I think, that it is most fully acknowledged to be a question of Scriptural evidence. It is not my fault if the Scriptural authority which the "Church system" appeals to, is an absolute nonentity. The Newmanite interpretation of our Lord's words, "Do this in remembrance of me," you confess to have startled you. Surely it may well startle any man, for no Unitarian comment on the first chapter of St. John could possibly be more monstrous. Now, in such matters, I speak and feel confidently from the habits of my life. My business as schoolmaster, is a constant exercise in the interpretation of language, in cases where no prejudice can warp the mind one way or another; and this habit of interpretation has been constantly applied to the Scriptures for more than twenty years; for I began the careful study of the Epistles long before I left Oxford, and have never intermitted it. I feel, therefore, even more strongly towards a misinterpretation of Scripture than I should towards a misinterpretation of Thucydides; I know that there are passages in the Scriptures which no man can interpret; that there are others of which the interpretation is doubtful; others again, where it is probable, but far from certain. This I feel strongly, and in such places I never would speak otherwise than hesitatingly. But this does not hinder us from feeling absolutely certain in other cases: and the Newmanite interpretations seem to me to be of the same class as the lowest Unitarian, or as those of the most extravagant fanatics; they are mere desperate shifts to get a show of authority from Scripture, which it is felt after all the Scripture will not furnish; for the anxious endeavour to exalt Tradition and Church authority to a level with the Scripture, proves sufficiently where the real support of the cause is felt to for no man would ever go to Tradition for the support of what the Scripture by itself teaches; and in all the great discussions on the Trinitarian question, the battle has been fought out of the Scripture: no Tradition is wanted to strengthen the testimony of St. John.

lie;

I suppose it is that men's individual constitution of mind determine them greatly, when great questions are brought to a clear issue. You have often accused me of not enough valuing the Church of England,-the very charge which I should now be inclined to retort against you. And in both instances the charge would have a true foundation. Viewing the Church of England as connected with the Stuart Kings, and as opposing the "good old cause,” I bear it no affection: viewing it as a great reformed institution, and as proclaiming the King's supremacy, and utterly denying the binding authority of General Councils, and the necessity of priestly mediation, you perhaps would feel less attached to it than I am. For, after all, those differences in men's minds which we express, when exemplified in English politics, by the terms Whig and Tory, are very deep and comprehensive, and I should much like to be able to discover a formula which would express them in their most abstract shape; they seem to me to be the great fundamental difference between thinking men; but yet it is certain that each of these two great divisions of mankind apprehends a truth strongly, and the Kingdom of God will, I suppose, show us the perfect reconciling of the truth held by each. I think that in opinion you will probably draw more and more towards Keble, and be removed farther and farther from me; but I have a most entire confidence that this, in our case, will not affect our mutual friendship, as, to my grief unspeakable, it has between old Keble and me; because I do not think that you will ever lose the consciousness of the fact, that the two great divisions of which I spoke are certainly not synonymous with the division between good and evil; that some of the best and wisest of mortal men are to be found with each; nay, that He who is our perfect example, unites in Himself and sanctions the truths most loved, and the spirit most sympathized in by each; wherefore, I do not think that either is justified in denouncing the other altogether, or renouncing friendship with it. I

have run on to an enormous length, but your letter rather moved me.

If you could see the beauty of this scene, you would think me mad to leave it, and I almost think myself so too. The boys are eager to be. off, and I feel myself that the work of Rugby is far more welcome when I come to it as a home after foreign travelling, than when I only go to it from Fox How, from one home to another, and from what is naturally the more dear to the less dear. Yet I should be very false, and very ungrateful too, if I did not acknowledge that Rugby was a very dear home; with so much of work, and yet so much of quiet, as my wife and I enjoy every day when we go out with her pony into our quiet lanes.

We have been reading some of the Rhetoric in the Sixth Form this half-year, and its immense value struck me again so forcibly, that I could not consent to send my son to an University where he would lose it altogether, and where his whole studies would be formal merely and not real, either mathematics or philology, with nothing at all like the Aristotle and Thucydides at Oxford. In times past, the neglect of philology at Oxford was so shameful, that it almost neutralized the other advantages of the place, but I do not think that this is so now; and the utter neglect of vivâ voce translation at Cambridge is another great evil; even though by construing instead of translating they almost undo the good of their vivâ voce system at Oxford.

CCL. TO THE REV. JAMES RANDALL.

Fox How, September 20, 1841. I read your letter to Coleridge with great interest, and wished much to write to you about it, but I fear that I have not time to do so. It would take rather a long time to state what I think about Dissent and what is called "Schism." I think it a great evil, as being inconsistent with the idea of the perfect Church, to which our aspira

tions should be continually directed. But "in fæce Romuli," with historical Churches, and such ideas of Church as have been most prevalent, Dissent seems to me to wear a very different aspect. Yet I am not partial to our English Dissenters, and think that their views are quite as narrow as those of their opponents. And what good is to be done, will be done, I think, much sooner by members of the Church than by Dissenters.

What you say of my books is very gratifying to me. It repays the labour of writing in the best manner, to know that any thinking man has considered what one has written, and has found in it something to interest him, whether he agrees with it or no. By the way, your criticism on a passage in my Christmas Day Sermon is quite just; and if my Sermon expresses any other doctrine, it has failed in expressing my meaning. Surely, I do not hold that the Godhead of the Son is really inferior to that of the Father, but only xar' dixovoμíav,—that is, it is presented to us mixed with an inferior nature, and also with certain qualities, visibility for instance, which have been assumed in condescension, but which are still what St. Paul calls "an emptying of the Divinity," presenting it to us in a less absolutely perfect form, because it is not merely itself, but itself with something inferior joined to it.

CCLI. TO THE REV. J. HEARN.

June 25, 1841.

I purpose leaving this place for the Continent with my two eldest sons on Monday next, and I wish before we set out to thank you for your last letter; and to send my earnest good wishes for the health and welfare, temporal and eternal, of my dear little godson. We have been here about a week, after a half-year at Rugby very peaceable as far as regarded the conduct of the boys, but very anxious

a Viz., that Deity does not admit of degrees.

as regarding their health. One boy died from pressure on the brain in the middle of the half-year; another has died within the last week of fever, and a third, who had been long in a delicate state and went home for his health, is since dead also. And besides all these, four boys more were at different times at the very point of death, and some are even now only slowly and with difficulty recovering. You may conceive how much anxiety and distress this must have occasioned us: yet I can most truly say, that it is as nothing when compared with the existence of any unusual moral evil in the school; far less distressing and far less harassing.

This place is very calm and very beautiful, and I think would furnish you with much employment, if you lived here all the year. But I am so ignorant about gardening and agricultural matters, that I can do little or nothing; and besides, we are away just at those times of the year when there is most to be done.

I am very glad you saw my old friend Tucker. He was with us for a few days in April, and he seemed to have derived nothing but good in all ways from his stay in India. Before he went out he had for some time been growing more and more of an Evangelical partisan, and had acquired some of the narrowness of mind and peculiarity of manner which belong to that party. But his missionary life seems to have swept away all those clouds; and I found him now with all the simplicity, hearty cheerfulness, affectionateness, and plain sense, which he had when a young man at Oxford, with all the earnestness and goodness of a ripened Christian superadded. It was one of the most delightful renewals of intercourse with an old friend which I can ever hope to enjoy.