Page images
PDF
EPUB

CLI. TO THE REV. G. CORNISH.

Fox How, February 5, 1837.

Even the bustle of Fox How is calmer than the quiet of Rugby. We are going away to-morrow morning, and it is now past ten o'clock; yet I know not when I can sit down to write so peacefully, as I can in this last hour of our last day's sojourn at this most dear and most beautiful home. Thank you very much for your letter. I will not revive matters of dispute ; what, if spoken, would be known at once to be half in joke, seems in writing to be all meant in sober earnest; and therefore our discussions shall wait till that day, which, I trust, will yet arrive, when we may again meet, and introduce some of our children to each other. A life of peace is one of the things which I vainly sigh after. If you can live out of the reach of controversy and party, it is a great gain. So a quiet, country parish is a far more attractive thing than the care of a great manufacturing town; but my lot, and, I believe, my duty have thrown me, as it were, into the manufacturing town; and I must contend for what I earnestly believe to be truth. Do you suppose that I could not resign myself with delight to the quiet of this valley, and the peace of these mountains, if so it might be? And we have been enjoying it for the last six weeks thoroughly. The climate has been better than in almost any part of England. We had no snow here to stop communication for half an hour; and since the snow went away from all but the mountain tops, the colouring of the country has been delicious. We have had our full share of walking; whilst all the morning, till one o'clock, I used to sit in one corner of the drawing-room, not looking towards Fairfield lest I should be constantly tempted from my work, and there I worked on at the Roman History and the Twelve Tables, and Appius Claudius, and Cincinnatus, and all the rest of them.

My wife, thank God, has been wonderfully well and

strong, and climbs the mountains with the rest of us. And little Fan, who was three years old in October, went over Loughrigg with us to Rydal the other day-though her little feet looked quite absurd upon the rough mountain side, and the fern-stalks annoyed her, as Gulliver was puzzled by the Brobdignag corn field.

We were, in the course of the summer, in the Isle of Man, and in Ireland. I admired Dublin and its bay, and the Wicklow Sugar Loaf, and the blue sea of Killiney Bay. But to my astonishment, the "Emerald Isle" was a very parched and dusty isle in comparison with Westmoreland, and the Three Rock Mountain, though beautiful with its granite rocks and heath, had none of the thousand springs of our Loughrigg. Of the people I saw little or nothing.

We expect to be in Oxford one day this week, before we settle at Rugby for our long half-year. I wonder whether I could find your tree in Bagley Wood, on which you once sat exalted. Do you ever see or hear of old Dyson, or of Ellison? or do you hear from Tucker? Coleridge, as you perhaps know, was a month at this house in the suminer with all his family;-then, on their way to town, they came to us at Rugby, and there met Professor Buckland; so that, after an interval of many years, I was again one of an old Corpus trio. It is eleven o'clock, and we are off at eight to-morrow, so good night.

[ocr errors]

CLII. TO THE REV. J. HEARN.

Yarrow Bridge, Chorley, Feb. 6, 1837.

I call all this Judaizing a direct idolatry,-it

is exalting the Church and the Sacraments into the place of Christ, as others have exalted His mother, and others in the same spirit exalted circumcision. There is something almost ludicrous, if the matter were not too serious in the way in which speaks of Calvin and the best and

[ocr errors]

ablest of his followers, and some of the great living writers of Germany, as of men labouring under a judicial blindness. "This people who knoweth not the law," i. e. as interpreted by the tradition and doctors of the Church, 66 are accursed.” It is vain to argue with such men, only when they ascribe a judicial blindness to Calvin and Zuingle, or to Tholuck, Nitzch, and Bunsen, one cannot but be reminded of those who "with lies made the heart of the righteous sad, whom God had not made sad," or of those who denied St. Paul's apostleship and spirituality, because he was not one of the original twelve Apostles, and because he would not preach circumcision.

