make me feel more ardently the wish that I could see you once again, and talk over instead of write the many important subjects which interest us both, and not us only, but all the world.

First, as to our politics. I detest as cordially as you can do the party of the "Movement," both in France and England. I detest Jacobinism in its root and in its branches, with all that godless Utilitarianism, which is its favourite aspect at this moment in England. Nothing within my knowledge is more utterly wicked than the party of

men

who, fairly and literally, as I fear, blaspheme not the Son of Man, but the Spirit of God; they hate Christ, because He is of heaven and they are of evil.

For the more vulgar form of our popular party, the total ignorance of, and indifference to, all principle; the mere money-getting and moneysaving selfishness which cries aloud for cheap government, making, as it were, avrò тdyalov to consist in cheapness-my feeling is one of extreme contempt and disgust. My only difference from you, so far as I see, regards our anti-reformers, or rather the Tory party in general in England. Now, undoubtedly, some of the very best and wisest men in the country have on the Reform question joined this party, but they are as Falkland was at Oxford-had their party triumphed, they would have been the first to lament the victory; for, not they would have influenced the measures carried into effect-but the worst and most selfish part of our aristocracy, with the coarsest and most profligate of their dependents, men like the Hortensii, and Lentuli, and Claudii of the Roman Civil wars, who thwarted Pompey, insulted Cicero, and ground down the provinces with their insolence and tyranny; men so hateful and so contemptible, that I verily believe that the victory of Cæsar, nay even of Augustus, was a less evil to the human race than would have resulted from the triumph of the aristocracy.

And, as I feel that, of the two besetting sins of human nature, selfish 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 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, I feel that while I agree with you wholly and most heartily in my abhorrence of the spirit of 1789, of the American war, of the French Economistes, and of the English Whigs of the latter part of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth, yet I have always been unable to sympathize with what you call " the historical liberty" which grew out of the system of the middle ages. For, not to speak of the unhappy extinction of that liberty in many countries of Europe, even in England it showed itself to have been more the child of accident than of principle: and throughout the momentous period of the eighteenth century, this character of it was fatally developed. For, not ascending to general prin

ciples, it foresaw not the evil, till it became too mature to be remedied, and the state of the poor and that of the Church are melancholy proofs of the folly of what is called "letting well alone" which, not watching for symptoms, nor endeavouring to meet the coming danger, allows the fuel of disease to accumulate in the unhealthy body, till, at last, the sickness strikes it with the suddenness and malignity of an incurable pestilence. But, when the cup is nearly full, and revolutions are abroad, it is a sign infallible that the old state of things is ready to vanish away. Its race is run, and no human power can preserve it. But, by attempting to preserve it, you derange the process of the new birth which must succeed it; and whilst the old perishes in spite of your efforts, you get a monstrous and misshapen creature in its place; when, had the birth been quietly effected, its proportions might have been better, and its inward constitution sounder and less irritable.

What our birth in England is likely to end in, is indeed a hard question. I believe that our only chance is in the stability of the present ministers. I am well aware of their faults; but still they keep out the Tories and the Radicals, the Red Jacobins of 1794 and the White Jacobins of 1795, or of Naples in 1799,-alike detestable. I do not think that you can fully judge of what the ascendency of the Tories is; it is not the Duke of Wellington or Sir R. Peel who would do harm, but the base party that they would bring in in their train, and all the tribe of selfish and ignorant lords and country squires and clergymen, who would irritate the feeling of the people to madness.

.

If you see my Pamphlet and Postscript, you will see that I have kept clear of the mere secular questions of tithes and pluralities, and have argued for a comprehension on higher grounds. I dislike Articles because they represent truth untruly, that is, in an unedifying manner, and thus robbed of its living truth, whilst it retains its mere literal form; whereas the same truth, embodied in prayers, or confessions, or even in catechisms, becomes more Christian, just in proportion as it is less theological. But I fear that our reforms, instead of labouring to unite the Dissenters with the Church, will confirm their separate existence by relieving them from all which they now complain of as a burden. And continuing distinct from the Church, will they not labour to effect its overthrow, till they bring us quite to the American platform?

LXIII. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN.

Rugby, May 21, 1833.

It is painful to think that these exaggerations, in too many instances, cannot be innocent; in Oxford there is an absolute ἐργαστήριον ψευδῶν, whose activity is surprising.

