Christianity disclosed 
 to me by history and by my own observation. Unextinguished, 
 indeed, by the mephitic vapours into which it has been plunged, 
 that celestial lamp has never ceased to illuminate and to gladden 
 many a lowly heart ; but from those eminences on which it should 
 have shone as a light to lighten the nations, it has emitted a 
 radiance for the most part faint and flickering, and but rarely to be 
 seen in its pure and native lustre. I had acquired a new and more 
 earnest love and reverence for the sacred volume, not only for its 
 own surpassing excellency, but for the contrast in which I found it 
 to stand to the corruptions of former ages, and to the languor and 
 feebleness of my own. Gladly would 1 have joined the great com- 
 pany of the preachers, if my lot had been thrown in those days when, 
 in the strength of their divine mission, they overthrew the imperial 
 
 38
 
 594 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 idolatry ; or in those times when an awakened world caught from 
 their lips the cry of resistance to sacerdotal tyranny ; or even in that 
 later generation when, in my own land, an Erastian prelacy and 
 their satellites fell down before them. But to swell the chorus of 
 formality ; to " do duty" in a listless congregation ; to be the admired 
 and the caressed of fashionable connoisseurs in divinity, or to wage 
 a puny war with timid critics and delicate objectors ! it was not 
 in my nature. Better far, I judged, to engage in some secular 
 pursuit, where, freely measuring my strength with my competitors, I 
 might, perhaps, rise to an elevation from which I could influence, if 
 not control, the destinies of one of the great families of mankind. 
 
 For those of our well-educated youth who have neither the interest 
 to become placemen, the genius to live by art, nor the capital required 
 for commerce, it remains to minister to the sick in mind, in body, or 
 in estate. My abandonment of the clerical life narrowed my choice 
 to the two last of those pursuits. I might not improbably have 
 been a physician, if the loathsome duties of the hospital and the 
 dissecting-room could have been dispensed with. But that being 
 impossible, I quitted my parental home for the remote and busy 
 world in which the unjoyous science of special pleading is taught to 
 the future aspirants to the dignities of the coif. 
 
 At this distance of time I never tread the flagstones of Fig-tree 
 Court, in the Inner Temple, without feelings akin to those with 
 which Gil Bias revisited the scene of the therapeutic labours in 
 which he assisted the learned Dr Sangrado. With what eagerness 
 did I join in the onslaught on the purses and the reputations of 
 mankind, under the guidance of the atrabilious skeleton, my tutor, 
 whose keen eye twinkled from its deep socket, as it lit on a point of 
 law, fatal to some unlucky litigant ! To He down at night with the 
 conviction that, since daybreak, I had been working harder than 
 any other intellectual operative in London, was, in those times, 
 among my luxuries. It was a sturdy and invigorating discipline. 
 It taught me a logic of more practical utility than I could have 
 acquired at Edinburgh or at Oxford. If the pleadings which I drew 
 in those murky chambers, contributed (as is but too probable) to 
 damage any honest man, they were at least of singular advantage to 
 myself. They placed a curb on a vagrant imagination, and prepared 
 me for controversies far more perilous than the interminable hostili- 
 ties between John Doe and Bichard Eoe, in which I was then so 
 zealous a partisan. 
 
 At the end of my novitiate, I took the gown, and, like other bar- 
 risters, traversed Westminster Hall, swinging to and fro an empty 
 bag. As my eye wandered from the plump, curly-headed cherubs
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 595 
 
 on the roof, to the wan and troubled visages, enveloped in powdered 
 wigs, below, I fancied that the architects of William Rufus, gifted 
 with a second sight of the Aula-Regia of the Georgian era, had carved 
 those chubby angels in a good-humoured mockery of us all. For I 
 soon learnt that in her glorious temple, the worship of Themis was 
 conducted by a priesthood, whose spirit was but too accurately ex- 
 pressed by those corroded countenances. Incessantly eulogising the 
 incorruptibility of the Bench, the honour of the Bar, and the 
 respectability of the Attorneys, they were incessantly depreciating each 
 individual of each of those goodly fellowships. Faint, indeed, was the 
 resemblance between the original, or Mosaic Decalogue, and that 
 " various reading " of it, by which the professional morality of our 
 gens torjata was regulated. Apologies, which would have been torn 
 to shreds by their acuteness, if preferred on behalf of any Prisoner 
 at the bar, were admitted by the Gentlemen at the Bar, to justify 
 their own acceptance of unearned and excessive fees to vindicate the 
 calling evil good and good evil, and to excuse the underhand game 
 played by opposing advocates for their own ease and profit, at the 
 expense of their helpless and ignorant clients. It was a life of rude 
 familiarity, of bitter jealousy, and of ceaseless gossip. There was 
 not one of the twelve judges, or of the leading counsel, whose 
 character escaped daily dissection by half a score of those learned 
 anatomists. Over the gate of Westminster Hall was the inscription, 
 visible, at least, to my own eyes, " All ye who enter here abandon 
 modesty." I found that it was well to possess virtue, talents, 
 scholarship ; well to know some little law ; well to be eloquent ; and 
 better still to be closely connected with attorneys and their clients ; 
 but that the one thing needful was intrepid assurance, animated by 
 constitutional vivacity. So gifted knavery, ignorance, and incapacity 
 fattened. Without this gift, worth, learning, and genius starved. 
 What the plain of Elis was to Greece, such is that venerable Hall to 
 England ; and its Pindar must sing of combatants who have rejoiced 
 in the dust, the sweat, the strife, and the turmoil of the contests. 
 His heroes must be painted with thick skins and hardy consciences, 
 buoyant and fearless, prompt in resources, and unscrupulous in the 
 use of them. No place or vocation there for men of pensive spirits, 
 delicate nerves, and high-wrought sensibilities ! When my mind at 
 length opened to this great truth, I threw aside my unprofitable 
 gown, repeating the old exclamation, "What business have I at 
 Rome I cannot lie !" 
 
 I next turned for employment to the other ancient halls of West- 
 minster. Topics of deep and stirring interest were then engaging 
 the attention of parliament. These I diligently studied ; and in due 
 
 38*
 
 596 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 time I despatched to one of the most celebrated London newspapers 
 a series of articles, designed to support the advocates of freedom, 
 and to disperse the mists which had been purposely raised, to darken 
 and to distort their policy. My papers found acceptance, and their 
 author encouragement. But that " blest folio of four pages, which 
 not .even critics criticise," existed only in the imagination of William 
 Cowper. Never was an author's self-esteem exposed to a keener 
 torture than that to which I was subjected. My editorial censor 
 and I had nothing in common but the advocacy of the same political 
 opinions. In everything else we were as far asunder as the poles. 
 Yet, in half an hour, he would completely assimilate to his own 
 style of thought and diction, any of my most elaborate performances. 
 The substance remained, but the form was absolutely new. My 
 facts, arguments, and conclusions reappeared in their original order, 
 but all my candid acknowledgments and cautious qualifications 
 had vanished away. My long and stately sentences had become 
 terse and pungent. The periods which had fallen from my pen 
 blushing, like so many mess roses, with the rich glow of humanity, 
 now bristled with points like so many cactuses. Their graceful 
 structure was broken up into epigram and antithesis. My grave 
 censures had passed into stinging sarcasms, and some equivocal jest 
 from " Eoderick Eandom " had thrust out an exquisite quotation 
 which I had drawn from " Comus." 
 
 Smarting under this strange transmutation, though amazed at the 
 facility and the skill with which it was executed, I sought and ob- 
 tained an interview with my Procrustes. A transient access of the 
 spirit of James Boswell has enabled me to record, for the benefit -of 
 others, the explanations which I then received from him. " Adept 
 as you are in many studies " (such was the complimentary com- 
 mencement), " you are but a tyro in the mystery of journalism. It 
 is not a science, but a trade. Morals, philosophy, and patriotism 
 are our raw materials, and must be got up to the taste of our cus- 
 tomers. The worthy haberdasher at the next door cannot watch 
 the turns of the market more anxiously than we do. Fashion is the 
 supreme arbiter with us as with him. From that tribunal neither 
 he nor we have an appeal to any higher. What have Ephemera to 
 say to Posterity ? To satisfy the demands of fashion, we must both 
 pass our wares through many successive hands he, his ribands, 
 we, our articles ; the last hand, in either case, being that which gives 
 to the commodity its gloss or bloom. You, my good sir, may be 
 considered as the weaver, I as the hotpresser of the piecegoods we 
 have on sale. You will excuse my freedom, but the fabric, when 
 fresh from your loom, is either flattened down to the homiletical, or
 
 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 597 
 
 wrought up to the poetical, or clouded by the metaphysical tone of 
 colouring. From my hand it receives the shape, the polish, and the 
 tint, demanded by the coffee-room or the club. For every purpose, 
 there is a time, a place, and a propriety. If either Locke or Milton 
 had edited a newspaper, he would have discussed the interests and 
 the duties of mankind slashingly, bitingly, and comically. His own 
 interest, and his duty to his proprietors, would have made him aim. 
 at a wide and immediate sale, by winning the suffrages of the idle, 
 the frivolous, and the malignant multitude." 
 
 " Enough," I exclaimed, in imitation of Rasselas. " Thou hast 
 convinced me that no one who aspires to be a teacher of mankind, 
 can ever be a newspaper editor." "It is indeed," he replied, after 
 Imlac, " exceedingly difficult." " So difficult," I rejoined, in the 
 words of the Prince of Abyssinia, " that I will have nothing more to 
 do with his labours." At once, and for ever, I abandoned all con- 
 cern in this political haberdashery. The whole tribe of party 
 writers, diurnal, and hebdomadal, now appeared to me in a new and 
 a truer light. Like a flight of obscene birds, they overshadowed my 
 path, polluting by their touch, and distorting by their dissonance, 
 those researches into the state of the commonwealth, and the social 
 duties of mankind, on which I desired to bestow a serene and 
 unbiassed attention. My heart assured, and my observation con- 
 vinced me, that both the leaders and the subalterns of contending 
 factions, were far wiser and better men than they appeared in those 
 clever, reckless, and uncharitable sketches, thrown off from day to 
 day, by writers agitated by ceaseless excitement, condemned to 
 mercenary toil, and excluded from the blessings of studious leisure 
 and of self-acquaintance. 
 
 " "When injured Thales bids the town farewell," the less he says 
 or thinks of his wrongs the better. I quitted the great city with no 
 injustice, real or imaginary, to resent. Fortune, indeed, had not 
 smiled on my efforts ; but neither had I wooed her smiles with 
 much ardour or perseverance. Early in life, and with a mind un- 
 ruffled by disappointment, I retired to scenes in which I might 
 reasonably hope to reconcile my own tranquillity with the faithful 
 discharge of active duties, at least as usefiU and as honourable as 
 those which I had declined. There I resolved to labour in educat- 
 ing the young, and in instructing the adult of my own generation, 
 not without some cheerful hope of audience from generations yet to 
 be born. My pupils would not prevent my pursuing those literary- 
 designs which must have perished beneath the shade of the pulpit, 
 the bar, or the daily journals. A school had not deterred the 
 Head of the younger House of Bourbon from aspiring to the noblest
 
 598 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 of European Thrones, nor Samuel Johnson from claiming the moral 
 dictatorship of England, nor Milton from scaling the Seventh Heaven. 
 
 In a rural retreat (the beauties of which nature has left to be de- 
 tected by the assiduity, perhaps to be created by the imagination, of 
 such as dwell there) I became a tutor, a husband, and a father. 
 The blessings shed over my path by the two last of those relations 
 has, I am told, imparted to my writings a deeper glow of domestic 
 tenderness than might have been expected, from the almost femin- 
 ine reserve and delicacy which my critics have laid to my charge. 
 If so, I am at least not intentionally criminal. An old bachelor, like 
 the author of the " Task," or an old debauchee, to whom love and re- 
 verence are incongruous ideas, like the author of the " Social Con- 
 tract," may, though for very different reasons, be induced to throw 
 open the sanctuary of home to the gaze of the inquisitive ; but I have 
 neither their temptation nor their excuse for such loquacity. With 
 those hallowed secrets of my heart, the stranger intermeddleth not, 
 if I can help it. 
 
 My library is another matter. Any one is free to inspect, and, if 
 it must be so, to envy it. Mine is no bibliomaniac collection. 
 There is not a volume there which is not either in active service, or 
 enjoying a well-earned repose as a faithful veteran. My teachers, 
 my companions, my comforters, my playfellows, my fellow-labourers, 
 and sometimes my antagonists, but always the cherished inmates of 
 my house, there they stand, my much-loved books, eloquent or silent 
 at my bidding, pleasant when I am pleased, melancholy when I am 
 sad, animating when I am languid, leaving no sorrow unsoothed, no 
 mood and temper of my mind unexpressed, no science uninterpreted, 
 no art unadorned, bringing me unto hourly intercourse with all the 
 noblest spirits who have sojourned in this world, and with those 
 whom the Author of all worlds has inspired to give us some intima- 
 tions of our origin, our destiny, and our hopes. 
 
 In that presence-chamber I reigned the monarch of many a well- 
 peopled province, giving audience in turn to each of my many-tongued 
 subjects, and exacting from them all a tribute at my pleasure. There 
 might be seen, supreme in favour as in place, a venerable copy of 
 the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. A troop of tall, sad-coloured 
 folios, the depositaries of the devout exercises and anxious self- 
 searchings of the Puritan divines, was drawn up on shelves within 
 reach of my outstretched arm. With but little more effort it could 
 light on a tribe of more lofty discourse, bred in the sacred solitudes 
 of Port Royal, yet redolent of the passion of their native land 
 for an imposing and fanciful exterior. Honest George Latimer, 
 with a long line of episcopal and episcopalian successors, held a
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 599 
 
 position a little too prominent perhaps, yet due to their unrivalled 
 worth and beauty, not less than to their aristocratic pretensions. 
 But the main power of my state consisted in a race of ancient lineage 
 and obsolete tongues, beginning with Clement, Hermas, and Irenaeus, 
 and so onward through the long series of Greek and Latin fathers, 
 ecclesiastical historians, acts of councils and of saints, decretals, 
 missals, and liturgies, all in turn casting their transient lights and 
 their deep shadows over the checkered fortunes of the Christian 
 Church. Brought within the precincts of my wide dominion, Homer, 
 xEschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, and the humble partakers of their in- 
 spiration, awaited at a greater distance my occasional summons. 
 But perhaps in their reverend aspect might be perceived something 
 which confessed that they were not among my habitual and chosen 
 companions. Court favour here, as elsewhere, may have been a little 
 too diffusive and capricious ; and writers on physiology, astronomy, 
 plants, insects, birds, and fishes, shared with metaphysicians, moral- 
 ists, and the writers of civil history, the hours occasionally with- 
 drawn by their ruler from more serious intercourse with his apostolic, 
 patristic, papal, and reformed counsellors. In short, it was one of 
 those chambers which he who can securely possess, quietly enjoy, 
 and wisely use, may in sober truth pity the owners of Versailles and 
 the Escurial. 
 
 There I conceived, and there I partly executed, the great labour 
 of my literary life. Deep as was the shadow which my earlier in- 
 quiries threw over the progress of Christianity down the turbid 
 stream of time, my more mature researches had but enhanced the 
 gloom. I resolved, therefore, to become the author of a book, which, 
 in its complete form, might perhaps be called " Ecclesiastical Noso- 
 logy, or the Morbid Anatomy of the Church." It was designed " to 
 exhibit at one view the principal forms of spurious religion." These 
 consisted either first of the unavowed scepticism which believes no- 
 thing ; or secondly, of the credulity which believes anything ; or 
 thirdly, of the enthusiasm which believes at the bidding of the im- 
 agination ; or fourthly, of the fanaticism whose belief is the offspring 
 of the morose and vindictive passions ; or fifthly, of the spiritual 
 despotism which exacts a belief (or the profession of a belief) deter- 
 mined not by conviction, but by authority ; or sixthly, of the cor- 
 ruption of morals generated by each of these substitutes for the 
 simplicity of the Christian faith. Here, then, was an analysis of 
 my general subject, giving promise of six distinct volumes, which 
 collectively were to form a comprehensive, though not a very Utopian, 
 series of lectures on the perversions of the Gospel in a sinful and 
 deluded world.
 
 600 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 Machiavelli, Bossuet, and Montesquieu were to be my models. 
 Like them, I hoped to throw broad masses of light on the principles 
 by which the various synchronisms and sequences of human a flairs 
 may be cemented into one comprehensive whole. Like them, I 
 proposed to extract philosophy from chronicles, and to elevate annals 
 into history. Like them, I resolved to relieve the dulness of the 
 didactic style by narrative, but to render narrative entirely subor- 
 dinate to the proof and illustration of doctrine. But neither " The 
 Prince," " The Universal History," nor " The Roman Greatness and 
 Decay," could supply me with a model of style. Our national taste 
 (so at least I jiidged) demanded a prose more richly inlaid with 
 ornament and cadences more various, intricate, and harmonious than 
 theirs. I would learn from those great masters how to erect theories ; 
 but from Dugald Stewart how to construct paragraphs. 
 
 I commenced the execution of my scheme by my " Natural His- 
 tory of Enthusiasm " the work to which I owe my distinctive title 
 in the world of letters. My success, if not splendid, was at least 
 decisive and encouraging. I had not, on the whole, much right to 
 complain of my critics. Some of them indeed turned my own guns 
 upon me : purloining from one half of my book the materials with 
 which they assailed the other half ; and with one voice they rebuked 
 my diction as stately, redundant, and obscure. But they all assigned 
 to me the praise of having imparted a definite shape to some moment- 
 ous questions, which till then had been floating up and down in the 
 form of loose popular discourse, and of having given a sound, if not 
 a perfect, solution to the problems I had raised. My incognito 
 contributed to my popularity ; and in my retreat I enjoyed the 
 double pleasure of revising several editions of my history, and of 
 hearing of the various speculations which ascribed it to as many 
 different pens. I perceived that fame was within my grasp, and I 
 was convinced that it might be secured and extended by the honest 
 art of promulgating salutary, though unwelcome, truths. Had I 
 wanted motives for perseverance in my task, this conviction would 
 have furnished them. 
 
 Accordingly, at no distant intervals, I committed to the press two 
 more of the six main divisions of my " Ecclesiastical Nosology." 
 But neither my " Essay on Fanaticism," nor my " Treatise on 
 Spiritual Despotism," enjoyed the favour, or attracted the notice, 
 which had been bestowed on their elder brother. Some indeed 
 there were, who gave to the last a decided preference over the rest 
 of the series. But it is impossible to deny that their reception was 
 cold and indifferent, when compared with that of my first-born. 
 This may be partly ascribed to the dropping of my vizor, and the
 
 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 601 
 
 consequent secession of the mere mystery hunters, and partly, per- 
 haps, to the public ear being cloyed by a style too rhythmical and 
 inflated ; but chiefly (I think) to an error in my original design, 
 which was brought but too distinctly to light by this repeated and 
 frequent recurrence to it. 
 
 I discovered that my undertaking was too austere, and my colours 
 too dark to satisfy the popular taste. Three copious volumes of 
 grave censure, relieved by no digressions into gayer or more animat- 
 ing topics, was, I found, more than mortal monitor might hazard, 
 and more than offending mortals would endure. I reflected, though 
 not till too late, that all the masters of the objurgatory art had been, 
 accustomed to medicate their reproofs with various condiments of 
 verse, or wit, or pleasantry, or pathos. I now remembered that the 
 satirists themselves had been but flatterers in disguise, by indirectly 
 ascribing to those whom they addressed, their own abhorrence 
 (genuine or assumed) of the crimes which they denounced ; that 
 even Juvenal supposes the moral sentiment of his readers to be 
 virtuous and uncontaminated, and that each of them probably ap- 
 propriated the fierce invective of the poet to his neighbour, the im- 
 plied compliment to himself. It now, also, occurred to me, that 
 some honest and respectable prejudices might have been wounded 
 by the gloom which my disquisitions threw over the general charac- 
 ter of the Christian world ; and that many simple hearts might have 
 thought themselves conducted, under my guidance, to the brink of a 
 fearful inference, to be avoided only by the desertion of their guide. 
 Such reflections came too late to obviate the fundamental error of 
 my design, but soon enough to prevent the completion of it. My 
 "Morbid Anatomy of Spurious Religion" remains an unfinished 
 fragment. 
 
 I was disappointed, but not discouraged. The impulse which 
 urged me to participate in the great debates of my age and country, 
 was too powerful to be thwarted or restrained. My faith in myself, 
 in the truths I sought to inculcate, and in the support from on high, 
 of which the devoted advocates of truth are assured, never failed me ; 
 and I contemplated from my retreat, with unabated interest, the 
 great intellectual movements of the world from which I had with- 
 drawn. They separated, as it seemed to me, into two currents, 
 moving in opposite directions, and with conflicting purposes. 
 
 The tendency of the first was to degrade man's noblest works and 
 faculties into toys for the pastime of a luxurious generation to con- 
 vert poetry into a mere vehicle for novels in rhyme history into a 
 quarry for romance the drama into an apology for scene-painters, 
 songsters, and buffoons philosophy into an embellishment of period-
 
 602 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 ical garrulities and theology itself into the art of rescuing certain 
 sabbatical hours from dulness, or from sleep. The rival stream took 
 its rise from Castalian fountains. To Samuel Taylor Coleridge and 
 "William Wordsworth might justly be given the title of fathers of 
 their country, because in their minds first germinated the ideas which 
 determined the character of no insignificant part of the nation to 
 which they belonged. They taught some two or three of their dis- 
 ciples to think. They taught to a vast multitude the use of a phrase- 
 ology which has become an admirable counterfeit and substitute for 
 thought a style in which the colloquial freedoms of the stage are 
 employed to set off the apophthegmatic sententiousness of Burke, 
 the shapeless abstractions of the Schlegels, and the traditional 
 doctrines and maxims of the Vatican. In this motley dialect, men 
 of large pretensions to learning laid claim to the high office of tbe 
 teachers and benefactors of the world ; while they contemptuously 
 denounced the effeminate spirit which, like Cleopatra dissolving her 
 pearls in her goblet, was desecrating all art and human knowledge 
 into the recreation of an idle hour, and employing divine knowledge 
 to feed a corrupt, effete, and emasculate rhetoric. 
 
