Now, with respect to being an example in a profession where example is much needed, I can hardly think that any man could choose a profession with such a view without some presumption. In such matters, safety rather than victory should be each man's object; that desire to preserve his best self, being not selfishness, but as I imagine, the true fulfilment of the law. If one is by God's will fixed in a calling full of temptations, but where the temptations may be overcome, and the victory will be most encouraging to others, then it may be our duty to overcome rather than to fly; but no man, I think, ought to seek temptation in the hope of serving the Church brilliantly by overcoming it.

now.

With regard to the minor question, I will not enter upon it Thus much, however, I may say, that, humanly speaking, I am not likely soon to leave Rugby; that it would be my greatest delight to have you here as a master; and that the field of good here opened, is, I think, not easily to be surpassed. If you decide on the parochial ministry, then I think that your calling would be to a large town rather than to a country village.

CCLIII. TO AN OLD PUPIL, ENGAGED IN BUSINESS.

(H.)

Rugby, November 18, 1840.

I think that even your very kind and handsome gift to the library has given me less pleasure than the letter which accompanied it, and which was one of the highest gratifications that a man in my profession can ever experience. Most sincerely do I thank you for it; and be assured that I do value it very deeply. Your letter holds out to me another prospect which interests me very deeply. I have long felt a very deep concern about the state of our manufacturing population, and have seen how enormous was the work to be done there, and how much good men, especially those who were not clergymen, were wanted to do it. And therefore I think of you, as engaged in business, with no little satisfaction, being convinced that a good man, highly educated, cannot possibly be in a more important position in this kingdom than as one of the heads of a great manufacturing establishment. I feel encouraged also by the kindness of your letter, to trouble you, perhaps, hereafter, with some questions on a point where my practical knowledge is of course nothing. Yet I see the evils and dangers of the present state of things, and long that

those who have the practical knowledge could be brought steadily and systematically to consider the possibility of a remedy. We are now in the midst of the winter examination, which, as you may remember, gives us all sufficient employment.

CCLIV. †TO REV. W. K. HAMILTON.

Rugby, November 18 or 19, 1840.

I have very much, which I should like to say to you if I were with you, but I have not time to write it, nor Iwould it do well in a letter. tells me that you were gratified with the improvement in the diocese of Salisbury; so one sees encouragements which cheer us, as well as disappointments enough to humble us; but, perhaps, I am already partaking of one of the characteristics of old age, according to Aristotle, and I am less inclined to hope than to fear. But it is a great comfort to know that there are many good men at work, and that their labors are not without a blessing. You will, I am sure have been wishing and praying that we may be saved from the curse of war; an evil which would crush the seeds of more good than can be told throughout Europe, and confirm or revive mischiefs innumerable. Your godson is well, but it is becoming needful to keep him from the boys of the school, who would soon pet and spoil him.

CCLV. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS.

Rugby, December 4, 1840.

I wished also to thank you for your Sermon, and to say a little to you about it. I quite agree with you that you should not attack the Newmanites directly. Independently of what I might call the moral reasons for your not doing so, I think that truth is never best taught negatively; and these very men derive a great advantage from holding up something positive, although, as I think, it be but a most sorry and abominable idol, to men's faith and love; and merely to say that the idol is an idol, and that its worship is pernicious, is doing but little good, unless we show where the worship can be transferred wholesomely. But your sermon is to me personally almost tantalizing, because it shows that we agree in so much, and makes it doubly vexatious to me that there is beyond this agreement, as I suppose there must be, a great

and wide divergence. I suppose that it is the hardest thing in the world to apprehend rightly what is that μéσov, which is really the great excellence to be aimed at. The Newmanites, humorously enough, call their system Via Media. You think that views are Via Media, I think that mine are so; your that is, we all see errors and dangers on the right and on the left of us, and endeavor to avoid both. But I suppose that the pérov is then only the point of excellence, when it refers, as Aristotle has referred it, to the simple tendencies of the human mind; whereas it appears to me that men are sometimes beguiled by taking the pérov of the views of opposite parties as the true point of excellence, or still more, the μéoov of the opinions held by people of our party or of our nation on any given point. You think that Newman is one extreme and I another; and so I am well aware that, in common estimation, we should be held; and thus in Church matters the μérov would seem to be somewhere between Newman's views and mine; whereas the truth is, that in our views of the importance of the Church, Newman and I are pretty well agreed, and therefore I stand as widely aloof as he can do from the language of "religion being an affair between God and a man's own conscience," and from all such persons who dispute the claims of the Church to obedience. But my quarrel with Newman and with the Romanists, and with the dominant party in the Church up to Cyprian,- (Ignatius, I firmly believe, is not to be classed with them, vehement as his language is,) my quarrel with them all—and all that I have named are exactly in the same boat is, that they have put a false Church in the place of the true, and through their counterfeit have destroyed the reality, as paper money drives away gold. And this false Church is the Priesthood, to which are ascribed all the powers really belonging to the true Church, with others which do not and cannot belong to any human power. But the Priesthood and the Succession are inseparable, Succession having no meaning whatever if there be not a Priesthood, as W. Law saw and maintained; arguing, and I think plausibly enough, that the Succession was necessary to carry on the priestly virtue which alone makes the acts of the ministry available. Now as the authorized formularies of our Church are perfectly free from this notion, and as the twenty-third Article to my mind implies the contrary, for no man, who believed in the necessity of a Succession, would have failed to omit that, to him, great criterion of lawfulness

