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. 

 
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