Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

Lincoln's Inn upon the text, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors." He died on the 23rd of the next month, his last words being an answer to a question of moving him in his bed, "Upward, upward."

John Frederick Denison Maurice was born in 1805, son of the Rev. Michael Maurice, a Unitarian minister. He went to Cambridge in October, 1823, joining Trinity College, and afterwards Trinity Hall. When he had qualified by examination for his degree, it was refused him, because he had scruples as to subscription, though he had upon all main points become in opinion a member of the Church of England. He therefore left Cambridge in May, 1827, and studied law in London, writing, meanwhile, an article or two in the Westminster Review, and reviewing in the Athenaeum. He became editor

of the Athenæum in 1828, but had ceased to be so in the beginning of 1830, when he went to Exeter College, Oxford. There he was borne for a time upon the rising tide of thought, and shared the desire to bring new life into the Church, and to establish unity. He was baptised in March, 1831, and graduated at Oxford in the following November, having spent the term before examination at a sister's death-bed. At Oxford, also, Maurice wrote a novel, "Eustace Conway," which was sold to its publisher in April, 1831, although not published until 1834. After graduating, he remained at Oxford as a private tutor. He was ordained in January, 1833, and had a curacy at Babnall, near Leamington. Maurice's partial sympathy with the enthusiasm of the Oxford Church reformers who were supporting the "Tracts for the Times," was wholly destroyed by Dr. Pusey's treatise upon baptism. His tract entitled "Subscription no Bondage," represented at this time his attitude towards Church questions of the day. In 1835, Mr. Maurice was appointed chaplain to Guy's Hospital. In 1837 he married, and in 1838 he published, in three volumes, "The Kingdom of Christ," the work in which he first set forth his detailed thoughts on the principles, constitution, and ordinances of the Church. In May, 1840, Mr. Maurice was appointed Professor of English Literature at King's College, London; he was at that time taking deep interest in educational questions, and editing an educational magazine. Acquaintance with one of the best friends of his after life, Charles Kingsley, was begun by a letter written in July, 1844. 1845, Mrs. Maurice died. In 1846, Professor Maurice was appointed Lecturer at Lincoln's Inn. He was then delivering both the Boyle Lectures and the Warburton Lectures, and was gathering fellow-workers about him. The Warburton Lectures, on the foundation of Bishop Warburton, were to extend over four years, three lectures being delivered in each year and printed. Professor Maurice's lectures in 1846 were on the Epistle to the Hebrews, "with a preface containing a review of Mr. Newman's Theory of Development." The theory reviewed was this:

In

That the increase and expansion of the Christian Creed and Ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession

of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion; that from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas; and that the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients; but as received and transmitted by minds not inspired, and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their elucidation.

Professor Maurice in these lectures, and in all his writings, dwelt upon the Bible as a book through which God speaks directly to the natural hearts of men as they are, and makes Himself felt as the immediate Father of us all. Thus, for example, he writes in one of these lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews:

THE VOICE OF THE BIBLE.

This, I think, is the principle of the Bible, the principle which goes through every part of it, that the unseen God is actually ruling over men; that all orders of men are appointed by Him, and are ruling under Him; that just so far as they know this, and live and act in the faith of it, they are doing their right work in the world, are helping to expound the laws and principles of the Divine Government, are helping to bring man into that service which is freedom. And that just so far as they are not doing this, but are setting up their own power and authority, and are working as parts of a system instead of working as the servants of the living God, just so far are they false kings, and false priests, and false prophets -misunderstanding the blessed order in which they are

placed-and hastening the dissolution of all that in it which can be dissolved; though, because God is, and his purposes cannot change, that dissolution is itself but the instrument of bringing out with greater clearness the real eternal principles of this order.

