a full Church of England education. Then, on the other hand, I am not afraid of sectarian feelings and struggles, where men live together, each with a distinct recognized position of his own, and with his own proper work assigned to him. I dread much more the effect of differences not publicly recognized, such as those of parties within the same Church. If Roman Catholics, as such, had a college of their own at Oxford, I do not believe that there would be half the disputing or proselytizing which exists now, where Roman Catholic opinions are held by men calling themselves members of our Church. A Scotch clergyman has to do with Scotchmen, as English clergyman with Englishmen. The national distinction would make the ecclesiastical difference natural, as I think, and would take away from it every thing of hostility. But, however, as I said before, I should have the greatest objection to pressing a point against your judgment. I grieve over the difficulty about the name of the College: it seems to me not a little matter; and how sadly does that foolish notion of its being profane, help the superstition to which it professes to be most opposed,-the superstition of holy places, and holy things, and holy times. But your leaving the question to the Government seems quite the wisest way of settling it.'

CCLXXII. TO REV. TREVENEN PENROSE.

(Who had asked him his opinion about sanctioning various Provident Societies by preaching sermons on their anniversaries.)

Rugby, April 10, 1841.

My opinion on such points as you have proposed to me, is not worth the fiftieth part of yours, so totally am I without the needful experience. But speaking as an idiotys, I am inclined quite to agree with you. These half heathen clubs, including, above all, Free Masonry, are, I think, utterly unlawful for a Christian man: they are close brotherhoods, formed with those who are not in a close sense our brethren. You would do a great service, if by your sermons, aided by your personal influence, you could give the clubs a Christian character. But their very names are unseemly. A club of Odd Fellows is a good joke, but hardly a decent piece of earnest. I suspect, however, that the Government plans are too purely economical: an annual dinner is so much the usage of all English societies, that it seems hard to deny it to the poor.

* CCLXXIII.

TO REV. T. J. ORMEROD.

Fox How, June 19, 1841.

I think that it is very desirable to show the connexion of the Church with the Synagogue, a point on which Whately insists strongly. I should also like to go into the question as to the δεύτεραι διατάξεις των αποTólov, mentioned in that famous fragment of Irenæus. That the Church system, or rather the Priest system, is not to be found in Scripture, is as certain as that the worship of Jupiter is not the doctrine of the Gospel: the only shadow of an apostolical origin of it rests on the notion, that after the destruction of Jerusalem, the surviving Apostles altered the earlier Christian service, and made the Eucharist answer to the sacrifice of the Temple. I believe this to be unsupported as to its historical basis, and perverted doctrinally if there be any foundation for the fact, it was not that the Eucharist was to succeed to the Temple sacrifices,―one carnal sacrifice, and carnal

1 This letter is, for the sake of convenience, transposed to this place from its proper order.

priest succeeding to another;-but that the spiritual sacrifice of each man's self to God, connected always, according to Bunsen, with the commemoration of Christ's sacrifice in the Eucharist, was now visibly the only sacrifice any where offered to God; and thus, as was foretold, the carnal worship had utterly perished, and the spiritual worship was established in its room That the great Enemy should have turned his very defeat into his greatest victory, and have converted the spiritual self-sacrifice in which each man was his own priest, into the carnal and lying sacrifice of the Mass, is to my mind, more than any thing else, the exact fulfilment of the apostolical language concerning Antichrist.

CCLXXIV. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

Fox How, June 26, 1841.

Thank you for your letter, and your remarks on my Introduction. You speak of yourself as standing half way between Newman and me; but I do not think that you will or can maintain that position. For many years such a middle position was in fact that of the majority of the English clergy; it was the old form of High Churchism, retaining much of Protestantism, and uniting it with other notions, such as Apostolical Succession, for which it had an instinctive fondness, but which it cherished indistinctly, without pushing them to their consequences. Newman-and I thank him for it-has broken up this middle state, by pushing the doctrines of the Succession, &c., to their legitimate consequences; and it appears now that they are inconsistent with Protestantism; and Newman and his friends repudiate the very name of Protestant, disclaim the sole supremacy of Scripture, and in short hold every essential tenet of popery, though not of Romanism for they so far agree with the Gallican Church, that they would set a General Council above the Pope; but the essence of Popery, which is Priesthood, and the mystic virtue of ritual acts done by a Priesthood, they cling to as heartily as the most vehement ultramontane Papists. Now that the two systems are set front to front, I do not think that a middle course is possible; the Priest is either Christ or Antichrist; he is either our Mediator, or he is like the man of sin in God's temple; the "Church system" is either our Gospel, and St. John's and St. Paul's Gospel is superseded by it, or it is a system of blasphemous falsehood, such as St. Paul foretold was to come, such as St. John saw to be " already in the world."

