no one can be so good a judge of this as a son can be, because he has fuller opportunities of knowing how far the private life corresponds to the public, and he is less liable to be biased in his judgment by party or theological prejudice. Where Colonel Maurice has departed from his usual method, as in chapter viii. of the second volume, the result is so charming as to make us wish for more personal reminiscences. The candour with which the letters and extracts of letters have been given to us is remarkable, extending, I should say, in a few instances, to the publication of what Mr. Maurice himself would have suppressed. To some of those who have only known Mr. Maurice in his books, it is possible that some of these letters, written under circumstances of excitement and impulse, will convey an impression of unrest and anxiety foreign to the serene result to which, in the sermons, thought and experience had given a prophetic calm; but we shall all feel the privilege of being thus admitted into the workshop of the mind, obtaining, I think, by such means, as true, as vivid, and as detailed a presentment of the personality which it is our wish to realise as we could with any reasonableness expect.

His biographer says that Maurice's position was unique. I conceive that Mr. Maurice himself was absolutely unique. I conceive that no other man ever occupied his precise mental standpoint, for he combined two qualities which are generally found to be incompatible-he united an almost perfect freedom and toleration of thought with the most entire certitude of conviction and teaching. It was this quality beyond every other which made him emphatically the teacher of teachers; for a teacher who attracted the freest and most acute intellects by his sympathy with their doubts and speculations, believing, as he did, that God's guidance was to be perceived not so much in men's opinions and conclusions as in their struggles and questionings and glimpses of light (vol. ii. p. 338), and at the same time appeared possessed of a certitude at least equal to that of the narrowest dogmatist, could not fail to command an influence over thinking men. It is easy for a man who has not to teach to assume a generous breadth and freedom of opinion; but it is obvious that the teacher must have something to teach, and must have arrived at some point of certitude from which, as from a rock, he can draw up his hearers from among the waves of perplexity and unrest. This was what emphatically Mr. Maurice did.

There is, however, another point in Mr. Maurice's character which I think well to touch upon here at the outset as giving a note most important to be struck thus early-I mean his saintliness. 'He was the only saint I ever knew,' was said to me the other day by one well known in letters and in society; others have aimed at it. He was a saint.' Dr. Goodeve, of Clifton, his cousin, the companion of his boyhood, says of him (vol. i. p. 38):

He was the gentlest, most docile and affectionate of creatures; but he was equally earnest in what he believed to be right, and energetic in the pursuit of his views. It may be thought an extravagant assertion, a mere formal tribute to a deceased friend and companion, but, after a long and intimate experience of the world, I can say with all sincerity that he was the most saint-like individual I ever met-Christ-like, if I dare to use the word.

I wish thus early to insist upon this, because I have no doubt that to a character of this description only that secret is entrusted which becomes the method of attraction which Mr. Maurice possessed. Others may have been holy as he was, though I think they have been few; but none could have possessed his attraction, however gifted with like gifts, save the holy, for he himself would tell us that none but the pure can see God, and the secret of his certitude and of his charm was that he had seen God.

'I was sent into the world,' he writes to his son, in one of his carefully prepared autobiographical letters- I was sent into the world that I might persuade men to recognise Christ as the centre of their fellowship with each other, so that they might be united in their families, their countries, and as men, not in schools and factions ;' that is, as I understand him, the bond of interest and union is not opinion, but that humanity which has been taken up into God.

Very early in life, in the little Quaker village of Frenchay, with its quiet greens and leafy parks, it was borne in upon the mind of this exceptional boy that there was nothing strange or exceptional in his circumstances, but that he was one of a race.' This, undoubtedly, is the keynote of Mr. Maurice's teaching to the end of his life—not children by election or adoption; not disciples or followers by choice or opinion, but children by natural birth, elect in virtue of the common humanity by which alone every human being is the son of God. The distinction between his view of baptism and Dr. Pusey's was just this: the latter regarded baptism as a change of nature; he saw in it the coming out of the infant into the first radiance of a light which had been ever shining for it and for all the world.