 All my sympathies were at first with those who thus contended 
 against the debasement of learning to frivolous and unworthy ends ; 
 even though they themselves were sublimating whatever they knew 
 or thought into a gaseous poetry. But the passage proved to be 
 but short from these exercises of the imagination to some of its most 
 fatal disorders. The theological poets and the poetical theologians 
 of Oxford were continually approaching nearer to a communion 
 with the theatrical ritual of Rome, to the adoration of her demigods, 
 and to the adoption of her creeds. From the dark, though inspired 
 oracles at the Lakes, they had learnt to tread that enchanted ground 
 on which everything, however homely, becomes significant of the 
 holiest things. From this poetical worship of nature in her humblest 
 forms, they had advanced towards the actual worship of the super- 
 human objects which those forms seemed to them to symbolise. A 
 soaring enthusiasm for the beautiful had proved the entrance into a 
 grovelling superstition. 
 
 My spirit was stirred within me as I watched this growing decline 
 from the faith of the Reformers. Nonconformist as I was, the 
 Church of England was scarcely more dear to the most zealous of 
 her sons than to me. Keen as was my perception of her errors, I 
 regarded her not only as the indispensable support, but as the indis- 
 pensable head, of the great Protestant league of Christendom as 
 the one body possessing the cohesion, the stability, the learning, the 
 temporal power, and the long tradition of illustrious names which
 
 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. COS 
 
 could "be opposed to the similar pretensions of the great Roman con- 
 federacy. I bethought me, that in her defence I might myself go 
 forth to the combat with the Goliaths of Oxford, with the greater 
 advantage, because without the incumbrance of cope, or gown, or 
 surplice. I was beyond the reach of those arguments ad homines, 
 by which such as wore them were but too successfully assailed. 
 Acknowledging no canon but that of Scripture, nor any creeds but 
 such as could be deduced from that source, nor any saint whose 
 apotheosis is not there recorded, I was free to reject all appeals to 
 ancient Christianity and to modern liturgies, and to esteem as a liar 
 every man whose teaching was opposed to the truth of God. 
 
 Notwithstanding my antipathy to periodical literature, the tac- 
 tics of the enemy and the habits of the times compelled me to adopt 
 that mode of publication. Thus I became the author of a series of 
 Tracts, which opened with a lecture to the Ultra-Protestants, who, 
 in their zeal for " the Bible only," repudiate the authority of the 
 Primitive Church, even as to matters of fact which passed under 
 their eyes, and even as to the meaning of words which were verna- 
 cular in their mouths. I next proceeded to show that superstition, 
 priestcraft, and theosophy, had, like deadly creepers, stunted the 
 early growth, and poisoned the first fruits of that tree which, spring- 
 ing as from a grain of mustard seed, was destined to cast forth her 
 branches to the ends of the earth, that the Mariolatry of Tertullian 
 had been quite as extravagant as that of Bernard, that the virgins 
 of the age of Cyprian had rivalled, in licentiousness, the nuns of the 
 age of Dominic, that the Doctors of the first four centuries had 
 substituted a Gnostic Deity at war with matter, for the Deity of the 
 Gospels at war only with sin, that Chrysostom, Basil, and the two 
 Gregories, in the East, and Ambrose in the West, had either ex- 
 cluded, from their teaching and from their creeds, the first great 
 principle of the Gospel, or had exhibited it in an order and position 
 the very reverse of that which is assigned to it by the inspired 
 writers, that virginity, fasting, and almsgiving had been placed by 
 patristic divinity on the thrones erected by Paul to Faith, and Hope, 
 and Charity, that with no difference but that of names, the same 
 daemons were worshipped in the Pagan and in the Christian temples 
 of the fourth century, that many of the most illustrious among the 
 anchorites of the East, and the Coelibates of the "West, had better 
 merited cells in some House of Correction, than niches in the gallery 
 of ecclesiastical heroes, that the greatest Saints and Doctors of that 
 age had sanctioned pious frauds, which, in our own times, would 
 have conducted their authors to the treadmill, that Ambrose had 
 been an impostor, Chrysostom the promoter of a cheat, and Augustiu
 
 604 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 a teacher of what he must have known to be false, that Popery hail 
 been a reformation of ancient Christianity, that the theology of 
 Mahommed and his caliphs had been superior to that which they 
 overthrew at Antioch and Alexandria, and that Attila was an 
 avenger of crimes rivalling those of the Egyptian mysteries. I next 
 advanced to the proof of the Protestantism of the Anglican Church, 
 and showed how in her liturgies, her articles, and her homilies, she 
 had raised her voice against the errors and corruptions, not of Rome 
 merely, but of the Churches which twice sent their bishops to hold 
 a general synod at Klcaea ; and, warming with my own movement, I 
 closed my assault on the religion of the third and fourth centuries, by 
 an unsparing exposure of the inconsistencies and the blunders com- 
 mitted by Eidley, and Jewell, and Bucer, in their awkward attempts 
 to shelter their allegiance to the Apostles by an appeal, alike unsuc- 
 cessful and unfair, to the authority of the Fathers. 
 
 Of all the labours of my literary life, this was the most arduous 
 and the most immediately effective j as it was certainly not the least 
 popular. But a writer will seldom be left by his critics in ignorance 
 of such of his faults as lie on the surface. I was charged with 
 some few oversights in my translations from my Greek originals ; 
 and admonished that I had failed in the reverence due to names had 
 in honour by fifty generations ; and warned, that truth would 
 admit, and that justice required, some mitigation of my censures on 
 the morals of their contemporaries. Censors of another class dis- 
 tinguished between the style of my successive numbers, condemning 
 the earlier as turgid and diffuse, and ascribing only to the latter 
 the freedom and vivacity requisite in controversial writing. They 
 imputed to me a disregard of method and of logical sequence in the 
 evolution of my argument ; and taunted me with having paid the 
 penalty of the periodical literature I had so warmly condemned, by 
 myself sacrificing to immediate effect, materials and researches 
 which, with greater leisure, and in a more tranquil mood, I might 
 have wrought (so they were pleased to add) into a comprehensive 
 and enduring commentary on the works, the doctrines, and the lives 
 of the Fathers of the first five centuries. 
 
 Whatever may have been the fairness of these strictures on my 
 "Ancient Christianity," it was honoured by one result more than 
 sufficient to countervail them all The great leader of the hostile 
 forces undertook to refute my accusations against Ambrose, and for 
 that purpose republished some chapters of the " Ecclesiastical His- 
 tory of Fleury," preceded by an " Essay on Miracles " from his own 
 pen. To vindicate the honesty and the prodigies of the Saints, he 
 was fain to rely on the alleged antecedent probability that some
 
 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 605 
 
 such marvels as those ascribed to Ambrose would be performed by 
 some such person, at some such time, and in some such manner, and 
 was driven to assert that the vast majority of the mighty works 
 recorded in the Old Testament and the New, must stand or fall on 
 the same narrow basis. For the first time in my life I was able to 
 enter into the exultation with which Samuel Johnson had ex- 
 claimed, " Sir, I reduced him to whistle." After a brief interval, 
 the same antagonist bore a yet more conclusive testimony to the 
 truths I had inculcated. In his new character of a Roman Catholic 
 he inculcated them himself ! He published an octavo volume to 
 verify all I had said of the wide interval between the patristic and 
 the apostolic doctrine, and attempted to deduce from the dogmas 
 of Rome a solution of the problem I had proposed, of finding a 
 law by which developments of primitive truths into new forms 
 might be distinguished from each other as genuine and as false. 
 A treacherous ally, thus converted into an avowed enemy, ceased 
 to be formidable. I gladly laid down my controversial pen, and 
 turned aside from the exhausted debates with the Church of Rome, 
 to pursuits far better suited to my temper, and more grateful to my 
 taste. 
 
 By the benignity of a kind Providence I lived like the patriarchs 
 of old, surrounded by the young, and especially by my own off- 
 spring. Alas ! for the Doctors placed by irrevocable vows beyond 
 the reach of those fountains of love and of wisdom. My pupils and 
 my children were my habitual study, as well as the daily joy and 
 interest of my existence. For their instruction or delight, I threw 
 off numberless pages in print or manuscript, for which, beyond that 
 gay circle, I sought neither eulogist nor reader; though, for the 
 benefit of other schools and nurseries, I ultimately published one of 
 them "An English Version of Herodotus," with such omissions 
 only as are needed to make his reception in a Christian household 
 as decorous as it must ever be cordial. Thus my second childhood 
 was separated by no long interval from my first ; for there I was, 
 the eldest, the gravest, and the least agile, indeed, of the jocund 
 group, but hardly less captivated than they were by the lessons and 
 the frolic of the passing hour. And when my little ones were 
 hushed into repose, the incidents of their bright and busy lives 
 would adjust themselves in my mind in the form of a connected 
 narrative, compared with which I found the delightful tales of the 
 great Father of History himself uninteresting. " Feed my lambs " 
 was nearly the lastest injunction which fell from the lips of Him of 
 whom the whole family both in heaven and earth is named. If 
 obedience to his more arduous precepts, in the spirit of a stern self-
 
 606 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 denial, is never unrewarded, even in this life, by peace and joy, 
 how exuberant the springs of happiness opened to those on whom 
 is laid a law, to which the first and deepest instincts of their nature 
 are continually responsive ! 
 
 With me, by this time, to meditate was to write. If I could 
 have so far yielded to the levities of the day, or to its coarseness, as 
 to have laid bare the recesses of my home to the public gaze, there 
 were before me materials for a domestic novel, to which a touch far 
 inferior to that of Rousseau might have imparted an interest far 
 superior to that of his Emilius. But I could just as soon have de- 
 livered over my body as an anatomie vivante to the surgeons for 
 dissection. Reversing the ordinary method of conveying moral pre- 
 cepts under the veil of narrative, I told my tale in the form of pre- 
 cepts, leaving my readers to resolve as they might, the admonitions 
 I laid before them into the very scenes which, as I wrote, were lying 
 before myself the quiet English country house, the affectionate and 
 not unlearned parents, the group of boys and girls, gay, docile, and 
 intelligent, each exhibiting some well-discriminated mental powers, 
 to the slow though complete development of which, the pursuits of 
 each were steadily and patiently directed. 
 
 My book on " Home Education," was received rather with cor- 
 diality by the few than with applause from the many. My self-con- 
 stituted judges were resolved to believe that I had been surveying 
 not the very England in which we live, but the Utopia in which 
 Sir Thomas More once sojourned. Admitting that, beneath the 
 tranquil shelter of such a house as I had unconsciously sketched, 
 many a youth and many a maid might have been trained to adorn 
 the land which gave them birth, they refused to admit the existence 
 of such another abode north or south of Trent, except on the author- 
 ity of a report to be first made to that effect by a commission of 
 married men of six years' standing, at the least. What with man- 
 aging constituents and turnpike trusts, writing sermons and prescrip- 
 tions, meeting the hounds to-day and the Quarter Sessions to- 
 morrow, an English country gentleman, whether clerical or laic, 
 who should undertake the late development of the " ideality," and 
 the "conceptive faculty," and the " sense of analogy" of his chil- 
 dren, though he should address himself to the " intuitive faculties " 
 alone, and those " gently stimulated by pleasurable emotions," 
 would, in a myriad of cases to one (such were the assertions and 
 such the slighting quotations of my critics), end in something very 
 different from the promised result of " putting their minds into a 
 condition of intellectual opulence." Here and there (they added) 
 may, perhaps, be found such an Eden as the author of " Home
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 607 
 
 Education " has inhabited and described ; where, exempt from the 
 cares of earth, and in habitual communion with the Father of 
 Lights, parents train their offspring " to apprehend truth, to impart 
 truth, and to discover truth." But lovely as the scene might be, and 
 profound as was the paternal love with which it was drawn (I am 
 still quoting my censors), the Belvidere Apollo did not contrast 
 more forcibly with an honest sportsman of our times, nor was the 
 Godfrey of Tasso more unlike an officer of her Majesty's Life 
 Guards, than did the rural philosopher, who had indited my book, 
 differ from the ten thousand respectable English gentlemen over 
 whose country mansions fertile vines have crept, and whose tables 
 are thickly set with olive branches. 
 
 Such is criticism ! I have reflected much ; I have written much ; 
 and much have I been taken to task for my writings. But a critic, 
 in the current acceptation of that much-abused term, I have never 
 been. Nor, if I have an enemy, do I wish for him any heavier 
 doom than that he should be inrolled and serve among that super- 
 cilious brotherhood, until he shall have learnt justly to appreciate 
 his own position, and his own real importance, in the world of 
 letters. 
 
 I gradually became review-proof; and, with very little concern 
 for what the month or the quarter might bring forth in that way, 
 I gave myself up to a series of contemplations on topics which had 
 caught without arresting my notice, while I was engaged on my 
 historical surveys, and in my polemical inquiries. Under the enig- 
 matical title of " Saturday Evening," I sketched, in a series of essays, 
 the hopes and prospects of the Christian Church, her lapse from 
 original purity, the fellowship of her members with each other, and 
 their isolation as individuals, the limits of revealed knowledge, the 
 dissolution of our nature, and its perpetuity, and the modes of our 
 future existence. It was not in my nature to acquiesce tamely in 
 any of the dogmatic systems of theology, definite as they were, and, 
 therefore, cold, sterile, and earth-born. I aspired to reach that 
 upper region which the pure light visits, and from which alone it 
 is reflected in all its purity. I dared to propose to myself problems 
 of which Butler might have surmised the solution ; and of which 
 Milton, when shut out from the sight of material things, might have 
 discerned and depicted the latent glories. I attempted to scale 
 eminences in the presence of which the mightiest become conscious 
 of their weakness, and the boldest imagination is taught the penury 
 of its resources. To throw some conjectural, unsteady, and precarious 
 light on such themes, ultimately became the limit of my ambition 
 and of my hopes. Yet I could not altogether abstain from the en-
 
 608 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 deavour to climb heights and to penetrate depths undreamt of in 
 our popular theology, and I applied myself, "with whatever success, 
 to themes which, when examined with reverence and freedom of 
 thought, can never be unfruitful ; though the fruits may often be 
 unripe, and, to the great majority, distasteful. 
 
 Wise men read books that they may learn to read themselves, 
 and for this purpose not seldom quit their libraries for the open air. 
 The heath, the forest, or the river side is the true academy. There, 
 with no intrusive neighbour to dissipate his thoughts, and with no 
 importunate volume to chain them down, the student casts them 
 into such forms of soliloquy or dialogue, of verse or prose, as best 
 suits the humour of the passing time. This peripatetic discipline 
 is best observed under the cover of an angling rod, or a gun ; for 
 then may not the vicar or the major, without an evident breach of 
 privilege, detain, you on the county-rate question ; nor can the 
 gentler voice of wife or daughter upbraid you with the sad list of 
 the visits you have received and neglected to return. Besides, your 
 country philosopher is apt to flatter himself that, in hooking a trout, 
 or flushing a pheasant, his eye is as true and his hand as steady as 
 those of the squire ; and from this weakness I was not altogether 
 exempt. Emerging from my library as one resolved to bring home 
 some score head of game, my stout purposes would gradually die 
 away, as I reached the brook, whose windings were oddly associated 
 in my mind with theories with which the world was one day to be 
 enlightened, and with half-conceived sections of essays yet to be 
 written. 
 
 There is a great want of a treatise on the choice, the uses, and the 
 treatment of hobby-horses. It would form a sort of connecting 
 link between the libraries of useful and of entertaining knowledge. 
 Scarcely a man (the made-up and artificial man alone excepted) 
 who could not be laid under contribution for such a work. I could 
 myself furnish a whole chapter. When it was not field day with 
 me, and I had no exercises in divinity to perform, I descended from 
 the great horse and ambled about, to my heart's content, on a 
 favourite pad, which, however, it was my whim to dress in the 
 housings of my tall charger, and to train to the same paces. In 
 leisure hours, my appointed duty was to extract from Church 
 History its pith and marrow ; my habitual recreation to construct 
 schemes of physiology. I emulated the zeal with which " my Uncle 
 Toby" threw up his entrenchments, and Mr Shandy his theories. 
 My "Home Education" was founded on a diligent survey of the 
 formation of the brain. My solitary walks gave birth to a system 
 in which was exhibited the future condition of man, when he shall
 
 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 609 
 
 he disencumbered of those viscous and muscular integuments which, 
 in his present state, serve as a kind of sheath to protect the sentient 
 soul within, from the intensities of delight or pain to which, with- 
 out such a shelter, it would be exposed. Dwelling habitually on 
 those scenes beyond the confines of earth, I became at last the pos- 
 sessor of a scheme, complete and coherent in all its parts, of that 
 glorious futurity to which, in their cravings for immortal bliss, all 
 men look forward, but which to nearly all presents itself only in a 
 dim, shapeless, and unalluring outline. 
 
 I did not, however, make this attempt to burst through the 
 barriers of time and space, without first tracing the steps of those 
 who had preceded me in this daring adventure. First, and before 
 all, I reverently consulted the inspired writers, among whose prero- 
 gatives it is not the least that, into whatever region of thought they 
 pass, sound sense is still the attendant minister by whose aid they 
 invariably ascend a region far beyond the morbid dreams of an ex- 
 cited fancy. Of such dreams, none had a firmer hold on the ancient 
 sages of Greece and Italy, than the notion that, after death, man 
 was to pass into a state of pure incorporeity, " the naked ascending 
 to the naked," to be absorbed into the great mundane soul. In op- 
 position to this dogma, the New Testament places human felicity, 
 on either side of the grave, in the union of sound mind with a sound 
 body. The same creed, as Irenaeus and Tertullian testify, was held 
 by their immediate successors. Origen advanced further, and 
 taught that to exist wholly detached and separate from matter, is the 
 incommunicable attribute of Deity that the " spiritual body " of 
 St Paul is identical with the " luciform body " of Plato and that 
 any created and subordinate mind destitute of such a covering, and 
 of such an instrument, must be cut off from all commerce with things 
 external, and degenerate into a mere contemplative, insulated, and 
 inert entity. 
 
 "With these earlier fathers of the Church, I found the later of 
 that venerable order in unbroken harmony. In their copious in- 
 quiries into the nature of good and bad daemons, they assign, indeed, 
 to the angelic host the nearest possible resemblance, and to the evil 
 spirits the greatest possible dissimilarity, to the " defecated intelli- 
 gences " of the schoolmen ; and represent the first as impassive to 
 sensual pleasures, and the others as inhaling, with an unholy relish, 
 the savoury fumes of the heathen sacrifices ; but they exhibit both, 
 whether angels or devils, as still clad with some material integument, 
 though it be subtilised to an indefinite and imponderable tenuity. 
 From the same erudite doctors, and especially from St Augustine, I 
 learnt what is the manner in which the spiritual inhabitants of these 
 
 39
 
 610 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 ethereal vehicles hold intercourse with each other, and what are the 
 shapes in which their presence is made manifest to those exquisite 
 organs of sensation to which alone they are perceptible. 
 
 After thus mastering the discoveries of the patristic voyagers into 
 the regions of the blessed, I turned to the other guides across that 
 pathless ocean. One contemptuous glance at the Koran, and the 
 Paradise it reveals, was sufficient. I paused a while to contemplate 
 the dark Homeric Hades peopled by the victims of the inexorable 
 fate with which they had wrestled so bravely on earth. Over the 
 Elysian fields of Virgil I saw satiety reigning in eternal and undis- 
 puted sway, and thought that the great poet had made an advan- 
 tageous exchange, when, at the distance of thirteen centuries, he took 
 up his abode on the outskirts of the Inferno, and made an occasional 
 pilgrimage through its gloomy mansions. The awful magician whom 
 he conducted to those abodes of woe, lost (as it seemed to me) much 
 of his own inspiration when, consigned to the guidance of Beatrice, 
 he traversed the seven heavens in her company, and listened, first 
 in the Sun, and then in the Planet Jupiter, to the lectures of St 
 Thomas, and to the metaphysical comments on the mystery of the 
 Divine decrees, delivered by the saints, congregated into the form of 
 a celestial eagle. 
 
 From the poets I passed to the philosophers. In Cudworth and 
 Brucker, I found a perfect analysis and interpretation of the doc- 
 trines of the schools, both ancient and modern, respecting the state 
 of departed spirits ; but the latitudinarian was as cold as the creed 
 he professed, and the commentator as dry as the parchments among 
 which he lived. I at length fell in with two volumes of far less 
 pretensions than theirs, in which the post-sepulchral condition of 
 man is delineated with an eloquence, a tenderness, and a warmth of 
 heart worthy of such a theme. One of them was the treatise of 
 Thomas Burnett, De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium. Burnett, 
 it may be supposed, best knew his own strength and weakness, and 
 therefore judged rightly in choosing scientific subjects, and in dis- 
 cussing them in a dead language ; but to the world at large, it must 
 ever remain a mystery why he subjected to such fetters a mind 
 which, as by some necessity of its nature, threw a gorgeous veil of 
 impassioned poetry over every topic which it touched. My other 
 conductor across the abyss which separates the living from the dead, 
 was Abraham Tucker, the author of the " Light of Nature," a man 
 unrivalled in the power of illustrating the obscure by the familiar, 
 and blest with a mind so habitually gay, benevolent, and serene, 
 that every page he has written is an undesigned and captivating 
 reflection of his own happy temperament. I gladly soared away
 
 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 611 
 
 with him, in one of his atomic vehicles, to that boundless expanse in 
 which he met the departed worthies of this world, shooting so plea- 
 santly from star to star, conversing without the clog of words, putting 
 forth, at their will, organs with which to feel or to perceive all ex- 
 terior objects, or retiring for meditation into a solitude which, when 
 those organs were retracted, was utterly impregnable by any invader 
 from without. 
 
 At the close of a winter's evening which had been passed in such 
 company, and with such books, I drew my chair to my fire-side, and 
 yielded myself passively to the incursion of the trains of thought to 
 which my employment had given birth. At first they sustained 
 themselves (like creepers hanging on a trellis- work) by the whimsical 
 relations which they spontaneously formed with the dancing flames 
 before me, and with the dark rocks, the illuminated caves, and the 
 glowing pinnacles on which I was gazing. In the microcosm which 
 blazed on my hearth, it was given to me to discover the present 
 abodes of the former generations of mankind, and to watch them 
 as they discharged the various offices which are there reserved for 
 the departed. But, ere long, I ceased to see those mimic mountains 
 of man's future dwelling-place, and to explore the interminable 
 vistas of light and shade by which they were perforated, or to hear 
 the flapping of the fiery pennons which rose above their summits ; 
 for, while I was thus ruminating on the occupations of those who 
 had passed through the gates of death, sleep had closed her portals 
 on myself. 
 