:

I think that you have not quite attended to my argument in the introduction, when you seem to think that I have treated the question more as one of à priori reasoning, than of Scriptural evidence. If you look at the paragraph beginning at the bottom of page xxix, you will see, I think, that it is most fully acknowledged to be a question of Scriptural evidence. It is not my fault if the Scriptural authority which the "Church system" appeals to, is an absolute nonentity. The Newmanite interpretation of our Lord's words, "Do this in remembrance of me," you confess to have startled you. Surely it may well startle any man, for no Unitarian comment on the first chapter of St. John could possibly be more monstrous. Now, in such matters, I speak and feel confidently from the habits of my life. My business as schoolmaster is a constant exercise in the interpretation of language, in cases where no prejudice can warp the mind one way or another; and this habit of interpretation has been constantly applied to the Scriptures for more than twenty years; for I began the careful study of the Epistles long before I left Oxford, and have never intermitted it. I feel, therefore, even more strongly towards a misinterpretation of Scripture than I should towards a misinterpretation of Thucydides. I know that there are passages in the Scriptures which no man can interpret; that there are others of which the interpretation is doubtful; others, again, where it is probable, but far from

certain. This I feel strongly, and in such places I never would speak otherwise than hesitatingly. But this does not hinder us from feeling absolutely certain in other cases: and the Newmanite interpretation seems to me to be of the same class as the lowest Unitarian, or as those of the most extravagant fanatics; they are mere desperate shifts to get a show of authority from Scripture, which it is felt after all the Scripture will not furnish; for the anxious endeavour to exalt Tradition and Church authority to a level with the Scripture, proves sufficiently where the real support of the cause is felt to lie; for no man would ever go to Tradition for the support of what the Scripture by itself teaches; and in all the great discussions on the Trinitarian question, the battle has been fought out of the Scripture: no Tradition is wanted to strengthen the testimony of St. John.

I suppose it is that men's individual constitution of mind determines them greatly, when great questions are brought to a clear issue. You have often accused me of not enough valuing the Church of England,-the very charge which I should now be inclined to retort against you. And in both instances the charge would have a true foundation. Viewing the Church of England as connected with the Stuart Kings, and as opposing the "good old. cause," I bear it no affection; viewing it as a great reformed institution and as proclaiming the King's supremacy, and utterly denying the binding authority of General Councils, and the necessity of priestly mediation, you perhaps would feel less attached to it than I am. For, after all, those differences in men's minds which we express, when exemplified in English politics, by the terms Whig and Tory, are very deep and comprehensive, and I should much like to be able to discover a formula which would express them in their most abstract shape; they seem to me to be the great fundamental difference between thinking men; but yet it is certain that each of these two great divisions of mankind apprehends a truth strongly, and the Kingdom of God will, I suppose, show us the perfect reconciling of the truth held by each. I think that in opinion you will probably draw more and more towards Keble, and be removed farther and farther from me; but I have a most entire confidence that this, in our case, will not affect our mutual friendship, as, to my grief unspeakable, it has between old Keble and me; because I do not think that you will ever lose the consciousness of the fact, that the two great divisions of which I spoke are certainly not synonymous with the division between good and evil; that some of the best and wisest of mortal men are to be found with each; nay, that He who is our perfect example, unites in Himself and sanctions the truths most loved, and the spirit most sympathized in by each; wherefore, I do not think that either is justified in denouncing the other altogether, or renouncing friendship with it. I have run on to an enormous length, but your letter rather moved me.

If you could see the beauty of this scene, you would think me mad to leave it, and I almost think myself so too. The boys are eager to be off, and I feel myself that the work of Rugby is far more welcome when I come to it as a home after foreign travelling, than when I only go to it from Fox How, from one home to another, and from what is naturally the more dear to the less dear. Yet I should be very false, and very ungrateful too, if I did not acknowledge that Rugby was a very dear home; with so much of work, and yet so much of quiet, as my wife and I enjoy every day when we go out with her pony into our quiet lanes.

We have been reading some of the Rhetoric in the Sixth Form this half-year, and its immense value struck me again so forcibly, that I could not consent to send my son to an University where he would lose it altogether, and where his whole studies would be formal merely and not real, either mathematics or philology, with nothing at all like the Aristotle and Thucydides at Oxford. In times past, the neglect of philology at Oxford was so shameful, that it almost neutralized the other advantages of the place, but I do not think that this is so now: and the utter neglect of vivâ voce translation at Cambridge is another great evil; even though by construing

instead of translating they almost undo the good of their vivâ voce system at Oxford..

CCLXXV. TO THE SAME.

Fox How, August 1, 1841.

