would give the vainest man alive a very fair notion of his own insufficiency, to see how little he can do, and how his most earnest addresses are as a cannon-ball on a bolster; thorough careless unimpressibleness beats one all to pieces. And so it is, and so it will be; and, as far as I am concerned, I can quite say that it is much better that it should be so; for it would be too kindling, could one perceive these young minds really led from evil by one's own efforts; one would be sorely tempted to bow down to one's own net. As it is, the net is so palpably ragged, that one sees perforce how sorry an idol it would make. But I must go to bed, and spare your eyes and your patience.

XVIII. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS.

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Rugby, November, 1830.

I am always glad to write to you, but I have now two especial causes for doing so; one to thank you for your Visitation sermon, and another to explain to you why I do not think it right to comply with your wishes touching the tricolor work-bag. For your sermon, I thank you for it; I believe I agree with it almost entirely, waiving some expressions, which I hold one never should cavil about, where one agrees in substance. But have you ever clearly defined to yourself what you mean by one society," as applied to the whole Christian Church upon earth? It seems to me that most of what I consider the errors about "the Church," turn upon an imperfect understanding of this point. In one sense, and that a very important one, all Christians belong to one society; but then it is more like Cicero's sense of "societas," than what we mean by a society. There is a "societas generis humani," and a "societas hominum Christianorum ; but there is not one "respublica" or "civitas of either, but a great many. The Roman Catholics say there is but one respublica," and therefore, with perfect consistency, they say that there must be one central government: our Article, if I mistake not its sense, says, and with great truth, that the Christian Respublica depends on the political Respublica; that is, that there may be at least as many Christian societies as there are political societies, and that there may be, and in our own kingdom are, even more.* If there be one Christian

66

*

See Appendix II. (d) to Fragment on the Church.

دو

66

society, in the common sense of the word, there must be one government: whereas, in point of fact, the Scotch Church, the English Church, and the French Church, have all separate and perfectly independent governments; and consequently can only be in an unusual and peculiar sense one society;" that is, spiritually one, as having the same objects and the same principles, and the same supports, and the same enemies. You therefore seem to me right, in saying that a Roman Catholic should be addressed in England as a Dissenter; but all this appears to me to lead necessarily to this conclusion, that the constitution and government of every Church is a political institution, and that conformity and nonconformity are so far matters of civil law, that, where nonconformity, as in England, is strictly legal, it is no offence, except in so far as it may be accompanied with heretical opinions, which is merely κarà σvμßeßηкòs. For the State says that there may be any given number of religious societies within its jurisdiction societies, that is, in the common sense of the term, as bodies governing themselves; and it is clear that the State may lawfully say this, for, if the Church were one society, in this sense, by Christ's institution, then the Romanist doctrine would be true, and, I do not say the Pope, but certainly a General Council would possess an authority paramount in ecclesiastical matters, payment of tithes, &c., to any local and human authority of Kings or Parliaments of this or that political division of the human race. I have thought not a little upon all this matter in my time, and I fancy that I see my own way straight; whether other people will think so, is a different question.

(After explaining a false report about a tricolored cockade and work-bag.) It is worse than obnoxious to apply this to English politics, and if any man seriously considers me to wish for a revolution here, with my seven children and good house to lose, (to put it on no other ground,) why he must even continue to think so. But I do admire the Revolution in France admire it as heartily and entirely, as any event recorded in history; and I think that it becomes every individual, still more every clergyman, and most of all, every clergyman in a public situation, to express this opinion publicly and decidedly. I have not forgotten the twenty years' war into which the English aristocracy and clergy drove Mr. Pitt in 1793, and which the Quarterly Review and other such writers are now seeking to repeat. I hold it to be of incalculable