 The time (so it seemed to me) had arrived at which I was to join 
 the solemn troops and bright societies who people the eternal world. 
 One universal bewilderment of thought, one passing agony, and all 
 was still. I had emerged from the confines of life, and yet I lived. 
 Time, place, and sensation were extinct. Memory had lost her 
 office, and the activity of my reasoning powers was suspended. 
 Apart from every other being, and entombed in the solitude of my 
 own nature, all my faculties were absorbed and concentrated in one 
 intense perception of self-consciousness. Before me lay expanded, 
 as in a vast panorama, the entire course of my mortal life. I was at 
 once the actor and the spectator of the whole eventful scene ; every 
 thought as distinct, every word as articulate, and every incident as 
 fresh as at the moment of their birth. The enigmas of my existence 
 were solved. That material and intellectual mechanism of which, 
 for threescore years and ten, I had been the subject, was laid bare, 
 with all the mutual dependencies of the countless events, great and 
 trivial, of my sublunary days. Grasping, at length, the threads of 
 that vast labyrinth, I perceived that they had all been woven by the 
 
 39
 
 612 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 same Divine Artificer. At each step of the way by which I had 
 come, I now traced the intervention of an ever-watchful Providence. 
 Complicated and perplexing as the condition of human life had 
 formerly appeared to me, I at length discovered the great ultimate 
 object to which each movement of that intricate apparatus had been 
 designed to minister. I saw that the whole had been one harmonious 
 and comprehensive scheme for purifying the affections of my nature, 
 and invigorating them for nobler and more arduous exercises. I had 
 gone down to Hades, and Deity was there. On earth His existence 
 had been demonstrated by reasoning. Here it was felt by a con- 
 sciousness intuitive and irresistible. A prisoner in the flesh, I had 
 been wont to adore the majesty of the Creator. A disembodied 
 spirit, I was awake to the conviction that He exists as the peren- 
 nial source of happiness, which, concentrated in His own nature, is 
 thence diffused throughout the universe, although in degrees im- 
 measurably distant from each other, and according to laws unsearch- 
 able by any finite understanding. Thus imbibing knowledge of 
 myself and of Deity, and alive only to the emotions inspired by this 
 ever-present spectacle, I became the passive recipient of influences 
 instinct with a delight so tranquil, and with a peace so unbroken, 
 that weariness, satiety, and the desire for change appeared to have 
 departed from me for ever. 
 
 Change, however, awaited me. So slight and imperfect was the 
 alliance between my disembodied spirit and the world of matter, 
 that, destitute of all sensation, I had lost all measure of time, and 
 knew not whether ages had revolved, or but a moment had passed 
 away during my isolated state of being. Heir to ten thousand 
 infirmities, the body I had tenanted on earth had returned to the 
 dust, there to be dissolved and recompounded into other forms and 
 new substances. Yet the seminal principle of that mortal frame had 
 adhered to me ; and at the appointed season there brooded over it 
 from on high a reproductive and plastic influence. Fearfully and 
 wonderfully as I had been made when a denizen of the world, the 
 chemical affinities, and the complex organisation of my animal 
 structure, had borne the impress of decay, of a transitory state, and 
 of powers restricted in their free exercise. Passing all comprehension 
 as had been the wisdom with which it was adapted to the purposes 
 of my sublunary being, those purposes had been ephemeral, and 
 circumscribed within precincts which now seemed to me scarcely 
 wider than those within which the emmet plies her daily task. In 
 the career which was now opening to me, I required a far different 
 instrumentality to give scope to my new faculties, and to accomplish 
 the ends to which I had learned to aspire. Emancipated from the
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 613 
 
 petty cares and the mean pursuits in which, during the period of 
 iny humanity, I had heen immersed, I now inhabited and informed 
 a spiritual body, not dissimilar in outward semblance to that which 
 I had bequeathed to the worms, but uniform in its texture, homo- 
 geneous in every part, and drawn from elements which were blended 
 together into one simple, pure, and uncompounded whole. Into 
 such perfect unison had my mental and my corporeal nature been 
 drawn, that it was not without difficulty I admitted the belief that 
 I was once again clothed with a material integument. Experience 
 was soon to convince me that such an association was indispensable 
 to the use and to the enlargement of my intellectual and moral 
 powers. 
 
 Emerging from the region of separate spirits into my next scene 
 of activity and social intercourse, I found myself an inhabitant of 
 the great luminary, around which Mercury and his more distant 
 satellites eternally revolve. In all their unmitigated radiance were 
 floating around me those effulgent beams of light and heat which so 
 faintly visit the obscure and distant planets. Everlasting day, the 
 intense glories of an endless summer-noon, rested on the numbers 
 without number of intelligent and sentient creatures who shared 
 with me my new abode. Incorruptible, exempt from lassitude, and 
 undesirous of repose, the imbibed energy from rays which, in the 
 twinkling of an eye, would have dissipated into thin vapour the 
 world and all that it inherits. On that opaque globe, the principles 
 which sustain, and those which destroy life had been engaged within 
 me in a constant but unequal conflict. The quickening spirit on 
 earth, though continually recruited by rest and sleep, had at length 
 yielded to the still-recurring assaults of her more potent adversaries. 
 Here the vital powers had no foes to encounter, and demanded no 
 respite from their ceaseless occupation. In the world below, from 
 man the universal sovereign, to the animalculse who people a drop 
 of turbid water, I had seen all animated things sustaining themselves 
 by the mutual extermination of each other. In the solar sphere I 
 found all pursuing their appointed course of duty or enjoyment, in 
 immortal youth and undecaying vigour. Death had found no 
 entrance ; life demanded no renewal. 
 
 I am anticipating the results of the observations which I gradual- 
 ly learned to make of the difference between solar and planetary 
 existence ; for on my first entrance into this untried state of being, 
 my thoughts were long riveted to the change which I had myself 
 undergone. While incarcerated in my tenement of clay, I had given 
 law to my nerves, muscles, and tendons ; but they had in turn im- 
 posed restraints on me against which it had been vain to struggle.
 
 614 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 My corporeal mechanism had moved in prompt obedience to each 
 successive mandate of my mind ; but so fragile were the materials 
 of which it was wrought, that, yielding to inexorable necessity, my 
 will had repressed innumerable desires which, if matured into abso- 
 lute volitions, would have rent asunder that frail apparatus. I had 
 relaxed the grasp, and abandoned the chase, and thrown aside the 
 uplifted weapon, as often as my overstrained limbs admonished me 
 that their chords would give way beneath any increased impetus. 
 And when the living power within me had subjected my fibres to 
 the highest pressure which they could safely endure, the arrange- 
 ment, and the relative position of my joints and muscles, had im- 
 peded all my movements, except in some circumscribed and unalter- 
 able directions. But my spiritual body, incapable of waste or of 
 fracture, and responsive at every point to the impact of the indwell- 
 ing mind, advanced, receded, rose or fell, in prompt obedience to 
 each new volition, with a rapidity unimpeded, though not unli- 
 mited, by the gravitating influence of the mighty orb over the sur- 
 face of which I passed. At one time I soared as with the wings of 
 eagles, and at another plunged into the abysses of the deep. My 
 spiritual body, the docile and indestructible instrument of my will, 
 could outstrip the flight of the swiftest arrow, or rend the knotted 
 oak, or shiver the primeval rocks ; and then, contracting its efforts, 
 could weave the threads of the gossamer in looms too subtle and 
 evanescent for the touch of the delicate Ariel. 
 
 While on earth I had, like Milton, bewailed that constitution of 
 my frame which, admitting the knowledge of visible objects only at 
 one entrance, forbade me to converse with them except through the 
 medium of a single nerve, and within the narrow limits of the retina. 
 Had the poet's wish been granted, and if, departing from her be- 
 nignant parsimony, nature had exposed his sensorium to the full 
 influx of the excitements of which it was inherently susceptible, 
 that insufferable glare would either have annihilated the percipient 
 faculty, or would have quickened it to agonies unimagined even by 
 his daring fancy. Under the shelter of my earthly tabernacle, which 
 at once admitted and mitigated the light, I had in my mortal state 
 been accustomed to point my telescope to the heavens ; and, while 
 measuring the curve described round their common centre by stars 
 which to the unaided eye were not even disunited, I had felt how 
 infinitely far the latent capacities of my soul for corresponding with 
 the aspect of the exterior world transcended such powers as could be 
 developed within me by nature or by art. An immortal, I quaffed 
 at my pleasure the streams of knowledge and of observation for 
 which before I had thus panted in vain. I could now scan and in-
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. C15 
 
 vestigate at large the whole physical creation. At my will I could 
 call my visual powers into action to the utmost range of their sus- 
 ceptibility ; for in my new body I possessed the properties of every 
 different lens in every possible variety of combination expanding, 
 dissecting, and refracting at any required angle the beams which, 
 radiating from the various substances around me, brought me in- 
 telligence of the forms, the colours, and the movements of them all. 
 Assisted by this optical incarnation, I could survey the luminary on 
 which I dwelt, the globes whose orbits were concentric there, and, 
 though less distinctly, the other solar spheres which glowed in the 
 firmament above me. Not more clearly had I deciphered during my 
 sojourn on earth the shapes and hues of the various beings by which 
 it is replenished, than I now discerned the aspect and the move- 
 ments of the countless species, animate and inanimate, with which 
 the prodigal munificence of creative will has peopled the various 
 planetary regions. 
 
 NOT was it through the intervention of light merely, that my new 
 corporeity brought me into communication with the works of the 
 Divine Architect. It attracted and combined for my study or my 
 delight, all the vibratory movements, and all the gustatory and 
 pungent emanations, by which the sense is aroused and gratified. 
 Celestial harmony floated around me, and I breathed odours such 
 as exhaled from Eden in the fresh dawn of the world's nativity. In 
 that world, chained down by the coarse elements of flesh and blood, 
 I had caught some transient glimpses of exterior things, through the 
 five portals which opened shall I say into my fortress, or my prison 
 house 1 From the glorious mansion which my soul now inhabited, 
 pervious to myself at every point, though secure from every hostile 
 or unwelcome aggression, I surveyed the things around me in 
 aspects till now unimagined. I did not merely see and hear, taste, 
 smell, and feel, but I exercised senses for which the languages of 
 earth have no names, and received intimations of properties and con- 
 ditions of matter unutterable in human discourse. Employing this 
 instrument of universal sensation, the inner forms of nature presented 
 themselves before me as vividly as her exterior types. Thus enter- 
 ing her secret laboratories, I was present at the composition and 
 the blending together of those plastic energies of which mundane 
 philosophy is content to register some few of the superficial results. 
 Each new disclosure afforded me a wider and still lengthening 
 measure of that unfathomable wisdom and power, with the more 
 sublime emanations of which I was thus becoming conversant. Yet 
 such was the flexibility of my spiritualised organs, that at my bid- 
 ding they could absolutely exclude every influence from without,
 
 616 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 leaving me to enjoy the luxuries of meditation in profound and un- 
 assailable solitude. 
 
 While thus I passed along the solar regions, and made endless 
 accessions of knowledge, I was at first alarmed lest my mind should 
 have been crushed beneath the weight of her own conquests, and 
 the whole should be merged in one chaotic assemblage of confused 
 recollections. From this danger I was rescued by another change 
 in my animal economy. During my planetary existence, the struc- 
 ture and the health of my brain had exercised a despotic authority 
 over my intellectual powers. Then, my mind laboured ineffectually 
 over her most welcome tasks, if accident or indigestion relaxed, dis- 
 tended, or compressed my cerebral vessels. For the time, the tools 
 with which she wrought were deprived of their brightness and their 
 edge. At such seasons (and they were frequent), the records of 
 past sensations, and of the thoughts associated with them, became 
 illegible in my memory, or could be read there only in disjointed 
 fragments. An acid on his stomach would have rendered vain the 
 boast of Caesar, that he could address each of his legionaries by 
 name. Even when all my pulses were beating with regularity and 
 vigour, the best I could accomplish was to grope backward through 
 my store of accumulated knowledge, holding by a single thread, to 
 which my attention was confined, and the loss of which defeated all 
 my efforts. 
 
 How different the tablets on which my observations of the past 
 were recorded in my spiritual body ! Unconscious of fatigue, 
 incapable of decay, and undisturbed by any of those innumerable 
 processes essential to the conservation of mortal life, it enabled me 
 to inscribe in indelible lines, as on some outstretched map, each 
 successive perception, and every thought to which it had given 
 birth. At my pleasure, I could unroll and contemplate the entire 
 chart of my past being. I could render myself as absolutely con- 
 scious of the former, as of the present operations of my mind, and 
 at one retrospective glance could trace back to their various fountains 
 all the tributary streams which combined to swell the current of my 
 immediate contemplations. Gliding over the various provinces of 
 the solar world, and gathering in each new treasures of information, 
 I deposited them all beyond the reach of the great spoiler Time, in 
 this ample storehouse of a plenary memory. With the increase of 
 my intellectual hoard, my cravings for such wealth continually 
 augmented. It was an avarice which no gains could satiate, and to 
 the indulgence of which imagination itself could assign no limit. 
 
 I should, however, have become the victim of my own avidity for 
 knowledge, if my ideas had still obeyed those laws of association to
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 617 
 
 which, in my telluric state, they had been subject. Then it behoved 
 my reason to exercise a severe and watchful government. "When 
 her control was relaxed, my thoughts would break loose from all 
 legitimate restraint. They arranged themselves into strange groups 
 and fantastic combinations, and established with each other such 
 alliances as whim, caprice, or accident suggested. These once made 
 were indissoluble. They asserted their power but too often, in 
 resistance to the sternest mandates of my judgment and my will. 
 But in times of debility, of disease, or of sleep, my ideas would com- 
 bine into heterogeneous masses, seething and mingling together, like 
 the ingredients of some witch's cauldron, assembled by her incanta- 
 tions to work out some still more potent spell. Over the whole of 
 this intoxicating confusion presided Carnality, in all her nervous, 
 cerebral, vascular, and other forms, and working by means of all her 
 digestive, secretory, and assimilating processes. 
 
 Now, no longer the inmate of a tremulous and sordid tabernacle 
 of flesh, but inhabiting a shrine pure and enduring as her own 
 nature, my soul was rescued from this ignoble thraldom. Accident, 
 appetite, lassitude, the heat and fumes of my animal laboratory, 
 had ceased to disturb the supremacy of reason. Instead of congre- 
 gating as an undisciplined host, my ideas, as in some stately pro- 
 cession, followed each the other in meet order and predetermined 
 sequence, their march unobstructed by any suggestions or desires 
 originating in my sensuous frame. I had become, not the passive 
 recipient of thought, but the unquestioned sovereign of my own 
 mental operations. The material organs, by the aid of which I now 
 wrought them out, obeyed a law like that on which depend the 
 involuntary movements of the heart and arteries, unattended by any 
 conscious effort, and productive of no fatigue. Every increment of 
 knowledge spontaneously assumed in my memory its proper place 
 and relative position ; and the whole of my intellectual resources 
 fell into connected chains of argument or illustration, which I could 
 traverse at pleasure from end to end, still finding the mutual 
 dependence and adhesion of each successive link unbroken. 
 
 To contemplate any truth in all the relations in which it stands to 
 every other truth, is to possess the attribute of omniscience ; but in 
 proportion as any created intelligence can combine together her ideas 
 in their various species, genera, classes, and orders, in the same 
 degree is diminished the distance from the Supreme Mind, immea- 
 surable and infinite as the intervening gulf must ever remain. On 
 earth I had been compelled, by the feebleness of my cerebral and 
 nervous economy, to render my studies almost exclusively analytical. 
 There, I had toiled to disencumber every question of whatever
 
 618 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 might obscure the view of the isolated point proposed as the end of 
 my inquiries. Morals apart from physics, are disunited from logic, 
 the science of numbers and of space detached from the exercise of 
 the imaginative power, even theology itself divorced from the devout 
 aspirations to which it tends, had each in turn engaged my earnest 
 pursuit. But to ascend those heights from which they could be 
 contemplated as parts of one harmonious whole to seize and to blend 
 together the analogies pervading the works of poets and mathema- 
 ticians, of naturalists and divines this was an attempt which had 
 convinced me how indissoluble were the fetters which riveted my 
 soul to her sluggish associate. Set free from this bondage, and sup- 
 plied with an instrument of sensation which kept pace with her own 
 inherent activity, she found and desired no repose. Solar time is 
 measured by the revolutions of the planetary orbs, and from the 
 commencement to the completion of his career through the firma- 
 ment, Uranus would often find me still engaged in some unbroken 
 contemplation. During that interval I had completed some vast 
 synthesis, in which were at once combined and distinguished all the 
 various aspects under which some province of knowledge had dis- 
 closed itself to my view. In the nether world, high discourse had 
 been held on the connection of the sciences ; but now I discovered 
 the mutual influence, the interaction, and the simultaneous workings 
 of their different laws. I no longer cultivated the exact sciences as 
 a separate domain, but the most severe physical truth was revealed 
 to me in union with the richest hues of ideal beauty, with the per- 
 fection of the imitative arts, with the pure abstractions of meta- 
 physical thought, with narratives both historical and romantic, with 
 the precepts of universal morals, and the mysteries of the Divine 
 government. Ontology vain-glorious word as used among men 
 the knowledge of universal being as distinct from species, and of 
 species as harmonised in universal being, was the study which en- 
 gaged the time and rewarded the labours of immortal minds animat- 
 ing spiritual bodies. 
 
 Let not those who boast jthemselves in logic, Aristotelian or 
 Baconian, assume that their puny architecture of syllogistic or in- 
 ductive reasoning affords the rules by which the soul, rescued from 
 the hindrances of a carnal corporeity, erects for herself edifices of 
 knowledge, immovable in their base, beautiful in their proportions, 
 and towering in splendid domes and pinnacles to the skies. To 
 Newton and to Pascal the theories of the vulgar geometry were as 
 instinctively obvious as the preliminary axioms on which they rest. 
 While yet an infant, Mozart was possessed of all those complex 
 harmonies which a life of patient study scarcely reveals to inferior
 
 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 619 
 
 masters of his art. In my planetary existence, I had rejoiced in 
 my habitual aptitude for physiology and historical researches, nor 
 had I regretted the years of ceaseless toil devoted to them. But 
 noAV I discovered that in myself, as in the great men I have men- 
 tioned, the apprehensiveness of truth had depended far more on the 
 animal than the mental framework. Quick and vigorous, in high 
 bodily health, but sluggish and inert under the pressure of corporeal 
 debility, I learned that logic, experiment, and calculation had been 
 but so many crutches to assist the movements of the halt and feeble ; 
 and that, with a physical instrumentality which study could not 
 exhaust nor disease assail, intuition took the place of reasoning. I 
 became rather the conscious witness, than the agent, of the process 
 by which consequences were evolved from the premises brought 
 under my notice. 
 
 In the society of which I had become a member, as in mundane 
 communities, discourse was amongst the chief springs both of im- 
 provement and delight. So curiously fashioned was the integument 
 within which my mind was now enveloped, that, after the manner 
 of an eyelid, it could either exclude the access of any external excite- 
 ment, creating within me an absolute and impregnable solitude, or 
 lay open to the immediate survey of an associate any thought or 
 combination of thoughts which I desired to impart to him. I had 
 acquired two distinct languages, one of visible signs, the other of 
 audible symbols. The first was analogous to the mute dialogue which 
 is carried on in pantomime by gesture and the varying expressions of 
 the countenance ; though, unlike such discourse, it was exempt from 
 all conjectural and ambiguous meanings. As in a camera-obscura, 
 my corporeal organs reflected the workings of the informing spirit ; 
 so that, like the ancient Peruvians, I could converse as by a series 
 of pictures produced and shifted with instantaneous rapidity. This 
 mode of communication served my turn when I had any occurrences 
 to relate, or any question to discuss, of which sensuous objects 
 formed the basis. But when phenomena purely psychological, 
 destitute of all types in the material creation, were to be conveyed 
 to a companion, I had audible symbols by which every intellectual 
 conception, and each fluctuating state of moral sentiment, might be 
 expressed as distinctly as geometrical diagrams express the corre- 
 sponding ideas to which they are allied. By the intermixture of 
 pictorial and symbolical speech, I could thus render myself intelligi- 
 ble throughout the whole range and compass of my mental opera- 
 tions, and could give utterance to all those subtle refinements of 
 thought or of sensation, which even amongst those who spoke the 
 vernacular tongue of Plato, must, from the want of fit and determin-
 
 620 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 ate indications, have either died away in silence, or have been 
 exhaled in some mystic and unintelligible jargon. Whatever dis- 
 tinctness of expression the pencil or vibratory chords enabled 
 Raphael or Handel to give to their sublime but otherwise ineffectual 
 conceptions, I had thus the power to impart to each modification of 
 thought, and to every shade of feeling. Verbal controversies, 
 sophistry, and all the other " idols of the cavern," had disappeared. 
 Philosophy and her legitimate issue, wisdom, piety, and love, were 
 cultivated and treasured up by each member of the great solar 
 family, not as a private hoard to minister only to his own uses, but 
 as a fund universally communicable, and still augmenting by con- 
 stant interchange. 
 
 It is difficult or impossible to speak intelligibly, in the language 
 of men, of the delights or of the duties of the state of being into 
 which I had thus entered. Borne along in the vehicle of my 
 spiritual body, I dreaded no fatigue, and was deterred by no danger 
 in the discharge of the most arduous enterprises. Aspects of the 
 creation, hidden from me while garmented in the gross elements of 
 flesh and blood, now burst on my perception as light visits him who, 
 in mature life, for the first tune acquires the visual faculty. Through 
 each new avenue of sense thus successively opened to me, my soul, 
 with raptures, such as seraphs feel, drew in from the still-expanding 
 circumference wonder and delight, and an ever-increasing conscious- 
 ness of the depths of her own being and resources. Contemplating 
 the hidden forms and the occult mechanism of the material universe, 
 I left behind me the problems with which physical science is con- 
 versant, and advanced to that higher philosophy which investigates 
 the properties of spiritual agents ; and to a theology, compared Avith 
 which that which I had hitherto acquired was as insignificant as the 
 inarticulate babblings of the cradle. My retrospective consciousness 
 for memory it can scarcely be called spread out before me scenes, 
 the bright, harmonious, and placid lights of which were mellowed, 
 though unobscured, by distance. Misgivings as to the stability of 
 my own opinions had fled away, as the truths with which I was 
 engaged presented themselves to me simultaneously in their relative 
 bearings and mutual dependence. Love, pure and catholic, warmed 
 and expanded my heart, as thoughts wise, equitable, and benign 
 flowed from other minds into my own in a continuous stream ; the 
 pellucid waters of which, in the inherent transparency of our regen- 
 erate nature, no deceit could darken and no guile pollute. My cor- 
 poreal fabric, now become the passive instrument of my will, im- 
 portuned me with no unwelcome intrusions ; but buoyant, flexible,
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 621 
 
 and instinct with life and vigour, obeyed every volition, and ob- 
 structed the accomplishment of none. 
 
