THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PETER BAYNE, M.A. Now we look upon Christianity not as a power which has sprung up out of the hidden depths of man's nature, but as one which descended from above, when heaven opened itself anew to man's long alienated race; a power which, as both in its origin and its essence it is exalted above all that human nature can create out of its own resources, was designed, to impart to that nature a new life, and to change it in its inmost principles. Nba,xdkb. Hold thou the good : define it well : For fear divine Philosophy Should push beyond her mark, and be Procuress to the Lords of hell. Tennyson. EDINBURGH: JAMES HOGG. LONDON: R. GROOMBRIDGE & SONS. p,u- EDINBURGH: PRINTHD BY J. HOOO. PEEFACE. In the opening paragraphs of his powerful essay on Jonathan Ed- wards, Professor M'Dougall remarks on the too extensive diffusion of the idea that evangelical religion, in its strict, personal form, comports ill with solidity and compass of intellect. In a course of somewhat desultory reading, I was forcibly struck with the preva- lence of this idea in certain departments of our literature; and it oc- curred to me that a statement of the Christian view of the individual character, together with a fair representation of the practical embodi- ment and working of that character in our age, might not be unat- tended with good. It was thus that the composition of the follow- ing chapters had origin. With the first idea certain others became gradually allied, and especially it seemed to me important that the position and worth of Christianity as a social and reforming agency should be, at least in outline, defined. The twofold statement and delineation which I here attempt was the final result. The first and third divisions of the general subject may seem not to bear a due proportion to the second. The disproportion is only apparent: if I may be permitted to speak somewhat pedantically, the relation between the three parts is that of stem, foliage, and fruit. The second part is biographic throughout: and in each of the IV PREFACE. Books into which it is divided, the working of the individual Christian life is intended to be represented. In the first of these, as I would have it specially noted, this life is manifested in the case of persons not extremely remarkable in an intellectual point of view, and who received their belief in the Christian Revelation in the natural way in which an accepted form of religion is trans- mitted from generation to generation, not through argument and unaffected by intellectual doubt: in the second, it is exhibited in the case of minds which will be allowed to belong to a high order, and in which the Christian faith became finally the pillar of cha- racter, only after having been more or less rocked in the wind of doubt. The first may meet the floating notion that Christianity is powerless with the popular mind: the second, that it has lost its grasp on thinkers. In the First Book of the Second Part, I treat also, though not, as I have said, exclusively, of the manifestation of Christianity in social life. In order to unite this endeavour with the general bio- graphic plan of the work, it was necessary that the men selected should be more or less representative of public movements or cha- racteristics. They are so: yet I have not been able to attain here a symmetry to yield me satisfaction. I must beg the reader, how- ever, to remark, that I refer only incidentally to what is strictly the national life, that which one nation has as distinguished from another, and that my object is the general structure of the internal social economy. A man in private life may well enough represent or introduce a phase of this. It was my idea and endeavour to represent the whole life of each individual of whom I spoke. I think that Mr Carlyle has demon- strated, that a biography can be given in the compass of a review article: his essay on Burns I consider, in the full signification of the term, one of the most perfect biographies I ever looked into: and the highest success at which I aimed, in a literary point of view, was the introduction into Christian biography of certain of the methods of him whom I believe to be the greatest biographic writer PREFACE. V that ever lived. My failure has been only not so complete as to hide itself from my own eyes. My relation to Mr Carlyle is twofold. The influence exerted by him upon my style and modes of thought is as powerful as my mind was capable of receiving: yet my dissent from his opinions is thorough and total. I believe that, without a grand rectification, his views must be pernicious in their every influence; when Christianity gives them this rectification, I think they convey important lessons to Christian men and Christian churches. Whether the streams that flow from that fountain are to spread bliss or bale, depends upon whether there can be put into it a branch from the Christian vine: and this, since no better has attempted it, I endeavour to do. Let it not be thought, however, that the following pages contain nothing but argument. Argument, indeed, does not very much abound. I endeavour to let facts speak. In delineating the Chris- tian life, moreover, one can never even approach truthfulness, if he regards only one aspect of character: Christianity, by hypothesis, makes all things new. The book is popular in the sense that I desired its style to be such as would please all readers: but I must beg to state that, in the first part, I endeavour to lay the foundation on the deepest and most stable ground. I have throughout abstained from quotation of book and page. The facts I state in connection with each man of whom I treat, are what might have been embraced in a pretty long review article. I state my obligations to the authors of the several biographic works I have consulted: and it will be no unimportant result, if my essay should lead to a wider and more practical use of the valuable and varied materials afforded by our now rich literature of Christian bio- graphy; from such a reservoir, streams might be led off to water many a particular field, and cause many a particular crop to grow. In my first chapter, and in the first of the Second Part, I speak occasionally with a decision and succinctness which may seem some- what assuming. I must excuse myself by saying, that I have almost VI PREFACE. entirely given results, and that I did not rashly satisfy myself of their soundness. I may mention that, in denning the nature of happiness, I do not mean to assert that the theory of Sir William Hamilton is identical with that of Butler, but only that they can be shown to harmonise. P. B. Edinburgh, January 1st, 1855. CONTENTS. $art I. Statement. Chapter I. The Individua l Lira , ... 1 ,, II. The Social Life, . . . .44 Part M (Exposition ano Illustration. BOOK I. CHRISTIANITY THE BASIS OF SOCIAL LIFE. Chapter I. First Principles, ... 51 II. Howard; and the Rise of Philanthropy, . 85 III. Wilberforce; and the Development of Phi- lanthropy, . . . 149 IV. Budgett: the Christian Freeman, . . 197 V. The Social Problem of the Age; and one or two Hints towards its Solution, . . 240 BOOK II. CHRISTIANITY THE BASIS OF INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER. Chapter I. Introductory: a Few Words on Modern Doubt, 287 Till CONTENTS. P*ge Chapter II. John Foster, . . . .299 III. Thomas Arnold, . . . 365 IV. Thomas Chalmers, . . . 402 Part M. Cutlook. Chapter I. The Positive Philosophy, . . 481 ,, II. Pantheistic Spiritualism, . . . 501 III. General Conclusion, . . . 513 PART I. S&tzttmtttt CHAPTEE I. THE INDIVIDUAL LIFB. In perusing The Tale of Goethe, a piece which is wonder- in 1 even among the works of that supreme literary artist, and which his worthy exponent and interpreter Mr Car- lyle has deemed, no doubt with perfect correctness, a pic- ture, in the colours indeed of fantasy and dream, yet, to the seeing eye, nowise indefinite, of the whole future, attention can scarce fail to be arrested by the destiny there appointed for the Christian Religion. In the Temple of the Future, the little hut of.the fisherman, to which former and darker generations had looked for aid in every great emergency of existence, still found a place. The light of reason, entering in, breathed through it a new life and an immortal beauty. " By virtue of the Lamp locked up in it, the hut had been converted from the inside to the out- side into solid silver. Ere long, too, its form changed; for the noble metal shook aside the accidental shape of planks, posts, and beams, and stretched itself out into a noble case of beaten ornamented workmanship. Thus a fair little temple stood erected in the middle of the large one; or, if you will, an Altar worthy of the Temple." The whole passage of which this forms a part, is perhaps the finest a 2 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. illustration to be found, of a certain widespread and mul- tiform intellectual phenomenon of our time. In the higher walks of modern literature, an attitude is not unfrequently assumed towards Christianity which, in these ages at least, is new. It is concluded by the serene worshipper of reason or of man, that the Christian Religion may now be treated with that polite and complimentary tolerance with which a generous victor treats the distinguished prisoner whose sword he has hung on the side of his tent. We are told that Christianity is the highest thing man has " done," that it is the purest of earthly religions, that it has given voice to the deepest emotions in the human breast. Language, which reaches the gorgeousness, and force, and sweetness of poetry, has been woven into wreaths to crown it; intellect, which, in the width of its domain and the greatness of its might, suggests compari- son with the central power of imperial Rome, has shrined it in a temple, or offered it a vassal throne. And how are Christians bound to receive the haughty condescension of all this praise? They are not left without an example by which to shape their conduct; their fathers taught them how to act, in still more trying circumstances. We have not forgot the ancient offers, tacit or express, which were made to the religion of Jesus, and the wrath which awoke on their rejection. It might have obtained a seat on Olympus, a niche in the Pantheon of the ancient world; it might have sheltered itself under the wide wings, dropping gold and manna, of the Roman eagles. That The Crucified of Judea should be deemed mightier than the Jupiter of the Capitol, that the words of a few fishermen were to be esteemed more worthily than the ancient voice of the Sybil, and the mystic whisperings of a thousand sacred groves; this astonished and incensed the Pagan world, THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 3 this cut to the heart the pride of Rome. But the declara- tion of the smitten Galileans was explicit and unchanging: The gospel of Jesus is everything or nothing ; if true at all, every god and oracle must absolutely vanish before it. Our answer now can be no other than that given of old. Christianity either lives a divine life or dies ; until the concession is made that it is divine, in no qualified sense but to the express intent that it came down from heaven, no approximation is made to what it demands-. It will not enter that temple, arrayed, as it is, in the still artistic beauty of Greece, which Goethe has reared for it ; it either fades utterly, or that temple crumbles into the dust before it. There are but three hypotheses on the subject of the existence of the Divine Being, and our relation to Him, which in our time deserve attention; those of atheism, pantheism, and monotheism. Of the first of these, we do not now speak. The tone of unbelieving tolerance to which we have just referred is used chiefly by the disciples of that great school of pantheism which originated in Germany in last century, and the ramifications of whose influence, more or less disguised and modified, we think we can de- tect very widely in our present literature. Its principal philosophic representative in Germany was Fichte ; its greatest embodiment in our country is in the works of Mr Carlyle. The former of these may be called its originator, although it is our strong impression, from what we know of the Kantian philosophy, and from the fact that Fichte was at first a disciple of Kant, that its original suggestion was found in the self-contained and self-sufficient law, the categorical imperative, of that philosopher. We do not intend to enter upon the exposition of this pantheism. We consider it now in one point of view, in application to one problem ; and we mean to evolve the essential points 4 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. of its solution of this problem, in contrast with that which we purpose briefly to sketch, the solution offered by Chris- tianity. This problem is the formation of individual cha- racter, or rather the procuring for its formation a vital principle and solid basis. Long and careful study of the works of Fichte and Mr Carlyle give us assured confidence in defining the essen- tial starting-point and characteristic of Fichtean pantheism. It is its assertion of the divinity of man. This is of course broad and explicit in the philosophy of Fichte. It is not so clear and definite in the works of Mr Carlyle; that great writer, although giving evidence of a powerful in- fluence from Fichte, having experienced one still more powerful from Goethe, and having clothed his doctrines, not in the statuesque exactitude of philosophic terminology, but in the living language of men. It were, however, we think, difficult to conceive a more perfectly worked out scheme of pantheism, in application to practical life, than that with which Mr Carlyle has furnished us; and its es- sential principle ever is, the glory, the worship, the divinity of man. In our general literature, the principle we have enunciated undergoes modification, and, for the most part, is by no means expressed as pantheism. "We refer to that spirit of self-assertion, which lies so deep in what may be called the religion of literature ; to that widespread ten- dency to regard all reform of the individual man as being an evolution of some hidden nobleness, or an appeal to a perfect internal light or law, together with what may be called the worship of genius, the habit of nourishing all hope on the manifestation of " the divine," by gifted in- dividuals. We care not how this last remarkable charac- teristic of the time be defined; to us its connection with pantheism, and more or less close dependence on the THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. O teaching of that of Germany, seem plain ; but it is enough that we discern in it an influence definably antagonistic to the spirit of Christianity. The great point to be established against pantheism, and that from which all else follows, is the separate ex- istence of a Divine Being. We shall glance at the evi- dence of this in one of its principal departments ; a depart- ment in which, we think, there is important work to be done ; that of conscience. There has appeared, in a recent theological work, what we must be bold to call a singularly shallow and inaccurate criticism of Butler's doctrine of conscience. It has been spoken of as depending on "probable" evidence, and cer- tain problems which it enables us to solve are alluded to as momentous or insuperable difficulties. The former of these assertions seems to us plainly to amount to an abso- lute abandonment of what Butler has done, to a reduction of it to a nonentity or a guess. As Mackintosh distinctly asserts, and as might be shown by overpowering evi- dence, his argument is based on the "unassailable" ground of consciousness ; on that evidence which is the strongest we can obtain. Even the author of the Dissertation, how- ever, has fallen into palpable error, in treating of Butler; and we must quote the following clauses from him, both to expose their inaccuracy, and to indicate wherein consist that definiteness and that precision which the author to whom we first referred desiderates in Butler's masterly demonstra- tion: "The most palpable defect of Butler's scheme is, that it affords no answer to the question, ' What is the distinguishing quality common to all right actions?' If it were answered, ' Their criterion is, that they are approved and commanded by conscience,' the answerer would find that he was involved in a vicious circle; for conscience b THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. itself could be no otherwise defined than as the faculty which approves and commands right actions." Let us hear Butler: " That your conscience approves of and attests to such a course of action, is itself alone an obligation. Conscience does not only offer itself to show us the way we should walk in, but it likewise carries its own authority with it, that it is our natural guide;" &c. This is quite sufficient. The supposed circle of Mack- intosh is at once broken. To the question, What is the distinguishing quality common to all right actions? our answer is explicit: The distinguishing quality is, that they are approved and commanded by conscience ; and, we add, the word " right " is that by which, in common speech, the common consciousness recognises them to be thus approved and commanded. To the question, What, then, is con- science? we answer, Not a faculty which approves and com- mands right actions, as if they were right before, and were enforced for some outlying reason, but one which claims a power, whether original or derived, to set apart certain actions, and stamping them with its approval, constitute them right. In one sentence, we think, we can sum up what Butler has done in this all-important matter. His doctrine simply is, that, by the constitution of the human mind, the essential characteristic of conscience is its power su- preme among the faculties, to adjudicate on actions; that the man who calmly interrogates consciousness, finds its declaration explicit, to the effect, that refusal to obey the dictate of conscience is a denial of his nature. Does this imply that man, by obeying conscience, be- comes infallible ? On no conceivable hypothesis. It is right, in a matter of inductive reasoning, to consult the logical faculty, and not the imagination ; a man who sub- THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 7 stitutes the fantastic limning of the latter, beautiful indeed in its place and time, for the substantial chain- work of the former, outrages his nature. But do we therefore say that the understanding errs not in the search for truth ? or do we consider the fact that it does often and grievously fail, an argument for discarding it from its office, and giv- ing the place to some other faculty ? Precisely so is it with conscience. The theory of its legitimate supremacy asserts not that it does not err: but it affirms that, in all circumstances, it is the faculty to decide on duty. We hold this precisely with the same degree of tenacity with which we hold the conviction, that, though reason may err, intellectual scepticism is intellectual suicide: conscience may not be infallible, but rejection of its authority is moral scepticism, that is, moral death. Butler shows the high- est point on which man can stand, in order, with his un- aided powers, to see God ; but can we for a moment allege, that the author of the Analogy did not perceive the fact, that this is but climbing to the top of a ruined tower, and that, though from its head we can see farther than from the plain below, the only hope for man is, that, gazing thence, he may see the dawning of the Sun of Righteousness? The above is, strictly speaking, all that Butler has done. The distinct and verbal testimony he bears to the fact, that conscience naturally refers to God, is in itself of great value; but it is of the nature of a testimony, not a proof; it has all the weight that the deliverance of the individual consciousness of one of the clearest and strongest thinkers that ever lived must be allowed to possess, but this is very far from equivalent to a demonstrative dictum of the uni- versal consciousness. Morality he demonstrated: to god . liness he bore witness. The numerous expressions of agreement with Butler in 8 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. his belief that conscience naturally spoke from God, can- not be considered, more than his own, as constituting any such proof of the point as he offers for the supremacy of the moral faculty. Dr Chalmers, perhaps the ablest of the writers who have thus recorded their assent, does, to an important extent, suggest the mode and indicate the materials of this proof; his reference to the phenomena of remorse and self-complacency is a very valuable hint; and his assertion of the fact that conscience points to the being of God as " with the speed of lightning," shows at least what has to be proved: but even he makes no stated attempt to connect the truth he asserts with the conscious- ness of the race, and thus vindicate for it a place in that fortress whose assailing is the assailing of the possibility of truth. Perhaps the greatest achievement now possible in ethics is, to connect indissolubly with the universal consciousness the fact that the moral faculty speaks by a delegated authority. We shall not pretend here to draw out the demonstra- tion which we believe to be possible. We 6hall merely offer two considerations, without fully unfolding either. We think that the second admits of being shown to be of itself conclusive. I. The human consciousness, as revealing itself in his- tory, has borne witness to the fact, that it is natural for man not to regard the voice of conscience as final. We here point to no particular system of belief: we care not even though the name of the religion was pantheism. We point simply to that one fact, whose exhibition seems co-extensive with history, that the human race has not worshipped itself. There has ever been manifested an irresistible conviction that the phenomena of conscience were knit by a whole system of relations to somewhat beyond and ex- THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. V ternal to the breast; that their meaning and efficacy were thus essentially affected. Did remorse cause the soul to writhe in hidden anguish? The hecatomb was straight- way piled, the altar smoked: some external power, be- lieved capable, in what way soever, of sending forth a gentle wind to calm and cool the troubled spirit, was ap- pealed to. Did a feeling of mild satisfaction breathe through the breast, in the consciousness of duty performed or nobleness evinced ? The present reward was not deemed exhaustive. Before the eye, resting afar, as on the still evening horizon of a troubled day, there beamed out softly the Elysian fields, with their tranquil rivers, on whose banks rested heroes, and their unfading flowers that breathed balm odours through the cloudless air. Every Pagan nation has had its mythology; and each mythology is essentially an attempt of the mind to shape out in visible form the several relations in which it believes itself to be joined with some external but invisible power. In one word, the conception of man as self-complete, as all in all to himself, as his own God, has been in all ages foreign to the mind of the race ; perhaps of no phenomenon could it be more confidently asserted that it is a universal habit of mankind, than of the tendency to associate inter- nal monitions with some great external reality or realities. II. This seems to be a necessary and demonstrable case of the action of the great mental law by which a cause is de- manded for every effect. As if impressed by God with a necessity of bearing testimony to His existence, every- thing within the realm of finitude, from Arcturus and the Pleiades to the tiny moss that clings to the ruined wall, presents itself to us with an irresistible power to compel reference to a cause. If we are to retain faith in mind, we must believe that, in the region of the finite, this urgent 10 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. necessity has a significance. Now, if the voice of the moral faculty is heard by the human soul as final, it is the one phenomenon within the bounds of conception which claims exemption from this law; it alone breaks the bonds of finitude. No such exemption can be pleaded; as surely as a monition of conscience is a phenomenon, so surely does it impel the human mind to seek its cause. The great his- torical fact we noted is thus at once confirmed and ex- plained. It is seen that it was a resistless necessity which in all ages urged the human mind to seek its Deity with- out. We do not hesitate to go further. We think it would admit of being shown that the law here acts in its most express form, and with clearest suggestion of intent. All nature bears the stamp of its Maker; but conscience names His very name. The above proofs, we are well assured, admit of being elaborated into an irrefragable demonstration, that con- sciousness teaches us to refer the commands of the moral faculty to an external authority; and if this is so, it will not be disputed that there is but One authority to which they can be thus referred. We conclude, then, that the doctrine of the delegated nature of conscience is grounded on evidence, of similar nature and like conclusiveness with that of its supremacy among our faculties: godliness is natural to man in the same sense as morality. Pantheism is a theory of God, man, and the universe, which cannot be denied to contain elements of great subli- mity: atheism can say nothing of the world, but that, for the living, it is a workshop, and for the dead a grave, nothing of the soul of man, but that it is the action of organism, and that the possibility of its separate existence is a dream ; but pan- theism, whether delusively or not, and at least in its popular representations, admits a theory of the world which is sub- THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 11 lime, and a theory of man which is exalted. When clothed in the chastened beauty of the language of Fichte, or wrapped in the poetic gorgeousnes of that of Carlyle, these-can scarce fail to awake enthusiasm; and it is when, with express in- tention or not, such writers cast a passing glance of contempt on the apparently dead and rigid universe of one who re- fuses to say that the All is God, that an entrance is apt to be found for those general modes of thought which are of the nature of pantheism. It were well, therefore, to look fairly in the face the express or tacit assumption of the pantheist; to contrast, with all impartiality and calmness, his universe and his God with those of the Christian. Ye make the great All a machine, say the pantheists, a dead piece of very superior mechanism: the tree Igdrasil of the old Norsemen was better than that; to look on the universe as godlike and god, how infinitely better is that? Let us consider. One mighty tide of force filling immen- sity, its waves galaxies and systems, its foam sparkling with worlds, one immeasurable ocean of life, swelling in endless billows through immensity at its own vast, vague will: such is at once the universe and the God of panthe- ism. The pantheist is himself one little conscious drop in the boundless tide, in the all-embracing infinite. In the branching of the stars, this infinite rushes out; in the little flower at your feet, it lives. In all the embodying of human thought in the rearing of nations and polities, in the building of towered cities, in the warring and trading of men it finds a dim garment; in the beauties, and gran- deurs, and terrors of all mythologies the grave look of the Olympian King, the still and stainless beauty of the wood- land Naiad, the bright glance of the son of Latona, the thunder-brows of Thor, the dawn smile of Balder it is more clearly seen ; the beauty which is the soul of art the majesty 12 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. that lives from age to age in the statue of Phidias, the smile that gladdens the eyes of many generations on the perfect lip and in the pure eye of a Madonna by Raphael, is its very self. You may look at it, you may, by effort of thought, endeavour to evolve it within you; but the drop holds no converse with the ocean, the great rolling sea hears not the little ripple on its shore; you can hold no converse or communion with your God; your highest bliss is to cease individually to be, to sink into unconscious everlasting trance. What, now, do we behold, when we turn, with unsandalled foot, to look upon the universe and the God of Christianity? An immensity, to the bounds of which, urge them never so wildly, the steeds of thought shall never pierce, thronged with ordered myriads of worlds, all willed into existence and ever upheld by a Being, of Whom tongue cannot speak or mind conceive, but Who lit the torch of reason, Who hears the voice of man, and Whose attributes are dimly mirrored in the human soul. En- deavour to embrace the universe in thy conception ; let thought take to it the wings of imagination, and imagi- nation open the oceanic eye of contemplation ; view this stupendous illimitable whole. Then conceive God infi- nitely above it; filling it all with His light, as the sun fills with its light the dewdrop; as distinct from it as the sun is from the dewdrop; to Whom the countless worlds of immensity are as the primary particles of water compos- ing the dewdrop are to the sun. Then add this thought: that He, around Whose throne the morning stars for ever sing, to Whom anthems of praise from all the star-choirs of immensity go toning on eternally from galaxy to galaxy, hears the evening hymn of praise in the Christian home, the lowly melody in the Christian heart, the sigh of the kneeling child; and, when the little task of his morning THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 13 sojourn on earth is over, will draw up the Christian, as the sun draws up the dewdrop, to rest on the bosom of Infinite Love. Such is the universe, and such the God of the Christian, in what faint and feeble words we can image the conceptions. Is the universe of pantheism more sub- lime than this? We must, however, pause. We have, in the preceding sentences, not unallowably conformed to those general ideas of God which must float in the general intellect. But, in order to show what Christianity here affords us, we must endeavour to define, with briefness but precision, the ultimate idea of God at which philosophy can arrive. We shall not enter into any proof of the fact, that the human mind cannot conceive the infinite ; that the sphere of thought is limited by the relative, the conditioned. We assume this point; or rather we accept regarding it, as what may now be considered final, Sir William Hamilton's demonstration. We shall agree with the declarations on this subject, which he cites as those of a " pious philo- sophy:" "A God understood would be no God at all;" " To think that God is, as we can think Him to be, is blas- phemy." The general intellect of the race has always sought for, and believed in, supernal power; this grand characteristic may be affirmed of all nations and ages; if some appearance of exception has been presented, it has been by no means of an extent or nature to invalidate the general evidence. This belief, however, has been either instinctive and imperfect or blind: either accepted at the instinctive bidding of those laws which will not permit man to consider phenomena causeless, and finitude final, or the faint echoes, received without question or examina- tion, of an original revelation. The general idea formed in all ages of the Divine has admitted of being analysed 14 THE INDIVIDUAL LIKE. into two components; a personality either human or strictly analogous to that of man, and a supplement of human power, beauty, and wisdom, by more or less skilful bor- rowing from those examples of force, loveliness, or design, which are manifested in nature, and were recognised to transcend human attainment. But, as civilisation ad- vanced, and thought began to appear, the popular concep- tions of divinity were submitted to philosophic examina- tion, and proved to be unsatisfactory. To avoid detailed explanation, we shall say, in general terms, that philosophy, after careful examination, arrived at the conclusion that the origin of the finite could not be found within the region of finitude. The theory that the sun was not alto- gether without a cause, but that it formed the chariot of an ever-youthful god, whose smile was the sunshine that yellowed the corn, whose anger was the drought that occa- sioned famine, that the deep roll of the thunder amid the folds of the black cloud was not self-originating, but was amply accounted for as the rattling of the wheels of the awful Jove, that the beauty of sea-foam, and rainbow, and rosebud, and vine cluster, and bewitching eye, and cheek, and lip, was no sport of accident, no uncaused fantastic play over the face of nature, but the cunning work of a goddess who embodied the beautiful, might hush any half-expressed questioning of the rude popular mind, but could nowise satisfy reason. Even the general intellect, when it at all engaged in reflection, found this first series of answers insufficient ; that sun-god, that Jove, that Venus, the whole magnificent company that sat in thrones over the unstained snow of Olympus, whence came they? There arose theories to account for their origin; if the keen-piercing human mind would not rest contented with this fair vision, if the finite attribute of THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 15 multiplicity pained and impelled it, an older mythology was seen or fancied to emerge, venerable Saturn, and Hy- perion the giant of the sun, and hoary Ocean, and the whole Titan brotherhood ; and, if even this satisfied not, all might be referred to the primal two, Heaven and Earth, or even they might be placed at the foot of an ultimate and im- moveable Fate. At this last stage, the reflections of the popular mind came nearly into coincidence with philosophy. This, as we said, passing beyond polytheistic notions, ar- rived at the original, unconditioned, inscrutable one. This was the critical moment. Was the fact that the Divine could not be comprehended and defined by the human mind to be taken as an evidence of its non-existence, or Avas a Divine, thus inscrutable, to be received? That philosophic intellect which we deem the noblest and most sublime, to which the belief in a God was a necessity, held by the second alternative, whether by accepting, with subtle yet sublime self-deception, the product of imagination for the affirmation of reason, or by devising some new faculty, whose voice was conclusive in the matter, and calling it faith; thus, we may boldly assert, did Plato in Greece, and Fichte in Germany : that phi- losophic intellect which could consent to abandon belief in man's spiritual existence, and in an unseen govern- ment of the world, lapsed into atheism ; this was perhaps the result of the Aristotelian philosophy in ancient times, and has been the avowed goal of the modern positive phi- losophy. And thus we are enabled to shut up for ever the pantheistic theory of God and man, against which we now especially contend, in one dumb negation ; to use again the words of Sir William Hamilton, "the All" evolved by " the scheme of pantheistic omniscience," " at the first exorcism of a rigorous interrogation, relapses into nothing," We are not here required to have recourse to 16 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. inference ; in the work which embodies Fichte's theory of practical things, his Way to the Blessed Life, we find his ultimate expression for the Divine Being to be, " the pure negation of all conceivability associated with infinite and eternal loveableness." We need scarce observe that this loveableness is a condition and conceivability, violating as absolutely as would a thousand attributes and qualities that character of the one being, upon which he so strenuously insists, that it is the absolute, immutable, unconditioned one. Of all that conception of the Divine which, by his aid, and using his colours, we have endeavoured to body forth, we must just say that, by the original axiom of his own philo- sophy, it is annihilated; proved to be either a mere play of imagination, or the common ideas and representations of God, highly coloured and refined. We turn to Christianity. The Bible, by many and ex- plicit declarations, affirms, that God cannot, in essence, be known to man; by no searching can Jehovah be found out unto perfection ; He is the I AM Whom no eye hath seen or can see. But He is not altogether an unknown God: when Paul professed, before the Athenian sages, his ability to reveal to them Him whom they had ignorantly worship- ped, he made no vain boast. Omitting express allusion to the doctrine of the Trinity, we may say that, in a twofold manner, God is thus revealed, and we are enabled to ap- proach unto Him: first, by a divine intimation that man is formed in the image of God; and, second, by the incar- nation of the Godhead in the man Christ Jesus. It is our present object to inquire what is thus obtained, not to adduce the evidence by which Christianity proves itself divinely empowered to afford it: we merely remark, in passing, that, since it came to supply what reason, by hypo- thesis, fails to achieve, to save man, on the one hand, from blank atheism, and, on the other, from blind faith or THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 17 imaginative delusion, it was to be expected that its funda- mental attestation would embrace somewhat out of the sphere of natural law and ordinary induction, in other words, be miraculous. By declaring, with a divine sanc- tion, that man was created in the image of God, Christi- anity at once affords a satisfactory and dignifying ex- planation of what would otherwise have been little more than a pitiable delusion, man's universal tendency to con- ceive of his divinity or divinities, as in the human form ; while it enables us to avail ourselves of every natural manifestation in which pantheism arrays its imaginary God, to set it in its own position in the general system of things, as a means of revealing even the least of the ways of the Christian God, and to gather from it fresh argument to strengthen our faith, or to deepen our adoration. To elicit the whole and precise meaning of the passage re- lating to man's creation in the image of God, a passage which, though profound and mysterious, commends itself irresistibly to the human reason and heart, would exceed our present scope ; only let it be remembered that Chris- tianity altogether avoids those anthropomorphic errors into which every conception formed of God by the unaided human reason must lapse, by proclaiming the fact of the fall, and representing the Divine image in man, although not altogether erased, as yet, to use the words of Calvin, " confused, broken, and defiled." This brings us naturally to the second point we mentioned, which is, indeed, the great central point of Christianity, the revelation of the perfect image of God in Christ Jesus. We still are un- able to conceive the essential Deity: but, if we continue to contemplate the Saviour, we rise to ideas of the mode in which His attributes find manifestation unspeakably more exalted, we mark the outgoings of His wisdom, power, and c 18 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. love, with a clearness inexpressibly greater than can be attained by any observation of the universe, or study of man. The infidelity with which we* are at present con- cerned, has expressed fervent admiration of Jesus: and this fact must at least make it appear reasonable in the eyes of its followers, that Christians discern in Him a holi- ness and beauty transcending those of earth. The might of the ocean and the tempest, the strength of the everlast- ing hills, the silent beaming forth, as in ever renewed miraculous " vision," of the splendour and opulence of sum- mer, the illumination of immensity by worlds, may offer some faint idea of the going forth of the power of Omni- potence: but there is a still more impressive, and as it were present manifestation of supernatural power made to man, when the storm sinks quelled before the eye of Jesus, or the dead comes from the grave at his word. When the heart expands with a love that embraces the whole circle of sentient existence, or even, by the bounteous imagining of poetic sympathy, first breathes an ideal life into flower and tree, and then over them too sheds, with Wordsworth, the smile of glowing tenderness, we may remember that there still linger traces of the Divine image in man, and faintly imagine the streaming forth of that Love which brightens the eyes of the armies of heaven, and gives light and life to the universe; but can any manifestation of human tenderness bring to us such a feeling of God's love, as one tear of Jesus shed over Jerusalem, or one revering look into His eye, when in the hours of mortal agony it overflowed in love and prayer for His murderers? We can attach a true and noble meaning to the words of Fichte when he bids us watch the holy man, because in what he " does, lives, and loves," God is revealed to us ; but we will affirm that any instance of human heroism is alto- THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 19 gether faint and powerless in enabling us to form a con- ception of the holiness of God, when compared with the devotion to His Father's service of Him Whose meat and drink it was to do the will of God, and Who died on the cross to make an atonement for sin. And if, in addition to all this, Christianity told us of a Divine Spirit, whose mysterious but certain influence on the mind enabled it to discern a glory and a beauty in the Saviour incomparably more exalted than could otherwise be distinguished, how truly might we assert that it brought us into a closer near- ness to the Divine, than the most ethereal dreaming of mystic trance, or the most gorgeous imagining of panthe- istic poetry! But not only thus is the God of the Chris- tian a known God, in a sense in which the God of pan- theism never can be; Jesus is not only the second Adam, revealing that Divine image in the human form which was presented by Adam before his fall, but also a Mediator between God and man. Through the Divine Man the Christian can hold converse with the Spirit of the uni- verse. And this brings us directly to the solution offered by Christianity of that problem of the individual life of which we have spoken, and which is expressly treated both by Fichte and Carlyle. Both these writers recognise it as seemly and right, if not in all cases necessary, that, at a certain stage of the personal history, the mind awaken and bestir itself, and struggle as in throes of birth or tumult of departure; that for a time it wrestle with doubt, or cower trembling under the wings of mystery, searching earth and heaven for answers to its questions and satisfaction for its wants; that there be a turning, in baffled and indignant loathing, from the pleasures of sense, as all inadequate either to still 20 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. or satisfy new and irrepressible longings after the good, the true, the beautiful, after God, freedom, immortality. We suppose it is an assertion which will not be counted rash or daring, that our language contains no example of the delineation of mental confusion and dismay, to be compared with Mr Carlyle's description of such a period in Sartor Kesart us. In this time of distraction and unrest, calm thought and manly action are alike suspended; the quiet of the soul is broken; around it seem to hang curtains of thick cloud, streaked with fire, shutting it, in gloomy solitude, from heaven's light above, and the voices of human sympathy around. Fichte and Carlyle profess to tell us how the soul may emerge from this confusion and distress to noble and perfect manhood; how it may once more feel around it the fresh breath of the open sky, and over it the clear smile of heaven ; how the streams of thought may again flow on in melodious harmony, and the wheels of action obey their impulse; how perfect content is to be regained with one's position in the system of things; how all fear and tor- ment are to give place to blessedness; how love is again to suffuse the world, and over every cloud of mystery to be cast a bow of peace. Such a period Christianity likewise recognises the period preceding conversion. It is indeed by no means necessary that in every case there occur this tumultuous crisis of internal life ; one of the above writers declares that the ultimate lesson of manhood may be taught by the mild ministries of domestic wisdom and love, even better than " in collision with the sharp adamant of Fate," and so the change which is wrought in the soul by vital Christi- anity may be silent and gradual as a cloudless dawn, unob- served by any human eye until the new light wraps the whole character, touching all its natural gifts with immortal THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 21 beauty, and turning the cold dews of night into liquid radiance. Yet, in order to define clearly and discriminate boldly the stages in the change, we shall contemplate it in such a case as these authors suppose. We shall conceive one, who has hitherto been a Chris- tian but in name, suddenly pausing and beginning to give earnest heed to the spiritual concerns which he has deemed of trivial importance. We shall suppose him to be affected in a twofold manner: by a sense of personal uneasiness, of what Fichte names " torment," of present self-accusation and prospective alarm ; and by doubt and dismay in consi- deration of the sad uncertainty of human sorrow, and the mysterious and appalling destiny which, as he learns from Christianity, awaits a portion of the human race. The first of these may be indicated by the general name, fear ; the second is an inability to assent to the fact of Divine justice, an inability of which we fully recognise the pos- sible honesty. The first will agitate most strongly minds not of a noble natural temper; the second, we are well assured, is often found to rack with keenest agony men of generous and benignant dispositions. The second may even be absent altogether; but we are disposed to think that the final attainment and rest in this case will be less lofty, and pure, and beautiful, than in the other. Let it be supposed, however, that the mind is in extreme tumult and anguish; we proceed to show how it is that Chris- tianity professes to restore tranquil happiness, and recall healthful activity. Perhaps in no case do the tremulous delicacy and subtle pride of the day come out more strongly than in our modes of regarding all that relates to fear in religious matters ; and perhaps in no other case does the power of Christianity to lay its hand on the heart of the race, and its way of 22 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. coming in contact with life and reality, contrast so boldly with the fine-spun, flattering, but evanescent theories of a haughty philosophy. The history of the world abundantly testifies that a religion altogether dissociated from fear is emasculated and unavailing; the state of Greece in its decline, of Rome under the Caesars, of the Italian repub- lics of the fifteenth century, shows what is that guardian- ship exercised over the national virtues, by a religion which has become a sentiment or a debate, which has laid aside its terrors, and passed into the school of the philo- sopher or the studio of the artist. We at once concede, that in the teaching of Christanity there is, and has always been an element, and a prevailing element, of fear. It is a fact which admits of no disguise, and we must endeavour to account for it. The phenomenon we consider under the name of fear, as characteristic of that state of the individual mind we at present contemplate, has escaped the observation of nei- ther of the authors of whom we have spoken. Fichte does not indeed, so far as we recollect, expressly mention fear; he uses the general term, torment, and regards this as na- ture's monition to leave self and sensuality, and turn to the divine. Torment, with him, is the stirring of the divine principle within, and the expression of its unrest and embar- rassment in the bonds of sense ; but whence it has arisen that this discipline is necessary for the human soul, why the throes of divine birth must agonise us, why the begin- ning is anguish, when joy, which is the companion of per- fection, the guerdon of genius, is the progress and the end, we learn not from his philosophy. Fichte, when his terms are rightly interpreted, defines, with a certain correctness, the office of fear ; of its origin, save perhaps some assertion of necessity, he offers, to our knowledge, no theory. The THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 23 way in which Mr Carlyle, in the ultimate attainment of rest by his wanderer, disposes of fear, is to us one of the most sadly interesting portions of his writings. Drawn by the force of intense human sympathy and fiery insight, into a more intimate knowledge of the actual feelings of the soul than the lofty philosophic enthusiasm of Fichte's speculation enabled him to attain, he seems to indicate the element of a regard to futurity as entering into the anguish which oppresses the awakening and aspir- ing soul. The wanderer attains true manhood by finally triumphing over fear; not only fear of anything on earth, but fear "of Tophet too;" by casting a defiant glance around this universe, and daring any existent power to make him afraid. We are aware of no voice reaching him from heaven, to whisper of pardon and invite to peace; we see no hand stretched out to remove sin or impart purity ; by one tremendous effort of will, he rids himself of terror, and declares that if hell must be dared, it must. Some time after this achievement, he discovers that nature is God, that he himself is part of the Divinity; we might say that, having shown himself brave, he had vindicated his right to his natural birth-right, and might boldly lay claim to his inherent divinity. Now, we shall dis- tinctly admit that there is sublimity in this spectacle of a finite being defying the terrors of Tophet ; we attempt not to deny that there is a grandeur in the aspect of him, who, a few short years ago a weeping infant in his cradle, and in a few more fleeting years to be so still under his green hillock, thus, in the brief path between, hurls indignant scorn at the terrors of infinitude. But was it not such a sublimity which rested on the brow of Moloch, in the glare of hell's battlements? Such a sublimity, methinks, was in the eyes of Eblis, where pride waged eternal con- 24 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. / flict with despair, as he sat on his globe of fire. "Let the world insult our feebleness ; there is no cowardice in capitulating with God." We do not afiirm that Mr Car- lyle intends to put into the mouth of his hero a deli- berate defiance of God; but we have perfect confidence in alleging, that he represents the soul, in the great crisis of individual life, as trusting solely to its own energies for deliverance, the terrors which encompass it as drawing off" at the determined hest of human will, not by Divine per- mission or commandment, the saviour of man, as himself. For the ultimate origin of the discipline of sorrow, we look likewise in vain in the works of Mr Carlyle. When we turn to Christianity, it seems impossible to fail to note an access of clearness, and what we might style an agreement with the general symmetry of nature. We do not now consider the kindred subject of the office assigned to hope in the Christian scheme; we speak now of fear. But it is important that the precise place of each be fixed. If not directly asserted of Christianity, it is certainly a taunt brought against those who, in modern times, have named themselves Christians, that their religion countenances and embraces a selfish theory of morals ; that it aims at render- ing a man virtuous by setting behind him Fear, with a picture of Dante's hell, and before him Hope, with a pic- ture of Milton's heaven. With individual cases we have nothing to do, but, as we proceed, the foul imputation will be seen totally to fall away from Christianity. Whence this torment of self-accusation and alarm, concerning which we have heard so much? It arises, says Christianity, in its strictly personal reference, from a twofold source ; from a 6ense of imperfection, and a con- sciousness of guilt. This last word is not named by Mr Carlyle or Fichte; yet surely history, reason, and con- THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 25 science, authorise us to impute to it a weighty significance. Why is it that in every age man has striven to propitiate his God? What mean those altars whose smoke lies so darkly along human history, the shrieks of those children whom they pass through the fire to Moloch? What spectre is that, which the human eye has always seen setting a crown on the head of Death, a crown of terrors? Most explicitly and conclusively of all, what is the word which reason utters, when compelled, by its very nature, to seek a cause for this torment, whose existence is granted? Are we not, by complicated and overpowering evidence, led to acknowledge the fact, however mysterious, of guilt? We deny not that this result is one of exhaustless melancholy; but, alas! our tears will not wipe out the statutes of the universe; and the man of real fortitude will, of all things, scorn intellectual legerdemain, and refuse to accept no fact. Of a sadness not so profound, but still sad, is the other source of personal anguish recognised at this stage by Christianity. It is this on which Mr Carlyle and Fichte lay stress, but without giving it any explanation, and virtu- ally or expressly regarding it as natural and right. It is the awakening sense in the bosom of man, that he is a stranger here, an exile from a home where a spirit could expatiate; it is the dim agony that comes with returning consciousness, when he begins to perceive the iron grating, and the chain, and the couch of straw, and when the eye which he turns towards the azure is pained and dazzled by the once natural light. Better is this agony, because it is the pain of one returning to consciousness, reason, and health, than any wild dreams of maniac joy; yet it too is unnatural; and we shall deem no theory of man's life as anywise sa- tisfactory, which tells us not how it became necessary, how this imperfection originated, how man came into that dun- 26 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. geon. Without comment or exposition we state, that Christianity affords a simple, natural, and adequate expla- nation, both of the guilt and the imperfection, by its doc- trine of the fall. Of the origin of evil we say not one word. But so profoundly does the theory that man is now in a state of lapse and distemper, seem to us to agree with all that can be gathered from consciousness and history ; so perfectly does it explain the glory of his sadness, and the sadness of his glory ; so definitely does it intimate why the prostrate column and the shattered wall tell of a mind in ruin, while yet the gold, and gems, and ivory that shine amid the fragments hint that it was once an imperial mansion ; so well does it explain the sublime home-sick- ness which has led earth's loftiest sons, despising all that grew on a soil accursed, that pleasure by which sense strove to wile away the faint reminiscences of other scenes, that wealth which but represented the perpetual struggle against death, to go aside from the throng, and seek the joys of spirit and the embrace of truth in lonely thought and contemplation; so satisfactorily does it harmonise the loveliness of the dawn, and the horror of the battle-field, as existing in one world ; that it seems to us worthy to be ranked among profound mysteries that it can at all be called in question. Christianity thus accounts for, and recognises as season- able, the action of fear on the human mind, which is un- able to feel itself at peace with God. How does it remove it? Does it enjoin a calculation of advantage? Does it declare that a certain amount of duty performed on the compulsion of terror will avert danger, or say that it is possible to perform one virtuous action on this compul- sion? We can, in one or two sentences, render a full and conclusive answer. The Christian scheme of morals does THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 27 not recognise as deserving the name of virtue what is pro- duced by any external motive, what has not its root in the heart. This it intimates in a twofold manner: by express declarations; and by the whole nature of that salvation which it offers to man. It explicitly declares that the glory of God is to be in all cases the unconditional motive of action, the deep and all-pervading spring of life. And the whole tenor of its descriptions of that salvation which it proclaims, renders the idea of its morality being pro- duced by external inducement absurd ; it demands a new birth, a new creation, a new life ; upon no action will it set its seal of approbation, unless it is the fruit of the Spirit, and springs from holiness and truth in the inward parts. Scripture being thus clear and decided, it might be well to know to what extent theologians have given colour to the charge that Christianity is thus selfish. The mode in which Christian writers during last century wrote did, to some extent, lend it countenance; the enforcement of virtue by rewards and punishment was, it is probable, too exclusively insisted on; although it has, we think, been somewhat hardly treated, the school of Paley and Butler did tend to give Christianity rather the aspect of a mechanism than of a life, did rather seek for it a place beside a refined Epicureanism, than claim for it its right and natural position, in a more lofty and ethereal region than was ever reached by the sublimest speculation of Platonism. But we have no hesitation in claiming for the Puritan theology a freedom from any such error; and in the conclusion of the second chapter of the first book of Calvin's Institutes, we have his express declaration, that, were there no hell, yet, since the Christian loves and re- veres God as a Father, the dread of offending Him would alone suffice to render him abhorrent of vice. Fear does 28 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. not produce virtue ; the fact that a man restrains himself from sin to avoid the punishment of hell, is no proof that he is converted. Yet fear is not without a function in the system of things. It bears not the wedding garment, and no hand but that of the Divine Spirit, working faith in the Christian, and so enabling him to appropriate that garment, and clothe himself in it, can effect in him that renovation which leads to godly action and spiritual joy; but it goes out into the highways of a blighted and delirious world, and there, like a terrible prophet of the wilderness, who foretells the coming of the mild Redeemer, startles and arouses men. Its office is preliminary, external, awakening; it is the beginning of wisdom. Since, indeed, on this earth, the deep-lying disease which renders it ne- cessary is never altogether removed, its warning voice is never altogether silent; but the humiliating remedy will vanish utterly with the disease of which it is a sign, and by which it became necessary; when the Christian goes to take his place among the angelic choirs, he will be able to join them in a melody that is only love ; and it does not admit of doubt, that every feeling of slavish fear with which any being regards God, is strictly of the nature of sin. By fear, or by whatever means the Spirit of G-od may employ, the soul is brought to lie down in perfect abase- ment before God, to acknowledge its want, its wo, its weakness, and its unreserving consent to receive all from His hand. This is what, in the Christian scheme, cor- responds to the self-annihilation of Goethe and Carlyle; now is the soul brought to that stage of utter desolation and bareness which agrees with the critical stage of the wanderer's trouble. "We cannot doubt that here we are at the point where the essential nature of Christianity is THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 29 revealed; that we come within sight of its great distinctive virtue, humility. Now it is that the sinful finite being, to use the words of Pascal, " makes repeatedly fresh efforts to lower himself to the last abysses of nothingness, whilst he surveys God still in interminably multiplying immen- sities;" this is what Vinet pronounces the end of all Christian preaching, " to cast the sinner trembling at the foot of Mercy." In the melodious, yet heart-wrung wait- ings which float down the stream of ages from the harp of the poet-king of Israel, the feelings of such moments found expression ; such feelings were in the heart of the Pilgrim, when, fleeing from the City of Destruction, and fainting under his burden, he knelt with clasped hands before the Cross; and it was in this same attitude that the New England Puritan, in utter self-abandonment and feeling of the majesty and holiness of God, judged himself worthy of damnation, and had scarce power to pray. It is but the unqualified acknowledgment that man, as he exists in this world, requires the aid of Divine power to raise him to that higher state of being to which he aspires. It is the disrobing of itself by the soul of all the raiment of human virtue; which, however pure and beautiful it may seem to earthly eyes, is not that spiritual glory which will beam more fair in its immortality, when the earth will have faded away, and all that framework of society, which gives occasion and play to the virtue that is between man and man, shall have been gathered in by death, alike its origin and its end. It is the confession that, however the soul of man may wing the atmosphere of earth, it has now no pinions on which to ascend into the sunless serenity of celestial light. And now we must be silent, nor attempt to define the new birth of the spirit. " In what way," says Coleridge, 30 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. " or by what manner of working, God changes a soul from evil to good, how He impregnates the barren rock with priceless gems and gold, is to the human mind an impene- trable mystery in all cases alike." Only this shall we say, that by faith the soul lays hold of and unites itself to Jesus, finding in Him all that for which it has sought; His mys- terious sacrifice sufficient to make atonement for guilt, His righteousness a spotless robe in which it may sit for ever at the banquet of the Almighty King, His name the harmonising of all contradiction, the solving of all doubt, the open secret of the universe. In a passage which he who has once read can hardly have forgotten, so softly pathetic is it, so richly and melo- diously beautiful, Mr Carlyle sets, as it were, to lyric music the joy of the wanderer's heart when he attains final peace. The inheritance of the Christian is likewise peace, though of another nature from that which visited the scathed heart of Teufelsdrockh. This is no reward of proud self- assertion, no rapture of philosophic dream : on the Chris- tian, from the eternal heavens, there now streams down the smile of a living Eye. The emotions which befit his state have, from the olden time, been voiced in a mild anthem, whose divine simplicity and angelic music are beautiful as the morning star, and to which we may imagine the saints of God, in the future eternity, attuning their harps, when memory wanders back to the little earth, and they think of that humility which is the highest glory of the finite. In that anthem the Hebrew minstrel sung of himself as a stricken lamb resting in Jehovah's arms. The peace of the Christian is to feel the circling of those arms, as he lies in the light of that countenance. "We are compelled to be very brief. We can but add a few fragmentary remarks, which we pray readers to regard THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 31 rather as partial indications of what might be said, than as any unfolding of the momentous and inspiring themes to which they relate. We should like to discuss, first, the ethical value of this theory of conversion in that precise point where it contrasts with pantheism; next, the mode in which it tranquillises the mind which is agitated by a sense of the sorrowful mysteries of human destiny, and the dark paths of divine justice; then, the Christian theory of work; and, lastly, the Christian theory of heaven. We can but offer one or two words on each. We accept from the hands of Mr Carlyle and Goethe the far-trumpeted doctrine of self-renunciation; we listen to Fichte, and to the whole of that lofty spiritualistic school of which he may be considered the head, and bear witness to their emphatic and eloquent proclamation of the sin and blasphemy of selfishness : and we boldly assert, that it is in Christian conversion alone that real self-renunciation is attained, that self is actually conquered. Of all that holds of pantheism, of the genius-worship of the day, of the idealistic or emotional religiosity now so common, of all which professes to work in the human bosom a benign and self-conquering revolution by the evolving of any hidden nobleness lying there, or reference to any perfect internal light hitherto obscured, we affirm that it utterly fails to approach the root of the evil. When laid down in the most perfect and plausible philosophic form, these views are thus powerless; and, in application to prac- tical life, the perils which encompass them are obvious and unavoidable. To denounce the sensual life is no great achievement or novelty in ethics; a moderately enlight- ened Epicureanism has always done that. But how can I apply the term self-renunciation to an act which is really and merely the assertion of self, of spiritual self, that is? 32 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. What is this more than the purchase of a lofty and deli- cious pride, by the sacrifice of the garbage of sense? Self, on every such theory, leaves the coarse dwelling of sensual pleasure, but it is only to rear for its own royal abode a palace of gold and cedar. And if the commands of a serene spiritualism may, in the case of the philosopher, repel the advances of sense, who that has ever cast his eye over life can refuse to concede that they would be all un- heeded on that wild arena ; while the absence of any pre- cise definition or applicable test of the spiritual and divine in the individual breast, would leave a broad avenue, the more inviting that it was lined by academic plane-trees, to all manner of delusion, extravagance, and absurdity. This is a delicate, soft-stepping, 6ilken-slippered age, patronising the finer feelings and a high-flown emotional virtue ; vice has cast away its coarse and tattered garment, and, though finding no great difficulty in obtaining admit- tance into good society, must come with sleek visage, in a spruce, modern suit, glittering with what seems real gold ; the religion that languishes in luxurious aspirings or dreams is very widely approved of. But does not an elevated and insidious but fatal pride tend to pervade the moral atmo- sphere of the time ? We will glow in lofty ardour over the page of Fichte, Carlyle, Schiller, or Goethe, but it is a balmy and consoling air which breathes its mild adula- tion through our souls; for is it not our own nobleness which is so gratefully evoked ? We will worship in the Temple of the Universe, with a certain proud homage, like that of the stars, and winds, and oceans; but our lordly knees must not be soiled by getting down into the dust. We will perform with Goethe the great moral act of self- annihilation, and wrap ourselves, with much ado, in the three reverences: but it were strangely bigoted to weep THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 33 like an old Puritan, because we cannot leap from sin our shadow. Christianity, we proclaim, is pervading the age more deeply than ever before ; not now as a constraining and antiquated form, but as an essence and life ; not, indeed, with remarkable definiteness, not troubling itself to answer such minor questions as whether Christ's history is an actual fact, or whether Paul was an inspired preacher or a moral genius troubled with whims, but with a grand expansiveness and philosophic tolerance, sweet to remark; casting a re- spectful and even deferring glance towards its plebeian an- cestor of Judea, in whose steps, however, an enlightened descendant cannot exactly walk. As of old, it remains true that Christianity alone preaches humility, and that this preaching is ever the special offence of the Cross; rather tread the burning marl in pride than receive mercy only from God. But for the fallen finite being, this is the true position towards the Infinite ; from this Christianity cannot swerve. We proceed to our second point. There is a pain which arises from inability to recognise the facts of divine justice, and from human sympathy with that part of mankind which rejects the Christian salvation, and meets the doom foretold. It is a sorrow which we believe never on earth departs entirely from noble minds, and is, perhaps, not intended to depart ; that sympathetic agony which, in virtue of our human unity, we feel with every brother sufferer, whatever his sin, is doubtless designed to be one of our most mighty incentives to spread the gospel and to urge its acceptance. But, if Christianity does not altogether remove this pain, it does more to that end than any other system; if there are clouds in the heavens which not even the telescope of faith can yet resolve into worlds of light, it can open a prospect infinitely more glorious and consoling than presents itself to the unaided eye. If we might conceive any sentence as written over the D 34 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. throne of God, kindling the eyes of the cheruhim, it would surely be this: "God is Love." Christianity came, as it were, with the intimation that such words were inscribed by the hand of Eternal Truth; faith, gazing from the far station of earth, might be unable to decipher the sepa- rate letters, and might see them only as blended into one star-beam, falling through time's night, but even in that beam there was infinite consolation and infinite hope. What does philosophy say of the future of the race ? Either it dismisses, as the vagary of superstition, all idea of the possibility of the future visiting of sin by retribu- tion, and thus leaves unstilled man's instinctive and inde- structible apprehensions, and unaccounted for a dumb yet adamantine array of facts. Christianity at least postpones the difficulty; it refers it to eternity and to God. It be- stows-the sublime privilege of waiting upon the Most High; it permits the weak and wildered creature of finitude to watch the unfolding of the schemes of almighty Wisdom under the eye of almighty Love; and it is not presumptuous to think that one great fountain of that felicity, on which as on an ocean stream the souls of the blessed will eter- nally float, will burst forth in the sudden discovery of the might of that love, and the depth of that wisdom, in the disposal of every fate. When God wipes away all tears from the eyes of His own, He will wipe away, also, those noblest, and perhaps hottest tears that are shed on earth tears over the lost. The Christian theory of work can be expressed in a few words, yet its full exposition and illustration were one of the most sublime pages in sacred poetry. " Faith that worketh by love ; " it is all here. The basis is faith ; we need scarce say it must lie at the root of all action : what- ever truth the age may have forgotten, there is one truth which has been uttered in strains of eloquence, so earnest THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 65 and overpowering, that it bids fair to be for some time re- membered; that a man or nation is mighty in work, pre- cisely as he or it believes. Give a people faith, and though its tribes lie scattered and powerless over its de- sert domain, like the dismembered limbs of a giant, it will gather itself together, and arise and stride forth, along the shaking earth, till every nation trembles at the name of Islam ; give a man faith, and though his heart be narrow and his brain confined, and what he believes an absurdity and dream, he will pass by hundreds of abler men who occasionally doubt, and, trampling them in their gore, will control a fiery nation, and reign in terror, till the name of Robespierre is a trembling and abhorrence over the whole earth. But, if all belief is powerful in action, if even belief in an idea makes a man resistless, of what nature will that work be, whose hidden root only is faith, but all whose bloom and outgoing is love? And thus it is in Chris- tianity. We enter not at all upon discussion of the nature of saving faith ; but this is, at least and beyond doubt, im- plied in it, that the believer is certain that God loves him, that in Christ He is his reconciled Father. For one mo- ment ponder this thought. The man has faith that God loves him; with all the emphasis of that strongest of human words, he lays it to his heart that an affection is in the bosom of the Eternal for him. What will be the instant result, by all we know even of fallen man ? We suspect it is not possible for a human heart alto- gether to resist the attraction even of human love; the blind and selfish affection of passion which impiously arro- gates the name may be scorned and hated, but deep, un- selfish, spiritual love cannot surely be known to exist to- wards us in any bosom without awakening some responsive thrill. Andifitis^possible between man and man, it is assuredhrHm possible between man and God. It is not 36 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. given to the human being to resist the attraction of infinite tenderness, when once faith has seen the eye of God look- ing down upon His accepted child; after long waiting, when at last the balmy drops descend, the fountains must spring. And what is the relief, the joy, the blessedness, of him that loves? Is it not the pouring forth of this love, the urging of it into every channel where it is pos- sible for it to flow ? Yes: and this is the Christian scheme of work ; that he, whose breast swells with the irrepressible love of God, finds duty transmuted actually into its own reward, and every labour but fuel to enable the flame of his joy to go up towards heaven. The psychological verity of this whole scheme is perfect. Why is it that when the heart of the youth or maiden has once been filled with love, when its whole compass has been occupied as with molten gold by affection for some beloved fellow-creature, if this beloved proves false or dies, it is no very uncommon cir- cumstance that madness or death ensue ? Is it not because the outgoing of love is prevented, and instead of issuing forth to wrap its object, instead of welling out in streams of joy, in offices of affection to that object, it must struggle in its fountain, and burn the heart that harbours it ? And may we not, in the face of Stephen, radiant in death, in the triumph-song of Paul when about to be offered, in the ecstatic hymns on the lips of the early martyrs as they went to the stake, find reliable evidence that there may be a love in the human breast for a Father God which will seek, as in an agony, for some channel in which to flow forth? And never can it have to seek in vain: in the inner kingdom of the soul, in the outer kingdom of the world, there is ever work to be done for God, ever some commandment to be fulfilled by which the Christian may prove that he loves his Saviour. Of this last duty and joy as permitted to the Christian, THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 37 we must say one word. It were certainly a strange mis- take, it would indicate an interesting, almost enviable freshness and spring verdure of intellect, to imagine that the refutation of an error would prove its destruction. Even at this day, and in publications by theological pro- fessors; you may find it declared that Calvinism circum- scribes the freedom and' fulness of the offer of redemption. Singular ! If you gather all the human race into one con- gregation, be I the most rigid of intelligent Calvinists, I will put to my lips the trumpet of the gospel; and proclaim that whosoever will may come and drink' of the water of life freely. If you bring me to a hoary sinner, who has defied God for a lifetime, and who 'now shakes with the palsy of death, I will tell him that God yet waits to be gracious, and willeth riot his death. And will my plead- ing with this dying transgressor be the less earnest and hopeful, because I have not to trust to the feeble efficacy of my words, or the grasp of his expiring faculties, but may look and pray for the extension of a Divine arm to seize and rescue his soul ? Because God has not taken me into His confidence, has not unfolded to me the Book of Life, and showed me the names of those chosen before the foundation of the world, will I not deign to be His in- strument, to save whom He pleases? You despatch a thousand vessels from this harbour, yet you know certain of them will be the prey of the tempest. You ship your compass; how does it act? You fix the lightning-rod on the mast; why, and in what precise manner, does it call down the fire of heaven ? Calvinism makes it a duty to proclaim the gospel freely: but, in accordance with the whole analogy of nature, it covers up in mystery God's creative work. In speaking of work, have we not already come to speak of heaven ? We have. By beginning with work, we 38 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. arrived at joy; we shall now, beginning from joy, see whether it will not lead us to work. Butler defines hap- piness to consist in " a faculty's having its proper object." "Pleasure," says Sir William Hamilton, "is the reflex of unimpeded energy." The two expressions explain and agree with each other; the latter, indeed, embraces the former. We doubt not they are substantially true, and would enable us to classify every degree and order of hap- piness from the highest to the lowest; it always remaining true that, however base or diluted might be the joy of activity, and though, relatively, even painful, it might yet be named pleasure, in contrast with the state of compul- sory inactivity: the pleasure of revenge is poor and con- temptible, yet it is a joy compared with its unsatisfied gnawing. And whatever might be the lowest and feeblest form of joy, it cannot admit of question what would be the highest. It would assuredly be the activity of love. We have no sooner uttered the word, than we are at the gate of the Christian heaven. When the heart begins to go out in love to God, heaven has commenced within it, and the certitude of an eternal heaven is found in this, that it is towards an Infinite God that it goes out. Provision is thus made at once for endles3 activity and endless love. There has been much written in our day about the worship of sorrow, and a great truth lies under the words; this truth, freed of its encumbering falsehood, Christianity em- braces ; it speaks of tribulation as that through which we enter into the kingdom of heaven, and gives sorrow the high office of breaking the soul to humility and contrite- ness, that it may kneel at the feet of Jesus. But, if there is any one instinctive utterance of the human soul to which we would accord consent, it is the declaration tliat sorrow, whatever it may subserve, is a blot upon God's universe, is the fang of the snake sin, is the shadow cast by the THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 39 wings of the great dragon that has come up from the bottomless pit to prey on man ; and that, if well interpreted, the .worship of joy is higher than the worship of sorrow. But how completely is all that insinuation about Chris- tianity being allied to a selfish theory of morals now seen to vanish ! The Christian does not serve God for happiness, but God by a sublime necessity has attached happiness to His service. Along the ranks of His army goes the com- mand to rejoice; above it floats the banner of love. Feli- city is the light which rests over it all. From the helmets of the seraphim that light is flashed back in full unclouded blaze; on us of the human race who, as Isaac Taylor says beautifully, " seem to stand almost on the extreme confines of happiness," its first rays are -even now descending. Happiness is the spheral music in which a God, whose name is Love, has ordained that holiness must voice itself; His light, as it sweeps over the ^olean harp of immensity, kindling every dead world into beauty, breaks forth in the Memnonian anthem of joy. And have we no distinctive character to assign to that state and that locality which, in common discourse, receive the special name of heaven ? In the essential character of the happiness of the future heaven, we can point to no change, but in circumstances there is a mighty alteration. Fichte, importunately insisting that a party, which we take to be that of evangelical Christianity, expects a sen- suous heaven, points in triumph to the fact that the eye is by it turned to futurity, when there can be but an ob- jective change; while all that is subjective in heaven's bliss must be enjoyed now or never. The philosopher is doubly at fault: to represent sublunary delights as filling, even to the most joyful, for any considerable time, the im- measurable capacity of joy possessed by man, can be con- sidered merely as a flourish of philosophic poetry ; while, 40 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. had he for a moment reflected, he must have considered it but fair to concede to those against whom he argued, that object and subject are so closely connected, that we must almost conceive ourselves beyond the bounds of fini- tude ere we can conceive their mutual independence. It is true that the difference between the inheritance of the saints on earth and their inheritance in light, is one of circumstances ; it is true, too, that sorrow as well as fear in the Christian bosom is the sign or the result of sin, and that the more faith now drinks of the cup of joy, the more does it obey divine injunction; yet we should deem it mournful indeed, if the gospel did not point the eye of hope to some great outbreaking of light, as to mark a certain stage in the Christian's history. And such there is; and so great is its brightness, that there is a propriety in the habit of appropriating to the ages which succeed it the special name of celestial. Those who desire to form some conception of the peculiar glory of these ages, of which we cannot speak here at length, we would advise to read Butler's sublime sermon on the Love of God, to ponder it deeply, and to follow out its suggestive meaning. Butler there aims at indicating the exhaustless sources of joy which would be found in the contemplation of the divine nature. We can here offer only one or two themes of meditation, supplementary to this central consideration. Let it then be thought what a power there is towards the impeding and shadowing of happiness, in the very fact that this is a world of prevailing sin. "We fight here under the cloud : we can have little hope that we will hear the final shout of victory. And as we go to each charge, do we not see around us the fallen and the dying? Are we not aware that over the whole earth there is always sorrow, and have we not to dim the eye of imagination, and close the gates of sympathy, that we cry not out at the spectacles THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 41 of grief which are ever, in woful pageantry, passing on- wards to the grave? How true is this of Mrs Browning's ! " The fool hath said there is no God, But none, there is no sorrow." Every human heart must throb to that touch of beautiful pathos, in which the author of Festus bodies forth the depth and earnestness of human wo. Among the celes- tial bands an angel is seen in tears; aword of amazement passes along at the sight of an angel weeping; but the wonder is toon explained. " It is the angel of the earth, She is always weeping." While our step is on such a world as earth, we must know the thrills of sympathetic anguish. Surely it will be an unmeasured access of joy when the cloud of sin, smitten by the light of eternity, finally rolls away, and bares the sunless heavens. Consider, again, the joy that may arise in the heavenly ages from the contemplation of the works of God. Even here it cannot be questioned that serene and exquisite enjoyment is obtained by pure and elevated minds in gazing on the greatness and beauty of nature. But the mind now may be compared to a mountain lake, in which, indeed, at times, the silent and beautiful hills, and the calm flowers, and forest foliage, and the clouds touched by the finger of morrt or eve, may glass them- selves, but which is ever and anon ruffled and obscured by the rude tempest. And who can tell how far this en- joyment may be enhanced, when the sympathies are all true and harmonious, and vibrating to the music of love? What mortal man can guess the rapture which fills the eyes of the seraphim as they sweep onward among the stars of God! Lastly, not to multiply instances, can we not even now perceive, that from Christian friendship, as it would exist in heaven, there would result an exhaustless and un- 42 THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. utterable joy. The one complaint that noble minds have against society is, that its vast texture of forms and gra- dations prevents kindred hearts from uniting, thwarts the action of sympathy. Assuredly the highest terrestrial joy is that of perfect friendship ; and how rare, how nearly impossible, is perfect friendship here! '* Are we not form'd, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar?" Yet the harmony that can result from this union in .diver- sity is scarce to be seen on earth. It is no vtgue imagi- nation, but what can be clearly deduced from Scripture and reason, and easily embraced in thought, that from the friendship of the redeemed, knit in perfect sympathy of divine love, will spring a joy which the harps of heaven will scarce have chords to voice. Such considerations as these might be multiplied inde- finitely, and that with strict adherence to truth. The prospect opened up to us is sublime indeed. And if its glory admitted of enhancement, would it not arise from casting a look back upon the stricken and lowly penitent, as he lay in Christian humility, expecting all from the hand of God? Here it is, every way, as in the case of physical science; which, beginning with bare algebraic formula, climbs upwards from system to system, till it is encompassed with the blaze of an inconceivable glory, and the wing of human imagination is seen feebly fluttering far below. We close this Chapter with an allusion to a passage in Fichte's Way to the Blessed Life, which has struck us as very remarkable. After confessing that neither himself nor any other philosopher had ever succeeded in elevating, by popular instruction, those who " either will not or can- not study philosophy systematically, to the comprehension of its fundamental truths," he distinctly allows that THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 43 " Christ's Apostles," and a succession of " very unlearned persons," have possessed this essential knowledge. He discriminates well the scientific and developed knowledge of philosophy from the life-knonJedge of its fundamental truths. But, might it not have occurred to him that per- haps this strange exception might have another meaning and cause than any of whieh he dreamed; that philosophy had, for some special reason, failed to do what the few poor men of Judea accomplished? Might he not have conceived it possible that the gospel of Jesus had actually some wondrous power of getting at the life? If he missed the truth, let us hold by it. We think there is a profound meaning in the following sentences of Neander, used in reference to primitive Christianity : "It belonged, indeed, to the essence of Christianity, that while it could become all things to all men, and adapt itself to the most different and opposite circumstances of human nature, it could condescend even to wholly sensuous modes of comprehend- ing divine things, in order, by the power of a divine life, working from within, gradually to spiritualise them. . . . In this respect, the great saying of the apostle may often have found its application, that the divine treasure was received and for a season preserved in earthen vessels, that the abundant power might be of God, and not of man." Let this be well pondered, and that superiority in Christianity which Fichte acknowledges over his or any other philosopher's teaching, may be explained. Coleridge spake truly when he said that philosophy was in the Pagan night as the fire-fly of the tropics, making itself visible, but not irradiating the darkness. CHAPTER II. THE SOCIAL LIFE. "We open this chapter with the following proposition: Religion is the only stable basis on which a commonwealth can be reared. This, we think, might be demonstrated by clear, unirapassioned, inductive reasoning; we desire to trace in outline one or twO of the main divisions of the proof. The first, and perhaps, all things considered, the most important argument in its support, is to be derived from the analogy of the individual. It is an indisputable fact that the community has, so to speak, a distinct person- ality; that it is not a mere collection of individuals. Yet, we venture to say, that the more careful and pro- tracted our observation of the man and the nation is, and the more profound our reflection upon the phenomena presented by each, the more firm will our assurance be- come that a strict analogy holds between them. So strong is our conviction of this, that Butler's demonstration of the supremacy of conscience in the individual bosom is quite sufficient to satisfy us that the healthful and natural state of the nation is exhibited, only when the national conscience is dominant, when religion prevails. The political Butler has not yet appeared; but a noble task awaits him. He will show how, as the man who listens THE SOCIAL LIFE. 45 to the voice of conscience, who can stand apart from his fellows, and, over all the brawling of the popular wind, hear the still small voice of conscience as supreme on earth, and turn his eye at its monition towards heaven for an approval which will make him independent of human opinion, is he who is most true to his nature ; so the nation which would rightly occupy its position in the world must have aims above all that is sublunary, and hold itself as a nation responsible to God. The second source of argument on this point is the evi- dence of history. More express and conclusive evidence than is derivable from this source, we can scarce conceive. Of many things the historical student may be doubtful, but of this at least he must be sure: That no amount of wealth, no extent of culture, has ever given a nation strength and stability, when the religious element has been in decay. Let it be noted that we now speak of the deve- lopment and power of the religious faculty; we treat not the subordinate, though important question, whether the religion is true or false. And we bid any man consider the whole history of Judea, of Greece, of Rome, of Italy, and we may add of France, and declare, whether the nation is capable of avoiding some one fatal peril or an- other which is not strongly religious. Either foreign sub- jugation, or domestic despotism, or maniac anarchy, has ever overtaken the godless nation; and, in all times, the nation that had a faith, that reverenced an oath, has put a bridle in the teeth of the unbelieving peoples. The only other department of proof to which we can refer is that of the testimony of great individual thinkers. It is interesting to note how, we might say without ex- ception, the great thinkers and workers of all time have agreed in this. Consider the amount and the nature of the 46 THE SOCIAL LIFE. evidence to be derived from that one source, the construc- tion of ancient and modern polities. Every legislator re- quires this as his bower-anchor; every man who attempts to establish a commonwealth or to rule an empire, com- mences with religion. That he was himself an irreligious man or sceptic mattered little. Whether he were a Zoro- aster or Mahomet, or a Ptolemy Lagus or Napoleon, it was the same; the point of the national pyramid, each felt, must point to heaven. And the testimony of thinkers is equally explicit. Plato virtually makes religion the base of his republic; and Mr Carlyle is, in our day, again pro- claiming, in what manner, or with what likelihood of suc- cess, we say not, the same truth. In one of Bacon's Essays, you find his authority and that of Cicero, like one sword with two edges, knit together. The fact is explicitly stated by Montesquieu; and, while the influence of what was or was not named the positive philosophy has here affected in- juriously our last schools of political economy, even they are compelled to lend their indirect suffrage. One of the most healthy thinkers of recent times, Thomas Chalmers, gave the strength of his life to enunciate and enforce the momentous doctrine. Our initial proposition being established, we proceed to inquire in what way, in the internal arrangements of society, a pantheistic theory of things would naturally and logi- cally be embodied: we shall then note briefly the basis on which Christianity places social relations. The works of Mr Carlyle, in one great aspect of them, are a series of endeavours, or rather one great connected endeavour, to bring the state into approximation to that condition in which rank, power, and possession, would be exactly graduated by ability. And this were a result fraught with so many beneficent consequences, that it must THE SOCIAL LIFE. 47 be acknowledged, that the extent to which he has succeeded in striking and infusing his great idea into contemporary literature and the public mind in general, is to be consi- dered a grateful and promising achievement. It is, how- ever, an indubitable fact, that an error in the original axioms on which any system of teaching is based, although in the course of that teaching separate and partial truths may find advocacy or enforcement, will show itself in any attempt to reduce theory to practice, and will most likely, we might perhaps say certainly, neutralise or poison the very truths amid which, erewhile, it lurked in concealment. And thus we conceive it to be with the teaching of Mr Carlyle: it contains invaluable truth, yet in the original fountain was a poison-drop, which will be found, if its streams ever come to irrigate the general fields of life, to kill the plants it was expected to nourish, and leave a sterile waste where men looked for the bloom and the opu- lence of a garden of God. The fundamental axiom of that pantheism of which we recognise Mr Carlyle as the great living advocate, we found to be, that man is divine. The great man is he in whom the divinity is most clearly manifested. This being so, how, we ask, would that graduation proceed of which we have spoken ? It would tend altogether to the exalt- ation of the great man : if such a thing as worship could exist, it would be worship of him: if a theory of govern- ment were to be propounded, it would be that in which his wisdom ruled without let, and his will was absolute. If my fellow is more divine than I, it is right that I bow down to him, it is right that I serve him: and it is no difficult task to show, that the good things of this life will plen- teously result to me from my doing so. In one word, if well traced out, the legitimate social theory of pantheism 48 THE SOCIAL LIFE. would be despotism. In the course of this volume we shall have occasion to mark, in certain important departments of social life, the development of this theory, and to dis- cover whether Mr Carlyle's own ultimate teaching con- firms our view; for the present, we can merely state it without exposing defects or considering advantages. Christianity is able to accept from Mr Carlyle all that is of value in his doctrines, while avoiding those perils with which they would prove unable to contend. It bids me not to bow down to any fellow-mortal ; yet it may en- join my according him all respect consistent with manli- ness: it bids me not to take commands from any absolute will with the servile cringe of the slave ; yet it makes room for hearty and strenuous obedience. All this it does by the recognition of two great doctrines : the absolute sove- reignty of God; and the relative sovereignty, yet absolute equality, of man. It sets the world, so to speak, in a par- ticular point of view, and by so doing makes everything plain; it represents it as the Lord's, as a field, or vineyard, in which He has certain grand objects to accomplish. It shows every man to be a servant: and to every man who is a dutiful servant it dispenses an equality of honour, and in certain grand particulars, nay, in all, though we cannot now stay to make good the point, an equality of reward. To endeavour to define and enumerate the ends which Divine Providence has in view with man in this world, were a rash and impotent attempt. But we certainly know that the great end of all things is the glory of God; that His glory is manifested in the perfection of His crea- tures; and that He, in His benignity, has ordained that an integral part of perfection is joy, that the higher man or nation ascends on that path, the richer are the fruits and the more beautiful the flowers which line the way. THE SOCIAL LIFE. 49 And it is not impossible, with the light of revelation and the voice of history, to discern the grand outline of that method by which God has ordained and commanded man, in slow progress through the centuries, to work out his perfection as a species. On the one hand, he has a freedom from God, which it is his duty to preserve, which he dare not alienate ; on the other, in order to his progress, God has revealed to him, first, by the fact of an experienced necessity, and, second, by the direct sanction of His word, that civil govern' ment, the more or less complete merging of individual freedom in public law, is also a divine ordinance. In the former of these it is implied, that every faculty which God has bestowed upon or committed to the individual perform its full and appropriate work, or reach its perfect and congenial development; that the intellectual powers have a fair sphere for their operation, that the conscience be untrammelled, that the will exercise its legitimate autho- rity over thought and action, and that each capacity of enjoyment be duly gratified. All this we hold to be implied in the perfection of individual freedom; and all this Christianity guarantees in its declaration of the es- sential equality, the blood-unity, of all men, and its com- mand that all work be done, that every faculty operate, with might. In the latter, in the ordinance of civil government, it is implied that every man perform not only his own primary and direct duty, but that he sub- serve the performance of all other duty; that he play, so to speak, into the hand of every other man ; that he make way where he is himself superfluous, that he obey where his service is necessary to the performance of a duty which he is himself incompetent to effect; in one word, that he recognise as right all that graduation of rank according to work done, which nature tends to effect. This is the true 50 THE SOCIAL LIFE. theory of divine right! that the real, the natural power be obeyed. Let it not be imagined that this is a divine sanc- tion of any particular form, or any particular depositary of governing power r Christianity does not change a living body into a mummy or petrifaction, and command men to obey it: it sanctions the power, and if the time has come for this power to be born, the giant child may hear its sanctioning voice in the womb of futurity, and tear its way, amid what throes soever, to life and inheritance. In the darkest and most barbarous times, this social theory of Christianity will be a guiding light ; when civilisation shall be completed, when freedom and law shall have become one, and not till then, it shall have been wrought out. In the following pages, we shall have occasion to trace a few of its gradual developments; and, first of all, we shall consider that defamed agency which yet Isaac Tay- lor scruples not to call the latest impersonation of the spirit of Christianity, Christian Philanthropy. PART II. (Bty&stim anir $Iklnftm. BOOK I. CHRISTIANITY THE BASIS OP SOCIAL LIFE. CHAPTEE I. FIRST PRINCIPLES. OF CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE ORIGIN AND END OP LAW. Proposing, in this book, to glance generally at a few of the characteristic social agencies of our time, it seems to us an orderly and perspicuous method to regard modern Christian philanthropy as a fitting representative of those agencies, and its consideration, for that reason, a meet introduction to their cursory survey. We shall not allege it to be a principal agency in our present and prospective so- cial system. But we do think that, in its treatment, we are brought eye to eye with that problem on which the future of the free nations depends ; and that an inquiry into its fundamental principles, and a survey of its development, lead us by a natural path to the full statement and com- prehension of that problem. With this statement we pur- pose concluding the present division of our subject. We consider, then, in the outset, the essential and fundamental ideas of Christian Philanthropy. 52 FIRST PRINCIPLES. We do not affirm that there is anything positively new in the idea of this philanthropy. It is as old as love. Its history began to be written in the first tear which fell from a human eye, over one whose only claim was pity, and whose only plea was sorrow. But we shall not be required to prove that there is such a thing in our day as " the phi- lanthropic movement:" we may safely allege the fact that simple pity, love for the wretched as such, has become a more formal and recognisable power in our time than here- tofore. Of this we speak. That our conception of Christian Philanthropy may be clearly perceived, and that it may be known at once what we believe to be its true nature, and what we are willing to stand by as its defensible positions, we shall state, in four ca- tegories, what we deem its grand fundamental propositions. I. In the system of human affairs, there is a distinct, traceable, and indispensable function, to be performed by compassion. II. All men are, in a definable sense, equal. All human law is grounded on expediency ; on what is temporal and not eternal. Revenge is foreign to the idea of law. III. It is not a possible case that hatred be the highest and most reasonable feeling with which one human being can regard another. There cannot, upon earth, exist, in the human form, any one whom it is not noble and holy to love. IV. It is impossible, in this world, that the traces of the divine image be absolutely obliterated from the human soul. God has not revealed to man any period at which it is either incumbent on, or lawful for him, to abandon hope and effort that his brother may attain to that higher nature, which is at once the restoration and elevation of humanity. FIRST PRINCIPLES. 53 These categories are closely connected with each other, and a more searching analysis might doubtless afford clearer lines of demarcation ; but, for practical purposes, we think they will serve. The first is the general declaration with which philanthropy, as such, sets out. The second leads us to define its true relation to justice. The third is inti- mately associated with the second, and is the. Christian rule of feeling, as expressed by our Saviour. The fourth indi- cates the rationale of every effort towards reclamation of the criminal or condemned. At its first arising, Philanthropy was hailed with accla- mation. Without hesitation, apparently without question, and almost with universal voice, men affirmed its light to be holy, and its influence, of necessity, benign. Be the cause, however, what it may, we now find matters altered. Philanthropy, it is true, has pervaded the nation, and more is done at the simple cry of compassion than was ever done before ; but it has been assailed with vituperation and con- tempt, scarcely condescending to argue ; while it furnishes every petty novelist and scribbler with subjects of cari- cature, and targets for small arrows that stick because they are viscous with venom not because they are pointed with wit. The chief argumentative assailant of philanthropy is a man whose words must always deserve calm and thorough consideration, whose name alone is a battery Mr Carlyle. Caricaturists and small wits might be left to shift for them- selves, after we had demonstrated, if that proved to be in our power, the value and reasonableness of philanthropy ; but to leave them thus altogether, were to fall into the mis- take of supposing that nothing can injure which has little force, or that men are not in the habit, every day, and scores of times every day, of holding apples so near to their eyes that they shut out the light of the sun. We consider, there- 54 FIRST PRINCIPLES. fore, a few words (and they shall be as few as we can pos- sibly make them) not wholly wasted on the subject of the ridicule to which philanthropy is in our day exposed : they may prove applicable to the sense of the ridiculous as exer- cised on every kind of religious or moral action or emotion. We are by no means among those who utter a sweeping condemnation against all laughter in the serious provinces of human affairs: we consider the sense of the ridiculous extremely valuable in a man and a nation. In every de- partment of art, of literature, and of life, it prunes a fan- tastic or grotesque exuberance, keeping down, to give it in one word, excessive idiosyncrasy. It is, by its nature, in close league with common sense ; it is the mortal foe of bombast, sentimentality, softness, and every sort of pre- tence. We regard the strong sense of the ridiculous in- herited by the English people, as one of the healthiest characteristics. It may at present threaten to degenerate into a universal titter; but, in its native strength and soundness, it preserves us in a fine mean between the French and the Germans; between the " gesticulating na- tion that has a heart, and wears it on its sleeve," and the nation that thinks walls, and holds the empire of the air.* We imagine there is much in our literature at present which might be bettered by a little smart satire: it is a tonic we cannot well do without. And we claim no exemption for philanthropy from the restraining or tempering power of a sound sense of the ridiculous, resulting in manly and discriminating satire. * " Gentlemen, think the wall:" these were the words in which Fichte commenced his philosophic lectures in Jena. However idealistic, we can scarcely conceive a British audience not being touched with a feeling of drollery by the words: the Germans sat like stucco. Let it not be thought from this remark that I intend the faintest disrespect for the majestic genius and noble character of Fichte. / FIRST PRINCIPLES. 55 Assuredly, like every other human thing, it may run into absurdity or excess, and, in particular instances, may fur- nish legitimate objects of caricature. But satire has its laws: as sure and imperative laws as any other species of composition. And in these it certainly is included, both that it must never be absolutely in error, and that it must never be absolutely frivolous. There is a national mirth which comports with earnestness and reve- rence, and is beautiful as the smile of natural and fearless strength ; but there is such a thing as the laughter of na- tional paralysis, and what more ghastly than that? Laughter is noble and profitable ; but not that of the madman when he sets the house on fire, or that of the fool who goes to wedding and funeral with the same mindless grin. Its office is to prune the excrescences that will adhere to the best of human things, to prevent stupidity, pretension, or weak enthusiasm, from attaching their distorting or encumbering insignia to any form of truth. But it becomes at once of malign in- fluence, if its attacks menace the truth itself, if, in cutting away excess of foliage, it draws the vital sap from the tree, if, in curing the squint, it cuts out the eye. Sound satire should clear from all stains the statue of truth ; but it should make men love to gaze on that statue the more. And, since satire is of prevailing influence, since it acts upon the mind with a more subtle insinuation, and often exerts a greater power of unconscious mental modification even than argument, it is of serious importance that this fact be constantly borne in mind. Now, we do think, that in the caricatures we have had of philanthropy, this fundamental law has been infringed. There has been a fatal want of all discrimination of the true from the false ; qualities radically and perennially holy, human in the noblest sense, and dignifying humanity, 56 FIRST PRINCIPLES. have been confounded with their morbid excess, or left to appear altogether absurd and ignoble. One or two words will make this plain. There are three circles in which, in his life on earth, and the discharge of his earthly duties, a man may act. The first is that of self: one must always, by duty and necessity, do more for himself, or in connection with him- self, than for any one else. The second is that of family and friends, of all those who have a claim on one by blood or friendship: within this circle a man must perform certain duties, or he meets universal reprobation and con- tempt. The third is that of humanity in general. We shall not insult our readers by proving to them that this is truly and properly a sphere of human duty; although there are not wanting writings in our day whose tendency seems to indicate it as an insult to suppose one to doubt the reverse: we shall not endeavour to eliminate the fact, which used to be considered as good as settled, that a man is by nature united in mysterious but ennobling bonds with every other man, and that it is not one of the charac- teristics of a high state of humanity, that it be separated into families and coteries, each attending to its own affairs, like so many families of wolves in the pine forest; we shall presume our readers to agree that severance, dis- union, isolation, selfishness, are symptoms of disease in the human race, and that the evolution of the ages, if it tends to any consummation whatever, must tend to their termi- nation. Not only, however, is this sphere noble ; we fear- lessly assert, still without deeming proof necessary, that it is this third sphere where, save in rare instances, noble- ness as such has existence. A man who performs well his duties to himself, who has no higher object than that he may be undisturbed and happy, we 6hall not call noble. FIRST PRINCIPLES. 57 In the second circle, we find many of the loveliest spec- tacles that our earth can show ; the affection of brothers and of sisters, the self-sacrificing nobleness of friendship, the sacred beauty of a mother's love. But, leaving the question of friendship (which, indeed, holds, in its pure form, of the high and the immortal), we cannot hesitate to place domestic feelings and spectacles, as such, among the natural productions of our planet; the loveliest perhaps we have to show, but of a beauty precisely analogous to that of the rose and the fountain, and essentially pertain- ing to time. By neglecting family duties, one becomes less than a man ; by performing them never so well, he comes not to merit applause. Distinctive nobleness com- mences in the third circle. It is when one rises above self and family, and looks abroad on the family of man- kind, that he takes the attitude which in a man is essen- tially great: when he no longer feels around him the little necessities which compel, or the little pleasures which allure, and yet is able to contemplate men as a great brotherhood of immortals, with a gaze analogous to that of Him in whose image he is made ; when he passes beyond what he shares with the lower orders of creation, and soars to those regions where, as an intelligent, God- knowing creature, he may sit among the angels; when he can look on the world through the light of eternity; then it is that he does what it is the distinctive privilege and nobleness of man on this earth to do, what marks him as animated by those emotions to which, under God, humanity owes all it has achieved in time. All this is so plain, and so absolutely certain, that statement embraces proof. "What excuse, then, could be pled for .a satire, which en- dangered this peculiar nobleness of humanity, and perpe- 58 FIRST PRINCIPLES. tually read to man the lesson that he should mind himself, or, at most, his family, or, at very most, some interesting family which he fancied, much as he might rabbits or pigeons? A very superfluous lesson, to be sure! For one man or woman who neglects self or family from ac- tual desire to promote the welfare of the human race, ten thousand, at the very least, neglect the latter for the former. Human indolence and selfishness require no aid from satire to make men ever sink back into their own little circles, into their own little hearts! Go out to your lawn in the evening after a shower, when the earthworms are looking out, and commence to lecture them on the paramount importance of home duties : how it is proper to keep their holes tidy, and attend to the respectable upbringing of their children ; how they have duties enough at their own doors, and it cannot be too earnestly enforced on them that they ought not to look much towards the stars, just beginning to come out, and so very far away: but spare your sweet breath, and aban- don the quite superfluous task of bidding men cultivate selfishness, and withdraw their eyes from looking in love towards the ends of the earth. Holy and beautiful are home duties, and home delights; these may nowise be ne- glected or scorned: but God did not kindle the smile of the winter hearth, or the warmer smile of the true wife, God did not fill home with the musical voices of children, and the thousand " hopes, and fears that kindle hope, an undistinguishable throng," that these should be his all to a man, that no voice should reach him from the outer world. These are a solace after his work, these are rewards of his toil, but these can never furnish him the tasks that mark him distinctively as a man. It is when we widen our sphere of vision and of love, a sphere which will go on FIRST PRINCIPLES. 59 widening to eternity, and not when we contract it, that we become noble and man-like. We turn now to our contemporary satire. Do we not meet, on all hands, with forms of ridicule with quiet sneers, with rude horse-laughter, with elaborate figures, of high broad brows, and breasts calm and cold as marble, and with sign-painter daubs, that are human only in bear- ing human names, but otherwise as dead as spoiled canvass all meant to raise the laugh against a philanthropy that would look abroad ? We desire no stop to be put to the laughter: only let care betaken, lest, while we laugh, our unconscious hearts are robbed of the purest spark of celes- tial fire lingering within. When we look at the delicate and living lines in the stately statue of a St. John, or at the mechanic movements, utterly removed from all possi- bility of sympathy, and to be condemned as abortive and inconceivable by every canon of mere criticism, in a Mrs Jellyby, let us beware lest we recoil too strongly from the finely and almost soundly satirised excess of the one, and from the hideous and unmitigated atrocity of the other, into what is, in the former, however painted, after all but human passion, or into what is offered as the right morality instead of the other, a silly and simpering good-nature, that never looks beyond its own little ring, and such objects as can look well and draw mawkish tears in the pages of a novel. Let it be remembered, also, that, whatever may be the case with morbid idiosyncrasy, it is in general the heat which warms most, that casts its warming influence farthest: the man who loves all men, will have love to embrace his neighbourhood. The cottages of Cardington did not suffer because Howard was visiting the sick-beds on the shores of the Bosphorus! These words cannot be considered uncalled for. Many, we 60 FIRST PRINCIPLES. fear, when their hearts, in the first ardour of youth, were beginning to expand with holy desires, that told of their brotherhood or sisterhood with earth's nobles and standard- bearers, have felt them contract again to the mere every- day feelings of home and neighbourhood, under the influ- cence of such satire as we have been here indicating ; satire which would laugh at Plato as he trod, afar from men, the lone mountains of thought, which would keep David ever at the sheep-fold, and John ever at the net. We turn now from this view of the subject. Philanthropy, we have said, has been attacked by Mr Carlyle. It has been attacked with weapons of argument, and with those of fiercest scorn, declared " a phosphores- cence and unclean," and rejected from among the ageneies to be regarded with hope by those who desire the oom- mon weal. We consider him to have erred; but, well assured as we are that he loves men as only a mighty man can love, we deem anything he may say on the subject worthy of attention, and we controvert his opinions with deliberation and care. By considering the case, too, in the precise light in which he views it, we come directly and conveniently to the heart of the whole question, to the de- termination of the relation borne by philanthropy to justice. This relation we shall endeavour to define with what we can attain of scientific accuracy. With very much of what Mr Carlyle says on the subject of the treatment of criminals, we perfectly agree; much, in- deed, which he alleges can, we think, be shown to be correct and consistent, only when interpreted in accordance with our theory. But the difference between us is decided. Our view of the matter leads us to what seems a satisfactory defence of that philanthropy which Mr Carlyle execrates ; and when we discover his positive conception of the origin of FIRST PRINCIPLES. 61 human law, we ean deliberately and decisively affirm our belief of its incorrectness. We plainly assert, that every man who is punished by any constituted authority on this earth, who is put to death, or who is fined sixpence, can be so treated, reasonably and rightfully, solely because of the "effects," too varied to be noted for the present, of his actions on his fellows and their prospects. Mr Carlyle has these words: "Example, effects upon the public mind, effects upon this and upon that all this is mere appendage and accident." We deliberately think that, to constitute revenge the true theory of justice between man and man, the human being must be at once an atheist and a savage. Mr Carlyle speaks thus: "Revenge, my friends! re- venge, and the natural hatred of scoundrels, and the in- eradicable tendency to revancher one's-self upon them, and pay them what they have merited: this is for evermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in the mind of every man." And again, after one of his own burning metaphoric passages, in which a man, in the fury of passion, is represented as reasonably slaying another: " My humane friends, I perceive this same sacred glow of divine wrath, or authentic monition at first-hand from God himself, to be the foundation for all criminal law," &c. We can no longer doubt that Mr Carlyle's theory of law is that of revenge, and this we proceed to question. Let no one imagine, while we do so, that we impute to him all which may be logically extorted from his premises. The explicative word of Mr Carlyle's whole system of belief is " hero-worship:" the immense debt we nationally owe him, and the unsoundness which may, we think, be shown to characterise very much of what he has written, are alike traceable to his view of the individual man, and the relation he bears to his fellows. With his views here, 02 FIRST PRINCIPLES. his theory of human law accords, in perfect philosophic consistency. We must therefore subject to an examination what we understand him to mean by * hero-worship." And we are the more willing to do so at this early stage of our progress, because we deem a conclusive exhibition of inac- curacy in his idea of man sufficient to overthrow all, or almost all, the errors which we shall have to combat in these pages. Mr Carlyle cares little for metaphysical supports for his opinions; he has long listened to the great voices of life and history; but we think his early works afford us the philosophic explanation of his doctrine of hero-worship. On a pantheistic scheme of things, it seems unassailable. God being all, and all being God, and a great man being the highest visible manifestation, and as it were concentra- tion of the universal divine essence, it is right to pay to the latter the homage of an unbounded admiration, to render him the only kind of worship possible to men. But we mean not to assail Mr Carlyle from this point: we likewise turn to the voices of history and the heart. We find him tracing all worship to admiration and reverence for great men ; we find him asserting that the limits are not to be fixed for the veneration with which to regard true heroism in a man. We think the very word " hero- worship" utterly inadmissible under any interpretation; we assert, that no religion ever had its origin in the ad- miration of men. Such the point in dispute; we turn to history. Two great classes may be distinguished among the leaders of mankind ; those who have exercised their influ- ence by power not moral, and those who made an appeal to the moral nature of man. We contend not for hair- breadth distinctions; we point out a difference which one JIRST PRINCIPLES. 