Alexandria, Antioch, or Carthage. The whole confusion of the ideas of priesthood and government, the taking half a notion from one, and half a notion from the other, the disclaiming a priesthood and yet clinging to conclusions which are only deducible from the notion of a priesthood, — and the want of familiarity with all political questions which characterize all that I have ever seen written on English High-Church grounds, may be exposed piece by piece with the utmost ease and certainty. . . . I am for the Church, and against the Priesthood; not for individual license against the Church.

CXLVI. TO J. C. PLATT, ESQ.

Rugby, November 28, 1836.

The state of the country interests me as much as ever, but since my correspondence with the Sheffield Courant, I have written nothing on the subject. I do not like the aspect of things at all. An extraordinary period of commercial enterprise threw into the shade for the time all those evils in the state of the laboring population, which I have ever dreaded as the rock fatal to our greatness; but, meanwhile, those evils were not removed, nor in fact attempted to be lessened, except by the Poor Law Act,

a measure in itself wise and just, but which, standing alone, and unaccompanied by others of a milder and more positively improving tendency, wears an air of harshness, and will, I fear, embitter the feelings of the poorer classes still more. Now we are threatened by a most unprincipled system of agitation, the Tories actually doing their best to Jacobinize the poor in the hope of turning an outbreak against the Whig government to their own advantage. Then there is the Currency question, full of immense difficulties, which no man can clearly see his way through. And withal the threatened schism between the Whigs and Radicals about the reform of the House of Lords. Surely there never was such folly as talking about a reform in the House of Lords, when it is very doubtful whether, if Parliament were dissolved, the Tories would not gain a majority even in the House of Commons. It is nonsense to talk of its being a struggle between the aristocracy and the people: if it were so, it would be over in a week, provided they mean by the aristocracy the House of Lords. It is really a great contest between the adherents of two great principles, that of preserving, and that of improving; and he must have studied

history to very little purpose, who does not know that in common circumstances the former party is always the most numerous and the strongest. It gets occasionally overpowered, when it has had rope enough given it to hang itself; that is, when it has carried its favorite Conservatism to such a height, that the mass of unreformed evil becomes unendurable, and then there comes a grand reform. But that grand reform once effected, the Conservative instinct again regains its ascendency, and goes on upon another lease; and so it will ever do, unless some rare circumstances enabled a thoroughly enlightened government to remain long in power; and as such a government cannot rely on being popular, for reform of evil in the abstract is gall and wormwood alike to men's indolence, and love of what they are used to, as to their propensities for jobbing, so it is only accident or despotism that can keep it on its legs. This is the secret of the Tory reaction; because men are all Tories by nature, when they are tolerably well off, and it is only some monstrous injustice or insult to themselves, or some atrocious cruelty, or some great reverses of fortune, that ever make them otherwise. Now I cannot foresee any question likely to arise on which the Government can strongly interest the public mind in England in their favor. Certainly it will not be in the Irish Church or Corporation questions, because the English people do not care about Ireland, nor, to say truth, about any people's rights except their own; and then there is the whole fanatical feeling against the Government, and fanaticism is a far stronger feeling than the love of justice, when the wrong is done, not to ourselves, but to our neighbor. Therefore, I think that, as it always has been, the Reformers will be beaten by the Conservatives, and then the Conservatives will again go on coiling the rope round their own necks, till in twenty years' time there will be another, not reform I fear, but convulsion. For, though the Reformers are a weak party, the Destructives are not so, and all evils, whether arising from accident or folly, or misgovernment, serve their purpose. A great man in the Whig Government might yet save them perhaps; that is, might keep them in till the king's death, and then they would have a chance, I suppose, of being really supported by the court in a new reign. But a great man I What I have said about Tory reaction, you will find strongly confirmed in the history of the French Revolution. After the Terror was over, the Revolution was

cannot see.

twice saved only by the army; in Vendemiaire, 1795, and in Fructidor, 1797. Twice the counter-revolutionists had gained the ascendency in the nation.*

CXLVII. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

Rugby, November 30, 1836.

I wish I could sympathize with you in what you say of our old Divines.† I quite agree as to their language; it is delightful to my taste; but I cannot find in any of them a really great man. I admire Taylor's genius, but yet how little was he capable of handling worthily any great question! and, as to interpreters of Scripture, I never yet found one of them who was above mediocrity. I cannot call it a learning worth anything, to be very familiar with writers of this stamp, when they have no facts to communicate: for of course, even an ordinary man may then be worth reading. I have left off reading our Divines, because, as Pascal said of the Jesuits, if I had spent my time in reading them fully, I should have read a great many very indifferent books. But if I could find a great man amongst them, I would read him thankfully and earnestly. As it is, I hold John Bunyant to have been a

"I should like," he said, "to write a book on 'the Theory of Tides,' the flood and ebb of parties. The English nation are like a man in a lethargy; they are never roused from their Conservatism till mustard poultices are put to their feet. Had it not been for the fires in Smithfield, they would have remained hostile to the Reformation. Had it not been for the butcheries of Jefferies, they would have opposed the Revolution."