 Yet had I not passed into that torpid elysium of which some 
 have dreamed, and over the descriptions of which many more have 
 slumbered. Virtue, and her stern associate, Self-control, exact 
 obedience not from the denizens of earth alone, but from the rational 
 inhabitants of every province of 'the universal empire. "With each 
 accession of knowledge and of mental power, my view became con- 
 tinually wider and more extended of that gulf, which, stretching out 
 in measureless infinitude, separates the Source of Being from the 
 most exalted of his intelligent offspring. My affiance in the Divine 
 wisdom and rectitude, reposing on foundations deep and firm in 
 proportion to my larger acquaintance with the ways of Providence, 
 was still necessary to sustain my trembling spirit as I meditated on 
 the mysteries of the Divine government. For, within the reach of 
 my observation, were discernible agonising intensities of suffering, 
 abysses of pollution and of guilt, attesting the awful powers both of 
 endurance and of activity of minds ejected from the defences, and 
 despoiled of the narcotics, once afforded them by their animal struc- 
 ture. Awakened to a sense of their inherent though long-slumber- 
 ing energies, they were captives. Exposed to every painful excite- 
 ment by which the sentient faculty can be stimulated, they were 
 naked. Reading on the face of nature inscriptions till now illegible, 
 they saw in them their own condemnation. Remembering each 
 incident of their former existence, they found in each fresh aliment 
 for despair. Disabused of the illusions of sophistry and self-love, 
 truth shed on them the appalling glare of inevitable light. Inter- 
 changing thoughts without the possibility of disguise, every foul and 
 malignant desire diffused amongst them a deadly contagion. Desti- 
 tute of any separate wants or interests, their bodies could no longer 
 minister to them the poor relief of an alternation of distress. The 
 reluctant and occasional spectator of such woes, I found in faith 
 and hope, and meek adoration, the solace which my labouring spirit 
 required a task commensurate with my now-elevated powers, 
 though the firmest and the holiest of mortals, while yet detained in 
 his tenement of the flesh, would have been crushed and maddened 
 beneath the burden of that fearful sight. 
 
 In the schools of the world, I had wandered in the endless mazes 
 of fate and free-will, and the origin of evil. An inhabitant of the 
 great celestial luminary, I became aware of relations till then un- 
 heard of and inconceivable, between the Emanative Essence and 
 the hosts of subordinate spirits, and of questions thence resulting,
 
 622 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 of such strange and mighty import, that, prostrating myself before 
 the wisdom and benevolence of the Most High, I was still com- 
 pelled, in reverential awe, to acknowledge how inscrutable, even to 
 my expanded capacity, was the thick darkness which shrouds His 
 secret pavilion. 
 
 Nor were there wanting tasks, which summoned to the utmost 
 height of daring the most courageous of the inhabitants of the sphere 
 to which I had been translated. Glorious recompense was to be won 
 by deeds such as immortal beings only could undertake or meditate. 
 Ministers of the Supreme, we braved at His bidding the privation of 
 all other joys in the delight of prompt obedience to His will. We 
 waged with His enemies fierce conflicts, and exposed ourselves to 
 ills, intense during their continuance, in proportion to the exquisite 
 sensibilities of our purified corporeity. Impelled by irresistible com- 
 passion, by the cravings of insatiable benevolence, or by the vehement 
 desire to obtain or to impart tidings affecting the happiness of our 
 own or of other orders of thinking beings, our active powers, with all 
 our resources of constancy, magnanimity, and prudence, were called 
 into habitual exercise ; nor were there wanting dignities to be at- 
 tained, or sceptres to be won, as the meet reward of illustrious 
 achievements. 
 
 A soft and protracted flow of vocal harmony, sustained by the 
 firmer cadence of vibrating chords, now broke in on my contemplations. 
 It could (I at first thought) be nothing else than a choir of seraphs 
 hymning the glorious exploits of the immortals among whom I so- 
 journed. Yet the notes seemed familiar as household names, and 
 the deepest springs of affection began to rise within me as I listened 
 to those young and well-remembered voices. Then we heard the 
 joyous laugh, the logs crackling on the warm hearth, and the hissing 
 urn ; while the gentle pressure on my shoulder of a hand embellished 
 with the still bright nuptial ring, recalled me from the Empyraean 
 on high to my home on earth, from the Paradise above to the Eden 
 which I had been graciously permitted to cultivate and adorn below. 
 I cannot truly say that I regretted the descent ; yet when the vespers 
 of my household had been sung, and the Divine presence invoked, 
 and the parental benedictions uttered, and my happy choristers dis- 
 missed to their light slumbers, I called once more for my trusty pen, 
 and drew up a sketch of " The Physical Theory of a Future State," 
 which, when matured by more patient labour, became one of the 
 most popular of the works which I have given to the world without 
 my name, though not without the hope to win an enduring reputation 
 among men.
 
 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 623 
 
 When the author of the " Natural History of Enthusiasm " threw 
 away the scabbard in his war with the periodical tribe, he must have 
 been prepared for vindictive reprisals. But it is improbable that he 
 ever anticipated them in a form so audacious as this. To invent and 
 publish an autobiography for him ! to infer his personal history from 
 his historical and other inquiries ! to spell out even his dreams from 
 his physiological speculations ! all this is (he may perhaps say) to be 
 exceedingly impertinent. Yet we have studied his writings to little 
 purpose if such shall be his real sentence. Supposing him to con- 
 descend so far as to read such pages as these at all, he will (we doubt 
 not) recognise in them rather the feelings of attachment and reverence 
 with which a grateful pupil looks up to his teacher, than the offens- 
 ive familiarity which would level the distinctions of intellectual rank. 
 The station he holds (or deserves to hold) in the commonwealth of 
 letters, would make such rudeness, recoil with destructive force on the 
 presumptuous author of it. 
 
 His title to that station rests chiefly in the breadth and compre- 
 hensiveness of his views of the history, the prospects, and the character 
 of our race. His survey of human affairs is conducted from an eleva- 
 tion far above the mists of religious or political partisanship. His 
 most inquisitive readers could never have discovered that he was a 
 Nonconformist, had he not announced himself in that character. 
 Unaided by that avowal, he must have been considered only as a 
 cosmopolitan student and teacher of Christian ethics and polity ; as 
 the grave censor of all ecclesiastical sects, the admirer of none, the 
 eulogist of none, the member of none ; as contemplating the universal 
 Church and each of her children (disunited and discordant as they 
 are) with a fervent though foreboding affection, and yet as pledged 
 to a passionate and relentless hostility against that sect (ever shifting 
 its name but never changing its character), which, under the sem- 
 blance of superhuman virtues, and the pretext of divine authority, 
 still aims at the establishment of a spiritual despotism over the people, 
 and the kingdom, of the Eedeemer. 
 
 The " Natural History of Enthusiasm " and the kindred works 
 which followed it, constitute in effect a series of lectures on the 
 latent principles which govern the course of ecclesiastical affairs, 
 and which solve the enigmas, reconcile the contradictions, and har- 
 monise the jarring elements by which they are perplexed. Striding 
 from one height of generalisation to another, the teacher leaves far 
 below him the lower Avorld in which antiquarians, story-tellers, 
 biographers, and dramatists are seeking the materials of their several 
 crafts. He narrates no incidents, sketches no characters, and 
 delineates no aspect either of social or of solitary life. His readers
 
 624 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 are supposed to be as familia? with the mere facts of history as 
 himself (a very hazardous supposition), and*/must bring to the 
 perusal of these books either much knowledge, or unbounded faith. 
 
 But though thus dwelling on the mountain tops of abstraction, 
 he never attempts to scale beyond the limits within which the in- 
 spired volume has circumscribed all human inquiries. His assent to 
 Christianity is no faint admission that the balance of conflicting 
 arguments inclines in favour of that belief. It is a conviction rooted 
 in the inmost recesses of his soul, the germinating principle of all 
 the thoughts which have taken the deepest root, and which most 
 luxuriantly flourish there. Though it is at once the labour and the 
 solace of his life to scale the eminences and to measure the depths 
 of truth ; yet truth and the Christian revelation are synonymes in 
 his vocabulary. With an ear trained to listen to the under tones 
 of the Divine voice, and a heart exercised in interpreting the in- 
 articulate language of the Divine government, he has studied the 
 written word as they only can study it, to whom it is the distinct 
 echo or the vivid reflection of those interior senses. 
 
 While thus grappling with principles of the widest span, our 
 lecturer never indulges himself in so much as a momentary repose 
 in the lap of mysticism. He steadily refuses the too ready aid of 
 that familiar narcotic. His outline is drawn with a hand as free and 
 bold as that of Guizot, his speculations are scarcely less recondite 
 than those of Coleridge, but his athletic good sense disdains to 
 enlarge itself by looming through a fog. Master as he is of the 
 chiaro-scuro, the love of truth is ever too strong in him for the love 
 of art. He has risen above the fashions of his age so far as to shun 
 the region in which sublimity and nonsense hold divided rule ; re- 
 membering, perhaps, that it has never been frequented by any of 
 the master-spirits of the world, and that, among men divinely in- 
 spired, he who was at once the greatest and the most profoundly 
 learned, had thought it better to speak five words to edification, 
 than to speak ten thousand words in an unknown tongue. 
 
 And yet these works have never been rewarded by the full tide 
 of applause or of popularity to which they have so many titles. 
 The tribute rendered to their writer has been very inadequate tc his 
 claims on the public gratitude. It is not difficult to assign the reason. 
 
 Wisdom is lovely still, in every form and under every disguise ; 
 whether inspiring the merriment of Momus, or prattling in homely 
 fables, or carving on the mind of man, as on a tablet, apothegmatic 
 inscriptions for the use of all ages, or employing as her instru- 
 ment the passions of the orator, the visions of the poet, or the 
 abstractions of the philosopher. But even wisdom ceases to
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 625 
 
 captivate, because she ceases to be recognised, when she sustains 
 at the same moment different and inharmonious offices, or cha- 
 racters at variance with each other. Pasquin impassioned, ^sop 
 rhetorical, Franklin visionary, Demosthenes clad in Jacques' suit 
 of motley, are so many niasqueraders, from whom the studious 
 expect no instruction, and the idle no amusement. Congruity of 
 style is not less indispensable than unity of design, to the success 
 of any work of art. 
 
 To the neglect and want of that congruity, the historian of " En- 
 thusiasm," of " Spiritual Despotism," and of " Fanaticism," must 
 ascribe the disproportion between the power which animates his 
 writings, and the effect which they produce. That which should 
 be narrative is absorbed, and, as it were, dried up into aphorisms, 
 and that which should be aphorism is dissolved and expanded in a 
 flood of rhetoric. His books contain neither occurrences for the 
 entertainment of the inquisitive, nor a body of carefully-digested 
 and well-measured doctrines for the meditation of the thoughtful. 
 The teaching and the eloquence jar with, and spoil one another. 
 
 The eloquence, moreover, is none of the best. Be his theme 
 what it may, the march of the historian or lecturer is still the 
 same ; stately, studied, and wearisome, period rolls after period in 
 measured cadence, page answers page in scientific harmony. This 
 paragraph challenges applause for its melodious swell, that for its 
 skilful complexity, the next for the protracted simile with which it 
 brings some profound inquiry to a picturesque and graceful close. 
 But the free movement and the welcome repose, and the brave 
 neglect of embellishments, which are the usual badges of power, are 
 wanting ; and their absence suggests the very erroneous belief that 
 the power on which they usually wait is wanting also. 
 
 This superfine style is a besetting sin of modern nonconformist 
 literature. It has infected the sermons of Hall, their greatest 
 preacher, the essays of Foster, their greatest thinker, and the 
 commentary of Adam Clarke, their greatest biblicist. It may be 
 traced in other living authors among them not less distinctly than 
 in this their Prselector on Church History. It springs out of the 
 jealousy and the self-assertion incident to the place they occupy in 
 the social and the learned world. It says, or seems to say, though 
 Oxford rejects us, and Cambridge knows us not, and Lambeth looks 
 down on us, and May Fair eschews our company, yet you shall see 
 that we can be as refined and as elevated in sentiment, and as 
 abstruse in speculation as the best of them ; that we can write as 
 gorgeously as your public orators, and as learnedly as if we wore 
 scarlet hoods in St Mary's. In very deed, good friends, you can do 
 
 40
 
 626 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 all this, and many more and better things than these ; and you 
 would do them too, if you could but settle it in your minds that 
 from the scorn which galls, and the indignities which ruffle you, 
 you have an appeal both to Cis- and Trans-atlantic England, and 
 that your appeal will be most effectually made, when made with 
 the least seeming consciousness of the wrongs under which you 
 labour. 
 
 Style in literature is like manner in society the superficial index 
 which all can read of internal qualities which feAv can decipher. If 
 the author of these lectures and essays had either written with ease 
 and simplicity, or had disguised his meaning under spasmodic con- 
 tortions, or had talked over these grave matters in the tone of a 
 blunt humorist, or had flattened them down to the level of a mono- 
 tonous orthodoxy ; if, in a word, he had either risen to the graces of 
 nature, or condescended to those of affectation, his admirers would 
 have been more numerous and more enthusiastic. Language in his 
 hands is an instrument of wonderful volume, flexibility, and com- 
 pass ; but it is made to produce harmonies of such subtle elaboration, 
 that the ear aches for the even flow of a few plain words quietly 
 taking their proper places. Felicitous expression is an excellent 
 thing in its season ; but serve up a whole octavo full of exquisite 
 sentences, and neither the guest nor the cook himself can clearly tell 
 what the repast is made of. In the didactic works of the Historian 
 of Enthusiasm, as in those of Dr Channing, penury and affluence of 
 thought are made to look so like each other, that they must be un- 
 dressed in order to be distinguished ; and while he is making out 
 which is which, the courteous reader is apt to lose his courtesy. In 
 proportion as he is the more profound thinker of the two, the Eng- 
 lishman is the more to be upbraided for the perverse ingenuity which 
 thus mars his own success. Objects so elevated as his ought not to 
 have been exposed to such hazard. 
 
 It is, however, chiefly, though not exclusively, when he fills the 
 Professor's chair, that he is to be numbered among the promoters 
 " corruptae eloquentiae." As an assailant of the heresiarchs of his 
 age, he was quite another man, and his war-cry rang sharp and clear. 
 His philosophic and his belligerent notes differed as the contortions 
 of the muscles differ from calisthenics ; or as Samson struggling with 
 the cords which bound him, differed from Samson falling with un- 
 fettered limbs on the hapless Philistines. Throwing aside his gown, 
 with all its elaborate and graceful folds, he girded up his loins for 
 the combat, and presented himself to his applauding friends and 
 discomfited opponents a literary athlete, in good wind and perfect 
 training, his thoughts condensed and his words compressed within
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. G27 
 
 the narrow limits of time and space permitted him by the conditions 
 of the controversy. Each successive number became more nervous, 
 pungent, and idiomatic, and he quitted the field not without the 
 praise (the last probably to which he ever aspired) of considerable 
 proficiency even in the arts of sarcasm and banter. 
 
 In his speculations on the state and employments of the human 
 soul when clad with her post-sepulchral or spiritual body, he resumed 
 the abstract style of his preelections polished up to a height of pain- 
 ful brilliancy, though their turgid and declamatory tone was ex- 
 changed for a manner more in unison with themes so grave and so 
 exalted. Voyages of discovery in Utopia, when conducted by skil- 
 ful explorators, are, however, so rich in the returns they make to 
 this world of realities, that it would be mere captiousness to com- 
 plain of the phraseology of the journal or the log-book. 
 
 Since death entered into our world, every tribe of men, almost 
 every individual of our species, has been labouring to penetrate the 
 dark abyss into which it conducts one generation after another. 
 Scipio dreamt of colloquies with the wise and the good of all ages. 
 Mahomet taught the students of the Koran to dream (if Sale's trans- 
 lation may be trusted) of " rivers of incorruptible water and rivsrs 
 of milk, the taste whereof changeth not ; gardens planted with 
 shady trees, in each of which shall be two flowing fountains ; 
 couches, the linings whereof shall be of thick silk, interwoven with 
 gold ; and beauteous damsels refraining their eyes from beholding 
 any but their spouses, having complexions like rubies and pearls, 
 and fine black eyes." The Esquimaux also has his heaven, where 
 seal-skins may be procured in placid seas, and undying lamps are 
 fed with inexhaustible supplies of the odorous grease of bears. 
 
 The stream can rise no higher than the fountain. Our ideas of 
 immortal good are but amplifications of our mortal enjoyments. To 
 associate together all innocent and not incompatible delights known 
 to us by actual experience, subtracting from them every alloy of 
 pain, satiety, and languor, and thus to sublimate and define our con- 
 ceptions of felicity, is to be the creator of the only heaven, by the 
 contemplation of which hope can be sustained and activity invigor- 
 ated. He who most diligently and cheerfully surveys the " happy 
 gardens " to which a benign Providence may have conducted him in 
 this world, is the best qualified to depict the Elysium which reason 
 ' or imagination has laid out and planted for the abode of the blessed 
 beyond the grave. 
 
 The author of " The Physical Theory of a Future Life," judged 
 by this test, must be esteemed a wise and happy man. Wise, 
 because, affecting no superhuman disdain of mere bodily gratifica- 
 
 40*
 
 628 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 tions, he has no fear of acknowledging to others, or to himself, the 
 dependence of his spiritual on his animal economy ; and happy, 
 because he must distinctly have experienced that unresisting ser- 
 vitude of the body to the soul, which he has so vividly described as 
 the great element of her serenity and freedom. Such as is his solar 
 Paradise, such must also have been his earthly Eden : the first, his 
 future blessedness in the highest conceivable measure ; the last, his 
 present happiness in the highest attainable degree. Such a mid- 
 summer night's dream could have visited the slumbers of no one 
 whose fancy was tainted with sensual defilement, or whose intellect 
 was untrained to active exercise and close self-inspection. Or, if 
 the theorist be really entitled to no higher praise than that of hav- 
 ing skilfully selected the most alluring possibilities of future good 
 from the many celestial schemes with which the poetry and the 
 fiction of all ages abound, yet even so it must be conceded that the 
 choice has been guided by opinions such as every one must wish to 
 adopt, and by tastes which, in our better moments, we should all 
 desire to gratify. 
 
 If our theorist had constructed his heaven from the materials 
 gathered in his survey, not of his domestic, but of the outer world, 
 there would, we apprehend, have been but few aspirants for a trans- 
 lation to it. For, both the world of active and the world of con- 
 templative life, as they exist beyond the precincts of his own retire- 
 ment, present themselves to him in dark and uninviting aspects. 
 He mourns over the low estate of theology among us, and laments 
 the degradation of all those higher intellectual pursuits with which 
 theology maintains an indissoluble connection. Acquainted, perhaps 
 but too well, with the religious parties of our State, their infirmities 
 and their faults, he pours out eloquent longings for the advent of a 
 more catholic spirit, of piety more intense and less ostentatious, and 
 of a sacred literature animated by some nobler impulse than the hire 
 of booksellers and the praise of ephemeral critics. His own labours 
 for the happiness of mankind do not seem to be well sustained by 
 the cheering influence of hope. His philanthropy is ever tinged 
 with sadness. He loves children, because they are exempt from the 
 prevailing degeneracy ; and the face of nature, because it is the one 
 unsullied reflection of the benignity of the Creator ; and the books 
 of other times, because they are the records of human wisdom, whose 
 living voice is no longer to be heard ; and the Universal Church,' 
 because it is the ark floating on the troubled waters of this evil 
 time, freighted with the best treasures, and charged with the destinies 
 of our race. Man also he loves, but with feelings pensive if not 
 melancholy, and fastidious even when most benignant. In his many
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. G29 
 
 books there is no tinge of spleen ; but they exhibit that disgust for 
 the follies and the vices of the world, which at once demands and 
 discourages exertion. 
 
 Casting off these depressing influences, he has, however, devoted 
 all the resources of a comprehensive understanding, and all the 
 affections of a benevolent heart, to correct the general debasement, 
 and to exhibit a model of those higher pursuits to which he would 
 reclaim his generation. Enthusiasts, fanatics, spiritual despots, 
 sciolists in education, the pastors who slumber within the fold, and 
 the robbers from without who spoil it, form a confederacy, the 
 assailant of which should be encouraged by the gratitude of all good 
 men. If the soul of William Cowper yet breathes among us, it is 
 through the lips of the historian of Enthusiasm. Not, indeed, that 
 the poet has found a successor in the magic art of establishing a 
 personal and affectionate intimacy between himself and his readers. 
 There is no new fire-side bike that of Olney round which we can 
 gather ; nor any walks like those of Weston Underwood, of which 
 we are the companions ; nor a heart at once broken and playful, 
 whose sorrows and amusements are our own ; nor are we surrounded 
 by a family group, with tame hares, spaniels, bird-cages, and knit- 
 ting-needles, as familiar to us as those of our own boyhood, and 
 almost as dear, each in turn reflecting the gentle, thoughtful, 
 elevated mind of him to whom they belonged, in all its vicissitudes 
 of despondency and hope, of grave wisdom and of a mirth as light 
 and pure as that of infancy. This is the high prerogative of genius, 
 addressing mankind at large through the vernacular idiom of one 
 land in the universal language of all. But Stanford Rivers has 
 given birth to a succession of efforts to exalt the national character, 
 which might vie with those of Olney and of Weston in piety and 
 earnestness, in genuine freedom of thought, in the relish for all the 
 domestic pleasures and innocent delights of life, in the filial love of 
 God, and the brotherly love of man. 
 
 Learning and logical acumen, and a wide acquaintance with the 
 history and the heart of man, which the poet neither possessed nor 
 needed, impart to the works of the essayist a charm, without which 
 it is vain, in these days, to interfere in the debates which agitate 
 society. There is a charm, too, even in his distaste for the pursuits 
 most in request amongst us ; for it springs from the grandeur of the 
 ideal excellence by which his imagination is possessed. He remem- 
 bers that Omniscience, though veiling its intimations in the coarse 
 mantle of human language, will occasionally emit some gleams of 
 that radiance which illumines the regions of the blessed ; and these 
 he would reverently gather and concentrate. He is conscious that
 
 630 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 there is in Christianity an expansive power, sometimes repressed but 
 never destroyed ; and that latent energy he strives to draw forth into 
 life and action. He perceives that the mysteries which shroud the 
 condition and the prospects of our race, however inscrutable to the 
 slaves of appetite, are not absolutely impervious to a soul purified by 
 devout contemplation ; and to these empyreal heights he aspires at 
 once to point and to lead the way. He knows that to him whose 
 foot is firmly planted on the eternal verities of Heaven, there belong 
 motives of such force, and a courage so undaunted, as should burst 
 through all resistance ; and he calls on those who enjoy this high 
 privilege to assert their native supremacy above the sordid ambition, 
 the frivolities, and the virulence of the lower world. The voice thus 
 raised in expostulation will die away, not indeed unheeded by the 
 interior circle he addresses, nor unblessed by a meet recompense ; 
 but unrewarded, we fear, by the accomplishment of these exalted 
 purposes. Eloquent as is the indignation with which our anonymous 
 monitor regards the low level to which divine and human literature 
 has fallen amongst us, and mean as is his estimate of the pursuits 
 in which the men of his own days are engaged, a hope may perhaps, 
 without presumption, be indulged, that less fastidious and not less 
 capable judges will pronounce a more lenient sentence on us and on 
 our doings. 
 