the

of any ordination, -it has always vexed me to see our Clergy coquetting as they do with the doctrine of Succession, and clinging to it, even while they stoutly repudiate those notions of a Priesthood which the Succession doctrine really involves in it. And it is by this handle that the Newmanites have gained such ground, especially with the Evangelicals,for they too have been fond of the Succession notion, and when the doctrine has been pressed to its consequences, they have in many instances embraced them, however repugnant to their former general views of doctrine. You speak of persons who do not value Church privileges. I have no sympathy with such at all; but then you seem to connect Church privileges with the Succession, and to shrink from those who deny the Succession as if they undervalued the Church. Perhaps I understand you wrongly in this, and if so, I shall be truly rejoiced, for, to my mind, he who holds to the Succession as necessary, should, consistently, adopt Newmanism to its full extent; for really and truly the meaning of the Succession is what one of the writers of the Tracts stated in one of the earliest of their numbers, "that no one otherwise appointed could be sure that he could give the people the real body of Christ." And this is a pure priestly and mediatorial power, rendered, according to this hypothesis, necessary to the Christian's salvation, over and above Christ's death, and his faith in it; a power which I am sure stands exactly on the same footing with Circumcision in the Galatian Church, and what St. Paul says of those who required Circumcision applies exactly to those who so hold a priesthood.

All this has been recalled to me now, for I dare say I have said it before, by your late sermon, and by my own rather increasing wish to write on the whole question; a wish strengthened by the incredible errors of Gladstone's last work. The vexation to me is, that while I hold very high Church doctrines, I am considered as one who dislikes the Church, whereas my whole hope for the advance and triumph of the Gospel looks to it only through the restoration of the Church. But the Christians were called eo because they respected not the idols which had transferred to themselves the name and worship of God. And so I am called a no-Churchman, because I respect not the idol which has slipped not only into the Church's place, but into God's — i. e. the notion of the Priesthood, which does not seem to me to be false only in its excess, but altogether from the very beginning-priestly

power under the Gospel being reserved to Christ alone, and its character being quite distinct from those other powers of government, teaching, and ministration, which the Church may have and must have. But from the natural confusion between government with ministration in a religious society, and the notion of priesthood, the master falsehood gradually stole in unperceived, till long time had so sanctioned it, that when at last men saw and allowed its legitimate consequences, itself was still spared as a harmless and venerable error, if not as a sacred truth. But I have sent you a sermon in manuscript, a thing intolerable, and therefore I will end abruptly, as they say my sermons are apt to do. Thank you for your allusion to our visit to Oxford; we hope that we may at any rate see something of you, and you need not dread my coming up with any designs of arguing or entering into controversy; my visits to Oxford are always intended to be for peace, and not for war.

CCLVI. TO AN OLD PUPIL. (G.)

Rugby, December 4, 1840.

I thank you for a certain pamphlet which gave me a day or two ago; I must earnestly wish it success; and such moral reforms are among the purest delights which a man can ever enjoy in this life. I delight too, most heartily, that the change of profession is decided. May God's blessing be with your decision, through His Son now and ever.

CCLVII. TO THE SAME.

Fox How, December 28, 1840.

I honor and sympathize with an anxiety to follow our Lord's will in matters of real moral importance, as much as I shrink from the habit of exalting every notice of what was once done in matters of form into a law, that the same ought always to be done, and that Christ has commanded it. But I do not feel your objection to taking an oath when required by a lawful and public authority, nor do I quite see your distinction, between taking an oath when imposed by a magistrate and taking one voluntarily, in the sense in which alone the oath of supremacy, when taken at Ordination, can be called voluntary. For, if the thing be unlawful, it must be as wrong to do it for the sake of avoiding a penalty, as of obtaining a