significance to those phrases, or merely look upon them as belonging to another period of the world. I do answer for myself, that I look upon the language of Scripture as the simplest, truest, most reasonable language of all that has ever been uttered; that I believe it tells us not merely who sent plagues upon Egypt, but who sends plagues now, and why He sends them; not merely what prophets, and kings, and priests were in the old time, but what they are now, and how He speaks in them. That they do not only show how He taught the prophets of old to separate between the precious and the vile in themselves, and to understand those judgments of His, by which He separated between what was precious and vile in the nation; but that He has taught men in all times, and will teach all who humbly desire His aid now, first, to recognise that great battle between the flesh and the Spirit in themselves, then, if that be their vocation, to trace it in history. In 1846, Maurice was appointed Professor of Divinity at King's College, London, and in 1847 he married again. In 1848, the stir of public events led to a movement in which Maurice and his younger friend, Charles Kingsley, were both active for bringing the agitation among the working classes into close relation with religion, and quickening with spiritual life the highest aspirations of the people. Meetings of working men were held. Maurice's age was then forty-three, and Kingsley's twenty-nine. Charles Kingsley was born in 1819, son of the Vicar of Holne, and born in the vicarage on the border of Dartmoor, in Devonshire. But he left Holne when he was six weeks old, upon his father's removal to the curacy of Burton-on-Trent, whence he again moved to Clifton, in Nottinghamshire. Charles Kingsley's father then held the rectory of Barnack for six years, on the presentation of the Bishop of Peterborough, with the understanding that he should vacate when the bishop's son was old enough to take it. The out-going rector of Barnack was then presented to the living of Clovelly, and went to Clovelly when his son Charles was eleven years old. There the minister entered with warm sympathy into the daily work of his little community. Out of experiences at Clovelly, the life came afterwards into Charles Kingsley's pathetic song of the "Three Fishers." In 1831 he was sent to a school at Clifton, and in 1832 he went to the grammar-school at Helston, where the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, son of the poet, was then master. 1836 his father left Clovelly for the rectory of St. Luke's, Chelsea, to which he had been presented, and Charles Kingsley became for the next two years a student in the Faculty of Arts, at King's College, London, walking to and fro every day from Chelsea. In October, 1838, he entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, obtained a scholarship, and was first, both in classics and mathematics, at the May examinations. Like other youths fervent in feeling, intensely earnest, and intensely true, Charles Kingsley suffered trials of his faith, and rose to noble life by fastening betimes on a true woman's love. At the close of his university course, he made up for lost time by six months' hard reading, came out in 1842 high in honours, was ordained, and took a curacy at Eversley, in Hampshire. He won upon the little community by his quick sympathy with the life of each, and by In cheery fellowship in their pleasures and their work. Carlyle's "French Revolution" had been a power over him at college, by intensifying his belief in God's righteous government of the world. At Eversley he now read another book, that had great effect upon him, Maurice's "Kingdom of Christ." In 1844 Kingsley married, and the rectory of Eversley becoming vacant, when he was about to remove to a curacy at Pimperne, the strong desire of the parishioners secured his nomination to the living. In that year the young rector of Eversley asked some counsel of Mr. Maurice in a letter, and the reply to it was the beginning of their friendship. At the end of 1847, Charles Kingsley published "The Saint's Tragedy," begun, when he left college, as a prose life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and then turned into a dramatic poem. It struck the keynote of his work in after days, and will be described in the volume of this series which illustrates English plays. Prohibition of a Reform banquet in Paris caused a rising of the people on the 24th of February, 1848, followed by the flight of the king and the abolition of monarchy. But the new Provisional Government was soon troubled with a fresh calamity. The rights of labour were recognised on the 27th of February, by instituting national workshops, in which all who applied might get employment at the expense of the state. A newly-elected Constituent Assembly met on the 5th of May. In June, an endeavour was made to draw back from the policy of the national workshops. This caused an insurrection of the operatives on the 22nd of June, with much bloodshed. Paris was declared in a state of siege. General Cavaignac was made Dictator. Eleven generals were killed or wounded. The Archbishop of Paris, while seeking to stay the carnage on the 27th of June, was killed by a chance shot from the barricade on the Place de la Bastille. On the 28th, the mob was at last forced by the troops to surrender. Cavaignac laid down his dictatorship, became President of the Council, and on the 4th of July issued a short decree for the suppression of the workshops. Side by side with these events, there was in England also a great Socialist movement among uneducated working men. The passing of the New Poor Law, in 1835, had led to the formation, in 1836, of a Working Men's Association. Already in 1838 monster meetings were held, and a charter was drawn up claiming manhood suffrage, equal electoral districts, vote by ballot, annual parliaments, with no property qualification, and payment of members. Many supporters of this