 In the great cycle of human affairs there are many stages, each 
 essential to the consummation of the designs of Providence, and each 
 separated by broad distinctions from the rest. They whose province 
 it is to censure, and they whose desire it is to improve their age, will 
 never find their sacred fires extinct from the mere want of fuel. 
 History and theory are always at hand with humiliating contrasts to 
 the times we live in. That men have been better or might be better 
 than they are, has been true since the first fathers of our race re- 
 turned to their native dust, and will still be true as long as our planet 
 shall be inhabited by their descendants. But below the agitated 
 surface of the ocean, under-currents are silently urging forward, on 
 their destined path, the waters of the mighty deep, themselves im- 
 pelled by that Power which none may question or resist. Human 
 society obeys a similar influence. Laws as anomalous in appearance, 
 as uniform in reality, as those which direct the planetary movements, 
 determine the present state, and regulate the progress of common- 
 wealths, whether political, literary, or religious. Christianity de- 
 mands the belief, and experience justifies the hope, that their ultimate 
 tendency is towards the universal dominion of piety and virtue. But 
 it is neither pious nor rational to suppose, that this consummation
 
 THE HISTORIAN OP ENTHUSIASM. 631 
 
 can be attained by any sequence of identical causes constantly work- 
 ing out similar effects. 
 
 The best generations, like the best men, are those which possess 
 an individual and distinctive character. A chain of splendid bio- 
 graphies constitutes the history of past centuries. Whoever shall 
 weave the chronicles of our own, must take for his staple not bio- 
 graphy, but statistics, illuminated by a skilful generalisation. Once 
 every eye was directed to the leaders of the world ; now all are turned 
 to the masses of which it is composed. Instead of Newtons presiding 
 over Royal Societies, we have Dr Birkbecks lecturing at Mechanics' 
 Institutes. If no Wolseys arise to found colleges like that of Christ- 
 church, Joseph Lancaster and William Bell have emulated each 
 other in works not less momentous at the Borough Road and Bald- 
 win's Gardens. We people continents, though we have ceased to 
 discover them. We abridge folios for the many, though we no 
 longer write them for the few. Our fathers compiled systems of 
 divinity we compose pocket theological libraries. They invented 
 sciences, we apply them. Literature was once an oligarchy, it is 
 now a republic. Our very monitors are themselves infected by the 
 degeneracy they deplore. For the majestic cadence of Milton, and 
 the voluptuous flow of Jeremy Taylor's periods, they substitute the 
 rhetorical philosophy, invented some fifty years since, to countervail 
 the philosophical rhetoric of the French Revolution ; and put forth, 
 in a collection of essays for the drawing-room, reproofs which the 
 hands of Prynne would have moulded into learned, fierce, and pon- 
 derous folios. 
 
 It is impossible to prevent is it wise to bewail ? this change 
 in our social and intellectual habits. During the inundations of the 
 Nile, the worship of the mysterious river ceased, and no hymns were 
 heard to celebrate its glories. Idolatry had lost its stay, and imagin- 
 ation her excitement : but the land was fertilised. Learning, once 
 banked up in universities and cathedrals, is now diffused through 
 shops and factories. The stream, then so profound and limpid, may 
 now, perhaps, be both shallow and muddy. But is it better that 
 the thirst of a whole nation should be thus slacked, or that the 
 immortals should be quaffing their nectar apart in sublime abstrac- 
 tion from the multitude ? There is no immediate and practicable 
 reconcilement of these advantages. Genius, and wit, and science, 
 and whatever else raises man above his fellows, must bend to the 
 universal motives of human conduct. When honour, wealth, public 
 gratitude, and the sense of good desert, reward those who teach 
 elementary truth to the people at large, the wisest and the best will
 
 632 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 devote to that office powers, which, in a different age, would have 
 been consecrated to more splendid, though not perhaps to more 
 worthy undertakings. 
 
 In the state of letters, there is no maintaining a polity iu which 
 the three elements of power are blended together in harmonious 
 counterpoise. There a monarch infallibly becomes a despot, and a 
 democracy subjugates to itself whatever else is eminent or illus- 
 trious. Divines, poets, and philosophers, addressing millions of 
 readers and myriads of critics, are immediately rewarded by tin 
 applause, or punished by a neglect, to which it is not given to 
 mortal man to be superior or indifferent. Inform the national 
 mind, and improve the general taste, up to a certain point, and to 
 that point you inevitably depress the efforts of those who are born 
 to instruct the rest. Had Spenser flourished in the nineteenth 
 century, would he have aspired to produce the Faery Queen 1 Had 
 "Walter Scott lived in the sixteenth, would he have condescended to 
 write the Lady of the Lake 1 Our great men are less great because 
 our ordinary men are less abject. These lamentations over the 
 results of this compromise are rather pathetic than just. It forms 
 one indispensable chapter in the natural history of a people's intel- 
 lectual progress. It is one of the stages through which the national 
 mind must pass towards the general elevation of Literature, sacred 
 and profane. We know not how to regret that genius has for the 
 moment abdicated her austere supremacy, and stooped to be popular 
 and plain. Mackintosh suspended his philosophy for the compila- 
 tion of a familiar History of England. Faithless to his Peris and 
 Glendoveers, Mr Moore turned clironicler to teach to the reading 
 commonalty of the realm the sad tale of the woes inflicted on the 
 land of his birth. No longer emulous of Person, the Bishop of 
 London devotes his learned leisure to preparing cheap and easy 
 lessons for the householders of his diocese. Lord Brougham arrests 
 the current of his eloquence, to instruct mechanics in the principles 
 of the sciences which they are reducing to daily practice. Tracts 
 for the times are extorted from the depositories of ecclesiastical 
 tradition, obedient to the general impulse which they condemn, 
 and constrained to render the Church argumentative, that they may 
 render her oracular. Nay, the author of the " Natural History of 
 Enthusiasm" himself, despite his own protests, yielding at length 
 to the current, has become the periodical writer of monthly tracts, 
 where, in good round controversial terms, the superficial multitude 
 are called to sit in judgment on the claims of the early fathers to 
 sound doctrine, good morals, and common sense. Let who will 
 repine at what has passed, and at what is passing, if they will
 
 THE HISTORIAN OF ENTHUSIASM. 633 
 
 allow us to rejoice in what is to come. If we witness the growth 
 of no immortal reputations, we see the expansion of universal in- 
 telligence. The disparities of human understanding are much the 
 same in all times ; but when the general level shall be the highest, 
 then will the mighty of the earth rise to the most commanding 
 eminences. 
 
 But whatever may be the justice of the hopes we thus indulge 
 for future generations, our business is with ourselves. If, as we 
 think, they are well judging who devote the best gifts of nature and 
 of learning to the instruction of the illiterate, the praise of wisdom 
 is not to be denied to such as write with the more ambitious aim of 
 stimulating the noblest intellects amongst us to enterprises commen- 
 surate with their elevated powers. No strenuous effort for the good 
 of mankind was ever yet made altogether in vain ; nor will those of 
 our author be fruitless, though the results may fall far short of his 
 aspirations. The general currents of thought and action can never 
 be diverted from their channels, except by minds as rarely produced 
 as they are wonderfully endowed. Energy, decision, and self-reli- 
 ance, independent of human praise or censure, are amongst the inva- 
 riable characteristics of such master intellects. To this sublime 
 order of men the Eecluse of Stanford Rivers does not belong. Nor 
 can a place be assigned to him among those calmer spirits, whose 
 inventive genius, or popular eloquence, has enabled them from their 
 solitudes to cast on the agitated mass of society seeds of thought 
 destined at some future period to change the aspect of human 
 affairs. He is an independent more than an original thinker. He 
 is rather exempt from fear than animated by ardent courage in 
 announcing the fruits of his inquiries. A great master of language, 
 he is himself but too often mastered by it. He is' too much the 
 creature to become the reformer of his age. His assiduity to please 
 is fatal to his desire to command. His efforts to move the will are 
 defeated by his success in dazzling the fancy. Yet his books ex- 
 hibit a character, both moral and intellectual, from the study of 
 which the reader can hardly fail to rise a wiser and a better man. 
 Standing aloof from all vulgar excitements, heedless of the transient 
 politics and the fugitive literature of his times, and intent only on 
 the permanent interests of mankind, he has laboured to promote 
 them with an honest love of truth, aided by brilliant talents, com- 
 prehensive knowledge, and undaunted intrepidity. And thus he has 
 corne under the guidance of principles, which no man can cultivate 
 in his own bosom, or earnestly impart to other minds, without earning 
 a reward which will render human applause insignificant, or reduce 
 the neglect of the world to a matter of comparative indifference.
 
 634 
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 ON the original appearance in the " Edinburgh Review " of the 
 Essays contained in these volumes, they were condemned, by some, 
 as casting only a furtive and timid glance at those sacred topics 
 which must lie at the foundation of all ecclesiastial biography. To 
 the author himself, however, it had appeared impossible to assign 
 to such topics their due prominence in a journal devoted to science, 
 to literature, and to politics. But, on republishing these papers 
 in his own person, and with his name, he contracts and acknow- 
 ledges the obligation to supply, as far as may be in his power, the 
 omissions which formerly appeared to him inevitable. He is even 
 solicitous to avow, without reserve, the opinions which have been 
 rather suggested or assumed, than explicitly stated, in the preced- 
 ing pages. Having celebrated, with almost equal zeal, the cha- 
 racters of many who maintained creeds and worshipped under forms 
 widely contrasted with each other, he is desirous to disclaim that 
 state of mind to which all religious distinctions are insignificant, 
 and to explain why the reverence of all the members of the great 
 Christian family is, in his judgment, due alike to many who have 
 belonged to each of the great sections of which it is composed. 
 Great as must be his liability to error on such a subject, he rejoices 
 to know that such errors can hardly be injurious to any one. No 
 authority will be attached by any other inquirer to the mere 
 " Guesses at Truth " of a man, who (unlike the profound and large- 
 minded scholars who have appropriated that title to some of their 
 maturest thoughts) is destitute of the advantage of a theological 
 education, and has throughout his life been deeply involved, with 
 scarcely any interval, in secular affairs. Yet, to assist as far as pos- 
 sible in the detection of any fallacies by which he may have been 
 misled, he will attempt to render an account of the reasons by which 
 he has been guided ; taking his departure from principles which he 
 supposes to be elementary. 
 
 From our Redeemer himself we have learnt what are the two
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 635 
 
 commandments on which hang all the law and the prophets. From 
 the disciple who lay in his bosom, and whom he selected as the 
 channel of his higher revelations, we have learnt what are the two 
 truths on which hang all the other doctrines of the Gospel. The 
 first is, that God is light the second is, that God is love. 
 
 God is light. He is light, inherent, pure, and inexhaustible. He 
 is also light diffusive, or " the Father of lights." From him, as 
 from an ever-salient fountain, light flows out to his whole animate 
 creation. But to each different order of living beings it flows in 
 infinitely varied degrees of intensity and clearness. It comes to 
 each through various mediums by which it is refracted. It is dis- 
 coloured in each by the corruptions of the recipients, or obscured by 
 their infirmities. Light, though from Heaven itself, when trans- 
 mitted through the exhalations of earth, may mislead even those 
 whom it illuminates. 
 
 From God we derive the light of our Animal Instincts that is, 
 our natural appetencies, and our natural aversions towards material 
 things. But the sorrows of a world, groaning beneath the curse of 
 intemperance, proclaim that they who were formed in the image 
 and likeness of their Creator, can never be guided into the ways of 
 wisdom, or into the paths of peace, by appetite alone. 
 
 From God we derive the light of our Sensitive Instincts that is, 
 those sympathies and antipathies which are the bonds of attach- 
 ment or the sources of disunion amongst mankind. But to trust to 
 our passions alone to conduct us to the repose of the soul the 
 haven of our rest and our true happiness would be as reasonable 
 as to navigate the ocean without rudder, chart, or compass, at the 
 bidding of each shifting breeze and devious current. 
 
 From God we derive the light of our Intellectual Instincts that 
 is, those intuitions or convictions of the mind which are common 
 to the whole race of man, which form the latent basis of all our 
 argumentations, and to which we inevitably, though often uncon- 
 sciously, refer as the test by which to ascertain the soundness of all 
 our inferences. Such, for example, is the indestructible belief in 
 our own individuality in the reality of the relation of cause and 
 effect in the real existence of the objects revealed to us by our 
 senses in the recurrence of the same sequences when all the ante- 
 cedents are the same with many other of those first principles 
 which are implied in all our words, and assumed in all our thoughts. 
 Yet how insufficient these first axioms are to lead us to true wisdom, 
 is attested by the incurable discords of the wisest. There are depths 
 of ignorance, and abysses of self-inflicted misery, into which the 
 possession of these great elements of knowledge has never pre-
 
 636 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 vented, and never can prevent, the great body of mankind from 
 plunging. 
 
 From God we derive the light of our Judicial Instincts that is, 
 of conscience, the interior tribunal by which we are either approved 
 or condemned, in the use we make of that measure of free will and 
 of free agency which is entrusted to us. This is the restraint which 
 the Author of that awful power has imposed on the improper, the 
 capricious, or the arbitrary use of it. But the accuracy of all judicial 
 sentences depends on the knoAvledge, the capacity, the patience, and 
 the impartiality of the judge. Who will venture to claim, for the 
 judge within his own bosom, the possession of those qualifications 
 in a perfect, or even in an eminent degree 1 In what tongue or 
 language has not the blindness of self-love passed into a proverb 1 
 Who is the man whose mental vision is not obstructed by some 
 beam, as often as it is directed to the survey of his own heart, or of 
 his own conduct 1 
 
 From God we derive the light of our Moral Instincts that is, of 
 those pains and pleasures which wait on the judgments of the con- 
 science, and form the sanctions of the law written on the heart. 
 This sensibility renders us the executioners on ourselves of the sen- 
 tences authorised by that law, and promulgated by that judge. If 
 those sentences were invariably right, and if they as invariably 
 awakened in us the corresponding sentiment, whether pleasurable 
 or painful, in its proper measure and due intensity, the constitution 
 of our nature would be perfect, and sin and sorrow would take their 
 flight from our world. But the light of moral sentiment fails us 
 because our self-adjudications are so often erroneous, and because 
 oui 1 sensibility is subject to a continual decay. Like our other affec- 
 tions, it retains its vitality and power, just so far as it is permitted 
 to regulate our conduct, and no farther. Emotions, followed by 110 
 practical results, first become dormant and then extinct ; and this is 
 true of self-complacency and of remorse, as much as of any other of 
 our feelings. 
 
 From God we derive the light of our Social Instincts that is, 
 the reflected light of the judgments of other men. By adopting 
 their opinions, we become, as it were, spectators of the stage on 
 which we are ourselves the actors, and applaud or condemn our own 
 conduct with a sort of borrowed impartiality. But the same social 
 nature which bestows this light also obscures it. For that nature 
 induces or rather constrains us to adjust our own standard of right 
 and wrong to the level of the maxims, the habits, and the senti- 
 ments of the socjety of which we are members, however low that 
 level may happen to be.
 
 THE EPILOGUE. C37 
 
 From God we derive the light of Understanding that is, of 
 the faculty which observes and reflects, which collects, premises, 
 and deduces inferences ; which has truth for its object and logic 
 for its guide. They who are most largely endowed with this mental 
 power, are accustomed to assign to it a supremacy to which it is, in 
 their judgment, absurd to suppose that any other faculty of the 
 mind can be superior or co-ordinate. They maintain, that he who 
 argues against the absolute dominion of the intellect admits, in effect, 
 the very proposition which he denies in terms ; and attempts, by a 
 process of reasoning, to show that reasoning is not a process on 
 which reliance may be placed. Yet the idolaters of the human 
 understanding had need be sustained by a very potent faith. Our 
 dialectics have indeed ascertained some of the laws of the material 
 world. But what is that problem, in the inquiries which most 
 concern us, of which they have afforded to mankind a solution in 
 which all unanimously acquiesce? What has the logical faculty 
 ascertained respecting our relations to Him who made us or our 
 duties to Him or to each other or our prospects beyond the grave 
 or the structure of our minds or the relation of the mind to the 
 body or even respecting our highest temporal interests in political, 
 social, and domestic life ? On these topics the logicians of every age 
 have been labouring since the creation of our race. Is there one 
 moral truth which they have placed beyond the reach of controversy 1 ? 
 Is there any one falsehood in moral science on which they have in- 
 flicted an incurable death-wound 1 ? One position, indeed, and only 
 one, relating to things not material, they seem to have made unas- 
 sailably secure. It is the position, that logic can discover for us 
 guides more trustworthy than itself, and can demonstrate their au- 
 thority over us. And to have conducted us to such guides is, in 
 fact, the highest triumph which the human understanding can boast. 
 
 From God we derive the light of Human Authority that is, the 
 teaching of our fellow-men, whether they address us by the voice of 
 ancient tradition, or of modern opinion whether they speak to us 
 as parents or as preceptors, as philosophers or as divines. Yet so 
 inconsistent are the demands made upon our assent by our various 
 teachers, and so nearly do their claims to our confidence seem to 
 balance each other, that the injunction to " call no man master " 
 had been laid upon us by human wisdom, long before it was sanc- 
 tioned by Him in whom was impersonated the fulness of the Divine 
 wisdom. 
 
 From God we derive the light of Eevelation and what tongue, 
 of men or of angels, can converse in terms befitting so lofty a 
 theme? The Holy Scriptures differ from other writings in kind,
 
 G38 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 rather than in degree. They, and they alone, have taught us what- 
 ever it most concerns us to know of Him who made us, and of 
 ourselves of the relations in which we stand to Him, and of the 
 duties which those relations impose upon us. They, and they only, 
 have disclosed to us the nature, the consequences, and the remedies 
 of sin. In them we have the portraiture, not elsewhere to be found, 
 of the highest perfection attainable by our fallen humanity, and of 
 that infinitely higher perfection which, though ideal in our race, was 
 real and absolute in Him who lived and died to redeem us. The 
 Bible is the sanctuary from out of which issue voices adapted to 
 every exigency of human life, and to every various form of human 
 utterance ; but, amidst that boundless variety, all harmonious in the 
 inculcation of a holiness otherwise unknoAvn and unimagined 
 amongst men. It is the point of convergence where meet history 
 and biography, sacred song and weighty apophthegm, parable and 
 proverb, law and prophecy, argument and expostulation, all steeped 
 and imbued in the colours of our mortal nature, and moulded into 
 its forms, and yet all instinct with the divinity of their common 
 origin. Is the joint work of princes and of peasants, of sages and 
 of fishermen, of saints and of publicans, all speaking in the same 
 elevated tone, and all breathing the same pure spirit, through a 
 long succession of fifteen centuries. It everywhere points to 
 one great Being as the common object and centre of all revealed 
 truth ; an incarnation of Deity, towards whom prophets and 
 evangelists alike direct their adoring gaze, who imparts unity of 
 design to the whole composition, and in whom the incommunicable 
 attributes of the Divine nature are reconciled with the essential 
 conditions of the nature of man. 
 
 And yet what is that doctrine, what that ecclesiastical polity, 
 what that system of moral obligation, in support of which the Bible 
 is not confidently quoted by contending multitudes 1 The Catholic 
 finds in it seven sacraments. The Quaker discovers that in the 
 system of the sacred writers, sacraments have no place or existence 
 whatever. To the adherents of the Mcene Creed the Scriptures 
 disclose a doctrine which reduces the thoughts of the heart to the 
 silent adoration of a mystery incapable of adequate expression. To 
 those who reject that creed, the same pages appear to declare that 
 doctrine to be nothing less than a profane idolatry. To the followers 
 of Augustine, the Bible appears to teach fatalism ; to the disciples 
 of Pelagius, an arbitrary freedom of the human will, and the con- 
 sequent contingency of all the events of human life. Some find in 
 revelation commands to baptize infants, to keep holy the first day of 
 the week, and to revere in bishops the legitimate successors of the
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 639 
 
 apostles ; while others declare that it is absolutely silent on all these 
 subjects. The necessity of a virtuous life to a happy existence after 
 death is, to some eyes, disclosed in the "Word of God as with a sun- 
 beam ; and there are those who declare themselves unable to dis- 
 cover in it the announcement of any such indispensable connection. 
 Thus, with the same end in view, and with the same guide-book in 
 their hands, crowds are thronging different, nay, opposite paths, and 
 all asserting, with apparently equal confidence, that the path they 
 pursue is that which the Book prescribes. 
 
 Shall we then conclude that this celestial guide is erroneous or 
 equivocal ? God forbid ! Or shall we say, that of the so many 
 paths thus pursued by so many contending sects, there is one, and 
 only one, which is trodden by the honest, the candid, and the up- 
 right, and that all who deviate from that one path are the victims 
 of their own levity, or prejudice, or insincerity 1 Or may we not 
 find some other explanation of this phenomenon, compatible at once 
 with the reverence due to the sacred canon, and with the charity 
 due by every man to his brother ? 
 
 First, then, let it be considered that whenever the Divine voice 
 breaks the otherwise uninterrupted silence between heaven and 
 earth, such an occurrence supposes either that man shall be pre- 
 pared for the reception of that voice by some organic change in his 
 nature, or that his Creator should address him in human language. 
 But human language, being impressed with all the infirmities, and 
 darkened by all the mental obscurities, of those who have invented, 
 employed, and modified it, must be a most imperfect vehicle and 
 exponent of thought. Consequently, communications reaching us, 
 even from the Deity himself, through the channel of our ' own 
 words and ideas, must partake, more or less, of the indistinctness and 
 ambiguity inseparable from all our thoughts and all our discourse. 
 
