66

so they?

are above the understanding of the poorer classes may be, but they are not above their misunderstanding, and they will think and talk about them, so that they had best be taught to think and talk rightly. It is worth while to look at Owen's paper, "The Crisis," or at the "Midland Representative," the great paper of the Birmingham operatives. The most abstract points are discussed in them, and the very foundations of all things are daily being probed, as much as by the sophists, whom it was the labor of Socrates' life to combat. Phrases which did well enough formerly, now only excite a sneer; it does not do to talk to the operatives about our "pure and apostolical church," and our glorious constitution;" they have no respect for either; but one must take higher ground, and show that our object is not to preserve particular institutions, so much as to uphold eternal principles, which are in great danger of falling into disrepute, because of the vices of the institutions which profess to exemplify them. The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save; my fear is, that, if we do not mind, we shall come to the American fashion, and have no provision made for the teaching Christianity at all. But it is late, and I must go to bed; and I have prosed to you enough; but I am as bad about these things as Don Quixote with his knight-errantry, and when once I begin, I do not readily stop.

XLV. TO HIS NEPHEW, J. WARD, ESQ., ON HIS MARRIAGE.

Brathay Hall, July 7, 1832.

A man's life in London, while he is single, may be very stirring, and very intellectual, but I imagine that it must have a hardening effect, and that this effect will be more felt every year as the counter tendencies of youth become less powerful. The most certain softeners of a man's moral skin, and sweeteners of his blood, are, I am sure, domestic intercourse in a happy marriage, and intercourse with the poor. It is very hard, I imagine, in our present state of society, to keep up intercourse with God without one or both of these aids to foster it. Romantic and fantastic indolence was the fault of other times and other countries; here I crave more and more every day to find men unfevered by the constant excitement of the world, whether literary, political, commercial, or fashionable; men who, while they

are alive to all that is around them, feel also who is above them. I would give more than I can say, if your Useful Knowledge Society Committee had this last feeling, as strongly as they have the other purely and beneficently. I care not for one party of the other, but I do care for the country, and for interests even more precious than that of the country, which the present disordered state of the human mind seems threatening. But this mixes strangely with your present prospects, and I hope we may both manage to live in peace with our families in the land of our fathers, without crossing the Atlantic.

XLVI. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN.

Brathay Hall, July 8, 1832.

This place is complete rest, such as I wish you could enjoy after your far more anxious occupations. As to the state of the country, I find my great concern about it comes by accesses, sometimes weighing upon me heavily, and then again laid aside as if it were nothing. I wish that your old notion of editing a family Bible could be revived. I do not know anything which more needs to be done, and it would be a very delightful thing if it could be accompanied with really good maps and engravings, which might be done if a large sale could be reckoned upon. It might be published in penny numbers, not beginning with Genesis, but with some of the most important parts of the New Testament, e. g. St. John's Gospel or the Epistle to the Romans. Some of the historical books of the Old Testament, I should be inclined to publish last of all, as being the least important, whilst the Psalms and some of the Prophets should appear very early. I am even grand enough to aspire after a new, or rather a corrected translation, for I would 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.

XLVII. 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 connection 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 labor.

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.

--

XLVIII. 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. O! for your Bible plan, or, at least, for the sanction of your name: I think I see the 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 toward 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 labor, 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 rather since 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, λέγω κατ ̓ ἄνθρωπον, which the Catholics had over the Protestants: they taxed them with damnable heresy, and pronounced their salvation impossible; the Protestants in return only charged them with error and superstition, till some of the hotter fort, impatient of such an