BOOKS.

JOHN M'LEOD CAMPBELL.*

[FIRST NOTICE.)

nATEVER may be the extent of the circle of readers who will be attracted to this memoir, there are some whom it will hold

with a spell which may rival that of genius. It is the record of an uneventful life, absorbed in those contemplations in which, just because they are of absolutely universal interest, we must expect to meet something that is trite, and cannot hope to meet much that is, to the merely intellectual eye, original. But the record vividly recalls, if it does but dimly paint, a small group of teachers, some of whom are well known to the world, some of whom are hardly

known at all, but between all of whom there were common en- dowments, AS well as common limitations, marking them out with

a luminous distinctness that is now the object to many hearts of a memory so regretful and reverent as almost to lose itself in the sense of the unseen with which it is so closely associated. Whether the ecclesiastical historian of the future will have many words for the few members of the English and Scotch Church to whom in the first half of the nineteenth century those Churches owed an impulse which seemed, to those who felt it, almost the herald of a new Reformation, we are not prepared to say, but there is no question that to those who have come under their influence, their disappearance has been like the setting of a constellation. The spirit seems, in its struggle towards the invisible and eternal, to rise, since their voices were silenced, almost with broken wing. To listen to any echoes of their voices, such as we hear in these volumes, with a critical ear, is, for one who thus misses them, impossible. The editor has indeed, it seems to us, done his work with excellent discrimination, and we here limit our fault-finding to the wish that his conception of an editor's duty had been a little less modest. For the latter part of the life, his ideal of a series of letters, cemented by the slightest possible infusion of narrative, could not be improved; but we do not think that Mr. Campbell's ejection from the Scotch Church is most conveniently given in this epis- tolaryform, which at once preserves much that is of mere ephemeral interest, and omits much that a reader entirely new to the facts re- quires to know. So much we cannot but say, because the real interest of the letters, when they express Mr. Campbell's mature mind, is a little blunted by the sense of heaviness in the beginning, though even hero we must add that the picture of his relation to his father is one of the most attractive parts of the whole repre- sentation. But we confess that any portraiture of one of the group we have indicated must to us be interesting rather from its subject than from its literary value, whatever this might be.

Perhaps a notice written under these circumstances may be fitly prefaced by an attempt to point out the common character- istics of this group,—to estimate the common principles which make us feel, in recalling the names of Thomas Erskine and John M'Leod Campbell, Frederick Maurice, and others, seine of whom are better known to Englishmen than the first two, some of whom arc hardly known at all, but remembered by those who do remember them by the side of those we have named, as if a family were reunited in some far-distant land.

All of those we have named, and remembered without naming, were representatives (some of them quite unconsciously so) of that phase of Christianity which has absorbed all that is positive and abiding in the spirit of modern democracy. We are aware that this assertion will awaken a protest in many of their most earnest disciples. It would, perhaps, have been denied by some among themselves. Few have less sympathy with de- mocracy than Mr. Campbell, and among those few was Mr. Erskine. But they opposed, or watched without sympathy, its political manifestations, because all that is vital in its principles was already absorbed by their creed. Mr. Camp- bell was, in his youth, turned out of the Church of Scotland for preaching that the pardon of God to man was universal. Me. Erskine occupied the last years of his old age, after a long cessa- tion from literary exertion, in an endeavour to show that this uni- versal pardon implied a universal salvation. If we seem to impoverish the truth which the one declared in his earliest and the other in his latest teaching by associating it with democracy, this is only because that sense of brotherhood which is the root of all that is good in democracy is easily distorted into, as it is in- evitably associated with, that passion for equality which is wide as the poles asunder from all that high-minded men seek to bequeath

* Memorials of John Ancor' CampLell: being Selections from his Correspondence. Edited by his Son. 2 vols. London ; Macmillan and Co.

to their race. The distinctness with which the teaching of such men as Mr. Campbell now stands forth, in contrast to that of many who from a certain point of view may be confounded with them, indeed depends on their emphatic protest against all that is produced by or allied with this vulgarising tendency of the present day. And it is worth while, even within such narrow limits as ours, to make some attempt to realise what this tendency is, that we may realise, on the other hand, what they were who withstood it.