 Nor must it be forgotten that the Scriptures are written in lan- 
 guages totally unknown to the vast body of those who read them, 
 and that incomparably the most important part of the Scriptures 
 (that is, the words of our Lord and Saviour himself) are known to 
 the most learned only by a translation. Here, then, is another 
 source of the diversity of our judgments about the real sense of the 
 Word of God. For example, the whole controversy regarding tran- 
 substantiation rests on the precise meaning of a Greek sentence, 
 TUVTO iffTi TO (Tw/jia. IJLOV ; words which it is perfectly certain that 
 Christ never uttered. In this, as in other cases, we can only con- 
 jecture what his very words were ; and, in the wide field of con- 
 jecture, it is morally impossible that a real unanimity of judgment 
 should prevail.
 
 640 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 This source of doubt was inevitable. If our Divine Master had 
 spoken to the multitudes which thronged him, or even to the chosen 
 twelve, in the tongues of Greece or of Eome, He would have been 
 unintelligible to them ; for, until the day of Pentecost, even Peter 
 and John were perceived to be " unlearned and ignorant men." The 
 Syro-Chaldaic was, therefore, the only articulate speech through 
 which it was possible that Christ should reach and inform their 
 understandings. Doubtless, indeed, had such been His good 
 pleasure, He might have employed for that purpose the language 
 of Plato or of Cicero, and might have miraculously enabled His 
 auditors first to understand, and afterwards to record his words. 
 But adorable was the wisdom and the grace which decided other- 
 wise ! If we had possessed in Greek or in Latin the very expres- 
 sions of Him who spake as never man spake, what would have been 
 the unavoidable result ? What but this that the Scaligers and the 
 Bentleys of each successive age would have usurped over the minds 
 of their illiterate fellow-Christians an authority even more despotic 
 than that which they have hitherto claimed and exercised 1 Our 
 blessed Lord did not see fit that linguists, and critics, and gram- 
 marians, and lexicographers should thus be enabled to interpose 
 between Himself and those whom, until the end of time, He con- 
 descended to instruct. Speaking through his original audience to 
 all nations, and people, and tongues, and kindred of the earth, He 
 employed an universal language a language of which the sense is 
 still essentially the same, and is still perceptible, in substance, to 
 every honest inquirer, in all the various versions into which it has 
 been translated, in all the dialects and idioms of mankind. It is 
 the language of parable and proverb, of metaphor and of contrast. 
 It is a language steeped in an imagery drawn from whatever is most 
 familiar, pathetic, and beautiful, in the homely realities of man's 
 daily existence. It is a language which at once interprets to us the 
 life of Him by whom it was uttered, and receives from His life its 
 own most constant, simple, and impressive interpretation. Suppose 
 that the story of the Prodigal Son, or of the Eich Man and Lazarus, 
 that the parable of the Sower, or of the Talents, that the bene- 
 diction on Mary of Bethany, or the lamentation over Jerusalem, 
 that the Sermon on the Mount, or the awful prayer poured out 
 immediately before He entered into the garden with his disciples, 
 had been pronounced, not in the Syro-Chaldaic tongue, but in the 
 language of the Academy, and had been recorded for our informa- 
 tion in the precise form of words in which they were so delivered, 
 could they have conveyed their real meaning with more precision 
 or with greater force? Could they have been more universally
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 641 
 
 welcomed, or more thoroughly digested by all the families of man, 
 in all the varying conditions of man's mortal existence? Would 
 they have borne a more distinct or indelible impress of His divine 
 love and wisdom ? "Would they have better fulfilled those purposes 
 of mercy which dictated them ? Or rather, would not such a trans- 
 mission from one generation to another of the very words of our 
 Great Teacher, even though in the glorious speech of Athens, have 
 caused them to be degraded, still more than they have hitherto 
 been degraded, into themes of philological debate, for learned tri- 
 fling, for arrogant criticism, and for the dogmatical interpretations of 
 those who, at all times, aspire to a scholastic lordship over the 
 heritage of Christ ? How narrow the capacity, how feeble the faith, 
 which cannot or will not perceive that, in employing not the noblest 
 and the most subtle, but one of the poorest and least elevated of the 
 instruments of discourse ever used among civilised men, the Saviour 
 of our race demonstrated that his thoughts were not as our thoughts ; 
 but that, when enveloped in any garb of human speech, however 
 humble, they would pass freely and unmutilated from mind to mind, 
 from nation to nation, and from age to age, by a law applying to 
 them alone, and inapplicable to the highest conceptions, and to the 
 most eloquent discourse, of any created intelligence ! 
 
 There are also large opportunities for honest differences of inter- 
 pretation of Holy Scripture, arising from the admitted variations be- 
 tween the different books of the Bible, and the different parts of the 
 same books, in what respects the plenitude of the inspiration of each. 
 Without entering on a subject so replete with difficulty, it may suffi- 
 ciently explain the disagreements of Christians in the conclusions 
 which they gather from the Bible, that the Bible of the greater num- 
 ber of them contains many books which are excluded from the Bible 
 of the minority ; and that few, if any, educated men, acknowledge 
 the same authority in every passage of what they receive as holy writ, 
 or have come to any clear agreement as to the passages to which the 
 highest sanction belongs. 
 
 But a far more important explanation than any of these, of the 
 discord between interpreters, is to be found in the very structure and 
 design both of the Old Testament and of the New. They are not, and 
 were never meant to be, what Urim and Thummim once were. They 
 have no positive mandates or oracular responses for the guidance of 
 individual inquirers in specific cases. The sortes sanctorum were as 
 gross a superstition as searching the entrails of victims, or watching 
 the flight of birds. The Bible speaks not to the eye, but to the in- 
 tellect not to the ear, but to the soul. It yields its precious ores 
 not to those who merely search the surface, but to those only who 
 
 41
 
 642 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 laboriously penetrate its mines. To extract the real spirit of any one 
 passage, many passages must be studied. 
 
 To become a scriptural interpreter, a man must have a scriptural 
 mind, and be living a scriptural life. To those who approach this 
 divine light in any temper less diligent or less devout than this, it 
 opens innumerable sources of error. The Bible abounds in examples, 
 some of which were never designed to be models for the imitation 
 of any one, and many of which are unfit for our own imitation. It 
 abounds in threatenings and promises detached from their implied, 
 though real, conditions. It has many precepts thrown into the form 
 of paradox many parables involved in purposed obscurity many 
 sacred songs in which the genius of poetry expands itself in the 
 abrupt, elliptical, and figurative language of imagination and passion 
 many proverbs in which epigram and antithesis are employed to 
 embellish the bald precision of moral truth many dramatic dia- 
 logues, in which the conflict of opinion supposes some of the inter- 
 locutors to speak erroneously many letters of which we under- 
 stand most imperfectly the occasions, the allusions, and the context 
 and innumerable references to customs, to laws, to modes of 
 thought, and modes of action, many of which are utterly foreign to 
 our own. 
 
 Is it, then, any reasonable cause of surprise, that the different 
 students of the Bible should deduce from it so great a variety of 
 conflicting opinions, and of rules of conduct opposed to each other ] 
 or that so vast an accumulation of narratives and parables, of 
 threatenings and promises, of hymns and proverbs, of letters and pro- 
 phecies, thrown out in so free a spirit, and so usually disconnected 
 from the restrictions and qualifications contemplated by their authors, 
 should be intelligible only to the few who carefully collate, diligently 
 balance, and devoutly meditate them 1 
 
 From God we derive that true light which lighteth every man 
 that cometh into the world that is, the light that emanates from the 
 person of Christ himself. He is revealed to us, not as a mere teacher 
 or prophet, but as in all ages a real and living presence in his Church 
 as one to whom we bear a spiritual consanguinity as at once high 
 and holy in a sense which no human language can express, and yet 
 a very man, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh as so intimately 
 known to us, that in every exigency of our own lives, imagination 
 can place him before us as at once an example and a monitor as 
 satisfying that craving of our nature, which, in its abuse, conducts 
 us to idolatry, by reducing what would otherwise be an impersonal, 
 and almost evanescent abstraction, into a definite, palpable, and 
 familiar form as sympathising with all our feelings which are either
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 643 
 
 good or "blameless, and as pitying, even while he condemns, the feel- 
 ings fatal to our own happiness as having partaken of all our 
 sorrows, and of some of our innocent and highest enjoyments as at 
 once our atoning sacrifice, and the high priest by whom that sacrifice 
 is offered as Himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life as the 
 Head in which all the members are united, the Stem from which all 
 the branches draw their nutriment, the Shepherd by whom all the 
 flock are gathered and protected within the same fold. 
 
 From God, also, we derive that awful interior light which the 
 dying Saviour promised, and which the ascending Saviour bestow- 
 ed that other glory of the Christian system, and inestimable 
 privilege of the Christian Church, by means of which the de- 
 finite, the palpable, and the familiar is withdrawn, to make way 
 for a presence (undefinable, imperceptible, yet not impersonal) of 
 holiness, of power, and of love a presence dwelling in a silent, 
 though real, communion with the intellect and the affections of man 
 a presence invoked by prayer, retained by obedience, grieved by 
 sin, and excluded by obduracy a presence which suggests to the 
 soul all heaven-born thoughts, and casts out all unhallowed imagina- 
 tions, and awakens that dawn of day which, if unobstructed by our 
 own perverseness, will gradually heighten to the very noontide of 
 spiritual wisdom. 
 
 It may seem a mere contradiction to assert or to suppose that in 
 this rich effluence of light derived from Him whom we adore as 
 incarnate Deity, and from Him whom we revere as indwelling 
 Deity, darkness should yet overcast the faculties we derive from 
 Him whom we worship as creative Deity. It should, however, be 
 considered, that it is to the pure in heart, and to them alone, that 
 it is permitted to see God that it is only if the eye be single that 
 the body can be full of light that if the light within us be dark- 
 ness, there is no measure for the depth of that darkness that as, 
 to the production of vision by the material eye, it is necessary not 
 only that the pure rays of light should reach the retina, but that 
 the component humours of the eye itself should be blended together 
 in limpid purity ; so light, though proceeding from Deity himself, 
 will produce no optical result on the mental lens which is darkened 
 by the predominance of sensuality, or worldly-mindedness, or any 
 other debasing passion. 
 
 Thus placed at the point of convergence of so many distinct 
 beams of light, all originally springing from the same heavenly 
 source, yet all distorted and discoloured or obstructed in their pro- 
 gress by the mediums through which they pass, man, even when 
 gifted with the clearest and the strongest vision, cannot but be to a 
 
 41*
 
 644 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 great extent perplexed and confused. His instincts, his under- 
 standing, his conscience, his moral sentiments, his human teachers, 
 his written oracles, his divine guides, all address him in voices 
 which, though capable of reconcilement, cannot always be promptly 
 reconciled. If he refuses his attention and reverence to any one 
 of them, it is at the imminent hazard of inducing a misapprehension 
 of the meaning of the rest. To perceive and seize the harmony 
 which pervades them all, is the great triumph and the high reward 
 of wisdom. To be deaf to that harmony, is the almost universal 
 condition of those who, without reason, claim to be wise. 
 
 Perfectly to combine into one pencil all the confluent rays of 
 these various lights from heaven, harmoniously to unite in one 
 strain all these voices, which reach us simultaneously from the same 
 Divine source of knowledge, is an attainment so sublime and 
 arduous, as to baffle the utmost efforts of our unaided reason. Yet 
 it is an attainment indispensable to the formation in the heart of 
 man of that living similitude to Christ himself in which all true 
 Christianity consists. Reverently, therefore, but with unhesitating 
 confidence, we turn to the revealed word of God for assistance in 
 this great exigency of our intellectual and moral nature, and in 
 that word we read that all-embracing truth, which Christ himself 
 lived to illustrate in action, and which it was given to His beloved 
 disciple to consecrate in speech, the truth, namely, that " God is 
 love." 
 
 The Hebrew psalmist knew, and even the Grecian rhapsodists 
 occasionally surmised, that " God is loving unto every man, and 
 that His mercy is over all His works." That God is love, is an 
 infinitely deeper discovery. It reveals to us that awful Being, who 
 is so infinitely exalted above our knowledge, as admitting of some 
 approach to definition by that sentiment which, of all others, is the 
 most familiar to our consciousness. It enables us to discern, however 
 faintly and obscurely, the moral nature of our Creator in the yet 
 remaining traces in ourselves of His own image and likeness, in which 
 our first progenitor was created. 
 
 He who acknowledges Deity, must also acknowledge that He is 
 the " Father Almighty, the Maker of all things visible and invisi- 
 ble." This is, indeed, the indispensable basis of all truth, physical, 
 moral, and religious. It is denied by no man possessing a reason- 
 able understanding, probably by no man of a sane mind. But 
 the inferences deduced from it by some of our teachers are of far 
 inferior authority. Of those inferences, one of the most ancient, 
 and the most commonly received, is, that the eternity of matter is 
 a dogma inconsistent with theism. For (it is alleged) the cause must
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 645 
 
 of necessity precede the effect. The produce can never exist except 
 in sequence to the producer. The maker of anything must needs 
 have existed in priority to that which he has made. The maker of 
 all things must have had his being when as yet there was no other 
 thing. But that being could itself have had no commencement. 
 There was, therefore (so it is inferred), an eternity inhabited by 
 Deity alone, in a profound and unbroken solitude, before the crea- 
 tion of the material or immaterial universe. 
 
 Now they who thus reason are taking for granted, that whatever 
 is universally true of those modes of existence with which we are 
 conversant, must also be true of all other modes of existence. They 
 assume that time that is, the succession of events or of thoughts, 
 is an eternal, an universal, and a necessary part of the law of all 
 being. They thus ascribe the properties of time to eternity, that 
 is, to a state in which, by the hypothesis, time was not. They 
 venture to discourse of an eternity, which, on reaching a certain 
 epoch, came to an end ! and indulge in the use of words, to which 
 it is impossible either for themselves or for any one else to attach any 
 real meaning. This extravagant and presumptuous dogmatising in 
 the science of universal ontology is, however, only one of the futile 
 attempts which man so continually makes to overleap the impassable 
 limits of his knowledge. Speculations so wild and so audacious 
 would be best opposed by silence, were they not urgent to conse- 
 quences which demand at least a transient notice. Among those 
 consequences is the irreverent assumption that until some definite 
 era, He who is love had no object and no exercise for that essential 
 condition of his very being. But, apart from such assumption, the 
 purest theism has nothing at variance with the belief that the eternal 
 fountain of life has been salient from all eternity that the creation 
 is coeval with the Creator that to impart existence to subordinate 
 intelligence is one of the inherent attributes of God and that the 
 Almighty Source of such derivative minds, has ever been pleased to 
 assign to them some local abode and some bodily integument. 
 
 As the objects of saints were formed not for themselves, but for 
 the sentient minds to whose wants they minister ; so those sentient 
 minds were called into existence not for themselves, but for Him by 
 whose fiat they were made. And that prolific volition, what else 
 was it, but the will of Him who is love, that His throne should be 
 girt about by a countless host of spirits, whom He might regard with 
 complacency, and enrich by His beneficence 1 
 
 But for complacency, that is, for the love of a moral agent, there 
 can be no place unless that agent possesses some inherent power 
 within the limits of which he is free. A mere machine, though the
 
 646 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 mechanism be intellectual or moral, can never be the object of ap- 
 probation or of esteem to any one who is aware that it has no spon- 
 taneous movements. Compulsory action can never win for him by 
 whom it is performed the favour or the kindly regards of any one ; 
 not even of him in whose service the agent is employed. 
 
 Man was thus created free, that he might be one of the objects of 
 the love of his Creator. Hence it followed, as an inevitable con- 
 sequence, that the Creator demanded from that free agent a return 
 of love. To human apprehension, at least, it is an impossibility 
 tbat the subject of love should not desire to be the object of love. 
 Accordingly, the first and great commandment was, " Thou shalt 
 love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
 with all thy mind, and with all thy strength." And the second was 
 like unto it. The common Father of all mankind, regarding all His 
 children with love, could not but desire, for the sake of all, that 
 mutual love should prevail among them. He therefore commanded 
 each one to love his neighbour as himself. 
 
 But love which is not spontaneous is love in name only, not in 
 reality. It was of necessity left in the choice of man, either to 
 render to his Maker the required tribute of affection, or to withhold 
 it. The very purpose of his creation required that he should be free 
 to fulfil the great commandment, or to infringe it ; that he should be 
 at liberty to do good, or to do evil to be holy, or to be sinful. In 
 a world created by Him who is love, in order to satisfy that immu- 
 table condition of his own being, there must therefore of necessity 
 have been a place for the appearance of moral eviL 
 
 But moral evil, or the withholding from the Author of our being 
 the love which He demands, must be the parent of physical evil, 
 that is, of pain, of suffering, or of sorrow. For that which infinite 
 love, directed by omniscience, commands, must be the highest good 
 of him to whom the command is addressed ; and disobedience to 
 such commands must consequently be the suicidal abandonment and 
 rejection of happiness. To prevent that suicide, or to reclaim the 
 self-destroyer into the ways of peace, love will resort to a discipline 
 as stern, severe, and formidable as the inveteracy of the moral dis- 
 order may require. Such love will never degenerate into fondness, 
 nor shrink from the infliction of any remedial punishment, however 
 protracted or acute. 
 
 As love can clothe and conceal itself in a wholesome rigour to the 
 disobedient, so it cannot but manifest itself in an indignant jea- 
 lousy to the faithless. The first injunction of the Decalogue is, that 
 we regard Jehovah as our only God ; the last is, in effect, that we 
 do not alienate our hearts from Him to any sublunary good. The
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 647 
 
 commands which intervene between these two, are all denunciations 
 of his rivals in our hearts ; that is, of idol worship, of irreverence, 
 of irreligion, of self-will, of selfishness, of sensuality, of fraud, and 
 of falsehood. With such rivals, He bids us know that He will 
 endure no compromise. 
 
 But love is prompt to pardon, easily entreated, long-suffering, and 
 kind. The parental love, beneath the care of which we live, arrests 
 the discipline and restrains the holy jealousy which we provoke. 
 He remembers that we are but dust, and will not always chide, nor 
 keep His anger for ever ; but exhibits to us a mercy as high as the 
 heavens are above the earth, and puts away our sins from us, as far 
 as the east is from the west. 
 
 Love is indulgent, ingenious, and profuse in the multiplication of 
 its bounties, and especially of those bounties which have blameless 
 delight for their only assignable object. Hence all the indefinitely 
 varied tastes, desires, and appetites of man, and the endless resources 
 provided for the gratification of them. Philosophy has laboured to 
 explain what is the sublime, and what the beautiful. Theology, 
 declining these problems, finds that the sublime and the beautiful 
 reside in that correspondence between the mind and the objects of 
 its perception, which the love of the Creator has established, in 
 order to elevate the thoughts and to gladden the hearts of His 
 family on earth. 
 
 Love necessarily seeks an intercourse with those towards whom it 
 is directed ; and therefore, in infinite condescension to our weakness, 
 our Father in heaven was pleased to infuse the Divine Logos,* his 
 
 * If, as I have been informed, this expression, and some similar words in a fol- 
 lowing page, are susceptible of a meaning opposed to that of the creeds and articles 
 of the Church of England, I have been most infelicitous in my choice of language. 
 To myself my words appear nothing else than a faithful translation of those formu- 
 laries on the subject of the incarnation, into terms less scholastic and more popular. 
 But if any one finds in them more or less respecting that mysterious doctrine than, 
 he finds in the Book of Common Prayer, let him be assured that the seeming 
 contradiction results from my unskilfulness in the use of theological phraseology, 
 and not from the very slightest purpose of mine to dogmatise on a topic so sacred, 
 and which to me at least is so impenetrably dark, obscure, and incomprehensible. 
 Without the aid to be derived from the primeval traditions of the Church, it would 
 be utterly impossible to myself (I do not believe that it would be in the power of 
 any other man) to exhibit this or any other of the great mysteries of the Christian 
 faith in a series of coherent, definite, and intelligible propositions. But believing 
 the Church of England to be one of the depositories of those traditions, I grate- 
 fully accept her guidance in the darkness by which I am surrounded. I regard 
 her creeds and her other formularies as accurate and faithful representations of 
 divine truth ; though not, I confess, without venturing to think that they also 
 exhibit many traces of the infirmities of the wisest, and of the faults of the best of 
 the children of men.
 
 C48 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 own communicative energy, into one of the children of Adam, and 
 through him, to impart to us the loftiest thoughts and the holiest 
 aspirations of which our humanity is susceptible. When that pre- 
 sence was withdrawn, and that once audible discourse became silent, 
 the same love opened another channel of intercourse with mankind ; 
 even that intercourse which the indwelling Comforter maintains with 
 the spirit and the intellect of every true Christian, soothing his cares, 
 animating his resolves, renewing his strength, enlarging his capacity, 
 enlightening his path, and sanctifying his affections. 
 
 And love is ever prompt to make costly self-sacrifices. No speech 
 or language in use among mankind can express, because no human 
 intelligence can conceive, the true sense of that revelation which 
 exhibits to us Him who is love, as becoming, in the person of His 
 Son, a sacrifice for us. Alas, for the foolishness which has agitated 
 the world in the attempt to embrace or to analyse so profound a 
 mystery ! Our debates about the incarnation and the atonement, 
 resemble nothing more than the discussions which some one has 
 supposed to take place among the animalculse detected by our mi- 
 croscopes, about the mechanism of the celestial orbs, made known 
 to us by our telescopes. Our real knowledge, however distorted, 
 inflated, and magnified by our phraseology, amounts to little more 
 than our acquaintance with the fact, that by sin, that is, withhold- 
 ing from our Maker and from our brethren our appointed tribute of 
 love, man has raised an obstacle to his future happiness, for the 
 removal of which the Divine Logos * united himself to one of the 
 sons of men, and in that human person, lived in humiliation, and 
 died in agony. But a darkness, which no inquiry tends to dissipate, 
 and which no conjecture contributes in any measure to dispel, broods 
 over all questions respecting the nature and the reasons of that 
 obstacle, and respecting the meaning of the hypostatic union of the 
 Logos with our humanity, and respecting the nature of Him by 
 whom and in whom that union is effected, and respecting the sense 
 in which His sufferings have made a propitiation for our sins. All 
 that is permitted to us is to adore, in silence, the awful image set 
 before us of holiness, of woe, and of love unutterable. That God is 
 love, is proclaimed from Bethlehem, and from Calvary, in a voice 
 penetrating the inmost heart ; but in a voice which addresses the 
 heart only, and which summons us not to investigate, but to worship 
 and to love. 
 