I do hope,

that we shall see you all next month. When I am not so strong as usual, I feel the vexation of the school more than I could wish to do. And I have also been annoyed at the feeling excited in some of my old friends by my Pamphlet, and by the constant and persevering falsehoods which are circulated concerning my opinions and my practice. Thucydides creeps on slowly, and nothing else, save my school work, gets on at all. I do confess, that I feel now more anxious than I used to do to get time to write, and especially to write history. But this will not be.

LXIV. TO REV. J. HEARN.

Rugby, May 29, 1833.

I do not know whether you have ever felt the intense difficulty of expressing in any other language the impression which the Scripture statement of any great doctrine has left on your own mind. It has grieved me much to find that some of my own friends, whilst they acquit me of any such intention, consider the tendency of my Church Reform plan as latitudinarian in point of doctrine. Now my belief is, that it would have precisely the contrary effect, and would tend ultimately to a much greater unity and strictness in true doctrine; that is to say, in those views of God's dealings and dispositions towards us, and of our consequent duties towards him, which constitute, I imagine, the essence of the Gospel Revelation. Now, what I want is, to abstract from what is commonly called doctrine every thing which is not of this kind; and secondly, for what is of this kind, to present it only so far forth as it is so, dropping all deductions which we conceive may be drawn from it, regarded as a naked truth, but which cannot be drawn from it, when regarded as a Divine practical lesson.

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For instance, it is common to derive from our Lord's words to Nicodemus, "Except a man be born of water," &c., an universal proposition, "No being can be saved ordinarily without baptism;" and then to prove the fitness of baptizing infants, for this reason, as necessary, out of charity to them; whereas our Lord's words are surely only for those who can understand them. Take any person with the use of his faculties, and therefore the consciousness of sin in his own heart, and say to him, that Except he be born again," &c., and then you apply Christ's word in its true meaning, to arouse men's consciences, and make them see that their evil and corrupt nature can of itself end only in evil. But when we apply it universally as an abstract truth, and form conclusions from it, those conclusions are frequently either uncharitable or superstitious, or both. It was uncharitable when men argued, though correctly enough as to logic, that, if no man could be saved without baptism, all the heathen must have perished; and it was uncharitable and superstitious too, to argue, as Cranmer, that unbaptized infants must perish; but that, if baptized, they were instantly safe. Now, I hold it to be a most certain rule of interpreting Scripture, that it never speaks of persons, when there is a physical impossibility of its speaking to them; but so soon as the mind opens and understands the word, then the word belongs to it, and then the truth is his in all its fulness; that "except he be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." So the heathen who died before the word was spoken, and in whose land it has never been preached, are dead to the word,-it concerns not them at all; but the moment it can reach them, then it is theirs and for them; and we are bound to spread it, not from general considerations of their fate without it, but because Christ has commanded us to spread it, and because we see that Christianity has the promise of both worlds, raising men's nature, and fitting them for communion with God hereafter,-revealing Him in His Son. Now, apply this rule to all the Scriptures, and ask at every passage, not "What follows from this as a general truth ?"-but "What is the exact lesson or impression which it was intended to convey ?-what faults was it designed to correct?-what good feelings to encourage?" Our Lord says, God is a

"

Spirit" now if we make conclusions from this metaphysically, we may, for aught I know, run into all kinds of extravagance, because we neither know what God is, nor what Spirit is; but if we take our Lord's conclusion, "Therefore we should worship Him in spirit and in truth;" i. e. not with outward forms, and still less, with evil passions and practices,then it is full of truth, and wisdom, and goodness. I have filled my paper, and yet perhaps have not fully developed my meaning; but you will connect it perhaps with my dislike of Articles, because their truth is always expressed abstractedly and theoretically, and my preference of a Liturgy as a bond of union, because there it assumes a practical shape, as it is meant in Scripture to be taken.

LXV. TO HIS SISTER, THE COUNTESS OF CAVAN.

(In answer to a question on Dr. Whately's "Thoughts on the Sabbath.")
Rugby, June 11, 1833.