In the very remarkable mental atmosphere in which the boy grew up, amid those religious questionings which led to the entire family of the Unitarian minister leaving their husband and father to follow other forms of faith, it was perhaps natural that, to such a mind, this principle should be strengthened, if indeed it was not suggested; for a craving would arise in an affectionate and susceptible nature for some other bond of union than that of mere opinion. When, after many discussions, he went to Cambridge, he came under the influence of a remarkable man in a very characteristic way. In a most interesting extract from his own papers, he gives an account of Julius Hare's lectures during two terms, first upon the Antigone of Sophocles, and secondly upon the Gorgias of Plato. Hare himself wrote of him that there was in his class-room a pupil whose metaphysical powers were among the greatest he had ever come in contact with,

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but that the man was so shy that it was almost impossible to know him.' Entirely unknown to the man who was afterwards to be his intimate friend and brother, this was what was passing in the boy's mind (he was eighteen) :—

I do recollect Hare's class-room exceedingly well. I am often surprised how clearly all the particulars of what passed in it come back to me, when so much else that I should like to preserve has faded away.

You will suppose, perhaps, that this was owing to some novelty in his method of teaching. You will inquire whether he assumed more of a professional air than is common in a College, and gave disquisitions instead of calling on his pupils to construe a book? Not the least. We construed just as they did elsewhere. I do not remember his indulging in a single excursus. The subject in our first term was the Antigone of Sophocles.

We hammered at the words and at the sense. The lecturer seemed most anxious to impress us with the feeling that there was no road to the sense which did not go through the words. He took infinite pains to make us understand the force of nouns, verbs, particles, and the grammar of the sentences. We often spent an hour on the strophe or antistrophe of a chorus.

If there had been disquisitions about the Greek love of beauty, about the classical and romantic schools, and so forth, I should have been greatly delighted. I should have rushed forth to retail to my friends what I had heard, or have discussed it, and refuted it as long as they would listen to my nonsense. What we did and heard in the lecture-room could not be turned to this account. One could not get the handy phrase one wished about Greek ideals and poetical unity; but, by some means or other, one rose to the apprehension that the poem had a unity in it, and that the poet was pursuing an ideal, and that the unity was not created by him, but perceived by him, and that the ideal was not a phantom, but something which must have had a most real effect upon himself, his age, and his country. I cannot the least tell you how Hare imparted this conviction to me; I only know that I acquired it, and could trace it very directly to his method of teaching. I do not suppose that he had deliberately invented a method; in form, as I have said, he was adapting himself exactly to the practice of English Colleges; in spirit, he was following the course which a cultivated man, thoroughly in earnest to give his pupils the advantage of his cultivation, and not ambitious of displaying himself, would fall into. Yet I have often thought since, that if the genius of Bacon is, as I trust it is and always will be, the tutelary one of Trinity, its influence was scarcely more felt in the scientific lecture-rooms than in this classical one; we were, just as much as the students of natural philosophy, feeling our way from particulars to universals, from facts to principles.

One felt this method, without exactly understanding it, in reading our Greek play. The next term it came much more distinctly before us. Then we were reading the Gorgias of Plato. But here, again, the lecturer was not tempted for an instant to spoil us of the good which Plato could do us by talking to us about him, instead of reading him with us. There was no résumé of his philosophy, no elaborate comparison of bim with Aristotle, or with any of the moderns. Our business was with a single dialogue; we were to follow that through its windings, and to find out by degrees, if we could, what the writer was driving at, instead of being told beforehand. I cannot recollect that he ever spoke to us of Schleiermacher, whose translations were, I suppose, published at that time; if they were, he had certainly read them; but his anxiety seemed to be that Plato should explain himself to us, and should help to explain us to ourselves. Whatever he could do to further this end, by bringing his reading and scholarship to bear upon the illustration of the text, by throwing out hints as to the course the dialogue was taking, by exhibiting his own fervent interest in Plato and his belief of the high purpose

He was aiming at, he did. But to give us second-hand reports, though they were ever so excellent—to save us the trouble of thinking-to supply us with a mora', instead of showing us how we might find it, not only in the book but in our hearts, this was clearly not his intention.

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Then Mr. Maurice goes on to say that Hare first set before his pupils

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an ideal not for a few 'religious' people, but for all mankind, which can lift men out of the sin which assumes selfishness as the basis of all actions and life;' and sécondly, the teaching them that there is a way out of party opinions which is not a compromise between them, but which is implied in both, and of which each is bearing witness.' 'Hare did not tell us this . . . . . Plato himself does not say it;

he makes us feel it.'

