how could this ever be done without having the process of construing, as the grosser medium through which alone all the beauty can be transmitted, because else we travel too fast, and more than half of it escapes us? Shakspeare, with English boys, would be but a poor substitute for Homer; but I confess that I should be glad to get Dante and Goethe now and then in the room of some of the Greek tragedians and of Horace; or rather not in their room, but mixed up along with them. I have been trying something of this in French, as I am now going through, with the Sixth Form, Barante's beautiful Tableau de la Littérature Française pendant le Dix huitième Siècle. I thought of you the other day, when one of my fellows translated to me that splendid paragraph, comparing Voltaire to the Babouc of one of his own romances, for I think you first showed me the passage many years ago. Now by going through Barante in this way, one gets it thoroughly; and with a really good book, I think it is a great gain. CXXXIX. * TO A. P. STANLEY, ESQ. Rugby, October 21, 1836. As long as you read moderately, and not voraciously, I can consent that your reading should even prevent your coming to Rugby ; and I am glad that, by beginning in time, you will escape all excessive pressure at last. You will be rejoicing at the meeting of the scattered members of your society after the Long Vacation. I can well recall the same feeling, deeply associated in my mind with the October tints of the Nettlebed beech woods, through which my road to Oxford, from Kensington and Hampton, always lay. The separation had been long enough to make the meeting more than joyous, and some of my most delightful remembrances of Oxford and its neighbourhood are connected with the scenery of the later autumn; Bagley Wood in its golden decline, and the green of the meadows, reviving for awhile under the influence of a Martinmas summer, and then fading finally off into its winter brown. Here our society is too busy, as well as too old, to enjoy in common, though we can work in common; but work after all is but half the man, and they who only work together do not truly live together. I agree with in a great deal, and so N- might ask as he does about Hampden and the Socinians, where I begin to disagree with him. Politically, I do not know that I do disagree as to any principle, and in sympathy with a man's mind in argument, it makes no difference whether he believes the exemplification of your common principles to be found in this party or in that party; that is a mere question of fact, which we need not impannel a jury to try; meanwhile we are agreed as to the law of the case.. But to supply the place of Conscience, with the apxa of Fanaticism on one hand and of Utilitarianism on the other,-on one side is the mere sign from heaven, craved by those who heeded not Heaven's first sign written within them ;-on the other, it is the idea which, hardly hovering on the remotest outskirts of Christianity, readily flies off to the camp of Materialism and Atheism; the mere pared and plucked notion of "good" exhibited by the word "useful" which seems to me the idea of "good" robbed of its nobleness,-the sediment from which the filtered water has been assiduously separated, It were a strange world, if there were indeed in it no one doXTEKTOVIKOV Eido but that of the ξύμφερον; if καλον were only κάλον, ὅτι ξύμφερον. But this is one of the peculiarities of the English mind; the Puritan and the Benthamite have an immense part of their nature in comnon; and thus the Christianity of the Puritan is coarse and fanatical;—he cannot relish what there is in it of beautiful or delicate or ideal. Men get embarrassed by the common cases of a misguided conscience; but a compass may be out of order as well as a conscience, and the needle may point due south if you hold a powerful magnet in that direction. Still the compass, generally speaking, is a true and sure guide, and so is the conscience; and you can trace the deranging influence on the latter quite as surely as on the former. Again, there is confusion in some men's minds, who say that, if we so exalt conscience, we make ourselves the paramount judges of all things, and so do not live by faith and obedience. But he who believes his conscience to be God's law, by obeying it obeys God. It is as much obedience, as it is obedience to follow the dictates of God's Spirit; and in every case of obedience to any law or guide whatsoever, there always must be one independent act of the mind pronouncing this one determining proposition, "I ought to obey" so that in obedience, as in every moral act, we are and must be the paramount judges, because we must ourselves decide on that very principle, " that we ought to obey." And as for faith, there is again a confusion in the use of the term. It is not scriptural, but fanatical, to oppose faith to reason. Faith is properly opposed to sense, and is the listening to the dictates of the higher part of our mind, to which alone God speaks, rather than to the lower part of us, to which the world speaks. There is no end to the mischiefs done by that one very common and perfectly unscriptural mistake of opposing faith and reason, or whatever you choose to call the highest part of man's nature. And this you will find that the Scripture never does; and observing this, cuts down at once all Pusey's nonsense about Rationalism; which, in order to be contrasted scripturally with faith, must mean the following some lower part of our nature, whether sensual or merely intellectual ;that is, some part which does not acknowledge God. But what he abuses as Rationalism is just what the Scripture commends