Now, this statement may seem to Mr. Newman, and to a great many others, a mere vague repetition of what they have often heard before; of what they have sneered at, and dismissed from their minds, as quite unsatisfactory and unmeaning. I am content that it should be so. But I am sure that this which they reject is still the simple faith of hundreds of poor men and women in all countries of the world, Romish as well as Protestant. I am sure that they have a belief, a very deep-rooted, practical belief, that the Bible sets forth God as actually speaking to men, as actually ruling in the midst of them. I am sure that they have no doubt that what was true in the old time is true now; and that neither Scripture, nor conscience, nor church, nor Holy See, deeply and profoundly as they may reverence one or all, would seem to them worth anything-the least comfort in their own sorrows, the least relief from the sense of the misery and curse of the world-if they did not think that the living God was teaching them, and disciplining them, and holding converse with them; and that the whole course of society, amidst all its strange contradictions, is as much testifying of His presence as it did when the manna fell from heaven. And it seems to me that we are arriving at a time when theologians must come to an understanding with these simple people, when we must tell them plainly and straightly whether we mean the same thing as they do or not; whether our divinity is the assertion of the living God and of His presence among men, or a substitute for that assertion; whether, when we use the phrases of Scripture, we attach

significance to those phrases, or merely look upon them as belonging to another period of the world. I do answer for myself, that I look upon the language of Scripture as the simplest, truest, most reasonable language of all that has ever been uttered; that I believe it tells us not merely who sent plagues upon Egypt, but who sends plagues now, and why He sends them; not merely what prophets, and kings, and priests were in the old time, but what they are now, and how He speaks in them. That they do not only show how He taught the prophets of old to separate between the precious and the vile in themselves, and to understand those judgments of His, by which He separated between what was precious and vile in the nation; but that He has taught men in all times, and will teach all who humbly desire His aid now, first, to recognise that great battle between the flesh and the Spirit in themselves, then, if that be their vocation, to trace it in history.

In 1846, Maurice was appointed Professor of Divinity at King's College, London, and in 1847 he married again. In 1848, the stir of public events led to a movement in which Maurice and his younger friend, Charles Kingsley, were both active for bringing the agitation among the working classes into close relation with religion, and quickening with spiritual life the highest aspirations of the people. Meetings of working men were held. Maurice's age was then forty-three, and Kingsley's twenty-nine.

Charles Kingsley was born in 1819, son of the Vicar of Holne, and born in the vicarage on the border of Dartmoor, in Devonshire. But he left Holne when he was six weeks old, upon his father's removal to the curacy of Burton-on-Trent, whence he again moved to Clifton, in Nottinghamshire. Charles Kingsley's father then held the rectory of Barnack for six years, on the presentation of the Bishop of Peterborough, with the understanding that he should vacate when the bishop's son was old enough to take it. The out-going rector of Barnack was then presented to the living of Clovelly, and went to Clovelly when his son Charles was eleven years old. There the minister entered with warm sympathy into the daily work of his little community. Out of experiences at Clovelly, the life came afterwards into Charles Kingsley's pathetic song of the "Three Fishers." In 1831 he was sent to a school at Clifton, and in 1832 he went to the grammar-school at Helston, where the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, son of the poet, was then master. 1836 his father left Clovelly for the rectory of St. Luke's, Chelsea, to which he had been presented, and Charles Kingsley became for the next two years a student in the Faculty of Arts, at King's College, London, walking to and fro every day from Chelsea. In October, 1838, he entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, obtained a scholarship, and was first, both in classics and mathematics, at the May examinations. Like other youths fervent in feeling, intensely earnest, and intensely true, Charles Kingsley suffered trials of his faith, and rose to noble life by fastening betimes on a true woman's love. At the close of his university course, he made up for lost time by six months' hard reading, came out in 1842 high in honours, was ordained, and took a curacy at Eversley, in Hampshire, He won upon the little community by his quick sympathy with the life of each, and by

In

At

cheery fellowship in their pleasures and their work. Carlyle's "French Revolution" had been a power over him at college, by intensifying his belief in God's righteous government of the world. Eversley he now read another book, that had great effect upon him, Maurice's "Kingdom of Christ." In 1844 Kingsley married, and the rectory of Eversley becoming vacant, when he was about to remove to a curacy at Pimperne, the strong desire of the parishioners secured his nomination to the living. In that year the young rector of Eversley asked some counsel of Mr. Maurice in a letter, and the reply to it was the beginning of their friendship. At the end of 1847, Charles Kingsley published "The Saint's Tragedy," begun, when he left college, as a prose life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and then turned into a dramatic poem. It struck the keynote of his work in after days, and will be described in the volume of this series which illustrates English plays.

