acting under the superintendence of the Principal, and the Principal himself taking a direct part in the religious teaching of the students of his own communion.

It might be possible and desirable to put the office of Principal altogether in commission, and vest it in a Board of which the two Deans should be ex officio members, and three other persons, or one, as it might be thought fit. Local knowledge is required to decide the details,—but in this way, if Gell were English Dean, his power and importance might be equal to what they would be as Principal; and his position might be at once less invidious, and yet more entirely free and influential.

This solution of the difficulty had not suggested itself to me before, but I give it for what it may be worth. I believe that I see clearly, and hold fast the principles on which your College should be founded; but different ways of working these principles out may suggest themselves at different times, and none of them perhaps will suit your circumstances; for it is in the application of general principles to any given place or condition of things, that practical knowledge of that particular state of things is needful, which I cannot have in the present case. Still the conclusions of our local observation must not drive us to overset general principles, or to neglect them, for that is no less an error.

CCXLVI. TO THE SAME.

Rugby, April 4, 1842.

Your letter of the 18th of August quite coincides with my wishes, and satisfies me also that I may, without injustice, act according to them. And I am happy to say that seems quite disposed to agree with your view of the subject, and to make it a standing rule of the College, that the Principal of it shall always be a member of the Church of England, if not a clergyman. My own

belief is, that our colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are, with all their faults, the best institutions of the kind in the world, at least for Englishmen ; and therefore I should wish to copy them exactly, if it were possible, for Van Diemen's Land. I only doubted whether it were just to Scotland to give a predominantly English character to the institutions of a British colony; but your argument from the establishment of the English law, is, I think, a good one, and mixed institutions are to my mind so undesirable, that I would rather have the College Scotch altogether, so far as my own taste is concerned, than that it should represent no Church at all. I have always wished, and I wish it still, that the bases of our own, as of other Churches, should be made wider than they are; but the enlargement, to my mind, should be there, and not in the schools: for it seems a solecism to me, that a place of education for the members of a Church should not teach according to that Church, without suppressions of any sort for the sake of accommodating others.

As to the other point,- of there being always an English and Scotch clergyman amongst the Fellows of the College, took your view of the case, and I yielded to him. . But, though I do not like to urge any thing against your judgment, yet I should like to explain to you my view of the case. I wish to secure to members of the Scotch Church the education of their own Church,-I mean an education such as their own Church would wish them to have,just as I wish to secure for our people a full Church of England education. Then, on the other hand, I am not afraid of sectarian feelings and struggles, where men live together, each with a distinct recognised position of his own, and with his own proper work assigned to him. I dread much more the effect of differences not publicly recognised, such as those of parties within the same Church. If Roman Catholics, as such, had a college of their own at Oxford, I do not believe that there

would be half the disputing or proselytizing which exists now, where Roman Catholic opinions are held by men calling themselves members of our Church. A Scotch clergyman has to do with Scotchmen, an English clergyman with Englishmen. The national distinction would make the ecclesiastical difference natural, as I think, and would take away from it every thing of hostility. But, however, as I said before, I should have the greatest objection to pressing a point against your judgment. I grieve over the difficulty about the name of the College: it seems to me not a little matter; and how sadly does that foolish notion of its being profane, help the superstition to which it professes to be most opposed, the superstition of holy places, and holy things, and holy times. But your leaving the question to the Government seems quite the wisest way of settling it ".

CCXLVII. TO REV. TREVENEN PENROSE,

(Who had asked him his opinion about sanctioning various Provident Societies, by preaching sermons on their anniversaries.)

Rugby, April 10, 1841.

My opinion on such points as you have proposed to me, is not worth the fiftieth part of yours, so totally am I without the needful experience. But speaking as an idiúrns, I am inclined quite to agree with you. These half heathen clubs, including, above all, Free Masonry, are, I think, utterly unlawful for a Christian man: they are close brotherhoods, formed with those who are not in a close sense our brethren. You would do a great service, if, by your sermons, aided by your personal influence, you could give the clubs a Christian character. But their very names are unseemly. A club of Odd Fellows is a good joke, but hardly a decent piece of earnest. I suspect,

a This letter is, for the sake of convenience, transposed to this place from its proper order.

however, that the Government plans are too purely economical: an annual dinner is so much the usage of all English societies, that it seems hard to deny it to the

poor.

CCXLVIII. TO REV. T. J. ORMEROD.

Fox How, June 19, 1841.

I think that it is very desirable to show the connexion of the Church with the Synagogue, a point on which Whately insists strongly. I should also like to go into the question as to the δεύτεραι διατάξεις τῶν αποσTÓλwv, mentioned in that famous fragment of Irenæus. That the Church system, or rather the Priest system, is not to be found in Scripture, is as certain as that the worship of Jupiter is not the doctrine of the Gospel: the only shadow of an apostolical origin of it rests on the notion, that after the destruction of Jerusalem, the surviving Apostles altered the earlier Christian service, and made the Eucharist answer to the sacrifice of the Temple. I believe this to be unsupported as to its historical basis, and perverted doctrinally: if there be any foundation for the fact, it was not that the Eucharist was to succeed to the Temple sacrifices, one carnal sacrifice, and carnal priest succeeding to another;-but that the spiritual sacrifice of each man's self to God, connected always, according to Bunsen, with the commemoration of Christ's sacrifice in the Eucharist, was now visibly the only sacrifice anywhere offered to God; and thus, as was foretold, the carnal worship had utterly perished, and the spiritual worship was established in its room. That the great Enemy should have turned his very defeat into his greatest victory, and have converted the spiritual self-sacrifice in which each man was his own priest, into the carnal and lying sacrifice of the Mass, is to my mind, more than any thing else, the exact fulfilment of the apostolical language concerning Antichrist.

CCXLIX. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

Fox How, June 26, 1841.

Thank you for your letter, and your remarks on my Introduction. You speak of yourself as standing half way between Newman and me; but I do not think that you will or can maintain that position. For many years such a middle position was in fact that of the majority of the English clergy; it was the old form of High Churchism, retaining much of Protestantism, and uniting it with other notions, such as Apostolical Succession, for which it had an instinctive fondness, but which it cherished indistinctly, without pushing them to their consequences. Newman-and I thank him for it—has broken up this middle state, by pushing the doctrines of the Succession, &c., to their legitimate consequences; and it appears now that they are inconsistent with Protestantism, and Newman and his friends repudiate the very name of Protestant, disclaim the sole supremacy of Scripture, and in short hold every essential tenet of Popery, though not of Romanism; for they so far agree with the Gallican Church, that they would set a General Council above the Pope; but the essence of Popery, which is Priesthood and the mystic virtue of ritual acts done by a Priesthood, they cling to as heartily as the most vehement ultra-montane Papists. Now that the two systems are set front to front, I do not think that a middle course is possible: the Priest is either Christ or Antichrist; he is either our Mediator, or he is like the man of sin in God's temple; the "Church system" is either our Gospel, and St. John's and St. Paul's Gospel is superseded by it, or it is a system of blasphemous falsehood, such as St. Paul foretold was to come, such as St. John saw to be already in the world."

66

I think that you have not quite attended to my argument in the Introduction, when you seem to think that I have treated the question more as one of à priori reasoning, than of Scriptural evidence. If you look at the paragraph beginning at the bottom of page xxix, you will see,

VOL. II.

S