"If I were living in London," he said, "I should not talk against the evil tendencies of the clergy, any more than if I were living in Oxford I should talk against the evil tendencies of the political economists. It is my nature always to attack that evil which seems to me most present." It was thus a favorite topic, in his exposition of Scripture, to remark how the particular sins of the occasion were denounced, the particular forms of Antichrist indicated often without the qualification, which would have been required by the presence of the opposite danger. "Contrast," he used to say, "the language of the first chapter of Isaiah, when the hierarchy of Judah was in its full pride and power, with the language of the second chapter of Malachi, when it was in a state of decline and neglect."

Connected with this, was the peculiar vehemence of language which he often used, in speaking of the subjects and events of the day. This was indeed partly to be accounted for by his eagerness to speak out whatever was in his mind, especially when moved by his keen sense of what he thought evil - partly by the natural simplicity of his mode of speech, which led him to adopt phrases in their simplest sense, without stopping to explain them, or suspecting that they would be misunderstood. But with regard to public principles and parties, it was often more than this. With every wish to be impartial, yet his natural temperament, as he used himself to acknowledge, made it difficult for him to place himself completely in another's point of view; and thus he had a tendency to judge individuals, with whom he had no personal acquaintance, from his conception of the party to which they belonged, and to look at both through the medium of that strong power of association, which influenced materially his judgment, not only of events, but of men, and even of places. Living individuals, therefore, and existing principles, became lost to his view in the long line of images, past and future, in which they only formed one link. Every political or

ecclesiastical movement suggested to him the recollection of its historical representative in past times,and yet more, as by an instinct, half religious and half historical, the thought of what he conceived to be the prototypes of the various forms of error and wickedness denounced by the Prophets in the Old Testament, or by our Lord and his Apostles in the New. And looking not backwards only, but forwards, to their remotest consequences, and again guiding himself, as he thought, by the example of the language of St. Paul, who "seemed to have had his eye fixed in vision rather upon the full-grown evil of later times, than upon the first imperfect show the faint indications of it in his own time," (Serm. vol. v. p. 346,) he saw in them the germs of mischief yet to come, not only the mischief of their actual triumph, but the mischief of the reaction against them.

There was besides a peculiar importance attaching, in his view, to political questions, with which every reader of his works must be familiar. The life of the commonwealth is to him the main subject of historythe laws of political science the main lesson of history

"the desire of taking an active share in the great work of government, the highest earthly desire of the ripened mind." And those who read his letters will be startled at times by the interest with which he watches the changes of administration, where to many the real difference would seem to be comparatively trifling. Thus he would speak of a ministry advocating even good measures inconsistently with their position or principles, "as a daily painfulness — a moral east wind, which made him feel uncomfortable, without any particular ailment❞— or lament the ascendency of false political views, as tending "to the sûre moral degradation of the whole community, and the ultimate social disorganization of our system, ""not from reading the Morning Chronicle or the Edinburgh Review, but from reading the Bible and Aristotle, and all history."

Such expressions as these must indeed be taken with the necessary qualifications which belong to all words spoken to intimate friends in a period of great excitement. But they may serve to illustrate at least the occasional strength of feeling which it is the object of these remarks to explain. It arose, no doubt, in part from his tendency to view all things in a practical and concrete form, and in part from his belief of the large power possessed by the supreme governors of society over the social and moral condition of those intrusted to them. But there were also real principles present to his mind whenever he thus spoke, which seemed to him so certain, that "daily experience could hardly remove his wonder at finding that they did not appear so to others." (Mod. Hist. Lect. p. 391.) What these principles were in detail, his own letters will sufficiently show. But it must be borne in mind how, whilst he certainly believed that they were exemplified to a great degree in the actual state of English politics, the meaning which he attached to them rose so far above their meaning as commonly used, that it could hardly be thought that the same subject was spoken of. Conservatism in his mouth was not merely the watchword of an English party, but the symbol of an evil, against which his whole life, public and private, was one continued struggle, which he dreaded in his own heart no less than in the institutions of his country, and his abhorrence of which will be found to pervade not only the pamphlets which have been most condemned, but the sermons which have been most admired, namely, the spirit of resistance to all change. Jacobinism, again, in his use of the word, included not only the extreme movement party in France or England, to which he usually applied it, but all the natural tendencies of mankind, whether "democratical, priestly, or chivalrous," to oppose the authority of Law, divine and human, which he regarded with so deep a reverence. Popular principles and democracy (when he used

