QK. MISCELLANIES. REV. JAMES MAETINEATJ. BOSTON: WM. CROSBY AND H. P. NICHOLS, 111 WASHINGTON STREET. NEW YOKK: C. S. FRANCIS AND COMPANY. 1852. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851, by WM. CROSBY AND H. P. NICHOLS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. CAMBRIDGE: METCALF AND COMPANY, PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY. PEE F AC E. MR. MARTINEAU is already known to a wide cir- cle of grateful readers in this country by the two volumes of " Endeavors after the Christian Life." A desire has often been expressed by those who have been familiar with his miscellaneous papers, that they should be collected in a volume. In re- sponse to such requests, a few of them are brought together and offered here; and the publishers feel that they are discharging a duty, in redeeming ar- ticles of such a character from their seclusion in the English periodicals, and bringing them to the notice of the American public. Any thing in the nature of a review, or extended advertisement of their merits here, would be as in- delicate as it is unnecessary. The rare qualities of IV PREFACE. genius that distinguish Mr. Martineau's writings are apparent to every competent reader. It will be seen that high themes are discussed in this volume, and great names examined, that 'stand for widely dif- ferent religious systems. The treatment, we are sure, will not be found unworthy of the subjects, but distinguished by a loftiness of tone, a catholic candor, a severity of logic and intellectual fidelity amid all the difficulties of the question in hand, a clearness of moral discrimination, and an affluence of imagery and vigorous precision of expression, which, how- ever unusual, will not surprise those who are ac- quainted with any of the author's productions, and cannot fail to make these papers valuable and wel- come to all earnest thinkers, even to such as cannot come into full sympathy with the theories of faith and the estimates of men which are offered to their consideration. A better service could hardly be done, in the pres- ent state and tendencies of theological opinion among the liberal Christians of this country, than to give a selection from the theological discourses and philosophical miscellanies of Mr. Martineau, which PREFACE. treat prominently and discuss thoroughly the re- lations of faith and records, and the differences be- tween a spiritual and a sacrificial religion. The present volume, not having been arranged with such reference, can only in part fulfil such a service. Nei- ther does the selection here made do full justice to their author. It is not, probably, such as he would have made, if scientific and literary considerations had controlled his choice. Certainly it is to be re- gretted that the papers on "Whewell's Systematic Morality," " MorelTs History of Modern Philos- ophy," " Dr. Channing's Memoirs," " Mesmeric Athe- ism," and " The Creed of Christendom," could not have accompanied the larger, and perhaps more timely articles, on the Church of England, and the Battle of the Churches. These last, however, have already excited such notice and admiration in this country, that their insertion seemed imperatively called for, and, by publishing them in connection with the essay on " Church and State," unity of theme and interest is gained for a large portion of the, volume. The other papers, with more of kindred topics, are in reserve for a second volume, should VI PREFACE. another be required. In the hope that the taste of our community may be exhibited in such a demand, the present collection is commended to the public. It may not be amiss to state, that the article on Dr. Priestley has been revised, and several errors of the English press in other essays have been cor- rected, for this edition, by the author. T. S. K. CONTENTS. PAGE THE LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS OF DR. PRIEST- LEY, 1 THE LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS AR- NOLD, D. D., 56 CHURCH AND STATE, 105 THEODORE PARKER'S DISCOURSE OF RELIGION, . 163 PHASES OF FAITH, 216 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, 281 THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES, . . . 373 2 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. hint that any thing which swims so near the source of light and heat endangers the world's temperature, and will burn us up as it sweeps by ; and many are the years on whose darkness it must shine, ere its course be traced, and it be found to be humanity's morning and evening star. The time necessary for the appreciation of a conspicuous mind will vary according to the nature of its genius and the state of society in which it is put forth ; but in proportion as it addresses itself to the general mind, and finds access to the general mind, will a true verdict be speedily passed. Large masses of men are more just, more discerning, more generous, than small; more ashamed of all petty passions ; less inclined to idolatry on the one hand, and to envy on the other. Imaginative genius, which in these days speaks to a splendid audience, standing amid an amphitheatre of nations, receives an answer of glorious acclaim to its cry of " Plaudlte ! " while originality in science, in theology, and even in political philosophy, appre- ciable at first only by schools and sects of men, waits for justice till the school or the sect becomes, in numbers and intelligence, coextensive with so- ciety at large. Scott and Byron have received the homage of their own times ; but such men as Priest- ley or Bentham must wait the revolutions of opinion, and the regeneration of social institutions, before the due rites of honor are enacted over their graves. Posterity, like Providence, rewards men according to their deeds. To their tribunal oblivion must give up its dead. What place will then be allotted to Dr. Priestley, among the benefactors of mankind, DR. PRIESTLEY. O we will not presume to decide ; sure we are it will be no mean one. And, in the mean while, it is evi- dent that the time is approaching for a correct and final estimate of his merits. His contemporaries, with their indiscriminate praise or censure, have, for the most part, retired from the scene ; and a new generation, partly educated by his writings, and able to bear testimony to their influence, has stepped into their place. The physical science to which, for many years, he brought his annual tribute of dis- covery, has advanced another stage ; and, apart from all rivalry and controversy, can afford to be just to his memory, and to devote a chapter of true history to its own historian. The philosophy of mind no longer pays exclusive honor to the favorites whose contempt was too strong for his living fame, and ranks among its greatest masters men who expound principles akin to his. In some measure his politi- cal sympathies seem to have been bequeathed to this generation, and the chains have been broken, for numbering whose links he became an outcast and an exile. And in theology he has had succes- sors, who have, in some measure, diverted from him the odium which he was wont to bear exclusively : theology, however, is singularly tardy in its justice, and a fame locked up in theology is scarcely more hopeful than an estate locked up in chancery. For a fair estimate of this extraordinary man, the advan- tages afforded by the complexion of the times are enhanced by the new biographical materials which have been laid before us by Mr. Rutt. These ma- terials consist of Dr. Priestley's letters to his most 4 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. intimate friends, extending in an almost unbroken series through the greater part of his life, and ap- pended to the several sections of his autobiography. We were disposed at first to wish that more selec- tion had been used, and that many letters, which convey no new impression of the writer's character, no indication of the spirit of his times, had been omitted ; and that, notwithstanding the amount of interesting small talk which is crowded into the notes, they had been occasionally in a less excursive style of illustration. But in both these particulars it is possible that the editor may have consulted the public taste as well as his own vast stock of dissent- ing lore. His errors (if errors they be) are those of an affectionate and faithful memory ; and the inter- est which, in the earlier portion of the biography, is weighed down by the indiscriminate mass of corre- spondence, is powerfully revived towards the close of the volume by the letters from America. It would be difficult to find, throughout the whole range of epistolary literature, any thing more touching than these letters, more pictorial than the impression they convey of the aged philosopher in his banishment, inspired by his faith to struggle with the shocks of circumstance, sustaining cheerfulness and devising good in the midst of his solitary sorrows, and feed- ing still an interior energy amid the waste of years. His seclusion there seems like an appointed interval between two worlds, a central point of observation between time and eternity. There is a quietude in his letters, which gives them the aspect of letters from the dead ; all the activity of life appears in DR. PRIESTLEY. O them as viewed in retrospect, and yet the peace of Heaven is still but in prospect ; and they send forth tones of indescribable melancholy, which, travelling over one of the world's broadest oceans, seem like communings from an unearthly state. Yet it is not that the Christian sufferer himself desponds; the melancholy is not in him, but in the reader ; and it is simply our wonder that he could uphold his spirit so nobly, which deepens the pathos of his history. It is obvious, throughout, that his self-possessed serenity comes from the past and the future, and not from the present ; and there is a simplicity, a reality, in his repeated allusions to his approaching immor- tality, which makes us feel perpetually that, step by step, we are passing with the venerable man to his grave, to meet him on the morrow in a home whence there is no exile. But we are anticipating. Not that we shall at- tempt any chronological narrative of Dr. Priestley's life ; our readers will, we trust, seek that from the volume whose title stands at the head of this arti- cle; a volume which, by recording not so much the events as the labors, the feelings, the habits, the discipline, the opinions, of a life ; by exhibiting the successive phases of a mind passing from darkness towards full-orbed truth, fulfils the expectations with which the student of human nature has a right to turn to biography. This volume brings to a close Mr. Rutt's protracted and, we fear, ill-requited labors, as editor of Dr. Priestley's Theological and Miscellaneous Works ; and we would avail ourselves of the opportunity to present our readers with an 1* 6 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. analysis of Dr. Priestley's character as a theologian, a physicien, a metaphysician, a moralist, and a Chris- tian. Few problems are more difficult than to determine the proportion between the internal and the external causes which create great minds. When genius, op- pressed with difficulties, toils its way upwards to the light, it is not the difficulty that creates the genius, or every man who wrote in a garret might be a Johnson or a Sheridan. Still less, when it flutters in the atmosphere of courts, is it the warmth of throned patronage which tempts its powers into life, or every minion of royalty might be a Horace or -a Moliere. No mind can possess real power which does not im- press you with the conviction that, wherever planted, it would have found for itself a greatness ; and the office of circumstances is but to trace the track of its energies. When the stream born among the hills tumbles its waters into the valley, it has its first channel determined by the mountain surface, turned aside by pinnacles of rock, and invited by the yielding alluvial soil ; but its ceaseless chafing loosens and rolls away the rugged masses that break its current, and makes for it a new and a freer way. And minds which are to fertilize the world may have the windings of their genius traced by influ- ences from without ; but the same mighty will by which they first burst forth to precipitate themselves on the world below, will undermine the most frown- ing barriers of circumstances, and carve out fresh courses for their power. Though Dr. Priestley would not have been unknown to the world had he, DR. PRIESTLEY. 7 in conformity with an intention once entertained, been doomed to a counting-house in Lisbon, it is not difficult to discern several groups of events which exercised a deep and lasting influence upon his char- acter, and determined the relation in which he should stand to society. The first of these is to be found in his early religious education, which was conducted on the old puritanical model of constraint and rigor. There is little doubt that he is right in ascribing to this cause the deep sense of religion which he maintained through life. His was not one of those minds which are necessarily devotional, which, under all conceivable adjustments of cir- cumstances, betray their affinity with Heaven, whose religious sympathies, instead of being sup- pressed by neglect, or overborne by the tide of ad- verse influence, would, like air entangled in the ocean-depths, rise the more buoyantly to their native element. Such a mind was Heber's, of which you can no more think as without piety, than you can of color without extension. Deprive it of this cen- tral attribute, and there remains an impossible com- bination of qualities ; but Dr. Priestley's other qual- ities might have existed independently of his devo- tion, without any violation of the order of nature. In the language of logicians, it was his property, not his essential difference. And, accordingly, we believe that, for its full and permanent development, a systematic and stimulant discipline was needed ; and this was abundantly administered in the coarse excitement and Sabbatarian severity of a Calvin- istic education. His acknowledgment of the mis- 8 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. cries accompanying its benefits is remarkable among the confessions of orthodoxy : " The weakness of my constitution, which often led me to think that I should not be long-lived, contributed to give my mind a still more serious turn ; and having read many books of experiences, and, in consequence, believing that a new birth, produced by the immediate agency of the Spirit of God, was necessary to salvation, and not being able to satisfy myself that I had experienced any thing of the kind, I felt occasionally such distress of mind as it is not in my power to describe, and which I still look back upon with horror. Notwithstanding I had nothing very material to reproach myself with, I often concluded that God had for- saken me, and that mine was like the case of Francis Spira, to whom, as he imagined, repentance and salvation were denied. In that state of mind I remember reading the ac- count of ' the man in the iron cage,' in the ' Pilgrim's Prog- ress,' with the greatest perturbation. " I imagine that even these conflicts of mind were not without their use, as they led me to think habitually of God and a future state. And though my feelings were then, no doubt, too full of terror, what remained of them was a deep reverence for divine things, and in time a pleas- ing satisfaction which can never be effaced, and, I hope, was strengthened as I have advanced in life, and acquired more rational notions of religion. The remembrance, how- ever, of what I sometimes felt in that state of ignorance and darkness, gives me a peculiar sense of the value of rational principles of religion, and of which I can give but an imperfect description to others. " As truth, we cannot doubt, must have an advantage over error, we may conclude that the want of these pecu- liar feelings is compensated by something of greater value, DR. PRIESTLEY. 9 which arises to others from always having seen things in a just and pleasing light ; from having always considered the Supreme Being as the kind parent of all his offspring. This, however, not having been my case, I cannot be so good a judge of the effects of it. At all events, we ought always to inculcate just views of things, assuring ourselves that proper feelings and right conduct will be the conse- quence of them." pp. 12, 13. " Though, after I saw reason to change my opinions, 1 found myself incommoded by the rigor of the congrega- tion with which I was connected, I shall always acknowl- edge, with great gratitude, that I owe much to it. The business of religion was effectually attended to in it. We were all catechized in public till we were grown up, servants as well as others : the minister always expounded the Scrip- tures with as much regularity as he preached ; and there was hardly a day in the week in which there was not some meeting of one or other part of the congregation. On one evening there was a meeting of the young men for conver- sation and prayer. This I constantly attended, praying ex- tempore with others, when called upon. " At my aunt's there was a monthly meeting of women, who acquitted themselves in prayer as well as any of the men belonging to the congregation. Being at first a child in the family, I was permitted to attend their meetings, and growing up insensibly, heard them, after I was capable of judging. My aunt, after the death of her husband, prayed every morning and evening in her family, until I was about seventeen, when that duty devolved upon me. " The Lord's day was kept with peculiar strictness. No victuals were dressed on that day in any family. No mem- ber of it was permitted to walk out for recreation, but the whole of the day was spent at the public meeting, or at home in reading, meditation, and prayer, in the family or the closet." pp. 15-17. * 10 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. A question of great moment is here suggested. Unitarianism has been tried upon two generations : has the experiment justified Dr. Priestley's faith in the devotional influences of truth ? Or, for illustra- tions of the spirituality which may be conjoined with heterodoxy, must we still point to minds which, like his, have emerged from Calvinism, and may be supposed to have brought their piety thence ? With the most fervent confidence in the moral power of truth, it may yet be doubted whether the largest portion of Unitarian piety has not been imported from orthodoxy ; and hence many have been led to conclusions favorable to the rigid system of religious education. The fact may be admitted, and the in- ference denied. It is in no case the rigor, the cere- monialism, that makes the saint ; regarded by itself, its whole tendency is to produce mental imbecility and disgust and unbelief; and wherever it has ex- isted as a system, whenever it has been made the instructor's main reliance, these effects, and no others, have followed ; not a gleam of emotion, not an impulse of holy desire, has ever come from it. But, long as it has been the receptacle of all the soul of orthodoxy, it would be strange if its ma- chinery had not often been plied by those who have made it the vehicle of their own piety, and have sent through its dead materials that living earnestness of mind, in love of which the young will often undergo much that would else be tedious and revolting. Wherever Sabbatarianism has fallen into such hands, a devotional feeling has resulted, not, indeed, from the system, but from its presiding DR. PRIESTLEY. 11 spirit. To revive the stiff regimen of our forefathers, because it sent forth a Priestley and a Lindsey, would be like reenacting the Mosaic law, in expec- tation of another " sweet singer of Israel." A ritual system can no more create a soul, than the study of Greek metres can make a poet. It does not, how- ever, follow, because sabbatical constraint fails to awaken piety, that laxity must certainly succeed ; and we rejoice to believe that Unitarians are begin- ning to perceive the error of this retaliative logic ; that, while they discard the enthralling formalities which rendered their fathers more superstitious than devout, they feel, in some degree, the solemn respon- sibilities of a spiritual faith ; that, while they rely as little as ever on mere externals of devotion, they think more of its interior spirit, and study more earnestly the means for its nurture. Whilst we admit that the conflicts of mind which Dr. Priestley describes may have occasioned a per- manent susceptibility to religious emotion, we main- tain that it was his subsequent conversion which gave that susceptibility its only value. His mental sufferings were accurate corollaries from his faith ; and his mind was too clear-sighted, too sincere, too literal, too little imaginative, speedily to have effect- ed an escape from them which nothing but self- deception and enthusiasm could have accomplished. And where, we would ask, is the efficacy of religious emotion so miserably perverted ? Neither inspiring holiness, nor infusing peace, its influence on the active powers is purely paralytic, and on the passive, torture. There is no charm in devotional anguish, v 12 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. more than in any other, which should make it a thing to be desired ; and self-persecution without reformation, tears wrung, not from the conscience, but from the creed, are only new items in the ac- count of human misery. It was not, then, till the reverential feelings towards the object of faith which those struggles implied were transplanted into a brighter system, not till they took their place in a religion of duty instead of dogma, not till they changed their character from tormentors to motives, from abjectness to love, that they brought with them any blessing to the mind. Calvinism, like the magicians of Egypt, could poison and taint the salubrious stream ; true religion, like the prophet's rod, could alone convert the current of blood into the waters of fertility. The next important circumstance of his life was his conversion; an event which, from its permanent influence on his external relations and his internal habits, forms the most momentous change in his personal history ; and, from its vast and still increas- ing effect on the state of opinion in this country, marks an era in the annals of our national Chris- tianity. It was brought about by the same qualities of mind which had sunk him in the agonizing hu- miliation of orthodoxy, we mean his plain-dealing with himself. It is not to the presumptuous, but to the humble, not to the self-ignorant, but to the clear- minded, student of their own nature, that the shade of Calvinism, like that of the fabled Upas-tree, proves itself, instead of a sheltering influence, a sickening and a deadly blight. Had Dr. Priestley DR. PRIESTLEY. 13 exercised more self-adulation and less perspicacity in his dealings with his own mind, he might have emerged from his gloomy terrors, into the comfort- able persuasion of his own saintship ; but the same sincerity which prevented his confounding the op- erations of his own thoughts with the agency of the Holy Spirit prevented him also from mistaking the prepossessions of education for the fulness of evidence. There never was a movement of opinion more purely characteristic than that of Dr. Priestley. It was performed exclusively by the natural gravita- tion . of his own faculties, with the least possible share of impulse from external causes. It was his " call " ; and we wish that every call which ortho- doxy records were as simply a transaction between God and the believer's own mind ; it was his " new creation," the brooding of God's spirit, i. e. his own thought and conscience, over the chaos of a rude creed, and bidding light to struggle through the mass, and the elements to fall into a fairer order. That the change was progressive, extending over sixteen years, not only assimilates it to all that is good in God's providence, but indicates its inde- pendent character. The opinions which he ulti- mately embraced were nowhere embodied as a whole at the commencement of his inquiries ; some of them were not in existence, and the rest were barely accessible, scattered through many dissimilar writers, rather hinted than stated; and, if deemed worthy of mention for their curiosity, requiring apology for their profaneness. The collective adoption of the peculiarities con- 2 14 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. stituting modern English Unitarianism would then have been unnatural, and their adoption from the dictation of others' minds impossible. Throughout the whole process of theological change which Dr. Priestley's opinions underwent, his transition from low Arianism to Humanitarianism, which was the last important step, is the only one in which the reasonings of a predecessor exerted a perceptible in- fluence ; and this was occasioned by the writings of Dr. Lardner, to be persuaded by whom must be a pure concession to evidence. Throughout every other stage of his conversion, Dr. Priestley was his own commentator; his inquiries followed the order of his own doubts ; his evidence was collected and arranged by his own assiduity ; and his conclusions drawn by the absolutely solitary exercise of his own intellect. He has been accused, and by an authority which gives weight to the accusation, of having imbibed from his age a spirit of innovation. We apprehend that the charge involves a material error with regard both to his character and his times. _ A more station- ary condition of the social mind than that in which his opinions commenced, matured, and almost com- pleted their progress, could not perhaps be selected from the last two centuries of English history. The underworkings of the earthquake had doubtless commenced in France; the interior power which was to burst through the crust of institutions, and rock the nations in alarm, was " getting up its steam " : but of this not the most penetrating had a glimpse ; all was quiet on the surface, not a growl DR. PRIESTLEY. 15 was heard, not a vibration felt. Had it even been otherwise, Dr. Priestley could have been little affect- ed, in the early part of his life, by the political oc- currences of the Continent, for he was not then in a position either to receive or to impart the influence supposed ; he was not then the admired philosopher, the conspicuous sectary, the obnoxious subject, but the poor, secluded, unpopular preacher of a small market-town. The relative chronology of his opinions is curious. Not only were his changes of mind in complete anticipation of the stimulating period which closed the last century, but some of his most startling sentiments were the earliest em- braced ; he had maintained the inconclusiveness of St. Paul's reasoning, gone all lengths with the doc- trine of necessity, and rejected his belief in divine influence, before he had been in the ministry three years. And on the other hand, when the time of restless theory came, and all old opinions were loos- ened, and the whole creed of society, political, social, and religious, was broken up for reconstruction, his convictions had been made up ; he had not to take up his opinions amid the maddening excitement which, in the eagerness to enthrone reason, thrust her from her seat ; calmer moments had been devoted to the task, and in the retrospect of his own mind he saw an epitome of the mental revolution whose rapid transitions were hurrying by. Hence the steady posture which he assumed amid all the revelry of speculation which he witnessed ; hence, with all his exultation in the new prospect which seemed to open upon society, he appeared as a conservator, no 16 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. less frequently than as an assailant, of existing opin- ions. It would indeed be difficult to select from the benefactors of mankind one who was less acted upon by his age, whose convictions were more en- tirely independent of sympathy ; in the whole circle of whose opinions you can set down so little to the prejudgments of education, to the attractions of friendship, to the perverse love of opposition, to the contagion of prevailing taste, or to any of the irreg- ular moral causes which, independently of evidence, determine the course of human belief. We do not assert that he was not precipitate; we do not say that he cast away no gems of truth in clearing from the sanctuary the dust of ages; we do not deny that, in his passion for simplification, he did some- times run too rapidly through a mystery, and pro- pound inconsiderate explanations of things deeper than his philosophy. But we maintain that his sources of fallacy, whatever they were, were from within, and not from without; that he was no man for the second-hand errors of indolent or imitative intellects ; that his faults were all those of a search- ing, copious, and original mind. We have said that Dr. Priestley's theological in- quiries followed the order of his doubts : his conver- sion followed the order of his inquiries, his publica- tions the order of his conversion, and his influence the order of his publications. Hence in part has arisen among Unitarians a conventional arrangement of their theological peculiarities, always beginning with the question respecting the person of Christ, and ending with Universal Restoration. Every com- DR. PRIESTLEY. 