219

Now, in respect to the great moral commands of worshipping and honouring God, honouring parents, abstaining from murder, &c.,-as these are equally applicable to all times and all states of society, they are equally binding upon all men, not as having been some of the commandments given to the Jews, but as being part of God's eternal and universal law, for all his reasonable creatures to obey. And here, no doubt, there is a serious responsibility for every one to determine how far what he reads in the Bible concerns himself; and no doubt, also, that if a man chooses to cheat his conscience in such a matter, he might do it easily; but the responsibility is one which we cannot get rid of, because we see that parts of the Bible are not addressed directly to us; and thus we must decide what is addressed to us and what is not; and if we decide dishonestly, for the sake of indulging any evil inclination, we do but double our guilt.

LXVII. TO MR. SERGEANT COLERIDGE.

Rugby, June 12, 1833,

on

Our Westmoreland house is rising from its foundations, and I hope rearing itself tolerably "in auras æthereas." It looks right into the bosom of Fairfield,—a noble mountain, which sends down two long arms into the valley, and keeps the clouds reposing between them, while he looks down on them composedly with his quiet brow; and the Rotha, "purior electro," winds round our fields, just under the house. Behind, we run up to the top of Loughrigg, and we have a mountain pasture, in a basin on the summit of the ridge, the very image of those" Saltus Citharon, where Edipus was found by the Corinthian shepherd. Wordsworths' friendship, for so I may call it, is certainly one of the greatest delights of Fox How,-the name of my zoolov,-and their kindness in arranging every thing in our absence has been very great. Mean time, till our own house is ready, which cannot be till next summer, we have taken a furnished house, at the head of Grasmere, on a little shoulder of the mountain of Silver How, between the lake on one side, and Easedale, the most delicious of vales, on the other.

The

LXVIII. TO. A PUPIL.

(Who had written, with much anxiety, to know whether he had offended him, as he had thought his manner changed towards him.)

Grasmere, July 15, 1833.

The other part of your letter at once gratified and pained me. I was not aware of any thing in my manner to you that could imply

The principle here laid down is given more at length in the Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture, at the end of the second volume of his Sermons; and also in the Sermon on the Lord's Day, in the third volume. It may be well to insert in this place a letter to Mr. Justice Coleridge in 1830, relating to a libel in a newspaper, charging him with violation of the observance of Sunday.

Surely I can deny the charge stoutly and in toto; for, although I think that the whole law is done away with, so far as it is the law given on Mount Sinai; yet so far as it is the Law of the Spirit, I hold it to be all binding; and believing that our need of a Lord's day is as great as ever it was, and that therefore its observance is God's will, and is likely, so far as we see, to be so to the end of time, I should think it most mischievous to weaken the respect paid to it. I believe all that I have ever published about it, is to be found at the end of my twentieth Sermon [of the first volume]; and as for my practice, I am busy every Sunday, from morning till evening, in lecturing the boys, or preaching to them, or writing sermons for them. One feels ashamed to mention such things,

disapprobation; and certainly it was not intended to do so. Yet it is true that I had observed, with some pain, what seemed to me indications of a want of enthusiasm, in the good sense of the word, of a moral sense and feeling corresponding to what I knew was your intellectual activity. I did not observe any thing amounting to a sneering spirit; but there seemed to me a coldness on religious matters, which made me fear lest it should change to sneering, as your understanding became more vigorous; for this is the natural fault of the undue predominance of the mere intellect, unaccompanied by a corresponding growth and liveliness of the moral affections, particularly that of admiration and love of moral excellence, just as superstition arises, where it is honest, from the undue predominance of the affections, without the strengthening power of the intellect advancing in proportion. This was the whole amount of my feeling with respect to you, and which has nothing to do with your conduct in school matters. I should have taken an opportunity of speaking to you about the state of your mind, had you not led me now to mention it. Possibly my impression may be wrong, and indeed it has been created by very trifling circumstances: but I am always keenly alive on this point, to the slightest indications, because it is the besetting danger of an active mind-a much more serious one, I think, than the temptation to mere personal vanity.

I must again say, most expressly, that I observed nothing more, than an apparent want of lively moral susceptibility. Your answers on religious subjects were always serious and sensible, and seemed to me quite sincere; I only feared that they proceeded, perhaps too exclusively, from an intellectual perception of truth, without a sufficient love and admiration for goodness. I hold the lines, "nil admirari," &c., to be as utterly false as any moral sentiment ever uttered. Intense admiration is necessary to our highest perfection, and we have an object in the Gospel, for which it may be felt to the utmost, without any fear lest the most critical intellect should tax us justly with unworthy idolatry. But I am as little inclined as any one to make an idol out of any human virtue, or human wisdom.

LXIX. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ.

Rugby, June 24, 1833.