That gradual widening of the scope of human sympathy from its first concentration on the family and the tribe, to its present inclusion of humanity which makes up whatever, in the record of history, we may describe as moral progress, has been subject to the natural law according to which what is gained in expansion is lost in intensity. The sense of community which welded together the republics of the ancient world will not bind the humanity of our day. The bond was close, because those it included were few. It has become weak because it no longer excludes any. A similar change has gone on in the con- ceptions which men have held of the heavenly kingdom,—its privileges, in becoming universal, have become insignificant. As its gates have been opened wider and wider, the sense of relief in gaining the shelter of its walls has faded away. Severity has faded out of heaven, as it has been banished from earth, and a kind of infinite good-nature has been enthroned in its place. The mildness of our penal code has been reflected in our anticipations of a future judgment, the slackening of our ideal of parental authority has changed our filial attitude to the Father of Spirits. And if, after all, it is sometimes brought home to Us that the ruler of this world shrinks from inflicting no ex- tremity of pain, we practically escape any moral conclusion from this fact by the analogy which inevitably arises between our ex- perience of earthly and our expectation of heavenly government. We know that much suffering occurs under the most benevolent rule, and we carry on our anticipations of failure to that rule which at the same time we suppose to originate bey ond the region of imperfection. And thus we transfer the weakness of the human to the Divine governor, just as a former age made a similar transference of his cruelty.

Hence it has happened that all those words which expressed for a former age the most awful transactions which the mind of man can contemplate, have lost their meaning even for those among us who still believe in this rule, and consider that man's chief blessedness lies in subordination to it and apprehension of its meaning. The belief that Salvation is an absolutely common benefit has passed into the belief that there is nothing to be saved from. The belief that Sin is an awful reality, of which the penalty reaches beyond the world of the phenomenal, has paned away with the belief that the penalty of sin was to last for ever. The belief that the death of Christ was a mysterious transaction, manifesting, in the world of the visible and temporary, the action of those laws which belong to the eternal world, and implying much deeper and more awful dealings between the powers of good and evil than cos/ be manifested in this outward world, has passed away with the belief that the death of Christ was a pro- pitiation to an angry God, desirous of a victim and careless of justice. As we have awakened to the artificialness of a certain dogmatic system, we have lost all sense of those transcendent principles of which it was the distorted application, and have thought to estimate by mere logic the laws of which the understanding can take as much account as, but no more than, a mathematician can take of the meaning of harmony in expounding the laws of sound.

But does the word " salvation " change its meaning with this expansion of the domain to which it applies ? Does it lose in intensity what it gains in extent ? Is it by this very expansion diluted into something almost meaningless, leaving nothing to be saved from ? It is not making too high a claim for the group of which Mr. Campbell was one of the most important metnbers, if we point out as their distinguishing characteristic, the combina- tion of those wide views of human brotherhood, that expanded ideal of the education of the human spirit throughout its whole career, which leads to the affirmative here suggested, with such a protest against that affirmative as not the narrowest Calvinist could have made with more fullness of meaning and intensity of conviction. These teachers (for the English reader, the honoured name of Frederick Maurice gathers up the influence which in the North took a slightly different form) had assimilated the influences of Modern Democracy so far as to include the whole of humanity in their hopes for a future rescue from the havoc that sin has made in the race,—they had resisted the influences of modern democracy so far as to remain witnesses for a divine dominion, in the perfect subjection to which lies man's sole blessedness ;—confessors of a human rebellion in which, and in the causes of which, lies his sole misery. They felt that what all must allow to be an inevitable law of the natural world had no place in the supernatural, they had expanded their sense of the scope of all that we gather up in thought as we use the word "redemption," without diluting its meaning. The death of Christ was for them an event which affected the condition of every human being, but the significance of this event remained to them what it was to those who regarded its influence as extend- ing to a small minority of the race. They kept the infinite horror of sin which others who share their hopes of its ultimate ex- tinction have lost. So unique a combination is enough to give a remarkable distinctness and unity to any set of teachers, even thouglithey were united by no outward bond, and did not always understand each other.

We are well aware that it will not be granted us, by many of those who knew best the men of whom we speak, that their ex- tension of the hopes which holy men have cherished for a select few, to the whole of mankind, was their distinguishing character- istic. Perhaps this protest will arise in the minds of those who knew best the subject of this memoir. He was certainly absorbed rather in the attempt to enter into, and bring others to enter into, the true character of that life which through Christ was communicated to mankind, than in the question whether as a matter of fact this gift would be accepted by all mankind. But still, it appears to us that what gave him his peculiar power was the latent, unformularised sense of an absolutely common interest in the message he had to deliver,—the conviction that its blessed import for every child of man was independent of any response that it might evoke in the threescore years and ten of our pilgrimage heie.