63 glance along the centuries will show to be real and broad. By the first class, we mean such men as Napoleon, Caesar, and Alexander; by the second, such men as Mahomet, Zoroaster, and Moses. The former were, viewed as we now regard them, mere embodiments of force; their sol- diers trusted and followed them, because armies were in their hands as thunderbolts. The captain of banditti, whose eye sees farther, and whose arm smites more powerfully, than those of his followers, exercises an influ- ence in kind precisely similar. Anything analogous to worship is foreign to every such case ; a fact rendered palpable and undeniable by the simple reflection, that there is no feeling of an infinite respect, as due to what is infinite, in these or the like instances. A supple-kneed Greek might have knelt to Alexander, " if Alexander wished," but no proclamations could make a Greek believe that Alexander could lay his hand on the lightning, or impart life to an insect. There is, however, another class of great men, with whose influence on their fellows worship has been ever and intimately connected: this we have represented by Mahomet, Zoroaster, and Moses. Here, then, the point at issue comes directly before us. Worship did originate in each of these cases. Whence did it arise? Mark the men in their work, and listen to their words. Mahomet arose and said, "Ye have been worshipping dumb idols, that are no gods: look up to Allah ; there is no god but Allah !" His words were not in vain. Zoroaster arose and said, " Ye have wandered from the truth which your fathers knew and followed; I bring you it back fresh from the fountains of heaven." Men gave ear to him also. Moses came to the children of Israel, and said, " I am hath sent me unto you." They heard the word, and followed him; through the cloven 64 FIRST PRINCIPLES. surges, into the howling wilderness, whithersoever he listed. Whom did men obey and worship in each of these cases? Did they worship Mahomet, when he pointed his finger upwards to Allah ? Did they obey the commandments of Moses, when he gave them the tables where God's hand had traced words under the canopy of cloud and fire? Surely we may say with plainness and certainty, No. It was ever the Sender that was worshipped, not the sent; it was the belief in his alliance with an exterior, an infinite power, which won him his influence. He has brought us fire from heaven ! Such, in all ages, has been the cry of men, as they looked, their eyes radiant with joy and thank- fulness, on the priest or prophet, and ranged themselves under his guidance. The crown and sceptre which men have most highly honoured, and most loyally obeyed, have always been believed to have come down from heaven; men have not worshipped the spirit of a man, or the breath in his nostrils, but the Spirit to whom he turned them. We suppose the rudest Polynesian islander regards with profounder veneration the black, unchiselled, eyeless idol to which he bows down, than the wisest and mightiest chieftain he knows: the one holds of the unseen and the infinite, the other he can look upon, and examine, and compass in his thought; to the one he may look in the day of battle, of the other he will think in the shadow of the thunder-cloud ; the one he will respect and obey, the other alone will he worship. Go into the portrait gallery of the Venetians, and mark there the "victorious Doges painted neither in the toil of battle nor the triumph of return, nor set forth with crowns and curtains of state, but kneeling always crownless, and returning thanks to God for his help, or as priests interceding for the nation in its affliction." That spectacle illustrates well the re- FIRST PRINCIPLES. 65 lative regards of men towards their greatest, and towards their God. But we think we hear some one indignantly exclaim, Why, in the first place, all this is the extreme of triteness ; and, in the second, Mr Carlyle, by his doctrine of hero- worship, means really nothing more. We claim no great originality in this matter, and certainly the truth for which we contend, whatever it wants, is clothed in the majesty ,i age ; we do not suppose even, so strictly in accordance with human instinct do we deem it, that it sounded very strangely in the ears of men, when Moses, bidding them turn from those whose " breath was in their nostrils," was commissioned to write it down, an eternal truth for eternal remembrance, in the Book of Deuteronomy. But, however this may be, and even though our expression of the truth might be sanctioned by Mr Carlyle, we are absolutely assured that it is enough to reverse his whole theory of human affairs. We find it perfectly sufficient to show that the term hero-worship is an absurdity, or worse ; to indi- cate the true significance of those phenomena of universal history which Mr Carlyle has categorised under that term ; and at least to lead to the overthrow of his theory that law originates in revenge. It were difficult to compute the practical importance of the truths to which, under the name of hero-worship, he has directed our attention ; but we must remember the true and pregnant remark of Mack- intosh, that, in the construction of theory, partial truth is equivalent to error ; and while we would not lose one grain of the real gold Mr Carlyle has brought to the treasuries of the world, we would assign to all its own precise place, and no other. We grant that men have honoured men ; we grant that, in every department of human endeavour, the point to be aimed at, for health, prosperity, and ad- 66 FIRST PRINCIPLES. vancement, is to obtain qualified men. But, when Mr Car- lyle associates this fact with worship, we at once declare him to have missed an all-important distinction, which reveals the highest lessons of what he names hero-worship. This distinction is, we grant, very simple. If a city is sur- rounded by armed squadrons and a line of circumvalla- lion, if the townsmen are in terror that no quarter will be given them, but yet, because of a scorching thirst which threatens to kill them by slow torment, are pro- ceeding to open their gates, if then suddenly one of their number discovers, in a spot hitherto un thought of, a well of cool and abundant water; if his fellow-citizens crowd around him, and grasp his hand, and look on him with tears of joy what shall we see in the spectacle? Respect for him, or delight at the discovery of the foun- tain? Entirely the latter. When a man, looking heaven- ward, cries out, I see heaven opened, and the light streams forth lift up your eyes, and see it for yourselves; when men hear, and believe, and bestir themselves, and exclaim, It is even so: we see the light, we feel ourselves being drawn nearer to it, and mayest thou be blessed for showing it to us what shall we see in the spectacle? Shall we regard it as a testimony of man to man, or of man to God? Certainly as the latter. We look with Mr Carlyle along human history; we see men paying the highest honour to their Mahomets and Zoroasters ; we see the character of whole epochs moulded by this honour; we see nations gathering round these, and willing, one would say, to cement for them thrones in their hearts' blood ; and from the whole we learn, not the divinity of man, but the fact that the deep human instinct has in all ages looked for a God. The louder the shouts arise of what Mr Carlyle calls hero- worship, the more definitely and decisively will they pro- FIRST PRINCIPLES. 67 claim to us, that hero worship, in any permissible or de- finable sense, is contradicted by the united voice of huma- nity. The two highest inferences to be drawn from all the great phenomena so magnificently illustrated by Mr Car- lyle under that name, seem to us to be these two: I. In the breast of the human race is a belief in an Infi- nite Being. II. There has been perennially in the heart of man an intense desire to reach a nearer knowledge of God, and a closer intimacy with Him a sublime and inextinguishable yearning towards a divine Father. The first of these propositions is one of nature's strongest arguments for a Deity ; the second is perhaps the strongest, for the fact that the Deity is such a conscious and personal existence as can hold communication with reasoning minds. The first goes to establish monotheism; the second sends a death-stab to the heart of pantheism. "We find ourselves led, then, by the path trodden by Mr Carlyle, to the throne where God sits, King of the universe. We shall endeavour to eliminate a theory of law in consistence with this great truth. If the hero is to be worshipped as a god, the scoundrel is to be hated as a devil; the revenge theory may then be defended: but the fact may be different, if there never was any such thing as strict worship of heroes if hero and scoundrel are the sub- jects of one living God. We desire to make no show of metaphysics here: we write with a practical purpose, and in a popular form; and therefore rest all on an appeal to men as they are repre- sented in history, and as they feel in their hearts. But there is one argument of perhaps a somewhat metaphysical nature, which is extremely simple, and seems to bear very strongly against the theory of revenge; it we adduce in 68 FIRST PRINCIPLES. the outset. It proceeds on the hypothesis that there is an intelligent and almighty Governor of the universe. "We introduce it by a well-known quotation: " Alas ! alas ! Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once; And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy: How would you be, If He, which is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are? 0, think on that; And mercy then will breathe within your lips, Like man new made." "We cannot consider this a mere echo of popular senti- ment on the part of Shakespere : we suspect these words came from depths in the greatest merely human heart that ever beat; we think we see in them one of those thoughts that pierce farthest into eternity. When thinking or speaking of the Infinite Being, we cannot proceed by cal- culation of degrees: absolute purity is stained by a mote as certainly as by a whole atmosphere of hell's darkness. If it is the eternal law of justice that the reasonable being affected with sin be hated, we cannot go. about to say, so much will be hated, so much will be tolerated, and so on. Now, Mr Carlyle will certainly not deny that sin adheres to the whole human race: set on a ground of perfect light, he will allow our species, as a whole, to look black. He sees a brother man commit some atrocious crime : with what he calls a glow of divine wrath, he slays him. It being a divine emotion to hate that being because affected with sin, it must be also divine, in one of absolute holiness, to hate and exterminate every creature so affected, even by the smallest speck that infinite light can reveal. If this is so, how is it that the human race exists ? How is it that God did not lift His foot in anger, and crush our planet into annihilation as a loathsome worm staining the azure of FIRST PRINCIPLES. 69 immensity ? Really there is no answer : if hatred is the highest and holiest emotion with which a man can regard a fellow-creature affected with sin, if this fact is the real foundation of justice, and if an infraction of justice here is an infraction of essential right, there cannot be conceived a reason, we might say a possibility, that a sinful species could subsist in God's world. And is there a living man, or has there ever been a man, who could deliberately consider that his distance from the purity of the Infinitely Holy was less than the distance of his most sinful brother from him ? Is there any of the sons of men, who could deliberately challenge his Maker to cast a stone at him ? If such there be, let him hold to the theory that hatred and revenge are the emotions with which God regards the sinner ; if there is none such, that theory chains the noblest human soul that ever existed on the eternal rock of despair. This preliminary consideration leads us to a distinction which lies at the basis of all that is to follow that, namely, between moral evil and the soul it pollutes. This distinction Mr Carlyle overlooks or ignores, yet on it all depends. God, we most certainly hold, does eternally and infinitely hate sin, and no bounds are to be placed to the hatred with which it is right for men to regard it ; but precisely as " hero-worship" was found not to indicate infinite love and honour as due to men, but as directed towards the foun- tain of light, so the efforts men have made to exterminate the excessively wicked from among them, indicate hatred of their brethren only in a secondary and temporary sense, and point chiefly to the abyss of blackness which their iniquity reveals. The whole moral universe seems to us to be whelmed in a confusion as of returning chaos, if this distinction is not rigidly adhered to. We cannot be required to prove the possibility of draw- 70 FIRST PRINCIPLES. ing this great distinction, or its reality when drawn ; and, convinced that we can appeal to the instincts of men, we intentionally fortify it by no metaphysical arguments. Every man could understand and sympathise with Cole- ridge, when he said he would tolerate men, but for princi- ples he would have no toleration. The peasant Christian sees no mystery in that passage where God is asserted to have no pleasure in the death of the sinner, although the whole Bible testifies His exterminating abhorrence of sin. And have not men ever borne witness to an instinctive feeling of this distinction ? Bad as the world is, there per- haps was never a scaffold erected, and a man put to death upon it, for whom, whatever his crime, certain eyes in the crowd were not filled with the dew of pity. Have not some nations treated the condemned, previously to their execution, with condoling kindness? Or what find we in that spectacle exhibited in Paris, on the autumn evening in 1792, which Mr Carlyle has painted for us as with the brush of Michael Angelo? The Septembriseurs, mad- dened with rage, their arms to the elbow clotted with gore, their whole aspect that of unchained demons, clasped to their breasts, with the audible weeping of irrepressible joy, any one among the prisoners who was pronounced guilt- less and snatched from the jaws of death. Even they Avitnessed to the fact that it is a stern work for man to be the executioner of man. It is the mark of the evil one perceived on a fellow-creature that is hated, not that creature himself. Would to God, men say from their in- most hearts, we could part this evil from you ; but we cannot, and we must expel it from the midst of us ; you must go with it. The tainted spot must be cut out; but while the knife is being whetted, the tear is being shed. Mr Carlyle acknowledges this general fact, but, if well FIRST PRINCIPLES. 71 pondered, we think it goes far to invalidate his theory. To account for it, without recognising the distinction we have stated, will be found difficult. The indulgence of every desire and propensity is, by a recognised psycho- logical law, associated with a pleasurable sensation. When a man kills another in the fury of revenge, he assuredly experiences a momentary relief and gratification. By our distinction, all becomes consistent; the passion is left in the enjoyment of its own pleasure; the pain arises from another source yet to be seen. Let it not be supposed that we allege that revenge per- forms no function in human affairs ; we do believe it to have a function. This we shall presently endeavour to indicate; but we now concede that, even in the precise mode in which Mr Carlyle pictures its exercise, it may, in rare cases, come legitimately into action. " The forked weapon of the skies can send Illumination into deep, dark holds, Which the mild sunbeam hath not power to pierce." "Where the calm voice of law cannot be heard, or its hand cannot strike, then revenge may start forth to assert huma- nity and justice. Keeping steadily in view the distinction between the sinner and his sin, we proceed to exhibit briefly what we deem the real origin and function of human law. We find man, in all ages and circumstances, present two great aspects: that of the individual; and that of the civis, or member of society. We must say one or two words of each. It is not a mere theological dogma, that man is king of this lower world that his relation to his fellows is differ- ent from that he bears to the inferior animals. Is there not a certain mystical sacredness attaching to the life of a man ? 72 FIRST PRINCIPLES. Is there any degree of idiocy or insanity which will turn aside that flaming sword with which conscience pursues the murderer? In the remotest desert, in the depth of the sequestered wood, why is it that he who deliberately slays his fellow feels that he is not unseen ? that, though no human power will ever reach him, there is a tribunal before which he will appear One to whom his brother's blood can cry even from the ground ? Is it not because there is a sense in which all men are equal their differences relative, their equality essential ? And what but this can we under- stand, by the inherent majesty imputed by sages and poets to men ? What but this renders it a glorious thing, how- ever slender my capacities, that I have the gift of a human soul ? Not only is it that the grandeurs and harmonies of nature are disposed for the delight and exaltation of all, not only that " The sun is fix'd, And the infinite magnificence of heaven Fix'd, within reach of every human eye; The sleepless ocean murmurs for all ears; The vernal field infuses fresh delight Into all hearts:" from which sublime truth a metaphysical as well as a poetical argument for essential human brotherhood might perhaps be drawn: the very fact that the human eye has been opened, as no other being's on earth has been, to see the face of the one God, seems a sufficient proof that there remains for man, from every power on earth, an ulti- mate appeal. The destinies of men are bounded, not by time, but by eternity; the human soul is a denizen, not alone of earth, but of the universe : " God's image, sister of the seraphim," if indeed the seraphim can claim a glory equal to that of the soul of man, will always assert a claim to the citizen- FIRST PRINCIPLES. 73 ship of heaven, and a power of appeal to the judgment of God. The right hy which any earthly power can judge and punish man must be delegated. By turning thus for a moment upon man the light of eternity, we find pertaining to him an essential equality ; we think, too, we here discover the source of that inex- tinguishable and resistless passion for freedom which has ever distinguished him in time. Neither is it merely a theological dogma that the human race is in a state of imperfection, and of effort towards some higher condition. It is a historical fact. Call it what you will, account for it as you may, the human race, in its history in time, has been marked by one grand characteristic, unique in this world. That charac- teristic is a visible effort towards some development a progress, or aim at progress. Our species has not the aspect of one who has finished his journey, but of one still proceeding in it; not of one who has cultivated his field, and can sit down to enjoy it, but of one who still sees it untilled and encumbered with rocks; humanity has always shown a brow darkened with care and dissatisfaction, an eye fixed on the distance, a staff in the hand. We need not ask whither it is bound; but, beyond question, it has ever been going; never could it lay itself down to sleep ; never could it build itself an eternal city ; ever its most heroic aspect has been displayed when it aroused itself, and set out anew on its march. But the deepest thinkers have recognised that, along with this characteristic of progress, the human species is distinguished by that also of a remarkable and pre-eminent unity. You cannot individualise man so far as to separate him from his species; in the wolf-child of India, in the maniac of solitary con- finement, you see what man is when separated from man. 74 FIRST PRINCIPLES. In the unity of the species, or its irresistible tendency to- wards unity, originated society. Society arrogated to itself a power which no individual man can claim, the power to touch the human life; this power, we believe, was conferred on it by God, and the form in which He revealed to man that it belonged to him was, the necessity, stern and painful indeed, by which he was driven to exercise it. The perfect development of human unity, the attain- ment of all that man can do or become in a civic capacity, is the aim of civilisation. The machinery of human civi- lisation is vast and various; one of its principal parts is law. Where, then, precisely are wc to look for the origin of law? Surely to the relation between the two entities the indivi- dual, and the society. And if we can find any reason why the society should originate law, we shall probably have discovered that of which we are in quest. We have not far to look : we find it by a glance at individual passion. At what time law commenced we inquire not whether its ori- gin was in any respect supernatural or not, is of no moment at present; but certainly it was when human passions were seen tearing the weak and defenceless, when individual greed, individual lust, individual hate, and, most cruel and perilous of all, individual revenge, ranged like beasts of the forest amid a flock, that Law unbared her " beautiful bold brow," and bade them all cower beneath the eye of reason. Human law arose from no human passion, but from the necessity discerned by men, if they were to abide longer in this world, to have some voice above human passion, with power to control it. That mighty instinct in the human heart which has ever spurned control by an individual brother, required absolutely to be commanded by a power not individual, FIRST PRINCIPLES. 75 which could dare to compel submission. In the very idea of law we find the restraint of the individual: the very object of law is the counteraction of passion ; if any two ideas are precisely antithetic, they are these two, law and passion. Let us, leaving the others, look for a moment at this particular passion of revenge. "We put these questions regarding it, When was it ever felt, save for personal wrongs, to such an extent that it could supply the place of an independent, disinterested voice ? When was it felt for sin, either against God or man, with half the inten- sity with which it has burned for the most insignificant personal injury? "When was its power ever permitted to remain comparatively unchecked, without producing effects of excess which were the mockery of justice ? Revenge was in the eye of Cain when he struck down Abel; re- venge was the Themis of the deadly feud demanding the unintermittent stream of blood from generation to genera- tion for the accident or the mistake; but when revenge ever spoke, save perhaps in the convulsions and spasms of national life, with the voice of reason, we know not. Of all the passions on which Law cast her quelling eye, blind, selfish, murderous revenge was perhaps the most turbulent and unreasonable. We are led to this conclusion : That man, feeling in his bosom a freedom which, like the very breath of the Al- mighty, seemed part of his essential existence, yet saw himself so encumbered by manifold imperfections, so preyed upon by individual passions, that, in his progress onwards, he was compelled, unconsciously or by a voice from heaven, to originate the thing society, and to establish a power which, personating the community, should visit with pu- nishment crimes committed against it : this last power was 76 FIRST PRINCIPLES. law. We have said that it had its root in expediency ; but the sense in which this holds good is important. It was expedient with reference to eternity: as mankind navi- gated the stream of time, a fatal mutiny broke out, and the expedient of law became necessary to make existence pos- sible; in a perfect state of humanity it were impossible; it will vanish when society vanishes, in the restored state of man. But it may, nevertheless, appeal to eternal laws; nay, it may be specially said to rise over the clamour of in- dividual and temporal interests, and endeavour to catch the eternal accents of justice ; its commission is temporal, its code may be eternal. Law is the antithesis of individualism. But, if we did seek its analogue in the individual mind, we should not look for it in revenge: we should find it in the serene pause of reason, when all noises from without are excluded, and the raving passions are stilled within, and the soul asks counsel of pure truth and perfect justice. Does not the universal opinion of mankind, in its un- conscious expression, during all ages, support us in our view of law? If not, whence is it that Justice has ever been figured as of calm, passionless countenance ; no cloud of revenge, no gleam of pity on her brow, and holding in her hand the well-poised balance ? Law does not regard men as such ; it regards them as retarding forces which hinder men in their march through time, and, as such, visits them with punishment. Hatred, love, revenge, pity, every emotion which has reference to the living, sentient being, is foreign to that iron brow ; there must be no quiver- ing in the hand which holds that even balance. The foregoing proof was necessary to enable us to ex- hibit the soundness of philanthropy, as brought forward into more prominent operation among the agencies of FIRST PRINCIPLES. 77 human civilisation, than it had hitherto been, by John Howard. Look again at that calm image of Justice, lifting her serene brow into the still azure. "VVe think that, with strict philosophic truth, a poetic eye, regarding that figure in time, may have seen that it has ever been accompanied by two other figures. On the one hand was Revenge, with instruments of torture, and an eye where blended the fury of hell and the hunger of the grave. She has ever called for more victims and more pain. That she has not cried in vain, let the groans that have come from earth's racks and wheels, earth's crosses and furnaces, bear sad witness. On the other hand was Love, pleading ever against Re- venge, and endeavouring to draw an iron tear from the eye of Justice. Both these figures are foreign to the idea of law. Revenge looks from the fault to the individual, and says, torture and kill him; Love looks from the fault to the individual, and says, pity and save him: Law regards the fault alone. We fully grant that revenge has thus a function in time. Love might conceivably become morbid, might de- generate into a weak sentimentalism, might cease to accept the stern necessity of not sparing the sin, whatever may be the feeling entertained for the sinner. And had it not been for the positive pleasure of revenge, perhaps the sorrow entailed upon men in the punishment of those among them who clog the wheels of progress, had caused its having never been proceeded with: so far, in strict psychological truth, does Mr Carlyle err, when he speaks of the exercise of revenge being painful. Love may go farther than can be allowed it in the present condition of the human race, and then revenge may feel itself crushed and unduly out- raged, and call out for a new fixing of that medium be- 78 FIRST PRINCIPLES. tween extremes, which is all we can yet attempt. Nay, it is quite heyond our intention to deny that this may, in individual instances, have been the case in the philan- thropic movement. Love and revenge, considered thus in their relation to justice, are alike temporal. When men have re-attained their true, original, spiritual life, their work will have been completed ; Justice will then for ever rule, and alone ; but no longer over cowering, struggling, trembling creatures; for, when we look up, the iron brow shall have become gold, and we shall know, by the fadeless smile on the lip, that to eternity Justice and Love are one. Now are we fairly at the point where we can decide upon the claims of philanthropy. Granting that love and re- venge are each and equally foreign to the idea of law, we ask this question : In a state of progress, in a state of ad- vancement from worse to better, shall we proceed towards the enlargement of the province of love, or to that of the province of revenge ? Surely we may answer, without hesitation, that the advancement must be in the direction of love, and that, more and more, revenge will be driven away, as men attain to higher and higher development. When all passions fade away, their function being per- formed, love will also pass away, but only to become one with justice. We shall not hang such a curtain of murky darkness over the future of humanity, as to say that it is not towards love, but towards hatred, not towards mercy, but revenge, that we are advancing. Surely, if there is one instinct in the human heart which is entwined with its essential life, and which wings its proudest aspirations ; if there is one universal faith written in the brightness which, even in its tears, the eye of humanity gathers as it looks towards the far distance; if there is one belief which FIRST PRINCIPLES. 79 pre-eminently stamps earth as the place of hope, it is this that, despite volcanoes and thunderstorms, despite scaffolds and battle-fields, despite death and the grave, love is, by eternal nature and essence, holier than hate, and will ulti- mately prevail against it. Whatever their present mission, revenge and hatred are known by men to belong to a state of disease, to be in their nature, when between reasonable beings, not divine, but diabolic. Go to the poor Bedouin of the desert, and ask what is his idea of justice and of law. There, amid his burning wastes, where he clings on to the skirts of civilisation, scarce able to count on his life for an hour to come, you find in full develop- ment the bare idea of force as what is to be feared, and obeyed, and worshipped. The foot that can crush him like a worm into the sand, the eye that will not relent for tears or groaning these he honours. Is not this the first rude idea of humanity? Must we still learn from the desert wanderer ? Surely, at some point in the revolution of the ages, the soothing, softening, mighty influences of kind- ness were to begin to make themselves more distinctly felt than in the old iron times. It is a universal principle that, strength being secured, the milder every government is, the nearer does it approach to perfection: this holds good in the heart, the family, and the nation. And however philanthropy may as yet struggle amid obstruction and ob- scuration, we shall hail it as a streak, coming beautifully, though as yet faintly and dubiously, over the mist-wreaths of morning, of that mild sunlight whose power will one day replace that of the tempest. The times, we shall hope, had come for philanthropy, and Howard was sent to call it into visible form and working. And, methinks, even although such a dreadful thing has happened as that one or two fewer strokes have been inflicted on the writhing criminal, 80 FIRST PRINCIPLES. than fierce revenge, or even Bedouin j ustice, might de- mand, it is better to have it so, than that we should go back to the days of racks and wheels, of human beings distracted with sorrow, and guiltless creatures dying of jail fever. But this consideration is not required. We calmly rest the cause of philanthropy on these simple truths: that there is a discernible and distinct office performed by pity in our present condition, relating to justice ; and that its function must go on expanding if men advance. Philan- thropy is a weapon from heaven's armoury ; we trust the time has come when we can use it ; if not, the greater our shame, not the worse the weapon. Extremes are always easy ; this is as true as that they are always wrong. A maudlin, morbid pity, refusing the imperative conditions of our existence in time, is the one extreme ; for it we offer no defence it we deem perfectly distinct from true Christian Philanthropy: a savage, un- sparing, execrating denunciation of philanthropy seems to us the other an equally false, and still more easy ex- treme ; against it we here specially strive. The difficulty assuredly is, to discover what is really valuable in philan- thropy, to separate it from dross, and to shape it into a tool for our work, or a weapon for our warfare. What little we have* to propose for the accomplishment of this, we shall de- clare hereafter. For the present, since it is of the idea of philanthropy and not of its developments we treat, we shall conclude with a word or two relating to the essential con- nection of the philanthropy we prize with Christianity, and what it gains from this connection. We have hitherto spoken of love in its human aspect, and appealed merely to human reason and history. But it can in no quarter be deemed unimportant that an idea is approved by a religion, which, name it as you will, is the FIRST PRINCIPLES. 81 highest that ever appeared on earth, and has swayed more intellect than ever any other. Christianity sanctions and embodies philanthropy. The angel that led the choir over the fields of Bethlehem was named Love. Take away love from Christianity, and you have taken away its life: love, not alone to the just and the holy, but to the sinner; to the pale Magdalene, to whom no one but the King of men and of angels will deign to speak, to the poor publican, and the hated leper, and the raving maniac. It was at the voice of Christianity that modern philanthropy awoke, and it is in this alliance that we regard it with hope. Christianity gives us those funda- mental truths of philanthropy, that sin can be hated and the sinner loved, and that love will be the end of all. Say not that this first is a filmy distinction, or that it will blunt the weapons and unnerve the arms that must in time carry on truceless war with evil. If it is a cloud, it is as one of those interposed by kind supernal powers between the breast of Greek or Trojan hero and the mortal stab: it alone shuts our hearts against hatred of our brothers. And think not the second charge valid: all human his- tory is against you. Men have always fought and toiled best when moved by impulses holding of the infinite. It is the banner painted on the clouds under which men will conquer ; it was when, amid the battle-d ust around Antioch, or coming along the slopes of Olivet, the worn crusader caught the gleam of celestial helms advancing to his rescue, that he became irresistible. The ill done us by a poor brother is a paltry motive: who would not rather strain his sinews a little harder, have a few more hot drops on his own brow, than kill the poor creature whom we had got down! We must have a motive, in our war with evil, that will be beyond the sounding and measuring of our 82 FIRST PRINCIPLES. own faculties. This Mr Carlyle knows well; but he finds it in boundless wrath against the individual caitiff; we, by looking heyond time altogether, in a necessity of nature, and the command of God. Sin is an infinite evil ; against it we can strive with unbounded indignation. To put it away from us, we must slay him who is fatally infected, and whose infection will spread: but not towards him are we necessitated to entertain any feeling but love; the whole fervour of our hate is against that snake whose deadly venom has utterly tainted his blood. It is by some mighty distraction in the order of things, by some staining of the " white radiance of eternity," by some disturbance of the everlasting rest, that sin has extended its influence to reasoning human beings. One great effect of this is, that, in time, and by man, the distinction between the sin and the reasoning human being it affects cannot be perfectly preserved. But the infinitude of God's peace will one day envelope the little stream of time, and hush all its frettings and foamings in the calm of its perfect light; and the religion whose aim and end is the attainment of this higher rest by men, does most fitly and with a sublime prominence wear this distinction on its front. " Love thy neighbour as thyself," says Christianity: there is no excep- tion. But does Christianity not bid us war against sin? "We suppose it is unnecessary to quote the whole Bible. Retaining, with Sandy Mackay, the ancient belief in a positive living spirit of evil, we believe also in sinless intelli- gences, superior, for the present at least, to men, and em- ployed on bests of mercy by God. Wandering unseen among us in the performance of their ministries of love, they are untainted by the sin, and untouched by the sorrow of earth. Now, we can conceive no way in which they could have been secured from mere earthly sorrow, from the poignaucy of FIRST PRINCIPLES. 83 sheer ignoble grief that grief which is dependent for its origin on the state, and not the circumstances of the soul save by their distinguishing between the sin and the sinner, and being thus wrapped up in an impenetrable garment of celestial love. Safe in this, they can gaze upon the wan- dering mortal, however black his iniquity, with eyes wherein every gleam of indignation, every dark speck of hatred, every scowl of revenge, is drowned in the softest dew. God has sent them as messengers to a world of sin, but they bear with them the atmosphere of heaven, for within them is the glow, around them is the music, of love. And we affirm that man by Christianity is exalted to a privilege like theirs. Like them, he shares in the universal battle; like them, he wars to the death with sin: but, if he is a Christian, he is like them dowered with an exemption from every emotion that would taint the atmosphere of his own mind. We think we have shown that all we now say is consistent with human instinct; but if nature only points to the distinction, if, like a dumb animal, it merely by its pain indicates a want, Christianity brings out the truth in its clearness, and vindicates a superiority to nature. It is on the mount with Jesus, that we enter the company of heavenly creatures. And with full decision, while with earnest reverence, would we point to Christ Jesus himself as the perfect philanthropist. Let who will deny the compatibility of a Christian hatred of sin with a Christian love of the sinner; let it appear to philosophers and to natural religionists chimerical or weak as it may; the Christian can always respond by merely pointing to Him as He appeared on that day when He looked over Jerusalem. Was there infinite hatred for sin in those words of doom ? Was there infinite love in those tears ? And, to make one allusion to what 84 FIRST PRINCIPLES. we have not space to prove, let who will jeer at the man or the woman who goes into the penitentiary, the prison, the condemned cell, with the Bible, to try to rescue for heaven those whom society must banish from earth: if nature calls that a vain or absurd task, Christianity speaks differently. To every objection of hopelessness, of sen- timentalism, of enthusiasm the Christian can simply answer, There was once a thief to whom the gospel was preached in the mortal agony, and that night he walked with the Preacher in Paradise. We proceed to mark, in the method we have proposed to ourselves in these pages, the emergence of Christian Philanthropy in our era : our task takes the form of bio- graphy. CHAPTEE II. HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. We feel ourselves enabled, and, for that reason, bound, to express a conviction, that there is no fair and adequate, in one word, satisfactory, biography of Howard in the hands of his countrymen, no estimate of his character and work which can or ought to be final. Aiken's work is mainly a lengthened mental analysis, by no means void of value, and written with clearness and spirit ; but it admits of doubt whether Howard was of that order of men, in whose case such analysis can be considered useful or admissible. Brown's life contains a true image of Howard, but it rests there in rude outline, too much as the statue lies in the half-cut block ; the work wants unity, is fatally dull, and is not free from the generic taints of biography, exaggera- tion and daubing. Mr Dickson's book is, in some respects, the best ; and yet, in some others, the worst we have seen on Howard. The account it gives of his journeys is spirited and clear, and no charge of dulness can be brought against its general style. Yet it may be pro- nounced, as a whole, and in one word, wrong. It is set on a false key. It is brisk, sparkling, continually pointed ; if it does not directly share the characteristics of either, it seems to belong to a debatable region between flippancy and bombast; in fatal measure, it wants chasteness and 86 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. repose. Now, we know of no man in whose delineation these general characteristics are so totally out of place, and these wants so plainly irreparable, as in that of How- ard. The great attribute of his nature, the universal aspect of his life, was calmness : he ever reminds one of a solemn hymn, sung, with no instrumental accompaniment, with little musical power, but with the earnest melody of the heart, in an old Hebrew household. Mr Dickson gives his readers a wrong idea of the man : more profoundly wrong than could have arisen from any single mistake (and such, of a serious nature, there are), for it results from the whole tone and manner of the work. A Madonna, in the pure colour and somewhat rigid grace of Francia, stuck round with gumflowers by a Belgian populace ; a Greek statue described by a young American fine writer; such are the anomalies suggested by this life of Howard. There were one or two memoirs published in magazines at the time of his death, but these are now quite unknown. On the whole, we must declare, that the right estimate and proper representation of the founder of Modern Phi- lanthropy have still to be looked for. And at the present moment such are specially required. Since the publication of Mr Carlyle's pamphlets, opinion regarding him has been, we think, of one of two sorts: either it is thought that his true place has at length been fixed, that Mr Carlyle's sneers are reasonable ; or unmeasured and undistinguish- ing indignation has been felt against that writer, and the old rapturous applause of Howard has been prolonged. In neither view of the case can we rest. To submit that applause to a calm examination, and discover where- in, and how far, it is and has been just; to estimate the power of Mr Carlyle's attack, and determine in how far it settles the deserts of its object; and to offer HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 87 a brief, yet essentially adequate representation of the life of Howard in its wholeness, has been our attempt in the following paragraphs. We are perfectly sensible that our effort has but partially succeeded ; we know too well how near to each other are the indispensable requisite, true repose, and the total failure, dulness: our hope is, that we have spoken truth, and truth which requires to be spoken. John Howard was born in London, or its vicinity, about the year 1727; the precise locality and the precise date have been matter of dispute. His mother, of whom we have no information, died in his infancy. His father was a dealer in upholstery wares in London, and realised a considerable fortune. We are somewhat astonished to hear that he had a character for parsimony. We are not, in- deed, furnished with any instances of remarkable closeness or illiberality, and his conduct to his son affords no marks of such. That the allegation, however, had certain grounds in truth, we cannot doubt ; and the circumstance is not a little singular in the father of one, who must be allowed, whether with censure or applause, to have found, from the days of his boyhood, a keen delight in giving. But, what- ever the nature or force of this foible, the character of the elder Howard was, on the whole, worthy and substantial. He was a man of quiet, methodic habits, deeply imbued with religious sentiment ; his views were Calvinistic, and he was a member of a denomination unconnected with the English establishment probably the Independent. He was specially characterised by a rigid observance of the Sabbath. We find in him, indeed, unmistakeable traces of the devout earnestness of an earlier age ; we think it admits of little doubt that his religion was a lingering ray of the light which burned so conspicuously in England in 88 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. the preceding century. While the bacchanal rout of the Restoration made hideous the night of England's departed glory, there were a few, perhaps many, who retired un- noticed into hidden places, to nurse, on household altars, the flame which seemed erewhile about to illumine the world ; and in the next century such could not have alto- gether died away. That deep godliness whose sacred in- fluence, like a resting gleam of soft dewy light, was shed over the whole career of John Howard, accompanied him from his father's house. Were it not somewhat strange, if it proved to have been a dying ray of the old Puritanism which brightened into Modern Philanthropy! The boy Howard made no figure in his classes. He was, beyond question, what is generally known as a dull boy. He never acquired a perfect grammatical knowledge, or a ready command, even of his native language. Yet he does appear, in his early years, to have given indications of a character different from that of ordinary dull boys. His schoolfellows seem to have discerned him, despite his slowness, to possess qualities deserving honourable regard ; they saw that he was unobtrusive, self-respecting, unos- tentatiously but warmly generous. Price, doubtless one of the quickest of boys, and Howard, slow as he was, were drawn towards each other at school, and formed a friend- ship broken only by death. He succeeded, also, and with no conscious effort, in inspiring his older friends and rela- tives with a sense of the general worth, the substantial, reliable value, of his character. He was known to be se- date, serious, discreet ; his word could be depended upon, his sagacity was true ; above all, he was simple, quiet, modest. It being manifest that he had no vocation to letters, his father very sensibly removed him from school, and bound HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 89 him apprentice to Messrs Newnham & Shipley, grocers in the city of London. A premium of 700 was paid with him; he was furnished with separate apartments, and a couple of saddle-horses. We find no mark of parsimony here. In 1 742, his father died, leaving him heir to considerable property, and seven thousand pounds in money. By the provisions of the will, he was not to enter on his inheri- tance ere reaching his twenty- fourth year. But his guar- dians permitted him at once to undertake the principal management of his affairs. As he was still a mere boy, seventeen or eighteen at most, this must be regarded as a decisive proof of the high estimation in which he was held by those who had been in a position to form an opinion of his character. He speedily quitted the establishment in the city ; his apprenticeship was never completed. Not long after his father's death, he travelled for some time on the Continent, and, on his return, went into lodg- ings at Stoke Newington. Here he continued for several years. His existence was quiet, even, in no way remark- able, broken only by visits to the west of England on account of his health. This last was quite unsettled. It is indeed to be borne in mind, in the contemplation of his whole career, that he had to sustain a life- long struggle with ill health, that all the influences, to sour the temper, to close the heart, to dim the intellect, to enfeeble the will, which are included in that one word, bore perpetually upon Howard. His constitution was by no means sound, and had a strong determination towards consumption. In his unnoticed retirement at Stoke Newington, we can easily picture him; his pale, tranquil countenance, marked, per- haps, with somewhat of the weary and oppressed look that comes of constant acquaintance with weakness and pain, 90 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OP PHILANTHROPY. but unclouded by any repining, and mildly lighted by modest self-respect, by inborn kindness, by deep, habitual piety. He derived some pleasure from a slight intermed- dling with certain of the simplest parts of natural philo- sophy and medical science: of the latter he seems to have obtained a somewhat considerable knowledge. This quiet existence was, after a time, rather interest- ingly and unexpectedly enlivened. Howard, in one set of apartments which he occupied, met with less attention than he deemed his due ; probably it was thought his mild nature could be imposed upon with impunity: he quitted the place. Entering lodgings kept by a widow named Loidore, he found himself waited upon to his absolute satisfaction. In his new abode illness overtook him, or rather his perpetual ill health reached a crisis. Mrs Loidore tended him with all possible kindness, and the result on his part was not only gratitude, but, as we believe, sincere attachment. On his recovery, he offered her his hand. She was above fifty ; he was now about twenty-five. Her health, too, was delicate; but Howard was resolute, and, after of course objecting, she of course consented. The circumstance in- dicates Howard's extreme simplicity of nature, and power to do, in the face of talk and laughter, what he thought right and desirable: it may also be regarded as one proof among many of a naturally affectionate nature: it reveals nothing further. For two or three years, the married pair resided at Stoke Newington, much in the same manner, we presume, as for- merly. Howard had a real, though by no means ardent affection for his wife; it was a sincere and even keen affliction he experienced, when, after the above period, she died. We have glanced lightly over the youthful period of HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 91 Howard's life. We have deemed it right to do so, although there are a few incidents recorded of the period not alto- gether unimportant, their importance being derived solely from the light reflected on them by his subsequent history, and their own aspect being somewhat trivial. The extent of information they afford us regarding him may be summed up by saying, that they show him to have been methodic, gentle, and, above all, considerately kind. He seems certainly never to have allowed the pleasure of making a fellow- creature happier to have escaped him. He was now about twenty-eight years of age. Unbound by any tie to England, he determined again to travel. The excitement arising from the occurrence of the great earthquake at Lisbon was still fresh, and he was attracted to Portugal. He sailed for Lisbon, in a vessel called The Hanover. His voyage, however, was not destined to have a peaceable termination; and the circumstances into which he was about to be thrown, exercised a perceptible influ- ence on his future career. The ship was taken by a French privateer; Howard was made prisoner. The treatment he met with was inhuman. For forty hours he was kept with the other prisoners on board the French vessel, with- out water, and with ** hardly a morsel of food." They were then carried into Brest, and committed to the castle. They were flung into a dungeon; and, after a further period of starvation, "a joint of mutton was at length thrown into the midst of them, which, for want of the ac- commodation of so much as a solitary knife, they were obliged to tear to pieces, and gnaw like dogs." There was nothing in the dungeon to sleep on except some straw, and in such a place, and with such treatment, Howard and his fellow-prisoners remained for nearly a week. He was then removed to Carpaix, and afterwards to Morlaix, where ho 92 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. impressed his jailer with such a favourable opinion of his character, that he was permitted to enjoy an amount of liberty not usually accorded to prisoners in his situation. At Morlaix, Howard had inducement and apology enough for remaining idle, or, at least, for occupying him- self solely in negotiations for his own release, and in gathering up his strength after his hardships. But he did not remain idle, nor did he abandon himself to the above occupations. The sufferings he had witnessed while in- mate of a French prison would not let him rest. He had seen something amiss, something unjust, something which pained his heart as a feeling man ; his English instinct of order and of work was outraged ; there was something to be done; and he set himself to do it. He collected infor- mation respecting the state of English prisoners of war in France. He found that his own treatment was part, and nowise a remarkable part, of a system ; that many hundreds of these prisoners had perished through sheer ill usage, and that thirty-six had been buried in a hole at Dinan in one day. In fact, he discovered that he had come upon an abomination and iniquity on the face of the earth, which, strangely enough, had been permitted to go on unheeded until it had reached this frightful excess. He learned its extent, and departed with his information for England; he was permitted to cross the Channel, on pledging his word to return, if a French officer was not exchanged for him. He secured his own liberation, and at once set to work on behalf of his oppressed countrymen. His representations were effectual: those prisoners of war who were confined in the three prisons which had been the principal scene of the mischief, returned to England in the first cartel ships that arrived. Howard modestly remarks, that perhaps his sufferings on this occasion increased his sympathy with the HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 93 inhabitants of prisons. There is not much to be said of these simple and unimposing circumstances. They merely show that he, on coming into a position to do a piece of work, did it at once, and thoroughly; that his feelings were not of the sentimental sort, which issue in tears or words, but of the silent sort, which issue in deeds; that what had doubtless been seen by many a dapper officer, and perhaps by prisoners not military, in full health and with ample leisure, had not been righted until seen by Howard, sickly and slow of speech. It was nothing great or wonderful that he did: in the circumstances, nine out of ten would have done nothing at all. He was thanked by the commissioners for the relief of sick and wounded seamen; but his real reward was the intense pleasure with which he must have hailed the arrival of those cartel ships, and felt that at least so much of iniquity and cruelty was ended. For the first time in his life, dull Howard was at the top of his class. Abandoning, for the present, all thoughts of foreign travel, Howard now retired to Bedfordshire, where he pos- sessed an estate. This was situated at the village of Car- dington, and had been the scene of his childhood; it was his principal residence during life. We come to contem- plate him in what he himself declared to have been the only period of his life in which he enjoyed real pleasure. Though quiet and unobserved, that pleasure was indeed real, and deep. He had reached the prime of his manhood ; his years were about thirty. His character, in its main features, was matured. He was quiet, circumspect, considerate; he knew himself, and was guarded by a noble modesty from obtruding into any sphere for which he was not fitted by nature; the groundwork of his character was laid in 94 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. method, kindness, and deep, unquestioning godliness. The time had arrived when he was to experience a profound and well-placed affection, and to have it amply returned. Henrietta Leeds was the daughter of Edward Leeds of Croxton in Cambridgeshire; she was about the same age with Howard, and seemed formed by nature precisely for his wife. She resembled him in deep and simple piety; she had drawn up a covenant in which she consigned her- self, for time and eternity, to her Father in heaven, and signed it with her own hand. She resembled him in general simplicity of nature; she had no taste or liking for aught beyond what was plain and neat. Most of all, she resembled him in kindness of disposition; the bestowal of happiness was the source of her keenest joy. Her features were regular; their expression mild, somewhat pensive, and not lacking intelligence: a little gilding from love might make her face seem beautiful. Where she and Howard first met, we know not; but meet they did, and thought it might be advisable to make arrangements to obviate the necessity of future parting. His love was cer- tainly in no sense rapturous. It was sincere and deep, but characteristic ; it retained, at a period when such is usually dispensed with, the noble human faculty of looking before and after. Love has a thousand modes and forms, all of which may be consistent with reality and truth. It may come like the burst of morning light, kindling the whole soul into new life and radiance ; it may grow, inaudibly and unknown, until its roots are found to be through and through the heart, entwined with its every fibre; it is un- real and false only when it is a name for some fqrm of selfishness. Howard's was a quiet, earnest, undemonstra- tive love. He was drawn by a thousand sympathies to Harriet; never did nature say more clearly to man, that HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 95 here was the one who had been created to be his helpmeet ; he heard nature's voice, and loved. But he was quite calm. Pie even looked over the wall of the future into the paradise which he was to enter, and remarked the possibi- lity of difference arising between the happy pair whom he saw walking in the distance. Accordingly, he went to Harriet, and proposed a stipulation that, in case of diver- sity of opinion, his voice should be decisive. Harriet as- sented. They were married in 1758, and took up their residence at Cardington. Here, with the exception of a few years spent at a small property which Howard pur- chased in Hampshire, they continued until the death of Mrs Howard. We cannot but linger for a brief space on the one plea- sant spot in Howard's earthly journey. Ere he met Har- riet, he had turned to the right hand and to the left, scarce knowing or caring whither he went, and dogged always by pain. Not long after her death, he heard the call which made him a name for ever, and which bade him leave the wells and the palm-trees of rest, to take his road along the burning sand of duty. Not only may the spectacle of a truly happy English home be pleasing, but we may gather from the prospect certain hints touching the actual nature and precise value of Howard's character. The pleasures of the new pair were somewhat varied. The embellishment of the house and grounds went so far. This was a business of particular interest with Howard. He built additions to his house, and laid out three acres in pleasure-grounds, erecting an arbour, and cutting and planting according to his simple taste ; the approving smile of Harriet always sped the work. A visit to London, too, was proposed and effected; but the enjoyment obtained was nowise great, for neither was adapted for town life, 96 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. and Harriet in particular longed for the green fields. Natural philosophy, in a very small way, was put under contribution. Then, there was occasional visiting and entertaining of the country gentlemen of Bedfordshire. Howard always exercised a warm and dignified hospitality, and though remarkably abstemious himself, kept ever a good table and excellent wines for his guests. But of all the joys of this Bedfordshire home, by far the principal arose out of the fact that Howard and his wife were both " by nature admirers of happy human faces." Around Cardington, there was soon drawn a circle of such ; gra- dually widening, still brightening, and, by nature's happy law, ever shedding a stronger radiance of reflected joy on the centre whence their own gladness came. Shortly after the marriage, we find Harriet disposing of certain jewels, and putting the price into what they called the charity- purse; its contents went to procure this crowning luxury, happy human faces. Since this pleasure interests us more than any of the others, we must inquire how the money was disposed of. The village of Cardington had been the abode of poverty and wretchedness. Its situation was low and marshy; the inhabitants were unhealthy; ague, that haunts the fen and cowers under the mantle of the mist, especially abounded. Altogether, this little English village had the discontented, uneasy look of a sick child. And the intellectual state of its people corresponded to their physical ; no effort, so far as we learn, had been made to impart to them aught of in- struction. Part of this village was on the estate of John Howard. Unnoticed by any, and not deeming himself noteworthy, but having in his bosom a true, kind heart, and loyally anxious to approve himself to his God, he came to reside upon it with his wife. No bright talents were HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 97 his, and his partner was a simple creature, of mild womanly ways, made to love rather than to think. Yet the fact was, account for it as you will, that, year by year, the village ofCardington showed a brighter face to the morning sun; year by year, the number of damp, unwholesome cottages grew less; year by year, you might see new and different cottages spring up, little kitchen-gardens behind, little flower-gardens before, neat palings fronting the road, roses and creepers looking in at the windows, well-washed, strong-lunged, sunny-faced children frolicking round the doors. These cottages were so placed that they could see the sunlight; the mist and the ague were driven back. Their inhabitants paid an easy rent, sent their children to school, were a contented, orderly, sober people. Cardington be- came " one of the neatest villages in the kingdom." If you asked one of the villagers to what or whom it owed all this, the answer would have been John Howard. Kind-hearted, conscientious, shrewd, and accurate, he had lost no time in acquainting himself with the evils with which he had to contend, and addressing himself to the con- test. The damp, unhealthy cottages on his own estate were by degrees removed, and such as we have described built in their stead ; those not on his own estate, requiring a similar treatment, were purchased. He let the new cottages at an advantageous rate, annexing certain conditions to their occupancy. He became the centre of quite a Patriarchal system. His tenants were, to a certain extent, under his authority; they were removable at will, they were bound over to sobriety and industry, they were required to ab- stain from such amusements as he deemed of immoral tendency, and attendance at public worship was enjoined. Besides the customary ordinances, there was divine service in a cottage set apart for the purpose, the villagers, we 98 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. are told, gladly availing themselves of the additional op- portunity. Schools also were established, not in Car- dington alone, but in the neighbouring hamlets. He ruled a little realm of his own ; a realm which, in the eighteenth century, was very favourably distinguished from the sur- rounding regions; an unmarked patriarchal domain, whose government was, on the whole, beneficent. When we contemplate the phenomenon of Howard's in- fluence at Cardington, we cannot but experience a strong impulse to question the fact of his having been, even in- tellectually, the ordinary, unoriginal man he has been called. It is fair to recollect that he was of that class which, perhaps pre-eminently, does nothing; of that class whose epitaph Mr Carlyle has written in Sartor Re- sartus. His task was not, perhaps, very difficult; but just think of the effect, if every English landlord performed his duty so conscientiously and so well. A biographer of Howard, writing when the present century was well ad- vanced, has recorded that Cardington still retained, among English villages, a look of " order, neatness, and regu- larity." If mere common sense did this, it was common sense under some new motive and guidance; we can only regret that it so rarely follows the higher light of godli- ness. And if Howard's claim to positive applause is slight, what are we to say of his exculpation from the positive sin which, during that century, accumulated so fearfully on the head of certain classes and corporations in England? Different had been the prospect now, had England, in that century, been covered with such schools as Howard's. Surely one may ask, without arrogance, why did not the Church of England accomplish at least so much then? In his own household, there reigned calmness and cheer- ful content. The whole air and aspect of the place was HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 99 such as might have suggested that perfect little picture by Tennyson, " An English home grey twilight pour'd On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient Peace." He lived much in the consideration of Old Testament times and worthies, shaping his life after that of the Hebrew Pa- triarchs. His Bible was to him a treasury of truth, which he never even dreamed exhaustible. As he looked over the brightening scene of his humble endeavours, and the pleasant bowers around his own dwelling, and felt all his tranquil joy represented and consummated in his Harriet, we may imagine those words breathing through his heart " I will be as the dew unto Israel:" as the dew, stealing noiselessly down, in an evening stillness, unseen by any eye, yet refreshing the very heart of nature. Harriet, with all her simplicity, was a perfect wife; she could hear the beat- ing of her husband's heart. Once there was somewhat over from the yearly expenditure. Howard, thinking his wife might derive enjoyment from a trip, proposed that they should spend it in a visit to London. We think Harriet looked quietly into his eyes as she answered, " "What a pretty cottage it would build!" Conceive the smile of silent unspeakable satisfaction, of deep unbound- ed love, that would spread over the placid features of Howard as he heard these words. The part taken by the kind and gentle Harriet in the general dissemination of blessing over Howard's neigh- bourhood was nowise unimportant. In the hour of sick- ness and distress, she was to be seen by the bed or the fireside, supplying little wants, whispering words of con- solation. She also made it a peculiar part of her duty to 100 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. see that the female portion of the community was em- ployed, and supply them with work when threatened with destitution. Thus was Howard, cheered and assisted by his wife, an unassuming, godly English landlord, doing his work, and never imagining that h J was a profitable servant. His tenantry, and specially his domestics, loved him ; although, as we are happy to find, since it is an almost conclusive, and certainly indispensable proof of decision and discri- mination, there was not a perfect absence of murmuring and insinuation against him in the village. He engaged in constant and intimate converse with his dependants, in- teresting himself in their affairs, and giving little pieces of advice. He might be seen entering their cottages, and sitting down to chat and eat an apple. We can figure him, too, as he walked along the road, " With measured footfall, firm and mild," stopping the children he met, giving each of them a half- penny, and imparting the valuable and comprehensive ad- vice, to " be good children, and wash their hands and faces." We can discern, as lie utters the words, a still smile of peace and satisfaction on his really noble English countenance. We must pronounce it such. There was, it is true, no sign of creative power in the eye; there were no lines of deep thought on the brow. But decision, and shrewdness, and intense though governed kindness, were written there. Above all, it was cloudless in its clear- ness. It was the calm, open countenance of a man who could look the world in the face, which was darkened by no stain of guile, or guilt, or self-contempt, and on which, through habitual looking upwards, there was a glow of the mild light of heaven. Isor was it destitute of a cer- HOWARD; AND THE BISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 101 tain reposing strength, a look of complete self-knowledge and self-mastery, gently shaded, as it was, by a deep but manly humility, which told again of the bended knee and the secret walk with God. When we look at Howard's portrait, we cease to wonder that his face was always re- ceived as an unquestionable pledge of perfect honour and substantial character. There was one drop by which the cup of happiness in the home at Cardington might still have been augmented. Howard and his wife had no child. Harriet seems to have been peculiarly adapted to perform the duties of a mother; so gentle, so full of quiet sense, so well able to read a want ere it reached the tongue. At length, after seven years of married life, on Wednesday, the 27th of March, 1765, she had a son. On the ensuing Sabbath, Howard went to church as usual ; all seemed to be doing well. After his return she was suddenly taken ill, and died in his arms. She had just seen her boy, just felt the unuttered happi- ness of a new love, just discerned that a fresh brightness rested on the face of the world, and then she had to close her eyes, and lie down in the silent grave. Howard's feelings, it is scarce requisite for us now to say, were not of the sort which commonly reach the sur- face. There was nothing sudden or impulsive in his na- ture; his very kindness and affection were ever so tem- pered, ever rendered so equable, by consideration, that they might at times wear the mask of austerity. But we cannot doubt that the sorrow he felt for his Harriet reached the innermost deeps of his soul. A light had passed from the " revolving vear;" the flowers which Love may strew in the path of the " stern daughter of the voice of God" for Duty herself strews no flowers had withered away; until he again clasped the hand of Harriet, his enjoyment 102 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. had ceased. He laid her in her grave, and a simple tablet in Cardington Church told the simple truth, that she had " opened her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue was the law of kindness." A good many years afterwards, on the eve of adeparture for the Continent, from whichHoward might never return, he was walking with his son in his grounds, and mentioning some improvements which he had contemplated : " These, however, Jack," he said, " in case I should not come back, you will pursue or not, as you may think proper; but remember, this walk was planted by your mother; and if ever you touch a twig of it, may blessing never rest upon you!" His infant son was now all that was left on earth to Howard. He loved him with the whole force of his nature. Two strong feelings, having reference to this earth, and two alone, were, in the years of his long journeyings, to be found in his bosom: the one was the memory of Harriet, the other the love of his boy. But it is not unimportant to a perfect comprehension of the character of Howard, to know that there was, in his general deportment as husband and father, a gravity, deci- sion, and authority, which wore the aspect of austereness. The founder of philanthropy was as free as ever man from any form of sentimentalism; it was for real affliction, for substantial pain, he felt and acted; a tender, winning, soothing manner was never his. Whatever may be said of modern philanthropists, he certainly was not one whose feelings carried him away, who saw distress and injustice, and, bursting into tears, rushed, half-blinded with his sympathy, to make bad worse. He has been spoken of by some as if he resembled one who, perceiving a child drowning in a reservoir, and being moved to pity by its cries, casts down an embankment to save it, and floods HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 103 a whole country. He was no such man. Since the world began, until he appeared, no one had done so much for the relief of distress, simply as such ; and yet we feel convinced that very few men have lived who could look upon pain with calmer countenance than he. Nineteen men in twenty had been weeping, and either blundering, or leaving the distress alone; Howard remained quite cool, looked at it, measured it, mastered it. For about a year after the death of his wife, he continued to reside at Cardington. Towards the end of the year 1766, we find him visiting Bath; ill health had again, in new extremity, returned upon him. In the spring of the following year, he travelled to Holland, and quickly re- turning home, remained at Cardington until it was time to send his son to school. In the interval, nothing worthy of notice occurred; he pursued his old plans tor the im- provement of his neighbourhood, deriving his principal comfort from his boy. At length it became proper to send his son to school, and Howard prepared again to visit the Continent. Car- dington had now, indeed, become sad to him. He in great measure broke up his establishment there, providing, with his own considerate kindness, for his domestics; these, as we have hinted, and as has been elsewhere remarked, loved him with an affection worthy of the servants of an old patriarch. He departed in the autumn of 1769; his intention was to visit the south of Italy, and probably re- main there for the winter: he went by Calais, the south of France, and Geneva. We come now to what we consider a most important epoch in Howard's life. We have not failed to inform the reader of the pervasion, from a period too early to be pre- cisely fixed, of his whole character, by godliness; and we 104 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. saw how the fact influenced his benevolent exertions in Bedfordshire. We have not yet, however, looked, so to speak, into the heart of Howard's religion; we have only noted it incidentally, and from afar. We proceed to view it more closely; it will be of great importance to ascertain the weight and nature of its influence. We are assured that we have arrived at a period when his spiritual life reached a crisis, which determined, in certain important respects, his future character and career. Since it is ne- cessary to carry readers along with us in our impressions, we turn to our narrative. We have said that Howard had intentions of spending the winter either in the south of Italy or Geneva. On arriving at Turin, he abandoned the project. We learn from his own words that he had been pondering seriously the object and nature of his journey. He accused him- self of mis-spending the "talent" committed to him, of gratifying a mere curiosity with those pecuniary means which might be turned in some way to God's glory, and which were necessarily withdrawn from works of mercy; he thought of the loss of so many English Sabbaths; he thought of "a retrospective view on a death-bed;" he thought also of his " distance from his dear boy." He determined to return. He concludes the memorandum from which we gather these facts in the following words:* "Look forward, oh my soul! How low, how mean, how little, is everything but what has a view to that glorious world of light, life, and love. The preparation of the heart is of God. Prepare the heart, oh God! of thy un- worthy creature, and unto Thee be all the glory, through the boundless ages of eternity." * Howard did not write English grammatically; we alter the spelling and punctuation. HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 105 " This night my trembling soul almost longs to take its flight to see and know the wonders of redeeming love join the triumphant choir ; sin and sorrow fled away, God, my Redeemer, all in all. Oh! happy spirits that are safe in those mansions." He turned homewards, and in February we find him at the Hague. We have here a further record of his spiritual life. We extract it entire. "Hague, Sunday Evening, February 11. " I would record the goodness of God to the un worthiest of his creatures: for some days past, a habitual serious frame, relenting for my sin and folly, applying to the blood of Jesus Christ, solemnly surrendering myself and babe to Him, begging the conduct of His Holy Spirit; I hope, a more tender conscience," evinced " by a greater fear of offending God, a temper more abstracted from this world, more resigned to death or life, thirsting for union and communion with God, as my Lord and my God. Oh! the wonders of redeeming love! Some faint hope," that "even I! through redeeming mercy in the perfect righteous- ness, the full atoning sacrifice, shall ere long be made the monument of the rich, free grace and mercy of God, through the divine Redeemer. Oh, shout my soul! Grace, grace, free, sovereign, rich and unbounded grace! Isot I, not I, an ill-deserving, hell-deserving creature! But, where sin has abounded, I trust grace superabounds. Some hope! what joy in that hope! that nothing shall separate my soul from the love of God in Christ Jesus; and, my soul, as such a frame is thy delight, pray fre- quently and fervently to the Father of spirits, to bless His word, and your retired moments to your serious conduct in life. " Let not, my soul, the interests of a moment engross 106 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. thy thoughts, or be preferred to my eternal interests. Look forward to that glory which will be revealed to those who are faithful to death. My soul, walk thou with God; be faithful; hold on, hold out; and then what words can utter! J. H." "We anxiously desire to avoid presumption here, and would leave every reader to his own judgment and con- clusion in the matter ; but we think we are not altogether unable to trace the workings of Howard's mind through this portion of his history. It seems to us that, on leaving Cardington, his mind had engaged in deep reflection. His boy had gone away from him; his Harriet was sleeping silently, her tender ways to cheer him no more; he looked over his past life, from which the last rays of joy's sunlight were departing; he looked forward to an old age, embittered by perpetual ill health. His mind awoke, in the discipline of sorrow, to a deeper earnestness. He felt, with sterner realisation than heretofore, that the world was a desert, and time a dream ; with a new and tremendous energy his soul rose towards the eternal kingdoms. He looked with earnest scrutiny within, he closed his eye more to all around, and gazed upwards from his knees for the smiling of one countenance upon him. The intensity of his feelings would not comport with the prosecution of his journey to Italy. He mused upon it in the strain we have indicated. He concluded that it was his duty to return home; and, in a state of mind not a little agitated, proceeded in the direction of England. We cannot certainly say whether it had been his immediate intention to return to Carding- ton; he was very fond of Holland, and would, perhaps, at the Hague, be able to enjoy Sabbaths like those of his home. Be this as it may, he did not proceed further than HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 107 the place last named. His mind appears here to have become calmer; we might say, indeed, that the second extract we have made reveals an almost rapturous frame of spirit. It is a detail of God's goodness towards him ; and let it be remarked, that this goodness consists in work wrought in him, in his closer approximation to the require- ments of God's law. The man who can feel ecstatic joy for that, and give God all the glory, has nothing higher to attain to in this world; and on him no essential change will be wrought by passing through the gates of heaven. He again turned southwards. At Lyons we find him writing thus: " Lyons, April 4, 1770. " Repeated instances of the unwearied mercy and good- ness of God: preserved hitherto in health and safety! Blessed be the name of the Lord ! Endeavour, oh my soul ! to cultivate and maintain a thankful, serious, humble and resigned frame and temper of mind. May it be thy chief desire that the honour of God, the spread of the Re- deemer's name and gospel, may be promoted. Oh, consider the everlasting worth of spiritual and divine enjoyments, then thou wilt see the vanity and nothingness of worldly pleasures. Remember, oh my soul ! St Paul, who was de- termined to know nothing in comparison of Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. A tenderness of conscience I would ever cultivate; no step would I take without acknowledg- ing God. I hope my present journey, though again into Italy, is no way wrong, rejoicing if in any respect I could bring the least improvement that might be of use to my own country. But, oh my soul, stand in awe, and sin not; daily, fervently pray for restraining grace; remember, if thou desirest the death of the righteous, and thy latter end like his, thy life must be so also. In a little while thy 108 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. course will be run, thy sands finished: a parting farewell * ith my ever dear boy, and then, oh my soul, be weighed in the balance wanting, wanting! but oh, the glorious hope of an interest in the blood and righteousness of my Redeemer and my God ! In the most solemn manner I commit my spirit into thy hand, oh Lord God of my sal- vation ! " My hope in time ! my trust through the boundless ages of eternity! John Howard." The last quotation we deem it necessary to make, is one of very great importance. It commences with a slight re- trospect and self-examination ; it passes into a deliberate dedication of himself and his all to God: Naples, May 27, 1770. " When I left Italy last year, it then appeared most prudent and proper; my return, I hope, is under the best direction, not presumptuous, being left to the folly of a foolish heart. Not having the strongest spirits or consti- tution, my continuing long in Holland or any place lowers my spirits; so I thought returning would be no uneasiness on the review, as sinful and vain diversions are not my ob- ject, but the honour and glory of God my highest ambi- tion. Did I now see it wrong by being the cause of pride, I would go back ; but being deeply sensible it is the pre- sence of God that makes the happiness of every place, so, oh my soul ! keep close to Him in the amiable light of re- deeming love; and amidst the snares thou art particularly exposed to in a country of such wickedness and folly, stand thou in awe, and sin not. Commune with thine own heart ; see what progress thou makest in thy religious journey ! Art thou nearer the heavenly Canaan, the vital flame burning clearer and clearer ? or are the concerns of a mo- HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 109 ment engrossing thy foolish heart ? Stop ; remember thou art a candidate for eternity: daily, fervently pray for wis- dom ; lift up your eyes to the Rock of Ages, and then look down on the glory of this world. A little while, and thy journey will be ended ; be thou faithful unto death. Duty is thine, though the power is God's; pray to Him to give thee a heart to hate sin more, uniting thy heart in his fear. Oh, magnify the Lord, my soul, and, my spirit, rejoice in God my Saviour ! His free grace, unbounded mercy, love unparalleled, goodness unlimited. And oh, this mercy, this love, this goodness exerted for me ! Lord God, why me ? When I consider, and look into my heart, I doubt, I tremble. Such a vile creature; sin, folly, and imperfec- tion in every action ! Oh, dreadful thought ! a body of sin and death I carry about me, ever ready to depart from God ; and with all the dreadful catalogue of sins committed, my heart faints within me, and almost despairs. But yet, oh my soul, why art thou cast down ? why art thou dis- quieted ? Hope in God ! His free grace in Jesus Christ ! Lord, I believe; help my unbelief. Shall I limit the grace of God ? Can I fathom His goodness ? Here, on His sacred day, I, once more in the dust before the Eternal God, acknowledge my sins heinous and aggravated in His sight. I would have the deepest sorrow and contrition of heart, and cast my guilty and polluted soul on thy sove- reign mercy in the Redeemer. Oh, compassionate and divine Redeemer, save me from the dreadful guilt and power of sin, and accept of my solemn, free, and, I trust, unreserved full surrender of my soul, my spirit, my dear child, all I am and have, into thy hands ! Unworthy of thy acceptance! Yet, oh Lord God of mercy, spurn me not from thy presence ; accept of me, vile as I am I hope a repenting, returning prodigal. I glory in my choice, 110 howakd; and the rise of philanthropy. acknowledge my obligations as a servant of the Most High God ; and now may the Eternal God be my refuge, and thou, my soul, faithful to that God that will never leave nor forsake thee ! " Thus, oh my Lord and my God, is humbly bold even a worm to covenant with Thee ! Do Thou ratify and con- firm it, and make me the everlasting monument of Thy unbounded mercy. Amen, amen, amen. Glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever, amen ! " Hoping my heart deceives me not, and trusting in His mercy for restraining and preventing grace, though rejoic- ing in returning what I have received of Him into His hands, yet with fear and trembling I sign my unworthy name. John Howard." Howard was not a man who found any special delight in using his pen; the deep modesty of his nature, the de- ficiency of his education, his consequent want of affluence in expression, and the whole structure of his character as universally recognised, put this beyond dispute. It was only when his heart was very full, and the emotions with which it burned were as mounting lava, that they over- flowed through that channel. We regard the expressions we have found him using simply as pulses of his spiritual life, proceeding as truly from the centre of his spiritual nature as the blood which at fever heat might gush from his heart, from the centre of his physical frame. And consider the earnestness, the stammering, gasping inten- sity, with which they start ruggedly forth ; mark the awe- struck humility with which he bows down before the Infinite God, and, as it were, the mute amazement of gra- titude, which, when the smile of God falls out of heaven HOWARD; AND THE KISE OF PHILANTHROPY. Ill upon his head, forces him to exclaim, " Lord God, why me?" Surely this last is a remarkable passage of feeling. Will it not be with such an emotion that the redeemed of God, when the eternal inheritance, so far surpassing ex- pectation and desert, at last and suddenly bursts upon their sight, shall shrink from asserting their right, and exclaim, "Lord, when did we merit this?" Observe, finally, here, respecting Howard, the completeness of the result, the un- wavering, unexcepting abdication of the throne of the soul to God. We think this was the consummation of the epoch in his spiritual history of which we have spoken. One other remark we must make respecting these docu- ments. In those awful moments, when Howard was alone with God, and his eyes, looking to the Rock of Ages, were so solemnly raised above every concern of time, there was yet one earthly visitant that entered the secret places of his heart: that visitant was his boy. We add no comment. The time was now near when Howard was to find his peculiar work. We think, though with reverence and hesitation, it may be said that he was specially fitted for it by God. Implanted by nature in his bosom, he exhibited from his earliest years a deep and a notably cosmopolitan compassion for the afflicted as such. In early years his nature was stilled, hallowed, and strengthened by religious principle. As he advanced in years, the great truths of Calvinism, or rather that one great truth of Calvinism, The Lord reigneth the Lord, just, sovereign, incompre- hensible, in whose presence no finite being can speak formed a basis, as it were of adamant, for his whole cha- racter. He was sorely tried by physical ailments, and, at the risk of his life, was compelled to pursue rigidly abste- mious habits, being thus also debarred from all the plea- sures of the great world. He was brought soon into actual 112 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. experience of the distresses suffered by the inhabitants of prisons, and his first piece of positive work in the world was the relief of such. His character was next matured, confirmed, and mellowed, in the soft summer light of a quiet English home, where he loved and was loved by a true wife, and where, in such tasks as we have seen, a mild apprenticeship was served to thoroughness and accuracy. He was then suddenly and awfully struck with affliction ; she who was so very beautiful in his eyes, " Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky," was taken away from him. And then, after a little time, came that crisis in his spiritual history which we have en- deavoured to delineate. Whatever were his natural abi- lities, he awoke from that crisis with a moral strength which no force of temptation could overcome, and a calm daunt- lessness which nothing earthly could turn aside. Then he found his work. Howard's history thus seems to suggest the idea that God intended by him to bring prominently before the world some truth not hitherto duly regarded, to accomplish some work not hitherto adequately done: that the time had arrived when some gospel shall we call it the gospel of love? was to be more specially and explicitly unfolded than it had been heretofore. With deliberate and immov- able faith, he himself entertained this belief, and we know not how more fitly or fully to embody our opinion of Howard's part in this work, and our view of the invisible power which guided him therein, than in his own humble, yet, we think, even sublime words, written when it was well-nigh finished: "I am not at all angry with the re- flections that some persons make, as they think to my dis- paragement, because all they say of this kind gives God HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 113 the greater honour; in whose Almighty hand no instru- ment is weak, in whose presence no flesh must glory : hut the whole conduct of this matter must he ascribed to Pro- vidence alone, and God by me intimates to the world, how- ever weak and unworthy I am, that He espouses the cause* and to Him, to Him alone, be all the praise." Returning from the Continent, Howard remained for a certain period at Cardington ; we hear of nothing re- markable in his life for some time. The state of his health in 1772 rendered it advisable to make a tour in the Chan- nel Islands, but he speedily returned to Bedfordshire. Here, in 1773, he was called to the office of sheriff of the county. He considered it his duty to comply with the invitation, and became such. Prudence might have whispered an- other decision. He was a Dissenter, and by becoming sheriff incurred the liability of very severe penalties. We do not suppose that his danger was very great; but it was real. He was not without enemies; and his act put it in the power of any one of them, with profit to himself, to inflict very serious injury on him. It is, besides, the part of pru- dence to guard against possibilities: there was, at least, the possibility that he might suffer. Howard, however, with all his calmness, was too brave to be distinctively prudent. It might astonish some to find this among his adopted maxims " A fearless temper and an open heart are seldom strictly allied to prudence." It is the maxim of a truly brave man. In this affair of the sheriffdom he just kept prudence in its proper place ; when the voice of duty was clear, its mouth was shut. The office of sheriff had been hitherto but a dignifying appendage, its duties mainly those of show. Howard could not regard or treat it thus. He went to his work as usual, * The italics are Howard's. 114 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OP PHILANTHROPY. quietly, accurately, thoroughly. From time immemorial, abuses had prevailed; safely wrapped in the mantle of custom, they had lived, and moved, and done their mea- sure of evil, unregarded as smoke. The cool, clear eye of Howard, looking straight to the heart of everything, could not but regard them. He had not acted long in the capa- city of sheriff, when his attention was arrested by some- thingwhich struckhim asstrange andanomalous: something which had its existence amid the light of a brilliant and boasted civilisation, but which was fitted rather to cower, snakelike and slimy, in the jungles of darkest barbarism. He fixed his attention upon certain persons who were de- clared not guilty by the voice of their countrymen, who were acquitted of everything laid to their charge, and thus proved to have endured the hard affliction of confinement and temporary disgrace, when their country had nothing whatever to say against them. He saw that these, on their acquittal, did not at once return to their welcoming and con- soling friends; that their chains were not at once struck off, with urgent haste and self-accusing regret: they were positively conveyed back to prison, until they should pay certain fees to functionaries connected with the jail and court. Others, who also might have suffered months of confinement, and against whom, from the non-appearance of their prosecutors, not even a charge was preferred, were similarly treated. Others still, regarding whom the grand jury could not find such evidence of guilt as rendered it reasonable to try them, went the same way: all, without semblance of accusation, were hailed back to prison. This cruel and glaring outrage on justice and feeling was quietly taking its course, and was likely for some time to do so in the County of Bedford, when it fixed the gaze of John Howard. Its days were then numbered. His proceed- HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 115 ings were quick : observation, decision, and action, seem almost to have been united. The abuse was undeniable and indefensible; its mode of cure was by paying, in some other manner, the functionaries interested. The justices of the county were the men to be applied to ; the application was made. A new thing this in the experience of these sedate functionaries ; it was proper to proceed with cau- tion, deliberation, and prudence. The good, formal, drowsy justices looked up through their spectacles, and found it necessary to satisfy their minds by seeing a precedent. Here then, perhaps, the matter would stop, and the jus- tices be troubled in their dozing no further. Howard did not stop. A precedent must be found : he takes horse at once, and proceeds to seek it in the neighbouring counties. In those counties, Howard met on all hands with in- justice and disorder, but found no precedent for his pro- posed remedy. He saw more than he expected, and more than he came to seek. In his own simple words, he " be- held scenes of calamity." Such he could not see without a desire to alleviate ; and a desire with Howard, of neces- sity, became action. Gradually it became plain to him that he had discovered a great work to be done, and that he was the man intended by God to do it. In the perform- ance of this work it was that the rest of his life was spent, and that his name became known and reverenced in every land under heaven. We have three questions to put and to answer respecting it : What was it? By what motives was Howard impelled to undertake it? How did he per- form it? It will be important, also, to consider, as we proceed, whether it had become necessary. What, then, first of all, was this work of Howard's? Having already spoken at large of philanthropy, we shall 116 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. not enter here upon the general subject; to define How- ard's particular part in calling it into existence is easy. Correspondent to, and resulting from, the sad discord- ance and rent in the individual human soul, there has been, in all ages, a great severance in the human family. A part of that family has always been put aside by the rest, and subjected to penal inflictions. Sorrowful, truly, is the aspect thus opened up to us. In the many-cham- bered dwelling framed for them by their Father, men could not live together and at peace. The roof and spires of that dwelling seem to rest in sunshine ; in the higher apartments is the voice of mirth and gladness; lower down the darkness of sorrow begins to thicken; and, beneath all, there have ever been lightless dungeons, from which, through the whole course of human history, have arisen the broken groans of agony, or the lone wailings of despair. By a stern and awful necessity, these dungeons were never empty; men were compelled to chain down their brothers in the darkness, lest, like maniacs, they should plunge their knives in the hearts that pitied them, or, like fiends, bring on all the destruction of Sodom ; never out of the ears of humanity could pass that doleful voice of lamen- tation, crying, like the conscience of the race, "Fallen, fallen, fallen." Respecting these dungeons, and their inhabitants, three methods lay open to those who had been bold to take their fellow-men and fling them in fetters out of their sight. They might look down upon them with the fierce glare of indignation, hate, and "revenge;" they might say, " Caitiffs, we hate you," ye have passed beyond the range of law and of pity, our duty towards you now is to load the whip, and to whet the axe. Or they might adopt a milder, but perhaps still more cruel mode of procedure. HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 117 They might turn them, in sickened horror, from the sight of the anguish whose existence they would forget; they might carefully deafen the walls, and stop up every avenue through which the sounds of wo might ascend ; they might then urge the dance, and laugh, and sing, they might sweep on in the glad pageantry of coronation and victory, they might listen to the chantings of solemn organs, or the light tremblings of bridal music, unsad- dened by any cloud that floated up from below. Mean- while, calamity might be waxing greater and greater there, writing its pale emblems on too many faces ; famine, pes- tilence, torture, and all injustice, might enter unseen; a groan of agony might go up to heaven, yet pass unheard by men on earth. Or, lastly, they might say, Be these tenants of the dungeon what they may, they are the chil- dren of our Father, the creatures of our God; we dare do towards them precisely what He commands, and has rendered necessary. We shall then avoid the fury of the first method, and the cruel cowardice of the second. We shall not, in weak and inhuman indolence, shut our ears to the sounds of human wo; we shall know what the case is, that we may meet its requirements: neither shall we, as avenging demons, pour the lava of wrath and revenge on the heads of our fellow-men: we shall do what law or- dains, and that alone: we shall light the lamp of Justice, and commit it to the hand of Love. Of the first and last of these methods we have already spoken. At the time when floward appeared, the second was widely and sadly prevalent; and the work he did may be briefly but compendiously indicated in these words : He penetrated into the dungeons of the world, and compelled men to hear the voice of the agony beneath their feet. The result of this work was, that a voice of 118 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OP PHILANTHROPY. pity was heard over the world, saying that cruelty had gone too far, and that the third method must now be attempted. We inquire next, In what light did he regard his work, and what motives impelled him to undertake it ? Touch- ing the first of these points there can be no doubt. Igno- rant as a child of all metaphysical speculation, his simple theory of the world was, that all men were equally devoid of merit before God, and that there is no reason by possi- bility to be alleged why we should not love every member of the human family. This is fully contained in the answer which he gave, after having been long engaged in his work, to one expressing his surprise at his deep love and pity for the depraved: " I consider that, if it had not been for divine grace, I might have been as abandoned as they are." In this sentence is contained, not only an ample exposition and defence of Howard's views as a phi- lanthropist, but also the whole philosophy of Christian Phi- lanthropy. The subordinate motives which urged Howard on his enterprise, and supported him in its achievement, are easily discoverable. It is certain that the precise posi- tion into which he was brought by the death of his wife rendered his home a place of small comfort; his own words expressly testify the fact. It is true, also, that he had travelled much during his life, and that travelling was by no means disagreeable to him, but rather the reverse. But the one grand motive which beyond all others im- pelled him to his work, was a conviction that the voice of God bade him go forth. No man in this world acts on a single or simple motive, and persistent, courageous work extorts the admiration and honour of men, though its motive is not of the noblest. That no lower motive than the simple approbation of God influenced Howard, we HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 119 cannot assert; but we do deliberately think, that, of the sons of men, few, or perhaps none, have acted more purely on the highest motive. " Howard is a beautiful philanthro- pist, eulogised by Burke, and, in most men's minds, a sort of beatified individual. How glorious, having finished off one's affairs in Bedfordshire, or, in fact, finding them very dull, inane, and worthy of being quitted and got away from, to set out on a cruise over the jails, first of Britain, then, finding that answer, over the jails of the habitable globe! 'A voyage of discovery, a circumnavigation of charity ; to collate distresses, to gauge wretchedness, to take the di- mensions of human misery:' really, it is very fine." In what precise manner these words are intended to define or sarcastically point at Howard's impulses in undertaking his work, we care not positively to determine. But it is surely fair to consider them as calculated to convey an impression, that in choosing his work he had at least some thought of the " glorious" aspect it would bear in the eyes of men, how grand it would look, and how much men would talk about it. Now we venture to assert, ap- pealing to bare and unassailable facts, that in few instances recorded in human history, perhaps hardly in any, could such an impression be more profoundly incorrect; that Howard's eye was closed, as scarce ever human eye was closed, to every influence within the atmosphere of earth ; that he looked, with a silent earnestness whose intensity was sublime, for his approbation and reward, into the eye of God. In this highest of all regards we scruple not to name him with the holiest of men, with Moses, Daniel, and John. In answering our third question, How did he perform his work, which must be done at somewhat greater length, light is cast on the former two. We come to look at How- ard in his actual operations. To detail his several journeys 120 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. in Great Britain and on the Continent, is indeed impos- sible here ; nor is the attempt in any respect called for; the main outlines of his work can be sketched, and its general spirit displayed, in a few comprehensive glances. About the close of the year 1773, there might have been seen, on the high-roads of the counties adjoining to Bed- ford, a gentleman on horseback, followed by his servant, travelling at the rate of forty miles a-day. At every town where he rested, he visited the jail. There was no fuss or hurry in his motions, he never lost a moment, he never gave a moment too little to the business in hand, nothing escaped his eye, and there was no spot into which he did not penetrate. He went into places where the noisome and pestilential air compelled him to draw his breath short, where deadly contagion lurked, where phy- sicians refused to follow him; unagitated yet earnest, he measured every dungeon, explored every particular re- specting fare, accommodation, and fees, inquired after the prevalence of disease, with the means adopted for its pre- vention, and learned in every instance the relation which the criminals held to those who superintended and kept the jail. He rested not until he had gone east and west, until he had carried his researches over the jails of Britain and of Europe, until he could credibly declare what was the state of the prisons of the world. That gentleman was John Howard. "Was the scene which discovered it- self to his eye such as confirms the idea that the time had arrived when an offence against God and man was no longer to be endured, and rays of light, as just as benefi- cent, to be cast into dungeons that had long been seen only by Heaven ? A few simple facts, illustrative likewise of Howard's mode of working, shall be our reply. HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 121 He saw prevailing far and wide in England, that pal- pable and cruel injustice which first set him on his jour- neying; men declared guiltless were still laid in the dun- geon. He found that in the same land it was possible for one whose neighbour owed him a paltry sum, to deprive that neighbour of his liberty, and subject himself and his family to everything short of absolute starvation ; nay, to starvation itself, if it wasspread over months instead of days. He found, still under the kindly skies of that free, enlight- ened, and religious country, that it was possible for men to be farmed by a fellow-man, and fed from such a miserable pittance of money, that they must have suffered the per- petual gnawings of hunger. He found dens or holes under ground, of dimensions such as might have held one wild animal, where several human beings were flung, to gasp and groan the night long. In some, the heat and closeness must have been stifling, in some, the floors were wet and the walls dripping, in some, open and reeking sewers poisoned the air; all that is noisome and revolting in gross uncleanness lay bare to his sickened but unflinch- ing gaze. Death, he discovered, had here a realm of his own, where he escaped the eye of justice and humanity. From time immemorial, uncured and uncared for, a viru- lent fever dwelt in those dreary abodes ; it had a character of its own; it was the progeny and it seemed the genius of the place; it was called the jail-fever. There, in dark- ness, famine, and loathsome horrors, it preyed on those victims who were handed over to it, and whose life- strength was broken by shame, sorrow, and despair; like a foul, and cruel, and insatiable vulture, which men per- mitted to tear out the hearts of their brethren, chained in the depths of dungeons. Year by year, its victims were counted by the score and the hundred; many of thei . 122 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. mere debtors, and few of them proved guilty ; a grave and notable fact, slight it who will, if nations are answerable to God for the blood they shed ! Nor was the jail-fever alone ; the small-pox raged fiercely, and the malignity of every other form of disease was heightened; the want of air, the damp vapours, the insufficient food, and other causes, too many to recount, exaggerated every tendency to consumption, rheumatism, palsy, and other nameless ailments. He found that not only the body was delivered over, bound hand and foot, to pestilence and famine, but that every soul which entered those dens seemed actually handed over to the evil power. All the maladies which can infect the mind still partially pure, when villany recounts and gloats over its crimes, finding its only recreation in the exercise, spread their contagion there; while drinking, swearing, gambling, and indecency, were the appropriate accompaniments and aids in the work. The jail-fever was not the worst enemy men en- countered in a prison ! The cases of individual wo which Howard saw, may be imagined, but cannot be detailed; they were such as might have wrung forth tears of blood: pale and haggard faces on which the light had not looked until its glare pained the glazed and hollow eye, spirits broken, hearts hopeless, ghast- ly beings who had, long years ago, left all the paths where comfort encourages, and better prospects smile, however faintly, in the distance, and who now stood fronting mankind with demoniac scowl, in the gaunt defiance of despair; men who, for small debts, after long years died in prison, fathers sustained in their dreary confinement by the families whose main support they had hitherto been, and several of whose younger members dropped at the time significantly into the grave, women lyingdesolate, far from every friendly eye, from HOWARD; AND THE RISE OP PHILANTHROPY. 123 every cheering word, and dying of incurable disease; brother mortals driven mad by anguish, whose cries at- tracted the passer by. Such were the sights which, in the course of his various journeys over England and the world, John Howard saw. Had the time come for philan- thropy ? Howard had not been long engaged in his work, ere the report of it reached the Bouse of Commons. The House had been lately concerning itself with such things, and Howard was called to give evidence regarding what he had seen. His answers were deemed clear and satisfac- tory, and he formally received the thanks of the House. One honourable member, however, hearing of his long and expensive circuits, and finding the idea new to him that such things should be done without cash payment, begged to be informed whether he had travelled at his own expense. The man to whom he put the question was no sentimentalist, but that question touched him in his very heart ; indignation, and contempt, and the tears of outraged modesty, seem to have blended with scorn, as he spurned the unconscious compliment of Mammon. In the course of the year 1774, two bills were passed: one abolished the injustice relating to the fees, the other had reference to the health of prisoners. Howard said nothing, but, in his own way, had them both printed at his expense, and sent one to every jailer in the kingdom. About the close of the same year, he was requested to stand candidate for the Borough of Bedford. He acceded to the request, and very narrowly missed his seat. He imputed his failure to government influence; and, however this may have been, we learn from his words on the occa- sion, that he was by no means a man who concerned him- self alone with village politics, or slavishly pursued one 124 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. idea. He had cast his eyes on the awakening motions of the great western giant, and boldly avowed his opposition to part of the policy adopted towards America. He also openly and emphatically declared that, if elected, he would never accept of five shillings of emolument. He felt the loss of his seat somewhat deeply, but, as usual, resigned himself with perfect calmness to the disposal of Providence. Meanwhile, his peculiar work had not been abandoned. In no degree agitated by the result of the election, he set out for Scotland and Ireland, and prosecuted still farther his researches in England. He was just a month at home about the election business ; in noting his method of going about his work here, one hardly sees wherein his " energy" was specially " slow." Having looked with his own eyes into the prisons of England, Scotland, and Ireland, he sat down, in the be- ginning of 1775, in his house at Cardington, to arrange his materials for the press, and offer to the world such sugges- tions as he now felt himself in a position to give. But a thought struck him. There were other prisons in the world besides those of Britain ; on the Continent of Europe might not new miseries be seen, and might not valuable hints be obtained ? The fact was palpable ; but then it delayed the work, and was so tedious. Howard calmly laid aside his papers, got ready his travelling gear, and set out for the Continent. There was " slow " energy here; and of a particularly valuable sort. Howard's first journey in the inspection of Continental prisons lay through France, Holland, part of Flanders, Germany, and Switzerland. His researches were con- ducted in his usual way quietly, quickly, thoroughly; his sense of justice marking every abuse, his sagacity not- ing every excellence. He did not travel so far without HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 125 seeing misery, and here again comfort and hope went along with him into many a dreary dungeon ; but the general glance at Continental prisons afforded revelations which redounded to the unquestionable honour of the Continent, and the shame of Britain. It is true that he did not gain access to the severest form of confinement in France ; his daring attempt to enter the Bastile was foiled ; it is true, likewise, that he did discover traces of torture such as was not known in England. But, in cleanliness, order, and the general characteristic of being cared for, the Continen- tal jails had the clear superiority. In Holland, at that time, to all appearance, the most orderly and internally pros- perous kingdom of Europe, he saw in operation a system of management of criminals, in its main outlines, wise and humane. And the jail-fever existed only in Britain ! On returning from the Continent, he applied himself to the publication of his work on Prisons. His friends Aiken and Price assisted him in arranging his matter and secur- ing literary correctness. The book was printed at War- rington. It was severe winter weather, yet Howard was always up by two in the morning, revising proof-sheets ; at eight, he was at the printing-office, having just dressed for the day and breakfasted ; here he remained till one, when the men went to dinner ; he then retired to his ad- joining lodgings, and taking in his hand some bread and raisins or other dried fruit generally walked for a little in the outskirts of the town, calling probably on a friend. The printers by this time had returned, and proceeding to the printing-office, he continued there until work was over. Still untired, he went then to look over with Aiken the sheets put together by the latter during the day. His supper consisted of a cup of tea or coffee, and he retired to rest at ten or half-past ten. 126 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. The book published by Howard requires no comment. It is a type of his work ; accurate, substantial, valuable, but devoid of everything allied, even most distantly, to adornment. It is rather a book of statistics than anything else, and as such there can be no doubt it was mainly re- garded by himself; the facts of the case were wanted, and these he gave. It was published in 1 777, and additions were made at several subsequent periods. In the course of the same year, by the death of his sister, he inherited 15,000. This addition to the means at his command he resolved to devote entirely to the prosecu- tion of that task which he believed to have been ap- pointed him by God. He knew his son to be amply pro- vided for, even though his patrimonial estate was encroached upon; but this enabled him to leave that estate untouched. Howard did his work not merely without cash payment ; he devoted to it every farthing he could conscientiously expend. For several years now his course does not demand a detailed account. He went on calmly and indefatigably, ever widening the range of his excursions, and ever render- ing more perfect what he had already done. Again and again, he visited the prisons of England, Scotland, and Ireland ; again and again, he swept over the Continent, the speed of his journeys equalled only by the thorough- ness of his work. He had in every respect attained per- fect adaptation to this last. By long and vigorous tem- perance, entire abstinence from animal food and intoxicat- ing liquors, and a constant use of the bath, his early weak- ness of frame seems to have been exchanged for a consider- able hardiness; he inured himself to do without sleep to such an extent, that, on his journeys, one night in three, and that taken sometimes in his carriage, sufficed; so perfectly HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 127 simple was his fare, that lie could, without boasting, pro- fess himself able to subsist wherever men were to be found, wherever the earth yielded bread and water. The tourist in the Highlands of Scotland might have seen him stopping at the cabin by the wayside to obtain a little milk ; among the mountains of Sweden he pushed on, undaunted and tireless, living on sour bread and sour milk; on the bleak plains of Russia, his lean and somewhat sallow face, and small spare figure, might have been marked as he dashed past in his light carriage ; he was on the high-roads of France, in the mountain-gorges of Switzerland, tossing on the Mediterranean or the Adriatic. Never did he tarry, never did he haste, never was he moved from his deliberate and wakeful calmness. No personal duty was neglected. His son he always carefully remembered, having him near him at all needful and proper seasons, and diligently in- quiring after the best instructors and guardians, to whose care to commit him. The little cottages of Cardington were not forgotten. These grew ever more numerous, and their inmates were well remembered ; the work of alleviat- ing the sorrow of the world did not prevent the little drops of comfort, which had gladdened them while their kind landlord dwelt beside, from falling within them still. And wherever Howard was, it was impossible for men not to discern wherein lay the secret of his indefatigable per- severance, his unwavering valour, his perpetual calm. In whatever land he was, and amid what observers soever, he never forgot or hesitated to join in evening prayer with his attendant ; the door was shut, and the master and servant knelt down together as if at home in quiet Cardington. For his own exertions, his one reason was, that he beliived himself doing the will of God ; for the disposal of all events he trusted, with the simplicity of a little child, and the 128 HOWARD: AND THE RISE OP PHILANTHROPY. faith of a Hebrew patriarch, to the immediate power of Jehovah. He passes by contending armies ; we mark a shudder going over his frame, but we see him also lift his eye upwards, and comfort himself with the knowledge that God is sitting King over the floods: he enters dungeons where others shrink back from the tainted air ; duty, he says, has sent him there, and Providence can preserve him: he is cast on a bed of pain and languor ; he bows submis- sive to the chastening hand of his Father, or bends his head, and asks wherefore He contendeth with him. Men look upon him with various feelings. The cold, the hard, the cruel, scorn the whole enterprise ; the worshippers of Mammon look on amazed, scarce finding heart to sneer; gradually, from all lands, there begins to rise a sound of approbation and acclaim. Howard hears neither sneers nor acclamations: he listens for the voice which seems to the world to be altogether silent. As our eye follows him during these years, it is im- possible not to discern a remarkable dexterity and adroit- ness in carrying through whatever business presents itself a quick perception of what the case demands a sure sagacity in providing against it a certain ready adapta- tion to circumstances, and swift assumption of the cha- racter necessary for the occasion ; all which it really seems difficult to reconcile with dulness. Let us briefly make good our words. Look at liim, for instance, in that visit to Russia, in which he excited the interest, and was invited to the court of Catharine. Unbroken by the toils and hardships undergone in Sweden, where not even tolerable milk could be ob- tained to put into his unfailing tea, he arrives in the neighbourhood of St Petersburg. Forgetful of nothing, HOWARD; AND THE RISE OP PHILANTHROPY. 