Prohibition of a Reform banquet in Paris caused a rising of the people on the 24th of February, 1848, followed by the flight of the king and the abolition of monarchy. But the new Provisional Government was soon troubled with a fresh calamity. The rights of labour were recognised on the 27th of February, by instituting national workshops, in which all who applied might get employment at the expense of the state. A newly-elected Constituent Assembly met on the 5th of May. In June, an endeavour was made to draw back from the policy of the national workshops. This caused an insurrection of the operatives on the 22nd of June, with much bloodshed Paris was declared in a state of siege. General Cavaignac was made Dictator. Eleven generals were killed or wounded. The Archbishop of Paris, while seeking to stay the carnage on the 27th of June, was killed by a chance shot from the barricade on the Place de la Bastille. On the 28th, the mob was at last forced by the troops to surrender. Cavaignse laid down his dictatorship, became President of the Council, and on the 4th of July issued a short decre for the suppression of the workshops. Side by sid→ with these events, there was in England also a great Socialist movement among uneducated working men The passing of the New Poor Law, in 1835, had led to the formation, in 1836, of a Working Men's Ass ciation. Already in 1838 monster meetings were held, and a charter was drawn up claiming manhood suffrage, equal electoral districts, vote by hallot annual parliaments, with no property qualificative. and payment of members. Many supporters of the charter Chartists-joined to these demands a cler for the re-distribution of property, and held it lawf to obtain their demands by force, if they were attainable by course of law. Stirred by the swiftnes of events in France, the leaders of the Chartis menaced London by calling a monster meeting Kennington Common for the 10th of April, 1848. before presenting to Parliament a monster petino", said to bear five or six million of signatures situation was so grave that the Duke of Welling. was placed in command on behalf of order. Hgood management, the services of a large body 4 civilians as special constables, a wet day, and

T

underlying sense of duty in Englishmen, that made for peace even when it was misguided and perverted, caused the meeting on Kennington Common to end in peace; but the certainty of peace was not secured. On the morning of the 10th of April, Charles Kingsley came to London. Next day he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley" Maurice is in great excitement. .. We are getting out placards for the walls, to speak a word for God with.

energies, and he was obliged to seek health by a long rest in Devonshire. When he went back to his work in the summer of 1849, there was low fever in Eversley, and after sitting up all night with a labourer's wife who had a large family, and whose life might be saved by faithful nursing, his health again gave way, and he had to return to Devonshire. Before the end of the year, cholera was in England, and Kingsley was working with all his soul in battle for whatever might bring health into the poor man's home. He was then thirty years old. Dean Stanley said afterwards, in his funeral

sermon

It was the sense that he was a thorough Englishman-one of yourselves, working, toiling, feeling with you, and like you-that endeared him to you. Artisans and working men of London, you know how he desired with a passionate desire that you should have pure air, pure water, habitable dwellings; that you should be able to share the courtesies, the refinements, the elevation of citizens, and of Englishmen ; and you may, therefore, trust him the more when he told you from the pulpit, and still tells you from the grave, that your homes and your lives should be no less full of moral

I was up till four this morning, writing posting placards under Maurice's auspices, one of which is to be got out to-morrow morning, the rest when we can get money. Could you not beg a few sovereigns somewhere, to help these poor wretches to the truest alms ?-to words-texts from the Psalms, anything which may keep one man from cutting his brother's throat tomorrow or Friday? Pray, pray help us. Maurice has given me the highest proof of confidence. He has taken me into counsel, and we are to have meetings for prayer and study, when I come up to London, and we are to bring out a new set of real Tracts for the Times, addressed to the higher orders." The placard written by Kingsley, and posted on the walls of London, on the morning of the 12th, ended with these words:"A nobler day is dawning for Eng-purity and light. land, a day of freedom, science, industry. But there will be no true freedom without virtue,' no true science without religion, no true industry without the fear of God, and love to your fellow-citizens. Workers of England, be wise, and then you must be free, for you will be fit to be free."