Thank you for Randall's letter. He is one of the many men whom the course of life has to my regret parted me from; I do not mean "parted," in the sense of estranged, but simply hindered us from meeting. I was very glad to see his judgment on the matters in which I am so interested, and rejoiced to find how much I agree with him. Indeed I do not think that we differ so much as he imagines; I think the existence of Dissent a great evil, and I believe my inclinations as little lead me to the Dissenters as any man's living. But I do not think in the first place, that the Christian unity of which our Lord and his Apostles speak so earnestly, is an unity of government, -or that national churches, each sovereign, or churches of a less wide extent than national, each equally sovereign, are a breach of unity necessarily; and again, if Dissent as it exists in England were a breach of unity, then there comes the historical question, whose fault the breach is?. and that question is not to be answered summarily, nor will the true answer ever lay all the blame on the Dissenters, I think not so much as half of it.

If you did not object, I should very much like to write to Randall myself on the point; if it were only to know from what parts of my writings he has been led to ascribe to me opinions and feelings which are certainly not mine, in his impression of them.

CCLXXVI.

TO THE REV. JAMES RANDALL.

Fox How, September 20, 1841.

I read your letter to Coleridge with great interest, and wished much to write to you about it, but I fear that I have not time to do so. It would take rather a long time to state what I think about Dissent and what is called "Schism." I think it a great evil, as being inconsistent with the idea of the perfect Church, to which our aspirations should be continually directed. But" in fæce Romuli," with historical Churches, and such ideas of Church as have been most prevalent, Dissent seems to me to wear a very different aspect. Yet I am not partial to our English Dissenters, and think that their views are quite as narrow as those of their opponents. And what good is to be done, will be done, I think, much sooner by members of the Church than by Dissenters.

What you say of my books is very gratifying to me. It repays the labour of writing in the best manner, to know that any thinking man has considered what one has written, and has found in it something to interest him, whether he agrees with it or no. By the way, your criticism on a passage in my Christmas Day Sermon is quite just; and, if my Sermon expresses any other doctrine, it has failed in expressing my meaning. Surely, I do not hold that the Godhead of the Son is really inferior to that of the Father, but only zar' oixovroular,—that is, it is presented to us mixed with an inferior nature, and also with certain qualities, visibility for instance, which have been assumed in condescension, but which are still what St. Paul calls "an emptying of the Divinity," presenting it to us in a less absolutely perfect form, because it is not merely itself, but itself with something inferior joined

to it.

Viz., that Deity does not admit of degrees.

CCLXXVII. TO THE REV. J. HEARN.

June 25, 1841.

I purpose leaving this place for the Continent with my two eldest sons on Monday next, and I wish before we set out to thank you for your last letter; and to send my earnest good wishes for the health and welfare, temporal and eternal, of my dear little godson. We have been here about a week, after a half-year at Rugby very peaceable as far as regarded the conduct of the boys, but very anxious as regarding their health. One boy died from pressure on the brain in the middle of the half-year; another has died within the last week of fever, and a third, who had been long in a delicate state and went home for his health, is since dead also. And besides all these, four boys more were at different times at the very point of death, and some are even now only slowly and with difficulty recovering. You may conceive how much anxiety and distress this must have occasioned us; yet I can most truly say, that it is as nothing when compared with the existence of any unusual moral evil in the school; far less distressing and far less. harassing.

This place is very calm and very beautiful, and I think would furnish you with much employment, if you lived here all the year. But I am so ignorant about gardening and agricultural matters, that I can do little or nothing; and besides, we are away just at those times of the year when there is most to be done.

I am very glad you saw my old friend Tucker. He was with us for a few days in April, and he seemed to have derived nothing but good in all ways from his stay in India. Before he went out he had for some time been growing more and more of an Evangelical partisan, and had acquired some of the narrowness of mind and peculiarity of manner which belong to that party. But his missionary life seems to have swept away all those clouds; and I found him now with all the simplicity, hearty cheerfulness, affectionateness, and plain sense, which he had when a young man at Oxford, with all the earnestness and goodness of a ripened Christian superadded. It was one of the most delightful renewals of intercourse with an old friend which I can ever hope to enjoy.

CCLXXVIII. TO THE REV. J. TUCKER.

Fox How, August 2, 1841.

I have heard of you in various quarters since your visit at Rugby, but I do not at all know what your plans are, and when you propose leaving England. If you can pay us another visit at Rugby before you sail, we shall all earnestly unite in entreating you to do so. It was a great gratification to me to find that many of our children enjoyed your visit extremely, and have spoken both of it and of your sermon which you preached in the church in a manner that has been very delightful to me.

For myself, my dear friend, your visit has been a happiness greater than I could tell you. It assured me, that I still possessed not only your affectionate remembrances for the sake of old times, which I never doubted, but your actual living friendship, unshaken by differences of opinion, whatever those differences might be. I believe in my own case, as often happens, my friends have exaggerated those differences. Keble, I am sure, has ascribed to me opinions which I never held, not of course wilfully, but because his sensitiveness on some points is so morbid, that his power of judgment is pro tanto utterly obscured. The first shock of perceiving something that he does not like makes him incapable of examining steadily how great or how little that something is. I had feared (therein very likely doing you injustice) that, before you left England for India, you had in some degree shared