problems of the world and of this age, to have either the calmness or the leisure necessary for the production of a profoundly truthful and consistent work of imagination. He is a preacher, an orator, a lyric poet, nay, a dramatic scene-painter of rare powers, who can enter into the hearts of other men, and even resuscitate the long-dead past in living reality, and in all its quaint bright detail of fashion and colouring; but he has not yet so schooled and mastered himself as to be a perfect craftsman of either prose or poetic fiction. The subjectivity of his deep, vivid, passionate nature will burst forth, and mar the coherency and finish of the pictured procession of characters and events in the actual world which he has essayed to draw. He fails not from defect of either knowledge or power, but of the requisite temper and self-command. If we look at the substance and moral or philosophical character of Mr. Kingsley's writings, perhaps there is nothing by which they are so obviously and pervasively distinguished as what we may call their humanity, the fellow-feeling which they show with all sorts and conditions of men,' and especially the sympathy which they breathe with every form of sorrow and distress. Their author knows how to rejoice with those that rejoice; his soul is kindled into flame by every deed or call of heroism; but most of all does he seem constrained to weep with those that weep, and to denounce with indignant and unsparing eloquence the different forms of neglect, oppression, and wrong under which the poor or the afflicted groan. Akin to the human sympathy which distinguishes Mr. Kingsley's writing are the views which he everywhere inculcates as to the beauty and sanctity of human relations, those especially which are connected with family and national life. There is not one of his works which does not distinctly and emphatically imply how strongly he cherishes these views. In his Dedication of Hypatia, in particular, to his father and his mother,' he commends to their special consideration the view of human relationships which is set forth in it;' and in the Preface he speaks of family and national life,' as the two divine roots of the Church, severed from which she is sure to wither away into that most godless and cruel of spectres, a religious world.' Such a religious world' he finds already realized in fully developed Popery, which ignores national life, and sets aside national distinctions; which profanes the very idea of the family, and scorns, blasphemes, and tramples under foot all family ties, duties, and claims. On these, rather than upon more special doctrinal grounds,-in reference to which, indeed, Mr. Kingsley would probably be quite as likely to approximate to Popery as to agree with Evangelical Protestantism, he shows in all his writings a strong antipathy to the system of the Romish Church. We need scarcely name Westward Ho in evidence of the intense and quasi puritanical abhorrence with which he regards the 'Spaniard and the Pope;' while his Saint's Tragedy-a work of no ordinary genius and power-was written for the purpose of showing the ruinous practical effect upon family purity and happiness, and upon national morality, of the doctrines of celibacy and auricular confession. Scarcely less intense than his dislike of Popery is his antipathy against Calvinism. We do not know what form Calvinism may assume in the country parishes of Hampshire among Baptists and Independents, nor have we a familiar acquaintance with the sort of doctrinal statements which constitute the staple of evangelical theology, as taught by the Calvinistic Low-Church clergyman; but to us Mr. Kingsley's descriptions of the doctrines he opposes seem like gross caricatures. And we cannot but fear, notwithstanding the favourable aspect in which he appears, in several instances, especially in connexion with the character of Tregarva, the Cornishman, in Yeast,to represent Wesleyan Methodist teaching, that his antipathy against those essential doctrines of Christianity which true Arminianism maintains, would be scarcely less vehement, and not less profound, than against any coarse material Calvinistic or quasi-Calvinistic perversions of them. Or, to put the matter still more strongly, we cannot but fear that Mr. Kingsley is as really and as deeply opposed to such liberal orthodoxy as that of the late accomplished Professor Archer Butler, as to the doctrines of the most ultra Church Calvinist of the extremest section of the Record school, or to those of a Gadsby or Spurgeon among Dissenters. This doctrinal bias comes out very strongly in all the volumes he has published, whether sermons or fictions, with perhaps the exception of the Saint's Tragedy; but in none, we think, so offensively as in Alton Locke.