DR. MARTINEAU'S RELATION TO UNITARIANISM. [To TUE EDITOR OP THE
" SPECTATOR."] SI11,—As you have published in the Spectator of December 12th Mr. C. B. Upton's sharp attack on my little book called " Recollections of James Martineau," I hope that you will allow me to offer a brief explanation of the views which I have expressed. Mr. Upton attacks me for saying that there was a constant discord between Dr. Martineau's intellect and his heart or soul as regards religion. I wish to explain that, in my opinion, this discord was not so much between unitarianism and the requirements of spiritual religion as between a semi- Deistic form of Unitarianism and those requirements. Pro- fessor A. Seth Pringle Pattison has clearly shown that a very large amount of Deism remained to the end in Martineau's philosophy, and I have tried to show that a very large amount also lingered in his religious system. Hence arose inevitable internal discord. Some degree of this discord must always be found in a man who is at once a rationalist and a mystic, as I believe that Martineau was. No permanent and entirely satisfying concordat CAR be established between the rationalistic and the mystical elements of our nature. Martineau's mind and soul were perhaps not more radically discordant than those of Pascal. I agree with Mr. Upton in thinking that, on the whole, the conception of God as uni- personal satisfied Martineau's intellect even to the end, and that so he never wavered in his speculative Unitarianism. But I believe also that in his more devotional moods he
admitted ideas and feelings which could scarcely be reconciled with this austere Unitarianism. Hence the internal—though perhaps for the most part unconscious—discord of which I have ventured to speak. That Martineau was to a great extent dissatisfied with all current forms of Unitarian religion is, I think, evident from his expressed conviction—recorded in his " Life and Letters "—that the best future of liberal religion in this country is more likely to be with the Con- gregationalists and the Presbyterians than with the Unitarians. Why should he speak thus unless he had some dim and half- conscious feeling that the practical deficiencies of Unitarianism are incurable P The secession from Unitarianism of his great friend Mr. R. H. Hutton must have tended to increase this feeling; for he writes thus of him in a letter to me published in my new book : " So entire was my trust in his religious intuitions that it went hard with me to abide by my own when they were unshared by him."—I am, Sir, &c.,
Onslow House, Tunbridge Wells. A. H. CRAITFURD.
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