In proportion as the influence of the priests was diminished, the opportunities of the Fenians increased. The British Government assisted the revolution in Italy which dethroned the Pope. The same British minister who glorified Garibaldi, now finds his Nemesis in another Garibaldi in Ireland, Mr. Parnell, whom he was obliged to imprison for a time, and with whom he is now forced to treat, although he is the leader of a revolutionary party which seeks to destroy the British Government in Ireland. Crimes in Ireland and the wicked attempts of Fenians elsewhere may be suppressed by vigorous administration of exceptional and coercive laws. A truce between Fenians and the constituted authorities may doubtless be arranged through the leader of the nationalist party by the Prime Minister. But the removal of the causes of Irish disaffection and of that demoralization which produces periodical disturbances of law and order, can hardly be effected by negotiation with revolutionary leaders, or by coercive enactments however severe. The statutes lately passed for the suppression of crime and outrage in Ireland cannot always remain in force, nor can the country be permanently governed by martial law. Coercion Acts cannot lessen the virulence of the hatred towards England which the Parnellites foment in every country wherein Irishmen are to be found. If any person be able to remove the spirit of demoralization, which renders Irishmen at home or abroad the ready dupes of Fenian and revolutionary agitators, and to stay the spread of that anti-English hatred, which, if unchecked, may at some future time cause serious embarrassment to the British Government, that person is the Pope, and his efforts in that direction which, at some risk to his own temporal interests, have been already made for the sake of the Catholic religion in general, and of the true welfare of Ireland in particular, should be actively seconded by the British Government, not only by means of remedial legislative measures, but by exhibiting cordial concurrence with the efforts made by the head of the Catholic Church to suppress Fenianism and the spirit of revolution. It is needless to add that the establishment of diplomatic relations with Rome is essentially necessary to enable Leo XIII. to fulfil his mission of pacification and regeneration with completeness and in harmony with the benevolent views of the British Government. Seeing that such vast interests are at stake, not only in Great Britain and Ireland but in every country wherein English-speaking Catholics reside, is it wise on the part of Great Britain to neglect the opportunity of securing the assistance of such a potent ally as the Pope, on the easy terms of sending to the Vatican a British envoy ? W. MAZIERE BRADY. FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE.1 THE publication of the late Professor Maurice's biography, twelve years after his death, naturally awakens many recollections in the minds of those who knew and loved him; but it is not my object to add any further reminiscences to those which his son, Colonel Maurice, has here gathered together with so reverent and loving a hand; and others, especially Mr. Llewelyn Davies, have spoken far better of his teaching than I can hope to do. Many doubtless of his critics, and of those who belong to the various schools of his ecclesiastical opponents, will write of him in the same sneering tone to which we were familiar in his lifetime; and I shall offer no refutation of such criticisms. To my mind he stands above any need for counter eulogies. I merely wish to record some of the impressions which I received from his personal friendship and from the study of his works. It is a poor offering, but perhaps he, in his kindness, might have welcomed it as coming from an old pupil "Ut caput in magnis ubi non est tangere signis His biography, now published, has a twofold value. It shows the unity of his life and the continuity of his teaching. I remember years ago hearing him in one of his lectures quote the lines of Wordsworth "The child is father of the man; Bound each to each by natural piety." Those lines-which were, he said, "as beautiful and noble a wish as a poet could utter"-were eminently true of himself. He was not one of those men who, like St. Augustine or Bunyan, have to turn over a new leaf at some special crisis of his career. To the last he retained "the young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks," and the aims and feelings of his youth were taken up and matured in the powers of his manhood. He was one of the few of whom Jeremy Taylor has spoken, of whom the grace of God takes early hold, and reason and religion run together like warp and woof to frame the web of an exemplary life. But further than this, his biography shows that the incidents of his early years, the sort of unspoken tragedy which was being enacted in his father's house, the daily spectacle which he witnessed of a deep religious separation between loving parents and loving children, contribute much to explain the peculiarities of his mind and style. They explain, for instance, the largeness of his charitable tolerance and the anxious scrupulosity of his invariable candour. Maurice had seen from childhood the compatibility of a holy (1) The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, chiefly told in his own letters. Edited by his son, Frederick Maurice. With Portraits; in 2 vols. (Macmillan & Co.). character with a defective creed. Some of those who were nearest and dearest to him, and to whom he always looked with the deepest gratitude and affection-especially among the Unitarians -held views which were opposed to his most intense and cherished convictions. This was one cause of his chief intellectual characteristics. "The desire for unity," he said in a fragmentary autobiography, "has haunted me all my life through; I have never been able to substitute any desire for that, or to accept any of the different schemes for satisfying it which men have devised." In other words, says Colonel Maurice, "the great wish in the boy's heart was to reconcile those various earnest faiths which the household presented." As an undergraduate at Trinity College, he had learnt indirectly from the study of Plato and the teaching of Archdeacon Hare "that there is a way out of party opinions which is not a compromise between them, but which is implied in both, and of which each is bearing witness." This spirit and principle runs through all his writings, and he was as well aware of its unpopularity as of its importance. His aim always was, not to give cut and dried opinions on party questions, and least of all to express them in epigrammatic forms which could be used as effective missiles in controversy, but to set free his own mind and those of his fellowmen from the bias of unfair prejudice. He would not tumble his readers into a stage-coach which would certainly not take them on the road to truth, but he would lend them a staff and lantern, and himself set forward with them on the way. It was a habit of his mind which is illustrated in his Religions of the World, in his Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, and in multitudes of his sermons, to search invariably for the positive elements in the faith and opinions