LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
MILL AND MAURICE.
(TO THY EDITOR OF THE "SPEOTATOR.1
SIR,—Those of us who have been accustomed to admire the genius of Mr. Mill, while yet thinking it inferior to that of Mr. Maurice, must be surprised at the estimate of the latter by the former in his " Autobiography." The heartiness with which Mr. Mill expresses his " deep respect for Maurice's character and purposes, as well as for his great mental gifts," and his unwillingness to " say anything which may seem to place him on a less high eminence than he would gladly be able to accord to him," is just what we should have expected ; but surely what follows is a strangely inaccurate, as well as inadequate, statement of the facts, and deduction from the facts. He goes on :— " But I have always thought that there was more intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my contemporaries. Few of them certainly have had so much to waste. Groat powers of generali- sation. rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide perception of important and nnobvious truths, served him not for putting some- thing bettor into the place of the worthless heap of received opinions on the great subjects of thought, but for proving to his own mind that the Church of England had known everything from the first, and that all the truths on the ground of which the Church and orthodoxy have been attacked (many of which ho saw as clearly as any one), are not only consistent with the Thirty-Nine Articles, but are better understood and expressed in those Articles than by any one who rejects them. I have never been able to find any other explanation of this, than of attributing it to that timidity of conscience, combined with original sensitiveness of temperament, which has so often driven highly- gifted men into Romanism, from the need of a firmer support than they can find in the independent conclusions of their own judgment. Any more vulgar kind of timidity no one who knew Maurice would ever think of imputing to him, even if he had not given public proof of his freedom from it, by his ultimate collision with some of the opinions commonly regarded as orthodox, and by his noble origination of the Christian Socialist movement. The nearest parallel to him, in a moral point of view, is Coleridge, to whom, in merely intellectual power, apart from poetical genius, I think him decidedly superior."
That is to say, on the one hand was a " worthless heap of received opinions on the great subjects of thought," and on the other "all the truths" which a man of Mr. Maurice's intellectual power might have been expected to put in their place ; and he did— according to Mr. Mill himself—put them in their place, though not in the way Mr. Mill would have done it. Mr. Maurice may have been mistaken in supposing that he found all these truths in the Thirty-Nine Articles, but he certainly did put them in the place of the received opinions. Many competent thinkers hold that Mr. Mill saw clearly a whole world of truths which the (in their judgment) narrow systems of Bentham and the elder Mill knew nothing of, but it would be a strange and inaccurate way of describing the philosophy of the younger Mill to say, that great powers of generalisation, rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide perception of important and unobvious truths, served him not for putting something better into the place of the narrowest Utilitarian opinions on the great subjects of thought, but for proving to his own mind that all the truths on the ground of which those opinions have been attacked are not only consistent with them, but are better understood and expressed in the writings of Bentham and Mill than by any one who rejects them.' Either he did " put something better" into their systems, or he showed that it already existed there, though it had not been pre- viously appreciated duly ; and the like is true of Mr. Maurice's treatment of the Church of England and the Thirty-nine Articles.
Nor is it leas strange that Mr. Mill, with his power, developed by habitual exercise, of looking at all sides of a subject, should have been able to find no better explanation of Mr. Maurice's defence of the Church than by "attributing it to that timidity of conscience, combined with original sensitiveness of temperament, which has so often driven highly-gifted men into Romanism, from the need of a firmer support than they can find in the independent conclusions of their own judgment." I grant that Mr. Maurice
was disposed to hold with too imaginative a belief, and to prove to his own mind with too great subtlety, that the Church of England embodied all truth in its institutions and formularies ; but this was not from timidity of conscience, or from any other of the habits of mind which have driven men to Romanism in our days. The characteristic of those men is a feminine love of good- ness, to which the desire for truth is quite subordinate. Such men, no doubt, have timid consciences, and seek for some authority which shall supply them with so much truth as is needed for their guidance in a holy life. But this sort of timid conscience cannot be predicated of a fearless lover of truth for its own sake ; we might as well say that a man can be conscientiously afraid of doing right, as that he who seeks for truth can conscientiously fear to seek it by his independent judgment. Love of truth and inde- pendence of judgment are for this purpose convertible terms. And such a fearless, masculine lover of truth for its own sake was Mr. Maurice, if ever man was. I remember a conversation with him six and thirty years ago, in which he summed up his utter hostility to the claims of authority taught by those same "highly gifted men," by saying, " If Christianity were not true, I should hate it." And this to the last was still his teaching,—that truth, and not authority, even though claiming to be divine, was the one firm support of a man's own judgment. I should have thought that Mr. Mill would have been able to see and understand that this absolute love of truth was always characteristic of Mr. Maurice, and that no explanation of his character could be the right one which did not accept this as an axiom. But Mr. Mill, with all his warm sympathies and his intellectual many-sidedneas, was of too analytical a habit of mind to be able completely to put himself at Mr. Maurice's point of view, and so to understand him rightly. Mr. Maurice's mind was eminently synthetic, though he showed great power of analysis on occasion. He looked at his subject first as a whole, and the whole was always to him something more than the sum of its parts as ascertainable by analysis. There was something which he recognised as the life, and which he said might be killed, and so lost, in dissection. Thus he approached everything from the conservative side ; his results might be, and often were, as radical as those of Mr. Mill himself ; but also they might be quite the reverse, because their methods were not the same. Mr. Maurice investigated the institutions and the doctrines of the Church of England as fearlessly as Mr. Mill did, but the one began his investigation on the hypothesis that he had to deal with an organic and living body, and the other, on that of its being a " worthless heap of received opinions." Nor was the investi- gation of Mr. Maurice the less searching and complete of the two ; and if the shaping spirit of imagination may have made the one inquirer to see more than was actually there, the other may have missed the life that was really to be found, because his method was not the right one, or because his faculty for such investigations had not been rightly trained. For it is conceivable that " one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it," who " grew up in a negative state with regard to it," and " looked upon the modern exactly as he did upon the ancient religion, as a thing which no way concerned him," may not have been able afterwards so to concern himself with it as to judge correctly of the action of other men's minds and consciences upon it. If a father were to put out a son's eyes in order that he might be an impartial judge of colours, his judgment would hardly be accepted by those who had kept their eyes, however purblind
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