BOOKS.

DR. MARTINEAU'S PERSONAL SKETCHES.*

THIS is the first volume of a new edition of Dr. Martineau's Essays, and contains chiefly personal sketches, together with three very able political papers contributed to the old National Review (not the present Review of that name) between the time of the Crimean War and the outbreak of the Secession movement in the United States. On the latter, which we only mention as showing how ably Dr. Martineau can write on sub- jects not exactly within the scope of his ordinary literary purview, we shall not comment. Indeed, nothing is more difficult than to give any adequate impression of the contents of a volume of miscellaneous essays by a writer of any strength and grasp ; and there is no writer still amongst us of greater strength and grasp than Dr. Martineau. There is not one of these essays that is not masterly,—sometirnes even imasterful,—in its way, and there is net one that has lost its interest by the mere lapse of time, though of course, as regards their occasion, the political essays are noW'obsolete.

The earliest of these essays, that on Dr. Priestley, was written as long ago as 1833, so that Dr. Martineau has been a powerful writer for considerably more than half-a-century, his latest work, that on the principle of authority in religion, exhibiting certainly as much force and freshness as this essay, and perhaps, also, a good many of the more remarkable intel- lectual characteristics which marked the essay on Priestley published in 1833. Coming as that essay did from a Unitarian, and published. as it first was in a Unitarian periodical, the estimate probably seemed, to the greater number of those who read it, unduly depreciatory of Priestley, at least as a religious thinker. That will certainly not be the view of the larger circle of readers to whom it is now presented. We should doubt whether even Dr. Martineau himself would estimate Priestley's significance in the religious world as highly as he did when he wrote it, and yet the drift of the essay certainly was to show the religious qualities in which Priestley was notably deficient. Great as was Dr. Martineau's appreciation of his manliness, simplicity, courage, and his fearless love of truth, the sum and substance of this view of Priestley, as a scientific and theological writer, is contained in the following striking criticism :—" He was the ample collector of materials for discovery rather than the final discoverer himself ; a sign of approaching order, rather than the producer of order himself. We remember an amusing German play, designed as a satire on the philosophy of atheism, in which Adam walks across the stage, going to be created; and though a paradox, it may be said that truth, as it passed through Dr. Priestley's mind, was going to be created ; the requisite elements were there ; the vital prin- ciple was stirring amid them, and producing the incipient types of structures that were yet to be ; but there was much that was unfit to undergo organisation, much that could never be transmuted into forms of beauty, or filled with the inspiration of life; and there must be other processes before the mass emerges a graceful and a breathing frame." That is, we con- * 111:111.0,1`8, and Addresses. By Tames Martineau, D.C.L. Vol. I. Porsonitl—Politic.a. Lomlou: Long,inans.

ceive; a good_description of the chief defect ofDr. Priestley's intehect, especially in relation to philosophy and theology, if not also in relation to science in its narrower sense; but we doubt whether we could say with anything like accuracy, looking to the state of philosophy and theology at the time Dr. Priestley wrote, that "the vital principle" of truth was stirring in his mind. For example, in his necessarianism, and the moral philosophy which resulted from his necessarianism, the "vital principle" of truth seems to us to have been absent ; and there, we imagine, Dr. Martineau would agree with us. In relation to his view of Christ and of the Christian Gospel as a whole, we should say very much the same ; and though Dr. Martineau would certainly differ from us on that head, he would probably admit that, if the early Church had been Priestleyan in its view of our Lord, there would have been little or no survival of Christianity for even a hundred years after its actual origin.

The essay on Dr. Arnold is full of eloquent and powerful criticism, perhaps the most powerful part of it being devoted to a rather sharp criticism on the means by which Dr. Arnold silenced his difficulties in subscribing the Creeds and Articles of the English Church, We agree with a good deal of what Dr. Martineau says on that subject, though we should not agree with his interpretation of the real meaning of the Athanasian Creed, or with his objections to it after the true interpretation had been arrived at. We cannot defend Dr. Arnold's peculiar view of what subscription meant, but we think it very possible that Dr. Martineau was very unjust to "a Beresford and a Blomfield " when be says, in his eloquent way, of their entrance into the ranks of the Anglican clergy : "A Beresford and a Blonifield glide in with complacent smiles; an Arnold passes with reluctant starts and bitter conflicts, and many a pause of prayer and fear." Nevertheless, the essay is brimful of vigour and of the purest Noncon- formist zeal, and its picture of Arnold is hardly less vivid and brilliant than that given by his son in the exquisite lines headed "Rugby Chapel." Take this, for example, in Dr.

