frohe Jubellieder;" of 839, "O Ewigheit! O Ewigheit;" and of 933 and 934. I have tried to translate some of them, but have been sadly disappointed with my own attempts. But I must give you one or two stanzas of the Morning Hymn, as a token of my love to it, and to show you also, for your satisfaction, how much our language is inferior to yours in flexibility and power, by having lost so much of its native character, and become such a jumble of French and Latin exotics with the original Saxon.. I shall send you, almost immediately, the third volume of Thucydides, and the third volume of Sermons. The Appendix to the latter is directed against an error, which is deeply mischievous in our Church, by presenting so great an obstacle to Christian union, as well as to Christian Church Reform. Still, as in Catholic countries, "the Church," with us, means, in many persons' mouths, and constantly in Parliament, only "the clergy;" and this feeling operates, of course, both to produce superstition and profaneness, in both respects exactly opposed to Christianity. Church Reform, in any high sense of the word, we shall not have; the High church party idolize things as they are; the Evangelicals idolize the early Reformers; their notion at the best would be to carry into full effect the intentions of Cranmer and Ridley; neither party are prepared to acknowledge that there is much more to be done than this; and that Popery and narrow dogmatical intolerance tainted the Church as early as the days of Ignatius; while, on the other hand, Christ's true Church lived through the worst of times, and is not to be confined to the small congregations of the Vaudois. The state of parties in England, and that ignorance of and indifference to general principles, which is so characteristic of Englishmen, is enough to break one's heart. I do not think that you do justice to the late government; you must compare them not with the government of a perfect Commonwealth, but with that worse than "Fæx Romuli," the Tory system that preceded them, and which is now threatening us again under a new aspect. . It strikes me that a noble work might be written on the Philosophy of Parties and Revolutions, showing what are the essential points of division in all civil contests, and what are but accidents. For the want of this, history as a collection of facts is of no use at all to many persons; they mistake essential resemblances, and dwell upon accidental differences, especially when those accidental differences are in themselves matters of great importance, such as differences in religion, or, more or less, of civil liberty and equality. Whereas it seems to me that the real parties in human nature are the Conservatives and the Advancers; those who look to the past or present, and those who look to the future, whether knowingly and deliberately, or by an instinct of their nature, indolent in one case and restless in the other, which they themselves do not analyze. Thus Conservatism may sometimes be ultra democracy, (see Cleon's speech in Thucydides, III.,) sometimes aristocracy, as in the civil wars of Rome, or in the English constitution now; and the Advance may be sometimes despotism, sometimes aristocracy, but always keeping its essential character of advance, of taking off bonds, removing prejudices, altering what is existing. The Advance in its perfect form is Christianity, and in a corrupted world must always be the true principle, although it has in many instances been so clogged with evil of various kinds, that the conservative principle, although essentially false since man fell into sin, has yet commended itself to good men while they looked on the history of mankind only partially, and did not consider it as a whole. . . . . ...... How you astonish and shame me by what you are yourself continually effecting and proposing to effect amidst all your official and domestic engagements. I do not know how you can contrive it, or how your strength and spirits can support it. O how heartily do I sympathize in your feeling as to the union of philological, historical, and philosophical research, all to minister to divine truth; and how gladly would I devote my time and powers to such pursuits, did I not feel as much another thing in your letter, that we should abide in that calling which God has set before us. And it is delightful, if at any time I may hope to send out into the world any young man willing and trained to do Christ's work, rich in the combined and indivisible love of truth and of goodness". * LXXXI. TO C. J. VAUGHAN, ESQ. Rugby, February 25, 1835. You must not think that I had forgotten you, though your kind letter has remained so long unanswered. I was always conscious of my debt to you, and resolved to pay it; but though I can write letters of business at any time, yet it is not so with letters to friends, which I neither like to leave unfinished in the middle, nor, to say the truth, do I always feel equal to writing them; for they require a greater freshness and abstractedness of mind from other matters than I am always able to command. I have been a "Cobbett is an anti-advance man to the back bone, he is sometimes Jacobin, sometimes Conservative, but never liberal; and the same may be said of most of the party writers on both sides, of which there is a good proof in their joint abuse of the French government, which is, I think, the most truly liberal and advancing' that exists in Europe, next perhaps to the Prussian, which is one of the most advancing ever known."