 We learn from Lord Bacon that, in the prophetic emblem which 
 exhibits the Deity as upborne in His transit through the universe 
 by the wings of ministering angels, the Cherubim represented the 
 
 * See the note on page 647.
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 649 
 
 heralds of love the Seraphim the messengers of light. In their 
 progress through our fallen world, those celestial visitants have 
 different enemies to combat, and different hindrances to subdue. 
 By what clouds the light diffused by the naniing Seraphim is 
 quenched or darkened, we have already attempted, though briefly 
 and most imperfectly, to intimate. How the genial warmth of love, 
 radiating from the glowing Cherubim, is chilled and arrested, we all 
 but too familiarly know. 
 
 That divine affection is rendered ineffectual in some by the 
 superstition which regards as poisonous the legitimate indulgence 
 of our animal appetites, the enjoyment of our domestic affections, 
 the pleasures of our intellectual tastes, and the delights of interro- 
 gating nature, and of resolving her enigmas. The love of God will 
 scarcely penetrate the heart of any man who believes that God is 
 the author of instincts created but to be thwarted, and of desires 
 which must be either snares, if satisfied, or temptations, if debarred 
 from their appropriate objects. Asceticism is, therefore, the enemy 
 of that holy affection which He who is love demands of His creatures. 
 Neither will love to God take up her abode in the heart of him 
 who, having learnt to consider his reasoning faculty as not merely a 
 fallible, but a dangerous guide, has transferred to his fellow-men the 
 responsibility of solving all the great practical problems of his life. 
 For freedom is the indispensable aliment of love. It is of a nature 
 too generous to live in spiritual chains and bondage. It can animate 
 the subordinate intelligence only when entrusted by the superior 
 power with a liberal confidence, and permitted to exercise some large 
 measure of self-direction. The slaves of a spiritual despotism can 
 hardly invoke a Father in heaven with filial affiance. 
 
 To the full expansion and development of that child-like affection, 
 it is also necessary that the conscience should retain her supremacy 
 uninvaded by any rival power, and uncontrolled by any human dic- 
 tation. If that most sensitive of all the plants which are cultivated 
 in the garden of the soul, be grasped, and bent, and pruned by the 
 rude hands of the stranger, it will quickly cease to vibrate to every 
 touch, and to indicate every change in the surrounding atmosphere. 
 It is necessary to the life of all our passions in their healthful exer- 
 cise, and therefore of divine love, that we cherish our own moral 
 sensibility, and rescue it from the narcotic influence of too close a 
 contact with other minds. The presence of the confessor may some- 
 times illuminate the conscience ; but in such a presence, when 
 habitual, it will lose all those finer delicacies of perception by which 
 every infidelity of the heart to its source and centre is visited with 
 a prompt rebuke and an effective penalty.
 
 650 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 It is essential to that allegiance of the heart, that we contemplate 
 the object of it in the light in which He has been pleased to reveal 
 himself to us, and in no other. If the God in our minds be not the 
 very God of our Bibles, as revealed in the person of His Son, and 
 communicating with us in the person of His Spirit, He will not be the 
 object of that supreme veneration and affiance which He demands 
 from us. Divine love, therefore, will not readily thrive in the soul 
 of him who worships God as He is depicted by human imagination 
 or as He is impersonated by an earthly vicar or as He utters 
 oracular responses, through that shapeless, boundless, placeless 
 abstraction, which presumptuously usurps to itself the name of the 
 Church or as He is approached, like some poor earthly sovereign, 
 by a throng of mediators and intercessors, of favourites and court- 
 iers. From such representations of Him who challenges, as His 
 own, the whole heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, who but 
 must turn away, as from illusions at variance with this great law of 
 his moral existence, and cheating him in that very field of vision in 
 which, above every other, it concerns him to see distinctly 1 
 
 And for this reason it is, that so fatal a lethargy of the heart has 
 benumbed so large a proportion of those who have learnt from the 
 Church of Rome to regard monastic solitude and ascetic rigours as 
 essential to perfection ; and to prostrate their minds to human 
 judgments, and their consciences to human authority ; and to render 
 their worship to the idols of the human imagination. And therefore 
 it is that every one who is anxious for the happiness and the im- 
 provement of mankind, is bound to "protest" as our Reformers pro- 
 tested, against a system which, by thus darkening the great truth 
 that " God is love," has, in the same measure, defeated the great com- 
 mandment of loving God supremely. 
 
 But they who make that protestation with the most profound seri- 
 ousness, will not be the last to acknowledge and to lament, that the 
 same consequences have, in no light measure, followed from some 
 parts of the creeds, or at least from some of the mental habits, of the 
 Churches to which they themselves belong. 
 
 For the absolute devotion of the whole spirit to God will hardly 
 be practicable to those who, attributing an undue authority to the 
 light to be derived from the animal instincts, follow their guidance 
 with but little habitual watchfulness, self-restraint, or self-distrust ; 
 nor to those who attach so much importance to the instincts of 
 natural affection, as to be ever prompt, at their bidding, to abandon 
 the loftier and more sublime purposes of the Christian life ; nor to 
 those who, referring conscience to the control of feeling, sentiment,
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 651 
 
 and emotion, do not usually subjugate that interior judge to the 
 dominion of any positive and well-ascertained law ; nor to those 
 who, while casting down all other idols, are secretly erecting in their 
 hearts shrines to the human intellect, regarding logic as the single 
 guide to truth, even after logic itself has conducted them to higher 
 and to surer guides ; nor to those who accept and regard the re- 
 vealed Word of God as if life were given, not by the spirit but by 
 the letter of it, nay, by the letter of some modern version ; nor to 
 those who search the Scriptures as if they were not a mine, which 
 yields its treasures to such as faithfully and laboriously toil for 
 them, but a mint, stored with coins fitted for immediate use, each 
 bearing an indelible impress, and disclosing, at a glance, its exact 
 weight, and quality, and value, and significance ; nor to those who, 
 having become accustomed to contemplate the one central object 
 and omnipresent Idea of the Gospel with a gaze either indecorously 
 familiar or coldly critical, debase that Idea by a homage erotic and 
 irreverent, or render it unimpressive by scholastic inquiries into 
 some imaginary plan or economy of human salvation. And for 
 these reasons it is that a lethargy, scarcely less fatal than that of so 
 many in the communion of the Church of Rome, has benumbed no 
 small proportion of those who hold the purer creeds, and worship in 
 the more apostolical forms of the Protestant Churches. 
 
 Thus, then, in each of the two great divisions of the Christian 
 world, the perception of the great central truth that " God is love," 
 and the performance of the great all-embracing duty of loving Him 
 supremely, have been obstructed by the too frequent rejection of 
 some of those rays of light which He has bestowed on mankind, or 
 by the inability to gather and to combine them all into one congruous 
 whole. And yet, in neither of those provinces of the kingdom of 
 Christ, has the obscurity or the disobedience ever been so total as 
 would be inferred by those who listen only to their reciprocal ana- 
 themas. Imperfectly, indeed, and through many an intervening mist 
 of prejudice and error, the convergent beams of the divine light have 
 yet deeply penetrated many an intellect, and gladdened many a heart, 
 and directed many a life, which either the Doctors of Rome or the 
 Doctors of Geneva would teach us to regard as having been aban- 
 doned to a hopeless reprobation. 
 
 For, in the midst of their mutual strife, the true followers of Christ 
 have everywhere, and at all times, learnt that " God is love," even 
 from the comparatively faint light of their mere animal instincts. 
 They have gratefully observed how the conservation of our race, and 
 of each member of it, is effected neither by pain, nor by terror, nor
 
 G52 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 by any irresistible compulsion, but by the instrumentality of desires 
 which rouse mankind to healthful pursuits, and of hopes attended by 
 much pleasurable excitement. 
 
 From the clearer intimations of our sensitive instincts they have 
 drawn the same lesson. They have perceived how the system of 
 social life is carried on by means of affections which are delightful 
 exactly in proportion as they are benevolent, and which are enduring 
 and intense exactly in proportion to the degree in which the objects 
 of them are dependent upon us. Those feelings, whether conjugal, 
 parental, fraternal, friendly, social, patriotic, or philanthropic, which 
 impel us to exertion and reconcile us to suffering, are also the sources 
 of our greatest enjoyments ; and sluggish, indeed, must be the 
 understanding or the heart, which can miss the inference, that He 
 who thus constituted our nature must have willed that we should 
 be happy. 
 
 Our intellectual instincts also bear their testimony to the Divine 
 benevolence a testimony which has been accepted by every genuine 
 member of the Church in all her various divisions. For it is by 
 means of those instincts alone, that we ever attain to truth, or to any 
 measure of intellectual repose. Those indestructible and ultimate 
 foundations of reasoning which are possessed by the whole family of 
 man in common, are the invaluable patrimony of each member of 
 that family. Without them, there could be no intercommunity of 
 opinions amongst mankind, no enduring fellowship of mutual interests, 
 no sure co-operation in the same general designs. They hold us all 
 together by bonds never entirely to be broken ; and, however wide 
 may have been our deviations into error or crime, they are still the 
 landmarks of the mind, indicating the paths by which we may return 
 to virtue and to truth. 
 
 The light of our judicial and moral instincts lend their powerful 
 aid in disclosing to us all, in whatever part of the " City of God " our 
 dwelling may be cast, the same consolatory view of Him in whom we 
 have our being. If conscience lays bare the infirmities, the wayward- 
 ness, and the corruption of our wills, it also proclaims that He has 
 provided us with a continual corrective of those disorders, that He 
 has not left himself without a witness and a vicegerent in our hearts 
 that His love is exerted, not only in His parental discipline of us, 
 but also in our own discipline of ourselves that our Father has not 
 left His feeble children to incur all the dangers which beset their 
 paths, without the presence of a guardian and a monitor, by obedi- 
 ence to whom they may attain to an abiding tranquillity, and to a 
 continual increase of power. 
 
 The social instincts of every disciple of Christ contribute also to
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 653 
 
 assure him that he is one of the children of that gracious Being, 
 whose mercy is over all His works. Eor the great safeguard of our 
 social happiness consists in the general diffusion, by means of those 
 instincts, of the sympathy which constrains the several members of 
 society to unite in regarding any sentiment or action as the fit sub- 
 ject of commendation or of censure. On this basis rests the rightful 
 dominion of the noblest spirits, and the willing, though often uncon- 
 scious, subjection of subordinate minds. To this we owe that social 
 economy which inflicts on crime the most effective punishment, and 
 secures for virtue an eventful though often a tardy triumph. Nor 
 is the hyperbole, Vox populi vox Dei, a mere extravagance, if it be 
 understood only as recognizing that beneficent constitution of our 
 common nature which renders every concurrence of mankind in their 
 moral judgments at once so terrible to guilt and so encouraging to 
 good desert. 
 
 Neither will any peculiarity in his theological opinions exclude 
 any true Christian from the assurance that " God is love," which he 
 derives from the light of understanding. For God has placed us 
 here in the centre of enigmas to engage our mental powers as well as 
 of mysteries to control our natural presumption ; and of all the grati- 
 fications of which we are capable, the most habitual, the most un- 
 failing, and the least contaminated by any admixture of guilt, are 
 those which we derive from a solution of those enigmas, and from 
 that measure of success which attends the ardent pursuit of truth. 
 Thus the whole interior life of every studious man is giving him con- 
 tinued assurance of the beneficence of his Creator, because he lives in 
 a ceaseless succession of healthful stimulants, and of rewards which 
 animate without satiating his curiosity. 
 
 And thus, to all who contemplate it in a devout spirit, human life 
 presents itself as a scene which, though beset with many trials, and 
 not much abounding in intense delights or in positive pleasures, is 
 yet replete (to borrow the distinction of Locke) with ever-recurring 
 satisfactions. Contracted as our range of choice usually is, and fre- 
 quently as we are reduced to choose between paths, each of which is 
 dangerous and painful, yet, whoever will attentively consider the 
 nature, the varieties, and the amount of the minute occurrences 
 which collectively compose the chronicle of his hours, his days, or 
 his life, will be constrained to acknowledge that his instincts, animal, 
 sensitive, intellectual, judicial, moral, and social, yield him an 
 amount of pleasurable occupation, thought, and feeling, transcending 
 incomparably the sum of his occupations, thoughts, and feelings, in 
 which pain preponderates. He who judges otherwise is usually the 
 dupe of his own imagination, which, by placing him in positions un-
 
 654 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 familiar, and therefore distasteful to him. induces him to ascribe to 
 the great mass of mankind, the suffering which an exchange into 
 their circumstances would, at first, inflict on the observer himself. 
 But the fishermen at the Orkneys, the miner in Northumberland, 
 the occupant of a cellar in St Giles's, the manual labourer in the 
 cotton factory, are all, in their various ways, quickened into grateful 
 activity by some or other of these various instincts throughout the 
 weariest hours of the longest day ; and all find in the success of that 
 activity, the continually recurring satisfaction which the great 
 Author of human society has designed for all the members of it. 
 
 Christians of all creeds discover, in the light of human authority, 
 proofs of the love of Him from whom, as the fountain-head, pro- 
 ceeds all legitimate power. Nothing was apparently more prac- 
 ticable than that each human being should have derived the light 
 required for his guidance through the world directly from God him- 
 self, without the intervention of any human teacher. But man has 
 been made the channel through which truth is disclosed to man, 
 and the appointed instrument by which precepts of duty are im- 
 pressed on him, in order that room may be provided for the de- 
 velopment, and occasion for the exercise, of many of the happiest 
 affections and propensities of his nature. By dividing our race into 
 the two classes, of instructors clothed with authority, and of pupils 
 bound to submission, God has provided for the growth, in the 
 superior relation, of fidelity, diligence, condescension, and tenderness, 
 and, in the inferior relation, of teachableness, reverence, gratitude, 
 and humility. By thus knitting together our best affections and our 
 highest wisdom, He has given to the Church much of the endear- 
 ing character of the Family, and to the Family much of the sacred 
 character of the Church, and has so framed the constitution, both of 
 ecclesiastical and of domestic society, as to render each of them one 
 of the highest and purest elements of our happiness. 
 
 These intimations of the parental character of God, are, indeed, 
 made to all men, and not to those only to whom He has imparted 
 the light of revelation ; although to them the truth that " God is 
 love," is disclosed in terms incomparably more distinct than any 
 which were ever employed by Natural Religion. And it is chiefly 
 by the light which the inspired volume throws on the condition of 
 human nature and of human society, that we are enabled to discern 
 in that system of things so many evidences of the Divine bene- 
 volence, and of our own corresponding obligation to render our 
 tribute of filial love to Him by whom that economy has been 
 constructed. 
 
 And yet, who ever meditated on the character of God, and on the
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 655 
 
 Divine dispensations as they are made known to us in the Holy 
 Scriptures, without the oppressive sense of a mystery beyond ex- 
 pression, momentous, fearful, and inscrutable ? How terrific is the 
 emphasis which the history of the Bible gives to the menaces of the 
 Eible ! Retribution is stamped on every page and line of that awful 
 volume ; and he who does not discern that impress on the sacred 
 text, must interpret it by some canons of criticism which would be 
 universally rejected as altogether extravagant and wild, if applied to 
 any other writing. Such canons are, however, in our own times, 
 diligently employed by the learned, and eagerly welcomed by the 
 unlearned. That mystic theory, of which Strauss is the great modern 
 teacher, when filtered through various mediums, and purged of its 
 coarser ingredients, is imbibed by multitudes amongst us, and is pro- 
 ducing in their minds results not dissimilar in kind, and scarcely in- 
 ferior in degree, to those which were induced by the scepticism of 
 the eighteenth century. 
 
 The real, though often unavowed, ground of the doubts which are 
 thus overclouding the spirits of so many of the nominal disciples of 
 Christ, is the hopeless dejection with which they contemplate that 
 part of the Christian scheme which is supposed to consign the vast 
 majority of our race to a future state, in which woe inconceivable in 
 amount, is also eternal in duration. From this doctrine the hearts 
 of most men turn aside, not only with an instinctive horror, but with 
 an invincible incredulity ; and of those who believe that it really 
 proceeded from the lips of Christ himself, many are sorely tempted 
 by it either to doubt the Divine authority of any of His words, or to 
 destroy their meaning by conjectural evasions of their force. 
 
 There are, indeed, others to whom it appears irreverent and even 
 impious to hold parley with such doubts at all. They forbid us to 
 inquire whether the generally-received sense of our Redeemer's lan- 
 guage on this melancholy and overwhelming theme, be really the 
 sense in which He spoke. They resent, as mere conceit and arro- 
 gance, the opposition of the human understanding to what they 
 consider as the unequivocal declarations of the Son of God himself ; 
 and demand that every voice which would presume to controvert 
 those declarations should be subdued into a submissive silence. 
 And most just is the rebuke, and most reasonable the demand, if 
 it be indeed the fact that our Divine Teacher has really revealed 
 to us the eternity of the punishment inflicted in a future state for 
 the sins of men in this life. For, as the truth of God is the corner- 
 stone of all religion, so the truth of Christ is the corner-stone of 
 Christianity. 
 
 Disclaiming, therefore, the very slightest sympathy with that
 
 656 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 arrogance which would reject any part of Divine revelation on the 
 ground of its inconsistency with the dogmas of human wisdom, we 
 would yet (in the exercise of that freedom which all Protestants, in 
 terms at least, assert for themselves and allow to others) venture to 
 inquire, or rather to suggest the inquiry, whether any sufficient 
 authority really exists for asserting that either Christ himself, or 
 His apostles, taught the doctrine of a penal retribution, which is to 
 he " eternal " in the sense in which we helieve the Deity himself to 
 he " eternal." 
 
 With the exception of one dubious expression in the book of 
 Daniel, the Old Testament is entirely silent on the subject of the 
 eternity of future punishment. The same thing is true of a very 
 large majority of the books of the New Testament. But in the 44th, 
 the 46th, and the 48th verses of the ninth chapter of the Gospel of 
 St Mark, we find our Saviour speaking with the most emphatic iter- 
 ation of " their worm " which " dieth not " and of " the fire " which 
 " is not quenched ; " and in the 43rd and 45th verses of the same 
 chapter, He, with yet deeper emphasis, refers to " the fire that never 
 shall be quenched." Words, doubtless, of fearful significance ! 
 words which, however understood, can intimate nothing less than a 
 danger, at the thought of which the stoutest heart should quake, and 
 the holiest stand in awe ! But while the reverence due to our Divine 
 Teacher forbids us to substract one jot or tittle from the force of His 
 expressions, it no less distinctly forbids us to enhance their force by 
 adding one jot or tittle to them. 
 
 Let it, then, be considered, first, that the words quoted from the 
 43rd and 45th verses (" the fire that never shall be quenched ") are 
 rejected by some eminent critics as a spurious interpolation ; and, 
 secondly, that, supposing the text to be genuine, the words Tritp TO 
 afffiearov mean, not " the fire that never shall be quenched," but 
 " the inextinguishable fire ; " and, thirdly, that no one of these five 
 verses in St Mark's Gospel asserts, either in express terms or by any 
 necessary implication, that the pains to which they refer will be en- 
 dured throughout eternity. They assert only that the agent or in- 
 strument by means of which those pains are to be inflicted is of an 
 immortal or an indestructible nature. , 
 
 It must, however, be acknowledged that the language of Christ, in 
 the closing verse of the twenty-fifth chapter of St Matthew, is per- 
 fectly clear and unambiguous, as it stands in our English Bibles. 
 " These," He says, " shall go away into everlasting punishment." It 
 therefore is of infinite moment to inquire whether the words which 
 our translators have thus given xis really correspond with the words 
 which our Saviour himself uttered.
 
 THE EPILOGUE. (557 
 
 Now no human being knows, or ever can know, what were the 
 very words which thus fell from the lips of Christ. They were spoken 
 in a dialect of the Syro-Chaldaic. No one even knows with any 
 certainty whether our extant Greek version of them proceeded from 
 the pen of St Matthew. On the hypothesis adopted hy many high 
 critical authorities, of an intermediate Hebrew Gospel, we must be- 
 lieve the contrary. Assuming, however, that the hand of an in- 
 spired writer did trace the very words dg KoXaviv alwvtov, it will yet 
 not necessarily follow that either of those words is a precise equiva- 
 lent for the original which it represents ; because, for terms so ab- 
 stract, perfectly precise equivalents can seldom, if ever, be found in 
 languages so essentially dissimilar in their structure and genius as 
 the Syro-Chaldaic and the Greek. Let, however, the sacred text be 
 read on the supposition, however unfounded, that our Redeemer 
 himself actually pronounced the very terms which now stand in the 
 Greek Testament. On that supposition can we really find in them 
 the terrific and overwhelming sense which the popular opinion at- 
 tributes to them. 
 
 It would be a mere impertinence if the writer of these pages 
 should presume to engage in a critical discussion of the precise force 
 and meaning of any passage in a Greek author. It would be still 
 more extravagant, if he should lay claim to the skill requisite for 
 analysing the sense of any Greek expressions deeply imbued in 
 Syriac and Hebraic idioms and allusions. It is sufficient for the 
 immediate purpose to say, in reference to the merely critical or 
 grammatical inquiry, that the words in question are manifestly 
 susceptible of the different meanings which so many scholars have 
 at different times pointed out. They might, for example, be ren- 
 dered with literal accuracy either by the words " into lifelong punish- 
 ment " or by the words " into perpetual abscission." But if the 
 meaning of those expressions be really ambiguous or equivocal, 
 then are we not only free, but bound, to adopt such a construction 
 of them as may be derived from the probabilities in favour of any 
 one or other of the possible meanings. What, then, are those pro- 
 babilities 1 
 
 First, then, let it be considered, that the doctrine of the eternity 
 of the future retribution forms no necessary substratum of any other 
 Christian doctrine. If it could be completely disproved, its disap- 
 pearance from the Christian system would not dissolve, nor apparently 
 impair, the strength of any other part of that mighty fabric. Every 
 argument, every narrative, every expostulation, every warning in the 
 Bible would be as complete and as intelligible, if not as emphatical, 
 without it as with it. The same thing cannot be said of any other 
 
 42
 
 658 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 of the main truths revealed in the Holy Scriptures. Each of them 
 is an integral part of the system to which it belongs. Is it, then, 
 probable, that a doctrine which, if true, infinitely outweighs in 
 importance all the rest of the articles of our creeds, should have been 
 propounded as a mere isolated truth, standing in no necessary con- 
 nection with the rest 1 Is it not far more probable that there is an 
 error in that construction of our Saviour's words, which would render 
 Him the promulgator of it 1 
 
 The angel who descended from heaven and proclaimed to the 
 shepherds the incarnation of the Redeemer, announced himself as 
 the herald " of good tidings of great joy which should be to all 
 people." But if it be indeed true, that He who was thus made in- 
 carnate, proclaimed an eternity of unutterable woe to the vast ma- 
 jority of those who, from generation to generation, throng our streets, 
 our marts, and our churches, how shall we reconcile the angelic an- 
 nouncement with this awful proclamation 1 The Gospel is, indeed, 
 intelligence of blessedness, surpassing imagination, to " the few who 
 are chosen ; " but that same Gospel is, on the popular hypothesis, 
 not less intelligence of wretchedness, surpassing imagination, to " the 
 many who are called." Is not, therefore, the accuracy of that hypo- 
 thesis involved in much improbability 1 
 
 The Bible teaches us that Christ came into the world to bruise 
 the serpent's head, to destroy the works of the devil, and to establish 
 the kingdom, of God ; and Christ himself declared that " He saw 
 Satan like lightning fall from Heaven." Is it reasonable to accept 
 any construction of the other words of Christ, which would seem to 
 ascribe to the Spirit of Evil an eternal triumph over the Spirit of 
 Good, in the persons of the vast majority of the race whom He lived 
 and died to redeem ? 
 