Martineau's essay :—

"The moral element—and that too, originally, in its bare and rugged form of the sense of justice and hatred of wrong—was tran- scendent over all else in him. It was not, as in most men, passive and negative, content with preserving its possessor from evil, and exercising only a protectorate ; but a right royal power, with divine title to the world ; aggressive, indomitable, magnanimous. Christianity had something to do, to make him rest and sit as a dis- ciple at the feet ; to raise him to the spiritual heights of its heaven, and subdue him to the sweet charities of earth. But it did both. Ho was an evangelised Stoic. From walking in the Porch, he came to kneel before the Cross. No wonder that he burst into tears, when—once in conversation—St. Paul was set, in some one's esti- mate, above St. John : for he himself passed from the likeness of one towards that of the other, and so had sympathies with both; and the fire of the man of Tarsus subdued itself in him, as life advanced, more and more into the Ephesian apostle's ultarlight of saintly love."

The essay on Dr. Channing is one of the least interesting in the volume, but it is followed by one of great power on Theodore Parker, a vigorous and rough-hewn anti-super- naturalist with whose semi-pantheistic religion Dr. Martineau, —though far from a pantheist himself,—has apparently more sympathy than he has with any other form of spiritual error. It is hardly possible to sketch more powerfully the mischief of treating everything that is reduced to law as if it were not

divine, and of treating only that as divine which cannot be reduced to law, than Dr. Martineau, in sketching Theodore Parker's vehement protest against this miserable travesty of the truth, portrays it in the following noble passage commencing with a sketch of the old-fashioned supernaturalism :—

"That is wherever Law is, Goa is not ; and where God Is, Law is not. The boundary' line thus drawn,—where does it pass ? what lies within it,—what beyond P The realm of Law is co- extensive with Nature, as an object of human study. Science is but our register of phenomenal laws ; and nothing which can ask for entry there can be anomalons. Science, however, is excluded from no department of the material or mental creation. From the bed of the ocean to the clusters of the milky way, it passes with its detective instruments of Number and of Meastu-e,, and never without the discovery, or at least the augury, of order. Whenever it alights on a fresh region, the first confusion begins instantly to show signs of an incipient symmetry, and the ranks of established law pass the confines which had arrested them, and spread their lines over the new realm. This, then, is a province actually con- quered from God ; as science, with its forces,' advances, His power is dislodged in our belief, and retreats; and every fresh occupation effected by human knowledge is an expulsion executed upon the divine energy. That this is the sentiment really enter- tabled by the upholders of the prevalent theology, is evident from the reluctance with which they admit any unexpected extension of the dominion of law. To find a rule of order, where they had fancied only insulated and anomalous volitions, seems to them like a loss of God. Who can doubt that this feeling is at the foundation of the hostility displayed against the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' ? The author has no doubt committed errors in detail, and availed himself of questionable hypotheses, in order to connect the parts of his system, and complete his generalisation. But the detection of those imperfections has been sought with an eagerness not to be misunderstood; and has brought relief to the awe-struck imagination of many a reader, to whom the spreading tracks of law, as they pushed their per- spective deeper and deeper into the wilderness of phenomena, seemed but a highway for the exile of his God. Science thus becomes burdened with a tremendous responsibility : wherever it works, it is engaged in superseding Deity : it drops, as a deadly nightshade, on a cluster of phenomena, benumbing all that was divine ; and as the narcotic circle widens, the awful sleep extends."