From that time Maurice and Kingsley, Archdeacon Hare, and many other zealous, earnest Englishmen, made it their chief public duty to strive for aid of the people, by their true enlightenment. On the 6th of May, 1848, they began a paper called "Politics for the People." Opponents fastened on a sentence in a letter which it contained, addressed to Chartists, by Charles Kingsley, and signed "Parson Lot." He said, "My only quarrel with the Charter is, that it does not go far enough in reform," and every line that followed was in enforcement upon the people of the need of needs, reform within themselves. The very next sentence warned them against "the mistake of fancying that legislative reform is social reform, or that men's hearts can be changed by Act of Parliament." The whole aim, indeed, of these fellow-workers was to urge the need of free citizens in a free state, citizens whom the truth makes free. They enforced it in all their writing, and they sought to aid in the raising of individual lives, wherever they could establish sympathetic intercourse with working men. For the higher education of women, Queen's College had been established in Harley Street, by the energies of Professor Maurice, who had begun simply with lectures to governesses, and Charles Kingsley, in May, 1848, began to give weekly lectures upon English literature there. Later in this year also, Kingsley was writing "Yeast" in Fraser's Magazine. Before the year was out his health gave way under the strain on all his

[graphic]

1 So the Attendant Spirit says, at the close of Milton's "Comus:"-
"Mortals who would follow me,
Love Virtue, she alone is free."

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

From a Photograph by Messrs. Elliott and Fry, London.

We return to Frederick Denison Maurice, who continued, after 1849, in alliance with Charles Kingsley and others, to hold meetings of working men, which gradually led to the establishment of a Working Men's College, in 1854. During the tumults in 1848, Professor Maurice, as Preacher at Lincoln's Inn, delivered, in February, March, and April, nine sermons on the Lord's Prayer, which were published, and of which he said, "I wished in these sermons to connect the Lord's Prayer with the thoughts which are most likely to be occupying us at this time. If they lead any to ask themselves how their study of passing occurrences may be made more serious and their worship more real, my purpose in publishing them will be answered." In the

following year, 1849, Professor Maurice delivered in Lincoln's Inn Chapel nineteen sermons on "The Prayer Book, considered especially in reference to the Romish System." The following passage from his sermon on the use of David's Psalms in the Church Service, is characteristic of his way of looking at the Bible as a Book of Life, in every sense, in which God speaks not as by passive instruments, but by bringing His Spirit home to us through the real words of real men with their human faults and passions and desires,-but the profound sense of living God in all :

THE PSALMS.

Nothing is more puzzling to the person who reads the Psalms merely as a student than the questions, Which of these refer to the condition of the individual writer? which to the condition of the Church generally? which may the individual Christian adopt, without dishonesty or irreverence, as the utterance of his own experience; which must he refer directly to Christ? After centuries of commentaries on these questions, one is often inclined to think that they are more unsettled than ever. The divine rests upon his distinction of Messianic and non-Messianic; the historian brings to light facts in the records of the Hebrew people which determine them to a particular age. The popular reader resolves that he will read himself into them, making Edom, Moab, Israel, and Zion just what he likes them to be. And yet beneath all these perplexities of the understanding, there has through all these ages been a strong and general conviction that every historical fact respecting the time in which the Psalm was composed is of the greatest value; that David must have written what he did write as David, and not in some fictitious character; that Christ must in some sense be the subject not of a few of them, but of all; that they do of right belong to each human being. Whence has come this settled and harmonious conviction, apparently so much at variance with that uncertainty, and contradiction, and restlessness, in the midst of which it exists? I answer: men have got it from worship. So far as they have felt that these Psalms were the best and most perfect expressions they could find for a public united devotion, so far has there been a reconcilement of difficulties which other experiments only made more hopeless. For they could not have anything to do with our worship if the writers of them did not refer themselves and the whole universe to one centre. While they do this, and we do it, we feel that they are meant for us. But it is just the doing this which makes them so strongly the property of their original owners. They are driven about and tormented by innumerable enemies-personal enemies--they betake themselves, as their only help and refuge, to one who is their friend. They are crushed under a weight of oppressive accidents; they must find one who is always the same. They are crushed under giant human ills. Death and hell are close to them, and are mightier than themselves. What can they do but trust in Him who has said to death and hell, I will be your plagues?"