An ordinary letter written to me when yours was, would have been answered some time since, but I do not like to write to you when I have no leisure to write at length. Most truly do I thank you both for your affectionate recollection of my birthday, and for coupling it in your mind with the 4th of April.' May my second birthday be as blessed to me, as the 20th of August, I doubt not, has been to her. All writings which state the truth, must contain things which, taken nakedly and without their balancing truths, may serve the purposes of either party, because no party is altogether wrong. But I have no reason to think that my Church Reform Pamphlet has served the purposes of the antichristian party in any way, it being hardly possible to extract a passage which they would like. The High Church party are offended enough, and so are the Unitarians, but I do not see that either make a cat's paw of me.

The Bishop confirms here on Saturday, and I have had and have still a great deal to do in examining the boys for it. Indeed, the work is full heavy just now, but the fry are learning cricket, and we play nice matches sometimes to my great refreshment. God bless you and yours.

but the fact is, that I have doubled my own work on Sunday, to give the boys more religious instruction; and that I can, I hope, deny the charge of the libel in as strong terms as you could wish."

Alluding to his sister's birthday and death.

LXX.

TO REV. AUGUSTUS HARE.

(In answer to objections to his Pamphlet,)

Grasmere, August 3, 1833.

And now I feel that to reply to your letter as I could wish, would require a volume. You will say, why was not the volume published before or with the pamphlet? To which I answer that, first, it would probably not have been read, and secondly, I was not prepared to find men so startled at principles, which have long appeared to me to follow necessarily from a careful study of the New Testament. Be assured, however, that, whether mistakenly or not, I fully believe that such a plan as I have proposed, taken altogether, would lead to a more complete representation of Scripture truth in our forms of worship and preaching than we have ever yet attained to; not, certainly, if we were only to cut away Articles, and alter the Liturgy-then the effect might be latitudinarian-but if, whilst relaxing the theoretical bond, we were to tighten the practical one by amending the government and constitution of the Church, then I do believe that the fruit would be Christian union, by which I certainly do not mean an agreement in believing nothing, or as little as we can. Mean time, I wish to remind you that one of St. Paul's favourite notions of heresy is " doting about strifes of words." One side may be right in such a strife, and the other wrong, but both are heretical as to Christianity, because they lead men's minds away from the love of God and of Christ, to questions essentially tempting to the intellect, and which tend to no profit towards godliness. And again, I think you will find that all the "false doctrines" spoken of by the Apostles, are doctrines of sheer wickedness; that their counterpart in modern times is to be found in the Anabaptists of Munster, or the Fifth Monarchy Men, or in mere secular High Churchmen, or hypocritical Evangelicals, in those who make Christianity minister to lust, or to covetousness, or to ambition; not in those who interpret Scripture to the best of their conscience and ability, be their interpretation ever so erroneous.

a

LXXI. TO REV. G. CORNISH.

Allan Bank, Grasinere, August 18, 1833.

I have had a good deal of worry from . . . . . the party spirit of the neighbourhood, who in the first place have no notion of what my opinions are, and in the next place cannot believe that I do not teach the boys Junius and the Edinburgh Review, at the least, if not Cobbett and the Examiner. But this is an evil which flesh is heir to, if flesh, at least, will write as I have done. I am sorry that you do not like the Pamphlet, for I am myself daily more and more convinced of its truth. I will not answer for its practicability; when the patient is at his last gasp, the dose may come too late, but still it is his only chance: he may die of the doctor; he must die of the disease. I fear that nothing can save us from falling into the American system, which will well show us the inherent evil of our Protestantism, each man quarrelling with his neighbour for a word, and all discarding so much of the beauty and solemnity, and visible power of the Gospel, that in common minds, where its spiritual power is not very great, the result is like the savourless salt, the vilest thing in the world. I would join with all those who love Christ and pray to him; who regard him not as dead, but as living. [This part of the letter has been accidently torn away: the substance of it seems to have been the same as that of Letters LXI. and LXIX.] . Make the [Church a] living and active. society, like that of the first Christians, [and then] differences of opinion will either cease or will signify nothing. [Look] through the Epistles, and you will find nothing there con

demned as [heresy] but what was mere wickedness; if you consider the real nature and connexion of the tenets condemned. For such differences of opinion as exist amongst Christians now, the 14th chapter of the Romans is the applicable lesson-not such passages as Titus iii. 10, or 2 John 10, 11, or Jude 3, (that much abused verse!) or 19 or 23. There is one anathema, which is indeed holy and just, and most profitable for ourselves as well as for others, (1 Corinth. xvi. 22,) but this is not the anathema of a fond theology. . . . . . Lo! I have written you almost another pamphlet, instead of telling you of my wife and the fry, who for more than five weeks have been revelling amongst the mountains. But as far as scenery goes, I would rather have heath and blue hills all the year, than mountains for three months, and Warwickshire for nine, with no hills, either blue or brown, no heath, no woods, no clear streams, no wide plains for lights and shades to play over, nay, no banks for flowers to grow upon, but one monotonous undulation of green fields, and hedges, and very fat cattle. But we have each our own work, and our own enjoyments, and I am sure that I have more than I can ever be sufficiently thankful for.

LXXII. TO REV. JULIUS HARE.

Rugby, October 7, 1833.

