knowledged as the great sanctions and securities of society-that one shrinks from bringing up one's children where they must in all human probability become lowered, not in rank or fortune, but in what is infinitely more important, in the intellectual and moral and religious standard by which their lives would be guided. Feeling this, and holding our West Indian colonies to be one of the worst stains in the moral history of mankind, a convict colony seems to me to be even more shocking and more monstrous in its very conception. I do not know to what extent Van Diemen's Land is so; but I am sure that no such evil can be done to mankind as by thus sowing with rotten seed, and raising up a nation morally tainted in its very origin. Compared with this. the bloodiest exterminations ever effected by conquest were useful and good actions. If they will colonize with convicts, I am satisfied that the stain should last, not only for one whole life, but for more than one generation; that no convict or convict's child should ever be a free citizen; and that even in the third generation, the offspring should be excluded from all offices of honour or authority in the colony. This would be complained of as unjust or invidious, but I am sure that distinctions of moral breed are as natural and as just as those of skin or of arbitrary caste are wrong and mischievous; it is a law of God's providence which we cannot alter, that the sins of the father are really visited upon the child in the corruption of his breed, and in the rendering impossible many of the feelings which are the greatest security to a child against evil. Forgive me for all this; but it really is a happiness to me to think of you in Van Diemen's Land, where you will be, I know, not in name nor in form, but in deed and in spirit, the best and chief missionary. CXLI. TO THE REV. JAMES HEARN. Rugby, September 11, 1836. I know not when I have been more delighted by any letter, than by that which I lately received from you. It contains a picture of your present state which is truly a cause for thankfulness, and speaking after the manner of men, it is an intense gratification to my sense of justice, as well as to my personal regard for you, to see a life of hard and insufficiently paid labour well performed, now, before its decline, rewarded with comparative rest and with comfort. I rejoiced in the picture which you gave of your house and fields and neighbourhood; there was a freshness and a quietness about it which always goes very much to my heart, and which at times, if I indulged the feeling, could half make me discontented with the perpetual turmoil of my own life. For Westmoreland itself has not to me the perfect peacefulness of the idea of a country parsonage; the house is too new, the trees too young and small, the neighbourhood too numerous, and our stay is too short and too busily engaged, to allow of any thing like entire repose at it It is a most delightful tonic to brace me for the coming half year; but it does not admit of a full abandonment to its enjoyments, and it is well that it does not. I sometimes look at the mountains which bound our valley, and think how content I could be never to wander beyond them any more, and to take rest in a place which I love so dearly. But whilst my health is so entire, and I feel my spirits still so youthful, I feel ashamed of the wish, and I trust that I can sincerely rejoice in being engaged in so active a life, and in having such constant intercourse with others. Still I can heartily and lawfully rejoice that you are permitted to rest whilst your age and spirits are also yet unbroken, and that the hurry of your journey is somewhat abating, and allows you more steadily to contemplate its close. Our own two boys have gone to Winchester, and have taken a very good place in the school, and seem very comfortable there; I am sure you will give them your prayers, that they may be defended amidst the manifold temptations of their change of life. I feel as if I could draw the remaining children yet closer around me, and as if I could not enough prize the short period which passes before they go out into life, never again to feel their father's house their abiding home. I turn from public affairs almost in despair, as I think that it will be a long time before what I most long for will be accomplished. Yet I still wish entirely well to the Government, and regard with unabated horror the Conservatives both in Church and State. They are, however, I believe, growing in influence, and so they will do, until there comes a check to our present commercial prosperity, for vulgar minds never can understand the duty of Reform till it is impressed on them by the argumentum ad ventrem; and the mass of mankind, whether in good coats or in bad, will always be vulgar-minded. CXLII. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE. (Then at Fox How with his family.) Rugby, September 23, 1836. If you have the same soft air that is now breathing round us, and the same bright sun playing on the trees, which are full charged with the freshness of last night's rain, you must, I think, be in a condition to judge well of the beauty of Fox How. It is a real delight to think of you as at last arrived there, and to feel that the place which we so love is enjoyed by such dear friends, who can enjoy it fully. I congratulate you on your deliverance from Lancaster Castle, and by what you said in your last letter, you are satisfied, I imagine, with the propriety of the verdict. Now you can not only see the mountains afar off, but feel them in eyes, lungs, and mind; and a mighty influence I think it is. I often used to think of the solemn comparison in the Psalm, "the hills stand about Jerusalem; even so standeth the Lord round about his people." The girdling in of the mountains round the valley of our home is as apt an image as any earthly thing can be of the encircling of the everlasting arms, keeping off evil, and showering all good. But my great delight in thinking of you at Fox How is mixed with no repining that I cannot be there myself. We have had our holyday, and it was a long and most agreeable one; and Nemesis might well be angry, if I was not now ready and glad to be at work again. Besides, I think that the school is again in a very hopeful state; the set, which rather weighed us down during the last year, is now broken and dispersed; and the tide is again, I trust, at