17 pletc published defence of their tenets, and almost every systematic course of public lectures in their chapels, exhibits this particular sequence of faith. It was not unnatural that the order of investigation should become, in Dr. Priestley's mind, the order of importance : in each succeeding inquiry he would use, in addition to its independent evidence, the con- clusion established in the preceding; and, at the end of the process, the first step would seem to be more purely and directly drawn from Scripture, and the next to be of a more inferential character. The or- der of discovery, however, is seldom the best order of proof; nor is either the best order for popular ex- position; and we think it, on some accounts, unfor- tunate that Unitarianism has disposed itself so inflex- ibly along the graduated scale marked out by the steps of its modern explorers. Whether we regard it as the negation of orthodoxy, or contemplate it as a set of positive and harmonious truths, this restric- tion is unnecessary. The ingenious construction of the popular system, which indissolubly cements to- gether its several dogmas, has its perils as well as its advantages. If any one of its tenets, on finding entrance into the mind, introduces its companions in its train, any one of them, on its departure, opens an exit for all the rest. It matters little, then, where you begin the assault ; the battery of your logic is circular, and, commence the fire where you may, will sweep the field. Or take the more interesting view of Unitarian Christianity, as a cluster of pos- itive doctrines, and the same remark holds good. With far less of the artificial ingenuity of system 2* 18 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. than the prevalent theology, it has still the, natural harmony of truth ; and the affinities which blend to- gether its parts are so close, as to spread a chain of delicate yet unbroken influence through the whole; and communicate the first spark of thought where you will, it will shoot from link to link to the farthest extremity. Unitarianism, we think, must discover more variety in its resources, must avail itself of more flexibility of appeal, must wield in turn its crit- ical, its philosophical, its social, its poetical, its devo- tional powers, before it gain its destined ascendency over the mind of Christendom. With great respect for the able contributions which Christian truth has received from its departed champions, we still must regard them as only contributions ; and think that the controversy must be again and again rewritten, and its whole form recast, before it may begin to number its triumphs. Though no external influences could produce that extraordinary versatility which characterized Dr. Priestley, the circumstances in his history which tended to encourage it are not unworthy of a pass- ing notice. During the lapse of seven years from the termination of his college life, he found himself in three different situations, each presenting strong, and almost exclusive, motives to a separate class of pursuits. First came a ministry of three years in a small country town, affording no occasions of active duty, and no distractions of society. Compelled to live on thirty pounds a year, watched, suspected, and partially deserted, by a congregation whose pie- ty vented itself in dread of heterodoxy, and finding DR. PRIESTLEY. 19 little congenial sentiment among his neighboring brethren, he devoted himself entirely to theological study, for which alone his library afforded him scope. Next he was a schoolmaster at Nantwich, under the same inability which every conscientious schoolmas- ter feels, to attend to any thing beyond the duties of his office ; and accordingly we here find him study- ing grammar and language. Thence he removed to Warrington, and there gave himself up with aston- ishing energy to the preparation of lectures on the theory of language, on oratory and the belles lettres, on history and general policy ; a class of topics almost entirely new to him, and for excellence in which there was little provision in the predominant qualities of his mind. Yet what he wanted of the critic's delicate perception he compensated by the philosopher's comprehensive views ; and though his labors in these departments may not be destined to live, there is in his treatment of his subjects a breadth and magnitude and metaphysical spirit, which con- trasts favorably with the small and superficial criti- cism of his predecessors in the same field. In his conception of his object he is as much their superior, as he is inferior to the noble school of German crit- ics, whose genius has, in our own day, penetrated the mysteries, and analyzed the spirit, of poetry and the arts. Before he quitted his office of tutor, and after he had completed the composition of his lectures, an in- troduction to Dr. Price and Dr. Franklin gave the first impulse to his philosophical pursuits. Whether this event be estimated by its effect on his fame or 20 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. that upon his character, it must be regarded as among the most important in his life. The unpar- alleled ardor with which he prosecuted his newly ac- quired objects, and the signal success by which it was at once recompensed and stimulated, soon ren- dered it manifest that his intellect had found its appropriate direction ; and from this time, until his career was checked by persecution, he continued to give to the world a series of discoveries, capable of comparison, in their variety and productiveness, with the achievements of the most honored names in the records of physical science. Of the qualities of mind which he brought to the study of Nature and her laws, it will be our business to speak hereafter : we notice his philosophical pursuits here, merely as they relate to the history of his character. Great as their influence upon him was, they wrought no revolution, no change, in his habits and feelings. All that he had been he continued to be ; all that he had done he continued to do. Their operation was one of pure addition. They extended his reverential gaze on creation over a wider field ; they quickened his marvellous activity ; they expanded his benevolence ; they deepened his piety ; they illustrated his own principle, that every intellectual and moral attain- ment sheds illumination on every other, and that mental power multiplies itself indefinitely : and they completed that rare combination of qualities by which, in an age of infidelity and of arbitrary power, science, liberty, and religion all found in him a fit- ting representative. Thus much we have said respecting the circum- DR. PRIESTLEY. 21 stances which were most deeply concerned in deter- mining the career of this eminent philosopher and di- vine. Our readers may wonder that we have omit- ted to notice the two most remarkable events of his history, his persecution at Birmingham and his retreat to America. The truth is, that the most romantic passages of human life are not always the most influential : our object has been, not to furnish an interesting narrative, but to sketch the records of a rnind ; and we think that the occurrences just men- tioned, taking place as they did, in the maturity of Dr. Priestley's mind, were means rather of indicating and developing than of forming his character. They will find, therefore, a more appropriate place in the analysis which we propose to attempt of that char- acter in its intellectual, moral, and religious rela- tions. If any one were to put forth the prospectus of a Cyclopaedia, proposing to write all the articles him- self, he would be set down for a genius or a mad- man. His admirers would think him the wonder of the world ; his opponents would cry out upon him as a shallow pretender. To the discerning, the concep- tion of such a design would disclose the true char- acter of his mind. To imagine the outline, and glance even rapidly from the Alpha to the Omega of human attainments, implies no ordinary power; to look over the wide continent of knowledge, and see it mapped out in all its bearings, and trace the great skeleton truths which form its mountain barriers, and follow the streams of beauty that wind below their base, is the prerogative of none but the com- 22 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. prehensive and far-sighted mind. But to suppose that the same intellect which sketches the outline can fill up the details, that he who understands the mutual relations of the different departments of sci- ence and art can unfold all their mysteries, betrays a miscalculation of the voluminous contents of human knowledge, and an ignorance of the varieties of in- tellectual power requisite to embrace them all. To refer to a catalogue of Dr. Priestley's works is like consulting a prospectus of a Cyclopaedia ; and it is impossible to remember that they are all the produc- tions of one individual, without the impression that his mind was more adventurous than profound, and its vision more telescopic than microscopic. How far this impression is just we may attempt to ascer- tain. We believe it to be the truth, but not the whole truth. There can be no doubt that versatility was the great characteristic of Dr. Priestley's genius. Singu- larly quick of apprehension, he made all his acqui- sitions with facility and rapidity ; and hence he de- rived a confidence in the working-power of his own mind, and a general faith in the sufficiency of the human faculties as instruments of knowledge, which led him on to achievement after achievement in the true spirit of intellectual enterprise. This excur- siveness of mind was encouraged by his metaphysi- cal creed. It has been the prevailing error of the Hartleian school, that they have made too light of the original differences of mental capability, con- scious, perhaps, that their philosophy has hitherto failed to explain them : and the natural consequence DR. PRIESTLEY. 23 of incredulity respecting the existence of peculiar genius is to give increased reliance on the efficacy of self-discipline, to lessen the motive to a division of intellectual labor, and make the mind a servant of all work. We are aware, however, that no specu- lative tenet is enough to account for the mental pecu- liarities of the individual who holds it; for the adop- tion of the tenet is itself a mental phenomenon, re- quiring to be explained, and frequently arising from that very constitution of mind which is supposed to be its effect. That Dr. Priestley thought little of the exclusive fitness of peculiar understandings for pecu- liar pursuits, is to be ascribed to the absence of any exclusive tendency in himself; that he was disposed to try every thing, arose from his having failed in nothing; the consciousness of power must precede the belief in power ; and the philosophy of the senti- ment, Possunt, qui posse videntur, is incomplete till the converse is added, Qui possunt, posse videntur. Dr. Priestley's extraordinary versatility, then, while it was confirmed by his intellectual philosophy, is to be traced to his possession of original endow- ments, bearing an equal relation to many depart- ments of knowledge. In theology, in mental and moral science, and, above all, in experimental chem- istry, his rapidity and copiousness of association, his prompt perception of analogies, his faith in the consistency of creation's laws, and his consequent passion for simplicity, were all available as means of detecting error, and aids in the discovery of truth. And the excellence which these qualities enabled him to attain in his several pursuits was of the same 24 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. kind in all. In none did they confer on him super- lative merit ; in some, at least, they led him into great faults : but in every one they fitted him to be the able and dauntless explorer, powerful to pene- trate the terra incognita of mystery, and quick to re- turn enriched with the spoils of fresh thought. Year after year he visited the temple of truth, and hung upon its walls some new exuviae : and who can wonder that his offerings in their abundance were more miscellaneous than rare ; that they consisted not always of the gold and the silver which could be for ever deposited in the sacred treasury, but sometimes of the scattered arms and fragments of wreck which were of little worth but as trophies of victory ? He was the ample collector of materials for discovery, rather than the final discoverer him- self; a sign of approaching order, rather than the pro- ducer of order himself. We remember an amusing German play, designed as a satire upon the philos- ophy of atheism, in which Adam walks across the stage, going to be created : and, though a paradox, it may be said that truth, as it passed through Dr. Priestley's mind, was going to be created : the requi- site elements were there ; the vital principle was stirring amid them, and producing the incipient types of structures that were yet to be ; but there was much that was unfit to undergo organization, much that could never be transmuted into forms of beauty, or filled with the inspiration of life ; and there must be other processes, before the mass emerges a graceful and a breathing frame. The characteristic qualities of Dr. Priestley's un- DR. PRIESTLEY. 25 derstanding led him to prosecute, with the greatest ardor, those subjects of inquiry in which but little progress had been made. The earlier and less exact stage of a science, which promises a great affluence of new phenomena, and admits of only the lower degree of generalization, and prepares the approach to the establishment of merely empirical laws, was that to which his powers were adapted. At a more advanced period of its history, when the field of observation is narrowed, and the demand for precise deduction increased, and where no appeal to fact can be of use, unless of the most refined and delicate kind, his faculties could have found no appropriate employment. In the age of Galileo he would prob- ably have gained a reputation for discoveries in optics or astronomy: in our days he might have aided the progress of geology : but in his own gen- eration the former had passed, while the latter had not reached the point at which alone he was able to apply an effective stimulus. It may be doubted whether, if he were living now, he would not find chemistry in advance of his peculiar genius ; whether its greatest discovery, the law of definite propor- tions, which has eminently enhanced the dignity, by increasing the precision of the science, would not appear to have spoiled it for his hand : and were a question to arise, what branch of it would retain the greatest attractions for a mind like his, no one could hesitate to answer, electro-chemistry, in which there is mystery enough still to stimulate an ardor like his, and glimpses enough of wonderful and ex- tensive laws to inspire the investigator with the 3 26 MARTINEAll's MISCELLANIES. perpetual feeling that he is on the eve of great dis- coveries. Could we have been permitted to select a period in the history of science with whose spirit his mind was most congenial, we should have set him down among the contemporaries or immediate followers of Bacon ; when, to a new and intelligent system of inquiry, Nature began to whisper her mighty secrets; when every penetrative mind that understood their value rushed to her shrine and lis- tened reverentially to the great oracle; when the rapidity of discovery, following close on a dreary track of centuries barren of philosophy, gratified the love both of the wonderful and of the true ; and when the passionate relish for fresh knowledge pre- vented the observance of definitive boundaries be- tween its different regions, and tempted the inquirer to a wide and adventurous range. Dr. Priestley has recorded of himself, that he exercised without diffi- culty the power of exclusive attention to any object of study ; but it would be a great error to suppose, that this mental habit in him was the same with that profound and steady abstraction which charac- terized the intellect of Newton, and amid whose stillness he slowly paced the upward steps of induc- tion to the sublimest law of the material creation. Dr. Priestley's attention was eager rather than pa- tient, active rather than laborious ; suited to subjects whose relations are various and simple, rather than few and intricate ; inclined to traverse kindred prov- inces of thought in quest of illustration, more than to remain immovable in the construction of a proof. His mind would become restive, if it had not scope. DR. PRIESTLEY. 27 It was incapable of proceeding long in the linear track of mathematical logic. The illumination of his genius was rather diffusive than concentrated. He could never have singled out any one phenome- non, and planted it in an intense focus of intellect- ual light, till he had fused it into its elements, and could exhibit its minutest component in distinct separation from the rest. The kind of accurate ob- servation and cautious analysis and finished induc- tion which Dr. Bradley manifested in his discovery of the aberration of light, and which at once de- tected, measured, and explained, by reference to a new cause, one of the minutest phenomena of the heavens, must be sought in a different order of intel- lect from Dr. Priestley's. During the origin of a science, when the object is to accumulate facts and arrange them according to their more obvious affinities, the quality most needed by the philosopher is the quick perception of analo- gies which we have ascribed to Dr. Priestley. Dur- ing its higher progress, when the object is to include large classes of facts under some general theory, or to measure the precise amount of causes already discovered, the quality most needed is a searching, discriminative power; a quality most rarely united with the former, and certainly not distinguishing the philosopher of whom we speak. Had he possessed it, few names greater than his would have appeared in the world's roll of honor. Because he wanted it, many of his philosophical works will have to be rewritten. Non omnis morielur; but while his opin- ions will live, his own exposition of them will hardly 28 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. satisfy the wants of a future age. That Dr. Hartley, at a time when no very precise limits had been drawn between physical and metaphysical science, should have entwined together a great truth in the philosophy of mind with a gratuitous speculation in the physiology of brain, is not surprising : that Dr. Priestley should have perceived that the doctrine of association was a fact, and the doctrine of vibrations a fancy, and have disentangled them from each other, is no more than might have been expected of his discernment : but that he should have separated them merely on the ground of their different evi- dence, without discovering their different provinces ; that, in his character of metaphysician, he should still have manifested a hankering after the very theory of which he had disencumbered his great master's philosophy ; that he should have been mis- led by the plausible analogy which promises to ex- plain the phenomena of mind by the changes of matter, indicates a want of clear perception with respect to the due limits of mental science which should have been reserved as the exclusive glory of the phrenologists. Dr. Priestley evidently thought, that, if there were but proof of the doctrine of vibra- tions, it might be duly expounded from the chair of moral philosophy; and had no idea that the pro- fessor who should do so would deserve a caning for his impertinence from his brother of the physiological school. Nor is this the only instance which marks his deficiency of acute discriminative power. The true test of this rarest and highest of human facul- ties is to be found in the researches of mental sci- DR. PRIESTLEY. 6v 4 ence ; its most refined exercise is required, and its greatest triumphs are achieved, in unravelling the subtile processes of reason, in penetrating the mov- ing throng of thoughts and feelings, and, through all their magic changes, distinguishing the separate character and origin of each ; and clear as a lens must that mind be, which, in transmitting through it the white light of intellect, can faithfully decom- pose it into its elemental colors. Dr. Priestley had far too much perspicacity not to perceive that mental analysis might be pushed much further, and, if intel- lectual science is to rank with other sciences, must be pushed much further, than it had been carried by the orthodox philosophers of Scotland. But we cannot think him happy in the specimens of analysis which he has left ; often ingenious, they are seldom complete ; they amount only to approximate solu- tions of the problem which he was encountering; they frequently furnish valuable hints to the future inquirer, and set him in the right track ; but in his eagerness to reach the object of his search, Dr. Priestley overleaps many needful steps of the pro- cess, or breaks off in the midst, and deems the task accomplished which a more careful thinker would feel to be only commenced. This disposition to post through a difficulty, and see nothing in it, is espe- cially apparent, we think, in his account of the idea of power, and in his attempt to explain the phe- nomena of memory; and throughout his works it would be in vain to look for any thing like the ana- lytical ingenuity of which later writers belonging to the same school, especially Brown and Mill, afford 3* 30 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. such elaborate, though unsatisfactory display. His merits in the department of mental science consist less in the success with which he attacked its diffi- culties, than the skill with which he multiplied its applications ; less in the light which he introduced into its interior recesses, than in the range of kindred subjects over which he spread its illumination. In his mind morals, history, religion, appeared tinged with it, and thence adorned with greater dignity. In- stances of this are to be found in his " History of Early Opinions," his sermons " On Habitual Devo- tion," " On Habit," " On the Duty of not Living to Ourselves," and above all, in his " Analogy of the Divine Dispensations " ; an essay which may be re- garded as perhaps the happiest effort of his mind, involving precisely that brief and simple exposition of a metaphysical principle with copiousness and magnitude of application, to which his powers were peculiarly adapted. There is, too, a solemnity in it, arising from the congeniality of its train of thought with all his faculties of intellect and soul, which is rarely perceptible in his writings. It is philosophy kindling itself into worship. Dr. Priestley's rank as a linguist and a critic may be inferred from the qualities which we have already ascribed or denied to him. The same fertility of association and love of analogy which facilitated to him the acquisition of a foreign language up to a certain point, rendered his complete mastery of it almost impossible. He wanted the imperturbable patience, the nice eye for minute differences, the un- wearied faith in the importance of an apparent DR. PRIESTLEY. 31 trifle, which are requisite to the character of the accomplished philologist. His knowledge of the laws of thought rendered him a perspicuous inter- preter of the theory of language ; and, if the sub- ject had been strongly urged upon his attention, would perhaps have made him a successful student of philosophical etymology, would have enabled him to detect the relations which group together in a few great families the whole population of words in the same language, and, having thus laid bare its pri- meval state, to trace the successive steps of associa- tion by which it has multiplied its resources, and refined its susceptibilities with the increasing wants and more delicate perceptions of the minds whose instruments it has been. There was nothing, at least, to prevent his delineation of the outline of such a history ; the details must have partaken of the defects already noticed in his mental analyses. Be this as it may, however, the attempt was never made. Nothing could ever have made him forget that language is only the vehicle of ideas, and the study of it, therefore, only a means to an end ; and we suspect that few who are habitually impressed with this undeniable truth will become men of eru- dition. We do not question the importance of minute criticism ; we admit that without it the whole meaning of an author cannot be developed, and that the lights and shades of expression which it brings out are really lights and shades of thought, consti- tuting an essential element in the graces of a for- eign literature. But most readers are utilitarians; of the amount of meaning which they lose by an 62 MARTINEAtTS MISCELLANIES. accuracy not absolutely finished they are necessarily unconscious, the quantity which they gain will seem enough for their purpose ; and, unless they possess a sensitiveness of taste seldom to be found, and read in order to gratify their perception of the beautiful, they will feel little inducement to brace themselves to the long, barren toils of the professed linguist. It may be doubted, however, whether Dr. Priestley renounced the needful labor upon any such deliber- ate calculation, and whether he did not greatly un- derrate the attainments requisite for a philologist. At least, we cannot but think that many of our grave professors, who can lecture an hour upon a word, would smile at his characteristic project of trans- lating the whole Hebrew Scriptures himself, during the intervals of other occupations, in three or four years. Dr. Priestley has repeatedly recorded of himself a remarkable deficiency of memory ; a want to be regretted less on its own account than because, in conjunction with another cause, it involved a mental failure of a more serious kind, a weakness of con- ception. By conception we mean the power of bringing vividly before the thoughts, in combination, the parts of any object or any scene which has been presented to the senses or the mind. It is emphati- cally the pictorial faculty needed by the illustrating artist, when, having gathered from Milton or from Byron the elements of his design, he brings them harmoniously together, and groups his figures, and makes his perspective, and disposes his lights ; needed by the historian, when, having learned the DR. PRIESTLEY. 33 catalogue of a great man's deeds, he blends these fragments into an image of his mind; or, having collected the dispersed events of a period, he dis- poses them in due relation before his view, so as to become familiar with the spirit of the time ; needed equally by the theologian, that he may live in thought through the sacred days of old, and become pilgrim in heart to the Holy Land ; that he may not only know how many stamens there are in the lilies of the field, and how many feet in the cedar's height, but see how they grace the plains of Jericho, or wave upon the top of Lebanon ; not only count the steps of the temple and tell the manufacture of the priest's robe, but gaze on the majestic pile from the Mount of Olives, or stand in the resplendence of its golden gate, and hear the murmur of the prayers, and watch the incense curling to the skies ; not merely dis- course on the properties of hyssop, and conjecture of what timber the cross was made, but mingle with the weeping daughters of Jerusalem, and raise a reverential eye towards the crucified, and listen to that fainting cry of filial tenderness. Now, both in his histories and in his theology, Dr. Priestley's de- ficiency of conception is much felt. In the former there is not, as far as we remember, a single deline- ation of character, a scene or a cluster of incidents as a whole, and consequently not any picture that leaves a strong impression upon the reader's mind : they are accounts, not of persons but of actions, not of eras but of events : the trains of contemporary occurrences in different localities are placed before us like a number of parallel lines, with no attempt 34 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. to twine them together ; and each course of succes- sive events like so many points, not melted into a continuous line. The nature of ecclesiastical his- tory itself offers, it is true, a great obstacle to the preservation of unity ; it is in its very essence a dis- location ; a number of events which form no proper class in themselves; apart arbitrarily cut out from the whole, comprising effects removed from their causes, and causes left alone by their effects : and, independently of this difficulty, the materials of ecclesiastical history are unpromising enough. Yet there are portions containing elements for strong im- pression ; there are persecutions, and councils, and crusades ; there are the broad contrasts of an idola- trous civilization and a barbarous Christianity, of the genius of Rome and the spirit of Christ, of the re- ligion of the East and the philosophy of the West ; there are matchless heroes of conscience in the Al- pine fastnesses, and intrepid reformers in the cities of Germany : and there is no reason why the power of these passages should be abandoned to the prov- ince of fiction. The want of picturesque effect in Dr. Priestley's narratives involves in a great degree a loss of moral effect ; by giving a ground plan of a persecution, and an enumeration of all the horrors it contained, he produces rather a disgust at the butch- ery than enthusiasm at the magnanimity with which it is said to have been met. The merit of his his- tories is to be sought, not in their narrative of inci- dents, but in their exposition of opinions ; not in the facts, but in the inferences ; not in the delineation which shows what society was, but in the philosophy which proves what it must have been. DR. PRIESTLEY. 