129 and conscious that his fame now goes before him, and is apt to interfere with his work, he leaves his car- riage in the neighbourhood, and enters the town pri- vately. The empress, however, has marked him, and sends a messenger to invite him to the palace. Here is clearly a call to the highest distinction and applause, to become the observed of all observers, in the smile of one whose smile secures that of all others: if there is observable weakness, even pardonable weakness, in his nature, if the appearance of his work, in the eyes of men, does sensibly affect him, here is a case for the quiet gratification of the hidden feeling, without the likelihood, nay, the possibility, of its ever being called in question. There are positive arguments, too, which seem plausible enough. The em- press may be won to a special interest in prisons, philan- thropy may kindle itself in the court, what unconceived good may shape itself out therefrom is not to be mea- sured. Howard looks at the invitation with his cool, piercing English eye, flashing at once through all plausi- bilities into the heart of the matter ; he feels instinctively that his work is in the dungeon, and not the palace, and that to encircle it with a blaze of publicity will probably interfere with the positive rugged task he has appointed himself: he refuses the invitation. Once in St Petersburg, he is soon at his work. He has heard very much of the humanity of the Russian criminal arrangements, and for one thing, it has been boasted to him that capital punishment is here abolished. His strong instinctive sagacity doubts the fact. But how attain a knowledge of the truth ? All authorities simply give the bland assurance that it is so; the published codes bear witness to the same; how can one get past what is said and seen, to be assured there is no discordance between K 130 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. that and the actual inner fact ? Howard hires a hackney coach, and drives to the house of the man who inflicts the knout. This first precaution is necessary to remove all appearance of heing a stranger. He enters quickly, wear- ing a purpose-like, business-like look, as of one who is in the simple discharge of his duty. The man eyes him with astonishment, and somewhat of fear. Howard ad- dresses him, soothingly but firmly; no evil is intended towards him, he has but to answer, clearly and at once, the questions about to be put. Howard's look is cool and adroit; the Russian is all submission and complaisance: the colloquy commences: "Can you inflict the knout in such a manner as to occasion death in a short time?" "Yes, I can." "In how short a time?" "In a day or two." "Have you ever so inflicted it?" "I have." "Have you lately?" "Yes; the last man who was punished with my hands by the knout died of the punish- ment." " In what manner do you thus render it mortal ?" " By one or more strokes on the sides, which carry off large pieces of flesh." " Do you receive orders thus to inflict the punishment?" " I do." The brief, soldier- like inquiry is completed; not a point has been omitted; Howard is satisfied, and departs. The elaborate cloaking of Russian policy, the infernal cruelty masked under the rliabolic smile, has been penetrated by the simple, plain- looking Englishman, now approaching his sixtieth year. While prosecuting his researches in St Petersburg, overcome by his exertions in Sweden, and affected pro- bably by the climate, Howard is seized with the ague. He has no time to spare; his work waits at Moscow; he procures a light carriage, and sets out. The ague is still on him, but his 6trong spirit shakes it away; he travels it off. The journey to Moscow is five hundred miles; in HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 131 less than five days he is there, his clothes having never been off since starting. He enters Moscow as calmly as if returning from a drive in the suburbs, and is instantly at his work. Such is the old man's way " the dull, solid Howard." Consider, again, that tour in France, when he was for- bidden to pass the frontiers. The interdict is strict. He has seriously offended the French Court by plain truths, and researches not to be baulked. He ponders the cir- cumstances with his usual calmness; duty seems to speak clearly; he resolves to enter France. He assumes the disguise of a physician having formerly acquired some knowledge of medicine adroitly escapes arrest in Paris, and on the streets of Toulon foots it trippingly as a French exquisite. He attains his object, and leaves France by sea. In the face of the French Government he has crossed the country, and made what observations seemed to him good. Whatever may be said of the achievement, it surely does not look like that of the mere shiftless mecha- nical workman. In more private instances, the case was similar. He visits the Justitia hulk. The captain brings him a biscuit as sample of the provisions ; it is as wholesome as could be wished. Howard puts it in his pocket. All ne- cessary information seems to have been obtained, yet he lingers; there is one on board who wishes he would take himself off. He has, in fact, been making observations in his own way ; his eyes are open as well as his ears. He remarks that things have a tawdry, disordered look, that the prisoners are sickly and tattered, that there are several things here which the captain's relation, so frankly given, by no means embraces. Accordingly he waits. At length the messes are weighed out, Howard looking on quite 132 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. calm, but with something of expectation in his face. Here come the biscuits; they are in broken bits, green and mouldy; there is no longer any mystery in the pallid looks of the crew. It is now Howard's turn to speak. Out comes the wholesome satisfactory biscuit, it is held up, be- fore captain and crew, beside the green loathsome frag- ments, and Howard indignantly rebukes the former for his cruelty and falsehood. We can conceive the brightening of the eyes of the crew as they stand by in amazement. If you say Howard was slow and heavy, it might be well to mention how he could have done his work better: if it appeals that he was a quick, indefatigable, effective worker, it might be well, we say once more, to consider to what extent biographic veils of dust and cobwebs may hide the clear strong lines in the face of a man. We do not assert that Howard was a man of very re- markable intellectual power. That in every mental ex- ertion connected with words, that in everything relating to expression of thought or narration of action, he was na- turally devoid of uncommon, perhaps even of ordinary, fa- culty, we at once concede: the only question which ad- mits of discussion is, whether, in that power of action, that faculty of perceiving and doing the thing needful, with closed or stuttering lips, which has been recognised as cha- racteristically English, he was not so far superior to the common run of men, that his title can be vindicated to a really remarkable endowment; whether, with what differ- ence soever, he was not cut from that same hard stratum of the Erzgebirge rock, from which have come the silent Saxon Clives and Wellingtons. He himself estimated his powers very low. " I am the plodder," he said, " who goes about to collect material for men of genius to make use of." And certainly the special honour we claim for Howard HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 133 is not intellectual. " How often," to use again his own humble words, " have we seen that important events have arisen from weak instruments;" perhaps, for once, it was right in the human race to set among its honoured and immortal heroes one whose highest glory was his humility, whose greatest strength was his weakness. Yet we must think it were a difficult thing to prove that he did not possess a high talent of the working order. Thurlow was very much struck with the sagacity he displayed in an interview he had with him ; when clearly set before the eye as they were done, and not as they have been narrated, his actions do not wear any aspect of slowness, dulness, or mere mechanical gyration ; the work he had to do required not high intellectual power, but what it did require he fully displayed. Once only does he seem to have failed, or at least to have abandoned an attempt ere effecting the work proposed: he was appointed supervisor of certain penitentiary establishments which were to be erected, and after a time resigned the post. But here he was at once hampered by interference, and restrained from the work which he deemed specially his own ; perhaps resignation was the most decided, manly, and appropriate course open in the circumstances. What Howard might have been in action, had he, in early life, been placed in a situation to exercise an important influence on his fellow-men, we need not inquire; yet we must urge the question, whether, considering the long-sustained activity, the inevitable observation, the iron decision, the quick adroitness, which a survey of his career displays, it is really a safe assertion that he possessed by nature no power of work, define it as you will, which made him remarkable among men, and would have secured him credit, if not fame, in whatever situation he had been placed. 134 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. Howard's two last journeys to the Continent claim a more particular notice than the others. We must, how- ever, still be brief. When he had been long engaged in the work of in- vestigating the state of prisons, and that task had been approximately accomplished all over Europe, it became apparent to him that yet another service was appointed him. He had looked upon one great portion of the human race, which most men forget and despise as having no claim upon them ; he now turned to look upon another, whose claim upon their brethren is also negative rather than positive, who are held to their hearts solely by the chains of pity ; the sick and diseased of the human family. This other great dumb class was to find an advocate in Howard ; he aspired to perform the twofold angelic office of bringing hope to the prisoner, and healing to the sick. About this time, menacing Europe from the East, lying along its borders like the purple cloud which wraps the Samiel, the destroying pestilence, named by distinction the Plague, seems to have attracted special attention. That slight and sallow man, who had struggled, his life long, with sickness, whose face was as that of a hermit in a wilderness, who was slow of speech, and upon whose head had now fallen the snows of nearly threescore winters, marked that Samiel-cloud from afar. He saw it coming slowly, resistlessly on, strewing its way with pallid corpses, taking the smile from off the faces of the nations. He thought it possible that, by entering its shade, he might learn the secret of its baneful energy, and save some of his fellow-creatures from its power. He thought he heard the voice of his God bidding him go; he looked calmly from his quiet island home towards Asia and the JEge&n, and went. Other diseases were to meet him on the way, HOWARDj AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 135 the lazar-houses of Europe were embraced in his enter- prise, but the great Plague, like the monarch of the bale- ful ho3t, was the ultimate, and gradually the principal foe with which the weak John Howard was to contend. Passing over the previous stages of his journey, we find him, in the summer of 1786, in Constantinople. Here he visited the hospitals and lazarettos, every den and strong- hold of the plague; as he entered, a pain smote him across the forehead, continuing for an hour after he left; his con- ductors drew back in fear, he saw what was oppressing to soul and sense; yet he never flinched, never abandoned that calm, heaven-lit look, which nought on earth could darken or abash, never stopped till his task was done. This once accomplished, he prepared to return to Vienna. But he paused; a thought had struck him he could not proceed. The prison-world he had entered solely as a visiter; in no other capacity was there a possi- bility of his doing so. But was not the case altered here ? Was there not a way of learning the secrets of lazarettos more thorough than that of mere inspection and hearsay ? There was, and Howard saw it. Yet the condition was stern. It was, that he should enter a lazaretto, and, con- fined himself, learn, beyond possibility of deception, the state and feelings of its inmates. The old man delibe- rately accepted the condition, and proceeded to enter a lazaretto. From Constantinople he sailed for Smyrna, chose there a vessel with a foul bill of health, and departed for Venice. On leaving the Morea, where the vessel took in water, they were borne down upon by a Tunisian pirate, and a fight ensued. To the astonishment of the crew, Howard stood by perfectly calm. At length the pirate seemed about to prevail. As a last resort, the Turks loaded their largest cannon to the muzzle with 136 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OP PHILANTHROPY. nails, spikes, and what destructive missiles could be found. Howard stepped forward, seeing, probably, that the men mismanaged the matter, and coolly pointed the gun on the enemy's deck; the volley burst out, carrying death among their crew, and, as the smoke rolled along the sea, the pirate was seen hoisting sail, and bearing away. The voyage proved long and stormy. For two months Howard was tossed about, alone in wild, dangerous weather ; yet he bore a brave heart through it all: "I well remember," he says, "I had a good night, when, one evening, my cabin-biscuits, &c, were floated with water ; and thinking I should be some hours in drying it up, I went to bed to forget it." Arriving at Venice, he found he had to spend two months in the lazaretto. He was first put into a loath- some room, " without table, chair, or bed," and swarming with vermin. He hired a person to cleanse it, and the operation occupied two days, yet it remained offensive; headache, caused by the tainted air and infected walls, perpetually tormented him. From his first apartment he was, after some time, removed to another as bad as the former. Here, in the division of the apartment where he was to sleep, he was " almost surrounded with water," and found a dry spot on which to fix his bed only by kindling a large fire on the flags. Six days he remained in the new quarter. Once more he was removed, and this time there appeared at least a possibility of improve- ment. His new apartment was indeed unfurnished, filthy, and " as offensive as the sick wards of the worst hospitals." But the water and the vermin seem to have disappeared. The rooms, however, were full of contagion, for they had not been cleaned from time immemorial, and though Howard had them washed again and again with warm HOWAEDj AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 137 water, he found his appetite failing, and that a slow fever was beginning to fasten upon him. But he was on no theatrical mission, and would die at his post only when all remedy absolutely failed him; his stout English heart had never yet fainted; and here, again, we meet the diffi- culties of the theory touching his slow and shiftless dul- ness. With the aid of the English consul, he obtained brushes and lime; his attendant for a consideration assisted him in manufacturing whitewash; despite the prejudices of the observers, he rose up three hours before his guard, and commenced, along with his former assist- ant, to whitewash his apartment. He resolved to lock up his guard if he interfered ; we are almost sorry the man did not, for most certainly Howard would have kept to his determination. He did not, however, and the only result was, that all who passed by looked with astonishment at the whitened and wholesome walls, where so many had been contented to pine and repine, with no attempt at cure. The days in the Venice lazaretto rolled slowly on, wearisome, dismal, unvarying; Howard watched every- thing, knew everything, and felt the weariness he longed to relieve. His faith failed not ; with calm and easy feel- ings, he looked forward to the term of his confinement. But suddenly there came a change: darker clouds than had ever yet cast their shadow over him took their course towards that dreary lazaretto. On the 11th of October, 1786, he received letters from England, with two pieces of information. The one was, that his son was following evil courses, and dashing wildly on in a path, whose end, dimly indicated to the father, must be one of the deepest darkness : the other, that a movement was proceeding in England, under high and promising auspices, for the 138 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. erection of a monument to himself. Not hearing, at first, the worst concerning his son, he wrote home with deep sorrow, yet in hope. The proposal for a monument next required his attention. An English gentleman had for- merly had an interview with Howard at Rome of an hour's length, and the result was an admiration on the part of the former which knew no bounds. On his return to England he had proposed, through the columns of the " Gentleman's Magazine," that a public monument should be erected to one whom he styled, " the most truly glorious of human beings." The widespread and profound ad- miration for Howard which, ere this time, had sunk into the British mind, had thus found vent ; at once the proposal had taken effect, and the movement was headed by certain noblemen. With astonishment it was heard that Howard wrote, absolutely refusing the honour, and alleging that its idea gave him exquisite pain. At first this was thought a graceful mode of acceptance, or at least a struggle of exces- sive modesty, easily to be overborne ; but the fact was soon put beyond dispute. Even after long arguing and urging by intimate and honoured friends, he decidedly and unal- terably refused his consent. From the lazaretto of Venice, he wrote to his friend Mr Smith of Bedford, rehearsing the directions he had given ere quitting Cardington respecting his obsequies ; his words were as follows, we copy them with no alteration, and with no comment : " (a) As to my burial, not to exceed ten pounds. "(b) My tomb to be a plain slip of marble, placed under that of my dear Henrietta's in Cardington Church, with this inscription: " ' John Howard, died , aged . My hope is in Christ.' " Some time after, in grateful and courteous terms, he sig- nified to his well-wishers in England, that his resolution HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 139 was fixed, and that he would accept no public mark of ap- probation whatever. Let this fact be fully and calmly considered ; and let it then be said whether what we have alleged regarding Howard's grand motive in his work, is other than the bare and faintly-expressed truth. For himself he would have no glory. He accept honour from men, who was the weak- est of instruments, and whose highest honour it was that he was worthy to be made an instrument at all in the hand of God ! He stop to be crowned by men, whom the Almighty had honoured with His high command, and permitted to give strength and comfort for Him ! He listen to the applause of the nations, whom his inmost heart knew to be weak and unworthy, and whose most inspiring yet indestructible hope it was, that he might be numbered even among the least in the kingdom of heaven ! The people seemed in loud acclaim to say, Thou hast brought us water out of the rock: Howard, with eager face, and out- stretched hand, and heart pained to the quick, cried out, I have done nothing, I deserve nothing ; God has done all. Released from the lazaretto, and after spending a week in Venice, Howard proceeded by sea to Trieste, and thence to Vienna. During this time, the fever he had averted for a time continued to creep over him, the whole air of the lazaretto having been infected ; it greatly impaired his strength, and the accounts, deepening in sadness, which reached him respecting his son, made his affliction almost too heavy to be borne : " I am reduced by fatigue of body and mind, I have great reason to bless God my resolution does not forsake me in so many solitary hours." It did not forsake him, it remained firm as a rock in vexed surge, it could ever raise its head into the pure light of God's smile ; but human faith has not often been so sorely tried. 140 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. In the letter written from Vienna, from which the above words are taken, he referred in approving terms to the conduct towards his son of several domestics whom he had left at Cardington, expressed his persuasion that it arose out of regard to his mother, and concluded the paragraph in these words : " Who I rejoice is dead." He often thought of Harriet, and we may conceive that now, in his extreme sorrow, the old days would flit past him robed in the still and melancholy light of memory ; that tender and to him beautiful wife seemed to return, to lean over him in his loneliness and sickness of heart ; but he thought of his son, and the tear which started to his own eye was transferred by imagination to that of his Harriet, where perchance he had never seen one before ; then love arose and triumphed over anguish, and he blessed God that his best beloved was lying still. Has art ever surpassed the pathos of these words ? Early in l787,,Howard was again in England, proceeding to make arrangements respecting his son. The latter was a hopeless maniac. He appears to have been of that com- mon class of young men, whom strong passions, weak judgments, and good-natured, silly facility, render a prey to those who combine artfulness with vice. A ser- vant in whom Howard placed absolute confidence be- trayed his trust infamously, allured his charge into evil, and excited in his breast contempt for his father. That father, ever most anxious to provide him the best and safest superintendence and tuition, had sent him to prosecute his education at Edinburgh, where he resided with Dr Black. There it was that prolonged habits of vice fatally impaired his constitution, and after a period he became deranged. In this condition, watched over with all the care and kind- ness which his father's efforts could secure, he lingered for HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 141 a considerable number of years, and died. It was a most touching case; for he seems not to have been without that gleam of nobleness which so often accompanies and adorns a character intellectually by no means strong. In Edin- burgh once, when some one spoke disrespectfully of his father, and basely hinted that his philanthropic expenses might impair the fortunes of his son, young Howard in- dignantly resented the insinuation, and asked how he could ever do so much good with the money as his father. Howard now remained in England for about two years, seeing his son provided for as well as was possible, and preparing the result of his late travels for the press. His religion still continued to deepen and to grow more fer- vent, the feeling of the littleness of his efforts and powers to increase. The few private memoranda that remain of the period breathe an earnest and habitual devotion; there is an occasional flash of clear intellectual insight and moral ardour; but, most of all, they are characterised by humility. " Examples of tremendous wrath will be held up, and what if I should be among these examples." " Be- hold, I am vile, what shall I answer Thee, oh my God; I have no claim on Thy bounty but what springs from the benignity of Thy nature. God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of Jesus Christ." " A few of God's people that met in an upper room appear, in my eye, greater than all the Roman empire. God kept them." " Where there is most holiness, there is most humility. Never does our understanding shine more than when it is employed in religion. In certain circumstances retire- ment is criminal; with a holy fire I would proceed." " Ease, affluence, and honours, are temptations, which the tcorld holds out but remember, ' the fashion of this world passeth away' on the other hand, fatigue, poverty, suf- 142 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. ferings, and dangers, with an approving conscience. Oh God! my heart is fixed, trusting in Thee! My God! Oh glorious words ! there is a treasure ! in comparison of which all things in this world are dross." England was now for Howard all hung as it were in weeds of mourning. The hope to which he had clung that his son might cheer him in his old age had vanished utterly, or at least the terra when such might be possible could not be fixed. There were probably in this world few sadder hearts at that time than John Howard's. But he had not yet discovered the secret of the plague ; there was still work for mercy to do: it was now perhaps the greatest happiness of which he was capable to go upon that work. And he went; the weary heart to soothe and heal the weary-hearted; one of the saddest men in Eng- land, to meet the plague. On the 27th of September, 1789, he was at Moscow. He seemed now to feel that his end was not far, and we find him engaged in solemn transactions with his God. He brought out that old dedication of himself to his Maker, which we saw him subscribe in the days when his life had first been darkened, and when the terrors of the Almighty, which had rolled like low cloudy masses over his soul, were just being suffused with celestial radiance in the full beaming out of the Sun of Righteousness. Again he owned his entire unworthiness and his entire weakness, again he looked up to the Rock of Ages, again he gave up his soul, spirit, and body, for ever and ever, to God. As we gather, too, from the pages of Brown, he looked again on that covenant which his beloved had made with her Father in heaven: we think we can see the old and weary man gazing over its lines, while a tear steals from his eye, a tear of lonely sadness, yet touched HOWARD; AND THE RISE OP PHILANTHROPY. 143 with one gleam of light, from the thought that it will not now be long ere he again meet his Harriet. This was in the September of 1789: it was his last pause on his hard life-journey, his last draught ol living waters from those fountains which divine Love never permits to dry up in the desert of the world: again he arose and went on his way, but now the pearly gates and the golden walls stood before the eye of faith, calm, beautiful, eternal, on the near horizon. In the beginning of January, 1790, he was residing at Kherson, a village on the Dnieper, near the Crimea, still as of old with indefatigable resolution and kindness pur- suing his work. In visiting a young lady dying of a fever the infection seized him, and he soon felt that death was upon him. On his death-bed he was just what we have always known him. We hear the voice of prayer for his son, of inextinguishable pity for the afflicted, and, concern- ing himself, these words, addressed to his friend Admiral Priestman, " Let me beg of you, as you value your old friend, not to suffer any pomp to be used at my funeral, nor any monument, nor monumental inscription whatso- ever, to mark where I am laid : but lay me quietly in the earth, place a sun-dial over my grave, and let me be for- gotten." Thus, with the same calm, saintly smile, so still but so immoveable, which he had worn during life, he passed away. All nations had now heard of Howard, and all nations honoured him: England, in silent pride, placed his statue in St Paul's Cathedral. There he remained unmoved, and his name more and more became a word of love and of admiration in the households of the world. Burke spoke of him in his own burning and majestic terms; 144 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. Foster pointed to him as one cased in an iron mail of resolution such as made him a wonder among the sons of men; Chalmers responded to his nobleness with all the tameless enthusiasm of his royal heart. But in our day a mighty hand has been stretched forth to drag him from his seat among the immortal ones of time: one, of perhaps more wondrous genius, and in some sense of more pene- trating intellectual glance, than either Chalmers, Burke, or Foster, has flung quiet but remorseless scorn on Howard. We mean, of course, Mr Carlyle. We deem it unnecessary to quote his words: those which appear to us to approach nearest to positive misconception and injus- tice we have already set before the reader. They are well known, occurring in his celebrated pamphlet on Model Prisons. We think it can be stated in a word or two what Mr Carlyle has seen, and what, making our ap- peal to readers, we must say he has not seen, in Howard. He has seen regarding him that of which he appears, in all cases, to possess a more vivid perception than any writer of past or present times the intellectual type and calibre. We have had, and still have, our doubts whether a strong case might not be made out in defence even here, if the difference between working and talking talent were accurately defined, and the dulness of biographers taken fully into account. But we care not to urge this con- sideration on behalf of Howard. We claim for him no in- tellectual glory. We concede that, if Mr Carlyle does not impute to him any vulgar motive, of desire to make an appearance, or the like, and we leave readers to judge whether such an impression is, or is not, conveyed by the words we have cited there is nothing which he says con- cerning him demonstrably false: say that his highest talents were "English veracity, solidity, simplicity," be- HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 145 lieve him even to have been (if you can, for we positively cannot) " dull, and even dreary," still, we ask, is his highest praise the words, so severely qualified by the spirit of the context, "the modest noble Howard?" Let any one look along that life, calmly figuring it to himself, pondering it till he knows its real meaning and vital principle, and say, whether there burns not through it, however veiled from the general eye, a sublime, an immortal radiance. Let him say, whether we cannot utter, with peculiar emphasis and veneration, these words, " The holy Howard." It is on this we found his claim to be honoured by men; that he was honoured by God to live nearer to Himself than any but a chosen few of the human race. And is this not a reasonable and equitable claim? Is it for ever to be impossible for a man to be honoured of men unless his intellectual power is great ? Ah! that were surely hard; surely essential equality were thus denied me as a man ; surely I could not so be calmly content under this sun. If our relation to the Infinite is of that nature which Christ has unfolded, it cannot be so. If, from the seraphim who receive the light of the throne on their white robes, to the poor widow who kneels by her hus- band's corpse, and bows her head to the God who has given and taken away, we are but servants of one Master, soldiers of one host, members of one family, it cannot be so. For then the highest honour of the archangel and of the child is, that he does, well and gladly, and giving God the glory, what God bids him do. And methinks it is best even so. We will honour the old soldier, whose name we have never heard, but who at eventide content- edly wound the colours round his heart, and died for the good cause, as much as we honour the Cromwell who led that cause to the pinnacles of the world: ay, and without 146 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. refusing to obey Cromwell either, without losing one atom of the real worth and value of so called " hero-worship." The angel who ministers to a dying beggar may hold himself as highly honoured as he who keeps the gate of heaven. Hence the honour we claim for Howard. Weak he may have been, slightly gifted, if you will: he knew the sound of his Father's voice; he could give his poor life for His sake. He showed to all men how the weakest do their work in God's army; really he did exhibit, with a strange revealing power, how, were men unfallen, every order of intellectual faculty might be employed to its full extent, but with equal merit, that is with none, and with equal reward, that is, the free smiling of God's counte- nance. Despise him who will on earth, in heaven Isaac Newton does not look with scorn on John Howard! Is not the special honouring of intellectual greatness, nay, the special honouring of any human being, an effect of the fall ? Is it not the true attitude of all the finite to look around with love on their brethren, but with un- divided gaze to look upwards to God? It would seem assuredly to be so, and that we now honour our great ones merely because we must fix our poor eyes so steadfastly on them, while, commissioned by God, they lead us onwards towards the eternal light. Howard is almost alone among those whom men have agreed to honour. It is the intellectually mighty, who, by that necessity of our position just glanced at, become best known. Thousands there may be, and there always are, whose whole lives are " faithful prayers," who would, with grateful joy, suffer anything for the sake of Christ. But Howard was separated by God for a work which could not but attract attention ; an arduous and a heroic work, for which the time had fully come in the history of the world. HOWARD ; AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROPY. 147 For that work he was qualified., and it, with absolute thoroughness, he did. Money was as nothing in his esti- mation in comparison of it ; but he was as far above fame as money, and no danger or toil could daunt him: "cholera doctors," Mr Carlyle compares to him, but he went where hired doctors would not go, and what cholera doctor, what man among men, ever went for two months into solitary confinement, amid infection and all discomfort, if per- chance he might bring thence one drop of balm for the sorrowful? Then consider his humility: ah! surely Howard was one of the men who might have been left on his pedestal. Think how he himself would have met Mr Carlyle's scorn. " It is true," he would have said ; " such I was, if so good ; I was nothing. Go into your great cathedral, and from the midst of your venerated dead cast forth the statue of John Howard ; let a white tablet alone recall my memory, and place it beside that of my Henrietta." Howard never asked his fame ; in his life he would accept no votive wreath : whatever had been said of his followers, regarding him one might have expected silence. In a very extended sense, his fame was unsoli- cited. Not only was himself of slow speech, but his bio- graphers were such as we have said. Yet the inarticulate human instinct discerned that there was around him that beauty of holiness, which, in the eyes of God and of angels, is alone honourable, and which it is well for men to honour, and placed him in the pantheon of the world: that human instinct, we think, was right ; there surely he will remain. Look not for him among the high intellectual thrones, among earth's sages or poets, among earth's kings or con- querors. But yonder, among the few lowly yet im- mortal ones, whose fame has been endorsed in heaven, see John Howard. His image is formed of marble, pure as 148 HOWARD; AND THE RISE OP PHILANTHROPY. the everlasting snow ; away from it, as if desecrating its whiteness, fall all the robes of false adornment in which men have sought to envelope it, away also fall all dimming, defacing, distorting veils of stupid misconception ; and there beams out clearly the face of a simple, humble man, earnest of purpose, celestially calm, and with one tear of inexpressible love on the cheek ; from the heavens comes a viewless hand, encircling the head with a serene and saintly halo, its mild radiance falling over the face, and blending with its speechless human pity; the eye is fixed on the eternal mansions, and the lips seem ever, in humble and tremulous gratitude, to say, "Lord God, why me!" The outline and features of that face Mr Carlyle saw, but that halo, and the fixedness of that heavenward gaze, he seems to us not to have seen. CHAPTEE III. WILBERFORCE; AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. William Wilberforce was born in Hull, in August, 1759. The auspices of his birth were in important re- spects favourable : a first glance reveals no exception or abatement to their happiness. Of a wealthy and ancient family, he opened his eyes on a life-path paved by afflu- ence, and thick-strewn with the flowers of indulgence. Every influence around him was of comfort and kindness; wherever his young eye fell, it met a smile. And his own nature was such as to make him peculiarly susceptive of the delights around. He was, it is true, a tender and deli- cate child, small for his age, and in no respect of promising appearance ; but there was in his heart an irrepressible fountain of kind and guileless vivacity, his voice was of sweet silvery tone, he was gentle and considerate in his ways ; altogether, he was a brisk, mildly-spirited, fascinating little thing, who could centre in himself every ray of kind- ness and comfort, and enhance their personal enjoyment by radiating them out on all around him. All this was well ; perhaps a happier sphere could scarce be imagined: yet we cannot pronounce it in the highest sense auspicious, because there was wanting in it any high presiding in- fluence of character. The boy's eye could rest on no clear, 150 WILBERPORCEj earnest light of godliness, burning in his father's house ; his parents were conventionally excellent people, respect- able, cheerful, hospitable, gay, nothing better or worse. In 1 768, the father of Wilberforce died ; the latter in- herited a rich patrimony, which was afterwards increased. The child, now nine years old, was sent to reside with an uncle, living by turns at Wimbledon and St James's Place. Here he came within the sphere of earnest piety. His aunt was one of those unnoticed witnesses to the inex- tinguishable powerof vitalChristianity, whose light, kindled by the instrumentality of Whitefield, spread a gentle but precious radiance through the spiritual haze of last century. Under her influence, his mind was roused to a new earnest- ness, and turned with great force in a religious direction. At the age of twelve, he wrote such letters on religious subjects as were afterwards deemed by some worthy of publication ; and, though this was wisely prevented, we cannot err in considering the fact a proof that his boyish intellect was brought into earnest and protracted considera- tion of religious truth. This state of matters was abruptly changed. His mother took the alarm. The prospect that her son should become a canting methodist, was appalling. She imme- diately recalled him to Yorkshire, and commenced the pro- cess of erasing every mark of strong individual character, of softening down into mere insipidity and commonplace every trait of personal godliness, which had appeared. He was at once inaugurated in a course of systematic triviality, not to end until it was fatally too late, whose great object was to clothe him in the garb of harmless, respectable frivolity, and leave him at last converted into that aimless worshipper of the hour, that lukewarm trimmer between all in religion, literature, philosophy, and feeling which AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 151 is, either cold or hot, that weathercock of vacant mode, that all-embracing type of the conventional a man of the world. His name threw open to him, on his return from Lon- don, every circle of fashion in Hull. Though still so young, he was introduced into all sorts of gay society. At first his lately-gained principles offered a firm opposition. The loud, half-animal life of the hearty, hospitable magnates of Hull contrasted boldly and unfavourably with the reli- gious earnestness of his aunt's spiritual life. The fashion was to have dinner parties at two and sumptuous suppers at six, the enjoyment having evidently a close and impor- tant connection*with the eating and drinking. Of card- parties, dancing, and theatre-going, there was no end. In all this, he found at first no pleasure; he turned in aversion from the coarse stimulants of sense, and sighed for the pure and lofty region he had left. But he was still a mere boy. The kindness universally showered on him could not be received with indifference by his warm and impressible nature; his was the age when new habits can yet be formed, and the process still result in charm ; worst of all, he per- ceived that his sprightliness and musical powers enabled him already to diffuse joy around him. The man who can fascinate society, is he who of all others is most subject to its fascination : we cannot wonder that the boy Wilberforce soon participated with joyous sympathy in all the merry- making of Hull. "We enter no protest against the healthful gaiety of youth. Even in that we here contemplate, there might, in many cases, have been nothing of present culpability or future injurious tendency. The young exuberant strength of boyhood healthfully and rightly prefers the open field to Jhe close schoolroom, the athletic sport or joyous dance to 152 wilberforce; the demure and measured walk. A strong mental endow- ment will, it is true, in most if not in all cases, evince itself by an element of thoughtfulness in early youth; but it is ever a circumstance of evil omen, boding intellectual disease, when the thoughtfulness of boyhood is of power sufficient to overbear its animal vivacity and sportive strength. One thing, however, is ever to be borne in mind, touching amusement and its connection with educa- tion: it cannot be the whole, but a part; it must derive its zest from being the unstringing of the bow. In the case of Wilberforce, it cannot be doubted that it usurped a place by no means its due a place where its influence was one of almost unmixed evil. And his natural temper and disposition were precisely such as rendered this circum- stance dangerous. His mind was of a sensitive, impulsive, lively cast, taking quickly the hue of its environment, and perhaps originally deficient in self-determining strength. To discipline his restless energy, to concentrate his volatile faculties, a firm though kind, a calm and methodic though genial training was required. Instead of this, he was, from early boyhood, the pet of gay circles, where no serious word was spoken, and found himself reaping most abun- dantly the approbation of his mother, when he flung all earnest thought aside, gave the odds and ends of his time to study, and made it the business of his life to be a dash- ing, lively, engaging member of fashionable society. That which occupied the formal place of instruction, was the tuition of a clerical gentleman who kept an academy. While residing with him, the main part of Wilberforce's education was what intellectual aliment he could gather at the tables of fox-hunting squires and jovial county gentlemen ; and we can conceive the effect upon the now faint religious impressions of the boy, of the spectacle of a AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 153 man, set apart to preach the gospel, whose whole life was a gentlemanly sneer at the spirituality of his office. Ere he proceeded to enter the university, which he did when seventeen years of age, every lingering trace of his early earnestness had been effaced ; he was in that soft plastic state which is incapable of exerting any reaction whatever upon surrounding influences. In all that related to the external qualities of a young man of fashion, his training had been amply successful. His manners were the happy union of sprightliness, ease, and unaffected kindness; his faculties were acute, his sympathy warm and vivacious, his wit ready and genial; he sung with great grace and sweetness. Furnished as he was upon entering the university, it is scarce to be wondered at that his sojourn there was well- nigh vacant of good : it were perhaps more correct to say, that it was fertile in evil. Not that it was contaminated by any taint of downright vice : the nature of Wilberforce was always too healthful, too open, free, and sunny, for that; but that the volatility which naturally characterised him, and whose final triumph, promoted by the studied frivolity of his boyhood, might yet have been averted, was here pampered to fresh luxuriance, and left to spread itself fairly over his mind; that the acquisition of the power of sustained and earnest study was fatally neglected; and that the opportunity of that first introduction to the treasuries of the knowledge of the world, which so generally determines the extent to which these treasuries are afterwards availed of, was lost. At St John's College, Cambridge, he fell among a set of the most pleasant, good-humoured, hearty fellows in the world. He had lots of money, of temper, of brisk- ness, of wit; they had free, jovial ways didn't mind tell- ing a good fellow what were bis good points could study 154 wilberforce; themselves, but could not perceive why a man of fortune should fag could probably tell a good story, give and take a repartee, appreciate a good song, or sing one last of all, and without any question, had the best appetite for good wine and Yorkshire pie. And so Wilberforce, whose natural quickness enabled him to figure to sufficient ad- vantage at examinations, left study to the poor and the dull; enough for him to be the centre of a joyous and boisterous throng, every good thing he said telling capi- tally, every faee around the board raying forth on him smiles and thankful complacency, the hours dancing cheerfully by, and casting no look behind to remind him that they were gone for ever. " The sick in body call for aid; the Bick In mind are covetous of more disease." Those men of St John's College, Cambridge, had all the best feelings towards Wilberforce, and seemed to him his truest friends. If you had spoken of him to any of them, you would have heard nothing but affectionate praise, with possibly just the slightest caustic mixture of contemptuous pity; if, iu their presence, you had called him a fool, or struck him on the face, a score of tongues or arms had moved to defend him. Yet how well had it been for Wil- berforce, had some rough but kind-hearted class-fellow turned upon him, like that class-fellow who saved Paley to British literature, and told him roundly he was a trifling fool; how well for him had his dancing-boots been ex- changed for Johnson's gaping shoes, his Yorkshire pie for Heyne's boiled pease-cods ! With bitter emphasis would he haye agreed to this in latter days, when he looked back on this time with keen anguish, and said, that those who should have 6een to his instruction, acted towards him unlike Christian, or even honest men. But such reflections were AND THE DEVELOPMENT OP PHILANTHROPY. 155 now far. Fanned by soft adulation, his heart told him he was a clever fellow, who would carry all before him ; for the present, he would sing his song, and shuffle the cards, and enjoy all the pleasure he imparted. So it continued until he approached the season of his majority, and it be- came proper to choose a vocation for life. Disinclined to mercantile pursuits, he withdrew from the business of which he was at his majority to have become a partner, and turned to another profession ; one which may be deemed of some importance, that of member of the British House of Commons. To be one of the governing council of the British Empire, to adjudicate on the affairs of that considerable assemblage of millions, to lend a help- ing voice and hand to steer the British monarchy in such an era as ours, that it may ever have its head forward, avoiding collisions, and sunken rocks, and quicksands, may be thought a task of some difficulty and solemnity. The instinct of British honour revolts at the idea of its being made a trade; no salaried members, were your legis- lators for ever confined to a class in consequence ; but there is no such prevailing abhorrenee against its being made an amusement. Accordingly, it is one of what may be styled the hereditary recreations of the British opulent and aristocratic classes; perhaps of a somewhat higher and more imposing order than fox-hunting and grouse- shooting; having, in particular, the advantage of serving as a background to these, giving them a look of relaxa- tion in the eyes of the world, imparting to their enjoy- ment a fine zest, and freeing them of all ennui or monotony. Young Wilberforce, whom we have been observing, and of whose education for this profession we can judge, thought that to be an honourable member would just suit him. He had, indeed, received a good average training for the busi- 156 wilberforce; ness. Quick to acquire, he had secured a fair amount of classical knowledge, and in those vital particulars, suavity of manners, happy fluency of speech, generally engaging deportment, he was surpassed by none ; the old gaieties of Hull, the Olympian suppers of St John's, and an excel- lent musical talent, would probably set him high among young honourable members. Besides, he would spend the last year of his minority in London ; in feasting and addressing a number of Hull freemen who lived there, he might make advances in the stiff" old art of ruling men ; while his evenings would be spent in actual apprenticeship to his business by attending the gallery of tl>e House. All this was done ; the member of the British Parliament deemed himself fully equipped. Immediately on becom- ing of age, Wilberforce was elected by an overwhelming majority for the city of Hull. His seat cost him between 8000 and 9000. Returned by such a constituency, and in such a man- ner, and on terms of personal intimacy with Pitt, who had been a Cambridge acquaintance, and whom he had met in the gallery of the House, Wilberforce found ho- nourable membership a most easy and animated affair. Acting as background, in the way we have indicated, it threw out finely the foreground of fan and frolic, of sport and light joyance, of feast, and dance, and merriment, on which he acted. At all the clubs he was received with the most cheerful welcome; there, with the men in whose hands were, or were soon to be, the destinies of the British nation, he laughed, and chatted, and sung, and gambled. His winnings were once or twice a hundred pounds, and happening, on one occasion, from an unforeseen circum- stance, to keep the bank, he cleared six hundred. But here, as always, on the verge of sheer vice, his better AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 157 nature checked him; what would have stamped a man of radical baseness an irretrievable gambler, pained and shocked Wilberforce: he played no more. There was no abatement of any of the other pleasures. " Fox, Sheridan, Fitzpatrick, and all your leading men," frequented those clubs ; Pitt showed himself there as the wittiest of the witty; altogether, the spectacle presented by British states- men behind the scenes was one of mirth and great exhila- ration. Gay, boisterous, frivolous they were; not devoid of a certain earnestness and business-like expertness when at their work, yet sportive and light of heart, as men whose places were safe, and who, for the rest, had only the matters of a British empire to think of. Wilberforce was by no means a technically inactive member; he pre- sented to the eye of the world an unimpeachable aspect, and kept his own conscience perfectly quiet. Seeming, to himself and others, to be doing his whole duty, he was satisfied and happy. Glancing, with his quick, clear eye, into circle after circle lighting up all faces, by the gentle might of his wit, if not with uncontrollable mirth, yet with soft, comfortable smiles suiting himself, by a tact swift and sudden as magic, to the society or subject of the mo- ment gesticulating and mimicking with rare histrionic art pouring forth, in unbroken stream, a warm and glow- ing eloquence or gliding softly into one of those songs to which his rich mellifluous voice lent such witching charms he was the life and soul of supper parties, the caressed of fashionable circles, the darling of the clubs. The Prince of Wales praised his singing; could human ambition look higher than that? After some more parliamentary work of this nature, Wilberforce flits gaily across the Channel; we find him in the autumn of 1783, with his friends Pitt and Elliot, in 158 wilberforce; the French capital. It is strangely interesting to mark him as he flutters among the Vauxhall luminaries of the old French court; light and frivolous almost as- they, yet with an open eye, and an English shrewdness, which note well the salient points in the dream-like scene. His jot- tings are brief but suggestive: " Supped at Count Don- son's. Round table: all English but Donson. Noailles, Dupont. Queen came after supper. Cards, tric-trac, and backgammon, which Artois, Lauzun, and Chartres, played extremely well." This was that Artois who goes down to a fool's immortality as the inventor or possessor of those " breeches of a kind new in this world," into which, and from which, his four tall lackeys lifted him every morning and evening; and this Chartres, who distinguished himself at tric-trac, became Egalite, and found it more difficult to play another game. Had the curtain of the future been drawn aside for a moment before the eyes of the group, and Philip of Orleans seen himself at that moment when he stopped before his own palace on his way to the guillotine, \^hat astonishment, and trembling, and dismay, would have sunk over that gay company ! He sees La Fayette, too, and styles him " a pleasing, enthusiastical man," surely with happy shrewdness and accuracy. The latter is already a patriot of the most highflown description, quite on the model of Addison's Cato. The ladies of the court try to induce him to join in cards ; but will the classic hero compromise the austere dignity of freedom? The ladies have to glide away in admiring respect, almost in reverence, and the heart of the patriot is strengthened. " The king is so strange a being (of the hog kind), that it is worth going a hundred miles for the sight of him, especially a boar-hunting." This was poor Louis, whose contribution to human knowledge was of so decidedly AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 159 negative a nature; who bore testimony to this one doc- trine, whose worth, however, deserved to be written in blood; that nature, in this world, grants inappreciably little to good intentions. He sees Marie Antoinette fre- quently, and bears witness to the gentle witchery of her manner, queenly dignity blended with feminine kindness. Seen against the darkness which we know lay in the back- ground, all this gaily-tinted picture, of which Wilberforce for a short space formed an appropriate figure, has a strange and fascinating look. " Light mortals, how ye walk your light life-minuet, over bottomless abysses, divided from you by a film!" In the spring of 1784, Wilberforce was elected to repre- sent Yorkshire. His popularity in his native county was extreme ; and when, after the prorogation of Parliament, he went down to spend his birth-day there, and appeared at the races, the whole era of his history which we now con- template may be said to have reached its highest manifes- tation and climax. A running chorus of applauding shouts followed his path; he was the cynosure of all eyes; if vacant stare and noise could make one happy, he were the man. In October, 1784, he left England on a journey to the Continent, in the company of Isaac Milner, brother of the Church historian, and, though unapt to show them, of thoroughly evangelical views. A few serious words which dropped from Milner's lips on the journey, and the effect of a perusal of Doddridge's " Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul," did not altogether pass away from the mind of Wilberforce; invisibly, perhaps intermittently, yet inde- structibly, the disturbing influence acted within. On his return to London, he again rushed into the halls of fashion and frivolity; now and then a monition of other things flickered momentarily, like the glance of an angel's eye, 160 wilberforce; across his sphere of vision; but he still continued, with reckless determination, to drain the chalice of wild, un- measured mirth. No change was seen in the external aspect of his life; he frisked about at Almack's, danced till five in the morning, charmed and fascinated as before ; yet the monitory glance was at intervals upon him, the perfect peace of death was broken. In the summer of 1785, he had another Continental tour with Milner. They now conversed more earnestly on the subject of religion, and commenced together the study of the New Testament. The time at length had come from which Wilberforce was to date a new era in his life: the time when he was, whether in delusion or not, to believe himself savingly influenced by the Spirit of the Almighty, and to prepare to walk onwards to eternity under that guidance. The manner of the change now wrought in Wilberforce is of less importance to us than its effects; but we must briefly indicate its general aspect. In our minds the be- lief is deeply seated, that the religious influence by which we saw him impressed in boyhood never totally lost its effect. Like an ineffaceable writing, it lay in his heart during all those years when the desert sands of vanity swept over it, hidden, perhaps forgotten, but imperishably there: it required but a calm hour and a strong skilful hand, putting aside the sand and revealing the golden characters, to bring the soul of Wilberforce to acknow- ledge their sacred authority. On this point, however, we do not insist; it is beyond the reach of positive proof. He did, at all events, now pause in startled earnestness; the fleeting monitions could no longer be put aside. The truths of God's Word first forced an intellectual assent; conscience, after long slumber, then awoke in the AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 161 might of its divine commission, and, like a heavenly mes- senger with a sword of unearthly fire in the hand, defied him to advance another step. His trouble of soul was long and terrible. He asserted in after years that he had never read of mental agonies more acute than his own; and we think it were difficult to over-estimate the weight of this testimony. Yet it was not terror that chiefly dismay- ed him. " It was not so much," these are his own words, " the fear of punishment by which I was affected, as a sense of my great sinfulness in having so long neglected the unspeakable mercies of my God and Saviour." His soul was not altogether a stranger to fear. The finite being who begins to have a fixed assurance that there is not a relation of perfect concord between him and the Infinite One, may well experience a feeling of awe; the man who hears conscience, with iron tongue, proclaiming that sin and misery are as substance and shadow, who has any conception of the deep, drear, moaning affirmative of this, which goes, like a melancholy Arctic wind, over all the centuries of the life of mankind, and who deems it even possible that this Upas root lies too deep in his own bosom to be eradicated by mortal hands, may well be afraid. The instinct of the human race echoes the Scripture words, " The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." But it was no slavish dread which urged him on. His was no longer the reckless bearing of a man of the world, arising from vacancy of thought or sheer imbecility ; nor did he change his attitude for that of the haughty assertor of himself against the infinitude of power, whose position is surely that of a maniac or demon: but it was the light of celestial holiness burning eternally around the throne of God in the far deeps of heaven, that caught and fixed his eye, it was an awakening consciousness of deep moral wants, that filled his heart with yearning sorrow, it was a 162 wilberforce; conviction that the name Christian had been hitherto, in his case, a mere vague sound or hypocritic deception, that touched him with hallowed shame, and it was dumb amaze- ment at the fact that the most sublime instance of love ever given in this universe had been unknown and unheeded by him, which brought him at last, a weeping suppliant, to the Mount of Calvary. The work he had to accomplish was of stern difficulty. That long course of noisy vanity had as it were deafened and distracted his spiritual nature; fixed thought he found in itself difficult; and now he had to stop and think as with his soul in his hand. Had escape been possible, he would have escaped ; for he put himself at first in a firmly defensive atti- tude, and turned again for a time to the charmers whose spells had hitherto held him. Consider what an outlook was his. By a thousand viewless chains he was bound to the world. Known and adulated in all the clubs and London fashionable circles, rejoicing in a rising fame for eloquence, and having long enjoyed the still more delicious fame of wit, keenly sensitive to every shaft of ridicule and in- tensely relishing applause, the strings of his very heart would be rent if he tore himself away ; while, hardest of all, he saw clearly that friendships, to his tender nature very dear, must either be cast away altogether, or arrange themselves on new sympathies of a comparatively shallow order. But it was to be done ; further he could not go; that flaming sword of God's angel, conscience, barred his way. In deep trouble of mind, he returned to London. He had abandoned the defensive attitude ; he no longer stood as one who could put a good face on the matter, and, as it were, prove to God that all was right ; he had flung away the armour in which he trusted, he had exchanged complacency for bitter repentance, defence or apology for earnest prayer. It was not yet light within, but outward AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 163 duty became plain, and with it he proceeded at once. He wrote to his principal friends, informing them that he was not what he had been ; he withdrew his steps from every haunt of worldly mirth ; despite a rising feeling of shame, he commenced the worship of God as a householder. He brought himself also, after a severe struggle, to introduce himself to John Newton, and thus commenced the forma- tion of a new circle of friendship. At length he began to reap his reward; that peace which has arisen after toil and darkness in so many Christian souls, and which is essentially the same in all ; that peace which came with returning light over the prostrate and trembling soul of Paul, which brought healing to the agonised heart of Luther, which wa3 devoutly treasured alike by Cromwell, Ed wards, and so far different men as Brainerd and M'Cheyne, diffused itself, at last, through the breast of Wilberforce. His testimony was soon decisive, that he had reached a higher and more exquisite joy than he had ever known in the saloons of fashion ; " never so happy in my life, as this whole evening," are words from his diary of the period. His correspondence began to breathe the earnestness of Christian zeal, and the serenity of Christian enjoyment. " The Eastern nations," he writes to his sister, " had their talismans, which were to advertise them of every danger, and guard them from every mischief. Be the love of Christ our talisman." Again, writing on an Easter Sab- bath, " Can my dear sister," he exclaims, " wonder that I call on her to participate in the pleasure I am tasting. I know how you sympathise in the happiness of those you love, and I could not, therefore, forgive myself if I were to keep my raptures to myself, and not invite you to partake of my enjoyment. The day has been delightful. I was out before six, and made the fields my oratory, the sun shining as bright and as warm as at Midsummer. I think my own 164 wilberforce; devotions become more fervent when offered in this way, amidst the general chorus with which all nature seems on such a morning to be swelling the song of praise and thanksgiving." He had now deliberately devoted himself to Christ, and resolved that all his energies should be dedi- cated to His service. We must pause for a moment, to learn accurately the pre- cise position of "Wilberforce at this juncture, to know what Christian conversion had done for him, and to estimate the forces at his command for serving his God and his country. The look he cast over his past life was one of asto- nishment and sorrow; his feelings were as those of a man, who, after a night of intoxication and revelry, is aroused from a drunken morning sleep to brace on his armour and go instantly to meet the foe ; or of one who finds that, while he has slept, a fair wind has been lost, and the tide is gone far backward, and he will never by utmost diligence make now a good voyage. He was twenty-six years of age. His life, since his twelfth year, had been one course of mental dissipation; his intellect, naturally alert, had been abandoned to utter volatility; he stood appalled, and well-nigh powerless. Had his will been roused to a giant energy had he collected all his faculties for one determined struggle had he, calculating that, to attain the mental power and material which a true educa- tion might have at that epoch realised for him, a space of ten or at least five years of stern, unmitigated, silent toil was absolutely required, deliberately given that period to the task, and performed it, it is impossible to say what he might have been, or what work he might have effected. But he made no such grand effort: life was so far advanced, that he did notdare to withdraw his hand for a moment from work ; he does not seem to have even formed the conception of what, as to us issufficientlyplain,wasabsolutelynecessary. AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 165 We do not blame Wilberforce in this matter; but it is requisite for us to be thus explicit, that it may be dis- tinctly understood what it is we conceive him to have been, and what we believe he was not. He can in no sense be regarded as the Christian statesman of our era. The modern Christian statesman, indeed, has not yet appeared. For, by statesman, we cannot be supposed to mean simply member of parliament: we must mean one who exerts so much power in the political world, that the general aspect of affairs is coloured by his influence, the attitude of his country among the kingdoms of the world that which he, at least in a large measure, has appointed. The Christian statesman will be he who can impart to Britain once more the aspect of a great, free, Protestant nation; who, in the nineteenth century, will bring Christianity into politics, and, helming the state with the strong arm of a Cromwell, make it apparent to all nations that he holds his commission, as governor, from God; who will gather round him that deep and ancient sympathy with vital Christianity which does exist in these lands, who will combine it with the science and adapt it to the conditions of the time, and make the flag of England once more not the mere symbol of commercial wealth or military renown, but the standard of Christian c : vilisation, and a beacon to every people that will be free. The ultimate perfection of civilisation is an enlightened and godly freedom. But our words, we fancy some reader conceiving, become visionary express mere vague enthusiasm, or Utopian dreams. Is it really so ? Have we tacitly come to the conclusion and agreement that Christianity, that Protestantism, is to be permitted indeed to exert what power it can in subordinate spheres, but, in its distinc- tive character, is no more to be admitted into the coun- 166 wilberforce; cils of nations ? Have we consented that Britain, when dealing with other kingdoms, shall indeed speak, and with resistless power, as a commercial, a military, a colo- nising nation, but have no word to say as a Christian nation ? It may be so ; but let us perceive clearly what we imply by the concession. We imply that nations, as such, are exempted from the ordinance of glorify- ing God; that, in this important respect, they form an absolute solecism in the universe. For our own part, we cannot believe it; we cannot but be profoundly assured that nations are intended, we say not in what precise way, but at least in their distinctive character, to bear a part in the universal harmony of the universal choir that hymns the Creator's praise; we cannot but believe that something more vital than political morality, more nobly human than desire of national wealth, more lofty even that what is far higher than these, martial honour, must one day again penetrate the senates and privy councils of the world ; it is with sorrow and shame that we regard the fact, that, since the days of Cromwell, there has been no leader of the British nation, no Pitt, no Fox, no Wellington, of whom you can say that, as a statesman, he was Christian. Wilberforce was a Chris- tian member of Parliament; it may even be alleged that he did, to some perceptible extent, introduce Chris- tianity into the councils of Great Britain; but the Christian statesman of the modern epoch he certainly was not. The power of vital godliness did all for Wilberforce that was, perhaps, without a miracle, possible; it did not create within him new powers, it did not convey super- naturally into his mind new and sufficient stores of know- ledge; but it did much, it did more, we may confidently AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 167 say, than any other conceivable power could have done. What that was, we go on to show. Light, frivolous, fascinating, "Wilberforce made a nar- row escape from being a character of a sort which is surely one of the most pitiful human life can show a fashionable wit and jester. How profoundly melancholy is the spectacle of a man, the main tenor of whose life is an empty giggle and crackle of fool's laughter! How ghastly, after it is all past, does the perpetual smirking and smartness of such men as Theodore Hook and Sydney Smith really appear! Wilberforce could vie with these in powers of entertaining and being entertained; his whole training, with one slight exception, tended to foster these powers; and now they had found their sphere, and passed their probation. In politics, his position promised little better. With powers of natural eloquence which drew unmeasured applause from such men as Burke and Pitt, with great quickness of memory, and, to a certain extent, of arrangement, with a judgment naturally clear and strong, and with a heart which would not swerve from the path of a rough genuine English honour, he had certainly reached a conspicuous station as a supporter of Pitt, and could speak a distinct, independent, and valuable word on most subjects; yet he himself records, that his political life was then without unity, that he " wanted first prin- ciples," that his own distinction was his " darling ob- ject." We cannot but agree with him when he says, " The first years that I was in Parliament I did nothing nothing I mean to any good purpose." Both as man and as politician, he was now changed. The flickering light of vacant and aimless mirth faded from his lip and eye, the sacred energy of Christian purpose began to mould and brighten his features; if 168 wilberforce; there was still somewhat of restlessness and unsteadied vehemence in his look, it had one point toward which it always turned, and its natural kindness was gra- dually deepened and sublimed into the holier warmth of Christian love. As a politician, he reached a new inde- pendence and individuality. He could no longer wheel round in the circle of party ; he could no longer, even to a limited extent, take his opinions in the mass from the faction to which he belonged ; he told Pitt he would still support him where he could, but that he was no longer to be a party man, even to the same extent as heretofore. He looked out for a work of his own, for something which he might do as one whose character was in all things pro- fessedly Christian, and who believed that it was as God's servant alone that he could take a share in the govern- ment of Britain. For this work, whatever it might be, he lost no time in preparing himself. He instantly set about the task of concentrating his faculties, and enriching his intellectual stores; he turned to study with an earnestness he had never hitherto known; above all, he commenced the careful and unintermitted study of Holy Writ. This last we agree with his biographers in considering the most important element in his new mental discipline. The power of the Christian Scriptures to engage, to train, and to occupy the intellect, has been attested in express and emphatic terms by such thinkers as Jonathan Edwards and Lessing. Wilberforce did not wait long ere he found his work. It was twofold. On Sunday, the 28th of October, 1 787, he wrote these words in his journal: " God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade, and the reformation of manners." With solemn yet courageous earnestness, he assayed these august achievements; he had already counted the forces AND THE DEVELOPMENT OP PHILANTHROPY. 169 against him in his public and private Christian walk; but after looking them full in the face, this had been his con- clusion : "But then we have God and Christ on our side; we have heavenly armour; the crown is everlasting life, and the struggle how short, compared with the eternity which follows it! Yet a little while, and He that shall come will come, and will not tarry." It is with Wilberforce, in his connection with those two movements, the first of which resulted in the emancipa- tion of the slaves in the British Colonies, and the second of which developed into what is called Exeter Hall Philan- thropy, that we are mainly concerned. The part, indeed, which he individually bore in each is of comparatively slight importance ; it we can briefly indicate in the outset of our remarks on the respective subjects. But it were well, if such might be possible, to reach a conclusive estimate at once of the value of the great measures of Abolition of the Slave Trade, and Slave Emancipation, and of the part Christianity bore in their attainment ; while the class of kindred phenomena, which we include in the general de- signation of philanthropic efforts for the reformation of manners, are those with which we are at present more par- ticularly engaged. Of the particular method in which Wilberforce led the contest against the Slave Trade, and of the various stages of that contest, we deem it unnecessary to speak. His task cannot be alleged to have been one of a severity de- manding the highest efforts of courage and endurance, or whose performance called forth special heroism. That he did encounter obloquy and scorn, that he did undergo heavy and protracted labour, is certain ; that, from year to year, he stood forth with the calm determination of one who had a great work to do, and who would do it with 170 wilberfokce; English courage, sagacity, and perseverance, is undeni- able ; that, in the whole course of his operations, he earned that substantial applause which is the meed of every man who performs well and completely the duty which he re- gards himself commissioned of God to accomplish, no one can question. But we claim for him no higher honour than this : our opinion here is substantially the same as that of Sir James Stephen. His sphere of exertion, what- ever its inconveniences or occasional troubles, was, on the whole, one of honour and ease ; failure brought no danger or biting disgrace, and, from the civilised world, voices were raised to cheer and applaud him ; it was worthy and honourable to struggle and conquer as he did, but the fact of his having done so, can never be such a testimony to character, as similar exertions were in the case of men who worked in the gleam of half a world's indignation, and, for one stern enemy, had always to look into the eyes of death. It was in 1789 that he delivered his first regular speech on the Slave Trade. Even when we have made allowance for the enthusiasm of the moment, we must conclude that the opinions expressed of this performance by Burke and Bishop Porteous, prove Wilberforce to have been a man of great natural eloquence, and of rich and vigorous mind. " The House, the nation, and Europe," according to Burke, " were under great and serious obligations to the honourable gentleman for having brought forward the subject in a manner the most masterly, impressive, and eloquent. The principles were so well laid down, and supported with so much force and order, that it equalled anything he had heard in modern times, and was not per- haps to be surpassed in the remains of Grecian eloquence." Porteous styles it " one of the ablest and most eloquent AND THE DEVELOPMENT OP PHILANTHROPY. 171 speeches that was ever heard." It lasted three hours. Its effect was to bear the House, with astonishing unanimity, along with the speaker. On the whole, we must regard it a conclusive proof that Wilberforce possessed popular talents of a high order. In 1807, after many a galling disappointment, his efforts were finally crowned with suc- cess. Congratulations poured in upon him from all parts of the world; but while drinking deeply of the joy which rewarded his toil, he abandoned every claim to honour for himself; all pride was swallowed up in thankfulness. " Oh what thanks do I owe the Giver of all good, for bringing me in His gracious Providence to this great cause, which at length, after almost nineteen years' labour, is successful!" These are the words of a true Christian 6oldier: their humility and silent earnestness, amid the applause of millions, are surely beautiful. He lived to see a still greater day. When he retired from political strife, the standard he had so long borne was held aloft by Bux- ton and others; with deep emphasis did he again thank God, when, in 1833, Britain emancipated her slaves. Concerning this whole work of Slave Emancipation, we have now heard the two extremes of opinion. For a time, and a long time, it seemed to be a subject on which men were at last agreed; a universal pasan arose around it, and continued to be chanted on all platforms, in all newspapers, in all schools of rhetoric and poetry. But, after a time, there exhibited itself a disposition to question the advis- ability and intrinsic excellence of the measures, and at length a strong revulsion of feeling has taken place in cer- tain quarters. Mr Carlyle has poured the chalice of his scorn, comparable to molten iron, on Britain's whole deal- ing with the Negroes of her colonies, and, wherever his in- fluence is paramount, a disposition to denounce the pro- 172 wilberforce; ceedings of the advocates of abolition and emancipation manifests itself. The paeans were certainly, we think, struck on too high a key. The stern and numerous difficulties which have since revealed themselves cast no shadow before ; that one grand, all-comprehending difficulty of making men free, im- plying, as it does, such an elevation of nature, such a rais- ing above sensuality, sloth, and foolishness, into industry, self-respect, and wisdom, as only a Divjne hand could at once effect, was not then conceived of; it did not strike men that, if they destroyed Sodom, they might have in its place only a Dead Sea. Yet, after all, we are disposed to say that the plaudits had more reason in them than the denunciations. There is something wholesome and inspir- ing in the sound of human rejoicing over wrong and ini- quity even believed to be overthrown ; but, on the other side, the vituperation, when all is well looked into, turns out to have little more on which to support itself, than the old fact, whose truth we must so often acknowledge and put up with, that human affairs are not ideal, that human in- tellects are indubitably bounded. We shall endeavour to strike the truth between the opposing views. Slave Emancipation, then, of which we consider the abo- lition of the Slave Trade a part, we regard as a great ini- tial measure, which did not exhaust the case, which did not even proceed far with it, which cannot be said to have touched certain of its greatest and most strictly original difficulties, but which cleared the ground for its possible discussion, fixed the imperative conditions of the problem, and laid down the fundamental axioms by which it must be solved. It cleared the atmosphere round the whole subject; its very excess, if such there was, the very fact of its abstaining from any tempering or temporising expe- AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHKOPY. 173 dients, but attempting to break, as by one sledge-hammer blow, the slave-chain that it abhorred, made its teaching of certain great first principles the more emphatic. These may, we think, be briefly recounted; they seem to range themselves under two heads. The first great truth it declared was none other than that of which we have already spoken, and on which we shall not here again enlarge; That an essential equality sub- sists among all the members of the human family. It was the second great assertion by Christian Philanthropy of this fundamental principle: Howard's work in the prisons of the world was the first. Slavery, in its essential nature, is precisely that which puts man individually in the stead of God, as the ulti- mate source of authority regarding a human being. Hence is at once obvious the error of those, who, pointing to the subordination of class to class, and such other arrange- ments of society as restrain and circumvent every man in every sphere, exclaim that slavery cannot be abolished. From the laws of society, in some form or other, we can- not escape; but, whatever their imperfections, we must look at society as originally an ordinance of God, enforced by a necessity of nature, and, with whatever subordinate disadvantages and difficulties, conducing towards the very highest and noblest results for the individual and the race; no man, therefore, is a slave, however hard he toils, however ill he fares, in simply conforming to them. But whatever negatives the action of the powers with which God has gifted a man, and which he holds from Him, is of the na- ture of slavery ; and thus, indeed, every social imperfection ilfcrolving injustice and partiality, is more or less allied to it; when a man is bought and sold as a chattel or animal, the action of those powers may be said to be negatived alto- 174 wilberforce; gether. Thus, too, we see that a man who is vitally a Christian cannot be totally a slave; he is Christ's freed- man ; there is a region in his heart which he deliberately regards as exempt from the control of his earthly master, a point in which, should he command him, he will not obey, but, if it must be, die a freeman. The second lesson which these legislative measures read to the world was this; That Mammon was not the ultimate authority in this question; that, though the pecuniary loss were of indefinite amount, there were other considerations, of justice and humanity, which would overtop them, and that infinitely. It was as if Mammon and Justice had been pitted against each other, with the world for an arena : Mammon pointed to these souls of men, said they repre- sented gold, and declared that the smoke of their torment would blacken the dome of heaven ere he let them from beneath his sway; Justice flung to him twenty millions, and bade him, with a contemptuous smile, relax his hold. By whatever law the questions connected with the Negro race were to be ultimately settled, it was not to be a consideration in the case, how they would realise the greatest pecuniary profit for white men; the general principle was emphatically enounced, that, whatever of wealth or luxury a man may extract from any portion of the earth, by making his fellow-man the tool for its attain- ment, this method is one essentially unjust, and on no con- ceivable hypothesis to be defended. On the whole, then, we must pronounce the value of these measures great, although the present state of our West Indian Colonies is as it is. Of the melancholy as- pect they present, we entertain so profound an idea, tlfct we can hardly trust ourselves to express it. Perhaps, fairly and fully considered, our legislation on subjects AND THE DEVELOPMENT OP PHILANTHROPY. 175 touching these colonies since the measure of 1833, is the most fatuous, contradictory, mean, and feeble, that ever had existence. If it had been the wish of Britain to stul- tify or abjure her own former acts, and if she had desired, by deliberate national hypocrisy, to change the form, but, perhaps, increase the virulence of her cruelty to the Negro race, she could not, by conceivable possibility, have suc- ceeded better than she has. To one fairly beyond the circle of political intrigue and blind interest, who casts an earnest glance over the rela- tion of Britain to her Western Islands since the Emanci- pation Act, the whole matter seems to beam out in per- fect clearness. We have reflected somewhat upon the subject, and shall venture a few suggestions towards de- fining the duty of Britain to tho3e Negroes with whom she is connected. First of all, it is necessary that we have a new Emanci- pation Act. We speak with perfect deliberation. It is necessary for us to emancipate our slaves in Cuba, the Brazils, and America. With a look of magnanimity, jus- tice, and love, Britain unchained her slaves: with a superb generosity, she paid down twenty millions, and washed from her hands the stain of blood. The nations of the earth looked on in admiration; from the four corners of the world came shouts of applause. It seemed indubitable that it had been an act of justice and humanity to the Negro. But the plaudits were premature. If appearances could be trusted, it was not the Negro but herself Britain had spared. She laid down her own whip, but, whether in imbecility or sentimentality, again took it up, loaded it afresh, and put it into the hand of the Spaniard or Ameri- can. There are two ways of keeping a slave; either by feeding and lodging him that he may till your own 176 wilberforce; ground, or paying another certain monies for keeping and working him. Britain emancipated the West Indian slaves: the sugar produce of her colonies declined; she opened or kept open her markets to slave-grown sugar; precisely the quantity of sugar she could not receive from the West Indies, she received from Cuba and the Brazils. What occasioned the diminution of sugar in the British Co- lonies? The diminution of toil bearing on the slave. What enabled the other slave-holding sugar-lands to in- crease their produce, so as to meet the new demand of the British market ? One of two things, or both, exhaust the the possibilities of the case: addition to the number of slaves, or an increase of toil, imposed on slaves already possessed, exactly equivalent to the diminution of work in the British plantations. We are not here, reader, lay- ing down anything difficult or abstruse; we are not even arguing ; we are expressing an absolute common-place ; we defy any man, who has ever read a book or reflected an hour on political economy, to question what we state. By the continual communication of all parts of the commercial world, by an action and reaction inevitable and speedy, when you have any article of commerce for which there is a known and steady demand, the withdrawal of a body of labourers from one field where it is produced will occasion their addition in another field. When Britain set free her Negroes in the West Indies, and still kept open her market to slave-grown sugar, she simply appointed a set of Spanish or Brazilian overseers to starve, to lash, and to murder her slaves. It was by the laws of commerce impossible for her really to emancipate a body of slaves equal in number to those employed in her colonies, to withdraw her con- tingent from the slave-chain of the world, in any but one way by closing her markets to all slave-grown sugar. AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 177 By any other expedient, she simply exchanged one body of slaves for another. The Emancipation Act was noble in intent, fine in example, and beautiful as a proof of na- tional generosity ; but in mitigating the woes of the Negro race, considered as a whole, it was then, and has since been, null, and worse. We appeal to any political economist in the British Empire, whether this conclusion is not a mathe- matical certainty. When we consider the amount of injustice, of useless, senseless, gross injustice, inflicted on our colonies in this business when we think of the state of those glorious islands flung to rot there on the ocean, while Britain, like an insane beldame, cherished elsewhere that for which she ruined them we can say only, in sickness of heart, that it is unspeakable. Mr Carlyle rails at the " Dismal Science ;" but we cannot cease to lament, despite his scorn, that there was not even that faint knowledge of the simplest laws of the commercial system of the world in the public mind of Britain, which would have saved us this humi- liating state of affairs. Let all who desire Slave Emancipation rally to one cry, and demand one measure, The exclusion of slave-grown produce from the British Isles. We have no choice, if we would do anything, beyond this ; keep your market open, and your number of slaves is the same. India may give us cotton ; our own islands, if rightly managed, will give us enough of sugar: but, however we do, there is now blood on our hands blood most cruelly, most inhumanly shed. As matters stand, all our abolition lecturing will not abate the minutest particle of slavery; if we have the na- tional heroism to pass the above measure, we may entertain a good hope of giving slavery its death-blow over the world. Let no one here desecrate the name of Free Trade, by 178 wilberforce; making it a plea for oppression and iniquity. It is not a question either of free trade or protection ; it is simply whether we are to hare slaves or no: we can emancipate them only in one way. But we turn now to the Negroes in our own Indian Colo- nies. Were the great measure passed which we have spe- cified, there would be hope for them ; while matters are as they stand, we can hardly entertain any. The only ad- missible mode of procedure, however, seems simple enough. "While recognised, in an unqualified sense, as our fellow- subjects, Negroes must certainly be taught to imbibe habits of industry worthy of British citizens. It is competent for every government, in a mild but resolute manner, to put in force the ancient rule, that he who does not work shall not eat. As Mr Carlyle says truly, the Negro has no right to run riot in idleness, and live on soil which British valour, at least in one sense, won, without paying a fair price for it: no British subject has such a right, and he can plead no allowable privilege. This is the first step which renders an industrial education practicable. A whole system of such education might gradually arise, and, by a natural, easy, and benign process, a free and indus- trious, a healthful and joyous coloured population might again make these islands like polished and glittering gems on the breast of ocean. And it is our decided opinion that there might, with the best effects, be an importation from Africa of free blacks into the West Indies. Mr Carlyle's argument against this is singular. It proceeds on the hypothesis, that, because something is required to be done in measure, it will be done in hideous and probably impossible excess. Ireland, such is his reasoning, does, or did suffer, from too large a population ; the West Indian Islands suffer from one by AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 179 much too small: therefore, if you introduce more men into the West Indies, you make it a black Ireland. Under which form of the syllogism is this to be ranged? The case is rendered the more absurd by the fact, that, since the project in question has reference solely to Blacks who would voluntarily push their fortune in the West Indies, the great danger would be, that the influx would stop far too soon. The Dismal Science could have given Mr Carlyle a hint here too. But what errors soever we have fallen into since the measure for the emancipation of our West Indian slaves was passed, and how ineffectual soever the ignorance of its framers may have rendered that measure itself, its value as a national act was not lost. To the principles we have stated, it did testify; Britain did, to the best of her know- ledge, free her bondmen; and if it is now found to be an undeniable fact, that her knowledge was so defective that her attempt, instead of being an alleviation of the miseries of the negro race as a whole, was, strictly speaking, the reverse, let us hope the cause of real Slave Emancipation may again meet a response in British generosity, huma- nity, and valour, and again find Christian champions like Clarkson, Buxton, and Wilber force. There has been not a little discussion as to the respective exertions of Clarkson, Wilberforce, and others, in the at- tainment of their common object. To this controversy we shall contribute not one word. We saw that Wilberforce accepted, as part of the work appointed him by God, the conduct of the struggle for the abolition, and we saw him, when the Slave Trade was no more, devoutly thanking God for having honoured him to bear his part in the work- But, in what shares soever the trophies of the victory be distributed to individuals, it is just to claim the whole 180 wilberforce; achievement as a triumph of Christianity. Ramsay, whose book, published towards the close of last century, was the prelude to the agitation, was a Christian pastor ; Clark- son and Wilberforce both toiled under the direct com- mission of Christian love. To such an extent, Christianity did colour our national counsels. In the former century, the love of the gospel had shed its mild light in the dun- geon ; it now spoke an emphatic word against slavery, a word which, however little it may have yet availed, will assuredly not die away until that foul stain of shame and guilt is wiped from the brow of humanity. All that was of real value in the measure was its testimony, on the part of the first nation in the world, to justice and love: that testimony was priceless; and it was the might of Chris- tianity which drew it forth. What was defective and neutralising in its provisions was unseen by all; the divine principles which acted in its attainment were perfectly in- dependent of that ; all the world, as well as its Christian movers, thought it was a real emancipation, and not an ex- change. But every noble mind, every heart touched with poetic fire or raised by philosophic ardour, hailed it with instant and exultant applause. Cowper, Coleridge, Byron, Schlegel, Fichte, and a list of such, embracing, with probably not a solitary exception, all the greatness and nobleness of the close of last century and the commencement of this, declared Slave Emancipation to be a high and glorious aim and achievement ; Mr Carlyle was, we think, the very first man of genius and nobleness, both unquestioned, to hint a doubt regarding the fundamental principles which animated Clarkson and Wilberforce. And whatever scorn or gratuitous insulting pity may accompany her path, we accept it as an auspicious omen, that the form in which Christianity has walked forth most prominently in the AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 181 sight of nations in these latter ages has again been that of love ; we will recognise her even by that railing, and know of a certainty that she is about her natural and pecu- liar work, when she brings hope to the prisoner and freedom to the slave. We arrive now at the second portion of that twofold task which Wilberforce believed to be appointed him by God. This was the reformation of manners. The method to be adopted was that of public exposure and philanthropic appeal. The force of Christian love, scattered in countless bosoms in the British Islands, was to become, as it were, con- scious of itself, to gather together and unite: when this was accomplished, it was to turn in concentrated power against evil, in whatever form and place it appeared, either by bringing its influence to bear directly on the legislature, or by local and personal endeavours. His efforts mark the commencement of the second stage of philanthropy ; the fire was to spread wide, and the attempt was to be made to give it form and union. We can here, again, while yielding perfect approbation, bestow but a qualified applause upon Wilberforce, as the leader and representative of what, if you choose, you may call, Exeter Hall Philanthropy. The part he played can be easily comprehended. Wherever there germinated a scheme of benevolence, he cast on it a glance of encourage- ment ; whoever designed, by voluntary efforts on the part of himself and his fellows, to benefit any part of the human race, looked towards Wilberforce, nor looked in vain. But, after all, he was rather the principal worker in philanthropy, than its organising, ordering, compelling chief; for him we still wait. To discern, by far-reaching and unerring glance, the real force and the real perils of this wide- spread benevolence, this many- worded spirit of kindness, 182 wilberfobce; that gathered its assemblies and spoke on its platforms ; to connect it, as a great phenomenon, with the grand charac- teristics of our age ; to be a head to its great throbbing heart, an eye to its hundred, earth-embracing hands, was not given to Wilberforce. Philanthropy, under him, was aptly and expressively emblemed by that motley throng which Sir James Stephen so graphically depicts swarming in the chambers of his house ; a number of living and em- bodied forces, some of whim, some of folly, some of mere maudlin softness, all inclined to do good, and complacently concluding that good intentions would pass for substantial working power. But we by no means allege that it was a slight or profitless work which Wilberforce did. Unless you know how to direct your motive power, you will do no work ; but unless you have your motive power, your are in a still more hopeless case. He, and the right-hearted men who were around him, fanned into a flame which covered Britain that spirit of active love which the holy Howard evoked. To consider the value of this service open to discussion, seems to deny every instinct man feels, every rule by which he acts. If a man says that it is not a consoling, an aus- picious fact, that in a million breasts there is awakened the will, the bare will, to work and war for the diffusion of light over our world, for the social and moral ameliora- tion of men, we know not how to answer him. If a man, contemplating the great temptation which, by necessity of position, assails Britain in these ages, the temptation to circumscribe the blue vault by an iron grating, and beneath it, as in a temple, kneel before the shrine of Mammon, finds no healing, counteracting influence in the spectacle of thousands of British hands stretched out to take Mam- mon's gold and lay it on a higher altar, we cannot assail, as we cannot conceive, his position. If any one does not AND THE DEVELOPMENT OP PHILANTHROPY. 183 perceive that there is an infinite difference, and that a dif- ference of advantage and advance between a nation, sloth- ful and avaricious, that will do and give nothing in the cause of God and humanity, and a nation saying, " I will give, I will act, and if I know not how, I will earnestly hear," we can merely signify dumb astonishment. Had philanthropy hitherto done nothing, its presence in the commonwealth were a blessing as of the early rain ; if it has in certain directions fallen into error, it is both a com- monplace and a fatal mistake to cast away good with evil; an error not committed, save by madmen, in other depart- ments, for you do not cast away your sword for its rust, or your scythe because it is not hung with perfect scientific accuracy. But philanthropy, Exeter Hall Philanthropy, has done much. We cannot consider as nothing, the alleviation of the woes of factory children, the erection of ragged schools, the providing of shelter for the houseless, of food for the starving; we cannot consider it little to have sown the world with Bibles! Since the day when Howard called it forth, as a power distinctly to be seen and felt in human affairs, its progress has been one before which oppression has fallen, its step has startled cruelty and crime. God has honoured it hitherto, and he will bless it still. But however well it may be to express the plain truth, and however lawful to draw encouragement therefrom, it is certainly of more strict practical avail to clear the way for future work, than to rejoice over what has been done. We shall offer a few leading suggestions bearing on the internal and operating mechanism of philanthropy. We shall be very brief, leaving readers to follow out our ideas for themselves. First of all, it must be clearly and definitely understood 184 wilberforce; what this widespread benevolence, in its strict nature, is ; we mean, as an agent for producing actual work. Emotion of every sort, all that portion, so to speak, of the mind which generates action, is simply a force \ whether it does good or evil, depends entirely on how it is directed. Steam lies for ages unknown as a moving power; then for ages it is used merely in mines and coal-pits ; at last it unites all lands by its iron highways, quickening the very pulse of the world, and making man finally victorious over every element. The tenderest pity, the most ardent love r can never be aught but a steam power; you must know precisely how to use it, or it steads you not. Nay, such a thing is plainly possible as that the force should do evil instead of good. In Hannibal's army at Zama, the ele- phants were turned back upon his own troops; it had been better if he had had no elephants. This is a principle which, when stated in terms, no one will deny ; but it is of vital importance, and is very apt to be practically lost sight of. The excellence of a man's sentiment is apt to cast a delusive brightness over his thought; when we listen to one whom we know to be a good man, the fervour of whose spirit delights and inspires, we feel it a thankless and ungrateful task to bring his schemes under the dry light of reason, and tell him that they are naught. Yet, when we come into contact with fact and reality, emotion goes for nothing; good intention is whiffed aside; no music of applause, no gilding of ora- tory, will keep the sinking ship afloat; it settles down like a mere leaky cask. Philanthropists must learn to look deeper than the first aspect of a project, to examine its ulterior bearings, to see how it allies itself with social laws; they must accustom themselves to resist the soft charm of plausible eloquence, to examine the bare truth AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 185 advocated, and to discern and accept this truth when recommended by no eloquence, and scarcely caught from stammering lips. Our second suggestion is this, That philanthropy should clear its eyesight by an acquaintance with that science which has for its object the laws of our social system. We care not how you name this science ; call it sociology, or poli- tical economy, or what you please; we merely say, that since all human affairs are inextricably interwoven, no man can rightfully hold himself entitled to put his hand to any part of the social fabric, without knowing how his act will affect other parts. There are only two possible hypo- theses on which the science of which we speak could be attacked; that there are no laws in economic and social matters, or that they are so profoundly mysterious, that an attempt to know them is prima facie absurd. The first, n% one, we suppose, since the days of Bacon, would main- tain. The second might be urged with some faint show of reason ; but we are convinced it is radically unsound. The freaks of individual will are countless; the soul of man is certainly the one thing, of all we know, which comes nearest to giving us the idea of infinitude; but it is assuredly true, on the other hand, that there are certain great laws which may be discerned acting in man's life from age to age, and that their general action may be traced and depended on. Political economy can be at- tacked by no arguments which do not militate against science in general; and to answer an argument levelled against modern science, would certainly be giving a suffi- cient reason to every reader to close our book. We think a little calm reflection will induce readers to agree, in what is with us a profound conviction, that philanthropy ought more and more to ally itself with social science, and 186 wilberforce; that the happiest results may be looked for from the union. Our last suggestion is perhaps the most important of all: it refers to the precise mode of going to work; to the manner in which agencies are to be made effective. And if we have hitherto ventured to oppose Mr Carlyle, we now turn round and take an arrow from his quiver. In every case where work is to be done, let the whole power of all engaged be brought to bear to this end to get men to do it. The whole might of Mr Carlyle's genius has been bent to the proclamation of one great truth the sumless worth of a man. Every thing else is dead. Constitutions of absolute theoretic perfection, laws of fault- less equity, riches and armies beyond computation, will be of themselves of no avail; men may put fire into these, but these will never fill the place of men. And the opera- tions of the Bible Society have, we believe, given tfce greatest confirmation to Mr Carlyle's words on this point ever furnished in the history of the world, or possibly to be furnished. It has given us one other proof that it is by man God will convert the world; the Bible itself, when alone, has not supplied the want. Here is the difficulty of difficulties. You can get gold by subscription; but a man of real power, of piety, faculty, energy, cannot be subscribed for. It is by the eye cleared and sharpened by long experience he can be recognised; it is by the saga- cious, powerful man, that the man of power is known; imbecility, seated on a mountain of gold, can do nothing here. And yet, till you get your men, nothing is done: if you give your gold to bad or incompetent men, it were belter that you flung it into the Thames. It must be fixed as an axiom in the heart of every philanthropist and phi- lanthropic society, that this is the point of absolute success AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 187 or absolute failure; it must be fairly comprehended, that it cannot be attained by mere examining of reports or any other mechanical process, although, indeed, each of these may contribute its aid; only, never for a moment is it to be forgotten that it must be done. Perhaps the great secret of getting at a practical test and assurance in this matter, lies in the discovery of some readily applicable method of ascertaining the real effects of a man's work in the sphere to which you appoint him. Offices might never be at first given for a permanence; by a continual casting away of the incompetent, the truly competent might gra- dually be found. We suspect this were the only infallible method. We are not blind to its difficulties, but any diffi- culties must be encountered in the only way to life, and for the avoidance of a death the more ghastly for its " affec- tation of life." If all the men employed by philanthropy, in its unnumbered schemes of instruction, were godly, earnest, and able men, what a power for good were then acting in our country and to the ends of the earth ! Then would Mr Carlyle have no word of objection to offer; nay, we believe he would heartily applaud, for we know well his nobleness, and that nothing would delight him so much as to be dazzled by a light of his own kindling. We think these suggestions of capital importance to the future advancement and real success of philanthropy. But they are, as we have here given them, to be looked upon in the light of finger-posts, indicating the way towards comprehensive reform, rather than unfolding the methods of such. Enough for us, if we have thrown out a few hints which may be of practical avail towards consolidating, invigorating, and ultimately extending its operations. If it is, on the hypothesis that it is attainable, and that work can be done by its agency, a noble form of exertion which 188 wilberforce; arises from union, sympathy, and the power of moral suasion, let us recognise a truly effective force in philan- thropy. If pestilent babblers will endeavour to possess our platforms, and to substitute mere ignorance and sen- timentality for knowledge and true manly compassion, let men of real power, by the might of those clear, strong words which an English audience really loves, strike them into harmless silence or benignant shame. If it is a fact, so boldly written on the forehead of our age, that its denial is an absurdity, and so firmly impressed upon our modern forms of life, that its alteration were an attempt to hide the steam-engine, to bury the press, to raze from the annals of man the French Revolution, that the voice of public opinion, whether right or wrong, does now rule Great Britain, let no true, and bold, and earnest man among us disdain to speak into the public ear by those thousand channels which determine the sound of that voice. Let Exeter Hall stand; shut no door where men are wont to assemble to listen to men ; but let every one who listens there scrutinise and judge in the awe of a fearful responsibility, and let every one speak as before God. When one surveys society in our days, and lays to heart how it is guided, he does not fail to learn, that the task of speaking words to a human assemblage just at pre- sent, is as the task of holding the lightnings. The conduct of the opposition to the Slave Trade, and the perpetual promotion and superintendence of philan- thropic operations, were those aspects of the life c/f Wil- berforce which first caught the eye, and stood out most boldly to the public gaze. Yet, perhaps, it is by some- what altering our point cf view that we gain a full and clear comprehension at once of the character in which he really was most serviceable to his country, of the fountain AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 189 whence each separate stream of his activity flowed, and of the highest lesson his walk conveys. Regard him in his sole capacity as a Christian man; look upon him as he moves in the circles of parliamentary ambition, in the full influence of that icy glitter which is the light and the warmth of those high regions. You then see how living Christianity, unassisted by the might of talent, can bear itself in the midst of political excitement and intrigue; you may then judge whether those ancient arms, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, have lost their heavenly temper. You find that, during his whole life, these never fail him. From fashion, and its loud pretence of joy, he turns aside; the atmosphere of faction is too foul for his purified organs; holding by the standard of truth and godliness alone, he be- comes himself a party. In a region unseen by the world, in the stillness of the closet, where only the all-seeing Eye is upon him, he lays open the recesses of his soul, that divine light may penetrate and pervade its every chamber; there, on his knees before God, he laments for secret sins, and pleads for holiness in his inner life; he looks earnestly and with severe honesty within; searching his heart with the Word of God as with a candle, that there may lurk in it no thought or feeling to exalt itself against the Most High. He then goes into Parliament and the world. By the gleam of the gold, it is seen that it has been purified by celestial fire; his light shines before men; they ac- knowledge it to be a steadfast flame, untainted by the dim atmosphere in which it glows, and ever pointed to heaven ; they are compelled to glorify the God whom he serves. He embodies the simple might of goodness; the serene majesty of light. He shows what that politician has won whose political scheme is briefly this, that he will follow 190 wilberforce; the Lord fully, and proves what a rectifying, healing, irra- diating power in human affairs is the awakened and vivid consciousness of immediate relationship to the Creator. He touches every question with the lthuriel spear of Christian truth, and the falsehood in it starts forth as by irresistible compulsion in its own image. And so, where the subject suggests doubt, where soft folds of plausibility are drawn over moral delinquency, or the shifting meteor of expediency offers itself for the pole-star of duty, men turn to Wilberforce ; look on this, they say, with your eye, we believe it has been purified by a light divine. To trace the various phases in which this distinctive godliness manifested itself in his parliamentary career, and to exhibit the various testimonies given to its heavenly virtue by the men with whom he worked, were to detail his actings from his twenty-sixth year. One instance serves for a thousand. We have all heard of the impeachment of Melville. Of his perfect innocence, or partial delinquency, it is not the place to speak. However it was, the case was one of pro- found interest in Parliament, and ministers were extremely anxious to screen him. Wilberforce was doubly drawn to come to a conclusion favourable to him. His heart was naturally of a delicately tender and kindly order, and his old friend Pitt had set his heart on clearing Melville. He examined the matter; but could not suppress the con- sciousness of grave doubts. He listened eagerly to the explanations offered by ministers, when the discussion came on in Parliament ; looking into them with the piercing flash of English shrewdness, quickened by godly earnestness, he saw, or thought he saw, them burned up as grass by lightning: he hesitated not a moment, but rose to his feet. The eye of Pitt was on him, with the pleading AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 191 of affection, and the authority of possessed esteem ; he felt the fascination of its gaze. But he faltered not: he spoke the bold, unmeasured words of Christian honour; he went against ministers, and condemned Melville. His words fell on an attentive house ; the number of votes he influ- enced was named at forty; ministers were defeated. It was felt that in a question of simple integrity, where casuistry had to be eluded, and plausibility swept aside, Wilberforce was the last authority. In the British senate in the nineteenth century, when a point of morality had to be settled, it was not to the man of poor duelling " honour," it was not to the philosophic moralist, it was not to the upright merchant, men looked for a decision : it was to the Christian senator, whose code was his Bible, and who walked, in childlike simplicity, by the old conversion light. Consider the number of opinions represented in that assem- bly, and then estimate the weight and worth of this testi- mony. Thus did Wilberforce, in his station in public affairs, conspicuously manifest to men the fresh and prevailing power of living Christianity, and testify its superiority to every other light. The book which he published was just the same testimony expressed in words. To criticise, however briefly, the "View of Practical Christianity," were now perfectly out of date. It was marked by no peculiar traits of genius, by no originality of thought or style. But it was clear, explicit, warm, and animated; over it all breathed the fervour of love and the earnestness of faith; it was an attempt to urge the pure gospel on the fashionable and worldly, and hold it, to use Milton's superb language, in their faces like a mirror of diamond, that it might dazzle and pierce their misty eyeballs. And man- kind did consent to listen to its pleading; it went round 192 wilberforce; the world: very few books have been so widely popular. It was published in 1797. Respecting the domestic life of Wilberforce, we require to say very little. Biography treats of the influences which mould character, of the influences which character ex- erts; if, in the circle of private life, there is any important element of influence, it must be noted; but, if biography were to regard a man not as before the world but as in his family, it would at onee descend from the office of in- structress to every noble faculty, and accept the miserable function of pampering a small and unmanly curiosity. The domestic life of Wilberforce was of that happy sort which defies long description. It can be but in rare cases that the description of the course of a river, if given mile by mile, is interesting ; even Wordsworth cannot persuade us to trace with him, more than onee, the course of that Dud- don, at whose every winding he has erected a mile-stone in form of a sonnet. The river rose among green craggy mountains ; in its joyful youth, it was the playmate of sun- beams, the dimpling, wavering, sparkling child, that dallied with the zephyrs, or leaped over the precipice, wreathing its snowy neck in rainbows ; as if in the strength of youth and manhood it flowed long through a bounteous and lordly champaign, of cornfield and woodland, resting calmly in the noonday sun, listening to the reaper's song; it widened into a peaceful estuary, its force becoming ever less, and in a silent balmy evening, lost itself in a placid ocean. This is all we wish to know about the river. Much the same is it in such a case as that before us. Wilberforce's boyhood, manhood, and old age, are aptly figured by such a sketch as this, and we desire to know little more about them. At the age of thirty-eight, he married; of the parti- cular circumstances and nature of his affection we are AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 193 unable to speak ; but we know that his was a happy- family, and that a congeniality in the highest tastes bound him in sympathising affection to his wife. In the arm- chair, or at the festal board, he was seen to the greatest advantage. By reading what he has left us, we can evi- dently form no idea of what he was either in Parliament or in his home. He expressly tells us that he did not succeed with his pen ; that the quickening excitement of society, the genial impulse of speech, caused his ideas to start forth in more vivid colours, in quicker and more natural sequence ; and we know that the particular power of both the orator and the wit, partakes so mueh of the nature of a flavour of an undefined and incommunicable essence, that a fame in that sort must always depend well-nigh entirely on testimony. A witticism without the glance that lent it fire, is often the dew-pearl without its gleam, a mere drop of water. But we cannot doubt for a moment that the social powers of Wilberforce were of an extraordinary order. The two qualities whose combi- nation gives probably the most engaging manner possible, are tenderness and quick sympathy ; the instantaneous ap- prehension of what is said, and its reception into the arms of a tender, sympathising interest. Wilberforce had both. His heart was very tender. To go from the country to the town, would affect him to tears. When John Wesley stood up and gave him his blessing, he wept. We have seen how he gave his testimony against Melville : hear now how they afterwards met; we quote Wilberforce's own words : " We did not meet for a long time, and all his con- nections most violently abused me. About a year before he died, we met in the stone passage which leads from the Horse Guards to the Treasury. We came suddenly upon each other, just in the open air, where the light struck upon our o 194 WILBERFORCE; faces. We saw one another, and at first I thought he was passing on, but he stopped and called out, 'Ah, Wilberforce, how do you do ?' and gave me a hearty shake by the hand. I would have given a thousand pounds for that shake." A generous and tender nature, capable of rich enjoyment. But he was also of keen apprehension, and for everything in nature or man he had a glance of sympathy ; provided always it lay in the sunlight, provided it had no guilt or baseness in it. Can we wonder that he was engaging? It is easy to present Wilberforce to the eye of imagina- tion seated in his arm-chair, the centre of a pleased and mirthful throng. Diminutive in size, with features spare and sharp, with vivid, sparkling eye, he does not rest, but has a tendency to jerk and fidget ; his face is piquant, mobile, varying in its lights and shades, like a lake in a sunny breezy April day. An idea is suggested by some one of the company ; a slight twinkle, an instantaneous change of light in his eye, shows he has caught it, and embraced it, and looked round and round it ; he tosses it about, as if from hands full of gold dust, till in a few moments it is wrapped in new light and gilding or he playfully trans- fixes it on the unpoisoned dart of a light, genial banter, shrewd and arch, which finds a way straight to the heart or his face grows solemn, and he utters, unostentatiously but earnestly, a few devout words regarding it Now his face is one free, indefinite, joyful smile now he mimicks some parliamentary orator now he is giving some little, graphic, faintly caustic sketch of character, with a sharp catching smile about his lips and now he listens quietly, a tear in his eye. Sir James Stephen, who doubtless was intimately acquainted with Wilberforce, compares his vivacity to Voltaire's, and sets his tenderness above that of Rousseau : Madame de Stael pronounced him the AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILANTHROPY. 