"These words must be real; they must have been felt by those who spoke them,” cries the worshipper, "because they are so real to me, because they so exactly express the burden under which I am groaning. Personal enemies are pursuing me; a load of potty anxieties is pressing upon me; these same giant universal foes are threatening me every moment. I have come to church to fly from one as much as the other. And there I find that I am not alone. My groan has been

uttered before; men thousands of years ago sought the deliverance I am seeking. And they did not pour out a wild shriek into the ear of some unknown power. They took refuge in a Being in whom they were sure they shotli find a refuge; One who, they say, had awakened their longing for Himself; who had declared that there was a bond, an everlasting bond, between them and Hims af What was that bond? It seems as if the men who were pouring out these prayers had a glimpse of it, and as if they were feeling their way into the full apprehension of it. Dore not this church to which I have come signify that I may have a fuller apprehension of it? Does it not say that the mystery has been revealed? Does it not tell me of an ath Living Person who is the bond, the perfect bond of pat between God and His creatures, and between these crvats as brethren of the same family? Does it not tell me it a Daysman in whom we are reconciled, and can meet ? of Dr in whom God looks upon us, and is satisfied!" The is working itself out in the mind of the Psalmist, as a s work itself out in ours. The mere notion is here we have the living process of discovery; its stums z doubt, clearness, vicissitude, fear, hope, rejoicing. 3 Psalmist is rising through worship into a perception d right which he has to call us and all in every at world, his brothers; we, through worship, come t stand his difficulties; in claiming that right he beme interpreter, while we yet are better able to undersen is words than he was himself.

This wonderful reciprocation of benefits, this mam communication between distant ages, is simply a fa commonest experiences of our lives imply it. We mu sympathise with Homer or any writer who grew up I stances altogether different from our own, if it d Christianity interprets the fact, Christian worship subm it for us, teaches us that the magnetism is a spITITOR animal one. It is not produced by the excitemen together; it is grounded upon that purpose of the purposed when He created us in Christ Jesus, RN, T. will accomplish when He shall gather up al thins in Him. By acts of worship, then, we come to how that which is David's becomes ours in Em Son of David and the Son of God. The servants us on the same day psalms written in the states of mind, expressive of the most difieren ↑ we have sympathised in one, it often seems a pain join in the rest. And so it must, as long aw prayers and praises as expressions of our monas we are not joining in them because we bei ni and count it our highest glory to lose oursera z Him who is the head of it. We must be eus 27. knowledge. It may be slow in coming, but t Psalms are not intelligible to us; our Christia: not intelligible to us: we do not more thar halt et parts of the service which we seem to enter t touch certain chords in our spirits, but nor ta musical chords. These do not belong to ours. human; they answer to the touch of the Iholds converse with the spirit of a man will i

It was this strong insisting or the he in the Bible that caused controversiast. I Maurice of unsound views upon instemati In 1852 he published a volume o sermons upon The Prophets and KTestament," from one of which w T. view of the Psalms a part of ins e aze: Psalmist :

DAVID.