But why Dr. Martineau,—who holds as strongly as we do, that if there be no free communication between God and his

creatures,—no communication, that is, which is conditioned by free acts of the human will, and might either have been or not have been according to the decisions of that will,—

there is nothing in the world but spiritual automatism, ex- cluding as mere illusion all the significance we attach to the higher life of conscience and love, should be so fully per- suaded as he is that this free communication between

God and man is confined strictly to the spiritual sphere, and never overflows into that of physical life, we have

never been able to understand. Theodore Parker had not the subtlety of mind necessary to appreciate the depth and importance of this question. He was a reformer, and in his way a sort of giant of very noble and generous spirit. But so far as regards his theology, Dr. Martineau treats it, we think, with far too much sympathy. The anti-super- naturalist in the physical sphere is only too sure to become, as regards his influence over others, if not in himself, an anti. supernaturalist in the spiritual sphere too, so that his pan- theistic worship of order ends in the deification of spiritual mechanism.

We cannot go through this vivid and powerful volume to the end even of its personal sketches, but must direct special attention to the very striking essay, written in

1856, on the influence exercised over the theology of that day by Newman, Coleridge, and Carlyle. The sketch in it of the philosophy of faith contained in Newinah's University sermons is very thoughtful and sympathetic, but we should not concur with Dr. Martineau in holding that the teaching of Dr. Newman's Loss and Gain is, that a man ought to submit to the Catholic Church, before he is convinced that it is the true Church, in order that he may become a genuine

believer. We are prepared to contend that an altogether opposite view of the drift of Loss and Gain is the true one.

We should say that there is less by far of the doctrine that faith is a venture in Newman's Roman Catholic tales, than there is in his University sermons. But the most powerful part of this powerful essay is the one which deals with Carlyle.

It would be impossible to find a more just and impressive criticism of Carlyle's crusade against self -consciousness and of his rapturous praise of unconsciousness than Dr. Martineau's.

Instead, he says, of carefully separating what are the per- manent deliverances of human self-consciousness in relation to the higher truths which guide our reason from our hasty generalisations, Carlyle "flings away the very pro- . blems with a shriek, as the fruit by which paradise is lost ; repents of all knowledge of good and evil ; claps a bandage round the open eyes of morals, religion, art ; and sees no salva- tion but in spiritual suicide, by plunging into the currents of instinctive nature that sweep us we know not whither. This tragic paradox has, indeed, a generous source, and is even thrown up by a certain wild tumultuous piety. It springs from a deep sense of the hatefulness of self-worship, and the barrenness of mere self-formation. It is a stormy prayer for escape from these ; only with face turned, alas ! in the wrong direction,—back towards the west, with its fading visions of Atlantic islands of Unconsciousness, instead of forwards to the east, where already the heavens are pale with a light, instead of a darkness, not our own." And what can be more powerful than this description of one of the chief consequences of this perversity in. Carlyle's philosophy of history ?—

" ft is for want of this deliverance from Self at the upper end, that Mr. Carlyle, resolute to break the ignoble bondage on any terms, propores escape at the lower end ; and, preaching up the glories of 'Unconsciousness,' sighs for relapse into the life of blind impulsive tendency. With him, we confess the curse ; we groan beneath its misery ; but we see from it a double path,— backward into Nature, forward into God,—and cannot for an instant doubt that the Self-consciousness which is the beginning of Reason is never to recede, but to rise and free itself in the transfiguration of Faith. Deny and bar out this hope, and who can wonder if the sharpest remedies for man's selfish security are welcomed with a wild joy ; if any convulsion that shall strip off the green crust of artificial culture and lay bare the primitive rock beneath us, appears as a needful return of the fermenting chaos ? How else are the elementary forces of instinctive nature. to reassert their rights and begin again from their unthinking freshness ? In some such feeling as this we find, perhaps, the source, in Mr. Carlyle, of that terrible glee that seems to flame up at the spectacle of revolutionary storms, and to dart with mocking gleams of devilry and tender streaks of humanity over a back- ground of divine despair.' Indeed we could not wish for a better illustration of the two paths of escape from Self,—back into Nature, forward into God,—than the contrast of Carlyle and Maurice in the whole colouring and climate of their spirit : the sad, pathetic, scornful humour of the one, capricious with laughter, tears, and anger, and expressive of manful pity and endurance, alike removed from fear and hope ; and the buoyant, serene, trustful temper of the other, genial even in its indigna- tion, and p'enetrated with the joy of an Infinite Love."

No criticism of Carlyle has detected the secret of his delight in volcanic national explosions so subtly and graphically as Dr. Martineau's.