35 That the deficiency of which we speak must di- minish the interest of his theological writings, that it must unfavorably influence their manner, will be readily admitted by all ; but it may not be at once obvious how it could affect their matter, and lessen their intrinsic soundness and truth. It is, however, evident that, c&teris paribus, in proportion as an in- terpreter of ancient writings can place himself in sympathy with his author, can plant himself by his side and look round on his position, can even take occupancy of his very mind, and discover how all things are tinged by the hues of his peculiar intel- lect and feelings, the chances are multiplied that the interpretation will be correct. Indeed, it is merely as aids to this transmutation of mind on the part of the student that the labors of the Scripture natural- ist, the traveller, and the archasologist are valuable. Now Dr. Priestley appears to us to have been in- capable of thus laying down his own personality : at the foot of Sinai, among the captives of Babylon, in audience of the minstrelsy of Israel, on the pave- ment of the temple, in the hired house of Paul, or with the exile in Patmos, he is the good, plain, spec- ulative Dr. Priestley still. He moves like a foreigner through all the scenes which he visits, too restless to take up his abode in them, and grow warm beneath their suns, and find a home among their people, and learn the spirit of their joys and sorrows, and be ranked as one who "loveth their nation." Accord- ingly, his theology is too much an Occidental system transplanted into the East ; he sees vastly too much philosophy, and vastly too little poetry, in the Scrip- 36 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. tures. He shows too much disposition to change their beautiful histories into imperfect ethics; and perhaps, by missing the object which the writers had in view, estimates their logic with real injustice. Whether illustrations of these peculiarities may not be found in his extensive use of the Gnostic philos- ophy as a key to the writings of the Apostle John, in his interpretations of the Jewish prophecies, in his anticipations with respect to the mode of transi- tion from this life to another, and in his apprecia- tion of the letters of Paul, we leave to be decided in the court of enlightened Biblical criticism. Let not our admissions with respect to Dr. Priestley's theology be unfairly used. A name like his is in- deed in little danger from such concessions. Let it be remembered that they leave unimpeached the cor- rectness of the processes by which he proved and proved again the great truths which form the defini- tion of Unitarian Christianity ; and until the time shall come (and it will not be soon) when the abso- lute unity of God, the universality and paternity of his government, and the simple humanity of Christ, shall need no more defence, recourse will be had to the store-house of perspicuous proof which his works contain. Who can draw for us truly the boundary between the intellectual and the active part of human nature ? The faculties into which wise men distribute the mind, like the hemispheres into which geographers divide the earth, though definable enough in theory, are hard to discriminate in practice. Nothing clearer than the equator upon a paper globe ; and in our DR. PRIESTLEY. 37 paper metaphysics, nothing is easier of discovery than that Chapter VI. treats of one faculty, and Chapter VII. of another; but Nature is far from being so obligingly distinct. We remember the days when, in our childish conceptions of crossing the line, a piece of graduated cord, belting the earth, was discernible ; and philosophy has perhaps been chargeable with a similar puerility of expectation in its progress from the mental to the moral regions of the mind. They blend indistinguishably, and recip- rocate their energies, like the waters of the Northern and the Southern seas, whose currents flow and whose billows roll together, irrespective of the arti- ficial limits of science. In the spiritual, however, as in the material world, Nature gives notice of our approach to her impalpable boundaries : she has her realms of transition : the traveller, nearing the earth's other half, finds a more copious vegetation, and warmer suns, and loftier skies, and bluer hills : and the explorer of the soul, passing from the intel- lect to the morality of man, will find an intermedi- ate region, adorned with a more exuberant foliage of thought, invested with a more glowing atmosphere of emotion. It is in no trifling sense that the poet- ical faculty, the perception and the love of beauty, whether physical or moral, may be said to lie be- tween the thinking and the motive departments of the mind : it cannot be identified with either, yet it pervades both : it belongs exclusively to neither, yet sheds an influence on both, kindling with new tints both truth and goodness : like the constellations of the equatorial heavens, it has its stars in both hemi- 4 38 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. spheres, and cannot be cut off from either without extinguishing some of its essential lights. But perhaps we are making a longer pilgrimage than was needful from Dr. Priestley's intellectual to his moral character; for in fact very little lay be- tween. With him duty was a portion of truth, a series of inferences from his philosophy ; clear and strong conviction, rather than warm affection, char- acterized his notions of right. Never was there a mind over which moral principle exercised a more paramount sway; but his was no blind and super- stitious obedience : with him conscience could not be moved without being convinced ; but only show him on evidence the reasonableness of any habit or train of feelings, and he would set himself to its cul- tivation without further demur ; he would no more have thought of not doing what was right, than of not believing what was true. No one can be sur- prised that Dr. Priestley repudiated as an absurdity the doctrine of an instinctive moral sense ; for he was singularly free from those mental qualities which lead to this belief. It is the natural creed of those whose intellects are slow in comparison with the quickness of their feelings, whose moral judgment possesses a speed too fast for their mental eye to trace, flashing on them with such velocity and in- tensity that, like the lightning, they seem to dart from heaven to earth, without traversing the space between. Dr. Priestley's mind was the reverse of this ; his emotions were never so intense as to sus- pend his observing faculty; and his intellect was rapid enough to keep pace with them and mark their DR. PRIESTLEY. 39 apparent course. His sentiments of moral approba- tion and disapprobation sufficiently resembled the processes of assent and dissent to send him in quest of a common origin for both in the association of ideas. It is instructive to compare the corresponding parts of such different characters as Mrs. Barbauld's and Dr. Priestley's ; and in the essay on devotional taste by the former, contrasted with the strictures on it by the latter, we have a picture of the piety of the exclusive- ly poetical, placed side by side with that of the exclu- sively philosophical. Every religious mind feels its religion to be the loftiest object of its regard, to lie at the very summit of its powers ; and in the effort to reach the infinite and eternal, in yearning to shadow forth the idea of unlimited perfection, naturally seeks for its faith an alliance with all that appears most interesting and glorious. Mrs. Barbauld's passion was for the beautiful and the sublime ; and to her, de- votion was poetry, akin to the aspirations of genius : Dr. Priestley knew nothing so noble as truth ; and to him devotion was philosophy gazing calmly at the only object above itself. Mrs. Barbauld saw in all creeds some elements of adoration for the heart, and dreaded lest controversy should brush off the emo- tions they awakened : Dr. Priestley saw in all creeds much error, and hoped that controversy would render them more quickening, by making them more pure. Mrs. Barbauld understood the natural language of art, felt the deep expressiveness of whatever is beau- tiful in form and sound, and would have given to piety the majesty of architecture, and the voice of 40 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. music : Dr. Priestley though^ that the eye and the ear, with their physical gratifications, were only in the way in the work of realizing great general truth, and "would have worshipped with the simplicity of a spirit in space. Mrs. Barbauld reverenced human affections, even in their illusions and extravagances ; she saw in them the passion for excellence, and the propensity to believe in its reality; she had probably observed the important fact (so conspicuous in Dod- dridge), that the tempers which are most devotional are generally the most tender in their human rela- tions ; she could discover no specific difference be- tween the emotions yielded to ideal excellence on earth, and invisible perfection in heaven; and she dared to find an analogy between piety and love : Dr. Priestley, little given to Platonisms of fancy, holding that all feeling should be proportioned to the real qualities of its object, and forgetting that it can- not overpass the gulf between the created and the Creator, and expand itself to literal infinitude, con- demned the expression as false and profane. Perhaps each was right, except in condemning the notions of the other. Happily, religion has its affinities with the whole soul, and there is no faculty incapable of worship. One mind is affected by conceptions of immeasurable space and time, another by ideas of life and change : one prefers the blank, great truth, another the single and moving instance : one to go forth and seek the object of its adoration in fields be- yond the solar light, another to bring his image home, and feel him in the closet or in the mind : one, when standing before the invisible, may love to look into - DR. PRIESTLEY. 41 the deep background of infinity which lies behind created things; another, to gaze on the beautiful forms of reality, sketched on its dark surface, and take them as types of what lies in the depth. Why limit the modes of devotional conception? Why say to any emotions or any thoughts, " You shall not worship," to any desires, " You shall not pray " ? There can be no proprieties here. Prayer is no more than the utterance, the irrepressible utterance, of the affections which most adorn and dignify human na- ture; it is the soul's act in laying itself consciously open at the feet of God ; it is the gush of tenderness with which the spirit pours forth its burning emo- tions of veneration and love ; it is the joy, or the agony, or the shame of placing the mind as it is, in contact with the great parent mind, that its sins may become clearer, its wants more craving, that its life may be quickened, and its sympathies refreshed. This is the end, this the temper of piety ; every thing else is but its instrument ; and that mode of thought and expression which is truest to each individual mind, must be that mind's best vehicle of devotion. But however little of apparent glow there might be in Dr. Priestley's piety, it was, like every thing else in his nature, sincere and true ; and it conducted him with a moral dignity, sometimes reaching the high- est kind of greatness, through a life of no ordinary vicissitude. It is difficult, even at this distance of time, in the quiet of one's study, with abundant proofs that better times have set in, nay, in immedi- ate view of ten Irish bishops and church-rates disap- pearing under the ministerial extinguisher, to read 4* 42 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. the history of the Birmingham riots with due com- posure. And yet the great sufferer himself, the pastor driven from his flock, the author despoiled of his manuscripts, the toil of years, the philosopher almost within hearing of the crash of his apparatus, the philanthropist hunted for his noble sympathy with his race, the man robbed of his social rights, uplifts amid the violence a front of unbroken, yet not cold magnanimity. Indeed, it is this very calm- ness, so instantaneous, so unlabored, so utterly free from stoicism, far more than the mere exhibition of suffering, that is most affecting in this narrative. There is an evident simplicity and fidelity in his de- lineation of his own state of mind which inspires one with that most delightful feeling, perfect faith in a fellow-being. There is no excitement; the deeps of his nature were stirred, but they were only freshened, not thrown into storm : there is no exaggeration, no consciousness of being an object of interest, no en- durance for the sake of setting an example, no sec- tarian triumph secretly exclaiming, " See what my principles can do": the same sentiments of sublime necessarian piety, the same indignation quelled in the faith that present evil is the index that points to future good, the same compassion for those who wronged him, neither mawkish nor haughty, which appear in his replies to public addresses, appear also, and with just the same prominence, in his careless and familiar letters. It was obvious that in all times past he had been faithful to his scheme of Christian philosophy, and deeply imbedded in his mind and heart every principle which his judgment had led him DR. PRIESTLEY. 43 to advocate. And he lived to afford a long fulfil- ment to his own prediction of the efficacy of his faith. After lingering in England long enough to follow to the grave his tried friend, Dr. Price, to see other as- sociates fast falling around him, to find himself shunned by the society which represented the science of his country, and whose records he had enriched by his discoveries, to be wearied by ceaseless calum- nies in the senate and from the press, and feel that here was no home for himself or his children : on the confines of old age, he went forth to die in the land on whose promised destinies his eye, ever brightened by the hopes of humanity, had long been fixed ; deeming it happier to live a stranger on the shores of liberty, than be dependent on the tender mercy of tyrants for a footing on his native soil. There, in one of its remoter recesses, on the outer margin of civilization, he, who had made a part of the world's briskest activity, who had led on the speed of its progress, whose mind had kept pace with its learn- ing, and overtaken its science, and outstripped its freedom and its morality, gathered together his re- sources of philosophy and devotion ; thence he looked forth on the vicissitudes and prospects of Europe, with melancholy but hopeful interest, like the proph- et from his mount on the land whose glories he was not to see. But it was not for such an energetic spirit as his to pass instantaneously into the quietude of exile without an irrecoverable shock. He had not that dreamy and idle pietism which could enwrap itself in the mists of its own contemplations, and be- lieve heaven nearer in proportion as earth became 44 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. less distinct. The shifting sights and busy murmurs that reached him from afar, reminded him of the circulation of social toils which had plied his hand and heart. Year after year passed on, and brought him no summons of duty back into the stir of men : all that he did he had to devise and execute by his own solitary energies, apart from advice and sympa- thy, and with no hope but that of benefiting the world he was soon to quit. The effort to exchange the habits of the city for those of the cloister was astonishingly successful. But his mind was never the same again ; it is impossible not to perceive a decline of power, a tendency to garrulity of style and eccentricity of speculation in his American publica- tions. And yet, while this slight though perceptible shade fell upon his intellect, a softened light seemed to spread itself over his character. His feelings, his moral perceptions, were mellowed and ripened by years, and assumed a tenderness and refinement not observable before. Thanks to the genial and heav- enly clime which Christianity sheds around the soul, the aged stem burst into blossom. And so it will always be when the mind is pervaded by a faith as real as Priestley's. There is no law of nature, there are no frosts of time, to shed a snow-blight on the heart. The feelings die out, when their objects come to an end ; and if there be no future, and the aims of life become shorter and shorter, and its treasures drop off, and its attractions are spent, and a few links only of its hours remain in the hand, well may there be no heart for effort and no eye for beauty, and well may love gather itself up to die. But open perfec- DR. PRIESTLEY. 45 tion to its veneration, and immortality to its step ; tell it of one who is and will always be the inspirer of genius, the originator of truth, the life of emotion; assure it that all which is loved shall live for ever, that that which is known shall enlarge for ever, that all which is felt shall grow intenser for ever ; and the proximity to death will quicken instead of withering the mind ; the eye will grow dim on the open page of knowledge; the hand will be found clasping in death the instruments of human good; the heart's last pulse will beat with some new emotion of benig- nity. In Priestley's case there was not merely a sus- tainment, but a positive advancement of character in later years. The symptoms of restlessness gradually disappear without abatement of his activity ; a qui- etude as of one who waits and listens comes over him ; there are touches of sentiment and traces of tears in his letters, and yet an obvious increase of serenity and hope ; there is a disposition to devise and accomplish more good for the world, and ply himself while an energy remained, and yet no anxi- ety to do what was beyond his powers. He succes- sively followed to the grave a son and a wife ; and the more he was left alone, the more did he learn to love to be alone ; and in his study, surrounded by the books which had been his companions through half a century and over half the earth, and sitting be- neath the pictures of friends under the turf, he took his last survey of the world which had given him so long a shelter : like a grateful guest before his depart- ure, he numbered up the bright and social or the ad- venturous hours which had passed during his stay ; 46 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. and the philosophers who had welcomed him in his annual visits to London, the broad, sagacious face of Franklin, the benignant intelligence of Price, rose up before him, and the social voices of the group of heretics round the fireside of Essex Street floated on his ear ; and, as the full moon shone upon his table, and glistened in his electrical machine, his eye would dream of the dining philosophers of the Lunar Society, and light up to greet again the doughty features of Darwin, and the clear, calculat- ing eye of Watt. Yet his retrospective thoughts were but hints to suggest a train of prospective far more interesting. The scenes which he loved were in the past, but most of the objects that clothed them with associations of interest were already trans- ferred to the future ; there they were in reserve for him, to be recovered (to use his own favorite phrase, slightly tinged with the melancholy spirit of his soli- tude) "under more favorable circumstances"; and thither, with all his attachment to the world whose last cliffs he had reached, and whose boundary ocean already murmured beneath, he hoped soon to emi- grate. There are few dispositions of which society ex- hibits rarer practical traces than the love of truth. There is abundance of profession ; but the more the profession, the less the reality. Where the feeling is genuine, truth is the mind's vernacular language ; and to give grave notice of an intention to utter it would be as absurd as if an advocate, on rising, were to say to the jury, " Gentlemen, I most sol- emnly assure you, that in what I am about to lay DR. PRIESTLEY. 47 before you I mean to speak English." In propor- tion as faith in truth becomes more common, it will cease to be matter of pretension. Were we to des- ignate Dr. Priestley in one word, that word would be "truth"; it would correctly describe the employ- ment of his intellect, the essential feeling of his heart, the first axiom of his morality, and even the impression of his outward deportment. He had none of that reckless sportiveness which makes play- things of opinions, and, for an hour's amusement, looks in at them, and turns them about, like the beads of a kaleidoscope, watching what fantastical shapes they may be made to assume. He had no sympathy with the sceptical philosophy which sees nothing but error in all human speculation, nothing but " sick men's dreams " in the mutations of opin- ion. That there is such a thing as truth, that it is not placed beyond the reach of the human under- standing, and that, when found, it is necessarily a pure good, were the first principles of his faith ; prin- ciples which he did not promulgate in their general form, and then reject in their applications, but car- ried out boldly, and without reserve, into every topic which invited his research. So utterly untrue is it that he had a passion for unsettling convictions, and then leaving the mind in a state of fluctuation, that if he committed any marked fault in the conduct of investigation, it was this; that he recognized no other posture of the understanding in reference to the subject of its inquiry than assent and dissent; that the intermediate state of doubt he disowned, except as a means of transition to one of the other 48 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. two ; and overlooked the fact, that, as there may be questions in which the conflicting evidence is accu- rately balanced, there may be occasions on which, in the present condition of human knowledge, sus- pense is the appropriate feeling. His tendency was much more to dogmatize than to doubt ; a dogma- tism, however, which, if occasionally appearing after investigation, never manifested itself before. With this limitation, his impartiality was unimpeachable. That his inquiry must lead to the positive discovery of truth or falsehood was certainly a species of pre- judginent; but it could not determine him unfairly towards either of two antagonist opinions ; it could only preclude from the rejection of both. In his comparison of the opposing claims of evidence, his faith in truth never deserted him ; altogether annihi- lating the influence of his previous impressions, and not even allowing them a presumption of innocence till proved to be guilty. His versatility of associa- tion rendered alterations of belief easier to him than to others : his feelings were not adhesive ; they could without violence be transferred from one class of sentiments to another ; and accordingly, even to the period of life when old impressions become indu- rated, and the emotions tardy of change, he was continually modifying his convictions, adopting new views with a facility truly wonderful, quickening them with life, and carrying them out to their re- moter consequences with energy and fearlessness. His defence of the doctrine of phlogiston, when dis- carded by all other philosophers, is the solitary in- stance in his life of prejudiced tenacity of opinion ; DR. PRIESTLEY. 49 and this was evinced in the decline of life, when even to him the difficulty must have been great of admitting a new theory, and applying it to the solu- tion of facts which had been regarded as otherwise explained, and when, moreover, his attention had ceased to be actively directed to chemical inquiries. Any one who is aware how much the very memory of facts by the mind is dependent on the hypothesis which has been employed as the principle of their arrangement, or even as the guide to their discovery, will be disposed to treat this error rather as interest- ing to the mental philosopher, than as justifying the severity of the critic. The spirit of freedom and of faith which conducted him through his private inqui- ries, he carried out into his publication of their re- sults. Ingenuous to himself, he was equally ingenu- ous to the world. He saw through the contemptible fallacies by which worldliness and imbecility would defend the suppression of opinions ; ease, popularity, sectarian prosperity, he held to be bawbles compared with the duty of individual thought and speech, and sins if purchased at its expense. Not even could he think his task to society performed when he had stated and recommended the truths which he seemed to have reached : he lays before the world the whole process of his own mind; tells his difficulties, his failures, his false inferences, the hypotheses which misled as well as those which aided him ; so that if his thoughts had fallen into type as they arose, they could scarcely have been more distinct. Hence he excelled much more in analytical than in synthetical composition, and seldom attempted the latter with- 5 50 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. out sliding continually into the former. And what- ever may be thought of their relative merits, regard- ed as methods of direct instruction, it cannot be doubted that the successful investigator, who has the honesty to write analytically, bequeathes in this pic- ture of his own intellect an invaluable guide to future inquirers in the same field, and a most inter- esting study to the observer of the human mind. In nothing did Dr. Priestley's mental and moral freedom more nobly manifest itself than in his well- proportioned love of truth. With all his diversity of pursuit, he did not think all truth of equal impor- tance, or deem the diffusion of useful knowledge an excuse for withholding the more useful. With all his ardor of mind, he did not look at an object till he saw nothing else, and it became his universe. He made his estimate deliberately ; and he was not to be dazzled, or flattered, or laughed out of it. In his laboratory, he thought no better of chemistry than in his pulpit ; and in the drawing-rooms of the French Academicians, no worse of Christianity than by the firesides of his own flock. He was never anxious to appear in either less or more than his real character. Even at the time when his name was most illustrious, and his associations the most close with the atheistical philosophers of the Continent ; when he was courted by the revolutionists of Eng- land, when, by the persecution and desertion of all others, he was more especially thrown upon the sympathy of those men, and a noble and fascinating sympathy it was ; when they urged him to quit the " unfruitful fields of polemical divinity, and cultivate DR. PRIESTLEY. 