-Extract from a Letter to Mr. Justice Coleridge in the same year. The doctrine alluded to in these Letters was one to which he often recurred, and which he believed to be peculiarly applicable to modern Europe. "A volume," he said, "might be written on those words of Harrington,' that we are living in the dregs of the Gothic empire. It is that the beginnings of things are bad-and when they have not been altered, you may safely say that they want altering. But then comes the question whether our fate is not fixed, and whether you could not as well make the muscles and sinews of a full grown man perform the feats of an Indian juggler; great changes require great docility, and you can only expect that from perfect knowledge or perfect ignorance." greatly delighted with all I have heard of you since you have been at Cambridge; it is vexatious to me, however, that from want of familiarity with the system, I cannot bring your life and pursuits there so vividly before my mind, as I can those of an undergraduate in Oxford; otherwise, to say nothing of my personal interest for individuals, I think that I am as much concerned about one university as the other. Lake will have told you, I dare say, all our vacation news, and probably all that has happened worth relating since our return to Rugby. In fact, news of all sorts you will be sure to hear from your other correspondents earlier and more fully than from me. I was obliged to you for a hint in your letter to Price, about our reading more Greek poetry, and accordingly we have begun the Harrow "Musa Græca," and are doing some Pindar. You may be sure that I wish to consult the line of reading at both Universities, so far as this can be done without a system of direct cramming, or without sacrificing something, which I may believe to be of paramount importance. Aristophanes, however, I had purposely left for Lee to do with the Fifth Form, as it is a book which he had studied well, and can do much better than I can. I am doing nothing, but thinking of many things. I forget whether you learnt any German here, but I think it would be well worth your while to learn it without loss of time. Every additional language gained is like an additional power, none more so than German. I have been revelling in my friend Bunsen's collection of hymns, and have lately got a periodical work on Divinity, published by some of the best German divines, "Theologische Studien und Kritiken." I mention these, because they are both so utterly unlike what is called Rationalism, and at the same time so unlike our High Church or Evan. gelical writings: they seem to me to be a most pure transcript of the New Testament, combining in a most extraordinary degree the spirit of love with the spirit of wisdom. It is a very hard thing, I suppose, to read at once passionately and critically, by no means to be cold, captious, sneering, or scoffing; to admire greatness and goodness with an intense love and veneration, yet to judge all things; to be the slave neither of names nor of parties, and to sacrifice even the most beautiful associations for the sake of truth. I would say, as a good general rule, never read the works of any ordinary man, except on scientific matters, or when they contain simple matters of fact. Even on matters of fact, silly and ignorant men, however honest and industrious in their particular subject, require to be read with constant watchfulness and suspicion; whereas great men are always instructive, even amidst much of error on particular points. In general, however, I hold it to be certain, that the truth is to be found in the great men, and the error in the little ones. LXXXII. * TO A. P. STANLEY, ESQ. Rugby, March 4, 1835. I am delighted that you like Oxford, nor am I the least afraid of your liking it too much. It does not follow because one admires and loves the surpassing beauty of the place and its associations, or because one forms in it the most valuable and most delightful friendships, that therefore one is to uphold its foolishnesses, and try to perpetuate its faults. My love for any place or person, or institution, is exactly the measure of my desire to reform them; a doctrine which seems to me as natural now, as it seemed strange when I was a child, when I could not make out, how, if my mother loved me more than strange children, she should find fault with me and not with them. But I do not think this ought to be a difficulty to any one who is more than six years old. I suppose that the reading necessary for the schools is now so great, that you can scarcely have time for any thing else. Your German will be kept up naturally enough in your mere classical read |