195 wittiest man in England. But we are convinced that the most entirely satisfactory and expressive idea of his whole manner to be possibly reached, is to be found in these words of Mackintosh, who visited him when advanced in life : " Do you remember Madame de Maintenon's ex- clamation, ' Oli, the misery of having to amuse an old king, qui n'est pas amusable /' Now if I were called to describe Wilberforce in one word, I should say he was the most ' amusable ' man I ever met with in my life. Instead of having to think what subjects will interest him, it is per- fectly impossible to hit on one that does not. I never saw any one who touched life at so many points ; and this is the more remarkable in a man who is supposed to live ab- sorbed in the contemplation of a future state. When he was in the House of Commons, he seemed to have the freshest mind of any man there. There was all the charm of youth about him. And he is quite as remarkable in this bright evening of his days, as when I saw him in his glory many years ago." The concluding years of his life were calm and beauti- ful. He spent them at his country residence of Highwood. More and more his eye turned towards the home he was now nearing; through his vivacity, through his still fresh activity, there shone more and more the softening, mellow- ing light of holiness. He loved to expatiate under the open sky, to watch the dew-drops, to gaze long and with unsated delight upon flowers, the rising gratitude and de- light of his soul flowing forth in the words in which King David voiced similar feelings on the battlements of Zion, three thousand years ago. " Surely," he would say, " flowers are the smiles of God's goodness." In 1832, he passed tranquilly into his rest. Richly gifted by nature, Wilberforce never repaired the 196 WILBERFORCE. waste and dissipation of his faculties in those years when a man ought to be undergoing a serious and methodic edu- cation. The mighty intellectual powers were not his; the strength of far-reaching, penetrating thought, the compre- hensive and ordered memory, the imagination of inevitable eye and creative hand. Unless that perpetual glow of feeling, that free and exuberant fertility of wit, that na- tural power of eloquence and acting, come within the strained limits of a definition of genius, he certainly had none. But in the evening of his days he could look over his life, and recall the hour when he had devoted him- self to his Saviour, and thank God, without hypocrisy, that he had been enabled in measure to perform his vow. His life was not ineffective or dark; it was spent in the noblest manner in which a man can live, in advancing the glory of earth's eternal King, by blessing that creature man whom He has appointed its king in time; and over it there lies divine grace, uniting, harmonising, beautify- ing all, like the bow of God's covenant. In treating our next biographic subject, we are furnished with a fitting opportunity of noting, in certain important and suggestive particulars, the general mode in which the social relations would shape themselves out in a state of Christian freedom. Our glance here becomes wider; we touch upon the vital question of the relation between man and man, as free and equal members of one common- wealth; and we are thus appropriately introduced to our final chapter. CHAPTEE IY. BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. What is that one point in which nature surpasses all novelists and depicters of character, and by their relative approach to which, all such are to be ranked, from Shak- speare downwards? It is the union of variety with con- sistency. To draw the man of one idea is easy : you have just to represent him, in all circumstances however dis- tracting, with his thoughts running in one channel; on all occasions however irrelevant, introducing his favourite topic; and, unseduced by any evils incurred or benefits foregone, spending health and wealth in the indulgence of his propensity. Don Quixote, Mr Shandy, and my beloved Uncle Toby, are models in this sort. To draw the man who is a bundle of inconsistencies is also easy : to attain this, you have simply to pay no attention to what your character, as an individual, either says or does, putting your own opinions, on all subjects, into his mouth, making him act, in all cases, just as the hour suggests, and always exacting from him the heroism to abandon his own individuality, to contradict himself in opinion and action, in order to ad- vance your plot, or bring you out of a difficulty. Now, nature never produces a man whose whole existence is 198 BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. simply and solely one idea, although she comes very near it; for the most part her way is to give men a large va- riety of qualities, opinions, powers: the man of absolute in- consistency she never produces at all: her own unattainable skill is shown in the delicate graduation and adjustment of powers, so that they can live at peace in one bosom, and the man is a single personal identity. As she has struck a beautiful harmony in the senses, so that, in their variety, they result in unity, so does she unite variety with unity in the individual character; her men are not single lines, nor does she piece together contradictions ; weakness and strength in action, unless each is fitful, warmth and coldness of heart, clearness and obscurity of intellect, ge- nerosity and niggardliness of disposition, never co-exist. We deem this an important principle both in criticism and biography. Macaulay and Sir James Stephen have noted nature's variety, but we do not remember to have seen the whole truth of her variety in consistency stated. Shylock, cited by Macaulay, shows indeed many passions; but they are of a household; they have all a hellish scowl; hatred, revenge, avarice, fanaticism, darken his brow and eye, but they admit no alien gleam from love, forgiveness, or generosity; he is just such a character as nature would produce, and as he who held the mirror up to nature could paint. So it is in every other case instanced by Mr Macaulay, and so it must always be in nature. To ex- pound fully, and apply the principle, might make a valu- able chapter in criticism. But biography, and not criti- cism, is our present business. The dramatist or novelist, and the biographer, differ in this; the former have for their aim to attain, amid diversity, a natural harmony; the latter has nature's unity given, and his task is to show how its variations cohere and are consistent. When, after budgett: the christian freeman. 199 fair scrutiny, you find a character, in a novel or drama, acting inconsistently, decide that the author is so far in- competent; when you see a man in life acting in a manner which appears to you contradictory, conclude you do not understand him. To our task. About the beginning of this century there was, at the village school of Kimmersden, near Coleford, in Somerset- shire, a boy about ten years of age. He had been born at Wrington, another Somersetshire village, in 1794, of poor shopkeeping people, who seem to have been hard put to it to find a livelihood; for they went from village to village, seeking a sure though humble maintenance, and it was only after many a shift that they opened a little general shop in Coleford. He was in some respects dis- tinguished from his fellows. One day he picked up a horse-shoe, went with it three miles, and got a penny for it. He managed to lay together one or two other pennies, and commenced trading among his school- fellows. Lo- zenges, marbles, and so forth, were his wares. He sold to advantage, and his capital increased. By calculation on the prices charged in the shops, by buying in large and selling in small quantities, by never losing an opportunity or wasting a penny, by watching for bargains and stiffly insisting on adherence to their terms, he laid shilling to shilling, and pound to pound, until, at the age of fifteen, he was master of thirty pounds sterling. The spectacle cannot be called pleasing. A boy, whose feelings should have shared in the exuberance and free generosity of youth, converted into a premature skinflint and save- all; the frosty prudence of life's autumn crisping and kill- ing the young leaflets and budding blossoms of life's spring; a rivulet in the mountains already banked and set to turn a mill; surely the less we hear of such a boy the better budgett: the christian freeman. was he born with a multiplication table in his mouth? This boy's name was Samuel Budgett. A touch of romance is a salutary ingredient in character, in boyhood and youth it is particularly charming; but there is a possibility it may go too far, and a sentimental, tearful child, who is always giving some manifestation of the finer feelings of the heart, borders on the intolerable. There was at this same Kiminersden school (even in vil- lage schools variety of character will come out) a boy who seemed to be somewhat of this sort. When a little money came into his possession, he bought Wesley's Hymns, and of a summer evening you might have seen him walking in the fields, reciting his favourite pieces with intense enjoy- ment. His mother was once dangerously ill, and his father sent him on horseback, in the night, for medical assistance; as he rode back, in the breaking morning, he heard a bird sing in a park by the wayside ; he listened in strange delight, and seemed to receive some tidings from the carol. On reaching home, he went to his sister and gravely informed her that he knew their mother would recover, that God had answered his prayers on her account, and that this had become known to him as he heard a little bird sing in Mells Park that morning. Not one boy in a thousand we speak with deliberation would have marked that bird's song. On another day, you might have observed him coming along a lane on horseback ; as you looked, you saw that he was not thinking of his horse or his way; his eyes had an abstracted look, though animated and filled with tears; the bridle had fallen from his hand, and his horse was quietly eating grass. He was at the mo- ment in reverie; he was dreaming himself a missionary in far lands ; and the tears streamed down his cheeks as he knelt among tropical bushes, under a southern sun, to budgett: the christian freeman. 201 implore blessing on the household he had left at home. Such was the sentimental scholar of Kimmersden. And what was his name ? Samuel Budgett! Nature had framed no contradiction. The boy's heart was tenderly affectionate, his nature keenly sensitive, his sympathies rich, kindly, poetie: but his young eyes had seen nothing but struggling and penury in his father's house; he had learned, by natural shrewdness and happy occasion, the lesson of thrift: he had a brain as clear and inventive as his heart was warm ; by accident or other- wise, the pleasurable exercise of his faculties in that juve- nile trading commenced, and with the relish of a born merchant he followed out the game. The money itself was little more to him than the men are to a born chess- player; its accumulation merely testified that all worked well. The coalescence and relative position of the two sets of qualities were sometimes finely shown ; he wasted no money, yet he lost no time in buying Wesley's Hymns ; he amassed thirty pounds in a few years of boyish trad- ing, but when the sum was complete he gave it all to his parents. Having come finally to the decision to be a merchant, and adopting it as his ambition to raise his family to tole- rably affluent circumstances, he was apprenticed at the age of fifteen to an elder brother, by a former marriage, who had a shop in Kingswood, a village four miles from Bristol. His education, now formally completed, had, in all relating to books, been meagre enough. He had learned to read, write, and to some extent count; no more. In other re- spects, it had been more thorough. He had already, in his boyish mercantile operations, served an apprenticeship to clearness of head, promptitude and firmness in action; his father's house had been a school of rare excellence ; so 202 BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. rare, that, on the whole, flinging in Pocklington Academy, and St John's College Oxford, and the Gallery of the House of Commons, into the opposite scale, we do not hesi- tate a moment in pronouncing his education superior to that of Wilberforce. In that house he saw honesty, in- dustry, determination, and godliness; he saw how severe the struggle for existence really is ; he saw how faculties must be worked in order to their effective exercise. Of special importance was that portion of his education which consisted in the influence of his mother's godliness. He was still a child of nine, when he happened one day to saunter past her room; the door was shut, and he heard her voice. She was engaged in prayer, and the subject of her petitions was her family. He heard his own name. His heart was at once touched, and from that moment it turned towards heaven. We deem it a very beautiful family incident. The heart of that mother was probably heavy at the moment, her eyes perhaps filled with tears; yet God heard her, and on herself was bestowed the angelic office of answering her own prayer. Samuel Budgett went to apprenticeship from his father's house, a steady, kindly, radically able, and religious youth. His apprenticeship was not such as to permit his habits of perseverant industry to be broken or to relax. He was at the counter by six in the morning, " and nine, ten, or eleven at night," were the ordinary hours of closing. The toil he underwent was such, that he used to speak of it till the close of his life. He was of small strength, and little for his years; the exertion of the grocer's business was doubtless too much for him. He soon became a favourite with customers, his manner was so unaffectedly kind, his attention so close and uniform. It is interesting also to budgett: the christian freeman. 203 observe the keen thirst for knowledge which he displayed during those years. If he heard a sermon, he treasured it up like a string cf pearls, and adjourned at its close to some sequestered place, to con it over, and lay it up in his inmost heart. What books came in his way he eagerly devoured ; for poetry he showed a keen relish, and com- mitted large portions to memory. He exclaims, almost in anguish, "O wisdom! knowledge! the very expres- sions convey ideas so delightful to my mind, that I am ready to leap out and fly; for why should my ideas always be confined within the narrow compass of our shop walls?" A shop-boy with so genuine and fixed an aspiration after knowledge will scarce fail to find education. The power to act nobly and effectively may exist with little book knowledge: to know living men, to have sat long under the stern but thorough teaching of experience, to have a sympathy open to the unnumbered influences of exhaust- less and ever-healthful nature, may set a man above those who have studied all things at second hand, as seen through other eyes, and represented by feeble human speech. Budgett had the faculty to work well; he was acquiring a thorough knowledge of men and a power to measure them at a glance; he loved the open fields and skies, the summer woods and the river bank, and every smile and frown of the ever changing but ever expressive face of what the ancients well called our Mother Earth. About the time when his apprenticeship closed, in August, 1816, we find him writing thus to a friend : " As it respects my coming to Frome, I thank you for your kind invitation. I have intended going; but I assure you, when it comes to the point, 1 have no inclination to go anywhere; for, if I cannot find happiness at home, it is in vain to seek it anywhere else. I think if I were to come with the deter- 204 BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. mination to enjoy the company of my friends, by going to any places of recreation or amusement, though I am very fond of such kind of engagements, particularly where reli- gion and real happiness is the subject of conversation, yet it may tend rather to divert ray mind from God as the source of my happiness, than unite it to him. But for one thing I have long felt an earnest though secret desire; which is, to spend a little time with you and Mr T alone, where no object but God could attract our atten- tion; that we may, by devout conversation, by humble, fervent, faithful prayer, get our souls united to each other, and to God our living Head, by the strongest ties of love and affection." The young man who writes thus from be- hind a grocer's counter, has pretty well supplied the de- fects of his education; in important respects he is edu- cated. The idea of the last sentence is that of the noblest possible friendship; we can look for no fairer spectacle than that of those three friends kneeling before God, that the celestial bond of a common love for Him may knit their hearts. And it is worthy of remark, that the style of our extract is unquestionably good; clear, nervous, direct, and free from any trace of juvenile bravura. The reader will begin to see that our opinion of Samuel Budgett is somewhat high. It is so. We consider him far the ablest man of whom we have yet treated; a cha- racter of uncommon breadth and completeness ; an embodi- ment of English sagacity, intelligence, energy, and piety, as healthful and respectable as any time could show; and conveying, in his life-sermon, many and most important lessons, as the Christian merchant and freeman of the nine- teenth century. After serving for three years with a salary, on the ex- budgett: the christian freeman. 205 piration of his seven years' apprenticeship, Samuel was taken into partnership by his brother. He feels now that he has got a firm footing, that a spot had been found in the world on which he may live and work. He prepares himself for the future accordingly. A pleasant little background of romance suddenly beams out upon us. We find that long ago " very early" he had fallen in love with a certain Miss Smith, of Mid- somer Norton. His little touch of originality had been mani- fested here too; he had ventured to admit hope into his heart to this serious extent; he had dared to permit imagina- tion to paint, in clear hues and with a flush of sunlight over its front, a snug pretty little cottage on his horizon, with one waiting at its threshold who to him seemed heavenly fair; and so, during all his toil in that dismal prosaic shop from morning to night, he could see in the distance that angelic figure smiling him on. We rejoice that we did not express any emotion of pity for him in his affliction; he certainly deserved none. He had now reached that little cottage; from the faint though beautifully-tinted work of a dream, it had changed into solid brick, a decided improvement: he married Miss Smith, and turned to face life with the heart of a man. He was now twenty-five years of age. Let us, for a moment, contemplate the sphere in which Samuel Budgett commences work for himself; what are his prospects, and what his difficulties. His sphere is not imposing ; it is a retail shop in the grocery business, in the village of Kingswood, four miles from Bristol. In the neighbouring villages, and in Bristol, are multitudes of shops in all respects similar; his brother is a respectable, industrious, plodding man, who has prospered hitherto according to his ambition, and dreams not of any change. 206 budgett: the christian freeman. Around all these shops, and around this little shop of Kingswood, lies the world ; each shop represents a man or men, combating on this arena for sustenance and success. There seems but little room for advancement, little scope for talent; one can but buy and sell like one's neighbours, and live as heretofore ; at all events, the field is open and level to all. Mercantile wealth and honour are, indeed, the possible prizes; but that a village shop should ever come into competition with any really great establishment, with those of Bristol, for instance, appears never to have occurred to any one. The little shop of Kingswood re- ceives into its working power Samuel Budgett; his pro- spects are such as one may have in a village grocery; his opponents are just all the grocers, wholesale and retail, who carry on business in these parts, and whom, if he is to advance, he must, however it may pain his feelings, compel to make way. The new partner is found to have ways of his own, which, in this establishment, must be regarded as new- fangled or even officious. His brother casts a glance of indifference, or even dislike, upon his proposals and pro- ceedings; only after a time, and as the commanding talent of Samuel becomes more plain, does he fairly throw the reins into his brother's hands. The latter acts in the way natural to him. It may be briefly characterised thus; he does, with perfect accuracy and thoroughness, what lies to hand, what is ordinary and established in the routine of business, and he has always, besides, a sure and piercing glance ahead and around. Now, we think this is the pre- cise point of difference between the accurate, methodic man, who will conserve all, but make no advancement, and the man who will step onward; both are thorough workers, but the one has no originality, no instinct of im- budgett: the christian freeman. 207 provement, no healthful, intelligent audacity, while the other has. The blundering man, again, the man whose boldness and originality are not so fitly those of manhood as of youth, looks only, or principally, forwards; he de- votes not sufficient time and energy to the ground already won, he will set off in foolish pursuit while a body of the enemy is yet unbroken on the field. The man who will make real progress never neglects the business of the mo- ment, but he looks forward too; he ventures, on the right occasion, in the strength and self-reliance of talent, to break through old sanctioned rules and shape new ones for himself. The truly and healthfully original man is not he who recklessly gambles, appealing from custom to chance, but he who, with a light of his own, holding as little of chance as the prudence of the veriest plodder, appeals from custom to vision. Such a light had Samuel Budgett; in this sense, and to this extent, he was an original man. Now, it is not easy to exhibit this originality of Bud- gett's in action. When once a thing is done, as Columbus and that wonderful Chinese genius who discovered that pigs could be roasted without burning houses knew, its performance, nay its invention, seem the simplest things in the world. If we trace Budgett's career, step by step, we find nothing in the course of his ascent to wealth and influence, which it does not seem certain that we should have done, had we been in the circumstances. Yet it is almost certain we should have done otherwise; and we have this simple way of satisfying ourselves as to the pro- bability that we should viz., by inquiring whether, mutatis mutandis, we are advancing in our own sphere. In every walk of life there are certain minutiae which are visible only to the man of insight, and to be seized only by the 208 BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. man of tact, but which are yet the tender, scarce percep- tible filaments leading to fortune's mines. If you know not how to see and seize these in your own department, de- pend upon it, gentle reader, had you been put down, instead of Samuel Budgett, in this shop at Kingswood, you had sold groceries over the counter all the days of your life. Mr Arthur sketches, with much animation and graphic power, the progress of Budgett, as he pushed on, step by step, and won position after position ; but we are unable to follow him. The reader must picture to himself a man of untiring activity who is yet never flurried, of keen and constant sagacity, of tact in dealing with men, of real and abounding affection to his fellows, so that the interest he manifests in their affairs has in it no element of deceit or affectation. He must mark him ever in the van of circum- stance, discerning opportunity from afar, and seizing it with eagle swoop. He must see him gradually diffusing a spirit akin to his own on all who come within the sphere of his influence; incapacity, indolence, and dishonesty, shrinking from his look. He must note specially the skill with which he combines conservation with advance. The customer who is secured is always first to be attended to; all thought of extending the trade is to be postponed to his convenience; the shops which deal with Budgett are seen to be the most prosperous, and no customer is ever lost. To look at the perfect internal working of the busi- ness, one fails to find any suggestion of progress; to mark how it is expanding, one is apt to think extension the one endeavour. Budgett has always his foot on the firm ground, but the light in his eye comes from yon bright gleam still in the distance. One example of his mode of working is as good as a thousand, and only one can we find space to give. budgett: the christian freeman. 209 The business has now branched out in all directions. There are "several establishments" in Bristol; the retail shop is the centre of great warehouses and counting-houses ; at Kingswood there are kept forty-seven draught horses. One night the citizens of Bristol are startled by the red- dening of the whole horizon in the direction of Kingswood Hill; the warehouses of the Messrs Budgett are in flames. The men of Bristol stand gazing as the huge blaze illu- mines the sky ; from all neighbouring quarters there is a flocking of spectators, and a racing of engines. Efforts are vain; the horses, indeed the stables, and the books, are preserved; but warehouses, counting-houses, and the retail shop, are burned to the ground. Samuel Budgett has not, of course, forgotten to insure, yet the pecuniary loss is above three thousand pounds. Here surely is enough to confuse one; without warning, and in a night, the fury of fire consumes your accumulated substance, and puts its volcanic interruption on your arrangements ; your workmen are flung out of their posts, your methods of work are broken up, your whole business-machine is torn limb from limb, and lies scattered in fragments. Now is the hour to prove whether you are a man of self-com- mand and originality ; whether your mind is of that iron order which the sound of battle only clears and animates; whether, when custom, on which, as on a quiet horse, you have hitherto ridden composedly along, suddenly pitches you from its neck and leaves you sprawling, you have courage and power to rise to your feet, and lay your hand on a new steed, and vault on his back, and break him in for yourself. Budgett sees into the whole matter, and comprehends how it is to be managed, precisely as if he had done nothing, his life long, but set things in train after sudden fires. The next morning, every customer 210 budgett: the christian freeman. expecting goods on that day from the Budgetts receives a circular. It states briefly, that there has been a fire on the premises, and that one day is necessary to repair the consequent disarrangement. Just one day; in such length of time, Samuel calculates, the wrath of the fire will have been baulked. And one day is sufficient. He goes swiftly, but with no hurry, into Bristol, hires a new house, sets all hands to work, and the next day sees all customers served. Bristol henceforward becomes head-quarters, and Samuel Budgett, who is now the sole head of the busi- ness, more powerful than ever. This is the true English working talent ; the same quiet, speedy energy you see in Churchill, in Monk, and, in grander combination, in Cromwell; in whatever form it is embodied, there is no standing it; men, nations, nature itself, give way before it. We think we may now allege that Budgett was a man of strong and ready energy, of calm, indomitable spirit, and of extraordinary resource; but this will become still more evident when we contem- plate, at one deliberate glance, his final attainment. It was but an unpromising sphere in which we saw him finally set to work ; a village shop, with a line of donkeys at its door. There he took his post to measure himself with his opponents, to bring his force into the general system of social dynamics. Years have gone by, and the never-failing might of intellectual power has vindicated itself. The force of Budgett's mind has affected the whole region. His warehouses tower proudly, like those of merchant princes ; over all the south-western counties of England his connection extends; over the sea, from distant lands, come vessels with cargoes for him. It is probable that a greater effect was not possible in his department. He was not in the arena of the Rothschilds and Barings, budgett: the christian freeman. 211 and we cannot say how he would have prospered if matched against the great rulers of the Stock Exchange. But in the field where he did contend, he distanced all competition ; without capital, without prestige, in a village in the vicinity of a large town, he built up a business which cast every rival into the shade. And those ware- houses have been built, this magnificent business has been established, with no fortuitous aid from happy conjunctures of circumstance, or timeous openings of the field; it has been by seeing the hitherto invisible, by descrying every trace of occasion, by the constant, imperceptible applica- tion of a clear and tireless intellect, that his triumphs have been won. And now he is a man of wealth and importance ; he has satisfied his youthful ambition. The day was when he sold cheese by the pound across the counter; he now receives goods " by the cargo," and sells them "by the ton;" the day was when it was a serious question whether goods might be conveyed to Doynton and Pucklechurch, a momentous and amazing undertaking to journey once a-month to Frome; he has now a regular staff of efficient travellers, spreading the connection north, south, east, into the very heart of England. M I remember," said an old man, who felt like a Caleb Bal- derstone on the subject " I remember when there were five men and three horses, and I have lived to see three hundred men and one hundred horses." We think it here in place, although what we have to say must be considered with the commentary of all we have yet to relate of Budgett, to look calmly in the face certain objections which have been urged against him on the score of sharp trading. He rose, it has been whis- pered, by elbowing aside his fellows, by grasping, with unbecoming haste and eagerness, what, in natural order, 212 budgett: the christian freeman. would have fallen to other men ; if j ust, he was not gene- rous ; he gave no indulgence, and made no allowance ; he pressed every advantage, and used every opportunity ; he seemed always at a running pace, while sober men walked. We deem it the one really important defect in Mr Arthur's spirited and valuable work on Budgett, that he takes the commonplace, and, as we think, erroneous view of his character here. As his testimony may be considered somewhat partial to Budgett, and as it is well to have an error which you wish to combat stated in its most plausi- ble form, we quote a paragraph from his pages. He has just intimated that the subject of his narrative was " quick to descry an advantage, and resolute to press it;" he pro- ceeds thus: "This . . . formed the chief deduction from the benevolence of his character. In business he was keen deliberately, consistently, methodically keen. He would buy as scarcely any other man could buy ; he would sell as scarcely any other man could sell. He was an athlete on the arena of trade, and rejoiced to bear off the prize. He was a soldier on the battle-field of bargains, and conquered he would not be. His power over the minds of others was immense, his insight into their cha- racter piercing, his address in managing his own case masterly, and, above all, his purpose so inflexible, that no regard to delicacy or to appearances would for a moment beguile him from his object. He would accomplish a first-rate transaction, be the difficulty what it might. That secured, his word was as gold, and generosity was welcome to make any demands on his gains. But in the act of dealing, he would be the aptest tradesman in the trade. To those who only met him in the market, this feature of his character gave an unfavourable impression. They frequently felt themselves pressed and conquered, budgett: the christian freeman. 213 and naturally felt sore. To those who knew all the excel- lence and liberality which lay beneath this hard mercan- tile exterior, it appeared the peculiarity and the defect of an uncommonly worthy man yet still a defect and a peculiarity." If Mr Arthur is wrong here, it is an important error. Whatever you may consider, in forming your judgment of a merchant, his manner of carrying on business is the first and the essential element in your estimate. If a man is found wanting here, all you can say of his other good qualities becomes mere extenuation. If there was any- thing in Budgett's mercantile dealing to be defined " a deduction from his benevolence," it will go hard to prove him really benevolent at all. His radical character is that of English merchant; this, so to speak, is the back- bone of the whole existence of Budgett; if you detect a twist here, or if the spinal marrow is diseased, you will hardly prove your man handsome or sound. Every mouth must be stopped that breathes the slightest insinuation here ; from his mercantile honour every imputation must be brushed aside; and, by mercantile honour, we mean all that thorough gentlemen can rightfully and honourably expect from each other when engaged in trade. For our own part, we think that Budgett's native and power- ful talent is attested in perfect accordance with the require- ment we have just stated; while it is precisely here that he embodies one of those lessons which nature repeats from age to age, and which is, perhaps, peculiarly deserving of study and of enforcement in our day. We must ask, first, what is the general law on this point: how does nature arrange in the matter? In all professions and trades, certain contending forces are brought into play. No man denies that the faculties 214 BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. of respective men, their sagacity, their energy, their per- severance, are different. Every profession is, in one im- portant and invariable aspect, a form of exertion of human faculty, an arena of power; and it is all but implied in this, that in every profession there will be degrees of suc- cess and failure. From this last circumstance it will be an inevitable result, that certain persons find themselves surpassed, beaten, thwarted, and that they feel pain in consequence. It is one of the sad consequences of the fall, irremediable save by a reversal of that fall, but, like other such painful phenomena, itself of remedial tendency in the body politic, that every man who rises in any profession must tread a path more or less bedewed by the tears of those he passes on his ascent. The incompetent or indo- lent soldier takes commands from his able and active com- rade who has left the ranks; the able and indefatigable physician absorbs the practice of the dullard or the em- piric; the lawyer, whose logic is as a Damascus sabre, and who wields it like an Arab arm, condemns his heavy- eyed or careless brother to starve. There may be no envy and no hate ; there may be no feeling of indignation and no affixing of blame ; but there will be, at least, the pain of privation, of failure. More peculiarly does this apply to mercantile professsions. Here the precise mode in which talent is brought to bear, is in making money: if you are so much abler than your neighbour, you win so much the more money than he; and, as your relative winnings are drawn from a common store, namely, the purse of the pub- lic, the more you have, the less he gets. Depend upon it, he will in these circumstances feel " sore." It is the producing of this soreness which has been objected to Bud- gett; we deem it a necessary and salutary pain, and con- sider it just and honourable in him to have inflicted it. budgett: the christian freeman. 215 What, we inquire further, are the components of that force which a man brings rightfully into the arena of hia profession, what means is it perfectly honourable in him to use for his own advancement? "We answer simply, its components are twofold it consists of capital andof faculty ; we contend it is his right and duty to use each to the utmost. In some professions, intellectual power constitutes the whole force ; but it is not so in commercial affairs. It is honour- able, as will not be questioned, to lay out at fair interest the money or other capital which is yours. It is precisely as honourable, we contend, to use to its last item of value the faculty which nature has committed to your charge. If you see the gleam of a gold vein where I saw only clay, the reward is justly yours; if you know the ground where corn will grow better than I, your sheaves must be more numerous than mine ; if you have stronger sinew and more perseverance, and choose to toil for hours in the westering sun after I have unyoked my team, you must lay a wider field under seed than I. And no upright or manly feeling in me will permit me to accuse you when you thus work your faculties to the utmost ; the pearls are for him that can dive, the golden apples for him that can climb ; I am no brave man if I bid you bate your energies out of pity or misnamed courtesy, and if you listen to such request, you incur the responsibility of show- ing, at the last, a return on your talents not so great as He will know to be possible, who gave you them to oc- cupy till His coming. Nature, and we use the word to de- signate reverently the method of His working who is nature's power, intends every faculty to be used to the utmost. A man who expects less from his competitors than an unsparing use of all their means, is a coward ; a man who aims at having more than the full use of his own, is a churl. 216 BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. There are two positive and conclusive proofs that this is nature's intention, which we shall presently adduce. But, first, we would ask, does not this view of the case accord with the general feeling and sense of men ? Is it not a bitter insult to a man who is on an equal footing with yourself, to temper your powers till they can act without in any way annoying him, to disguise your faculties that he may not feel his weakness ? Is it not recognised, that if one man sees where he can make a bargain honourably and openly where another man is blind, and, instead of availing himself of the opportunity, apprises his neighbour of its whereabouts, he does virtually give the latter a dole? Assuredly, there is a distinction drawn between that profit which results from the dealing of one man with an- other of a purely mercantile nature, and for which no thanks are looked for, however great it may be, and the profit for which one has to thank another, which is a favour and gift in all essential points, however slight. Leaving this, however, we offer these two considerations as demonstrating the fact that nature means and commands men, without asking any questions, and in every depart- ment of affairs, to use their talents to the utmost. The first is, That this is nature's method of spurring on the indolent, and having her work rightly done. Every true man is a whip in nature's hand to scourge on the laggard ; if he works rightly, he must be so. And if there is whipping, there must be feeling. What is it which keeps the human race in progress at all ? what is it which prevents our sitting down by the wayside and falling into a half-sleep, and, finding what will merely suffice for an animal existence, moving onward no more? Is it not just that, at intervals, in the several corps of the army, a strong and determined spirit starts up, who will strike forwards budgett: the christian freeman. 217 with new speed, and, despite the remonstrance of the sloth- ful, animate the whole battalion to new life and energy ? Nature makes you pay for every hour of sleep or plea- sure beyond the number she approves; and he whom she appoints to receive for her the payment, is the man who has worked while you have slept or danced. But, secondly, it is found that nature is here kind also; that, however individuals may smart and grumble, this method subserves most effectually the interests of the majority. Her aim is thoroughness of work and amount of produce ; when these are attained, the interests of the common weal are best consulted. And, to reach this, it is necessary that all the faculty of the community be at work, and to its utmost strain. One man cannot pos- sibly restrain the honourable action of his powers for the sake of the feelings of another, without the loss of a certain amount of that force by which nature carries on her operations, and provides for her children: kindness must blunt no sword or scythe, or it will cause ten to weep instead of one. The idea of charity, we conclude, is alien to the idea of trade ; all that can be demanded, under the name of mer- cantile honour, is simple justice. We are happy to be able to illustrate these remarks, es- pecially the second of our proofs, that nature intends no respect to be shown to individual feeling in mercantile competition, by a glance at the general effect of the suc- cess of Samuel Budgett in the south-west of England. That effect was a general increase in the animation and vigour of his order of commercial operations over the district. The customers caught the spirit of those who had so ably secured their custom ; the firms still able to contend bestirred themselves; there was new activity every- 218 budgett: the christian freeman. where. In one word, nature's work was better done in those quarters than formerly. Mr Arthur appears to be all unconscious of that very important aspect of the ope- rations of the commercial class in every country which we have indicated. He recognises the duty of each man to provide for himself; he recognises the duty of every man to "adapt his services to the general good;" but he does not perceive that, in the thorough performance of this last task, the man may find it impossible to avoid giving pain to certain of his own class. The confusion into which he falls arises from his failing to distinguish the " general interest" of the public, as contrasted with the in- dividual interest of members of the class of merchants. He starts with a condemnation of Budgett for inflicting " soreness" on those with whom he dealt ; but he never says, and his whole book is an affirmation of the opposite, that he did not work as effectually for the public good as was possible. It was his brother merchants alone who suffered ; it was in the market he was harsh ; it was the ex- treme thoroughness of his performance of that task which Mr Arthur accurately defines as the merchant's in the social system, the task of "directly conveying the creatures of God into the hands" of those for whom they are intended, which made him at times obnoxious to those who performed the same task, from whatever cause, not quite so thoroughly. We recognise, in fact, here, the radical strength and stamina of Budgett's character: we point to the circum- stances urged in objection, as conclusive proof that his mind was hale and of strong fibre; that vital Christianity had introduced no softness or incapacity for working to the utmost of his powers into his nature. Mr Arthur in- forms us his aim was unimpeachable honour and his word gold. We know, too, that money was not his object; budgett: the christian freeman. 219 that wealth was a matter for which he cared very little. The proof of this important point is perfect. He did not cling, with miserly tenacity, to business to the last ; he took matters quietly, and strove after no further extension when life was still strong in him. After he had ceased to attend with his old impelling vigour to the affairs of the firm, he heard some one say he wished for more money. " Do you?" he exclaimed; " then I do not* I have quite enough. But if I did wish for more, I should get it." On his death-bed, when his voice was tremulous with the last weakness, he deliberately said, " Riches I have had as much as my heart could desire, but I never felt any pleasure in them for their own sake, only so far as they enabled me to give pleasure to others," &c. ; and we know him to have been a man, out of the market, of a gene- rosity which might be deemed extravagant. His brother merchants did, unquestionably, at times feel themselves disagreeably overborne, did experience an uneasy sensa- tion and call him keen and harsh; it is always unplea- sant to pay tribute, and these men were commanded by nature to pay tribute to Budgett as their king. And why did he, who had no particular desire for money, and an acute feeling of any pain he gave, thus permit himself, we cannot doubt consciously, to pain his brother mer- chants? It was the strong instinct of the born merchant in his heart, the strong instinct of the true man. He could not dishonour his competitors by supposing them incapable of the stern joy of warriors in worthy foemen; he could not rein his steeds that stumbling or laggard hacks might reach the goal before him; he could not, without intense suffering, curb the faculties nature had given him, or turn them from their work. They felt sore, to be sure. Did the sectioners feel sore when they arrived at the camp of 220 BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. Sablons, " some minutes" too late, and found that Napoleon had clutched the guns? But was it not right that the quick mind and ready hand should have them? In the market, Budgett knew instinctively that integrity ruled, that charity and favour were alien to the place; had he won counters instead of guineas, he would have acted just in the same way. We can imagine him even having had compunctious touches, but a sterner and healthier feeling overruled pity, and held it firmly in its place. " I'd give the lands of Deloraine Brave Musgrave were alive again;" so said generous William, although he had just explained that, were Musgrave actually alive again, it would be ne- cessary for him, by the rules of Border honour, at once to rekill him. Our whole argument, in defence of Budgett, falls to the ground, if it can be proved that, in his habitual dealing, there was the slightest infraction of equity, the slightest departure from the rules of the game ; but, when we per- ceive that all the pain occasioned to his rivals in the mar- ket can be accounted for in the simple, rational, and pro- bable way we have seen, since we are absolutely certain he had no particular love of money, and since we find his hand to the full as ready to give as to gain, we confidently declare his sharp, or, as we should prefer saying, his thorough dealing in business to have been no deduction from his benevolence, but to have been a testimony of remarkable point and conclusiveness to the general force and ability of his character. To any man that needed a helping hand, we cannot doubt he would have extended one, but if you met him on the field, you were foot to foot and eye to eye opposed, and mercy could come only in the form of con- tempt. Saladin sent Cceur-de-Lion a horse that he might budgett: the christian freeman. 221 fight like a knight, but did he bate his sabre when he met him on the battle-plain? We have thus, then, got, so to speak, the framework of our man ; we find that it is the unflawed iron of integrity, clear insight, and energy; he is a man who can thoroughly work. But we saw that, in his boyhood, there was not only a stern but a gentle aspect of his character ; we may find now that this iron framework of his manhood is wreathed with pleasant verdure and dewy flowers. We have seen him when he had simply to measure his strength; we must survey him now as a master, as a member of society philanthropically desirous of removing its evils, and as a father. Entering the central establishment where, as we have seen, hundreds of men are employed, we find that the whole works with faultless regularity. The genius of English industry seems to have chosen the place as a temple. There is no fuss, little noise ; there is no haste no time for that. The face of every workman shows that he may not linger ; its firm lines at the same time de- clare that he has no wish to do so. Hearty activity, health- ful contented diligence are seen on every hand. The im- mense daily business is timeously transacted, and the hours of evening see the place shut and silent. Samuel Budgett is the mainspring of the whole vast machine. Under the middle size, with strong brows, open forehead, and lower features firm and clearly cut, he may at once be discerned to be a man who can dare and do : his "quick brown eye" glances everywhere, and over- looks nothing ; its light makes the wheels go faster. He speaks a word of encouragement to the active, he sends an electric look to the indolent ; it is plain his autho- 222 bddgett: the christian freeman. rity is unquestionable, and that he retains and uses it with- out an effort. Bungling of no sort, be it from want of power or want of will, can live in his glance ; he can de- tect falsehood lurking in the depths of an eye, and veiling itself in the blandest smile ; he has a tact and ready inven- tion which find a quiet road to every secret ; only perfect thoroughness of work and perfect honesty of heart can stand before him. Yet the kindly and approving is evi- dently his most natural and cherished look; he' speaks many a word of sympathy and kindness ; the respect and perfect deference which wait on his steps are tempered by affection. We find that, as a master, he is, first of all, thorough. His men have a profound knowledge that he is not to be trifled with. The incompetent, the indolent, are discharged. A man must perform what he has taken in hand, or he must go. " Why, sir," said one who had been long in his service, "I do believe as he would get, ay, just twice as much work out o' a man in a week, as another master." This power of infusing a true working spirit into men ex- plains his whole success. Conceive every man he em- ployed working thoroughly, no workman dawdling, no traveller loitering, every customer finding himself punc- tually and perfectly attended to ; everything else becomes then conceivable. He has the gift of knowing men ; for him who would prosper in any sort of practical endeavour, it is the indispensable gift. Upon this thoroughness and penetration it was of course again an attendant, that pain was felt in certain quarters ; rotten branches, ineffec- tive workmen, could not be cut away without crashing and crackling: here, too, we meet that fine confirmatory evi- dence of his real power and energy, that he awakened com- plaints on the part of those in whom these were lacking. budgett: the christian freehan. 223 We learn, next, that he has a warm and honest sym- pathy with his men. It is not the result of their work in the shape of his own profit which gratifies him, so much as the satisfaction and advantage of all who work along with him. We find no niggardliness, no appearance of strain, in his efforts to attain wealth. If he gets more work out of men than other masters, his employed get more from him in the best forms than other men. At the time of his entering partnership, the working hours are from six in the morning to nine at night. This goes against the new partner's grain. "I do not like to see you here," he would say to the employed; " I want to see you at home : we must get done sooner." Dismissal at half-past eight is attempted, and the men are greatly relieved. But this is only a commencement. If there are too few men, more can be added ; if there is trifling, men must go altogether. As the business enlarges, the time shortens, and Samuel does not rest until he sees his men all trooping off cheerily to their families at five or half-past five in the evening. Keep these two parallel attainments in view, when you estimate the generosity and mercantile honour of Budgett. There is, in the establishment, a regular system of fines ; but the head or heads pay most, and the whole goes to a sick fund. There is an annual festival given to the men ; good cheer, athletic games, and a certain amount, we trust moderate, of speech-making, speed the hours ; the Rev. Mr Carvasso, hearing our merchant speak on one such oc- casion, thinks his address of "an extraordinary character," wishes it had been printed, and adds, " Except on that oc- casion, I never beard him come out in a set public address, but the talent then displayed convinced me of the grasp of his mind, and how greatly some had mistaken him." There is a systematic distribution of small rewards from 224 budgett: the christian freeman. week to week ; Budgett stands at a certain outlet to the premises with a pocketful of little packages containing money, and slips one into each man's hand as he passes out ; " One would find he had a present of five shillings, another of three, another of half-a-crown ; " the gift is graduated by respective merit. " Ah, eir," exclaims an old informant, " he was a man as had no pleasure in muckin' up money ; why, sir, he would often in that way give, ay, I believe, twenty pounds on a Friday night well, at any rate, fifteen pounds." Besides this, certain of the employed are made directly to feel their interest in the success of the business. " When a year wound up well, the pleasure was not all with the principals ; several of those whose dili- gence and talent had a share in gaining the result, found that they had also a share in the reward." " One," Mr Arthur goes on to say, " after describing the pains Mr Bud- gett had taken to make him master of his own branch of the business, and how, when satisfied with his fitness, he had devolved upon him important responsibilities, said, with a fine feeling which I should love to see masters generally kindle among those in their employment, ' And he never had a good year, but I was the better for it when stock- taking came.' " But, last and most important of all, Budgett, in his capacity as master, is a religious man a real, earnest Christian. We have not now to ask whether his energy is unimpeded and unrelaxed, whether his powers have their full swing; but it is important to learn of what sort his religion is, and to what extent it pervades his life, that we may know whether it is of a nature to be pronounced effete whether it is, on the one hand, a deistic fashionable assent to Christianity, or, on the other, a cramped fanati- cism or bigotry, not blending in kindly union with the budgett: the christian freeman. 225 general modes of his existence. "We know that in his case Christianity has never been intellectually doubted, and he may therefore be taken as a good example of a thorough English merchant, who still, in the nineteenth century, draws the vital strength of his character from that Chris- tian religion in which he has been born, and which he has unconsciously drunk in. We discover that his religion is of that personal penetrating order which has in all times characterised men who, even among Christians, have been recognised as such in a peculiar sense; of that sort which made Bunyan weep in anguish, and at which the merely respectable person in all ages laughs ; of that sort against which Sydney Smith aimed his melancholy raillery, in un- affected wonderment at its refusing to him the name of Christian minister or Christian man. This determined merchant, whom we have seen pushing on to fortune through the press of vainly opposing rivals, humbles himself daily before God, searches his soul for secret sins, finds cause for keenest sorrow in the turning of God's counte- nance away from him. This Budgett can weep like a child, or like Bunyan, or an old Ironside, for his short- comings. Christianity is to him as fresh as it was to Peter when Christ commanded him to feed His lambs; its salva- tion is to him as clear a reality as to Stephen when he saw heaven opened. And it does blend in the kindliest union with his whole character and actions; he feels that a Christian must be one all in all ; he lives as if in the con- tinual sense of having been made by Christ one of God's priests upon earth. His natural tact and power of winding himself into close conversation, so as to get at men's inmost hearts, are brought into the service of the gospel. In an unostentatious, quiet way he manages to urge its claims on hi3 men, by casual words, by little snatches of conver- 226 BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAK. sation, in any moment when he has them alone. Every man in this establishment is perpetually reminded that he is considered by his master an immortal being, and feels that all temporary differences between them are merged in the sublime unities in which Christianity embraces all human relations. Once a man came begging employment of him ; the wife of the former thus related the result: "I shall never forget my husband's feelings when he came in after having seen Mr Budgett for the first time. He wept like a child; indeed, we both wept, for it was so long since anybody had been kind to us. Mr Budgett had been speaking to him like a father; but what affected him most was this when he had signed the agreement, Mr Budgett took him from the counting-house into a small parlour in his own house, and offered up a prayer for him and his family." The young men resident on the premises have separate rooms, for the express end that they may be able to seek God in private. There is daily prayer on the pre- mises: every day, in the morning, the whole concern is, as it were, brought directly under the eye of God His autho- rity over it recognised, and His blessing invoked. And every year at stock-taking, ere Samuel had become sole head, it was observed that the two brothers, when it was ascertained what precise progress had been made, retired into a private room, and there joined together in prayer. It is a Christian mercantile establishment. And what is the result, on the whole? There is the progress we have seen a progress which we can now to some extent understand ; his neighbour tradesmen are heard to " speak as if he rose by magic," and to in- sinuate that "there is some deep mystery in his affairs:" we have some idea of his enchantments. But the progress is not all. There is another circumstance, of which we budgett: the christian freeman. 227 have already let fall certain hints, but which is deserving of special attention. It is the fact that there is diffused, through the whole body of the employed, a loyal zeal for the success of the business that they are united by sym- pathy in a common aim~-that they feel as true mariners for the honour of their ship, as true soldiers for the fame of their regiment. His men, we hear, are " personally attached" to Budgett; they like to work with him and for him; they are proud of what has been done, and proud of having contributed to its achievement. This is a notable fact. With it, as the crown of the whole, we complete our survey of Budgett in the capacity of master. But we cannot at once quit the subject: we think we find here certain lessons clearly legible, and of vital con- cernment, touching what may be called the practical philo- sophy of social life in this our age. It being sufficiently evident that feudal tenures and powers have in our age ceased to exist, and the first gene- ral glance at our social arrangements seeming to reveal "cash-payment" to be the "sole nexus," the universal connecting medium between the classes of society which employ and those which are employed, Mr Carlyle and others have pronounced on the case in contempt, wrath, and lamentation. In a pamphlet recently published by Mr Carlyle, we find the objectionable aspect of the case finely embodied in a high personage who complains to the writer. Being very philanthropic, and anxious, if conscience and common sense permit, to condole with our distressed fel- low-creatures, we must accord a hearing to his complaints. "Drops of compassion tremble on our eyelids," &c: " The Duke of Trumps," says Mr Carlyle, " who some- times does me the honour of a little conversation, owned that the state of his domestic service was by no means 228 budgett: the christian freeman. satisfactory to the human mind. ' Five-and-forty of them,' said his Grace, ' really, I suppose, the cleverest in the market, for there is no limit to the wages: I often think how many quiet families, all down to the basis of society, I have disturbed, in attracting gradually, by higher and higher offers, that set of fellows to me ; and what the use of them is when here! I feed them like aldermen, pay them as if they were sages and heroes. Samuel John- son's wages, at the very last and best, as I have heard you say, were 300 or 500 a-year; and Jellysnob, my butler, who indeed is clever, gets, I believe, more than the high- est of these sums. And, shall I own it to you? In my young days, with one valet, I had more trouble saved me, more help afforded me to live, actually more of my will accomplished, than from these forty-five I now get, or ever shall. It is all a serious comedy what you call a melan- choly sham. Most civil, obsequious, and indeed expert fellows these ; but bid one of them step out of his regulated sphere on your behalf! An iron law presses on us all here on them and on me. In my own house, how much of my will can I have done, dare I propose to have done? Prudence, on my part, is prescribed by a jealous and ridi- culous point-of-honour attitude on theirs. They lie here more like a troop of foreign soldiers that had invaded me, than a body of servants I had hired. At free quarters ; we have strict laws of war established between us ; they make their salutes, and do certain bits of specified work, with many becks and scrapings ; but as to service, properly so called ! I lead the life of a servant, sir; it is I that am a slave ; and often I think of packing the whole brother- hood of them out of doors one good day, and retiring to furnished lodgings, but have never done it yet!' Such was the confession of his Grace." budgett: the christian freeman. 229 " For," adds Mr Carlyle, " indeed, in the long run, it is not possible to buy obedience with money." Your complaint, we must confess, addressing his Grace, is indeed pitiful. Your domestics look upon you mani- festly as a mere dispenser of good things ; they know you have money, and that by a little juggling they can get it out of your hands; they laugh at you in their sleeves; you are among them as the returning lord in Don Juan among the groups that feasted at his expense; in one word, they make a fool of you. Now this is never done, your Grace, unless nature gives material assistance. You per- ceive that the sailors of a seventy -four do not make a fool of their captain ; Budgett's men, we find, made no fool of him ; and do you think that the man to whom you confess would be made a fool of in that style, were he in your place ? He has made something very like an assertion, that you are a "reed shaken in the wind;" he thinks, we used to understand, that your Grace's coat and badges were " torn in a scuffle" somewhere about 1789; we think your resort for consolation a little strange. What does your Grace want ? Would you have your fellow-creatures bow down to your coronet ? They say it is of faded tinsel. Would you have them reverence the face of which you are the " tenth transmitter?" They say, " 0, ju6t look at it; it is uncommonly foolish." Would you like to have the gallows- tree on your lawn, and manacles in a dungeon under your hall? Like enough; but these are precisely what your Grace never shall get; reach forth your hand to them, and see whether a red stream will not flow to wash your parch- ments very white ! Your Grace finds it too much to re- member the duties for which you have hired your servants ; you have no tact or authority to rule men, no dignified self-respecting sympathy to win them ; you fancy it is the 230 budgett: the christian freemait. gold that prevents your being honoured; it is no such thing: the dying Napoleon awed men by the power of his eye when his tongue was already silent, but men of your stamp were never truly obeyed sinee the world began. Not even a gallows would help you ; it is a hopeless case. And we regard it as exactly as it should be; like master, like man. Your affliction administers to us soft delecta- tion ; we should deem it treacherous to our time to pity you. We give you sixpence I The case is simple enough; the phenomenon need not startle us. The old obedience has certainly passed away; and true it is that obedience has never been, and can never be, bought by money. What then? There is a new obedience possible. Thanks to the French Revolution, thanks, whatever its evils, to advancing democracy, that it has struck, as by a universal electric shock, into the heart of humanity, the idea, to be extinguished never again but to work itself more and more into life and de- velopment, that no parchment written by human hand, no gold dug from earthly mine, can give a man a title to obedience. That title must be written with other than human ink, bought with other than earthly gold. It must be written on the brow in lines of strength and thought- fulness, it must be seen on the lip, where earnest self- respect, and habitual self-eommand, and resolution that can die, have displaced vanity, sensuality, and pride; it must glow, with a clear and ethereal fulness as of heaven's sanctioning light, from the unagitated eye, in the calmness of comprehending knowledge, the deliberate energy of jus- tice, the disarming magic of love, the constraining majesty of godliness. As never before, all men are now flung on their individuality; obedience is seen to be a thing beyond the reach of purchase, the possibility of transmission; if budgett: the christian freeman. 231 you can rule men, they will obey you; if you cannot, there is no help. Look into that establishment of Budgett's once more. What tie subsists between him and his men? The only visible tie is of gold ; he pays them certain moneys, and they work for him in return; their right to stay, his right to retain them, are precisely equal. Is he not, then, their master? He can show no patent of nobility unless he has one from " Almighty God ; " he was rocked in no ducal cradle, he wears no feudal coronet, beneath his mansion is no dungeon. Yet is he not a mas- ter? Shall we say that the obedience which waits upon his steps is of degraded quality, or unworthy of the name, because it is expressed in the alacrity of the open and manly forehead, the willing sympathy, unshaded by fear and untainted by sycophancy, of the freeman's kindling eye? Shall we say that the workman no longer renders to his natural and equal master a service and homage, as precious and as sincere as those of the serf who was pre- destined, ere his birth, to follow his chief whithersoever his bare will ordained, because the honeysuckles of his cottage wrap his own inviolable castle, and free-born chil- dren gambol round his knee? That he toils is no disgrace; it is appointed him by no injustice of man, but by the bene- ficent, though stern, decree of nature ; and his evening may be as glad and tranquil when the day's work is over, his sleep as sweet ere he goes forth to labour, his self-respect, his independence, his bold uncowering truthfulness, in one word, his whole inheritance both of duty and reward, as rich in the essential bounties of freedom as those of his mas- ter. Some men must ever ride in the car of civilisation, while others drag it. The old reins by which men were guided have been wrenched from the hands of the drivers; the drivers themselves have, in some places, been rolled in the 232 budgett: the christian freeman. dust, and trampled in their gore; but the fate of the French nobility is not necessarily to be universal; a strong and wise man can yet take the seat, and with new reins the golden chords of love, the viewless chains of sympathy still guide and control men; we see Budgett, a man born in poverty, do so with easy and natural effort. Why look back ? Why not rather charge ourselves than our time? Why perpe- tually gaze with reverted visage on the coffined Past? That lingering red is not the flush of health, that tranquil and smiling slumber is not the repose of gathering energy ; it is the stillness and rigid moulding of death that are on that face; no resurrection ever awoke a buried era: feud- alism in all its aspects its airy and gallant chivalries, its simple devotions, its conventual dreamings with its Du Guesclins, its good Douglases, its kingly Abbot Samsons, its troop of fair ladies riding with golden stirrups to the crusade has passed away to the very spirit and essence, and Democracy lays its iron roads across its grave. Many generations will gaze on the picture of the whole resusci- tated life of the thirteenth century, as it has been painted in a boldness of outline and incomparable richness of colour which must long defy the rounding finger and obscuring breath of time, by Mr Carlyle; yet Abbot Samson had his hand-gyves in his dungeon, and no tongue dared to move in his presence. The man who will rule men in an era of freedom must dispense with these; and though the hero of Past and Present was assuredly born to be a prince and ruler, we cannot but believe that men of his radical type are still extant and even common in England, and why ob- stinately close our eyes to the same power as his, when ex- hibited not in a mediaeval monastery, but in a mercantile establishment of the working era. Of old, you might have obedience of serfs, but you had not freedom. In the mo- BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. 233 dern time, when your masters are incompetent, you have a pretended though ignoble freedom on the part of ser- vants, and no true obedience. Where you have compe- tent masters and governed servants, both are free. Is it reasonable, then, and manly, to whine and whimper over our modern arrangements, as might a delicate-looking Puseyite curate, or to sneer at, and denounce, and turn away from them, as do very different men, instead of recognising it as one great task and duty of our age to reconcile master- ship with freedom, and valiantly setting about it? That Mr Carlyle has written on these matters as he has done, may well excite surprise. We may have utterly miscon- ceived the whole purport and philosophy of his history of the French Revolution, despite of what appears to us perfect clearness, and of what we know to have been en- thusiastic and protracted study ; but, if we have any one decided idea as to the meaning of that book, or of what he says in his essay on Ebenexer Elliott, it is, that one great lesson he would enforce is, that the feudal nobility must either vanish, or show themselves possessed of per- sonal powers to win the respect and affectionate obedience of men. Yet this duke appears to us to furnish an appo- site and express illustration of such words. The world has seen strange things, but it may yet be worth its while to turn aside and contemplate Mr Carlyle in the capacity of apologist for pithless personages still fondly called noble- men. The true point of view from which to discern the essen- tial type and distinguishing characteristics of Budgett is the mercantile ; it is him in his true character you see, when you mark his intense delight as he moves among a group of active working men, animating them by his pre- sence, directing their movements, and thrilled with sym- 234 BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. pathy for honest exertion. But we must briefly glance at the other phases which his character displays: we must see him fairly out of the commercial atmosphere. And what aspect does he present to us? He comes out from the mine where he has been toiling so eagerly with the gold he has so manfully won. Has he the greedy, inhuman look of the miser, the small frostbitten eye of the niggard? He has worked hard, and the result we see in money: the " beaverish" talent he certainly possesses. Has his soul be- come beaverish too? No. He has still the boy's heart which throbbed with joy when he flung his boyish earnings, the thirty pounds which probably appeared to him then a greater sum than any he afterwards possessed, into his mother's- lap. Over the deep mine, far up in the taintless azure, his eye has ever caught the gleam of treasure which might well purge his eyes in the glare of earthly gold. To make money has been his duty; he could not work to the mea- sure of his abilities without that result; but to give is his delight, and his reward. With the same tact which stood him in such good stead among his workmen and custo- mers, he strikes out devices of good ; with his native energy he carries them out. His positive expenditure in philan- thropic objects is fully 2000 a-year. His mansion becomes a centre of beneficent light for the whole district, in every direction the broken mists of ignorance and vice retiring. His heart is as warm, his hand as open, as if he had never known what it was to make a shilling; he shows himself worthy to be a steward of nature, with large gifts com- mitted for disposal to his hand; he scatters bounty where his agency is unseen ; he ever makes charity the hand- maid of industry, never of recklessness or sloth ; the blessed influence of generosity, tempered by justice and governed by strong intelligence, is felt over the district. BTJDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. 235 And now we shall look, for a few moments, into the sanctuary of his home. We saw him take his early love to be his wife, in a little cottage in an English lane. As his other projects have prospered in his hands, his cottage has gradually changed its appearance; he is now in a commo- dious mansion, seated in the midst of broad pleasure- grounds, and commanding a wide prospect of that region which his presence has lighted with new comfort and glad- ness. In his family circle we find him displaying the same traces of original character which we have marked in his procedure elsewhere. His children are admitted to an unwonted intimacy and confidence. " They knew his business affairs intimately, and in every perplexing case he would gather them round him, with their mother and aunt, and take their advice. His standing council was formed of the whole family, even at an age when other fathers would think it cruel and absurd to perplex a child with weighty concerns." We do not remember to have ever met with an instance precisely corresponding to this. And its effects are all benign. He seems to have attained that perfection of domestic rule, where kindness is so governed by sagacity, that severity is banished, yet every good effect of severity won. The sympathy which he meets among his workmen, and which lends an aspect of noble work and noble governance to his whole business esta- blishment, pervades, with a still finer and more tender warmth, the chambers of his home ; his children go hand- in-hand with him in his plans of improvement, the wil- ling instruments in all his philanthropic devices. And he feels that he has their sympathy in higher things than these ; we hear him expressing the conviction that they are all going along with him on the way to heaven. This is the final touch of joy that can gild a Christian 236 budgett; the christian freeman. home, a ray of heaven's own glory coming to blend with, to hallow, to crown the blessings of earth. Be it a delu- sion or not, one would surely wish to "keep so sweet a thing alive:" if it is a fond enthusiastic dream, so perfect is the smile of happiness on the dreaming face, that it were surely kind to let the sleeper slumber on. He believes that all his family will again gather round him on the plains of heaven: that the flowers which now shed fragrance through his life will continue to bloom beside immortal amaranths ; that the voices which are now the music of his being will mingle with the melodies of his eternal home; that the light of those smiles which greet his approach to his threshold, and which now make summer in his heart, will blend with the light that fadeth never. We shall not say that his hopes are vain : his children are his friends, and friendship lives in the spirit-land. Thus, soft, genial, tenderly kind, do we find the hard- trading Budgett, when we contemplate him where kind- ness and tenderness are in place ; depend upon it, were he not a right merchant in the market, he would not be so gentle in the home ; it is only the strong who can thus wrap the paternal rod in flowers. To see him in the mar- ket, one would say there was not one dew-drop of poetry to soften the ruggedness of his nature. Follow him in a walk on his own grounds, and you are apt to think him a soft sort of man, with somewhat of a sentimental turn. For he has still the same open sense for nature's beauty and music that he had when he heard that little bird's morning carol, and felt in his young heart that God had answered his prayer for his mother. There is a certain dewiness, a flowery freshness, over his character, an air of unexhausted, unstrained strength. Three things, at least, nature has united in him, which have been deemed incom- budgett: the christian freeman. 237 patible: thorough working faculty, religion of the sort which weeps for sins invisible to the world, and poetical sympathy. You may see him distancing his competitors in the market, until they whisper that he must work by magic; you may see his cheek wet with tears as he prays to his God ; you may hear him, in gleeful tone, quoting verse after verse of poetry in his fields, while his children romp around. From his early days, too, the strange mer- chant has preached, and with extraordinary power; his connection with the Wesleyan body led him to this. His whole character, last of all, is veiled in humility ; his bearing is that of a truly modest, self-knowing man, who can act with perfect self-reliance, yet take advice, if such may come, from a child. At the age of fifty-four, when it might have been hoped that many years of life were yet before him, Budgett gave symptoms of a fatal malady. Dropsy and heart-complaint showed themselves, and his strength gradually wore away. His death-bed was glorious even among Christian death- beds. And though we would ground no weighty argu- ment upon the closing scenes of Christian men, we cannot regard death-bed experience as of slight importance. Life is assuredly more important than death ; on it would we fix our main attention. Yet it is mere vacant absurdity to deny that fear casts its shade over mankind here below, as they look forward beyond time ; that it is really the king of terrors whose realm is the grave, and that it has been one grand aim of all religions to discrown the spectre. If, moreover, man is only for a moment a denizen of time, if he is yet to be born into eternity, and his life here is of importance only in its relation to his life beyond, it must ever be a moment of supreme interest to men, when the immortal soul is preening her wings for an infinite as- 238 budqett: the christian freeman. cent, when earth is becoming still, and voices out of the distance seem to reach the dying ear, and a strange radi- ance falls across the bourne into the glazing eye. Budgett found his simple Christian faith, laying hold of the sword of the Spirit, strong enough to palsy the arm of the terror- crowned, and strike from it its appalling dart; nay, he found that simple Christian faith of power sufficient to steady his eye in gaze upon the spectre, until his terrors faded away and he became an angel standing at the gates of light. At first he was troubled and cast down; but ere long the victory was complete. We shall simply quote a few of his words, leaving readers to make upon them their own comments ; to judge for themselves, whether they express a selfish joy, or that of one whose delight was in holiness and in God; and to observe the childlike humility that breathes beneath their rapture. His death oeurred in the April of 1851, and these words were uttered by him from the time that his illness began to manifest its fatal power: they suffi- ciently indicate the occasions of their utterance : " I 6ent for you to tell you how happy I am ; not a wave, not a ripple, not a fear, not a shadow of doubt. I didn't think it was possible for man to enjoy so much of God upon earth. I'm filled with God." " I like to hear of the beauties of heaven, but I do not dwell upon them ; no, what I rejoice in is, that Christ will be there. Where He is, there shall I be also. I know that He is in me, and I in Him. I shall see Him as He is. I delight in knowing that." " How our Heavenly Father paves our way down to the tomb ! I seem so happy and comfortable, it seems as if it cannot be for me, as if it must be for somebody else. I don't deserve it." " I have sunk into the arms of Omnipotent Love." BUDGETT: THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN. 239 " I never asked for joy, I always thought myself un- worthy of it ; but He has given me more than I asked." " I am going the way of all flesh ; but, bless God, I'm ready. I trust in the merits of my Redeemer. I care not when, or where, or how ; glory be to God! " CHAPTER V. THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE; AND ONE OR TWO HINTS TOWARDS ITS SOLUTION. That there is in our time some great difference from other ages, that some Ionian change is in progress, seems hidden from no thinker of the day. De Tocqueville on the one hand and Carlyle on the other proclaim the fact. This process of change was inaugurated by the greatest event of modern times, in itself, indeed, but a re- sult, the first French Revolution. The doctrines of the Encyclopaedia, the infidel or atheistic theories of Voltaire, Diderot, Naigeon, and their followers, had gradually per- vaded French and European society, eating out religion from the heart of nations. Kings and nobles trembled not. This new philosophy of materialism and sensuality seemed to them but a summer cloud, touched with the roseate hues of genius, and distilling a gentle rain, to nourish the flowers of sentiment and foster the growths of science; if there did issue from it a few gleams of distant lightning, these would but clear the air from ennui, and promote a freer respiration. The ancient sentence, " Fear God, and ho- nour the king," had, it was agreed, held sway long enough over the minds of men ; the principalities and powers of earth were perfectly satisfied, and sat smiling in the se- cure content of dotard imbecility, while the Encyclopaedic THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 241 lightning burned out from its place among the beliefs and maxims of men, the former half of the regulating sentence ; Let there be no God, they said, but oh, continue to honour us. At last the storm came, in a burst that shook the globe. The world stood still to listen; even the lone and dis- crowned Jerusalem, sitting amid her graves, became more desolate, for .pilgrims forgot io turn their steps to the East. We know the result. We have marked the path of that light- ning which burned the old French monarchy from the face of the earth, and in whose blasting gleam the brilliance of every crown in the world waxed pale. That wild glare awoke a power that had long slumbered: The people. Leaving Encyclopaedism behind, and lifting its voice in other nations besides France, this great new element in social affairs in its awakening, its attempt to make itself heard, its slow gravitation towards its own place in the system of things has given its distinctive features to our epoch. To deny the fact, that the relations of classes and the modes of social action wear at present among free nations an aspect unknown in the feudal ages, is now impossible. It is simply out of the power of any man to turn the eye of his imagination upon the mediaeval time; to note the tranquillity of its general atmosphere, breathing in dim religious light through the still cathedral aisle and resting round the hoary turret of the feudal castle; to mark how reverently the serf looks up to his master, and with what undoubting devotion the worshipper kneels before the uplifted crucifix ; to observe the Book unchained from its place at the altar, and the venerating wonder with which men gaze upon him who can read; to see one large class sitting aloft, glittering in its badges, in its one hand feudal charters, in its other a feudal sword, on its lip 242 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. a really noble and beautiful smile of chivalrous valour and youthful strength, on its brow all the intelligence of the age, and another large class below, born to bow down be- fore this, to receive food from its hands and instruction from its lips, and yield it in return the instinctive affec- tion of children and the childlike obedience of men not born to the heritage of a will; and then to maintain that the whole order of society has not undergone a universal and upturning alteration. So thorough, so transforming is the change from this era, that a single glance at the picture is sufficient to convince any intelligent, informed, and healthy- minded man that it is gone for ever. The individual or party who proposes any attempt towards its recall is not to be listened to: we do not take up the view of the present time, generally understood as that of Puseyism: we fore- close all pleading on that side of the question, by the simple observation, that we can regard neither with hope nor apprehension what were an absolute anomaly in this world, an unrolling of the scroll of history after it has been once folded up. But there has taken place a much later change than that we here indicate. It is, we think, only in what may be called late years that the ultimate influences of the mighty agency introduced by John Faust into civilisation have begun to become traceable. It is only in these times that its unpredicted power to loosen the tongue of the world, to draw forth the electricity of thought, to turn the pen to a sceptre, and the hereditary diadem to a toy, has been fairly evinced. It is the grand characteristic of our age that thought is more fluent, that men more easily communicate together, than heretofore ; the university of the modtern era can be closed to none, for who is it that cannot learn to read and write, and who that can THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 243 read, and Las the power of using his fingers, may not act upon his fellows? We see around us the rending of ancient associations, the awakening of novel powers; we witness discordance, severance, doubt; the ancient reverences and the ancient unities have mostly passed away; men believe not, without uttering a determined Why; men respect not, without a mandate in nature's handwriting. To us, none of these things are amazing, for we see them to be the na- tural and inevitable birth of freedom and knowledge: the problem they present we will accept and endeavour to solve. We venture to- enunciate what we believe the precise meaning, cause r andtendency,when philosophically weighed, of all these great phenomena. We find these by considera- tion of a profound apophthegm of Goethe's, spoken with re- ference to the individual mind : " Thought widens, but lames; action narrows, but animates." It is well known- how the man of one idea can work; it is well known, too, that in order to do any single work well, you must on it concentrate your efforts. We have no hesitation whatever; and since we cannot here demonstrate the propriety of our proceeding, we must request readers to assure themselves by reflection and investigation that we are right, in applying this individual law to the nation. The army of Islam was victorious, because it poured the lightning of its defiance on the foe as from one blazing eye. Nations rolled away resistlessly to the crusade, because their mighty hearts throbbed with the one idea of saving the sepulchre of the Saviour from the desecration of unbelievers. If you look well into the ancient time, you will find the unity of action on the part of vassals accounted for by the consideration that they had not a sufficient power of thought to doubt; the iron energy of governments, by the fact that there 244 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. had not yet dawned on the world the idea of toleration, and that they were lamed by no freedom or variety of opinion. There are, however, in the individual life, stages which are peculiarly those of doubt. The youth acts cheerfully and with energy, on the belief he has received from his fathers: then he begins to question, to hesitate, to doubt: his arm is at once paralysed, and with many words his -ac- tions become few and undecisive. But he may advance to yet a higher state: this doubt and temporary indecision may be a stage in his progress to calm intelligent man- hood; he may regain his early cheerful and united energy, with hi.s beliefs his own, and the still sky of manhood over him. With Britain, as a nation, we cannot but think that it at present is as with the doubting, examining, question- ing man. With the old relations of force, we have lost much of the old power of action.; pretension and quackery flourish amain. Mr Carlyle tells us that all things have unfixed themselves, and float distractedly in an ocean of talk. It is useless, and it is contrary to truth to say, that his denunciations are altogether uncalled for, that the peril he descries is not real. Let any one look into the state of our law, and the slow success of efforts making for its amendment; let him examine the condition of our trusts, enough, as on good authority appears, of itself to give work, long and difficult, to Reform, had it the hands of Briareus; let him consider the ease with which public nuisance can shelter itself under so-called private right, and the clumsy and inefficient machinery by which any change, demanded it may be by the very health of our towns, can be effected \ let him reflect on the power of corporations to clog the wheels of general progress, and the seeming powerlessnesa of Britain to teach her own children ; then, or rather when he has added from all hands THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 245 to this partial list of our shortcomings, let him decide whether an infusion of energy into the internal economy of our country is not urgently demanded. Nay, if this does not satisfy him, let him pace the Continent of Europe, and see despotism teaching all her children, cleaning, and beautifying, and ordering her streets, offering countless suggestions of order, cheapness, decorum, common sense, to a British observer, and then let him answer. " When," exclaims Mr Carlyle, " shall we have done with all this of British liberty, voluntary principle, dangers of centralisation, and the like? It is really getting too bad. For British liberty, it seems, the people cannot be taught to read. British liberty, shuddering to interfere with the rights of capital, takes six or eight millions of money annually to feed the idle labourer whom it dare not employ. For British liberty we live over poisonous cess-pools, gully-drains, and detestable abominations; and omnipotent London cannot sweep the dirt out of itself. British liberty produces what? Floods of Hansard de- bates every year, and apparently little else at present. If these are the results of British liberty, I, for one, move we should lay it on the shelf a little, and look out for some- thing other and farther. We have achieved British liberty hundreds of years ago; and are fast growing, on the strength of it, one of the most absurd populations the sun, among his great Museum of Absurdities, looks down upon at present." Now we desire specially to have it observed here, that we consider it necessary for no one, in order to comprehend and intelligently judge of the few observations we have to offer in the succeeding paragraphs, to agree fully in all the preceding remarks: let it not even be thought that we pro- nounce the state of Britain decadent: it will not be denied 246 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. that, if more energy could, in perfect combination with freedom, be introdaced into the practical working, external and internal, of our nation, and of free nations in general, it were well. We certainly attach importance to what we have said, and we have not only Mr -Carlyle on our side, but all those thinkers, among whom are to be ranged Fichte and Richter, who designate this a transition era; yet we demand nothing more of the reader, than that he call to mind the commonplace about the inefficiency of freedom as compared with despotism, and yield us a hearing while we offer one or two suggestions towards the practical solution of what we must believe to be the great problem before the free nations at present, The combina- tion of modern freedom, thought, and enlightenment, with the strength and activity of despotism. Omitting 'the consideration of certain views of less importance, we -deem it right to notice two solutions of our problem, proposed, either explicitly or implicitly, by classes of thinkers who recognise the necessity of reach- ing a solution. With each party, we have one important point of argument : from each we differ in matters of vital moment. The first solution is that which, however modified, had its source in the montanism of the first French Revolu- tion, and has ever continued in essential particulars to agree with it; that of liberal, or, more strictly, infidel radi- calism. The one thing which we accept from the French Revolution, and from the party whose view we now .con- sider, is their testimony to human freedom. We will recognise a sublimity in the attempt of the French nation to be free and self-governing.; we will allow it was an apple of celestial hue and fragrance France stretched out her hand to pluck; and if she found it but bitter and THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 247 bloody dust, we shall not the less believe that it proved such, only because the hand with which she grasped it was that of a blaspheming demon. The sun looked down on strange sights in that Revolution tumult; on sights whose signifi- cance can never be exhausted, and in which the eyes of nations will in all time have deep lessons to read. It looked down on a people that turned its gaze on the past, and saw generation after generation trooping dimly down the vista of years from the cavern of vacant Chance, which had the heart to cast its eye on the future, and see all men sinking from the verge of the world into the blank abyss of annihilation, and which, even in the ghastly lone- liness of such a universe as this, standing for one cheerless moment between two vast and eternal graves, could con- trive to be riotous and gay. It looked down on a cathe- dral where men were grimacing in idiot laughter round what they called the goddess of reason. It looked down on a Convention where they were " decreeing " the exist- ence of the Supreme Being; the existence of Him, to whom the whole universe is as a film of breath on the morning air. Perhaps more wonderful still, it looked down upon a nation having, with all this, the name of freedom on its lips, and uttering words which sounded like those of heroic patriots and poets, asserting the equality of man, and declaring that it would rule itself. But it had been most wonderful of all, if it had seen these words made good, if a people denying its immortality and believing the universe to have no moral Sun, knit by no sacred memories to the past and owning no treasure of hope in the future, its spirit stubborned by none of the iron of duty and its appetites calling aloud for pleasure, had been able to be- come free. This it did not behold. That nation first mocked freedom by the mummeries of children, and then made 248 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AOE. its name a loathing over the world by the horror of bloody cruelty. Federation fetes, statues of liberty, endless out- flowing of meaningless mellifluous oratory, and then foam- ing hatred, and the long line of death-tumbrils; the dream that freedom was no-government, and the awaken- ing to find that it was the government of madness; such was the history of the French Revolution. If we accept even from it the imperishable truth that freedom is the inalienable inheritance and ultimate goal of man, we will also read in it this other lesson, that without religion a nation can never be free, but will either go mumming and fooling to plant liberty trees and inaugurate plaster-of- Paris images, or will awaken the Furies of anarchy, and join with them in a dance of death. Never did revolution more completely fail than that of France; and never in this world was there a revolution so profoundly infidel. Its source was the infidelity of Voltaire; the philosophers who supported it were, as a body, infidel; and its poet Shelley, while believing in the immortality of the soul, refused to bow the knee to the Christian God. Soft, and glowing, and streaming from the very heart, that music of Shelley's, one might almost deem, would have charmed the maniac fury from godless freedom, and bent the minds of men to truth's own sway; that temple which he reared to the sound of dulcet melody, and over which rested the glories of one of the princeliest imaginations that ever sublimed enthusiasm or personified thought, would, one might think, have drawn the nations to the worship of a calm and be- nign freedom, whose every word was wisdom and all whose looks were love; but it was not so: the entrancing poetry of Shelley seems to us like an .ZEolean harp, hung out in the tempest of modern democracy, whose soft tremblings, whose plaintive persuasive murmurings, will never attune to har- THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 249 mony that hoarse and wintry blast. To another music than that must the nation march that will be free; to no such gentle melody did the legions of the Republic march to meet Pyrrhus, the Ten Thousand to the field of Marathon; other and inferior gifts God may grant to nations that have utterly forgotten Him, but it would seem that the crowning gift of freedom will be granted only to one in whose heart there is the belief in a God, and which can reverence an oath. Nor i3 it difficult to discern the reason why: whatever may appear in the philosophic diagram, there are passions sleeping in the human breast that, in the open sea of actual life, will always awake, and over- whelm the vessel of freedom, if they are not quelled by one Eye. For this reason, we turn away from infidel radicalism; it aims at an impossibility, it contradicts human history. From irreligious radicalism, which must end either in folly or in anarchy, we turn to Mr Carlyle. We think that an earnest student of his works can discover in them a solution of our problem, though not one which can be pronounced hopeful or flattering. We have already de- fined what we believe to be the theory of government which is philosophically deducible from pantheism, and which, whether deliberately, consciously, and avowedly deduced or not, shapes itself naturally out in the mind of a thinker whose general mode of viewing human affairs is pantheistic. It will be no small confirmation of our state- ment, if we find that it coincides with actual circumstances in the case of one, whose writings, however wrathful and torrent-like, flow from a fountain of love, and who, in the prime of his gigantic energies, turned away from the pleasant places of literature, and the calm inviting fields of abstract speculation, to concentrate his powers upon practical life, 250 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. and the answering of* the great social questions of the day, but the whole tenor of whose thinking is pantheistic. Now, though we find in Mr Carlyle's latest writings what seems to expose him to the objection of looking somewhat too fixedly on the past ; and although we cannot think it im- possible that our time and land might have furnished him with scenes and with men, as well fitted to enforce dra- matically certain of those lessons, sumless we allow in their value, which he has read us in his Past and Pre- sent, as St Edmundsbury and Abbot Samson; yet we think it is but a superficial view of his whole works which does not unveil a deeper truth behind all his applause of the past, and prove that his eye is on the future. His mighty intellect and iron will are drawn, as by the sympathy of brotherhood, towards the giant forces of the olden time ; he invariably speaks of the pre- sent age as feeble and distracted, when contrasted with ages long gone by ; and in the work we have named, he has, by the wizard power of his genius, summoned up, in living distinctness, certain great spectacles and men of the past, that those of the present may hide their heads before them. Yet who has proclaimed with sueh emphasis as he, that the law of all human things is progress, that it is vain to attempt to chain the future under the past? We can- not doubt that it is not his desire or hope that the nine- teenth or twentieth century should become the thirteenth, but only that certain fundamental characteristics should be found in both. It is our anxious wish fairly to repre- sent the essential aspect of that new time, which, though removed by centuries, he still confidently predicts, and which is to be, not the past, but the life and truth of the past, transformed by the spirit and transfigured by the light of the present. THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OP THE AGE. 251 We conceive Mr Carlyle, looking forward into the dis- tance, to contemplate a time characterised as follows: the rubbish of extinct customs has been swept aside, the dust of shattered systems has fallen from the air and sunk harmless into the soil, the discords of quackery and dispu- tation have gone silent, and, alas! the world-tree of the nations, planted of old in Judea, the Igdrasil of modern civilisation, that bloomed into its chivalries, and yielded fair flowerage of literatures and philosophies, and bore its final fruit in the Lutheran Reformation, has fallen utterly, and mouldered as into mocrland .moss; the deep eternal skies of nature, the great laws of duty, of industry, and of hero-worship, have then again emerged, and roofed the world. We cannot err in believing, that more and more the development of his system has tended to the pouring of contempt upon all the modes and agencies of our present social life ; that he has scowled upon popular assemblies, upon free election, upon all forms of public opinion, upon what -is partly the voiee and partly the guide of public opinion, the free press : that more and more clearly his all-embracing word of command, of de- nunciation, of prophecy has been hero-worship; and that, with more and more distinctness and decision, he has pointed at the severance of all men into two great classes, the foolish and the wise, the silently and blindly governed and the silently and irresponsibly governing. He has declared his utter abandonment of faith in the popular un- derstanding, by proposing a step of manifest return, in the appointment of certain senators or privy-councillors by nomination. One of his late works contains an assertion, which, with absolute explicitness, declares him the eternal foe of freedom, which prescribes to it, in conferring or debating with him, but one tone, and that the tone which 252 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. can so well be borrowed from his own works, of implacable defiance, namely, and irreconcilability; which is probably the keenest and most bitter insult that was ever sent to the rude heart of the human race, ever levelled against that great class which has made up, and which for an indefinite number of centuries must continue to make up, the bulk of mankind, and if not a preponderating, at least a large pro- portion of the public voice of every free country; the sad and amazing declaration, that "by any ballot-box Judas will go as far as Jesus." He has sneered at the advantages of liberty and palliated the evils of despotism, pointing to Epictetus and to Paul as showing the independence of the individual character to any such influence. In a word, no one can question the fact, that Mr Carlyle has drawn off altogether from the side of what is meant by radicalism; that his political philosophy, while exterminat- ing enough, has disjoined itself from the popular enlight- enment, the popular science, the popular election, which cluster round that standard. What, then, does he propose, or prophetically proclaim ? What, we ask, are we to find in his unceasing laudation of "might," in the analogies upon which he ventures, surely with a strange boldness, be- tween men and lower animals? What in that circum- stance which we deem of a profound interest and signifi- cance, his known admiration of Frederick the Great, who illustrates to us, with perfect and precise appropriateness, the ultimate development of a pantheistic theory of human government, of whom, whatever is doubtful, this may be considered sure, that the virtual declaration of his reign to his subjects was, All you can demand of me is, that I govern well, if you are happy, it is of no importance whether jour happiness is that of freemen or slaves ? The sum-total and ultimate goal of Mr Carlyle's political thinking, we must THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 253 conclude, has turned out to be what we showed was naturally and philosophically to be expected Despotism. He will not attempt to marry freedom to strength, nor cherish the hope that the race may pass from the unintelligent energy of youth, when force followed authority, and thought had not lamed action, to the free energy of manhood; the multitude are hopelessly foolish, and their highest bliss must be found, in bowing, with instinctive reverence, before an absolute sovereign, their eyes blinded by the glare of his sole and God-like will. All the inventions, all the sciences, all the enlightenment of modern times, may then be brought to clothe and feed them, as his ability renders possible, and as his bounty chooses to dispense ; only they must obey with no question as to the reason. This result does not anywise induce us to retract or modify what we have said of the deep patriotism and love lying in the heart of Mr Carlyle; but no less assured are we that this is the only logical de- duction from his original axioms, and the sole inference that can be drawn from the whole series of his works. Ancient and modern times may, according to him, differ in many things, but in one thing they must agree, that the highest political attainment of mankind is subjection to a wise and heroic but absolute will. Surely there is something sad and disappointing in this prospect opened up by Mr Carlyle for the future. Has all that ancient and heroic struggling after freedom, then, been but the fruit of delusion and frenzy ? Or was our race destined to expend all its heroism in a long, weary battle, and when at last it saw its enemy dead, when at last it did behold Despotism in the swoon of death, with its cruel and bloodshot eyeball at length glazing and becoming all light- less and ghastly, to find it had toiled and bled for a mere bauble, and that its only hope was to resuscitate the con- 254 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. quered monster? Has the path of humanity, over sandy deserts and up flinty mountains, through hurning heats and bitter storms, been to such a promised land as this? A promised land ! We will not accept it, if its vines- were richer than those of Eschol, and it flowed with milk and honey. Decided as is our difference with the radicals of the French Revolution, we have a deeper debate with Mr Carlyle. From whatever quarter it is that we hear the note of disaffection to freedom, we will not consent to hear it. We believe there is a strength of nobleness in the human heart to scorn such prosperity as even perfect de- spotism could bestow; for no humiliating happiness will it sell its birthright of freedom ; men will rather be freemen, ay, and die for freedom, in a rocky gorge of Hellas, or on bare moors in Scotland, than slaves amid the vines f Cam- pania, or on the fragrant banks of Ganges. " Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame, Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts, Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame; Terse echoes not one beating of their hearts History is but the shadow of their shame Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts, As to oblivion their blind millions fleet, Staining that heaven with obscene imagery Of their own likeness." We think that one great temptation of the age is to dis- trust and abandon Freedom. Her robe has been soiled with blood, her eye has been lit with frenzy, " blasphemy's loud scream" has mingled with her " musie of deliverance;" but she is, for all this, an angel of light, and we must not forego the faith and hope that her features will yet beam forth in their own immortal loveliness. We shall not lift the light from human annals, and silence the songs which have risen from earth's fairest homes and noblest battle- fields; that thrill which the word freedom has ever, sent THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 255 through the heart of nations, has not been altogether meaningless. Upon any correct theory of man, the essen- tial excellence of freedom is demonstrable ; not, certainly, as a present possession, but as a future attainment: it must be the aim of civilisation to educe every faculty of the whole man, spiritual as well as physical, and this can never be done until man, as a civis, as one united indissolubly with his fellows, thinks and wills, as well as works and feeds. At what period a nation may come to be capable of free- dom, it were long to tell ; but this we may say with unfal- tering lip, that the nation which has had freedom won for it by the wisdom and dauntlessness of its sons, covers itself with everlasting infamy if it cannot enter on the possession of its inheritance. To accept Mr Carlyle's view of the future, were to confess ourselves nationally worthy of this contempt; and if we put " British freedom on the shelf," our heroic fathers that have bled for us from Bannockburn to Sedgemoor, will, from their high thrones, look down upon us with indignation and shame. We shall hope there may be found some other solution of our problem than any we have glanced at. But first it may be well to ask, whether it is to be considered easy. "The discipline of slavery is unknown among us." Is there, then, to be no discipline ? Does human freedom mean the dissolution of government? Are the shouts of nations at the name and prospect of liberty to be understood as indi- cating that freedom is easy, that it consists in every man's doing as he likes, that, when a nation has hurled tyranny aside, it has now only to gesticulate round plaster figures, or go in long white-robed procession to plant liberty trees, or amuse itself with any other form of foolery ? No. The sternest task ever attempted by a nation is that of inaugu- rating and supporting freedom. The man who governs 256 THE SOCIAL PROBLE OF THE AGE. his own spirit has been, on supreme authority, pronounced greater than he who takes a city: this man has attained personal freedom. National freedom is simply the govern- ment of its own spirit by a nation. It is the attempt on the part of a people, as on the part of a man, to have a will chainless as that of the wildest libertine, and yet live and work with united energy under wisdom's law. And the toils of Thermopylae, Morgarten, and Naseby, were, we think, slight to this. " Latius regnes avidura domando Spiritual, quam si Libyam remotis Gadibus jungas, et uterque Poenus Serviat uni." There i no free people to which we may not address the lines. It was a sublime ottv, and not an alluring pleasure, whose distant gleam lit the eyes of nations as they looked to liberty ! To attain true freedom seems to us to demand the very last agony of national effort, the severe and final endeavour, by whieh a people at length reaches its throne. Christianity affords us the axioms on which alone a solu- tion can be attempted: taking from irreligious radicalism the truth groped after by it, and accepting at the hands of Mr Carlyle the vitally important lessons he has so power- fully re- proclaimed, avoiding anarchy on the one hand and despotism on the other, it sets the race on a path of unlimited advancement. Christianity pronounces men equal. All the protests which, in the course of human history, have been uttered against the oppression of the poor by the rich, and in behalf of the real native majesty of man, sink into insignificance when compared with that uttered by and embodied in Christianity; there is one grain of truth in that claim which modern democracy, though in crazed, and maundering, and blasphemous tone3, has so often THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 257 put forth, to number the founders of Christianity in its ranks. In express terms, the Christian revelation declares all nations of the earth to be of one blood; it pronounces all men equally the subjects of one King; it makes the value of a soul infinite, and shows no difference between the worth of that of a beggar and that of a prince. Look into the stable at Bethlehem, on that night when crowned sage and humble shepherd knelt by the cradle of that Babe who was their common King; do you not see, in that spec- tacle, the bond of an essential equality uniting all ranks, and making the regal purple and the peasant's russet faint and temporary distinctions? Well might Coleridge say, that the fairest flower he ever saw climbing round a poor man's window, was not so beautiful in his eyes as the Bible which he saw lying within! If all classes forsook the gospel, one might expect the poor, the hard-toiling, the despised, to cling to it. Whatever Christianity may have become in our churches and in our times, the great class of the workers can find in its aspects no excuse for abandoning itself, unless they can show that the churches have re- written the Bible ; unless they can allege that it no longer exhibits the divine Founder of Christianity preaching to the poor, companying with publicans and sinners, bringing into the bosoms of harlots the healing light of divine love; unless they can show that it was the sanctioned usage of apostolic times to honour the rich in the Christian assem- blage ; unless, in one word, they can deny that the gospel holds forth to every man the prospect of being a king and priest to God. But Christianity does not make this truth powerless by leaving it alone. Mr Carlyle, with his glance of light- ning, saw the anarchy or the weakness to which modern freedom was tending ; government he knew to be absolutely s 258 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AOE. necessary. And this government, in some way or other, must he vested in ahle men. He called on the nations to obey their mightiest, to worship them as heroes, and pro- ceeded to scorn and scout the prevalent ideas and hopes of freedom. But Christianity meets this want too. It writes down civil government as an ordinance of God. Not that it sanctions what has been called divine right or any such su- perficial and absurd notion : not that, in any part or passage of the sacred volume, it commands us to honour any one for the blood in his veins; but that it recognises the institution of government as a necessity, and enjoins men loyally to submit to it, and honour the king. Any one form of govern- ment is not appointed: but government is stamped with ap- proval, and by the promulgation of the truth of radical equa- lity, a way is opened up by which freedom may flourish under any political form. How then are we, in every case, to find our rulers? Simply by finding those who are fitted to rule. Is the fact that they are thus fitted the reason of our honour- ing them, and our theory, after all, the same as that of hero- worship? By no means. Their honour is reflected. Their fitness is the indication of the reason why they should be honoured; the reason itself is because God has commis- sioned them; and we are precisely as free in performing the tasks naturally appointed us, as they in performing those for which He has fitted them. Thus, as it embraced the one truth of democracy, Christianity embraces every par- ticle of truth which Mr Carlyle has contributed to human knowledge. All that he has said of the might and value of man, though perhaps demanding supplement and modifi- cation, can on these terms be accepted without endanger- ing human freedom; every power of the hero can be brought to serve the race, and yet honour be done both to God and to man. The greatest will rule because God has THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGTET. 259 given them the kingdom ; and the people shall he willing in the day of His power. A nation were perfectly free and perfectly governed, where the allied truths of equality and subordination were both in full force ; where not only the ablest governed, but where the channels to government were absolutely unobstructed, and every man had the assur- ance that, if he were the ablest, be would be governor. Now it is not by any means our assertion or idea, that Christianity furnishes us with a nostrum by which all the ills of society can be at once cured, its weakness turned to strength, and its powers brought into operation;, the bare fact, that any one, whencesoever he derive his specific, misconceives so far the nature of man and the evo- lution of history, as to imagine that the one is to be perfected and the other brought to a close by a magic word which he can utter, is conclusive evidence of his utter incapacity. It is our conviction that without Christianity no nation can be regenerated; that, unless we proceed upon its theory of man, we always fall into some fatal error; spreading out into the stagnant marsh of weakness and disunion, tumbling in cataract-foam, writhing madly and streaked with blood, into the abyss of anarchy, or gliding into the Dead Sea of Despotism: but earnest thought and practical effort of our own are necessary in addition to all it gives us, calm consi- deration of the difficulties, conditions, and tools of our time, valour to dare and perseverance to do, Baconian induction and Platonic ardour. It is in this spirit and with this con- sciousness that we would offer a few hints towards the solution of that great problem To show Freedom her . hands, to point out how the energy of Despotism may be in her reasoning eye, the power of Despotism in her will- ing arm. It will be much if our words even call attention to this subject, for, in its precise nature, we cannot see that THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OT THE AOE. it has been fairly grappled with; it is time that we began to have an express literature of freedom, that a systematic attempt were made by thinkers to teach the people to gird on the armour of free men. Our meaning will be fully apprehended, as we proceed to do even that little which is here possible. Casting, in the present day, a general glance on a free nation, with the view of discovering how it may best per- form that august task to which, by the fact of its freedom, it is called by God, we think we should find ourselves called u pon to treat of each of the following departments at some considerable length: I. The central government. II. Free association, for philanthropic or reforming pur- poses. III. The relation of ranks. IV. Municipal government. In the brief remarks which follow, we shall confine our- selves entirely to the internal aspects of a free state. Touching the first of the above subjects of discussion, much were to be said. It suggests two questions: How is the governing body to be got together? and, To the discharge of what duties is it competent when assembled? With all its drawbacks, and with full recognition of the dangers to which it is exposed, we have a grounded faith in popular election : we strongly suspect no method was ever devised better adapted for getting the really strong- est man to the top. That the great preacher of the duty of hero-worship, who has expressly asserted that the hero must and shall be worshipped, should have given expres- sion to that utter denial of any power in the mass of a popu- lation to distinguish ability and worth which we have quot- ed, is surely somewhat singular; we thought he regarded THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 261 the instincts of a people as truer than their thoughts, and should have expected that he would have had some reliance upon the half-articulate consciousness of men, who are ever, to use his own phraseology, in contact with fact and re- ality. The philosophy of popular election we take to be, that it aims at stripping a man of all those extrinsic recom- mendations and assisting influences, which he might possess as member of a family or class, and subjecting him to the judgment, while offering him to the choice, of so largeanum- ber of men, that he can be commended to them solely by his individual qualities; and we should wish for no sounder method, by which to discover those men who, as ablest, ought to be set apart to govern their country, than one in which a vast body of electors contrived, either by instinct or education, to separate from those presented to their suf- frages every adventitious circumstance, of birth, wealth, or connections, and asked regarding them simply what were their personal qualities. That we have not approached this, we frankly concede; but we cannot grant that no attempt can be made to reach it. Were it a vain attempt to endeavour to educate the po pulation of a free country to the special duties and func* tions of freemen? It has been little thought of. Much, we cannot doubt, might be done, both to awaken a sens* of duty, and to guide to a selection of men. Unless integrity reigns in the heart of the free elector, we cannot hope for a happy issue to the exercise of his office: we say not that free constituencies or other electing bodies are less marked by integrity, than is the case in any one instance where the number of electors is closely circum- scribed; but none the less is there room for improvement, and a call on all men to promote it. Not only must virtue and ho- nesty, generally considered, be advocated in a free country, 262 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OP THE AGE. but freemen must be aroused to a sense of the nobleness, the responsibility, the sacredness of the distinctive duties of the free. In a brave army, cowardice is reckoned more to be shunned than death: every brave soldier will rather die on his colours than abandon them. Travellers tell us of the Osmanli, that, however reduced they find him, how faded soever the glory of olden days, he yet regards, with a silent pride, the sabre that hangs at his belt, letting no speck stain its brightness, but stinting himself rather than part with a jewel in its sheath: it seems to whisper of the old might of Islam, to tell him that in his veins runs the blood of conquerors, that he has in his heart a treasure dearer than life. Now, methinks, a freeman, with a heart in his breast, should treat an attempt to buy from him his honour, to purchase his free voice, as a true soldier would a charge of cowardice, or a valiant Osmanli a request to sell his sabre for a bit of bread. Every free-born elector of Britain or America possesses the birthright of a sacred duty ; he has one act to perform which is worthy of the greatest, and for the right doing of which it were noble to die. "The honour of a freeman " this, in free nations, should be a formula for the expression of something stronger than death. But, on the other hand, might not the at- tempt at bribery be regarded as standing high in the list of crimes? Is such a thing impossible as high treason to the people, and is it unjust that it should be visited as severely as high treason to the prince? And if the honour of freemen might be cherished, to guard the purity of election, its efficiency might unques- tionably be promoted by the adoption of certain prac- ticable methods, by which the body of electors in free nations might be guided, at least in an important de- gree, in the selection of representatives. It is surely THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 263 somewhat strange, that Mr Carlyle, instead of denouncing popular election in that unqualified and indignant manner, did not think it might be possible to give such directing hints to honest electors, as would aid them in fixing upon the worthiest candidate for their suffrages. Men of all ranks having such an irresistible tendency to bow down to the hero, might it not be possible, to some extent, to point the said hero out? Is it so hard to indicate certain of the particular difficulties and dangers to be encountered by the elector? Would rough common sense, when set on its guard, be apt to be blinded by cajolery or fawning? Were it im- possible to awaken electors to a feeling of the emptiness of mere talk, and train them to a habit of comparing words with actions? Is there not spread widely such a measure of intelligence among our working men, and the general body of our freemen, that they could, especially if urged and instructed, inform themselves of the past life of their pro- posed representative, and judge whether, from his bear- ing in what spheres he has occupied, he has the heart, the head, the arm of a man? Is it altogether hopeless, that they might learn a total indifference to the jingle of the guineas in his purse, and ask neither of what blood he comes, nor what are his possessions, but whether he is a man of ability, uprightness, information, discreet valour and religion, worthy to become a British lawgiver? These are but a few lessons which electors might learn. More we need not add. This would be a wide and important department in a literature of freedom. So much directly bearing on electors; one word on those whom they may elect. The question admits, to say the least, of discussion, whether it is not advisable, in our British Islands, to find a larger body of men from which representatives can be obtained. Here we desire 264 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. to speak with somewhat of caution and hesitancy. Yet it does seem a reasonable idea, that a larger class of British subjects might, beneficially to the commonwealth, have opened up to them a path into the House of Commons. The aristocratic and monied classes alone can enter there. Is it certain that there is not thus excluded an important and available portion of the intellect of the country? The shrewd, energetic, earnest citizen, of the lower order in the middle class, accustomed to think much and work hard, enters not. The bulk of the intellect of the powerful fourth estate must rule without the doors of the Senate House. That a powerfully-minded member of the work- ing class, who knows the feelings and wants of his bre- thren, should ever be admitted, seems to be regarded as an extravagant idea ; yet, can it be doubted that such might prove an abler senator, than the gambler for fame with an abundance of money, or the brisk scion of the nobility, who can drive tandem and is a capital shot? We scout the idea of paying our legislators in gold ; we fear they occa- sionally make us pay for the honour of employing them in even rarer coin. A few evils might arise from making it possible for membership to become a trade ; would there arise a greater number than from continuing to make it a fashionable amusement? We do not regard with any measure of doubt the fact, that governing bodies, of which the members have been or are paid, have proved themselves not one whit less patriotic, and we are inclined to add able, than those where the practice has never been introduced. The question of the functions to which the governing body in a free nation is competent, is one which interests us very deeply. The notions which float in the public mind on this subject are, we think, vague, and not un- frequently erroneous. There is a tendency, fatal in its THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OP THE AGE. 265 consequences, and decried by earnest men, to confound true freedom with laissez /aire; as if liberty meant no rule at all, or as if it even implied any curtailing of the executive; instead of government, effective and indefinitely extended, by the best, with consent of all. National freedom, too, is apt to be confounded with individual liberty, and thus to lose its power. A people may be nationally impotent from fear to meddle with personal rights. The idea is too com- mon, that in a free state the government ought to exer- cise little or no control over private affairs, and that the state is free, in proportion as this is the case. It is for- gotten that the essence of tyranny consists, not in the fact that men obey, but that they do so without knowing and comprehending the reason of their action ; and that the life of freedom consists, not in any exemption from obey- ing, but in obedience after due exercise of that will which God has implanted in men and nations, after assurance ob- tained that submission or active compliance are promotive of the general welfare, and assent asked and accorded. Now, it will of course be seen that we here advocate no particular measures; but we do say that we now oppose a misconcep- tion of the very essence of liberty, one which dooms it to be utterly ineffective for any great national end. The one characteristic of real freedom is, that a nation acts with consent and intelligence; you cannot decide whether a nation is free or enslaved by knowing uhat its government does, you must know how it dues it. The man is as free who commands himself to be bound, with express direc- tions that no attention be paid to any subsequent .