what parts of my writings he has been led to ascribe to me opinions and feelings which are certainly not mine, in his im pression of them.

CCLXXIII. TO THE REV. JAMES RANDELL.

Fox How, September 20, 1841.

I read your letter to Coleridge with great interest, and wished much to write to you about it, but I fear that I have not time to do so. It would take rather a long time to state what I think about Dissent and what is called "Schism." I think it a great evil, as being inconsistent with the idea of the perfect Church, to which our aspirations should be continually directed. But, "in fæce Romuli," with historical Churches, and such ideas of Church as have been most prevalent, Dissent seems to me to wear a very different aspect. Yet I am not partial to our English Dissenters, and think that their views are quite as narrow as those of their opponents. And what good is to be done, will be done, I think, much sooner by members of the Church than by Dissenters.

It.

What you say of my books is very gratifying to me. repays the labor of writing in the best manner, to know that any thinking man has considered what one has written, and has found in it something to interest him, whether he agrees with it or no. By the way, your criticism on a passage in my Christmas-Day Sermon is quite just; and, if my Sermon expresses any other doctrine,* it has failed in expressing my meaning. Surely, I do not hold that the Godhead of the Son is really inferior to that of the Father, but only κar' οικονομίαν, that is, it is presented to us mixed with an inferior nature, and also with certain qualities, visibility, for instance, which have been assumed in condescension, but which are still what St. Paul calls, "an emptying of the Divinity," presenting it to us in a less absolutely perfect form, because it is not merely itself, but itself with something inferior joined to it.

CCLXXIV. TO THE REV. J. HEARN.

June 25, 1841.

I purpose leaving this place for the Continent with my two eldest sons on Monday next, and I wish before we set out to

*Viz. that Deity does not admit of degrees.

thank you for your last letter; and to send my earnest good wishes for the health and welfare, temporal and eternal, of my dear little godson. We have been here about a week, after a half-year at Rugby very peaceable as far as regarded the conduct of the boys, but very anxious as regarding their health. One boy died from pressure on the brain in the middle of the half-year; another has died within the last week of fever; and a third, who had been long in a delicate state and went home for his health, is since dead also. And besides all these, four boys more were at different times at the very point of death, and some are even now only slowly and with difficulty recovering. You may conceive how much anxiety and distress this must have occasioned us: yet I can most truly say, that it is as nothing when compared with the existence of any unusual moral evil in the school; far less distressing and far less harassing.

This place is very calm and very beautiful, and I think would furnish you with much employment, if you lived here all the year. But I am so ignorant about gardening and agricultural matters, that I can do little or nothing; and besides, we are away just at those times of the year when there is most to be done.

He was

I am very glad you saw my old friend Tucker. with us for a few days in April, and he seemed to have derived nothing but good in all ways from his stay in India. Before he went out he had for some time been growing more and more of an Evangelical partisan, and had acquired some of the narrowness of mind and peculiarity of manner which belong to that party. But his missionary life seems to have swept away all those clouds: and I found him now with all the simplicity, hearty cheerfulness, affectionateness, and plain sense, which he had when a young man at Oxford, with all the earnestness and goodness of a ripened Christian superadded. It was one of the most delightful renewals of intercourse with an old friend which I can ever hope to enjoy.

CCLXXV. TO THE REV. J. TUCKER.

Fox How, August 2, 1841.

I have heard of you in various quarters since your visit at Rugby, but I do not at all know what your plans are, and when you propose leaving England. If you can pay us another visit at Rugby before you sail, we shall all earnestly

in entreating you to do so. It was a great gratification me to find that many of our children enjoyed your visit extremely, and have spoken both of it and of your sermon which you preached in the Church in a manner that has been very delightful to me.