51 the philosophy of which he was the father," and promised him thus an eternal fame; he assures them that he esteems his theology of far greater im- portance to mankind than his science, and risks his reputation at its height, by making it the vehicle to carry the great principles of religion before the almost inaccessible mind of the sceptics of France : perceiving the affinities and analogies which subsist- ed between the different departments of human knowledge, he did not desire to divorce them in his own mind, and derive a separate character from each. His philosophy is replete with faith, and his faith with philosophy ; his conceptions of the Creator aid him in deciphering the creation ; and every discovery in creation contributes a new element to his ideas of the Creator. The changes of the universe are the movements of God ; and he that contemplates them without reference to the mind of which they are ex- pressive, might as well study the laws of human action in the gestures of an automaton. It is impossible to make human character a study without being tempted to speculate on the causes of the marvellous varieties which it exhibits. That those causes are not all external to the mind, scarcely admits of a doubt ; and so difficult is it to define, or even to conjecture, those which are inherent in the mental constitution, that the philosophy of individual character can hardly be said to have any existence. Priestley was an adherent of that school by which all the phenomena of mind, whether intellectual or moral, were resolved into cases of the law of associ- ation ; but why the law in question, operating on 52 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. the ideas furnished by sensation, should produce results so much more widely divergent from each other than are the external circumstances of man- kind, is a problem very embarrassing to the resources of this doctrine. Perhaps more might be explained by original differences of sensibility than is com- monly imagined. Were it true that the affections are the results of pleasurable and painful associa- tions, that desire is simply the idea of a pleasure, and aversion the idea of a pain, it would follow that the vividness of the affections, the strength of the desires, and aversions must depend on the viv- idness of the primary sensation ; in other words, that the warmth of the moral part of human na- ture must vary with the degree of original sensi- bility. In this explanation, however, it is evident that no reason is involved, accounting for the relative promi- nence of the several moral faculties ; it is only their absolute strength, the amount of fervor and enthusi- asm, which would be explained. Possibly, however, the theory might be carried further, so as to provide an adequate cause for several intellectual peculiari- ties. The sensations supposed to form the elements of all knowledge are received either simultaneously or successively : when several are received simultane- ously, as the smell, the taste, the color, the form, &c., of a fruit, their association together constitutes, ac- cording to this theory, our idea of an object ; when received successively, their association makes up the idea of an event. Any thing, then, which should javor the associations of synchronous ideas, would DR. PRIESTLEY. 53 tend to produce a knowledge of objects, a perception of qualities ; while any thing which should favor association in the successive order would tend to produce a knowledge of events, of the order of occurrences, and of the connection of cause and effect : in other words, in the one case a perceptive mind, with a discriminative feeling of the pleasura- ble and painful properties of things, a sense of the grand and the beautiful, would be the result ; in the other, a mind attentive to the movements and phe- nomena, a ratiocinatlve and philosophic intellect. Now it is an acknowledged principle in the philos- ophy of suggestion, that all sensations experienced during the presence of any vivid impression become strongly associated with it, and with each other ; and does it not follow, that the synchronous feelings of a sensitive constitution (i. e. the one which has vivid impressions) will be more intimately blended than in a differently formed mind ? This sugges- tion involves an inference which might serve to verify or refute it ; that where nature has endowed an indi- vidual with great original susceptibility, he will prob- ably be distinguished by fondness for natural history, a relish for the beautiful and great, and moral enthu- siasm; where there is but a mediocrity of sensi- bility, a love of science, of abstract truth, with a deficiency of taste and of fervor, is likely to be the result. Might not many of Dr. Priestley's characteristics be traced, in consistency with his own philosophy, to such an original mediocrity of sensibility ? his want of memory, to a deficient vividness in the asso- 5* 54 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. elated ideas ? his versatility and rapidity of asso- ciation, to the absence of any strong concentrative emotion tending to arrest his thoughts at any point in a train, and to forbid them to pass on? the direction of his analogical power towards philosophi- cal invention, rather than poetical imagination, to his want of perception of the beautiful ? his even- ness of temper and spirits, to a freedom from that alternate action and reaction to which susceptible minds are liable ? Perhaps even the inability which he mentions to do any thing when hurried, might admit of a similar explanation. For what is the feeling of hurry, but a belief that an unusual exer- cise of vigor, a great gathering of power, must be put in requisition, in order to accomplish some de- sired object? And one whose uniformity of tem- perament gives no experience of such occasional expansion of power has no faith in its possibility, or its effect : and hence he despairs, when the man of impulse becomes inspired. We throw out these brief hints with great diffidence, for the consideration of those who feel the defects, and would improve the resources, of the association-philosophy ; they can be of no further use, than to suggest something better than themselves to more competent thinkers. Our main object in the remarks which have been made on Priestley has been, to revive the memory of a great man, at a period more favorable than any since his death to a just estimate of his character; to furnish a faithful delineation of his whole mind ; to aid in determining his true position among the bene- factors of mankind; and define his claims on the DR. PRIESTLEY. 55 veneration of his country. If we have in any de- gree succeeded in these objects, it will be no slight satisfaction to have performed some little part of the act of posthumous justice due from this gen- eration. THE LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D.* [From the Prospective Eeview for February, 1845.] IN the preparation of these volumes Mr. Stanley had to perform a sad and solemn task. To present to the world the last glimpse of one who had been its benefactor, is at all times a melancholy office. But it is a bitter grief to do this for one whose past performance, admirable in itself, was less great than his future promise, and on whom men looked as yet with expectant, rather than with grateful eye. Eng- land was not prepared to lose Arnold ; and finds it hard to accept his final image from his biographer, in place of much fruitful work from himself. Under the pressure of occupations that would exhaust the energy of ordinary men, he had not only meditated, but in part achieved, a system of designs by which the historical, philosophical, and Christian literature of his country would have been permanently en- riched, and the spirit of its social life sensibly ele- * The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D. D., late Head Master of Rugby School, and Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, M. A., Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford. In two Volumes. Fellowes. 1844. DR. ARNOLD. 57 vated. Just as he was raised into a position prom- ising to render his industry and enthusiasm most rapidly productive, he has vanished from our hopes ; and instead of those priceless stores of uncommuni- cated wisdom, the leaves casually scattered from his table are gathered together, and presented as his last memorial. In the midst of the third act the curtain has suddenly dropped ; and rises only to show us the noble form, lately kindling with humane and earnest speech, now stretched in the silence of death. Happily, however, it is only in the case of ordinary men that the value of a life can be measured by its quantity. The almost infinite worth to us of such a mind as Arnold's depends upon its quality; and if it only remains and toils in our midst long enough to show us the spirit and manner of its work, its high- est function is performed. Let the deep game of life be played with a divine skill, and we must not complain though the calculable stake which is won in our behalf be only nominal. However great the loss of Arnold's Roman History, it is as nothing to the wealth he leaves us in this Biography. From what a good man does there is no higher lesson to be learned than what he is ; his workmanship inter- ests and profits us as an expression of himself, and would become dead and indifferent to us, if, instead of being a human creation, it were the product of some mechanical necessity. That Arnold has lived, and shown how much nobleness and strength may maintain itself in an age of falsehood, negligence, and pretence, with this let us rest and be thank- ful. 58 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. The work before us is essentially an autobiogra- phy. The letters, which form its chief portion, ex- tend from the year 1817 to 1842 : and they present so vivid and complete an impression of the writer throughout the changes of his career, and the ripen- ing of his character, that little occasion remained for their editor to appear as an original biographer. He has had the rare modesty and merit to perceive this ; and in the chapters of his own, by which we are in- troduced to the several periods of the correspond- ence, every thing is kept in strict subordination to the legitimate purpose of the book: he evidently had no desire but to make us know the subject of his Memoirs ; and the affectionate singleness of his aim was itself an adequate security for tact and suc- cess in its accomplishment. There are indeed traces of abstinence and self-restraint in the treatment of his materials, for which we honor him. Nothing would have been easier than to have created private heart-burnings and sectarian animosities by the indis- creet use of such letters as Arnold's ; letters full of reference to every controversy of the day, and passing the freest judgment on most of the conspicuous actors in Church or State. Mr. Stanley's good taste has conducted him wisely through a very delicate task. If we were disposed to find any fault with its execution, we should complain that he has not told us more of the personal habits and minuter traits which so materially help us to conceive the physi- ognomy of a character. The few things of this kind which he has given us constitute most delight- ful elements in our image of Arnold ; his sofa full DR. ARNOLD. 59 of books, his boyish play, his daily walk beside the pony, his mountaineering rambles ; and we would fain have known his time of rising and of rest, the distribution of his hours, his method of study and composition, his love or disregard of external order, and such other trivial particulars as might complete the lineaments of his familiar life. Details of this kind, always full of expressiveness, are especially needed in a Life, the interest of which is that of portraiture, not of history. There is an entire ab- sence from this biography of all outward incident and adventure. Even the ordinary struggles are wanting, through which men of thought and ca- pacity, wrestling with poverty, or restrained by the singularities of their own genius, finally establish themselves in a professional career. There is not a single passage of suffering, not a - momentary crisis of difficulty, nothing like a dramatic attitude of events, from the opening to the close. Arnold's way was quietly opened before him from year to year, and he had only to occupy the successive positions into which the most commonplace external causes threw him. At no time was it his task to choose a lot, with the world before him ; but, what is more difficult, to travel on a routine path, without con- tracting the routine spirit, to keep the high-road of life, unsoiled by its dust, unexhausted by its heat, and pressing on to the last with all the freshness of an explorer. He was one who could be a hero with- out romance. To him " the narrow way that lead- eth unto life " was no mountain by-path of exist- ence, but just the personal track each faithful pilgrim CO MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. may pursue (though few, alas ! there be that find it) on the same " broad road " by which many pass to their destruction. It has been remarked, that a large proportion of the men who have obtained distinction in the world have been the last members of a large, or, as the Irish expressively term it, a long family. Among the English aristocracy this is the natural conse- quence of the law of primogeniture, and the prac- tices connected with it, which throw the younger sons into professions requiring, for their successful exercise, a healthy culture of personal qualities. In the middle class it must arise from the less anxious and elaborate care, the freer hand usually applied by parents to their latest than to their earliest charge. There is thus a larger proportion of self-formation in the character, and the natural forces of the mind, exempt from the repression of system, display them- selves, with less perhaps of the harmony that con- stitutes personal well-being, but with more of the strength which makes them effective on society. Arnold, the seventh child in a family early orphaned, was no exception to this rule. From childhood his mind seems to have been directed, rather than con- strained ; and, even during the eight years spent at Warminster and Winchester schools, to have indi- cated that eager and exclusive interest in every thing human, which at once disqualified him for eminence in Philology, in Science, in Metaphysics, and consti- tuted his greatness as an Historian, a Politician, and a Divine. Ballad poetry, dramatic representation, history, and geography, every thing which brought DR. ARNOLD. 61 before his conception life and its scenery, had irre- sistible attractions even for his boyhood. With what remarkable tact this sympathy enabled him to detect what was untrue to nature in the legends of nations, is manifest from the following sentence, written when he was fourteen years old : "I verily believe, that half at least of the Roman history is, if not totally false, at least scandalously exagger- ated : how far different are the modest, unaffected, and impartial narrations of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon." (Vol. I. p. 5.) His studies at Oxford tended to confirm his Real- ism of character. The neglect prevailing there of all formal science, with exception of the Deductive Logic, and the ascendant influence of Aristotle among the great masters of thought, and Thucyd- ides among the models of history, combined with the vehement state controversies of the day, and the exciting progress of the Peninsular war, to engage his enthusiasm with practical questions of society and government, and to strengthen his inaptitude for poetical or speculative thought. In the private friendships, indeed, which he formed in the little circle of Corpus Christi, there was much to counteract the objective and prosaic cast of his character ; his love especially for Keble and Mr. (now Justice) Coleridge, brought him under the influence of two minds, both of great richness, whose highest qualities formed the complement to his own. The first reverence with which an affectionate spirit looks up to one who is strong where it is weak, and light where it is dark, is often the birth-hour of its deep religious life : the 6 62 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. throbbing vital action in which the soul opens its chrysalis of sleepy and stationary habit, and assumes its free and winged state, amid the sunshine and the air of heaven. So it seems to us to have been with Arnold. His understanding was too robust, and his moral affections too decided, to be turned from their natural direction by any external agency; but his college attachments mingled an element of humility and devotion with a mental activity else too hardy and dogmatical ; gave him the feeling of a sphere of truth and beauty different from his own ; and habitu- ated his mind to that upward look of trust and won- der, which is not indeed piety itself, but is as truly its genuine antecedent, as the raised hat and sub- dued footfall on entering a church are the natural prelude to the hour of prayer and aspiration. The influence of these associates, however, though touch- ingly referred to in later years, was imperfectly ac- knowledged at the time; the external form of his opinions and the habits of his intellect seemed to be engaged in constantly withstanding it. He was characterized by a vehement, and even disputatious independence ; he apparently adhered to his utilita- rian, rather than esthetic estimate of the studies and attainments of the place ; insensible to the beauty of the Greek drama, which was too much a beauty of form to please a perception fond of the depth of human coloring, and slighting refined and fastidious scholarship, on the plea of preferring the study of things to that of words. Yet he entered his college a Jacobin, and quitted it a high Tory : he became a convert to the rigorous discipline by DR. ARNOLD. 63 which a taste for philological niceties is formed ; he permitted his theological doubts to be overawed and stifled by the remonstrance which Mr. Keble ad- dressed, not to his reason, but to his fears and his affections ; and in other ways gave symptoms of being now, for the first time, subdued into an appre- hension of a wisdom not his own, and led by the power of an unconscious deference. Indeed, with some apparent dogmatism, Arnold appears from this time to have been exceedingly susceptible of influ- ence from any man " rich in the combined and indi- visible love of truth and goodness." No sooner did he exchange the society of Corpus Christi for that of Oriel, on his election to his fellowship, than a fresh series of changes became apparent in his views : in the presence of Davison, Copplestone, Whately, he felt the irresistible action of a new intellectual climate ; and the seeds of all his characteristic be- liefs, productive afterwards of fruit so wholesome, rapidly germinated and struck root. His abhorrence of sacerdotal religion, his conception of a Christian TroXiTfi'a, his appreciation of the origin in human na- ture, and dangers in human society, of Conservation on the one hand and .Jacobinism on the other, all date from the time of his connection with Oriel : and much of the character of his future works is, perhaps, referable to the fact, that their materials were mainly collected during this period, and were results of his reading in the Oxford libraries, whilst he was in the enjoyment of his fellowship. Even where his subsequent opinions deviated from the standard of the Oriel school of liberal divines, we 64 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. may trace the operation of a new influence ; his veneration for Niebuhr and Bunsen completing the elevation of that structure of conviction of which the ground-plan had been traced in intimacy with Whately ; and imparting an historic richness and Gothic sanctity to a system of thought having its foundations in philosophy. To this succession of admirations and their powerful but healthful agency upon him, he beautifully alludes in a letter to Mr. Justice Coleridge, apparently justifying himself from the charge of a presumptuous mental independence. The date is January 26th, 1840. " Your letter interested me very deeply, and I have thought over what you say very often. Yet I believe that no man's mind has ever been more consciously influenced by others than mine has been in the course of my life, from the time that I first met you at Corpus. I doubt whether you ever submitted to another with the same com- plete deference as I did to you when I was an undergradu- ate. So, afterwards, I looked up to Davison with exceed- ing reverence, and to Whately. Nor do I think that Keble himself has lived on in more habitual respect and admiration than I have, only the objects of these feelings have been very different. At this day I could sit at Bun- sen's feet and drink in wisdom with almost intense rever- ence. But I cannot reverence the men that Keble rever- ences, and how does he feel to Luther and Milton ? It gives me no pain and no scruple whatever to differ from those whom, after the most deliberate judgment that I can form, I cannot find to be worthy of admiration. Nor does their number affect me, when all are manifestly under the same influences, and no one seems to be a master-spirit, fitted to lead amongst men. But with wise men in the way DR. ARNOLD. 65 of their wisdom, it would give me very great pain to differ ; I can say that truly with regard to your uncle, even more with regard to Niebuhr " I was brought up in a strong Tory family ; the first impressions of my own mind shook my merely received impressions to pieces, and at Winchester I was wellnigh a Jacobin. At sixteen, when I went up to Oxford, all the in- fluences of the place which I loved exceedingly, your influ- ence above all, blew my Jacobinism to pieces, and made me again a Tory. I used to speak strong Toryism to the old Attic Society, and greedily did I read Clarendon with all the sympathy of a thorough royalist. Then came the Peace, when Napoleon was put down, and the Tories had it their own way. Nothing shook my Toryism more than the strong Tory sentiments that I used to hear at , though I liked the family exceedingly. But 1 heard language at which my organ of justice stood aghast, and which, the more I read of the Bible, seemed to me more and more un- christian. I could not but go on inquiring, and I do feel thankful that now for some years past I have been living, not in scepticism, but in a very sincere faith which embraces most unreservedly those great truths, divine and human, which the highest authorities, divine and human, seem con- curringly to teach." Vol. II. p. 190. There is one instance in which this openness to persuasion through his affections appears to us to have impaired the simplicity and clearness of Ar- nold's conscience. We say this with absolute sor- row of a man whose memory we love with devotion almost unreserved. We say it with self-distrust, because conscious that, in bringing a charge of doc- trinal partiality, we may not ourselves be sufficiently without sin to cast the first stone. Still, we cannot 6* 66 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. satisfy ourselves that Arnold got rid of his doubts about the Trinity by fair means : and in the advice given to him on the subject, we see so much of the mischievous sophistry and dishonest morality cur- rent on these matters among divines, that we feel bound to enter our protest as we pass. When he was about to resign his fellowship and take orders, previous to his marriage, he found his course em- barrassed by doubts as to the doctrine of the Trinity. With the moral clearness and simplicity which inva- riably distinguished his natural judgments, he was willing to accept the doubt as a voice of God, and make a reverent pause in his career, while he listened to it, and pondered its intimations. But he was sur- rounded by associates who were incapable of appre- ciating such a state of mind, who lifted their hands in pious horror at his perplexity, and treated it as the first coil of the old serpent lurking, as of old, in the path of a guilty curiosity. How little sympathy, and how much misdirection, he met with at this trying crisis of his life, will be apparent from the following passage of a letter, addressed (-evi- dently by Keble) to Mr. Justice Coleridge, February 14th, 1819: " I have not talked with Arnold lately on the distressing thoughts which he wrote to you about, but I am fearful, from his manner at times, that he has by no means got rid of them, though I feel quite confident that all will be well in the end. The subject of them is that most awful one, on which all very inquisitive, reasoning minds are, I believe, most liable to such temptations, I mean the doctrine of the blessed Trinity. Do not start, my dear Coleridge : I do DR. ARNOLD. 67 not believe that Arnold has serious scruples of the under- standing about it, but it is a defect of his mind, that he cannot get rid of a certain feeling of objections, and par- ticularly when, as he fancies, the bias is so strong upon him to decide one way from interest : he scruples doing what I advise him, which is, to put down the objections by main force, whenever they arise in his mind, fearful that in so doing he shall be violating his conscience for a mainte- nance' sake. I am still inclined to think with you, that the wisest thing he could do would be to take John M. (a young pupil whom I was desirous of placing under his care) and a curacy somewhere or other, and cure himself, not by physic, i. e. reading and controversy, but by diet and regimen, i. e. holy living." Vol. I. p. 21. The sacerdotal sophistry of this letter is so com- plete and characteristic, that the subsequent career of the writer seems to be almost prefigured in it. To quench by the " main force " of an idolatrous reverence the truthful aspirations of a holy spirit, and suppress the starts of a waking conscience by the hideous nightmare of church power, is the grand aim of the school to which he belongs ; and the per- verseness with which he here designates the purest sincerity as " a defect of Arnold's mind," counsels a sceptical man to " take a curacy " in order to believe the doctrines he is to teach, and calls the dishonest stifling of thought in action " holy living," is singu- larly symptomatic of the moral blindness to which superstition inevitably tends. We are far from de- nying that there are cases of embarrassed thought, in which the advice here given would be the best, and the only cure must be sought in active duty, 68 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. not in lonely meditation. We admit the error of treating all sorts of doubt indiscriminately as mere affairs of the intellect, determinable by pure reason- ing, and equally possible to every condition of the character and will. Unquestionably, the effect upon a man of what is called " evidence " depends, in sub- jects of a moral nature, not less upon the suscepti- bility of his conscience and affections, than on the acuteness of his understanding: and any one who forbids us ever to judge others by their belief, and requires from us an equal sympathy for all states of mind consistent with good conduct, is deluded by the cant of a philosophy which he himself neither does nor can reduce to practice. There is no more full and direct expression of a man's whole mind than the faith by which he lives ; and by this, bet- ter than by any single symptom, do we know one another, and keep apart in strangeness, or draw to- gether in love. But there is a distinction to be drawn between spiritual and simply historical relig- ion, and between doubts arising from spiritual ob- tuseness, and those which are due to want of his- torical light. Religion, we conceive, like morals and physics, has first truths, which are incapable of being derived from any thing more certain than themselves, which the human mind, at a particular point of its development, invariably recognizes, and the in- tuition of which is a direct result of the activity of its highest faculties. As no one without senses could ascertain the reality of matter, or without self-con- sciousness become aware of the existence of mind, so no one without moral perceptions and desires DR. ARNOLD. 69 could learn the being or feel the presence of a God. Believing the knowledge of him to be in direct "pro- portion, not to the sharpness of the intellect, but to the purity, depth, and earnestness of the heart, we can understand why a moral remedy, rather than a speculative discipline, should be prescribed for the genuine atheist, and he should be desired to do the Will ere he deny the Agency of God. With one who questions a first truth, you can do nothing but improve his mental aptitude for apprehending it. But who can affirm that the doctrine of the Trinity stands in this predicament ? Who can say that there is any condition of the character to which it becomes self-evident ? that the numerical analysis of Deity is " experimentally " revealed through the moral dispositions ? The doctrine, as its supporters are the most eager to aver, is wholly the result of external testimony, and on the right reading of that testimony depends its truth or falsehood. If it be said that an indisposition to receive it may arise from a mean repugnance to any thing wonderful and great, and a propensity to make every thing comprehensible, that we may have the less that is adorable, even this, which in other cases is a mis- representation, is in Arnold's instance inapplicable : for Mr. Justice Coleridge expressly assures us, that his doubts " were not low nor rationalistic in their tendency, according to the bad sense of that term : there was no indisposition in him to believe merely because the article transcended his reason ; he doubt- ed the proof and the interpretation of the textual authority." (Vol. I. p. 20.) 