charter-Chartists-joined to these demands a claim for the re-distribution of property, and held it lawful to obtain their demands by force, if they were unattainable by course of law. Stirred by the swiftness of events in France, the leaders of the Chartists menaced London by calling a monster meeting on Kennington Common for the 10th of April, 1848, before presenting to Parliament a monster petition, said to bear five or six million of signatures. The situation was so grave that the Duke of Wellington was placed in command on behalf of order. His good management, the services of a large body of civilians as special constables, a wet day, and the underlying sense of duty in Englishmen, that made Maurice has given me the highest proof of confidence. He has taken me into counsel, and we are to have meetings for prayer and study, when I come up to London, and we are to bring out a new set of real Tracts for the Times, addressed to the higher orders." The energies, and he was obliged to seek health by a long rest in Devonshire. When he went back to his work in the summer of 1849, there was low fever in Eversley, and after sitting up all night with a labourer's wife who had a large family, and whose life might be saved by faithful nursing, his health again gave way, and he had to return to Devonshire. Before the end of the year, cholera was in England, and Kingsley was working with all his soul in battle for whatever might bring health into the poor man's home. He was then thirty years old. Dean Stanley said afterwards, in his funeral sermon: It was the sense that he was a thorough Englishman-one of yourselves, working, toiling, feeling with you, and like you-that endeared him to you. Artisans and working men of London, you know how he desired with a passionate desire that you should have pure air, pure water, habitable dwellings; that you should be able to share the courtesies, the refinements, the elevation of citizens, and of Englishmen; and you may, therefore, trust him the more when he told you from the pulpit, and still tells you from the grave, that your homes and your lives should be no less full of moral placard written by Kingsley, and posted on the walls From that time Maurice and Kingsley, Archdeacon Hare, and many other zealous, earnest Englishmen, made it their chief public duty to strive for aid of the people, by their true enlightenment. On the 6th of May, 1848, they began a paper called "Politics for the People." Opponents fastened on a sentence in a letter which it contained, addressed to Chartists, by Charles Kingsley, and signed "Parson Lot." He said, "My only quarrel with the Charter is, that it does not go far enough in reform," and every line that followed was in enforcement upon the people of the need of needs, reform within themselves. The very next sentence warned them against "the mistake of fancying that legislative reform is social reform, or that men's hearts can be changed by Act of Parliament." The whole aim, indeed, of these fellow-workers was to urge the need of free citizens in a free state, citizens whom the truth makes free. They enforced it in all their writing, and they sought to aid in the raising of individual lives, wherever they could establish sympathetic intercourse with working men. For the higher education of women, Queen's College had been established in Harley Street, by the energies of Professor Maurice, who had begun simply with lectures to governesses, and Charles Kingsley, in May, 1848, began to give weekly lectures upon English literature there. Later in this year also, Kingsley was writing "Yeast" in Fraser's Magazine. Before the year was out his health gave way under the strain on all his 1 So the Attendant Spirit says, at the close of Milton's "Comus :"- CHARLES KINGSLEY, From a Photograph by Messrs. Elliott and Fry, London. We return to Frederick Denison Maurice, who continued, after 1849, in alliance with Charles Kingsley and others, to hold meetings of working men, which gradually led to the establishment of a Working Men's College, in 1854. During the tumults in 1848, Professor Maurice, as Preacher at Lincoln's Inn, delivered, in February, March, and April, nine sermons on the Lord's Prayer, which were published, and of which he said, "I wished in these sermons to connect the Lord's Prayer with the thoughts which are most likely to be occupying us at this time. If they lead any to ask themselves how their study of passing occurrences may be made more serious and their worship more real, my purpose in publishing them will be answered." In the following year, 1849, Professor Maurice delivered in Lincoln's Inn Chapel nineteen sermons on "The Prayer Book, considered especially in reference to the Romish System." The following passage from his sermon on the use of David's Psalms in the Church Service, is characteristic of his way of looking at the Bible as a Book of Life, in every sense, in which God speaks not as by passive instruments, but by bringing His Spirit home to us through the real words of real men with their human faults and passions and desires,—but the profound sense of living God in all: THE PSALMS. Nothing is more puzzling to the person who reads the Psalms merely as a student than the questions, Which of these refer to the condition of the individual writer? which to the condition of the Church generally? which may the individual Christian adopt, without dishonesty or irreverence, as the utterance of his own experience; which must he refer directly to Christ? After centuries of commentaries on these questions, one is often inclined to think that they are more unsettled than ever. The divine rests upon his distinction of Messianic and non-Messianic; the historian brings to light facts in the records of the Hebrew people which determine them to a particular age. The popular reader resolves that he will read himself into them, making Edom, Moab, Israel, and Zion just what he likes them to be. And yet beneath all these perplexities of the