flood, and will, I hope, go on so. You would smile to see the zeal, with which I am trying to improve the Latin verse, and the difficulty, which I find in doing it. But I stand in amaze at the utter want of poetical feeling in the minds of the majority of boys. They cannot in the least understand either Homer or Virgil; they cannot follow out the strong graphic touches which, to an active mind, suggest such infinitely varied pictures, and yet leave it to the reader to draw them for himself on the hint given. But my delight in going over Homer and Virgil with the boys makes me think what a treat it must be to teach Shakespeare to a good class of young Greeks in regenerate Athens; to dwell upon him line by line, and word by word, in the way that nothing but a translation lesson ever will enable one to do; and so to get all his pictures and thoughts leisurely into one's mind, till I verily think one would after a time almost give out light in the dark, after having been steeped as it were in such an atmosphere of brilliance. And how could this ever be done without having the process of construing, as the grosser medium through which alone all the beauty can be transmitted, because else we travel too fast, and more than half of it escapes us? Shakespeare, with English boys, would be but a poor substitute for Homer; but I confess that I should be glad to get Dante and Goethe now and then in the room of some of the Greek tragedians and of Horace; or rather not in their room, but mixed up along with them. I have been trying something of this in French, as I am now going through, with the Sixth Form, Barante's beautiful Tableau de la Littérature Française pendant le Dix huitième Siècle. I thought of you the other day, when one of my fellows translated to me that splendid paragraph, comparing Voltaire to the Babouc of one of his own romances, for I think you first showed me the passage many years ago. Now by going through Barante in this way, one gets it thoroughly; and with a really good book, I think it is a great gain. * Rugby, October 21, 1836. As long as you read moderately, and not voraciously, I can consent that your reading should even prevent your coming to Rugby; and I am glad that, by beginning in time, you will escape all excessive pressure at last. You will be rejoicing at the meeting of the scattered members of your society after the Long Vacation. I can well recall the same feeling, deeply associated in my mind with the October tints of the Nettlebed beech woods, through which my road to Oxford, from Kensington and Hampton, always lay. The separation had been long enough to make the meeting more than joyous, and some of my most delightful remembrances of Oxford and its neighbourhood are connected with the scenery of the later autumn; Bagley Wood in its golden decline, and the green of the meadows, reviving for a while under the influence of a Martinmas summer, and then fading finally off into its winter brown. Here our society is too busy, as well as too old, to enjoy in common, though we can work in common; but work after all is but half the man, and they who only work together do not truly live together. I agree with in a great deal, and so Newman might ask as he does about Hampden and the Socinians, where I begin to disagree with him. Politically, I do not know that I do disagree as to any principle, and in sympathy with a man's mind in argument, it makes no difference whether he believes the exemplification of your common principles to be found in this party or in that party; that is a mere question of fact, which we need not impannel a jury to try; meanwhile we are agreed as to the law of the case. But to supply the place of Conscience, with the doza of Fanaticism on one hand and of Utilitarianism on the other, on one side is the mere sign from heaven, craved by those who heeded not Heaven's first sign written within them ;-on the other, it is the idea which, hardly hovering on the remotest outskirts of Christianity, readily flies off to the camp of Materialism and Atheism; the mere pared and plucked notion of "good" exhibited by the word "useful;" which seems to me the idea of "good" robbed of its nobleness,the sediment from which the filtered water has been assiduously separated. It were a strange world, if there were indeed in it no one dozitextovizór Eidos but that of the ξύμφερον ; if καλον were only καλον, ὅτι ξύμφερον. But this is one of the peculiarities of the English mind; the Puritan and the Benthamite have an immense part of their nature in common; and thus the Christianity of the Puritan is coarse and fanatical ;-he cannot relish what there is in it of beautiful or delicate or ideal. Men get embarrassed by the common cases of a misguided conscience; but a compass may be out of order as well as a conscience; and the needle may point due south if you hold a powerful magnet in that direction. Still the compass, generally speaking, is a true and sure guide, and so is the conscience; and you can trace the deranging influence on the latter quite as surely as on the former. Again, there is confusion in some men's minds, who say that if we so exalt conscience, we make ourselves the paramount judges of all things, and so do not live by faith and obedience. But he who believes his conscience to be God's law, by obeying it obeys God. It is as much obedience, as it is obedience to follow the dictates of God's Spirit; and in every case of obedience to any law or guide whatsoever, there always must be one independent act of the mind pronouncing this one determining proposition, "I ought to obey ;" so that in obedience, as in every moral act, we are and must be the paramount judges, because we must ourselves decide on that very principle, "that we ought to obey." And as for faith, there is again a confusion in the use of the term. It is not scriptural, but fanatical, to oppose faith to reason. Faith is properly opposed to sense, and is the listening to the dictates of the higher part of our mind, to which alone God speaks, rather than to the lower part of us, to which the world speaks. There is no end to the mischiefs done by that one very common and perfectly unscriptural mistake of opposing faith and reason, or whatever you choose to call the highest part of man's nature. And this you will find that the Scripture never does; and observing this, cuts down at once all Pusey's nonsense about Rationalism; which, in order to be contrasted