70 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. How could doubts like these, not arising from de- ficient idealism and love, having confessedly no "wilful" origin, be justly treated as wicked "temp- tations," and legitimately resisted by prayer and practice? Can a change in the moral state settle a question of disputed interpretation ? Will active life improve the exegetic skill? Will a batch of hard work enable a man to punctuate Timothy, ex- plain apTray/ta, and penetrate the true meaning of the Paraclete ? Can parish duty remove obscurity from the proem of John ? and a curacy demonstrate the Athanasian Creed ? What can be more evident than that the advice given to Arnold was good for stifling the doubt, bad for reaching the truth ? It is as if Mr. Justice Coleridge were to decide a question of law by shutting his ears (per " main force ") against one half the pleadings, nightly remembering the others in his prayers, refusing to consult his books of precedents, and submitting the matter to the ordeal of a brisk walk. Unhappily, the solemn sophistry, recommended by the entreaties of friendship, and decorated with the phrases of academical devotion, appears to have imposed upon Arnold. Mr. Justice Coleridge refers " the conclusion of these doubts " to a later period of his life, " when his mind had not become weaker, nor his pursuit of truth less honest or ardent, but when his abilities were matured, his knowledge greater, his judgment more sober." We know not how to avoid the obvious inference from this statement, that Arnold's doubts did not vanish till long after he had assumed the clerical office ; that he was ordained in the midst of them; that he DR. ARNOLD. 71 signed the Articles first, and believed them after- wards. This indeed is painfully evident from the date of Mr. Keble's letter descriptive of his state of mind ; for at the time when it was written, he had already been in holy orders for two months, having received ordination in December, 1818. Are we not justi- fied in saying, that he admitted the influence of others to have an improper suffrage in matters where his own conscience would have been the better guide ? What sort of " holy living " must that be, which, as advised by the saintliest of his friends, could be entered only through an inauguration of falsehood and pretence? And when disingenuous- ness like this can be advised by Keble, practised by Arnold, applauded by Mr. Justice Coleridge, and tacitly approved by Mr. Stanley, what must we surmise as to the morality of opinion within the Church, and what value can be attached to the ap- parent testimony of its learning and its worth to the doctrines it upholds with so proud a dignity ? Questionable practice is the natural source of sophistical theory : and it is not wonderful that this one weak point in Arnold's life should entail a cor- responding unsoundness in his notions of subscrip- tion to articles of faith. Of this act he defended the lax construction by which alone he could have found admission into the Church ; a construction so lax, that his apology for it fills us with astonishment and shame. His doctrine and example on this point, recommended by his general simplicity and integrity, are likely to be widely injurious ; and, thrown into the balance against wavering principle, have already, 72 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. we have reason to believe, determined many a youth to an evasive conformity. If the question could be submitted to the simple, veracious perceptions of a child, whether a man may not declare his belief in some things which he disbelieves, there would be no fear ; the very question would be seen to be immoral, and one on which no argument could even be innocently heard. If it were submitted only to men of strong sense and intellect wholly unsub- orned, there would be no fear; they would see straight through the hollow ingenuities interposed to color and distort the truth. But there are weak, bewildered minds, to whom a pleasant fallacy comes with all the force of conviction ; uneasy from the wish to serve two masters ; too scrupulous to make a deceitful profession, but ready to hear evidence in favor of its honesty ; shrinking from the positive ap- proaches of falsehood, yet looking after it with lust of the eye ; and these half-souls are they for whom Arnold's guidance in this matter is dangerous. With the perverseness of those who search the les- sons of life for justification of their weakness, rather than for the ennobling of their strength, they will appropriate the one only dishonest comfort that can be gathered from a good man's history; flattering themselves that they are wiser by his wisdom, and holier by his faithfulness, they will be but partners in his infirmity, and victims of his mistake. Arnold's practical morality on the matter of sub- scription and confession appears from the following sentences : " I do not believe the damnatory clauses in the Athana- DR. ARNOLD. 73 sian Creed, under any qualification given of them, except such as substitute for them propositions of a wholly different character But I read the Athanasian Creed, and have and would again subscribe the Article about it." Vol. II. p. 120. It is to be presumed that, in reading the Creed, Dr. Arnold did not omit the " damnatory clauses." Then he publicly pronounced a most solemn anath- ema of which he did not believe a word ! He as- serted a thing to be " above all things necessary to salvation," which he did not suppose to be necessary at all ! He warned many a hearer that " without doubt he should perish everlastingly," apprehending all the while no danger whatsoever ! Nothing surely but the terrible paralysis of custom could deaden a man's sense of the guilt of so great a mockery. Were he to hurry through his task lest he should be struck dumb in the midst, we should scarcely think it an unnatural superstition. Apart from all ques- tion as to the engagements made at his ordination, it is a shocking Jesuitry to maintain that a cler- gyman instructor of the people's conscience and messenger of their prayers need not assent to the promise or the curse he utters in the hour of wor- ship, and may innocently invite his hearers to stand up with him before God, and take lying judgments upon their lips. And what is the plea put forth to blunt the edge of our natural indignation at such laxity ? " I have and would again subscribe the Article about it [the Athanasian Creed], because I do not conceive the clauses in question to be essential parts of it I 7 74 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. do not imagine that the Article about the Creed was intend- ed in the least to refer to the clauses." Vol. II. pp. 120, 121. Be it so : what does this amount to but the plea, " I never engaged to believe these falsehoods, so why should I object to utter them " ? Is insincerity then quite allowable, except where a man has contracted to avoid it? And are the words of holy men to be no index to their minds unless a truthful intent has been written in the bond? The obligation to guile- less veracity does not arise from ordination promises and doctrinal subscription, and does not stop where they happen to terminate. Take away Articles, sig- nature, vows altogether, and it is no less a duty than before, for a man to say only the thing he truly means. His added pledge is but a recognition of the antecedent obligation, an assurance to others that he owns the justice of their moral expectations, and has a sense of right and fidelity concurrent with their own. But let us even accept Arnold's mode of putting the case, and see whether Churchmen such as he can be justified in signing the eighth Article, which is as follows : " The three Creeds, Nice Creed, Athanasius's Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostle's Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed ; for they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture." Arnold resolves the Athanasian Creed into two parts; one defining the doctrine of the Trinity; the other defining the Divine purpose with respect to DR. ARNOLD. 75 unbelievers in it : the one therefore referring to the psychological nature, the other to the moral char- acter of God ; the one pronouncing on the mysteries of his Absolute Essence, the other on the principles of his Relative conduct and sentiments towards men. Strangely inverting the comparative importance of these, Arnold decides that the incomprehensible metaphysics are the essential part, the intelligible declarations of law, the non-essential : and he argues, " I believe the former, I do not believe the latter ; so I may say that I believe the creed ' thoroughly? " And is there the least ground, except in the con- venience of half-believers, for this dismemberment of the Creed ? Not the slightest. The " damnatory clauses " are not only inseparably interwoven with it, beginning, middle, and end, but logically consti- tute the substantive affirmation of the whole docu- ment, of which the statement of the " Catholic Faith " is but a dependent and subordinate member. Perhaps, however, there may be historical reasons for Arnold's view, not apparent from the mere struc- ture of this formulary. Let us hear : " I do not conceive the clauses in question were retained deliberately by our Reformers after the propriety of retain- ing or expunging them had been distinctly submitted to their minds. They retained the Creed, I doubt not, deliberately ; to show that they wished to keep the faith of the general Church in matters relating to the Arian, Macedonian, Nes- torian, Eutychian, and Socinian controversies ; and, as they did not scruple to burn Arians, so neither would they be likely to be shocked by the damnatory clauses against them ; but I do not imagine that the Article about the Creed was 76 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. intended in the least to refer to the clauses, as if they sup- posed that a man might embrace the rest of the Creed, and yet reject them. Nor do I think that the Reformers, or the best and wisest men of the Church since, would have ob- jected to any man's subscription, if they had conceived such a case ; but would have said, ' What we mean you to em- brace is the belief of the general Church, as expressed in the three Creeds, with regard to the points, many of them having been disputed, on which those Creeds pronounce : the degree of blamableness in those who do not embrace this belief is another matter, on which we do not intend to speak, particularly in this Article.' I do not think that there is any thing evasive or unfair in this." Vol. II. p. 121. A thoughtful man must assuredly be very hard- pressed, before he could produce so extraordinary an argument as this. In the times of the. Reformers, it appears, there were two grades of certainty felt as to Christian doctrine. Some points had been dis- puted, and were known to be in peril from the varia- ble movements of opinion : others had never been called in question, and remained fixed in uncon- scious security as the faith of Christendom. The doctrine of the Trinity was among the former; the perdition of heretics and unbelievers among the latter. The Reformers were well acquainted with Arian and Socinian perverseness, and had perhaps not been without difficulties on these matters them- selves : but that misbelievers must be damned, is a thing which they never supposed that any body could doubt. They burned Arians without scruple ; and made sure that God would burn them too. Upon both these elements of their belief, the questioned DR. ARNOLD. 77 and the unquestioned, they have left us their mind ; what reception are we to give it, when we bind our- selves to their formularies ? Arnold's decision is, " We must adopt their opinions ; but we may freely throw away their certainties : what they knew to be mutable, we must not presume to change ; what they supposed to be immutable, we may alter as we please." Is it conceivable that the founders of the Reformed Churches, while binding their followers on all debated matters, meant to leave them free on all the questions which no scepticism had yet dared to approach? True, they did not contemplate the par- ticular case of half-belief which now arises, and made no special provision to meet it. But a man may abstain from taking security for either of two reasons, because he is willing to make us a present, or because he is assured we shall acknowledge the debt. Arnold admits the profoundness and uncon- sciousness of the Reformers' trust, and gives it as a reason for cheating them of their obedience, and pocketing a license which they never left. And he thinks there is " nothing evasive or unfair in this " ! In other passages he defends the acceptance of holy orders by men who " cannot yield an active be- lief to the words of every part of the Articles and Liturgy as true," on the ground that, without this latitude, " the Church could by necessity receive into the ministry only men of dull minds, or dull con- sciences : of dull, nay almost of dishonest minds, if they can persuade themselves that they actually agree in every minute particular with any great number of human propositions; of dull consciences, 7* 78 MAKTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. if, exercising their minds freely, and yet believing that the Church requires the total adhesion of the understanding, they still, for considerations of their own convenience, enter into the ministry in her des- pite." (Vol. II. p. 173.) The reasoning of this passage, if we understand it, proceeds thus : The Church must have men of active minds ; only men of dull minds can sign the Articles with full belief; therefore the Church must have men who sign the Articles without full belief. But these men must also have lively consciences : if they take signature to denote full belief, they must have dull consciences to sign without it ; therefore they should think that signature does not denote full belief. Unhappily, however, this a priori argument lands us in conclusions wholly at variance with fact. The Church has not left her intent as to the Arti- cles and Liturgy, and the degree of assent demanded to them, a matter of doubtful inference. The thirty- sixth Canon orders that " no person shall be received into the ministry," "except he shall first subscribe to these three Articles following, in such manner and sort as we have here appointed." 1. The declaration of supremacy, which it is need- less to cite. "2. That the Book of Common Prayer, and of ordering of Bishops, Priests,. and Deacons, containeth in it nothing 1 contrary to the Word of God, &c. " 3. That he alloweth the Book of Articles of Re- ligion agreed upon by the Archbishops, &c. ; and that he acknowledgeth all and every the Articles therein contained, being in number nine-and-thirty, DR. ARNOLD. 79 besides the Ratification, to be agreeable to the Word of God. " To these three Articles, whosoever will subscribe, he shall, for the avoiding of all ambiguities, subscribe in this order, and form of words, setting down both his Christian and surname, viz. : 'I, N. N., do will- ingly and ex animo subscribe to these three Arti- cles above mentioned, and to all things that are con- tained in them.' " All argument against the necessity of ex animo subscription being set aside by this Canon, Dr. Ar- nold has only put it in the power of opponents to retort upon the Church thus: All clergymen must declare their full assent to the Articles and Liturgy : in doing this, they either honestly believe them throughout, or they do not : if they do, they are men of " dull minds " ; if they do not, they are men of " dull consciences " ; therefore " the Church can re- ceive into its ministry only men of dull minds or dull consciences." And is it not undeniable that, in fact, the entrance into her service, smooth and easy to thoughtless mediocrity and worldly ambition, is beset by scruples and difficulties, chiefly for men of intellectual genius and moral earnestness? A Beres- ford and a Blomfield glide in with complacent smiles; an Arnold passes with reluctant starts, and bitter conflicts, and many a pause of prayer and fear. They carry with them the undisturbed consistency so easy to minds without lofty aspiration, and are of no dimmer sight or less graceful movement than before : but he has withstood the repugnance of his noble nature, and a speck is thenceforth fixed on his Intel- 80 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. It'ctual clearness, which, at one part of his course of thought, compels him to feel his way along the con- ventional path, and restrains the free step with which elsewhere he pursues " in open vision " only what is great and true. For nine years after his ordination, Arnold was settled, as private tutor, at Laleham, near Staines : mingling, with the duties of his own house, no slight share of aid to the curate of the parish, in the church, the workhouse, and the cottage. The pe- riod was one of little incident, but of the deepest moment in his internal history. It was his initia- tion into the real business of life, and showed at once the masterly hand with which he was to rule its affairs and manage its responsibilities. It was the commencement of his most sacred domestic ties, and bears traces of the genial ripening of his character beneath the warmth of new affections. It witnessed the beginning of all his literary undertak- ings, and the completion of his articles on Roman History in the Encyclopedia Metropolitana. It in- troduced him to the knowledge of Niebuhr, whose influence was thenceforth to constitute so large an element in his mental progress. But the great func- tion of this time was to establish the real seat of Arnold's strength ; it became evident at once that he was at home, not in the cloister, but in the city and the field : respectable in scholarship, insensible to art, undistinguished in philosophy, he was great in action. His sphere was not large : but the healthy vigor which he infused into the whole; the moral earnestness which put pupils, household, almost the DR. ARNOLD. 81 village, under his control ; the quantity of ivork of all sorts which he got through himself, and inspired others to achieve, indicated the remarkable capacity for government, which dictated his early longing for a statesman's life. And, as is usual in such cases, the expansion of the leading faculty, instead of over- whelming, reawakened all the rest: the more he did, the more also he thought and felt ; reflection and emotion deepening and widening through the mate- rials of an outward industry, which, he sometimes feared, would stifle them. Archbishop Whately had early pointed out the indications, in Arnold's fellowship examination, of a remarkable faculty of mental growth. We doubt whether the prediction, true as it was, would have been conspicuously ful- filled, if he had remained within the walls of a col- lege. In him, intellect and affection waited upon the conscience and the Will ; and became great and rich and tender in the divine hardships of duty, and the strenuous service of God. During the years spent at Laleham, especially the earlier ones, there are many marks of crude, unmellowed feeling, of conventional sentiment, of prosaic and utilitarian estimates of human interests. The thoughts with which he anticipates his married lot (Vol. I. p. 60) are after the most ordinary fashion of moralizing. His views in the choice of a profession are according to the approved canons of spiritual prudence; and he takes to the Church, not so much inspired by the high aims of a holy calling, as from the wish for an asylum (Vol. I. p. 53) from moral danger, ^ o-^daewy, dXX' da-Kfo-fus tvfKa. Even his sermons contain more 82 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. profit-and-loss religion than consists with the noble- ness of his later Christianity; as in p. 243, where "the good which a man may get from acting" on holy principle is made to depend on its "lasting for ever," instead of " being over in less than a hundred years." And finally, his style that unerring expres- sion of a man's whole spiritual nature was at this time rude and shapeless, marked by a certain business- like simplicity and directness, but destitute of the force given by the under-play of a living enthusiasm beneath the dry matter of the composition. The fuel, however, of his central being was kindled ; life, like a glowing furnace, rose to a higher and higher intensity, and penetrated with a glorious heat even his originally colder and remoter faculties ; till his whole nature was fused into one living mass, radiating force and fire throughout the sphere of his activity. It was not till he assumed his office as head mas- ter of Rugby School, that all the energy and great- ness of his character were fully brought out. The fourteen years which he spent there, were in all re- spects the most memorable of his career ; showing how, amid many discouragements and frequent lone- liness in his favorite aims, he could prevail over the heaviest tasks submitted to his hands, and the most plausible sophistries competing for his mind. We must dismiss with few words the whole subject of his School management. It is admitted on all hands, that he turned to the best account all the ele- ments of good in the English system of public schools, and struggled manfully and with unexam- pled success against its peculiar evils. His general DR. ARNOLD. 83 theory of his office may be stated thus ; the pe- culiar character of the English gentleman being as- sumed as an historical datum, the aim of education should be to penetrate and pervade this with a spirit of Christian self-regulation. He was aware how great was the revolution implied in the accomplish- ment of this end ; that moral heroism must take the place of feudal independence ; devout allegiance, of personal self-will ; respect for faithful work, of the ambition for careless idleness ; manly simplicity and earnestness, of gentlemanly poco-curanteism ; the true shame for evil, of the false shame for good ; that contempt of pleasure must be added to the contempt of danger and of pain ; and courage to defy corrupt fashion and opinion, to the hardihood which resists the aggressions of unjust authority. With numbers of his scholars he doubtless realized a near approxi- mation to his aim ; with none, perhaps, did he wholly fail ; for he strongly marked, and rendered unmis- takably felt, the evils with which he was resolved to contend, and by which he would never be baffled. There was no hope that he would ever connive at any thing false or wrong; there was no fear that he would overlook or desert any .faithful will, striving with limited powers within, or the jeers of low ridi- cule without. There was established an absolute confidence in his truth and justice : every culprit felt the shadow of his frown, every clear con- science the assurance of his protection. His atten- tion was not reserved for pupils of remarkable at- tainments and brilliant promise, who might reward his assiduity by conferring distinction on their in- 84 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. structor. None were so loved and honored as those who persisted in laborious effort without the power or talent to win admiration and command success ; of such a one he said, " I could stand before that man, hat in hand" And if, amid the host of the foolish and corrupt, there appeared any " Abdiel, faithful found Among the faithless, faithful only he ; Among innumerable false, unmoved, Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified " ; he was secure of Arnold's exulting sympathy, and, as " he passed long way through hostile scorn," might hear in heart his voice of blessing, " Servant of God, well done ; well hast thou fought The better fight, who single hast maintained Against revolted multitudes the cause Of truth." The personal qualities of Arnold were eminently fitted to give success to these high aims and noble sympathies. Frank, brave, guileless, he mingled no moroseness with his moral severity, no weakness with his pity, no secrecy with his vigilance. His joyous and trustful nature had never divested itself of the best attributes of boyhood, but simply added to them the wisdom and the strength of manhood. His elastic spirits, his vivacfty of expression, his love of the open air and all athletic sports, were no incon- siderable qualifications for obtaining the admiration of boys ; and, above all, he wholly lost sight of him- self, and never gave occasion for even the perversest spirit to suspect that his battle with school evils was a contest for personal dignity or power; in his dom- DR. ARNOLD. 85 inance over wrong, he was himself but serving" the right. But the most vivid individual character could not directly reach the multitude collected in a public school. In the chapel, indeed, they were all sub- mitted immediately to his most powerful influence, and the constancy and fervor with which he availed himself of this means of discipline are known to all who are familiar with his Rugby Sermons. At this moment, no poem, no biography, actual or pos- sible, occurs to us, which we had rather read, than the secret spirit-history of that chapel. The many- colored thoughts, evanescent, it may be, but not traceless, of those young hearts ; the dark, obdurate will, struck by a sudden flash, then closing sullenly again ; the light, unstable mind, fluttered with mo- mentary shame ; the first sense of lost innocence, awakening the sorrowful images of too happy sis- ters, and mother with no reproaches on her face ; the manly pity for a younger brother newly come, and high resolves, were it only for his sake; the eager outlook into life, deep in its early flush of glory ; the opening awe, the thrilling touch, of things invisible ; the dawning perception of the divineness of Christ, and nearness of the living God ; the tumultuous grief roused by the funeral bell, or the solemn won- der, as if it swung in the air of eternity, and made the dead silence speak, all these primal stirrings of expanding life contain the profoundest interest and beauty, both as prophetic of a most various hu- man growth, and as attesting the healthful power of the soul creating it. In connection with this part of Arnold's labors, 8 86 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. we have seen new reason to justify an old admira- tion for a religious rite prevailing in most of the Protestant churches, the practice of Confirmation. We have no sympathy, indeed, with the form which it assumes in the English Church ; we acknowledge the admixture with it of false and pernicious moral ideas ; we object to its use, as an appendage to the ceremony of Baptism, and its connection with the superstitions represented by that word. Still, when stripped of ritual and traditional adhesions, it repre- sents a momentous fact in the religious life of indi- viduals, and helps to turn that fact to its proper account. There is a period, extending some years beyond mere infancy, of imperfect and inchoate re- sponsibility, during which the unreflecting play of instinctive feeling constitutes the moving- force, and external restraint prescribed by others affords the regulative principle, of all our activity ; the child is delivered over for guidance to his parents and pro- tectors, with whom rests the largest share of ac- countability for what he is, for what he believes, for what he loves. This period passes away ; and an- other comes, in which the instinctive temptations become more dangerous, and less within reach of outward rule and authority ; but at the same time the faculties needed for self-guidance rapidly ap- proach their full dimensions : reflective self-conscious- ness deepens, manifesting itself under the form of mere shyness in ordinary natures, of boastful and irreverent license in bad ones, of moral thoughtful- ness in minds of higher tone : the knowledge of good and evil, and the force of the electing will, DR. ARNOLD. 87 assume new precision and strength ; and the objects both of human admiration and of religious faith become the centres of more intent inspection and earnest wonder. The transition from one of these periods to the other is perhaps the greatest spiritual crisis of human life ; the turn of the tide, when we quit the haven and drift to the unstable sea, with or without the compass for dark nights, and the eye skilled to steer by the eternal stars. We would mark, with devout recognition, this era of experi- ence ; give voice, method, and direction to its tumul- tuous emotions ; bring its burning aspirations to merge in the cool ascending breath of prayer; dis- tinctly present the young disciple, fast becoming one of us, before the Master at whose feet he is to sit, and the God whose still, small voice he is to hear. True, the step into this full responsibility is not in- stantaneous, and can have no exact date assigned to it ; and no turn should be given to a confirma- tion service, implying that personal accountability is postponed till its arrival. But exaggerations of this kind are easily avoided, so as to render such a rite truly symbolical of the fact ; and, with such provis- ion, we would fain, by some Christian consecration, claim for good the young romance of life, and turn the seasonal bloom of nature into fruitful flowers of pure faith. With all the aids of the chapel services, Arnold could not bring his personal influence to bear imme- diately upon many of the scholars. Without some interposed medium between himself and the multi- tude of boys, it was impossible to propagate the 88 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. power of his ideas and principles throughout the school. For this end, he not only availed himself of the cooperation of the Assistant Masters, but, bring- ing the Sixth Form or Prapostors into close connec- tion with himself, invested them with larger powers and more direct responsibilities of control over the younger pupils than they had possessed before. This system offered, doubtless, the best chance of intro- ducing some approach to moral government into the wild elements of a public school ; and infused a wholesome action of the apia-roi into the combination usually presented in such an institution, of turbu- lent democracy, and absolute despotism. For the youths themselves, thus trusted by Arnold with a share of his authority, the benefit was great. The manliness, the earnestness, the religious convictions, which were remarked at Oxford and Cambridge as frequent characteristics of the Rugby scholars, were mainly acquired, it is probable, during the period of immediate contact with himself. The general im- pression, however, of the public school system, even as worked by Arnold, which we derive from these volumes, is very painful ; and strongly confirms the unfavorable recollections of our own experience. We have often thought that Hobbes's theory of society must have been suggested by his remem- brance of the grammar-school at Malmesbury. If there is any place in the world where every body is convinced that he has a right to every thing, and with unlimited voracity of claim absorbs whatever is within his reach, until he clashes against the appe- tences, no less universal and no less entitled, of his DR. ARNOLD. 