No man doubts that a strictly universal consent would be a very strong argument indeed; but then by the very fact of its being disputed, it ceases to be universal; and general consent is a very different thing from universal. It becomes, then, the consent of the majority; and we must examine the nature of the minority, and also the peculiar nature of the opinions or practices agreed in, before we can decide whether general consent be really an argument for or against the truth of an opinion. For it has been said, "Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you;" and then it would be equally true of such a generation or generations, that it was, "Woe to that opinion in which all men agree.”

Now I believe that the Apostles' Creed may be taken as a specimen of truths held by the general consent of Christians; for every thing there (except the Descent into Hell, which was a later insertion) is in almost the very words of Scripture. It is just like St. Paul's short creed in 1 Corinthians, xv.: "I delivered unto you that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and was buried," &c. But this Creed will no more suit -'s turn than the Scriptures themselves will. It says not a word of priesthood or succession,-it does not even say a word of either Sacrament. The points for which needs the consent of the

Church, are points on which the principal ecclesiastical writers, from whom he gleans this consent, had all a manifest bias; partly from their own position as ministers, partly from the superstitious tendencies of their age. And after all how few are these writers! Who would think of making out the universal consent of the Christian world from the language of ten or a dozen bishops or clergy who happened to be writers? Who will bear witness to the opinions of the Bithynian Church, of whose practice Pliny has left so beautiful a picture? Or who would value for any Church, or for any opinion, the testimony of such a man as Tertullian? But, after all, consent would go for nothing where it is so clearly against Scripture. All in Asia were turned away from Paul even in his lifetime. [No wonder] then, if after his death they could not bear his doctrines, and undermined them while they were obliged outwardly to honour [them]. The operation of material agency to produce a spiritual effect [is not] more opposed to reason than it is directly denied by our Lord, on grounds which would call rationalistic, if I were to use them. I refer to what He says of the impossibility of meat defiling a man, or water purifying him; and the reason assigned to show that meat cannot morally defile ́ is of course equally valid to show that it cannot morally strengthen or cleanse. I believe it might be shown that the efficacy of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper has been weakened directly by the superstitions about it; that in proportion as a value was attached to the elements, as they were called, so the real Christian Sacramentum,—each man pledging himself to Christ and to his brethren, upon the symbols of his redemption and sanctification,--became less and less regarded; whilst superstitions made the Sacrament less frequent, and thus have inflicted a grievous injury on the spiritual state of every Church.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

CLIII. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ.

Rugby, March 3, 1837.

About the grammars, I am inclined to think that the common Eton Grammars, purged of their manifest faults, would answer better than any thing else. I am more and more in favour of a Latin rather than an English grammar, and I think that the simpler and more dogmatical the rules are, the better. That is best in a boy's grammar which can be easiest remembered, and understood enough to be applied practically; the explanation of the principles of grammar belongs to a more advanced age.

By "manifest faults," I mean such as calling "hic, hæc, hoc," an article; or teaching boys to believe that there is such a word as ἔτυπον, or such an Aorist to λέγω as ἔλεγον, and other monstrosities. And I think such corrections might be made easily. But let us save "Verba dandi et reddendi," &c., and, if I dared, I would put in a word for "As in præsenti," perhaps even for "Propria quæ maribus." Is not this a laudible specimen of Toryism? Or is it that we are Reformers in our neighbours' trade and Conservatives in our own?

[ocr errors]

CLIV. TO CRABBE ROBINSON, ESQ.

(Who had written to him fearing he would not continue in the new University unless more were done in the examinations as to Theology, than could or would be effected.)

[ocr errors]

March 15, 1837.

First, be assured that I will do nothing hastily, that I wish most earnestly well to the London University, and look upon it as so great a possible means of good, that nothing but what will appear to me imperious duty shall tempt me to leave it. Neither have I the least thought or wish of conciliating the Tories; on the contrary, I regret nothing so much as the possibility of appearing to agree with them in any thing; neither in fact, can I believe that I ever shall be so far mistaken.

« PreviousContinue »