gressions, and of another emancipation from inward misery and pangs of conscience which he is utterly unable to offer. Now this would be the method I should endeavour, with God's help, to pursue myself, and to urge upon other preachers. Whether it is so vague, ridiculous and fantastic a method, as you represent it, I leave others to decide. If I thought the great end of God's revelation was to tell men of future bliss or future woe, it might be a legitimate question whether your denunciations of fire and worms, or mine of being left without God, would be the most or least ineffectual: I believe they would be nearly on a level. But as I speak of a present evil, which may grow harder and deeper every day, and of a present deliverance from that evil which God's grace offers to the will and conscience of a voluntary and conscious being, I think the dark vision of being left without such a friend,—of being left to himself,-is something more real, more dreadful to a man, than any which you can conjure up; even as the hope of living under His government and enjoying His friendship would be far more blessed and full of immortality than one of some unknown reward for services never performed.

You say, most rightly, that the influence of what I have said on the theological students ought to have been considered by me before I published my Essays. I did consider it; they were present to my mind while I was thinking over the awful subjects I have treated of, and while I was putting my thoughts into words. I did remember that they were going forth into different parishes of this land, where they would have to address themselves to the most criminal, the most hardened, the most indifferent, the most unbelieving. I did consider that they might have to encounter some of those revived Anabaptist tenets, to which you darkly allude, respecting property and marriage. I did ask myself how will these young men be able to face all these terrible enemies, how may they themselves be preserved from insincerity and from despair? I knew that not a few of the clergy-yes, of the best and truest among them-had been driven into insincerity by thinking that they were bound by their profession

⚫ to use phrases respecting God's purposes to men which they felt that, as ministers of His Gospel, they ought not to use; that a number of them had been driven to despair by feeling that they must declare that Christ came into the world not to save it, but to pronounce the condition of ninety-nine out of every hundred of its inhabitants hopeless. I did believe that some must say to the clergy generally-to those for whom they have themselves to give account particularly-" You are not forced by the Formularies you have subscribed to put yourselves in this dreadful position. You have good news to preach. You may say 'that there is an abyss of love deeper than the abyss of death."" I did think that the task of helping, so far as in me lay, the members of my own order and the multitudes-I repeat the word, the multitudes-who are in misery because they feel as if we had no message to them but one of wrath and destruction, was not "self-imposed." I thought that it was im posed upon me by my ordination vow; that if I were to shrink from it I should, in the sight of God, be breaking that vow.

You ask me why I did not resign my professorship before I published my Essays? I answer, I believed that I was doing what it was right that I should do as a clergyman of the English Church; therefore I believed that I was doing that which it was right I should do as a Professor of Divinity in King's College. I was not acquainted with those tacit engagements which you tell me I contracted when I took that office. I knew that I was bound by the Scriptures, the Prayer Book, and the Articles, I knew that I was under solemn obligations to God as an ordained man. If I had supposed that you desired more of your Professors than that they should endeavour faithfully to fulfil these engagements, I should have felt I was committing a sin in placing myself under your government. I did not believe that that was the intention of the Council, or of the Chairman, or of the Visitor; therefore I did not resign.

Nor can I resign now. Far more is at stake than the question whether I am fit to be a teacher in King's College, or even than whether I am fit to be a Minister of the English Church. Every

one of my colleagues is interested in knowing whether the Council demands that he shall assent to certain conclusions of the Principal concerning our Formularies, and not to the Formularies themselves. Every clergyman is interested in knowing, if in the judgment of his fathers and brothers in Christ, it is a greater offence to throw "an atmosphere of doubt" on a certain "meaning of the word Eternal," or to throw an atmosphere of doubt on the whole question whether God loves His creatures; whether He desires their salvation; whether the Cross of Christ is or is not the complete exhibition of His character.

Tens of thousands of laymen as well as clergymen—not, as you fancy, of laymen or clergymen, who are anxious for "relaxations," who want a more indulgent Gospel than that which · their fathers received, but who cannot bear the equivocations, relaxations, indulgences, which the popular doctrine substitutes for the full proclamation of a love that is stronger than sin and death-crave for satisfaction on these points. You may succeed in driving them out from among you; I tremble to think how soon. But if you do, you will deprive the Church of England of some of those who love her best,-who, in evil days, will show whether they clung to her because it was fashionable and respectable to do so, or because they found in her springs of life and healing. When such issues as these are involved in the decision of the Council, how dare I think for a moment about so paltry a point as whether they will take from me my Professorship or not? If they shall determine that, after the discovery which has been made, not only to them but to the public, of the wide differences which exist between us on certain points, my position as your subordinate is no longer tenable, I shall not impeach the justice or the wisdom of their resolution. But in that case I demand from them, as English gentlemen, that they will declare distinctly to the world the grounds on which they dismiss me. I demand, further, that they shall authorize the publication of this correspondence.

You have informed the public through the Record newspaper

that you are examining into my orthodoxy. I desire that the course and issue of that examination should also be known. If you should wish to answer this letter in such a publication I shall not object. I am not anxious for the last word. My defence is closed. Unless new topics of accusation should be brought forward, I have no desire to reopen it.

Faithfully yours,

F. D. MAURICE.

NOTES.

NOTE A.

It is perfectly true, as a valued friend has remarked to me, that the original 42d Article condemns the very opinion which I have condemned in this letter. I hold it to be "a dangerous opinion that all men, be they never so ungodly, shall at length be saved, when they have suffered pain for their sins a certain time appointed by divine justice." Such a doctrine entirely outrages my idea of the divine justice, and of the nature of sin. But I am not the less thankful that the Elizabethan Reformers struck out this Article from their list. It would have suggested the notion that the judgment of God might be controlled and. anticipated by ours; it would have been a snare to the consciences of many who take refuge in the notion that a certain amount of pain may be accepted as a compensation for evil, rather than adopt an alternative which seems to them still more at variance with the Gospel. Most mercifully, therefore, has it been ordained that the Articles which we have subscribed should contain no decision whatever on this subject.

The fact is not disputed; about the reason of the silence there be many opinions. Dr. Jelf has suggested one which is exceedingly plausible,-most likely, I should suppose, the true one. The Reformers were frightened by the practical offences of the Anabaptists; in their eagerness to stop an immediate evil, they hastily pronounced several decrees which would have been most mischievous if they had become parts of a permanent code. For the faith in the fact of a bodily resurrection, which the Apostles' Creed demands, would have been substituted, as Dr. Jelf seems to admit, a dry theory about it; because Millenianism had been associated with sensuality, such men as Mede, or as Mr. Elliott and Mr. Faber, would have been shut out from the ministry of our church. The Providence which averted such consequences is one for which I should think we must all be most thankful.

NOTE B.

In the year 1845 I published a pamphlet entitled "The New Statute and Mr. Ward." The subject was particularly interesting to Oxford men. As my pamphlet was short, as it was noticed in the Times newspaper, as it was the first I had written after Dr. Jelf became principal of King's College, in the General Department of which I was a Professor,-as he was a Canon of Christ Church,-I had some right to expect that he might refer to it as a means of ascertaining what I thought and believed. Within a year after the appearance of it he asked me to become a Professor of Theology. In this pamphlet I spoke of the new test which had been proposed to the University as a security against the "non-natural" subscription to the Articles which Mr. Ward had confessed and defended. All who accepted the test would have bound themselves to take the Articles in the sense in