a

importance, that, while the conduct of France has been beyond all example pure and heroic, there should be so manifest a display of sympathy on the part of England, as to lead to a real mutual confidence and friendship between the two countries. Our government, I believe, is heartily disposed to do this, and I will not, for one, shrink from avowing a noble cause and a noble nation, because a party in England, joined through timidity by a number of men who have really no sympathy with it, choose to try to excommunicate all who will not join them. I have myself heard them expressing hearty approbation of the French Revolution, and yet shrink from avowing it, lest they should appear to join the Radicals. And thus they leave the Radicals in exclusive possession of sentiments, which they themselves join in, just as they would leave the Useful Knowledge Society to the Benthamites. I quarrel with no man for disapproving of the revolution, except he does it in such a manner as to excite national animosities, and so tend to provoke a war; but in a case so flagrant case of as clear right as the abolition of the slave-trade-it is clearly not for the friends of France to suppress or conceal their sentiments. About Belgium the case is wholly different: there, the merits of the quarrel are far more doubtful, and the conduct of the popular party far less pure; and there I have no sympathy with the Belgians. But France, if it were only for the contrast to the first revolution, deserves, I think, the warmest admiration, and the most cordial expression of it. I have written now more upon this subject than I have either written or spoken upon it before to any one; for indeed I have very little time, and no inclination for disputes on such matters. But if I am questioned about my opinions, and required to conceal them, as if I were ashamed of them, I think it right then to avow them plainly, and to explain my reasons for them. There is not a man in England who is less a party man than I am, for in fact no party would own me; and when I was at 's in the summer, he looked upon But those who hold their own

me to be quite illiberal.

opinions in a string, will suppose that their neighbors do the

same.

CHAPTER VI.

LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE, SEPTEMBER, 1830, TO DECEMBER, 1832.

PERHAPS no more striking instance of his deep interest in the state of the country could be found, than in the gloom with which his correspondence is suddenly overcast in the autumn of 1830. The alarming aspect of English society brought to view in the rural disturbances in the winter of 1830, and additionally darkened in 1831-32, by the visitation of the Cholera, and the political agitations of the Reform Bill, little as it came within his own experience, gave a color to his whole mind. Of his state of feeling at this time, no better example can be given than the five sermons appended to the opening course of his practical school sermons, in his second volume, especially the last of them, which was preached in the chapel on the Sunday when the news of the arrival of the Cholera in England first reached Rugby. There are those amongst his pupils who can never forget the moment when, on that dark November afternoon, after the simple preface, stating in what sense worldly thoughts were or were not to be brought into that place, he at once began with that solemnity which marked his voice and manner when speaking of what deeply moved him: "I need not tell you that this is a marked time-a time such as neither we, nor our fathers for many generations before us, have experienced; and to those who know what the past has been, it is no doubt awful to think of the change which we are now about to encounter." (Serm. vol. ii. p. 413.) But in him the sight of evil, and the endeavor to remove it, were hardly ever disjoined; and whilst everything which he felt partook of the despondency with which that sermon opens,

everything which he did partakes of that cheerful activity with which the same sermon closes, in urging the example of the Apostle's "wise and manly conduct amidst the dangers of storm and shipwreck.'

The alarm which he felt was shared by many of the most opposite opinions to his own; but there could have been few whom it touched at once on so many points. The disturbances of the time were to him the very evils which he had anticipated even as far back as 1819; they struck on some of the most sensitive of his natural feelings - his sense of justice, and his impatience of the sight of suffering: they seemed to him symptoms of a deep-seated disease in all the relations. of English society-the results of a long series of evils from the neglect of the eighteenth century—of the lawlessness of the feudal system of the oppressions of the Norman conquest-of the dissoluteness of the Roman empire of the growth of those social and national sins which the Hebrew Prophets had denounced, and which Christianity in its full practical development was designed to check.*

Hence arose his anxiety to see the clergy take it up, as he had himself endeavored to do in the sermons already noticed.

"I almost despair," he said, "of anything that any private or local efforts can do. I think that the clergy as a body might do much, if they were steadily to observe the evils of the times, and preach fearlessly against them. I cannot understand what is the good of a national Church if it be not to Christianize the nation, and introduce the principles of Christianity into men's social and civil relations, and expose the wickedness of that spirit which maintains the game-laws, and in agriculture and trade seems to think that there is no such sin as covetousness, and that if a man is not dishonest, he has nothing to do but to make all the profit of his capital that he can."

Hence, again, his anxiety to impart or see imparted

*See Miscell. Works pp. 176, 192, 276. Hist. of Rome, I. 266.