much to bring the matter of schism to an issue; and if any respectable man were to notice that part of the pamphlet, I should like to enter more fully into the subject. My own notions upon it have grown up wholly out of the New Testament, and because I never have thought, that what people call the Primitive Church, and much less the Ante-Nicene Church more generally, was any better authority per se, than the Church of Rome, or the Greek Church. But I do not know that what I have said in the pamphlet goes at all beyond the fair conclusions to be drawn from our own Article,* which gives to any national Church an authority to manage its own concerns, where God has not laid down any fixed rule; and, besides, what resemblance is there between the government of the most ancient Episcopal Churches, and that of the Church of England, to those who regard resemblances or differences of government to consist in things more than in names? I think, that what I have said in my pamphlet merely goes so far as to assert, that there is no schism in the Church of England, having nothing to do with the Bishop of Rome, or in the Kirk of Scotland, having nothing to do with any Archbishops and Bishops at all, but that I have not at all treated of the question of different ecclesiastical societies existing in one and the same civil society like our English Dissenters, whatever my own opinions may be about the matter. I find people continually misunderstanding the strong distinction which I draw between individuals and societies, insomuch that Faber charges me with saying, that every individual has a right to govern himself, which I have specially disclaimed in divers places; being, in fact, a firm believer in the duty of absolute passive obedience in all cases between an individual and the government but not when the individual is acting as a member of the society, and their concurrence with him tells him that obedience is now a misplaced term-because there is no authority in a rebellious government rebellious against society- to claim obedience. I am sure that my views in this matter are neither seditious nor turbulent and I think I stated them clearly, but it seems they were not clear to everybody.

*Article 34.

20*

X. TO REV. F. C. BLACKSTONE.

Rugby, October 14, 1829.

I never felt more strongly the desire of keeping up my old friendships, and it often grieves me to think how little I see or hear of many of those for whom I feel the strongest regard. I do not mean that this is their fault rather than mine, or that it is a fault at all; but it is a tendency of middle life and settled occupation, which I think we ought to struggle against, or else it grows with a fearful rapidity. I am very anxious to express my repentance of that passage in my pamphlet, which you allude to, "raving about idolatry," &c. I mean my repentance of its tone and language, for the substance of it I think correct, and that men whose most ignorant, and worse than ignorant, application of English history had, to say the truth, made me angry, are likely to do a great deal of mischief in Ireland. But the expression was unkind, and too sweeping, and I certainly ought not, nor would I, speak of all those as " raving about idolatry," whose opinions as to the guilt of the Romish Church differ from my own. With regard to the apparent inconsistency between the sermons and the pamphlet, you will find the term "practically idolatry" applied to the Roman Catholic system in some countries, even in the pamphlet. I never wish to mince the matter with their practices, but still, in principle, I cannot call the Romish Church an idolatrous Church in that strong sense as to warrant Faber's conclusions, even putting aside the difference of Christian times from Jewish. I should compare their superstitions to the worship of the brazen serpent, which Hezekiah did away with, which appears to have been long in existence, and which, in many of its worshippers, at any rate, was practically idolatry; but I should not have called the Jewish Church idolatrous so long as this worship was encouraged, nor applied to it the language of "Come out of her, my people," &c.

Of the moral state of the boys, for which of course I care infinitely the most, I can judge the least; our advantages in that respect are great, at least in the absence of many temptations to gross vice; but to cultivate a good spirit in the highest sense is a far different thing from shutting out one or two gross evils from want of opportunity.

XI. TO REV. J. TUCKER.

Rugby, October 25, 1829.

If we are alive fifteen years hence, I think I would go with you gladly to Swan River, if they will make me schoolmaster there, and lay my bones in the land of kangaroos and opossums. I laugh about it; yet if my wife were alive, and able to go, I should think it a very great benefit to the good cause to go out with all my family, and become a Swan-River man; and I should try to get others of our friends to go out with us. My notion is, that no missionaryzing is half so beneficial, as to try to pour sound and healthy blood into a young civilized society; to make one colony, if possible, like the ancient colonies, or like New England- a living sucker from the mother country, bearing the same blossoms and the same fruits, not a reproduction of its vilest excrescences, its ignorance, and its wickedness, while all its good elements are left behind in the process. No words can tell the evil of such colonies as we have hitherto planted, where the best parts of the new society have been men too poor to carry with them or to gain much of the higher branches of knowledge; or else mere official functionaries from England, whose hearts and minds have been always half at home, and who have never identified themselves with the land in which they were working. But if you and your sisters were to go out, with half Southborough after you, apothecary, lawyers, butchers, bakers, tailors, carpenters, and laborers, and if we were to join with a similar draught from Rugby and Laleham, I think we should deserve to be ἀναγραπτοὶ έργεται both here and in Swan River. Such are my notions about it; and I am not clear that I shall not devote my first £ 1,000 that I make here to the purchase of land in Swan River, that I may have my estate and the school buildings got into due order, before I shut up shop at Rugby. Meantime, I hope you will not think I ought to shut up shop forthwith, and adjourn to the next asylum for daft people, because I am thus wildly dreaming about Swan River, instead of talking soberly about Rugby. But Rugby is a very nice place all the same, and I wish you would come and form your own judgment of it, or that some of your sisters would, if you cannot or will not.