* Underlying all these characteristics, and accounting for them in some degree, is that peculiar variation of the Neo-Platonic theosophy, baptized with a Christian nomenclature, and to some extent regenerated by a Christian spirit and sympathy, which is common to Kingsley and Maurice, and which is partly a theory to justify, and partly a philosophy which dictates, the doctrinal peculiarities of these clergymen, and of their school. This theosophy is expounded in Yeast, Alton Locke, and Hypatia; it appears in that clever and charming, but unsatisfactory, performance, Phaethon ; it is implied in his Sermons; it is pretty fully exhibited in his Alexandrian Lectures. The charm which a humanity so intense and benevolent * We may be reminded that in Alton Locke and elsewhere Mr. Kingsley must not be made responsible for all the sentiments of his characters. Our answer is, that we hold him responsible for the general lesson and tendency of his works; and for such particular statements as express the deliberate and revised judgment of those whom he represents as either the evangelists or the confirmed and purified recipients and disciples of his own special philanthropy and theosophy. as that we have described, united to such genius and eloquence, imparts to Mr. Kingsley's writings, is very great. We do not envy the heart or the head of that man, however he may differ from Mr. Kingsley in philosophy or theology, who can read his works without feeling for him, on many accounts, both admiration and love. Nor can we hesitate to say that, in respect to the particular characteristic of which we are now speaking, we not only sympathize strongly with the spirit and purpose of his writings, but are convinced of the truth of the representations which they contain, and agree, to a considerable extent, with the views they advocate. Mr. Kingsley has used as much diligence, and shown as penetrating a keenness of insight, in observing and inquiring, in reading and making research among documents and Blue Books, as to the condition of the depressed classes of his countrymen, as when studying medieval lore to understand the heart of mystics and Roman saints, or poring over musty, half-forgotten historians of Church and State in the fourth and fifth centuries, to acquaint himself with the struggles of the beset and dying Pagan Empire, and of the young, but already corrupt, the semi-paganized, but yet victorious, Church. He has entered into the heart of the working man, and has taken pains to know the circumstances of those who are oppressed by grinding and hopeless poverty. He has shown the pitiful hardships and cruel glaring inequalities which have driven many an honest man to bitter discontent and political Chartism,-hardships and inequalities which no man with the faith and love of a Christian ought to believe to be either right or necessary. He has taught, as no one had done before, the more fortunately circumstanced to put themselves in the place of their poor brethren, and ask themselves how, under their circumstances, they should feel and act. He has contributed to produce the conviction which is taking root deep and strong, that the condition of things to which we have referred ought to be remedied, and must. If things are now amending, this is, in some degree, due to his pleadings and example. Powerful co-worker has he been, though operating from a different angle, and in a somewhat different way, with such men as the Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord Robert Grosvenor. Poor sweated slop-workers; sempstresses and shirt-makers driven by poverty to despair or sin; stunted, degraded, hopeless field-labourers; such as these owe to him a debt which cannot be weighed. It was time, indeed, a dozen years ago, that some one should arise, in the spirit of Isaiah or Jeremiah of old, to plead the cause of the poor, and needy, and oppressed. The social and political machine was working with a force and swiftness never before approached. It was pouring wealth untold into the laps of some, and was raising many more from poverty to competence; but, at the same time, there were multitudes who, beneath its ponderous Mammon-Moloch. wheels, were being crushed, and mangled, and destroyed. It seemed as if Mammon had assumed the character of Moloch; as if his priests and many of their aids and dependents grew fat and wealthy, at the cost of crowds of victims who were immolated before his shrine. And, alas! Malthusians and political economists said that thus it must be; that these were the laws of society and civilization; that is, if they believed in the name, that they were the laws of God. A shallow and heartless optimism reconciled even the just and benevolent to what they supposed to be a sad necessity, and served many as a plea for callous indifference. The famous maxim, 'We must buy in the cheapest, and sell in the dearest, market,' which should never have been laid down except with proper restrictions and qualifications, was exalted into a law of ethics, and quoted as if thatand not, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself'--had