89 neighbors in the scramble ; where a state of war is the state of nature, ever and anon resumed to settle the exact sphere of every new-comer, and all deter- mination of rights has to be fought out; where order and law prevail in unstable equilibrium (like the right of search among our French allies) as disa- greeable conditions of a treaty of peace, and the only principle truly and heartily respected is, Do, if you dare, certainly that place is an English public school. Speaking loosely, to live as they like and as they can is the primary rule of children ; to live as they ought, the primary rule for men. A crew of boys is an aggregate of self-wills, limiting one an- other by mutual interference and repulsion. A socie- ty of men is a community of consciences as well as interests, combining by mutual reverence, cooper- ation, and attraction. Hence public opinion, in adult society, is expressive of the minimum of moral principle that will be allowed; in schools, of the maximum of moral principle that will be endured : and the force which, in our maturest strength, cornes in aid of conscience, in our early weakness presses, with frequent scoff and scorn, against it. This is an unequal match for wills imperfectly inured to hardi- hood. Hence Arnold's frequent laments as to the irresistible strength of a low and tyrannical school- opinion ; his vain attempts to encourage any large number to struggle against the stream ; his sorrow, ever renewed, at watching the declension from inno- cence to corruption ; and his pathetic forebodings on receiving, at the opening of each half-year, boys now in their home simplicity, but entering on a trial, 8* 90 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. always severe, and rarely triumphant. He admits that, while minds of peculiar strength are elevated by the ordeal, the ordinary class of amiable, well- disposed, neutral characters are usually carried away by the evil influence of the place, and gradually sink from promise into corruption. Can there be a plain- er confession of the unfitness of these schools for the vast majority of boys ? Startled by the detection of something wrong, he exclaimed on one occasion : " If this goes on, it will end either my life at Rugby, or my life all together. How can I go on with my Roman History ? There all is noble and high-minded, and here I find nothing but the reverse." And in a letter to Sir T. Pasley he says : " Since I began this letter, I have had some of the .trou- bles of school-keeping ; and one of those specimens of the evil of boy-nature, which makes me always unwilling to un- dergo the responsibility of advising any man to send his son to a public school. There has been a system of perse- cution carried on by the bad against the good ; and then, when complaint was made to me, there came fresh perse- cution on that very account ; and divers instances of boys joining in it out of pure cowardice, both physical and moral, when, if left to themselves, they would have rather shunned it. And the exceedingly small number of boys who can be relied upon for active and steady good on these occasions, and the way in which the decent and respectable of ordinary life (Carlyle's ' Shams ') are sure on these oc- casions to swim with the stream, and take part with the evil, makes me strongly feel exemplified what the Scripture says about the strait gate and the wide one, a view of human nature, which, when looking on human life in its full dress of decencies and civilizations, we are apt, I im- DR. ARNOLD. 91 agine, to find it hard to realize. But here, in the naked- ness of boy-nature, one is quite able to understand how there could not be found so many as even ten righteous in a whole city. And how to meet this evil I really do not know ; but to find it thus rife after I have been [so many] years fighting against it, is so sickening, that it is very hard not to throw up the cards in despair, and upset the table. But then the stars of nobleness, which I see amidst the darkness, in the case of the few good, are so cheering, that one is inclined to stick to the ship again, and have another good try at getting her about." Vol. I. p. 161. That he was not, however, without the refresh- ments due to so faithful a heart, is evident from the conclusion of the following passage, of most charac- teristic beauty : " A great school is very trying. It never can present images of rest and peace ; and when the spring and activi- ty of youth is altogether unsanctified by any thing pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is as diz- zying, and almost more morally distressing, than the shouts and gambols of a set of lunatics. It is very startling to see so much of sin combined with so little of sorrow. In a parish, amongst the poor, whatever of sin exists, there is sure also to be enough of suffering ; poverty, sickness, and old age are mighty tamers and chastisers. But, with boys of the richer classes, one sees nothing but plenty, health, and youth ; and these are really awful to behold, when one must feel that they are unblessed. On the other hand, few things are more beautiful than when one does see all holy thoughts and principles, not the forced growth of pain, or infirmity, or privation ; but springing up, as by God's im- mediate planting, in a sort of garden of all that is fresh and beautiful ; full of so much hope for this world as well as for heaven." Vol. II. p. 137. 92 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. Though Arnold's great work lay at Rugby, and he achieved it in a way which was soon felt in every public school in England, his sympathies were not collected there; they were interwoven with society at every fibre, and bled with the wounds of humani- ty everywhere. No danger could befall the state, but he was startled by it, and stood up to give the warning or inspire the defence. No idolatries could be set up within the Church, but he exposed and confronted them with resolute Iconoclasm. And as evils of both kinds seemed to him to arise from a false theory of Christianity on the one hand, and a false conception of the re'Xos of civilized communities on the other, the great purpose of his life was to write a work on Christian politics, organizing into a system, and presenting in their unity, the opinions now scattered over his occasional writing and cor- respondence on Theology, Social Philosophy, Eccle- siastical Polity, Education, and Government. For want of an adequate exposition of his staminal ideas on this subject, it is difficult even now, and was much more so at the time of their expression, to criticize with advantage his sentiments on the party topics of the day; and they often appeared like narrow prejudices, when in fact they were deduc- tions from a wide and generous philosophy. As we may have occasion in a future Number to notice his " Fragment on the Church," just published at the particular desire, it is understood, of Mr. Bunsen, we shah 1 reserve this whole matter, with his connected opinions as to the terms of citizenship and the meth- ods of public education, for consideration hereafter. DR. ARNOLD. 93 Even his Roman History was subsidiary in his mind to the development of his conception as to a Chris"- tian TroXiTft'a. To his practical understanding no the- ory of the Church could be constructed without its history ; no history of it could be written without en- tering deeply into the spirit of its early struggle with Paganism, and observing the inevitable action and reaction of the two religions ; nor could any appre- hension of that spirit be reached, without a sympa- thy with the recollections and traditional glories which gave the Western Polytheism its strength, and a consequent familiarity with the palmy days and legendary lore of Roman faith and Roman virtue. Over this border-land, covered with the cities of the old civilization, and the forest-growth of the new, Gibbon is at present our only guide. His sympa- thies were wholly given, not only to the ancient world, but to its period of material grandeur and corruption, when the severity of its manners and the earnestness of its life had passed away. His whole spirit was unsocial and irreverent; his affections never deep in the sorrows, his moral sense not re- volted by the sins, of the beings he presents on his magnificent stage ; his imagination resting on the pageantry, the scenery, the mechanism, the dress, the evolutions of national existence, but not penetrating to its real life; and his Epicurean cast of character wholly disqualifying him for any appreciation of the genius and agency of Christianity. Arnold's en- thusiasm fell pretty nearly on the same objects as Gibbon's contempt; travelling through the heathen world as a disciple of the porch rather than the gar- 94 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. den, he pitched his admiration on Republican, not on Imperial Rome; and passing through Christen- dom, not as an alien, but as a sworn brother, he would have taught men the meaning of a " martyr" and made them feel that it was not ridiculous to lay down the life for simplicity and truth. There are, we think, in Arnold's scheme of opin- ion, many deviations from logical consistency. But there never was a man whose system of thought was pervaded by a more evident moral consistency. His character a living whole cannot be ana- lyzed without being lost from view. Its beauty is not of form, like a statue; or of color, like a pic- ture; but of movement, like what he simply was a man : and the moment you arrest it to seek its essence, it is gone. Still we may say, without much error, that at the very fountain-head of his nature, far up as among the old granitic rocks of a hardier world, there sprang up a clear, fresh, exhaustless love of goodness ; that sometimes rushed down in a tor- rent, like passion, only that, with all its vehemence, it was never turbid ; that mingled a purity with all the courses of his thought, and fertilized the retreats of his affections, and wholly surrounded and bap- tized the temple of his worship. The moral ele- ment and that too, originally, in its bare and rug- ged form of the sense of justice and hatred of wrong was transcendent over all else in him. It was not, as in most men, passive and negative, con- tent with preserving its possessor from evil, and ex- ercising only a protectorate ; but a right royal pow- er, with divine title to the world ; aggressive, indom- DR. ARNOLD. 95 itable, magnanimous. Christianity had something to do, to make him rest and sit as a disciple at the feet; to raise him to the spiritual heights of its heaven, and subdue him to the sweet charities of earth. But it did both. He was an evangelized Stoic. From walking in the Porch, he came to kneel before the Cross. No wonder that he burst into tears, when once in conversation St. Paul was set in some one's estimate above St. John : for he himself passed from the likeness of one towards that of the other, and so had sympathies with both ; and the fire of the man of Tarsus subdued itself in him, as life advanced, more and more into the Ephe- sian apostle's altar-light of saintly love. The leading principle of his character may be traced through his sentiments on subjects wildly re- mote from each other. It was his Moral Faculty, his sense of Obligation, that awakened his intense antipathy to both Benthamism and Newmanism, the two grand counterfeits forged at the opposite ex- tremes of error, of true moral responsibility and per- sonal duty ; the one merging the conscience in self- interest, the other in priestcraft ; the one identifying moral and sentient good, the other separating moral and spiritual; both extinguishing the proper person- ality and individual sacredness of man ; the one treating him as a thing to be mechanically shaped, the other as a thing to be mysteriously conjured with ; with infallible nostrums, labelled " motives " in the one case, " sacraments " in the other, promis- ing to cure the sick world, but alas ! only decoying it from the natural sources of health, and spoiling its 96 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. relish for the free breath of heaven. In opposition to both these systems, which sought for human con- duct some external guide, one in social utility, the other in church authority, Arnold held fast to the internal guidance, which he maintained God had given to all, and through which his Will was practi- cable, and Himself accessible to all. That this was the precise position which he conceived himself to occupy, is evident from the following exposition of his moral faith : " To supply the place of Conscience with the apxai of Fanaticism on one hand, and of Utilitarianism on the oth- er, on one side is the mere sign from Heaven, craved by those who heeded not Heaven's first sign written within them ; on the other, it is the idea, which, hardly hover- ing on the remotest outskirts of Christianity, readily flies off" to the camp of Materialism and Atheism ; the mere pared and plucked notion of ' good ' exhibited by the word ' useful ' ; which seems to me the idea of ' good ' robbed of its nobleness, the sediment from which the filtered water has been assiduously separated. It were a strange world, if there were indeed no one apxiTficroviKov d8os but that of the gvptpfpov ; if KoAoj/ were only KoAoi/, on gvpfapov. But this is one of the peculiarities of the English mind ; the Puritan and the Benthamite has an inmense part of this in common ; and thus the Christianity of the Puritan is coarse and fanatical ; he cannot relish what there is in it of beautiful, or delicate, or ideal. Men get embarrassed by the common cases of a misguided conscience ; but a com- pass may be out of order as well as a conscience, and the needle may point due south if you hold a powerful magnet in that direction. Still, the compass, generally speaking, is a true and sure guide, and so is the conscience ; and you can DR. ARNOLD. 97 trace the deranging influence on the latter quite as surely as on the former. Again, there is confusion in some men's minds, who say that, if we so exalt conscience, we make ourselves the paramount judges of all things, and so do not live by faith and obedience. But he who believes his con- science to be God's law, by obeying it obeys God. It is as much obedience, as it is obedience to follow the dictates of God's Spirit ; and in every case of obedience to any law or guide whatsoever, there must always be one independent act of the mind pronouncing one determining proposition, ' I ought to obey ' ; so that in obedience, as in every moral act, we are and must be the paramount judges, because we must ourselves decide on that very principle, * that we ought to obey.' " And as for Faith, there is again a confusion in the use of the term. It is not Scriptural, but fanatical, to oppose faith to reason. Faith is properly opposed to sense, and is the listening to the dictates of the higher part of our mind, to which alone God speaks, rather than to the lower part of us, to which the world speaks." The peculiarities of his theological opinion are referable, no less distinctly than his philosophy, to the depth and clearness of his moral sentiments. It was a necessary consequence of this, that the dif- ference between right and wrong should present itself to him as an infinite quantity ; that separating the two, there should seem " a great gulf fixed " ; that man should appear to range, from his lowest to his highest desires, over an immense interval, and in his extremes of temptation and aspiration to lie apart from himself, far as demon from angel. He felt, with a profound consciousness, the severe and internecine struggle between these two, inevitable to 9 98 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. the faithful mind, and understood the whole history of that inner strife, the shame of defeat, the thankful- ness of victory. Hence his conceptions both of the Di- vine Government (including the Christian economy) and of the allotted work of life amount almost to a scheme of Dualism. He looks up, and sees God, in himself, in his Christ, in his Spirit, in all that is holy enough to represent him below, engaged in " putting down moral evil." He looks within, and sees his own soul enlisted, by an articulate and bind- ing call, in the same great warfare. He looks around, and in the constitution and arrangements of the world he sees the well-ordered battle-field, and in the evolutions of history, the marchings and counter- marchings of hosts, prepared for the great campaign. One to whom the whole scene of things resolved itself into this aspect could not but enter, with pas- sionate fellow-feeling, into the character of St. Paul ; seize, with instinctive apprehension, the great scheme of the Apostle's spiritual Christianity; thrust away, with indignant reason, every priest, every rite, every idol of the fancy, that interposed between him and the Christ in heaven, whose immediate disciple "by faith, not by sight" he was, no less than the convert of Damascus, and to whom alone his alle- giance was due. In the same spirit he objects to the mere historical Christ of the Unitarians : instead of a being nearly two thousand years off, he needs to feel himself the disciple of one who is living now, and to whose heavenly spirit his own may draw nigh in trustful devotion. In his view of Christ, there is nothing to which, with very slight modification of DR. ARNOLD. 99 language, we should not heartily assent. He is re- garded, in Arnold's theology, less as the achiever of Redemption, than as himself a Revelation of the Divine nature ; it was not as the author of binding precepts, or the teacher of new truths, or the exem- plar of a good life, but as the symbol of God's moral perfections, that he was most dear and holy to this noble heart. Arnold's practical, and little specula- tive or ideal mind, rendered this view particularly needful for him: God, in himself, the Absolutely Infinite, being to his thought inconceivable and unapproachable, a Gfos apfaros, awfully beyond human affections, unless contemplated in some concrete ex- pression of his nature. The cast of Arnold's mind gave him a deep sympathy with the human element in the Scriptures; the answer of his quick nature told him, in many a prophet's strain, and many an historic touch, that a man's hand had been there ; and his habit of critical examination of the records of antiquity made it impossible for him to overlook the symptoms of origin not infallible in some of the books. Hence he wholly repudiates the doctrine of plenary inspiration, and even speaks of Coleridge's " Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit," bold as it is, as only the " beginning of the end " on this great sub- ject. He says to Mr. Justice Coleridge : " Have you seen your uncle's ' Letters on Inspiration,' which I believe are to be published ? They are well fitted to break ground in the approaches to that momentous ques- tion which involves in it so great a shock to existing notions ; the greatest, probably, that has ever been given since the dis- covery of the falsehood of the doctrine of the Pope's infalli- 100 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. bility. Yet it must come, and will end, in spite of the fears and clamors of the weak and bigoted, in the higher exalting, and more sure establishing, of Christian truth." Vol. I. p. 358. Nor did he, in relinquishing the literary inspira- tion, cling fast, as some ineffectually pretend to do, to the personal infallibility of the Apostles, even on matters nearly affecting their own mission and the faith of the early Church : but found it not incon- sistent with his unconditional reverence for St. Paul, to acknowledge that he entertained the fallacious expectation of an approaching end of the world. Condemning the spurious heavenly-mindedness affected by certain religious professors, he says : " There are some, Englishmen unhappily, but most un- worthy to be so, who affect to talk of freedom and a citi- zen's rights and duties as things about which a Christian should not care. Like all their other doctrines, this comes out of the shallowness of their little minds, ' understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.' True it is that St. Paul, expecting that the world was shortly to end, tells a man not to care even if he were in a state of per- sonal slavery. That is an endurable evil which will shortly cease, not in itself only, but in its consequences. But even for the few years during which he supposed the world would exist, he says, ' if thou mayest be free, use it rather.' " Vol. II. p. 413. We can imagine, indeed, the consternation with which dogmatical Christians, who must have a be- lief imposed upon then: nature, rather than educed from it, would regard Arnold's free dealings with the authority of Scripture in matters not spiritual. DR. ARNOLD. 101 He could not shut his eyes to the manifest traces in the book of Daniel of an origin full as late as the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes ; and in proof of the mere historical character of its " pretended prophe- cies," he adduces, with apparent unconsciousness, the very same arguments which in 1724-1727 brought upon Collins the prolixity of frightened Churchmen and the imputation of secret unbelief. (Vol. II. p. 188.) Perhaps his early study of Geology, under the guidance of Buckland, may have combined with historical criticisms to loosen the hold of the book of Genesis on his mind : we find him, at least, treat- ing the problem as to the origin of mankind from a common stock as an open question, remaining to be decided by physiological and ethnological research ; and he is even ready with a theory to meet the case of a plurality of races, and exhibit its harmony with the general analogy of Providence in the education, of the world. (Vol. I. p. 371.) Well may orthodox rigor stand aghast, and think, What then becomes of our Adamic inheritance of corruption, "naturally engendered" in "every man"? of the fatal effects of the fall of our first parents ? of the whole scheme for redeeming our last race from its despair ? Either Christianity must forego its universal character, and be restrained to the tribe of whose progenitors the Mosaic narrative speaks ; or its whole economy must be addressed to the act- ual moral constitution of men, irrespective of their original parentage. It is not for us to satisfy such objections. We have little doubt that Arnold's doc- trine of human depravity was, like Coleridge's, a 9* 102 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. mere expression of the insatiable thirst of his intense moral nature: conscious of a love and desire of goodness far beyond the measure of his best attain- ment, feeling the interval between the obligations he reverently owned and the life he actually lived, he described this fact, which is human, not personal, by saying that the Will of man is stricken with disease and infirmity, and, without the helping spirit of God, is ill-matched with its acknowledged duties. The entire trust which he reposed on the oracles of Con- science and Reason is further evident from his adop- tion of Locke's opinion, which it is the fashion to treat as virtual Anti-supernaturalism, that " the doctrine must prove the miracle, not miracle the doc- trine." On this point he says : " You complain of those persons who judge of a Reve- lation, not by its evidence, but by its substance. It has always seemed to me that its substance is a most essential part of its evidence ; and that miracles wrought in favor of what was foolish or wicked, would only prove Manicheism. We are so perfectly ignorant of the unseen world, that the character of any supernatural power can only be judged of by the moral character of the statements which it sanctions ; thus only can we tell whether it be a revelation from God, or from the Devil. If his father tells a child something which seems to him monstrous, faith requires him to submit his own judgment, because he knows his father's person, and is sure, therefore, that his father tells it him. But we cannot thus know God, and can only recognize his voice by the words spoken being in agreement with our idea of his moral nature." Vol. II. p. 221. All these free and natural movements of his mind DR. ARNOLD. 103 on questions the most momentous, are concurrent with a manifest increase in the depth and loftiness of his religious character ; a coincidence perfectly intelligible to those who appreciate, as he did, " . . . . the great philosophical and Christian truth, which seems to me the very truth of truths, that Christian unity, and the perfection of Christ's Church, are independent of theological articles of opinion ; consisting in a certain moral state, and moral and religious affections, which have existed in good Christians of all ages and all communions, along with an infinitely varying proportion of truth and error." Vol. I. p. 359. The supremacy of the moral nature in Arnold was so absolute, as to determine all his tastes exclu- sively towards objects of real and of human interest. He could never construct a world for himself, of ideas, of images, of things ; he must live among per- sons. Metaphysics, Art, Science, had no attractions for him. If he praises Plato, it is the Phcedo that extorts his admiration, and that chiefly for the lan- guage. (I. 391.) He does not care for Florence, (I. 304,) and throughout his Continental journeys never mentions even a picture or a statue. He could teach the first six books of Euclid! (II. 206,) and rather than have physical science the principal thing in his son's mind, he " would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament." (II. 37.) And where human knowl- edge occupies the transition territory from things to persons, viz. in Natural History, or the study of liv- ing things, he was deterred from entering by the up- 104 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. rising of imperfect moral sympathies, which could neither be laid asleep nor satisfied : " the whole sub- ject," he said, "of the brute creation is to me one of such painful mystery that I dare not approach it." (II. 348.) We must tear ourselves away from this delightful companionship with one whose image will hence- forth stand in one of the most sacred niches of our memory. His political opinions, amply discussed in Reviews of a different character, we cannot notice. They were in the spirit with all the expressions of his mind : the joint results of a clear-sighted and unconquerable sense of justice and a profound his- torical wisdom, that, with that moral eye fully open, had read the lives of nations, and connected their punishments with their sins. His occasional faults, his vehement expression of opinion, his severe con- demnation of individuals not fairly obnoxious to per- sonal reproach, we feel no desire to draw forth for censure. These things may well pass, without a word, in such a man. It is hard enough to speak with just and wise appreciation of what is noble and great in one to whom we look up through so im- measurable a distance ; and one ought in truth to be like him, to show him as he is. Statuere qui sit sapiens vel maxime videtur esse sapientis. CHURCH AND STATE.* [From the Prospective Review for May, 1845.] THE questions which engage the attention of speculative men often appear to have little connec- tion with the actual affairs of their time : and are re- garded, both by those who discuss them and by those who despise them, as mere ideal things, touch- ing at no point the realities amid which they appear. Yet this estimate, invariably made by contempora- ries, is as invariably reversed by posterity. In the historical retrospect of any period, the relation be- tween its Thought and Action becomes clear : and its philosophy appears, no less than its poetry, its art, or even its polity, distinctly expressive of its real in- * The Ideal of a Christian Church considered in Comparison with existing Practice. By Rev. W. G. Ward, M. A., Fellow of Baliol College, Oxford. Second Edition. 