XII.

TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ.

Rugby, November 4, 1829.

What a time it is since I wrote to you! And how much has occurred and is continually occurring, on which I should like to write to you. You have heard perhaps of Mr. Penrose's death in September last, when, from the enjoyment of full health and vigor of mind and body, he was called away in three days with no intermediate pain or struggle, but by a gentle lethargic sleep, which lasted uninterrupted to his very last moment. Coupled with his holy and Christian life, which made him require no long time to go and renew his exhausted oil, his end was a most complete evðavaría, so rare a blessing, that one dares not hope or pray for a similar mercy in one's own case.

We are going on comfortably, and I trust, thrivingly, with the school. We are above 200, and still looking upwards; but I neither expect, and much less desire, any great addition to our numbers. The school cannot, I think, regularly expect more than 200 or 250; it may ascend higher with a strong flood, but there will be surely a corresponding ebb after it. You may imagine that I ponder over, often enough, the va rious discussions that I have had with you about education, and verse-making, and reading the Poets. I find the natural leaning of a schoolmaster is so much to your view of the question, that my reason is more than ever led to think my own notions strongly required in the present state of classical education, if it were only on the principle of the bent stick. There is something so beautiful in good Latin verses, and in hearing fine poetry well construed, and something so attractive altogether in good scholarship, that I do not wonder at masters directing an undue portion of their attention to a crop so brilliant. I feel it growing in myself daily; and, if I feel it, with prejudices all on the other side, I do not wonder at its being felt generally. But my deliberate conviction is stronger and stronger, that all this system is wholly wrong for the greater number of boys. Those who have talents and natural taste, and fondness for poetry, find the poetry lessons very useful; the mass do not feel one tittle about the matter, and, I speak advisedly, do not, in my belief, benefit from them one grain. I am not sure that other things would answer better, though I have very little doubt of it; but at any rate, the present plan is so entire a failure, that nothing can be risked

by changing it. More than half my boys never saw the sea, and never were in London, and it is surprising how the first of these disadvantages interferes with their understanding much of the ancient poetry, while the other keeps the range of their ideas in an exceedingly narrow compass. Brought up myself in the Isle of Wight, amidst the bustle of soldiers and sailors, and familiar from a child with boats and ships, and the flags of half Europe, which gave me an instinctive acquaintance with geography, I quite marvel to find in what a state of ignorance boys are at seventeen or eighteen, who have lived all their days in inland country parishes, or small country towns. For your comfort, I think I am succeeding in making them write very fair Latin prose, and to observe and understand some of the differences between the Latin and English idioms. On the other hand, what our boys want in one way they get in another; from the very circumstance of their being the sons of quieter parents, they have far less ßpis and more evnela, than the boys of any other school I ever knew. Thus, to say the least, they have less of a most odious and unchristian quality, and are thus more open to instruction, and have less repugnance to be good, because their master wishes them to be so. .. I have almost filled my paper, and can only add that Thucydides is getting on slowly, but I think that it will be a much less defective book than it was likely to have been had I remained at Laleham; for though I have still an enormous deal to learn, yet my scholarship has mended considerably within the last year at Rugby. I suppose you will think at any rate that it will be better to publish Thucydides, however imperfectly, than to write another pamphlet. Poor dear pamphlet! I seem to feel the greater tenderness for it, because it has excited so much odium; and now I hear that it is reported at Oxford that I wish to suppress it; which is wholly untrue. I would not print a second edition, because the question was settled, and controversy about it was become absurd; but I never have repented of it in any degree, or wished it unwritten, "pace tuâ dixerim," and I only regret that I did not print a larger impression.