as knowledge, judgment, understanding, and the like; that is, not the following of a merely intellectual part of our nature, but the sovereign part; that is, the moral reason acting under God, and using, so to speak, the telescope of faith for objects too distant for its naked eye to discover. And to this is opposed, in Scriptural language, folly and idolatry and blindness, and other such terms of reproof. According to Pusey, the forty-fourth chapter of Isaiah is Rationalism, and the man who bowed down to the stock of a tree was a humble man, who did not inquire but believe. But if Isaiah be right, and speaks the words of God, then Pusey, and the man who bowed down to the stock of a tree, should learn that God is not served by folly. CXL. TO SIR THOMAS S. PASLEY, BART. Rugby, October 29, 1836. The authority for the statement which you quote is to be found in Hallam's Constitutional History, vol. i. chap. iv., which says that "it was a common practice for several years to appoint laymen, usually mechanics, to read the service in vacant churches." This does not touch the question of the Sacraments, nor do I imagine that any layman was ever authorized in the Church of England to administer the Lord's Supper; but lay baptism was allowed by Hooker to be valid, and no distinction can be drawn between one sacrament and the other. Language more to the purpose is to be found in Tertullian,-I think in the Treatise De Corona Militis, but at any rate he states first of all that the mode of administering rather than communicating in the Sacrament was a departure from the original practice; and then he explains the origin of the practice by using the word "Præsidentes" not "Sacerdotes" or "Presbyteri ;"-that is, the person who presided at the table for order's sake would distribute the bread and wine; and in almost every case he would be an elder, or one invested with a share of the government of the Church, but he did it not as priest, but as president of the assembly; which makes just the whole difference. But, after all, the whole question as to the matter of right, and the priestly power, must be answered out of the New Testament; no one disputes the propriety of the general practice as it now stands; but the Church of England has not said that it adopts this practice because it is essential to the validity of the sacraments and is of divine institution, but leaves the question of principle open; and this of course can only be decided out of the Scriptures. That the Scriptures are clear enough against the priestcraft notion, is to me certain; the more so that nothing is quoted for it, but the words of St. Paul, “The bread which we break, the cup which we bless," &c.; words which, quoted as a text, look something to the quoter's purpose, because the ignorant reader may think that "we" means St. Paul and his brother apostles; but if any one from the text looks to the passage, he will find that the "we" is the whole Christian congregation, inasmuch as the words immediately following are, " for we being many are one bread and one body, for we are all partakers of that one bread." 1 Corinth. x. Yet this text I have both seen in books and heard in conversation quoted as a Scripture authority for the exclusive right of the clergy to administer the Communion. Wherefore I conclude, independently of my own knowledge of the New Testament, that such an argument as this would not have been used, if any thing tolerable were to be had. .... CXLI. * TO DR. GREENHILL. Rugby, October 31, 1836. I was very much obliged to you for your letter, and much gratified by it. It is a real pleasure to me to find that you are taking steadily to a profession, without which I scarcely see how a man can live honestly. That is, I use the term " profession" in rather a large sense, not as simply denoting certain callings which a man follows for his maintenance, but rather, a definite field of duty, which the nobleman has as much as the tailor, but which he has not, who having an income large enouhg to keep him from starving, hangs about upon life, merely following his own caprices and fancies; quod factu pessimum est. I can well enough understand how medicine, like every other profession, has its moral and spiritual dangers; but I do not see why it should have more than others. The tendency to Atheism, I imagine, exists in every study followed up vigorously, without a foundation of faith, and that foundation carefully strengthened and built upon. The student in History is as much busied with secondary causes as the student in medicine; the rule "nec Deus inter sit," true as it is up to a certain point, that we may not annihilate man's agency and make him a puppet, is ever apt to be followed too far when we are become familiar with man or with nature, and understand the laws which direct both. Then these laws seem enough to account for every thing, and the laws themselves we ascribe either to chance, or the mystifications called "nature," or the "anima mundi," the "spiritus intus alit" of Pantheism. If there is any thing special in the atheistic tendency of medicine, it arises, I suppose, from certain vague notions about the soul, its independence of matter, &c., and from the habit of considering these notions as an essential part of religion. Now I think that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection meets the Materialists so far as this, that it does imply that a body, or an organization of some sort, is necessary to the full development of man's nature. Beyond this we cannot go; for,-granting that the brain is essential to thought,—still no man can say that the white pulp which you can see and touch and