'LVIII.

TO WM. SMITH, ESQ., FORMERLY M.P. FOR NORWICH.

(In answer to a letter on the subject of his pamphlet, particularly objecting to his making it essential to those included in his scheme of comprehension. that they should address Christ as an object of worship.)

Rugby, March 9, 1833.

I trust you will not ascribe it to neglect that I have not returned an earlier answer to your letter. My time has been very much occupied, and I did not wish to write, till I could command leisure to write as fully as the purport and tone of your letter required.

I cannot be mistaken, I think, in concluding that I have the honor of addressing Mr. Smith, who was so long the Member for Norwich, and whose name must be perfectly familiar to any one who has been accustomed to follow the proceedings of Parliament.

The passage in my pamphlet to which you allude is expressly limited to the case of "the Unitarians preserving 'exactly their present character;" that is, as appears by a comparison with what follows, (p. 36,) their including many who "call themselves Unitarians, because the name of unbeliever is not yet thought creditable." And these persons are expressly distinguished from those other Unitarians whom I speak of "as really Christians." In giving or withholding the title of Christian, I was much more influenced by the spirit and temper of the parties alluded to than by their doctrinal opinions. For instance, my dislike to the works of the late Mr. Belsham arises more from what appears to me their totally unchristian tone, meaning particularly their want of that devotion, reverence, love of holiness, and dread of sin, which breathes through the Apostolical writings, than from the mere opinions contained in them, utterly erroneous as I believe them to be. And this was my reason for laying particular stress on the worship of Christ; because it appears to me that the feelings with which we regard Him are of much greater importance, than such metaphysical questions as those between Homoousians and Homoiousians, or even than the question of His humanity or proper divinity.

My great objection to Unitarianism in its present form in England, where it is professed sincerely, is that it makes Christ virtually dead. Our relation to Him is past instead of present; and the result is notorious, that instead of doing everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, the language of

Unitarians loses this peculiarly Christian character, and assimilates to that of mere Deists; "Providence," the "Supreme Being," and other such expressions taking the place of "God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," "the Lord," &c., which other Christians, like the Apostles, have found at once most natural to them, and most delightful. For my own part, considering one great object of God's revealing himself in the Person of Christ to be the furnishing us with an object of worship which we could at once love and understand; or, in other words, the supplying safely and wholesomely that want in human nature, which has shown itself in false religions, in "making gods after our own devices," it does seem to me to be forfeiting the peculiar benefits thus offered, if we persist in attempting to approach to God in His own incomprehensible essence, which as no man hath seen or can see, so no man can conceive it. And, while I am most ready to allow the provoking and most ill-judged language in which the truth, as I hold it to be, respecting God has been expressed by Trinitarians, so, on the other hand, I am inclined to think that Unitarians have deceived themselves by fancying that they could understand the notion of one God any better than that of God in Christ: whereas, it seems to me, that it is only of God in Christ that I can in my present state of being conceive anything at all. To know God the Father, that is, God as He is in Himself, in His to us incomprehensible essence, seems the great and most blessed promise reserved for us when this mortal shall have put on immortality.

You will forgive me for writing in this language; but I could not otherwise well express what it was, which I consider such a departure from the spirit of Christianity in modern Unitarianism. Will you forgive me also for expressing my belief and fervent hope, that if we could get rid of the Athanasian Creed, and of some other instances of what I would call the technical language of Trinitarianism, many good Unitarians would have a stumbling-block removed out of their path, and would join their fellow-Christians in bowing the knee to Him who is Lord both of the dead and the living.

But whatever they may think of His nature, I never meant to deny the name of Christian to those who truly love and fear Him; and though I think it is the tendency of Unitarianism to lessen this love and fear, yet I doubt not that many Unitarians feel it, notwithstanding, and then He is their Saviour, and they are His people.

LIX. TO THE CHEVALIER BUNSEN.

Rugby, May 6, 1833.

I thank you most heartily for two most delightful letters. They both make me feel more ardently the wish that I could see you once again, and talk over instead of write the many important subjects which interest us both, and not us only, but all the world. .

First, as to our politics. I detest as cordially as you can do the party of the "Movement," both in France and England. I detest Jacobinism in its root and in its branches, with all that godless Utilitarianism which is its favorite aspect at this moment in England. Nothing within my knowledge is more utterly wicked than the party of . . . men, who, fairly and literally, as I fear, blaspheme not the Son of Man, but the Spirit of God; they hate Christ, because He is of heaven and they are of evil.

