only alter manifest faults or obscurities, and even then preserving as closely as possible the style of the old translation. Many could do this for the New Testament, but where is the man, in England at least, who could do it for the Old? . . . . . . But alas! for your being at Dublin instead of at Canterbury.

LII. TO REV. J. E. TYLer.

Manchester, July 28, 1832.

I am on my way to Laleham from the Lakes, to see my poor sister, whose long illness seems now at last on the point of being happily ended. And whilst waiting here for a coach, I have just bought four of the numbers of the Saturday Magazine, and think this a good opportunity to answer your last kind letter. The difficulty which occurs to me in your Sermon project, is, how to make the work sufficiently systematic, or sufficiently particular. I mean this, a real sermon has very often no sort of connexion with its last week's predecessor, or next week's successor; but then it is appropriate either to something in the service of the day, or else to something in the circumstances of the hearers, which makes it fitting for that especial season. And if it be nothing of any of these, but a mere sermon which might as well be preached on any other day, and in any other place as when and where it is actually preached, then I hold it to be, with rare exceptions, a very dull thing, and a very useless one. Now in a monthly publication of Sermons, you lose all the advantages of local and personal applicability:-you have only the applicability of time, or of matter; that is, your month's sermons may be written on the lessons for the month, or the part of Scripture then read, or on the season of the year, whether natural or ecclesiastical; or else they may form successive parts of one great whole, to be completed in any given time, and to be announced in the first of the series. But if you publish a mere collection of miscellaneous sermons, I think that you will be wasting your labour.

Now then practically to the point. Fix on your plan, whether your arrangement be of time or of matter, or of both; and let me know what part you would like me to take: e. g. whether sermons on any given book of Scripture, or on the Lessons for the Sundays in Advent, or in Lent, or at any other given period;—or Sermons for Spring or Winter, &c., adapted either to an agricultural or manufacturing population; or, if you like the arrangement of

matter, give me any subject that you choose, whether of evidence, history, or exhortation upon doctrine, and I will do my best for you: but I cannot write sermons in the abstract. I like to have my own portion of any work to be kept to myself, and you would not thank me for copying out for you some of my old sermons out of my paper

case.

I am sorry for what you say about my not writing anything startling; because it shows how long we have been absent from one another, and that you are beginning to judge me in part upon the reports of others. There are some people whom I must startle, if I am to do any good: and so you think too, I am sure. But to startle the majority of good and sensible men, or to startle so as to disgust at once a majority of any sort, are things which I most earnestly should wish to avoid. At the same time, I do strongly object, on principle, to the use of that glozing, unnatural, and silly language, (for so it is in us now,) which men use one after another, till it becomes as worn as one of the old shillings.

I wish your Saturday Magazine all success; I do not quite like the introductory article, but I think it improves as it goes along. The print of the departure of the Israelites was a good notion, and well executed; and I like some of your poetry. I could only do you good by sending you something very radical; for you will have enough of what is right and proper. But seriously, if I can persuade the Penny Magazine to receive things more in your tone, I think I shall do more good than by writing for you-if, as I fear, I cannot do both. In fact, I have for some time past done neither, and I know not how or when I can mend.

LIII. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN.

Rugby, September 6, 1832.

Have you heard that the Useful Knowledge Society have resolved to publish a Bible, and asked to be editor? Hâc tamen lege, that, where doctrine is introduced, the opinions of the different sects of Christians should be fairly stated. Now Evans's Dictionary of all Religions is a useful book, but I do not want exactly to see it made a rider upon the Scriptures. We want something better than this plan. . . . I told that I must write to you before I gave him any promise of assistance. plan, or, at least, for the sanction of your name: I think I see the

O! for your Bible

possibility of a true comprehensive Christian Commentary, keeping back none of the counsel of God, lowering no truth, chilling no lofty or spiritual sentiment, yet neither silly, fanatical, nor sectarian. Your book on Romanism shows how this may be done, and it applies to all sects alike. They are not all error, nor we all truth; e. g. the Quakers reject the communion of the Lord's Supper, thereby losing a great means of grace; but are they not tempted to do so by the superstitions which other Christians have heaped upon the institution, and is there not some taint of these in the exhortation even in our own Communion Service? And with regard to the greatest truths of all, you know how Pelagianism and Calvinism have encouraged each other, and how the Athanasian Creed, at this day, confirms and aggravates the evils of Unitarianism. I heard some time since, as a matter of fact, that, in the United States, where the Episcopal Church has expelled this creed, the character of Unitarianism is very different from what it is in England, and is returning towards high Arianism, just as here it has gone a downward course to the very verge of utter unbelief. I know how much you have on your hands and on your mind; I, too, have my hobbies, but I know of nothing more urgent than to circulate such an edition of the Scriptures, as might labour, with God's help, to give their very express image without human addition or omission, striving to state clearly what is God's will with regard to us now; for this seems to me to be one great use of a commentary, to make people understand where God spoke to their fathers, and where he speaks to them; or rathersince in all he speaks to them, though not after the same manner— to teach them to distinguish where they are to follow the letter, and where the spirit.

