XXXVII. TO THE SAME.

Rugby, September 6, 1832.

Have you heard that the Useful Knowledge So

to be

ciety have resolved to publish a Bible, and asked 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 towards 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 labour, with God's

VOL. I.

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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 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 sort, impatient of such an unequal rejoinder, bethought themselves of retorting with the charge of damnable idolatry. But still I think that we have the best of it, in not letting what we firmly believe to be error and ignorance shake our sense of that mightier bond of union, which exists between all those who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity; perhaps I should say, in not letting our sense of the magnitude of the error lead us to question the sincerity of the love.

I must conclude with a more delightful subject-my most dear and blessed sister". I never saw a more perfect instance of the spirit of power and of love, and of a

a Susanna Arnold died at Laleham, April 4, 1832, after a complaint in the spine of twenty years' duration.

sound mind; intense love, almost to the annihilation of selfishness a daily martyrdom for twenty years, during which she adhered to her early formed resolution of never talking about herself; thoughtful about the very pins and ribands of my wife's dress, about the making of a doll's cap for a child,-but of herself, save only as regarded her ripening in all goodness, wholly thoughtless, enjoying every thing lovely, graceful, beautiful, high-minded, whether in God's works or man's, with the keenest relish; inheriting the earth to the very fulness of the promise, though never leaving her crib, nor changing her posture; and preserved through the very valley of the shadow of death, from all fear or impatience, or from every cloud of impaired reason, which might mar the beauty of Christ's Spirit's glorious work. May God grant that I might come but within one hundred degrees of her place in glory. God bless you all.

CHAPTER VII.

LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE-JANUARY 1833

SEPTEMBER 1835.

His alarm about the state of the poor naturally subsided with the tranquillization of the disturbances amongst the rural population, but was succeeded by an alarm almost as great, lest the political agitation which, in 1832, took the form of the cry for Church Reform, should end in destroying what, with all its defects, seemed to him the greatest instrument of social and moral good existing in the country. It was this strong conviction which, in 1833, originated his pamphlet on "the Principles of Church Reform." "I hung back," he said, " as long as I could, till the want was so urgent, that I sat down to write, because I could not help it." But with him preservation was only another word for reform; and here the reform proposed was great in proportion as he thought the stake at issue was dear, and the danger formidable. "Most earnestly do I wish to see the Establishment reformed," was the closing sentence of his Postscript, “at once, for the sake of its greater security, and its greater perfection: but, whether reformed or not, may God in his mercy save us from the calamity of seeing it destroyed!" As much of the misunder

standing of his character arose from a partial knowledge of this pamphlet, and of his object in writing it, it may be as well to give, in his own words, the answer which he made to a friend, in 1840, to a general charge of indiscretion brought against him.

"It seems to me that the charge of 'indiscretion,' apart of course from the truth or error of the opinions expressed, belongs only to my Church Reform pamphlet. Now, I am quite ready to allow, that to publish such a pamphlet in 1840, or indeed at any period since 1834, would have been the height of indiscretion. But I wrote that pamphlet in 1833, when most men-myself among the numberhad an exaggerated impression of the strength of the movement party, and of the changes which it was likely to effect. My pamphlet was written on the supposition-not implied, but expressed repeatedly-that the Church Establishment was in extreme danger; and therefore I proposed remedies, which, although I do still sincerely believe them to be in themselves right and good, yet would be manifestly chimerical, and to advise them might well be called indiscreet, had not the danger and alarm, as I supposed, been imminent. I mistook, undoubtedly, both the strength and intenseness of the movement, and the weakness of the party opposed to it; but I do not think that I was singular in my error-many persisted in it; Lord Stanley, for example, even in 1834 and the subsequent years—many even hold it still, when experience has proved its fallacy. But the startling nature of my proposals, which I suppose constitutes what is called their indiscretion, is to be judged by the state of things in 1832-3, and not by that of times present. Jephson finds that his patients will adopt a very strict diet, when they believe themselves to be in danger; but he would be very indiscreet if he prescribed it to a man who felt no symptoms of indisposition, for the man would certainly laugh at him, although perhaps the diet would do him great good, if he could be induced to adopt it."