For the more vulgar form of our popular party, the total ignorance of, and indifference to, all principle; the mere money-getting and money-saving selfishness which cries aloud for cheap government, making, as it were, avrò r'ảyabòv to consist in cheapness - my feeling is one of extreme contempt and disgust. My only difference from you, so far as I see, regards our anti-reformers, or rather the Tory party in general in England. Now, undoubtedly, some of the very best and wisest men in the country have on the Reform question joined this party, but they are as Falkland was at Oxford had their party triumphed, they would have been the first to lament the victory; for, not they would have influenced the measures carried into effect · but the worst and most selfish part of our aristocracy, with the coarsest and most profligate of their dependents, men like the Hortensii, and Lentuli, and Claudii of the Roman civil wars, who thwarted Pompey, insulted Cicero, and ground down the provinces with their insolence and tyranny; men so hateful and so contemptible, that I verily believe that the victory of Cæsar, nay even of Augustus, was a less evil to the human race than would have resulted from the triumph of the aristocracy.

And, as I feel that, of the two besetting sins of human nature, selfish neglect and selfish agitation, the former is the more common, and has in the long run done far more harm than the latter, although the outbreaks of the latter, while they last, are of a far more atrocious character; so I have in

a manner vowed to myself, and prayed that with God's blessing, no excesses of popular wickedness, though I should be myself, as I expect, the victim of them, no temporary evils produced by revolution, shall ever make me forget the wickedness of Toryism,—of that spirit which crucified Christ Himself, which has throughout the long experience of all history continually thwarted the cause of God and goodness, and has gone on abusing its opportunities, and heaping up wrath by a long series of selfish neglect against the day of wrath and judgment.

Again, I feel that while I agree with you wholly and most heartily in my abhorrence of the spirit of 1789, of the American war, of the French Economistes, and of the English Whigs of the latter part of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth, yet I have always been unable to sympathize with what you call "the historical liberty" which grew out of the system of the middle ages. For, not to speak of the unhappy extinction of that liberty in many countries of Europe, even in England it showed itself to have been more the child of accident than of principle; and throughout the momentous period of the eighteenth century, this character of it was fatally developed. For, not ascending to general principles, it foresaw not the evil, till it became too mature to be remedied, and the state of the poor and that of the Church are melancholy proofs of the folly of what is called "letting well alone;" which, not watching for symptoms, nor endeavoring to meet the coming danger, allows the fuel of disease to accumulate in the unhealthy body, till, at last, the sickness strikes it with the suddenness and malignity of an incurable pestilence. But, when the cup is nearly full, and revolutions are abroad, it is a sign infallible that the old state of things is ready to vanish away. Its race is run, and no human power can preserve it. But, by attempting to preserve it, you derange the process of the new birth which must succeed it; and whilst the old perishes in spite of your efforts, you get a monstrous and misshapen creature in its place; when, had the birth been quietly effected, its proportions might have been better, and its inward constitution sounder and less irritable.

What our birth in England is likely to end in, is indeed a hard question. I believe that our only chance is in the stability of the present ministers. I am well aware of their faults; but still they keep out the Tories and the Radicals,

the Red Jacobins of 1794, and the White Jacobins of 1795, or of Naples in 1799, alike detestable. I do not think that you can fully judge of what the ascendency of the Tories is; it is not the Duke of Wellington or Sir R. Peel who would do harm, but the base party that they would bring in in their train, and all the tribe of selfish and ignorant lords and country squires and clergymen, who would irritate the feeling of the people to madness.

If you see my pamphlet and Postscript, you will see that I have kept clear of the mere secular questions of tithes and pluralities, and have argued for a comprehension on higher grounds. I dislike Articles because they represent truth untruly, that is, in an unedifying manner, and thus robbed of its living truth, whilst it retains its mere literal form; whereas the same truth, embodied in prayers, or confessions, or even in catechisms, becomes more Christian, just in proportion as it is less theological. But I fear that our reforms, instead of laboring to unite the Dissenters with the Church, will confirm their separate existence by relieving them from all which they now complain of as a burden. And continuing distinct from the Church, will they not labor to effect its overthrow, till they bring us quite to the American platform?

LX. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN.

Rugby, May 21, 1833.

It is painful to think that these exaggerations, in too many instances, cannot be innocent; in Oxford there is an absolute εργαστήριον ψευδῶν, whose activity is surprising. I do hope that we shall see you all next month. When I am not so strong as usual, I feel the vexation of the school more than I could wish to do. And I have also been annoyed at the feeling excited in some of my old friends by my pamphlet, and by the constant and persevering falsehoods which are circulated concerning my opinions and my practice. Thucydides creeps on slowly, and nothing else, save my school work, gets on at all. I do confess, that I feel now more anxious than I used to do to get time to write, and especially to write history. But this will not be.