-hrieks or implorings, that he may undergo an excruciating operation, as he who sweeps the moorland on his own steed, or gazes over the face of a flashing sea from the deck of his own bounding yacht. We shall illustrate 266 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. these remarks by a modern instance. Every one is aware of the prevalency of what has been named bureaucracy on the Continent; that government, through its officials, exer- cises a superintendence over most private business, settling, it may be, the order in which streets are to be built, the manner in which houses are to be constructed, the establish- ment of every sort of mercantile company, and so on. This circumstance produces a great deal of intermeddling on the part of government functionaries, little annoyances neces- sarily arise, and many arguments are urged against the system; we greatly mistake, if it is not frequently looked upon as an integral portion of Continental despotism, and quite out of accordance with our British freedom. We neither defend nor impugn the system; but we allege that it has no necessary connection either with despotism or liberty. If a nation, acting through men by itself deputed, men who represent the national will, comes to the conclu- sion that the beauty of its cities would be enhanced, by their streets being built according to plans approved by a body of artistically qualified men, it continues a perfectly free state, though no one of its citizens can, at his own whim or caprice, inflict an architectural nuisance upon his fellow-townsmen. If it is discovered by a nation that the malconstruction of private dwellings frequently occasions fire and gives rise to extensive damage, or that the stupi- dity or carelessness of individuals results in the confusion of titles and the multiplication of quarrels and lawsuits, it may most freely appoint bodies of judicious men, archi- tects and lawyers, to inspect plans and titles. And so on. The nation is ever free when itself wills the restraints which on itself it imposes. We do not say it is necessary that it impose such; by no means; but that every such measure is, in strictest accordance with real freedom, open THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 267 for consideration. We do, however, go the length of say- ing, and that with all emphasis and earnestness, that, until freedom takes this positive, and as it were aggressive attitude; until it learns to extend its executive in various directions, and to bring the sifted intellect and the concen- trated will of the nation to look upon with scrutinising glance, and to order with energy and exactness, the various modes and departments of national life, it will never fully unfold its powers. As yet, it has not been fairly pitted against despotism. It has been individual effort in free nations which has been matched against national effort in despotic states. We trust it will one day prove possible, with the perfect preservation of individual freedom, of which more presently, to pitt national effort in free nations against national effort in despotisms, and to demonstrate that the analogy between the nation and the individual here too holds good: that, as the free poet sings more sweetly and more thrillingly than he whose song is heard through a grating; and as three free warriors will hurl back a host of enslaved invaders; so a nation, which freely collects its reason, and gathers its will, and girds up its loins, and exerts itself in all manner of regulating and compelling ac- tion, will in peace tower in calm wisdom, a Pallas among the nations, and in war ride over their necks, as the proud vessel, with all sails set and every spar in order, but with a living will on board, rides over the poor slaves of moon and tem- pest, the wandering billows. It were certainly competent to the British nation, it were consistent with its freedom, nay, it were positively the awakening to vigour and action of its freedom, to have all great public concerns transacted by men better qualified to transact them than private in- dividuals can be hoped to be, by men who, of the whole nation, are best fitted to transact them. Until this com- 268 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. mences on a grand scale, the capacities of a free nation, as distinguished from those of free individuals, will not be unfolded. It appears to us, that it is the general oblivious- ness to this great aspect of freedom, and the kindred phe- nomenon of testiness to all touching of so-called private rights, which have given edge and occasion to such denun- ciations, on the part of Mr Carlyle, as we have quoted. In treating of the central government in a free country, the subject which engages our attention is national free- dom. In turning to the second of those categories under which a discussion of the whole matter seemed to us to ad- mit of being ranged, we are met by the distinct yet related topic of individual freedom. Association for philanthropic or reforming purposes is a necessary phenomenon in a free country ; and of all the questions which present themselves to him who reflects upon the nature and working of free- dom, it might be alleged that no one is of more importance, and perhaps difficulty, than that which bears upon the con- nection and relations of this form of force, for it is none other than a form of force, with that central power, which, strictly, represents the thinking and acting power of a free nation. We believe it to be a prevalent idea, that voluntary asso- ciation ought to do very much, if not all, in a free country; it is to individual enterprise, to the thought and energy of the private subject, attracting and combining into an avail- able force the intellects and energies of his individual fel- low-citizens, that we naturally look for the performance of great undertakings; we look not to government, but to individual co-operation, for water, for gas, for steam con- veyance to the ends of the world, for railways and electric wires to cover our own island. It is our profound convic- tion that we may permit this idea to carry us too far; that the hope of freedom at present is to be placed in a large THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 269 measure in its learning to take up the tools of despotism in a free hand, and to perform great national enterprises, not by the blundering, and in many cases blinded agency of provincial association, but by the disinterested will of what in a perfect state of freedom would certainly be, and even in an imperfect state of freedom we believe generally is, the highest intellect of the nation, its freely elected central power. But we do not at all hesitate in pronouncing volun- tary association a natural, wholesome, and inevitable growth of freedom. It is possible, indeed, that it may be, to a large extent, merely temporal ; and, seeing a grander possibility of attainment ahead, we cannot say we should regret its prov- ing to have been so: it is possible that it may in all its forms mark merely a stage in the life of free nations, a part of a great system of practical education; that it will be only when they awaken to the dangers of indivi- dual association, when they find railway companies ruin- ing themselves and putting the public to inconvenience, water companies bickering and battling in the presence of a thirsty and unwashed township, private corporations perpetuating the causes of disease or preventing the beau- tifying of cities, that they will fully and joyously perceive that it is nowise inconsistent with perfect liberty that the management of railways, and we know not how much else, be ultimately vested in a body of national rulers chosen by themselves. Yet it is impossible, on the one hand, to deny the fact that association has its roots in the soil of liberty, and, on the other, that there may, in any conceivable case, remain a work for it to do. All national freedom is founded on individual; the mind and tongue must first be free ; and this being granted, the necessary origin of association is at once perceived: no man finds it good to be alone; man feels at once more happy and more 270 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. powerful when he acts with his brothers ; and therefore the thought in his head, the wish in his heart, will reach his tongue, in the form of a request or exhortation, addressed to other men, to sympathise with him, or work along with him. Christian philanthropy, of which we have said so much, is but a form of free association; on the hypothesis that Christianity and Christian love exist in a free nation, its rise is unavoidable. In his essay on The Signs of the Times, an essay marked by his usual penetrating intellectual energy, and perhaps remarkable, even among his essays, for the brilliant and musical terseness of its style, Mr Carlyle divides the forces which act in human affairs into the dynamic or individual forces, love, religion, enthusiasm, and so on, and the mechanical, which arise from organisation and union. His distinction and classification we accept as cor- rect, but he has omitted something which to us appears of great importance, to define, namely, the connection be- tween the two provinces of human affairs on which he comments. In the close of his essay, he distinctly recog- nises the soundness and necessity of each set of forces. But has he fully considered how they are connected, how the machinery and the dynamics are related? The con- nection is that of simple, proportional, indissoluble sequence. The machinery arises from the dynamics, the organised and united force results from the individual, by a necessity which we cannot exhibit, because its negation cannot be even conceived. An army of which the soldiers are drilled, marshalled, and then enlisted; a tree that unfolds its leaves, and strikes down its stem, &ndjinally deposits its seed ; these are precisely analogous conceptions to that of a society which has not originated in individual force. Goethe said his opinion was infinitely strengthened by the THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 271 assent of even one. In his aphorism is to be found the sole possible explication of that machinery for the carrying on of various objects, which seems to Mr Carlyle to be in such excess in our time. An individual or dynamic force acts in an individual bosom; it is communicated to another bosom, to a third, to a fourth: these all now have a com- mon bond, a common force ; a society, an organisation, if you will, a machine, is formed. The machinery must always be in a precise ratio to the dynamics. Whence is it, then, that we see so little machinery in the olden time, say in the time of Luther, and so much in our day? For a simple and conclusive reason. Before Luther could at all disseminate his views, he also had, by immoveable necessity, to find and form his machi- nery; men heard his voice, and gathered round him, and he was speedily in the centre of a square with fixed bayonets, powerful for aggression or defence. The effec- tiveness of this square, besides, depended precisely on the amount of the dynamic force in each breast ; the more perfect the individual, the more perfect the machine. But Luther, or any man of Luther's time, had a much harder task to perform in securing his machinery, than any man can have now-a-days. It is, we have seen, the great leading characteristic of our age, that thought is more fluent, that men more easily communicate and draw together, than was ever the case in this world. It is because every dynamic force can now, with extreme facility, gather round it a machinery, that the land is covered with organisations and societies. Had Luther lived now, he had found it a more easy task to spread his doctrines than he did in the six- teenth century, but he could not by any possibility have spread them without gathering round him a living machine of men. If, therefore, desirous of urging a point, we said 272 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE, that Mr Carlyle, in opposing these two provinces of our affairs, in saying we have too much machinery, and too little dynamics, gave expression to a sheer natural im- possibility, we should speak the actual truth ; every human organisation must originate in dynamic, in individual force. The truth, of course, is, that it is in the latter we are always to look for the evil; change the quality of your dynamic force, and all, save some matter of practical de- tail, is done; and we most willingly put this interpreta- tion upon Mr Carlyle's essay, and benefit by his superb en- forcement of the great duty of purifying the nation's heart that the issues of its life may be pure. In those stern old ages, it was a serious matter for a man to gain his ma- chinery ; it was only when he saw, as by the light of a cherub's sword, and felt himself commanded to speak as by a voice from a bush burning yet not consumed, that he would risk his life for his doctrine. In our day, every man, who has a crotchet and a well or not very well hung tongue, can gather his company, can form his asso- ciation, can construct his machine. Would you wonder that the flower which grows in the hothouse has a sicklier look, than that whose roots had to cling to the solid rock in the scowl of the norland blast ? Mr Carlyle looked over the luxuriant field of modern society, and saw the growth of organisations most abundant, in great measure a growth of weeds ; accepting the hard- won conditions of our time, we recognise it as well that plants spring quickly, but would direct all energy to pluck up such weeds, and to ex- amine the seed sown. In the brief glance we took at the development of modern philanthropy, in our chapter on Wilberforce, we offered one or two suggestions, which will be found applicable to the working of free associations in general. We cannot enter THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 273 further upon the subject, inviting and important as it is ; the reader will find it treated, in several of its important aspects, by modern writers on political economy. On the subject of the relation between rank and rank in a free state, we could enlarge to an indefinite extent, but we shall say almost nothing. It is unnecessary to enter on its discussion, so ably and lucidly has it been treated by Mr Mill, Mr Greg, and others. The only relationwhich we can in future hope to see subsist between employer and em- ployed, is that which we have seen uniting Budgett and his men. " We have entered," says Mr Mill, " into a state of civilisation, in which the bond that attaches human beings to one another, must be disinterested admiration and sym- pathy for personal qualities, or gratitude for unselfish ser- vices, and not the emotions of protectors towards depen- dants, or of dependants towards protectors." It seems to us a demonstrable point that this relation is at once possible and noble ; and while we do not by any means disguise from ourselves its difficulty, we can sympathise with no attempt to replace it by another. We think we can detect a two- fold error by which it is impeded. One half of society lauds freedom in name, and even, verbally, evinces a desire that it should be extended to all: while there is either an ignorance of its real character, demands, and difficulties, or an unwillingness to meet them ; a backwardness, above all, to embrace, in all its significance, the essential truth of freedom, that the soul of every man is of equal worth, and, of natural consequence, the hardship or inconvenience of one class, save where special injustice is involved, no more to be deprecated than those of another. When the rich think of the poor, the ruling and enjoying classes of the toiling and obeying, their ideas run mainly, we suspect, on the retaining of these in quiet and content, in comfort, T 274 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. indeed, and it is to be hoped in happiness (for we are very tender-hearted), but in a condition of inferiority ; and if this is the case, it is not to be wondered at that the patro- nised classes may entertain a half suspicion of kindness, as if allied to charity. On the other hand, we think we per- ceive among the working classes, in their yearning towards freedom, an error, if possible, still more pernicious : the idea that this liberty for which they long is a certain worldly good ; a dim, half-conscious notion, that the free are those who sit at a well- furnished table, while the only partially free or enslaved pick up the crumbs; and that the grand object of these last is just to change places. Of the unnumbered errors that went to compound the idea to which the pa- triot Frenchman of 1793 gave the title of freedom, perhaps none was more insulting to the name of liberty and the soul of man, than the conception, ever emerginginthetumult of the time, that freedom meant the procuring of some great accession of eatables and drinkables by the populace ; that it would prove the opening of exhaustless breasts of abundance; thatit was tobe, in greatmeasure, the satisfaction of thestrong but not very sublime human faculty of greed. Now, there was just a particle of truth here, the particle, namely, that in a state of perfect freedom, the physical condition of all classes would be the best possible in the circumstances ; but this is precisely the lowest truth, for the sake of which a man can desire freedom ; and a pre-eminent cause why the stern republican goddess poured such indignant con- tempt upon the worship offered her by the patriots of France, was, that they forgot the high blessings she sheds upon the spirit, and bent before her with the prayer that she would degrade herself to minister first and chiefly to the body. Freedom does not absolutely guarantee physi- cal opulence to any class ; her aim is to fix every man in THE 80CIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 275 his station, and give him there his desert: to enable, on the one hand, the workman to toil with no feeling of in- feriority or self-contempt, in the sense that it is not man and injustice, but God and nature, which ordain his labour and appoint his sphere, and in the deliberate and intelligent belief, that it is, in all respects, physical and spiritual, best for him that the man whom he obeys actually com- mands him, receiving, in respect of severer and more pre- cious work, a higher reward ; and, on the other hand, to take every ray of insulting pride or condescending inso- lence out of the eye of the mafeter, as having no essential superiority over his employed, as deserving a kindly respect but no reverence, as simply doing, in his sphere, that duty which his equal but not equally endowed brother does in his. Whether the precise form of the relation between the industrious classes and those who employ them may, to any considerable extent, and at an approaching time, un- dergo alteration, is a question of no small interest. We do not regard it as a matter open to dispute that the gra- dual superseding of the ancient method, of wages given by a master and work done by a servant, is, in extensive de- partments of our affairs, possible and desirable. We see no effective mode of counteracting that often deprecated tendency of civilisation to concentrate wealth in certain quarters, save by carrying out the principle of co-opera- tion in the manufacturing, and perhaps also the mercan- tile provinces ; this, certainly, is a thoroughly efficient means of that counteraction ; and it were hard to say how there could be pointed out, on the whole, a more perfectly whole- some and promising phenomenon in a state, than that of workmen, by force of thrift, sobriety, education, and sense, becoming their own employers. The achievement here 276 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. being lofty, the task is again difficult; but we would fain cherish the hope that there is stamina in the British working class ultimately to effect it. Mr Greg has dis- cussed this subject in a truly masterly manner. To tell the working classes that they are perfectly en- lightened and endowed with every manly virtue, that they are, therefore, unjustly treated by the higher ranks, while their country suffers from their not sharing more largely in political rights, is an extremely easy, but signally use- less proceeding. "We look with no forbidding coldness on attempts which may be ma'Qe towards any really valuable extension of those rights; but we deem it gross flattery to our lower classes in general, to say, that they stand remark- ably high in culture and moral worth ; we think the fact d <es not admit of disguise, that the work of their educa- tion, using the word in its widest sense, has yet, in very groat measure, to be done, and that it will be no easy task; while it is our profound conviction, that Britain, as a whole, possesses such an amount of freedom, that no class within its borders, morally and intellectually strong, can be long defrauded of its substantial rights or excluded from its na- tural station. We have not to win our freedom ; we have but to learn to use it; and we think both that the higher classes may learn boldness in proceeding with reform, and the lower encouragment in waiting, from the fact that re- volution for the attainment of any political privileges in our island would now constitute an absolute novelty in the history of nations. Can any man conceive so large a number of British citizens as would constitute a force suf- ficient to make itself felt by the government of the empire, deliberately putting life and living to the hazard for all that an almost ideal reform could offer? Or, on the other hand, can any man fairly consider the state of feeling in THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 277 our higher classes towards the lower, the desire of fair play and equitable sharing of the advantages of liberty, which may be pronounced universal, and the encouraging sympathy and glad accordance of aid, which abound to an unexampled extent, and maintain, that any reform of real value, upon which the great body of the working class, not any pitiful and fractional portion of the scum and froth of that class, as in the Chartist movement, has earnestly set its heart, will be long denied it? Any particular scheme of all-effecting political attainment will for the future prove a mere ignis fatuus, a mere deluding, dis- tracting phantom to our working classes, turning them from the path of their real interests, blinding them to their substantial hopes. In moral and intellectual edu- cation; in the acquisition of an intellectual power to dis- cern their true position, with all its possibilities and perils, as affected by modern invention, and of a moral ability to accommodate themselves thereto; in gradually becoming fit to be their own masters; in bridling passion, and subduing intoxication; lies the true game of the work- ing classes. The method in which this great and momentous process of education is to be proceeded with, cannot be here dis- cussed. We shall merely, in one or two words, guard against what we deem an important misconception, and in- dicate the precise quarter in which promising efforts are to be made. Mr Ruskin, a man concerning whom, whatever may be the minor diversities of opinion, it seems agreed, that his entrance upon literature will, in all time to come, mark an epoch, and that one of beneficent change and noble ad- vancement, in the history of art, has lately turned his at- tention, to some considerable extent, to certain of our 278 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. social aspects. With a nobleness the more beautiful that it is evinced with manifest unconsciousness, and which is of a sort very rarely found among men who, like him, have devoted life-long and concentrated attention to any one department, whether of science, literature, or art, he deliberately, in a small volume which he has lately pub- lished, declares the most important portion of the whole of a great work devoted to the advocacy of particular ideas in pure art, to be that which most men would have either overlooked or considered a point of incidental and second- ary interest, their bearing upon the true liberty, the real advantage, in one word, the life, of the workman. This declaration he associates with a complaint, that, save in a single instance, critics have overlooked the chapter in which he has discussed the point. His remonstrance is no doubt reasonable ; the chapter deserved serious considera- tion. That consideration we are the more willing to bestow, from an unwavering assurance, that the truth which lies in his words must prove useless or even dangerous, if not dissociated from the important oversight and the essen- tial error which we remark in his paragraphs. We shall quote one or two of his words: " I know not if a day is ever to come when the nature of right freedom will be understood, and when men will see that to obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty liberty from care." Again : "There might be more free- dom in England, though her feudal lords' lightest words were worth men's lives, and though the blood of the vexed hus- bandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, and racked into THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 279 the exactness of a line." To remedy this sad state of mat- ters, he offers three suggestions, in the form of advices, to those who, directly or indirectly, employing workmen, ex- pose themselves to the danger of falling into the guilt of slaveholding. The second and third are almost corollaries from the first, and the latter has reference exclusively to art. The first is as follows t " Never encourage the ma- nufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share." We think we need not now tarry to prove that, in speaking of freedom as a liberty from care, Mr Ruskin totally misconceives its nature; that its precise and essen- tial characteristics are will and ability to undertake this same honourable and manlike, though, no doubt, at times oppressive care; that exemption from the labour of per- sonal and earnest thought is the most tempting of all the bribes of despotism, and its deliberate and unalterable re- jection, the express act by which a man vindicates his title and asserts his power to be free. When reverence is the hereditary claim of any man, or set of men, when the word of one man is worth the life of another, no soft cushions of indolence on which to lie, no dealing out of dainties on which to batten, can effect any change in the essentially despotic and slavish construction of society. This original and ruining flaw in his conception of free- dom must weaken and unsettle the whole system of Mr Ruskin's thinking on the subject. But, leaving this, let us inquire into the worth of his recommendation as to invention. We think it is of important value ; but let us carefully define the limits of its operation. No minute investigation or very deep reflection is necessary to enable us to do so : we have not to inquire how far, in the several departments of our national work, the action of individual 280 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. invention may be combined with the agency of machinery: we have but to refer, on the one hand, to the positive super- seding of the human arm, by that steam-power which, in all provinces of manufactures, does the work of millions, and, on the other, to the numerous trades in which the labour is entirely and necessarily mechanical. The un- numbered thousands who toil in factories, work, according to the objection, in a manner purely mechanical. If Mr Ruskin proposes to cast the steam-engine back into the womb of oblivion, we shall not answer him ; if the mecha- nical action of those who watch the huge wheels as they set in motion a thousand looms, is a necessary and un- changeable fact, we cannot eonsider that we have any choice save to accept it and make the most of it. And how is invention to be brought to bear in many ancient and indispensable callings? The ploughman and the sower must lay furrow over furrow, and cast the corn across the fallow ground, much in the manner of their fathers. We see not how the baker or slater can show much invention in the exercise of their vocations, and we think any attempt on their part to do so were decidedly to be deprecated. An inventive shopkeeper, who departed from established usage in the disposal of his goods, and manifested a talent for eloquence in their recommenda- tion, would, we trust, speedily be bankrupt; the navvy is a sufficiently respectable citizen, and a set of navvies at their work a noble and exhilarating spectacle, but if each of the gang took to an original mode of shovelling the earth and using the pickaxe, it might, especially if they happened to belong to the sister isle, partake of the comic; the grim-looking personage, whose bright eyes look out from a blackened and streaming visage, and whose Cyclo- pean arms hammer the white-hot iron, beyond aiming well THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 281 and hitting hard, has little to attempt in the way of dis- covery; and any attempt to find a vent for original genius in that useful and elevated profession, sweeping of chimneys, would full surely end in smoke. The fact is perfectly plain : it is but to a fractional part of our working population that Mr Ruskin's suggestion can apply. But to a fractional part it does, and that in a very important manner. Mr Raskin is a writer on art, and it is natural that his general views should be coloured by his continual thinking on art and its kindred subjects. Invention is the soul of art; but the common handicrafts of life are in great measure its ab- solute negation. We sympathise unreservedly in his every word, in so far as artistic matters are concerned; we agree, too, that in all provinces where invention can be profitably and naturally introduced, it is to be encouraged; and we think he throws out an available and weighty hint, when he bids all classes consider what sort of handiwork they chiefly encourage, and how it affects the health and free- dom of the workman: but when he ventures to cast his eye over that vast tree of national life of which art is but the final flower, and in each leaf, where is to be expected only the sober and accustomed green, looks for the golden and roseate beauty which is naturally to be sought in that crown- ing efflorescence of existence to which he has devoted his powers, we cannot question that he errs. What intellectual and moral education can be introduced into the working of each of the employments of the body of the people, we should rejoice to see taken advantage of; but it were deeply to be deplored if the benefits to be hence derived prevented our clearly perceiving the direction in which the most important progress is to be made. It is not by entering on the fantastic undertaking of getting rid of machinery, but by making it do for us our rude and 282 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. physical work, that we can advance. As by a spell of supreme potency, modern science and invention have summoned to our aid, to be our unresisting and irresistible slaves, the mechanical powers which thunder in a thousand factories, and hang their black smoke-banners over our towns. Is it impossible, that such advantage be taken of their capabilities that a larger amount of leisure than heretofore may be found for purely intellectual pursuits, by our mechanical workmen ? And may not the inventive ex- ercise, which was formerly found in individual operations, be advantageously foregone, for the sake of the enhanced freshness of intellect and keenness of relish, with which he, who has been engaged during working hours in a mecha- nical employment, will turn at its close to the pursuit of science, or the study of literature ? If we cannot regard this prospect with hope, we must abandon hope altogether; to break asunder our engines and quench our furnaces, all will concede, were an attempt which could originate only in a delirious dream: but there are not wanting facts to justify us in cherishing the expectation, that indefinite advancement is here possible. The manufacturing work- men, we understand from Mr M'Culloch, are a particularly intelligent class; and the free libraries of Manchester and Liverpool, with the ranges of quiet, studious, dignified, and happy readers, which we have seen in at least one of them, give surely a conclusive testimony to the truth of our words. And if workmen gradually be- came their own masters, and could thus to some extent control the feverish intensity of manufacturing competi- tion, how nobly consistent with freedom, and how plainly practicable, were this whole scheme of advancement ! Our hope, then, of the education of the working class rests on two things : first, that working hours be shortened ; and, second, THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 283 that operatives prove themselves possessed of the moral power, and the capability of intellectual pleasure, which alone would make such curtailment a blessing, and not a curse. Let no one imagine we are insensible to the diffi- culties which are to be met with in any attempt at improve- ment here ; we know them to be stern, complicated, all but overpowering: but however steep and rugged the way, there is no other. Did we say the attainment of perfect spiritual freedom was easy ? We have left ourselves no space to speak of Municipal Governme\i. We can merely express our profound feel- ing of its importance our conviction that, if our towns are to be beautified and cleared, if we must not relinquish every hope of such an artistic education for the mass of our people as is presented by the very streets of certain Continental towns if, in one word, all those local duties and reforms are to be rightly performed, to which a central government cannot, under any circumstances, be expected to direct its attention, the Municipal Institutions of a large empire must be in free and vigorous working. We have thus, in faint and partial outline, traced at least the initial steps in what, without unsettling any part of our social system, without any startling innovation, and without the very possibility of revolution, might prove a thorough and all-embracing reform. We can imagine our words appearing to some to have an unreal and Utopian 60und, and it had been easy to throw ourselves open to this charge; but we think we have not in any measure done so. It were surely a depressing consideration, if, to the calmest and most careful thought, it seemed an impossibility that freedom might yet achieve triumphs unexampled, perhaps undreamed of, in the history of the world. It were Utopian, indeed, if we represented the attainment as easy ; and all 284 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. we have said would deserve to be put aside with a pitying smile, if we fancied that by one effort, or through the wis- dom, theoretic and practical, of anyone scheme, a nation was to be regenerated. But if we confess that the realisation of perfect freedom appears to us, in every aspect, a work of difficulty; and ground our hopes of this realisation upon the gradual, almost or altogether imperceptible pervasion of the nation by a deeper nobleness and a more substantial intelligence; we see not on what a charge of Utopianism can be based. We cannot even profess to entertain im- mediate or sanguine hope ; but we will not relinquish a profound conviction of possibility, or a clear assurance of duty. And as we set out from Christianity, as we found in it the basis upon which a system of free social relations could be reared, it is only by returning to Christianity, and finding in it a golden band to unite the whole in safety, harmony, and beauty, that we can irrefragably demonstrate the possibility, while assured it is the sole possibility, of the execution of our scheme. The real happiness of freedom was never in the course of human history attained by a nation morally weak ; licentious, irreverent, feeling itself bound by no relations to an unseen world. The alliance of freedom and irreligion, which we have seen attempted in these latter ages, is anomalous and impossible. Show me a sniffing, unbelieving, debauched, playacting thing, gesticulating on its platform or stump, swelling with con- ceit and self-importance, listening open-eared for any faint breath of applause, basely flattering the crowd before it, mere animal greed in its eye, and mere tirade about the felicity of the rich and the removal of taxes on its lips, and I will show you that which no earthly power will ever make free. That heart has not width enough to hold the love of freedom, that poor head cannot form its very con- THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. 285 ception ; it is but an imaginary and absurd delusion of which that tongue is prating : freedom disowns the whole exhibition. But show me a working man, who, from his free fireside, with his own loving wife beside him, and his children smiling in his face, can look beyond earth and time, and see a King, from whom he holds a charter of free- dom, seated on an eternal throne, the rays from His eye falling equally on the king and the peasant, the oak and the lichen ; who has not contracted his wishes and thoughts upon the spreading of his table and the covering of his back, or on anything which he will have to surrender to the cold grasp of death ; who has not denied his immaterial existence, but knows that it is as a thinking, reasoning, lov- ing spirit, that man has a real existence and a perennial nobleness : and I will show you one on whom freedom will look with hope. Hear the calm testimony of history on this point : the following passage, on the disbanding of the great army of Puritanism, with which we close this Book, is, we believe, a testimony to the power of Christianity to fit a nation for conjoining freedom with law, to which no philosophic system can even pretend to adduce a parallel, which stands absolutely alone, in the annals of man : " Fifty thousand men, accustomed to the profession of arms, were at once thrown on the world : and experience seemed to warrant the belief that this change would pro- duce much misery and crime, that the discharged veterans would be seen begging in every street, or would be driven by hunger to pillage. But no such result followed. In a few months there remained not a trace indicating that the most formidable army in the world had been absorbed into the mass of the community. The royalists themselves confessed that, in every department of honest industry, the 286 THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF THE AGE. discarded warrior prospered beyond other men, that none was charged with any theft or robbery, that none was heard to ask an alms, and that, if a baker, a mason, or a waggoner, attracted notice by his diligence and sobriety, he was in all probability one of Oliver's old soldiers." BOOK II. CHRISTIANITY THE BASIS OF INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY: A FEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. " Those," says Mackintosh, " who are early accustomed to dispute first principles, are never likely to acquire in a sufficient degree that earnestness and that sincerity, that strong love of truth and that conscientious solicitude for the formation of just opinions, which are not the least vir- tues of men, but of which the cultivation is the mote espe- cial duty of all who call themselves philosophers." This is a weighty remark; not, perhaps, singularly recondite, but, beacon-like, giving warning of much, and peculiarly applicable to the present time. Behind us now we see a long roll of ages ; as we look backwards over the path of mankind, we discern opinions of all sorts maintained by men of all orders of talent ; from belief in transubstantia- tion to belief in nothing, all beliefs have had their able advocates. This prospect cannot again be darkened, this fact can no longer be disguised: while newspapers, and 288 A FEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. mechanic institutes, and even ragged schools exist, men will know that the mode of their parish, of their country, of their generation, is not the only conceivable mode. Even the body of the people cannot again, save by an iron despotism, be brought to any such state as sub- sisted in ages long gone by. It is therefore nothing wonderful, that a common phenomenon of the day is doubt. In considering the aspects of the time, one cannot fail to be struck with the singular spectacles which arise out of this characteristic. We have been forcibly reminded, in reflecting on certain of these, of a certain Arabian tale. We find there recorded the fate of a vessel, whose pilot unfor- tunately steered her into the too close vicinity of a magnetic mountain. The nails were all attracted, the planks fell as- under, and total wreck ensued. It is no uncommon thing at present, to see a man sailing in the vessel of his belief and appearing to do well enough. But he nears some new system of philosophic or theological thought, or comes within the influence of some man of overwhelming powers. This is the magnetic mountain. It at once draws out the con- necting and riveting points of his faith, and his whole ship, himself sprawling among the severed timbers, lies scattered wide on the tossing sea. But he manages to gather together the floating wreck, he repairs his belief, and again sets sail : Lo ! another magnetic mountain ; the nails are again flying ; again he lies discomfited among waves and mere confused planks. His courage does not quite fail, however; yet again he gets piece to piece, and, under a new phase, once more sets forth: and so it proceeds, mountain after mountain, and phase after phase, the whole voyage being taken up either in refitting, or in proclaiming that now at last a balmy and salubrious region A FEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. 289 has been entered, that all ships ought to sail on this tack, and that the last magnetic mountain (the head of the next just becoming visible in the horizon) is positively the last in this world. Now we think it cannot be denied that there is an un- wonted amount of intellectual foppishness at present ex- tant ; the old Byronic fop, who sneered with the precise sneer supposed to curl the lip of the Childe, and looked as if his friends ought to keep the knives well out of his way, has given place to the Carlylian dapperling. This one " looks under the shows of things," finds the age hopelessly decadent, deals out critical damnation on every writer cf the day save Carlyle and Thackeray, and wishes his "great soul" had taken form in some heroic old age, when men really believed, and had sense enough left to worship heroes like him. Mr Carlyle is unquestionably a mountain, but never did mountain bring forth so large a progeny of mice. True, however, as all this is, it were a fatal error to confound with mere foppery the honest and earnest doubt which we meet with. Our time here demands a faithful valour beyond that of chivalry. " There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds." There may, in our quiet domestic life, arise temptations to mental cowardice as severe as ever prompted a soldier to quit the field under some cloud of dust, or on some plau- sible pretext: there may be suspicion and contempt to be encountered as biting as the cold steel, before which the clear eye scorned to flinch: there may be endearments as tender to be torn asunder in the struggle towards internal freedom and truth, as ever drew a manly tear from the u 290 A FEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. strong knight who hade adieu to his ladye-love on his way to Palestine. There may be a deliherate abandonment, for the sake of a pure conscience, and to preserve an un- polluted mental atmosphere, of respect long accorded, of esteem for kindness and faithfulness of heart, or deference, perhaps still dearer, to power of intellect, of sympathetic joys from truth shared and loved in common, of hopes and expectations whose extinguishing looks like quenching the last fire in a cold wintry day. And,wesay, this deliberate lay- ing of the joys of earth on the altar of truth and conscience, may cause severer pangs than were ever felt by the true warrior, who would still march on though his companions fell stiff by the wayside, or continue to face the foe when he stood on ground slippery with the blood that was dear to him. The loneliness one feels when afar from the habitations of men, on the ocean or in the desert, is, we are assured, but a faint emblem of that dread feeling of sad and ghastly solitude which many a noble soul has ex- perienced, when compelled, by bests inaudible to his fel- low-men, to pass forth alone into new regions of thought and belief. The former solitude was but relative, and scarcely real: the hearts that loved him might be distant, but in his hand were invisible threads of gold which linked them still to his; the smiles of welcome were waiting at the door of home, the accents of kindness, tremulous through excess of joy, would ring clear whenever his foot was heard on the threshold; nay, by a thousand acts of nature's gentle magic, memory and imagination could make those smiles and accents present, to soothe his toil with encouragement, and fill with music the hot air round him: but here those golden chains themselves had been strained or riven, those smiles themselves had faded; instead of a few miles of earth, there had yawned between him and ths A FEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. 291 best riches of his heart an impassable chasm, and for con- solation he could have no thought of an earthly home, but must listen only to the voice within, or look up to a Father who was in heaven. " Feebly must they have felt Who, in old time, attired with snakes and whips The revengeful Furies. Beautifvl regards Were turn'd on me the face of her I loved, The Wife and Mother pitifully fixing Tender reproaches, insupportable ! " Such thoughts should make men at once careful and lenient in judging of those who differ from them and the majority, and especially it should avert all asperity from the mode of dealing with young men, who have been led to doubt, it may be through earnestness, and who have strug- gled to regain their footing, it may be almost in despair. We are not now to enter on any discussion of this wide subject : we present merely one or two preliminary but we think vitally important considerations. First of all, let it be fully and boldly admitted, what doubt really is and occasions; we mean in its bearing upon life and action. Blanco Whites and John Sterlings may be admirable and may deserve commendation in many ways, or they may not ; but, if such are to be taken as spe- cimens of widely extended classes, if men are more and more to resemble these, it is at least plain that work is no longer to be got done in this world. If our modern en- lightenment is merely to produce a vast swarm of doubters, if every year and decade, with its harvest of systems and proposals, furnishes simply an addition of labour to the poor man of next generation, who would attain stable belief, our outlook for the future is somewhat startling ; it is perfectly manifest, that the children of the Hebrews, the Romans, and the Puritans, must become moonstruck 292 A FEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. gazers rather than faithful workers, that the words of the poet must reach a positive and ghastly fulfilment, and Earth become the Bedlam of the universe. "But next, and summarily, we lay it down as an axiom, that even this consideration must not be used as an argu- ment that doubt should be stifled, and falsehood or partial falsehood, either real or suspected, contentedly accepted in its stead. Sad as the above spectacle may be, we must courageously behold it ; the searching, struggling, groping attitude is not defeat, but the best proof of worthiness of victory ; the eye in which is doubt will swim irresolute, the arm of the doubter will hang powerless, but it is only the calmness of truth that must steady the one, and the energy of truth that must nerve the other; falsehood is perfect blindness and perfect death. If we might venture on a suggestion as to a speedy method of reaching a firm and stable position, and putting an end, either in one way or another, to this paralysing and afflicting doubt, it would be to this effect: That attention should be turned specially in two directions; to determine the great fundamental points of belief, and to distinguish between what are mere difficulties and what are positive proofs or disproofs. It has often been remarked how near to each other in their original fountains are the streams of belief; like rivers, whose sources are seen by one poised condor on the topmost ridge of the Andes, and whose mouths are divided by a continent. Thus philosophic faith and philosophic scepti- cism, wide apart as flow their respective streams, yet enter their several channels according to the answer, affir- mative or negative, given to the simple question, can the human consciousness be trusted ? And there are not a few such determining Questions, whose answer may at A FEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. 293 the outset confirm religious belief, or summarily dismiss it; of such sort the following appear to us to be: Whether, on the whole, the phenomenon presented by Paul can be accounted for, save on the hypothesis of the supernatural origin of Christianity ? Whether, fairly applied to, history can take us to Judea and set us among the auditors of Christ, and whether, then, He can be deliberately pro- nounced a deceiver or deceived? Whether all the religions of men have been mere pitiable delusions, or are to be ac- counted for as pointing towards one true religion and do- ing it honour, as bending, unconsciously, indeed, and as if with the vague uncertain motions of a dream, yet manifestly bending, around its greater light? Whether human his- tory can furnish a precise or approximate analogue to the combination of New Testament morality and New Testa- ment assertion of the exercise of supernatural power, on the hypothesis that the one is a hypocritic disguise and the other a pestilent lie, or that the one is the maundering of weakness and the other the dream of fanaticism ? Such questions could be indefinitely multiplied, and many might be found far better adapted to the end than these. Such have the advantage of bringing the matter to a speedy issue. Be their answer positive or negative, the power of doubt to fetter action is broken ; all succeeding ques- tions are of secondary moment. And it will commend it- self, as a reasonable and manly mode of procedure, that when once such definite answer has been given, minor questions be placed in the rank of mere difficulties, able no longer to touch the citadel of the soul. If I can believe that the Saviour wilfully deceived his disciples, the sere- nity of my unbelief will be troubled by no difficulty, serious as in itself it might be, in accounting for the Ser- mon on the Mount. If I believe that Jesus raised the dead 294 A FEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. in Palestine, I will feel that my foot is on a rock, around which I can behold a shattering universe unmoved, and from which I can calmly look until all shadows vanish, and every cloud of difficulty, looked upon by the morning light, rest radiant in a serene sky, visible only by its power to absorb the sunbeams. And there is one point never to be forgotten ; that, be- neath all doubt, there must in every case continue to lie a certain immoveable and unquestioned foundation, or all is lost. There are two perils, each of fatal tendency, which beset the youthful inquirer on the way to truth; perils against which it is no prejudging of the case on our part to warn him, since they affect, not the attainment of any positive creed, or modification of a creed, but the very ability and will to search for such, the very life of the soul. The first peril, thus absolutely ruinous in its action, is that of sensuality; we are assured it is real and fearful. The young man has long ago left the kindly shore of his early belief, it may be the genial smile of his native home, and embarked on a wild and apparently endless voyage. The sky seems ever to grow blacker, the surges more wrathful, the howl of the bitter blast more melancholy and foreboding: he set out to reach the Happy Isles, full of noble hope and lofty aspiration ; but never has he at all approached them; never, through the darkness and tem- pest, was seen the calm gleam of their resting haven, the welcoming smile of their unfading gardens; and now his heart sickens in his breast, with unsolaced yearning, with hope long deferred, in the scowl of that black negation which seems to press down on him from the whole starless sky: then there steals over the ocean a sweet, a witching melody, and he sees a soft light through the storm in the A PEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. 295 distance, streaming gently as from a dwelling of perfect peace; lifting his eyes, he beholds the Syren songstress, with alluring smile, sitting at the door of her enchanted cave, baring her voluptuous bosom, offering the spiced and mantling draught. Here, at least, is certainty. For the excitement of passion will be exchanged the misery of disappointing thought, for the living raptures of pleasure, the unsubstantial and hard-won joys of truth. Why in toil and anguish seek an inheritance for the soul ? Why look out into immensity, forward to eternity ? We are on the earth, why not be altogether of the earth? Much may deceive, but passion at least is real. The temptation is strong, and, we fear, often prevailing: and when it does prevail, it can be only by a convulsive effort that the life of the soul is saved. For here there could be no doubt as to the meaning of the temptress; the invitation was clear and unmistakeable : Turn from spirit to sense, leave faith for sight, bow down at the shrine of Belial, curse God and die to all nobleness. While the mental atmosphere is pure, while the darkness is only without, while the " red lightnings of remorse " do not flash within, and self-con- tempt is not added to that of others, there is good hope that the haven of a believing working manhood may be gained; but from the rocks of the Syrens who ever re- turned ? The second peril is not the surrender to sensualism, but is perhaps still more desperate; the abandonment of ear- nestness, the lapse into a harmless but purposeless scepti- cism. Concerning much a man may question, but of this he must not entertain any doubt; that the universe is not a dream, a phantasmagoria, an aimless, incompre- hensible nothing, but a reality. He shall always believe that, whatever his uncertainty, truth is immoveable and 296 A PEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. immortal. There is thus a refuge for faith in the wildest discord of doubt; and the very inability of the earnest mind to reach a definite and particular belief may render the more emphatic and even heroic an unwavering con- fidence in the existence of truth, in the verity of God. "Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood: That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroy'd, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete; That not a worm is cloven in vain; That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire, Or but subserves another's gain." Once this faith is lost; once a man comes to question whtther there is an earnest purpose in this universe at all ; when it is no longer of his own path or his own powers of navigation that he doubts, but of the very existence of a celestial vault above those clouds, with its immoveable lights burning round the throne of God; then he is in an evil case. Here, too, he finds rest; but it is only a degree nobler than the rest of sensualism; it is the rest of an easy, careless, blunt indifference, an accepta- tion of the good things of the day, a consent not to push sternly forward in an undeviating path, but lightly and laughingly to " gyrate," like M. Maurepas. Is it un- common, either in literature or in society, to observe the working of such a spirit as this? Does there not subsist in our age a certain scepticism, good-humoured from its very completeness, and extremely clever and gentlemanly, which would laughingly aim its darts at the very heart of truth? All loftiness of emotion, all earnest prizing of A FEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. 297 spiritual belief, is genially bantered aside. Truth may be very good, but its pursuit is so tantalising; one gets on to satisfaction without troubling himself about profound faith ; intensity of feeling is a sign of youth, or affectation, or feeble enthusiasm; the nil admirari mood, the abnega- tion of all reverence and wonder, befits the smart member of polite society ; honesty consists in making no pretence to earnestness. And then wit survives; on everything there can be hung a jest ; from the star to the grass blade, all things can be covered with the flickering light of clever and kindly banter. It is by no means unpleasant to meet a disciple of this school; he is sure to be witty, cheery, sparkling, devoid of all pretence, blithe as a canary. No less exhilarating is the same spirit when breathed from the page of literature. Sydney Smith was perhaps its most signal embodiment; allied with genius still more rare and delicate, we are sensible of its subtle enchantment in the softly glowing paragraphs of Eothen. Yet this whole phenomenon is one of unquestionable sadness ; perhaps few things could be more melancholy. Fichte and Carlyle proclaim rightly that there is a grandeur in noble sorrow : it is ill with him who is incapable of spiritual anguish, even of lofty despair. That very pain is, we repeat, a proof of devotion to truth; as the keenness of the slighted lover's distress tests the depth of his affection. Better bow before a veiled Isis than care not whether the Divine can be known at all! This is the second peril, and many are there in our day, whose best existence, whose soul's life, is by it put in jeopardy. But for him who doubts sincerely, and will nowise fail from his faith in truth itself, there may be ordained the breaking forth of a great glory of deliverance and of dawn. True it is, his doubt is to be hated, and he can never 298 A FEW WORDS ON MODERN DOUBT. fairly take the road until it is no more. But the bright- ness of the morning may be proportioned to the length and the darkness of the night. The overwearied dove had long winged its aimless way, over an earth that was but one wide waste of waters, under a streaming and darkened sky ; and now its tired pinions flapped heavily, the heart within had almost failed, the last ray of hope was fading from the eye ; but even then the olive twig emerged, and from a rift in the thick cloud a beam of light fell on the fainting breast, and gradually the earth again unveiled her face, and the triumphant embrace .of the returning light kindled a glory which eclipsed all other dawns. Need we apply the parable ? In the following chapters of this Book, we shall, amid much else, have occasion to note several of the phases of Modern Doubt, and to observe whether and how the Chris- tian life can spring amidst it, triumph over it, or stand unassailed by it. CHAPTER II. JOHN FOSTER. John Foster, peasant in the west of Yorkshire, and father of the subject of these paragraphs, was one of those undoubt- ing Christians, whose lives, unnoticed by the world and unconsciously to themselves, are yet faithful transcripts from apostolic or patriarchal times. He no more questioned the stability of that path on which he went towards eternity, than he questioned the firmness of the ground along which, with solid measured tread, he walked to his daily toil. For twenty years before his death, he prayed, every year, that God, if it seemed good to Him, would terminate his earthly career. And this strength of character was finely shaded by a tendency towards reflection, a love of medi- tation and retirement. There was a lonely spot on the banks of the river Hebden, whither he used to retire in me- ditative hours, and which became known as Foster's cave. His wife Ann was the fitting spouse of such a husband. Her piety was of the same order as his; her decision still more conspicuous. One day, before their marriage, Mr Foster happened, in her presence, to be in a desponding mood. " I cannot," he said, " keep a wife." " Then I will work and keep my husband," rejoined Ann. Prudence would join with love in recommending such a union. 300 JOHN FOSTER. On the 17th of September, 1770, their son John was born. It soon became evident that the child inherited, more or less, the disposition of either parent. He was a quiet retiring boy, who loved to separate himself from the boisterous circle of youthful mirth, and commune with his own heart alone; his sympathies were not diffusive, his likings were few, we hear but of one friend of his own age ; he lacked the glad buoyancy of early youth, and soon learned to wander musing by the brook side, or in the lonely wood. In this we recognise the son of that John Foster who used to meditate and to pray in the cave be- side the murmuring Hebden. He was, however, nowise destitute of acute feelings or strong energies; here he took after his other parent. When he did love or hate, he did either well. But it soon became manifest that he possessed elements of character distinctively his own. He was not merely shy and silent, heedless of boyish sports ; he was not only an observant, sagacious, precociously wise, and, as neigh- bours said, "old-fashioned" little man: he was conscious, besides, of feelings with which no sympathy was to be expected from any one, of pensive yearnings, and half- defined longings, which shut him by the barrier of a strong individuality from the throng. His sensibilities we mean his unselfish and kindly sensibilities were tender to a degree very rare in boyhood; he "abhorred spiders for killing flies, and abominated butchers;" his imagina- tion tyrannised over him, painting to his eye the scene of torture, or the skeleton, or the apparition, until he shrunk in loathing and terror from their ghastly distinctness. This delicate sensibility, manifesting itself in a fellow-feeling with every being that did or could suffer pain, and this JOHN FOSTER. 301 eye-to-eye clearness of imaginative vision, were determin- ing elements in his developed character. He was about fourteen years of age, when he heard what we must regard as the first direct monition from Heaven, the first call to pause and consider. About that time, he ven- tured so far to unbosom himself to his friend Henry Hors- fall, as to let him know that the peace of his heart had been disturbed, and that it was only by taking to himself as a gar- ment the robe of Christ's righteousness, that he could regain calmness of mind. This was unquestionably the turning- point of his life, the occasion of his first and irrevocably determining to enlist in the army of light. A long period elapsed ere his whole system of belief evolved itself, and many a change passed over his spirit before he finally reached a station in which he could calmly feel and act, unshackled by fear and unshaken by doubt; but he had taken the step of separation, he had lifted his eye from earth to heaven, and whatever change of circumstance, of opinion, of feeling may afterwards have taken place however he may have doubted, whithersoever he may have wandered we can firmly say, that this direction was never altered. When he attained his seventeenth year, he became a member of the Baptist congregation at Hebden Bridge, and about the same time resolved to dedicate himself to the Christian ministry. For three years, he devoted him- self to theological and general study in Brearley Hall, an educational institute in the neighbourhood. While here, he continued, as in his early boyhood, to lend his parents occasional assistance in their labours at the loom. He now applied himself to the acquisition of knowledge with intense earnestness. For whole nights he read and meditated, choosing as his retreat on such occasions a 302 JOHN FOSTER. grove in Dr Fawcett's garden. His mind was tardy in its operations. He performed his scholastic exercises with extreme slowness. But his efforts were unremitting and determined ; and we doubt not it was here that he acquired much of that extensive, though somewhat miscellaneous in- formation, of which his works give ample evidence. Here, too, he was enabled to indulge his love of the various aspects of nature. It was his recreation to ramble in the neighbouring glens and woodlands. On one occasion he wandered for a whole night with a friend under the open sky, that he might note the varying features of twilight, of darkness, and especially of dawn. He dis- played at an early period, what he continued to evince through life, a deep and genuine love of nature. In early days it led him to wander in solitary ways, while other boys were at sport, and in after years it caused him to speak of those unacquainted with the sympathetic emo- tions of a deep affection for nature as seeming to want a sense. He loved every aspect of sky and earth, but the naturally serious cast of his mind was evinced by his pre- ference of the great and gloomy. The glories of the moon streaming over the forest and showing the dim crag with its giant shadow in the slumbering lake, the slow march of the laden clouds across the sky, the cleft cloud, whose jagged edges were fringed with white fire, and from whose caverns issued the laugh of the thunder; these fitted best his sombre yet vivid imagination, and yielded him the pleasure of a stern enchantment. But he had also a look of sympathy and love for more delicate and minute beauties. He would watch lovingly the kind- ling smile of nature as Spring awoke and opened the gates to Summer; he heard with a thrill of joy the note of tba bird, and often speaks of the sky-people, the inhabitants JOHN FOSTER. 303 of the summer sunbeams, that were such favourites with Richter. Yet Foster's love of nature was perhaps never the passionate love of the poet, and the flow and fresh- ness of its early manifestations were soon impaired by a habit of schooled and conscious observation. He exer- cised a careful supervision over his thoughts and im- pressions, striving to subject all the operations of his intellect to a " military discipline." He learned to observe nature with a certain constrained accuracy, to jot down his various impressions of her beauty, to gather analogies, similes, and so on : by which method, it appears, coy na- ture will not be known. Foster was in all things too self- conscious. He would have the flower up to see how its roots were thriving, he would lay out his mind like a Dutch garden, all trimmed, and squared, and ordered. This is an important element in his character. It impeded that easy natural flow of thought and diction, it dulled that sportive buoyancy of soul, which indicate, as they spring from, an energy working much by spontaneity and im- pulse, a knowledge that has been naturally matured, and is ever kept fresh and verdant. We meet in his works with glimpses of insight into the vast region of our un- conscious influences ; but he seems to have considered it his duty to order every movement of his own mind with an algebraic exactness ; he never fairly embraced and sub- mitted to the beautiful and important truth, that the noblest education is that of sympathy, when, with viewless hand, she throws open the gates of the soul, that the forms of beauty and the light of truth may silently enter in. We have already noted the acuteness of Foster's sensi- bilities : we must say another word on the subject ere pass- ing on. In no way is he more frequently or dogmatically characterised than by the word misanthrope. This word, 304 JOHN FOSTER. we maintain, is an absolute misapplication. We are con- fident we can prove that, from his earliest to his latest years, his heart was tenderly, delicately kind. His sensi- bilities were not less, but more acute than those of his fellow-men. At first glance he appeared cold. It was natural that he should ; the circumstances of his boyhood, and perhaps a constitutional tendency, determined it so. He had no very early associates: his parents were far advanced in life, and did nothing to encourage the healthful sprightli- ness of childhood; his brother Thomas was too much younger than himself to be his playmate ; he had no sister. The consequence was, that he grew up externally cold and self-involved. On his sedate and pensive countenance there was not that look of vivacious geniality, that flower- like smiling, which is nature's appointed expression and emblem of kindness of heart. He possessed no advantages of face and form, nor had he that nameless power to attract and please which make some persons universal favourites. Yet we are assured that all this is not inconsistent with the fact that he was naturally one of the most truly loveable of human beings; noble, gentle, tenderly affectionate. His nature, in its depths, had a far truer and deeper tender- ness than that of thousands of genial, ever-smiling, com- panionable boys and girls. Our proof of this is twofold: first, we have direct manifestations of delicate sensibility; and, next, we find this deep kindness necessary to solve, and absolutely sufficient for the solution of, several remark- ably prominent leanings and opinions of Foster. Among the direct manifestations of genuine and tender kindness, we place his acute feeling of the sufferings borne by the lower animals ; and we deem this an infallible pledge of kindness of heart. In his case, it was a deep, constant, JOHN FOSTER. 305 and considerate feeling. We point also, as of itself suffi- cient to establish our view, to that sense of a void in his heart, to be filled only by a loved and loving object, which breathes in his early letters. He yearned with intense desire for some fully sympathising heart. " Cold as you pronounce me," he exclaims, in an early let- ter, " I should prefer the deep animated affection of one person whom I could entirely love, to all the tri- bute fame could levy within the amplest circuit of her flight." Again: " Something seems to say, Come, come away, I am but a gloomy ghost among the living and the happy. There is no need of me; I shall never be loved as I wish to be loved, and as I could love. ... I can never become deeply important to any one; and the un- successful effort to become so costs too much, in the pain- ful sentiments which the affections feel when they return mortified from the fervent attempt to give themselves to some heart which would welcome them with a pathetic warmth." These are the accents of a really tender, as well as noble nature; of one which found no joy in isola- tion, although met by disappointment in the throng. Foster was not recognised by men in general to be kind; but none ever came into close converse with him who did not know it well : there were deep and pure fountains of tender- ness in his heart, but far secluded from the general gaze. There are wells among the calcined ridges of the Abyssi- nian deserts, known only to the wild gazelle, and for which even the wandering Arabs seek in vain for ages. Many a man there is who is deemed hard and ungenial, merely because his kindness is hidden deep and cannot be ap- proached by ordinary paths. Further and conclusive proofs of Foster's deep kindliness of nature will unfold themselves as we proceed. x 306 JOHN FOSTER. At the age of twenty-one, he left Brearley and entered the Baptist College in Bristol. His application here must have been fitful. " Probably," he says, writing to a friend in Yorkshire, " there never was a more indolent student at this or any other academy. I know but very little more of learning, or anything else, than when I left you. I have been a trifler all my life to this hour." But his mind was advancing. His letters testify to strong moral earnestness, to a stern and manly ambition, and to a ripening soundness of judgment. His eye was ever up- wards. He left the Bristol seminary ere he completed his twenty- second year. His education, which, so far as school and college were concerned, was now completed, must be pro- nounced defective. A general idea of the classics he had, but nothing more ; his memory seems not to have been trained by any systematic discipline, and though by no means singu- larly bad, was yet a cause of complaint to him through life ; his reasoning powers do not appear to have been ma- tured by any course of scientific or metaphysical s^udy, and all his works bear witness to the fact. By miscellaneous reading, however, he had gained a large, though hetero- geneous, stock of knowledge; his intellect, while certainly giving no clear promise that it would ever be of that em- bracing kind which casts its generalising glance over vast tracts of history, or science, or philosophy, had yet proved itself possessed of great natural vigour and shrewdness ; beneath all, the substratum of his whole mind, lay a ra- dical honesty, a penetrating sense of reality. This last armed him with an almost irresistible power to pierce disguises and burn up moral and social cobweb and fillagree. Such, in meagre outline, were the boyhood and youth of Foster. We have seen him under the influences JOHN FOSTER. 307 of the home and the school. We now arrive at that portion of his history which is in every case critical. We have to observe him as he emerges from the quiet region, and the still though powerful influences which have hitherto moulded his character, and enters a wider and more peril- ous sphere. The kindly words and glances of a godly father and mother, the friendly admonitions of Christian instructors, must give place to the rude teaching of expe- rience. Till now, he has been gently and genially swayed by influences exterior to himself; he has gone on in peace and trustfulness, unconsciously leaning on the thought and knowledge of others; not to any measure of excess, but rightly and blissfully, he has hitherto imbibed the impres- sions of his circle, and been what it is seemly for a boy and a youth to be, who has been planted by God in a Christian family and a Christian land. But now his instructors are to be the many voices of contemporaneous life: his keen and susceptible mind is to be brought into contact with the agencies that ever work in the great world, shaping out the future; he is to know what men in their various grades and nations are doing and saying, that he may manfully determine how it is his duty to speak and to act. He is to make his opinions his own, by taking them down for a time from those niches in his mind where the hand of parent or instructor had placed them, subjecting them to a careful and earnest scrutiny, and either replacing them, or casting them away, by the free yet resolute hand of in- dividual will. He is to know the agony of doubt. He is to be flung from youth's pinnacles of hope, till he almost discerns in the distance the dim Lethe of despair. He is, so to speak, to serve his apprenticeship to the time, to be made acquainted with its wants, its sicknesses, its condi- tions, its weapons, that at length he may step forth a skil- 308 JOHN POSTER. ful and well-approved workman, knowing what it is foolish or boyish to attempt, what it is imbecile or cowardly to shun. For the accomplishment of this high object, a period of ten years will not be too long. We shall take a broad glance along it, specifying a few of its more prominent in- fluences, and endeavouring, in his own words, to trace his progress through it. It will be necessary for us in the outset to ask what were the great public influences of the time : the question can be briefly answered. We have already had occasion to refer to the French Revolution. It is unnecessary to do more now than to note the extent of its influence. Every vein and artery of the social system, and that in all lands, felt that tremen- dous throb at the heart of the world. Thrones, senates, churches felt it; nay, to pursue the metaphor, we might say that every smallest capillary to which blood could cir- culate was affected, every unobserved assemblage where eyes caught light from answering glances, every college coterie, every family circle. There was not a noble young heart in Britain but beat more quickly at the great tidings, and almost universally it was the beating of exultant sym- pathy. The revolutionary fire went burning and blasting, and the eyes of the young kindled into joy and hope. It is," such was the universal shout, " the breaking of the dawn; the mists are retiring before it; nothing but mist is dissipated ; presently the wide landscape, in a glory and beauty as of calm and bounteous summer, will spread away to our dazzled eyes towards the horizon of the future." They did not reflect that the path of fire is over a soil left blackened and sterile, where only the charred skeletons of the once proud forest remain, and that long years revolve JOHN FOSTER. 309 ere nature kindly mantles it in green. Those were the days when Coleridge and Southey were building, of cloud and moonbeam, their notable fabric of pantisocracy, the government of all by all ; where every man, as Louis Blanc promised, would keep his carriage. James Montgomery, in those days, found himself a dangerous person, and was immured in a prison. Wordsworth looked dark and dange- rous. It was a strange and tumultuous time. The great era of doubting had finally come. All things were subjected to a trial as of fire, and antiquity seemed only to make them burn better. Foster was deeply affected by the great changes taking place. Both politically and religiously, his opinions be- came unsettled we might almost say, wild; while the turmoil and confusion in his mind were greatly aggravated by individual characteristics. For far different questions presented themselves to his mind than troubled other de- mocrats. He pondered deeply on the human tale, and the unfathomable dealings of God with man. That insatiable yearning, which has marked the noblest minds, to penetrate the gloom that surrounds the destiny of man, to call a voice from the silence in which we thread our way through immensity; that sublime want and disease which points to the state which is man's health, and the place which is man's home, was a prominent and life-long characteristic of Foster. At first his ideas on these matters were con- fused, tumultuous, and wrapped in deepest gloom; for a time, a ray as of dawning light seemed to fall on them, and he was joyous and full of hope; then this again proved itself an earthly meteor, and no true herald of day; finally the gloom again fell in thick shadows, but in his own hand was a lamp which made him at least secure and calm. " At some moments," he says, " life, the world, mankind, 310 JOHN FOSTER. religion, and eternity, appear to me like one vast scene of tremendous confusion, stretching before me far away, and closed in shades of the most dreadful darkness a darkness which only the most powerful splendours of Deity can illumine, and which appears as if they never yet had illu- mined it.'' Such causes of internal unrest complicated greatly the difficulties with which Foster had to contend. As yet the light of religion shed no definite radiance. He had not settled for himself the old question put to us so emphati- cally in our time, " What think ye of Christ whose son is He?" He was not absolutely sure whether He was the son of God, or only the supreme of finite beings. He looked eagerly in a direction different from that where rested, calm amid all tempests, the banner of the Prince of Peace. He turned for a time to Thomas Paine. The first rude accents of universal freedom, which, rude as they were, we yet respect, caught his ear; he spoke of the " rights of men," and " all that, and all that." Nay, with a smile of amazement we see the gentle, pensive, musing Foster in Dublin, hand in glove with a crew of fiery de- mocratic Irishmen, calling himself a " son of Brutus !" The aspect, indeed, of this whole period of Foster's history is that of distraction and disquiet. There is a want of settled determination, of deliberate working energy, of manlike fixedness of aim. We can mark in his active life the alternation of spasmodic effort, with too great relaxation of mind ; and what remain to us of his writings bear a similar testimony. We meet with flashes of strong discernment in thought, and striking brilliancy in expression ; of indications of genius there is no lack : but we ever feel that this, as he tells us he was himself con- scious, is not his rest. One thing, however, is always be- JOHN FOSTER. 311 yond doubt, and it is of a nature to impart to all devia- tions and distractions a deep value and interest. Through his whole life and thinking there burns the fire of an inde- structible ardour in the search fortruth,and a determination, come what may, to put up with no counterfeit ; sacred and unquenchable, we see this glowing in his letters and stray sentences, a veiled radiance but of heavenly brightness. "Was not this the light that had been kindled in him when he unbosomed his youthful sorrow to Henry Horsfall ? In early life, " before the age of twenty," he commenced the practice of jotting down observations and reflections; of these he carefully copied out a copious selection, en- titling them, " A Chinese Garden of Flowers and Weeds." It is a strange medley, of great interest, and strikingly illustrative of the varying mood of his mind. It abounds in passages of beauty and even of grandeur ; at inter- vals we meet an observation on men and character somewhat severely true ; his strong tendency towards the mysterious, his deep devout earnestness, the excellences and the defects of his imagination, and his genuine though somewhat restrained and impaired love of nature, all reveal themselves. He longs for what he names " an extensive atmo- sphere of consciousness," but which we should call rather a universal and tender sympathy, which, " like an JEolean harp," might "arrest even the vagrant winds and make them music." Of a calm and beautiful evening we hear him say, that it is as if the soul of Eloisa pervaded the air : the idea has always appeared to us delicately and extremely beautiful. He reads Milton, and pictures to himself his world of spirits. He peers earnestly into the deeps of the olden eternity, and could even wish for death to snap the gravitation of earth : " I cannot wonder," he says, "that this intense and sublime curiosity has sometimes 312 JOHN FOSTER. demolished the corporeal prison, by flinging it from a pre- cipice or into the sea." Then, it may be, his imagination lapses into a wild and freakish mood : he figures himself, in great exultation, tossing on the waves of a flaming ocean, rising sky-high on the peaks of fire ; or, he looks on a file of clouds slowly and darkly trooping along the sky before the wind, his imagination transforming them into gaunt and sullen giants, that frown grimly to the soft smile of the interspersed azure. Presently, in milder and higher mood, he dreams of a visitant that comes to his earnest longings from the celestial choirs ; he walks in thought by his side, propounds to him the questions he has been gathering up for eternity, listens, in revering and wonder- ing love, to every word in reply, and thinks that he has at last found his ideal friend and his satisfying informant. Soon he is again in the throng of common men and women making his half-cynical remarks ; he gravely lets us know that, when he goes into company, he can see the ladies taking his measure, and thinking they have it, while he knows well enough they have not nor are capable of having; some one speaks to him about a certain " narrow-minded religionist ;" " Mr T.," he replies, " sees religion not as a sphere but as a line; and it is the identical line in which he is moving;" sometimes his satiric fancy takes a wider sweep, and fancying the sun an intelligence, he figures his rage and disappointment at the miserable show the world turns out for him to light up, "a tiresome repetition of stupidity, follies, and crimes." Foster's life during this which we have called his tran- sition period, was externally as well as internally full of vicissitude. He went from situation to situation, from England to Ireland, from Ireland to England, and from England to Ireland again, without finding a permanent JOHN FOSTER. 313 resting-place. His preaching was nowhere acceptable with the mass of the people ; instead of being a centre of attraction, he was decidedly a centre of repulsion in the con- gregations where he ministered. He was really and deeply defective as a preacher. His manner was always and exceed- ingly bad. We cannot doubt, also, that a tendency to ex- cessive refining made his sermons difficult to follow. The writer, over whose page a reader can pore until he has ana- lysed every clause and paragraph, may trace what labyrinths he chooses to enter, and may lead his readers by what thin silken thread or what faint taper-light he thinks fit ; but oratory of every sort, and none the less but perhaps rather the more pulpit oratory, demands the strongly marked line of distinction, the bold and massive argument, the clear broad gleam of light. Of this Foster was never fully conscious, or if conscious of the fact and of his want, he yet failed to amend it. It might, too, we think, be affirmed that his tone of remark- had, at times, an air somewhat unnatural and far-fetched; not obvious certainly, but not perfectly natural, and we know that novelty and nature must unite to produce any sort of literary excellence. However it was, he was certainly unsuccessful as a preacher. He went from chapel to chapel in vain ; his de- licacies were rejected by the body of the people : they de- sired bread. There were generally a few who esteemed his teaching very highly. To trace his external career in all its changes during these ten years, is uncalled for. His general course of life can be easily conceived. He spent much time in mus- ing. By the banks of the Tyne, and in the meadows about Newcastle, he might have been seen, pensive and thoughtful, his eye often abstracted, yet at times lit up with a glance of keenest scrutiny and shrewdness. At Chichester, where 314 JOHN FOSTER. we find him a few years afterwards, he used to pace the aisles of his chapel, in the silent moonlight, thinking ear- nestly, and it seems to have been in those still hours, that wider and calmer views touching time and eternity, God and man, gradually opened up before him. One or two extracts from his correspondence of this time will best illustrate his mental condition. " I sometimes fall into profound musings on the state of this great world, on the nature and the destinies of man, on the subject of the question, What is truth ? ' The whole hemi- sphere of contemplation appears inexpressibly strange and mysterious. Itis cloud pursuingcloud,forestafter forest, and Alps upon Alps. It is in vain to declaim against scepticism. I feel with an emphasis of conviction, and wonder, and re- gret, that almost all things are covered with thickest dark- ness, that the number of things to which certainty belongs is small. I hope to enjoy the sunshine of the other world. One of the very few things that appear to me not doubtful is the truth of Christianity in general." This passage we deem of great interest and importance. The earnest, reli- gious Foster gazes forward and around; in every direction he sees stretching away the infinitude of wonder, in which floats our little world, and his eye falls only on thick tem- pestuous gloom ; he turns almost in despair from the clouded heaven, and longs for the sunlight of eternity. On one point he is assured : but it is not sufficient to give him rest and satisfaction. Christianity came from God : this he accepts as a general proposition. And while he doubts not of this, while he deliberately and immoveably believes that the Maker has broken silence in time, and spoken to the creature in Christianity, he is severed by an unfathomable gulf from every variety of mere philosophic morality, from all that can be called bare natural religion. JOHN FOSTER. 315 Yet this is not enough to give him rest ; general beliefs never bring stable tranquillity. He knows that God has spoken: but can a reasonable being, so believing, rest while he has no definite conviction of the import of what He has said ? There is progress indicated in the next, "Oh, what a difficult thing it is to be a Christian ! I feel the necessity of reform through all my soul. When I retire into thought, I find myself environed by a crowd of impressive and awful images; I fix an ardent gaze on Christianity, assuredly the last best gift of Heaven to men ; on Jesus the agent and example of infinite love; on time as it passes away; on perfection as it shines beauteous as heaven, and, alas! as remote; on my own beloved soul which I have injured, and ,on the unhappy multitude of souls around me ; and I ask myself, Wby do not my passions burn ? Why does not zeal arise in mighty wrath to dash my icy habits in pieces, to scourge me from indolence into fervid exertion, and to trample all mean sentiments in the dust ? At intervals I feel devotion and benevolence, and a sur- passing ardour; but when they are turned towards sub- stantial, laborious operation, they fly and leave me spirit- less amid the iron labour. Still, however, I do confide in the efficacy of persistive prayer; and I do hope that the Spirit of the Lord will yet come mightily upon me, and carry me on through toils, and suffering, and death, to stand in Mount Zion among the followers of the Lamb ! " As probably every man of high moral and intellectual endowment, Foster, in the first ardour and poetry of youth, had looked upon perfection as it shone beauteous as heaven ; he had felt profoundly and unaffectedly that the world is not dressed in those robes of purity and beauty in which it could possibly have come from the hand of 316 JOHN FOSTER. an infinite God. He recognised the universal imperfec- tion, and felt it most keenly in his own bosom. At times his heart would burn with an ardour that appeared un- quenchable; he seemed to shout for the battle, and to rush out to confront the foe: but the world stood there in its armed and serried ranks, its thousand eyes looking stony defiance and inflexible hate ; he dropped his weapon and recoiled before the iron labour. But he has made progress. A general belief in Christianity has become an earnest personal straining of the eye towards Jesus; though all on earth fail him, and though his own heart harbours traitors, yet is there an ever-living Spirit of the Lord, and His ear can be reached by a mortal by persist- ive prayer. " Every new reflection tells me that my evangelic de- terminations ought to be, and every hope flatters that they will be, irreversible. Assembling into one view all things in the world that are important, and should be dear, to mankind, I distinguish the Christian cause as the celestial soul of the assemblage, evincing the same pre-eminence, and challenging the same emphatic passion which, in any other case, mind does beyond the inferior elements; and I have no wish of equal energy with that which aspires to the most intimate possible connection with Him who is the life of this cause, and the life of the world." Yet again, writing to his friend Hughes, he says: " The gospel is to me, not a matter of complacent speculation only, but of momentous use, of urgent necessity. I come to Jesus Christ because I need pardon, and purification, and strength. I feel more abased, as he appears more divine. In the dust I listen to his instructions and commands. I pray fervently in his name, and above all things for a happy union with him. I do. and will proclaim him. For JOHN FOSTER. 317 his sake I am willing to go through evil report and good report. I wish to live and die in his service. Is not this some resemblance of ' the simplicity ' of the fishermen, on which you insist with emphasis? This spirit, my dear friend, is in a certain degree, to be, I trust, divinely aug- mented assuredly mine. The Galilean faith has gained the ascendant," &c. " The Galilean faith has gained the ascendant !" After all doubting and striving, this is the resting-place; he sits like a child at the feet of Jesus. Silently as the sleep of re- turning health, there steals over the mind of Foster that peace which was the legacy of our Master. True, his con- tendings are not yet at an end, darkness and dismay at times seem still closing round him : but he now discerns his work, he now sees the goal, he can now measure the enemy's force, and knows Who is fighting on his own side ; stern as he may feel his own contest to be, mournfully slight as may be his impression on the ranks of the foe, he knows that, one good day, the battle will be won. His intellectual position he thus defines: "My opi- nions are in substance decidedly Calvinistic. I am firmly convinced, for instance, of the doctrines of original sin, predestination, imputed righteousness, the necessity of the Holy Spirit's operation to convert the mind, final per- severance, &c. &c. As to the doctrine of the divinity of Christ, I do not deny that I had once some degree of doubt, but not such a degree ever as to carry me anything near the adoption of an opposite or different opinion. It was by no means disbelief; it was rather a hesitation to decide, and without much, I think, of the vanity of specu- lation. But for a long while past I have fully felt the necessity of dismissing subtle speculations and distinctions, and of yielding a humble, cordial assent to the mysterious 318 JOHN FOSTER. truth, just as and because the Scriptures declare it, without inquiring, ' How can these things be?'" Thus had Foster arrived at that great epoch in a man's life, when he can feel with a good conscience that his work is found, and that, until his allotment of time is spent, he is delivered from the fickle and distempered sway of change. The period of this consummation was auspiciously marked by another of equally happy omen. He now at length met one whom he could entirely love, and who reciprocated the affection. A few words will be well spent in glancing at this last happy crisis in Foster's life. In judging of one who has been so widely characterised as a misanthrope and imper- sonation of cold intellectual sternness, it may be of some avail to know assuredly how he acted as lover, as father, and as husband. We desire definiteness and certainty on these points: both can be attained with very little loss of time. We presume that the biography of Foster, by his friends Messrs Ryland and Sheppard, must have ere now dissi- pated the general idea that he was unsocial. Of delicate sympathies and high intellectual tastes, he was, of neces- sity, sensible of something alien and uncomfortable in an atmosphere of dulness, presumption, or frivolity; but he enjoyed, with a more lively relish than is anywise common, the gentle, animating influence of noble converse. This fact is confirmed, and the assurance we have that there was no total absence of the light and poetical ingre- dients in Foster's character, well illustrated, by his short series of letters to Miss Caroline Carpenter, a young lady who attracted his attention, before he met her who became his wife. These are quite in the tone of a sentimental scion of chivalry. He waxes very gallant. He is not JOHN FOSTER. 319 perhaps in exact drawing-room costume ; the clank of the chain armour is heard, half-muffled by the silken doublet; even in his mood of extreme politeness, he cannot be weak or frivolous. He does not attain a faultless ball-room idiom; he has always had something to say, so that he has not had practice in the art of piquantly and simperingly saying nothing. Shall we blame him? Perhaps the thing transcends the limited human faculties. " Pure, involun- tary, unconscious nonsense," Southey thought, " is inimi- table by any effort- of sense." But no one can read these letters without recognising a fine youthful strength of emotion, a genial heartiness and warmth, removed very far from aught allied to austerity. Miss Carpenter died young. It was not until he attained his thirtieth or thirty-first year, that Foster met the lady to whom he was afterwards married. She was a woman cast in no common mould. Her faculties and her will were powerful; her feelings were of great strength, and rested more deeply in her breast than is usual in her sex ; her character was com- pleted and crowned by earnest Christianity. She had entered regions of contemplation far beyond those of ordinary minds, and her deep musings on the dark and wonderful in human destiny had imparted to her charac- ter a stateliness and solemn repose. She was"* an ear- nest, intellectual woman, sensible to high ambitions, and fitted, every way, to be the friend and counsellor of a true man. Foster addressed his essays to her; she could judge of them sternly and well. She was able to sympathise with him in his highest moments. Nay, she was perhaps by one shade too congenial with Foster ; another gleam of sunlight had been a clear advantage. A friendship such as can exist only between noble spirits arose between them, a friendship founded in natural, unforced sympathy, and 320 JOHN FOSTER. growing by the waters of immortality. After two years of intimacy, it began to lose its name in the intensity of love, and they resolved to become knit in the closest bonds with which friendship can be bound on earth. Five years still elapsed ere they were married. Foster's preaching could not be depended on for a livelihood, and it was only when he became permanently connected with the Eclectic Review, that he took home his friend, and called her wife. After five years waiting, he did this with signal joy. All nature, he tells us, seemed brightening around him; Spring advanced with a new smile ; the very roses that wreathed her brow, the very light that beamed from her eye, caught new radiance from that figure, whom, this time, she led in her hand. The married life of Foster was such as might have been hoped for. There had been no taint in the original affec- tion. There had been no base thought of gold. Nor had he married in the blindness of passion. For this, too, is a fatally erroneous course. Men are to marry in emotions they share with the angel; not with the animal. Foster knew that when, in the calm and real atmosphere of life, the fever of love's first intensity was cooled, and pas- sion's fine frenzy had passed away, he would still see in the eyes of his Maria the immortal sympathy of friend- ship, deeper than sex, stronger than passion, fadeless to eternity. Perhaps the severest form of human sorrow, that which most nearly approaches the slow gnawing agony of him fixed hopeless on the immoveable rock, arises from marriage in which there never was any friendship, but the original bond was earthly passion, arrogating to itself, with the ( impudent lie of a harlot, the heavenly name of love. It is only base natures that are beguiled by the vulgar glare of gold, natures incapable of lofty joy or JOHN FOSTER. 321 acute sorrow. But passion is a Syren of more winning song, of more fatally charming lure; the warm, the im- pulsive, the noble fall victims to her, and, after a short delirious dream, awake to a life of hopeless misery. Friend- ship and love must unite in every married union where happiness can be reasonably expected or truly deserved : and by friendship we mean an affection arising from pure sympathy of spirit, independent of aught else. Let none look for happiness in marriage who are unable deliberately and firmly to declare, that it would be a happiness to live together for life, though they were of the same sex. We state this with some breadth, and do so with consideration ; we point to a hidden rock round which the ocean seems to smile in sunny calm, but on which many a noble bark has perished. Foster's marriage was such as beseems a man. The affection began in friendship, and around this, as around a rod of heaven's gold, the flowers and fruits of earth's pure love, those tender joys and beloved interests which a bounteous and motherly nature fails not to supply, when man has rightly and valiantly performed his part, gradually and gracefully came to cluster. " In passion's flame Hearts melt, but melt like ice soon harder froze. True love strikes root in reason." Foster was never compelled, in his moments of lofty thought and exalted sentiment, to withdraw himself, at least by silence, from her who was to sojourn with him insepara- bly on earth ; he did not, in the presence of others, treat his wife's remarks as frivolous, or her opinions as slight: he found in her the sympathy, and accorded her the natural habitual respect of friendship. And let no one think that their happiness was merely negative ; a monotonous and in- sipid respect or admiration, instead of the warm, enthu- T 322 JOHN FOSTER. siastic, unutterable intensity of love. Love cast its golden anchors in their heart of hearts, affecting every pulse of their being. And a genial home they had ; natural fountains of child- ish mirth and parental pride continually welling up within it. Long after his marriage Foster wrote thus: " I have noticed the curious fact, of the difference of the effect of what other people's children do and our own. In the situations I have formerly been in, any great noise and racket of children would have extremely incommoded me, if I wanted to read, think, or write. But I never mind, as to any such matter of inconvenience, how much din is made by these brats, if it is not absolutely in the room where I am at work. When I am with them, I am apt to make them, and join in making them, make a still bigger tumult and noise, so that their mother sometimes complains that we all want whipping together." The happiness here is very real. The fact of "these brats" being privileged, though singular, is not unexampled. Richter, when reso- lute performance of duty made him deny himself even his ordinary meals, yet professed his inability to deny himself the interruption of his children. We desire no further re- futation of what, to our astonishment, we have seen al- leged touching Foster's sternness in his own household: this single passage, casting, as it does, a light before and after, is the condensation of a thousand proofs that every member of his family was a note in a perfect harmony, and that, in the fine music which was the result, the silver treble of childhood rung clearly and cheerily. Look at that father as he rises from his work, yielding to the fond and joyous impulse of his breast, snatches up his children, tosses them in the air, and becomes merely the biggest and loudest child of the group: then endeavour to suit the part JOHN FOSTER. 323 he acts to the grave, stern, grimly intellectual Foster of whom you have heard. A disorder in his throat, together with his striking un- popularity, made it now advisable for Foster to relinquish regular preaching. His virtual profession became litera- ture. During a protracted life he brought his influence to bear on his age through the press. His residence was, for the most part, the vicinity of Bristol. There he worked steadily, in the heart of a peacefully happy home, cheered by the sympathy of a noble wife and the glad looks of his own children. In the following paragraphs, we shall first define, generally, the attitude in which he stood to God and man ; and then, more particularly, consider certain of the remarkable points in his system of opinion. When the restlessness of youth began to settle into the seriousness of manhood, Foster seems to have looked more earnestly into " the abysmal deeps of personality," into his own soul, than ever formerly. He found it not what a spirit endued with power to know its Author could normally, and by original intention be ; it was an exception and anomaly in the works of Him who formed the lily and the star. And this imperfection he perceived to be singular in its character. The consciousness of himself and his race, written deep and ineffaceable, as in eternal adamant, pro- claimed man to be a being, in such sense free, that he was responsible. The stain on the flower and the speck in the star were innocent imperfection : the stain on his soul was guilt. Man stood on the peaks of the world, where no other creature born of earth c;>uld come, and, as to him alone was given to gaze upward and onward to the infini- tude of spiritual glories, so for him alone existed the pos- sibility of an infinite descent. In so mysterious and awful a system of relations, it was of unspeakable moment 324 JOHN FOSTER. that it should be certainly known that there was a living and governing God. This central truth seems never to have been questioned by Foster. Nor did he ever seri- ously doubt whether this God had actually and specially spoken in the Bible. His doubts pertained mainly to the mode in which the word " Christ" was to be taken as the word of reconcilement, of explanation, of healing the ex- plicative formula of the universe the ladder between time and eternity, between God and man. Whether Christ was God, or only a sublime created being, was, for a time, to him doubtful. He questioned, he hesitated, he speculated. But as his mind matured, and to the eye of contemplation the universe seemed to deepen and widen around him, he became gradually more and more impressed with the feeble- ness of human speculation, and the strength of simple, if honest and earnest, faith. His conception of the infantine weakness of the reason of himself and his brethren, went on deepening, and stern and indubitable traces of law met his eye more and more boldly, as he advanced in years. He was profoundly impressed with the mystery which en- velops human things when contemplated by human rea- son. The poor finite creature stood on his little world, and cast out the sounding-line of his tiny intellect into the abysses of infinitude; for a little space it seemed to live, for one little moment it seemed to be piercing the dark- ness, like those darting threads of light seen in Novem- ber; but then it was swallowed up in the infinite hol- low of the night. He heard afar the music of the redeemed, he looked to the heaven of perfect holiness, he earnestly yearned thither; but guilt obscured the heavens, and speculation could not pierce the gloom. The infinite value of a definite declaration on the part of the living God iecame then manifest; it seemed plain to his un- JOHN FOSTER. 325 controlled reason that the Bible afforded such, in pro- nouncing Christ the equal of the Father, the Infinite God. If this truth was mysterious, it was at least certain : speculation, while unable to penetrate mystery, had at the same time strengthened the hand of doubt; but here doubt was slain. He accepted it. Believing de- finitely in the divinity of Christ, and resolving to take the facts of the universe as God had first fixed and then re- vealed them, he adopted the general system of belief which has been that of so many of earth's most earnest and mighty thinkers. He consented to see mankind as a drop of water resting in the hollow of Jehovah's hand; he subscribed to all the essential articles of that reading of man's destiny and God's revelation, known now for several ages as Calvinism. Such was Foster's final reli- gious attitude. The political ground which he came to assume was worthy of himself as a man and a Christian. When the atmosphere of the world was all in vibration with the shouts of joy, of triumph, and of hope when many nations seemed about to join in choral dance around a freedom arrayed in the snowy robe when love was finally to become lord of all, and science, the minister of love, to vanquish even death it was not to be wondered at that Foster, for a time, almost exulted in his humanity, and forgot the chains which may cramp and degrade the soul bound by no external bondage. He took up, as we have seen, with sons of Brutus and the writings of Tom Paine: perhaps the tough old world was to be renovated even so ! But the earnestness of his being, the singleness of his eye, could not but dissipate such delusions. Gradually the romantic light was seen to fade from human history and human nature. Like a true and valiant man, he dared to 326 JOHN FOSTER. look until he saw the worst, and as he gazed with deter- mined though saddening eye, he could not but perceive that a long dark cloud, murky as the smoke of hell, lay along the generations of men ; that the shouts of riot and revelling might rise above it, and gleams of wild mirth break through, but that, in general, it formed the fitting canopy of the lazar-house, the scaffold, and the battle-field. The time when tyranny and misery were to sink into a common grave, he was compelled to allow, had not yet come. He awoke startled from his dream of Eden, as at the flash of the cherubic swords. But how did he act ? Terror-stricken like a -nervous child, at the shouts of blas- phemy and the deluge of blood, did he tremble, and shriek, and rush back into the arms of the nurse, into old Tory- ism, and the worship of "whatever king dolh reign?" Having looked long on the mountain, did he conclude no Moses would ever emerge, and bow down to the golden calf of despotism? No. He took a position worthy of a man who could look deliberately and choose firmly : who could hear above .the dinning present, the great voices of all time; a far truer position than many great men of his and our time. It was manlier than Southey's, saner than Shelley's, more stable and honest than Byron's. He held by the great fact that, however defaced, however distorted, however contaminated, freedom is in essence eternally noble; and by the kindred fact, that despotism, however tempered, however embellished, is by nature poisonous and vile. For the present, the graceful and musical motions of the free had passed into the mad writhings and convulsive leapings of anarchy. But he did not therefore believe the devil's elaborate lie, that, because he had power to bring evil out of good, it was a right and hopeful attempt to bring good out of essential evil. JOHN FOSTER. 327 " Lord of unceasing love, From everlasting Thou ! we shall not die. These, even these, in mercy didst Thou form, Teachers of Good through Evil, by brief wrong Making Truth lovely, and her future might Magnetic o'er the fix'd untrembling heart." We can scarce conceive a more striking or conclusive proof of the soundness and unimpaired vigour of Foster's in- tellect, after having brought his reason reverently to accept " incredibilities," than is afforded by the fact that, after the fierce revulsion in his ideas caused by the French Revolu- tion, he still held, and continued with unchanging resolu- tion during life to hold, by the standard of freedom. When we come more closely to survey Foster's system of thought, as displayed in his writings and embodied in his life, we are met by one great belief which casts its shadow over the whole. This is the belief in man's depravity. Human iniquity, wherever he looked, seemed to pollute all, to pervert all. There is a certain gloomy sublimity in his tearful gaze along the centuries. Where his eye falls, all seems to become dark. As a storm in the high Alps has been observed to hush the songs of the birds, and cast every gleaming point into shade, so earth's boasted virtue and grandeur faded before the look of Foster. You pointed him to the great and good of the past, the wise and heroic, whose names are the pride of nations: These, he said, were but the mountain-peaks, that rose, few and soli- tary, into the sunlight, while a world of ignorance, wretch- edness, and crime, weltered below. You told him of the literary masterpieces of bygone ages, of sublime thoughts set in the perennial jewellery of poetic beauty: These, he replied, were flowers, for the most part gaudy and ungrace- ful, growing on a putrid mass. You spoke of the benign agencies which have been at work and are still at work on $28 JOHN FOSTER. man ; of the powers of science, of the refinements of litera- ture, of the gentle rain of education in the atmosphere of earth, and the sunlight of religion coming down from heaven: a sad smile passed over his features as he deeply muttered, There is a power in man's heart, when blown upon by the devil, to transform all these into " the sublime mechanics of depravity ! " This fearful thought was ever present with Foster, and was ever a fountain of wo. The sovereign power in man's nature he saw to have been dethroned, man's crown had fallen from his head, man's moral gravitation to the centre of the universe had been mysteriously broken. He looked upon sin simply as an evil, an incalculable evil. We think he was right We deem it inconsiderate and indicative of a want of sober and careful reflection, to indulge in expres- sions regarding our fallen state such as are met with in the present day. The individual and distinctive nature of sin seems to us to be lost sight of. It is spoken of as mere imperfection, as little more than what atfords an opportunity or a battle-field for goodness. Whereas it seems plain that its peculiar nature arises from its connec- tion with a free, willing being, as related to a supreme Father, that it is inextricably intertwined with the idea of personality, and that its least speck is in an essential and unqualified sense vile. The supposition of sin's existence in any world of God's creation besides our own, was to Foster an idea of acute pain ; and we confess we sympathise with him. We disagree with a brilliant and able but some- what incautious writer of the day, in his remarks on this part of Foster's views. We hope there is sublimer em- ployment to be found in the universe than battling to the death with the devil and his angels. It is unsafe to fami- liarise ourselves with the idea that sin came into God's JOHN FOSTER. 