these words in a good sense) were not the opposition to an hereditary monarchy or peerage, which he always valued as precious elements of national life, but were inseparably blended with his strong belief in the injustice and want of sympathy generally shown by the higher to the lower orders, a belief which he often declared had been first brought home to him, when, after having as a young man at Oxford held the opposite view, he first began seriously to study the language used with regard to it by St. James and the Old Testament Prophets. Liberal principles were not merely the expression of his adherence to a Whig ministry, but of his belief in the constant necessity of applying those principles of advance and reform, which, in their most perfect development, he conceived to be identical with Christianity itself. Even in their lower exemplifications, and in every age of the world except that before the Fall of man from Paradise, he maintained them to have been, by the very constitution of human society, the representatives of the cause of wisdom and goodness. And this truth, no less certain in his judgment than the ordinary deductions of natural theology, he believed to have been placed on a still firmer basis by the higher standard held out in the Christian religion, and the revelation of a moral law, which no intermixture of races or change of national customs could possibly endanger.

That he was not, in the common sense of the word, a member of any party, is best shown by the readiness with which all parties alike, according to the fashion of the time, claimed or renounced him as an associate. Ecclesiastically, he neither belonged, nor felt himself to belong, to any of the existing sections of the English clergy; and from the so-called High Church, Low Church, and Evangelical bodies he always stood, not perhaps equally, but yet decidedly aloof. Politically, indeed, he held himself to be a strong Whig: but as a matter of fact, he found that in cases of practical cooperation with that party, he differed almost as much

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from them as from their opponents; and would often confess with sorrow, that there were none among them who realized what seemed to him their true principles.* And whilst in later years his feelings and language on these subjects were somewhat modified, he at all times, even when most tenaciously holding to his opinions, maintained the principle, that "political truths are not, like moral truths, to be held as absolutely certain, nor ever wholly identical with the professions or practice of any party or individual." (Pref. to Hist. of Rome, vol. i. p. 11.) There were few warnings to his pupils on the entrance into life more solemn, than those against party spirit, against giving to any human party, sect, society, or cause, that undivided sympathy and service which he held to be due only to the one party, and cause of all good men under their Divine Head. There were few more fervent aspirations for his children, than that with which he closes a letter in 1833: "May God grant to my sons, if they live to manhood, an unshaken love of truth, and a firm resolution to follow it for themselves, with an intense abhorrence of all party ties, save that one tie, which binds them to the party of Christ against wickedness."

II. But no temporary interest or excitement was allowed to infringe on the loftiness or the unity of his ultimate ends, to which every particular plan that he took up, and every particular line of thought which he followed, were completely subordinate. However open to objection may have been many of his practical

The interest which in his earlier life he took in the leading questions of political economy, though it was always kept alive by his general sympathy with all subjects relating to the social state of the country, was yet in his later years considera')ly abated, by growing consciousness of his ignorance of the subject. On some points, however, he always felt and spoke strongly. The corn laws, for example, he always regarded, though not as the chief cause of national distress, yet as a great evil, the removal of which was imperatively demanded by sound economical principles; and of the practice of accumulating national debts, he said, in the last year of his life, that he rejoiced in few things more in his professorial lectures at Oxford, than in the protest which he had there made against it. "Woe be to that generation that is living in England," he used to say, "when the coal-mines are exhausted and the national debt not paid off.".

† See Sermon on "Who are partakers in our hope?" vol. iii.