I have promised to send Tyler some sermons for his Magazine, though the abstract idea of a sermon is rather a puzzle to my faculties, accustomed as they are to cling to things in the concrete. But I am vexed to find how much of hopeless bigotry lingers in minds, οἷς ἥκιστα ἔχρη. I am sure old is personally cooled towards me, by the Essay attached to the Sermons, and the Sheffield Courant Letters. And another very old and dear friend wrote to me about my grievous errors and yours, praying "that I may be delivered from such false doctrines, and restrained from promulgating them." These men have the advantage over us, λéyw nar' är@pwov, which the Catholics had over the Protestants: they taxed them with damnable heresy, and pronounced their salvation impossible;

S

arrive at. It follows from this, that if I were talking with an Atheist, I should lay a great deal of stress on faith as a necessary condition of our nature, and as a gift of God to be earnestly sought for in the way which God has appointed, that is, by striving to do his will. For faith does no violence to our understanding; but the intellectual difficulties being balanced, and it being necessary to act on the one side or the other, faith determines a man to embrace that side which leads to moral and practical perfection; and unbelief leads him to embrace the opposite, or what I may call the Devil's religion, which is, after all, quite as much beset with intellectual difficulties as God's religion is, and morally is nothing but one mass of difficulties and monstrosities. You may say that the individual in question is a moral man, and you think not unwilling to be convinced of his errors; that is, he sees the moral truth of Christianity, but cannot be persuaded of it intellectually. I should say that such a state of mind is one of very painful trial, and should be treated as such; that it is a state of mental disease, which like many others is aggravated by talking about it, and that he is in great danger of losing his perception of moral truth as well as of intellectual, of wishing Christianity to be false as well as of being unable to be convinced that it is true. There are thousands of Christians who see the difficulties which he sees quite as clearly as he does, and who long as eagerly as he can do for that time when they shall know, even as they are known. But then they see clearly the difficulties of unbelief, and know that even intellectually they are far greater. And in the meanwhile they are contented to live by faith, and find that in so doing, their course is practically one of perfect light; the moral result of the experiment is so abundantly satisfactory, that they are sure that they have truth on their side.

I have written a sermon rather than a letter, and perhaps hardly made myself intelligible after all. But the main point is, that we cannot and do not pretend to remove all the intellectual difficulties of religion; we only contend that even intellectually unbelief is the more unreasonable of the two, and that practically unbelief is folly, and faith is wisdom.

If I can be of any further assistance to you in your charitable labour, I shall be most happy to do my best.

XLVI. TO THE SAME.

Rugby, March 7, 1832.

I thank you for your last letter, and beg to assure you very sincerely, that I shall have great pleasure in placing myself under your directions with regard to this unhappy man; and as he would probably regard me with suspicion, on account of my profession, I think that you would act with the best judgment in alluding to me only in general terms, as you propose to do, without mentioning my name. But I say this merely with a view to the man's own feelings towards the clergy, and not from the slightest wish to have my name kept back from him, if you think that it would be better for him to be made acquainted with it. With respect to your concluding question, I confess that I believe conscientious atheism not to exist. Weakness of faith is partly constitutional, and partly the result of education, and other circumstances; and this may go intellectually almost as far as scepticism; that is to say, a man may be perfectly unable to acquire a firm and undoubting belief of the great truths of religion, whether natural or revealed. He may be perplexed with doubts all his days; nay, his fears lest the Gospel should not be true, may be stronger than his hopes that it will. And this is a state of great pain, and of most severe trial, to be pitied heartily, but not to be condemned. I am satisfied that a good man can never get further than this; for his goodness will save him from unbelief, though not from the misery of scanty faith. I call it unbelief, when a man deliberately renounces his obedience to God, and his sense of responsibility to Him: and this never can be without something of an evil heart rebelling against a yoke, which it does not like to bear. The man you have been trying to convert, stands in this predicament:-he says that he cannot find out God, and that he does not believe in Him; therefore he renounces His service, and chooses to make a god of himself. Now, the idea of God being no other than a combination of all the highest excellences that we can conceive, it is so delightful to a good and sound mind, that it is misery to part with it; and such a mind, if it cannot discern God clearly, concludes that the fault is in itself—that it cannot yet reach to God, not that God does not exist. You see there must be an

assumption in either case, for the thing does not admit of demonstration, and the assumption that God is, or is not, depends on the degree of moral pain, which a man feels in relinquishing the idea