1844. The Kingdom of Christ delineated ; in Two Essays, on our Lord's own Account of his Person and of the Nature of his Kingdom, and on the Constitution, Powers, and Ministry of a Christian Church, as ap- pointed by Himself. By Richard Whately, D. D., Archbishop of Dublin. 1841. On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the Idea of each. By Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1839. Fragment on the Church. By Thomas Arnold, D. D., late Head Master of Rugby School. 1844. 106 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. ternal life. Nay, the very literature which most af- fects universality is often most deeply stamped with the characteristics of age and race. The genius of a peculiar civilization, slowly and obscurely rising, appears to reach its culminating intensity in its philosophy. Standing at that point of its culture, we occupy the precise meridian from which it looked forth on the universe. What it missed and what it saw, what it loved and what it hated, all its concep- tions of truth and all its aspirations after good, are collected there, and so constructed into a systematic whole, as to be apprehensible at a single view. There is nothing more absolutely Hellenic than the Dialogues of Plato, or more distinctively medieval than the writings of Thomas Aquinas : the England of. the Reformation perfected itself in Locke, and the France of the Revolution is reflected in Diderot. He who would thoroughly appreciate the actuating spir- it of any period must study, not only the debates of its Senates, but the discussions of its Schools. In the theories of Society produced by the great masters of thought in ancient and in modern times, we find this remarkable difference : that with the for- mer the grand problem is, to adjust the relations of the State to the Individual ; with the latter, of the State to the Church. Yet the change, when rightly interpreted, will appear a change rather of names than of things, and presents us only with two cases of a problem essentially one and the same. No one can suppose that the agency of the Individu- al, so much guarded against in the ideal communi- ties of the Greek philosophers, has vanished from CHURCH AND STATE. 107 modern society, and can-led off the difficulties which its presence was once felt to introduce. Nor is it correct to imagine that the influences which we de- note by the word Church constitute a new element special to Christian nations, and had not to be taken into account in schemes of ancient polity. They were in truth comprised in the Hellenic idea of the State ; which was not equivalent, as with us, to the mere aggregate of individual interests in respect to physical good, but represented all those moral ends which transcend personal happiness, and constitute the re\fi6rarov re\os of human life. An institution for the protection of "body and goods" would have been considered by Plato as a club of private per- sons requiring to be strictly watched ; or at most as a police organization subsidiary only to the true aims of government : while, on the other hand, the direct training of individual character, the influence over prevailing habits, the maintenance of the highest sentiments, which we consider the proper business of the Church, he claimed as characteristic functions of the public polity. So that, when we look to the principles of human nature operative in each, we find in the modern State only the corporate existence of the ancient tSiwr^y; and in the ancient ir6\is the territorial sovereignty of the modern e/c/cX^o-ia. The real subject of controversy is at bottom still the same ; as to the proper sphere and limits, in the af- fairs of men, of Self-will on the one hand and Rev- erence on the other. That the mere form of the question has undergone a change, is a natural conse- quence of the new cast which has been given to the 108 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. elementary forces of social life. The Greek mythol- ogy and worship were, for the most part, unmoral, and had little tendency to control the individual will by a sentiment of duty ; and to inspire and maintain in a people the sense of a law higher than them- selves, philosophers, left at fault by the Temple, looked to the Senate-house. The Christian faith, on the other hand, is in its very essence moral, and wherever taken to heart, has established over private life the august rule of conscience. Religion, in its proper sense, having thus gone over from the State to the Individual, has left the functions of the sov- ereign power in a reduced condition, and made them rather protective of the personal desires, than an en- croachment upon them : and hence the modern no- tion of the purely negative office of government, and the limitation of its action to what are called secular affairs. It is easy to understand, when these changes are taken into account, why men whose minds were purely antique as Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle regarded the State as wholly including all the influ- ences now contained under our word " Church," while men in sympathy with modern ideas as Warburton and Locke regard it as wholly exclud- ing them ; why writers imbued with the wisdom of both periods as Hooker and Arnold refuse to admit either agency as prohibitive of the other, and therefore pronounce the two spheres of operation ab- solutely coincident; and why those who engage themselves chiefly wih the transition from the Hea- then to the Christian civilization should admire, with CHURCH AND STATE. Mr. "Ward, the sacerdotal system of the Middle Ages, which practically leavened the mass of European population with Christian ideas, and should desire to subordinate the human sovereignty of govern- ment to the divine supremacy of the Church. At the present moment we can turn our eyes to no considerable province of Christendom, which is not agitated by the contest, between the State and the Church, for the private life of individuals. There seems to be a general conviction, that the Reforma- tion has developed itself into an excessive self-will ; that its maxims have weakened religious unity, and relaxed temporal authority ; that the great multitude of men require more systematic guidance, more pro- tection from temptation, more steady help towards a Christian life, than are secured by its methods, ever alternating between the repose of latitudinarian ease, and paroxysms of importunate zeal. That the let- alone system is incompetent to the moral manage- ment of the new economical conditions under which society exists, is the inference generally drawn from the frightful mass of practical Heathenism existing in the heart of Christian countries. But whether the new and needed power shall be assumed by the sceptre or the cross ; whether either can make good its exclusive prerogative, from natural reason, from human prescription, from divine ordination ; whether both must concur, and lay aside all mutual jealousy in a work demanding alike the strength of the one and the persuasion of the other, are questions by which the whole mind of Europe is vehemently moved. Scotland, impatient of the restraints im- 10 110 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. posed by the law on its ecclesiastical activity, sets up its Free Church. Ireland, ruled by priests, is tempting the State too long hated and defied to seek alliance with the only power through which the functions of government can be recovered. Eng- land, ashamed of its neglected population, is agitat- ed by the rival efforts of a repentant legislature and a repentant clergy, aiming to regulate the labor, to abate the ignorance, to elevate the desires of the people, the one by legalized discipline, the other by a sacerdotal police. France, with a Catholic king, whose policy has been indulgent to a clergy long de- spised, sees its Church unsatisfied, and resolved to dispute with the University the right of control over public instruction. Switzerland becomes the centre of anxious attention to all Europe, while deciding the fate of the Jesuits, to whom Lucerne had intrust- ed the education of her citizens. And if at Treves another Luther has arisen in the person of Rouge, it is from too bold an attempt to reassert the power of Ultramontane superstition over the Catholics of modern Germany. Everywhere an aggressive ac- tion has commenced upon the private elements of society : and usually the civil and ecclesiastical pow- ers appear as competitors for the new influence which is confessedly required. Hence the revived interest in those discussions of polity, which have at all times so much attraction for thoughtful men, and have given occasion to the works of our greatest moralists. Of the treatises mentioned at the head of this article, only those of Coleridge and Arnold attempt CHURCH AND STATE. Ill directly to define the relation between the Church and State. The other two are wholly occupied with the internal constitution and proper office of the Christian Church considered by itself. Incidentally, however, a State theory is involved in this narrower discussion : for in proportion as the range of eccle- siastical functions is made to take in more or less of the moral work of society, will less or more remain for the civil power to undertake. Accordingly, there is no difficulty in perceiving that Mr. Ward and Archbishop Whately occupy the opposite extremities of political philosophy as well as of theological sys- tem. Their whole conception of human life is so different, that, in dealing with it, temporally or spir- itually, each would precisely invert the rules of the other. Whatever the one delights to disparage pre- sents the favorite views of the other ; the ideas which the one has lived to expel, it is the highest ambition of the other to restore ; and the lessons from Scrip- ture, from history, from science, from reflection, which constitute the characteristic wisdom of the one, are present to the other as a never-failing stock-on-hand of fallacies and follies. Mr. Ward maintains the world to have been pre- pared for a divine revelation by the inextinguishable activity of conscience; which has power, even where connected with a feeble will, to maintain a secret sense of danger, or, possibly, an ineffectual sadness of aspiration. He lays the greatest stress on the truths of Natural Religion and the obligations of Natural Law : and regards Christianity as through- out assuming these, and furnishing their supernatu- 112 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. ral complement. The Church is an institution set up for the divine guidance of men ; to alarm, to counsel, to encourage them, to a moral obedience, of which, without such heavenly aid, they will only have a distant and passing dream. Her title to afford this guidance must be sought, not in any mere external credentials, but in her self-evidencing power to the conscience. Hence her discipline must begin with simply taking up the disciple's existing concep- tion of duty, and effecting its realization in his life ; and for the acknowledgment of her higher laws, the admission of her doctrines, and the adoption of her characteristic methods of worship, she must rely on the enlargement of moral perception and enrichment of spiritual knowledge which the habits of a holy life invariably bring. What, now, is the nature of the institution to which so great a work is as- signed ? It consists of a sacerdotal order, holding a mediatorial position between a Holy God and a sinful world ; intrusted with certain mystic media, through which alone a reconciling grace can pass ; and dispensing the heavenly guidance to those ex- clusively who will accept the sacramental rites. Thus there is no communion possible between the human conscience and Divine Spirit except through the appointed priesthood ; the whole work and strife of penitence, of aspiration, of duty, throughout the earth, is without a benediction unless offered through them. Their office is not simply spiritual, i. e. to deal, by the methods of earnest wisdom, with the spirit or moral reason of man ; but superhuman and M/i-spiritual, to hold and to distribute certain physi- CHURCH AND STATE. 113 cat conditions of sanctity, of which they are deposi- taries, not from the purity of their affections, the clearness of their discernment, and the faithfulness of their wills, but from their standing in an un- broken line of ordination, reaching through the bodies of bishops to the Apostolic age. In addition, how- ever, to their supernatural function of dispensing or withholding the cftvine grace and forgiveness, they have natural duties of counsel, warning, and com- passion to perform. Members of a corporate com- munity, which has gathered to it for eighteen centu- ries the moral experience of saintly men, and whose archives contain a record of every temptation and sorrow that can befall, and every conquest that can ennoble, the human heart, they have access to the wisdom of ages, and are trained in such familiarity with its stores as to derive from it the discipline and rules suited to every new emergency. In the private confessional they must watch and guide the indi- vidual conscience : in public convocation, estimate the duty of classes, regulate the usages of profes- sions, and pronounce on the moralities of empire. Their duties have an immense range over the morals, the discipline, the thought, the government of so- ciety. In morals they have a negative office, as the stern representatives of the divine abhorrence of evil : and must proclaim the hatefulness of sin by denying the communion, not only to open transgres- sors, but to the idolaters of wealth and the uncon- scious slaves of low and unspiritual desires; by excluding from the education of the young every thing at variance with the tastes of a holy mind ; by 10* 114 MAHTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. falling on the neck of each softened transgressor, and committing him instantly to the seclusion of some sacred retreat ; by the direct training of saints, and holding up in visible contrast with the prevalent pursuit of earthly shadows an order of men wholly dedicated to heavenly realities. To this must suc- ceed the positive task of watching over the duty of Christians in the two related particulars of faith and obedience; preserving perfect uniformity of language, without the slightest allowance of individual dis- cretion, in the statement of doctrine ; constantly pre- senting the historical Christ of the Gospels to the people as their God, who created them one by one, who is closely present with them, and knows their thoughts ; and habituating them daily to the phrases expressive of the two great truths of Revelation, " Three Persons, one God," " One Person, two Natures." As a disciplinary institution, the Church must not only provide a sublime and beautiful ritual, " such as the Spirit himself has suggested to the be- loved bride of Christ," but must adapt her methods of influence with versatile skill to the several classes of society. The poor are her especial charge, to whom she must never rest till full justice has been done. Such of their employments as are incom- patible with the Christian life she must detect and prohibit. Their oppressors, however powerful, must be sternly denounced. Their day of rest must be guarded, and refreshed by a religious ceremonial in- vested with every beauty that may touch and solem- nize their hearts. The rich, too, must be warned of their temptations, not only by direct resistance and CHURCH AND STATE. . 115 reproof to the desire of wealth, but by examples of cheerful and voluntary poverty. And the educated must be saved from the dangers of corrupt admira- tions and a mere diabolical acuteness, by imparting in early life the Catholic rather than the Classical idea of heroism ; and throughout his course keeping the student closely implicated in habit with the dis- cipline and offices of the Church. Perhaps the hardest task imposed by Mr. Ward upon his Church is, to maintain -supremacy over the thought of society. For this end he requires her to create a new literature and philosophy, antagonistic to that which, he complains, the spread and advance- ment of knowledge has put into the hands of un- believers. She must find a way of prevailing over the apparent results of the modern criticism and exegesis; must relieve the Old Testament of the difficulties with which historical research painfully oppresses it ; must harmonize the Hebrew cosmogo- ny with the discoveries of modern science ; and, in order to guide the reaction against the infidel phi- losophy of the last century, must produce a new sys- tem of metaphysics, capable of coping with the subtlety of Protestant analysis, and of giving a sci- entific basis to the Catholic system. Finally, the influence of the Church over the body politic must be obtained, not by aspiring to the direct administration of State affairs, but by proclaiming the application of Christian principles to political government; by denouncing State sins; by guiding the popular eagerness for redress. Nor are more positive inter- positions to be avoided. Rules must be made for 116 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. almsgiving, to correct the cold-hearted morality of , economists. It must be authoritatively settled what causes a barrister may plead, what books a book- seller may distribute. And above all, the education of the people must be undertaken by the Church, and a subsequent control over their habits be main- tained, with a special view to counteract the evils, mental and moral, arising from the excessive division of labor. All these duties devolve upon ecclesiastics, not by delegation . from the State, but by super- natural appointment from God. Their long neglect is to be deplored with a greater sorrow than for any unfaithfulness towards men : and they are to be resumed with the consciousness of an authority above the law. From this imperfect sketch of Mr. Ward's " Ideal," it will be evident that, with him, the Church is con- stituted wherever the clergy exist : that its origin is higher than that of society, and its rights beyond the reach of the consentaneous will of men ; that the sphere of its power is coextensive with human life, and embraces, therefore, the whole range of the State's activity ; that it may not, unless through the law, enforce its claims by the temporal sword, but may cut off offenders from communion with divine mercy ; may " declare war in the name of the Lord against wickedness in high worldly places, and draw the spiritual sword which has so long rusted in its scabbard." (p. 437.) We know of no living writer, of any reputation as a thinker, who has proved so little, and disproved so much, as Archbishop Whately. And on no one CHURCH AND STATE. 117 of his works is his negative mode of treatment more impressed than on the Essay now before us. We close it with the clearest knowledge of what the kingdom of Christ is not; of the powers which its ministers must disown ; of the purposes they can- not serve ; of the spurious origin of almost every thing that occurs to the mind when the Church sys- tem is spoken of, catechisms, creeds, articles, liturgy, sacramental forms, ordination, rubrics, canons, and episcopacy itself. But of any high and holy ends worthy of a divine institution ; of any principle of unity connecting its parts into a spiritual whole ; of the nature of the vital activity which should pervade the organism of the Church, and its relation to the other forces which determine the phenomena of society, the faintest possible conception is given. As the temple, with its metropolitan priesthood, is the type of Mr. Ward's Church ; so is the municipal synagogue, with its lay officers, of Dr. Whately's. Our Lord determined to gather his disciples after his departure into local societies. In the constitu- tion of these, the practice of the synagogue was naturally followed: for there it was that the Apos- tolic missionaries first sought a hearing : and if they failed to convince the majority of the assembly, so that the synagogue became a church, the converted minority, on their secession, followed in their new combination the model with which they were fa- miliar. Hence in the earliest Christian communi- ties, the deacons, the presbyters, the bishops, had like duties with the officers of the same designation in a Jewish association of worshippers. The effect of 118 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. this statement on the pretensions of the ecclesiastical body is evident. The several societies of disciples may claim a direct sanction from Christ, since he distinctly provided for their formation ; but he took no notice of the functionaries who were to admin- ister their affairs ; and that they exist at all, arises only from the wants and convenience of the associa- tions which they represent ; every society having its officers, its rules, its terms of membership. And as for the particular nature of the offices thus created, that grew naturally out of an historical antecedent which cannot possibly impart to it any superhuman authori- ty : for, whatever obscurity hangs over the origin of the Hebrew synagogues, they certainly cannot be referred to the Mosaic law, or to any causes higher than the human will. Hence a Church is a " con- gregation of faithful men," to which the clergyman is but an appendage, with title depending on his being the " regularly appointed officer of a regular Christian community." Each society, moreover, is as wholly independent of the rest, as the synagogue of Athens from that of Caesarea ; connected indeed by sympathy, and at liberty to establish a federal combination with others ; but no longer bound by such organization, when it fails to accomplish its appointed end. The Church has accordingly no unity but in name ; it is wholly provincial, and has no visible head, either individual or collective. And whatever range of discretion may be left as to the functions of the clergy, one thing is absolutely ex- cluded by the very religion which they serve : they have no templar and sacerdotal duties, can offer no CHURCH AND STATE. 119 sacrifice, absolve from no sin, and stand between no man and his God. And even in the prosecution of its legitimate ends, the Church must wholly abstain from secular coercion, as an encroachment on the " things that are Caesar's," and alien to the spirit of a religion whose " kingdom is not of this world." All temporal sanctions are replaced in Christian societies by the sanctions of the world to come. This it is which, according to Archbishop Whately, constitutes the spirituality of the kingdom of Christ. We must protest, in passing, against this prevalent but gross abuse of the word spiritual. It does not denote a mere far-sighted self-interest, in opposition to the narrow calculations of a worldly mind ; but is the name of a higher order of motive than any prudence, long or short. Action which proceeds from personal hope or fear is wholly unspiritual : the nearness or remoteness of the pleasure or pain contemplated does not alter the moral quality, but only the sagacity, of the agent's determination : he makes an investment, in the one case for a quick return, in the other giving credit on good security ; in both the transaction is strictly mercantile. Were this the difference between the foundation of the State and that of the Church, then political society would be like a partnership for prosecuting a home trade with cash payments ; while Christian society would resemble a joint-stock company for colonizing some antipodal region, that, after the judicious out- lay of years, might yield, not the profits of a shop, but the revenue of a commonwealth. It is the re- mark of Coleridge, that, whether a " man expects the 120 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. auto da fe, the fire and fagots, with which he is threatened, to take place at Lisbon or Smithfield, or in some dungeon in the centre of the earth, makes no difference in the kind of motive by which he is in- fluenced ; nor of course in the nature of the power which acts on his passions by means of it." * That influence alone is spiritual which awakens the con- sciousness of obligation and the sentiments of wor- ship. To sum up, then, the leading particulars of Arch- bishop Whately's theory. The end of the Church is to enforce the moral law, as recognized among Christians, by the sanctions of a future life. The end of the State is the protection of person and property by the use of temporal sanctions. In both cases the institutions derive their existence from the component members, over whom the functionaries have no authority beyond that which belongs to reg- ular official appointment. And all questions as to the internal organization of the Church, the mode of supporting its cost, and of adjusting its relations to the secular governmept, are open to determination by regard to expediency, provided coercion, priest- hood, and a visible head be altogether disclaimed. In one important respect Dr. Arnold occupies an intermediate position between the two writers al- ready noticed. In his design of a Church Mr. Ward labors for Christendom, Archbishop Whately for a congregation, Arnold for a nation. The Christians of this realm constitute, in the view of the first, only * Church and State, p. 134. CHURCH AND STATE. 121 an integrant part of one vast civitas, conscious of its unity ; in that of the second, an aggregate of partic- ular communities, forming together a local societas, unconscious of its unity, but collected into a class by observers from without ; in that of the third, one en- tire and independent civitas among many within the wide circuit of the Christian societas throughout the world. This peculiarity, like every other in Arnold's theory, is singularly expressive of the character of his mind. It was not simply his historical taste, or his love of Aristotle, that led him to identify the functions of Church and State, and seek in Chris- tianity the bond of citizenship to replace the an- cient ties of race. Hooker, so induced, had done the same; with the significant difference, that he nei- ther hated a priesthood, nor appreciated the Puritans. Arnold's all-prevailing moral nature made him seize with avidity, from every age, all the securities for hu- man duty which genius had devised or inspiration imparted ; and reject with indignation every coun- terfeit pretending to do the sterling work of a re- sponsible will. He could not, for all his faith in revelation, forego one jot of the ancient reverence for law; or, for all his high doctrine of obedience, allow the priest to touch with one of his fingers the bur- den of individual obligation. He would save gov- ernment from degenerating into police, and Chris- tianity into conjuring ; and he had an unconquerable aversion to accept the constable as representative of the State, or the bishop of the Church. Both in- stitutions were to him but incorporated expressions of the conscience of their members ; the one of its 11 122 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. executive energy, the other of its meditative aspira- tions ; neither, therefore, having an aim less or more comprehensive than the other; neither complete and healthy without the other ; and requiring, in order to effectuate the ends of either, their coalescence into a living unity. The " Fragment on the Church " con- tends, no less strenuously and successfully than the " Essay on the Kingdom of Christ," against a sacer- dotal system, and subordinates the ministry to the " congregation of faithful men " : yet with the dif- ference that Dr. Whately seems to be stripping the clergy of their pretensions ; Dr. Arnold, to be distrib- uting to the laity their duties : the one, impatient for the abatement of nonsense ; the other, unhappy at the usurpation of a trust. Apart, however, from this characteristic difference of feeling, there is a perfect accordance between the two friends in their nega- tive conclusions, as to the internal constitution of the Church. Nothing whatever, according to Ar- nold, is instituted, except that the disciples shall form themselves into communities, for mutual help in du- ty, in the same way as mere society is an aid in civ- ilization. It is a thing authoritatively settled, that there shall be this divine polity of cooperation, for bringing the faith of Christ to the masses of men, and remedying the extent of the Fall, as individual devotedness countervails its intensity. But as to the modes by which this association shall conduct its contest against moral evil, and the scheme of or- ganization by which its parts shall be maintained in active unity, all is left open to the discretion of suc- cessive ages. On this point his language is most unqualified : CHURCH AND STATE. 