out; I also like the substance of about half of it; the rest of course appears to me erroneous. But it must be good to have a public man writing on such a subject, and it delights me to have a good protest against that wretched doctrine of Warburton's, that the State has only to look after body and goods. "Too late," however, are the words which I should be inclined to affix to every plan for reforming society in England; we are ingulphed, I believe, inevitably, and must go down the cataract; although ourselves, i. e. you and I, may be in Hezekiah's case, and not live to see the catastrophe.

I thank you very much for your truly kind offer of assistance about the Roman History. If any man were reading Augustine or any other writer for his own purposes, and took notes of such points as you mention, there is no doubt that his notes would be very useful to me; but there is this objection against asking any body to read for my purposes, that the labour saved to me might not be in proportion to that which I was imposing on him. Such notes as you suggest would be like an exceedingly good index; but they must rather guide my own researches than supersede them; for it is, I think, absolutely necessary to look through for oneself all the most important works which relate to one's period of history. I shall save myself many or most of the Byzantine writers by stopping at any rate in the eighth century, and confining myself chiefly to the Latin empire.

I think that, hard as the Agrarian questions are, they connect themselves with one almost harder, namely, “How can slavery be really dispensed with?" It is, of course, perfectly easy to say that we will have no slaves, but it is not quite so easy to make all the human inhabitants of a country what free citizens ought to be; and the state of our railway navigators and cotton operatives is scarcely better for themselves than that of slaves, either physically or morally, and is far more perilous to society. It is when I see all these evils, which I believe

the Church was meant to remove, that I groan over that fatal system which has so utterly destroyed it; that system of substituting unrealities for realities, which Newman and his party are striving to confirm and to propagate. But I feel, also, that even a sham is better to most minds than nothing at all; and that Newmanism ought not to be met with negatives, by trying to prove it to be false, but by something positive, such as the real living Church would be. And how is the Church to be revived? So Newmanism, I suppose, will grow and grow, till it provokes a reaction of infidelity, and then infidelity will grow and grow, till up starts Newmanism again in such form as it may wear in the twentieth or twenty-first century.

*

CXCI.

TO A. P. STANLEY, ESQ.

Rugby, February 27, 1839.

The stir about Church matters, of which Gladstone's book is a symptom, interests me, of course, and on the whole delights me. Any thing on such a point is, I believe, better than the mere ignorance of indifference. But I am more and more anxious to organize, I do not say a party, for I dislike all parties; but a system of action for those who earnestly look to the Church as the appointed and only possible means of all earthly improvement for society, whether in its larger divisions or in its smaller. Nothing can or ought to be done by merely maintaining negatives; I will neither write nor talk if I can help it against Newmanism, but for that true Church and Christianity, which all kinds of evil, each in its appointed time, have combined to corrupt and destroy. It seems to me, that a great point might be gained by urging the restoration of the Order of Deacons, which has been long, quoad the reality, dead. In large towns many worthy men might be found able and willing to undertake the office out of pure love, if it were understood to be not necessarily a step to the Presbyterial order, nor at all incompatible with lay

callings. You would get an immense gain by a great extension of the Church,-by a softening down that pestilent distinction between clergy and laity, which is so closely linked with the priestcraft system, and by the actual benefits, temporal and spiritual, which such an additional number of ministers would ensure to the whole Christian congregation. And I believe that the proposal involves in it nothing which ought to shock even a Newmanite. The Canon Law, I think, makes a very wide distinction between the Deacon and the Presbyter; the Deacon according to it, is half a Layman; and could return at any time to a lay condition altogether; and I suppose no one is so mad as to maintain that a minister abstaining from all secular callings is a matter of necessity, seeing that St. Paul carried on his trade of tentmaker even when he was an Apostle. Of course the Ordination Service might remain just as it is; for in fact no alteration in the law is needed;-it is only an alteration in certain customs which have long prevailed, but which have really no authority. It would be worth while, I think, to consult the Canon Law and our own Ecclesiastical Law, so far as we have any, with regard to the Order of Deacons. I have long thought that some plan of this sort might be the small end of the wedge, by which Antichrist might hereafter be burst asunder like the Dragon of Bel's temple.

.

*

CXCII.

TO J. P. GELL, ESQ.

Rugby, March 15, 1839.

I have just received a letter from Sir John Franklin, who, as you know, is Governor of Van Diemen's Land, accompanied by one from the Colonial Office, asking me to recommend some man as Head Master of a great school in Van Diemen's Land, which it is wished to establish on the very highest scale, in the hope that it may hereafter become a College or University for that part of the world. [After stating the nature of the situation.]

He enters at length and with all his heart into the plan; and from what he tells me of the capabilities and the wants of the situation, I know of no man whom I could so much wish to see intrusted with it as yourself, if you should feel disposed to let me name you to Lord Normanby. It is a most noble field, and in Franklin himself you will have a fellow labourer, and a Governor with and under whom it would do one's heart good to work. He wants a Christian, a gentleman, and a scholar,—a member of one of our Universities, a man of ability and of vigour of character, to become the father of the education of a whole quarter of the globe; and to assist, under God's blessing, and with the grace of Christ's Spirit, in laying the foundations of all good and noble principles, not only in individual children, but in an infant nation, which must hereafter influence the world largely for good or for evil. And I think that, if you could feel disposed to undertake this great missionary labour, you would work at it in the spirit of Christ's servant, and would become the instrument of blessings, not to be numbered, to thousands, and would for yourself obtain a xágπov Egyou, such as can rarely be the fortune of the most ambitious. Let me know your mind as soon as you can decide on a matter which I am sure, will not treat lightly. Give my kindest regards to your father, towards whom I feel more guilty than towards any one else; for I am afraid that he and your mother will not thank me for making such a proposal. But I believe you to be so eminently the man for such an undertaking, that I could not acquit myself of my commission to the Government, without naming it to you. Your brother is very well, and writing Greek verse close by my side, seeing that it is Fourth Lesson. I hope that you can give me good accounts of your brother Charles.

you,

CXCIII. TO THE UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE.

(Relating to the College in Van Diemen's Land.)

Rugby, March 19, 1839.

Some expressions in your letter lead me to ask whether, if the person appointed to the School were not in orders, there would be an objection on the part of the Government to his entering into them before he left England? Because, I think that many persons best fitted to carry on the work of education, would be actually unwilling to engage in it, unless they were allowed to unite the clerical character with that of the teacher. This feeling is, I confess, entirely my own. Even in a far lower point of view, as to what regards the position of a schoolmaster in society, you are well aware that it has not yet obtained that respect in England, as to be able to stand by itself in public opinion as a liberal profession; it owes the rank which it holds to its connexion with the profession of a clergyman, for that is acknowledged universally in England to be the profession of a gentleman. Mere teaching, like mere literature, places a man, I think, in rather an equivocal position: he holds no undoubted station in society by these alone; for neither education nor literature have ever enjoyed that consideration and general respect in England, which they enjoy in France and in Germany. But a far higher consideration is this, that he who is to educate boys, if he is fully sensible of the importance of his business, must be unwilling to lose such great opportunities as the clerical character gives him, by enabling him to address them continually from the pulpit, and to administer the Communion to them as they become old enough to receive it. And in a remote colony it would be even more desirable than in England, that the head of a great institution for education should be able to stand in this relation to his pupils; and I am quite sure that the spirit of proselytism, which some persons appear so greatly to dread, would no more exist in a good and sensible clergyman, than in a good and sensible layman. Your