XL. TO REV. JULIUS HARE.

Nov. 9, 1831.

(After thanking him for the first number of the Philological Museum, and wishing him success.) For myself, I am afraid Thucydides will have shown you that I am a very poor philologist, and my knowledge is too superficial on almost every point to enable me to produce anything worth your having; and to say the truth, every moment of spare time I wish to devote to writing on Religion or πολιτική. I use the Greek word, because "politics" is commonly taken in a much baser sense. I know I can do but little, perhaps nothing, but the "Liberavi animam meam" is a consolation; and I would fain not see everything good and beautiful sink in ruin, without making a single effort to lessen the mischief. Since the death of the Register, I am writing constantly in one of the Sheffield papers, the proprietor of which I earnestly believe sincerely wishes to do good.

I heartily sympathize with the feeling of your concluding paragraph-in your note, I mean-but who dare look forward now to anything?

XLI. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF Dublin.

Rugby, November 8, 1831. You must not go to Ireland without a few lines from me. I cannot yet be reconciled to your being on the other side of St. George's Channel, or to thinking of Oxford as being without you. I do not know where to look for the Mezentius who should "succedat pugnæ," when Turnus is gone away. My great ignorance about Ireland is also very inconvenient to me in thinking about your future operations, as I do not know what most wants mending there, or what is likely to be the disposition to mend it in those with whom you will be surrounded. But you must not go out with words of evil omen; and, indeed, I do anticipate much happiness for you, seeing that happiness consists, according to our dear old friend, i įvegyɛią, and of that you are likely to have enough.

......

I am a coward about schools, and yet I have not the satisfaction of being a coward xarà goxięso; for I am inclined to think that the trials of a school are useful to a boy's after character, and thus I dread not to expose my boys to it; while, on the other hand, the

immediate effect of it is so ugly, that, like washing one's hands with earth, one shrinks from dirting them so grievously in the first stage of the process. . . . . . I cannot get over my sense of the fearful state of public affairs:-is it clean hopeless that the Church will come forward and crave to be allowed to reform itself?

. . . I

but a

can have no confidence in what would be in men like death-bed repentance. It can only be done effectually by those who have not, through many a year of fair weather, turned a deaf ear to the voice of reform, and will now be thought only to obey it, because they cannot help it. If I were indeed a radical, and hated the Church, and longed for a democracy, I should be jolly enough, and think that all was plain sailing; but as it is, I verily think that neither my spirits nor my occupation, nor even spearing itself, will enable me to be cheerful under such an awful prospect of public evils.

XLII. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ.

Knutsford, December 16, 1831.

I want to write an Essay on the true use of Scripture; i. e. that it is a direct guide so far forth as we are circumstanced exactly like the persons to whom it was originally addressed; that where the differences are great, there it is a guide by analogy; i. e. if so and so was the duty of men so circumstanced, ergo, so and so is the duty of men circumstanced thus otherwise; and that thus we shall keep the spirit of God's revelation even whilst utterly disregarding the letter, when the circumstances are totally different. E. g. the second commandment is in the letter utterly done away with by the fact of the Incarnation. To refuse then the benefit which we might derive from the frequent use of the crucifix, under pretence of the Second Commandment, is a folly, because God has sanctioned one conceivable similitude of himself when He declared Himself in the person of Christ. The spirit of the commandment not to think unworthily of the Divine nature, nor to lower it after our own devices, is violated by all unscriptural notions of God's attributes and dealings with men, such as we see and hear broached daily, and, though in a less important degree, by those representations of God the Father which one sees in Catholic pictures, and by what Whately calls peristerolatry, the foolish way in which people allow themselves to talk about God the Holy Ghost, as of a dove.

The applications of this principle are very numerous, and embrace, I think, all the principal errors both of the High Church and of the Evangelical party.

XLIII. TO REV. G. CORNISH.

RYDAL!!! December 23, 1831.

We are actually here, and going up Nabb's Scar presently, if the morning holds clear: the said Nabb's Scar being the mountain at whose foot our house stands; but you must not suppose that we are at Rydal Hall; it is only a house by the road-side, just at the corner of the lane that leads up to Wordsworth's house, with the road on one side of the garden, and the Rotha on the other, which goes brawling away under our windows with its perpetual music. The higher mountains that bound our view are all snow-capped, but it is all snug, and warm and green in the valley,-nowhere on earth have I ever seen a spot of more perfect and enjoyable beauty, with not a single object out of tune with it, look which way I will. In another cottage, about twenty yards from us, Capt. Hamilton, the author of Cyril Thornton, has taken up his abode for the winter; close above us are the Wordsworths; and we are in our own house a party of fifteen souls, so that we are in no danger of being dull. And I think it would be hard to say which of us all enjoys our quarters the most. We arrived here on Monday, and hope to stay here about a month from the present time.