understanding, there has through all these ages been a strong and general conviction that every historical fact respecting the time in which the Psalm was composed is of the greatest value; that David must have written what he did write as David, and not in some fictitious character; that Christ must in some sense be the subject not of a few of them, but of all; that they do of right belong to each human being. Whence has come this settled and harmonious conviction, apparently so much at variance with that uncertainty, and contradiction, and restlessness, in the midst of which it exists? I answer: men have got it from worship. So far as they have felt that these Psalms were the best and most perfect expressions they could find for a public united devotion, so far has there been a reconcilement of difficulties which other experiments only made more hopeless. For they could not have anything to do with our worship if the writers of them did not refer themselves and the whole universe to one centre. While they do this, and we do it, we feel that they are meant for us. But it is just the doing this which makes them so strongly the property of their original owners. They are driven about and tormented by innumerable enemies-personal enemies-they betake themselves, as their only help and refuge, to one who is their friend. They are crushed under a weight of oppressive accidents; they must find one who is always the same. They are crushed under giant human ills. Death and hell are close to them, and are mightier than themselves. What can they do but trust in Him who has said to death and hell, "I will be your plagues?" "These words must be real; they must have been felt by those who spoke them," cries the worshipper, "because they are so real to me, because they so exactly express the burden under which I am groaning. Personal enemies are pursuing me; a load of petty anxieties is pressing upon me; these same giant universal foes are threatening me every moment. I have come to church to fly from one as much as the other. And there I find that I am not alone. My groan has been uttered before; men thousands of years ago sought the deliverance I am seeking. And they did not pour out a wild shriek into the ear of some unknown power. They took refuge in a Being in whom they were sure they should find a refuge; One who, they say, had awakened their longing for Himself; who had declared that there was a bond, an everlasting bond, between them and Himself. What was that bond? It seems as if the men who were pouring out these prayers had a glimpse of it, and as if they were feeling their way into the full apprehension of it. Does not this church to which I have come signify that I may have a fuller apprehension of it? Does it not say that the mystery has been revealed? Does it not tell me of an actual Living Person who is the bond, the perfect bond of peace, between God and His creatures, and between these creatures as brethren of the same family? Does it not tell me of a Daysman in whom we are reconciled, and can meet? of One in whom God looks upon us, and is satisfied?" This truth is working itself out in the mind of the Psalmist, as it must work itself out in ours. The mere notion is nothing; here we have the living process of discovery; its stages of doubt, clearness, vicissitude, fear, hope, rejoicing. The Psalmist is rising through worship into a perception of the right which he has to call us and all in every age of the world, his brothers; we, through worship, come to understand his difficulties; in claiming that right he becomes our interpreter, while we yet are better able to understand his words than he was himself. This wonderful reciprocation of benefits, this magnetic communication between distant ages, is simply a fact. The commonest experiences of our lives imply it. We could not sympathise with Homer or any writer who grew up in circumstances altogether different from our own, if it did not exist. Christianity interprets the fact, Christian worship substantiates it for us, teaches us that the magnetism is a spiritual, not an animal one. It is not produced by the excitement of meeting together; it is grounded upon that purpose of God which He purposed when He created us in Christ Jesus, and which He will accomplish when He shall gather up all things together in Him. By acts of worship, then, we come to understand how that which is David's becomes ours in Him who is the Son of David and the Son of God. The service brings before us on the same day psalms written in the most different states of mind, expressive of the most different feelings. If we have sympathised in one, it often seems a painful effort to join in the rest. And so it must, as long as we look upon prayers and praises as expressions of our moods, as long as we are not joining in them because we belong to a family, and count it our highest glory to lose ourselves in it and in Him who is the head of it. We must be educated into that knowledge. It may be slow in coming, but till it comes, the Psalms are not intelligible to us: our Christian position is not intelligible to us: we do not more than half enter into the parts of the service which we seem to enter into most. They touch certain chords in our spirits, but not the most rich and musical chords. These do not belong to ourselves; they are human; they answer to the touch of that Divine Spirit who holds converse with the spirit of a man which is in us. It was this strong insisting on the human truth in the Bible that caused controversialists to accuse Maurice of unsound views upon inspiration. In 1852 he published a volume of Lincoln's Inn sermons upon "The Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament," from one of which we may add to his view of the Psalms a part of his comment upon the Psalmist : DAVID. This, brethren, was the man after God's own heart, the man who thoroughly believed in God as a living and righteous Being, who in all changes of fortune clung to that conviction; who