In Italy you met Bunsen, and can now sympathize with the all but idolatry with which I regard him. So beautifully good, so wise, and so noble-minded! I do not believe that any man can have a deeper interest in Rome than I have, yet I envy you nothing so much in your last winter's stay there, as your continued intercourse with Bunsen. It is since I saw you that I have been devouring with the most intense admiration the third volume of Niebuhr. The clearness and comprehensiveness of all his military details is a new feature in that wonderful mind, and how inimitably beautiful is that brief account of Terni. You will not, I trust, misinterpret me, when I say that this third volume set me at work again in earnest, on the Roman History, last summer. As to any man's being a fit continuator of Niebuhr, that is absurd; but I have at least the qualification of an unbounded veneration for what he has done, and, as my name is mentioned in his book, I should like to try to embody, in a continuation of the Roman History, the thoughts and notions which I have learnt from him. Perhaps I may trouble you with a letter on this subject, asking, as I have often done before, for information.'

LXXIII. TO MR. SERGEANT COLERIDGE.

Rugby, October 23, 1833.

I love your letters dearly, and thank you for them greatly; your last was a great treat, though I may seem not to have shown my sense of it, by answering it so leisurely. First of all, you will be glad to hear of the birth of my eighth living child, a little girl, to whom we mean to give an unreasonable number of names, Frances Bunsen Trevenen Whately; the second after my valued friend, the Prussian Minister at Rome, of whom, as I know not whether I shall ever see him again, I wished to have a daily present recollection in the person of one of my children. I wish I could show you his two letters, one to me on the political state of Europe, and one to Dr. Nott on the perfect notion of a Christian Liturgy. I am sure that you would love and admire, with me, the extraordinary combination of piety and wis

This alludes to a plan he at first entertained of beginning his own Roman History with the Punic wars.

dom and profound knowledge and large experience which breathes through every line of both. I go all lengths with you in deprecating any increase of political excitement, any thing that shall tend to make politics enter into a man's daily thoughts and daily practice. When I first projected the Englishman's Register, I wrote to my nephew my sentiments about it in full; a letter which I keep, and may one day find it convenient to publish as my confession of faith; in this letter I protested strongly against making the Register exclusively political, and entered at large into my reasons for doing Undoubtedly I fear that the Government lend an ear too readily to the Utilitarians and others of that coarse and hard stamp, whose influence can be nothing but evil. In church matters they have got Whately, and a signal blessing it is that they have him and listen to him; a man so good and so great that no folly or wickedness of the most vile of factions will move him from his own purposes, or provoke him in disgust to forsake the defence of the Temple.

so.

I cannot say how I am annoyed, both on public and private grounds, by these extravagances, [at Oxford;] on private grounds, from the gross breaches of charity to which they lead good men; and on public, because if these things do produce any effect on the clergy, the evil consequences to the nation are not to be calculated; for what is to become of the Church, if the clergy begin to exhibit an aggravation of the worst superstitions of the Roman Catholics, only stripped of that consistency, which stamps even the errors of the Romish system with something of a character of greatness. It seems presumption in me to press any point upon your consideration, seeing in how many things I have learnt to think from you. But it has always seemed to me that an extreme fondness for our "dear mother the panther," ' is a snare, to which the noblest minds are most liable. It seems to me that all, absolutely all, of our religious affections and veneration should go to Christ himself, and that Protestantism, Catholicism, and every other name, which expresses Christianity, and some differentia or proprium besides, is so far an evil, and, when made an object of attachment, leads to superstition and error. Then, descending from religious grounds to human, I think that one's natural and patriotic sympathies can hardly be too strong; but, historically, the Church of England is surely of a motley complexion, with much of good about it, and much of evil, no more a fit subject for enthusiastic admiration than for violent obloquy. I honour and sympathize entirely with the feelings entertained; I only think that they might all of them select a worthier object; that, whether they be pious and devout, or patriotic, or romantic, or of whatever class soever, there is for each and all of these a true object, on which they may fasten without danger and with infinite benefit; for surely the feeling of entire love and admiration is one, which we cannot safely part with, and there are provided, by God's goodness, worthy and perfect objects of it; but these can never be human institutions, which, being necessarily full of imperfection, require to be viewed with an impartial judgment, not idolized by an uncritical affection. And that common metaphor about our "Mother the Church," is unscriptural and mischievous, because the feelings of entire filial reverence and love which we owe to a parent, we do not owe to our fellow Christians; we owe them brotherly love, meekness, readiness to bear, &c., but not filial reverence, "to them I gave place by subjection, no not for an hour." Now, if I were a Utilitarian, I should not care for what I think a misapplication of the noblest feelings; for then I should not care for the danger to which this misapplication exposes the feelings themselves; but as it is I dread to see the evils of the Reformation of the 16th century repeated over again; superstition provoking profaneness, and ignorance and violence on one side leading to equal ignorance and violence on the other, to the equal injury of both truth and

'Dryden's "Hind and Panther."