This, brethren, was the man after God's own heart, the Iman who thoroughly believed in God as a living and righteous Being, who in all changes of fortune clung to that conviction; who could act upon it, live upon it; who could give himself up to God to use him as He pleased; who could be little or great, popular or contemptible, just as God saw fit that he should be; who could walk on in darkness secure of nothing but this, that truth must prevail at last, and that he was sent into the world to live and die that it might prevail; who was certain that the triumph of the God of Heaven would be for the blessing of the most miserable outcasts upon earth. Have we asked ourselves how the Scripture can dare to represent a man with David's many failings, with that eager, passionate temper which evidently belonged to him, with all the manifold temptations which accompany a vehement sympathetic character, with the great sins which we shall be told of hereafter, as one who could share the counsels and do the will of a Holy Being? Oh! rather let us ask ourselves whether, with a plausible exterior, a respectable behaviour, an unimpeachable decorum in the sight of men, we can ever win this smile, hear this approving sentence. The words, "Well done, good and faithful servant," are not spoken by the Judge of all now, will not be spoken in the last day, to him who has found in his pilgrimage through this world no enemies to fight with, no wrongs to be redressed, no right to be maintained. How many of us feel, in looking back upon acts which the world has not condemned, which friends have perhaps applauded, "We had no serious purpose there; we merely did what it was seemly and convenient to do, we were not yielding to God's righteous will; we were not inspired by His love." How many of us feel that our bitterest repentances are to be for this, that all things have gone so smoothly with us, because we did not care to make the world better or to be better ourselves. How many of us feel that those who have committed grave outward transgressions-into which we have not fallen because the motives to them were not present with us, or because God's grace kept us hedged round by influences which resisted them-may nevertheless have had hearts which answered more to God's heart, which entered far more into the grief and the joy of His Spirit, than ours ever did.

to

Attacks had been made in a religious newspaper upon Professor Maurice's theology, and in 1851 the Council of King's College, in which he was Divinity Professor, appointed a committee of divines examine his writings. They did so, and reported warmly in his favour; but from that time he was regarded as a heretic by one of the parties in the Church. In 1853, Professor Maurice published a volume of "Theological Essays," written for the purpose of overcoming doubts of the Trinity. It was said that in these essays he showed a want of faith in hell, and was unsound upon the subject of eternal punishment. In July, August, and September, 1853, there was much controversy on this subject, and in October Maurice was deprived of his Professorship. In 1854 he was actively at work for the creation of a college, and gave at Willis's Rooms, in June and July, before fashionable audiences, six lectures upon "Learning and Working," in which he developed the design of the Working Men's College, then established. He thus described the fellowship that had made the college, which was, in

the following November, to begin work never since interrupted :

IDEA OF A COLLEGE FOR WORKING MEN.

A club and a college are very different things; they may be wide as the poles asunder. But a club of ordinary Englishmen may become a college of intelligent, thoughtful men, provided a human purpose take the place of a selfish one.

It is a conviction of this kind which has led a few friends of mine to propose a College for Working Men in the northern part of London. They answer with tolerable exactness to tne description I have given of the persons from whom it is reasonable to demand such an effort. They are all at work themselves, in occupations which they believe to be vocations, and which they do not hold it would be right to forsake under any plea of benevolence to their fellow-creatures. They do not, therefore, aim at forming a guild or order of teachers.

[graphic][merged small]

They are already admitted into their different guilds as members of the Inns of Court, or the Colleges of Surgeons or Physicians, as Artists, as Ministers of the Gospel, as Tradesmen, as Operatives. What they believe is best for themselves -best for the special fraternity to which they belong, in respect of the work which it is pledged to do, as well as of the science which it is pledged to advance-is that they should keep up an intercourse with men of different callings, and should do what in them lies, that those who are engaged merely in manual labour should feel that also to be a high calling. They may differ among themselves about some of the ways in which this end should be accomplished; they are perfectly agreed that one of the ways, and the most effectual, is to strive that the manual worker may have a share in all the best treasures with which God has been pleased to endow them. They do not think they have any business to consider how few of these treasures they may possess in comparison with many of their contemporaries; by all means let those who have more give more; all they have to do is to ask how they may make what they have most useful, and how they may increase it by communicating it. Their design is far from ambitious. It is not to found a College for the workers

[ocr errors]
« AnteriorContinuar »