could act upon it, live upon it; who could give himself up to God to use him as He pleased; who could be little or great, popular or contemptible, just as God saw fit that he should be; who could walk on in darkness secure of nothing but this, that truth must prevail at last, and that he was sent into the world to live and die that it might prevail; who was certain that the triumph of the God of Heaven would be for the blessing of the most miserable outcasts upon earth. Have we asked ourselves how the Scripture can dare to represent a man with David's many failings, with that eager, passionate temper which evidently belonged to him, with all the manifold temptations which accompany a vehement sympathetic character, with the great sins which we shall be told of hereafter, as one who could share the counsels and do the will of a Holy Being? Oh! rather let us ask ourselves whether, with a plausible exterior, a respectable behaviour, an unimpeachable decorum in the sight of men, we can ever win this smile, hear this approving sentence. The words, "Well done, good and faithful servant,' are not spoken by the Judge of all now, will not be spoken in the last day, to him who has found in his pilgrimage through this world no enemies to fight with, no wrongs to be redressed, no right to be maintained. How many of us feel, in looking back upon acts which the world has not condemned, which friends have perhaps applauded, "We had no serious purpose there; we merely did what it was seemly and convenient to do, we were not yielding to God's righteous will; we were not inspired by His love." How many of us feel that our bitterest repentances are to be for this, that all things have gone so smoothly with us, because we did not care to make the world better or to be better ourselves. How many of us feel that those who have committed grave outward transgressions-into which we have not fallen because the motives to them were not present with us, or because God's grace kept us hedged round by influences which resisted them-may nevertheless have had hearts which answered more to God's heart, which entered far more into the grief and the joy of His Spirit, than ours ever did. Attacks had been made in a religious newspaper upon Professor Maurice's theology, and in 1851 the Council of King's College, in which he was Divinity Professor, appointed a committee of divines to examine his writings. They did so, and reported warmly in his favour; but from that time he was regarded as a heretic by one of the parties in the Church. In 1853, Professor Maurice published a volume of "Theological Essays," written for the purpose of overcoming doubts of the Trinity. It was said that in these essays he showed a want of faith in hell, and was unsound upon the subject of eternal the following November, to begin work never since interrupted:- IDEA OF A COLLEGE FOR WORKING MEN. A club and a college are very different things; they may be wide as the poles asunder. But a club of ordinary Englishmen may become a college of intelligent, thoughtful men, provided a human purpose take the place of a selfish one. It is a conviction of this kind which has led a few friends of mine to propose a College for Working Men in the northern part of London. They answer with tolerable exactness to the description I have given of the persons from whom it is reasonable to demand such an effort. They are all at work themselves, in occupations which they believe to be vocations, and which they do not hold it would be right to forsake under any plea of benevolence to their fellow-creatures. They do not, therefore, aim at forming a guild or order of teachers. They are already admitted into their different guilds as members of the Inns of Court, or the Colleges of Surgeons or Physicians, as Artists, as Ministers of the Gospel, as Tradesmen, as Operatives. What they believe is best for themselves -best for the special fraternity to which they belong, in respect of the work which it is pledged to do, as well as of the science which it is pledged to advance-is that they should keep up an intercourse with men of different callings, and should do what in them lies, that those who are engaged merely in manual labour should feel that also to be a high calling. They may differ among themselves about some of the ways in which this end should be accomplished; they are punishment. In July, August, and September, perfectly agreed that one of the ways, and the most effectual, 1853, there was much controversy on this subject, and in October Maurice was deprived of his Professorship. In 1854 he was actively at work for the creation of a college, and gave at Willis's Rooms, in June and July, before fashionable audiences, six lectures upon "Learning and Working," in which he developed the design of the Working Men's College, then established. He thus described the fellowship that had made the college, which was, in is to strive that the manual worker may have a share in all the best treasures with which God has been pleased to endow them. They do not think they have any business to consider how few of these treasures they may possess in comparison with many of their contemporaries; by all means let those who have more give more; all they have to do is to ask how they may make what they have most useful, and how they may increase it by communicating it. Their design is far from ambitious. It is not to found a College for the workers of England, or of London. It is simply to make an experiment, necessarily on a very small scale, in the neighbourhood which is nearest to the places in which most of them are busy during the day. If working and learning are to be combined, learning must come to the door of the workshop and factory, till the better day when it shall be allowed to enter into them. In 1866 he a Maurice remained to the end of his life the leading spirit of the college thus begun. His acceptance presently of the pulpit at Vere Street was followed by another theological