For myself, my dear friend, your visit has been a happiness greater than I could tell you. It assured me that I still possessed not only your affectionate remembrances for the sake of old times, which I never doubted, but your actual living friendship, unshaken by differences of opinion, whatever those differences might be. I believe in my own case, as often happens, my friends have exaggerated those differences. Keble, I am sure, has ascribed to me opinions which I never held, not of course wilfully, but because his sensitiveness on some points is so morbid, that his power of judgment is pro tanto utterly obscured. The first shock of perceiving something that he does not like makes him incapable of examining steadily how great or how little that something is. I had feared (therein very likely doing you injustice) that, before you left England for India, you had in some degree shared Keble's feelings, though on different grounds; and I did not write to you, though with many a wish to do so, because one feels instinctively repelled, I think, from communicating with an old friend, except on a footing of equal confidence and respect; and I doubted your feeling these towards me, though I did not doubt your kindness and affection. But one or two men have behaved towards me in the course of my life just as they might have done, being kind-hearted and affectionate men, if I had committed some great crime, which rendered respect or friendship impossible, though old kindness might still survive it. And this is hard to bear, when, far from being conscious of such great fault in myself in the points which are objected to, I hold my faith in those points to be the most certain truth in Christ, and the opposite opinions to be a most grievous and mischievous error, which I only will not, in the individual cases of those holding it, regard as they regard my supposed error, because I know that along with it there exists a truth and a goodness which I am clearly warranted in loving and in believing to be Christ's Spirit's work. But your last visit was so friendly; -I perceived, too, that you could bear things with which you might not agree, and saw and felt with satisfaction how much there was with which you did agree, that I was altogether revived, and, if I may use St. Paul's lan

guage, "my heart was enlarged," and I ventured to tell Fellowes to send you my new volume of Sermons, as to a man who might not and would not agree with all that he found there, but yet would not be shocked at it, but would believe that it was intended to serve the same cause to which he was himself devoted. And I have had the full intention of writing to you as in times past, if you again sailed to India, or if you remained in England; of which intention be this present letter the first fruits and pledge.

CCLXXVI. TO THE SAME.

Fox How, August 12, 1841.

I thank you very much for your letter, although, to say the truth, there were some expressions in it which a little disappointed me. I do not know, in point of fact, what our differences of opinion are, and with regard to Newmanism, I had supposed that we were mostly in agreement. I should have expected, therefore, that generally you would have agreed with the Introduction to my last volume; and that your differences would have been rather with some parts of the appendices. But I do not mean by disappointment the finding more or less of disagreement in opinion, but much more the finding that you still look upon the disagreement, be it what it may, as a serious matter, by which I understand you to mean a thing deserving of moral censure; as if, for example, one had a friend whom one respected and loved for many good qualities, but whose temper was so irritable, that it made a considerable abatement in one's estimate of him. Of course, he who believes his own views to be true, must believe the opposite views to be error; but the great point in our judgment and feeling towards men seems to be not to confound error with fault. I scarcely know one amongst my dearest friends, except Bunsen, whom I do not believe to be in some point or other in grave error. I differ very widely from Whately on many points, as I differ from you and from Keble on others; but the sense of errors is with me something quite distinct from the sense of fault, and if I were required to name Keble's faults or yours, it would never enter into my head to think of his Newmanism or your opinions, whatever they may be, which differ from my own. The fault would be, in my judg ment, and you will forgive me for saying so, the feeling as Keble does, and as I hoped that you now did not, towards an

error as if it were a fault, and judging it morally. We are speaking, you will observe, of such errors as are consistent with membership, not only in Christianity, but in the same particular Church; and I cannot think that we have a right to regard such as faults, though we have quite a right, a right which I would largely exercise, to protest against them as mischievous, mischievous, it may be, in a very high degree, as I think Newmanism is.

CCLXXVII. TO THE SAME.

Fox How, September 22, 1841.

I must write a few lines to you before we leave Fox How, because my first arrival at Rugby is likely to be beset with business, and I fear that your time of sailing is drawing near. Most heartily do I thank you for your last letter, and you may be sure that I will not trouble you on the subject any farther. Nor do I feel it necessary, for although it may be that there is something which I could wish otherwise still, yet I feel now that it need not and will not disturb our intercourse, and therefore I can write to you with perfect content.

You are going again to your work, which I feel sure is and will be blessed both to others and yourself. I should be well pleased if one of my sons went out hereafter to labor in the same field, but what line they will take seems very hard to determine. They do not seem inclined to follow Medicine, and I have the deepest abhorrence of the Law, so that two professions seem set aside, and for trade, I have neither capital nor connection. Meanwhile I wish them to do well at the University, which will be an arming them in a manner for whatever may open to them. We shall leave this place, I think, on Friday. This long stay has doubly endeared it to us all, and though I am thankful to be able to get back to Rugby, yet there will be a sad wrench in leaving Fox How. It is not the mere outward beauty, but the friendliness and agreeableness of the neighborhood in which we mix, simply as inhabitants of the country, and not as at Rugby, in an official relation.

The school is summoned for the 9th of October, but many of the boys will return, I think, on Saturday, so that the work will begin, probably, on Monday; but as I have some of the Sixth Form down here, I have not the leisure for my History I could have desired. I trust that you will go on with your