329 creation for its decoration. From eternity to eternity, from world to world, sin was, is, and will be damnable. There is, indeed, a sublime aspect of its connection with man's destiny, which we have not failed to discern, nor assuredly did Foster ; it is a sublime office to battle for light, were it in a world that quivered on the smoke of hell i let us not shrink from the combat ! But we dare not forget that what we struggle against is eternally vile, and that there is no sublimity, but endless shame, worthy of an agony to freeze our very tears, in much that it has en- tailed on humanity. Is there any sublimity in the fact, that a man cannot grasp the hand of his brother without the possibility of its one day striking a dagger to his heart? Why is it that the smile, and the complacent gesture, and the softly- tuned word, and all those dear emblems of kind- ness which shed a lingering starlight over life, can be mimicked, and debased, and turned into the dead paint cf what is called politeness and etiquette, to hide the sepul- chral rottenness of false hearts? When the friend you have loved for years turns treacherously against you for gold, is there sublimity in the fact? Is it not the agony of infinite shame that rises in our bosoms, as we read that the mode of expression which nature has given for the last speechless tenderness of love, was that by which a Judas betrayed a Jesus? Wander through the dreary vistas of time: look into the caverns of the Inquisition ; see the flames encircling that queenly maiden of eighteen who had rescued her country; gaze into the swollen eyes of the beautiful Beatrice Cenci ; stand by the scaffold of Leonora Schoening: then tell us of the sublimity of man's destiny. Look at that streak of hell-born slime, foul and inexpungeable, darker than mist or rain-cloud on the purity of Mont Blanc, which blackens the lofty snow 330 JOHN FOSTER. of Bacon's brow, and then speak of the sublimity of man's destiny. Worst, far worst of all, why is it that in our own hearts a hellish venom lurks ? The external battle were slight, if it were all. But it is not so. Why is it that we feel the suggestion of generosity ever cramped by some small insinuation of self? Why is it that only at rarest moments we can rise to the feelings of noblest friend- ship with man, or devotion to God? Why is it that, un- less we are utterly lost to nobleness, or utterly blind to our own state, we are so often "replenished with contempt?" Sin has done all this. We have beard enough of subli- mity ; we must change our tone a little. Not death alone, and pain, and disease, has this hellish agency brought along with it; but as it were the very rottenness and repulsive horror of death ; ingratitude, cowardice, sloth, unclean- ness, treachery. Sin is the blackness of all light, the de- filement of all purity, the all-embracing formula for what is ignoble. We shall still have self-denial and nobleness enough to hope that our poor world is the only tainted spot in the universe of God. Foster's intense .conception of sin is the key to much in his system of thought. This we shall find as we proceed. We have seen that his ultimate belief was that which is commonly designated Calvinism. But there was one point on which he rejected its .dogma; he never be- lieved in the eternity of hell torments. There are few passages in literature more profoundly interesting, than the long letter .in which he details his belief and its grounds on this solemn subject : of all the writings of Foster it is that which at once reveals to us most of his character, and draws our heart towards him with the tenderest feelings of affection. The source of his belief here was twofold: the eye- to- JOHN FOSTER. 331 eye vividness with which his imagination painted before him the horrors of eternal destruction, and the trembling sensibility with which he looked upon any fellow-creature in pain. We see both of these in the following brief extract ; it seems to us inexpressibly touching: " It often surprises me that the fearful doctrine sits, if I may so express it, so easy on the minds of the xeligious and benevolent believers of it. Surrounded immediately by the multi- tudes of fellow-mortals, and looking abroad on the present, and back on the past state of the race, and regarding them, as to the immense majority, as subjects of so direful desti- nation, how can they have any calm enjoyment of life, how can they even be cordially cheerful, how can they escape the incessant haunting of dismal ideas, darkening the economy in which their lot is, cast? I, remember sug- gesting to one of them such an image as this: Suppose the case to be that he knew so many were all doomed to suffer, by penal infliction, a death by torture, in the most protracted agony, with what feelings would he look on the populous city, the swarming country, or even a crowded, mixed congregation? But what an infinitesimal trifle that would be, in comparison with what he does believe in looking on these multitudes. How, then, can they bear the sight of the living world around them?" Read these words, and judge of the heart of Foster. With what a trembling, earnest hand, did he trace them! What a world of tender emotion, of mild but intense human sympathy, of deepest love, is shown here! And how beautiful, though sad, is the simplicity that breathes through the passage ! In perfect unconsciousness he writes, all unthinking of the rugged bosoms of his fellow-men, forgetful that each has his own little circle of work, with its own little circle of dust, encompassing it and him and 332 JOHN FOSTER. very much shutting out the rest of the world. Of a thousand men, probably not one has any definite concep- tion of what the common belief implies. The imagination is too dull to conceive it, the heart is too hard to feel it. But Foster's intense conceptive power led him in thought into the very bosom of hell; there he saw human eyes fixed in the agony of eternal despair, there he listened to the endless, hopeless wailings of his brethren ; and his heart was steeled by no hard worldliness, by no wild fana- ticism, to sympathy with their woes; he seemed to feel that, were he himself among the celestial bands, the know- ledge that those with whom he had once been a fellow- sojourner were in keen and everlasting anguish, would make him weep upon the plains of heaven. He thought not of himself, all his pain and sorrow came of sympathy. If ever in the breast of man there was a heart more tremu- lously tender than a woman's or a child's, that heart was John Foster's. Such was the source of his belief respecting God's punishment of sinners. The argument to which he was led can be briefly summed up. After painting fearfully the horrors of eternal wo, he deliberately adds: "I ac- knowledge my inability (I would say it with reverence) to admit this belief, together with a belief in the divine goodness the belief that ' God is love,' that his tender mercies are over all his works." He did not pass on to a belief in immediate and promiscuous redemption: "On no allowable interpretation do they" (the words of Scrip- ture on the subject) " signify less than a very protracted duration, and a formidable severity." The above may fairly be said to be Foster's one argu- ment; the aids he seeks from Scripture to his views are, at best, but attempts to open a path to a possible JOHN FOSTER. 333 warrant on its part. And, in truth, it seems to us well- nigh the only argument of strength which can be urged on that side. Let it not, however, be thought that we therefore deem the position of those who adduce it weak. We consider it not only strong, but, in one point of view, absolutely unassailable. If John Foster, or any man, deliberately and honestly conceives it irreconcilable with infinite love that God should condemn the wicked to everlasting punishment, we see not how he can accept the fact without blasphemy. If a man's reason, gazing ear- nestly and reverently, with lively consciousness of its own faint and glimmering vision, and full thought of the com- pass and might of infinite love guiding infinite power, is yet unable, we say not to justify, but to believe in the possible justice of eternal torments, we see not how he can accept the doctrine; it is not lawful for any man, taking the sentence, " God is love," to use it as a fiery rod, though it were of celestial gold, wherewith to sear the eyeballs of his reason. One man, considering long, and searching Scripture, can, with no outrage on his moral being, em- brace in one view the courts of eternal joy and the prison of eternal darkness, and believe unconstrainedly that the King who sits over both is Love; such an one, we believe, was Jonathan Edwards. But another man cannot do so; and if he is as honest and reverent as the last, who is there on earth that can accuse him? Deeply and solemnly earnest was Foster; we seem to see a dark cloud labouring along that letter, dropping tears on its way. We cannot subscribe to his belief on the point ; we think his view was somewhat contracted, and that, by a more mature conside- ration of what is revealed to us of God's dealings and designs in the creation of man, and a warrantable though careful borrowing of light from other quarters, it might 334 JOHN POSTER. have undergone important and advantageous change; hut how, with his premises, he could avoid his conclusion, we cannot see. We are not called upon here to discuss fully, or even to enter upon this stupendous subject. So profoundly difficult does the whole question of eternal punishment appear to us, and so intimately allied with a series of ques- tions that have baffled, and surely will for ever baffle, human reason, that there is, perhaps, no conceivable case in which we would more carefully avoid peremptory or upbraiding dogmatism. Poor finite beings, treating such a question, may well bear with each other ! We do no more at present than offer a general and preliminary remark, defining, in some measure, the condi- tions of the question, and indicating what every man, in coming to a decision regarding it, has, so to speak, to take along with him. In a volume of sermons, published some time since by Mr Theodore Parker of America, we find the matter treated in the following off-hand, easy manner: " You look on the base and wicked men who seem as worms in the mire of civilisation, often delighting to bite and to devour one another, and you remark that these also are the children of God; that He loves each of them, and will suffer no ancient Judas, nor modern kidnapper, to perish ; that there is no child of perdition in all the family of God, but He will lead home his sinner and his saint, and such as are sick with the leprosy of their wickedness, ' the mur- rain of beasts,' bowed down and not able to lift themselves up, He will carry in his arms'." Is it possible to believe that there is not in this some- thing essentially wrong? Is the subject, then, after all, one of such wayside plainness, such clear, and absolute, JOHN FOSTER. 335 and sunny simplicity? Are the clouds and thick darkness that have from the olden time mysteriously veiled the future, and cast their shade over such intellects as those of Luther, Calvin, Leibnitz, Pascal, and Jonathan Ed- wards, to roll away before such a soft summer gale of sen- timentality as this? We cannot believe it. We can scarce conceive aught more diametrically opposed to the mightiest instincts that have swayed nations, and the most earnest beliefs which have been arrived at by great individual thinkers. What real thinker has there been, from Plato to Dante, from Dante to Calvin, and from Calvin, we shall add, to Carlyle, who has not recognised something unspeakably stern, something to create a solemn awe, in the general structure and relations of this universe ? Were nature all sunny and cloudless ; were the sea at all times glassy and still, or the pathway only of the spiced and gentle wind, leading along the white sail as if it were an infant of Ocean ; were there only soft flowery lawns and May mornings, and no volcanoes or avalanches ; were there but the smiles of birth-day and of bridal upon human faces, no furrow traced by tears, no wrinkle writ by age, no shadow cast by coming death ; were human history one joyous chime, ascending from the green earth to meet and mingle with the angels' music, broken by no wailings of sorrow, no shrieks and groans of battle ; had the slopes of Olivet been ever mantled with the vine, and rung only to the song of the vintage, and never seen the crosses by thousands in the grey morning ; did the human eye, as years go on, gather brightness, and beam with ever a clearer and prouder gladness, and were it not a fact that the eye of every man or woman of well advanced years, has one expression giving tone to the others, vanishing, it may be, for an hour, but always returning, and that an ex- 336 JOHN FOSTER. pression of sorrow: then might we have heart to join Mr Parker in his soft and child-like strain. But whenever we would assay to doso, we see ourselves confronted by immove- able facts, by this one great fact misery ; and our tongue cleaves to the roof of our mouth. Has it been all a mis- take, then, by which men have ever regarded death as dark and calamitous, and its infliction the severest form of punish- ment ? What means the smoke of those sacrifices rising from every nation on earth to an angry deity ? Who put that word into the mouth of conscience, giving, along with it, a power to compel all men to listen, which declares and has ever declared man responsible and the sinner in danger ? Surely the assertion that these phenomena have reference solely to the inconveniences entailed on the sinner in this life, requires no refutation. God has not averted the painful effects of sin in this world ; He let Judas go to his despairing death, and a devil even on earth gnawed the heart of Saul ; by what argument, then, can we conclude that He will totally avert the effects of sin in the next, and place Judas and Stephen alike within the light of His throne? "Infinite pity yet also infinite rigour of law : it is so nature is made ; it is so Dante discerned that she was made." These are the words of Mr Carlyle. We have already referred to the prevalent assertion of Foster's misanthropy. We boldly denied it, and ventured the affirmation that his heart was tenderly kind. We think this will now be agreed to; the words he uttered re- garding eternal punishment put it beyond further ques- tion. But it still admits of dispute whether he did not take a morbidly gloomy view of human affairs whether, though personally of tender kindliness, he may not yet, as a public teacher, be rightfully designated a misanthrope. Most of the ideas abroad regarding him have it for their basis that JOHN FOSTER. 337 he was such; and even in a noted disquisition upon his character, we find it sententiously stated that his tenderest emotions were acts of ratiocination. Perhaps precisely the most important lesson he conveyed to his age may be brought to light by inquiring into the truth of such state- ments. Foster's tremulous sensibility, and his vivid and sleep- less imagination, gave him what we may call a perpetual consciousness of human misery. The misanthrope says men are bad, worthy to be hated, and deserving their sor- row; Foster also said men were bad, but he heard love whispering that they were weak, and hatred for their sin was drowned in pity for their suffering. " Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break;" and he seemed to hear it break. Do we not, as may be worth noting as we pass, see so much in his portrait? Is not the expression which gives it tone that of tender, yearning affection ? Sorrow and misgiving are in the eye, but they seem to float in pity and love. There is something of trouble in the earnest, inquiring glance, telling of long pondering and of a high curiosity not to be satisfied, but there is neither indignation nor disdain. If the lip is faintly curled, it is not with contempt; it seems to tremble with a sad and extorted confession, that human effort is all but vain in assuaging human wo. As we look, are we not vividly reminded of the lines by Keats " Anxious, pitying eyes, As if he always listen'd to the sighs Of the goaded world]" These words are precisely descriptive of Foster's habitual cast of mind. His face is not hopeful, it is not joyous; but if one emotion is absent, it is that of contemptuous z 338 JOHN FOSTER. hatred, and if one is present, it is that of scarcely hoping love. Foster was a stern teacher. Looking, with penetrative vision, over human history, and entering by imaginative power into every scene and region of misery looking on ancient history, and seeing, " by its faint glimmer," that it had been " an ocean of blood" and marking how, in modern times, even the celestial light of Christianity had but faintly and fitfully irradiated the gloom of earth he turned round, with the austerity of earnestness and the sadness of love, and proclaimed, in solemn accents, that the world was no joyful garden, but a sterile desert, its wells few, its palm-trees faded, and resting, as under a sky of iron, beneath the curse. Let the shout of triumph, he said, die away: brethren, these are no cool tranquil lakes, these towers and palaces are not of pearl and gold ; these are but the mockeries of our sorrow, no man of heart will look upon them ; beneath our feet is burning sand, and it is manful to know it; only on the far horizon gleams the serene light of our home. Gloomy, misanthropic, only half the truth, say a thousand ; alas, it is too near the whole truth, and of it we must be at times reminded. Easy it is to paint your world ; so infinitely easier, as has, we think, been remarked, to paint it an inch deep, than to amend it by a hair's-breadth. Heroism, virtue, domestic joys, rural bliss, the progress of the species, the sway of love, liberty, equality, and fraternity; do you think Foster had not heard of these ? Yes, and for a time he listened earnestly, if perhaps there might be any healing there; and even when disappointed, he held to the truth they shadowed. But how did his strong heart respond to the general advocates of freedom in our day ? How did Enceladus greet the soft frivolous accents of the erentle JOHN FOSTER. 339 Clyraene, who lisped her comforting syllables to the Titans? " Not thunderbolt on thunderbolt, till all That rebel Jove's whole armoury was spent; Not world on world upon these shoulders piled, Could agonise me more than baby-words In midst of this dethronement horrible." There are few if any spectacles afforded by our earth more noble in their sadness than this first which we find pre- sented by Foster, and misnamed misanthropy. It is the spectacle of a man who looks over the ranks of his brothers as they wend mournfully through time, who feels a sorrow deeper than words, striving upwards to his eye to pour itself forth, but who yet sternly crushes down the " climb- ing agony," and compels his tears to burn only in his heart, lest they film his eye, and prevent the earnest glance of thought from piercing into the evil. This, too, is among the duties of man; to stand, like a kind physician, beside the writhing patient, mankind, and, while listening to the groans, to mete the extent and virulence of the distemper, and, it may be, apply some remedy which will for the time increase the plaining. A man on earth may have too much love to weep ! The duty of man, as man, is thought. This is his dis- tinctive regal duty. Pity and love may aid and cheer him, but, as sovereign worker in this world, his duty is governance, guidance in one word, thought. And in order to this, he must, with a valiant calmness, know in all cases the worst. " To bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance all calm That is the top of sovereignty." No man is qualified to be a public guide or instructor of men, who cannot more or less do this ; and a man generally 340 JOHN FOSTER. is mighty in proportion as he can do it, and has a love strong enough to dare it. But there is another aspect in which to regard Foster's gloomy representations of the human state and prospects. His position was twofold: in one point of view, it resem- bled that of the misanthrope; in another, it was diametri- cally opposed thereto. He declared the work to be stern, the battle to be a reality. But he held earnestly by his standard, he never flinched work. Hear this grand sentiment from his lips : "All that pass from this world must present them- selves as from battle, or be denied to mingle in the eternal joys and triumphs of the conquerors." We know that he was tenderly kind, and he never for a moment flinched from the combat. This union absolutely negatives misan- thropy, and the general notion which attributes such to Foster must be dissipated. He was a practical living en- forcement, with a new and peculiar energy, of the great lesson that every man must work. However dark the aspect of the field, though no higher hope exists for you than to lie cold and stiff" while your brethren go on to vic- tory, yet you must fight on. Comparatively easy is it to struggle when our hope is bright, although this also is noble; but far more difficult is it, to know all the hazards and toils of the combat, to see no prospect that our indi- vidual might will perceptibly avail, and yet to keep the sword unbared, and never dream of returning it to the scabbard. This is that high form of virtue which is missed by the real misanthrope; and it Foster attained. Whoso fully comprehends his whole position here, has understood his life: here, we think, lies the problem of his biography. We shall call this gloom, then, of which we have heard so much, a right noble, a sublime melancholy. In the strength of youth, as we have seen, his hopes had been high ; his eye JOHN FOSTER. 341 bad caught the distant gleaming of paradaisal fields ; he had seemed to hear the sound of millennial anthems ; his heart had swelled high with emotion; he had shouted for the battle. But he soon paused in astonished sadness. It was as if a seraph had seen from afar the new smile of our planet among the stars of God, and had come through the azure to hear the notes of its new hymn of praise, and had landed on its golden margin, and been confronted by sin. The sorrow that was in Foster's eye has been known by the noblest of earth. It was that sadness which shaded the brow of Plato ; such sadness was in the heart of Solomon when he said that much wisdom was much grief. We say not such sorrow as this is absolutely required of us, nor certainly ought it to darken the whole character. With all her sternness, nature has appointed feelings of mirth to play over the dark places of our lot. A stern mother she is, a stern destiny is ours: but sometimes, nevertheless, she does take her children in her arms and smile on and kiss them ; she does intend us to yield at times to glad impulses, to leave our brooding, to look at the sunny side of the cloud. It is a fact that, at every moment, bitter tears are furrow- ing human faces; it is a fact that, at every moment, Night, with her shrouding darkness, is closing over half the world: but it is a fact also, that at every moment some are smiling; at every moment, somewhere, Morn is scattering golden light. And, above all, the Christian may be re- moved from overwhelming access of grief; he " Whose meditative sympathies repose Upon the breast of Faith;" he who can overarch all clouds and contradictions with an infinite radiance. But the calm rejoicing of the healthful and balanced Christian mind is removed as far as possible from flippancy or thoughtless gaiety. If our natures are 342 JOHN FOSTER. of the sunny complexion, let us be glad and thankful ; but let us not forget that some of the greatest intellects of time have looked sadly on human affairs, or neglect the lesson they teach. Of these intellects, though not taking a high rank among them, was Foster's. He came near certain fatal influences, but he remained unscathed by all. He knew doubt,yethe wasnot driven into infidelity ; he sawdifficulty, yet he was not driven into despair. He told men that the battle with principalities and powers was stern and long, and with hasty superficiality they exclaimed that he was wrapped in a garment of mere gloom. H2 shrunk, in horror and agony, from the baleful form of sin, as he saw it in the world around him ; by a sublime casting of the mantle of his love over the universe, he yearned to shut out from its rejoicing borders that mortal taint, and confine it to his own blackened world ; and they exclaimed that he was a misanthrope! In considering the works of any powerful and sincere thinker, it is well to give a close attention to what in them is defective or erroneous. In tracing the line beyond which, by being pressed too far, truth becomes of no avail, or even, as extremes meet, rushes off to embrace error, we can mark well the lineaments of the truth itself, and com- prehend, more fully than before, the work done by him whose writings we inspect. The mistakes, also, of a sin- cere man, and one of great influence in the world of mind, are more apt to obtain currency and produce evil, than those of one of slighter build : from gold it is worth while to separate the clay. We therefore proceed to state a few important defects in Foster's opinions and teaching, and to endeavour to evolve the full truth in each case. It is not difficult to enunciate in general terms the one great want alike in Foster's powers, knowledge, and opi- JOHN FOSTER. 343 nions. In one word, he wanted completeness. His ima- gination, powerful, amazingly powerful, to draw a single figure, or a single spectacle, could not produce a full and harmonised picture. Passages in his works are, perhaps, not to be surpassed for lurid distinctness, for happy meta- phor, or for clear force ; but he could not produce a com- plete book, or design a complete essay, and what Dr Cheever says of his compositions, that they commence and end by no rule, and are governed by no principles of symmetry, is accurately true. His knowledge was various, and in its separate parts, so far as we can judge, sufficiently exact; but it was fatally deficient in method, it formed no complete system or series, beautiful to behold and easily referred to: it was like a museum packed up in the hold of a ship. His strictly intellectual power and his strictly reasoned opinions have the same characteristic. We are able to express in his own words the great fact, that " the con- junction of truths is of the utmost importance for preserv- ing the genuine tendency, and securing the appropriate efficacy of each ; " yet his system of opinion was by no means symmetrical. Each separate doctrine which he en' forces has an aspect of truth, but often this aspect, by be- ing made to fill the field of view, implies error. After all his pondering, he had reached no explaining theory, even of certain facts of history, which can, within limits, be ac- counted for, and whose allied good and evil can be discri- minated. The truth of these general remarks will become manifest as we proceed. Of the meaning and function, in the present stage of man's history as a species, of certain agencies, which must always, in their ultimate relations, be regarded with sor- row, but which subserve important purposes in the present dispensation, Foster had no clear conception. Of these 344 JOHN FOSTER. agencies, by far the most remarkable is war. If all other arguments in proof of the fact that the species man is fallen were swept away, the one great fact of war would yet, we say not prove to us the fall, but render it beyond our power to conceive a man deliberately believing his species still in that state of perfection in which God created it. But if war came with sin, it came as the red-hot iron comes with poison ; to scarify and blacken, but yet to prevent pain from becoming death. When sin entered, a great severance took place ; right and might parted company. One in the bygone eternity, again to be one in the coming eternity, in the little vexed strait of time, tossing and weltering and never at rest, which lies between the two, they severed. To say that might and right are one " in the long run," is to enunciate what we have just endea- voured to express ; to say might and right are one in time, traceably and exactly one in human history hitherto, or to be so ere the species is restored to its native condition, is to deny that ever a Helot was murdered or a child op- pressed. When might and right become one, War will unbrace his armour, and lie down, and die. But till then, War has functions to perform. These are various, but per- haps the most important among them is this: either, in his rough and rude manner, to vindicate outraged justice and let the oppressed go free ; or, in the blood of these oppressed on the lost battle-field, to inscribe a perpetual testimony to the right, and a stern and dumb appeal to Heaven. Of other agencies, seemingly evil, which God makes to praise Him, we shall not speak. How did Foster think and speak of war? He looked over human history, with a search- ing and a loving eye ; he saw it followed by a pale host of woes, and moving through all time to a music of bitter wail, making man its prey : he broke into a shriek of sor- JOHN FOSTER. 345 row and indignation, and never went further or altered his tone. Now, it cannot be asserted, in proof of any man's being a thinker, that he has perceived the evil of war. Since themes began to be written in academies, that was known and discoursed of. Every school-boy has a set of tropes to illustrate it. But a profound and deliberate thinker should see farther. The very recognition of that great ne- cessity at which we have pointed, at least in bygone ages, were enough to silence a scarce manly and perpetual whin- ing over the woes of war ; but a conception even of this we have not found in Foster. Much less did he see how it has, in many ages, subserved other and benign purposes. Dear-bought, indeed, have been the harvests which its red rain has made to grow, but it has made them grow. Look upon Europe at the time of the breaking up of the Roman Empire ; it is a case precisely in point. The ap- pearance presented is inexpressibly awful : one scene of horror, of devastation, of tumult, from the gates of Con- stantinople to the pillars of Hercules. How far better had it seemed, how far higher had been the sentimental beauty, if things had continued as they were, if Rome's soft licen- tious slaves had gone on dawdling and lolling till now. But on that Europe God had other nations to be planted; new blood had to be introduced; and the northern hordes came down, sword in hand. It is an undeniable ethno- logical fact, that, by the agency of the fearful wars which ensued, by the commingling of races resulting therefrom, the puny, emasculated subjects of Rome were exchanged for those nations, which now, for more than a thousand years, have reared their mountain-like forms on Europe. This is a great fact. Say, if you will, that God over- ruled the horrors of war for the advancement of mankind ; we, indeed, consider this the most accurate mode of express- 346 JOHN FOSTER. ing the fact: but learn to discern the mode in which He does overrule it, and say not that the devil alone had a hand in the matter. Often amid the shakings of the nations, when men's hearts were failing them for fear, and in the bosoms of all the noble there was a speechless yearning for rest, God's Providence has been at work, the cloud seeming to veil love has been " itself love," and in the course of centuries the light of that love has beamed out perceptibly to all. What a profound significance now attaches to the following words of Milton, uttered in reference to that tumultuous time when " faithful and free-born Englishmen and good Christians" were driven in multitudes from home and country, to seek shelter in " the wide ocean and the savage deserts of America:" "Oh, sir, if we could but see the shape of our dear mother England, as poets are wont to give a personal form to what they please, how would she appear, think ye, but in a mourning weed, with ashes upon her head, and tears abundantly flowing from her eyes." "Were the eye of John Milton now to rekindle in its dry socket, what a gleam of glory would flash from it, as he gazed over to the "savage deserts of America 1" How would he now robe in poetic life the figure of England, looking to the mighty nation to which she gave birth in pains like those of dissolution! How proudly would he now regard the Island mother and her Titan son, in- trusted by God with the high commission of bearing the standard of freedom in the front of the peoples! Would he not at least bow his head in wondering praise, and de- clare that, clearer and more powerful than ever song of bard, to justify the ways of God to man, is the silent roll of the ages ? We have said we would speak only of war, but there JOHN FOSTER. 347 might be urged considerations of a nature somewhat simi- lar, to show that pestilence and famine are not unmingled evils, that even their steps are watched of God. Nations spring again with fresh vigour to their feet, after having been cast down. Through the branches of the pruned forest, rushes the stream of life with wilder energy, and gushes forth in a fresh magnificence of foliage. No fact seems to us more likely to be soon unfolded to the careful student of history, than that after every period of winter has come a period of spring. With such thoughts as these, Foster had no acquaint- ance. He could nowise see his way through history. It were foolish to conclude, from aught we have said above, that we are pleaders for war, famine, and pestilence. We know these are doomed, and the sooner they go the better; they point to a fearful chronic disease in the sys- tem of human affairs; in the evolution of man's history, of God's plan in man's creation, they will vanish. Welcome shall science be, with all her mild methods, thrice welcome. As war was the agency by which a sufficiently wide field was prepared for first planting the foundations of Christ's kingdom on earth; as it was the sword of Rome which, all unconsciously of the end to be accomplished, fitted the world for Christianity in its troubled militant state ; we trust that, when that kingdom is to be fully established, and the golden battlements of Zion to cover the whole earth, the preparing agencies will be no longer those of war, but those of peace. But, meanwhile, nothing is to be gained from immature attempts or Utopian expectations. Hu- manity is a patient difficult to deal with, and, for our part, we suspect the monster will have to be bled several times yet; it will bleed no longer than until bleeding ceases to be a necessary agent of cure. 348 JOHN FOSTER. Reflections such as we have indicated are of great moment. They enlarge our apprehension of the wisdom of God, and show how deeply, yet unmistakeahly, His designs penetrate the general framework of things : they foster a child-like, yet manful confidence in the Almighty, and hint audibly, however the floods rage, that He sits King for ever: lastly, and in especial application to our day, they prevent men from fancying, as even earnest and able men are apt to do, that their time is the worst of times, and that the world is falling to wreck around them. They impart " That severe content That comes of thought and musing;" they might have whispered to Southey, Arnold, and Car- lyle, to possess their souls in patience. To proceed. In all Foster's performance as a Christian instructor, there is no circumstance which we regard with feelings of deeper admiration, than his downright advocacy of strict Christianity within the courts of literature. He will have a Christian to be one in thought, word, and deed: he will listen to no compromise; he will hear of no palliation ; him who is not with Christ he will declare to be against Him. So far he has our warmest sympathy. As the old Judaistic preaching of law is obsolete, so the old philo- sophic preaching of virtue is obsolete ; law and virtue are both embraced, and, as it were, transfigured, in the doc- trine of Christ crucified. But here, also, we can say with full assurance that his view was narrow and erroneous. He felt two powers contending within him. Gifted by nature with a fine sympathy for all thatwas beautiful and elevating, he could not but experience a thrill of richest enjoyment when any tint of real beauty met his eye, any tone of real beauty fell upon his ear; but he had often met such in the JOHN FOSTER. 349 spacious fields of literature, both ancient and modern, where he had extensively wandered, and these were, for the most part, unchristian; the sovereign voice of religion seemed to say, that in these regions it was sinful to expatiate, and that every fruit to be plucked there, however clear and golden its beauty, must be an apple of Sodom. He took his determination. He uttered a voice of warning and condemnation. On all literature commonly called profane he laid his ban. However pure the joy appeared, however distinctly it was from inner and native fountains of sym- pathy that the rapture seemed to flow, it was to be curbed, thwarted, cast aside, if the object of beauty which evoked it was not within some enclosure distinctly marked off for Christian purposes. In this we think he erred. Two very great departments of truth may be categorised and looked at in parallel lines, under the respective titles of laws of mathematics, and laws of beauty. The limits of these departments, their points of divergence and of coales- cence, are not our present concern. We have to speak of the laws of beauty, and introduce the laws of mathematics to aid our explanation. Of both of these we have this as- sertion to make; that they are absolute and self-dependent. No one with whom men would reason doubts the abso- luteness of mathematical truth: it has been questioned, but we must at present assume it as a fact, that the laws of beauty what is often called aesthetic, and what Ruskin calls theoretic truth are also absolutely true and single. In other words, however much they may seem to man to fluctuate, these laws are the writing of the Eternal mind, and are more stable than the created universe. This is now, so far as we know, the belief of all our higher think- ers; its being questioned so largely during last century was merely the exhibition, in the rsgion of criticism, o 350 JOHN POSTER. that scepticism characteristic of the time. The natural and usual connection between sensational theories of morals and relative theories of beauty, has been ably noted by Dr M' Vicar. The ancient and noble faith is, that the laws of beauty are independent of man and removed above cir- cumstance, precisely as the truths of geometry. The laws by which the colours of the rainbow are mingled, by which the draped elm-branch hangs, by which the long sweeps of mountain curve are drawn, by which the waves bend, and wreath, and dance, with the grace of new-bornCytheras, are as firmly established in the mind of God as the laws by which He has hung the world on nothing. If any man agrees not with us here, we can carry him no further. But, supposing this granted, let us next inquire how the human mind, in its present shattered and enfeebled condition, looks at the respective provinces of mathematic and aesthetic truth. The process by which man has unfolded the truths of mathematics seems to us comparable to the gradual removal of the clay, or sandstone, or chalk, from a fossil. Line by line, the encasing substance is removed, the plates of the old scales, the forms of the old bones, are displayed; the instant a new portion is uncovered, it is seen perfectly, and without mistake; nothing farther is to be learned regarding it. Exactly so in mathematics; as each new proposition is unfolded, the attainment is perfect, removed from the possibility at once of question and of improvement. The human mind has retained power, by however long a process, to unveil mathematical truth perfectly. It has not been so with the laws of beauty. These may be compared rather to immoveable stars, fixed in the heavens, while far below there is a cloudy atmo- sphere, kept in perpetual turmoil by tempests, through which they can but gleam at moments; up into the vault JOHN FOSTEK. 351 men gaze and gaze with their sin-dimmed eyes; so wildly do the clouds roll and toss, and so feeble is their vision, that at times they are apt to turn away, and exclaim that those stars are not fixed at all, but are mere stray meteors wandering through the cloud- rack. As yet no man has so clearly and conclusively fixed what their position and relative magnitude are, as to command universal assent; but in no age has the eyesight of men been so dim, that stray gleams from them have not been noted, and sure though partial tidings of what they are obtained. But the grand fact to be remembered is this: That every gleam really discerned has been seen by man, not created, has been a glimpse of a light of which God is the eternal foun- tain. For some reason, which we may well leave to His wisdom, neither the laws of mathematics, nor the laws of beauty, are in this world revealed specially to those who seek a re-attainment of sonship in God's house through Jesus Christ; but, as the Christian believes in, and derives intellectual nourishment from, a new truth in mathe- matics, discovered by a blasphemer, he may rightfully and with good conscience look upon every beam of real beauty, though seen by an infidel, as a revelation of the thoughts and workings of his God. And the truths of beauty seem to be of a higher sort than those of mathe- matics. These last are the laws by which God fixed the pillars of His universe; but beauty, we may reverently say, is His very garment; and our greater ignorance of its laws than' of the laws of mathematics is, perhaps, because, as fallen children, we cannot see our Father's face. Truly glorious is the prospect opened up by the simple and sublime truth we have feebly enunciated. It enables the Christian to go round the garden of poetry, sepa- rating the Satanic slime from paradaisal flowers, claiming 352 JOHN FOSTER. all that is beautiful for his God. Thus is that teeming sympathy with loveliness, which Foster thought it neces- sary to restrain, nurtured to full fruition and perfect bloom. Thus all that the human imagination has in every age framed of true beauty, returns to the Christian in a new relation, and with new significance; every form of grace that the Greek saw in the dusky wood, or rising from the ocean, every fair mythic youth of Eastern song, every impersonation of summer dawn by Northern bard. The vessels of the Pagan temples, the notes of Pagan choirs, may be turned to the service of the true God, and even from the sterile desert of atheism be gathered angels' food. "We shall see the stars though the night is around them ! The devil is darkness and defilement, but he never can cast his livery over, and compel into his service, one ray of God's light; the fact of a beautiful object's being beautiful, is equivalent to the fact that its beauty is from God; what- ever opposition to beauty, whatever defilement is exhibited by it, cannot extinguish its vital element; to say other- wise were Manichean. The flower that grows on the battle-field is as truly the work of God, and as perfectly reveals His beauty, as the flower that wreaths the Chris- tian cottage; the beauty, where it is real, which has been seen and sung of by a Byron or a Shelley, may be taken by the Christian, with clear open mind, as a plant of God's rearing, though on an unwilling human soil. The evil one must be beaten into his own grounds, and permitted to vindicate as his no spot of the territory of our Father. The earth was cursed in its relation to man ; it was degraded from what it was to Adam, a grand written scroll, its words the cloud, and flower, and mountain, the light by which it was read that of the sun and stars JOHN FOSTER. 353 wherein, as his own heart thrilled with the angelic joy that springs from rapt sympathy with loveliness, he saw the glory and the beauty of God, into a field and workshop of toil, where man cannot rise, on the wings of pure emo- tion, into the heaven of loveliness, because of the brassy dome of labour. Yet the lilies of the field were not cursed in themselves or made less beautiful; their beauty was only veiled from men, so that they saw it not, nor were moved by it to a sacred joy; and we may be absolutely certain, both that every thrill of rapture awakened in us by true beauty is a noble emotion, and that, when our nature is restored to what it was, or raised higher than before, a beauty will beam upon us from every part of God's universe, till then scarce dreamed of. Foster's conception of the fallen state of human nature, shadowing as it did the whole range of his opinions, led him into views respecting the means available and hopeful for the amelioration of humanity, which seem to us of so dangerous tendency as to require a word of comment. He looked for light from heaven, in a way in which it is not now, we think, to be expected, and in which it would do little good if it came. Casting his eye upon man as an agency for the regeneration of the world, his feeling of the depth of human corruption made him almost turn from the reforming teacher or preacher in despair. True, as we have seen, he never flinched, but he consi- dered the world so bad, that no terrestrial mechanism hitherto known could save it; he desired, therefore, and expected, visible supernatural assistance. It is interesting to observe the eagerness with which he grasps at any ap- pearance of supernatural influence, to account for an ex- traordinary religious movement ; the look of suspicion with which he regards any act of general heroism is by no 2 a 354 JOHN FOSTER. means so pleasing. He strongly insinuates supernatural aid in the case of Whitefield ; perhaps the coldest and small- est remark he ever made, and that with the spirit of which we least sympathise, is that in which he seems to cling to the idea that the ministers of the Church of Scotland who left their manses in 1843 would flinch when it came to the point. Foster had by no means an adequate idea of man, of his countless capabilities and countless diversities; how, borrowing a hint from a clever writer, one might say he suggested the idea of a cross between an angel and a demon ; how the heaven-light and the hell-light mingle in his eye. And, for one thing, he had no clear idea of the mighty influence of man on man. He looked, to use his own words, for " the interference of angelic, or some other extraordinary and yet unknown agency." The influence, both for good and evil, that may be ex- erted by man upon man, it were extremely difficult to overrate. The light from the human eye flashes along a column in the battle-day like a gleam of sunlight on the bayonets; read the history of the " Little Corporal," and you will know that to be a fact. The light of the human eye will set continents ablaze for centuries; read the his- tory of Mahomet and Islam for the proof of that. That light will bring the men of one half of the world upon those of another, as the moon leads the vast tidal wave of ocean; witness Peter and his Crusades. Think of the influence of Luther on the world, and of Whitefield upon immense bodies of men; think of the sway of Knox in Scotland, and of his true successor Chalmers; reflect, in a word, upon human history in its whole course; and own the irresistible force of the conviction that the human eye and voice are the mightiest agencies which have acted there, whether directly as instruments of the Highest, or JOHN FOSTER. 355 indirectly as such. Supernatural agency for the regene- ration of the world we distinctly look for ; hut we appre- hend that such agency will not necessarily be in any other sense supernatural than it is in the conversion of every believer. Conceive the effect of a band of men with the ardour, the rapt earnestness, the immoveable valour of Paul, and the sacred enthusiasm of John ; by the laws of human nature, they would move the world as it has never yet been moved ; and what, save such graces as may be drawn down by prayer, do Christians now require to be such? Our Saviour set the human for ever on a level with visible supernatural agency, by His declaration that, " If men heard not Moses and the Prophets, neither would they be persuaded though one rose from the dead." This truth is of very grave import; for, if it is our first duty to avail ourselves of all aid to be had, it is our second to ascertain in what case to look for aid is hopeless. "We shall draw to a close our exceptions to Foster's teaching, by a brief glance at the subject of amusements. These, as is well known, were, on the whole, an eyesore to him : even the sports and dances of children he looked on with a scowl of disapproval and discontent. It was not, indeed, always so ; of that we have had satisfactory proof: but he did not feel at rest respecting them; any appearance of lightness, any approach to frivolity, in such an earnest world as ours, he could not sanction with the kind indulgence of sympathy. He saw what was bad in amusements, but not what was good ; he perceived not the end they serve in the present economy, if not perfect or altogether excellent themselves, in yet averting worse evils, and at lowest finding something harmless for idle hands and feet to do. He fixed his eye too exclusively on the hollowness of worldly courtesy, and while he sneered it 356 JOHN FOSTER. away he told us not what to put in its place. The pre- sent fabric of society is, indeed, crazy and infirm, rot- tenness in its rafters, flaws in its iron-work, cracks in its pillars ; but all must be better and stronger ere these can be dispensed with ; pull them out with the rash hand now, and all will go into a heap of rubbish. What is the rationale of noble amusement? what its method and what its end ? In the mirthful meeting, it is intended, and should be, so far as is possible, attained, that the social instincts come into healthful and cheering play, that the latent fire of aflection for our brethren and sisters, simply as such, by, as it were, the pleasing friction of con- course and converse, evolve itself on all faces in genial smiling or free laughter; that the frame, physical and psychal, sportively unbend itself without sinking into tor- por, drawing refreshment and invigoration from a certain active rest, midway between sleep and labour. Such is needful for poor man, and nature has kindly given it. Three radical errors, in three respective ways, may vitiate the philosophic perfection of amusement. The entertain- ment may be simply and exclusively animal ; then it is ignoble in man : it may be simply mental ; then it defeats its purpose : it may be destitute of true kindness, of trust- ful, friendly confidence ; then it is false. This is self- evident and irreversible, and thus may all amusement be tried. How do our public ball-rooms and large formal danc- ing parties stand the test? Not remarkably well. Ge- nuine geniality is well-nigh absent. The kindness con- sists in becks, and bows, and ceremonies; in lispings, and simpers, and smiles; all of which were accurately put down in the dancing-master's bill. It is a farce, better or worse played, in which men and women act kindness. JOHN FOSTER. 357 It is also highly distinctive of the place that mind is wanting. Was it not Hook who observed that dancing and intellect are in our island in an inverse ratio? It was a shrewd re- mark; and one thing upon which frequenters of ball- rooms, of both sexes, seem unanimous, is that the parti- cular persons with whom they have happened to dance were remarkably silly. In plain truth, the entertainment must be put in comparison with those of the lower animals. All the inferior tribes have their amusements. Crows wheel round in the sky, sweeping in full circle, evidently in joyous sport; kittens and dogs are familiar examples; donkeys, be it known, are remarkably frisky, when it is their own amusement they have to attend to; even sheep have been observed clumsily gambolling and kicking about in their thick woolly vestures, and have suggested the idea of a ball-room of ladies and gentlemen threading the wreathed dance in flannel dressing-gowns. Now we dis- tinctly allow that the entertainments of a ball-room may produce that swiftened gallop of the blood, and consequent exhilaration of animal spirits, which, we presume, attend the sports of the sheep and the donkey; and the music and champagne may be allowed, in philosophic fairness, to set the ball-room, considered as a place of animal sport, perceptibly above the playgrounds of the last-mentioned creatures: but, since we are thus liberal, we will be per- mitted to say that, when you have no friendliness, no all- pervasive play of mirth, no unlaced ease and freedom, when you stand to each other merely in the relation of necessaries to the dance, the pleasure, however heightened, is animal in essence and ignoble. Relaxing amusement, however, is noble and proper, whenever it bides the tests we have proposed. When you can trustfully grasp the hand extended to yours ; when you 358 JOHN FOSTER. know the smile on the lip that addresses you to be the speechless voice of the viewless spirit of kindness; when you can be assured that the tongue, now tuned to soft ge- niality and friendliness, will not to-morrow slander your name; when mirth flows in its natural channels, and trust- ful heart leaps in sympathy with trustful heart; then all is right. And if, in such an assemblage, the joyous exhi- laration will be increased by moving to harmonious sound, with gestures of beauty and vivacious grace, let no one object to the dance ; the buoyant leaping of the blood is nature's, the laws of beauty in sound and sight are nature's, who can say they are wrong? The rain falls no less cheeringly because the sunbeams painted the cloud with gold and vermilion; industry and action flourish all the better, for this sporting in the sunlight of mirth and glad- ness. "We seriously invite all persons to consider the essential accordance of this with Christianity, with the example of our Master. Never smile passed from human countenance as He entered the abode, never child ceased to frolic be- cause He was near. We speak most seriously, deliberately, and reverently, when we say that if, in the degenerate state of the Jews at the time, they still retained any noble melodies commemorative of the days and deeds of the first Asmoneans, He would have listened while they were sung without commanding silence, and sanctioned by His sacred approval the flow of manly mirth. Because worldly amuse- ment, as we in general find it, is unworthy of men, let us not forget that the relaxing and yet reiuvigorating enjoy- ments of social entertainment were never frowned upon by Him whose sympathy embraced everything beautiful and true in this universe. It will be remarked that we have in no way restricted JOHN FOSTER. 359 true, lawful amusement to one form. Our tests exclude all that ought to be excluded, but make room for all else. In the freest and best relaxation, the heart will naturally turn to what draws it most, and the devout Christian may find every essential of recreating social enjoyment in sharing with others the feelings of gratitude or irre- pressible love to his God which fill his bosom. As true recreation, as pure enjoyment, may be derived from the sharing of Christian feelings, as from any other out- going of the heart, or rather far truer and purer. Were the hymns which, at early morning, the primitive Chris- tians sung to Jesus less joyful than the bacchantic choruses that had made night hideous a few hours before? Nay, this form of enjoyment will ultimately swallow up all others. Meanwhile, it is bootless to scowl upon amuse- ments; by no single edict can they be removed or reformed. Only let us always keep the end in view, and strive to be on the way of improvement. As the human mind becomes gradually elevated, and the human heart gradually deep- ened, this and many other reforms will come in their season. We have thus found not a little to qualify and supple- ment in the works of Foster. It were quite an erroneous idea, however, if our exceptions were taken as illustrative of the whole tenor of his works, or as testing their general value. We mean rather to witness to their worth, and aim merely at freeing this of excrescence, and making it more accessible. His books are precious in a high and perennial sense. You cannot read any paragraph of them, without perceiving that an earnest and lofty mind is at work. Earnestness was perhaps his distinguishing characteristic ; over his very page you seem to see bending the knit brow and indomitable eye of the thinker. This man, you 360 JOHN FOSTER. feel, is conscious that it is a great and awful thing to be alive to be born to that dread inheritance of duty and destiny which awaits every spirit of man that arrives on earth. He shakes from him the dust of custom ; he little heeds the sanctions of reputation; afar off and very still, compared with a voice coming from above, he hears the trumpetings of fame: calm, determined, irresistible, his foot ever seems to press down till it reaches the basal ada- mant. This earnestness is made the more impressive from the manifest leaning of his mind towards the gloomy and mysterious. Of habits of thought deeply reflective, he re- tired as it were into the inner dwelling of his mind, there to ponder the insoluble questions of destiny; like dim cur- tains, painted with shapes of terror, of gloom, and of wierd grandeur, that hang round a dusky hall, waving fitfully in the faint light, these questions seem to us to have hung round his mind, filling it all with solemn shadow: he looked upon them as on mystic hieroglyphs, but when he asked their secret, they remained silent as Isis ; he ever turned away, saying, in baffled pride, I will compel your answer in eternity, yet always turned again, fascinated by their sublime mystery, and stung by their calm defiance. No word of frivolity escapes him ; he tells men sternly what they have to dare, and do, and suffer; he never says the burden is light or the foe weak, but the one must be borne and the other must be met You feel in perusing his works as in going through a rugged region, where nature, forgetting her gentler moods, desires to write upon the tablet of the world her lessons of solemnity and of power; you perceive that only hardy plants can breathe this atmosphere, that here no Arcadian lawns can smile, no Utopian palaces arise; there awakens in you that courage, you seem to be conscious of that sense of greatness, which JOHN FOSTER. 361 the strong soul knows in the neighbourhood of crags and forests, where the torrent blends its stern murmur with the music of the mountain blast. Foster is to us one of the best representatives of the lite- rary Christian priesthood which is arising in these days. He did not leave his Christianity in the pulpit; in his every book, and his every article, he speaks as one fully conscious that, by ceasing to preach his religion, he has not obtained any dispensation from the duty of proclaiming it. If asked to indicate what we would deem a lair specimen of that Christianised literature, to which we earnestly look as to a fountain of blessedness for these latter times, we know not whither we could point with more decision than to John Foster's contributions to the Eclectic Review. It cannot, perhaps, be alleged that there is any positively new revelation of truth to be exhibited from the writings of Foster. But they have the originality of spirit and the originality of application : the grain is the ancient grain of Christian truth, of manly sentiment, and of free loyalty; but it has grown green in the showers of a new spring, and yellow under the suns of a new summer, and it yields a rich harvest, wholesome and pleasant as before, for the food of man. In an age when severe teaching was perhaps more than usually required, he recalled the public mind to those stern aspects and realities of our lot which it is never well to forget. His enforcement of the great doctrine of human depravity is in itself sufficient to render his works permanently valuable. And he was perhaps the first dis- tinctly to apprehend and point out how certain of the great influences of the age are to be dealt with: he fairly understood the French Revolution, and proclaimed the necessity of universal education. To criticise his separate works is beyond our scope, and 362 JOHN FOSTER. were quite superfluous. His style, even in its ultimate form, was unquestionably and definably defective. It never became capable of expressing delicate, sprightly, or buoyant emotion; it wants variety, light graceful force, easy-stepping familiar elegance ; it has always something of an elephantine tread, and its gaiety is apt to remind one rather of the jingling of an elephant's trappings, than of the laughter of children : or, to change the figure, it never spreads out into wide islanded shallows, rip- pling to the breeze and sparkling in the sunbeams, but is always a massive, stately, slow-rolling river. Yet it possesses very rare and excellent qualities. It is remark- ably rich and expressive; you cannot skim along it. Almost strangely, too, considering its mass, it is by no means fatiguing. Continually and unexpectedly, as if nourished by hidden fountains, the flowers of a deeply poetic nature bloom forth on the page. And though it cannot be said to possess sprightliness, yet there is not wanting a pleasantly caustic wit, a quiet, earnest humour. Foster possessed a true vein of humour. Perhaps no style so deeply serious was ever so widely popular. We have entirely abstained from speaking of Foster's private life. His biography, however partial, must be that of a thinker ; his external life, was that of a thousand Englishmen. He was a shrewd, somewhat sarcastic, but friendly man, loving his friends and social converse, and deeply happy in his family. He excelled in conversa- tion when in a genial atmosphere, and specially when any friend whom he loved and honoured Hall, Fawcett, Hughes, or such other was present. He took a deep interest in politics, lending all his influence to the side of freedom. We noticed Foster's marriage ; we may venture to cast JOHN FOSTER. 363 one look upon him as he lays his Maria, mourning, in the grave. It was in 1832, and he was now sinking into the vale of years : we think no description of the joy of a long married life, where perfect love and perfect friendship have blended mortal and immortal joys in one pure harmony, could so pathetically body forth its felicity as the following words, written by him when first the light of the present drew away, to rest, like a sunset, on the past : " I have returned hither, but have an utter repugnance to say returned home ; that name is applicable no longer. . . . There is a weight on the heart which the most friendly human hand cannot remove. The melancholy fact is, that my beloved, ines- timable companion has left me. It comes upon me in evidence how various and sad ! And yet, for a moment, sometimes I feel as if I could not realise it as true. There is something that seems to say, can it be that I shall see her no more ; that I shall still, one day after another, find she is not here, that her affectionate voice and look will never accost me ; the kind grasp of her hand never more be felt ; that when I would be glad to consult her, make an obser- vation to her, address to her some expression of love, call her ' my dear wife,' as I have done so many thousand times, it will be in vain she is not here ? Several times, a considerable number, even since I followed her to the tomb, a momentary suggestion of thought has been, as one and another circumstance has occurred, ' I will tell Maria of this.' " One treads with silence and tears in the sacred neighbourhood of such a sorrow. As Foster's life drew near its end, the sadness which had ever characterised him became more deep. He never wavered in his trust in God, but he felt ever the more profoundly that this world was one of sorrow and dark- ness: he looked wistfully into the future, pondering upon 364 JOHN FOSTER. the intermediate state and such subjects ; he walked sadly and solemnly gathering up questions for eternity. At last he came to die: it was October, 1844. On his death-bed he showed the same tremulous sensibility to the distress or annoyance of others as had always characterised him. He would permit no servant to sit up with him during the night, and if it was insisted upon, he could not sleep ; the fact is little in itself, but of singular interest in the case of Foster. The substantial peace which he had attained did not desert him in his dying hours. He died as one can die who has well acquitted him in the far sterner duty of liv- ing a true and godly life. As he felt his strength gradu- ally stealing away, he remarked on his increasing weak- ness, and added, " But I can pray, and that is a glorious thing." Truly a glorious thing; more glorious than atheist or pantheist can even pretend to. To look up to an Omni- potent Father, to speak to Him, to love Him ; to stretch upwards as a babe from the cradle, that He may lift His child in his everlasting arms to the resting-place of His own bosom ; this is the portion of the dying Christian. He was overheard thus speaking with himself: " O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ!" The eye of the terror- crowned was uoon him, and thus he defied him. CHAPTER III. THOMAS ARNOLD. About the beginning of this century, a little boy might have been seen playing in a garden at West Cowes, Isle of Wight. The name of Napoleon and the din and rumour of war filled the air around him ; his keen eyes brightened and sparkled continually, as they looked out upon martial pomp and preparation. The sight of the great war-ship entering the harbour, or bearing away to meet the foe ; the news of battle and victory ; the loud, loyal choruses of mariners, who stepped and looked with the consciousness of ruling the waves : these, mingling with the kindly tones and melodies of a Christian home, which softened every harshness and discord into a musical harmony, were the earliest influences to mould the young mind of Thomas Arnold. Though naturally bashful, the child was yet, so to speak, intensely alive, in body and mind. He got hold of Pope's Homer, and the many voices of war around him strengthened its influence ; it was one of his favourite amusements, to enact the Homeric battles, with staves and garden implements for swords and spears, reciting, with a great sense of the valour and grandeur of the proceeding, the speeches of the heroes of Homer, that is, of Pope. At eight, he went to Warminster School, at twelve, to Win- 366 THOMAS ARNOLD. Chester ; in each he showed sympathetic intensity of intel- lect, heart and head acting strongly and in unison. He displayed great warmth in his boyish friendships. Ere proceeding to Oxford, which he did at sixteen, his infor- mation had extended widely. He had read Gibbon and Mitford twice, and was well acquainted with Russel's Modern Europe ; he knew also, to a considerable ex- tent, the historians of Greece and Rome ; his bent, it was already manifest, was towards geography and history. Arnold entered at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1811 ; it was an important epoch in his life, and his whole sojourn at the university is full of interest. The society in Corpus was select ; and during Arnold's career it em- braced young men of an extremely high and rare order; such, for instance, as Whateley, Heber, and Keble. He was an important member of the fraternity. He repre- sented the healthful, well-balanced, daringly active Eng- lish mind; instinct with sympathies that swept beyond academic walls to expatiate in the wide world; fond of poetry, and ardently affectionate, yet shrewd, discriminat- ing, and burning his way through words to things. The air of Oxford was such as breathes through the Hall of the Past, and the great body of the students of Corpus, each in his several manner, loved and reverenced what was old ; but Arnold was for freedom and advancement, and rebelled against the genius of the place. Yet, one by one, the nobler of his fellow-students came to know him and to love him ; into one true heart after another he threw his invisible grappling-iron, and linked it to his for life. Corpus was a little senate in itself, where all the big questions of the day were discussed; and he was an active and vehement disputant. We can imagine him appearing at times even overbearing, but it was only when he was himself overborne THOMAS ARNOLD. 367 by his subject. He could not hold an opinion by halves; if it entered his heart at all, it was received with the warm welcome of hospitality, and served and defended at all risks. He was to be seen in the midst of a circle of the best men of Corpus, combating valiantly and cheerily for his own views against them all. The logical arguer would urge the danger of cutting the moorings of society, and drifting off on the revolutionary sea ; but he would answer that it was only conservatism which transmuted harmonious change into colliding revolution : the Tory loyalist, whose father was in Parliament, might expatiate on the glories of the throne and the nobility, as the ramparts of a nation ; but he would briefly answer, I love the people, and feud- alism was wrong in its very idea: and then, in mild accents, might Keble evoke a faint cloud of golden dust from the treasuries of the past; and this he would sum- marily lay with some cold water from the wells of his favourite Aristotle. Yet his warm sympathies could not resist the strong and kindly influences of the place, and he became somewhat more conservative. Of his religious feelings during his abode at Corpus, we have slight information. His reading led him to Barrow, Hooker, and Taylor, and his heart was opened by natural nobleness to the more profound and enduring influence of Christian truth. His disposition was devout, his morals pure ; farther we cannot declare. Altogether, the university career of Arnold is to be pro- nounced auspicious. If his scholarship was not what is technically called profound, it was yet thorough and com- prehensive: he was not ignorant of words; but that hungry instinct of reality within him, with which it was vain to contend, called resistlessly for things. He won the prize for two essays, Latin and English; he became intimately 368 THOMAS ARNOLD. and sympathisingly acquainted with ancient history; and he drank in the wisdom of Aristotle with almost pas- sionate enthusiasm. But the most benignant of all the in- fluences which encircled him at the university, was assur- edly the friendship of such as Keble, Whateley, and Justice Coleridge. These friendships were cherished by him dur- ing life, with the earnestness of duty and the enthusiasm of love. It is a beautiful and inspiring spectacle to behold the several friends, as from their respective stations they send kindly and life-long greetings to each other; like vessels in one fleet sailing towards the dawn, that hang out lamps of signal and comfort, to point the way and break the darkness. Just as he was about to emerge from the years of youth and education to those of manhood and performance, Arnold's mind became more deeply moved than it had hitherto been on the subject of religion. He remained at the university for four years after ceasing to be a gowns- man. During these it was that his mind passed through a discipline of doubt, which finally resulted in the esta- blishment of his character on a Christian basis, in what he would have defined as his conversion. The precise stages of this all-important occurrence we are unable in his case to trace; but his ultimate attainment was clear and deci- sive, the general method of his reaching it is perfectly ascertainable, and the lessons conveyed in it to similar in- quirers, together with its testimony to the truth of Chris- tianity, invaluable. The special subject of his questioning was, as in the case of Foster, the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. His be- lief on the point appears to have been confirmed by two great arguments: first, that the attempts made by those who rejected the doctrine to find for their views a warrant THOMAS AKNOLD. 369 in Scripture, were the mere mockery of criticism; and, second, that the abstraction to which deism gives the name of God, leaves all- unsatisfied in the human soul that su- blime craving which is its distinguishing glory, that yearn- ing pain which finds solace only in communion with the Divine. In order to his finding the former of these argu- ments conclusive, it was necessary that he should consider the testimony of Scripture final in the matter; and the question arises, What were the grounds on which he re- ceived the Bible as the word of the living God? The answer we are enabled to render, not perhaps precisely given at this period, and gathered by us not from any single declaration uttered at any one time, but from the tenor of his whole writings, is singularly satisfactory. It is on all hands conceded that his historical acumen was piercing: his most obvious characteristics were clear shrewdness, and sharp-cutting English sense; he had trained himself to investigate ancient writings by con- stant study from his boyish days of Greek and Roman authors; and, in the early vigour of his powers, he sat down at the feet of Niebuhr, to listen to his teach- ing with intense and increasing appreciation, and to learn to infuse into English historical thinking the irre- sistible penetration and clearness of that great critic. He approached the Scriptures precisely as he did any other composition handed down from ancient times; he applied to them that searching criticism which separated the chaff from the wheat in Livy, and unravelled the intricacies of Thucydides; and he found conclusive evi- dence that they were the word of God. The reader may, perhaps, in perusing the Biography of John Sterling by Mr Carlyle, have been struck with the effect produced upon the mind of the former by the perusal 2b 370 THOMAS ARNOLD. of Strauss's Life of Jesus. Sterling remarked, that, what- soever men were going to, it was plain enough what they were going from ; this German hook, one is apt to conclude from his words, was to deal the finally shattering blow to all Christian institutions; the ears of the world, you suppose, are deafened with the rumour of it, the sky darkened by its mighty shade. Of the same book, Arnold wrote as follows: " What a strange work Strauss's Leben Jesu appears to me, judging of it from the notices in the ' Studien und Kritiken.' It seems to me to show the ill effects of that division of labour which prevails so much among the learned men of Germany. Strauss writes about history and myths, without appearing to have studied the question, but having heard that some pretended histories are my- thical, he borrows this notion as an engine to help him'out of Christianity. But the idea of men writing mythic his- tories betwen the time of Livy and Tacitus, and of St Paul mistaking such for realities!" Thus it is that the matter appears to one really trained in historical induction. There is no " Coleridgean moon- shine" in that eye! He sweeps through painted mist and carefully woven cobweb, right to the heart of the question. It is to no fond dreaming enthusiasm, very beautiful, it may be, but very weak, that he commits himself; he asks no aid from imagination, and he does not stop to inquire whether the plain fact, which his Saxon intellect demands, is given him by logic or by reason; he wants the fact itself: grasping firmly, therefore, the hand of history, he finds his step at once on Judean hills, and he is surrounded by men who have the same hearts in their breasts, the same earth under their feet, as men in the nineteenth cen- tury. He fixes specially his regards upon Paul. He sees him trained in the school of Tarsus; he hears him, in THOMAS ARNOLD. 371 calm, earnest, clear, persuasive words, disputing with Grecian sages; he notes that his opinions are so temperate that he becomes all things to all men, that his moral preaching is pure, mild, and thorough, that his zeal is stronger than death ; he perceives that his every earthly- prospect is blasted, his good hopes of advancement, under the smile of high priest and pharisee, turned into certainty of bitter hatred, his life rendered one scene of hardship, danger, and poverty, by his belief in the divine mission of a certain Teacher ; he observes that he companies with men who declare that, a few years before, they saw this Teacher pass upwards into heaven, and had witnessed his raising of the dead while He went in and out among them. All is real, present, visible; there is none of the dimness of antiquity, the seclusion of mystery ; these men sit there in Judea, unim passioned, earnest, unanimous; there is in the whole scene no analogy the most distant to aught resem- bling a myth; the gospel they proclaim is love and truth, the danger they face is death, the motive they can have, on the hypothesis that they are liars, inconceivable, the life they lead, the unanimity of their testimony, on the hy- pothesis they are enthusiasts, positive contradictions : as with a stamp of his foot, he shakes the whole mythic theory to atoms, as an absurdity, to accept which were a feat of credulity within the powers of no faith save that of infi- delity. There is, we think, a fine precision in his instant selection of Paul, as affording absolutely conclusive means of vindicating the strict historic verity of Christianity: the leading facts of Paul's life, as eliminated in the Horae Paulinae, are as well established, on their own evidence, as those of the life of Calvin; and if they are granted, not only does every mythic theory dissolve like a film of vapour, but the first links of a chain are taken into the 372 THOMAS ARNOLD. hand, by which it seems to us scarce possible to avoid being led believingly to the feet of Jesus. Finding the historical evidence of the divine truth of Christianity satisfactory, he does not seem to have been able to doubt that Paul, John, and the other evangelists, do, with more or less explicitness, avow their belief in the divinity of Jesus. To this belief he was perhaps partially led, and in it he was certainly confirmed, by the second consideration we have mentioned. Wedeemthe following an important passage: '*For my own part, considering one great object of God's revealing Himself in the Person of Christ to be the furnishing us with an object of worship which we could at once love and understand; or, in other words, the sup- plying safely and wholesomely that want in human nature, which has shown itself in false religions, in making gods after our own devices,' it does seem to me to be forfeiting the peculiar benefits thus offered, if we persist in attempt- ing to approach to God in his own incomprehensible essence, which, as no man hath seen or can see, so no man can conceive it. And, while I am most ready to allow the provoking and most ill-judged language in which the truth, as I hold it to be, respecting God, has been ex- pressed by Trinitarians, so, on the other hand, I am in- clined to think that Unitarians have deceived themselves, by fancying that they could understand the notion of one God any better than that of God in Christ; whereas, it seems to me that it is only of God in Christ that I can in my present state of being conceive anything at all." Strangely enough, a Unitarian writer of the day has quoted from this passage against the doctrine of the divinity of our Lord. To us it appears simply the sub- scription of a singularly clear, and healthful, and honest mind, to that great fact of the human consciousness, which THOMAS ARNOLD. 373 is the chief argument deducible from nature in support of the doctrine of the Trinity. It is a virtual appeal to the testimony of history, that deism has ever failed to take a real hold of the mass of mankind; that, when strenuously pressed by dialectic, its deity has become a confessed incon- ceivability, the absolute nothing of Oken, and that,when left to gain a footing among the body of a people, it has taken the thousand forms of polytheism. We will not say that the noblest of the Grecian sages pointed at nothing, when he longed for more light, and dimly shadowed the Chris- tian Trinity; even the brow of Plato grew sad under the infinite vault, filled, indeed, with a certain pale icy radiance, but having no Sun. Christ came to lift the veil of Isis; to fix the lorn eye of humanity on a known God. Arnold, by his revering love of the Saviour, and the satis- faction which he declared he experienced for the highest and most profound longings of his soul in the worship of Him, testified that the Desired of the nations had come; through Jesus he could commune with his God ; holding by the hand of Jesus, he could stand unconsumed, as it were, in the very blaze of the throne; instead of seeking in his words an argument in support of Unitarian views, we find in them one more proof that there is between poor man, lying in troubled slumber on the world-desert, and his God, the precipice of an unsealed infinitude, if no ladder is let down, if no divine Saviour has come. The end of all his doubt was, to use his own form of expression, his placing himself consciously under the banner of the Lord Jesus, his cleaving to Him, his reposing absolute trust in Him, his resolving to become His faithful soldier and servant to life's end. Then his mind became calm and strong; he had, as he again says, " a security within, a security not of man, but of God." 374 THOMAS ARNOLD. Arnold now took orders in the Church of England, sub- scribing to her formularies. He professed not to agree with these in all things; he specially dissented from the Athanasian Creed. Of his views on these points he never made a secret, openly declaring that no interpretation of the clauses to which he objected in the creed just men- tioned could bring them into accordance with his opinions, and defining his act of subscription to indicate merely a general sympathy with, and willingness to adhere to the Church of England. We have no hesitation whatever in thinking that in this he erred. "We agree with Mr Greg in believing him to have acted with perfect honesty ; yet we deem his mistake serious. We cannot discuss the matter here, but we refer the reader, both for its masterly treatment, and for what is essentially our view of the sub- ject, to Foster's article on the Life of Paley. Arnold settled first at Laleham, near Staines, with his mother, aunt, and sister, proposing to take pupils. Here he remained for nine years, his character gradually un- folding, and his views becoming matured. He disciplined himself to thorough work, and thought much. His eye, during the period, turned with ever-increasing earnest- ness upon the great interests and questions of his age and country, and, gradually, every conservative tendency which had attached to him at Oxford was cast off; he be- came the determined, uncompromising foe of every form of worship of the past, or attempt to clog the progress of the present. His religion, too, went on deepening from year to year, he drew closer and closer to God, and to his Friend and Saviour Jesus; and, more and more, the fruits of the Spirit beamed forth in thought, feeling, and action. At Laleham he married, and here six of his nine children were bom. THOMAS ARNOLD. 375 At length Arnold was elected, in a marked and flatter- ing manner, to the head mastership of Rugby. He was then thirty-three years of age; in the very prime of life. He continued to occupy this post until his death, and here it was that he became so widely known and valued as a practical thinker and reformer. We desire to throw out before the eye of the reader a whole general picture of his life, for it is so alone that an adequate idea can be formed regarding it; one or two of his more remarkable opinions we will thereafter briefly glance at. The first look at Arnold's career reveals a very im- portant circumstance ; one which constituted a main ele- ment in his character, and exerted a great influence in moulding his career. It is impossible to regard him for a moment, without perceiving the intensity of his physical life. We have seen this in his early days ; it continued to characterise him to the last. It made labour a positive pleasure; it sent him to the mountain side with ever fresh delight; it impelled him resistlessly to the work before and around him. Acting the Homeric battles in his father's garden, scampering over the fields at Oxford, bathing and boating with his pupils, he is ever the same intensely alive, joyous being. It is seen in his face; he looks as if he were watching the moments in their flight, eager to grasp them; his eye reminds us of the good Bitter Hagen's of "the rapid glances;" his lips are com- pressed and firm, as if closed after the utterance of one clear unalterable No, which Coleridge could not say; there is strength in his firm unquivering cheek, in his iron brows, in his unwrinkled forehead. His intensity overthrows everything, even literary delicacy; "I must write a pamphlet, or I will burst," he says; we think we see him gasping with earnestness as he utters the words. 376 THOMAS ARNOLD. We find it likewise in his valour and open-faced inde- pendence. He longs to fight the Oxford heretics, " as in a saw-pit." And he has a clear sympathy for the noble- ness of the battle-field, thinking no man can be of sound human feelings without sharing it. Directing attention to the sphere in which this tireless energy worked, and the modes in which it exhibited itself, we are called first to observe him as a teacher. Both in theory and practice he is here admirable. The objects he aimed at in education may be summed up in two words character, power. By the first of these we mean complete self-estimating, self-respecting manhood ; by the second, that harmonious development of each faculty of the mind, that raising of each capacity into the condition in which it can naturally, healthfully, and perfectly perform its function, which is attainable by intellectual culture. He avoided, on the one hand, the fallacy, that a man is not fitly educated unless he is made master of the powers, we say not the acquirements, of a scholar; that, for instance, a man of slight intellectual faculty, like Howard, may not be as thoroughly educated in character, as a man of high intellectual faculty like Bentley; he shunned, on the other hand, the far more palpable, but extremely common error, which surely has exerted an unsuspected influence in our modern educational improvements, that education consists mainly in conveying a certain amount of information into the mind. We find this statement embodied in two brief but com- prehensive expressions quoted from Arnold by Mr Stanley: first, " If there be anything on earth which is truly ad- mirable, it is to see God's wisdom blessing an inferiority of natural powers, where they have been honestly, truly, and zealously cultivated:" second, "It is not knowledge THOMAS ARNOLD. 377 but the means of gaining knowledge, which I have to teach." As his theory of education was philosophic in its sound- ness and. width, his practice of tuition may be characterised in one word as marked by its totality; it embraced him as a whole; it was in his step, and eye, and tone, and much which cannot be even indicated ; the pupils saw that their teacher was a true man and Christian ; the grasp of his energy they felt upon them ; they knew not how, but the very air seemed pervaded by his influence. That continual watchfulness and readiness of mind, that never-flagging energy, that clearness and compactness of knowledge, and that genial sympathising insight into the youthful mind, which are demanded in the practical teacher, were his in unusual measure. And his success wa9 propor- tioned to his merits. His pupils were inspired with a fine sympathy with himself in carrying on the business of the school; accustomed to be treated as Christian gentlemen whose word was not to be called in question, they learned to shrink from meanness, to acquire self-command, and to make intelligence and nobleness their aims; at the uni- versity, youths from other quarters might excel in the quickness, the cleverness, and, it might even at times happen, the minute accuracy, of school-boys; those from Rugby had the character, the thought, the deliberate pur- pose, of men. But the expansive energies of Arnold could not confine themselves to the school. Around him lay the world in a stirring and tumultuous epoch, with its questions to be answered, and its work to be done. He was not the man to be struck dumb by the one, or confounded by the other. Christian himself in every pulse of his being, believing in Christianity as a truth, knowing it as a life, and recognis- 378 THOMAS AKNOLD. ing its claim to pervade with its influence every province of human affairs, he bent all his energies to effect that re- form which it professes its power to work in nations. We speak not now of his particular views; we look merely at his attitude and aim. And these present a spectacle of Christian thoroughness and valour which must stir every heart attuned to high impulses. He knows no fear, he will listen to no compromise. To the world he seems even turbulent; for he cannot breathe the same atmosphere with error, but must instantly unsheath his sword, and rush against it: there is a flash of real war-horse fire in his eye ; he yearns for the battle. Words fall from him which a man may seize and treasure up, as a sort of diamond-dust for whetting and burnishing his mental armoury. " 1 do not understand how the times can help bearing what an honest man has the resolution to do ! " Ha! The opposition of the wicked to Christianity and the Christian ministry, he regards as satisfactory, and even consoling, the only testi- mony in their favour which it is in the power of such to give. He feels that it is a grand thing to fight the devil, when one's mind is fairly made up as to the identity of the foe. " The work here is more and more engrossing con- tinually; but I like it better and better: it has all the in- terest of a great game of chess, with living creatures for pawns and pieces, and your adversary, in plain English, the devil," &c. This is a different attitude from Foster's, though that, too, was sublime. Foster looked over the field where the forces of the enemy were ranged, and gazed into the eyes of their "great commander," with stern defiance, indeed, but with a tear of burning grief that the positions of the field were in his hands; Arnold's eye flashes right in his face with utter defiance, but also with a certain blasting gleam of triumphant contempt; he THOMAS ARNOLD. 61 if longs only to come to close quarters, and, with the sword and the shield given him from heaven's armoury, wrest the victory from the prince of the world. It is always the word "onward" that he speaks; it is ever higher that he will have the banner float; God and the angels may be spectators, but, for us, up, brothers, and at them ! Arnold was singularly true to that type of character which is recognised as in a peculiar sense English ; he em- bodied its indomitable energy, its unpretending honesty, its practical sense. In doing work he will be unmatched; but he must clearly see what is the work to be done. When he reaches the Gallic iavasion in his Roman his- tory, he must commence the study of the Erse language ; but he never finds his footing sure among the abstractions of metaphysics or even of mathematics. He attacks the evil that lies to his hand. He prefers, in conversation, a man who differs from him to one who agrees, because some work may then be done, and they end not exactly where they began. He claims no right or power to rule the em- pire of the air, and radically lacks the faculty of building air-carriages for a lifetime. With what is deemed dulness in Germany and sense in England, " before a confessed and unconquerable difficulty his mind reposed as quietly as in possession of a discovered truth." In strict and beautiful accordance with the general firm- ness and health of his distinctively English character, was the love of nature which he displayed. It was not that sympathy which gives full occupation to the soul, and becomes the business of a life; which casts over nature a spirit- woven web, of sentiment and phantasy, more faintly aerial and more delicately tinted than a veil of gossamer, and kindling to the eye such new and won- drous colours, that men gather round its possessor, and 380 THOMAS ARNOLD. hail him a poet. He could not anywise sympathise with Wordsworth when he said, that the meanest flower that lived awoke within him thoughts that were too deep for tears. This, he felt, was a little too ethereal, the spire melting into the mist, the strong, clear glance of a manly love fading into the filmy gaze of one that dreamed. But perhaps none ever illustrated with finer precision, that strong and healthful sympathy with nature, which is a desirable, if not indispensable element in every complete and harmonious character; that unaffected delight in the beautiful, which sheds a dewy and flowery freshness over earnest devotion to the good, and wreaths with a green garland the brow that inflexibly endeavours after the true ; a power to hear, and to blend with the practical energy of life, those unnumbered lessons which are inscribed on na- ture's varied pageantry, and which we cannot doubt that God intended us to read. With the healthful, rejoicing, boyish affection, of an intensely alive and happy nature, he expatiated in the magnificent home which God had hung out in the heavens for His creature man. He did not look upon it, as it is the duty and high privilege of the poet to do, with the feeling that it was his work to reveal its wonders, and, by a melody that leads captive every heart, turn the eyes of men to behold it; but he never ceased to look upon it with the eye of one who felt that he worked better in the consciousness that he dwelt in such a home, and knew that to the unstopped ear of man, as he marches on the general journey of life, there arises, from stream, and rock, and wood, and gentle fountain, a choral melody, to inspire, to tranquillise, to gladden. It was just the ordinary Eng- lish love of fields, and hills, and sunbeams, sublimed into intensity. His eye kindles grandly as he sees the sun pouring his broad, bright, parting smile over the Gram- THOMAS ARNOLD. 381 pians, seeming to " tread on thrones;" he has watched the Alps at eventide, and remembers for ever the sublime ap- pearance of their peaks "upon a sky so glowing with the sunset, that, instead of looking white from their snow, they were like the teeth of a saw upon a plate of red-hot iron, all deep and black ; " he has never done looking at the great running rivers, which he regards as the most beautiful objects in nature; the wild flowers on the mountainsides are, he tells us, his music; it is Arnold in his kindliest, but not least characteristic aspect, that we see, as we mark him walking by his wife's pony in sunny English afternoons, watching every phenomenon of nature, and doubling his joy by the sympathy of his own Mary. To form an adequate idea of the nature of Arnold's re- ligions life, it is necessary to conceive fully that which was its central point, his close, conscious, and ever realised union and friendship with the Lord Jesus. His percep- tions were all clear, his emotions warm ; he realised, with vivid distinctness, the living manhood of Jesus, and all that warm affection which found such dear employment in embracing his earthly friends, clung with exhaustless en- joyment and perpetual freshness to the Divine Man, whom as a friend he had in heaven. Of Jesus he ever thought; the outwelling of tender love towards Him shed over the strong framework of his character that beautiful and gentle light which rests on the soul of him who has even one bosom friend; for, in the throwing wide open of the breast to the eyes of another, in reposing perfectly in hia honour, wisdom, and love, in humbly, yet joyously know- ing that he is every way worthy of your total affection, there is implied such a power of breaking the chords that bind you to self, such a power to identify yourself with an- other, to look upon your whole character through his eyes, 382 THOMAS ARNOLD. and estimate yourself by his fully appreciated and dearly prized excellence, that a noble modesty, and mildness, and manly tenderness, must more and more speak its in- fluence, in voice, mien, and action. This, we say, is the natural influence of pure human friendship. And in Jesus, Arnold found, in faultless perfection, all he sought in an earthly friend. His eye went right across the intervening ages to look into the eyes of the Saviour; he saw there that wisdom which silenced the gainsayer, that calm before which the tempest became still, that love which beamed through tears upon the weeping sisters by the grave of Lazarus; he seemed to grasp that hand which supported Peter among the waves, and whose touch lit the seared eye- ball. Or his eye pierced beyond the atmosphere of earth altogether: he felt himself walking by the river of life, in the midst of the Paradise of God; and here, too, he saw that same Jesus, with those same human features and that same human smile; and when, in the overflowing fulness of his heart, every expression of affection that might pass between earthly friends failed to express his emotion, he could, without scruple and with speechless joyfulness, bow down and worship Him. We noted that his heart had yearned after one in the image of God, and yet in the image of man, whom he could worship ; we found in that yearning the expression of a want common to humanity, and an argument against Unitarianism ; and now, when we find the yearning satisfied, we bid every Unitarian say, whether this blessed influence that hallows his whole life is a delusion, and whether such warm and living emotions could flow from the sole and irrealisable conception of the infinite, the absolute, the one. But we must look at Arnold in one other and final aspect; or rather we must look at him where every other THOMAS ARNOLD. 383 aspect is seen under a mellowing light, and all his joys blend in one perfect harmony. We have not yet looked into his home; and, without any exaggeration, we may say, it was a sight for an angel's eye. It warms one's heart to think of his marriage and his domestic circle; he was so precisely fitted for household joys. There is something comforting in the absolute demonstration, which his in- tense relish of life affords, that, bad as the world may be, and dismal as are the aspects of human society, there is yet a distinct possibility, beneath the stars, of enjoyment, serene from its very intensity, perfectly apart from the restless excitement of worldliness, or the melancholy deli- rium of passion. His home was a scene of unbroken, of almost ecstatic joy ; we are continually reminded of its vicinity in perusing his biography; stray gleams from its ever-burning hearth are perpetually wandering over his correspondence. With an earnestness that is the very voice of the heart, he exclaims, " My wife is well, thank God," and we are strangely impressed with the uncon- scious but true sublimity of his words, when he speaks of the " almost awful happiness of his domestic life." It has, in all ages, been a prerogative of Christianity to plant and foster domestic feeling and felicities. We would figure the religion of Jesus, as walking among men and offering them two great boons ; in one hand she holds the treasures of immortality, in the other are the mild blessings of home. Philosophy has ever been high, remote, and unparticipating; in her glittering robes, she treads in majesty along the high places of the world, amid a light that scarce mingles with earth's atmosphere, but falls on the eternal snow, a cold, intellectual light, which has never yet brightened the cloud of unspeakable sad- ness resting on her brow. A high task is hers, and we 384 THOMAS ARNOLD. shall pay her all honour, but let us dwell rather with Christianity in the valleys and in the clefts of the rock, where she spreads the nuptial couch, and lights the house- hold fire. We come now briefly to notice one or two of Arnold's principal opinions. Arnold of Rugby will ever be known as a foremost cham- pion of the belief that church and state are identical. He re- garded Christianity as the true test of citizenship, and at once withdrew from the London University, when he found that his proposal for including Scripture in the entrance ex- amination was not to be acceded to. He earnestly op- posed the very idea of a Christian priesthood, as disting uished from a Christian laity; he considered discipline strictly and appropriately a civil penalty; the idea of government pro- pounded by YVarburton, that it is a mere protective and legislative force, he deemed utterly erroneous. Arguing that the end of a nation, as of an individual, must be the glory of God in its own greatest happiness, he asserted that the sovereign power, that from which there was no appeal, must, without a solecism and almost a contradic- tion, be a religious power, in a Christian country, of course a Christian power. Let there, he proposed, be framed some general declaration of belief in Christianity, embrac- ing the recognition of the Trinity, the inspiration of Scrip- ture, and certain other grand leading doctrines; let a cer- tain diversity be permitted in the forms of worship; let the churches be occupied by ministers of various shades of belief and various preference of form, in the several parts of the Lord's day; let the king be recognised as the head of the church on earth ; and let all members of the govern- ment, from premier to constable, be ministers of the church- state. Such was his scheme: it may well, we think, be regarded THOMAS ARNOLD. 385 with wonder. It is true that he did not look upon it as at once realisable ; it is a fact that he cared little for any impos- ing aspect which might result from uniformity, if reality were sacrificed to attain it ; yet it is also unquestionable that no idea lay nearer his heart than the identity of church and state,and the importance of comprehensiveness in standards of belief; while no desire moved him more strongly than the instant and earnest promulgation of his views on these subjects. Now we deem it unnecessary to enter at length into the examination of the scheme, it is so absolutely cer- tain that it will not have soon to be opposed in practice. We shall not test it scripturally. That we deem unne- cessary, since the firm grasp of common sense pulls it to pieces. It were improper, however, to pass it by altogether with- out remark: it contains too much truth to render it a useless or superfluous task to combat its error. Several of its minor propositions, too, are extremely popular in our day. Particularly is this true of the proposal it embraces, to intro- duce the external morality of a respectable life in place of any allusion, tacit or express, to particular points of intellec- tual belief, as a test of church membership. Few general declarations are hailed with warmer enthusiasm than that which affirms it to be the panacea for our ecclesiastical ills, to remove entirely, or to attenuate until all obstructing de- finiteness is removed, the dogmatic creeds of our churches; substituting some easy acknowledgment of the truth of Christianity, and a consideration of individual character. Not doctrine, but life ; such is the cry of thousands. Com- bined with an earnest desire, and we deeply honour and defer to such desire, for unity and uniformity among the churches, this idea leads men of deep piety, and accustomed to reflect on the present aspect of things, to propose such mo- 2c 386 THOMAS ARNOLD. dification of our creeds as would make Presbyterians and Episcopalians one, and, it might even be, draw an immense contribution from Rome; combined with a desire to share the ease and respectability of national establishment, and a distaste for all religious controversy, it leads men of un- settled or latitudinarian opinions to hope that their gene- ral, and, as it were, complimentary recognition of Christi- anity will procure them the name and honour of Chris- tians. We think the idea is erroneous, and would offer a few remarks on the subject. First, then, we call attention to that principle, clearly discernible, and of unbounded range in our present eco- nomy, which may be generally designated, Division of labour: that principle which seeks the attainment of re- sults by the balancing of forces, the harmony of antago- nisms. The preference and pre-eminence which each indi- vidual accords to his own profession are certainly delu- sions ; yet is it manifest that these and similar delusions pro- duce expedition and heartiness in the several departments of human work. Boldly extend the application of our prin- ciple : it is scarce possible to extend it too far. It will show the Almighty Governor of the world, in the inscrutable wisdom of His providence, educing in man's history the greatest good possible to a free but fallen will ; it will lead us to discern that many ideas of vital moment are kept alive by the jealous circumscriptive zeal of sects, and that a general ardour and activity are maintained hy the really noble emulation of bodies making, though by different paths, for one goal; whereas, otherwise, both might be covered up in the whited sepulchre of a vast and lifeless uniformity. We are fallen: we cannot, in speaking of man, take a step without acknowledging that. Truth does not here embrace the world like the great tidal wave, THOMAS ARNOLD. 387 sweeping along in majestic calmness of power, and filling every little creek and estuary ; truth rather descends fer- tilising in many rills, from the mountain side ; and it is better that it descends for the present even so, than that it should flow in one broad river, leaving an arid desert over all the land, save on its immediate banks. Were Chris- tian zeal increased in each of the Christian sects, the earth would revive and bring forth fair flowers and fruits; but, by the draining of them all into one huge reservoir, no good would for the present be done. But, next, we beg those we oppose to consider earnestly the intense individuality of Christianity; its habit of start- ing, in all its reforms, from the unit and not from the mass. Arnold knew the importance of that word " The king- dom of God is within you;" but we cannot think that he kept it in view with sufficient constancy and earnestness. By the conversion of individuals the world will be rege- nerated, and not otherwise. This does not make the church, in its visible form and appointments, of slight im- portance, but it points out its grand duty, that of convert- ing men, and shows the vanity of looking for a substitute for personal godliness in any mechanism or apparatus. The difficulty here presented is stupendous; but it is pre- cisely the one which must be met. Easy were it to renew mankind, and change the face of the world, if it could be done in a public way, by the devising of some magnificent and politic scheme of government; then might the corner- stone of the new world be brought out in haste, and, indeed, with shouting (for should not we have found it ?) ; but the kingdom of God cometh not with observation: it is the silent unseen work, in the quiet parish, in the quieter heart, that advances it; there is no waving of banners, no triumph of human wisdom. And its final glories will 388 TI10MAS ABNOLD. come when the Sun of the latter morn is rising: the golden walls of the New Jerusalem will be cast in heaven. And we must urgently press the question, What sort of unity or uniformity is desired? A reality or a sham? A unity which will give clearness and wisdom in counsel, and prompt decision in action, which will fan gently the ranks of a sympathising, consciously agreeing people, each individual strengthening his neighbour's hand, or a flaring, meaningless banner, towards which every man looks with anxious suspicion, not knowing whither it leads a bla- zoned pretence, which makes each man unaware with whom he acts, and leaves him in the torment of loneliness, rendered threefold more intolerable, by the absence of that clearness of vision, and distinctness of aim, which redeem the evils of positive singularity of belief a perplexing and indefinable Delphic enigma, whose highest end is that ever contemptible one, to save appearances ? Supposing any such scheme as Arnold's were carried into effect to-morrow, what were gained? Surely it were no additional union, that ministers who were wont to preach in different places of worship, officiated at different times, and to different congregations, in the same edifice; surely it could not be expected that a month would pass over without discomfort and disruption ; surely no additional force would be conferred upon individual effort by its being all ranged under this tottering standard of patchwork unity. What advantage would result in the assailing of adversaries is so slight as to be almost impalpable even to imagination ; while vast additional contempt would be hurled against any such church, by a body of assailants more closely united than ever. A church acts through her members ; Christianise your members and you invigorate your church; but that some unaccountable power would arise from furnishing THOMAS ARNOLD. 389 members with a huge vapour-built abstraction, called a church, is surely incredible. This whole idea, we suspect, contradicts and outrages certain of the deepest, noblest, and most ancient instincts of men. To purify the banner of truth, to leave no stain on the stars beaming there, and then to strive, in the face of scorn and hatred, to draw men around it and to carry it over the world ; these are the perpetually noble aims of men. To inscribe it with an ambiguous legend, to blot and stain its stars, to exclaim that it is of slight conse- quence that men disbelieve in it, if they only follow it; these are no sublime objects at all. It is proper next to obviate difficulty, by observing that all Arnold's reasoning from the Epistles of St Paul, and that of similar arguers, even if we granted it to be unassailable on its own ground, which we by no means do, can be met by this altogether preliminary considera- tion; That the Epistles of Paul, and all the Epistles of the New Testament, are addressed to those already in the Christian Church, and supposed, ipso facto, to have acceded to the scheme of Christian doctrine propounded by the Apostles. In the Church, assuredly, attention was di- rected to the conduct; although it is almost impossible to believe that, since the enforcement of doctrinal points is so emphatic and so habitually takes the lead in Paul's Epistles, he would not have regarded the rejection of any material portion of Christian doctrine an adequate reason for refusal of the benefits of Christian communion; but, even overlooking this and his express pronunciation of a curse upon him who preached any other doctrine than he had delivered, we say that it is not to the internal exer- cise of church discipline, but to the original admission into the church, that appeal must be made. And in this 390 THOMAS ARNOLD. case, how brief soever the formula might be, it had no reference to the life, but to the faith. It was the believing acceptance of Christ which entitled any one to baptism. And if the simple declaration of belief in Christ were now as little ambiguous as it was then, the briefness of the formula, as well as its essential characteristic, might be retained; but when a general declaration comes simply to nothing, when it would admit all men, from Unitarians to Methodists, who chose to name the name of Christ, your only choice, if you retain the essential nature of the early declaration by which a man was admitted to the Church of Christ, is, to make it more explicit. We next demand, on the part of all those whose per- petual cry is against creeds, to weigh well the question, whether it is not really more in consistence with the general constitution of human affairs, that a body of men should unite themselves under a test of doctrine, than a test of conduct. There is, no fact more certain, or more generally recognised, than this, That the spiritual life of a man, his internal world of belief, opinion, feeling, is be- hind and determinative of his spoken or acted life. " False action," remarks Mr Carlyle, "is the fruit of false specu- lation; let the spirit of society be free and strong, that is to say, let true principles inspire the members of society, then neither can disorders accumulate in its practice;" &c. If you wish to know a man thoroughly, you must know his belief: as he thinks in his heart so is he. No great re- volution in man's external life ever took place without originating in this internal region ; all religions and phi- losophies address man as a reasoning, believing, not alone as an acting creature ; and the fact holds eminently good in the case of Christianity, which came to the world with salvation by faith in Christ, wrought by the Spirit of God THOMAS ARNOLD. 391 in the inner man. It may be known, indeed, from life, whether profession is faithful ; if one comes with " Lord, Lord," on his lips, you may know by his fruits, you have no other means of knowing than by his fruits, whether he really believes in the Lord or no. But if he declines even this preliminary confession, if he cannot say, in terms ad- mitting of no ambiguity, that his faith is the Christian, he must remain without the pale of your church, and you have no power or right to control either his beliefs or actions. Last of all, we would remind those who believe that in- stant and universal harmony would arise from an appeal to a standard of life in our determination of the question of church membership, that there are facts in ecclesiastical his- tory to render their position more than doubtful. We would commend to them the study of the history of Menno Simonis and his followers, in the period following the Reformation. Whatever lessons we may or may not draw from that his- tory, we cannot fail to draw this : That to settle the standard of conduct will be as fruitful a source of disagree- ment, as it has been to uphold that of belief. You will again have your lax and more lax, your old and new, your hot and cold, your good, bad, and indifferent (the latter tending to multiply) ; in one word, you will find that the formula for absolute concord in any great body of men is still in that undiscovered region where lie the philoso- pher's stone and the elixir vitae. Unless, indeed, you are willing, for uniformity, to sacrifice everything else; there is one magician whose wand will give you uni- formity enough, on his own conditions ; will you con- sent that your church be touched by the mace of Death? The fact is, that we must bear in mind, what we may call the melancholy immortality, the resurgent Phoenix 392 THOMAS ARNOLD. nature of error. Looking on former ages, we can dis- cern, perhaps, an excessive tendency to rely upon creeds; this perished, but, in dying, gave birth to what is equally an error, the disposition altogether to underrate them. Surely it is unwise to cast from us the fruit of the in- tellectual toil of centuries; if it is true that creeds can- not save us, is it not a still more absurd mistake to con- ceive that theological indefiniteness will prove a salve for all our ills? We think we reach the source at once of Arnold's general misconception on these subjects, and of much of the prevalent error regarding them, by considering the slight hint given when he happens to speak of " Sectarian- ism, that worst and most mischievous idol by which Christ's Church has ever been plagued." This is at the very root of the matter, and deserves especial consideration. For it is absolutely certain that there is a deeper evil than Sec- tarianism in the Church of Christ j there is, in all ages, that tendency of poor drowsy humanity to fall asleep and hide its eyes from the celestial radiance ; there is that stagnation, that indifference, that death, wrapping itself in various coverings, of loyalty to man, of custom, of respectability, against which all that is good in Sectarianism has been the rebellion and resistance. Who, with the Bible in his hand, and the history of the Church to read by its light, can fail to discern, what, indeed, has been seen by a search- ing eye which has yet, alas! looked away from the Cross to some other hope, that it is precisely the heavenly na- ture of Christianity as an individual work, its perennial and essential superiority to any form of belief or mode of practice^ to any standard in morals or attainment in life, which can be asserted of a class, or transmitted by descent, which has necessitated the phenomenon, startling at first, THOMAS ARNOLD. 393 but, when well examined, highly encouraging, that its every great revival has occasioned division and debate. Christianity has been a struggling light, a fermenting leaven, a purging flame; at its every revival, men have striven, as it were, to crystallise it and still keep it hot, whereas it has indeed crystallised, but instantly began to cool. Were it not for Sectarianism, would not certain churches have become absolutely dead decayed willow- trunks, hollow, dry as tinder, hoary yet not venerable ? That divisiveness is in its nature bad, we were certainly the last to deny ; that the strength of union is so great, that the Christian ought to look well ere he foregoes it, is also true ; yet we must believe that, when our Lord Jesus spoke of his bringing division into the world, his eye glanced over the whole interval between that hour and the millen- nium, and that, though the unspeakable peace which He breathed over his disciples ere departing from them is ever to be sought after by the Church, and may at times blissfully envelope it as it wraps in its ethereal atmosphere the indi- vidual soul, yet it cannot hope for unbroken repose until it is touched by the rays of the latter morning. And this fact is of extreme importance, for instruction, for warn- ing, for consolation. It is well that men be constantly re- minded that Christianity is, once for all, essentially and eternally different from a power of respectability; that it has a perennial tendency to turn this world upside down, that it raises the soul into a region of other and loftier feelings and habitudes than can be attained by the embrac- ing of any system or the following of any rules, that it is a walk of tribulation gloomy with the frowns of kinsman and fellow-citizen. Christianity is a personal, real, and even awful agency, and no yearning for peace must be permitted to neutralise the effect of this consideration. 