of every man, and to avoid the mischievous "negative" elements which lay in their denunciations of others. This was one reason why several of his works were written in the form of dialogues. I have heard him say that there were very few books in the worldpre-eminent among them are the writings of Plato-which adopt this "maieutic" or "obstetric " method of guiding men to truth, by a fair discussion of the premisses on which alone it can be based. He expressed the hope that the day might yet come when more books of this kind should be written. "If I, being no Samson," he writes to his wife, "have got any strength at all, I will tell you, being no Delilah, where the lock is on which it depends: it is simply in the faith that the truth which is highest, as well as the highest faculty which apprehends it, is also the most universal. I certainly find very few who see this as clearly as I wish them to see it. Some form of intellectual worship, some exclusiveness or other, mars the fulness of this conviction. Till men are brought to it somehow, the philosophy of Christianity and of the Church cannot even be approached by them; both must seem to them foolishness." These views and this method explain not only his writings, but much also of his life. They give the reason why he was an object of hostility to all party-men, upon each of whom, without any distinction, he urged fairness towards one another. He was never of the least use to the heated partisans who rushed so eagerly to pelt some unpopular scapegoat of the hour. It might be predicted as safely of him as of Dean Stanley—a man unlike him in everything but innate truthfulness and chivalrous generosity-that he would never be actuated by the "eternal spirit of the populace," which leads men to trample savagely on the persecuted, and that he would never be conspicuous in any "clerical stampede." He was quite ready to "alienate all respectable Church people" by opposing the Hampden agitation. He stood among a very small number of the clergy in firmly supporting the admission of Jews into Parliament. This he did on the ground, which to most persons would still be unintelligible, that he acknowledged Christ as the root of our national stability, and not the weak declaration that He is so. Against the opinion of those who chiefly worked with him, he defended the retention of the Athanasian Creed on the ground, to many no less unintelligible, that it gave the true conception of eternal life as consisting exclusively in the knowledge of God, and that it saved us from judging others by seeming to pronounce upon them a judgment so harsh that it could not be regarded as meant for any individual offenders except ourselves. His desire for unity sprang out of that love of truth which disunion and opinionativeness always distort. With characteristic humility he tells us that as a child he had the same temptations to speak and act falsely as other children. "I daresay I yielded to them as often. But I do think there was in me a love of truth which has kept alive in me ever since." It was the fusion of Maurice's love of truth with his yearnings for unity which gave to his writings the "obscurity" of which almost all but his immediate disciples complained. In reality no writer, so far as his English style was concerned, was less obscure. His sentences were often too long; but I do not think that it is ever possible to mistake their meaning, or to doubt as to the construction which can alone be put upon them. The little children whom he taught, the working men to whom he lectured, the poor villagers of the country parishes in which he ministered, never found him obscure or mystical. But to many others, to persons of culture and to violent ecclesiastical controversialists, he seemed to speak parables, because he had a habit of addressing them interrogatively rather than by assertion, and because their minds were unreceptive of the truths which he desired to set forth. Men look to their religious guides for definite propositions and systematised inferences, set forth in clear outline, rather after the manner of Fra Angelico than after the manner of Rembrandt. But Maurice saw truth as Dante saw charity, in a sunlike centre of light, which caused the outlines of all but the main features to be indistinguishable in the surrounding glory.1 "Dark with excess of light her skirts appeared." If a man can see only one fragment of a truth and one side of a question, he may feel that absolute certainty about every disputable point which is a characteristic of many minds; but if he desires to be scrupulously fair, he finds it impossible to shut his eyes to the fact, that views which are forced by their adherents into the sharpest contradiction are often in reality complementary and supplementary of each other. Maurice's one aim, therefore, was to persuade men not to plunge into mutual denunciations, but to find a basis for unity in things essential, and to assert modestly and tolerantly the special truths which they severally held. "Nothing," he said, "goes nearer to take away one's senses than the clatter of tongues when you feel everyone is wrong, and know that if you tried to set them right you would most likely go as wrong as any. It would not be so if one had learnt to keep Sabbath days in the midst of the world's sin-but that is the difficulty.' 2 Cognate to this balance and resolute fairness of mind was his determination to take all men at their best, and to judge them and their opinions in the most favourable light. It sometimes happens that one text takes more powerful hold of a man's mind than any other, and exercises a preponderant influence upon his life. The text to which Maurice most constantly refers as a rule of conduct is "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged." He tells us that he held it in more reverence than any other in the whole Bible. "I do not believe that we can, any of us, know the inmost thoughts of another man with reference to God." It always produced self-contempt in him if he was led to sauciness of language or impertinence in judging others. And this beautiful habit of mind depended again, in no small degree, on the belief which lay at the centre of his entire theology, namely, the headship of Christ. Every relation to our fellow-creatures seemed to Maurice to be a step in a ladder which reached to Christ. The thought which is rarely absent from any of his books for many pages is that Christ is King, and that the Church is His kingdom. His wife once said to him that he might do much. better work if he would only act on his conviction that Christ is in everyone. He recognised in the rebuke the clearest indication of what he felt to be God's purpose in all His teachings, and it led him to such remarks as this to Sir E. Strachey: "One can find enough that is not good and pleasant in all; the art is to detect in (1) Dante, Purgator. xxix. 118. (2) Maurice's letters and writings are singularly free from severe remarks about persons, even when he was most deeply moved. One of the severest in the book is his remark-only, be it observed, in free private intercourse with an intimate friend-about Mansel's Carlton Club and Oxford Common Room yawn, "Pon my soul! can't see why evil should not last for ever, if it exists now." |