† Of the English Divines in general, this was his deliberate opinion:"Why is it," he said, "that there are so few great works in Theology, compared with any other subject? Is it that all other books on the subject appear insignificant by the side of the Scriptures? There appears to me in all the English Divines a want of believing, or disbelieving anything, because it is true or false. It is a question which does not seem to occur to them. Butler is indeed a noble exception." As he excepted Butler among the Divines of a later period, so amongst those of the earlier period he excepted Hooker, whose Ecclesiastical Polity, as a whole, he regarded with great admiration, though with great dislike of parts of it. "I long to see something which should solve what is to me the great problem of Hooker's mind. He is the only man that I know, who, holding with his whole mind and soul the idea of the eternal distinction between moral and positive laws, holds with it the love for a priestly and ceremonial religion, such as appears in the Fifth Book."

His admiration of the Pilgrim's Progress was very great:-"I cannot trust myself," he used to say, to read the account of Christian going up to the Celestial gate, after his passage through the river of death." And when, n one of the foreign tours of his later years, he had read it through again, after a long interval, "I have always," said he, "been struck by its piety: am now struck equally, or ever more, by its profound wisdom."

man of incomparably greater genius than any of them, and to have given a far truer and more edifying picture of Christianity. His Pilgrim's Progress seems to be a complete reflection of Scripture, with none of the rubbish of the theologians mixed up with it. I think that Milton, in his "Reformation in England," or in one of his Tracts, I forget which, treats the Church writers of his time, and their show of learning, utterly uncritical as it was, with the feeling which they deserved.

CXLVIII. TO SIR THOMAS S. PASLEY, BART.

Rugby, December 14, 1836.

The view which you mention is one into which I suppose no one ever fell, who became a Christian in earnest through the workings of his own mind and heart, and through the Scriptures. That is, suppose a young man, when he begins to think seriously upon life, resolving to turn to God, and studying the Scriptures to learn the way, it is clear that all this stuff about the true Church would never so much as come into his head. He would feel and see that the matter of his soul's salvation lay between God and Christ on the one hand, and himself on the other; and that his belonging to this or that Church had really no more to do with the matter, than his being born in France or England, in Westmoreland or in Warwickshire. The Scripture notion of the Church is, that religious society should help a man to become himself better and holier, just as civil society helps us in civilization. But in this great end of a Church, all Churches are now greatly defective, while all fill it up to a certain degree, some less, others more. In proportion as they fulfil it less perfectly, so all that is said in Scripture of divisions, sects, &c., becomes less applicable. It is a great fault to introduce division into an unanimous and efficient society; but when the social bond is all but dissolved, and the society is no more than nominal, there is no such thing, properly speaking, as creating a division in it. In this simple and scriptural view of the matter, all is plain; we were not to derive our salvation through or from the Church, but to be kept or strengthened in the way of salvation by the aid and example of our fellow-Christians, who were to be formed into societies for this very reason, that they might help one another, and not leave each man to fight his own fight alone. But the life of these societies has been long

since gone; they do not help the individual in holiness, and this is in itself evil enough; but it is monstrous that they should pretend to fetter, when they do not assist. This view arises simply from my old enemy, the priestcraft, in this way. The Popish and Oxford view of Christianity is, that the Church is the mediator between God and the individual: that the Church (i. e. in their sense, the Clergy) is a sort of chartered corporation, and that by belonging to this corporation, or by being attached to it, any given individual acquires such and such privileges. This is a priestcraft, because it lays the stress, not on the relations of a man's heart towards God and Christ, as the Gospel does, but on something wholly artificial and formal, his belonging to a certain so-called society; and thus, whether the society be alive or dead, — whether it really help the man in goodness or not, - still it claims to step in and interpose itself, as the channel of grace and salvation, when it certainly is not the channel of salvation, because it is visibly and notoriously no sure channel of grace. Whereas, all who go straight to Christ, without thinking of the Church, do manifestly and visibly receive grace, and have the seal of His Spirit, and therefore are certainly heirs of salvation. This, I think, applies to any and every Church, it being always true that the salvation of a man's soul is effected by the change in his heart and life, wrought by Christ's spirit; and that his relation to any Church is quite a thing subordinate and secondary: although, where the Church is what it should be, it is so great a means of grace, that its benefits are of the highest value. But the heraldic or Succession view of the question I can hardly treat gravely: there is something so monstrously profane in making our heavenly inheritance like an earthly estate, to which our pedigree is our title. And really, what is called Succession, is exactly a pedigree, and nothing better; like natural descent, it conveys no moral nobleness,- nay, far less than natural descent, for I am a believer in some transmitted virtue in a good breed, but the Succession notoriously conveys none. So that, to lay a stress upon it, is to make the Christian Church worse, I think, than the Jewish: but "the sons of God are not to be born of bloods," (i. e. of particular races,) "nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man,”" (i. e. after any human desire to make out an outward and formal title of inheritance,) "but of God," (i. e. of Him who can alone give the only true title to His inheritance, the being conformed unto the image of