394 THOMAS ARNOLD. Though there is thus much to be questioned in Dr Arnold's views on churches and creeds, we must again affirm, and with emphasis, that there was embodied in these views a great amount of invaluable truth. The pro- minence he gave to the great fact that priesthood, in all relating to mediation, intercession, or peculiar hereditary privilege, found its completion and conclusion in Christ, is sufficient of itself to impart value to his system. There is, perhaps, no idea in the circle of theologic truth more glo- rious or pregnant than this. That every member of Christ's mystical body, His Church, is a king and priest to God; that converted men are now God's Levitical tribe on earth, witnessing for Him before the world, and bearing censers filled with fire from off the heavenly altar ; that no Christian, whatever his sphere, can absolve himself from the responsi- bility and duty of preaching. Christ in his life and conver- sation ; that the clergy have no power as distinguished from the Church, and are simply that part of it set aside, as fitted in a more marked degree than the others, to preach and to rule; these and kindred ideas would, if they pervaded the minds of Christian nations, so completely dissipate at once all superstitious reverence towards the pastorate, and all class opposition to it would shed such a spirit of true internal unity, and harmonious, intelligent content through ourchurches wouldanimate to such fresh and far-extended zeal in the efforts of all to spread the gospel of our Lord, that no earnestness, no iteration, can be excessive, in their advocacy and demonstration. All the writings, too, of this truly Christian man, whether on this or on other subjects, proclaim to the world the sad fact that Christianity has yet but slightly leavened its affairs, and call for a thorough penetration by its spirit of every province of things. Contemplating the whole phenomenon of Arnold's be- THOMAS ARNOLD. 395 lief in this church-state, we cannot but conclude that he fell into that mistake of noble minds, to represent the world as by no means in so ruined a condition as has. been deemed, and hope for speedy amendment, by simple declaration of error, and proclamation of truth. Nature seems, as it were, to kindle this hope, that the young and ardent may go in full heart to the work, and not leave the world to absolute stagnation and death. Had Luther, when he felt the giant stirrings of the young life in his bosom, been per- mitted to catch a glimpse of those griefs and forebodings, with which, in his latter days, he was apt to regard the state, of the world, his hand had scarce been steady enough to hold that pen whose end shook the mitre in the Palace of the Seven Hills. .The glory of exultant hope gleams over Milton's earlier page, yet he lived to mourn the evil days on which he had fallen, and to shadow forth his own stern sorrows in Samson Agonistes. All great and noble souls seemed to have begun their work in hope, and ended it in sorrow ! Arnold could not even have given utterance to his scheme as a present measure, with- out conceiving more favourably of men than their state warranted. When death overtook him he ..was, of course, as far from the attainment as ever. Towards the end he said: " When I think of the Church, I could sit down and pine and die." He retained the idea to the last, but was beginning to have misgivings. "I am myself so much inclined to the idea of a strong social bond, that I ought not to be suspected of any tendency to anarchy ; yet I am beginning to think that the idea may be overstrained, and that this attempt to merge the soul and will of the in- dividual man in the general body is, when fully deve- loped, contrary to the very essence of Christianity. After 396 THOMAS ARNOLD. all, it is the individual soul that must he saved, and it is that which is addressed in the gospel." And again, shortly before his death : " I feel so deeply the danger and evil of the false system, that despairing of seeing the true Church restored, I am disposed to cling, not from choice, but ne- cessity, to the Protestant tendency of laying the whole stress on Christian religion, and adjourning the notion of Church sine die." This certainly is in the right direction ; in conformity with the spirit not only of the Reformation, but of the New Testament. Consider, once more, the close personal dealing of our Saviour's discourses, and the burning earnestness of Paul's discussion and enforcement of the points pertaining to individual salvation in his several epistles, and this must become evident. The Old Testa- ment dealt with systems and nationalities; the New Testa- ment deals with individual conversion, with individual life: the old dispensation had its kingdom of Israel, seen among the nations as a cluster of beams falling from heaven on one spot, in a dark weltering sea ; the new dis- pensation has its kingdom of God, all noiseless and unob- served, in the individual heart: the old dispensation had its temple on Moriab, crowning the mountain with gold, and adorned with the richest and rarest workmanship of the ancient world; the new dispensation has the soul of man for its temple, viewless, and, to the unpurified, uncnnobled thought, unimposing, yet all-containing and everlasting. It is an unseen, a spiritual sublimity that Christianity aims at; its ineffable holiness is discerned in the fact that it enrobes the soul in an immortality which can even now be recognised to hold more of heaven than of earth, and to have no element which will not flourish best in the serene air of eternity; confound it with sys- tems and hierarchies, with the pomp and show of visible THOMAS ARNOLD. 397 ceremonious uniformity, and you overlook its essence ; there will be no end of your wandering. Let Christians awaken to convert the world ; that done, all is done; that missed, though the world tottered under the weight of cathedrals, and the pile of ghastly uniformity had a base as broad as Sahara, all were lost. Arnold's view of the office and education of the theo- logian in our day deserves a passing glance. It recognised the value of the human element, as distinguished from the barely theological, the fatal danger, that students of theo- logy become mere discriminators of doctrinal correctness, mere defenders of creed and system, mere catechetic ex- pounders of the truth, mere denizens of the school or library, failing to unfold within them that expansion of human sympathy which is the means in God's hand of the action of man on man. Soundness in doctrine is of vital importance ; yet theological education must wander from the spirit of Christianity, if it becomes a mere instruction and practice in systematic or exegetic theology; it is well that a fisherman can keep his net in order, perceiving and rectifying the slightest rent or weakness; yet the manner of casting the net is also of great moment, and we appeal to those informed in the matter, whether it is not com- mon to find young men armed at all points in exegetic and controversial theology, who yet fail utterly when they come to cast the gospel net out into the world. Christ called his disciples to be fishers of men, to the grand practi- cal task of world-conversion; when He sent out the seventy, His summary of doctrine was very short, while His detail of the method of their preaching was much more extended. Arnold's political views need not long detain us. He loved politics extremely ; he considered it a noble ambi- tion which prompted the desire of ruling. The leading 398 THOMAS ARNOLD. features of his system can be easily defined ; they reflect well the main features of his mind, fiery realism, and states- manlike constructiveness. He was one of the most deter- mined opponents that conservatism, in the various forms in which it has stereotyped itself, ever met. He deemed it always, in its essence, erroneous; to halt was of necessity wrong; it was only by progress, he would have said, that what is good could be preserved: proceed as slowly as is necessary for sureness, but pause in the ocean, and that moment your ship begins to rot, or the revolutionary tem- pest awakens behind, and then the acceleration is fatal. His words on the subject are deliberate and bold: " As I feel that, of the two besetting sins of human nature, self- ish neglect and selfish agitation, the former is the more common, and has, in the long-run, done far more harm than the latter, although the outbreaks of the latter, while they last, are of a far more atrocious character; so I have in a manner vowed to myself, and prayed that, with God's blessing, no excesses of popular wickedness, though I should be myself, as I expect, the victim of them, no temporary evils produced by revolution, shall ever make me forget the wickedness of Toryism, of that spirit which crucified Christ himself, which has, throughout the long experience of all history, continually thwarted the cause of God and goodness, and has gone on abusing its opportunities, and heaping up wrath, by a long series of selfish neglect, against the day of wrath and judgment." Again: "There is nothing so revolutionary, because there is nothing so un- natural and so convulsive to society, as the strain to keep things fixed, when all the world is by the very law of its creation in eternal progress; and the cause of all the evils of the world may be traced to that natural but most deadly error of human indolence and corruption, that our busi- THOMAS ARNOLD. 399 ness is to preserve and not to improve." He challenges a wide induction:" Search and look whether you can find that any constitution was destroyed from within, by faction or discontent, without its destruction having been, either just penally, or necessary, because it could not any longer answer its proper purposes." At times he breaks forth in a fine strong figures "'Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo,' is the cry of Reform, when, long re- pulsed and scorned, she is on the point of changing her visage to that of Revolution." From these characteristic sentences, compared with other parts of his works, we learn accurately his position as a political thinker. Self- ishness in it's two forms he shunned on either hand: the selfishness that will sit in icy and relentless indifference on its throne, though that throne be placed on a pyramid of skulls; this is the selfishness of those for whom it has, in all ages, been hard to enter into the kingdom of heaven : and the selfishness which cries simply, give, give, let religion, honour, valour, all be flung aside, let Throne, Church, Aris- tocracy be cast into the fire, that we may be warmed at the blaze; this is the selfishness of anarchy and atheism: between the two he trimmed, in the golden mean of a manly patriotism, a reasonable, unresting, unhasting pro- gress, and a stooping to the majesty of law. The Warbur- ton theory of government, as we have seen, he rejected ; he recognised the duties and responsibilities of nations; and thus we trace his political system to its union with his Christianity in the responsible civil-religious church-state. The laissez-faire school he opposed absolutely, looking with feelings of profound and melancholy interest upon the eighteenth century in its first half, as a time of rest, which might have been improved but was lost for ever. In 1842, we find Arnold writing thus in his diary: 400 THOMAS ARNOLD. " The day after to-morrow is ray birth-day, if I am per- mitted to live to see it ray forty-seventh birth-day since my birth. How large a portion of my life on earth is already passed. And then what is to follow this life? How visibly my outward work seems contracting and softening away into the gentler emotions of old age. In one sense, how nearly can I now say, ' Vizi.' And I thank God that, as far as ambition is concerned, it is, I trust, fully mortified; I have no desire other than to step back from my present place in the world, and not to rise to a higher. Still, there are works which, with God's permission, I would^do before the night cometh ; especially that great work, if I might be permitted to take part in it. But, above all, let me mind my own personal work to keep myself pure, and zealous, and believing labouring to do God's will, yet not anxious that it should be done by me rather than by others, if God disapproves of my doing it." Christianity has wrought its work; the armour is girded on, yet there is the willingness to unbrace it, the noble warrior valour yearns to share the combat, but yet is em- braced and transfigured in the nobler, that hides self alto- gether in desire for the glory of God. Next morning he hears the voice of death; the sun of that birth-day looked upon his corpse. There is something to us martially stirring, and even beautiful, in the death of Arnold. It is like that of a warrior on the stricken field ; so suddenly does it come, and with such a calm pride does he meet it. That brief, decisive inquiry as to the nature of his ailment is strangely interesting ; he is racked with pain, and yet he is as pointed, cool, and explicit as if he were examining a pupil. And the last look seen in his filming eye was that of unutter- able kindness ! THOMAS ARNOLD. 401 At the time when Arnold died, he could be ill spared to England. In the peaceful retirement towards which he had for some time looked, his eye might have taken a calmer, a wider, a more searching look, at those great questions with which his life had made him so thoroughly conversant, and on which the thought of a lifetime was well spent; in the still and rich light of a restful evening, he might have seen what escaped his somewhat agitated gaze in the glare and bustle of day. Indications there were, as we have seen, of a change. It is not our part, however, to complain ; rather let us join in that noble ex- pression of satisfied acquiescence in the plans of .God, which so appropriately and sublimely closed his last writing. 2 n CHAPTER IY. THOMAS CHALMERS. Thomas Chalmers was born in one of those homes which have been the pride and the blessing of Scotland ; to which, rather than to aught else, Scotland may point as her achievement among the nations, and to whose final uprearing countless influences and agencies have co-ope- rated. It is often in the far distance that causes work, whose effects are seen in living bloom around: the cloud was gathered from the remote Atlantic, whose drops cause the farmer's little corn-field to spring ; the hillock on whose side his cottage turns its bright face towards the southern sun was upheaved by the might of central fire ere mankind was born. The fierce struggle in the dark wood of Falkirk, the victorious charge on the bright plain of Bannockburn, the wrestling of Luther with Satan in his silent chamber at Erfurt, the far flight and inevitable gaze of the intellect of Calvin, the rugged earnestness of Knox, the godly valour of Peden and Cameron, all con- joined their agencies to build up the quiet homes of Pres- byterian Scotland. Nor was this an unworthy or insigni- ficant consummation: the almost reverential admiration with which all men have looked into the circle of " The Cottar's Saturday Night " proclaims it to have been noble THOMAS CHALMERS. 403 and sufficient. Of such homes, substantial comfort and cheerful piety were the characteristics; religious thought- fulness and industrious peace dwelt there in kindly union ; the " auld Ha'-Bible " was their corner-stone. Such homes write on the face of the world the best evidence of the truth of Christianity ! And the father of Thomas Chalmers was the worthy head of such a home, a fine example of the right-hearted Calvinistic Scotchman. Of deep and ten- der feelings, yet ever manly and firm, humble and reve- rent towards God, unobtrusive yet unbending in the pre- sence of men, John Chalmers of Anstruther was that style of man which forms the life-blood of a nation, and whose presence in a family is the satisfactory guarantee of an education which may, without hesitation, be pronounced good. Thomas was his sixth child; he was born at Anstruther in Fife, in March, 1780. He showed from the first a noble disposition : truthful, joyous, affectionate ; the reader can judge how the influences of such a father and such a home would act upon him. In his childhood we find little worthy of remark ; little more, probably, than is to be told of all healthy and clever children. When so much a child as to be grossly ill- treated by his nurse, he is yet so much a man as to ob- serve with strict honour a promise of secrecy which she easily won from his unsuspecting heart ; he soon determines to be a minister, and, not to lose time, chooses his first text, " Let brotherly love continue," a text, by the way, of which he would have approved as heartily at sixty as at six; one day he is caught pacing his room, and repeat- ing, in evident emotion, the words " Oh, Absalom, my son, my son." These are pleasing traits if nowise ex- traordinary ; they at least show clearly that he was a noble child. 404 THOMAS CHALMERS. At school he was almost precisely what it is best for a boy to be ; if he erred at all, it was on the safe side. This portion of his training may be characterised fully and fitly by saying, that the important education of the class-room was carefully prevented from encroaching on the perhaps even more important education of the playground. He was distinguished in school by no remarkable proficiency, and might be known among his class-fellows only by the greater strength and buoyancy of his young nature. When he chose to learn, he learned fast; this is an un- doubted and important fact. But it was in the field or the playground, where the free loud laugh of the glad young bosom rang cheerily, every faculty awake to watch the turns and win the triumphs of the game, every muscle in fine healthful tension, every drop of blood surg- ing in exultant fulness of life, that an observant and pe- netrating eye might have discerned the probability of his trimming skilfully between metaphysical dreaminess and mechanic dulness, and attaining a healthful, powerful man- hood. He was at school rather a Clive than a Coleridge. His youthful mind was one of marked candour and purity; at no period of his life was he tainted with aught definitely vicious or ignoble. His nature was open, generous, affec- tionate ; his strength, physical and intellectual, exuberant ; he was social, truthful, and pure-minded. Ere completing his twelfth year, he entered the Univer- sity of St Andrews. During the first two sessions, he was still a school-boy. " Golf, football, and particularly hand- ball," with similar avocations, occupied his time. Anything deserving the name of classical culture he never received. At the precise period when a few additional years at school would probably have affected his whole history, he was sent to the university; his sympathies, unawakened to the THOMAS CHALMERS. 405 greatness and the beauty of antiquity, were soon arrested by mathematics. It was in his fourteenth year that his mind awoke to its full intellectual vigour. He then commenced his third session at the university, and entered upon the study of mathematics. The pursuit was eminently congenial, and he at once became distinguished. The teacher of the mathematical classes in St Andrews at this time was Dr James Brown, and Chalmers was much in his society. It was the period of the French Revolution, and Dr Brown participated largely in the excitement of the time. He was of the school of radical reform in poli- tics, and no doubt of extremely liberal sentiments on reli- gious matters. As was to be expected, Chalmers embraced the opinions of his instructor. He read Godwin's Poli- tical Justice with delight and approval; he gazed on that vast, elaborate, and surely imposing structure, with its ice pinnacles, clear, sharply denned, glittering in the wintry air, and deemed it a palace in whose many chambers the human race might at length find rest; he breathed for a time the thin atmosphere of its chill virtue and clockwork justice, and thought it were well always to be there. The ideas which he had brought from his father's house fell away from him; for the homespun but substantial garb of Scotch Calvinism, he substituted one of modern make, jaunty and of bright colour, but spun mainly of vapour and moonshine. The thorough depravity of man, an atonement by the death of Christ, salvation by faith alone, were left to the weak and narrow-minded. What seemed a wider and more brilliant prospect opened to the eye of the aspiring student. Scaling the sunny heights of college promotion, loving truth and proclaiming virtue, winning the crowns of fame, expatiating in the sky-fields 406 THOMAS CHALMERS. of thought and imagination, basking in the smile of the Universal Benevolence, he would go on in his strength and prosper. This we consider the first epoch in the intellec- tual history of Chalmers. In 1795, he entered the Divinity Hall, formally to com- mence the study of theology. His mind, however, was yet under the spell of geometry. He had forced his way to the French mathematical literature, and was diligently occupied in that opulent field. Towards the close, however, of his first theological session, a more important intellectual influ- ence than that of mathematics was brought to bear upon his mind. He became acquainted with the Inquiry of Jonathan Edwards. Its study was to him an exercise of rapturous de- light ; his mind was filled with it till it seemed about to " lose its balance." It was the second determining influ- ence in his mental development; mathematics and radi- calism were the first. We must make one or two obser- vations on its nature, and on what it reveals. The simple fact that, at the age of fifteen, it was to him not a task, but a positive and intense pleasure, to follow the dry light of the great American metaphysician into those remote and difficult regions of thought, is a proof of extraor- dinary intellectual endowment. At an age when his sympa- thies might have been expected to find comfort and response in the circulating library, and his intellect a pleasurable oc- cupation in the lighter walks of history or science, he found his whole spiritual nature freely and delightfully exercised by the treatise on the freedom of the will. And the effect it produced on his boyish mind is remarkable. With the exception of Swift's icy misanthropy, we can remember no phenomenon in literature comparable to the un- impassioned coldness of the mind of Edwards in the investigation of those high and awful themes which are THOMAS CHALMERS. 407 directly or indirectly the subject of his Inquiry. We con- ceive his argument, when well understood in its limits and conditions, to be irrefragable ; yet it is more than can be demanded of the human mind to disrobe itself so entirely of human sympathy, as the mind of Jonathan Edwards ap- pears to disrobe itself as we read that treatise. We assert not that its author was a man devoid of kindness of heart, but, in his work on the freedom of the will, he seems to us to resolve himself absolutely into a thinking apparatus. He deliberately looks into hell, and the whole heat of its burn- ings cannot melt into a tear the ice in his eye ; he gazes on a great portion of his brother men stretched to eternity upon a wheel, and his eyelid quivers no more than if he saw a butterfly. Now we desire to note, that, despite the tremendous im- pression produced on the mind of Chalmers by the In- quiry into the freedom of the will, the effect was not to darken but to brighten, not to depress but to elevate. It produced "a twelvemonth of elysium;" these are his own words. His intellect was not beaten hard, and rendered dead to all other impulses, a common case with young men whom the genius of some writer over- powers. He did not, with a trembling, gloomy, irresistible curiosity, pry and pry into the world of mystery here opened up to him, as young Foster would have done. He accepted the truth he found; he saw the whole universe in God. But when he went with Edwards to the mouth of hell, he still heard the melodies of heaven. He saw that Infinite Power clasped the world, but he could feel that In- finite Wisdom guided the infinite might, and be content. His mind expanded and brightened. He might have been seen at early morn in the dewy fields, whither he went to wander alone, and to expatiate in the vast conception ; to 408 THOMAS CHALMERS. feel the world but a little station on which to stand and see himself overarched by the infinitude of God as by the illimitable azure above his head ; to lift up his eyes and catch a glimpse of the golden chains by which the universe hung round the throne of God. Looking upon him in those hours, it seems scarce possible not to be reminded of that striking passage in modern poetry, in which the great poet of nature and meditation, whose conception of certain great influences which aid in moulding lofty and thoughtful character was perhaps stronger than that of any other, has pictured the corresponding stage of mental history in the case of his own hero. " The growing youth What soul was his, when, from the naked top Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun Rise up and bathe the world in light ! He look'd Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay Beneath him: Far and wide the clouds were touch'd, And in their silent faces could he read Unutterable love. Sound needed none, Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form, All melted into him; they swallow'd up His animal being; in them did he live, And by them did he live; they were his life. In such access of mind, in such high hour Of visitation from the living God, Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired. No thanks he breathed, he proffer'd no request; Rapt into still communion that transcends The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, His mind was a thanksgiving to the Power That made him; it was blessedness and love." We do not find that Chalmers was at all smitten by fear; the passionless demonstration of Edwards, of all modes of representation perhaps the best calculated to im- press his mind with terror, cast over it no thick abiding THOMAS CHALMERS. 409 gloom; he experienced the sublime emotion of reverential awe, but he knew nothing of slavish fear. His mind was of that radically sound and noble order which responds to influences of hope and love rather than of fear and con- straint; he had an affinity with light. He had not yet, however, completed the stages of what was strictly his education. He had to pass through a more painful ordeal than he had hitherto known. In 1798, he entered the family of a gentleman as private tutor. Nothing of moment occurred during his residence there. It was, indeed, a fine reply which he gave when taunted by his employer with pride, one worthy of a self- respecting and high-minded youth: " There are," he said, " two kinds of pride, sir; there is that pride which lords it over inferiors, and there is that pride which rejoices in re- pressing the insolence of superiors. The first I have none of; the second I glory in :" yet we attach little importance to the probably accidental squabbles in which he became involved. But about the period of his quitting this resi- dence and returning to St Andrews to complete his theo- logical studies, when he was just entering on his twentieth year, he fell in with D'Holbach's once celebrated Systeme de la Nature. The agitations of his tutorship had, it may be, somewhat unsettled and fevered his mind, rendering it more open to assault, disturbing that calm concentration of power by which error is best met and repelled. The pompous, far-sounding rhetoric of the book charmed his ear; the magnitude and apparent stability of its scientific scaffolding caught his eye; its tone of calm assumption, as if it were the conclusive utterance of ultimate truth, per- plexed and confounded him. Its was not the flippant audacity of youth; it preached virtue of the most high- flown order; it could not be the birth of ignorance, for it 410 THOMAS CHALMERS. was reared upon the foundation of modern science. It planted its scientific engines on the earth, and with an air of perfect strength and philosophic deliberation turned them against principalities and powers. First, it swept from earth's horizon all religions, the Christian among the rest; these it flung into one grave, and wrote over it Supersti- tion: then it cast a thick impenetrable smoke, as from the depths of hell, over all the heaven, blotting out those fields of immortality, towards which the eye of humanity, through its weary pilgrimage, has ever gazed with wistful hope ; these it called the phantom pictures of enthusiasm and imagination: last of all, it aimed its bolts at the throne of the universe, to dethrone Him that sat there. The ulti- mate achievement of science was to seat itself in the throne of God. And how beneficent was its reign to be ! The green earth was to bask in universal sunshine, impeded by no darkening cloud; the fair field was no longer to be trodden by the hoof of the war-steed, the harvests of earth were no longer to be fatted with human gore ; the world was to become one vast dancing saloon, where men abode for a time, and from which, on any occasion of inconve- nience, suicide, the noble right and privilege of the free, was ready to dismiss them ; all Ethiopians were to be washed white, or, at least, whitewashed ; the infancy and boyhood of humanity had passed, and now the noonday of its youth had come. These things were to be done by the knowledge of the laws of the world ; such laws were all physical; ideas could be mechanically accounted for; " our soul has occasion for ideas the same as our stomach has occasion for aliments." The proud philosopher required but one word to account for the universe physical law. Such was the teaching of the System of Nature. The mind of Chalmers was of a decidedly scientific THOMAS CHALMERS. 411 cast ; he had been long accustomed to the bare and precise reasoning of mathematics; he delighted in a definite, com- prehensible, tangible proof. Here, then, was D'Holbach, pointing out his laws, measuring, with consummate assur- ance, heaven and earth, plausibly, nay, powerfully, exhibit- ing the evils of superstition, and making them synonymous with the evils of religion, talking in the loftiest strain of universal benevolence and felicity, and concluding with a fine rhetorical panegyric on virtue. To the baron it was sun-clear that a divine power in the universe was superfluous; these were the laws, why go beyond them? And if such was superfluous, it was but the next step to pronounce its belief noxious. Chalmers was staggered. It seemed, for a time, as if that Eye which Edwards had shown him lighting the universe was to go out. He was in deep anguish and perplexity ; his friends feared for his reason. But his mind was too fair, too noble, and too sub- stantially grounded, to lapse into scepticism. He had heard one side of the question ; he honestly turned to hear the other. The result was, that he was firmly and for ever es- tablished in the belief of Christianity. The various steps in this gradual consummation we are unable to trace: but we know the general means by which he attained it. It was by a fair study of the great apologists of the last century Beattie, Paley, and Butler. The first of these it was who steadied him after the maddening draught of materialism : the precise date of his perusal of Paley we cannot fix; his final declaration, uttered long afterwards, was, "Butler made me a Christian/' The outline of his progress may, we think, be traced. He soon saw that, with all its pretence and paraphernalia, the system of D'Holbach was a mere film on the surface of things; the arguments 412 THOMAS CHALMERS. of Beattie certified him of the reliability of man's inner beliefs; and Butler's giant intellect gave him a glance into the real structure of the universe. He came to the unal- terable conviction that there was a God. This we take to have been his first stage. He then looked calmly at the historical evidence of the fact, that Jesus of Nazareth did perform works competent only to almighty power on the plains of Judea; the clear and masterly logic of Paley satisfied him of this. The other steps naturally followed. The result was a deliberate conviction that it was a fact dubitable by no fair and capable intellect, that the Chris- tian religion was positively revealed to man by the living God. We have two remarks to make here. The first is, That this method of proof embraces sub- stantial evidence for the truth of Christianity. There are minds which are incapable of doubting the existence of God: born with such an ingrained conviction that man was created for an end, that the universe is not a mad flickering phantasmagoria, devoid of purpose, and meaning blank nothing, as to be unable to compass the conception of the non-existence of the Supreme Mind. We deem this the form of intellect which is of all others the most substantial and healthful. And we are inclined to think that the mind of Chalmers was radically of this type; the temporary delirium produced by D'Holbach would probably have departed even without positive op- posing argument, when his mind regained the power of calm thought. But, if this central fact is doubted, it must, first of all, be placed on an impregnable basis: and how can it be so, save by exhibiting the reasonableness of an acceptation of the ineradicable beliefs of humanity, of a trust in "the mighty hopes which make us men?" it THOMAS CHALMERS. 413 being placed beyond doubt that God exists, and that the world has been established by Him, we see not how the mind is to advance to a more precise idea of His general government and our relation to Him, except by earnest contemplation of that small portion of His ways which we do know in other words, by a consideration of the analogies of Butler. The ground thus cleared, the want and the reasonableness of Christianity demonstrated, the time has come to consider the actual historical evidence for its truth, considered as a strictly objective revela- tion ; and we know not whither to point the inquirer for this rather than to the clear, impartial, comprehen- sive summary by Paley of the testimony to the fact that Christ raised Lazarus, and rose Himself from the grave. If he believes that the mission of Jesus was divine, that His "living Father" sent Him, the whole system of revelation of which He is the corner-stone is seen to stand on an impregnable basis; all that was delivered before the Christian era resting on His authority, all that has been delivered since secured by His promise. In the individual case, there may be a mode of arriving at the conviction of the divine truth of the Scriptures different from all this; these Scriptures may be in such manner applied to the soul by the Holy Spirit, that their divine origin cannot be doubted ; and it is equally true, that the profound accord- ance with the general order of things here on earth exhi- bited by these writings, the answers they embody to man's questionings, the supply they offer to man's wants, may be so explored and comprehended, that the result must be an assurance that the whole phenomenon is utterly beyond explanation, save on the hypothesis that the ordinary dealings of Providence had in one case been diverged from, and the natural powers of man in one instance divinely 414 THOMAS CHALMERS. supplemented. Yet, when the question is a simple ques- tion of fact; when a man desires not, in the first instance, to enter the edifice of Christianity, but to learn whether the pillars of it were laid by God, in the same positive, in- dependent, objective way, in which He created the world, we must consider the plain logical vindication of the his- torical fact, that a superhuman power accompanied the words of Jesus, a substantial form of Christian evidence. For it must be distinctly avowed on the one hand, and kept in view on the other, that the province of the Chris- tian apologist is limited. There is one sphere which he can never enter, the sphere of the operations of the Divine Spirit. He may show the consistence of Christianity, viewed as an external fact, with the laws of evidence; but he cannot open the eyes of " the world " to see that Spirit whom the Saviour declared its inability to see, he cannot enable the natural man to discern the things which are " spiritually discerned." We are far from asserting that the work of Christian apology has been exhausted; but, when it has been, it will by possibility have achieved but two things: the proof of Christianity as a religion once supernaturally given, and the proof of Christianity as a religion in all ages divinely sustained. The work still re- maining to be done in Christian apologetics is embraced in the second. That work Paley and his school did not certainly, save perhaps in a scarce perceptible degree, attempt; but they did attempt, and with a success which can hardly be called in question, the former portion of Christian apologetics. They answered the question which men will naturally and fairly in the first instance put to the Christian How do you know that your Master spoke in Judea, and spoke with supernatural authority? And a satisfactory answer to this question must always embrace a THOMAS CHALMERS. 415 proof of Christianity sufficient to content the sob;r mind, and to condemn the gainsayer. Our second remark is but a particular application of our first. It is, that in the present day there exists a dispo- sition unduly to depreciate the apologists of last century. Against Paley in particular a very strong prejudice has begun to gain ground a prejudice of perhaps slight im- portance in itself, and by no means absolutely without foundation in reference to Paley individually but of de- cidedly injurious tendency in throwing discredit on the substantial service rendered by him to the Christian cause. His character, we think, it is not difficult to define. It was not of the noblest type: but we have no hesitation in de- claring it still further removed from one radically ignoble. His mind was antithetically opposed to all that holds of poetry ; emotional energy of every sort was alien to his mental atmosphere; his temperament was a uniform mean, an untroubled calm, removed at once from the glory and the gloom of storm. His intellect bore such relation to a mind like Paul's as a creed bears to a Pro- phecy of Isaiah as the cold steel of a Roman legionary to the flaming sword of an angel. Joy to the measure of rapture, sorrow to the measure of despair, he could not feel; the devotion of the martyr and the raving of the fanatic were alike removed from the balanced mode- ration of his mood; the mighty passions which surge in the revolution or crash on the battle-field found no answering sympathy in his breast. And we per- fectly agree with Foster, in thinking that this " order of mind is ill fitted to embody the highest grandeur of the Christian character, that the natural incapability of great emotions operates very strongly to prevent the prevalence of the Christian spirit." Yet it is just as plain to us, on 416 TH0MA8 CHALMERS. the other hand, that Paley was radically an honest, able, worthy man. Of rough Yorkshire kindred, and humorous homely ways, he was precisely of the stuff from which nature makes the substantial, deliberate, steady, sagacious Englishman ; there was a certain sarcastic, though kindly ruggedness and plainness in his speech, pointedly opposed to insincerity or meanness; a warm homely man, whom those who knew him loved, one totally devoid of affecta- tion and pretence, with little ambition, and no greed. And his intellectual light, if very dry, was very power- ful; the error was subtle it could not pierce, the truth was sure which stood its scrutiny. To discern with conclusive certainty the vital points of a question; to draw them out in clear logical sequence ; and to estimate their real and available value, few minds have had more power than Paley's. His style wants all poetic adornment and emotional fire ; yet it has a certain conclusive satis- fying tone, and its perfect clearness lends it no mean charm ; it makes us feel that it is not all base metal which does not glitter. We should have no feeling of uneasiness in maintaining that his mind, though wanting certain affini- ties with minds of the highest order which Johnson's did possess, was essentially more substantial and powerful than that which produced Rasselas. If you look well, moreover, you will find the moral system of each nearly similar; the high and serene region of Christian holiness, as distinguished from virtue, neither can be said to have entered. We shall not object to Johnson's being entitled a hero; but if his theory of virtue radically resolved itself into prudence, as Mr Carlyle grants, we shall at least con- sider Mr Kingsley in an untenable and absurd position, when he represents Paley's character as an unanswerable argument against his reasonings. But, indeed, the absur- THOMAS CHALMERS. 417 dity into which Mr Kingsley, in the person of his hero Alton Locke, has suffered himself to fall, is complicated and glaring. To effect that confutation which the precise nature of the infidelity of last century required, an intel- lect such as Paley's was positively demanded. The faintest gleam of enthusiasm, the slightest warmth of passion, had neutralised its effect. It was the cool, " philosophic," en- lightened intellect which found Christianity unsatisfac- tory; it was the cold sharp edge of the scalpel of modern science which was declared to have exposed its unsound- ness; unstable and excited minds, natures enthusiastic and fanciful, might be allured by this imposing fable, but if you divested yourself of all prejudice and all passion, and turned on the Bible the same clear impartial light which you brought to the study of Euclid, it was not a matter of doubt that rejection of every notion of its inspiration would result. To meet such men, to dissipate such ideas, Paley was the very man. " Not so fast," he said, " I'm Yorkshire too: look at this phenomenon just as you look at any other in nature or history; look at it on all sides, with piercing scrutiny, but with fairness and without haste; and then, whether convinced or not, de- clare honestly if it does not, at least, require a tre- mendous effort to consider it the fruit of imposture or frenzy?" Since the days of Paley, infidelity has changed its tone ; the old jargon about priestcraft, imposture, and fanaticism, has well-nigh died away; there is a caution now in assailing fairly and in front the facts of Chris- tianity: and for this change there can be no doubt we are largely indebted to him. Mr Kingsley is a man of rich emotions and unquestioned earnestness; but his intellec- tual force is puny to that of Paley ; and it is not with the best grace that a clergyman of the Church of England puts 2k 418 THOMAS CHALMERS. into the mouth of a sceptic a vague and irrelevant charge against the character of him who wrote the Hone Pau- linae. The temperament of John Foster differed as essen- tially from that of Paley as Mr Kingsley's, yet his ver- dict on Paley's achievement as a defender of Christianity was as follows: " It has been the enviable lot of here and there a favoured individual, to do some one important thing so well, that it shall never need to be done again : and we regard Dr Paley's writings on the Evidences of Chris- tianity as of so signally decisive a character, that we should be content to let them stand as the essence and the close of the great argument on the part of its believers ; and should feel no despondency or chagrin, if we could be pro- phetically certified that such an efficient Christian reasoner would never henceforward arise. We should consider the grand fortress of proof, as now raised and finished, the in- tellectual capital of that empire which is destined to leave the widest boundaries attained by the Roman far behind." "We think that this requires qualification and circumscrip- tion, but it is a very important testimony, and may ulti- mately be found to be substantially correct. We have seen that Chalmers passed through an ordeal of doubt; and such doubt as was peculiarly ensnaring to his mathematical intellect and strong scientific tastes. That Harmattan wind, in which it is said no soul of man can now live, had passed over him, with its doleful music and its burning sand; but on the homeward side of the desert his joints were not loosed, his nerves were not unstrung, his frame had been too firmly knit to be relaxed, he sprang forward as if he had never drooped. And, on any theory of character, this is the grand proof of the vital force and natural vigour of a man. Doubt is the foe by vanquishing which the young knight of truth wins his spurs. Doubt THOMAS CHALMERS. 419 is the lion guarding the palace of truth, which must be looked at, and dared, and controlled by the dauntless eye, but in passing beyond which alone are to be won the conquests of manhood. It had no power to petrify or paralyse Chalmers; he inherited the instinctive knowledge that between the true, however difficult its proofs may be to exhibit, and the plausible, however difficult its dis- guise may be to pierce, the distance and difference are simply infinite. It was a moral impossibility for him to have been a sceptic; he would have forced his way to con- scientious and hearty action, or sunk into madness or the grave; doubt was to him agony, he felt it to be the ne- gation of all work, the death of action if it was not its birth, and he struggled towards truth, as a giant might struggle through flames to his dearest treasure. In his twentieth year, he was licensed to preach the gospel. For the functions of the high calling to which he aspired, he felt no enthusiastic predilection. His thirst for knowledge was by no means satisfied, and the decided bent of his ambition was still towards academic preferment. Instead of seeking work in his profession, he proceeded to Edinburgh, and studied at the university there during two sessions. Metaphysical and mathematical subjects mainly engrossed his attention ; but we cannot doubt that his reading was wide and varied. It is generally said that he was a man of meagre knowledge, that he could lay no claim to the title learned. There is truth in the asser- tion, but it is apt to render us oblivious to another truth of no slight importance, by which it is to be qualified and supplemented. What is generally and technically under- stood by learning, he certainly did not possess. But with the great questions of his day, and the general questions 420 THOMAS CHALMEHS. which, at all times, naturally agitate the human mind, he was abundantly acquainted; and the impetuous force of his own genius was sufficient to overpower and render invisible even what knowledge of books he did possess. His native strength refused to be trammelled by the thoughts of other men ; he so completely fused in the fire of his own intellect what he obtained from others, every ingot was so perfectly melted, that it became impossible to recognise it in that molten torrent. And of the pedan- try of learning he was perfectly, we venture to say, felicitously, void. If he found good wheat lying around him, he deemed it to the full as valuable and fit for use as if it had lain three thousand years in the brain of a mummy ; if common sense and plain evidence set their stamp on a fact or argument, he did not care to affix to it the seal of antiquity. We saw him deeply influenced by the lite- rature and ideas of the French Revolution; we found him rejoicing in the sublime abstractions of Edwards; we found him plunged in the surges of doubt by D'Holbach, and rescued by the strong arms of the great apologists of his own or the preceding age. And now, for two years, during which he engaged very sparingly in ministerial work, he led the life of a student; a life which, in his case, could not be idle. We must not forget, besides, that he had mastered French, and carried his studies into the rich mathematical literature of that language; his scientific acquirements, lastly, were becoming more and more ex- tensive and profound. If not learned, he was certainly a man of very great information. We are compelled now to pass lightly over what is yet one of the most interesting and characteristic portions of the history of Chalmers; that, namely, which embraces the first few years of his incumbency in Kilmany, and THOMAS CHALMERS. 421 during which, amid scorn and conflict, he taught mathe- matics and chemistry in St Andrews. Looking over the whole period, we cannot but think that, with all its eccentricity, and with even a certain de- gree of displeasing extravagance, there is in it much to admire. So great and healthful is the young strength, that it must, with all its exuberance, attract the sympathies of the healthful and strong. A surging, insatiable energy characterises the time. It seems a pleasure to him to find hills in his way, for the mere opportunity of grasping and hurling them aside; his toil and his enjoyment rise to- gether; he is a perfervid Scot, a lion rampant: mathema- tical studies, chemical studies, considerable metaphysical studies, parochial duties, university struggles, book -making on an important scale, and much more, are insufficient even to damp his first youthful ardour. His intellectual powers, too, have not been outrun by his energy ; he has given un- questionable proofs of a rare order of talent: the speedy and joyous subjugation of every new science which came in his way, the suggestion of a theory upon which, and perhaps upon which alone, Scripture and geology can be shown to be in harmony, the acquisition of a clear, glow- ing, and finely balanced style. There is sufficient proof, also, that he has already conceived, in outline, a whole scheme of Christian evidence. Lastly, and of all most de- cisive, he has begun to make his influence distinctly felt among the men who came within its sphere; Chalmers of Kilmany has become one to whom eyes are turned, and concerning whom expectations are formed; the invisible crown set by nature on his brow is slowly waxing vi- sible. And whatever may be doubted, it is certain that his moral qualities are of the kingly order. Courage to defy a whole university, tenderness to weep in the garden 422 THOMAS CHALMERS. at Blenheim, enthusiastic loyalty both in the pulpit and in the ranks, an ever open hand, wakeful and ardent sympathy with all that is high, and pure, and healthful ; these, and similar traits of nobleness, cannot fail to evince that here is another of those whom, from the ancient time, nature has intended for trust, honour, and love. But it must be conceded that, in an estimate of the cha- racter and powers of Chalmers during this youthful period, no express reference is necessary to Christianity: Chal- mers, in fact, was then a Christian pastor, in a sense and manner which, we think, is now becoming obsolete. The last century produced in Scotland a form, we should, perhaps, rather say a semblance, of Christianity, which will probably never re-appear. It was the result of the general decay of earnestness over the land, and the sickly flowering of a sentimental and wordy philoso- phistic morality. From the religion of the Puritan and Covenanter, there was a recoil; to be virtuous was good and fair, honour and truth were to be commended, sublime benevolence was to be preached; but to defy earth and hell for your belief, to worship God under the mist of the mountain corrie, or mount the scaffold rather than throw a sand-grain in the eye of conscience, were the follies of bigotry and excitement, produced endless commotion, and even endangered the interests of general morality and re- spectable society. The great distinctive doctrines of Chris- tianity were, probably, In some sense true; to deny them altogether would utterly stultify the Bible ; but they were to be quietly considered incomprehensible, and, as strictly esoteric mysteries, to be carefully excluded from public ministrations. Who is not familiar with the watchwords of the honey-mouthed school, which came then to occupy the pulpits of the church of Knox? Virtue its own reward, THOMAS CHALMERS. 423 white-robed innocence descending from heaven (in no great haste), decorum and decency, prim of visage and trim of garb, the enlightenment of the age, the happiness of the greatest number, flowed blandly forth as the preach- ing of Christianity. The art of the preacher then was softly to mouth truism, skilfully to gild commonplace. That school produced Blair. It is interesting to observe what it made of Paul. We have happened to see a sermon or two in which the attempt was made to depict him as a Christian orator. The fiery and urgent man, whose words flame and burn on the page, who startled the philosophic serenity of the sages of Athens, and uttered his grand song of triumph in the very scowl of Nero, who could not open his lips without speaking of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, who abandoned, in express terms, as different in idea from Christianity, the wisdom of Greece and the morality of law, was represented standing, in polite and graceful attitude, and lecturing Felix, for more than half an hour, on virtue, mercy, j ustice, and respect- ability in general, cautiously avoiding the "mysteries" of the Christian religion, and recommending it to his weak hearer in a soft and harmless garb borrowed from Seneca. The effect over the country was simple and decisive. The heart of the Scottish people turned from the modern school: the popular instinct named it moderate. It may be thought strange that such a man as Chalmers could ever have been a follower of such a school as this. Yet it is a fact admitting of no question. Christianity had never fairly laid its grasp on his heart ; he had never profoundly considered whether it was the real living Christianity he had or no. He is a striking example of the not unusual phenomenon of a man whose natural force and nobleness will be unparalysed by any influence of 424 THOMAS CHALMERS. school or creed. But it may be that this easy-suiting garment called Christianity is not really adapted to dis- play the herculean mould of his limbs; it may be in the garb of the warrior, in the old mail of the martyr, that we can best discern the strength and majesty of his frame. Let us proceed. At about the age of thirty, Chalmers engaged to write the article Christianity for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia. In the midst of the study and composition connected with this article, he was attacked by a severe illness, which con- fined him for a period of four months. It was an era in his history; the most important era of all. It was from it that he dated what was to him, and appears to us, the great fact of his life his conversion. Death had, of late, more than once passed by Chalmers, casting on him the pale glare of his eye; one after an- other of his brothers and sisters had been carried to the grave. At length the impartial foot seemed to be drawing near to his own threshold; he felt no coward fear, but, with an earnest calmness that he had not hitherto known, he began to think. Fear was no important agent in the mental revolution which ensued the state of mind indi- cated by Bunyan's Slough of Despond, he expressly says, he never experienced. His nature was of the nobler sort, which is drawn by a glimpse of heaven, and that a heaven of holiness, rather than by an unveiling of hell. He could not but discern that there had been something in the breasts of the early Christians which was not in his. Eternity, in its unmeasured vastness, enwrapped his mind ; time, seen against its burning radiance, seemed dream-like and filmy. The virtue of philosophy, he began profoundly to suspect, was not the holiness of God. The power of this virtue, too, to do much towards the regeneration of the THOMAS CHALMERS. 425 world, became questionable. His old friend Godwin, in discoursing of justice, had spoken thus: "A compre- hensive maxim which has been laid down upon the subject is, ' that we should love our neighbour as ourselves.' But this maxim, though possessing considerable merit as a popular principle, is not modelled with the strictness of philosophical accuracy." Chalmers hardly found this maxim, defective as it might be, conformed to in the parish of Kilmany ; all his appeals on the subject, in fact, had been received with imperturbable calmness; he had discerned no effect whatever from lectures, however im- passioned, on virtue and benevolence. In his own heart, and in his sphere of work, something seemed essentially wrong. And so there commenced a work in the privacy of his closet, which may, without any figure, be said to have resulted in the kindling of a new vital energy in the centre of his being. Its progress was gradual, but every step was taken irrevocably; its conclusion found Chalmers transformed from a historic into a vital Christian, from a philosophic into a Christian pastor. Christ had become to him all in all. We shall not intrude into the privacy of his closet while the great change is taking place. "We shall not attempt to trace the fading of old things into oblivion and death, and their gradual resurrection as all things become new in Christianity. We shall not venture to watch the soul in its pleadings with God, until, at last, that wonderful passage bears personal reference to Chal- mers, " the kingdom of God is within you." But we can- not forbear remarking the appearance of weakness which presents itself as we look into that closet. It recalls the " hysterical tears of a soldier like Cromwell," the " delu- sion," whose strength "scarcely any madhouse could equal," of Bunyan; there is not, certainly, such intensity 426 THOMAS CHALMERS. of feeling, but the sense of a divine presence and agency is the same. We hear him earnestly pleading for par- don, though his life has been most virtuous ; he calls him- self a sinner, though always respectable; he trembles, although surely God is good. His soul is prostrate. What can we hope for from the like of this? What advantage has it over the most "melancholy whimpering" of fanati- cism, of which Chalmers could once speak? May we not apprehend a total relaxation of energy, a total shrivelling of intellect? Time will answer the questions. Meanwhile one point of considerable moment may be remarked. It is before the Infinite God he stoops! It may be deemed pos- sible, that conscious alliance with the Infinite will not make him weak among the finite ; possibly, when he once feels that the eye of God is actually fixed on him, the light of all other eyes, whether in wrath or in applause, may grow dim; perhaps, when he lays down the philo- sophic armour in which he has trusted, he may go forth in the strength of weakness, mightier than before. "'Tis conscience," said Coleridge, "that makes cowards of us all, but oh! it is conscience, too, which makes heroes of us all." Times are changed in the manse and parish of Kilmany. The minister is changed, and many changes follow. One by one, the worldly aspirations that have fired the breast of Chalmers fade away; reluctantly but resolutely, the eye is averted from university honours; reluctantly but irreversibly, the determination is taken, and the mathema- tical volume closed. One great idea embraces his soul like an atmosphere, the glory of God; one great work lies before him, to manifest that glory in the good of man. His soul now gushes forth at all seasons in prayer: his aim with himself is no longer to preserve an unblemished walk before men, and to have the testimony of his heart THOMAS CHALMERS. 427 that he possesses the manly virtue of the schools ; his aim is tbe inward heaven of Christianity, the mental atmo- sphere that angels breathe, unsullied purity of thought and emotion in that inmost dwelling where hypocrisy cannot come: his aim with his people is no longer merely to re- press dishonesty, to promote sobriety, and produce respect- ability in general ; it is to turn them to righteousness, that they may be his joy and rejoicing in the day of the Lord, it is to array them in that robe, purer than seraphs' cloth- ing, in which not even the eye of God can find a stain, it is to lead them with him as a people into the light of God's countenance. His parishioners, meanwhile, are astonished. They see by " the glory in his eye " that some strange new light has dawned upon him. They sat listless while he descanted on the beauty of virtue, but they cannot sit unmoved while his heart glows within him, and his face seems suffused with a transfiguring radiance, as he unveils the beauty of holiness, and turns their eyes to the wonders of Infinite Love streaming through Jesus down upon the world. Nor can their apathy maintain itself, when he carries his ministrations into the domestic circle, and with burning earnestness presses home individually the offers and the appeals of the gospel. The parish of Kilmany glows with returning Christianity like the fields of opening summer. For it is no partial change that has come over Chalmers. Partial characteristics were never his; halfnesswent against the grain of his nature ; he had held all his beliefs firmly. And now, in the manhood of his powers, when the feeling was beginning slowly to permeate Scotland, that a man of mastering intellect had arisen in the land, after he had long and diligently walked in the path of this world, he was arrested as by a blaze of light from heaven, smitten awhile to 428 THOMAS CHALMERS. the ground, and then raised up a new man, a Christian. He had formerly known the God of the fatalist, and had bowed, in a certain ecstatic awe, before Him ; now he knew the God of the Christian, and believed Him to be love. He had never worshipped sinful self; now even righteous self was crucified. Ah ! it was a great day for Scotland when Chalmers, in all the might of his manhood, became vitally Christian. It was about this time, in August, 1812, that Chalmers married Miss Grace Pratt. Of his domestic concerns it is unnecessary to say more than that his home was one of deep and tranquil comfort, in all embarrassment, toil, and opposition, a sanctuary of inviolable repose. But his fame has been extending; the news that some mysterious change has passed over the minister of Kilmany has thrilled electrically over Scotland. Such oratory has not been heard in these parts in the memory of man. It speedily becomes known that one of the greatest preachers in the Church of Scotland ministers weekly in a sequestered valley near the estuary of the Tay. A feeling of deep gladness begins to pervade the evange- lical party, as the new leader, strong and indomitable as a youthful Hannibal, steps forward to take the command. And hark, from the respectable, soft-going, moderately- religious ministers, what voice is that ? " As for Chalmers, he is mad!" What a piece of testimony is here! How decisive, how comforting ! " Paul, thou art beside thyself." This fortuitous sneer about madness is not void of sug- gestive meaning. Look at the great workers and warriors, the great thinkers and governors, all who have been of the kings of the earth: does not their power, in one universal aspect of it, admit of definition thus A force as of mad- ness in the hand of reason ? In our age, we find two men THOMAS CHALMERS. 429 who pointedly suggest this combination: Thomas Chal- mers, and, perhaps still more forcibly, Thomas Carlyle. But the sequestered Fifeshire valley cannot retain Scot- land's greatest preacher. The Tron Church in Glasgow becomes vacant; and after a sharp contest, in which he is pitted against Principal Macfarlane, Chalmers is appointed its minister. Calmly balancing arguments, he concludes that the hand of .God is in the arrangement, and that it is his duty to go; but he is well aware that he leaves tran- quillity for turmoil, the trust and tenderness of personal friendship for the din and vacancy of public station and applause; he, bids adieu to his. quiet valley and its 150 families with deep and honest sadness. "Oh!" he said, long afterwards, "there was more tearing of the heart- strings at leaving the valley of Kilmany, than at leaving all my great parish of Glasgow." It was some time after quitting Kilmany, that Chalmers, in an address to his former parishioners, bore that emphatic and weighty testimony to the power of evangelical Chris- tianity as a moral agency, which has been so often quoted and referred to. He distinctly declared that his preaching of mere virtue had been absolutely powerless; but that the proclamation of God's love in Christ Jesus was at once mighty. We accept his words as an additional and im- portant attestation, that the simple truths of the gospel of Jesus are gifted with a power to lay hold upon and impress healthy and unsophisticated intellects, which belongs to no moral or philosophical dogmas. In Chalmers, Christianity was seen in its ancient freshness, beauty, and power; and in our century he found its might to purify the hearts and lives of men, to breathe moral health over a people, to radiate light around, as prevailing as when the star led the way to Bethlehem. He was, and any man like him will 430 THOMAS CHALMERS. be, a centre of beneficent influence. Such talents as his must ever continue rare ; but think what were the effect to be looked for from a pastorate, whose members all re- sembled him in the single but paramount circumstance of his godliness. Imagine the land sown with pastors kindled as by divine fire with that ambition which God, in a pro- mise unspeakably glorious, has appointed for them: " They that turn many to righteousness shall shine as the stars for ever and ever." We will maintain that it lies within the discernible and traceable power of a truly Christian ministry, to shed over our land a brightness as of the re- surrection morning. The nation would live anew; the golden day would break ; the baleful forms and influences of crime would be smitten ; and infidels, as they saw the serpents which now cast their deadly coils round the limbs of the nation, writhing, with dazed eyes and relaxing hold, in the overpowering light, would be astonished and silenced. From the time of his settlement in the west may be dated the commencement of that intellectual kingship which Chalmers can be said to have long exercised over the great body of the Scottish nation. He now steps forth into that arena where are the severest tests of great- ness. He becomes the cynosure of a city and people; he reads applause in every eye; he hears it from every tongue. Now is the time to know what he really is. Does Chalmers in elevation seem in his natural sta- tion and atmosphere? Does he, amid noise and pretence, lose the power of distinguishing and prizing real work? Can he gauge and measure fame, and put it to its uses like any other dispensation of God? Can he distinguish be- tween adulation streaming in from all the winds, and which, in all its varieties, is either mere vacant sound or selfish- ness set to music, from the still but immortal voice of THOMAS CHALMERS. 431 friendship? Does he give indications of an unsettled, weakly enthusiastic, or fanatical mind? Are his air and attitude those of one who has drugged his intellect with an " opiate delusion," and rushes wildly and vaguely on, with haste for energy, and vociferous dogmatism for thought? These are fair and important questions; the answers will gradually unfold themselves. No sooner do we find him fairly in the midst of the tumult and glare of his Glasgow popularity, no sooner do we perceive his words swaying the minds of thousands, his house the centre of admiring throngs, his fame a theme and topic in the city, than we are arrested by an instance of retired and tender affection. There is a member of his congregation, aged twenty. The delicacy and beauty of his thoughts, the purity of his aspirations, the general nobleness of his nature, draw towards him the heart of Chalmers. There springs up between them a close, con- fiding, boy-like friendship; tender and impassioned as any friendship of romance, yet cemented by the holier sym- pathy of Christian love. Their " loves in higher love en- dure ; " to endure for ever. We cannot but deem it a strange spectacle in our hard-working century, where ideals are so few; Chalmers, the most renowned preacher, perhaps in the world, and certainly in Scotland, walking by the side of his boy-parishioner, and pouring out his heart in all the endearments of a soft, almost womanly affection. If you would thoroughly know the man, look long upon that spectacle. The trumpeting of fame brings no com- fort to him, he permits it to die away in the far distance; but now he finds one heart where pure love dwells, he knows that this at least is real, he folds his friend to his breast in an ecstacy of fondness, he walks by his side under the blue sky, listening to his voice, in deep serene 432 THOMAS CHALMERS. delight, as to a strain of spiritual music. Or look into his closet, and see the friends on their knees before God, the fiery Chalmers and the mild Thomas Smith, to whom his heart is soft as a fountain. Smith gradually faded away in a consumption; often, with tear- ful eye, did his pastor bend over his bed, or kneel by its side ; and when, at last, he lay in death's pallor, the strong, manly face of Chalmers was bathed in uncontrollable tears. From of old it has been known, that valour and tender- ness form the noblest and most beautiful union ; the lion heart and strength, guided by maiden gentleness ; perhaps all the true and brave are tender. We feel this simple story of his friendship for Thomas Smith bring us into closer knowledge, and, as it were, contact with the heart and nature of Chalmers, than would the mere record of his fame, if echoed through centuries. It was in the close of the year 1815, that his renown in Glasgow culminated. He then delivered his famed Astrono- mical Discourses. They were preached on week-days, yet the audience crowded the church. There was a reading- room opposite the edifice: during the time of delivery it stood vacant; the merchant and the politician pouring out, to hang breathless on the lips of Chalmers. His style was now fully formed, and was, in many respects, extraordinary ; perfectly dissimilar from any other English style, unallied in diction and cadence to any foreign language, it was the native growth of his mind, an original birth of genius. And whatever minor or particular exceptions may be taken to that style, we cannot regard it as a matter open to dispute, that it is possessed of marvellous power and grandeur. Massive and gorgeous, expressive, often graphic, yet with a certain billowy regularity of sen- tence and rolling cadence of rhythm, it was in the hand THOMAS CHALMERS. 433 of its own magician a really mighty weapon. Exube- rant to what in written composition seems diffuseness, it might, if used by a weakling, sound like bombast; but its exuberance is that of tropic woods, and ocean waves, and rainbowed cataracts, the teeming and varied opulence of a mind of boundless sympathy, the grand luxuriance of nature ; and when the curbless intensity of the preacher's fire burned in its every word, when the glittering eye, and glowing features, and fiery gesticulation, proved that even its abundance sufficed not to body forth the earnestness of Chalmers, all thought of bombast or diffuseness fled, and the effect was tremendous. The true power of the orator was his; he could subject men not merely to his reason but to his will. The witnesses to the effect of his elo- quence are so numerous and explicit, that doubt is no longer possible on the subject. When the thunder was at its height, when his eye blazed with that strange watery gleam of which we hear, men involuntarily moved their bodies, and, though in postures which would ordinarily occasion pain, were unconscious of a sensation ; when there was a pause, a sigh arose from the congregation ; strong men, even learned men, wept. We may form some conception of the impression made by these Discourses, when even now we consider their general tenor. The theme, whatever may be said con- cerning its argumentative value or treatment, is su- blime ; it is handled, too, precisely in the way to give it power in the pulpit; every point is brought out with such boldness, that no eye can fail to see it; there is no wire- drawing, no soft murmuring, no delicate pencilling, no easy meandering ; each vast wave comes rolling on, fringed with its own gorgeous foam, and echoing its own thunder. If we consent to place ourselves under the wizard eye 2f 434 THOMAS CHALMERS. of the orator, if at one moment we mark its rapt and fiery gleam, as if lit in sympathy with those seraph eyes which it saw looking from the empyrean ; if, at another, we watch the deeper softness of its azure glow, while it seems to gaze on Mercy unfolding her wings; and if we surrender ourselves to the combination of influences, as voice, fea- tures, and subject, are all at last in climax, it will surely be no longer impossible to conceive the effect, when the ocean billow, after long gathering, broke. An elaborate and detailed criticism of these sermons is now superfluous. Many objections have been taken to their logic; and Foster stands, doubtless, not alone, in objecting to their style. For our own part, we confess that our admiration is intense. They appear to us to have the true poetic glow; that fusing, uniting fire burns over them, whose gleam compels you to drop your measur- ing line or gauging apparatus, and utter the word genius. To accompany the preacher in his high flight, seems to us like sailing with that archangel whom Richter, in his dream, saw bearing the mortal through the endless choirs and galaxies of immensity ; only that here we do not trem- ble and cry out at the overpowering spectacle of God's infinitude, for the softening light of the Cross falls continu- ally around us. And, after all we have heard, the logic of these marvellous Discourses is to us satisfactory. It has been said that the argument against which they are levelled is weak and obsolete. We suspect it is neither; save in a sense applying to infidel arguments in general. Walking in a still autumn night in the country, by the faintly rust- ling corn-field or the lonely wood, and gazing upward to the illimitable vault, where the stars in their courses walk silent and beautiful, and where the milky-way, with its myriad worlds, lies along the purple of night like a breath THOMAS CHALMERS. 435 of God's nostrils, is it unnatural for the human being to say, Can the Son of the Almighty have come to die for atoms sueh as I, in such an atom as is this world of ours? If such a thought is powerless with many minds, we sus- pect it is very forcible with others: we know it is so with some. And after calm reflection, what do we finally ar- rive at in the case, as the seemly and reasonable attitude of him who is a feeble and puny denizen of earth, yet a spirit of thought and immortality? It appears to be two- fold. Looking towards the stars, it is seemly for him to bow his head in lowliness and gratitude, and say, with the monarch minstrel, " What is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou regardest him?" But then, looking to the corn God has raised to nourish him, the animals over which God has made him king, the fair world He has from of old prepared for him, the still princely retinue or army of faculties he has given him, to master it and to count the stars, he may turn with reasonable and faithful joy to the Son of David, and listen to Him as he says, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" This seems the true attitude. This last is the satisfactory answer to the infidel argument, and it is this answer which Chalmers, with all the force lent it by modern science, re-enunciated. The telescope may keep men humble, but it cannot crush him into insignificance ; the microscope shows ever how the world of littleness stretches away, as if to infinitude, under his feet. And if the might of Omnipotence can arrange, in their un- 436 THOMAS CHALMERS. speakable delicacy, the tendrils of the corals in the depths of ocean, and bring to maturity colonies and nations, in all the animation of their life and the glow of their costume, within the bosom of a flower, and reach a perfection of beauty, after which art toils at what may be called an in- finite distance, in the rainbow He hangs in every mountain brook, will He not wipe away a stain as if from His own forehead, will He not humble His great adversary on a territory he hoped he had won, will He not amend the one imperfection in the world sin? And is it not in consist- ence with the glory of His name, that, thus to vindicate Himself, He has made a display of mercy and condescen- sion at which heaven and earth may stand agaze ? Chalmers had now fairly reached the pinnacle of Scot- tish renown. The heart of the populace throbbed respon- sively to his eloquence; and from perhaps the highest per- sonal authority then in Scotland, from Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review, it received this testimony: "I know not what it is, but there is something altogether remark- able about that man. It reminds me more of what one reads of as the effect of the eloquence of Demosthenes, than anything I ever heard." And now, when his Astronomical Discourses had, with far-reaching trumpet-flourish, heralded his approach, he proceeded to London. % On the day after his arrival in the metropolis, he preached in Surrey Chapel. The service began at eleven ; at seven in the morning the place was filled. At length Chalmers ascends the pulpit, and all eyes are centred there. The sermon commences. The face of the preacher has a cer- tain heavy look, over its pale, rough-hewn, leonine linea- ments ; his eyelids droop slightly, and his eyes have something at once dreamy and sad in their expression ; his THOMAS CHALMERS. 437 voice is thin, somewhat broken, unimpressive; his tone may be called drawling, and his dialect is broadly, almost unintelligibly provincial. The London audience sits cool and business-like, not given to tumultuous emotion, and accustomed to moral essays ; eye meets eye in half-disap- pointed surmise. But look, Chalmers is beginning to move; he gradually works himself into the heart of his subject; his voice is becoming loud, rich, impassioned: the Londoners sit still unmoved, but now no eyes are wander- ing; the preacher warms, the latent heat within is begin- ning to be evolved; he curbs his spirit sternly, but it will bear him away: his auditors are silent, a consciousness of some strange enchaining power begins to pervade the place, but the light in the thousand eyes fixed on Chalmers is still in great measure that of criticism; the Londoners still know where they are: the orator warms swiftly to white heat; his face is radiant with earnestness; the dis- tending eyeball swims; at last the fire within lights in it that wondrous watery gleam which tells that the spirit of Chalmers is in the last passion and agony of its might: his audience have forgotten where they sit; they bend forward in simultaneous assent to his every para- graph; he has chained them to the chariot-wheels of his eloquence. Report of the new wonder flies over London. Fashion hears of him in her glittering saloons ; senators and peers speak of him in their halls and cabinets. The highest and gayest in the land crowd to hear him. " All the world," writes Wilberforce, in his journal, " wild about Chalmers." Chancellors and lords desire to be introduced to him; the lord mayor visits him ; mighty London seems to do him homage. The spectacle is strange ; the test the man has to stand 438 THOMAS CHALMERS. is searching. From the still and sequestered vale of Kil- many, he has ascended to the highest summit of contem- porary fame. He was all unregarded in his quiet parish; he has now the great ones of the earth becking and ap- plauding round him; there is a shout in his ears as if he were more than human. Let us not fail to perceive the danger and difficulty of his situation. The assenting voice of one fellow-creature has been said by one of the -best of judges to " strengthen even infinitely" any opinion a man may have formed, and a flattering opinion of one's-self is so easy to -strengthen; amid the vociferous plaudits of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, to retain one's self- estimate, undiminished, unmagnified, unwavering, is diffi- cult indeed. And how many, even of the powerfully- minded, have failed, when popular applause, that sun whose stroke so often is madness, has centred its rays upon them. Edward Irving was no ordinary man ; yet he who, in his noble and beautiful eulogium on this " freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul" he ever met, bears wit- ness to his force and healthiness, tells us also that he swallowed the intoxicating poison of fame, and had not " force of natural health " to cast it out. Edinburgh cele- brity contributed largely to the ruin of Burns; applause, every one knows, inflated and befooled Rousseau ; Byron, unconscious perhaps of the fact, and in words scornfully denying it, was really the slave of fame we might almost say, of mode; and to what length might we not extend the list ? We remember a masterly touch in Ovid's descrip- tion of Phaeton, and his unhappy ride. The chariot has just reached the zenith. Hitherto the aspiring driver has kept a tight rein, better or worse, with fair success. But now he looks from his imperial station on the vast round of the earth; its oceans, its forests, its mountains, its cities, THOMAS CHALMERS. 439 are outspread below him; all seem to gaze towards him, and drink glory from his eye. He cannot endure it ; his brain reels, his eye swims, the weight of his office op- presses his individuality, the fire- snorting coursers drag the reins from his relaxing hand, and tear away after their own mad will. The man who can see the world gazing at him unmoved, is the man intended by nature to be gazed at ! Chalmers triumphantly bears the test. Let the world say what it will, he knows he is just Chalmers of Kilmany, neither more nor less one whose power, be it what it may, neither inflates nor collapses in the popular gale. All who approach him find him simple, unassuming, devout. Nay, his instinct of reality is rather offended than other- wise; his heart whispers that much of this tumult is mere vocal vacancy. As principalities and powers cluster round him, he stands quiet and self-possessed, unabashed, un- astonished, unalarmed ; his greatness has its source within. No man could more thoroughly weigh popular acclaim, and more firmly pronounce it wanting; beautiful ardours and rapturous admirations would have been somewhat damped in London, had his ultimate definition of such matters been, by any chance, heard " the hosannahs of a drivelling generation !" We must add one other remark ere accompanying Chal- mers back to Scotland. There was a day when he spoke of "literary distinction" as his "pride and consolation;" there was a day when this London notoriety would have appeared almost sublime. Is it unfair to suppose that the light of that Eye which, though invisible, he now seems ever to see resting on him, has shed an equalising radiance over chancellors and peasants, and made sublunary appro- bation a matter of quite secondary moment? Returning to Glasgow, his popularity continues at the 440 THOMAS CHALMERS. same unprecedented height as before ; his study becomes a presence-chamber for guests of all ranks and from all quarters. But it is never through the general eye that you can really see Chalmers ; it is when you mark him unbosom- ing himself, in tender artless affection, to his sister Jane, or warming the hearts of all around him by his hearty genia- lity and rough sagacity, or turning from the despised " popularity of stare, and pressure, and animal heat," to look for any plant which the Lord of the vineyard has honoured him by using his hand in planting. Of this last we have an instance which is too beautiful and of too profound significance to be omitted ; he who cannot read in it the true nature and the intrinsic nobleness of Chal- mers can interpret no biographic trait whatever. A gentle- man named Wright, an intimate acquaintance, meets him one day in company. Usually the centre of cheerfulness and pleasure, he is to-day downcast and heavy. Mr Wright happening to walk with him on the way home ventures to in- quire whether he is ill. He is well enough, but must con- fess he is not at rest. His heart is grieved. " It is a mat- ter," he says, " that presses very grievously upon me. In short, the truth is, I have mistaken the way of my duty to God, in at all coming to your city. I am doing no good. God has not blessed, and is not blessing my ministry here." He remembers Kilmany and its 150 families; he thinks how sure and how beautiful the work of God was there ; he has exchanged his earnest ministrations from house to house, for inevitable and perpetual visits of ceremony or entertainment, his parish church, filled with devout and humble hearers, for a mixed and staring throng, many of whose members come to see the preacher. It is like going from reality, which he loves as his heart's blood, to hollow- ness and pretence, which he hates with ingrained and im- THOMAS CHALMERS. 441 measurable hatred. His heart sinks at the idea that in his hands the work of a Christian pastor should degenerate into emotional excitement or literary admiration ; that his portion is to be mere earthly renown, instead of the glory of having turned even one to righteousness. His eye is where a Christian pastor's should be; fame, adulation, popularity, will, he knows, be shrivelled up in the first breath of eternity, while an immortal soul, saved by his means, will be a gem in a crown eternally brightening. In friendly simplicity and greatness of heart, seeking the relief which every noble nature finds in sympathy, he re- veals his sorrow to his friend. And lo! he finds in his answer a solace which he little expects. Mr Wright details to him a case in which he knows the ministry of Chalmers to have been effectual in rousing a soul to deep personal godliness, in making it flee to Christ for salva- tion. " Ah," exclaims his delighted and grateful listener, " ah, Mr Wright, what blessed, what comforting news you give me; for really I was beginning to fail, from an appre- hension that I had not been acting according to the will of God in coming to your city." We have still, however, to contemplate Chalmers in his principal aspect as a force and influence among men. That which, in our estimation, gives to his career its highest grandeur, and ranks him with the great ones of time, is the tremendous power with which he grasped one vast idea; the idea of Christianity in application to national existence, of the Christianisation of the state. To use his own magnificent words, the aim of his life was to nurse the empire to Christianity. It is fine to see, as it were, his great heart throbbing with this sublime conception; to mark how his enthusiasm always gushes out afresh as it comes before him; to listen to the incidental tones of lyric 442 THOMAS CHALMERS. rapture which break from his lips, when the light of the mighty thought, as of the coming Christian morning, strikes along his brow. This is the idea which makes the life of Chalmers epic. The nineteenth century is marked by the triumphant march of science on the one hand, and by the awakening of the peoples on the other. Banners innume- rable have been unfolded as banners of national salvation ; there has been the cloudy ensign of transcendentalism; there has been the standard of mere science and political philo- sophy, with its meagre diagrams and cold metallic lustre ; there has been the black flag of atheism ; Chalmers, with the gait of a champion, stepped forward with the ancient banner, the old legend still burning on its massive folds as in letters of golden fire, "In Christ conquer!" Round that banner, in the age of science and democracy, he called us to rally, and told how the fight would go. But it was not only the dauntless valour and tireless perseverance with which he proclaimed that Christian- ity alone can save the nations, which distinguished him. These might have characterised a very inferior man. It was his clear perception of the position in which Chris- tianity now stands to peoples, it was his essential agree- ment in the axioms on which he proceeded, with the soundest and greatest intellects of this and all ages, it was his statesmanlike comprehension of the main outlines of the method by which Christianity is to be applied to na- tional life, that stamped him as the highest practical Chris- tian thinker of his age. Of an intellectual power which en- abled him to sum and master the lessons science has taught, and the means science has provided, for the amelioration of the community, he was able to discern what was the place Christianity was to occupy in relation to these. Agreeing with all the master intellects among men, that it is only by THOMAS CHALMERS. 443 the inspiration of moral life into a nation that its physical life can prosper, and differing from Mr Carlyle only in that he deemed the one source of moral life a personal God, and the grand instrument of moral life the religion of Jesus, he yet did not turn with contemptuous indignation from the advocates of special scientific methods; he took the differ- ent plan of supplementing their deficiency, of speaking the truth without which their systems were dead. He did not, with indignant stamp of his foot, shake to pieces as worthless the mechanism of science ; he said it was an in- valuable, an indispensable mechanism; but he brought a coal kindled in heaven to put it in motion, to inspire it with life, and spread over it a new and glorious light. In language of glowing poetry, he represents Christianity visiting earth from the celestial realms, her first and all- embracing object to bring to men treasures of immortal joy, yet, by a sublime necessity, scattering beatitude in the paths of mortal life. With the ancient heroic devotion, he toiled for the realisation of his idea; no old crusader or mediaeval king strove more valiantly in faith or in patriot- ism, than he to be the Christian divine demanded by the nineteenth century. If it is the harmonising, concentrat- ing might of one great idea pervading a character and life, which are recognised as imparting to these an epic great- ness, surely we can affirm such of the life and character of Chalmers. Descending to the practical application of his one life- effort, we find that it admits of easy and clear definition. With the glance of one who sees before and after, far along the centuries past and future, his high aim was, by one gigantic impulse, to raise the Church of his country to what the nation and the age required. Town and country he would divide into manageable parishes ; the Presbyterian 444 THOMAS CHALMERS. mechanism of the kirk session he would bring to hear with its innate power and intimacy; over all would preside a set of godly and energetic pastors, who would superintend and vitalise the whole. Thus, in a thousand streams, the very water of life would circulate through the veins of the nation. A personal intimacy and friendship would bind pastor to peasant, rank to rank ; " the golden chain of life" would be unbroken, and it would be none the less beautiful, binding, or pleasant, that it was anchored within the veil. Over the land there would pass the breath of a moral renovation ; every other renovation would follow in benign and natural sequence ; it would look to heaven with one broad smile of peace and contentment, like the face of a strong man awakening to health after long sickness. His method of carrying out his plans in his own parish, the example he offered to the pastors of Scotland and the world of their efficacy, was perhaps the most triumphant portion of his whole acting in the matter. Here it is im- portant to note him; new discoveries of his intellectual energy and his moral worth dawn on us at every step. We saw formerly that, in the meeting of all the winds of fame, he could preserve unfluttered his self-estimate, and work as calmly as in quiet Kilmany. He could stand alone. We learn now that he can draw others around him, work with them, and teach them to work. Here it is that the true kingly talent comes out. He knows the genuine worker, he attracts him towards himself, he strikes into him new fire; he can light a sympathetic flame in the bosom of each with whom he acts, so that he becomes a miniature of himself. Everything yields to his contagious energy; the very Town Council of Glasgow assent to his views; his subordinates follow him as the carriages follow the steam-engine. Chancellors and duchesses, and the THOMAS CHALMERS. 445 tumult of crowds encircling Chalmers, might be gadflies round a mere gaudy sunflower: but we cannot be deceived here. Look upon him in the heart of Glasgow, as he dives into noisome vennels, or feels his way up dark wind- ing stairs, seeking out destitution, seeing the fact in its own nakedness, looking his foe in the face, and bringing to smite it that one weapon he bears, the sword of the Spirit. Then you see Chalmers. And his great experi- ment prevails: Christianity, with Chalmers and the kirk session he directs as its instruments, is found to meet every social want in the populous and difficult parish of St John's. It is well known that Chalmers was during his whole life an implacable enemy of the English poor-law. We are compelled to omit a detailed review of his opinions and projects in connection with the subject; but we shall be able, in narrow compass, to exhibit the fundamental prin- ciple on which he proceeded, and the method in which he believed it possible, by the aid of vital Christianity, to dis- pense altogether with such an institution. In his fundamental proposition, That a poor-law endan- gered the feeling of independence, and consequently the mo- rality of a people, by converting the petition for an alms into the demand of a right, he has been agreed with by men of the most directly opposed character and opinions, and of the highest intellectual powers. The acknowledged master in the schools of political economy, David Ricardo, records his emphatic opinion to this effect ; his shrewd and cool-headed disciple, M'Culloch, pronounces the poor-laws "essen- tially injurious" an opinion, by the way, which renders to us absolutely astonishing his estimate of the efforts made by Chalmers against them. At the distance of a hemisphere, both in thought and sentiment, from these men they, as it were, in polar cold and bareness, he in tropic 446 THOMAS CHALMERS. thunder and luxuriance Mr Carlyle has expressed the same opinion. Whether these authors have been quite correct or no, we say not ; Dr Alison adduces a fact or two which tell strangely in an opposite direction; what we wish to be noted is, that Chalmers here stood by no means alone, that his belief on the point has been treated as an axiom by such thinkers as Ricardo and Carlyle. He de- clared that the only sound and safe method was that of nature; and he pronounced Christianity able to hold up the hands of nature, and strengthen her to attain the desired end in her own fair and salutary manner. To the argument, that the support of the poor, if left to voluntary effort, would fall entirely on the benevolent few, he replied, that, if things were properly managed, every parish would be able, without strain or inconvenience, to support its own poor; he might have added (perhaps, though we do not remember meeting the remark in his writings, he has added), that Christianity makes it a privilege to stretch out the hand of charity, and that this act of the benevolent may be intended as a continual rebuke of the world's self- ishness and protest against it. To the assertion that bene- volence could not be depended upon, he replied, that he trusted to no fortuitous impulse, but to known principles of human nature, the desire to rise, the sympathy of friends, and the unfailing bounty of at least a chosen few. The machinery he provided is thus described in his own words: " We divided the parish into twenty-five parts; and, having succeeded in obtaining as many deacons, we assigned one part to each thus placing under his manage- ment towards fifty families, or at an average about four hundred of a gross population. We constructed also a familiar or brief directory, which we put into their hands. It laid down the procedure which should be observed on THOMAS CHALMERS. 447 every application that was made for relief. It was our perfect determination that every applicant of ours should be at least as well off as he would have been in any other parish of Glasgow, had his circumstances there been as well known so that, surrounded though we were by hostile and vigilant observers, no case of scandalous allowance, or still less of scandalous neglect, was ever made out against us. The only distinction between us and our neighbours lay in this -that these circumstances were by us most thoroughly scrutinised, and that with the view of being thoroughly ascertained ^and that very generally, in the progress of the investigation, we came in sight of opportunities or openings for some one or other of those preventive expe- dients by which any act of public charity was made all the less necessary, or very often superseded altogether." Here there is really nothing Utopian ; rather is there a delibe- rate and accurate calculation of means, measuring of re- sistance, and mastering of details. With so many inspec- tors, it is difficult to see how destitution could be over- looked; with so many to scrutinise and investigate, it can hardly be conceived that any natural channel of relief, by the obtaining of work or of assistance from relatives, could be unnoticed ; with so many to inform and appeal, it would be no easy matter for benevolence to fall asleep. And then, as we have said, he proved it; amid difficulty, ob- struction, and without putting out all his force, he suc- ceeded to the full; every objection and sneer was at last silenced, save one. And if all men despaired of the power of Christianity to heal and beautify the nation, was it not right, and noble, and valiant, that Chalmers should not do so ? His belief was no empty sound, no half- hypocrisy. The religion of Jesus, he said, has all its ancient power ; for the mechanic dispensings 448 THOMAS CHALMERS. of a great lifeless reservoir, walled in by the state, it can give the sweet watering of nature's gentle rain; where Law can but order relief with her iron tongue, it can set Pity by the bed of national weakness, to hallow the ministries of Mercy by their own native smile. There was a great fund of hope and valour in his breast; he would not despair of the commonwealth; he would not sit slothfully down in what was at best a mere negation of evil, and whose occupancy deferred the really good. The worst you can say of him here, is actually and without paradox the best which could be said; for it is that which is to be said of all the noblest of the sons of men, and which is the crown of their noble- ness; namely, that they looked forward to a brightened future, as that in which it would be good, and, as it were, natural, for them to live and expatiate, that they seemed to be messengers sent before to herald a better time, and that the mode in which they delivered their unconscious pro- phecy was a summons, burning with earnestness and hope, to all men to arise and inaugurate the new era now. Chalmers could not find his rest in " The round Of smooth and solemnised complacencies, By which, in Christian lands, from age to age, Profession mocks performance." He dared the original attempt to infuse the spirit of Chris- tianity, like vital sap, into the national frame, he aspired to shake off from the Christian peoples that mournful sleep of custom, of routine, of worldliness which has ever, with gradual, but hitherto irresistible influence, closed the national eye, that seemed erewhile to be opened wide and kindled with empyreal fire. This is the heroic aspect of his life; his endless battle against mere respectability and commonplace; his valiant and life-long endeavour to set THOMAS CHALMERS. 449 Christianity on the throne and in the heart of the nation. He is the modern Christian ; shutting his eye to nothing, acquainted with every contemporary agency, but declaring that Christianity is still able to marshal every force, and meet every requirement in social existence. And we need not say that he here pointed the way in all reform which can be regarded with perfect satisfaction and unfaltering hope; if he failed, we must just raise the same banner, and, with somewhat of his ardour, still calmly and dauntlessly exclaim, Excelsior: the life of Chalmers was a proclama- tion of the world's last hope. And in at least the special forms in which he himself had striven to reanimate the nation with Christian life, he did fail. For long years he travelled, and wrote, and argued for church extension ; year after year, he looked to every quarter of the heavens, if perchance a gleam of hope against pauperism might cheer his eye. But the day of his life drew on to a close, and the work was yet to do. Then he withdrew into his closet, and in silent heaviness of heart penned the following words; we find them in Dr Hanna's last volume: " Sabbath, December 12, 1841. The passage respecting Babel should not be without a humble and wholesome effect upon my spirit. I have been set on the erection of my Babel on the establishment of at least two great objects, which, however right in themselves, become the mere objects of a fond and proud imagination, in as far as they are not prosecuted with a feeling of dependence upon God, and a supreme desire after his glory. These two objects are the deliverance of our empire from pauperism, and the establishment of an adequate machinery for the Christian and general instruction of our whole population. I am sure that, in the advancement of these, I have not 2 a 450 THOMAS CHALMERS. taken God enough along with me, and trusted more to my own arguments and combinations among my fellows, than to prayers. There has been no confounding of tongues to prevent a common understanding, so indispens- able to that co-operation, without which there can be no success, but without this miracle my views have been marvellously impeded by a diversity of opinions, as great as if it had been brought on by a diversity of language. The barriers in the way of access to other men's minds have been as obstinate and unyielding as if I had spoken to them in foreign speech; and, though I cannot resign my convictions, I must now and surely it is good to be so taught I must now, under the experimental sense of my own helplessness, acknowledge, with all humility, yet with hope, in the efficacy of a blessing from on high still in reserve for the day of God's own appointed time, that except 4 the Lord build the house, the builders build in vain.'" The spectacle of Chalmers, as he pens these lines, is as- suredly the most sublime afforded by his life. The very health and tenderness of childhood are in the heart of the old warrior ; he brings his sword, and lays it down at eventide, willing, even with tears, to acknowledge that it is because of the weakness of his arm, and the faithlessness of his heart, that the enemy has not been vanquished. The light in the face of Arnold, too, we found to shine more brightly as he was about to enter the valley of death. Of the causes of this ultimate failure, which, however, might be a failure more in appearance than reality, it is unnecessary to say much. If there was any great supplement to be made to the general system of Chalmers's thought and opinion, it was an adequate sense, on the one hand, of the difficulty of his THOMAS CHALMERS. 451 enterprise, and, on the other, of the chief and indispensable means by which it could be accomplished ; on the one hand of the impotence of machinery, and on the other of the extreme rarity and inestimable worth of true and mighty men. It is an invisible force that is wanted rather than wheel-work; the latter will be provided with comparative ease ; the most elaborate machinery ,without this living force, may hang vacant in the winds, like a rattling skeleton where once was the throb of life and the flush of health. The Church-state of Arnold kings and senators teaching wis- dom and doing the bidding of God, the powers of evil aghast at the new vision of Christian unity and love the manage- able parishes, and country studded with churches, of Chal- mers: alas! we must cast a questioning, or at least a warn- ing glance towards all such schemes. The universal Church, that looks so fair in the distance, of which all the formerly separate churches are but pillars, all within whose walls are true Christians, all without whose Walls are Pagans; can we look long at the imposing structure without seeing, as if emerging from beneath its crumbling battlements, a great whited sepulchre, uniform as death? A country filled with clergymen, a church in every street, a parish in every valley: must we not here also proclaim that danger impends? In our crossgrained world, every good thing has a counterfeit which is doubly evil: self-respect, recognised as indispensable to completeness of character, is aped by impudence and conceit; politeness, one of na- ture's fairest and costliest flowers, which can grow only in a rich and kindly soil is mimicked by etiquette, a very gumflower ; sanctity, the attribute of the sons of the morn- ing, may, by human eyes, be confounded with sanctimo- niousness spurned of devils. And it is a well-known law, that the nobler the thing is, the baser is its counterfeit. 452 THOMAS CHALMERS. A hypocritic smile, a traitorous kiss, are far worse than a scowl of honest hate or a stab of open vengeance. If, then, as we assuredly believe, a godly minister is an angel of light, a godless pastor is a very angel of darkness. Be- tween the real Christian pastor, whose worth cannot be summed, and the indolent, greedy, black-coated lounger, who burdens with his maintenance, and blights by his ex- ample, who is a continual living profanation of what is holiest, there is but an invisible difference. Get your men, and all is got. A Brainerd finds himself a congregation among North American Indians, a Schwartz among the swamps and fevers of the Carnatic, but churches will not by any natural necessity attract ministers. This immove- able fact we must always take along with us. Chalmers, no doubt, knew it, and it will ultimately, as seems pro- bable, be found that it was by acting on individual men over the country that his influence was most powerful: but he did not grasp it in all its mighty import, and make it consciously and avowedly the basis of his operations: one man alone has proclaimed this doctrine in all the em- phasis which is its due Thomas Carlyle. Ah ! what a prospect might we have had now, had Carlyle and Chal- mers toiled side by side in the Church of Scotland. Let us not, however, deem that we shall be sinless, if we neglect the truth to which the former has called our at- tention. After four years' incumbency in the parish of St John's, Chalmers removed, in November, 1823, to St Andrews, to fill the chair of Moral Philosophy in the university there. His main reason for quitting Glasgow deserves notice. His experiment in the parish of St John's silenced, as we said, all objections but one. This one was the determined asser- tion that the whole success was due to the eloquence and THOMAS CHALMERS. 453 energy,in oneword,to the individual character, of Chalmers. It is fine to see how this galls him. He exclaims against the " nauseous eulogies" which would turn into an empty compliment to him the demonstration of the power of Chris- tianity. But it is vain to argue: the one reply they make to every appeal is, St John's parish is worked by Chal- mers. What can be done? The following are his own words:- "There was obviously no method by which to disabuse them of this strange impression, but by turning my back on the whole concern ; and thus testing the inher- ent soundness and efficacy of the system, by leaving it in other hands." And so he goes to St Andrews; let the cause prosper whatever may become of him ! Like him- self again. In 1 828, he is inaugurated as Professor of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh, an office he continues to fill until within a few years of his death. Over his students he exercises the same powerful and benign influence which he has shed on all who have come within his sphere. His prelections tend to produce godly and ardent pastors, rather than nice controversialists; he is, though not so named, the greatest among professors of Pastoral Theology; his spirit goes over Scotland incarnated in young, vigorous, aggressive Christian ministers. We now approach that epoch in the life of Chalmers, during which, for the last time, he was to act a great and prominent part before the eyes of men. Within the circle of his sympathies and the ken of his powers, he had embraced all the leading interests of the empire; with a gigantic and hallowed energy, he had striven to reani- mate them by an inspiration of divine fire. And with a certain hopefulness, which, though damped by opposition, could not altogether die, he had ever looked to the provi- 454 THOMAS CHALMERS. sions and mechanism of that Scottish Church which he loved with the double affection of patriotism and pride. Whether it came of the substantial and practical nature of his intellect, or whether it arose from his deep loyalty and conservative tendencies, we shall not say, but the fact is certain, that he was a decided and inflexible advocate of religious establishments. But, with the views of a states- man, he was also a divine. Never for a moment did he conceive the unchristian idea that it was State support which gave existence or power to a Church. The doctrine of the distinct existence of the Church of Christ he grasped with all the firmness of his strong powers, and discerned with all their clearness; whatever his faith in the efficacy of Christianity, it was in a Christianity not the bondslave of man, but the messenger of God. It is, of course, unnecessary for us either to detail the various stages of the -controversy which preceded the cele- brated Disruption of 1843 in the Scottish National Church, or to define, with precision and in detail, the argumen- tative positions taken by the respective parties. It were, however, unpardonable, altogether to shun the question. Chalmers acted a part therein too prominent to render this permissible; while the movement itself bears closely on one of the main general objects of our little work, the as- certainment of the actual power and practical availability of what names itself Christian principle in our age. We shall endeavour to eliminate, from the outline we purpose giving of the question at issue, all merely local reference and detail, seeking some truth of universal and important application. We shall avoid, also, almost entirely, the discussion of the exegetical arguments on either side: not that the testimony of Scripture is not final and absolute on the point, but that the perfect reasonableness of what we THOMAS CHALMERS. 455 deem the truth in the matter will, if well established, render the simple deliverance of Scripture at once intelli- gible, express, and beyond reach of cavil. If we in any measure succeed in our object, we shall aim blows at certain of the most baneful, and, as we fear, widespread errors which endanger religion in our day. To speak in a way perhaps somewhat pedantic, but which is the only way we can see to express concisely our meaning, we have to discover, as the essential points of the matter before us, the idea of a State, the idea of a Church, and the relation between the two ; wherein each of these, the state, the church, and the relation, essen- tially consists. We shall encumber ourselves with no preliminary dis- cussion of the question. What is the final end at once of State and Church? We lay it down as the fundamental axiom of the whole discussion, that the glory of God is the end and intent of each. We hold that the arguments adducible by reason to prove that the end of individual existence is God's glory, can be brought, perhaps without exception, to prove the same fact in the case of govern- ments. But let no rash conclusions be drawn from this all-important declaration. Every man works for God's glory when he performs the peculiar task assigned him by God; it may be implied in his thorough discharge of this task, that he abstain from all other efforts and functions, however plausibly he may be invited thereto: and the re- mark applies equally to all beneath the government of God. This axiom laid down, we have to take but one step, when the whole matter clears up before us. Man's nature, individual and social, is twofold, spiritual and physical. That he has a physical nature, that he is a denizen of 456 THOMAS CHALMERS. earth, and has to work that he may live, we need adduce no argument to show. That his nature, also, is spiritual, that, as a spirit, he is connected with a system of things not terrestrial but celestial, not temporal but eternal, is attested by reason. Here, too, nothing more is strictly necessary, than a simple statement of the fact. Now we hold it a definition of Church and State perfectly adequate for our purposes, which declares the former to be a union among men, considered as spiritual beings, and for spiritual ends, and the latter a union for objects of a strictly terrestrial nature. Let it be remarked here, first, that we look at both Church and State with the eye of reason ; and, second, that we thus define a State not in its relation to other States, but with reference to its own members. Has God appointed to the church and state, thus defined, respective duties ? We think He has ; and shall endeavour briefly to discriminate their functions. The function of a State, viewed in the relation indicated above, is confined to terrestrial matters. A government is, as it were, God's commissioner to see that the national farm be thoroughly tilled. If this can be shown to be work sufficient and separable, our point will be half proved. The State's object is to render itself safe from without, and, to express all in one word, prosperous within. We shall not say that this exhausts its duty in relation to other States; we speak of its duties towards itself. And for the attainment of this object, what is necessary ? It is needful, in one word, that the national virtues flou- rish. For safety, it is requisite that the people be cou- rageous, sober, observant of an oath; for prosperity, it is necessary that they be industrious, so that the nation collectively may derive the greatest possible benefit from its soil, climate, and mineral wealth, and that they be com- THOMAS CHALMERS. 457 mercially upright, so that the rights of all may be balanced, and the general welfare subserved. A government pre- vents internally every form of aggression by man on man ; this last is the precise, scientific definition of crime in a nation. It is a fact that there is a morality whose exclu- sive theatre is earth ; there is an integrity between man and man which supports commerce, a national steadfast- ness and industry which avert revolution, a loyalty, a patriotism, a valour, which girdle the state as with bayonets. And surely these and we have nowise ex- hausted the list constitute work sufficient for any body corporate. There are men, and in our day they are numerous, we fear, beyond precedent, who consider such achievements as we have glanced at above, and the general morality we have indicated, to be all which can concern men and nations. Atheistic morals are by nature and necessity confined to such. A man might remain immaculate, on the system of D'Holbach, or Godwin, or Comte, though he had never believed in or heard of a God. In all such systems, man's whole duties are his duties to man. But, if we believe that man is even now the deni- zen of a higher world than that of sense, if we attri- bute reality to a spiritual province of things, a morality and a government different from these are seen, in na- tural and inevitable sequence, to emerge. This is celes- tial morality: and the body corporate which bears the same relation to it that secular government bears to se- cular morality, is the Church. All that a brother man is empowered to demand of another is, that he give him free and fair play for all his faculties, that he barm him not ; God may demand of a man that he be holy in 458 THOMAS CHALMERS. thought, heart, and action; terrestrial morality may be called harmlessness ; celestial, holiness. To profane the name of God may imply no harm to a fellow-man, but it may be an infraction of man's duty to God. The devotion of a certain time to the worship of God, may or may not be of direct and obvious advantage to the commu- nity, but it may be required by God. In short, there may be a surveillance of man as a denizen of the spiri- tual world, as well as a surveillance of him as a denizen of earth. And so, by a sequence as strict as in the case of the State, a separate set of functions arise for the Church. If, now, we have followed correctly, though for a short way, the light of reason, it seems to have led us to the greater light of revelation. This teaches us that man at first was not a fettered bondslave, that he had not to purchase existence by toil, that he was not cursed with labour; that sin deprived him of his spiritual birth-right, condemned him to work that body and soul might remain together, and set Death over him as a ruthless taskmaster, to keep him in the furrow. But it teaches us, also, that those higher regions, towards which reason wistfully but weakly looks, are real; that we are spirits still; that God is yet our King ; that immortality and spiritual joys may again be ours; and that we even now exist in a system of rela- tions which bind us to the spirit-world. Secular govern- ment has been rendered necessary by the fall; the Church exists by virtue of the promise. Both of them, viewed from the stand-point of eternity, and regarded as separate systems of mechanism, are expedients, and both temporary. The state must cease to exist when men are purely spiritual, and mutual injury is impossible; it will cease, as we said long since, when justice and love shall have become one. THOMAS CHALMERS. 459 The Church, too, viewed as a visible organisation, will conduct men but a certain way ; it will vanish at the gates of heaven ; it finds man in a condition of lapse and dis- temper, it aims to restore him to a paradaisal state: this done, it will pass away, enveloped in a cloud of glory. For the present, the duties of State and Church are discri- minated; neither is delivered from direct responsibility to God ; but the Church respects the first table of the law, the State the second. A detailed proof from Scripture that the State has duties of its own, is unnecessary; and, touching the distinctive powers of the Church, we have declared our determination to abstain from a detailed proof and definition of these from Holy Writ. The general course, however, and nature of the evidence in the latter case maybe easily and at a glance com- prehended. Either, with Whateley, we might determine the powers which pertain of necessity to every corporation, and, showing that the Church is, by its scriptural definition, of that nature, infer that these powers belong to it. Or we might cite the express declarations of our Lord, by which He committed the power of discipline, the power, under Him, of opening and shutting the kingdom of heaven, to His Church; declarations with which, whatever they mean, it cannot even be maintained that any terrestrial power can interfere, and whose meaning seems as clear and ex- plicit as words can make it. And we might point, further, to the indubitable practice of the early Church ; we might instance, as absolutely sufficient and conclusive, the case of the Church of Corinth. The authority of Paul as a preacher of Christianity will not be questioned by any to whom we now speak ; the fact that he points out the duty of expelling a certain member from the Church, is not within the reach of cavil ; and the whole nature and com- 460 THOMAS CHALMERS. pass of the discipline of a Christian Church are unfolded in his general directions on the subject. In a word, it might be shown, by clear and conclusive arguing, that the early Christian Church exercised powers within itself accord- ing to a law given it by inspiration. "We shall not speak of the delinquencies which may be visited with discipline by a church. In general terms, it ex- ercises all the powers belonging to a corporation as such. But of the nature of the penalty to be inflicted it is well to re- mark, that it must, of necessity, be purely spiritual. The offence committed is one against God; the punishment with which it is to be visited can have reference solely to Him. A physical punishment is, by the nature of the case, out of the question. If the member expelled or excommunicated laughs at the decree, it is, as respects visible suffering inflicted by men, null and void. It is true, indeed, that if the inhabitants of the country in which the decree takes effect are all Christians, and consequently attach weight to the displeasure of the Church, considerable discomfort may result from discountenance by his brethren. But this, be it distinctly noted, is a remark which applies to the working of every possible corporation. Having now granted that the provinces of Church and State are absolutely severed, and having laid it down that the former, in its requirements and penalties, must have exclusive reference, directly or indirectly, to celestial morality, it may seem difficult to find any mode in which they can legitimately and beneficially be allied. To us, on the other hand, this is now a simple matter. The State is bound to entertain the question, regarding every agency which may present itself, Does it further the views entertained, the objects aimed at, by the State? We de- sire special attention here: what we deem the truth lies THOMAS CHALMERS. 