scripturally with faith, must mean the following some lower part of our nature, whether sensual or merely intellectual; that is, some part which does not acknowledge God. But what he abuses as Rationalism is just what the Scripture commends as knowledge, judgment, understanding, and the like; that is, not the following a merely intellectual part of our nature, but the sovereign part; that is, the moral reason acting under God, and using, so to speak, the telescope of faith, for objects too distant for its naked eye to discover. And to this is opposed, in Scriptural language, folly and idolatry and blindness, and other such terms of reproof. According to Pusey, the forty-fourth chapter of Isaiah is Rationalism, and the man who bowed down to the stock of a tree was a humble man, who did not inquire but believe. But if Isaiah be right, and speaks the words of God, then Pusey, and the man who bowed down to the stock of a tree, should learn that God is not served by folly. CXLIV. TO SIR THOMAS S. PASLEY, BART. Rugby, October 29, 1836. The authority for the statement which you quote is to be found in Hallam's Constitutional History, vol. i. chap. iv., which says that "it was a common practice for several years to appoint laymen, usually mechanics, to read the service in vacant churches." This does not touch the question on the Sacraments, nor do I imagine that any layman was ever authorized in the Church of England to administer the Lord's Supper; but lay baptism was allowed by Hooker to be valid, and no distinction can be drawn between one sacrament and the other. Language more to the purpose is to be found in Tertullian,-I think in the Treatise De Corona Militis, but at any rate he states first of all that the mode of administering rather than communicating in the Sacrament was a departure from the original practice; and then he explains the origin of the practice by using the word "Præsidentes" not "Sacerdotes" or "Presbyteri ;"—that is, the person who presided at the table for order's sake would distribute the bread and wine; and in almost every case he would be an elder, or one invested with a share of the government of the Church, but he did it not as priest, but as president of the assembly; which makes just the whole difference. But, after all, the whole question as to the matter of right, and the priestly power, must be answered out of the New Testament; no one disputes the propriety of the general practice as it now stands; but the Church of Eng. land has not said that it adopts this practice because it is essential to the validity of the sacraments and is of divine institution, but leaves the question of principle open; and this of course can only be decided out of the Scriptures. That the Scriptures are clear enough against the priestcraft notion, is to me certain; the more so that nothing is quoted for it, but the words of St. Paul, "The bread which we break, the cup which we bless," &c.; words which, quoted as a text, look something to the quoter's purpose, because the ignorant reader may think that "we" means St. Paul and his brother apostles; but if any one from the text looks to the passage, he will find that the "we" is the whole Christian congregation, inasmuch as the words immediately following are, "for we being many are one bread and one body, for we are all partakers of that one bread." 1 Corinth. x. Yet this text I have both seen in books and heard in conversation quoted as a Scripture authority for the exclusive right of the clergy to administer the Communion. Wherefore I conclude, independently of my own knowledge of the New Testament, that such an argument as this would not have been used, if any thing tolerable were to be had. * CXLV. TO DR. GREENHILL. Rugby, October 31, 1836. I was very much obliged to you for your letter, and much gratified by it. It is a real pleasure to me to find that you are taking steadily to a profession, without which I scarcely see how a man can live honestly. That is, I use the term "profession" in rather a large sense, not as simply denoting certain callings which a man follows for his maintenance, but rather, a definite field of duty, which the nobleman has as much as the tailor, but which he has not, who having an income large enough to keep him from starving, hangs about upon life, merely following his own caprices and fancies; quod factu pessimum est. I can well enough understand how medicine, like every other profession, has its moral and spiritual dangers; but I do not see why it should have more than others. The tendency to Atheism, I imagine, exists in every study followed up vigorously, without a foundation of faith, and that foundation carefully strengthened and built upon. The student in History is as much busied with secondary causes as the student in medieine; the rule "nec Deus intersit," true as it is up to a certain point, that we may not annihilate man's agency and make him a puppet, is ever apt to be followed too far when we are become familiar with man or with nature, and understand the laws which direct both. Then these laws seem enough to account for every thing, and the laws themselves we ascribe either to chance, or the mystifications called "nature," or the "anima mundi," the "spiritus intus alit" of Pantheism. If there is any thing special in the atheistic tendency of medicine, it arises, I suppose, from certain vague notions about the soul, its independence of matter, &c., and from the habit of considering these notions as an essential part of religion. Now I think that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection meets the Materialists so far as this, that it does imply that a body, or an organization of some sort, is necessary to the full development of man's nature. Beyond this we cannot go; for,-granting that the brain is essential to thought,-still no man ean say that the white pulp which you can see and touch and anatomize can itself think, and by whatever names we endeavour to avoid acknowledging the existence of mind,-whether we talk of a subtle fluid, or a wonderful arrangement of nerves, or any thing else,-still we do but disguise our ignorance; for the act of thinking is one sui generis, and the thinking power must in like manner be different from all that we commonly mean by matter. The question of Free Will is, and ever must be, imperfectly understood. If a man denies that he has a will either to sit or not to sit, to write a note or |