It is indeed a long time since I have written to you, and these are times to furnish ample matter to write or to talk about. How earnestly do I wish that I could see you; it is the only ungratified wish as to earthly happiness of my most happy life, that I am so parted from so many of my dearest friends. . . . . . [After speaking of objections which he had heard made to the appointment of Dr. Whately to the Archbishopric of Dublin.] Now I am sure that in point of real essential holiness, so far as man can judge of man, there does not live a truer Christian than Whately; and it does grieve me most deeply to hear people speak of him as of a dangerous and latitudinarian character, because in him the intellectual part of his nature keeps pace with the spiritual-instead of being left, as the Evangelicals leave it, a fallow field for all unsightly creeds to flourish in. He is a truly great man-in the highest sense of the word, and if the safety and welfare of the Protestant Church in

Ireland depend in any degree on human instruments, none could be found, I verily believe, in the whole empire, so likely to maintain it. . . . . . I am again publishing Sermons, with an essay at the tail, on the Interpretation of Scripture, embodying things that I have being thinking over for the last six or seven years; and which I hope will be useful to a class whose spiritual wants I am apt to think are sadly provided for-young men bringing up for other professions than the church, who share deeply in the intellectual activity of the day, and require better satisfaction to the working of their minds than I think is commonly given them.

XLIV. TO THE SAME.

Rugby, February 15, 1832.

A letter from Tucker has this morning informed me of the heavy trial which has fallen upon you. I write because I should wish to hear from you under similar circumstances, and because it is unnatural not to assure you at such a moment how dearly your friends at Rugby love you and your dear wife, and how truly they sympathize with your sorrow. Tucker's letter leaves us anxious both for your wife and for little Robert-especially for the latter; it would be a great comfort to hear favourable accounts of them, if you could give them. I will not add one word more. May God strengthen and support you, my dear friend, and bless all his dispensations towards us both, through Jesus Christ.

XLV. TO THE LADY FRANCIS EGERTON.

(On the subject of the conversion of a person with atheistical opinions.)

Rugby, February 15, 1832. The subject of the letter which I have had the honour of receiving from you has so high a claim upon the best exertions of every Christian, that I can only regret my inability to do it justice. But in cases of moral or intellectual disorder, no less than of bodily, it is difficult to prescribe at a distance; so much must always depend on the particular constitution of the individual, and the peculiarly weak points in his character. Nor am I quite sure whether the case you mention is one of absolute Atheism, or of Epicurism; that is to say, whether it be a denial of God's existence altogether, or

only of his moral government, the latter doctrine being, I believe, a favourite resource with those who cannot evade the force of the evidences of design in the works of Creation, and yet cannot bear to entertain that strong and constant sense of personal responsibility, which follows from the notion of God as a moral governor. At any rate, the great thing to ascertain is, what led to his present state of opinions; for the actual arguments by which he would now justify them, are of much less consequence. The proofs of an intelligent and benevolent Creator are given in my opinion more clearly in Paley's Natural Theology, than in any other book that I know, and the necessity of faith arising from the absurdity of scepticism on the one hand, and of dogmatism on the other, is shown with great power and eloquence in the first article of the second part of Pascal's "Pensées," a book of which there is an English translation by no means difficult to meet with. In many cases the real origin of a man's irreligion is, I believe, political. He dislikes the actual state of society, hates the Church as connected with it, and, in his notions, supporting its abuses, and then hates Christianity because it is taught by the Church. Another case is, when a man's religious practice is degenerated, when he has been less watchful of himself and less constant and earnest in his devotions. The consequence is, that his impression of God's real existence, which is kept up by practical experience, becomes fainter and fainter; and in this state of things it is merely an accident that he remains nominally a Christian; if he happens to fall in with an antichristian book, he will have nothing in his own experience to set against the difficulties there presented to him, and so he will be apt to yield to them. For it must be always understood that there are difficulties in the way of all religion,-such, for instance, as the existence of evil, —which can never be fairly solved by human powers; all that can be done intellectually is to point out the equal or greater difficulties of Atheism or scepticism; and this is enough to justify a good man's understanding in being a believer. But the real proof is the practical one; that is, let a man live on the hypothesis of its falsehood, the practical result will be bad; that is, a man's besetting and constitutional faults will not be checked; and some of his noblest feelings will be unexercised, so that if he be right in his opinions, truth and goodness are at variance with one another, and falsehood is more favourable to our moral perfection than truth; which seems the most monstrous conclusion, which the human mind can possibly