My own notions about the matter would take up rather too much room, I fear, to come in at the end of my paper. But my conclusion is, that, whilst St. Paul on the one hand would have been utterly shocked, could he have foreseen that eighteen hundred years after Christianity had been in the world, such an institution as the Sabbath would have been still needed; yet, seeing that it is still needed, the obligation of the old commandment is still binding in the spirit of it; that is, that we should use one day in seven, as a sort of especial reminder of our duties, and a relieving ourselves from the overpressure of worldly things, which daily life brings with it. But our Sunday is the beginning of the week, not the end-a day of preparation and strengthening for the week to come, and not of rest for the past; and in this sense the old Christians kept it, because it was the day on which Ged began his work of creation; so little did they think that they had any thing to do with the old Jewish Sabbath, You will see, also, by our common Catechism, that "the duty towards God," which is expressly given as a summary of the four first commandments to us, as Christians, says not one word about the Sabbath, but simply about loving God, worshipping him, and serving him truly all the days of our life. It is not that we may pick and choose what commandments we like to obey, but, as all the commandments have no force upon us as such, that is, as positive and literal commands addressed to ourselves,-it is only a question how far each commandment is applicable to us, that is, how far we are in the same circumstances with those to whom it was given. Now, in respect to the great moral commands of worshipping and honouring God, honouring parents, abstaining from murder, &c.,-as these are equally applicable to all times and all states of society, they are equally binding upon all men, not as having been some of the commandments given to the Jews, but as being part of God's eternal and universal law, for all His reasonable creatures to obey. And here, no doubt, there is a serious responsibility for every one to determine how far what he reads in the Bible concerns himself; and no doubt, also, that, if a man chooses to cheat his conscience in such a matter, he might do it easily; but the responsibility is one which we cannot get rid of, because we see that parts of the Bible are not addressed directly to us; and thus we must decide what is addressed to us and

what is not; and if we decide dishonestly, for the sake of indulging any evil inclination, we do but double our guilt.'

LXVI. TO MR. SERGEANT COLERIDGE.

Rugby, June 12, 1833.

Our Westmoreland house is rising from its foundations, and I hope rearing itself tolerably "in auras æthereas." It looks right into the bosom of Fairfield,-a noble mountain, which sends down two long arms into the valley, and keeps the clouds reposing between them, while he looks down on them composedly with his quiet brow; and the Rotha, "purior electro," winds round our fields, just under the house. Behind, we run up to the top of Loughrigg, and we have a mountain pasture, in a basin on the summit of the ridge, the very image of those "Saltus 39 on Citharon, where Edipus was found by the Corinthian shepherd The Wordsworths' friendship, for so I may call it, is certainly one of the greatest delights of Fox How,-the name of my xúptov,-and their kindness in arranging every thing in our absence has been very great. Mean time, till our own house is ready, which cannot be till next summer, we have taken a furnished house, at the head of Grasmere, on a little shoulder of the mountain of Silver How, between the lake on one side, and Easedale, the most delicious of vales, on the other.

LXVII. TO A PUPIL.

(Who had written, with much anxiety, to know whether he had offended him, as he had thought his manner changed towards him.)

Grasmere, July 15, 1833. The other part of your letter at once gratified and pained me. I was not aware of any thing in my manner to you that could imply disapprobation; and certainly it was not intended to do so. Yet it is true that I had observed, with some pain, what seemed to me indications of a want of enthusiasm, in the good sense of the word, of a moral sense and feeling corresponding to what I knew was your intellectual activity. I did not observe any thing amounting to a sneering spirit; but there seemed to me a coldness on religious matters, which made me fear lest it should change to sneering, as your understanding became more vigorous; for this is the natural fault of the undue predominance of the mere intellect, unaccompanied by a corresponding growth and liveliness

1) The principle here laid down, is given more at length in the Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture, at the end of the second volume of his Sermons; and also in the Sermon on the Lord's Day, in the third volume. It may be well to insert in this place a letter to Mr. Justice Coleridge in 1830, relating to a libel in a newspaper, charging him with violation of the observance of Sunday.

"Surely I can deny the charge stoutly and in toto; for, although I think that the whole law is done away with, so far as it is the law given on Mount Sinai; yet so far as it is the law of the Spirit, I hold it to be all binding; and believing that our need of a Lord's day is as great as ever it was, and that therefore its observance is God's will, and is likely, so far as we see, to be so to the end of time, I should think it most mischievous to weaken the respect paid to it. I believe all that I have ever published about it, is to be found at the end of my twentieth Sermon [of the first volume]; and as for my practice, I am busy every Sunday from morning till evening, in lecturing the boys, or preaching to them, or writing sermons for them. One feels asbamed to mention such things, but the fact is, that I have doubled my own work on Sunday, to give the boys more religious instruction; and that I can, I hope, deny the charge of i the libel in as strong terms as you would wish."