discussion. was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge. He had distinguished himself as writer on Moral Philosophy, by a work on "Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy," in 1850; another, on "Philosophy of the First Six Centuries," in 1853; another, on "Mediæval Philosophy; or, a Treatise of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century," in 1857; and another, on "Modern Philosophy; or, a Treatise of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, from the Fourteenth Century to the French Revolution, with a Glimpse into the Nineteenth Century," in 1862. In 1872 he died, and Charles Kingsley was among the friends who followed him to his grave. Kingsley had written novels that dealt with essentials of human life and duty; had worked for the health of bodies and of souls; had been made one of the chaplains to the Queen in 1859, and in 1860 Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. He had resigned that office in 1869, when he became a Canon of Chester. At the end of that year he sailed for the West Indies, and was at Eversley again in the following March. Of Maurice, he said, "I had seen death in his face for, I may almost say, two years past, and felt that he needed the great rest of another life. And now he has it." His own hour of rest was then not distant. In 1873 he was offered by Mr. Gladstone an exchange from the canonry at Chester to a canonry at Westminster. In 1874 he paid a visit to America; in January, 1875, he died. We have seen that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was among writers who touched the minds of earnest young Cambridge students in the time of a new trial of the foundations of religion. Coleridge argued that where in the Bible God is said to have spoken, and words are said to be His, they are so to be taken; and where the writers quote documents and otherwise speak as from themselves, without anywhere claiming to do more than tell the best they know, they are also to be so understood. Holding that the Bible contains the religion of Christians, but not daring to say that whatever is contained in the Bible is the Christian Religion, Coleridge said that Scripture so received by a heart answering to the Divine Word which speaks through it, is a stronghold of spiritual life from which no attacks of infidelity can ever drive the faithful Christian. The soul to whose depths it has once spoken answers back out of its depths with a conviction of its own that surface criticisms have no power to shake. He said of THE BIBLE: In every generation, and wherever the light of revelation has shone, men of all ranks, conditions, and states of mind have found in this volume a correspondent for every movement towards the Better felt in their own hearts. The needy soul has found supply, the feeble a help, the sorrowful a comfort; yea, be the recipiency the least that can consist with moral life, there is an answering grace ready to enter. The Bible has been found a spiritual world-spiritual, and yet at the same time outward and common to all. You in one place, I in another, all men somewhere or at some time, meet with an assurance that the hopes and fears, the thoughts and yearnings that proceed from or tend to a right spirit in us, are not dreams of fleeting singularities, no voices heard in sleep, or spectres which the eye suffers but not perceives. As if on some dark night a pilgrim, suddenly beholding a bright star moving before him, should stop in fear and perplexity. But lo! traveller after traveller passes by him, and each, being questioned whither he is going, makes answer, "I am following yon guiding Star!" The pilgrim quickens his own steps, and presses onward in confidence. More confident still will he be, if by the way-side he should find, here and there, ancient monuments, each with its votive lamp, and on cach the name of some former pilgrim, and a record that there he had first seen or begun to follow the benignant star. No otherwise is it with the varied contents of the sacred volume. The hungry have found food, the thirsty a living spring, the feeble a staff, and the victorious warfarer songs of welcome and strains of music; and as long as each man asks on account of his wants, and asks what he wants, no man will discover aught amiss or deficient in the vast and many-chambered storehouse. But if, instead of this, an idler or a scoffer should wander through the rooms, peering and peeping, and either detects, or fancies he has detected, here a rusted sword or pointless shaft, there a tool of rude construction, and superseded by later improvements (and preserved, perhaps, to make us more grateful for them); which of two things will a sober-minded man, who from his childhood upward had been fed, clothed, armed, and furnished with the means of instruction from this very magazine, think the fitter plan? Will he insist that the rust is not rust, or that it is a rust sui generis, intentionally formed on the steel for some mysterious virtue in it, and that the staff and astrolabe of a shepherd astronomer are identical with, or equivalent to, the quadrant and telescope of Newton and Herschel? or will he not rather give the curious inquisitor joy of his mighty discoveries, and the credit of them for his reward? Whether Coleridge's view be right or wrong, may not Christians show their inevitable differences in opinion upon such a point, and yet keep unbroken that spirit of charity which is the very seal of their religion? It is unbroken in the sermons of Frederick William Robertson, who from 1847 to 1853 was incumbent of Trinity Chapel, Brighton. The year after his appointment was the year of Revolution, 1848, and Frederick Robertson boldly applied religion to the problems of the time, in lectures on the first book of Samuel, which he had begun in January. He was widely misunderstood, as with intense earnestness he sought to raise the working men to Christian freedom. For him in his way, as for Arnold in his, and Maurice in his, |