the argumentum ad ventrem; and the mass of mankind, whether in good coats or in bad, will always be vulgarminded.

CXX. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

(Then at Fox How with his family.)

Rugby, September 23, 1836.

If you have the same soft air that is now breathing round us, and the same bright sun playing on the trees, which are full charged with the freshness of last night's rain, you must, I think, be in a condition to judge well of the beauty of Fox How. It is a real delight to think of you as at last arrived there, and to feel that the place which we so love is enjoyed by such dear friends, who can enjoy it fully. I congratulate you on your deliverance from Lancaster Castle, and by what you said in your last letter, you are satisfied, I imagine, with the propriety of the verdict. Now you can not only see the mountains afar off, but feel them in eyes, lungs and mind; and a mighty influence I think it is. I often used to think of the solemn comparison in the Psalm, "the hills stand about Jerusalem; even so standeth the Lord round about his people." The girdling in of the mountains round the valley of our home is as apt an image as any earthly thing can be of the encircling of the everlasting arms, keeping off evil, and showering all good.

But my great delight in thinking of you at Fox How is mixed with no repining that I cannot be there myself. We have had our holyday, and it was a long and most agreeable one; and Nemesis might well be angry, if I was not now ready and glad to be at work again. Besides, I think that the school is again in a very hopeful state; the set, which rather weighed us down during the last year, is now broken and dispersed; and the tide is again, I trust, at flood, and will, I hope, go on so. You would smile to see the zeal, with which I am trying to improve the Latin verse, and the difficulty, which I

find in doing it. But I stand in amaze at the utter want of poetical feeling in the minds of the majority of boys. They cannot in the least understand either Homer or Virgil; they cannot follow out the strong graphic touches which, to an active mind, suggest such infinitely varied pictures, and yet leave it to the reader to draw them for himself on the hint given. But my delight in going over Homer and Virgil with the boys makes me think what a treat it must be to teach Shakespeare to a good class of young Greeks in regenerate Athens; to dwell upon him line by line, and word by word, in the way that nothing but a translation lesson ever will enable one to do; and so to get all his pictures and thoughts leisurely into one's mind, till I verily think one would after a time almost give out light in the dark, after having been steeped as it were in such an atmosphere of brilliance. And 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? Shakespeare, with English boys, would be but a poor substitute for Homer; but I confess that I should be glad to get Dante and Goëthe 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.

VOL. II.

E

CXXI.

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, about Hampden and disagree with him.

and so N― might ask as he does the Socinians, where I begin to 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 axa 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. Itwere a strange world, if there were indeed in it no one αρχιτεκτονικὸν εἴδος but that of the ξύμφερον ; if κάλον were only κάλον, ὅτι ξυμφερον. But this is one of the peculiarities of the English mind; the Puritan and the Benthamite have an immense part of their nature in common; 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 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.

CXXII. TO SIR THOMAS S. PASLEY, ᏴᎪᎡᎢ .

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 ima