 In our present life, trouble, pain, and sorrow are, indeed, thickly 
 sown. But they exist among us as anomalies, not as laws, as the 
 medicinal and remedial provisions which the Creative wisdom has 
 infused into this economy of things, not as the ultimate end contem- 
 plated by that wisdom. In this world " nothing terminates on evil ;" 
 although, in this world, evil so unhappily abounds. Do not, there- 
 fore, all the analogies of the Divine government raise a strong pre- 
 sumption against that interpretation of our Saviour's discourse, which 
 represents Him as foretelling a future economy of things, in which 
 evil, not remedial but penal, not transient but eternal, is to be the 
 doom of the vast majority of the children of Adam 1 
 
 Throughout the Holy Scriptures a constant appeal is made to 
 those moral sentiments which God has himself implanted in our 
 nature. Our heavenly Father has graciously condescended every-
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 659 
 
 where to point out to us the sacred harmony between His law as 
 revealed by prophets and evangelists, and His law as written by 
 himself on our hearts ; and from that harmony we are taught to 
 draw the best and highest proof of the inspiration of those sacred 
 writings. Deeply conscious with what profound reverence it be- 
 hoves us to apply that test of truth to any opinion deduced by the 
 Church at large from Holy Scripture, we may yet venture to inquire 
 whether it could be successfully applied in the case under consider- 
 ation? If the words ascribed to our Saviour are not inexorably 
 bound down to the construction they usually receive, by the abso- 
 lutely inflexible force of the text and of the context, is it not most 
 reasonable to adopt some other construction, to which our own na- 
 tural sense of justice and equity can respond as clearly as it responds 
 to all the rest of the inspired canon ? 
 
 So inveterate is the corruption of the human heart, that in the 
 judgment of some, the infliction and announcement of no penalty 
 less than that of eternal misery would be sufficient to turn it aside 
 from present sinfulness. But does the dread of that terrific penalty 
 really stem the headlong current of iniquity ? Is it really productive 
 of any corresponding alarm ? Does it produce an alarm equal to 
 that which would have been excited by the announcement of a 
 penalty of infinitely less amount, but definite and intelligible? 
 Does the world does the Church do her ministers do her saints 
 really believe this part of the language of our Redeemer in that 
 sense in which they familiarly interpret it ? Is any human mind so- 
 constituted as to bear the incumbent weight of so fearful a pro- 
 bability of an evil so utterly beyond the reach of exaggeration ? Is 
 the texture of any human body vigorous enough to sustain the throes 
 of so agonising an anticipation ? What means the whole course and 
 system of life which is passing hourly before our eyes, and through 
 which we are ourselves passing ? Why have our preachers time to 
 engage in study, to harmonise the periods of their sermons, to give 
 heed to our wretched ecclesiastical disputes, to devote one superflu- 
 ous instant to food, to repose, or to occupy themselves with any 
 other thing than the proclamation of the horrors of the approaching 
 calamity, and the explanation of the only way of escape from it ? 
 Let any honest man fairly propose to himself, and fairly answer the 
 question, whether the unutterable disparity between his actual 
 interests in all the frivolities of life, and his professed belief in an 
 eternity of woe, impending probably over himself, but certainly over 
 the vast majority of the human race, does not convict him of profess- 
 ing to believe more than he actually believes? And, if so, is there 
 not some reason to doubt whether he has not erred in attributing to 
 
 42*
 
 660 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 his Saviour a meaning, for which, after all, he cannot find any real 
 place in his own mind, or any vital influence on his own heart ? 
 
 Nothing can be more remote from the design with which these 
 pages are written than to suggest a doubt whether penal retribution 
 in the future state does really await " the many who are called," but 
 who throng " the broad way which leadeth to destruction." Neither 
 does the writer of these pages presume to intimate that either the 
 nature or the continuance of that penalty are such as to be fitly 
 contemplated by any soul of man without the most profound awe 
 and the most lively alarm. To propagate or to entertain such opin- 
 ions would be to question the truth of Him who is emphatically 
 himself " The Truth." The questions proposed for inquiry are 
 whether He, or any one of His inspired Apostles, has really 
 affirmed, in express words, that the retribution shall be endured 
 eternally by those on "whom it shall fall 1 whether all the words 
 employed by Him, or by them, on the subject are not satisfied by 
 understanding that the punishment is eternal only inasmuch as it 
 involves the ultimate destruction, or annihilation, of those on whom 
 it is to be inflicted 1 whether the sense usually ascribed to this part 
 of Holy Scripture is congruous with the spirit of the rest of the 
 revealed will of God? whether it is not really derived from eccle- 
 siastical traditions, rather than from any sound and unbiassed cri- 
 ticism 1 and whether our own translators have not been induced, by 
 those traditions, to enhance the real force of our Saviour's words by 
 a forced and exaggerated version of them. 
 
 These suggestions or surmises are, however, opposed to the com- 
 monly-received opinion of, perhaps, all the Christian Churches. The 
 most learned could not, therefore, offer them, except with the most 
 extreme diffidence. By one who can make no claim whatever to 
 learning, properly so called, either as a theologian or as a linguist, 
 they are proposed with the deepest possible consciousness of his 
 liability to error. He knows how weighty is the presumption in 
 favour of the construction which the Church of Christ has, in all 
 ages, given to words which, however understood, are the most terrific 
 which have ever been spoken in the ears of man. And if, indeed, 
 that construction truly represents the real meaning of those fearful 
 words, what remains for him who revolves the prospect they open 
 to that great human family of which he is a member, except to repose 
 the aching heart on those declarations, so copious, so unequivocal, so 
 interwoven with the whole scheme, structure, and system of our faith, 
 which concur in assuring us that " God is love," and which will still 
 encourage or rather constrain us to hope even against hope, that no 
 rational being throughout His vast universe shall ever be so entirely
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 661 
 
 exiled from His fatherly presence, as to be unable to turn to Him 
 with penitence, or as to be beyond the reach of that mercy of which 
 we are so often assured that it " endureth for ever." 
 
 This digression (if such it be) from the more immediate subject of 
 these pages, has been suggested, and may, it is hoped, be vindicated, 
 by the consideration, that the generally-received opinion regarding 
 the endless duration of the state of punishment, is among the most 
 effective of all the causes which are at present inducing amongst 
 us that virtual abandonment of Christianity, which assigns a mythic 
 sense to almost every part of the sacred oracles. Learnedly and 
 wisely as that fallacy has been combated by many, their yet more 
 serious attention might, perhaps, be advantageously given to the 
 inquiry whether that opinion, which is to so large a number an in- 
 superable rock of offence, might not be either retracted or qualified 
 without any sacrifice of truth ; and whether, if so, they would not 
 contribute, by such an acknowledgment, to reclaim the deserters to 
 the camp much more effectually than by any assault on the positions 
 in which they have openly entrenched themselves. 
 
 Except so far as it is overcast by the portentous cloud which the 
 doctrine of the eternity of penal retribution throws over it, the Word 
 of God reveals the love of God with all the effulgence of a noontide 
 sun. It makes that disclosure chiefly, of course, to such as most 
 freely receive that Word, and as most devoutly revolve it. Yet so 
 bright are those " shafts of day," that, by many a reflection, they 
 irradiate even those to whom spiritual despotism forbids an unre- 
 strained access to the inspired volume. For, in those pages, love is 
 exhibited, not as an abstract quality or affection, but as a living 
 person ; and that impersonation, whether it be presented to us under 
 the veil of a tutelary and national Deity, as in the last four books 
 of the Pentateuch, or under the veil of Christ's humanity, as in the 
 four Gospels, is still ever one and ever the same, ever yearning 
 over our fallen race with more than parental tenderness, and ever 
 resisting our suicidal self-will with the wholesome, though reluctant, 
 severity of a Father. And the love thus impersonated to all Chris- 
 tian people, is no more the object of the exclusive knowledge, or of 
 the exclusive adoration, of any single society of Christians, than the 
 air we breathe, the ocean we navigate, or the sunshine by which we 
 are warmed. To shut the gates of mercy on all who will not adopt 
 our opinions, join in our solemnities, and attach themselves to our 
 party, is one of the most inveterate of human infirmities ; because it 
 is one of the most inveterate of human habits, to avert the eye from 
 some of the many rays of light by which it is the good purpose of 
 God that we should illuminate our minds and guide our steps. To
 
 662 THE EPILOGUE. 
 
 throw open those gates as widely as Love desires, and as Truth 
 allows, is, on the other hand, the delight of those by whom all 
 those confluent rays are received, and welcomed, and harmonised. 
 
 There is, therefore, a catholic Belief and a catholic Morality, broad 
 and comprehensive enough to form the eternal basis of a catholic 
 Church and of a true Christian Unity. That Belief is, that " God 
 is light," and that " God is love." That Morality is, that we love 
 Him supremely, and each other as ourselves. That Church is com- 
 posed of all who, in the strength of this belief, are habitually striv- 
 ing to practise this morality. That Unity is effected not by any ex- 
 ternal conformities, but by the same interior spirit and hidden life 
 manifesting itself, in the members of all Christian communities, by 
 acts of devotion, of humility, of self-sacrifice, of temperance, of justice, 
 of truth, and of peace. 
 
 Holding these opinions, we have presumed, in the preceding pages, 
 to record the acts, and to celebrate the virtues, of some of the saints 
 both of Eome, and of our native land. Our Hagiology is drawn from 
 many distant, and, as some may think, from many incongruous, 
 sources. We have ventured to extol the heroic daring of Hilde- 
 brand, and the tender enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi. We have 
 dared to applaud the energies, at once so passionate and so calm, so 
 widely diffused and yet so concentrated, of Loyola and his first as- 
 sociates. We have celebrated cordially, however faintly, the fervent 
 zeal of Martin Luther, steeped in every human affection, even when 
 most instinct with a diviner influence. We have rendered homage 
 to the piety wliich sustained the intellectual prowess of Mabillon 
 and his companions ; and have deeply felt our incompetency to 
 render any meet tribute to the memories of the wise and holy men 
 of Port-Eoyal and of her illustrious daughters. Passing to our own 
 land our glorious land and, above all other things, glorious in the 
 parentage of the mighty transatlantic nation to which God has so 
 largely committed the future destinies of mankind, we have at- 
 tempted to depict Eichard Baxter, dwelling on the confines of the 
 temporal and of the eternal states, and performing miracles of in- 
 dustry and of devotedness, over the truth of which no scepticism can 
 cast a shade of doubt ; and Whitfield and his disciples, labouring to 
 evangelise the world with an energy almost as rare as miracle, and 
 with a faith in themselves, in their cause, and in their Divine 
 Leader, which no scepticism could ever cloud, and which no disap- 
 pointment could ever weaken. And then, contracting our vision 
 within a narrower, a more familiar, and, in truth, a domestic circle, 
 we have hazarded the exhibition of a series of portraitures drawn 
 from the life, and which, until they shall be superseded by some
 
 THE EPILOGUE. 663 
 
 more skilful hand, may serve as sketches of a society, to which Eng- 
 land and the world at large owe no common debt of gratitude. But 
 since, in that society, no such benefactor of mankind could be found, 
 who did not worship within the pale of our national Church, we 
 have ventured to draw, from his own books, a conjectural likeness 
 of a Nonconformist, whom that society would have received as a 
 brother, if his times had fallen in their generation. 
 
 To our own apprehension, at least, there is, in these attempts at 
 ecclesiastical biography, a certain unity of design, because all the 
 subjects of it held that Belief, practised that Morality, and were 
 members of that Church which, in the sense already explained, we 
 regard as catholic. They all believed that " God is light," and 
 reverently sought that divine illumination. They all believed that 
 " God is love," and devoutly surrendered their highest affections to 
 Him. They all loved their bretliren of mankind as the common 
 children of their Father in heaven. They have all deserved, and 
 some few of them have found, an infinitely nobler memorial among 
 men than it is permitted to the author of these pages to raise to any 
 man. Yet he will not think that these pages have been written in 
 vain, if they shall stimulate any one gifted with the requisite 
 abilities and learning, to give to the Christian world a Protestant 
 Hagiology, celebrating the Saints of that universal Church, which 
 embraces within its ample fold every faithful servant of Christ, 
 whatever may be the peculiarities of his ecclesiastical system, or of 
 his theological creed. 
 
 THE END.
 
 JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.
 
 1869] 
 
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 INDEX. 
 
 ACTON'S Modern Cookery 28 
 
 Afterglow (The) 26 
 
 ALCOCK'S Residence in Japan 23 
 
 ALLIES on Formation of Christendom 20 
 
 Alpine Guide (The) 23 
 
 APJQHN'S Manual of the Metalloids 12 
 
 ARNOLD'S Manual of English Literature 7 
 
 ARNOTT'I Elements of Physics 11 
 
 A runtimes Cami 25 
 
 Autumn holidays of a Country Parson .. 9 
 
 AVKE'S Treasury of Bible Knowledge 20 
 
 BACON'S Essays, by WHATELY 6 
 
 Life and I/etters. by SPRDDINO 5 
 
 Works, edited by SPI-DDINO 6 
 
 BA;N'S Mental and Moral Science 10 
 
 on the Emotions and Will 10 
 
 on the Senses and Intellect 10 
 
 on the Study of Character 10 
 
 BALL'S Alpine Guide 23 
 
 BARNARD'S Drawm? from Nature 16 
 
 BAYLDON'S Rentsand Tillages 18 
 
 Beaten Tracks 22 
 
 BECKER'S Charicles nnrf Gallus 84 
 
 BKNPEV'S Sanskrit Dictionary 8 
 
 BLACK'S Treatise on Brewing 28 
 
 BLACKLEV'S Word-Gossip 7 
 
 BLACKI.FY and FHIEDLANDER'S German and 
 
 English Dictionary 8 
 
 BLAI.VE'S Rural Sports 2 
 
 Veterinary Art 27 
 
 BOOTH'S Epign 
 
 BOURNE on Screw Propeller 
 
 BOURNE'S Catechism of the Steam Engine. 
 
 Handbook of Steam Ensrine 
 
 Treatise on the Steam Engine .. 
 
 Examples of Modern Engines . 
 
 BOWDLER'S Family SBAKSPEARB 
 
 BRANDB'S Dictionary of Science, Literature 
 
 and Art 
 
 BRA's(C.) Education of the Feelings .... 
 
 Philosophy of Necessity 
 
 i Force 
 
 in 
 10 
 
 BRINTON on Food and Digestion 28 
 
 BRODIE'S (Sir C. B.I Works 15 
 
 BROWNE'S Exposition of the 39 Articles 18 
 
 BCCKLR'S Tlistory of Civilization 2 
 
 BULL'S Hints to Mothers 28 
 
 Maternal Management of Children. 28 
 
 BUNSKN'S (Baron) Ancient Egypt 3 
 
 God in History 3 
 
 Memoirs 4 
 
 BUNSEN (E.DB)on Apocrypha 20 
 
 's Keys of St. Peter 20 
 
 BPRKE'S Vicissitude* of Families 5 
 
 BORTON'S Christian Church 4 
 
 Cabintt Lawyer 
 
 CALVERT'S Wife's Manual *' 
 
 CANNON 'a Grant's Campaign * 
 
 CARPENTER'S Six Months in India 22 
 
 CATES'S Biographical Dictionary 4 
 
 CATS' and FARLIE'S Moral Emblems 1 
 
 Changed Aspects of Unchanged Truth*.... I 
 
 CHIMNEY'S Euphrates Expedition 1* 
 
 Indian Polity * 
 
 Waterloo Campaign ' 
 
 CHILD'S Physiological Essays ' 
 
 Chorale Book for England 1 
 
 Christian Schools and Scholars 10 
 
 Churchman's Daily Remembrancer 40 
 
 CLOCOH'S Lives from Plutarch * 
 
 CosBB'sNorman Kinss of England 4 
 
 COLENSO (Bishop) on Pentateuch and Book 
 
 of Joshua 20 
 
 Commonplace Philosopher in Town and 
 
 Country 8 
 
 CONINOTON'S Chemical Analysis 14 
 
 Translation of VIRGIL'S jEneid K 
 
 CONTANSEAC'S French-English Dictionaries 8 
 
 CONYBEARB and HOWSON'S Work on St. Paul 19 
 
 COOK on the Acts 18 
 
 COOK'S Voyngfs 5 
 
 COPLA ND'S Dictionary of Practical Medicine 15 
 
 COULTHART'S Decimal Interest Tables 28 
 
 Counsel and Comfort from a City Pulpit .. 9 
 
 Cox's (G. W.) Manual of Mythology 24 
 
 Tale of the Great Persian War 
 
 Tales of Ancient Greece 24 
 
 (H.) Ancient Parliamentary Elections 1 
 
 History of the Reform Bills .... I 
 
 Whig and Tory Administrations 1 
 
 CRESY'S Encycloptedia of Civil Engineering 17 
 
 Critical Essays of a Country Parson 9 
 
 CBOss'sOld Story 26 
 
 CROWE'S History of France t 
 
 CIU-MP on Banking, Currency, & Exchange* 27 
 
 CCLLEY'S Handbook of Telegraphy 17 
 
 CL-IACIV'S History of Ireland 3 
 
 DART'S Hiad of Homer 26 
 
 D'AOBIONB'S History of the Reformation in 
 
 the time of CALVIN 1 
 
 DAVIDSON'S Introduction to New Testament 19 
 
 DAYMAN'S Dante's DivinaCommedia i6 
 
 Dead Shot (The), by MARKSMAN 2t> 
 
 DE LA RIVE'S Treatise on Electricity 11 
 
 I)) MORGAN on Matter and Spirit 9 
 
 DE TOCQCEVILLE'S Democracy in America. . 1 
 
 DOBSON on the Ox S7 
 
 DOVB on Storms 11 
 
 DVHR'S City ot Rome 2 
 
 EASTLAKE'S Hints on Household Taste 
 History of Oil Painting ....
 
 NEW WORKS PUBLISHED BY LONGMANS AITD CO. 
 
 EDOTNTOX'S Odyssey ........................ 26 
 
 EDWABDS'S Shipmaster's Guide ............ 27 
 
 Elements of Botany ........................ 13 
 
 ELLICOTT'S Commentary on Ephesians .... 19 
 
 -^ _ Lectures on Lite ot Christ ....... 19 
 
 Commentary on Galatiana ...... 19 
 
 . - Pastoral Epist... 19 
 
 Philippians, &c.. 19 
 
 ' 19 
 
 Essays and Contributions of A. K. H. B. .. 
 Essays and Reviews ........................ 21 
 
 EWALD':, History of Israel .................. 19 
 
 FAIRBAIRN on Iron Shipbuilding 17 
 
 FAIRBAIRN'S Application of Cast and 
 
 Wrought Iron to Building 17 
 
 ^^^ Information for Engineers... 17 
 
 Treatise on Mills & Millwork 17 
 
 FAHRAB'S Chapters on Language 7 
 
 FELKIN on Hosiery and Lace Manufactures 18 
 
 FFOULKES'S Christendom's Divisions in 
 
 FLIEDNEH'S (Pastor) Life'.'.'. .'.'.'.'.'.'.".'.'.'.'.'.'.'.I 5 
 
 FORBKS'S Earls of Gran&rd 5 
 
 FRANCIS'S Fishing Book 26 
 
 FBOCDE'S History of England 1 
 
 . Short Studies on Great Subjects 9 
 
 GAWOT'S Elementary Physics 
 
 GILBERT and CHURCHILL'S Dolomite Moun- 
 tains 
 
 GILLY'S Shipwrecks of the Navy 
 
 GOLDSMITH'S Poems, Illustrated 
 
 GOODEV E'S Elements of Mechanism 
 
 GOULD'S Silver Store 
 
 GRAHAM'S Book about Words 
 
 GRANT'S Ethics of Aristotle 
 
 Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson .... 
 
 GHAT'S Anatomy 
 
 GREENE'S Corals and Sea Jellies 
 
 - Sponges and Animalculse 
 
 GREENHOW on Bronchitis 
 
 GBOVE on Correlation of Physical Forces.. 
 
 GWILT'S Encyclopaedia of Architecture .... 
 
 Handbook of Angling, by EPHEMERA 
 
 HARE on Election oi Representatives 
 
 HARTWIO'S Harmonies of Nature 
 
 Polar World 
 
 Sea. and its Living Wonders.... 
 -Tropical World 
 
 HOLLAR'S Transition Musical Lectures .... 15 
 HUMPHREYS' Sentiments of Shakspeare .... 16 
 
 INOF.LOW'S Poems 25 
 
 StoryofDoom 25 
 
 JAMESON'S Legends of the Saints and Mar- 
 tyrs 16 
 
 Legends of the Madonna 16 
 
 Legends of the Monastic Orders 16 
 
 JAMESON and EASTLAKE'S History of Our 
 
 Lord 16 
 
 TENNER'S Holy Child 25 
 
 JOHNSTON'S Gazetteer, or Geographical Dic- 
 tionary 11 
 
 JORDAN on Vis Inertias in the Ocean 11 
 
 JUKES on Second Death 21 
 
 on Types of Genesis Sk 
 
 KALI 
 
 CH'I Commentary on the Bible 
 Hebrew Grammar. 
 
 KEITH on Fulfilment of Prophecy 19 
 
 Di-stiny of the World 19 
 
 KERX'S Metallurgy by CROOKFS and RCHBIO 10 
 
 KESTEVEN'S Domestic Medicine 16 
 
 KIRBY and SPENCE'S Entomology 13 
 
 LANDON'S (L. E. L.) Poetical Works 25 
 
 LATHAM'S English Dictionary 7 
 
 River Plate 11 
 
 LECKV'S History of European Morals 3 
 
 Rationalism . 
 
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