While, therefore, we fully allow that 1112Leod Campbell , and others like him, were not consciously aiming at the destruction of those barriers which shut in the divine influence to a particular time and a particular set of individuals, it still appears to us that their success in bringing home to the minds of their hearers the lessons they did design to convey, depended on their freedom from any acceptance of these barriers. Doubtless the reader is familiar with a kind of representation of Christianity which makes it almost a declaration of these barriers. We have all read in newspapers and magazines of the day descriptions of what a Christian is supposed to believe, which we may almost sum- marise as a set of hypothetical answers to the question,—Who will have to go to hell? Such a view would now be brought forward only in a more or less veiled attack upon Christianity, but in each a form it is not uncommon, and makes the attack a telling one with a certain class of readers. What gave weight to the teach- ing of such men as Campbell was the unconscious protest borne by it against this view of Christianity. It was not that they ever contemplated this representation, it was j ust because they never con- templated it, that so far as their teaching was received, they made it impossible. For they could wait to have their message received as the could not wait who believed that a sudden chill, a false step on a plank, a runaway horse, or any of the ordinary contin- gencies to which any of us are liable during a large part of every day, might at once remove the hearer beyond all reach of the message. They could concentrate their attention on the message itself with a quiet mind, which was impossible to those who believed that the penalties for not listening to it during the few short years of man's sojourn in this world were to last for ever.

Like all thinkers who fall naturally into a single group, these

men in united by their limitations as well as by what was posi- tive n their teaching. None of them had the kind of missionary power that stirs great bodies of men, or suddenly wins over those who were sunk in evil to a higher life. While some of all classes, probably, were deeply impressed by them, their message was mainly to the educated and the virtuous. And we must yet further limit their influence by the admission that it did not ex- tend to that region which is the battle-field of faith at this moment. It found its limit'in that boundary-line between physi- cal and metaphysical speculation, which, on the whole, separates the representatives of the immediate present from the representa- tives of the past. So far as the man of science, using that word in its narrower sense, in which it excludes even mathe- matical study, is the ultimate arbiter of truth, so far as an invisible world is a thing to be proved, so far none of the men whom we recall had anything to say. While ready to contemplate large differences of opinion as to the laws by

which the unseen world is governed, they hardly came into con- tact with any mind which questions the existence of such a world. No earnest questioner could approach any of them without carry- ing away an impression of such profound conviction, such abso- lute repose upon the present reality of the invisible world, as might well quicken even a feeble hope of such a world, if it already existed. But we can go no farther than this, oven as to their direct influence ; and as to the influence of their writings, we cannot go so far. We could not expect that one who, as it has been said with all the force of experience, watches the spring sun shine out of an empty heaven, and misses the great Com- panion from his path, should find anything in this volume which should rouse in him any other feeling than that impatience with which we listen to futile words on the subject of our deepest need. The reader who knows nothing of the pressure of such need, or who has passed beyond it, will, indeed, be struck with the justice of Mr. Campbell, even to those whom, from his point of view, he might almost have regarded as the cause of this need. Nothing in these volumes strikes us as more interesting than his efforts to 'understand those whose influence on the convictions which were his life was merely destructive, and nothing more testifies to the reality of that which lay beneath the convictions he could thus afford, for the moment, to lose sight of. But the critic is forced to concede that these passages mark at once the utmost approach made by these men towards the intellectual scepticism of the hour, and their powerlessness to meet it.

We should, however, protest with emphasis against the in- ference that, because we have conceded their influence to extend neither to those who lie wholly beyond the pale of intellect, nor to those who in our own day represent the very kernel of the intellectual life, we have described their influence as some- thing ephemeral or narrow. The very opposite is the truth. The most important spiritual region is that region which is bounded, on the one hand, by the domain of mere ignorance ; on the other, by the domain of pure knowledge. If, on the one hand, the teaching here embodied failed to reach the minds wholly un- touched by any dawn of the intellectual life (and large exceptions will doubtless occur to all who are in a position to perceive them) ; if, on the other hand, it failed to reach the minds illumined by the full noon of the intellectual life (and here and there an exception will perhaps occur to some), still it remains that this influence extended over the region that is most fertile in the real potencies of life. Without some admixture of intel- lect, no amount of feeling permanently influences the current of thought. At the very focus of intellect, intuition and feeling lose their due predominance. It is in that harmony of feeling and intellect which precludes alike the predominance and the utter submergence of intellect that all that is most valuable in social movement originates. The men whose influence tolls in this region, if they lead the lives of recluses, still do more to stir the springs of action than many who stand forward most prominently in the eye of the public ; their contemplative life passes in- sensibly into many practical lives ; they become teachers Of teachers, and that which is thought with them is action with many, of whom some, perhaps, may never have heard their names.

We propose in a future article to return to these volumes, and , notice with somewhat more of detail, these memorials of one whose teaching we believe to have thus leavened an important, if not a large part of the religious life of our day.