461 close to deadly error. It is one thing to ask, Will the Church, used as a mechanism by the State, promote State objects? and another to ask the absolutely distinct ques- tion, Will the Church, acting solely for its own ends and by its own laws, promote that morality which the State re- quires, and is appointed by God to require ? The first is a question the Church of Christ dare not even listen to; the second is that which the State is bound to ask, and to which the Church may, we think, give a decisive answer, and one on which an alliance between Church and State may be reared. We venture to say that we are here at the very spring and original fountain of all the errors, theoretic and prac- tical, which have encumbered this subject: by a distinct recollection and recognition of the separate provinces of celestial and terrestrial morality, and of the respective functions of Church and State, such errors had been ob- viated. The Church, in virtue of its origin, by charter of its King, in the discharge of those duties which alone ren- der it necessary and existent in the sum of things, concerns itself with celestial morality; with a morality which lies beyond the pale of human law, whose rejection may infringe no right of man with man, which is between man and his God. Reason, in its highest and purest moments, declares the province and functions of the Church to be real; the Word of God assigns it certain duties, and appoints for it a certain government. The only offer it can or dare listen to from the State, is one which will guarantee its action as a Church. Turning to the State, on the other hand, we find it answerable to God for the maintenance of the common weal; and it is but another form of expressing this, to say, that it is answerable for the promotion of those virtues on which the safety and prosperi ty of a commonwealth 462 THOMAS CHALMERS. depend. When a Church comes before it, then, it must simply inquire whether it, acting in the only way in which a Church can act, will promote public morality; in other words, whether the promotion of celestial morality will further that other morality by which a State subsists. And what answer is it right for a State to render to this question? We think that State and Church can each satisfy the other here, so as to form an alliance not merely of harmless, but of eminently beneficent nature. State and Church hold their powers from the same Hand ; God has appointed them to perform different functions, but they are united by the bond of a common service. Their powers are co-ordinate, but they mutually assist and establish each other. The one grand argument to prove that the State ought to be in kindly alliance with the Church, ought to countenance, and to its ability support it, is this: That reason, history, and Scripture, blend their testimonies to show that religion is the only safeguard of a nation, that love to one's neighbour can never nationally subsist save as dependent upon love to one's God. We have in a for- mer part of this volume adduced sufficient proof of that. Observe how close truth here lies to error. The Church, forgetting that its province is essentially and exclusively spiritual, that its penalties can be terrible in the esteem of a man, only in so far as he is a Christian and believes in its power with God (with the qualification we formerly mentioned), oversteps its bound, and touches a man's ter- restrial possessions; fines, tortures, slays him. This is an anomaly in nature ; no Church can have power to touch a hair of a man's head, or an ear of his corn. Of this error we need not speak: it has taken form in a system which has not failed to illustrate its baneful effects, the system of Popery. THOMAS CHALMERS. 463 Bat in our day it is an error of a very different order which prevails. It is the error of regarding the Church as an organisation to be looked at as primarily and directly subservient to the interests of State morality. This ignores celestial morality, and, by turning it into a system of police, positively annihilates the Church. Now, we venture to say, that with a great body among our re- spectable, cultivated classes, no other idea of a Church is to be found than this, that it is a piece of State mechanism, to be worked by the State for its own purposes. Such a Church is easily conceivable. It is one which simply re- linquishes its native functions as connected with celestial morality. A secular government desires that men be up- right, and sober, and brave ; but it directly subserves no end of state that men believe in an everlasting reward and a heavenly King: yet, if the Church has a distinct exist- ence, these must be of capital importance for it. A Church is required to proclaim from her pulpits a morality imma- culately pure; government may find, or imagine it finds, such morality reflect in no flattering manner on its own measures: nay, it may desire the advocacy of its measures, directly or indirectly, from the pulpit; and so the process may go on extending and deepening, till the very essence and origin of a Church are forgotten ? And yet, as we say, do not ideas, tending directly to this result, pervade society in our day ? Is it not a common notion, however unconsci- ously held, among the members of our National Churches, that these are Churches in virtue of their connection with the State? Is it not a fact that many excellent persons in our Churches, in the Church of England for instance, would ap- ply the term of schism to a separation from the State ? As if the State made the establishment of England a Church, as if it could exercise no function apart from the State, as if it 4G4 THOMAS CHALMERS. would be equivalent to its extinction as a Church, to throw it again into the condition in which that of Corinth was when it received its doctrine from the mouth of Paul! Among the Dissenters, on the other hand, and in what may be called a negative form, the same idea has exten- sive prevalence. It seemed perfectly absurd to Foster to hear it asserted, as the Scotch Non-intrusion party asto- nished him by asserting, that a state might endow, but could never regulate a church. As if, forsooth, the ques- tion of endowment or non-endowment were a vital, or even an important one in the matter ! The grand question is, Whether the State is bound to sanction, countenance, and promote the Church ; settle this affirmatively, and you have settled the question of an establishment; whether the form of support which consists in handing it a certain portion of money is sound and legitimate or not, is a different question altogether, and of very subordinate importance. To imagine that the acceptance of a certain form of sup- port implied an abnegation of distinctive and essential power and existence, was surely an egregious error, and one which, fallen into by such an intellect as Foster's, in- dicated wide oblivion to the real nature and functions of a Church. We cannot sufficiently denounce this great heresy. A Church such we have seen men imagine for themselves would not necessarily turn men to God ; it would merely preserve them in a state of respectability and loyalty. This is against the very idea of a Christian Church ; if it becomes universal, religion, strictly speaking, is as good as dead in our Churches. The sister establishments may, doubtless, go on for a time ; and it may even be deemed desirable by many without their pale, that they should still continue to subsist. Evils there are which they may THOMAS CHALMERS. 465 certainly obstruct. But if they become simply a part of the government mechanism for the quiet guidance of the nation; if they are to be primarily and undeniably hills of dead earth heaped on the Enceladus of modern revolution- ism; if their strength is to be made up of the many who, having no religion of their own, take that which comes to hand with a government sanction ; if their members are to be not Christians, but " respectable persons;" if their piety is to be not the reverent upturning of the finite eye to the In- finite God, but a fluctuating accommodation to the religious fashions of the day that goes once to church, or twice, as is the mode, that subscribes to missions, and gets up sales for charitable purposes, or does not, as is the mode, that has family prayers or not, as is the mode then they may indeed remain for a time, and even do their work, and get their reward, but the first blast of millennial Christianity will sweep them utterly away. The Tyrians chained Apollo to the statue of Dagon, but Alexander laid their towers in the dust all the same! Revolution is fearful; the unchained masses, foaming maddened in atheistic frenzy, are fearful ; but Christianity chained in the temple of Mammon is the most fearful of all. We can have no hesitation in declaring, that the great principles we have sketched, or rather the one principle of the separate existence and co-ordinate Divine origin of the Church, in perfect independence of the State, constituted the vital element in the long struggle which issued in the rending asunder of the Church of Scotland. To one out of the din of conflict, who contemplates the matter in the calm stillness of distance, the whole becomes absolutely plain. We say not that there were no such obscuring or confounding influences around those who were parties in the debate, as to render it conceivable, and consistent with honesty, that they should oppose that view of the case 2 H 466 THOMAS CHALMERS. taken by the party of Chalmers; and plain as it seems to us, that the question was one touching expressly those principles we have laid down, there is perhaps no person now in Scotland who would refuse assent in terms to what we have said. Yet, putting the argument of the party which opposed the majority in the most favourable light possible, what does it amount to? Suppose that the Church, in admitting the ministers of Chapels of Ease to a full and equal share in every ministerial function, did overstep the letter of its legal powers, and that the whole actings of government towards it during the struggle were influenced by this consideration, how does it affect the question ? It seems to us merely to clear it up, and to bring it within a narrow compass. If a Church possess corporate freedom, we shall agree that it has those powers which belong by nature to a corporation. These we may as well take from Whateley ; no one will say he fixes the standard too high. Corporate freedom implies that the body in question has officers, rules, a power of discipline, and an authority to admit or exclude members. Now, when Chalmers in London declared the Church of Scot- land free, it either was so in the above sense, or it was not. If it was, then it is but a statement of an obvious fact, that it was competent to it to admit the chapel ministers to its full membership. If it was not free, if Chalmers was mistaken, if, from any cause whatsoever, or in any circumstances, this right was called in question, it was necessary, at whatever expense, that it should be vindicated. It will be said that this act of admission on the part of the Church affected, indirectly but unques- tionably, the civil rights of certain individuals. Be it so; we have made full provision for the objection ; we simply say, that, if a time had come when civil rights, when en- dowment, in one form or another, interfered with the very THOMAS CHALMERS. 467 life of the Church, the time had also come when it behoved that Church to declare, that its perfect severance from all endowment was, strictly speaking, of infinitely less mo- ment than that there should remain the faintest doubt of its freedom. It is, besides, a well-known fact that the Church, ere laying its endowments at the foot of the State, expressed its willingness to surrender all control over the money paid to* those inducted into its parishes. That fatal error, however, which we have noted, prevailed widely. Men deemed it something anomalous and un- heard of, that a Church should receive money from a State, and yet possess a jurisdiction absolutely distinct from that of the secular government. It must be added, that the catastrophe was heightened and induced by a too great oblivion in the public mind to the nature and extent of Christian discipline, and a thick and stupid ignorance of the very ideas and necessities of corporate existence. Chalmers, looking at the whole question with the eye at once of a statesman and divine, saw into its essence, and took his position accordingly. With no elaborate search- ing or arguing, his piercing eye at once flashed through all sophistry, to the truth that the life of the Church was in danger. It was with a certain astonishment and sorrow that he fought his last battle. If ever there beat a loyal heart, it was in his bosom. Since the day when he wept in the garden at Blenheim, since the day he had enlisted in the volunteers, chaplain and lieutenant, since the day he had invoked death to smite him ere his country fell, he had ever loved kingship, and national steadfastness, and the dignity of an ancestral Church. He knew that the Church of his fathers was throbbing with spiritual life, as she had not done for two centuries; he saw her missionaries going to the ends of the earth ; he saw her blooming into new 468 THOMAS CHALMERS. fruitfulness at home, and casting her mantle over all the population. It was with dismay and amazement that he witnessed the infatuation of the government; that he list- ened to the unspeakable nonsense uttered about clerical oppression, popery, liberty of the subject, &c; that he saw Conservatism in Scotland trying to get the tough old Presbyterian Samson, his hair grown after two centuries of weakness, to be a mere maker of sport for it. As he said of his parting from his dear sequestered Kilmany, there was tearing of the heartstrings there ! Yet we shall also say that there was something fine in the spectacle of Chalmers contending at the head of the Church of Scotland, for the fundamental doctrine that the Church of Christ owes its existence to no fiat of the State, to no dole of public money, but to the word of its Master, and to that alone. That it was the duty of the State to support the Church, he held to be irrefragable; but to make the Church, not a fire which it fed with fuel, but a machine which it regulated and worked, he saw to be a fundamental heresy. With a mind perfectly settled on the question, and with an intrepidity which his known and enthusiastic respect for constituted authorities ren- dered the more conspicuous and the more noble, he calmly yet unflinchingly contended. His hair was growing white, and a deeper stillness was settling in his eye, though the old liquid fire would at times glare out; his fame had spread over the old world and the new; he had been flattered by the highest aristocracy of the land: yet he was still the same devout humble Christian that he had become when first the light of God opened upon him at Kilmany, he was still the same earnest worker as when he set Glasgow into a ferment of Christian Phi- lanthropy, he was still the same tender-hearted personal friend who wept over the grave of Thomas Smith. His THOMAS CHALMERS. 469 words, his writings, and, most of all, his example, had struck new vitality through all the horders of Christian Scotland; and now, as the glories of eventide were he- ginning to encircle him, he saw around him an army of young ardent spirits, who, in their pulpits, preached Christ and Him crucified, and, in the assemblies of their Church, defended her rights with an ability and a persistency which astonished every party. The sun looks proudest in the evening; and the cause of his grandeur is, that, ere he himself sinks to rest, a thousand clouds, which his light brightens into radiance and beauty, encircle and seem to escort him : so, when a great man draws to his rest, a thousand younger men, whose fire has been kindled by him, reflect his light and testify his power. In the beginning of the summer of 1843, Thomas Chalmers and in all nearly five hundred ministers of the Church of Scotland severed the connection which bound them to the State, relinquished every claim on its im- munities, and re-constituted the Church in a state of freedom. Not abjuring the principle of an establishment, but protesting that no government sanction could stand in the room of that Divine authority which gave life to a Church, they parted from a government which seemed ignorant of its nature, and claimed an authority paramount to that of its charter written by the finger of God. By its position, the Church is ready, at any moment, to re-unite with the State ; but this cannot be, until it is acknowledged by the highest authority in these realms, that, without con- sideration of circumstances or results, it is corporately free, within itself supreme. Till then, it must remain dis- established. The act of Chalmers and his followers requires no trum- peting, and none shall be attempted here. But it is a mere argumentative assertion, removed altogether from enthu- 470 THOMAS CHALMERS. siasm or exaggeration, that the Scottish Disruption, what- ever minor opinions may be held regarding it, did evince that Christianity has a real and a powerful hold upon both the pastors and the people of Scotland in our day. We care not how little be made of this ; we know too well that Scotland has little to boast of, and great cause for re- pentance; but we cannot defraud ourselves of the hope and assurance that there is ground to stand upon, that there is a fire in the nation's heart which may be fanned into beneficent light and heat. In an age of respectability and commonplace, in an age when the decorous, the established, the aristocratic, is still so revered and clung to by at least our middle classes, a large body of men, well advanced in life, and many of them tottering under grey hairs, deli- berately stepped from under the smile of power, deliberately risked their continuance as a Church on the Christianity of the people and the blessing of God. Such events do not occur in the history of dead religions; such phenomena cannot appear where religion is a doubt. The whole spectacle of the Disruption, viewed in the relation borne to it by government, is anomalous and amaz- ing. Disencumbered of all incidental and extraneous en- tanglements arising from the civil rights of individuals, the power claimed by the Church of Scotland, ere demo- ting its endowment, was precisely that which is exercised by every Dissenting body in the kingdom, and which it at once began to exercise on parting from the State. This circumstance alone appears sufficient to Isaac Taylor to stamp the conduct of the State as impolitic; and, though we' should take far higher grounds than he in discussing the general question, we deem the fact an absolute evi- dence that there was no ruling British statesman of the day capable of taking a strong original look at the matter. The sovereign power of Britain tore asunder a body of THOMAS CHALMERS. 471 known loyalty, which sat enthroned in the affection of the mass of the people of Scotland, and whose influence could not but be pronounced, on the whole, promotive of public morality, for one of two causes : either because it would not permit the Church to do what every Dissenting body does, and what this body could not when disestablished be prevented from doing ; or because there was not ability and decision in its compass sufficient to disentangle and make short work with a few beggarly questions touching money matters. From this dilemma there is no escape. Into one of two errors or both, it seemed impossible for British statesmen to avoid falling: into that of fancying that the Church claimed a Popish power, that it was going to erect a spiritual despotism; to which, remembering that we live in the nineteenth eentury, and that all Protestant bodies are thus spiritual despotisms, we deeline replying, as sheer and infantile foolery: or into that of affirming the Church to be a mere state police, paid, and, by natural consequence, superintended, by government; which we have already abundantly shown to be an ignorance of the very conditions of the question, a negation of the existence of a Church. Chalmers was now becoming an old man. On passing his sixtieth year, he entered on what he called the Sab- bath of his life, six working decades past. It was a beau- tiful thought, and showed how his great soul yearned, like all the noble, for repose. Over the last years of his life there rests a still and pensive beauty, a soft radi- ance of Sabbatic calm; not unshaded by sadness, not all unbroken by agitation, they are wrapped in peace and har- mony by that effect which poet-painters ever love, the dawning, in the background, of infinite light. It was hard, with now aged limb, to leave that establishment, from whose battlements, in the morn, and noontide, and 472 THOMAS CHALMERS. hale afternoon of his years, he had looked with a glance of pride and satisfaction, such as lit the minstrel king's, when he looked from the towers of Zion. It was, indeed, a high consolation that in Scotland there was still enough of " celestial fire " to organise and animate a free Church: but his faith in voluntaryism was not even yet absolute ; and the one grand idea of his life, the reaping of the great out- field, the diffusion of Christianity over all the land, seemed no longer realisable. That sadness which we have seen to be characteristic of the close of the most memorable and precious lives, descended perceptibly, in the evening of his days, on the manly brow of Chalmers. The general aspect of these years is of deep interest and instruction, and cannot but reward a few final glances. While the member of an established Church, his large heart had opened its gates to everything noble in dissent, to receive and love it; and now, when he was himself member of a disestablished body, his nature flung aside those constraining and cramping cords of sectarianism, which seem inevitably to twine themselves, however insen- sibly, round men of particular parties and denominations. It was with a glow of generous and enthusiastic joy that he hailed the Evangelical Alliance ; as one in a fleet on a stormy sea, when morn was drawing on, might hail the streaks of that sun which was to extinguish the lamp in each separate vessel. And with a fearless and truly Chris- tian cosmopolitanism, he threw out his sympathies in other directions. He earnestly accepted a contribution towards the cause of humanity, whencesoever it came. He could stand immoveable in his own belief: and yet hear words of in- struction or monition from others whose opinions were widely apart from his: he could rest in his belief that Christianity, that the preaching of Christ crucified, could alone regenerate the world ; and yet he could hear, in the THOMAS CHALMERS. 473 words of Mr Carlyle, the voice of God to the Churches, proclaiming that their indifference and their dormancy had left a breach to the enemy. What a stirring gleam of Christian valour, too, in that determination, old as he was, to master German philo- sophy! He is not the man to be afraid ; he will enter this untrodden region ; if any new seed, or fruit, or flower of truth has been found, he must know and possess it; if any new form of error has appeared, he must go, like a brave and faithful son, to set it, yet another trophy, on Truth's immortal brow! His intellect was now calm, comprehensive, sage; his heart was fresh as with the dew of youth. He again read Shakespere, Milton, and Gibbon. His re-perusal of the former furnishes a beautiful and characteristic trait. After a life of continual effort, of perpetual contact with men and things, after the world had done its worst towards him, both in applause and in censure, he still revelled in the aerial gaiety, the many-tinted summer- like beauty, the genial, though keen sagacity, of Mid- summer's Night's Dream. Of Shakespere's plays that was his favourite. It is a very remarkable circumstance; telling of a gentleness of nature, a kind gleesome humour, an exuberant unstrained force and freshness of intellect, surely rare among theologians. As kindred to this, and of still deeper beauty, we may regard his tender play- ful affection for his infant grandson. He writes to little Tommy with the perfect sympathy of one whom the world has still left guileless as a child; he relates little anecdotes for his amusement; tells him of birds' nests; demonstrates to him, with syllogistic conclusiveness, that it is a logical mistake to love his hobbyhorse better than his grandpapa, simply because the former is "biggest:" he does not forget to send him toys when at a distance, 474 THOMAS CHALMERS. he makes him feel himself quite a man as he stands heside grandpapa assisting him to range his books; and best of all, he leads him, by kind, winning, imperceptible ways, to the footstool of their common Father. The child of four, and the veteran of threescore, kneel down together alone, that the smile of God may light on both His children ! There is one negative characteristic which is, we sup- pose, constant in men deserving to be called, in any right sense, great. They are perfectly free of knowingness ; of the light-sniffing, nil admirari mood, that trembles at the thought of a sneer; they are more simple than other men. This was signally the case with Chalmers. It is by looking at the inner life of Chalmers, at his walk with God, that we come to know and understand him. It is by knowing well what he was in his closet, that we can explain what he was in the world of men. The three reverences that figure so largely in Goethe's system were all found there; with this difference, that the word and feeling of reverence were applied to no finite being, but only to the Infinite God. The "trust thyself" of Emer- son, that "iron string to whieh every heart vibrates," was never shown in any better than in him; but it was held, not as the whole truth, but as half of the truth, which could never become the whole. It was the self- trust of humility, not of pride; it was the trust that knew the world, hanging as it seems on nothing, to be yet upheld by the hand of God; it was the trust which felt no- thing finite worthy to be feared, since a chord of love bound him eternally to the very heart of God. He trusted himself; as David, Paul, Luther, Cromwell trusted; but it was among the finite he did so; before his God, he lay low. He trusted himself to face the world, but not to scale the universe. Christianity has THOMAS CHALMERS. 475 furnished a greater number of courageous, ironbuilt men, than either philosophy or any religion besides itself can show; but the sternest and greatest of them bowed the head to the Highest. Christianity leaves no place for cowardice, while it blasts the eye of pride. Chalmers was a man of prayer.; he was much alone with God. And how much is included in this assertion? Did the world shout and adulate? Its voice became silent and of little moment when the inner chambers of the heart were flung open before the eye of God, searching into the recesses of the soul, casting a ray of celestial pure- ness, in whose light motes, else invisible, were seen. Did the world rage and scorn? Its frown became of small importance in the smile of God, its rage and tumult of slight avail, if the voice that ealled order out of chaos said, "Let there be light." The hallowing influence of habitual prayer pervaded his whole life; to eomfort in adversity, to strengthen in toil, to cheer in battle, to sober in victory. Humble yet courageous, weak yet strong, he saw himself filled with human frailty and human faults, yet he shone before the eyes of men. The deep sagacity which had been ripening during a lifetime was true and sure at its quiet elose. " The pub- lic is just a big baby ! " What a profound and deliberate knowledge of society is here ; and what a comparison ! A big baby ! a great, pulpy, lumbering thing, that could do nothing but bawl ! Yet how he grasped to his heart any really noble and godly man; even with a kiss, as Tholuck said in amazement ! The true individual soul, and the real hidden work, were still what he dearly loved. From the glare of observation he shrunk aside; but you might have seen him in Burke's Close, in the West Port, at his old work, bringing Heaven's light into the hovel and the heart of the poor, 476 THOMAS CHALMERS. Taken all in all, he was a noble type of the Christian man. He showed how Christianity embraces and en- nobles, but does not cramp or curtail humanity; how, in that divine influence, all old things do indeed pass away, but leave no desert behind, for a fairer verdure springs, beautified by immortal flowers, and nourished from living fountains, in an inner world where all things have become new. The vital warmth which would pervade a system of society really Christian, can be but counterfeited and galvanically mimicked by worldliness; Christianity ex- tends her claim and dominion over everything, if it have the one characteristic of being good. From the breast of Chalmers all the counterfeits of worldliness were banished, but the goodly company of healthful human emotions, of noble human attributes, entered in their stead. The cold affectations, the hypocritic smiles, the mellifluous false- hood, the greedy complaisance, all the glitter by which fashion hides her heart of ice, never found any point of adherence in him ; but the manly and genial deference of true politeness, a politeness based on the essential equality in the sight of God of " all human souls," was truly his ; to peer and peasant, he was the same self-respecting, yet truly modest and courteous man no touch of trepidation, no tone of flattery, towards the one ; no " insolence of con- descension," no patronising blandness, towards the other. He loved genial mirth and a deep hearty laugh; the sim- per of etiquette, the giggle of frivolity, were alike alien to his nature. It is well, likewise, to remember, that his heart was ever kept warm and fresh by those gentle ministries which na- ture has appointed, and Christianity, of course, sanctions: by the tender influences of home, by the wife of his bosom, and the children whom God had given him. These are nature's general means, and doubtless they are, in general, THOMAS CHALMERS. 477 the best, to preserve health in the whole system of thought, of feeling, and of action. The man who plays for an hour or two at bowls with hi3 children, as his elder found Chalmers doing, will not likely, with Godwin or any other, fabricate for you a world on philosophic principles, with ice figures going by clockwork for men, and painted in the highest style of art. Follow the ecclesiastic, or pro- fessor, from the debate or the conclave, into his own home ; there see him, in his warm arm-chair, with his three daughters near him, one shampooing his feet, another talking the sort of nonsense which she knows will set him into fits of laughter, and the third making up the perfect harmony, by playing the tunes of dear old Scotland; can you apprehend narrowness or fanaticism in that man? Will not that laugh shake out of the heart every taint of theological rancour, lift from the brow every shade of gloom, express that unromantic, unostentatious, unspeak- able comfort, which fills a really Christian home? These are drops of sweetness instilled into the very fountain of the life; no wonder that the streams are clear, and musi- cal, and bordered with flowers. Those combinations in which nature most cunningly displays her power, and which give the rare and excelling character, were variously represented by Chalmers; his mind was rarely complete and symmetrical. An eye to see, a voice to speak, an arm to do: iew men have had all three as Chalmers. The strength that can stand alone: the social sympathy that plants little grappling gold-hooks of love in all surrounding hearts: the receptive faculty to grasp the thoughts of others, to sift them, to compare them, to mete their power of light to reveal truth and of light- ning to blast error, to make the world an armoury: the in- dependent and original energy by which nevertheless the character acts freely and naturally : the power of saying, 478 THOMAS CHALMERS. deliberately and irreversibly, No ; the tenderness that often wept: reverence towards God, respect towards man, love towards all: we can assert for him each of these. The balancing of hope and apprehension is an important consideration in the elimination of character. It seems, as we once before remarked, a providential arrangement that hope generally prevails in the noblest and greatest minds. Chalmers was sunny in his whole nature. Fear plays a very slight part in his mental or external history. It had a small share in his conversion; it was rather the conviction that the remedy needed for the world was deeper than he had formerly deemed, the holiness without which a man can- not see God, something above the virtue of philosophy, which led to that great change. And in all his works there are cheerfulness, hope, courage no touch of despon- dency or misanthropy. Yet his mind was of no flimsy, romantic cast. He knew the world was a stern reality, with ribs of rock and veins of iron, not to be softened and tamed into perpetual mildness and docility, by poet, pedant, or philosopher. He had enough of hope to make him work cheerfully and indefatigably; he had enough of fear, of soberness and apprehension, to avert despair at the re- sults of his work. " The king-becoming graces, As justice, verity, temperance, stableness, Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude," were all in some measure his; and in him they flowed from the only Source from which they can flow in strength and purity. If required to give his radical characteristic in one word, we should say, that, as man and as thinker, he was a great mass of common sense. He had a giant's grasp of the fundamental facts of man's existence, an inborn notion how this world is put together; he was not the man to THOMAS CHALMERS. 479 boild you metaphysical palaces, mist skilfully tinted by moonshine, or to lead you, with clear small safety-lamp, through argumentative mazes ; but he had a profound con- sciousness of those unseen principles by which men actu- ally live and work; he was a man, we deliberately say it, against whom a nation might lean. To use a comparison applied by himself in the case of Edward Irving, he was a force of gravitation, not of magnetism. And his books, which it is unnecessary to review, are distinguished in a manner correspondent to this. They were now round him in many substantial volumes, and more were to be given to the world after his death. They embodied that grand idea which lent sublimity to his life, the union of humanity with Christianity, the omnipotence, in the man and in the nation, of the gospel of Jesus. He is the king of practical theologians. Those books do not abound with learned disquisitions or erudite quotations ; but they take bold broad views of man and his salvation, and they burn all over with the blended fire of lofty human emotion and lowly Christian faith. If you do not find in them the delicacies of a minute ingenuity, or the meagre exactness of logical formula, you meet with those great ideas which may be called the key ideas in sys- tems of religion, ethics, and polity; with which, if your hand is not specially weak, you can solve, far and wide, the practical problems of life. It has been objected that they are filled with iteration, and their style has often been called declamatory. There is doubtless something in the charges. But it should be remembered that Chalmers was by instinct an enforcer, a preacher of truth; he would fling thunderbolt on thunderbolt, till he sent one fairly home; he looked upon what he delivered not so much as something for its own sake to be demonstrated, as what was to tell on the public mind, and be impressed upon it 480 THOMAS CHALMERS. with that view. He wrote with the sound of the world in his ears ; every one of his books seems anchored to earth. At last his earthly Sabbath came to an end. He had been in London, giving evidence before a committee of the House of Commons. His intellect, as this evidence testi- fies, was still clear and strong, and in private he was the same quiet but genial and hearty man that he had ever been. He visited Mr Carlyle, and the two extraordinary Scotchmen had an acquiescing and cordial conversation, with " a great deal of laughing on both sides." He re- turned to Edinburgh about the time when the Assembly of the Free Church met; on Friday, May 28, 1847- On the Sabbath evening that followed, he was more than usually benignant and genial; but a cloud might be seen to flit across his features, and walking in the garden he was heard, in low but very earnest tones, saying, " O Father, my Heavenly Father!" His general aspect, however, was one of cheerful and genial composure. Next day, the May morning rose over Arthur Seat, and the Castle rock, and the spires and palaces of that lordly city which he loved so well. Men rose bustling after the Sunday rest, and the conversation in town would turn largely on the doings of the two assemblies, and the ap- pearance he was to make that day. But as the hours wore on a whisper stole over the city, stopping for a mo- ment every breath: Chalmers was dead. One had en- tered his room in the morning and found him motionless: " he sat there, half erect, his head reclining gently on his pillow; the expression of his countenance that of fixed and majestic repose." The land mourned for him, as Judah and Israel mourned for the good kings of old. PART III. 2i CHAPTER I. THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. Ik the first part of this work, we made reference to that modern school of infidelity which holds of pantheism ; and, in succeeding portions, we have mainly endeavoured to combat its views and tendencies. But there is another school of infidelity, to which we have but alluded in pass- ing, and which, whether from the magnitude of its preten- sions, the talent of its disciples, or the appalling complete- ness of its results, deserves consideration. We mean the school of Auguste Comte, the far-famed Positive Philo- sophy. To it we devote the present chapter. We found the essential characteristic of modern pan- theism to be an assertion of the divinity of man. Some- what of study and reflection was necessary to assure us of this. But in the case of the Positive Philosophy there is no such labour necessary: it wears its distinctive dogma written on its brow. The ancient Jewish high-priest wore on his forehead, as a sign before which armies and em- perors should bow down, the mystic name of Jehovah: this philosophy bears as its badge the express and conclusive legend, There is no God. We have said that we had, in the preceding pages, but alluded to the atheistic science of Comte. Though not, 482 THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. however, naming either him or his philosophy, we have al- ready, we have no hesitation in asserting, come into the neigh- bourhood of both. We have known them in their prototypes. For M. Comte, we had the Baron D'Holbach ; for the Posi- tive Philosophy, the System of Nature. We institute no individual comparison between D'Holbach and Comte; we should think it beyond doubt that the latter was by far the abler man ; but, in their respective systems, no one, we think, can fail to perceive an essential similarity, be- neath a partial and superficial difference. The point from which they start is the same; the goal at which they arrive is one; their general method is identical. The axiom from which they set out is, that nothing is to be be- lieved save what is seen, heard, handled ; the common goal is atheism ; the method is that of physical science. The advance of knowledge has occasioned considerable change in the general aspect and finish of the edifice of scientific atheism : what D'Holbach conceived to be an exhibition of the physical origin of life, has proved to be a childish mis- take; a great deal, probably, of sentimental foolery, about suicide and the like, has been, as faded drapery, put aside ; the walls have been newly overlaid with scientific mortar, tempered by modern enlightenment; the whole has been refitted, according to the most improved modern methods, with an utter regardlessness to expense. But the very fact of these recent amendments and repairs might have suggested that it was the old house, freshly swept and garnished, in which a new crew had come to habit. The universal appearance and proclamation of sys- tem, the endless ranges of pillars, the countless museum- cases, the perpetual diagrams, the reiterated profession of power to explain all things and annihilate wonder, might have led us to suspect that the spirit of D'Holbach (if it is THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 483 not an insult to the man to suppose he had a spirit) reigned within. The original axiom of the Positive Philosophy is, that the immaterial exists not, that sense is the sole source of evidence. Alleging that man cannot prove the existence of a Divine Being, or of a spirit, refusing to be- lieve aught which. cannot be defined in language and pre- cisely comprehended in thought, its advocates prefer the alternative of utterly denying the existence of an invisible world, and a system of spiritual relations connecting man therewith, to that of accepting instinct, listening to faith, or bowing to revelation. It might be interesting to trace, in a few departments, the mode in which this philosophy would take practical manifestation. We are unable here to do more than in- dicate the method in which the reader may work out a whole scheme of its operation. Its general effect would be to circumscribe every province of affairs: to cabin, crib, confine the spirit of social life: to limit advancement to one path, to turn the eye of man to earth, to pronounce those mighty hopes which have been said to make us men, mere toys of the nursery. If it retained the word duty, it would restrict its operation entirely to that between man and man ; duty would become synonymous with interest, and conscience with calculation; the decalogue would be a series of arithmetical conclusions. There would be a great enumeration of motives ; but they would all have one cha- racteristic; they would hint of their father's house by always whispering the word, system. They would be cut and squared, weighed and measured, committed to memory and carefully remembered; they would never kindle the eye or flush the cheek, they would have none of that in- spiring indefiniteness, of that animating suggestion of 484 THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. something infinite, which has ever roused and supported men ; they would all be known, ticketed, and brought out for use, as methodically as a gardener's tools or a grocer's measures: for this is the science that knows, and sees, and annihilates alike the weakness of enthusiasm and the weakness of hope. The moralist and the political econo- mist would become almost the same: the one might more particularly devote himself to investigate the mode in which commercial equity might have full action, how each man might have his own ; the other might direct special attention to the means of obtaining most to be divided: the commission of each would emanate from the shop. And so you would have a science of political economy not un- deserving the name of the " dismal science : " for it would proceed on the supposition, that, when you had classified a few of the facts of man's existence, and the laws by which they are connected, you had reached the secret of govern- ment and prosperity, you could wind up the clock at plea- sure: however far it went, and it might embrace much important matter, it could never go farther than the philo- sophy, of which it was an offshoot, goes with the individual man ; it might admirably lay bare and explain the mecha- nism of society, but it would altogether ignore the soul of society. What would be the fate of religion ? It had been one of the great mistakes and delusions of the human race; but, if there still subsisted aught to take the name, it would be the obligation of the social contract, or whatever it might be which bound men to the State; its high-priest would be the hangman. How would this philosophy affect friendship? It would narrow it to those sympathies which are present, seen, calculable ; it would change it into co- partnery. The Platonic friendship originated when two persons were knit by the sympathy of a common ardour THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 485 in the pursuit of truth; they sat beside each other, and strove jointly to keep the head of the snow-white steed towards the heavenly dwelling of perfection, and to curb the base black horse that ever strove earthwards; but friends according to the Positive Philosophy, would un- yoke the celestial courser altogether, and be united by the sympathy of a common desire to break the passion steed well in, that it might go softly in the provision-cart. Thus we might proceed; noting how all human things are by the Positive Philosophy circumscribed, diminished, cramped. We ask no more, in order to impart to us perfect confidence in so proceeding, than the original axiom, that sense is the only source of evidence, that the immaterial does not exist, that every motive and sympathy is defined and bounded by the cradle on the one hand, and the grave on the other. We are very far from asserting that all who, more or less, favour the doctrines of Comte would go this length ; the atmosphere of the world still retains too much of the old taint of religion and metaphysics to render that possible ; and, as we have said, whatever its defects, its dis- ciples can point to what seems a goodly amount of actual at- tainment, of solid work, on the part of positive science. Yet, if the expressly negative nature of all its reasoning is borne in mind, and the strictly logical result of its method ac- cepted, it cannot, we think, be alleged that we misrepresent. To this there will, perhaps, be yielded a more cordial assent, when we endeavour, in a few sentences, to trace in outline that achievement which is aimed at by the Positive Philosophy. This is the more necessary, because, in order to address any effective argument to the advocates of an opi- nion, we must learn what recommends it to their sympa- thies, and, in order to vindicate truth, we must know the most formidable aspect of error. 486 THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. Let us suppose, then, that it has accomplished all which it professes its power to achieve. Agricultural science has done its work. The most rugged soil has yielded to the skill of man. The unwholesome and barren marsh has been drained and ploughed; where once it was, the corn now waves, or the rich meadow, amid whose flowers the bees are humming, and where sheep and cattle stray, spreads out beautiful in the noonday sun. To the top of the moun- tain the plough has been carried, and the eternal snows and tempests have seen their ancient domain curtailed by the power of chemistry and mechanics. The world has burst forth in opulence of crop, and fruit, and flower, and the glad light that rests above it more than realises the vision of the golden age. Commerce has done its work. The tempest of the deep has at length been bridled and subdued by man ; science went to watch the monster in the homeless tracts where he sought his prey, and learned at last to trace his footstep, to know his approach, and to baulk his utmost might. Each soil produces, to the full of scientific culture, what it is naturally fitted to grow ; and a universal free trade and perfection of transmission have put the production of every soil within the reach of the inhabitant of every other, as if it grew at his own door. Locomotion has been fully developed; internal communication has reached a perfection which renders it but a slight figure that time and space are annihilated. History and political science have been perfected. The past has yielded all its secrets to tireless research and penetrative criticism: the philosopher can look back on the prospect of the bygone ages, and see, clearly bodied forth, the work and warring, the joy and sorrow, all the varied pageantry, of all genera- tions. The light of political economy has risen high and burned bright, fed with oil by the sister science of history. THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 487 The inducements which wealth can bring to bear on man have all been summed, the means of its production and the laws of its distribution ascertained, and the all-embracing doctrine of social existence fully promulgated and enforced, that if all work peacefully in their several stations, each will obtain the greatest amount possible of food and cloth- ing. The museum of the world has been finally furnished and arranged, the storehouse of the world filled, the move- ments of the stars set forth in geometric diagrams, the ex- haustive system of the Positive Philosophy completed. "We shall grant that, if our attempt has failed, it is yet assuredly possible to draw a picture of the ultimate attain- ment of physical science, which, realisable or not, will have an imposing aspeet. Let it be added, also, that the whole is put in, not in the gaudy eolours of romance, or with the delusive license of poetry; the positive philo- sopher makes no demand on your enthusiasm, but, for that very reason, claims the more ready accordance of your be- lief. The air is pervaded by philosophic calm: the pro- fessor deals solely in demonstration, the pupils talk in for- mula. It is not to us inexplicable that the Positive Phi- losophy enjoys its popularity. But, when we have exhausted all that ean be said in favour of the school of positive atheism, we must hold by our original assertion, that its tendency is to discrown man, and to take the light off the universe. What is all this wealth, what all this power which it offers ? They are, at the very best, the bribe which earth otfers to the human being, to induce him to deny his celestial origin and barter his spiritual inheritance. What is all that fabric, rising in its still and cold magnificence, covering the earth and shutting out the heaven ? It is a magnificent tomb for the spirit of man. Deck it as you will, let the flags of all the 488 THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. sciences float over it, it is but an ornamented grave. And if you tell me that creatures still move about within it, I will refuse to call those living men, who declare themselves " cunning casts in clay," and profess that the souls are out of them. The mummies in the pyramids wear the human form, yet we do not call them men. The password into that fabric is an insult, the bitterest of insults, to man; it supposes that it is possible to find food so abundant and clothing so rare, that it will woo him to abdicate his spiritual throne, and declare himself an animal. We would not give the delusion of religion for all the realisation of the philosophy of Comte ! Where it comes all waxes dim : its foot blackens the stars. For why should I care to look to these stars, if they are but a mockery of my little day of life? or why should I delight to search into the beauty and the bounty of the earth around me, if it gives me but a table and a grave, and, by instilling into my veins some maddening poison, has left me the possibility of imagining for myself a better fate ? Physical science itself, which, when subordinate to higher ends, I can cultivate and prize, is ruined utterly by this pretentious but fatal alliance: in the words of Chalybaeus, it either becomes the handmaid of a poor curiosity, or a " partner of trade." How deeply melancholy is the life of man, if he has no inheritance in the past or the future ; if there are no mighty nations of the dead; if the friends he has loved are loath- some clay, and between himself and annihilation there is but a breath ! How all the dewy umbrage of his sympa- thies is withered, the fountains of his heart dried up ! A man comes upon the world with mighty powers, capable of exerting an influence which will outlive his day by millenniads. He stands in his own little generation, but by some strange destiny, his mind's dwelling is all time; THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 489 on his own little world, but his mind's dwelling is im- mensity. He acts, or thinks, or sings. If he has planned an Alexandria or a Babylon, he must pass away ere its streets and quays are ranged in the order in which his mind's eye saw them ; if he has desolated realms, he must pass away ere nature, weeping over them in rain, and smiling in sunshine, wraps them again in soothing green. If he has pondered, half a lifetime, on the state and the destinies of man, and reared some theory to renovate and to save his race, he must depart ere any save its initial effects are seen. If he have sung some mighty song, which has taken the ear of the ages, and to which, with the noble pride of genius, he can see generation after generation, through the long vista of years, pausing to listen, he must himself lie down and die when perhaps only a few bosoms have thrilled to its music. Man here has only time to do his work, and dig his grave. If he can believe that all the buried generations have gone onward to another state of ex- istence, and if he can himself look forward to a protracted life, in which he will retain his personality, his connec- tion with humanity, and that interest in all things human which marked the range of his humanity here, he may work in the sense of inducements really sublime and pe- nalties really awful. But how he shrivels in the glance of the Positive Philosophy ! Man the animal were a pitiful and anomalous thing, all whose grandeur arose from de- lusion ; a dreamer of empire in a tenement of clay : man the spirit wanders through eternity, and is formed verily in the image of God. We shall not formally and at length assail the Positive Philosophy. We presume that the reasoning by which materialism is to be overthrown is now pretty well elabo- rated, and that it does not admit of important addition, 490 THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. that a man may now sum up and balance the arguments for and against, with conviction pretty well assured, that none others of importance are to be adduced. We shall, how- ever, bring against this latest form of materialism one argu- ment which we deem amply sufficient to overthrow it, and which, from the great educational pretensions of the science of Comte, has a speciality of application to it which is a true originality. We, indeed, are not the first so to apply it; the metaphysician of the day has virtually done so, and we shelter ourselves under his shield. It is the argument that the Positive Philosophy, like eyery system of materialism, really cuts away its own ground, that the more it acquires, the less it can enjoy; that it inevitably weakens the human mind ; that it might be represented by a deceiving magician, who offered to his dupe a magnificent estate, al- leging that he had merely to till and enjoy it, while there lurked in the soil some fatal necromantic power to palsy the arm that turned it, and deaden the palate which tasted its fruit. Sir William Hamilton, in allusion to the effect of the philosophy of Condillac in France, a philosophy essentially the same as Comte's, in silencing discussion and rendering philosophy synonymous with the observation and compari- son of physical phenomena, has the following passage: " Nor would such a result have been desirable, had the one exclusive opinion been true, as it was false; innocent, as it was corruptive. If the accomplishment of philosophy imply a cessation of discussion, if the result of specula- tion be a paralysis of itself; the consummation of know- ledge is the condition of intellectual barbarism. Plato has profoundly defined man, 'the hunter of truth;' for in this chase, as in others, the pursuit is all in all, the suc- cess comparatively nothing, t Did the Almighty,' says THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 491 Lessing, holding in his right hand Truth, and in his left Search after Truth, deign to proffer me the one, I might prefer in all humility, but without hesitation, I should request Search after Truth.' We exist only as we ener- gise; pleasure is the reflex of unimpeded energy; energy is the mean by which our faculties are developed; and a higher energy the end which their development proposes. In action is thus contained the existence, happiness, im provement, and perfection of our being; and knowledge is only precious, as it may afford a stimulus to the exercise of our powers, and the condition of their more complete activity. Speculative truth is, therefore, subordinate to speculation itself; and its value is directly measured by the quantity of energy which it occasions, immediately in its discovery, mediately through its consequences. Life to Endymion was not preferable to death ; aloof from practice, a waking error is better than a sleeping truth. Neither, in point of fact, is there found any proportion be- tween the possession of truths, and the development of the mind in which they are deposited. Every learner in science is now familiar with more truths than Aristotle or Plato ever dreamt of knowing; yet, compared with the Stagyrite or the Athenian, how few, among our masters of modern science, rank higher than intellectual barbarians ! Ancient Greece and modern Europe prove, indeed, that 1 the march of intellect' is no inseparable concomitant of 'the march of science;' that the cultivation of the indi- vidual is not to be rashly confounded with the progress of the species. " But, if the possession of theoretical facts be not con- vertible with mental improvement, and if the former be important merely as subservient to the latter, it follows, that the comparative utility of a study is not to be principally 492 THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. estimated by the complement of truths which it may com- municate, but by the degree in which it determines our higher capacities to action " On this ground (which we have not been able fully to state, far less adequately to illustrate), we rest the pre-emi- nent utility of metaphysical speculations. That they com- prehend all the sublimest objects of our theoretical and moral interest; that every (natural) conclusion concerning God, the soul, the present worth, and the future destiny of man, is exclusively metaphysical, will be at once admitted. But we do not found the importance on the paramount dignity of the pursuit. It is as the best gymnastic of the mind, as a mean, principally and almost exclusively conducive to the highest education of our noblest powers, that we would vindicate to these speculations the necessity which has too frequently been denied them. By no other intel- lectual application (and least of all by physical pursuits), is the soul thus reflected on itself, and its faculties con- centred in such independent, vigorous, unwonted, and continued energy; by none, therefore, are its best capa- cities so variously and intensely evolved. ' Where there is most life, there is the victory.' " We shall not say that we unreservedly subscribe to each particular clause in this powerful passage; but we hold that it furnishes an overpowering argument against the Positive Philosophy. That philosophy annihilates a he- misphere of human thought and endeavour; and the he- misphere which it annihilates is that in which all the sublime constellations burn. It can be necessary to add no word on the value of metaphysics as a discipline of mind; but a few words may not be out of place to suggest the corresponding value of religion. The Positive Philosophy is explicit in its denunciation THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 493 both of the former and of the latter ; religion was the first great human delusion, metaphysics was the second: the course of humanity, according to it, has been that of the North American Indian, who, as he gradually imbibes ideas and forms habits of civilisation, lays aside, one by one, the bits of painted glass, and the strings of beads, and the gaudy feathers, which were erewhile his glory ; we should rather, on its hypothesis, say, that it was that of the monarch, who ruled well, and looked proudly, in his youth and manhood, but on whom the dotage of age came, and who laid aside his diadem, and unclasped his royal robe, and shut himself into a grave that he had hewn for himself in a rock. If we might venture on indicating a difference and relation, more or less partial and strict, between the nature and influence of the mental gymnastic of metaphysics, and what results from that element in religion which is not of the nature of a truth discovered, but of a truth accepted, not of reason but of faith, we should say it might be figured by the difference and relation between light and heat, be- tween truth and beauty, between strength and gentleness. The moral world, alleges the positive philosopher, requires no Sun. Not so, answers the metaphysician, for then there were no light, no knowledge; what you call Positive Science, when taken alone, is no knowledge at all. Not so, answers the religious man, for then there were no heat ; the culinary fire of your provision shop, the Plutonic fire of your furnaces, will never array earth in its summer raiment, or cause its face to break into its summer smile. And if metaphysical training makes man intellectually strong, religion is required to give him a beauty and a gentleness. We found pantheism wrap man in a mail of pride, which we could pronounce none other than a mail of madness. Positive Science seems to make man very 494 THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. humble, but it too leaves him proud; only the pride of pantheism was that of a monarch who said he was well enough, and required no aid from God; that of atheism is the pride of him who, though beggared, prefers living on husks to returning to his Father. There must not be taken from man the belief in an In- finite: in that belief alone can his whole nature be deve- loped and displayed : thus alone does he find the humility that does not degrade him, and the honour that makes him not proud, the faith that clothes him in strength, and the reverence that breathes over his face a softened majesty, the love that makes him a fellow of angels, and the fear that reminds him he is still on the earth, the blessing that breathes tenderly on his pathway here, and the hope that beckons from the golden walls. There is a beauty in the face of man when his God smiles on it, as on the face of the babe in his cradle on which a father looks in joy, which must not be taken away. There is an earnestness in the heart and life of a man, when he knows that the eye of the Eternal is on him, which must not be foregone. There is an eternity of consequence in every act of an immortal, which he cannot deny and continue to work. The finite being staggers in bewilderment when separated from the Infinite; he cannot stand alone in the universe; he cannot defame his spirit without darkening it, he cannot scorn faith without weakening reason, he cannot deny God and reach the full strength and expansion of his faculties as a man. Coleridge says truly that religion makes all glorious on which it looks. How poor the education for my highest faculties, obtained by going round the world to learn in what order its phenomena are ranged, and discover, as my highest reward, new food to eat and new rai- ment wherewithal I may be clothed ! How effectual and THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 495 sublime is the education I receive in the survey, if every object I meet is gifted with a power of exhaustless suggestion, and every leaf of the forest and star of the sky is a commissioned witness for God, and not the most careless trill of woodland melody, no chance gleam of sunlight over the fountain that leaps from the crag, and, reckless as it is, must stay to reflect in its rainbowed love- liness the beauty of heaven, no wild wave tossing joy- ously on the pathless deep, but has power to call into ac- tion my highest and holiest powers, of wonder, of reverence, of adoration ! Could no other argument be brought against the Positive Philosophy, than the effect it would neces- sarily have on the education of the race, by excluding, so to speak, religion and metaphysics from the world-school, it were argument sufficient. Listening to the magniloquent professions of this philo- sophy, and looking at the results to which it may in some sort lay claim, it is important to inquire whether, and to what extent, its teaching is likely to be accompanied with success. We must not omit, however, to remark, that the atheistic science can nowise lay claim to the whole achieve- ment of Baconian induction. Physical pursuits managed at least to subsist when unallied with atheism, nay, we suspect that even for them the alliance would be cramping and pernicious. Bacon denounced atheism in absolute and unmeasured terms, and Newton never turned his eye to- wards the stars without looking for the light of God, which they revealed. Of the ultimate success of the Positive Philosophy we have no fear. Instinct is stronger than argument. It is not natural for man to find his all in this world. The gravitation of reasoning beings towards the moral Sun of the universe is too strong to be permanently or altogether 2 K 496 THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. broken. Where untutored man acts in the mere strength of nature, we are met by spectacles which, however sad, have one element of sublimity, in that they bear witness to man's belief in his spiritual nature ; at the other end of the scale, where the loftiest intellects of the human race rest in the solitude of greatness, we receive the same as- surance. If I visit the banks of some lone Indian river, where the Hindoo superstition still reigns supreme, I find I have not yet descended to a rank of humanity in which an invisible world is denied or forgotten, and man can name no motive strong enough to silence the remonstrances or to defeat the offers of sense. The widow is brought out to die on the funeral pile of her husband. I may weep over that fair form, in its simple beauty, where the blush and the dimple of girlish hope are just yielding to the matron smile of perfect womanhood, and deem it all too lovely for the embrace of fire. But even here I will have within me a haughty consolation, and I will gaze with pride in my melancholy, because that here also the human spirit asserts its supremacy over pain and death, even here, for duty and devotion, a weak woman can die. And, if the disciples of M. Comte tell us that this is just one of those spectacles which it is their boast to do away with for ever, we point them, as we said, to those minds which the ac- clamations of the race pronounce the greatest and best. While men gaze in revering pride towards Plato, and ho- nour the lofty contempt with which Fichte looked down on the joys of sense, while there is rapture in the eye of Poetry, and majesty on the brow of Philosophy, sight will not altogether prevail against faith, the sense will not, with its foul exhalations, wholly choke the spirit. Your light Anacreons, and careless Horaces, and frivolous Moores may continue to sing; even your Gibbons and Humes THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 497 may still work ; your system-builders, with ears deafened by their own hammering and backs bent with stooping to their own toil, will not cease to build; but no Homer or Dante, no Shakespere or Milton, no Coleridge and, we even add, no Shelley, will sing under the auspices of the Positive Philosophy ; your Fichte, your Carlyle, your De Quincey, your Tennyson, your Euskin, will refuse to serve nature on such conditions ; they will throw up their commissions at once. What men have deemed best de- serving of the name of thought would expire. " Why thought 1 To toil, and eat, Then make our bed in darkness, needs no thought." We have been told that immortality inspires the lyric Muse ; that it is the light in the distance which kindles her eye ; but now her song would be a funeral dirge. We might add quotation to quotation from our poetry, in in- definitely extended succession, of appeal from this theory, and assertion of a higher lot for man. Young exclaims, as if in anger, " Were then capacities divine conferr'd, As a mock-diadem, in savage sport, Rank insult of our pompous poverty, Which reaps but pain, from seeming claims so fair 1 " Shelley,with all his profession of atheism, shrinks startled from the brink of annihilation : " Shall that alone which knows Be as a sword burnt up before the sheath By sightless lightning 1 " Tennyson expressly alleges he would not stay in a world where the demonstration of the Positive Philosophy was complete : he would not confess himself and his fellows to be " cunning casts in clay: " " Let science prove we are, and then What matters science unto man, At least, to me 1 I would not stay." 498 THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. We suppose the following stanza, in which he again defines man, on the hypothesis that he is no more than an animal, and has no more to enjoy or look to than the pleasures of sense, is one of the finest in poetry: " No more 1 a monster, then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music match'd with him." We find, in a poem by Coleridge, which is not, we think, very well known, a general estimate of the absurdity and contradiction which are all remaining to man when he has denied his immaterial and immortal existence. We must be excused for quoting it at length ; since our present ar- gument has reference to the sympathies and instincts of the noble, it cannot be refused even a logical value: " If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom, Whose sound and motion not alone declare, But are their whole of being ! If the breath Be life itself, and not its task and tent, If even a soul like Milton's can know death; Man ! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant, Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes! Surplus of nature's dread activity, Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finish'd vase, Ketreating slow, with meditative pause, She form'd with restless hands unconsciously ! Blank accident ! nothing's anomaly ! If rootless thus, thus substanceless thy state, Go, weigh thy dreams, and be thy hopes, thy fears, The counter-weights ! Thy laughter and thy tears Mean but themselves, each fittest to create, And to repay the other ! Why rejoices Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good ! Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood, Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices, Image of image, ghost of ghostly elf, That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold ? Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 499 These costless shadows of thy shadowy self? Be sad ! be glad ! be neither ! seek, or shun ! Thou hast no reason why ! Thou can'st have none; Thy being's being is a contradiction." Thus we cannot entertain any apprehensions of the ulti- mate success of atheistic science. But we speak with a confidence no less assured, when we say, that its present diffusion may he wide, that it is either expressly the most formidable infidel agency of the day, or one of the most formidable. It possesses elements of strength which have ever proved powerful. Besides all that we formerly spe- cified, we may still note, as pertaining to this philosophy, two characteristics which render it strong: definiteness and union. And it is favoured by circumstances. The general human mind has scarce power to act long and earnestly on indirect motives; let it be once understood that meta- physics, however useful as a mental gymnastic, can yield directly no harvest of truth, and, we suspect, metaphysics will not long continue to be pursued. It is this considera- tion which leads us to withhold at least an absolute assent from what Sir William Hamilton says on this subject; and if metaphysical scepticism can find no arrow in the quiver of the great advocate of metaphysical studies, there has, be- yond question, been much in the late history of metaphysics to produce and encourage it. It is now a widely known and acknowledged fact, that the last great efflorescence of metaphysical study in Germany withered away, without having borne any fruit, that when men attempted to take of it and apply it to use, it crumbled away in their hands: Hegel, the last great ontologist, died with the assertion on his lips that no one understood him. All that expenditure of intellect seems to the practical man to have gone for nothing, to have been so much mere absolute loss. The dis- 500 THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. ciple of Comte is at hand, urgent in pressing on him that this is but the last instance of a failure in which the life of the best intellect of earth has been wasted, the last earnest attempt, with terrestrial arrow, to strike the stars. He will lay forth his laws, he will show how they account for pheno- mena, he will prate plausibly of a good that is definite, an end that is seen. Here, at least, he will say, is rest ; after six thousand years of tossing and groping, the race re- quires it; cast away Utopian fancies, they but clog the soul in its way to real advantage ; take the good you have, and fly not weakly after other that you know not of. And then there is Mammon to lend his auxiliary prompt- ing, and the hard practicality, the quite unideal nature, of everyday life, to sanction and second. Let us remem- ber well the reign of sensualism in France; and let us not forget that not a little of the ardent and really noble mind of England follows, with more or less completeness of ad- herence, the banner of Comte. Amid decaying systems of metaphysics, and systems of religion whose difference is too readily taken as a proof of universal unsoundness, the compact, single-eyed band of positive atheists may go very far! CHAPTEE II. PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM. We enter not again upon any examination of Pantheism. Our object in this Chapter is to inquire very briefly what hope may be reposed in the infidel spiritualism of the day, in the contest which all who believe in a spirit at all may unite in waging with the Positive Philosophy. The literary atmosphere resounds at present with cries that remind us of what is lofty and eternal in the destiny of man. We hear of the eternities and the immensities, of the divine silences, of the destinies, of load-stars, still, though seen by few, in the heavens. We are well-nigh confounded, and, unless we have listened long, are at a loss to attach a meaning to the high-sounding but indefinite terms. Mean- while the compact phalanx under the black flag is steadily advancing. Can the spiritualistic pantheism which ema- nated or still emanates from Mr Carlyle, oppose to it a line which will not easily be broken? We must answer with an emphatic negative. We shall state briefly the leading reasons which prevail with us in so doing. We assert of infidel spiritualism that it is rendered prac- tically powerless by one great characteristic ; the reverse of that which imparts strength to the positive array: it is hope- lessly indefinite. 502 PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM. The British intellect imperatively demands clearness. We think we may venture now to hazard what is partly an assumption and partly a prediction, that the era of in- definiteness in metaphysics and religion is drawing to a close, and will ere long have been. A strange delusion seems to have possessed these latter years, that metaphysical truth, that discourse about the origin, nature, and destiny of man, was necessarily dim, obscure, unintelligible to ordi- nary minds. Presumptuous as it may seem in us, we must conceive it possible that, eighty or a hundred years hence, the spectacle of Coleridge and his gaping circle at High- gate will be regarded with an interest quite dissimilar from that which has hitherto attached to it. We fancy its interest will partake somewhat of ironical wonder. It will be taken as a sign of the singular decay and absence of metaphysical study in England. All that incomprehensibility in which the words of the great magician were wrapped, will be re- ferred, partly to the want of intellectual power in the magician, and in still larger measure to absence of philo- sophical knowledge and metaphysical penetration in the audience. Men will have decided that the whole philo- sophy of Coleridge, had it arisen in Germany instead of England, would have been recognised, not as a wonderful phenomenon, worthy to be stared at and bowed down to by all men, but as a wing, with fittings of its own, of the general edifice of the philosophy of Schelling. In Ger- many, we imagine, it would have produced a few magazine articles, and perhaps a certain amount of disputation in the class-room of Schelling: in England it was enough to found an oracle. We are not sure that it will even seem presumptuous now to hazard this prediction. Clearness has again been vindicated for the language of metaphysics, a clearness equal to that of Hume or that of Berkeley : and PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM. 503 the whole magnificent fabric of painted mist and moonshine, which named itself the philosophy of Schelling, has been smitten as by keen lightnings, and may be said to have vanished from the intellectual horizon. This twofold result has been attained by one philosopher: Sir William Hamil- ton writes with the clearness and smites with the force of lightning. His advent on the philosophic stage we take to have marked the date at which the conclusion of the in- definite era became certain. Now what definiteness do we find in the floating spiri- tualism of the day ? We find, in looking towards Mr Carlyle, that, though the Coleridgean distinction between reason and understanding may be shelved and laughed at, there is yet some esoteric region, removed altogether from that of logic, where truth is still secluded. We could have thanked Mr Carlyle for his chapter on Coleridge, the clever- ness of which is absolutely amazing, if he had clearly pro- mulgated the doctrine, that there is more sense and straight- forward manliness in going at once to the question, Is this true? than in raising endless debate as to how the truth is got at, and whether it is handed to us by reason or by un- derstanding ; if he had really exposed, as one of our latest hallucinations, the conception that truth was to be reached, not by the persistent and earnest use of the old time- tried fa- culties, but by cunningly evolving some new faculty, which, by its power to see, or its method of manipulating truth, would at length bring us into the light of knowledge. But we positively discover that Mr Carlyle himself has some mysterious grove, into which, when hit by the sun-shafts of argument, he can retire ; that plain logic and everyday reasoning will not suffice to combat any doctrine of his; that the only difference between him and Coleridge is, that the latter did name the new and superior faculty reason, nay, 504 PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM. in his discourses on its nature and function, embodied a large amount of truth, while Mr Carlyle gives no name whatever to his Dodona grove, and demands belief without even a verbal reason for its accordance. Looking, too, from the means by which truth is attained, to the truth ar- rived at, is not the indefiniteness still extreme? We say not that, save in one or two perplexing instances, the great author of whom we now speak ever writes without having a deep meaning in his words; but we now speak of the ap- plicability of his teaching, and of that of his whole school, to the positive education of the race, to the practical opposi- tion of atheism. And what a ghastly prospect opens before us! We put the question, What is the outlook for eternity ? Amid much denunciation of douht, we learn that we cannot be assuredly answered, that a look into futurity is a look into a "great darkness." We ask, What is virtue, and how we are to perform the duties of our station? We are told that hero-worship is the all-embraeing formula of duty, and that in its performance we attain unto the three re- verences. When, at last, we are driven by the inappeas- able demand of our souls to say, Who is the Lord, that we may serve Him? we are told that even once-honoured Pantheism is but matter for a jest, and that all we ean know of God is that He is inscrutable. A new pro- clamation of the worship of the Unknown God will hardly serve for the practical teaching of the world. On this last sublime and solemn theme, we must be permitted to offer a remark. There may exist a spurious humility, and mock reverence, which will not honour God, and will defraud man of his highest glory. It does not honour God to make Him one with the Fate of Pagan- ism, and virtually allege that His creatures cannot or dare not draw near to Him : and if I cannot in some way know my PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISE. 505 God, where is the distinction of ray birth-right from that of the beasts that perish? Contemplating the universe in its vastness, all alit as it is with radiance, remembering that proximity is but relative, and that the particles of a sand-grain may to God appear no more in contact than the clustering galaxies whose distance we cannot sum, it is in the power of the human mind, by an effort of abstrac- tion, to figure it all as a bush, burning in the desert of immensity, to which the reasoning spirit, in hallowed awe, yet with a certain sublime confidence, may draw near to see its God. Let the shoes be from the feet, let no rash or irreverent approach be made, but let no human being shut his ear to the voice that calls to him as to the Hebrew prophet. I will not reject the highest attribute of my humanity, power to hear that voice; I will not go away, saying, the sight is too great for me, and indeed inscru- table. I will look because I am king of the earth, and I have my commission from Him Who calls : I will look with silent reverence, because He is King of the universe. "We proceed to a second argument. We need not claim the assent of the followers of Mr Carlyle to the fact that religion must live in a man or nation, if he or it is to be strong : this truth has been fully acknowledged by the school. But we earnestly en- treat both the strict adherents of Mr Carlyle, and all those who look for individual and social regeneration in an abandonment of the forms of Christianity, and the per- vasion of the atmosphere of the world by a certain lofty spiritual illumination, to consider one great historical fact and one great human characteristic. The historical fact is, that a religion devoid of forms has never been the re- ligion of a nation; the human characteristic is, that man will never bow down before a truth discovered, 506 PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM. but only before one received on authority, that he will worship by faith and not by reason, a God not discovered but revealed. "We quote a passage from Jonathan Edwards: " I sup- pose it will be acknowledged by the deist, that the Chris- tian religion is the most rational and pure that ever was established in any society of men; and that they will except only themselves, as serving God in a manner more according to his will, than the Christian manner. But, can any believe that God has so wholly thrown away mankind, that there never yet has been a society of men that have rightly paid respect to their Creator? " It is easily proved that the highest end and happiness of man is to view God's excellences, to love Him, and receive expressions of His love. This love, including all those other affections which depend upon, and are necessarily connected with it, we express in worship. The highest end of society among men, therefore, must be, to assist and join with each other in this employment. But how comes it to pass, that this end of society was never yet obtained among deists? Where was ever any social worship statedly performed by them? And were they disposed socially to express their love and honour, which way would they go about it? They have nothing from God to direct them. Doubtless there would be perpetual dissensions about it, unless they were disposed to fall in with the Christian model. We may be convinced, therefore, that revelation is necessary to right social worship." Is this not a profound and suggestive passage ? And may we not say that we have arrived at a time whose very characteristic it is, as distinguished from other times, that the truth it embodies be applied. Man is such a child of the Infinite, so indissolubly, consciously or unconsciously, wil- PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM. 507 lingly or unwillingly, is he bound to an Infinite Creator, that he can act earnestly and long, he can bridle passion and cast away sloth, he can live well and die calmly, only when strengthened, urged, supported, by motives which seem to him infinite. The tradition that comes out of a dim antiquity will win his homage, the song of his coun- try's bard will inspire him; but the law, however sapient, which was promulgated yesterday, acts faintly on his en- thusiasm, and the constitution which exists merely on paper, which is written in no time-hallowed memories on the heart of the people, though devised by one who has exhausted the science of polity, and inaugurated with the waving of all a nation's banners, and the flourishing of all a nation's trumpets, will either be trodden into the kennels or washed out in blood. And if man demands elements of infinitude in the modes and maxims of his everyday life, if his faculties will never heartily serve where they can altogether grasp, and his emotions lie very placid, if he knows precisely whence the wind bloweth that is to move them, can we find any difficulty in connecting with the general nature and character of man the phenomenon which the observant and reflective Edwards remarked? If man sees a brother, by the might of his own reason, un- veiling the face of God, he will connect with that God the element of finitude which attached to His revealer, and in neither the fear nor the love with which he regards Him, will there be that infinite something which is of the nature of worship. And since, by a corresponding necessity, man ever demands forms, since it is an impossibility for him to worship mere vague abstractions a fact which, we pre- sume, no serious thinker in the ranks of the spiritualists will deny we are shut up irresistibly to one of two alter- natives, either to abandon religion altogether, or to find 608 PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM. one which in origin and form is divine. Let it be re- marked, that the form of religion is not the same with forms of worship ; the latter may vary indefinitely or may not, and yet the religion retain its hold on the heart of a nation; but the former cannot depart, and religion remain. "We wish specially to urge this argument. It is a great leading doctrine of Mr Carlyle's, that all forms die, that spirit only lives; and far and wide beyond the ranks of Mr Carlyle's followers, you may meet with vague ideas about the form of Christianity being antiquated, but the spirit being yet destined to survive. We bid all who en- tertain such ideas to look well, lest they be harbouring an absurdity, hoping for an impossibility. Various religious ideas have taken form in various religions; but there is one phenomenon which we challenge any one to present to us from history, the worship of a personified religious idea, when the form of personification was known to be an allegory. If the great forms of the Christian religion, the Unity and the Trinity, the atonement by the Son, and the operation of the Spirit, are considered to body forth cer- tain moral ideas and truths, the race may conceivably have worshipped the ideas under tliese forms, but, if once it is understood that every such embodiment is merely tem- porary and allegorical, men will do with the ideas as they choose, but never again can they receive them as a reli- gion. Philosophy and religion cannot become one: the abstract idea which you receive as a philosophic truth, you cannot worship, the God before "Whom you kneel, by whatever name you call Him, can never be to you an ab- straction : the idea of philosophy is truth, the idea of reli- gion is life. We beg leave to submit this argument, as a reduction of the Carlylian spiritualism to a practical zero. On all who own the tremendous power of the PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM. 509 religious instinct, we urge the necessity of accepting as immoveable and eternal, the theological facts of Christi- anity ; or proclaiming a new religion in the only way in which a religion as such can be proclaimed, on the autho- rity of God, attested by the exertion of infinite and crea- tive energy, by suspending or modifying the existing laws of nature, in one word, by working miracles; or, thirdly, receding from their position. There is, in the present age, and in a country of free- dom, an awful import in the appeal we here make in favour of positive religion. There are terrible powers slumbering in the human breast. It is not such an easy matter to frame a religion that will make man tremble or work! We have often thought, with deep and curious interest, on what we have all heard of as Mr Leigh Hunt's Religion of the Heart. We know this work only from reliable indirect sources, but the name itself is sufficient to hint to us its nature, and enable us to compute its rea- sonableness and likelihood of success. The religion of the heart! The cure of human ills, the satisfaction of human doubt, the vanquishing of human sin, by an appeal to the finer feelings, and by the gentle influence of a meek senti- mentality! Has Mr Hunt set forth his theory to Mr Carlyle, and endeavoured to make him a proselyte? We trust he has. The interview would have been worth the theatrical exhibitions of a season. How did the sardonic painter of the French Revolution look upon the proposed Palingenesia? Was it with inextinguishable laughter, or with a glance of burning fire, or with melancholy, unutter- able scorn? He knows the world is not a cloud-film. He knows that men are not wax figures whose cheeks can be painted by a delicate lady-like hand. He might tell us that the lion of the desert, with the madness of hunger in 510 PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM. his eye, may be tamed by sweetened milk and water; that the raging volcano, which has torn up the welded earth, and is hurling its flaming fragments at the 6ky, may be lulled by the song of the soft west wind or the waving of a lady's fan; that the chafed surges of ocean may pause and bow placidly their heads, when the maiden prays them in mild accents to spare her lover; but that man is to be charmed by no gentle music, that man is a creature of battle and of blood, that the Furies and the tempests but faintly image the savageness of his mood, and that all absurdities pall before that which regards him as reclaim- able by honied words. There is but one thing in this uni- verse that will overmaster the spirit of man: the sight of God laying hold of His thunderbolts! The Positive Philosophy, the serried ranks, that con- sciously or unconsciously follow the dark guidance of Mammon and Atheism, are, we repeat, advancing. Say not Atheism cannot, for a time, prevail. Even now the Fiend may be filling his chalice in the fire of hell, to pour it on our heads in some agony of national horror, like that of the French Revolution. Atheism has ere now led nations captive, and a theory of atheism so plausible, so temperate, so seemingly innocent and benign, was never advocated in the world before. Are we to oppose it by the like of Mr Hunt's Religion of the Heart? Or even by sublime but sadly indefinite apostrophes to duty, and reverence, and hero-worship, and the divine silences? If we might respect- fully draw an inference from the tone of Mr Carlyle's late works, we would be inclined to think that he is aware of some deficiency of force, and has a sad foreboding as to how the battle is to go ! A glance at past history and at the present state of the world reveals to us here two perils which we dare not PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM. 511 overlook. The one is superstition, the other, licentious- ness. It will not be in the power of atheism to extinguish the religious instinct: but it may confine its manifestation to barbarous and debasing forms. If we drive away from us religion, when arrayed in the spotless robe of Christianity, if we will insist that we can devise for ourselves, with the aid of reason and science, better rules of action and modes of life than are afforded by that gospel, which even its enemies allow to stand pre-eminent among the institutions of men, we will find religion, by unalterable necessity, re- appearing amongst us, but now in a polluted garment, and bearing a curse rather than a blessing. Is there no lesson for the age in our St Simonisms and Mormonisms ? Do they not prove the desperate and reckless yearning of the human heart after faith in God? a yearning not to be appeased by the removal of all religious education, not to be satisfied by sensual joys, and which, if there is no true religion in which it can rest, will always call forth for itself some humiliating and baneful form of superstition. The second peril, that of licentiousness, is no distant possi- bility, no slight and permissible evil: we suspect the time is drawing on when it will assail the very life of our na- tion. Against this, the Positive Philosophy would be ut- terly inefficient. To restrain, indeed, any of the living and powerful forces in the human breast, it would be un- availing: Superstition would break asunder its green withes, on the one hand, and Passion, on the other, would snap its flaxen cords as with the might of fire. And it is to us not a little mysterious how a spiritualism, so high-toned and lofty as to be removed above the common apprehension of men, and alleging all thought of reward or punishment immeasurably beneath the serene dignity of its virtue, 2l 512 PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM. can yet look with indulgence, or at least with tolerance, upon foul incontinence ! We think that if there is one form of iniquity beyond another which all pure-minded and patriotic men ought now to unite in opposing, it is this. It might be a question whether there is a sin possible to a writer, which no conceivable amount of genius is sufficient to induce us to pardon. If such there be, it is that committed in the works of Byron. We can bear with him in all his petulance and scorn, in his unhealthy ego- tism and half-conscious affectation ; one star-glance of his Muse will cast a redeeming light over all that: but, if we see him draggling in the very mire the pinions of that Muse, and heaping foul ashes on her head, how can we pardon him? We may have a certain sympathy with him, as we mark his regal port, though his aspect and fierce demeanour seem to speak defiance to God and man ; but we cannot pardon him when we see him, a vile toad, squat at the ear of youth and purity, instilling foul poison. We may own a grandeur in Cain, and have a word to say even for the Vision of Judgment, but Don Juan must be flung upon the dunghill. We never can think of the state of the Roman Empire in its decline, without seeming to trace certain analogies between its state and that of Europe in the present day: one at least of the great causes which then enervated the race, and fitted it to be trodden in the dust by the strong men of the North, is now in operation over Europe. And if Atheism and Mam- mon once do their work, the judgments of God may again awaken to burn up a polluted and enfeebled people! When the carcass of a nation lies dead, tainting the solar system, there will not want lightnings to kindle its funeral pyre ! Such are the dangers which threaten us, and such the power to oppose them. Have we yet another hope? CHAPTER III. GENERAL CONCLUSION. We have but a few words to add. "We shall consider it made good in the foregoing pages, that Christianity still retains power to breathe a healing balm into social and individual life: and we shall now endeavour briefly to indicate in what precise position it stands, and how it is capable, as in every age, of drawing around it all the real enlightenment of the time, and going on ever to nobler manifestation and wider conquest. We have already had occasion to refer to the remark of Goethe, that "thought widens but lames;" that it is a natural law and tendency that the intensity of belief be in an inverse ratio to its range. If we examine well the re- ligious phenomena of the middle ages, we will find them characterised indeed by strength: but it was a strength that owed much to narrowness on the one hand, and super- stition on the other. History has now, so to speak, lifted the roof from each nation and from each generation, show- ing the many families that dwell under the common blue, the many generations within one cycle of time; astronomy has opened up the heavens around the arro- gating earth, and compelled it to dwindle from the central 514 GENERAL CONCLUSION. sun of the universe, with all the orbs circling round it, to a puny and planetary ball: the Reformation shattered the vast and icy crystallisation of Popery, and since then the tongue of controversy has never been silent; men must now have a far wider range of ideas than in former ages. A proportionate lesseningof intensity is the necessary result. Is it, however, to be impossible that the faith of a narrow intensity may be exchanged for that of an intelligent know- ledge, which difference can no longer startle, and novelty no longer emperil? that it attain a noble and manly com- posure, and a calmness of spiritual strength, which can distinguish between opinions and opinions, so as not to condemn good with bad, and between opinions and men, so as to tolerate and love the one, while opposing and ex- terminating the other? To mourn over the old intensity is weak ; to recoil into scepticism and the universal unsol- dering of belief, is a cowardly and feeble proceeding: to be religious without superstition, to be enlightened yet not infidel, i3 at present the part of a true man. It may at length be possible for Faith and Philosophy to form an alliance on such terms as these. Indecision and a spurious toleration are reigning temp- tations of the day. " As far," says Coleridge, " as opinions and not motives, principles and not men, are concerned, I neither am tolerant, nor wish to be regarded as such." " That which doth not withstand, hath itself no standing place." And again, quoting from Leighton: " Tolera- tion is an herb of spontaneous growth in the soil of indiffer- ence; but the weed has none of the virtues of the medi- cinal plant reared by humility in the garden of zeal." We cannot too carefully remember that, if controversy is the sign of an imperfect development or distempered action of life, indifference, whether in philosophy or religion, is death. GENERAL CONCLUSION. 515 If we might venture to trace the history of toleration in mo- dern European progress, we should say that it had come through two stages, and might now be hoped to be entering on the third. First, there was the deep and universal sleep of Paganism; the throne of toleration stood immoveable under the canopy of the ancient night. Then, for long ages, there continued the reign of intolerance ; and, with all its gloom, we hail this new phenomenon, as the indication of a mighty advancement made by the human mind, as a proof of the implantation in the heart and intellect of the race of the conviction that belief was important enough to be measured against the physical life : in this one con- sideration, we find power to turn into a beacon of promise every fire which persecution has lighted since the commencement of the Christian era. A third and noblest epoch is still possible. It is that during which truth shall have absolutely and for ever relinquished the ministry of pain, and shall yet continue to be loved and followed with devotion equal to that of the olden time, when Earnestness and Intolerance, like two austere Spartan kings, exercised joint sovereignty. It is one great hope of our age that this era can now be inaugurated: and one great peril that, shaking itself free of the middle-age intolerance, it lapse into that indifference to all spiritual things which Christianity at first dispelled. It is at pre- sent the peculiar and urgent duty of every brave man to witness to the unity, the definite clearness, the indestruc- tible life, the perpetual value of truth: to manifest his un- wavering conviction that, though a thousand arrows fly wide, the mark is stable and eternal ; that, though every voice of a discord, like that in the cave of iEolus, proclaim that truth is with it, truth itself is immoveable and im- mortal, and would be nowise differently affected, though 516 GENERAL CONCLUSION. all the languages of men were blended to express it in one indivisible tone. And it is not to be disguised that the attitude of Christianity has in no age been that of com- promise. It has been like a fiery sword, going up and down among the nations, searching, separating, and start- ling. It has never striven to show the similarity of error to truth, or to attempt a patchwork alliance between them. Any such attempt must come to nought; and it should be seriously laid to heart by all how deadly is the injury which may be inflicted by erring friendship, or a rash zeal that cannot wait. There have been many arguments ad- duced to prove that Judas, in coming to the Pharisees to bargain for the betrayal of his Lord, might not actually in- tend His death ; that it is a possibility his motive was but to force on the manifestation of the kingdom of Jesus: and whether we are convinced by such arguments or no, they contain profound suggestion for us of these latter ages. Let us beware how we serve the Lord, even with a kiss! It is not difficult, we think, to point to the precise tower of the strength of Christianity, to that position whose abandonment is the final yielding up of the victory. There is in the present day a vast deal of confounding babble about book revelations, historical evidence, and so on. We must look for some source of calming and ordering light to impart coherence and definiteness to our ideas of revelation, inspiration, and all kindred subjects. We find such a source, and we reach the ultimate fortress of Chris- tian evidence, when we consider what, strictly speaking, the Christian Revelation is. It is the Revelation of a Person : it is the manifestation of Jesus Christ. All Re- velation before His advent is the radiance that heralds the dawn: all Revelation after His advent is the shedding on the world of the risen Light. Let me once stand in His au- GENERAL CONCLUSION. 517 dienee in Judea, once believe that He raises the dead, that He is from God, and all becomes clear. Out of His lips I hear the words, " The Scripture cannot be broken : " the words are clearly distinguished; there is no variety of reading; history hears the words. "What must I say on this? What He means by Scripture is an open question; but that, if what He does intend can be broken, His word is broken with it, cannot be open to dispute. I listen fur- ther; I hear Him utter these words: "Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in nowise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." Here again I ask history what He means by the law, but I must, in the meanwhile, grant that a stronger declaration of the supernatural cha- racter of a certain writing so named could not be framed. What now becomes of all the jargon about a book reve- lation? Can I believe Jesus without believing His words? And I find that these are not exceptional words, but that in many forms and on many occasions He utters similar. I cannot fail to perceive in Him a fixed habit of regarding a certain body of writings, as authoritative in matters of doctrine, and supernatural in respect of foresight. I note also that there accompany Him twelve men, that He sends them out to preach miraculously endowed, that He says to them expressly, " He that receiveth you receiveth me." I hear Him promise them the "Holy Ghost," in these words: "But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you." This, I must ad- mit, seems an explicit promise of exemption from error in things connected with the teaching of the gospel. Last of all, I watch Him in the midst of His dis- ciples after His resurrection, and once more hear these 518 GENERAL CONCLUSION. words " Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me, both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth." As I see Him received into the cloud, and vanishing towards heaven, can I doubt any longer that He has left trustworthy apostles of His doctrines ? can I turn away from the witnesses whom He has expressly commissioned? If I can repose absolute confidence in the declaration and promise of the Saviour, my future inquiries are limited to the discovery of that " Scripture" which He said could not be broken, and that testimony which His commissioned " witnesses" bore. Con- firmatory evidence may arise from many quarters, but this is the centre towards which all must converge. And let it be recollected that, in order to this result, we demand not any aid save that of history, of unaided human faculty, and (by hypothesis) uninspired human knowledge : we ascend the mount with our natural limbs, but we reach a station where we can see the hand of God tracing characters in celestial light. Christ and Christianity thus bring us to the Bible: we crave permission to quote certain sentences from Cole- ridge touching that Book: " In every generation, and wherever the light of Revela- tion has shone, men of all ranks, conditions, and states of mind, have found in this volume a correspondent for every movement toward the Better felt in their own hearts. The needy 60ul has found supply, the feeble a help, the sorrowful a comfort; yea, be the recipiency the least that can consist with moral life, there is an answering grace ready to enter. The Bible has been found a spiritual world spiritual, and yet at the same time outward and common to all. You in one place, I in another all men GENERAL CONCLUSION. 519 somewhere, or at some time, meet with an assurance that the hopes and fears, the thoughts and yearnings, that pro- ceed from, or tend to, a right spirit in us, are not dreams or fleeting singularities, no voices heard in sleep, or spectres which the eye suffers, but not perceives. As if on some dark night a pilgrim, suddenly beholding a bright star moving before him, should stop in fear and perplexity. But lo ! traveller after traveller passes by him, and each, being questioned whither he is going, makes answer, I am following yon guiding Star!' The pilgrim quickens his own steps, and presses onward in confidence. More confident still will he be, if by the wayside he should find, here and there, ancient monuments, each with its votive lamp, and on each the name of some former pilgrim, and a record that there he had first seen or begun to follow the benignant Starf "No otherwise is it with the varied contents of the sacred volume. The hungry have found food, the thirsty a living spring, the feeble a staff, and the victorious war- farer songs of welcome and strains of music ; and as long as each man asks on account of his wants, and asks what he wants, no man will discover aught amiss or deficient in the vast and many-chambered storehouse. " For more than a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilisation, science, law in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species always supporting, and often leading the way. Its very presence, as a believed Book, has rendered the nations emphatically a chosen race, and this, too, in exact proportion as it is more or less generally known and studied. Of those nations which in the highest degree enjoy its influences, it is not too much to affirm, that the differences, public and private, physical, moral, and intellec- 520 GENERAL CONCLUSION. tual, are only less than what might be expected from a diversity in species. Good and holy men, and the best and wisest of mankind, the kingly spirits of history, en- throned in the hearts of mighty nations, have borne wit- ness to its influences, have declared it to be beyond com- pare the most perfect instrument, the only adequate organ of Humanity." These beautiful sentences will not fail to recall to many the tones and touches of glowing eulogy of the Scriptures scattered over the works of Mr Carlyle ; and it were no difficult task to give actual realisation to the assertion in the concluding clause, by appending an extended list of those mighty intellects which in all ages have recognised an in- dividual greatness and sublimity in the strange Book. It is encompassed, all must conceive, with a mystery and ancient grandeur which set it alone among the phenomena of time, and will cause any sober and thoughtful man to approach it with a feeling akin to awe. Gradually beam- ing forth, in the infancy of the race, ere the dawn of his- tory, and reaching meridian splendour over the manger of Bethlehem, it seems to possess a unity, measured by time, bridging the two eternities between which it lies, and over the whole stormy history of mankind casting a soft rain- bow splendour, a mild, heaven-lit radianee of infinite hope. Men and nations, at least as great as ever figured in the annals of the world, have not merely prized it but held that its light is, by nature, alone; that it is diverse from aught that can be attributed to the action of those faculties belonging to man in his present state as a species ; that it could no more have been the production of a Shakespere or a Newton, than of a child ; that it came even from Him who hung the stars and ranged the galaxies, in mercy to a world in spiritual night, lying under the mysterious GENERAL CONCLUSION. 521 eclipse of sin. The destinies of humanity are bound up with that Book ! The Word of God suggests His works. "We have traced, in some measure, the general action and influ- ence upon men of a physical science in league with atheism. But the proximity of darkness can never defile light, the fact that knowledge has been made the mini- ster of evil can never absolve us from the responsibi- lity of making it the handmaid of good. Our God made the world: every discovery of its treasures, every revela- tion of its beauty, must be marked by Christians with a sacred interest. We offer one or two words on the pre- sent relations of Christianity and science. It is a sublime and suggestive thought of Thomas de Quincey's, that it was only at the Reformation that Chi'is- tendom began rightly to decipher and understand the OFacles of GodL It is nowise inconceivable to us, that modern science may bear a commission to shed a light upon these oracles which will deserve the name of another Reformation. Even as it is, science has done much. It has widened vastly the conceptions of all enlightened men touching the power and the working of God. The astro- nomic scheme of the heavens, which satisfied the mind of Milton, and which he ha3 lighted up with a radiance which will never fade in the temple of his immortal song, is now known assuredly to bear no more proportion to that limit- less immensity where dwells the Almighty, and where the unnumbered worlds He has willed into being float like a little cloud of light, than the orrery of a school-boy to the conception of the mighty poet. Almost strangely, too, and certainly in accordance with no presage or expecta- tation, physical science has, in our own day, thrown a light of spirituality over the page of inspiration, bringing 522 GENERAL CONCLUSION. out a radiance thereon hitherto unseen, and touching with golden fire certain of the dogmas of an iron theology. It has shown that death existed in the world ere the fall, thus turning perforce the attention of men to the nature of that death entailed upon man by sin, suggesting the question of the difference between the death which can pass upon an animal and that which can affect a spirit, and opening up vast fields of lofty and noble speculation regarding the complete and healthful nature of man, whe- ther original or to be restored. Science has certainly opened the minds of men to perceive a deeper significance than hitherto recognised in the words of our Saviour which declare that what He said to His disciples was " spirit and life." And if it has enabled us more clearly to discern what was the past sentence and what is the present curse, it casts also a fainter but still most precious ray into the far future of punishment and reward. We pursue not this subject further. Let us merely remark that apprehension on the part of Christians with reference to science is, in all respects, causeless, unreason- able, and absurd. To suppose that truth and God can be severed, is blasphemy. To refuse to accept the ascertained doctrines of science on behalf of revelation, is to cut away the foundation in order to save the house. The attitude of Christians towards science should be that of calm and earnest waiting. The Word of God stands on its own basis; its foot on the rock foundations of the earth, its head reaching unto heaven. Science, too, stands on its own basis, stable as the faculties by which men grasp truth, and waxing in these times towards colossal dimen- sions. Even now it were surely an assertion far removed from extravagance, that it has done more for revelation than it has even seemed to do against it; pointing back to GENERAL CONCLUSION. 523 an original revelation with really marvellous distinctness, and showing a correspondency between the Bible's theory of humanity and the truths of induction, which can hardly, by any man, be imputed to unassisted reason. But even supposing science to have as yet but disturbed that rest of ignorance which she cannot yet recompose into the peace and strength, the repose and majesty, of perfect knowledge, cannot Christians wait? Truth must cast light upon truth ! Christianity is not to abandon her old position in the van of civilisation, her old attitude of proud and challenging defiance to all adversaries; she is not to lag ignominiously behind the race, entreating only not to be forced to a com- bat. Science is yet far from its meridian. It may take even centuries before its several subordinate lights blend their rays to cast a common illumination; but is it too much to predict that, when science shall have filled its orb, it will be seen by all nations, that the Father of spirits has had a higher design regarding it than that of spreading man's table or shortening his path, and that it casts a light, to reveal and demonstrate, over every pil- lar, down every avenue and colonnade, into every nook and crevice, of His Word? " Wait on the Lord; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord." " My faith," says De Quincey again, " my faith is, that, though a great man may, by a rare possibility, be an in- fidel, an intellect of the highest order must build upon Christianity." Surely it is a reasonable and manly faith. Christianity gives to man the immoveable assurance of the Word of the eternal God for all those verities which are his glory and sublimity. While atheism, speaking great swelling words, would have him make his bed in the dust, and would spread over the universe that wan and 52i GENERAL CONCLUSION. desolate look which the home of his infancy wears to the orphan that returns from his father's closing grave, it gives him the certainty of a spiritual existence, and a Creating Father. And it shows that Father manifesting His love in a manner whose very greatness wraps it in mystery: He is a God not far away, but brought nigh in Christ Jesus. While a vaguely aspiring and haughty spiritualism would cast over the future heavens a general indefinite illumination, or a sublime but fearful darkness, it pictures out the future of humanity, not, indeed, in detailed minute- ness, but with such a defined and comprehensible clearness, that hallowed musing, aided by the sovereign imagination in its highest mood, may clearly distinguish certain of its great features, may breathe the unbroken serenity of the cloudless light, and gaze reverent on the fadeless crown. It can indicate, though faintly, " Those high offices that suit The full-grown energies of heaven ;" it can guarantee the eternity of friendship, and of that love which is the friendship of spirits. It opens up, also, the prospect of an inspiring futurity for earth ; it sheds an auroral splendour over even the terrestrial destiny of man. We allude not now to the millennial epoch, irreversible as the promise of such an epoch is. We refer to the power of Christianity to develop and ennoble the whole charac- ter of man ; and this grand peculiarity it has, that it makes this development and this ennobling sacred duties, that it tells a man that neither his faculties nor their sphere of operation are his, that he has to subdue the whole kingdom, and cultivate the whole garden of his soul for God, and must not rest, save in the peace that is the music of work, until the limits also of God's outer kingdom of the world enclose the whole earth. Where faith is firm, it must GENERAL CONCLUSION. 525 impart a steadfastness, an earnest composure, a dignity, to the whole man. A man must be affected by his sense of his position and responsibilities: he assuredly, whatever his abilities, and whatever his sphere, who knows himself to be a soldier in God's army, will possess elements of strength and contentment that will distinguish him among men. Shall we not agree with these words of Edwards? " Now, if such things are enthusiasm, and the fruits of a distempered brain, let my brain be evermore possessed of the happy distemper! If this be distraction, I pray God that the world of mankind may be all seized with this benign, meek, beneficent, beatifical, glorious dis- traction 1" Christianity can at least, and surely with no need of argument, affirm that it possesses a practical worth and power superior to that of any other system. The idea of world-history is not philosophy but faith. It is an old doctrine, which yet, like the forgetting of it, must ever be new, that to demonstrate and promulgate a truth is not to enforce it: to establish it in the heart and life of man, to set it by the ploughman in the furrow, with the sailor on the ocean, with the artisan in the work- shop, by the household fire, and in the brawling mar- ket-place, it must have some power of laying its hand on the instincts that lie deep and half-conscious in the bosom. The religious instinct is perhaps the deepest and most powerful of all; no agency will produce a great im- pression, or effect a permanent lodgment in the world, that admits not of being leagued with it; and if it has now become a pre-eminent duty of the race to unite science and general education with religion, it maybe argued, that if the race is really to bestir itself to effect its thorough education, education must come under the sanction and with the en- 526 GENERAL CONCLUSION. forcement of religion. Neither must be left to stand alone. A people with the religious instinct strongly developed, yet all unenlightened by education, is like a giant smitten blind, that rushes wildly on, impelled by some resistless force, but towards no definite or nohle goal; an enlightened, an edu- cated nation, without religion, is like a skeleton bearing a lamp, it has light but not force. And if a superstitious nation, spreading its religion at the sword-point, or burning imaginary devotees of the prince of darkness, is a sad and dismal spectacle, it yet appears to us to have elements of real life and human strength with which we can sympa- thise ; while we find something to excite an utter loathing, in the aspect of a nation, where there is no earnestness above that of the market-place, no temple more sacred than the studio, and life has become one immeasurable gal- vanic simper of theatricality and art. And let it once more be called to mind, that superstition or licentiousness will never be long asleep. On the deck of the vessel they may be dancing to soft artistic music, or rejoicing in the dainties of a scientific luxury, but meanwhile the fire of supersti- tion is smouldering in the hold, erewhile to wrap it in flames, or the ship draws near some endless bank of fucus and sea-weed, into which when it once sails it makes no further progress, but rots away amid foul odours, on a sea where no wind ever blows. *fc 4 5-6/ B33 THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. Wf </* r A 000 988 640 9