123 " In matters of doctrine, an opinion, however unimpor- tant, is either true or false ; and if false, he who holds it is in error, although the error may be so practically indif- ferent as to be of no account in our estimate of the men. But in matters of government, I hold that there is actually no right and no wrong. Viewed in the large, as they are seen in India, and when abstracted from the questions of particu- lar countries, I hold that one form of Church government is exactly as much according to Christ's will as another ; nay, I consider such questions as so indifferent, that, if I thought the government of my neighbor's Church better than my own, I yet would not, unless the case were very strong, leave my Church for his, because habits, associations, and all those minor ties which ought to burst asunder before a great call, are yet of more force, I think, than a difference between Episcopacy and Presbytery, unless one be very good of its kind, and the other very bad." Life, Vol. II. p. 105. The only material point on which Arnold dissent- ed from the opinions expressed in Whately's Es- says was the right of the Church to wield the tem- poral sword. And this, as it appears to us, was a difference more in words than in reality, and re- solved itself into the question, whether the power which enforced the laws in a Christian country should be called the State or the Church. Arnold was as far as his friend from claiming coercive pre- rogatives for either ecclesiastical officers or worship- ping assemblies : all judicial and executive authority he would leave where now it rests: only he would regard the functionaries who exercise it as deputed, not by the material interests, but by the moral sense of the community, and standing for the law of 124 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. Christ by which all are bound. This ascription of a sacred character to authorized and constitutional rul- ers is all that Arnold meant by his desire to make " the Church a sovereign society." He wanted, not more power to the Church, but a more Christian tem- per to the State. He could not endure that any part of life should escape the reach of obligation; that the process of social organization should be thought to give rise, at any step, to relations exempt from moral inspection ; that any voluntary deeds between citizen and citizen, between subjects and rulers, between the commonwealth and foreign states, should be treated as less amenable to the divine rule of conscience, than the private conduct which is abandoned wholly to its sway. Hence he was im- patient of the false distinction between " secular " and " spiritual " things ; under cover of which he be- lieved that countless questionable ways of thought and act passed without a just verdict, or even an in- quiring challenge, and whole provinces of life were ceded as irreclaimable for Christian cultivation. He felt how untruly this distinction presents the real difference between the pursuit of physical and that of moral good, as if they were each a separate business, to be achieved in society by different agents, in indi- viduals by different acts. As in the case of private persons there are not two sets of employments, one irresponsibly abandoned to the natural desires, the other the exclusive realm of duty; but moral good consists in the regulated pursuit of natural good ac- cording to a divine and holy law : so in communi- ties there are not two spheres of work and office, CHURCH AND STATE. 125 one with only physical ends, the other with only spiritual ; but all parts of the body politic must serve one supreme intent, viz. that the whole natural life of society shall also be a moral life. Arnold, ac- cordingly, with adventurous nobleness, insisted on carrying the Christian standard through every depart- ment of the state : sovereign and council, judges and ministers, legislators and magistrates, were to regard themselves as functionaries of a Christian church. Nay, he did not shrink from applying his principle to the province of government most difficult to re- duce under the rule of truth, honesty, and justice, we mean, the foreign relations of the commonwealth. He had no idea of leaving, in diplomacy, a privileged nest of retreat for chicanery and fraud; or in war itself, a licensed escape from moral obligation. In all questions between nation and nation, in the con- duct of all disputes, and the resistance of aggres- sion, there actually exists a right and a wrong : and is it for Christian men to throw up these things in confusion and despair, and bid conscience turn the back till they have scrambled through a crisis they cannot manage by her rules? He was not to be scared, therefore, by any amount of Machiavellian practice, from including ambassadors, army, and na- vy in the staff of his national Church. They were all instruments in that contest with moral evil, and pressure towards the highest good, which formed the true tpyov of every Christian community, and must share alike the responsibility and the dignity of their association with such a work. Arnold would have heartily adopted his favorite Aristotle's estimate of 11* 126 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. the religious character of wise and thoughtful sway, when he identified the rule of reason and law in states with the authority of God, and said that, to al- low scope for the unregulated will of governors, was to give power to the brute.* Of this sentiment, in- deed, the following passage from the " Fragment" is little more than a Christian amplification : " It is obvious that, the object of Christian society being thus extensive, and relating not to ritual observances, but to the improvement of the whole of our life, the natural and fit state of the Church is, that it should be a sovereign society or commonwealth ; as long as it is subordinate and municipal, it cannot fully carry its purposes into effect. This will be evident, if we consider that law and government are the sovereign influences on human society ; that they in the last resort shape and control it at their pleasure ; that institutions depend on them, and are by them formed and modified ; that what they sanction will ever be generally considered innocent ; that what they condemn is thereby made a crime, and if persisted in becomes rebellion ; and that those who hold in their hands the power of life and death must be able greatly to obstruct the progress of whatever they disapprove of; and those who dispose of all the honors and rewards of society must, in the same way, be greatly able to advance whatever they think excellent. So long, then, as the sovereign society is not Christian, and the Church is not sovereign, we have two powers alike de- signed to act upon the whole of our being, but acting often in opposition to each other. Of these powers, the one has * 'O p(V ovv TOV vovv KeAeuow ap%fiv SoKei KfXfvav ap%eiv TOV Qtbv KOI TOVS vopovs, 6 8' avdpanrov Kf\eva>v TTpocm'^cri Kal drjpiov. Polit. III. 16. CHURCH AND STATE. 127 wisdom, the other external force and influence ; and from the division of these things, which ought ever to go together, the wisdom of the Church cannot carry into effect the truths which it sees and loves ; whilst the power of government, not being guided by wisdom, influences society for evil rather than for good. The natural and true state of things then is, that this power and this wisdom should be united : that human life should not be pulled to pieces between two claimants, each pretending to exercise control over it, not in some particular portion, but universally ; that wisdom should be armed with power, power guided by wisdom ; that the Christian Church should have no external force to thwart its beneficent purposes ; that government should not be poisoned by its internal ignorance or wickedness, and thus advance the cause of God's enemy, rather than per- form the part of God's vicegerent." Ch. I. p. 10. It is impossible, in reading this passage, not to be reminded of the well-known saying of Plato, that there can be no cessation of ills to states, or, gener- ally, to the human race, unless either philosophers become their kings, or their so-called kings and rulers become true philosophers ; and unless such a coales- cence takes place between political power and philo- sophic wisdom, that natures devoted to either, at the expense of the other, are for the most part expressly excluded from public affairs.* To Arnold, " so natu- * 'Ecu/ p.f) f/ ol s re Kal iicavtos, Kal TOVTO tls ravrov f-vnTTfcrt), Suva/it's re iroKiTiKr/ Kal (f)i\o(ro(f)ia, T>V 8e vvv Tropfvofj-fvav , x&pls e(f>' (Kartpov at TroXXcu (fri/vets '' avayKTjS a.TroKXfi.j e'ortj'. avayKalov Toivvv fit 8vo ftfpr) birjprjpai>, *ai TTJV pen elvai KOIVTJV, S>v. Polit. VII. 10. CHURCH AND STATE. 135 knowledge ; next, a class of instructors for effect- ing its distribution. " A certain smaller number were to remain at the foun- tain-heads of the humanities, in cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the interests of physical and moral science ; being likewise the instructors of such as constituted, or were to constitute, the remaining more numerous classes of the order. The mem- bers of this latter, and far more numerous body, were to be distributed throughout the country, so as not to leave even the smallest integral part or division without a resident guide, guardian, and instructor ; the objects and final inten- tion of the whole order being these, to preserve the stores and to guard the treasures of past civilization, and thus to bind the present with the past ; to perfect and add to the same, and thus to connect the present with the future ; but especially to diffuse through the whole com- munity, and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indis- pensable both for the understanding of those rights, and for the performance of the duties correspondent ; finally, to secure for the nation, if not a superiority over the neighbor- ing states, yet an equality at least, in that character of gen- eral civilization, which, equally with, or rather more than, fleets, armies, and revenue, forms the ground of its defen- sive and offensive power." Church and State, Ch. V. p. 46. The true end for which this educated and edu- cating class is created, and that on which alone the State has a right to insist, is the training of citizens in the essentials of the social character, the dif- fusion among the people of "legality, that is, the obligations of a well-calculated self-interest, under 136 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. the conditions of a common interest determined by common laws." (p. 58.) The provisions for this national culture may be wholly detached from the institutions of the Christian Church : they vested, among the Hebrews, in the Levites, among the Kelts, in the Druids, before Christendom existed : and in countries of mixed religions, either receiv- ing the advance or witnessing the retreat of Chris- tianity, they could not be identified with an ecclesi- astical system having only partial contact with the people. In some respects they have to accomplish more, in others vastly less, than falls within the prov- ince of the Church of Christ upon the same spot; more, inasmuch as they must include the support, not of theology and morals alone, but of all the sci- ences, not omitting those which sustain the lay pro- fessions of law and medicine; less, because they are content with forming good subjects for the com- monwealth, and stop short of the high aim at per- fection through the whole inner and outer life of individuals. The functions, therefore, of the national clerisy are truly distinct from those of the Christian clergy : and in relation to the Church of the body politic, " Christianity is a blessed accident, a provi- dential boon." (p. 59.) Whether, the functions being different, the functionaries can ever with ad- vantage be the same, must depend on historical con- ditions present in one age, absent in another. The circumstances under which Christian institutions developed themselves in the earlier period of Eng- lish history, rendered them in every way the fittest depositaries of the national trust. They were the CHURCH AND STATE. 137 centres of all the intellectual and spiritual light which ages of violence had left unquenched. No physical science, no mental skill, no moral art, had yet disengaged itself from their fostering shelter. They comprehended " All the so-called liberal arts and sciences, the posses- sion and application of which constitute the civilization of a country, as well as the theological. The last was indeed placed at the head of all ; and of good right did it claim the precedence. But why ? Because, under the name of theology or divinity were contained the interpretation of languages, the conservation and tradition of past events, the momentous epochs and revolutions of the race and nation, the continuation of the records, logic, ethics, and the determination of ethical science, in application to the rights and duties of men in all their various relations, social and civil ; and last, the ground-knowledge, the prima scientia as it was named, philosophy, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas." p. 49. At a time when the Christian Church in the na- tion failed of no function appropriate to the Clerisy of the nation, ecclesiastics were naturally taken as the Officiaries also of the national Church. That they were ministers of a religion which, besides securing the civil ends, went on to accomplish some- thing more and better, did not disqualify them for their State trust. It is only needful that their work should comprise an instruction of the people in legal obligations. " Whatever of higher origin and nobler and wider aim the ministers of the national Church, in some other capacity, and in the performance of other duties, might labor to im- 12* 138 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. plant and cultivate in the minds and hearts of their congre- gations and seminaries, should include the practical conse- quences of the legality above mentioned. The State requires that the basin should be kept full, and that the stream which supplies the hamlet and turns the mill, and waters the meadow-fields, should be fed and kept flowing. If this be done, the State is content, indifferent for the rest, whether the basin be filled by the spring in its first ascent, and rising but a handVbreadth above the bed ; or whether, drawn from a more elevated source, shooting aloft in a stately column, that reflects the light of heaven from its shaft, and bears the Iris, cadi decus, promissumque Jovis lucidum on its spray, it fills the basin in its descent." p. 59. The fitness, however, of the ecclesiastical body for the State task confided to them diminished in proportion as their power assumed more prominently a sacerdotal character, and their influence was ex- erted rather on the superstitious fears, than on the reason and conscience, of the people. When at length they lost all patriotic ties, and merely resided on the land, as members of a cosmopolitan priest- hood under allegiance to a foreign head, the grossest abuses of trust occurred. Large portions of the heritable lands of the country were absorbed into the Nationalty, by bequests dictated in ghostly fear : and, on the other side, masses were sacrilegiously alienated from the Nationalty by those who were only its life-trustees. The true " Idea " of the Eng- lish Reformation though never worked out was to right the balance thus disturbed, and to re- impose upon the clergy the neglected conditions CHURCH AND STATE. 139 required of them as functionaries of the common- wealth. The Nationally should accordingly have been allotted to the maintenance, (1.) of the Uni- versities, and great schools of liberal learning ; (2.) of a pastor or parson (persona, exemplar of the per- sonal character) in every parish ; (3.) of a school- master in every parish, who might succeed to the pastorate ; (4.) of the poor, from age or sickness ; (5.) of the Church and School buildings. How far the miserably imperfect results of the Reformation in England constitute an unfitness in the Church of England for any longer performing the duties of the National Clerisy, Coleridge nowhere declares his opinion. Writing with a special reference to the Catholic Emancipation Act, he enumerates only the disqualifications for this trust peculiar to the Ro- man priests, viz. allegiance to a foreign power, and compulsory celibacy, in connection with an anti- national head. But his principles manifestly imply that the State may at any time vest the Nationalty in the body of men be they who they may best fitted to realize its proper ends; and if, from changes either in themselves, or in the community around them, the Clergy no longer represent and guide the intellect and conscience of the nation at large, either new orders of Educators may be added to them as the complement of their defects, or they may be wholly discarded in favor of a Clerisy of lay-instructors. The utter contempt of " vested interests," and even disregard of individuals, in contemplation of the public weal, which marked this conception of the 140 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. Church, are no less apparent in Coleridge's Theory of the State. He looks upon society, not in Arnold's way, as composed of persons, but as a combination of class interests and tendencies; while the persons change, like the atoms of an animate body, these, like its essential organs, remain through all its growth and activity, and constitute the functional powers, whose deranged or concentaneous operation determines the death or life of communities. He resolves the total well-being of a State into two ele- mentary interests, that of Permanence, represented by the landed property of a country, held (1.) by the Major Barons or Peers ; (2.) by the Minor Barons or Gentry : and that of Progression, repre- sented by its Personalty, under the several heads of, (1.) the manufacturing people in towns ; (2.) the commercial, in ports ; (3.) the distributive ; (4.) the professional. The negative end of all the activity of the State is, to guard the interests and concerns of the whole Proprietage, whether landed or per- sonal ; and even the protection of life and limb is an object of care only in so far as it is involved in this. But when this negative end has been attained, there still "remain its positive ends: (1.) to make the means of subsistence more easy to each individual ; (2.) to secure to each of its members the hope of bettering his own condition or that of his children ; (3.) the development of those faculties which are essential to his humanity, that is, to his rational and moral being." * It is evident from this that, in his * Lay Sermons, p. 415. CHURCH AND STATE. 141 estimate of the proper functions of a State, Cole- ridge occupies an intermediate position between Whately and Arnold ; embracing within its ends more than the negative system of the former, and less than the full Christian Polity of the latter. While he would not restrain the State to a mere work of police, he does not require it to become an instrument and help to the special perfecting of pri- vate life, demanding of it, not " those degrees of in- tellectual cultivation which distinguish man from man in the same civilized society, but those only that raise the civilized man above the barbarian, the savage, and the brute." * Arnold nowhere gives us, so far as we remember, a hint of any thing which his State, alias Church, can not do : he affirms every- where that it covers the whole ground of human life : no portion of the energy of individuals is left afloat for independent action ; but all is merged into the organization of the body politic or the body ecclesiastic. Coleridge, on the other hand, declares it essential to the well-being of the commonwealth, that there should be a reserve of latent power in the hands of individuals, and that this shall be main- tained in due proportion to the embodied power of the State. He deprecates the loss of individuality which takes place in absolute monarchies and in absolute republics, in the one case by autocratic annihilation, in the other by democratic absorption of private characteristics : and justly refers the prac- tical freedom of the English people to the fact that * Lay Sermons, p. 415. 142 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. they have not delegated their whole power to the Par- liament and sovereign. This point secured, there is but one other condition on which the healthy action of the State depends ; viz. that there be a due pro- portion between the real social influence of its sev- eral classes and interests, and their recognized politi- cal power. If the Permanent and Progressive ele- ments have their relative forces adjusted in one way in society, and in quite another in the legislature ; if any class has risen into possession of influential wealth, without admission into the public franchises ; or if intellect and skill obtain direct entrance to administrative offices, without any of the securities afforded by cognizable possession ; this rule is vio- lated, and the equilibrium of social functions is dis- turbed. It may be observed, however, that where the conditions of well-being in communities seem to be hopelessly absent, a spontaneous compensation takes place, till the requisite element has had time to unfold itself. Thus Coleridge himself remarks, that while the Progressive interest in our own coun- try lay yet undeveloped, the Church in a great degree performed its functions and supplied its place ; coun- teracting feudal tyranny and relaxing the severity of vassalage ; holding forth the benefits of knowledge and the means of future civilization ; and, by open- ing in its monasteries an asylum for fugitive depend- ents and oppressed franklins, becoming the nursery of towns. We would add, that at this moment a striking illustration of the same principle of compen- sation is working itself out before our eyes. It is undeniable that among the disorders of our English . CHURCH AND STATE. 143 State we must reckon it not the least, that the Pro- gressive interest has not political power at all in proportion to its free life and energy in society ; and that the " clear and effectual majority of the lower House," provided for it in the theory of the Consti- tution, has been shifted into the opposite scale. Of this disorder the obstinate maintenance of the corn- laws and the game-laws are the plainest and most irritating symptom. But who can fail to observe the healthy natural tendency of this incorrespondency to right itself? The elements which have hitherto composed the Permanent interest are manifestly un- dergoing dissolution. The landed influence has for ages included both the owners and the occupiers of the soil : and to regard them otherwise than as one body would have been considered, a century ago, a sign of ignorance and folly. And so it might have continued, had the fiduciary character of land- ed possession never been forgotten, and had not a course of cupidity and ambition on the part -of the owners reduced the cultivators to a state of depend- ence and uncertainty, without any enduring stake in the fields of their own tillage. But this very de- pendence, this precarious tendency, converts them into mere traders ; makes the principles of commer- cial exchange not only applicable (which of course they must always be) to the produce of their toil, but paramount with them over every feeling which might otherwise have continued to determine their political associations. They are accordingly under- going a transference from the landed to the personal interest ; learning to regard themselves as mere capi- I 144 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. talists; and acquiring the feelings, the notion of rights, the estimate of duties, which characterize that class. This we consider to be one of the most mo- mentous social changes of our own time : the re- moter consequence of which may be, when a system of long leases has restored the feeling of indepen- dence, to shift the Progressive movement of society, now dangerously limited to town populations, back among a rural yeomanry, ruled in their political as- pirations by a sterling and steady sense of justice, rather than by the capricious and self-willed notions of liberty that are apt to impel the city multitudes. We refrain from following Coleridge through his historical illustrations of his theory, from the devel- opment of the constitutional powers of the British commonwealth. What has been said will suffice to present his system of thought in comparison with Arnold's ; over which it seems to us to possess two prime advantages. On the civil side, it gives a more precise and practicable definition of the proper func- tions of the State, and removes the negative doc- trine, not by verbal arguments about " a sovereign society," but by furnishing a positive substitute. On the religious side, it has the unique merit of wholly separating the National from the Christian Church: thus vindicating the principle of public endowment for the higher culture of the nation, without impli- cating it with theological disputes ; imposing no confession of faith as a condition of citizenship ; re- quiring no legal definition of Christian essentials ; and keeping the staff of government officiaries aloof from controversies between Episcopacy and Presby- CHURCH AND STATE. 145 tery, Priests and Preachers. It is curious that Ar- nold, with his wide historical view, with his interest in modern colonization, with his epistolary connec- tions in many lands, should have failed to perceive the utter impracticability of his theory in such an empire as that of Great Britain. "With Indians and half-castes in Canada, with Pagan aborigines in New Zealand and Australia, with Hottentots at the Cape, with the Buddhists of Ceylon, the Parsees of Bombay, the Brahmins of Bengal, and Jews every- where, embraced within the sovereignty of England, how is it possible to make the profession of Chris- tianity a requisite for political rights and civil offices? It is vain to thrust these vast territories out of sight, and construct a theory that shall be bounded by the British seas. Ecclesiastical and educational institu- tions, direct ramifications from those at home, al- ready exist in all our dependencies : an administrative system pervades them all : and the relation of the natives to these cannot be an external one : wealth, character, intelligence, all the elements of social influence, must not be disowned in behalf of re- ligious exclusion ; and once admitted as trusted functionaries of colonial governments, they surely are not to be held disqualified by creed from serving the imperial. The difficulties of Arnold's theory are great enough in England ; when it is carried to the offsets from English power, it vanishes in impossi- bilities. Yet, widely as methods of government must be diversified with the populations to which they are applied, a political philosophy ought surely to reach some fundamental principles which underlie 13 146 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. them all, and to enable the widest and most various empire to preserve a characteristic unity. We are unwilling to try our readers' patience by needlessly extending a discussion which, from the compressed form it unavoidably assumes, occasions, we fear, an unwelcome strain upon their attention. Yet we cannot close without indicating, in some im- perfect way, the course of reflection by which, as we conceive, these great questions of Polity may be brought to a successful issue. We are satisfied that no test can be applied to the several competing sys- tems of our day, that no sound guidance can be obtained even through the confusion of the May- nooth debate, without adverting to the first prin- ciples of political society. Almost all the ecclesias- tical schemes of our times seem to us well-reasoned from the premises they severally assume. The vol- untaryism of the Independents, the Catholicism of Mr. Ward, the Establishment scheme of Warbur- ton and Mr. Macaulay, the National endowment of Coleridge and Chalmers, are all admirably de- fended, and command the assent of those who can take their first step without hesitation. But here is the difficulty. To us they seem to set out with Scriptural interpretations, or Apostolic parallels, or historical predilections, or ethical maxims, or party phrases, or rules of expediency, of the most unreal and questionable kind ; to which, at all events, we find no correspondent conviction; and before and beyond which we must search for the point of di- vergence of these different systems. Our real clew must be found in the principles of human nature CHURCH AND STATE. 147 that give rise to Church and State, Religion and Government; principles, of which all historical precedents, and even Christianity itself, as a received faith and source of social phenomena, are but the results ; and without reference to which only a blind and empirical use can be made of the lessons of the past. An origin has been sought for the social existence of man in the weakness of the isolated individual, and the necessity of union for purposes of self- defence. The manifest objections to this view, fa- miliar as they have been made by the reasonings of Aristotle and Cicero against it, have not prevented its frequent reappearance.* A general preference, however, has been given to the theory which refers the formation of communities to the affectionate propensities of our race ; and this account of the original social bond has received the sanction of Aristotle.f But it appears evident that the relation of mutual equality which would ensue from the mere sentiment of attachment (