been the Divine summary of relative morality. Thus a formula which, nakedly put, is the maxim of an unqualified and remorseless selfishness, which ignores not only charity but equity, was constituted into the standard of commercial integrity and honour, and was used as a defence for every enormity of greedy speculation and overreaching competition. Here was a warranty for gambling in railway shares; for hoarding corn in the season of famine, till rats had consumed what starving peasants wanted; for cutting down wages as low as possible, even though the families of the workmen should starve and die, not because the masters could not themselves afford to give more, but because their helpless men had no remedy against them, if they gave less. All such things as these were, and too often are still, unblushingly justified on the principles of political economy. That is, commercial selfishness has been wrought into a system; its principles and results have been defined, and classified, and reduced to formulæ; and then these are quoted as facts and laws,' in justification of the evils which they represent. Meantime the Gospel, we are told, has nothing to do with political economy; and integrity is made to consist not in doing to others as we would that they should do to us, but in taking care never to go so far in selfishness and greed as to become thief or knave in legal construction. It was against such principles of political economy and commercial morality as these that Mr. Kingsley began, a dozen years ago, to lift up his voice with almost prophetic sternness, and pathos, and power. In whichever direction he looked, he saw lamentable evils and distresses. Never does poverty appear so lean, and yellow, and withered, as in the glare of splendour and luxury. Rentals had trebled within fifty years, and yet wages to southern labourers remained unimproved. Proprietors had become more wealthy than Doges were in the times of old; farmers were advancing both in intelligence and opulence; but : the ploughman was still a serf in all but name. He was as hopelessly degraded as in the days of the Edwards, and far more consciously and painfully depressed, in comparison with all around him he was less fully fed than his forefathers were when their diet was black bread, and they fattened their geese upon the common; not cleanlier housed than in the times when dainty niceness and modern refinement were as unknown in castle and in hall as in the labourer's cot; embittered and despairing to hear of progress which he might not hope to share,-of liberty which brought scant privilege and no chance of elevation to him or his,-of education and books which if his children tasted at the village school, it would only be to render them more sadly sensible thereafter of the poverty which forbad them to hope to possess even the cheapest books worth reading, and of the drudgery which would leave them no time to keep up the little knowledge they might once have gained. If possible, it was a yet more hideous injustice and wrong, that contractors, slop-sellers, and outfitters should be amassing immense fortunes, with an unprecedented rapidity, precisely because and by means of a system which depressed grade beneath grade of the men they employed, till the lowest stratum of those upon whose powers and labour they reared their colossal fortunes were literally reduced to starvation and to death. In the light of eternity and of God's judgment-day, some of these 'masters' will be counted far more cruel and infamous than the Tartar conqueror who left, for his monument at Bagdat, a vast pyramid of human skulls. Our readers must not suppose that we exaggerate. They will not have forgotten-though, alas! such things we too easily forget the Letters of the correspondents of the Morning Chronicle. And the Reports of the Sanitary Commission, with the Blue Books on Education, show that, though much has been and is being done to amend the condition of things we have indicated, much yet remains to be done. It was time that these iniquities should be exposed; that property should be made to understand its Christian duties; that the law of God and His Gospel should be applied to the relations of national life. There were many landlords and employers who needed to be taught that their dependents are their brethren, and that they are their 'brothers' keepers;' that they owe moral, religious, and charitable obligations to those around them, and this in proportion to the influence they have over them, and the benefit they derive from them; that they are not the absolute proprietors of their wealth or their land, but only stewards acting for God, for the nation, and for their fellows around them; and that they have not a right to do 'what and how they will with their own.' We who write thus are neither Communists nor Radicals; we have no faith in universal suffrage, or even household suffrage; we do not believe in |