anatomize can itself think, and by whatever names we endeavour to avoid acknowledging the existence of mind,-whether we talk of a subtle fluid, or a wonderful arrangement of nerves, or any thing else,-still we do but disguise our ignorance; for the act of thinking is one sui generis, and the thinking power must in like manner be different from all that we commonly mean by matter. The question of Free Will is, and ever must be, imperfectly understood. If a man denies that he has a will either to sit or not to sit, to write a note or no, I cannot prove to him that he has one. If again, he maintains that the choosing power in him cannot but choose what seems to it to be good, then this is a great tribute to the importance of good habits, and to the duty of impressing right notions of good on the young mind, all which is perfectly true. And, in the last case, if a man maintains that his nature irresistibly teaches him that what we call good is evil, and vice versâ, then I find at once the value of those passages in Scripture which have been so grievously misused, and I see before me a vessel of wrath fitted for destruction, fitted, as I believe, through its own fault; but if it denies this, then at any rate fitted for destruction and on the sure way to it. But no doubt every study requires to be tempered and balanced with something out of itself, if it be only to prevent the mind from becoming "einseitig” or pedantic; and, ascending higher still, all intellectual study, however comprehensive, requires spiritual study to be joined with it, lest our nature itself become "einseitig," the intellect growing; the higher reason the moral and spiritual wisdom-stunted and decaying. You will be thinking that I have been writing a sermon by mistake, instead of a letter, but your letter led me into it. I believe that any man can make himself an Atheist speedily, by breaking off his own personal communion with God in Christ; but, if he keep this unimpaired, I believe that no intellectual study, whether of nature or of man, will force him into Atheism; but, on the contrary, the new creations of our knowledge, so to speak, gather themselves into a fair and harmonious system, ever revolving in their brightness around their proper centre, the throne of God. Prayer, and kindly intercourse with the poor, are the two great safeguards of spiritual life ;-its more than food and raiment. CXLII. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ. I have begun the Thessalonians, and like the work much; but I dread the difficulty of the second chapter of the Second Epistle. You will not care to hear that I have got into the fourth Book of Gaius. But you will not, I hope, find it against your conscience so far to aid my studies of law, as to get for me a good copy, if you can, of Littleton's work upon Coke commented. Coleridge recommended it to me as illustrating the early state of our law of real property, with the iniquities of feudality and the Conquest as yet in all their freshness. I am fully persuaded that he, who were to get the law of real property of any country in all its fulness, would have one of the most important indications of its political and social state. We have got Coleridge's Literary Remains, in which I do rejoice greatly. I think with all his faults, old Sam was more of a great man than any one who has lived within the four seas in my memory. It is refreshing to see such a union of the highest philosophy and poetry, with so full a knowledge, on so many points at least, of particular facts. But yet there are marks enough that his mind was a little diseased by the want of a profession, and the consequent unsteadiness of his mind and purposes; it always seems to me that the very power of contemplation becomes impaired or perverted, when it is made the main employment of life. Yet I would fain have more time for contemplation than I have at present ; so hard is it τυχεῖν τοῦ μέσου. CXLIII. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. Rugby, November 25, 1836. Thank you very much for your inclosure against neutrality, which I suspect would be repelled by the state of mind of those for whom it is designed, like a cannon ball by a woolpack. Neutrality seems to me a natural state for men of fair honesty, moderate wit, and much indolence; they cannot get strong impressions of what is true and right, and the weak impression, which is all that they can take, cannot overcome indolence and fear. I crave a strong mind for my children, for this reason, that they then have a chance at least of appreciating truth keenly; and when a man does that, honesty becomes comparatively easy; as, for instance, Peel has an idea about the currency, and a distinct impression about it; and therefore on that point I would trust him for not yielding to clamour; but about most matters, the Church especially, he seems to have no idea, and therefore I would not trust him for not giving it all up to-morrow, if the clamour were loud enough. We look forward with some yearnings to Fox How, and we much wish to know when you will all be coming over. It is but an ostrich-like feeling, but it seems as if I could fancy things to be more peaceful when I am out of the turmoil, down in Westmoreland, and I find that I crave after peace more and more. But it is οὔπω, οὔπω. I shall have occasion soon to set to work at the Celtic languages. Can you get for me, and send me a good Erse grammar; and that book that you were mentioning, about the Welsh being Picts, and not the Aborigines of Wales? I shall want all this for the Gallic Invasion of Rome; so beautifully does History branch out into all varieties of questions, and contin |