I do not apologise for the length of these extracts: they are so interesting in themselves, and are so intensely valuable as showing the forces that were at work in the boy's mind. The most enlightened men in Germany, France, and England,' he wrote afterwards, are acknowledging the deep obligation which they have owed to Plato for having enfranchised them from systems, and sent them to seek for wisdom, not in the strife of parties, but in the quiet of their own hearts.' 'Maurice says,' writes his pupil, Edward Strachey, to Lady Louis- Maurice says all little children are Platonists;' and we know of Another who said that only as little children could we enter the kingdom of God. It was through this portal, then, that young Maurice, like so many others, entered into intellectual life.

On leaving Cambridge, not having made up his mind to the required subscription to the 36th canon, he took his name off the University books, without taking a degree, declining the kindly suggestion of the Senior Tutor of his College that he should allow the full term of five years' standing to expire before taking so decisive a step. Whatever his future opinions might be, he characteristically said he could not hazard their being influenced by any considerations of worldly interest. During his stay in London, where he wrote for and finally edited the Athenæum, during an interval at home during which he wrote his novel, Eustace Conway, and at Exeter College, Oxford, to which college he was attracted by the kindness of Dr. Jacobson, he was gradually forming those convictions which resulted in his taking orders in the English Church, of which, I imagine, it would be difficult to find a more ardent or a more thorough adherent than he became.

I have agreed with Colonel Maurice that his father's position with regard to the Church was unique, but in addition to this I should not hesitate to say that at first sight it seems, and all through his life it did seem, intensely subtle: so much so that he himself could scarcely expect it to be grasped by religious people of ordinary calibre; still further, I am not ashamed to admit that it has often appeared to me so subtle that I have failed for some time altogether

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to grasp it; nevertheless I am perfectly certain that it was of the simplest description. We have seen that Mr. Maurice's idea of God was that of a God of the natural human race. He conceived of a living God, the Author, Origin, and Support of the race-a God who in all ages had not only been speaking to it, but had been living in it, teaching, leading, drawing it to Himself-a God who was doing this now as much as ever. In the Hebrew Scriptures he found the fullest and clearest proof and exposition of this immortal fact. believed, with his whole heart, in the existence of this ceaseless. Energy, this unwearying Love and Power. He believed, also with his whole heart, that the English Church, in its formularies, in its Articles, in its Liturgy, in its Creeds, literally, and in the plain and ordinary English interpretation of the words, inculcated this truth; just as the English translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, in their literal sense, also inculcated it. The errors of the Oxford Tracts,' i.e. of the High Church movement, he wrote to Edward Strachey, consist, I think, in opposing to 'rò пveûμa тoû aiŵvos TOÚTOV' (the spirit of the πνεῦμα αἰῶνος τούτου" present age) the spirit of a former age, instead of the ever-living and acting Spirit of God, of which the spirit of each age is, at once, the adversary and the parody. The childlike spirit of the Fathers, say they, must be brought in to counteract the intellectual spirit of these times the spirit of submission to Church authority against the spirit of voluntary association.

It was not that he objected to the spirit of the Fathers-so far from it, he was most deeply read in and conversant with them, especially with St. Augustine—but their utterance was not that everliving and acting Spirit to which he believed the formularies of the English Church bore witness, and any slighting, or crippling, or ignoring of which Spirit he believed to be heresy against such formularies and articles.

Now this ever-living and acting Spirit of God pervades the whole human race, absorbing all its functions into Himself, so that, as in the old Jewish times, king and priest and prophet were the instrument and mouthpiece of this Spirit, so now king and state and commonwealth are as much, and no more, manifestations of this Spirit as the Church itself. There is no power whatever but that of God; all else is mere lawlessness and anarchy. So far as the democracy declared itself absolute, he opposed it to the death, but he would have been the first to recognise in the most stifled outcry of a democracy the voice of God proclaiming, as by the wild cry of a gaunt and ragged prophet by the wayside, wrath and future judgment against the selfishness and atheism of kings and states. So far as the sectaries set themselves up against the visible unity of the one Kingdom and Church of God-so far he would have no fellowship with them; but he would have been the first to recognise the side of truth each of them had grasped, as a witness against the error and